Anatolia! Anatolia! : ELIA KAZAN A Life<i> by Elia Kazan (Alfred A. Knopf: $24.95; 816 pp.) </i>

Even at the height of his success as a Hollywood and Broadway director--he made “On the Waterfront” and “East of Eden,” and staged “Death of a Salesman” and “Streetcar Named Desire”--Elia Kazan tells us that he detested the constraints of celebrity and longed to find authenticity by breaking away and working poor.

It sounds like a familiar sort of pose, but it isn’t. Or maybe it shows that if you live long enough, you can actually become what you pose as. Kazan has produced an autobiography that tries to affirm his life by dismantling it and casting it away. Everything about it is excessive: Its length, anger, revelatory zeal, recrimination and self-recrimination, and the dark flood of detail that churns together the scabrous and the illuminating.

Nearly 80, Kazan is going not at all gently into a night that is anything but good. He rages, as if to hold it off. The eye he casts on life and death is filled with flame, and every so often it suddenly goes cold and clear.

He begins the account of his tumultuous life and career with his third and current wife asking him of a morning: “Why are you mad?” His reply: “I’m not mad. It’s just my face.”

It is a triumph for him, this perpetually scowling face. Most of his life, he tells us, he was afflicted with a different expression, “the Anatolian smile.” It is a smile that conceals an anger dangerous to show.

Anatolia is the part of Turkey from which his Greek father emigrated shortly after Elia was born. Turkish Greeks live under the threat and often the fact of persecution; they had to make themselves deferential if not invisible.

Even when established as a modestly prosperous rug dealer in New York, Kazan’s father’s mottoes were: “Don’t Start Up Arguments” and “Walk Away From a Fight.” Except at home, of course, where he once knocked his wife off her chair when she disclosed her secret arrangement to send young Elia to Williams College instead of letting him go into the rug business.

Kazan’s “A Life” is built around his resentful sense of subjection to his Anatolian heritage. This included the need to conceal anger, to regard himself as an outsider even among friends, to dissemble and--particularly in his compulsive womanizing--to live a double life.

In this perspective, writing the book becomes an act of national insurrection, a war against the Turks. It tells nearly all; it is a monumental and often unbearably prolonged burst of fury, lightened by some remarkable perceptions and a wealth of anecdote, and written in a style that ranges from pithy to verbose.

After Williams, Kazan attended Yale School of Drama, where he met Molly Thatcher, who was to become his first wife and longtime collaborator, supporter and--by his account--protesting victim. After a number of rebuffs, he joined the Group Theater, led by Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford. He had some success acting nervy young men--he was the star of Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty”--but turned increasingly to directing.

His career reached its highest point in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Directing Wilder, Miller, Williams, Robert Anderson and William Inge, he was the supreme exemplar of that extinct genre, serious Broadway Theater. In Hollywood, he was similarly called upon for the Serious Picture. However, when it came to his one undisputed film masterpiece, “On the Waterfront,” none of the studios would finance him. He had to resort to the independent producer, Sam Spiegel, who was flamboyantly struggling to make a name for himself.

In the ‘60s, with Williams and Miller past their peak, and with the psychological realism of the Group Theater and the Actors Studio--where it became The Method--beginning to show its weaknesses, Kazan, a Studio founder, began to do independent projects. One was “America America,” a film effort to recapture the immigrant experience; another was “The Arrangement,” a successful novel and unsuccessful film which fictionalized some of his own experiences.

His career was in a decline, and his efforts to set up a permanent repertory theater at Lincoln Center, along with Robert Whitehead, collapsed with a disastrous first season.

I have said that Kazan’s book is excessive, but part of the excess consists of virtues. He is an angry man discovering the liberating properties of anger and overdosing on them; he is not a self-pitier.

Perhaps the single most traumatic period of his life came when, a one-time Communist, he decided not only to admit this to the House Un-American Activities Committee but also to name eight other former members of the Group Theater who were also Communists. Many of his friends, and virtually the entire Liberal community, criticized him harshly, and some of the friends cut him dead for years afterwards. He justifies his decision in a complicated and, essentially, unconvincing manner. Soon after, he tells us that he was probably wrong to do what he did.

There is confusion here but also the evidence of a man trying to think his way out of a calamity. In any case, the fact that he tells the whole story with more anger than self-compassion gives the account a certain stature.

Kazan blames himself for much of the Lincoln Center debacle; he is not a good director, he tells us, except in a narrow realistic range of theater where his personal involvement gives him insight.

And he is frank to say that this is not theater at its best. What he really admires is the non-realistic work of a Peter Brooke or a Patrice Chereau, and is quick to tell us that he has no hope of doing such work. This is no superficial disclaimer. Kazan’s limitations were real ones; the fact that he says so is the kind of painful truth-telling that is one of his strengths.

His portraits are biting; sometimes gratuitously. His report of the bloated, aged Orson Welles devouring a whole roast chicken in a car amounts to self-loathing applied to someone else.

More often, though, his sharpness is justified. There are many more splendid things in the book than can be cited. There was the feud between Tallulah Bankhead and Florence Eldridge during “The Skin of Our Teeth.”

Bankhead would comb her yellow hair conspicuously while Eldridge was giving her main speech; in reprisal, Fredric March, Eldridge’s husband, stood in the wings gargling loudly while Tallulah delivered hers. Tallulah shoved her tongue in March’s mouth during their love scene; he bit it.

There is Lee Strasberg descending to the dining shed at the Group Theater summer camp “like Zeus from Olympus,” followed at a respectful distance by his mistress.

Kazan is sometimes critical of Clurman, but he can’t resist the man’s sunny enthusiasm. “Harold’s rehearsals were like parties at which he was the guest of honor,” he writes. A similar geniality attends his last visit to Clurman in the hospital, where the dying man, surrounded by friends, was cheerfully presiding over his own wake.

Sam Spiegel’s mix of lavishness and penny-pinching is splendidly rendered by one image: He kept a refrigerator stocked entirely with champagne for his guests, but the champagne was all in splits.

The book’s most sensational parts are Kazan’s accounts of his infidelities. While married to Molly Kazan, he describes his trysts with Barbara Loden, whom he would marry after Molly’s death. It was “dog and bitch,” he writes. They would couple “in alleys, in the back rows of movie theater balconies and on park benches. . . .” There are detailed accounts of other liaisons, serious and casual. He lets us know that he was Marilyn Monroe’s lover, off and on.

He tells us that he could give up neither the security and devotion he found with Molly, nor his adventures. These last kept him from “drying up, turning to dust and blowing away,” he insists.

He lied all his life about these things. Duplicity, he claims with some satisfaction, is part of his “Anatolian” condition. Now, writing, he wonders if his children will forgive him when they read the book.

His frankness becomes self-serving. He argues that affairs between directors and the actresses they direct are in reality “temporary marriages.” You need to be a skillful carpenter or casuist to turn a casting couch into a marriage bed. And it is hard not to be appalled by his cynical description of the arrangements during a shooting in Athens:

“To attend to other needs, I acquired a mini-harem of two actresses whom I could call on whenever I chose.” They wanted to get ahead, he writes, “and made the mistake of believing I would help.”

His account of his relations with Molly are one of the book’s central themes. Through the fog of his own betrayals and distances comes a picture of a man who feels genuinely bound by love, who resents the bonds, and who slips them incessantly and with an incessant guilt. The picture is stormy and dark.

Molly herself comes through as both admirable and frail. Towards the end of her life, she decorates a Manhattan apartment in the hope that Kazan will settle down and that she can launch a much-delayed writing career. He cannot settle, she cannot write; and she dies not long afterwards of a massive stroke. Kazan’s account is a nearly unbearable mixture of heartbreak, tragedy and plain horror.

It is strong stuff, and so is the book as a whole. It is repellent in part, admirable in part, fascinating for much of the time and far, far too long.

The last 100 pages or so are descriptions of other people’s deaths. He is obsessed with the details, he cannot seem to stop; as if stopping meant dying. The resilience that gave energy to the darker passages of the memoir disappears; Kazan’s turbulent stream sinks into a morass.