Books: Love at Parade Rest

ARE You HUNGRY ARE YOU COLD (245 pp.)—Ludwiq Bernelmans—World ($3.95).

The heroine of Humorist Ludwig Bemelmans’ new novel is as pretty as a picture, and she poses an interesting proposition. “Evildoing when done adroitly is very exciting.” she purrs. What follows should be naughty and very funny. It is nightmarish instead—like too much Liederkranz. In one of his rare excursions outside the Hotel Splendide, Funnyman Bemelmans draws a demon-driven adolescent who swears like a legionnaire, squeezes the head of an infant like a tennis ball, flips hatchets instead of hips at suitors, does her best to entice a priest, and sets fire to a convent.

The young lady is sore, it seems, because she is a French army brat and parental love is at parade rest. Papa is a cavalry colonel, more interested in charges than children, while Mama is a Spanish noblewoman too haughty for tender talk. What daughter knows about affection comes from spying on peasant maids and their trooper lovers on a slumbering military post before World War II. And what she learns of life comes from Daddy’s batman, a sporting type named Killer, whose off-duty kicks come from impaling jack-lighted wildlife on the iron spikes attached to the grille of his Jeep.

In the inevitable rebellion and battle against her father, the daughter wins all the rounds. She lets two baby wild boars run wild through a military ball and gets the requisite licking. This imposition of authority she neatly overcomes by imagining her tormentor sitting on the toilet. More whippings, and she snaps her father’s riding crop in two, tries to brain him with a flower pot. The battle continues in Germany after the war. Her father is now a general in command of a force of French occupation troops, so she naturally sews his medals to the seat of his pants. Living in a near-demented world of make-believe, she grows to adulthood near crazy with rage at her wasted, loveless youth.

Here and there a few bright flashes of Bemelmans’ wit save Are You Hungry Are You Cold from being just another of the many cloudy apologias for the rebel cult of Depression-born, war-torn youths who cannot come to terms with a world they think their parents botched. But so determined and savage is the heroine that the reader cannot really root for her. He is left only with a slightly subversive feeling of compassion for the baffled and sputtering villain of the piece, Papa the martinet.