Generations the Chief: a Memoir of Fathers and Sons by Lance Morrow Random House; 249 pages; $16.95

By Kenneth Turan

Lance Morrow's earliest memory is of loss: "I look for my father, but cannot move . . . I stand in the middle of an open space, immobile, under a dark gray sky." Some four decades have passed since that bleak moment. Morrow, a TIME senior writer, is himself a parent, but he remains a Daedalus figure, trying to come to terms with the past.

On the surface, and he had an excess of surface, Hugh Morrow would seem the epitome of a family man; he was one of eight children and came to be father and stepfather to ten of his own. He was genial, articulate, gregarious, a spokesman for Nelson Rockefeller, intimate of politicians and journalists across the country. But at home he often seemed a figure invested with glamour, forbearance and remoteness. There, "injury and anger gusted inarticulately through the house. The spirit bore a bruise, a grievance: the bruise was mysterious . . . We could not explain it, we could not assuage it."

To his large brood, Hugh adopted a tone of remote and incomprehensible irony. His children came to believe that somehow they seemed to have "done him a concealed injury, to have stolen something from him, something they may have taken without knowing the wound they were inflicting."

In this elegant and glowing memoir, Lance Morrow sifts time like sand in an hourglass, revisiting the places and stations of his life. They are brilliantly specific, but they resonate far beyond their locales. In Washington, "politics, elections, chicaneries flowed through private conversation . . . marinated in Scotch and cigarette smoke," and the boy immediately associates tobacco with wisdom and maturity. At Harvard, a fellow student tells him Schopenhauer, the ultimate pessimist, " 'knows the way life is' . . . life was painful. 'No,' I would say. 'Life is not like that at all.' I was terrified that it might be."

And so it is. In New York, he watches a beloved younger brother, "a form of sunlight," dying of cancer and turns away from the unbearable. Morrow also reaches forward, sometimes into the incalculable future, through his two sons. The elder goes to school with the Shah of Iran's son, and the author finds the boy "so like his father . . . all hauteur and vulnerabilty delicately balanced. The Shah and his son, my father and I, Jamie and I: I thought about the tenderness and the capacity for violence in the configurations."

Wherever the author goes, father-son parallels seem to stretch to the horizon without touching: in the Roman Catholic Church, which he abandons and rejoins; in the attitudes of his doctors after Lance, a heavy smoker, suffers a heart attack at 36; in the jousting of police and demonstrators. The relationship that causes the greatest internal rift is the one between Hugh Morrow and Nelson Rockefeller. "No one does the words better than Hughie," Henry Kissinger remarks, as if "he were giving an endorsement to the pastry chef." Those words, Morrow acrimoniously notes, are what Rockefeller demands for 21 years, along with the deference of a talented man writing below his worth: "In my sight, Rockefeller cost my father something of his manhood."

Yet all this highly charged and total recall heals nothing, and Lance Morrow knows it. So he amplifies his theme with shrewd and tough-minded investigations of the nature of American power and of the collisions of class and generations. The Chief is an ambiguous title: it signifies an Indian- hunting ancestor and the man he pursued; it is also Hugh Morrow and his employer. And it is every father and the next generation. At the finale, the author asks his two-year-old son Justin, "What's new?" The child replies "with perfect accuracy, for him, 'Everything!' " Irony does not intrude. There are other differences between Lance and Justin and their predecessors, but this is the one that will count, the chief one.