ONE OF MY first ventures beyond adolescence was to read the memoirs of older but still living writers. I wanted to see how they thought about themselves, and how they thought about writing. Among the memoirs that most impressed me were Albert Camus`s Notebooks, Cyril Connolly`s The Unquiet Gram and Enemies of Promise, and the various memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir. In different ways, they all filled me with delight, and still do. I discovered that there is something profoundly exciting about a first-rate writer`s private thoughts, whatever he or she happens to be thinking about. I think it has to do with the fact that what they write asserts the universality of ideas, yet makes them - writers and ideas - human and achievable in scale. There is also the pleasure of unexpected combinations of ideas, the unguardedly confessional contact with someone else`s inner life, and, at times, the sheer velocity and brilliance of their thought. I opened Timothy Findley`s Inside Memory, therefore, with both anticipation and a certain degree of trepidation. How would the memoir of a first-rate Canadian writer compare with the standards I noted above? It doesn`t, because it is not a true memoir. Inside Memory is mostly a collection of journalistic pieces and essays, with a smattering of diary entries tossed in to authenticate it as memoir. This is not to say it is not an interesting read and a valuable book. It is both. It just doesn`t quite deliver what it promises. At least part of the reason rests in Findley`s character. He hasn`t lived a boring life. He comes to writing from a career as an actor, and he`s lived, in the vernacular, an unusually rich and eventful life. As a result, he plays a more "active` and intrusive role in his own tales than do most writers. The result is a memoir that is often primarily a recounting of what he`s done rather than a record of what he thinks or has thought. On the other side of this - exacerbating the effect without balancing it - is the fact that as writers go, Findley has never been exactly notorious for his candour and directness. He has, for instance, always kept his personal life a private matter, and Inside Memory doesn`t after this pattern. It isn`t that he hides any of it. It becomes clear, for instance, that he doesn`t regard his homosexuality as a primary - or even significant - part of the subject matter and identity this memoir intends to assert. Inside Memory is a memoir of Timothy Findley, actor and writer of books, and everything else is subservient or secondary to that identity. It is therefore not a memoir in which many secrets - open or otherwise - get revealed. I respect his discretion here as elsewhere, but some readers are likely to be disappointed. For my money, the best chapter in the book is the final one. It carries the same title as the book, and is a set of obituaries that becomes a meditation on the meaning of life, death, and artistic longevity. Those whose deaths are marked include Margaret Laurence, Ken Adachi, Glenn Gould, and Marian Engel. Like most of the rest of the book, the chapter is largely cadged from magazine articles he`s written, but this time perhaps because of the gravity of the subject matter -he transcends the superficiality that man his other chapters and becomes truly intimate and thoughtful. Readers won`t find the intense philosophical ennui of Camus in this book, nor the penetrating character insights of de Beauvoir or even the rich prose fugues of Connolly. Timothy Findley is an actor, a cultural activist, and a very fine novelist, and he clearly prefers to be known for those public roles, and no others. Since he has seen, been, and done a great deal, maybe we should be content with that.