Revival

Music AT MIDNIGHT--Muriel Draper --Harper ($4).

Ladies who in the past have presided over brilliant salons are Mme. du Barry, Mme. de Stael and the author of this book. The salon was fast becoming a lost art when Mrs. Draper staged her revival, substituted garish Bohemian cushions for frail gilt chairs, substituted brusque moderns for precieux. In "memories of a world that has passed" she reconstructs her London music room; then peoples it with musicians--Thibaud, Rubinstein, Ysaye--and with listeners-- James, Sargent, Norman Douglas. Of each she makes a shrewd, if flattering, portrait. Of Henry James she threatens to write a book, contents herself instead with a few pages; ''With a labouring that began stirring in the soles of his feet and worked up with Gargantuan travail through his knees and weighty abdomen to his heaving breast and strangled column of a throat. . . he spoke." The day she met him she was wearing a hat with a cluster of small white lovebirds in front. "He gasped with horror, pointed his finger, and said with utter kindness. 'My child, my very dear child--the cruelty--ah! the cruelty of your hat! That once living--indeed yes, loving--creatures should have been so cruelly separated by death to become so unhappily and yet, ah' how becomingly united on your hat.

The incidental sketches of herself are quite as shrewd and quite as flattering. She says that Carl Van Vechten thought she should dress "very simply, in black, no headdress at all, no earrings, nothing but her own strange face." He raged at Robert Edmond Jones for jeopardizing his dramatic tastes by approving her passion for ''dressing up" in gaudy turbans and flaming ospreys.

Muriel Draper was born in New England, bred in Italy and France. She married the late Paul Draper, singer of songs, brother of Monologist Ruth Draper; and for six years they entertained in Vienna, in Florence, in London. Divorced before Paul died, Muriel Draper now works as interior decorator.