Bohemia with Baedeker

THE BURNING MAN (428 pp.)--Stephen Longstreet--Random House ($4.95).

This latest specimen of "fictionalized biography," based on the yet unfinished life of Pablo Picasso, rattles along like a tourist train through the garrets and grandeurs of Bohemia. First stop, Spain: guitars, poverty, bullfighters, the inevitable gypsy temptress ("She kissed him. He kissed her. It was alive in him, and urgent"). Next stop, Paris: chimney pots against the sky, artist's life, nightlong arguments, more temptresses ("On the sixth day when Leah came to the studio he took her brutally in his arms. 'Damn you,' he shouted and gave her a long cruel kiss"). Last stop, the Riviera: clear sunlight, indolent and pagan bathers, the evening of life. Along the way are conducted side trips to World War I, the Spanish Civil War, marriage and the art forms of the Fauves, impressionists, cubists, Dadaists--all written in racy, journalistic prose.

Novelist-Playwright Longstreet, 51 (The Pedlocks, High Button Shoes), was a youthful art student in Paris, but this hardly qualifies him to write about the titan of the century. The morning meditations and night thoughts attributed to Picasso (called Julio Navarro in the book) are the cliches of art; his views on life and love are similarly copybook. And the speeches put in Picasso's mouth ("Balbac, I've got it! A whole new approach to painting!") often make him sound like a U.S. adman in the throes of a new toothpaste campaign.

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