Unstrung Quartet

THE BANQUET YEARS (306 pp.)--Roger Shattuck--Harcourt, Brace ($8.50).

Nobody quite agrees about what happened at the banquet after pretty Painter Marie ("Coco") Laurencin fell on top of the pastries. Nor has it been decided whether the two poets who foamed at the mouth and had to be locked in the men's coatroom had eaten soap for fun or had faked an attack of the D.T.'s for the benefit of Leo and Gertrude Stein. And nobody knows just how much wine was drunk by Lolo, the donkey that painted impressionist canvases with its tail.

The party was given in 1908, in honor of elderly Primitivist Painter Henri Rousseau, by a youthful admirer named Pablo Picasso, who decorated his Montmartre studio with Chinese lanterns and ordered in a "gargantuan supply of wine.'' When the party ended and the sun was rising, Rousseau had long since left his seat of honor (a chair on a crate) and gone home.

It was not just a banquet; it was "one of the landmarks of the pre-World War I era." That is the thesis of Author Roger Shattuck, Fulbright scholar and assistant professor of Romance languages at the University of Texas. In his breathlessly complicated period study, Shattuck takes as true a highly debatable line written in 1913 by Poet Charles Peguy--"The world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years"--and discusses the nature of the change as expressed in French art. Author Shattuck has chosen four French men of the arts to exemplify just how the change took place:

PAINTER HENRI ROUSSEAU (1844-1910) was the son of a tinsmith, became a customs officer and started in art as a Sunday painter. In middle age he developed enough confidence to resign from the customs (now it would be "Sunday all week long"). He lived on a tiny pension, in a one-room studio, but he did not mind the cramped quarters because, when he woke up in the morning, he could "smile a little at his paintings." His now famed works suggested the bright but prim world of a precocious child, its whims ranging from shaggy liona to mustached men stiffly springing as they play "le football." With Rousseau, thinks Author Shattuck, begin "the childlike tendencies" of modern art, as it starts from scratch again after centuries of traditional maturity.

COMPOSER ERIK SATIE (1866-1925), like Rousseau, turned instinctively to the Hans Christian Andersen world in which fairy stories are meant less for children than for "unbelieving adults." Dismissing Richard Wagner's work as "sauerkraut," Satie spent his life creating tiny musical gems. To Rousseau's mannered childlike-ness, says Author Shattuck, he added a formal naughtiness that made his works almost "a fragile fabric of inanity." For Parade, a ballet on which Diaghilev, Cocteau, Picasso, Massine and Satie collaborated, he wrote a score including parts for typewriters, sirens, airplane propellers, Morse tickers and lottery wheels. An eccentric in his personal life as well, he went about with a lighted clay pipe stuck in his jacket pocket, its stem reaching up to his ear. He became associated with the Rosicrucians, later founded a religion of his own, "the Metropolitan Church of the Art of Jesus the Conductor." He then issued his own encyclicals and excommunicated his enemies (including the music critic Willy, husband of Colette).

NOVELIST ALFRED JARRY (1873-1907) was the inventor of a tongue-in-cheek philosophy named 'Pataphysics ("the science of the realm beyond metaphysics") and creator of the famed fictional character Doctor Faustroll, who is "born full-grown at the age of 63, navigates unendingly across dry land in a sieve." Author Shattuck sees Jarry as a comedian and wizard whose farcical wand-waving expressed a world in which Nietzsche's famed dictum--"God is dead"--was translated into a scandalous joke. Jarry enthusiastically drank absinthe and, near the end of his life, ether (he died at 34). At the theater he wore a dirty white canvas suit and a makeshift paper shirt with the tie painted on in India ink. He was, said Gide, "an incredible figure . . . plaster-faced . . . gotten up like a circus clown and acting a fantastic, strenuously contrived role which showed no human characteristic." He often carried firearms. Once he was shooting the tops off champagne bottles lined up against a wall behind which some children were playing. Their mother hurried over to complain that her children might be shot. "If that should ever happen, Madame, we should ourselves be delighted to get some new ones with you," Jarry courteously replied.

POET GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE (1880-1918) often sounded like one of his characters, who said: "I found humanity on its last legs, devoted to fetishes, bigoted, barely capable of distinguishing good from evil--and I shall leave it intelligent, enlightened, regenerated, knowing there is neither good nor evil nor God nor Devil nor spirit nor matter in distinct separate-ness." Apollinaire's thoughts, attitudes and interests hopped from point to point with anarchic abandon: "Unsolved crimes, papal infallibility, and the new art of the moving picture inspired him equally." Blessed with true lyric talent, Apollinaire nevertheless "felt the need to jumble and rearrange his work in complex patterns." His writing "became a vast radiation of himself in all directions"--an illusion that he intensified by sometimes giving his poems and letters the shapes of circles and fans.

What emerges if these four types are added together? Dadaism, surrealism, stream-of-consciousness-ism and many another esthetic "ism" spring, obviously. from sources akin to those of Rousseau, Satie, Jarry and Apollinaire. Author Shattuck tries hard--and on the whole unsuccessfully--to cram all these tricks into a single bag. Despite the hearty, festive ring of the title, the "Banquet Years," says Author Shattuck, were essentially morbid. In his view they show the connection between modern art and a world that had lost its God and sprawled on the earth with many a gaping hole knocked through it. While the attempt to make four eccentric figures speak for an entire era is muddled, the figures themselves--four characters in search of a historian--provide enough entertaining episodes to make the reader wish he had gone to one of their blowouts.

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