Books: What’s Funny?

LAUGHING DIPLOMAT—Daniele Varè—Doubleday, Doran ($3).

When Princess Radziwill heard that Daniele Varè was hesitating between a musical and a diplomatic career, she told him: “There is a new character for you to create. The Laughing Diplomat.” This was at the Italian embassy in Berlin, in 1900, when Varè was 20. Young Varè took her at her word, laughed genially through his years of service in the Italian consulate in Vienna, as first secretary of the legation in Peking, in the foreign office in Rome, as delegate to the League of Nations, at the San Remo conference, in London, Luxemburg, Copenhagen, Berlin and on vacations in Venice. Lighthearted, sophisticated, well-bred, he laughed at the remarks of his German sweetheart, Lenchen, who was a good girl by her lights, which were occasionally dim ; at the practical jokes he played with U.S. Ambassador Hugh Gibson on the League of Nations (Varè invented an imaginary country, Zembla); at the grotesque reformers who flocked to Geneva with their crazy plans for saving Europe.

Meanwhile, he married an English girl, raised three daughters, wrote light novels (The Maker of Heavenly Trousers), composed witty epigrams (A diplomat sometimes has to deal with people who appear to be stupid. Very often they are stupid. But it is better not to count on their stupidity). His humor is infectious; his jokes are good; his friends highly placed; his tone that mixture of arch indiscretion and frivolous reticence which is found nowhere on earth except in diplomats’ autobiographies. But when readers consider that through the years of his hilarity wars and revolutions swept over Europe, that his daughters were fascinated by the corpses floating down Chinese rivers, they are likely to ask, What is this man laughing at?