NONFICTION - Sept. 1, 1991

A TERRIBLE LIAR by Hume Cronyn (William Morrow: $23; 448 pp.) It’s an awe-inspiring revelation, but true: With a slight allowance for relative years devoted to craft, Hume Cronyn is as adept on the printed page as he is on stage or screen. This memoir, written, he explains, at the incessant urging of writer Susan Cooper, is an articulate, insightful account of his journey from a privileged Canadian boyhood up to 1966. (When he got to that point in the manuscript he decided to get back to acting for awhile.) The opening scene, in which the young Hume, having confessed his desire to become an actor, faces a tribunal composed of his mother and two much older brothers, is an understated, detailed delight; the glorious clarity of his memory, despite his jokes about its failings, informs the story of his experiences on Broadway and in Hollywood. Cronyn exemplifies a wonderfully weathered optimism--not Pollyanna’s naive glee, but the genuine hope of a man who has faced his own artistic and personal demons, and prevailed. He quotes a poem by Christopher Logue as his “ultimate maxim”: “Come to the edge. / We might fall. / Come to the edge. / It’s too high! / COME TO THE EDGE! / So they came / and he pushed / and they flew.”