And Hid His Face Amid a Crowd of Stars : MOVIELAND,Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture,<i> by Jerome Charyn</i> ,<i> (G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $19.95; 304 pp.; 0-399-13423-9) </i>

Jerome Charyn wants to be very honest about his predicament: “I can say without melodrama, or malice, that Hollywood ruined my life.” This is sentence one, Chapter 1, after a prelude that describes the Loew’s Paradise, one of the magnificent if absurd movie palaces of the author’s youth. This was a Venetian palazzo so serenely out of place in the Bronx that maybe it foresaw the coming destruction of that borough. Beyond the mezzanine there was a plaster “sky” with birds and trees. It was a lovely trick, yet Charyn tries to suggest he was deceived. The palaces, you see, were churches--the metaphor is elastic--and worship was required because of those new creatures, bodiless yet body-snatchers, the stars.

Charyn fell for the stars in that false night sky: “It’s left me in a state of constant adolescence, searching for the kind of love that was invented by Louis B. Mayer and his brother moguls at Paramount and Columbia and Twentieth Century-Fox.

“I’ve hungered for dream women, like Rita Hayworth, whose message has always been that love is a deadly thing, a system of divine punishment.”

This may seem a romantic and old-fashioned illness now. I don’t think kids today dream of falling in love with movie actresses, just as they cannot know the delirious folly of places like the Loew’s Paradise. Furthermore, I’m not quite sure that Charyn means “ruined.” He is 52, as I calculate; he is a visiting distinguished professor of creative writing at City College of New York; and this seems to be his 22nd book. He is, evidently, quick, intelligent, humane, capable of amusement, and he writes up a storm that is provoking, touching and worthy of endless dipping, even if it isn’t a coherent book.

Late in his flow, Charyn allows that Louis B. Mayer fell and the author’s marriage failed. But there’s little true regret of damage in “Movieland” and no inclination to explore the social pathology of the dream. Rather, you feel a still-amazed and swept-away helplessness in Charyn, watching the show and realizing that so many people closer than Clara Bow or James Dean have become ghosts, immaterial figments beyond touch or saving.

In other words, there’s something ecstatic in the illness: Charyn writes so well and is such a chronic, agile leaper from one point to the next, he cannot help impressing us with his unstable vitality, his pleasure. He thinks the way movies cut; he feels the way light slips off the screen. He says he’s sick, yet this is only a classic show-business version of malaise, a way of drawing attention to oneself. This is the malady of unmet desire.

I’m too much a fellow sufferer to act like a doctor; and I had far too much fun with “Movieland” to be reproachful with a straight face. Still, an objective critic would have to say that the book sprawls and twists as if indifferent to whether anyone reads it all, or in what order. There are repetitions that leave one wondering whether Charyn has read it cover to cover in the appointed sequence.

Nor does the author permit analysis of the “disease,” the way in which such things as love, sex, marriage and the waiting for death have been turned into tropes of plot and close-up by movies. There is a book to be written in which life keeps equal footing with the movies and an author tries to fathom how his thoughts of Rita Hayworth undermined a certificated marriage. There is even the possibility that the “fever” might remit if one stopped talking about it, or got out of the dark.

As it is, Charyn goes wherever feverishness takes him. “Suddenly it’s 1972,” one chapter begins; and then another starts up, “Borges brings me to another labyrinth. . . .” The chapters aren’t steps in an argument or progress; they are versions of one dominant dream, the recurring song-and-dance, as samely and immediate as all our love-makings.

It’s more useful, I think, to pick out some figures in the dream: interviews with Paul Newman, Arthur Penn, Mae Clarke, Viveca Lindfors; abrupt dives into such dark pools as “Mickey One”; the sadness of being Jean Seberg; “Vertigo”; the turmoil of Louis B. Mayer; the look of Betty Grable, Kim Novak, Sean Young, Gene Tierney . . . or, as Nabokov once put it, ditto to the bottom of the page.

Charyn is turned on by men too. He can smell the young Brando; he is hooked on Gary Cooper’s speech; he struggles to make Paul Newman interesting; he keeps a soft spot for Otto Preminger. But it’s the dream women that drag him down, their eyes, the shape of their faces, the gravure of their flesh.

There’s not a lot to learn in this book; revery and remembering outweigh research. Its natural readers will be fans who know the movies, the anecdotes and the glances. (This is becoming a smaller, nearly secret, society.) But for those readers, Charyn surely beats the drum and sets the page dancing. I like his medley a lot more than I did Otto Friedrich’s “City of Nets.” That was far more organized a book, a skeleton recomposed with scissors and paste. But Friedrich came across as a chilly, unmoved outsider. Charyn’s book has no bone structure. It’s all hot flesh, or the tormenting illusion of flesh. But he has been to Paradise, been formed by it, and he knows that heaven and hell are just alternate takes in a delicious but camp game in which, somehow, we appear to have mislaid reality.