Bemelmania

FATHER, DEAR FATHER (247 pp.)--Ludwig Bemelmans--Viking ($3.50).

"I was born in a hotel and brought up in three countries,'' Humorist Ludwig Bemelmans tells his daughter Barbara when she asks why all the characters in his books are crazy. "And then I lived in other hotels . . . and the only people you met were odd ones . . . Upstairs was a collection of Russian grand dukes and French countesses, English lords and American millionaires. Backstairs there were French cooks, Rumanian hairdressers, Chinese manicurists, Italian bootblacks, Swiss managers, English valets . . . When I was sent to America to learn the hotel business here, I ran into the same kind of people."

"Do you speak any language correctly?" asks Barbara.

"Well, I have the least accent in French . . ."

"That's all rather sad, Poppy."

Barbara, now a young lady of 17, was 11, precocious and down-to-earth when she accompanied Bemelmans on a grand tour of France, Switzerland, the Tyrol, Italy. Every page of their progress is littered with the types that have peopled Poppy's works for the past 15 years. The bowing hotel managers (suggestive of urbane boa constrictors), the bespatted aristocrats, the bored billionaires, the Tyrolean songsters with hooked pipes, the tiny donkeys and the hairy mongrels--all these Bemelmans perennials once floated in a dream ballroom and filled the air with a fragrance of old brandy, Russian leather and pine needles. For what Bemelmans calls the cosmopolitan "sleeping-pill set," he created a magical ideal and a high standard of make-believe.

But where Gourmet Bemelmans used to cook his literary schnitzel only with the finest schmalz, some of Father, Dear Father would make even Charles Dickens clutch his stomach and turn pale (e.g., "I wonder," says Barbara, "if Christ came to earth, could he get a table at Twenty-One?"). Moreover, Poppy's critical eye, which was always whimsically weak, is now rolling toward astigmatism. "It never occurred to me," he groans of Lady Elsie Mendl, ". . . that she, poor darling, was relatively destitute. She left a million . . . but it's peanuts, considering her fashion of living, her travels . . . artisans . . . servants . . . hospitality." Too many cosmopolitan sleeping pills, perhaps; but Bemelmania, while still fun, is not nearly as wonderfully crazy as it used to be.

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