Books: Nosegay

THE EYE OF GOD (312 pp.)—Ludwig Bemelmans—Viking ($3).

“Sugarwater,” says a “Toulouse-Lautrec lady” to a “demure garden statue” in the latest book by Ludwig Bemelmans, “let Champagne show you how it’s done.”

Since 1937, when Bemelmans uncorked his private stock of anecdote in My War with the United States, he has been showing his sugarwater imitators how it’s done. Yet none have been able to match his polite gurgle, his discreet fizz; and none have provided so charming a label as his sketches, or been so deft at dabbing up little literary excesses before they make a mark.

This time Bemelmans pops the cork in a village of the Tyrol, where he spent part of his boyhood. Out comes a bubbling mixture of beautiful spies who refuse to be seduced, mountaineers who outwit pockmarked Nazis, and emigrant sons who write home from America: “Chopping wood one day recently, I cut off my left thumb and the cat got it … and ate it. I am now forced to stay idle. Send me some money.”

Its publishers call The Eye of God (the name of the local mountain) a novel. It isn’t. Anecdotes don’t make a novel any more than edelweiss make an alp; but when Bemelmans does the picking, they make a bright nosegay.