BOOK REVIEW : A Memoir Adrift Without Its Bearings : THE DAY GONE BY: An Autobiography <i> by Richard Adams</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf $25, 416 pages

It’s very tempting, after slogging through Richard Adams’ memoir, to sum up the author as a generally agreeable but often boring old codger. But that would be wrong; that would be ageism. Adams is best known as the author of “Watership Down,” the mythic tale of a band of rabbits, led by the brave but modest Hazel, looking for a safe place to live. It’s particularly tempting to go ahead and be ageist because, in this memoir, Adams himself is surprisingly animalist. “I am nervous by temperament,” he writes, “and when I was young I would sometimes, in fits of bravado, enter upon hare-brained exploits . . . .”

What’s more, as a young supply officer stationed in Gaza, Egypt, in the summer of 1943, Adams used to shoot the stray dogs that knocked over the garbage cans. “I aimed at the head,” his colleagues in the animal-rights movement will be startled to read, “because if you hit it, that killed them dead.”

In telling his own story, Adams has lost the bearings he had so firmly when he told Hazel’s. What set “Watership Down” apart from animal tales in which the animals are no more than furry four-legged people was Adams’ description of how rabbits use their senses. To stay alive, they have to sense changes in the warmth and dampness of the soil and observe the direction of air currents and the scents the wind carries.

The most vivid description in the book, of particular interest to Watership fans, is Adams’ earliest memory, which happens to be of dead rabbits. Walking hand-in-hand with his mother down the street, he saw a dirty, bearded man pushing a handcart full rabbits.

“Their back legs were tied together and as the cart rattled along, their ears and poor, eye-glazed faces swung and bobbed. The man, to leave his hands free, had tied the shafts with a bit of cord under his armpits, and as he went he was very deliberately skinning a rabbit with an old knife, and tugging off the loose fur where he had got a grip . . . . The man’s unconcerned, workaday air as he plied his knife made me realize in an instant that rabbits were things, and that it was only in a baby’s world that they were not.”

Much of Adams’ sensitivity, we learn, came from memories of his happy baby’s world. Born in 1920, he grew up near Newbury, Berkshire. Adams father, a doctor, was a shy and proper man. He married late. He was happiest talking to his son about plants and animals.

“The Day Gone By,” like “Watership Down,” is full of the names of unassuming flowers of English meadows. Knot-grass and pimpernel, fluellen and speedwell, heartsease and persicary, fleabane and scabious and meadowwort--flower names only an Englishman could love.

The family’s three acres had a view to the south of meadows and copses of Berkshire and, further away, the Hampshire downs, including the real Watership Down. Like many a boy, Adams came to see his father as flawed, but he expresses it in a terribly British way.

“The snipe and the wheatear he certainly knew, but I wonder whether he would have recognized a greenshank: not, I am virtually certain, a red-throated diver.” Adams wonders about his father’s deficiencies in sighting the red-throated diver, but he doesn’t wonder why his mother and father were so miserable.

His country idyll ended when he was sent to boarding school at age 9, not unusual for a middle class boy. What was sad was that although he’d actually been enrolled for some time, his mother told young Richard that he was being sent because he had recently become “too naughty and uncontrollable.”

You can practically hear the man’s teeth gritting when he writes: “If my dear mother had a fault it was a moody inconsistency of temper.”

As you’d expect, the young Richard Adams was a great fan of Beatrix Potter and of Hugh Lofting, creator of Dr. Doolittle. He didn’t much like A. A. Milne. Adams found the Winnie the Pooh stories “too trivial” but “redeemed by the marvelous characters. Characters are the essence of fiction.”

The essence of memoir as well, and “The Day Gone By” is peopled by walk-on ghosts. Adams possesses the opposite of the eye for the telling detail. For example, he needs to let us know that his headmaster, one J. L. Stow, was chairman of the Prep School Headmasters’ Assn. There may be some readers anxious to know who played Puck in the Bradfield School’s 1938 “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (John Hopewell). The man’s powers of exclusion are not as strong as an author’s need to be.

Even before he went away to school, where he met with the usual assortment of English boarding school sadists, Adams was fearful. He attributes to himself “a behavior pattern of cracking under stress” that first shows up when he becomes hysterical over a Punch and Judy show at a birthday party. Because his telling of his fears is uninvolving, the reader dismisses the child’s worries as, though you hate to say it, somehow rabbity.

It’s familiar to American Anglophiliacs for one thing; the same territory is covered in the far more masterful memoirs of Robert Graves, George Orwell and Roald Dahl.

After tough times at boarding school came the usual idyll at Oxford, including a punting adventure that would later figure in “Watership Down,” when the rabbits escape by boat. The pace is so leisurely that at this point you find yourself reduced to begging for World War II to begin.

Although he never had to fire a shot, Adams was on hand for the liberations of Belgium, Copenhagen and Singapore. He brought up the rear at Arnhem in 1944, bringing supplies to Operation Market Garden, in which many of his comrades were lost.

The book ends on a genuinely melancholy note as he returns to finish at Oxford, where new and unknown undergraduates seem to intrude, moving into the rooms of friends who have been killed. As the book ends, Adams’ future wife enters, possessed of “the grace of innocence.”

The readers suspects the next volume will see Adams returning to an innocent world, a baby’s world. Many small children, like many old men, don’t worry for a minute about being boring.

“Names mean little or nothing except to the memoirist himself,” Adams says, “but all the same I’d like to put down a few.” Spare me, sighs the reader. Can you imagine George Orwell or Robert Graves putting in anything that would mean little or nothing except to the memoirist himself?

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “You’ve Had Your Time: The Second Part of the Confessions” by Anthony Burgess.