Mame's the Same

AROUND THE WORLD WITH AUNTIE MAME (286 pp.)--Patrick Dennis--Har-court, Brace ($3.95).

Patrick Dennis, the bearded Scheherazade with the eye for the Mame chance, has strummed out another night's entertainment. This leaves 999 nights, and so the public can probably look forward to Auntie Mame at Yale and Auntie Mame in the R.A.F., if not (unless something sordid has been withheld) Son of Auntie Mame. At any rate, there is no important difference between Auntie Mame, which sold 1,500,000 copies and Around the World. Biggest change: in the starting novel Mame Dennis gets married; in the sequel she just gets around.

At the end of the first book, the madwoman of Beekman Place was getting on toward 60 and past her best years (although she would not have admitted it). Clearly Author Dennis (real name: Edward Everett Tanner III) had to backtrack and find a more youthful Mame. Deftly he discovered a hitherto overlooked interlude. It seems that between the time Mame's nephew Patrick was kicked out of St. Boniface Academy in Apathy, Mass. and the time he entered college and the brawny embrace of Bubbles, the waitress, there was a broadening period of travel.

In spite of being the world's most progressively educated orphan, Patrick is a little stuffy, and he watches his manic aunt's antics with considerable unease. Mame, rich, beautiful and pushing 40 (determinedly ahead of her, with a 10-ft. pole), gives him good reason for alarm. In Paris she flutteres her feathers across the stage of the Folies-Bergere. In the south of France she becomes romantically involved with a Mediterranean matron-menace named Amadeo Armadillo, and in the Tyrol with an obnoxiously handsome Nazi named Putzi. In London Lady Gravell-Pitt, a flatulent and fraudulent old sandbarge, undertakes to direct Mame's entry into court society.

What Author Dennis offers is less often humor than lunatic good humor, and the reader is blown by a pleasant breeze of cheerful idiocy throughout most of the book. Probably inevitably, a calm is reached toward the end, when Mame doing her old turns in outlandish new costumes no longer seems very funny. Particularly in a long, unnecessarily moralistic chapter on Mame among the anti-Semites, Around the World begins to sound like The Long Voyage Home.

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