The moment Julian Barnes got into his room in the Sorrento Hotel yesterday afternoon, he turned on the television. He was still glued to it half an hour later when I called from the lobby. 

"Would you mind terribly watching the end of the Masters with me?" he asked. "It's absolutely enthralling." 

"Golf?" I muttered disbelievingly as the elevator rose to the sixth floor. I was going to meet one of England's most witty and elegant writers, a playful intellectual best known here for his novel "Flaubert's Parrot" and his Letters from London for The New Yorker. 

I'd expected to talk about his new satirical novel, "England, England," which comes out here next month and was nominated for the Booker Prize in Britain. Or about the movie of his first novel, "Metroland," which opens this week with Emily Watson in the lead. Or his views on England and America, Serbia and Kosovo. 

But golf? That was nowhere remotely on my screen. It seemed so utterly . . . normal. 

Which may be precisely the point. 

Tonight, Barnes will give the last lecture of this season's Seattle Arts & Lectures series. And his topic, "Cigarettes, Syphilis, and Genius," is an attempt to reestablish normality as an artist's birthright. 

Once Jose Maria Olazabal had secured his victory over Greg Norman in Augusta, Ga., Barnes could relax and explain. "I want to throw some cold water on the romantic idea of genius stemming from neurosis, illness or violent eccentricity," he said. 

"The cigarette thing comes from a contemporary piece about George Sand in a Parisian newspaper in which the writer argued that since her ideas violated the sanctity of religion and the family, and she was a woman, and she smoked, then surely it was nicotine that was the source of these dangerous ideas. 

"You could call that a perfect example of getting it back to front: It wasn't smoking that caused her opinions, of course, but her opinions as to what an independent, liberated woman could do, that caused her to smoke." 

Barnes will be taking aim at no less a literary mountain than Edmund Wilson, who took the myth of Philoctetes, the Greek archer hampered by a snakebite on the heel, to mean that the wounded archer is the one who shoots straightest. 

In one of those odd coincidences of time and detail, Olazabal had just won the Masters for the second time after having been sidelined for nearly two years with a bad foot. But that bad foot was not the reason he'd won, Barnes reasoned. Similarly, "artists can be neurotic or sick, like anyone else, but it seems to me that if so, their art comes from the healthy part of them, not the sick one." 

It was refreshing to hear an argument for the sanity of artists, especially when I thought of the juicy biography of Byron I'd been reading for the past few days. Mad, bad and dangerous to know. "But aren't people very attracted to the idea of the insane artist?" I asked. 

"Oh yes, the idea of artists destroying themselves in order to provide others with art is a very popular one. At times you feel almost under an obligation to screw up in a major way in order to fulfill the myth." 

He leaned back and smiled - a happily married man doing the work he enjoys in a way that pays well and gains the respect of those he respects. Finally he shook his head and declared: "I'm against that whole idea of screwing up. I'm not prepared to sacrifice myself just yet. And I'm against the kind of assumptions made in the Paris Review interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, where the interviewer basically says, `All sorts of wild things happen in your novels - you must have been on some pretty weird drugs at the time.' 

"I won't spoil it for those who are coming to the lecture by saying how Marquez replied, because I'll be telling the story then. But I'll tell you right now it was quite wonderful."