A Gift for Dispraise
LAMB, RICHARD
A Gift for Dispraise Max Beerbohm: Caricatures By N. John Hall Yale. 240 pp. $45.00. Reviewed by Richard Lamb Max Beerbohm as drawn by himself was a round-headed youth bearing a striking...
...I seem to have mislaid my gift for dispraise," he said...
...Wilde, by contrast, is depicted as aman brutalized by celebrity, a sort of picture of Dorian Gray...
...He was next engaged to another actress rumored to be his brother's mistress...
...Mrs...
...In caricature they are doubly so...
...Both the engagement and its vagueness lasted for six years...
...One diptych of George Bernard Shaw and his inamorata, the actress Mrs...
...Each of the 213 works Hall has judiciously selected for this handsome volume from the artist's 2,000 formal caricatures characteristically reflects some personal quality...
...That only lasted a few months...
...Max's friend Aubrey Beardsley has a head shaped like the state of Texas (his nose the jutting Panhandle) and resembles, too, Tenniel's drawing of the Mad Hatter...
...Well—I knew them all...
...Part of the appeal of his drawings is that they combine the impressions of a precocious child at his parents' cocktail party with the affectless familiarity of a clubman running into a cabinet minister he has known since boyhood...
...Max was a natural celibate and I doubt whether he ever had a sexual experience of any kind," Hart-Davis wrote, adding thathebelieves Florence was "as undersexed as Max...
...This, we are informed, is "Mrs...
...According to Beerbohm biographer David Cecil, "His romances were not passionate affairs...
...He wears an overcoat of elegant cut and great bulk, from the skirt of which two dancing pumps protrude, looking as if he were in the habit of wearing a pair of patent-leather mosquitoes on his feet...
...But as Hall demonstrates, Beerbohm also made frequent efforts to get at his subjects' state of mind...
...Ait critic Roger Fry has eyes full of mad glee and long fingers outstretched in grasping acquisitiveness...
...Late in life Beerbohm said, "As Oscar became more and more successful, he became...
...Rupert Hart-Davis, the editor of his letters, thinks otherwise...
...Whatever the case, the pair were married for 40 years (until Florence's death in 1951) and lived in a small house on the coast road in the Italian resort town of Rapallo...
...Campbell and Mr...
...For caricature is a form of wit, and nothing so ruthlessly chokes laughter as the suspicion of labor...
...I'm not sure I wasn't as charming as the King himself —very charming though he looked...
...Asked why he left his native city, Max replied "How many people were there in London...
...Hall presents an intricate social world without exhibiting that dread "suspicion of labor" Beerbohm so deplored...
...It is certainly a suspicion Beerbohm avoided...
...But judgmental or not, his work has been revealed by the passage of over half a century to belong to that odd and select artistic category: lasting ephemera...
...By age 24 he was famous both as an essayist and—with the publication of Caricatures of TwentyFive Gentlemen—as the cruelest caricaturist of his day...
...One was the well-known actor/manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who facilitated his kid brother's ascension to minor celebrity status...
...Caricature," Max Beerbohm once insisted, "implies no moral judgment upon the subject...
...gross not in body only—he did become that—but in his relations with people...
...Shaw as they respectively appeared to each other...
...He surveyed life from a far distant peak of infantile narcissism...
...When Beerbohm was born in 1872 his father, a prosperous corn merchant who had emigrated from Germany, was 62...
...Hall's biographical essays on Beerbohm and his subjects provide needed context, arcane information and ancient witticisms...
...A professor of English at Bronx Community College, he makes good use of Beerbohm's mots (the artist besides being an accomplished literary parodist, also published a novel, Zuleika Dobson...
...The shunning of complexity in favor of simplicity or stylization was an impulse that ruled Max's life no less than his art...
...In 1895, for example, he became "vaguely engaged" to an actress...
...Beneath the brim of a gigantic, rakishly angled top hat one heavy-lidded eye is visible, its squiggle of dark lash in counterpoint to a mouth expressive of all things jaded and frivolous...
...Max himself would probably have been amused at the curiously appropriate hybrid production of Hall's work as a scholarly coffee-table book...
...In 1939, on being knighted, he observed that he was "the bestdressed of the Knights...
...Beerbohm never drew from life or from photographs, preferring to observe his targets—he knew most of them well —and then let memory prune or magnify until they "melted down, as in a crucible...
...Part of his small, peculiar brilliance is thathe proved otherwise...
...Max had several siblings from his father's first marriage old enough to be his parents...
...His tiny right hand holds a epee-thin cane...
...Patrick Campbell, first shows a boy with an air of Shavian mischief and a coquettish girl with a romantic tangle of dark hair à la Helena Bonham Carter...
...Consisting of a few lines, a vast nose or chin, a waistcoat tight or distended, and a wash of watercolor, his relentless likenesses still provoke wonderment and the joy of schadenfreude...
...at the same time, he existed in an atmosphere of rarefied sophistication and extreme innocence...
...He would surely have been relieved at how lightly the author wears his learning...
...The world of affairs—particularly its moral topography—was a constant source of fascination to him...
...Eight million...
...He observed that "In every work of art elimination and simplification are essential...
...but they were romances all right, not sexless friendships...
...Campbell and Mr...
...Max's Oscar has a face like a T-bone steak, most prominent in its expanse of hanging wattle, all a shade of livid pink with a tinge of gray...
...In 1910 they were married...
...Reviewed by Richard Lamb Max Beerbohm as drawn by himself was a round-headed youth bearing a striking resemblance to Peter Lorre...
...The victims ranged from Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill and King Edward VII to "barrister-turned-playwright" Sydney Grundy and "fairly successful poet" Stephen Phillips—who almost alone in the Beerbohm oeuvre, wears wrinkled and ill-fitting clothes...
...Others fared no better...
...In 1930 he gave up caricaturing...
...In 1908 he became engaged yet again, this time to American actress Florence Kahn, whom he had known for several years...
...The effect is horrifying...
...The second panel shows a vast matron and a broken-down ancient...
...Edward VII looks very much like a rhinoceros in a kilt...
...Given such sartorial turpitude, can we be surprised when the descriptive paragraph by author N. John Hall further informs us that "his decline was swift and conclusive...
...Nine million...
...In his selfportraits, rather than a nose or jaw providing the exaggerated feature, Beerbohm's clothes are the focal point, suggesting thathe considered—orwanted— his apparel to be his most revealing aspect...
...Shaw as they respectively appeared to themselves," reads the caption...
...It was in this dandyish guise that Beerbohm burst upon the London scene shortly after coming down from Oxford, degreeless, in 1893...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 18
