FIRST STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE

By CHARLES MICHENER

Remember when cockroaches were romantic? Mary Cantwell's Manhattan, When I Was Young (Houghton Mifflin; 214 pages; $21.95) is an unusually deft contribution to the durable genre of memoirs on the theme of How I Came of Age in a Greenwich Village Walk-Up, Married an Intellectual and Learned to Survive on My Own in the Big Apple.

Actually, the author's first New York City apartment in the 1950s was a walk-down: the "back half of a basement" with one room and a toilet down the hall. There this shy, Catholic girl from a small town in Rhode Island would sit "cross-legged on my studio couch, Vivaldi's Four Seasons on the phonograph" and feel "joy exploding in my chest. Because from this house I emerge every morning into the place my father promised would be mine one day. The place where there'd be lots of people like me."

Those promises at least partly came true. Cantwell became a successful magazine editor at Conde Nast and a member of the editorial board of the New York Times. Appropriate to the setting, her prose might best be described as "racing." It dashes through the offices of Mademoiselle and Vogue. It darts into the dress stores where she acquired the right coloration. It pauses for the dinner parties at which her cooking graduated from veal wrapped around Jones sausages to beef Wellington. Inevitably, it lands her in a shrink's office, where she tried to come to terms with the ghost of a "perfect" father who died when she was 20.

Cantwell populates the Conde Nast hothouses with a sharp sense of the pretensions by which publishing people define their territory. There was the society editor who was "a friend to the rich, a brute to her researcher"; the entertainment editor who sat behind an "enormous mahogany desk, taking phone calls from Marlene Dietrich and Truman Capote"; the editor in chief who addressed long letters to the staff with "Dearly Beloved Family."

More fleshed out is the man she married and, after two children, divorced--a New York literary agent identified only as "B." Coming from a family of Jewish left-wing intellectuals, he was the perfect Lochinvar to take her out of Rhode Island but not to replace her sainted father. On one hand: "If it hadn't been for him, I thought, I would not have heard Montand sing Les Feuilles Mortes or read Mrs. Dalloway or tasted Brie or drunk any wine beyond sherry." On the other: "Lose one's temper or burst into tears, and he would say, 'I never realized how sick you really are' and leave."

Books like this usually conclude on a note of hard-won triumph. But perhaps the most appealing thing about this spare, beautifully etched memoir is that after 40 years of thriving and surviving in New York City, Cantwell admits to no greater wisdom than she had when she first arrived. More comfortable as observer than confessor, she ends where she began--in another Village apartment. This one looks out on a brick-walled garden, and before going to sleep, she opens her bedroom window to get that old charge: the sound of Manhattan "buzzing."