Walesa--Simple Genius of Gdansk : Poland: The Solidarity leader begins a U.S. visit next week. Included will be a rare honor--an address to a joint session of Congress.

“Sometimes I am ashamed that my nation is represented by such a simple guy,” a Polish political commentator said the other day of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. “But at other times I think he’s a genius.”

Throw in a touch of professional jealousy, a pinch of hero worship and a drop of political theater and you begin to see an image, through Polish eyes, of the electrician who next week will be the third non-government foreigner in history to address a joint session of Congress. The other two were a Revolutionary War hero, the Marquis de Lafayette, and British statesman Winston Churchill.

Walesa, who arrived Friday in Canada on the first stop of what he has called his most important trip ever, is going to the United States as what a Western diplomat here called a powerful symbol of “the good, the true and the democratic.”

Here at home, where Walesa has been much more controversial, his image is fuzzier than ever.

Once he was seen even by his admirers as mostly a creature of fate, manipulated by shrewd advisers. But now he is accepted as a serious political figure in his own right, the architect in September of the first East European government in 40 years headed by a non-Communist.

But he is increasingly a player without a clearly defined team. The Solidarity movement he heads by virtue of a 1981 trade union election is now heading off in several directions. It is still a trade union movement and a broad-based social movement but is now a political party as well. And Walesa seems progressively more detached from the day-to-day business of any of the three.

“Who is Lech Walesa?” a well-known Solidarity activist, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, asked at a recent meeting.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Stefan Staniszewski, who, as an ambassador to London under the old Communist government, routinely derided Walesa as just another “private citizen,” is among those who predict that Walesa will succeed Poland’s Communist President Wojciech Jaruzelski.

“Why not?” Staniszewski said in an interview. “After Jaruzelski’s (six-year) term, (Walesa) will only be 51.”

Walesa may be “somewhat primitive,” Staniszewski said, but he “has the instinct.” And opinions about him in the past were “one-sided, not objective.” This, Staniszewski said, “was the mistake of the former Polish government.”

But he argued that Walesa’s advisers and the Western press were equally guilty of misjudging him.

“Maybe (his advisers) used to have more influence on him than now,” he said, “but Walesa was Walesa. And if this movement hadn’t had Walesa in 1980, history would be different.”

Walesa himself plays the reluctant hero. After 20 years of struggle, he is a tired amateur, he says. His worst enemy is time. Even 48 hours in jail would be a welcome relief. What he would like to do is go fishing.

On the other hand, he talks about the Solidarity-led government as “my child.” Occasionally he slips into the royal “we,” and he seems genuinely amused by all the guessing about his current role.

He receives a steady stream of visitors at an office in Gdansk near the shipyard where Solidarity was born, and he has a press conference every Thursday afternoon when he’s in town.

He has traded in his car, a Polish Polonez, for an Italian Lancia, and moved his family from an apartment in a working-class district of Gdansk to a sprawling old villa complete with a gardener and nannies for his eight children.

More militant young Polish workers and a few former colleagues charge that Walesa has betrayed the revolution. Sometimes they heckle him outside the church he attends on Sundays, chanting, “No bread, no meat; all we’ve got is Walesa.”

Marian Jurczyk, a former colleague who heads a breakaway Solidarity group in Szczecin, speaks derogatorily of “Lech Walesa’s nomenklatura ,” an allusion to the Communist Party’s privileged class.

“I want to be a very good union leader,” Walesa told his critics in a recent interview with Rzeczpospolita, the government newspaper, “but I need the right conditions, and I am trying to create them. Those guys say I have betrayed the labor movement. Let’s ask them when were we stronger, in 1980 or now?

“If you just count the members, I can’t deny that we don’t have 10 million members now like we had in 1980. But if you count it differently, and admit that we have both the premier and the government and then Solidarity, you will probably agree that we are stronger now.”

Jurczyk and others accuse Walesa of being an autocrat, of ignoring “all the principles that were the basis of Solidarity.” Recently he was criticized for putting his own man in charge of the Solidarity newspaper.

But supporters note that Walesa also acted on his own last summer when he proposed that Solidarity take the premiership and the lead in forming a coalition government here.

“He didn’t consult anybody,” a Western diplomat said. “He decided now is the time. He has this uncanny sense of time and opportunity.”

There has reportedly been some friction between Walesa and Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who has made it clear that he is nobody’s puppet. But officials say the problems should not be overemphasized. Mazowiecki was a close associate of Walesa for years, and he continues to consult him regularly. He knows that without him, he would not be prime minister.

Walesa is not one to get involved in the detailed discussions of government policy, according to informed sources, although he does like to be informed on general developments. As one source put it, he “doesn’t like to read about things in the paper.”

Still, there are signs that Walesa is uncomfortable with his ill-defined status.

Last month, he ran successfully for the relatively lowly post of Solidarity chairman at the Gdansk shipyard. Asked why, he told the Polish press, “They know that I will only visit the shipyard once a month, but for political reasons it is good to have the backing of the workers.”

Solidarity politicians see him as an ace in the hole, the “shadow president” available in case of emergency, as Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a member of Parliament, put it.

A diplomat said that for Walesa to become president would require “a further evolution on this road to democracy.” But at a time when East Germany’s Communists are turning the Berlin Wall into little more than a historical curiosity, the idea of Jaruzelski stepping aside in favor of his former nemesis may not be so far-fetched.

“In terms of Poland’s image in the world, it would be fabulous,” another diplomat said.

Walesa sidesteps such speculation, preferring to remain something of an enigma.

“He is no one and everyone at the same time,” the popular newspaper Weekly Review commented last weekend. “He is a democrat and an autocrat. . . . He listens to everyone carefully, interrupts no one, but thinks and does on his own. . . . He is first of all a realist, and a ruthless pragmatic.”

The headline on Weekly Review’s article put it this way: “Walesa--He will go anywhere as long as it’s forward.”