THE GREAT AMERICAN MAGAZINE: An Inside History of LIFE <i> by Loudon Wainwright (Knopf: $19.95; 443 pp., illustrated) </i>

In a way, Life was like an over-the-hill prizefighter who doesn’t have the good sense to retire before his diminished gifts make him look foolish. Eyes swollen nearly shut, cuts leaking blood around the trainer’s hasty patches, legs turning to water, he staggers around the ring under the battering of a much younger opponent. . . .Such was really the case with Life, no matter how valiantly its managers tried to doctor the wounds, to alter its stance, to pump it up with some vital new resolve. The great American magazine had outlived its own strength, was dead on its feet, and its fatal weakness was apparent in almost every issue.

The younger opponent, and the cause of death, was television. It delivered the mass audience in numbers and at a cost per thousand Life couldn’t match. But, even more to the fatal point, television had seized the attention of the audience away from Life and all the other general circulation magazines, just as Life itself had seized the public fancy from Vol. l, No. 1, dated Nov. 23, 1936. It died as a weekly on Dec. 29, 1972.

For a quarter-century, Life really was the great American magazine. It had the largest circulation of any weekly, ultimately touching 8 million (with a readership at least triple that figure). A single issue commanded more ad revenue than even a good-sized daily newspaper would see in a year.

More than that, Life became, to an unprecedented degree, part of the American experience, American life, American culture. Its photographers emerged as a folklore of their own, and they appeared as characters in novels, plays and films.

The picture essays--on a country doctor, a career girl, a Sunday in Missouri--became an art-form of their own. The images of war, commencing with Robert Capa’s extraordinary photograph of a Spanish soldier being shot, are fixed forever in the memory of those who have seen them. The editors were determined to popularize all the arts, to make the mysteries of modern science comprehensible, to instruct the masses on the broad sweeps of history from mammoth to Mendes-France, and to a quite remarkable degree, they succeeded.

The magazine was, along the way, a hell of a place to work, exhausting, exciting, challenging, frustrating and even demoralizing. Loudon Wainwright, who joined Life in 1949 as a trainee in the picture bureau, taking over a seat I had warmed for six months, has told the story of Life from birth to its death in 1972.

(The later, candy box Life is no part of the book, although Wainwright has been an assistant managing editor and columnist of the monthly version.)

Anyone who worked at Life can only be pleased and relieved that someone, at last, has got it right, got it all right, the dark side as well as the bright.

Life has been one of the most written-about magazines ever. A bibliography lists 30 titles, from the official corporate histories by Robert Elson and Curtis Prendergast, to William Brinkley’s comic (and score-settling) novel, “The Fun House,” to David Cort’s angry memoir “The Sin of Henry R. Luce” and Dora Jane Hamblin’s amusing and anecdotal “That Was the Life.” One of several additional titles that could have been included is Ralph Ingersol’s 1948 novel, “The Great Ones,” whose protagonists suggest Henry and Clare Luce, thinly disguised and unflatteringly seen.

All earlier accounts of Life have been overcheerful, or malevolent or, if balanced, too detached and undetailed to catch all the human drama of the publishing of Life.

Wainwright quotes a famous late closing night utterance by Natalie Kosek of the picture bureau: “Each week we pretend we’ve never put out a magazine before.” He quotes as well, a heartfelt note he typed to himself while trying, late one other closing Saturday night, to come up with a headline that would satisfy Joe Kastner, the unutterably demanding copy editor: “How can he be so sure what he wants and not know what it is?”

Wainwright has lived with Life for more than 25 years, and he tells it with what I can only call a hard-eyed affection and an unsparing, but also unmalicious candor. No one has made better use of the corporation’s carefully maintained archives to recount, via the public and private memo-age, the beginnings of the magazine. (This is not, however, an authorized history, Wainwright points out.)

He nicely catches the tensions that existed between the photographers and everybody else. The word people, Wainwright says, “often looked down on photographers and thought of them as marginally talented, babyish, unreliable, opportunistic, self important, boring and even stupid. All these things were now and then so.”

The photographers, on the other hand, “often considered the others snobbish, slow-witted, freeloading, blind, callous, treacherous, cowardly and incapable of knowing the difference between a really good picture and some hokey setup shot banged off by the clowns at the wire services. Some of the time, naturally, the photographers were right.”

“There are two kinds of magazines,” one of the editors liked to say; “there is the Gee Whiz magazine and there is the Oh Pshaw magazine”--the editor did not say Pshaw--”Life is a Gee Whiz magazine, and don’t you ever forget it.” Luce told the last managing editor of the weekly Life, “I always thought of Time as making enemies and Life as making friends.”

No one forgot for long that it was a Gee Whiz magazine--even if the exclamations were over the excellence of the coverage of tragedy. But the prevailing attitude, and the journalistic preeminence and the profitability of the great years, peaking in the ‘50s, did tend to create at Life a collegiate and even undergraduate atmosphere of ebullient, confident fun and games.

Wainwright celebrates the glories of the magazine, including the headlong bravery of the photographers who died at war, beginning with Capa himself, then later Paul Schutzer (in Israel), the ceaselessly valiant Larry Burrows in Laos, and several others.

But he records as well, the fierce competition among the young tigers eager for the top job at Life, and the bitter and sometimes ruinous disappointment felt by those who were passed over for advancement. One of the editors committed suicide after a drunken debacle at a sales convention in the Caribbean, and for Wainwright, his death symbolized a loss of innocence for the magazine--a glimpse of the dark side whose existence could no longer be denied.

Life, with its long and erratic hours and the common interests shared by those who worked there, was hell on marriages and home life generally. Closing night could last past dawn, and often did. The drinking lamp was lit at 10, and the foreign news department had a martini flag which flew on very slight provocations. The three-martini lunch was common, and not even deductible. Alcohol could be a real problem, and Wainwright, ever candid, admits to his own falls from grace, under pressure.

Wainwright’s fondest and most admiring portrait is of Edward K. Thompson, “the make-believe rube from North Dakota” who was the magazine’s gruff and mumbling managing editor for its dozen greatest years and a genius in the use of photographs. When Luce, inexplicably, kicked Thompson upstairs, he left to become the founding editor of Smithsonian Magazine, where he proved that his success at Life was no accident.

The portraits are not all flattering, and if the book is short on villains, there are acid sketches of editors who were the magazine at its most bureaucratic (a characteristic of which it was surprisingly free) and whom it is impossible to remember fondly.

Wainwright was the principal Life writer, bylined or ghostly, during its long association with the astronauts, and a kind of bonus within the book is his account of the negotiations with the group and his relations with them later. It is a long postscript to “The Right Stuff,” by someone who was there.

“This is neither an objective nor a definitive history of Life,” Wainwright says in a preface. “I have no emotional distance from the subject and never will.” Good. It is, I think, as definitive as a book will ever need to be about the magazine’s impact on the society, its achievements and its swift decline. And no one, I suspect, will write more feelingly or carefully about the experience of working there.

It all ended on a December morning in 1972 when the staff was gathered to be told what the top editors had known for two weeks and had feared for months and even years.

The last managing editor, Ralph Graves, said, “We worked on a great and famous magazine; we’ve published many wonderful stories and we had a remarkable experience together. . . . I won’t pretend that any place else is going to be like what we shared together at Life. And I thank you all for that gift we gave to each other.”

For those who wish to remember, there is that fat $3.95 special issue on the stands currently, and a thigh-numbing $50 book (“Life: The First 50 Years,” published by Little, Brown), with more than 5,000 reproductions of covers (all of them), layouts and individual photographs, including the Capa and many of the others that a couple of generations of us, anyway, regard as unforgettable. The book says Gee Whiz, as Life indubitably did, and it is a reminder just how profoundly tacky, trivial, ephemeral and silly--as well as profound--the magazine could be.