Contemptuous of publicity and intensely private, he has never occupied the foreground of the literary scene except when he refused the Goncourt Prize for ''The Opposing Shore'' in 1951. Besides four novels, he has published, at long intervals, a play, one collection of prose poems and one of short stories, four essays and two autobiographical texts. His status could be compared to that of Marguerite Yourcenar, although he seems unlikely to seek a place among the Academicians.

Born Louis Poirier in 1910, he has written books that show as little affinity with what he has called the ''zinclike'' nouveau roman as with the existentialist novel, ''bursting with a sour and exasperated humanity.'' He is something of a loner in what he derisively refers to as the republic of letters, but he is a well-established one. The author uses his extensive classical culture and Proustian sense of names to create a geography of the mind. Gracq's Syrtis will not be found on any map, ancient or modern. In different ways, the French title ''Le Rivage des Syrtes'' and its English counterpart, ''The Opposing Shore,'' conjure up this old image of an alien coast, clearly still vivid in the Western imagination. Virgil called it ''inhospitable Syrtis,'' not only for its strong currents and shifting sands but for its wild shores and the nomadic tribes of the bordering country. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the gulf was reputed perilous to ships. Long before being named the ''Death Zone'' by Col. Syrtis Major was the ancient appellation of the Gulf of Sidra. Richard Howard's translation retains all of the novel's verbal magnificence and its full grip on the imagination. AT last, 35 years after its first publication in French, Julien Gracq's major novel, ''Le Rivage des Syrtes,'' is available in English.

The opposing shore by julien gracq