Of Monsters, Saints and Rivers : NONFICTION : MEMOIR IN TWO VOICES: Francois Mitterrand and Elie Wiesel.<i> Translated from French by Richard Seaver and Timothy Bent (Arcade: $21.95, 192 pp.)</i>

As the saying goes: When elephants fight the grass suffers.

“Memoir in Two Voices” is a long conversation and only the rarest suggestion of a fight. But the dialogue between two public men, the late Francois Mitterrand--president of France and a man of letters--and Elie Wiesel--a man of letters and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize--has its pachydermic aspects.

Readers are apt to find the grazing fairly patchy underneath, what with the ponderous prancing in place, the elaborate courtesy and only one real tusk-jab. Perhaps a better comparison is to the joust between Alice’s White and Red Knights: so heavily padded and bedizened that they hardly get at each other.

Yet the book is an interesting part of a peculiar phenomenon. Approaching the end, last year, after 14 years in office--all of those years afflicted by the undisclosed prostate cancer that killed him this January--Mitterrand became the subject of a number of memoirs, biographies and interviews. Some were favorable and some damning. It appears that he deliberately encouraged both with the thought, as Adam Gopnik wrote recently in the New Yorker, that posthumous as well as contemporary fame is best secured by controversy. To speak no ill of the dead, after all, is a sound moral principle but a poor historical one; it means that less will be spoken.

This apart, Mitterrand was a man who all his life tacked mysteriously among a variety of personal and political postures, all the while puzzling his countrymen as to just who he was. In 60 years of public life, he went from Catholic conservative to centrist to Socialist and back to the center. He went from following De Gaulle (when the general teetered over a balcony to greet Parisians after the city’s liberation, it was Mitterrand who held his ankles) to stubbornly contesting him to virtually re-creating him.

He was an active member of the Resistance and, as it turns out, maintained close connections with important Vichy figures. His marriage to Danielle Mitterrand was known to leave room for numerous affairs, but only recently was it disclosed that he maintained a fully established second family with one of his lovers.

Perhaps he was as much the enigma to himself as to others and he was determined while alive to keep it that way. To decide who you are, paradoxically, can be a vulnerability. It provides a handle, and Mitterrand seems to have trusted no one’s hand with such a handle, not even his own. Conceivably, his decision at the end to facilitate so much divergent evidence was with the thought that history might resolve it. If so, the dialogue he arranged to hold with his friend, Wiesel, suggests that on most matters he was in no particular hurry for history to do so.

“Memoir in Two Voices” is as abstract and frequently as lofty as one of Plato’s dialogues. It seems to set nowhere; there are no chairs, no gestures, no food or drink or any physical or emotional detail to suggest that two flesh-and-blood figures are in the room. It could be the bust of Wiesel confabulating with the bust of Mitterrand. It does not come easy--Wiesel’s normal style is hot, intuitive, searching--but here he does his best to adjust to his interlocutor’s Olympian mode.

Not very rigorously, Wiesel raises theme after theme: childhood, character, beliefs, war experiences, literature and the exercise of power. Occasionally, he will venture his own thoughts, and once in a while Mitterrand returns a question, though perhaps more out of politeness than curiosity. Mostly, Wiesel is not so much asking questions as arranging opportunities for answers.

Mitterrand rearranges the arrangements. Solicited for introspection and wit, he evades with the introspection--sometimes with a bland generality, more often by elevating the question to a higher philosophical or literary plane. Wit he provides, though on his own terms and on the subjects he chooses.

Only once is there a hint of control lost. Deferential, but suddenly tough and persistent, Wiesel--novelist and philosopher of the Holocaust and an Auschwitz inmate--presses Mitterrand about the revelation of his longtime friendship with Rene Bousquet, a leader of the Vichy police and a participant in the deportation of French Jews to the death camps.

Mitterrand gives not one answer but a flurry: He did not know Bousquet during the war; his wartime contact with a Bousquet lieutenant was useful to the Resistance; Bousquet was cleared by a tribunal after the war and became a respected member of the establishment, and, anyway, Mitterrand did finally break with him in 1986 after learning more. He acted well, he insists, feeling “neither regret nor remorse” and his blood “boils” over the criticism he has received.

Blood temperature reestablished, Mitterrand reascends Olympus: “You say that [Bousquet] is Evil incarnate. But Evil is rarely incarnate in a single man, any more in fact than is Good. Monsters are as rare in this world as saints.”

He amplifies the particular case into perhaps his clearest response to the longtime charge by critics that his career, under a lofty moral stance, has been a play of all possible sides against the middle. As president, he argues, it was his role to represent all currents of the divided French polity. One hundred years ago, this would have meant Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards; in the second half of the 20th century, it was the double heritage of Vichy and the Resistance.

These passages provide a break in the play of evasion, deflection and occasional sudden intellectual ambush with which Mitterrand conducts the conversation. In a sense, though, it is the play that is the more revealing. Mitterrand’s notion--at least as Wiesel seems to have understood it--was that with the sympathetic help of a writer and intellectual whom he respected, he would be able to open up part of the interior life that he always guarded so carefully. Instead, like Bob Dole removing his jacket, the fortifications are as high as ever.

He asserts the importance and happiness of his rural childhood--the warmth, the family around the table--but he freezes up at the particulars. Was there any figure at that table to whom he felt especially close? “I really can’t say. We were such a closely knit, homogeneous group.” Anyway, out of this concealing fog of homogeneity he was shot off to boarding school. What about adolescent rebellions? “I had what you might call ‘sensitivities,’ but they were stippled revolts, fleeting moods.”

He loved solitude, he says, and wrote poems. Not love-poems, though; he was interested in nature, the play of light, rivers. “I made up my mind that every time I came to a body of water, I’d write a poem to celebrate it.” He names some of them: the Charente, the Seudre, the Gironde, the Rhine, the Rhone, the Garonne. What he doesn’t name is any of his youthful companions; nor does he tell any anecdotes about them. Rivers are safer to remember; they don’t remember you.