The Final Flowering of the School of Paris : SOME REMARKABLE MEN: Further Memoirs.<i> By James Lord (Farrar Straus & Giroux: $27.50, 336 pp.)</i>

The irrepressible, bird-like Jean Cocteau holds forth on his Riviera terrace, amid the flowers, the views of the sea, the fine drinks (perhaps a bit of opium?). His beautiful, silent boyfriend Doudou listens intently while Cocteau schemes with our young narrator, the fresh-faced, amazingly ingratiating American expatriate James Lord, on how to get back into the good graces of the monstrous Picasso, who lives down the road.

Balthus (or the Count de Rola, as the Polish-born, Swiss-raised, Paris-bred artist styles himself) happily accepts the offer of the narrator’s fine Persian carpet to help furnish his castle-studio redoubt (“the Chateau de Chassy could easily have been taken for a Gallic version of Wuthering Heights. The place was quite as bleak as the one imagined by the melancholy Emily Bronte”). The haughty painter strings him along for many months before repaying with the promised--and brilliant--portrait.

One Paris night in 1952, Lord bumps into his artistic hero, Alberto Giacometti, at Deux Magots. Giacometti casually invites him to stop by his ramshackle studio. Lord frets; to go immediately would be bad form, but he can’t bear to wait. So he shows up a week later and then begins an inchoate friendship in which Lord is welcome to come by the studio any time. He gets to know the complicated artist, his scatterbrained wife, his mistress and his charming brother. Gifts of sketches and sculpture pour forth over the years, until Lord finds his great calling--to write the biography of the artistic titan after his death in 1964.

These tales--intriguing, odd, funny and moving--animate Lord’s beguiling new memoir. Like his previous book, the brilliantly weird, mental menage a trois, “Picasso and Dora,” “Some Remarkable Men” is an indispensable guide to key figures present at the creation of what he calls “the final flowering of the school of Paris,” in which Lord plays a latter-day Vasari to the art giants he befriends and frankly worships. His infatuation with the artists’ high calling is deeply romantic and, occasionally, a touch cloying. But his book is much more.

This is a memoir, like most of the best, that gains richness from being written from the perch of time (Lord is 73). To the young man, raised in middle-class New Jersey, who arrived in Paris puppy-eager after the end of the war, first meetings with Jean Cocteau and friends are fabulous affairs, full of gossip and glamour. To the mature memoirist, what is equally worth telling is Cocteau’s straining for effect, the compulsion to stay on the surface, the vainglory, the colossal ego. Lord writes, “Of all desires, the desire to please at any price, whether sexually, socially or intellectually, is the most insatiable, treacherous and pitiless, for it can never be sufficiently satisfied even if it protests too much that it expects nothing in return.” Men write with this worldly rhythm, I imagine, only if they have lived long years in France.

It’s this twin vision, of the giddy young man and of the mature writer, that gives these sketches much of their charm and interest. Then, too, Lord’s writing gains another dimension from his persona as a gay man from what I would call the old school, one with a penchant for euphemism, storytelling for its own sake, arch diction, a sense that all dreams must come to dust.

The first of this book’s four chapters is about the very epitome of this personality, the writer and bon vivant Harold Acton, who spent his last decades holed up in the disintegrating grand villa his miserable English parents bequeathed him on the edge of Florence. Lord colorfully paints a world-class talker, the partying, the bitchy wit. Acton’s story ends even more sadly than Cocteau’s, all the high hopes blasted.

Balthus and especially Giacometti come off as singular, single-minded geniuses--notice how at a time of swirling experimentation, Lord was drawn to these representational artists. True, stories of the heroic are not as fun as those of the haunted, and there are some tedious pages describing the period after Giacometti’s death, when the artist’s wife unsuccessfully hauled Lord into court to recover some of her husband’s gifts.

Memorably droll is Lord’s account of the drunken Acton’s attempt to seduce him--Acton then 45, Lord 28--an amatory maneuver Lord calls the inevitable “pounce.” Once again, through the haze of time, Lord educes a smart little moral: “I’d already been to bed with men even older and less attractive because I liked them personally. This entailed no sacrifice. I was glad to give pleasure without myself enjoying much, and it occurred to me at the time that when I grew older, I’d be pleased if attractive young men occasionally did as much for me, and that, indeed, is how it has turned out.” That occasionally is the Lordian note, decorous even in desire.

Lord withholds a lot about himself and seems to be a showily modest man, full of asides about the unpublishable novels he was writing at the time of these encounters, wonderment that the giants would even give him the time of day. In the end, that’s what’s so classic about this story, offered to us as it is during the high tide of personal confessions from all quarters, most of them much younger, much more complaining, true, much more engaged than Lord. At the end of his memoirs, Lord remains elusive, making us hungry for his next installment.