Baby in the Jungle

THE DONKEY INSIDE--Ludwig Bemelmans--Viking ($3).

Ludwig Bemelmans has the face and physique of a divinely inspired, slightly intoxicated baby. Born & raised in Austria, he flunked out of a school for boneheads, came to the U. S. in 1914 (he was 16, two-pistoled in readiness for New York's Redskins). Here he wrote and illustrated classics for children and adults, became known as a fey genius whose private life was as original as his books. Better known than he cared to be, he announced to his publishers: "I am leaving America to escape to the jungle. ... I have been compared to Hemingway, Goethe, Menuhin, Schnitzler and Mozart. This has left me with not only a split but a hashed personality. I must leave, take myself to the silent forests of Ecuador and Chile, to write another book."

The Donkey Inside is the book. Technically a travel book, it is as far superior to the type as Sterne's Sentimental Journey. It uses the sights & scenes of Ecuador as a medium for the exercises of a quick eye and an original mind. Bemelmans is the kind of person to whom strange, delightful things always happen.

His arrival in Guayaquil was announced in the morning paper, with picture. The title was "El Senor Bnelemaas"; the picture that of James Cromwell, who, says Bemelmans, is "the Ecuadorian ideal of the typical North American." Later, in a Quito paper, Cromwell appeared as Russell Davenport.

To Bemelmans' artist eye, Quito appeared from above "as if made of marzipan crawling with numberless black flies." The Quito train was small, baroque and red with "banisters . . . that belong to an old brownstone house." Restaurant signs en route read: Hays Krim (Ice Cream), Airistiu (Irish Stew) and Wide Navel Wiski (White Label Whisky). In a hotel, whose walls were papered with copies of the Schweizer Hausfrau, he could read useful pointers on the cure of hemorrhoids and on what to do if encumbered with a hat, an umbrella and a lighted cigar when approaching a lady.

In Quito a sunburned lieutenant told him: "It is terrible here, Senor. First you must make love to this girl you want until your nose bleeds; second you must make love ... to her mother, her father, the butler, and the parrot, and in the end you must always marry her." The cafe society set was dull and insolent ("they all but come over to your table to read the labels on your clothes") but some of the transients were good. "Franz Josef's local grandson had some claim to authenticity: his accent was correct, he clicked his heels in the real sloppy Viennese fashion, he was heavy-lipped, and appeared always to be unhappy."

The jungle itself smelled of every excellent food he had ever known, and conjured up a beautiful picture of Luchow's on a Sunday evening. (One of the four illustrations in color is Luchow's on a Sunday evening.) In the jungle, too, in a less-than-village, he found Indians praying around a little child in a chair, dressed in white lace and embroidery, her hair decorated with tinsel and with silver wire. She had been dead several days. There were paper wings attached to the dress. The major-domo explained: "The child, who is now an angel up in heaven, is ... carried about in processions from house to house . . . until it is in such a state of decay that it can no longer be enjoyed." Finally it is placed in its coffin, "with the words 'adios, mamacita' on the lid, and the properties are returned to the priest or the nuns from whom they were borrowed."

Quito schools were definitely progressive. In the copybook of one little boy, an honor pupil, Bemelmans saw a picture "like a Christmas card, with sunrays, little stars, scrolls, and illumination surrounding the words 'La Sifilis.' Equally beautiful and fetching was the next title, 'La Gonorrea.' This was done in green, with darts. The teacher explained that such instruction prevents shock later on."

Bemelmans was considerably more saddened by some of Quito's Jewish refugees who, in the pitiful hope of some day returning to Germany, were playing every possible kind of ball with the local Nazis. As for the Nazis, they were insidious and smart. Thanks to their magazine, The Voice of the Worker, the average Quiteno believed of the "damned Yanquis" that: "One day they will come over, hundreds of them, and kill us all with them, with these machines, with bombs that come down." There were busses named Hindenburg and Adolfo Hitler. And out in the jungle, headhunters no longer brewed the poison for their darts; they got it through white traders, most probably from a German chemical firm.

Just as engaging as his people are Bemelmans' animals and still lifes. He saw an agonized baroque statue of Jesus crowned with a Shirley Temple wig; a native painting of a waterfall which resembled "noodle soup running down over a green couch"; a sloth's "unfinished face"; a fly, the description of whose trajectories is one of the most delectable pieces of animal-writing in literature.

One of the book's shortest chapters, and its only bitter one, is a bullfight. The band blasts Cheek to Cheek; the stunted bull comes out, soils himself and trembles when at length he comes to "sense the purpose of his presence"; tries to escape, is tortured into the open ring and dealt loathsome, blundering wounds. Finished off with a dagger, he kneels gently like a child in prayer and his head sinks to earth. The band plays Cheek to Cheek and another little bull trots out.

The Donkey Inside is written with beauty, sympathy and control. Its essential quality is the gentle courage of comedy. Blending facts and imagination at the author's fancy, it is incidentally as deft and intimate a portrait as a country could ever hope to sit for.

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