Correction Appended

During Diane Arbus's funeral, the photographer Richard Avedon turned to a friend and whispered, ''Oh, I wish I could be an artist like Diane.'' The friend, Frederick Eberstadt, answered, ''Oh, no, you don't.'' Their brief exchange - as recounted in Patricia Bosworth's biography of Arbus - raises the charged questions surrounding the tormented, even self-destructive, creative artist. Chief among them is where reality ends and mythology begins.

Arbus personified the artist whose inner turmoil - depression, dislocation and a taste for risk bordering on a death wish - fueled her creations, those moving and disturbing photographs of drag queens and hermaphrodites, celebrities and Siamese twins. But Arbus was also a woman defeated by depressions so debilitating she often could not work and, ultimately, chose not to live. Finally, Arbus represented an artist who gained more fame, who was indeed romanticized, more for living on the edge than for the artistry she brought back from that emotional frontier.

It is no wonder, then, that Arbus - that the entire issue of the ''mad artist,'' as the awful cliche has it -should both attract and repel, as it has for literally thousands of years. Aristotle spoke of ''divine madness,'' Renaissance scholar Marsilio Ficino of the ''Saturnine temperament.'' The playwright August Strindberg declared that few people were ''lucky enough to be capable of madness,'' and the poet John Berryman opined, ''The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not nearly kill him.''

For both creators and scientists, the subject is an extraordinarily loaded one -even more so now, when popular culture so glorifies violent and bizarre behavior. The American artistic landscape is littered with the corpses of the brilliant, from painter Mark Rothko to poet Anne Sexton to musician Charlie Parker, and one must wonder if they died in part because sycophants with safer lives so celebrated their excesses. For contemporary artists like the jazz musician Jackie McLean and the writer Raymond Carver true creativity began only after conquering their respective addictions to heroin and alcohol. To them, and many other creators, the image of the self-destructive artist not only invites futility or death but denies the value of disciplined craft.

There is no question that many creative artists, perhaps the vast majority, are centered and sane.

There may be just as many self-destructive bakers as painters, but psychiatrists and biographers do not analyze their cakes. It is the tormented artist and not the untroubled one - the Vincent van Gogh, not the Peter Paul Rubens - who provides the stuff of tabloid notoriety and romantic embellishment.

But if that image is inflated, neither is it groundless. For many artists, creation is a constant act of balancing the dark side that allows introspection with the brighter one that turns raw material into finished product. One result of the process, ''The Iceman Cometh'' by Eugene O'Neill, is now playing at the Lunt-Fontanne. The play, set in a saloon ironically called Harry Hope's, closely parallels O'Neill's years of uncontrollable drinking in dives like Jimmy-the-Priest's and the Hell Hole. It is impossible to imagine O'Neill having written the play without becoming the virtual ascetic he did; yet it is equally impossible to imagine him writing as rendingly about self-destruction and self-delusion without having lived both.

O'Neill's life and work raise some of the most frightening - and central - questions about creativity. Can the forces that make you creative also kill you? Can you live with control and yet create free of restraint? Can you live enough of the dark side to tell the tale without becoming a casualty? The equilibrium is precarious. As the playwright Arthur Miller wrote of Strindberg: ''Strindberg not only suffered what by most definitions would be madness, but managed it like a conductor managing an orchestra. It makes his suffering no less real and painful to say that it was always being turned over and over by the bloody fingers of his mind.''

In Sam Shepard's work that tension is frequently embodied by pairs of brothers - Lee and Austin in the play ''True West,'' Travis and Walt in the film ''Paris, Texas.'' These characters represent the polarity in the playwright himself. ''Somewhere there's a myth about the wolf and the sheep,'' Mr. Shepard said, ''and man carries both inside him. And the process of keeping alive is trying to have these two cohabit, trying to carry on a balance between these two parts, because one's always trying to devour the other. And the one that wants to devour - the wolf - is the animalistic one, the one that operates on impulse and is pretty insane.

''There's definitely a struggle going on, and it's answered in different ways. Some people do it with drinking or drugs. The difficulty is trying to accept that this is the condition you're living with, the condition of these two parts banging up against each other, and the constant threat of being overthrown by one.''