There Are No Second and Third Acts in American Life : TIMEBENDS A Life <i> by Arthur Miller (Grove Press: $12.95; 594 pp.) </i>

In America, Arthur Miller writes, “the quickest road to failure is success.” It is the theme of his massive and uncomfortable memoir; the angry cry that the act of remembering keeps wringing from him.

“Timebends” tells of Miller’s childhood, his work in the theater, his encounters--particularly with Marilyn Monroe--and his thoughts about art, politics and life. His paradox shadows all of it.

Miller endured its most painful version. It is one thing to succeed and, when the successes run down, to ease gradually out of sight. But Miller remained public and active, the exemplar of the great American playwright, even though his two most important works, “Death of a Salesman” and “The Crucible,” appeared 38 and 35 years ago, respectively.

After that, nothing remotely comparable was forthcoming--”A View From the Bridge,” has theatrical bite but a mealy aftertaste--and the plays that did appear met a colder and colder critical reception. Thirty-five years is a long fall when the spotlights are stuck on you. His tormented marriage to Monroe stepped them up, for a while, to laser intensity.

In the United States, we do not treat monuments well unless they are made of stone. We do not give our artists lordships, as in Britain; or gold-embroidered academicians’ uniforms, as in France; or Living National Treasure status, as in Japan. We do not say: “To have created Willy Loman and John Proctor makes you an immortal.” We say: “Now then, Immortal: Show us that you’re alive.”

Miller refers repeatedly in the memoirs to the honor and appreciation he enjoyed abroad these past three decades. For the chilliness he met in his own country he has a number of explanations, none of which contemplates the possibility that his work is weaker.

Some of the explanations make valid points. It is certainly true that we have a boom-or-bust mentality, particularly in the theater; that to affirm that a work is merely good is to damn it.

What makes Miller’s attitude particularly knotty is that while condemning this attitude, he shares it. “Incident at Vichy,” he writes, received “an unexcited if respectful welcome” when it opened in 1964. He attributes this welcome to the critics’ “ongoing contempt” for the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, the first of a series of ill-starred efforts to make the Center’s theatrical component work.

The inference is that anything less than excitement--mere respect, for instance--must be the product of active contempt and that the history of the Whitehead-Kazan-Clurman era at Lincoln Center is one of fine work blighted by critical hostility to the institution, rather than an institution’s fading because of faded work.

If this at least astigmatic, Miller’s account of the failure of an earlier play approaches pure blindness. “Coming so soon after Marilyn’s death, ‘After the Fall’ had to fail,” he writes. As an immediate reflex of pain and bitterness, such a notion may be understandable. Reiterated two decades later, it is deforming. It is hard not to think that Miller caught some of the illness that helped bring down his wife: poisoning by your own image.

Miller treats his relationship with Monroe at great length. On a physical level, he is entirely and fittingly discreet. Emotionally, he is more revealing. Not so much about Monroe; the portrait of her magnetic neediness is striking and pitiable, but it is not very different, except in some of his details, to what we have already been told.

She seems to have sought Miller out as one more salvation--in this case, escape with a certified artist from the reality of her Hollywood life--and to have come up once more against the dilemma of her illness: That salvation by what you think you want means rejection of what you know you are.

The more striking revelations are about Miller’s own vulnerability. He tells of the devastating attraction he felt for Monroe. Part of the devastation is to his prose. He can write very well about it; he can also write that Monroe was “part queen, part waif”; and engage in the kind of awful floweriness he uses about a pre-Monroe dalliance: “I let the mystery and blessing of womankind break over my head once or twice.”

More startling than such glimpses of a writer going stylistically berserk is his depiction of sex as a kind of warrior’s conquest, with Monroe as the ultimate prize. Fidelity to a first wife had become irksome, he tells us, to someone who had achieved his kind of success. “I wanted to stop turning away from the power my work had won for me and to engorge experience forbidden in a life of disciplined ambition.”

Miller’s account of his family, wealthy clothes manufacturers ruined in the Depression, is full of striking detail. His relatives were colorful and assertive, and his portraits of them and of his childhood are dense and varied. They also possess a certain oppressiveness, as if the vision he acquired had been so hard-won that it was damaged in the winning.

There is a sense of liberation--for the reader, as well--when he leaves home for college and writes of his early days learning to be a playwright and knocking about New York. There is a wonderful description of a trip to Sicily after the war in the company of a Brooklyn dockhand reformer who decides to run for office and wants to reassert his Italian heritage. Their adventures are extraordinary and splendidly told; among them, meeting Lucky Luciano and being put under a kind of Mafia house arrest.

He gives an exuberant account of writing “Death of a Salesman” and working with Elia Kazan on the rehearsals. His portraits of Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, Jed Harris and other theatrical figures are instructive and vivid.

The vividness tends to get swamped, though, as he deals with his career, and the witch hunts of the McCarthy period. He was badly hurt by them, and he has earned the right to philosophize. But whereas his accounts of people and incidents are lively and convincing, his philosophy tends to be turgid, crushed by a grievance that is unable to go beyond its own pain.

There is an artist under it all. There are splendid lines in “Timebends,” as when Miller writes of his lifelong pleasure in carpentry and building things: “The idea of creating a new shadow on the earth has never lost its fascination,” he writes. He describes an uncle’s energetically ambitious family as “a house without irony.” Of Boston audiences in the 1950s, he tells us that they were in “a state of stubborn spiritual stateliness.”

There is some stimulating thinking as well. He makes an interesting--though not, I think, convincing--case against reliance upon alternative theater as the vehicle for serious drama. By being forced to make their serious artistry available to Broadway audiences, he argues, playwrights found themselves obliged to be relevant and to engage in large social issues.

He has little taste for formal experimentation and for the absurdist tinges of much contemporary theater. He criticizes it as “naturalistic reportage of life’s crazed surfaces . . . Naturalism disguised and as incapable of projecting alternatives to what we were doing and why as naturalism had been.”

There is wit and some depth in this. “Timebends” possesses quite a lot of both qualities, but they are obscured; casualties of an autobiographical struggle that the author seems too scarred to win.