Haunting the Past : THE GREEN PARADISE: Volume One of an Autobiography, <i> By Julian Green Translated from the French by Julian Green and Anne Green (Marion Boyars: $24.95; 256 pp.)</i>

At the beginning of the century, when he was a boy, Julian Green’s mother would give him his bath, but leave him to attend a part she carefully referred to as “the body.” Generally, she kept her eyes averted, but one day she was impelled to look and pronounce: “How ugly that is.” Then she hugged him so he would feel loved.

If Green meant to provide a key to the themes of passion, dark scruple and religious fervor that permeate his work, the tub-time account certainly succeeds.

Green, whose parents were American, was raised in France, wrote his novels in French and belongs to the Academie Francaise. This first volume of his autobiography, which he began 30 years ago, has only now been published in English. It tells of a childhood and adolescence marked by obsessive attachments both to purity and impurity, and to the mother from whom the mixed messages came.

The door to his bedroom was kept open at night to deflect any temptation to tuck his hands between his legs. Once, when a tweak of the sheet revealed them there, his mother picked up a knife and threatened to cut “it” off. (For months afterward, whenever Julian wandered into the kitchen, the vastly amused cook brandished a knife and delivered her French phonetic version: “Alcotetof!”)

But the image is ambiguous. There was a kind of scattiness at work. The Greens were Southerners--Mr. Green represented the American cotton producers in France--and the family Puritanism seems to have been mixed with something earthier. Julian’s parents would go into fits of laughter reading aloud from the bawdy humor magazine “Le Rire.” Mrs. Green read Maupassant and made a point of giving money to ugly street-walkers, arguing that their earning powers were unfairly limited. Could that knife have been partly serious and partly a joke?

It was no joke to little Julian, or to big Julian, either, judging from the temper of his novels and, particularly, of this early autobiography. It is torn by his young fears and struggles with sexuality, piety and family shadows. It is an impassioned account, relived from the high-strung perspective of the child and the adolescent, and deliberately incorporating the confusions, the gaps in knowledge and the mysteries that he experienced at the time. Conversely, it has only an occasional mature reflection and very few clarifications.

This gives it a peculiarly foreshortened effect. The priggishness, the self-absorption, the scruples of the decidedly precious adolescent of 1912 keep us at a distance. The deliberate withholding of information can be exasperating. We learn of Julian’s stunned bewilderment as his mother lies dying; we never learn what she died of. We learn about his gropings at the hands of fellow schoolboys in intense emotional detail, but we don’t quite know what happened. Yet just when the mists seem hardly worth penetrating, there comes the clarity of a dispassionate or sunlit aside.

Green does not so much visit his past as haunt it. His voice is immaterial and in pain over what he is trying to piece together. Of the gaps in his story, he writes that the reader should think of paintings on a wall and the spaces in between. The truer image is of a fresco that has lost large sections of its plaster.

He was an island of a child. His family lived apart in a French world, but the United States was only dimly present, though his mother cherished her Confederate flag and the outrage of a lost cause. This prompts one of his better reflections: that to teach children history is “to make them vainglorious or hopeless beforehand.” His island feeling, his sense of uniqueness, was doubtless intensified by his position as the youngest child and the only boy among five sisters.

His parents and sisters are powerful but mostly undefined presences. His father was a kind and patient man, with a fire we sense but don’t quite see, no doubt because Julian felt love but was unable to accept closeness (one of the cuts inflicted by that knife, perhaps). When the boy re-created an Old Testament burnt offering by incinerating Mr. Green’s top hat, the father was angry but not frighteningly so. Once, sleepless after a dinner-table debate with a friend, he got up at 2 a.m. and traveled across Paris to ask if he had been too vehement.

Julian’s childhood sexual preoccupations centered around nudity, not the thing itself, but its representation. With a pencil, he would follow the lines of the naked figures in Gustave Dore’s illustrations for the “Inferno.” He would draw his own naked figures, which lacked sex organs (that knife!), and experienced tremors of pleasure and guilt. He showed them whipping each other because they were naked, and to be naked, he explains, was to be “impure.”

Later, he was repelled and fascinated by a group of homosexual schoolmates. He held off their advances until his mother died; then he succumbed, though with more “dizziness” than pleasure, he tells us. He fell passionately but chastely in love with another boy. When he masturbated in his bedroom, he first took down the crucifix hanging on the wall.

What emerges has more to do with guilt than eroticism, but then, guilt itself was erotic. There are a number of passages in which shame, sensuality and mystical devotion are entwined. At various points, he thanks his mother or the “Divine Plan” for protecting him from irremediable “carnality.”

At 15, after his mother’s death, he took instruction and converted to Catholicism, only later discovering that his father had quietly done the same thing. He writes of his Catholic faith with a fervor and vagueness that looks back beyond such great French writers as Georges Bernanos and Charles Peguy to 19th-Century devotionalism and, before that, to Thomas a Kempis’ “Imitation of Christ.”

Much of Green’s superheated sensibility seems hard to grasp or sympathize with. And yet the heat is real; so is the avowedly perverse pride. If this pride keeps his experiences and emotions in a deliberate fogginess, the writing is lapidary. It makes an unsettling contrast.

At 5, Green tells us, he had his first self-conscious experience. Looking out the window, he suddenly became aware of himself as separate from the world. He had lost “the Eden from which we are chased by the fiery angel called Me.” Green’s fiery angel has done its job thoroughly, all but incinerating the world of his past, even as he recalls it. It is a hard angel to like, but also a hard angel to forget.