Home-brew

SMALL BEER -- Ludwig Bemelmans --Viking ($2.50).

As a Bavarian adolescent Ludwig Bemelmans was known to his family as a Lausbub, or Katzenjammer kid. At 16, when he was shipped to the U. S., his Uncle Hans summed up a last desperate family hope when he anticipated that the cunning Americans would shear Ludwig's pelt, clip his horns. At 41, Bemelmans is a brilliant contradiction of family prophecy--a famed artist, author and illustrator of four children's classics* (Hansi, Quito Express et al.), and of two adult volumes (My War With the United States, Life Class) which rank with the most engaging of reminiscences. But Bemelmans is still a Katzenjammer kid. His fame, in fact, rests largely on the fact that he never outgrew his Katzenjammerism; it gives his drawings and prose a special quality of naive sophistication, outlandish imagination, impulsiveness, sly satire.

Small Beer, an aptly titled profusely illustrated collection of ten stories and sketches, is authentic Bemelmans brew. From his hotel background (Bemelmans once managed a small swanky restaurant on Manhattan's upper East side) comes the story of Gabriel, the perfect maitre d'hotel, who revealed his true genius at the super-swanky birthday party for Mrs. George Washington Kelly, the story of another maitre whose phobia was The Blue Danube. Among minor classics of travel literature is Bemelmans' account of a small island off the coast of France, where Madame Clamart, because of an unfortunate experience with a U. S. sailor, barred all Americans from her cafe.

From his trip to South American jungles in 1937 Bemelmans brings back a hilarious travelogue of rivers "as loud as the finale of Goetterdammerung," of flora that looked "as if the florists had thrown the end of a Hutton wedding down the back-stairs," of one Captain Vigoroux, famed in cigaret ads. Two tales, one about a dachshund, another about a Nazi dissenter who invented a seventh-class funeral, are not only funny but belong with the best satire yet written on dictators. In a story about a cobbler who belied the old proverb, Bemelmans combines entertainment for all members of the family.

Not all Bemelmans tales will bear reading to little tots. One such is the story of Putzi, a premature baby who lived in a jar of alcohol on its parents' mantelpiece, became a hero when his father discovered he was a perfect barometer, sinking to the bottom on approach of bad weather, bobbing to the top, with "a Lilliputian smile and rosy cheeks," at the approach of fair.

*His fifth juvenile, Madeline, a story in verse, will appear next week.

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