Do-It-Yourself Toulouse-Lautrec : He was an odd-shaped peg, but he found the hole that fit him in <i> fin-de-siecle </i> Paris : TOULOUSE-LAUTREC: A Life, <i> By Julia Frey (Viking: $34.95; 595 pp.)</i>

If Henri Toulouse-Lautrec walked into a party you were at, you would forget what you were doing and stare. You would not stare furtively. Something about the little guy would reassure you that he expected and even welcomed it. But something else about him would make you self-conscious in the manner of your staring. You wouldn’t want to gawk like a dope. An amused, urbane gaze might be the ticket. Think Vincent Price.

Think fast. The little guy is here, stepping from the pages of Julia Frey’s efficient biography. Our attitude problem is immediate. How do we look while looking at the weird and prodigious, funny and tragic Monsieur Lautrec?

We look like yokels out of our depth, is how we look. Admit it. We can’t cope with the master from an enchanted time in Montmartre, Paris, France. Practically nothing human was alien to that time, when great art was the small change of everyday life. It was an age dominated by giants of style including this one, a giant who could stand up and look you square in the shirt pocket. You needed exquisite aplomb then not to gawk. They don’t make aplomb like that any more.

Lautrec, 4 feet, 11 inches tall, had a regular-sized head and body with stubby arms and legs, effects of a hereditary endocrine disorder that caused such other woes as brittle bones and leaky sinuses. He had droopy purplish lips and a tendency to drool. His one becoming feature besides a dazzling personality was a set of huge eyes whose brown irises, Frey reports, were so dark they appeared to merge with the pupils.

Among his seduction methods was to gaze fixedly at women as if to freeze them like deer in headlights. Imagine looking across a table in the gaslit Paris night, catching yourself being watched by those eyes like the business end of a double-barreled shotgun of love.

On at least one occasion he asked a woman in a nightspot to turn her back and, not looking at him, simply to listen as he spoke to her like Cyrano in shadow.

Frey suggests that Lautrec’s record as a seducer was spotty. While fending him off, one grand lady made a lunch date with him for the following day only because, she explained to a friend, his despondency alarmed her. She wanted to give him something to live for overnight. She needn’t have bothered.

For Lautrec there was always the consolation of the brothels--where he would spend days at a time--not to mention the bottle that, perhaps abetted by tertiary syphilis, killed him at the age of 36. He never lacked company. He was adorable, plus rich. He lived surrounded with smart, dark, glittering denizens of the town.

He was friends with the Madonnas of his day, divas of the demimonde whose names live on through his revolutionary poster art: La Goulue, Jane Avril, Yvette Guilbert. While shrewdly appreciative of the publicity value, those stars often loathed his images of them: so ugly! Like his misogynist hero, Edgar Degas, Lautrec promulgated a modern femininity whose allure had nothing to do with garden-variety beauty.

From a top-drawer aristocratic lineage whose habit of first-cousin marriages sprinkled deformity among its heirs, Lautrec had one of those mother-fixations that can seem obligatory for male geniuses, especially French. His countess mother Adele, who looms throughout Frey’s biography, was straight-laced but doggedly loving, until something snapped and she fled him in horror toward the end. His father the count, a hunting nut, was raffish and remote. Lautrec grew up spoiled by female doting and steeled by solitary pain.

Apropos of a letter Lautrec wrote at age 13, Frey ticks off the lifelong patterns of his personal style: “wit, punning, scatology, visual imagery, grandiosity, complete absence of self-pity backed by self-deprecation humor, obsessive and dictatorial demands along with real tenderness and affection.” Thus equipped, he launched a career that, starting in his late teens, led to one triumph after another until alcoholism drove him down.

The secret of his genius was a capacity of hard, exacting, experimental work, a dedication nearly as scandalous to his family as his shady ways. (Your proper aristocrat doesn’t do anything; he maintains.) Disciplined audacity focused everything about this complicated man in breathtakingly economical marks--sensual and intelligent, nasty and nice--on canvas, paper and lithographic stones.

Frey, who teaches French at the University of Colorado and has had printmaking experience, is good on technical aspects of Lautrec’s restlessly inventive art, less good on the significance of his style for art history. (Among other things, he lit a fuse in the dialectic of “high” and “low” aesthetics that would go ka-boom six decades later, with Andy Warhol.) The book’s complement of reproductions is maddeningly skimpy.

Frey has researched profoundly, and she writes with unfailing clarity. On the minus side, she is pedestrian in style and, as an interpreter, cautious to a fault. For a presumed expert, she can seem awfully puzzled by her subject, as when she says of Lautrec’s love of cross-dressing, “Was he fetishistic, unclear about his sexual identity, imitating (his father) or merely playing around?”

I don’t know, Ms. Frey. What do you think?

“In any case, he was thoroughly ambivalent.”

This is like a batter at the plate studying a pitch with conscientious interest: curve or slider? The thing is, he is supposed to swing the bat.

But Frey’s indecisiveness has its virtues. In a way, her fastidious avoidance of analysis and mythifying only increases the power of material that largely explains and vastly mythifies itself. Think of this biography as a do-it-yourself Toulouse-Lautrec kit and you’ll like it fine.

For much of the book I couldn’t shake the mental image of Jose Ferrer’s knee-walking, bitterly droll performance in the movie “Moulin Rouge.” Then I got a new image from descriptions of the master’s voice: probably “the high resonant twang common to most dwarfs” and “marked by a mixture of lisping, sniffling, and drawling which seemed infantile and made his witticisms all the more amusing.”

What made Lautrec a joy to be around comes across in his habit of “referring to almost any action as a ‘technique’ (which he pronounced in a funny way, exploding the consonants: ‘Tek-nik’).” Thus “he referred to the way an actress’s husband mounted guard in her dressing room as ‘jealousy tek-nik.’ ”

From Frey, you will gather grist for your reverie tek-nik on Montmartre in its Age of Miracles. Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Auguste Renoir and the rest come and go, charismatically touchy. (To understand the behavior in the book, it often helps to assume that everyone is nursing a hangover.)

Lautrec emerges as a man absolutely of his time, an odd-shaped peg snugly fitting an odd-shaped hole that history might as well have designed for him. Amplified, meanwhile, is a general sense of fin de siecle Paris as a fabulous engine of civilization that, like the Renaissance, burned hot and clean the fuel of any talent brought to it.

Just how much actual fun it was is arguable. Frey’s account of Lautrec’s nightmarish decline, to which his death came finally as a relief, leaves a sour taste of the era’s destructive penchants. Nor do his friends and associates shine very brightly in the mensch department. People then could be so busy aestheticizing everything that they flat forgot to be quite human.

But anybody booking the time-machine junkets to the Belle Epoque should sign me on anyway, OK?