The Talk of the Irish : HARP <i> by John Gregory Dunne (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 235 pp.; 0-671-68852-9) </i>

Harp? Try knell. Though this Irish-American memoir includes a trip to Ireland, John Gregory Dunne has less unfinished business with the Emerald Isle than he does with the Grim Reaper. But then: Don’t we all? And what of it? You can’t talk of the Irish anyway without talking, soon enough, of the dead.

“I call myself a harp,” Dunne writes, “because I like the sound of the word--it is short, sharp and abusive.” I could call myself a harp too; but if I did, it would be because I find the word short, sharp and roughly affectionate. It’s a good one-word title for Dunne’s book, all right, but not if you hear it his way, only if you hear it mine. Harp Lager doesn’t owe its name to an ethnic slur.

“Harp” is rather like the life story of an Irish writer as you might hear it in a single long night in a bar, especially if you were Irish too, and the writer could take the corresponding liberties. In Irish company, it is never bad form to bring up your “people.” In fact, if too much time passes and you have failed to do so, you may receive a gentle invitation.

And when you accept, a certain disarming readiness in your companion--a sense that for him, the family question is not an idle one--will mix with the drink and loosen your tongue. And in short order you’ll be telling about your poor younger brother, the sweetest, dearest one of the lot of you, and to end that way. And then there was your niece, her that was killed, and what you hope happens to her murderer there in prison when his fellow convicts get their hands on him. (I spare you the details, but in a bar I might not; and in “Harp,” Dunne doesn’t.)

It’s not against the rules to talk even of old nuns and elderly maiden aunts (not that these categories are mutually exclusive), though you’ll most likely be doing that in connection with a story about the wake and funeral of one of them, and maybe the reading of a will. And then what does that kind of talk lead up to but the fate that awaits us all? And then invariably the talk gets warmer and better, and the company dearer, as Death--banished but remembered--waits outside in the dark lane, and the waning of the night is like the waning of life itself.

Death is only the penultimate Irish topic, however. The ultimate topic is regret. Lost loves. Ruinous mistakes. Vanished youth. Squandered fortunes. Broken promises. And for these, you must remain through the last round.

“Harp” declines the last round. It stands in the door with its cap in its hand, willing its eyes dry, holding its tongue, because that kind of talk, you know, with the tears and all, what good does it do you? Well, the Irish know what kind of good it does them; but since “Harp” has held up its end of the conversation so well for so long, no one will mind, much, if it leaves a little early.

John Gregory Dunne was born in Hartford, Conn., the son of a physician wealthy enough to have servants and a six-car garage, the grandson--on his mother’s side--of a banker, in fact, a bank-founder. His irritation with

the Yankee establishment of the Northeast is not the kind felt by the

Irish who didn’t make it but the special kind felt by the Irish who did. For them, after the fading of the gross differences of wealth and education between the Irish and the English in America, what remained was a residual difference of style, a difference whose meaning to the Irish Dunne catches brilliantly as follows:

“My parents’ house . . . looked out on the house of that quintessential Yank Thomas Norval Hepburn, a urologist and pioneer in social medicine, but best known as the father of Katharine Hepburn; our summer house in Saybrook was only a hop, skip and jump from the Hepburns’ house in Fenwick. I must confess here a certain lack of enthusiasm for the public and cinematic persona of Katharine Hepburn--the feisty lady of quality, a tad feistier and with a tad more quality than anyone else within range. She has always seemed to me all cheekbones and opinions, and none of the opinions has ever struck me as terribly original or terribly interesting, dependent as they are on a rather parochial Hartford definition of quality, as reinterpreted by five decades’ worth of Studio unit publicists. This obiter dictum is, I admit, not a majority view.”

Dunne’s attitude toward Hepburn is, broadly, the attitude of the American Irish--at least of his generation--toward the Yankees. Yankee “quality” has always seemed to them to be a distinction without a difference, a glance downward from the Olympian flats. Books like Robert C. Christopher’s recent “Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America’s Power Elite” (Simon & Schuster) may be right to claim that the fire is mostly gone out of this old fight. The erstwhile aristocracy has become, at best, a “class act,” like the Hepburn act; at worst, a set of mannerisms and commodities packaged--as in Ralph Lauren’s “Polo” line of costumery--for anyone who, God save us, wants to look that way. And yet “Harp,” running atavistically athwart such claims, isn’t entirely wrong either. If John Dunne wears his slightly bruised Celtic heart on his sleeve, a similar bruise may be found darkening other, less prominently displayed hearts, not all of them, by any means, Irish.

Slightly bruised, I said, and I used the adverb advisedly. By the time Dunne had graduated from Princeton (yes, not B.C. or the Cross) and done his stint in the U.S. Army in Germany (a full chapter on that time), a difference had taken hold of him that would dwarf all merely ethnic differences; namely, the difference between the writer and the rest of mankind. There is in this book--curiously, perhaps, though I can’t say I much miss it--nothing of the usual making-of-the-writer sort: no first jobs, mentors, breakthroughs, crucial lessons, etc. The writer in this book is the writer Dunne has become, not the writer he was at any point along the way.

Beginning with the suicide of his younger brother, Stephen, and ending with his own heart attack in Central Park, “Harp” is, en route, a mix of dead Dunne relatives (and one friend) remembered and the live novelist/journalist at work. The tone in the author-at-work sections wavers between oblique vaunt--”This is what I do!”--and equally oblique dread--”Is this what I do?”

Thus, early in the book, Dunne writes: “(Writing) is the only job I have. I do not teach, I rarely lecture. I occasionally do screenplays, but the operative word is ‘do’; doing screenplays does for me what doing screenplays did for Faulkner: it buys time.”

Near the end of the book, however, after the heart attack, he writes:

“ ‘I think I know how to end this book now,’ I said to my wife on the walk home from (the doctor’s). I knew I did not have to spell it out to her.

“ ‘Terrific,’ she said, the novelist in her taking precedence over the wife who knew her husband too well ever to express the concern she felt, the husband who was so volatile except in times of crisis.

“ ‘It’s a hell of an ending,’ I said, and what I meant was that a writer’s life is his only real capital, his and his alone to invest, and to imagine, and to reimagine, even unto this.

“Well, hell, yes, it’s what I do.”

What do you do?--the great American question. And as the writer’s life draws nearer its close, the great American follow-up question: What have I done? I find it utterly Irish of Dunne to manage his answer in asides during a long night of talk about death in the family. And for once the Irish way seems a reasonable way. The question What have I done? is a beast best taken from the flank. One senses that Dunne does indeed have a few regrets, or at least a few longstanding worries that may someday mature and blossom as regrets. But this is just a hunch, one reader’s extrapolation. The writer himself says little.

“Harp” is, I would note before closing, Irish in one other particular. When I come home from an evening out with my oldest Irish friend, my wife always asks about his wife. And I never have anything to report. I always feel a little sheepish saying, “Well, she didn’t come up. I mean, she did, of course, several times, but we didn’t talk about her.” Joan Didion appears at several crucial moments in “Harp,” including the one just noted (it is indeed a hell of an ending, by the way); she is not, however, among her husband’s public subjects.

Not yet.

Winsome, accommodating beyond the usual measure, and unpredictably, truculently, cripplingly touchy: That’s how the Irish seem to me. Dunne is Irish in all these ways: thin-skinned and easily aggrieved; engaging, invincibly gregarious; and, depending on your cause, combatively at your service as scarcely another writer of his prominence in the nation. “Harp” is just the kind of book that such a man would write, a book that welcomes you in, talks to you wonderfully for a while, takes you into its confidence, then backs off just a bit abruptly (“Was it something I said?” you wonder) and takes its leave. If you know someone like that, and if you find him, on balance, worth the trouble, then you may find “Harp” worth the trouble too.