SMALL dinners are usually stuffy affairs. People sit uneasily around the table and present the Name with stock questions. And the Name, who needs only about three minutes to decide that held better forget about eating, painfully replies with careful answers. No one learns very much. On occasion, if the Name is unusually relaxed or the wine is particularly good, or the cigars 15 inches long, Himself will explain how he got started and what it was like.

Alfred Kazin's Starting Out in the Thirties, a short autobiography of his early years, is like the more successful of these after dinner conversations. Kazin, a literary critic and historian, wasn't an influential man of the thirties and his book is no walk through the corridors and closets of power. He wasn't even an influential critic and probably, had never even been in the Hotel Algonquin. Kazin's memoirs are the acute recollections of an observant young man finding his way through the New York of the Depression.

Unlike most biographical writing, Starting Out in the Thirties is not a chronicle. At the book's end one knows nearly as little about the achievements or accomplishments of Kazin's life in the thirties as one did at the beginning. It is, instead, a portrait of the two communities Kazin lived in--the tenements of Jewish Brownsville and the heady, exciting community of radical writers in Manhattan and Provincetown.

Chance is one of the subtle themes in Starting Out in the Thirties, and it was by chance that Kazin entered the radical writer's community. Riding the subway home from City College one day in June, 1934, Kazin read a review by John Chamberlain, the radical New York Times reviewer, of a book on youth.

"I hated all abstract talk of youth and the problems of youth: I was youth, afraid to go home without a job. Chamberlain's programmatic remarks seemed to me condescending, his manner unfeeling; I was convinced that he knew nothing about the subject: even his bothering to review such a book showed a highly abstract mind. I was youth--out of college for the year, useless, driven as an alley cat. What the hell does this fellow know about it anyway?"

So Kazin got off the subway at Times Square and went up to see Chamberlain. Five hours later he left carrying with him a recommendation that he be given a chance to review books for the New Republic.

With this entree, Kazin met most of the characters whose portraits make up the rest of the book. Some of the names Kazin discusses are still familiar--Mary McCarthy, Malcolm Cowley, William Saroyan, and James T. Farrell; others, like those of V.F.Calverton, editor of the Marxist Modern Monthly. Otis Ferguson, the ex-sailor who worked on the New Republic, and Francis Corcoran, a pietistic Catholic who also managed to be a Communist, mean nothing to people who can hardly remember the early '50's. But all were part of the literary-political world of Alfred Kazin and all were part of the '30's.

WHAT IS most striking about the radicals Kazin writes of is the ease with which they adopted radical postures. For many of Kazin's friends, radicalism was not the result of a John Winthrop-like examination of conscience, but rather a garment that for one reason or another, perhaps social or psychological, was congenial. Inconsistencies don't bother these people. "The cool-looking types I now met at cocktail parties never seemed to find it odd to express the most revolutionary opinions against the most luxurious backgrounds. It was as if they were demonstrating, more than their new principles, the detached intelligence that had made them executives in the first place. They were the harbingers of the new society, but meanwhile they were bosses in the old."

Far more irksome to Kazin, however, were "those middle-class and doctrinaire radicals who, after graduating from Harvard or Yale in the Twenties, had made it a matter of personal honor to become Marxists, and who now worried in the New Masses whether Proust should be read after the Revolution and why there seemed to be no simple proletarians in the novels of Andre Malraux. "Kazin's irritation with these men is a product of his involvement in the other community--the tenements of Brownsville. Although these middle class radicals may have been socialists, the socialism they espoused seemed more like a pretty, colored, faceted glass ball which they gingerly held at their finger tips, rather than the quiet, unideological socialism that grew out of the "daily struggle of life in Brownsville."

And it is for people whose beliefs grew out of that daily struggle, no matter where it took place, that Kazin reserves his admiration. While Kazin's biases and prejudices are interesting in trying to understand the complexities that plagued American intellectuals in the '30's, they are not nearly so interesting as the tone of tentativeness in which Starting Out In The Thirties is wrapped.

Most biography with its marching tone of inevitable progress, upward development, and certainty is frightening. Starting Out in the Thirties is full of people who make mistakes, who aren't completely honest with themselves at crucial times, whose lives are changed by the interference of chance; just like people starting out in the sixties.