BOOK REVIEW : Plimpton Captures Best Times : THE BEST OF PLIMPTON<i> by George Plimpton</i> ; Atlantic Monthly Press $19.95, 288 pages

Ihave to admit a depressing thing. Up until now, I have stayed away from reading George Plimpton.

I suppose, in one of his own phrases, I have “seethed with envy.” Plimpton is a Harvard man. He comes from a fine New England family. His money is family money. He invented (up to a point) “The Paris Review.”

And he has made his career in the most irritating possible way (at least from the point of view of the middle-class drudge): Plimpton has gone out to have fun. And he has succeeded.

It is intolerable, when you think about it, that while the rest of us pay bills and fret about taxes and car pools and picking up the dry cleaning, George Plimpton has been playing baseball in Yankee Stadium “in a post-season affair . . . between teams from the National and American Leagues headed respectively by Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle.”

Or whanging the triangle in a symphony orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Or hanging out in a dressing room with Muhammad Ali before a fight. Or--the final irritation!--sitting across the table from that noble boxing champ and the renowned poet, Marianne Moore, watching that unlikely pair collaborate on a poem.

All this fun, while the rest of us have been stuck picking up the dry cleaning!

But when, sulkily and suspiciously, the reader cracks open “The Best of George Plimpton,” something else--akin to envy but far more complex--kicks in. Here is Plimpton, bravely explaining his notion of “participatory journalism,” reminding us that we all want to know what “it” was like--whatever it was.

A corollary of that fact is that though we all admire success, we begin to notice early on that we may not end up playing in the big leagues; indeed, in the larger sense we may be doomed to lead bush league lives.

Life being what it is, a Mickey Mantle can never write the Great American Novel; a William Styron will never be a movie star. In the face of all that, Plimpton has decided to juggle the odds, tilt the penball machine, and do as much as he can. And the way that he writes about it is pure crystal.

Yes. His is a life of privilege, and he can give us a portrait of John Kennedy at Newport, playing on the sand with his kids that is--really!--unblemished perfection.

Yes. Plimpton hangs out with celebrities, so he can retail for us the silly picture of Norman Mailer at a Fourth of July party, bending over fireworks, misjudging the blast, and rolling head over heels without ever spilling his huge bourbon drink.

And here is Warren Beatty, sliding through life by telephone, asking Plimpton the perennial question: “Is this the man who has never had an olive?”, and waiting for Plimpton’s ritual, wistful answer, “Is that you, Warren?”

The truth in these essays is this, and it is what we feel sometimes, thumbing through old photograph albums. Even though you have the experience, you can never really keep it.

Fun is the mercury of life; it splits, slides, rolls away and is gone. There will never again be the moment in Paris when William Styron finishes reading aloud “The Long March” for his friends; never again the moment when Muhammad Ali “helps” Marianne Moore with her poem. And no John-John Kennedy “thumping sturdily through the sand toward his father.”

These moments are as lost to Plimpton as they are to us, and that’s when the reader’s seething envy turns to awe. This is a terrific book. Buy some now, and for Christmas, give a copy to every guy you know.

Next: John Wilkes reviews “Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists” by Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer (Harvard University Press).