Armed for Adventure

When the SS Ryndan set sail from Rotterdam for New York in 1914, it was carrying among its fur-coated passengers one Ludwig Bemelmans, a 16-year-old from Tyrol, Austria, who would later become the celebrated author and illustrator of the “Madeline” children’s books. His only knowledge of America gleaned from James Fenimore Cooper novels, the young Bemelmans planned to arrive in America armed with two pistols and a load of ammunition “to protect myself against the Indians,” he would later explain. Though unfamiliar with life in the New World, Bemelmans was well acquainted with firearms: He had precipitated his departure to America by shooting a waiter at his uncle’s hotel.One does not usually expect to find beloved children’s book authors armed to the hilt, but “When You Lunch With the Emperor” (Overlook Press, 308 pages, $24.95), a posthumous collection of Bemelmans’s autobiographical vignettes, tall tales, and line drawings, makes it clear that he was a through-and-through original. This latest volume is a follow-up to last year’s “Hotel Bemelmans,” and though it disappointingly reprints a number of essays from that earlier anthology, “When You Lunch” still surprises and delights. It follows the life of this natural raconteur and globetrotter from his trouble-making childhood in Tyrol and Bavaria to his farcical career waiting on powerbrokers at Manhattan’s Hotel Splendide (aka the Ritz-Carlton) and his later tramps through Europe as a man of leisure. “My habitat is mostly bars and restaurants, hotels and depots, and the lobbies and entrances thereof,” Bemelmans declares.As a writer, Bemelmans maintains an illustrator’s eye for gentle exaggeration and caricature. In his quick renderings, the hunched turn stooped, the slender become frail, and the plump become potbellied. The flutist of a small Irving Place theater that Bemelmans frequents is “thin, long, with all the lines of his face drawn down to the small apron of his upper lip which rested on the wet end of his flute.” Bemelmans also retains a child’s reckless (or is it oblivious?) attitude towards danger. His giddy embrace of adventure leads him to hire a French pimp as his daughter’s babysitter (a remarkably responsible nanny, it turns out), and enrage a room full of Nazi party officials at Berchtesgaden by pressing a half-smoked cigar to his upper lip and offering a staccato (and drunken) impression of the Fuhrer. Only indirectly – and often insouciantly – does he intimate at the desperate poverty of his early years, the lean days following the stock market collapse, or Hitler’s annexation of his native Austria.Bemelmans’s world, like that of his “Madeline” books, is charming. He regales his readers with tales of glamorous gilded hotels, tables set with fine china, steamships, and storybook Tyrolean villages. He employs a lyricism usually reserved for nostalgic remembrances when describing this world and his contemporaries. It’s as though he foresaw their eventual decline, overtaken by the jet plane and the curious, acquisitive masses. One can’t help but read “When You Lunch With the Emperor” as both a celebration and a eulogy.***If memories are the fodder of the best travel writing, then the life of James Salter – a Korean War fighter pilot, novelist, screenwriter, skier, and mountain climber – provides exceptionally fertile ground. In his novels (“The Hunters,” “A Sport and a Pastime”), memoir (“Burning the Days”), and the recent short-story collection “Last Night,” Mr. Salter has distinguished himself with a taut, crystalline, and episodic style. Similarly, his work in “There and Then” (Shoemaker Hoard, 226 pages, $15), a new anthology of travel essays, often reads like a collection of exquisite postcards or reminiscences.Mr. Salter offers a guide to touring the Loire valley chateaux; recollections of restaurants and women discovered as a young man in Paris; stories of summer rentals on the Mediterranean, and memories of Aspen before the nouveaux riches arrived. It’s a deceptive collection, one that appears effervescent but carries its weight in Mr. Salter’s careful prose. In just three sentences, he is able to capture summer in a small Loire village, and with it all the enchantment France still holds over Americans:It is full, slumberous July. We swim in the wide, flowing river or come well laden from the open market, artichokes the size of melons, wine for fifteen francs a bottle, cheese of every description. Everyone seems friendly, even the dogs – there doesn’t seem to be a pedigreed one in town.Time is soft in these essays, which span (one surmises) some 40-odd years. Their chronology is arrived at through guesswork and hints, as when Mr. Salter mentions the astonishingly inexpensive price of a hotel room or an obsolete European currency. Pieced together, however, the chapters form a memoir of sorts, the history of a man through his travels. Mr. Salter matures from a young bon vivant set loose in Europe for the first time into a romantic pilgrim, seeking attachments and solidity in a continent much older than our own. Later, he’s a discerning and ever-so-slightly jaded traveler who laments the inevitable changes to landscapes that he once found pure. And finally, he’s an older man, savoring past experiences, aware of his limits. Here is Mr. Salter in that final incarnation, after describing the vigorous feeling of invincibility that comes from a day on the slopes:Of course even on great days there is always that lone skier, oddly dressed, off to the side past the edge of the run, going down where it is steepest and the snow untouchable, in absolute grace, marking each dazzling turn with a brief jab of the pole – there is always him, the skier you cannot be.In these lines and throughout “There and Then,” the medium is truly the message: Mr. Salter’s focused prose reflects a life deliberately and attentively lived. In ways more than one, he is that lone skier.

Armed for Adventure

Armed for Adventure

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