Books: Son of a Sphinx

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APOLLINAIRE by Francis Steegmuller. 365 pages. Farrar, Straus. $6.50.

Being a living legend in one's own lifetime is hard on the liver—especially in Paris. But it is even harder on the serious biographer who, several generations later, tries to separate subject and myth. Poet-Critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who died on the eve of the 1918 armistice, is an almost classic case in point. For the avantgarde, he loomed as a giant figure, an irrepressible rebel against stuffy conventions, a decisive experimental voice in modern French poetry, and the cultural midwife of the cubist movement in painting. For most of the rest of the world, he was little more than an obscure bohemian scribbler from the heady pre-Dada days in Paris when it was still possible for the bohemians to think that society needed their help in turning itself inside out and upside down.

Opium of the Muses. Writing the first full-length biography of Apollinaire by an American, Francophile Francis Steegmuller has considerable trouble trying to find the real man in the middle. His carefully contrived book is likely to please best only those readers who know least about Apollinaire, but who are delighted to dip into a nicely, often spicily, written story about a fin de siècle Villon who smoked opium, palled around with Picasso, Matisse and Braque and (in 1911) got arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa.

Apollinaire didn't steal it really. That heroic act was reserved for an Italian house painter with an inflated sense of national pride. But Apollinaire and the young Picasso did happen to be harboring some statuettes that a zany friend had stolen from the Louvre as a joke. Once, during the national furor which followed, Apollinaire and Picasso wandered the streets of Paris for an entire night, miserably toting the incriminating statuettes in a suitcase, not knowing whether to throw them or themselves into the Seine and not quite daring to do either. Eventually, Apollinaire had them returned to the museum, faced the police, and was let off after a five-day stretch in prison. He wrote six poems about the experience, but he was deeply hurt by it, Steegmuller reports, because a police official referred to him as "scum."

Wilde Postcard. It is often hard to disagree with the judgment. Born in Rome in 1880 and grandiosely christened Guglielmo Alberto Wladimoro Alessandro Apollinaire Kostrowitzky, the future poet was in fact the bastard son of a beautiful Polish courtesan and an unknown man, possibly of noble blood. "Your father a sphinx," Apollinaire once bitterly gibed at himself, "your mother a one-night stand." At 19, he was helping his mother swindle a hotelkeeper in Belgium out of three months' food and lodging. At 20, when a young English governess refused to accept his hand in marriage, he threatened to throw her (not himself) off the cliff on which they were standing.