Street Artist : IN THE OPEN: Diary of a Homeless Alcoholic.<i> By Timothy Donohue (Univ. of Chicago: $22.95; 204 pp.)</i>

Timothy Donohue is a gifted writer who has been seduced and harassed and hobbled and pained by a virulent addiction to alcohol. He is what was called a bum when I was a child. He often sleeps in culverts and ravines, on the rooftops of abandoned buildings, in cardboard boxes and in cold so severe that he says it sometimes makes him feel nauseous to emerge from the warmth of his covers. Even so, he has worked diligently for periods of time at laborious jobs, and he has written a book that can handsomely stand as a life’s work, if he writes nothing else, and it has to.

“In the Open” covers the period in Donohue’s life from February 1990 to December 1994. In this accounting, he works sporadically in a gold mine, in a factory that prints covers for books and in a factory that cleans and chops lettuce for salads. He also travels a lot; there are entries from Las Vegas, Tucson, Los Angeles, St. Paul and parts of Hawaii.

“I am staying in a hotel in Waikiki . . . “ he writes. “I am very serious about this place. I can’t afford to have bad memories in any place anymore because I am running out of places.” His father dies, and he tries not to squander his inheritance but he does, all $15,000. He broods and feels contemptible. He suffers discomforts. “My skin has developed into a veritable litmus test of abuse. The left side of my face is like a bulb that brightens slowly to a fierce red as I imbibe,” he writes.

Leaving a laundermat in Las Vegas, he blacks out and revives several hours later, “walking away from a casino with the remnants of a steak dinner in my teeth and my wallet lighter by 20 precious dollars.” Crossing a bridge above the St. Croix River in Minnesota in the middle of the night, he takes off all his clothes and cannonballs into the river. “The problem was that a cop was in the audience,” he says. On a bank of the Mississippi, he builds a bonfire and tosses into it everything he has written during the last 10 years--a book about science, a collection of stories and half a novel about “an illegal immigrant from South America who comes to California to gain financing for what he fancies are revolutionary advances in technology made possible by his own renegade ideas in the field of physics.” He moves out of his brother’s house because he worries that his drunkenness threatens his brother’s sobriety. He spends long stretches of time drinking and sulking alone.

The exchanges he reports with others--mainly cops who detain him, people who eventually steal from him, someone at work he has a tiff with--probably amount to no more than two or three pages. As a result of being arrested, he has been subjected to lectures on drinking, but he is resistant to them and is especially allergic to the spiritual element of Alcoholic Anonymous’ philosophy. “For my part,” he writes, “the only function ‘higher power’ has played in relation to my use of alcohol has been to subject me to such intense retribution, dragging me through the mud nose down, so to speak, for the last 11 years, that I cannot help but cite it as the prime cause of my alcoholism to begin with.”

I don’t know if anyone has drunk as much alcohol before and so described the torment that such an unrestrained addiction brings on. Donohue’s life is so haunted and forsaken that few people will ever experience anything like it. One can view Donohue either as a person who is hopelessly and willfully inept at taking care of a problem that has caused him to live as an outcast and menaced his health and might kill him, or as someone who has remained intact in the face of a relentless assault and written with great exactness and insight and intelligence about a shattering and despotic circumstance.

I fall somewhere in the middle, I guess. Donohue hopes that by writing about alcohol and what it has cost him, he might change his relation to it and drink less, or maybe even stop. This intention strikes me as a somewhat coy and devious compromise with the part of his nature that makes him drink in the first place: Describe me, darling, and you won’t have to get rid of me, I will be your subject, your preoccupation, you will need to drink, otherwise, how can you write about drinking? Which furthermore strikes me as an impossible way to give up an addiction. A romance is involved.

Woven into the narrative of Donohue’s wanderings and vexations and binges is a long problematic essay about economic reform--Donohue has degrees in business administration from the University of Minnesota. I can see why it is there: Donohue was writing it at the same time that he was keeping the drinking journal, and he refers to the essay now and then in the journal’s entries, but I suspect that combining them was an editor’s idea. The essay had its beginnings in the job at the lettuce factory, and a certain amount of his reflections on it would have served as a respite from the journal’s catalog of hardships. Furthermore, the essay adds to the stature and richness of Donohue as a narrator. But when the proofs of his arguments began to involve equations, my heart sank.

Donohue otherwise describes complicated states of mind precisely and offhandedly; he is funny when he wants to be and his sense of pace is sure. Sometimes his descriptions are so apt and poetic that they are startling. He describes a tent he lives in for a while as “my little nylon hovel.” Suffering itching lesions, he describes the sensations of his body as a “turmoil of aggravations.” Here is a piece of landscape in Hawaii: “The water around the point is a pale blue of such pristine clarity that it almost elicits an embrace.”

The subject matter of “In the Open” is strange and compelling, but what gives it the breath of life is that it was written by an artist. Accurately rendered, the story of any deeply felt life always has whatever form, structure, pattern and weight it needs to hold the reader’s attention. Books like this one are where the individual histories of our time are kept.