A True Southie : MEMOIR : WHILE THE MUSIC LASTS: My Life in Politics,<i> By William M. Bulger (Houghton Mifflin: $22.95; 326 pp.)</i>

Mr. Dooley lives. Not only that, but for 17 years he has been president of the Massachusetts Senate and one of the more formidable state legislators in the country, up there somewhere with California’s Willie Brown.

True, Brown got elected mayor of San Francisco, and there is no chance that Billy Bulger will ever be mayor of Boston. On the other hand, nobody has mentioned Brown as a future chancellor of the University of California. William M. Bulger--a name to conjure with in Boston, but only as Billy--is about to leave the senate and head up the University of Massachusetts.

Meanwhile he has written a political memoir in the form of a vaudeville turn. The book jacket shows him strutting his stuff, a grin on his face, a flower in his buttonhole, a blackthorn cane just on the edge of a twirl. The contents are a similar strut, lively and varied and with just a suspicion that the feet are tired and the bunions twinge.

“While the Music Lasts” is partly a rant at political rivals, Harvard intellectuals, the Boston Globe and the architects of Boston’s painful experiment with busing; a rant notable for its lively wit, deadly insults and paranoid air. It philosophizes awkwardly. It is a flowery, evocative tribute to “Southie,” his South Boston turf and the Irish American capital of the United States.

Along with this, it is a gorgeous display of picaresque anecdote and cynical reflection worthy of Finley Peter Dunne’s hero. This Mr. Dooley, though, can get 50 Southie volunteers out to carry your cousin’s campaign signs--or, if he is down on you, a pair of drunken rowdies.

Nobody has ever said of Bulger that he is anything but a complicated man and, for such a public figure, a private one. Born in 1934 to a South Boston blue-collar family, he struggled to work his way through a demanding Catholic high school, Boston College and law school.

He writes proudly of learning Latin and Greek and of the books he devoured. He is proud of his wife and nine children. He is bristlingly proud of his Irish American heritage, Southie and the power he has won. He writes of expending that power upon Massachusetts’ long record of progressive legislation--and upon failed efforts to block school busing and allow state aid to Catholic schools.

He bristles also--who knows with what mixture of pride and defiance?--at the shadows. His brother, James “Whitey” Bulger, who served 12 years in high-security prisons for bank robbery, is a named mob leader and is being sought on racketeering charges. Whitey scares people, and some of Billy Bulger’s critics say he has used the scariness for indirect political intimidation. Billy says he loves his brother but has no knowledge of his recent activities. Nobody disputes that, but the relationship has contributed to an image of unsavory bossism.

He admits the bossism, he flaunts it--it is one of the pleasures of his book. He rejects the “unsavory.” The Boston consensus allows him personal honesty, but notices his minimal distance from those who lack it. He has lain down with dogs and gotten up with flea powder. It is his job, after all, as legislative leader in a state where doing well not in but through politics is more than an art. It is a performance art, and rather appreciated.

Particularly by his constituents and, I suspect, by many readers. If all politics is local, in South Boston all the locals are political. Bulger recounts his beginnings and rise with the rich store of anecdote that has made his annual roast at the St. Patrick’s Day lunch a must for politicians in and out of state.

There was Edward (Knocko) McCormack, brother of John, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, who would hand job seekers a note: “OK, Knocko.” Rarely did they actually get jobs, but the effort counted. “Here was Knocko,” Bulger writes acidly, “regarded as a power broker for failing to accomplish something.”

Neighbors helped neighbors, and from high school on, Bulger was receiving and doing favors and putting together a near-feudal machine. (His son is running for his Senate seat.) Feudal lords receive allegiance; they also owe it. In the ‘60s, Bulger’s South Boston base impelled him to support then-Speaker McCormack’s nephew, Eddie, in his futile U.S. Senate primary against the young Ted Kennedy.

Bulger says he never considered switching. He did attend an arm-twisting lunch given by Kennedy and his handlers at Locke-Ober’s, then Boston’s priciest restaurant. Bulger ordered lobster while everyone else had tuna fish. At arm-twisting time, his mouth full of Kennedy’s lobster, he announced that he was sticking with McCormack. “Can you at least stop eating for one minute so we can talk to you?” a Kennedy man muttered. The future senator, more philosophical, remarked, “I don’t think we can afford to feed him.”

There is an edge to Bulger’s account of just about anyone, even an ally, who ever gave him trouble. He writes of one that “he never held a grudge for more than 30 or 40 years.” To write is to look in the mirror.

His fury is vitriolic, the more so for the tight jaunty smile. Nothing aroused it more than the battle over busing, which ended with federal Judge Arthur Garrity--”the sensibility of a chain-saw and the foresight of a mackerel”--taking control of the Boston schools, with black students sent to white neighborhoods and vice versa.

Bulger defended South Boston with the zeal of someone who saw himself not as a racist but as a defender of neighborhood rights. There were violent confrontations with the police and a lasting bitterness. Bulger argues the Southie view, sometimes movingly, sometimes maniacally--as when he accuses the police chief of having his men beat the protesters “to satisfy some dark need within himself.”

Still, two retired Globe editors, both harsh critics at the time, tell me of their retroactive respect for the man. A museum director who ran a radical state arts program in the ‘70s describes Bulger quietly accompanying her to Washington to lobby for funds. “He’s no Jesse Helms,” she said. Nor Pat Buchanan, exactly.

He is a contradiction, seemingly, or as he would say, consistent in a different fashion. So is his book: badly and beautifully written, revealing and concealing, pretentious and, once in a while, near gold. His law partner once reproached him for spending all his time in politics and neglecting the business.

“Your life isn’t just some story you made up about yourself,” he said.

“That’s exactly what it is,” Bulger answered. How few politicians could know it, or admit it.