`INSIDE' FEELINGS LEFT OUT : AUTHOR'S MEMOIR OF BLACKLIST EMERGES UNEVEN.

Byline: Michiko Kakutani The New York Times

Twenty years ago, Walter Bernstein, a screenwriter who had been blacklisted for almost a decade, wrote a movie called ``The Front,'' set against the backdrop of the red scare of the 1950s.

The hero was a small-time bookie who lends his name to a blacklisted friend and finds himself falling in love with a high-minded script editor who believes he is an idealistic artist. Her love, in turn, inspires him to do the right thing - that is, refuse to name names - and risk going to jail.

Whereas ``The Front'' was a comedy - relying upon those familiar movie conventions of mistaken identity, romantic epiphanies and stark black-and-white choices - Bernstein proposes to tell the real and often very somber story of his own blacklisting in a new memoir, ``Inside Out.''

The results are decidedly mixed: some genuinely moving passages, depicting the plight of blacklisted artists; lots of rationalizations about the perceived nature of communism, and an oddly opaque self-portrait of a naive young writer who fell in love with the movies and the idea of communism.

The book also boasts a Forrest Gumpian cast of extras, including James Dean, Irwin Shaw, A.J. Liebling, W.H. Auden, Irving Berlin, Harold Ross, Al Jolson, Robert Capa, Marshal Tito, Bette Davis, Elia Kazan, Zero Mostel, Boris Karloff and Sophia Loren, all nimbly sketched in a reporter's brisk, observant prose.

As Bernstein tells it, he more or less stumbled into his Communist sympathies. He was a high school graduate on a six-month visit to France when he met a group of English Communists that included Robert Conquest, the writer who later would become a fervent anti-Communist and expert on the Soviet gulag. Lonely and shy, the young Bernstein eagerly fell in with them.

Waving to strikers and singing the ``Internationale,'' he recalls, he felt the way he had at war movies: ``There was nothing else with which I could compare this feeling. It made me tingle as I did when my hero went over the top or took his Spad into the air against Richthofen's Flying Circus. Tears came to my eyes.'' In retrospect, he wonders about his ``desire to please these new, necessary friends'':

``I wanted their approval and they were so certain in their beliefs; I had nothing to go up against them with, even if I had wanted to.''

At Dartmouth, Bernstein joined a cell of the Young Communist League, which he says never had more than four members. After World War II, which he spent working for the United States Army magazine Yank, he joined the party.

His devotion was unquestioning and willfully naive. ``Whatever line the Soviet Union took, we followed,'' he writes. ``It seemed only right. The Russians had suffered more than anyone (30 million dead in the war) and they `Knew the Way.' ''

``Facing the growing attacks from the outside, I dug in my heels,'' he writes. ``It became a matter of pride and defiance, of identity, the image I had of myself.''

Bernstein stuck to his convictions, not only in the face of eight years of being blacklisted in the movie business and 11 years in television, but also in the face of increasingly distressing reports about Soviet anti-Semitism and Stalin's tyrannical rule. ``I knew little about the gulag,'' he recalls, ``and wanted to know less, fearful of its meaning, distrusting the sources of this terrible information.''

Unable to find employment, Bernstein, like many other blacklisted workers, found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. He says he was followed by FBI agents, his phone was tapped, his garbage was examined. An aimlessness infected his life. He began buying raffle and sweepstakes tickets. Sometimes at night he took the subway to Coney Island and walked the boardwalk in the dark.

Most of his efforts to find fronts for his writing projects ended in comic disarray. One front named Olga said she had to quit because her analyst said it was bad for her self-esteem. Another, named Leo, said he had to quit because his parents thought he was making a lot of money in television and wanted him to share the wealth.

What got Bernstein through the difficult times, he says, was his friendship with other blacklisted writers and artists. ``We specialized in the hilarity of doom,'' he writes. ``New friendships were formed and quickly became precious. If someone were in particular need, money would be pooled and given. We helped one another without thought of repayment or consequence and did not think this unusual.''

This was the same sense of solidarity and purpose that Bernstein says he felt during the war, the same sense of brotherhood he worshiped in the movies. And it was something he would miss, he says, when the blacklist ended. ``My friends would still be my friends, but we were no longer held together by the cement of repression,'' he recalls. ``We were no longer a community.''

Although Bernstein does a nimble job of evoking the mood of those blacklist years, his book tends to vastly oversimplify complex events. The Alger Hiss case, for instance, is passed over in a single, highly questionable phrase: ``Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official, was convicted of perjury on the testimony of a witness whom psychiatrists called a psychopath.''

In addition, Bernstein tends to be oddly reticent about his own emotions. He does not explain his passionate need to belong to some larger group or movement, be it the Army, the Communist Party or an underground community of blacklisted writers. Odder still, he does not really come to terms with his former commitment to communism and his decision to leave the party after the Soviet crackdown in Hungary in 1956.

Instead, he gives us platitudes: ``Had it all been for a lie? I would not accept this, would not relinquish what had inspired so much of my life, the socialism in which I still believed, however corrupted it may have become.'' And cryptic confessions: ``Somewhere, somehow, I had failed. What I had failed was not clear, but what else was my gut telling me?''

Because of these holes, ``Inside Out'' feels incomplete. Like ``The Front,'' it offers only a partial view of a very dark time.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Twenty years after writing ``The Front,'' with Zero Mostel, left, and Woody Allen, Walter Bernstein proposes to tell the real and often very somber story of his own blacklisting in a new memoir, ``Inside Out.''