BOOK REVIEW : Tragic Chords of a Composer’s Life : A HEART AT FIRE’S CENTER: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann, <i> By Steven C. Smith</i> University of California Press, $29.95, 415 pages

Bernard Herrmann was a composer curiously without honor in his own country. Although he scored some of Hollywood’s most celebrated motion pictures, including “Citizen Kane” and “Taxi Driver,” he won only a single Oscar over his long career, and--characteristically--he repaid ingratitude with bitter scorn.

“There’s no point in belonging to an organization in which one is judged by one’s inferiors--not one’s peers,” Herrmann sneered as he resigned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1967. “It was Tolstoy who said ‘Eagles fly alone and sparrows fly in flocks.’ ”

The story of Herrmann’s soaring flights of musical achievement--and his headlong dives into anger, resentment and despair--is recounted at length and in heart-rending detail by Steven C. Smith in “A Heart at Fire’s Center,” a disciplined and discerning biography that gives us yet another take on that peculiar circle of hell known as Hollywood.

Herrmann is best known for scoring some of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films--not only “Psycho” but also “Vertigo” and “North by Northwest” among others--and Hitchcock even honored his then-favorite composer by featuring him on the stage of Albert Hall in the climactic scene of the remake of “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

“The choicest screen appearance by a real-life conductor,” cracks Smith, “since Stokowski shook hands with Mickey Mouse.”

Smith reminds us that Herrmann’s achievements transcended the Hitchcock movies. For example, Herrmann composed the music for the Orson Welles broadcast of “The War of the Worlds,” among hundreds of other episodes of the Mercury Theater, and he devised the eerie musical theme of “The Twilight Zone”--perhaps the most pervasive and enduring three notes in all of popular culture.

But it was the long and turbulent relationship with Hitchcock that created Herrmann’s enduring reputation--and, in the end, broke his heart. The two titans butted heads (and egos) over the scoring of “Torn Curtain,” and their friendship and collaboration came to an abrupt and bitter end.

“I heard the first segment,” Hitch recalled, “and I said, ‘Finished, no other way, finished; goodby, here’s your money, sorry.’ ”

The wound inflicted by Hitchcock was opened again and again over Herrmann’s long career as he clashed with directors who thought they knew how to score a movie.

“They’re never gonna listen to me,” Herrmann said about another collaboration with another director, “because they never do.”

His own considerable reputation was sometimes turned against him by latter-day movie directors with big egos and tiny hearts. When William Friedkin approached Herrmann to score “The Exorcist,” for instance, he taunted the distinguished old composer: “I want you to give me a better score that you wrote for ‘Citizen Kane.’ ” To which Herrmann responded: “Well, why didn’t ya make a better picture than ‘Citizen Kane?’ ”

Still, there is little gossip here and almost no scandal. A beloved pet, it turns out, was “the . . . great love of his life.” Among the many, many cohorts and colleagues who testify to Herrmann’s genius, the consensus is that he was a charming eccentric rather than an ugly churl.

“He was temperamental,” recalls one secretary, who paints a none-too-attractive picture of Herrmann sitting at the open door of the office refrigerator and chowing down, “but Benny had a sweet old heart, and I loved him.”

Smith, too, seems to tolerate the unrelenting crankiness of his subject. The reader, on the other hand, may find the detailed chronicle of Herrmann’s temper tantrums to be grating. But Smith insists that Herrmann’s fits, feuds and general biliousness are the marks of a tortured artist.

“Unable to sustain personal happiness, he maintained a faith in the spiritual transcendence of the artist,” Smith explains. “A passionate, inexhaustible man, Herrmann excelled in capturing the psychological bond between love and anxiety.”

Smith shows us exactly how and why Herrmann has earned his laurels as a film composer. Herrmann knew when music was required--the “recognition” scene in “Vertigo” runs eight minutes with no dialogue or sound effects--and when it wasn’t: the crop-dusting scene in “North by Northwest,” by contrast, has no music at all.

“If you’re a painter,” Herrmann once observed, “it doesn’t mean you can’t use black.”

Herrmann made his own Faustian deal in Hollywood, and he ended up regretting it. He longed for the respectability of a conductor’s baton and a symphony hall, but he had to settle for the adoration of directors like Truffaut or Scorsese or De Palma, all of whom paid homage to him by giving him work. Homage was never enough, as Smith allows us to see, and that is what makes “A Heart at Fire’s Center” such a tragedy.

Next: Christopher Goodrich reviews “Typical” by Padgett Powell (Farrar Straus & Giroux).