FRANGLAIS SPOKEN HERE

By LANCE MORROW

In the '20s, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and company may have picked over the freshest entrees. But Paris was still feast enough when a new migration of expatriates collected there after World War II--Irwin Shaw, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and--with a palate educated by leftover meat loaf in Queens, New York--Art Buchwald.

One generation passeth away, a new generation cometh. Buchwald met Hemingway in the Ritz Bar. Buchwald was reverently awed. Hemingway looked up from his drink and said, "Kid, have you ever wrestled a bear?" The dumbstruck Buchwald answered, "What the hell?" He probably should have left the question mark off the reply.

When Buchwald established himself as the great humorist-tour guide of the old New York Herald Tribune, he wrote a parody of Hemingway's novel Across the River and into the Trees, and Hemingway, in a letter to a friend, called Buchwald "a smart-assed son of a bitch."

Buchwald would surely plead guilty to the first half of the accusation, but not to the second. He almost never wrote to wound. Being an amiable smartass--a pseudonaif American trickster, like Bugs Bunny with a cigar in his mouth instead of a carrot, wandering through glittering Paris with its haute cuisine and wines he professed not to understand--became Buchwald's signature. In the 10 years when he wrote a column from Paris until the New Frontier attracted him to resettle in Washington, Buchwald made a very funny American Abroad.

In an earlier memoir, Leaving Home, Buchwald described a somewhat bleak childhood spent in foster homes. I'll Always Have Paris (Putnam; 236 pages; $24.95) takes up the story after Buchwald completed a hitch in the Marines and three years at the University of Southern California. In June 1948 Buchwald sailed for France, where he took certain liberties with the G.I. Bill. He told the Veterans Administration he would be studying French, but he never showed up for class. Indeed, he never learned the language, getting by on body English and the Franglais that eventually made his Paris dispatches (including, among other things, the famous Thanksgiving number that translated Miles Standish as Kilometres Deboutish) even funnier to Americans.

The early days of this memoir have the charm and freedom of life lived as holiday in someone else's magic country. "My first impression of Paris was that it wasn't so much a city as a stage setting from a Broadway musical," Buchwald reports. "The sidewalk cafes were exactly as they were depicted in the magazines and movies...honking taxis, street vendors selling dirty pictures, roses, oriental rugs..." Buchwald talked his way into a job as a nightclub and film reviewer for the Herald Tribune. His career was launched. Buchwald's recollections of the Trib's scruffy Paris bureau--the sound of the printers singing the Internationale booming up the air shaft, with the editorial staff joining in--are lovely.

Soon, Buchwald set himself up as the laughing dragoman to American celebrities. The foster home boy became Our Man in Paris. He took Elvis Presley to the Lido. He asked James Thurber what it was like to be blind. Thurber replied, "It's better now. For a long while, images of Herbert Hoover were the only thing that kept popping up in front of me." He got to know Orson Welles, Audrey Hepburn, Lena Horne, Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Somerset Maugham, Danny Kaye, Humphrey Bogart. At Buchwald's wedding to Ann McGarry in 1952, Gene Kelly danced with the bride and Rosemary Clooney toasted the groom.

Eventually, some of the bleakness of the first memoir reasserts itself in the story. The catalog of celebrity names passing through town loses its electrical charge. Returning to the U.S., Buchwald had to be hospitalized for clinical depression. Much later, his marriage of 40 years fell apart.

But in 1994, as Ann was dying of cancer and Buchwald was writing the book, they made peace by way of shared memory: "Paris brought us together in the beginning," Buchwald says in his dedication to Ann, "and it brought us together at the end." Buchwald's old smartass merriment and his depressive undertow set up an interesting resonance in this volume. The dragoman was a more complicated man than the long-ago celebrities knew.