What was going on when I was born?

The Reagan Administration wants Federal employees to keep their mouths shut, and favors one particular way of making sure they do. Last week, the Justice Department backed random lie detector tests for screening officials with access to especially sensitive information. But in a rebuff of another part of the President's plan - lifelong censorship - the Senate voted 56 to 34 for a delay pending Congressional hearings.

VANESSA BELL By Frances Spalding. Illustrated. 399 pp. New York: Ticknor & Fields. $22.95. VITA The Life of Vita Sackville-West. By Victoria Glendinning. Illustrated. 464 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $17.95. BOOKS about the lives of gifted women are inevitably also books about the restraints in women's lives - society, conventions, manners, class, men - and about the desires of those women to free their gifts from such restraints and to live their lives on their own terms. Two new biographies - one of Vanessa Bell by Frances Spalding, the other of Vita Sackville-West by Victoria Glendinning - tell us much that is interesting about English society in the first half of this century, about the professional and upper classes, as well as the growth of two unusual talents. They also offer still more additions to the chronique scandaleuse of the Bloomsbury set. If you really want to know, you can find here just how many times Virginia Woolf went to bed with Vita, and whom Duncan Grant was in love with when. But I'd be happy to leave the sex lives of the dead to the necrophiles and attend instead to other aspects of these two careers.

WHEN John A. Passidomo, the Democratic Supervisor/Mayor of Harrison, was appointed State Commissioner of Motor Vehicles by Governor Cuomo last February, Republicans in the coterminous town and village were presented with one of their strongest opportunities to capture a position that Mr. Passidomo had held for 19 years. The Republicans selected Pat V. Angarano, a financial consultant who, in 1977, came within 49 votes of defeating the extremely popular Mr. Passidomo. His opponent will be Frank A. Vetere, a Harrison Councilman since 1968, who was selected by the Town Board as Acting Supervisor after Mr. Passidomo's departure. The Harrison contest is considered to be among the most interesting in an election year in which supervisor races are being held in 18 of the county's 19 towns. All supervisor terms are for two years.

In the past few years the warehouse district of Secaucus, N.J. has emerged as a haven for bargin hunters who have been drawn to the neighborhood by discounted goods sold by retailers leasing storage space there. So popular has the neighborhood become that on some weekends shoppers bring traffic in the area to a halt.

TODAY I am running in the New York City Marathon, a statement most people who know me will not believe. I'm the one in school no one ever wanted on their team; the plump, overly protected bookworm whose parents did not even send to summer camp. I'm the one who was always hauling grapefruits home to control my weight or having my toenails painted to show off in sandals. I'm the one who boycotted athletic events, flunked tryouts for the cheerleading squad, considered the waltz her only sport. I'm still not even sure whether I enjoy running. I find talk about it self-indulgent and other runners boring. I say the best part of running is stopping and soaping up in the shower. And yet I'll be out there today pounding the pavements like everyone else; running through five boroughs, crossing a total of five bridges, attempting to conquer the ''wall'' - a concept that even after all these weeks of training amazes me.

Another Record Year Whether commodity prices rise, fall or move sideways, the volume of trading continues to set records year after year. In the first nine months of 1983, continuing the pattern, 105.8 million futures contracts changed hands, compared with 112.4 million for all of 1982. Indeed, the futures industry has had nothing but record years since 1968. That's when volume slipped by 200,000 contracts, to 9.3 million, because a huge grain surplus depressed prices and eliminated uncertainty. It is uncertainty about supplies of a commodity that prompts hedgers and speculators to trade in futures.

WASHINGTON TEN years after Henry A. Kissinger engineered an end to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and started a peace process, and four years after Jimmy Carter cemented that process between Egypt and Israel at Camp David, the situation in the Middle East has deteriorated sharply and American involvement has increased dramatically. With diplomatic efforts running out of gas and the fighting constantly on the verge of escalation, President Reagan last week embarked on an overall review of Middle East policy. White House officials said that basically all that Mr. Reagan had decided thus far was to rejuvenate efforts to get Syrian and Israeli troops out of Lebanon and rekindle his comprehensive peace plan for the Middle East. At his Wednesday news conference, he placed the blame for ''foot-dragging'' in Lebanon on Syria and the Soviet Union.

DETROIT One hot Friday in August, a team of city auditors accompanied by plainclothes policemen and acting under the orders of Mayor Coleman A. Young, entered the Detroit Institute of Arts, assembled eight years of financial records, and behind a padlocked door of a third-floor office, began an investigation that continues to shake Detroit's cultural community. While the specifics have to do with a Middle Western museum, however, the seizing of the books of the Founders Society, the private board of the institution which administers millions of dollars in state money, has had reverberations that go beyond Detroit. The issues that have been raised involve the struggle for control of institutions that are both privately and publicly funded and run. And they involve museum and gallery practices and procedures that ordinarily are not a matter of public attention. The special audit was ordered by Mr. Young after reports had circulated here for months of cronyism, mismanagement, and improper spending on the part of Frederick Cummings, the director of the museum and the man widely credited with building the Detroit Institute of Arts into a museum whose exhibitions and collections command international respect. After examining the audit, Mayor Young said last week that he found ''no evidence of conscious wrongdoing'' on the part of Mr. Cummings or the Founders Society, a support arm of the museum that also manages museum programs, exhibitions and acquisitions. He said, however, that ''the audit indicates there are administrative deficiencies which need to be dealt with and corrected.''

MACY'S doesn't usually talk publicly about Gimbels, but last week Dayton-Hudson had harsh words for two of its biggest competitors in the $100 billion-a-year retail clothing business. ''Both Federated Department Stores and Carter Hawley Hale pressured some of our suppliers and caused them to cut us off,'' contended Boake A. Sells, vice chairman of the Minneapolis-based Dayton Hudson. The reason, Mr. Sells maintains, is that Federated and Carter Hawley Hale believed Dayton-Hudson's new off-price chain, Plums, threatened their own traditional pricing structure in the pivotal Los Angeles market by selling brand-name clothing at excessively cut-rate prices. ''We flatly deny ever having pressured any suppliers to cease doing business with Plums or anyone else,'' said a spokesman for Federated, referring to Mr. Sells' charges. Added J. Hart Lyon, executive vice president of Carter Hawley Hale Stores: ''We know of nothing to support those allegations.''

Plaza tower is a crisp abstraction in pale blue reflective glass, a minimalist form full of sharp angles and cut- ins and nips and tucks. It could not seem, at first glance, to be more different from the A.T.& T. Building - it is cool and sleek where A.T.& T. is warm and solid, and it is light where A.T.& T. is heavy. It seems to proclaim the future as much as A.T.& T.'s Renaissance arches and pedimented top look to the past. What could possibly tie these two buildings together, and somehow make it right rather than anomalous, that they both came to completion in 1983? Both the United Nations Plaza tower and the A.T.& T. Building are picturesque, almost romantic designs, created less by theory than by an intuitive understanding of composition. If they signify anything jointly, it is not that Renaissance arches are in and glass is out, or that glass is in and Renaissance arches are out, but that the art of composition is once again coming to play a major role in the act of design.

IN 1976, when Mrs. R. could no longer manage well financially, she decided to rent out the upstairs bedrooms in her Levittown home. Mrs. R. was afraid that neighbors might complain, because renting to tenants other than immediate family members violated the single-family zoning restriction for her area. But because she had little savings and no income besides her modest salary as a bookkeeper, she overcame her reluctance. Her early tenants were friends who needed a place to stay, and she charged them $35 or $40 ar week. Last year, again in need of further income, she converted the upstairs into a separate apartment, complete with kitchen and private inner entrance. Her currant occupants, a family of three, pay her $450 ar month. ''In January,'' she said, ''it's going up to $475.''

THERE will be more of almost everything for today's 14th running of the New York City Marathon, including a record number of competitors, medical units at every mile and the possible choices of an eventual men's champion. In an event which has come to symbolize a coming-together of the city's five boroughs, even no-parking signs along the course of 26 miles 385 yards will be posted in three languages (English, Spanish and Hebrew) for the first time. Many of the 17,165 entrants from all 50 states and 68 foreign countries were still queuing for numbers late yesterday afternoon at the Sheraton Centre. The acceptance breakdown includes 14,315 men and a record total of 2,850 women, but the actual number of starters who will line up on the Staten Island side of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge for the 10:45 A.M. start (Channel 7, New York; WABC Radio) may wind up at somewhere between 15,000 and 16,000, including 4,400 newcomers.