The most typical episode in ''Tough Guys Don't Dance'' occurs when Madden, accompanied by Stunts, discovers the severed heads in his marijuana patch and carries them back to his car. He is attacked by the villains, Nissen and Stoodie, Nissen with a knife, Stoodie with a tire iron. The details of the fight can't be paraphrased. Madden survives it and drives home. ''Shall I tell you the virtues of such a war?'' he offers. In fact, he doesn't recite them, but reports that ''if not for the war by the side of the road, I could never have slept.'' As it was, ''I slumbered as well as any of those who were dead.''

''Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated,'' the poet Keats said, ''the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel - by a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone - though erroneous they may be fine.'' Madden, Mailer's surrogate in this respect, would offer a Keatsian justification for his violence, if the question were raised. Mailer would justify it further by seeing it as heroic resistance not only to evil at large but to the naturalism that demeans his energy. So a fight with thugs becomes ''the war.''