THE BEST OF TIMES (188 pp.) Ludwig Bemelmans -Simon & Schuster($3.95)
“The average Austrian,” says Bemelmans, “is like the cocker spaniel, helplessly affectionate and sentimental.” Bemelmans himself has been a U.S. citizen since he was a young man, but his native affectionateness and sentimentality (he was raised in the Tyrol) still run like a groundswell under his clear prose and brilliantly childlike paintings and drawings. No man can be more superficial than he when commenting on the causes of contemporary misery (“If politicians can clean up the messes they have made and are making, then Paris will be the old place again”), but it is precisely this relaxed laziness of thought that gives him not only his sensuous warmth but his faculty to echo, like a verbatim record, whatever scenes or conversations may happen to brush up against his impressionable senses.
The Best of Times is his description of a journey through Europe, for Holiday magazine, in 1946-47. It is a mixture of Europe recalled and Europe revisited — a nostalgic, often beautiful restatement of things that have survived, and a horrified reporting of things that now lie in ruin. Like the vivid paintings and drawings that accompany them, the numerous anecdotes carry a rich embroidery of Bemelmanly fantasy.
What’s Left? In Paris the traditional agent de police sketched by Bemelmans as a square-topped pyramid balanced on twin sticks, still stalked the streets in his cap and dark blue cape. The portly headwaiter too, who greeted both Barbara Hutton and Marshal von Brauchitsch with the same bow, had weathered the storm without a ruffle. Georges, the pander of the prewar underworld, had actually improved his status; he was now a respectable black-marketeer.
In Austria, where traditions never die, the new civil servants still played the favorite national drama — gravely concocting and slowly handing back & forth list upon list of government decrees, which must be “carefully aged, like bottles of rare wine” before they could enter public life. And on the public roads, the previous occupants of these high seats, now paying the price of cooperation with Hitler, were playing the same drama as if they were still in it. “Please, Herr Oberregierungsrat,” requested the ex-judge, “will you have the kindness to hand me that shovel?” “With the greatest of pleasure, Your Excellency,” replies the ex-ministerial councillor.
“Not a bad life,” said the Hungarian Count who has lost his huge estates, as he sat darning his seeks in an Arlberg farmyard. “In me you behold the only decent-living Hungarian … I have never made love to a woman behind her husband’s back … I have never had an ‘affair.’ I have always done it correctly.”
“And how is that?”
“. . . Very simple. I have always fallen in love with them and married them—always.”
“How often have you married?”
“About ten times, I think.”
“But what did you do with the woman you were married to, when you fell in love with a new one?”
“Oh, I threw her out, of course.”
In Swiss Davos, where the crocuses still bloomed and the cowbells tinkled, Bemelmans found the tuberculous rich coming again to the magic mountain from the four corners of the world. “The smoke from the disinfecting plant drifts up the side of a hill, and this Grand Hotel fashion of luxurious dying away from home is sadder than any other I have seen. The graves here lie in greater and more aching lonesomeness than soldiers’ graves, in foreign lands.”
Tomorrow. In a German high school, the boys were asked to write a composition “On the future of Germany,” and to state their opinions truly and fearlessly. All the compositions sounded much like this one, which a “quiet boy” handed in:
“I was a member of the Hitler youth, and I am not sorry … I was a Nazi, and I was happy that I was one … I can be forced to give the outward signs of another belief, but what I keep in my heart is mine forever … Oh my God, I love Germany, as she is now, a hopeless wasteland, and I will walk into this wasteland and, with only the power of my hands, create a paradise therein, more beautiful than that in the Bible. This shall be my future way!”
“I think,” said the teacher grimly to Author Bemelmans, “that the people of any country would be proud of such children.”
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