ANYTHING YOUR LITTLE HEART DESIRES.<i> By Patricia Bosworth</i> .<i> Simon & Schuster: 416 pp., $27.50</i>

It is inevitable that “Anything Your Little Heart Desires,” Patricia Bosworth’s account of her eccentric family, riding the crest of the flood tide of confessional literature, spilling into the bookstores, splattering more reticent writing with big gobs of daddy-daughter sex, pederasty and whatnot, will be lumped together with the contributions of the daughters of Mary Karr and most conspicuously, with Kathryn Harrison’s recent “The Kiss” (Reviewed, Page 8). On the face of it, nothing would seem more preposterous. Bosworth’s account does have its share of booze, pills, closeted homosexuality and suicide, but instead of a dark and claustral world of furtive incest, hers is a story told against the broad landscape of mid-20th century American politics. Still, there are stranger bedfellows than sex and politics, and her father’s kiss left its own kind of scars.

Although this is a family history, it is mostly about Bosworth’s struggle to come to terms with the life and death of her mercurial father, attorney Bartley Crum, a charming man whose quicksilver passage through the lives of the famous, rich and not-so-rich of his day, his flourishing corporate law practice, frantic good works and whirligig of speaking engagements and writing obligations concealed an absence disclosed only when he ended his life at 59 with a bottle of Seconal and a whiskey chaser. As a liberal Republican, Crum was truly an endangered species, a creature so maladapted that the very phrase now seems oxymoronic. He rose to prominence in San Francisco political circles in the 1930s working for a law firm that serviced William Randolph Hearst, but he deserted the great man to campaign for Wendell Wilkie in his futile attempt to unseat Franklin Roosevelt. He then cast his lot with American Zionists and crusaded for the creation of the state of Israel, bought and folded the New York Star, nee PM, a liberal New York tabloid, along the way lent his name to a number of Popular Front anti-fascist organizations and then really got himself into trouble by defending the Hollywood Ten.

Crum was raised in the Central Valley of California. On his mother’s side, he came from shanty Irish stock; his father was a bronco buster who literally bet the ranch and lost, reducing his family to not-so-genteel poverty and himself to a lifetime of inebriation and disgrace. Young Bart was a lively, cheerful boy, well liked by everyone. He breezed through UC Berkeley, got his law degree from Boalt Hall and married Anna Gertrude “Cutsie” Bosworth, a petite, blond former crime reporter for the San Francisco Call Bulletin.

The Crums quickly found a place among the beautiful people of a beautiful city. But Crum must have inhaled something of the tradition of California Populism embodied in the gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair, because he began mixing pro bono work for progressive causes into his corporate practice. He witnessed the violent longshoremen’s strike of 1934 orchestrated by the legendary Harry Bridges and the two men became friends. Bosworth says she thinks that observing the government’s persecution of Bridges radicalized Crum, although she goes on to ascribe more influence to his Catholic “search for redemption.” In any event, he was too passionate and idealistic to be satisfied representing his deep-pocket clients and joined the radical National Lawyers Guild in 1937, along with Thurgood Marshall, Arthur Goldberg and Abe Fortas. Around the same time, he also joined the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, which raised money to help the defeated anti-Franco Loyalists.

Crum was already being called naive for working with communists, an epithet, like innocent, that would dog his footsteps throughout his career. But in those days, the Communist Party was one of the few organizations effectively organizing against fascism, and he was guided by the principle: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It was the high tide of the Popular Front; everything seemed simple. Liberals and communists worked toward the same end. The Crums were always throwing parties and, at their home, with the booze flowing freely, Bridges would rub shoulders with Paul Robeson, Orson Welles, Dorothy Parker and even Crum’s right-wing Hearst buddies. As Bosworth puts it, “They thought they were indestructible then, and so smart and beautiful and well connected that nothing could ever touch them.”

Still, there were clouds on the horizon. Crum was often traveling, and his wife, who did not share his political interests, was bored. Their young son, Bart Jr., was withdrawn and difficult. But in those days, nothing was so intractable that it could withstand the family magic and Crum produced, as if out of thin air, one of America’s foremost psychoanalysts, Erik Erikson, to treat him. Once Crum joined the Wilkie bandwagon, he virtually abandoned his family. His wife began a series of flirtations and affairs, the first of Laurentian dimensions with a mysterious drifter who did the gardening at their summer home and then nearly burned it down when she broke off the liaison. As time passed, she took few pains to conceal these relationships from her husband. It was never clear if he knew about them or not; nothing was ever discussed. Crum was always on the go; he chain-smoked, drank, popped pills and jumped on another plane.

In 1946, President Truman appointed him to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine and, after visiting “displaced persons camps” all over Europe, which were often little better than Auschwitz and Dachau without the ovens--one was in a place so pitiful that it had been turned down as a site for a German POW camp--he broke ranks with the rest of the committee by going public with an account of what he had seen in the camps. He also violated the rules of the club by making pointed public criticisms of key government officials who were worried about the impact American support for a Jewish homeland might have on Arab governments that controlled the flow of oil.

The following year, he joined the legal team defending the Hollywood Ten. The Hollywood Ten were, of course, the handful of movie folk (mostly writers) who defied the House Un-American Activities Committee when it began to investigate communist influence in Hollywood and ended up with one-year sentences for contempt of Congress. (It was ironic that when screenwriters--long the dogsbodies of the industry--finally got the recognition they always sought, it was from HUAC.) They emerged from prison to find their careers in ruins and, along with hundreds--perhaps thousands--of other Hollywood people, were blacklisted for a good two decades.

By the time he took the case, Crum had flitted about the flame of controversy for nearly two decades, but this case was incandescent, and everybody associated with it got burned. Defending the Hollywood Ten was an act of considerable courage, but Crum had no idea how far and how violently public opinion was swinging to the right. He was snubbed by old friends, became a victim of hate mail and obscene phone calls and was harassed by the FBI, which had opened a file on him in 1942. But worst of all, he was betrayed by his own side, shut out of meetings by other lawyers on the team he assumed were Communist Party members and lied to by clients who swore they were no longer communists. As always, the Communist Party was its own worst enemy and, once again, friends told him that he was being naive, that he was being used as a front man because he was a Republican. Indeed, Crum was associated with the right wing of the Hollywood Ten. Although he defended the group as a whole, he personally represented director Edward Dmytryk, advising him when he broke ranks, caved in to HUAC and named names. Soon Dmytryk was directing again. None of the other Hollywood Ten lawyers ever spoke to Crum again.

The experience defending the Hollywood Ten had been so disheartening that Crum began to shy away from loyalty cases and resigned from the left-wing organizations he belonged to. But the FBI continued to harass him. They tapped his phones, followed him in unmarked sedans and showed up at his Wall Street office. In 1953, J. Edgar Hoover called him from Washington while Crum was eating in a New York restaurant to inform him that his passport would be revoked if he didn’t go to Washington to “answer some questions.” Hoover was showing Crum that the long arm of the FBI could reach out and finger him any place, any time. Crum did go to Washington and cooperated with State Department interrogators, making the increasingly pro forma mea culpa designed to get the government off his back: “My religious and political views are not and have never been compatible with communism or socialism. . . .”

Later that year, Bart Jr., away at Reed College, killed himself with a bullet to the head. A remote, obviously troubled young man, he had earlier been expelled from Deerfield Academy after being found with his arms around another boy with whom he’d become close. The boy subsequently committed suicide, and Bart Jr. apparently never got over it. He was struggling unsuccessfully with repressed homosexuality. This time there was no Erikson to help him.

Early in the book, Bosworth describes poring over the family photo album full of official, “happy” pictures, trying to divine what “was going on in their heads,” and although she succeeds in writing a lively, readable account of their lives, so far as her father is concerned, she never does connect all the dots. She never explains why he fled from her mother, although she drops a hint that leaves the reader wondering if he too were not a closeted homosexual.

Moreover, in the course of researching her book, Bosworth discovered that her father, the courageous defender of the First Amendment, had become an FBI informer, giving information to the bureau about his colleagues in the National Lawyers Guild. She was shattered by the discovery, felt he had betrayed her and her “impossible fantasies of him” and devotes the concluding pages of her tale to struggling--not very successfully--to coming to terms with this revelation. She had always believed in the black-and-white distinctions between those who collaborated with the witch hunters and those who stood up to them. She wanted her father to be like Arthur Miller, who refused to name names and risked jail and disgrace. She concludes, lamely, that “I would never fully know the terrible pressures my father was under, financial and otherwise, that had forced him to inform. . . .” But surely the scores of people who resisted and did sacrifice their careers were under the same pressures.

Bosworth’s pained and painful attempts to deal with her father’s informing appear to be either the cause or effect of her own political confusion. On the one hand, she clearly shares her father’s idealism and regards the witch-hunt as the great crime that it was. On the other, her conviction that the communists “duped” her father leads her to write approvingly of the kind of Cold War liberals who organized the Americans for Democratic Action. Their adamant refusal to find common cause with communists, although understandable, made them singularly ineffectual in stopping the HUAC steamroller, while their main contribution to American politics was Arthur Schlesinger’s notion of the “vital center,” whose “me too” legacy is the bipartisanly corrupt one-party system we have today. In fact, an argument can be made that it was Crum who represented the authentic vital center, and his tragedy was that there was no place for such a middle ground in postwar America. When the right tried to drive a wedge between the Communist Party and its liberal allies, people like Crum were the victims.

Apropos of her father’s services to Dmytryk, Bosworth quotes one of the Hollywood Ten’s lawyers, Robert Kenney, a former California attorney general and the only other liberal on the team, commenting, “Bart Crum rolled over. Bart was with us all the way through the appeals up to the Supreme Court. Now he has no friends on either side.” She springs to her father’s defense, writing, “My father would not dignify that statement with a response. But he didn’t enjoy being thought of as a traitor simply because he’d stood by a client who changed his mind. All he’d ever wanted was for Eddie to feel free to tell the truth.” But surely Kenney was right, and at some level her father must have understood that. He had violated the principles he lived by. Without acknowledging this, Bosworth can’t really explain his life or unhappy end, which is perhaps the legacy of a father’s kiss.