IN some ways, Julian Green's method of autobiography is close to Proust's novelistic one: the past mused over and re created in the light of memory and imagination (and experience), rather than straightforward factual reminiscence.

Green's particular emotional world demands some time to feel our way in it, and though there is no mannerism in his elegant, unemphatic prose style or any hint of intellectual pose, his mentality is utterly his own and defies categorisation.

An American of southern patricianstock growing up in Paris, a Catholic who is haunted by the old pagan concept of Destiny or Fate, a homosexual at odds with his upbringing, an ascetic with a monkish streak, and a sensualist with a classical love of physical beauty ... he seems a blend of contradictions, a curious balance of inquietude and tough, almost serene self acceptance.

These conflicts are mirrored in his haunted, highly original novels. This volume picks on his return to Paris and his family, after study at the University of Virginia. Green's adored mother was long dead and his father, 47 years older than Julian, seemed to him more like a grandfather.

They lived in "reduced circumstances", due to imprudent speculations by the father early in life - though being the soul of southern honour, he insisted on paying all his creditors back to the last franc or shilling.

Ties between his children were close, and Julian's sisters were all strong minded, individual people with more than a whiff of eccentricity. Just what they thought of their brother's emerging homosexuality is not clear or whether they quite realised it, but one day he found that his very private notebooks had vanished. They have never surfaced since, though he says that if they did, he would try to buy them back.

At this stage of his life Green still.

wanted to be a painter, but his vocation as a writer was insistent and he scribbled compulsively without much idea of what it would lead to.a The claims of sexuality were equally or even more insistent, and night after night he went out into the Paris streets, "cruising", as we would say today.

Gradually, he began to be asked to literary dinners and lunches, and at the house of an acquaintance in Passy, with a Foujita nude hanging on the wall, he met a strange duo: a younger man who at once sank into a sofa and began to read, ignoring the other guests, and an elder one "slim and agile, with a tapered lace in which eyes of a restless intelligence shone, black and alert like those of a lizard, he spoke in a high, nasal voice and displayed an exquisite politeness". These were Cocteau and his lover, the gifted novelist Radiguet, who died at 20.

He was still socially gauche, with a terror of saying the wrong or in apposite thing, but he did call on the Steins, where he was well received and shown their Matisse paintings.

At another literary lunch he met Somerset Maugham, apparently served up as a European celebrity; when an ill judged remark by Green caused laughter at table, Maugham asked for it to be repeated, then said "Oh" and nothing more.

The intermittent agonies of conscience - about his homosexuality, about his religious beliefs - do pall a little, but we are dealing with an ultra sensitive and idealistic nature which includes a Jansenistic streak.

Finally he men the man who, he says, was to be the companion in his life (he is not named, but readers of Green's Journals can quite easily identify him). On a trip to Germany with this young man, the physical beauty of the blond young Germans, whom Green saw around him simultaneously thrilled and made him miserable. His visit to Weimar - Goethe's old Weimar - is mentioned, but not his meeting with the remarkable Count Harry Kessler, who describes it in his own Diaries.

Throughout all this he is writing steadily, and then his first novel appears and is praised; soon he begins to win literary awards, and so a career takes off which apparently has not ended yet, though Green is 96 this year.

A fascinating, though blurry, photo reproduced on the jacket shows him in 1927, handsome, well built and neatly suited, receiving a fiction award in the company of Virginia Woolf, who is spare and bony and rather badly dressed, and Hugh Walpole who looks subfusc and ill at ease.

A turning point in his life had been reached, and passed. The schoolboy and adolescent of the previous three volumes has finally broken his shell and, on the verge of 30, has taken his own special, bilingual place in literature.