Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man.

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, by Norman Mailer (Atlantic Monthly Press, 400 pp., $35)

Mr. Gelernter teaches computer science at Yale and is the author most recently of 1939: The Lost World of the Fair.

MAILER'S Picasso is an account not merely of the man but of his art, which is reproduced on nearly every page and discussed at length. Somehow the author has gotten the subversive idea that painting is important enough for a major writer to treat seriously, and not merely in a gossipy biography or a bunch of occasional pieces but in a big, idea-containing, theme-developing book. This book is an affront to the specialists who swarm over art like ants on a layer cake. They tend to write badly, in bristling, heavily fortified sentences designed to keep mere art-lovers at bay. "The near-impenetrability of the critical jargon," Mailer notes, "is startling to anyone schooled in a literary tradition"; but it is perfectly in keeping with the ideology of "expertise" that dominates modern culture. Decades ago, our dazzled-by-science intellectual elite decided that only specialists are worth listening to, and the way you recognize specialists is that you can't understand them. Mailer objects; in his view, to love art and be capable of careful, original thought and powerful prose are sufficient qualifications for interpreting Picasso.

Picasso is a collage; the author quotes often and at length from other books. The counterpoint that results is odd but effective. For example: just as Picasso is about to take up with Fernande Olivier, his first serious mistress, we encounter nearly thirty pages of (occasionally annotated) excerpts from Fernande's memoirs. During this unexpected vacation from Mailer's belligerent prose we rest and reflect. Fernande tells of a strictly reared middle-class girl's brief and brutal marriage ("Why, then, do men find so much excitement in violence?"), half-hearted lesbian encounters, flight from her husband, sexual meanderings. Some readers would have been just at the point (as I was) of dismissing Mailer's relentlessly sexual reading of every aspect of Picasso's life and art -- but Fernande's voice makes one reconsider in a way Mailer's own voice could not have. The book actually closes with a paragraph from another writer, and the effect once again is interesting. The author lowers his sails and bows out, and the story glides home under its own formidable momentum.

Sharp observations keep us interested. Picasso is apparently stillborn; the midwife gives up, but his physician uncle blows cigar smoke in his face and he comes to life. "It is not unfair to say that the harsh spirit of tobacco is seldom absent from his work." A 1904 photo of a corner in Montmartre reminds us "of how much a city square could still look like a painting at the turn of the century." There is a fine discussion, on the occasion of the police's collaring Picasso on suspicion of complicity in the theft of the Mona Lisa, of "the primal panic that still lived in frantic disarray beneath his ego." After the strict ocher-and-umber severity of pure Cubism, color is allowed back in: "conceive of a high-tech operation in a wholly sterile room that now is flooded with odors of cooking fat, garlic, and onions -- such was the effect of color on Analytic Cubism."

The best part of the book has to do with the violence and death at the heart of Cubism. Depicting people as if they have been cut into small pieces and spread out to dry is inherently a violent gesture. And Cubism at the very least is the first portrait-painting technique in history that is guaranteed, as Picasso proudly demonstrates to Fernande, to make beautiful girls look ugly. (Of course, she is thrilled.) "Some of the paintings, if we dare to entertain the vision, have the appearance of corpses, their flesh in strips and tatters, organs open." "Picasso's canvases usually look as if he is absolutely confident of what he is seeing, is truly gazing into a great and often ominous depth, whereas Braque, generally, seems merely to be searching."

Despite such fine sentences, the first of the book's big flaws is that the author hasn't looked hard enough at individual paintings; he spends too much time stuck on big, general themes. Masterpieces fly by and he misses them completely. He reproduces a 1901 self-portrait -- Picasso's first great painting, full of calm power; the spattering boil of the early paintings has settled down finally to an even simmer. But Mailer is interested only insofar as he can saddle the thing with a far-fetched sexual interpretation. The Blue Period arrives with a famous portrait of friend Sabartes. Isn't it remarkable that all of a sudden, an artist who draws magnificently has decided to make misshapen people on purpose? Mailer has no comment. In a 1905 painting of a family of acrobats, a girl props one foot on the other with exquisite, compelling feminine grace. A 1906 portrait of Leo Stein leaps off the page -- a staggering composition with the quiet, composed face at dead-center like the clapper of a bell while the radically off-balance body bongs around it. The author has nothing to say. The 1910 portraits of Kahnweiler and (still more) Vollard are Cubism's masterpieces because they respect the structural integrity of the thing depicted, turn the canvas into a magic panel interposed between the viewer and the real world, give us an inkling of what Cubism might have been -- brutal and also lovely. Mailer's comment: "These portraits are not only familiar but successful." Of course they're familiar, but if you have nothing to offer on familiar topics, why write the biography of one of the century's most famous men?

The author deserves much credit for making fascinating questions surface in the reader's mind -- but then he consistently refuses to answer or even acknowledge them, as if he is still unsure of his material; as if he is still one radical rewrite short of a brilliant book. Braque (to simplify only a little) wants to be an artist but can't draw, so he invents Cubism. Picasso is the century's greatest draftsman. For several years Braque and Picasso make Cubist paintings that are nearly indistinguishable. Is Picasso's stupendous draftsmanship a non-factor in these paintings, or does it do something important beneath the surface, or is it the subterranean force that ultimately destroys Cubism? Mailer says of Fernande that "her face was her fortune," and writes at length about Picasso's appearance too: his smallness, darkness, sturdiness, hypnotic eyes. But if you look at Picasso's face (or better, draw it), it strikes you immediately that maybe his face is also his fortune. Those classical features recur constantly in his work. When he rejects elegant classicism (only to come back to it repeatedly), is he rejecting his own face? Mailer makes much of his latent self-loathing -- thereby laying the basis for a fascinating discussion; but the discussion itself never materializes.

Saddest of all is the slack writing that bleeds so much energy from the narrative. There are brilliant sentences, but too many lazy ones. Still, can you blame the author? He has produced dazzling stylistic masterpieces (Ancient Evenings, Harlot's Ghost), and the critics simply haven't noticed. To the book-review establishment -- led by that one-magazine cultural catastrophe, The New York Times Book Review -- good prose is a distraction. The Times is famous for its expert-reviewer corps, and experts have more important things to worry about than good writing. But good writing takes enormous energy, and if no one cares (one can imagine Mailer reasoning, perhaps subconsciously), why bother? (Elgar wrote a Third Symphony that he left in piano score because, he figured, no one wanted to hear it. The experts of his day were also busy with more important things -- all those gorgeous 12-tone compositions the music-loving public still can't get enough of.)

I move we vote Mailer a round of thanks and ask him to go home and write a second edition.