The Basketball Diaries & Forced Entries

JIM CARROLL is a poet and rock musician in his mid-30's who grew up in several poor sections of Manhattan, the son and grandson of Irish Catholic bartenders. In the fall of 1963, when he was all of 13 years old, he began keeping a diary: ''Today was my first Biddy League game and my first day in any organized basketball league. I'm enthused about life due to this exciting event. The Biddy League is a league for anyone 12 yrs. old or under. I'm actually 13 but my coach Lefty gave me a fake birth certificate.''

The diary project proved successful. He kept at it for at least three years, later published excerpts of it in The Paris Review and other magazines, and eventually brought out a version of it in book form, The Basketball Diaries (1978), which created something of a sensation for its hair-raising portrait of adolescent street life in New York.

It was not a book that seemed likely to produce a sequel. Filled with a kind of vitality, though clearly exaggerated in its boastful accounts of drinking, drugs, sex and every sort of crime from stealing cars to hustling homosexuals in Times Square, the diary's final entry leaves its author on the brink of the abyss:

"Totally zonked, and all the dope scraped or sniffed clean from the tiny cellophane bags. Four days of temporary death gone by, no more bread, with its hundreds of nods and casual theories, soaky nostalgia (I could have got that for free walking along Fifth Avenue at noon), at any rate, a thousand goofs, some still hazy in my noodle . . . Nice June day out today, lots of people probably graduating. I can see the Cloisters with its million in medieval art out the bedroom window. I got to go in and puke. I just want to be pure."

But he's embraced the life he's leading - hanging out at Max's Kansas City, working for Andy Warhol at the Factory, publishing occasional poems, socializing with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, George Balanchine and William S. Burroughs, and doing drugs even more intensely, if possible.

The voice is grown up now. There are occasional vestiges of its origins (''That was it for Anne and Ted and I . . .,'' but the whine and the adolescent strutting are gone. The author now admits that the entries are ''embellished and fictionalized to some extent . . . mainly for the sake of humor,'' which, he has found, ''has an uncanny ability to create its own energy and push on a writer against his will.''

He is reaching for something deeper now. Instead of hip talk, he's trying for poetry. Of a stately Times Square prostitute he writes, ''The whole effect . . . was as if someone had placed a Rubens portrait at the bottom of a cesspool, and after centuries of strangeness and decay among the stillness of vile things and vile notions, some chance lightning hit

Instead of teen-age bravado, he writes of violent suicide, of ''evil as a pervasive entity,'' and of the emptiness of adolescent fantasies. ''And what is it you want?'' he asks of his desire for a fashion model he sees on an elevator. ''It is not sexual, though you do want her. You want her because, in some unfathomed way, she is the proof, the proof of those things you always knew existed but could not define. Yet you've had women like this in the past, and in the end they proved nothing. They solved nothing. They were usually not too bright and were terribly self-indulgent. They were, as this one is, only another emblem of your own vanity, and the vanity of your Art.''

Despite the maturing voice of Forced Entries , the two diaries remain similar in their quest for extreme sensations and their eagerness to shock the reader. One is aware almost throughout that the author is more intelligent than he appears and that he takes a certain pride in dissipating his gifts.

And yet the diarist finally gains control of himself. The image with which he dramatizes his victory over drugs will disgust many readers, just as many of his effects will seem excessively overwrought. But readers who can stomach the ending of Forced Entries will find it both effective and convincing. And beside the description of his cure there is the external evidence of the poetry collections he has published since 1973 -- Living at the Movies (1973) and The Book of Nods (1986) -- as well as the three music albums he has released -- Catholic Boy, Dry Dreams and I Write Your Name .

But whether or not one believes Jim Carroll's redemption, his two diaries constitute a remarkable account of New York City's lower depths. At the very least, they should serve further to demystify the usefulness of drugs to writers. Finally, the main reason that Mr. Carroll decides to kick his habit is for the sake of his art. ''It's my only choice for my work. I need a consistency of my moods if there is to be any consistency in my style. I can't attempt to write always in the hollow flux of desperation and incipient terror. I try to cover this up, cower behind some facade of humor, hoping that old Aristotle was right -- that humor will act as a catalyst to purify the tragic. But it can't go on. My body is broke.'' He has to mend himself, unpleasant though the purging proves to be.

© The New York Times Company