The Beerbohm Cult

...Auden's phrase) "the baffle of being," such casualness, far from seeming quirky, is instead rather refreshing and even admirable...

...There have been other Beerbohm biographies, the most complete of which is that written by the English man of letters David Cecil...

...Some people are born to lift heavy weights...

...My own feeling is that, as with so many genuine artists, he had great powers of detachment: "I have a power of getting out of myself," he wrote...

...Much as I would have loved to have known Max Beerbohm, I'm not sure that personal acquaintance with him would have been worth the pain of gazing upon his drawing of me...

...He finally married one, an American actress named Florence Kahn...

...The 'inner man of Max Beerbohm' sounds oxymoronic...

...Had he met Isaac Newton, Beerbohm remarked, "I would have taught him the Law of Levity...

...The cult itself sometimes goes by the name "Maximilians...

...What this leaves Hall in his biography is a review of Max Beer-bohm's career, an appreciative yet critical sorting out of his various works, and a consideration of the main unresolved questions about his remarkably quiet life...

...To be outmoded is to be a classic," he once said of himself, "if one has written well...

...Very Jewish, this, or at least a quality that often shows up in Jews...

...he had a readership of no more than fifteen hundred in England and another thousand in America...

...He thinks Beerbohm's single famous work, Zuleika Dobson—the novel about a beauty whose arrival at Oxford causes the death by suicide of all the university's undergraduates—rather overdone and therefore tending toward the monotonous, though even so he includes it among Beerbohm's best work...

...I think for Max Beerbohm it had to do with his aloofness, his not-quite-fully belonging to any groups or coteries, and with his ironic approach to life...

...As it happens, A kind of a life turns out to be A Sort of a Biography—a rare and unusual sort...

...His book is not meant to be exhaustive or in any way definitive, and in some ways it is all the more pleasing for its modesty of intentions...

...Yet I find I cannot quite bring myself to do it...

...Asked by the playwright S.N...

...Of all the comic reputations of that day—S.J...

...I am myself, as you will perhaps by now have gathered, a member of the Beerbohm cult...

...David Cecil thought that Max Beer-bohm was a man of "low vitality," and he was too much the gentleman to place the adjective "sexual" before the noun...

...Hall expends rather less space on Beerbohm's caricatures, having already devoted a lengthy book to the subject...

...The sadness, of course, is that a case of any sort need be made at all...

...Yet for all that has been written about Max Beerbohm, no one has come close to capturing the extraordinary personality behind his small but remarkable creations both in prose and with pencil...

...When critical, Hall often levels his criticisms in an amusingly oblique way that his subject would probably have much approved...

...Auden, among others, weighed in), and was widely respected if not revered by people of literary sensibility...

...The golden jugglers are the ones with wit, the ability to pierce pretension, and the calm detachment to mock large ideas and salvationist schemes...

...Hall's biography touches on all three, none in smothering detail, though he is stronger on the first two than the third...

...Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, E.M...

...Beerbohm, even when alive, thought Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Five years ago, Hall published a beautiful and impeccably edited collection entitled Max Beerbohm Caricatures, to which he supplied a fine and splendidly informative accompanying text...

...A picture of Max Beerbohm is on a wall roughly six feet from where I am now writing about him...

...if he ever wrote a flawed sentence, I have not come across it...

...But, being in fact a Gentile, I am, in a small way, rather remarkable, and wish to remain so...

...Rather Jewish, much of this, too...

...Still, he was always what Arnold Bennett called a "small-public" writer...

...Believing that "only the insane take themselves quite seriously," Beerbohm was primarily and always an ironist, a comedian, an amused observer standing on the sidelines with a smile and a glass of wine in his hand...

...His economy of formulation touched on genius...

...Professor Hall comes near to suggesting that there is nothing really that needs to be captured...

...He provides an excellent account of his subject's brief but brilliant performances over the BBC...

...Something more than charm has kept the small if scarcely gem-like Beerbohmian flame alive...

...They go in for handsome gestures (Beer-bohm refused to accept a fee for speaking about his recently dead friend Desmond MacCarthy over the BBC), have wide sympathies, and understand that a complex point of view is worth more than any number of opinions...

...Some years ago, before his late-life turn to Christianity, Malcolm Mug-geridge, then still an exquisite troublemaker, wrote in the pages of the New York Review of Books that Max Beer-bohm "was in panic flight through most of his life from two things—his Jewishness and his homosexuality...

...I have been rather a lightweight...

...displayed a wide knowledge of Beerbohm and his milieu and a depth of sympathy for the large comic enterprise that are his caricatures...

...on the contrary he looked upon it as a great misfortune to be avoided if possible...

...When Max Beer-bohm died, in his eighty-fourth year, he was buried in St...

...The photograph shows an elderly man—born in 1872, he lived until 1956—sitting on a cane chair on the terrace of his small villa in Rapallo...

...His family's house in Kensington, at 57 Palace Gardens Terrace, has long borne one of those periwinkle blue plaques noting that an important figure had resided there...

...I have been referring to him as Beer-bohm or Max Beerbohm, but members of the cult tend to refer to him as "Max" merely, which is how he signed his caricatures...

...He recognizes that Beer-bohm tended to underrate Shaw—he had a real antipathy to geniuses, whom he thought "generally asinine"—and to overrate Lytton Strachey...

...I don't think he really believed it...

...Jewish talent"—of what might it consist...

...In that work, Professor Hall (tempted though I am, I shall refrain from calling him "N...

...A woman friend said he "combined an accurate appreciation of worldly values with an ultimate indifference to them...

...His head and hands seem rather large for his body...

...The best of Beerbohm, Hall holds, includes Beer-bohm's book of parodies, A Christmas Garland...

...He was very self-aware, but he was not given to introspection or soul-searching...

...I wish, Ladies and Gentlemen," he said in one of his famous BBC broadcasts during World War II, "I could cure myself of the habit of speaking ironically...

...He will provide an interpretation for, or offer a possible motive behind, a work and then blithely add, "I may be wrong," or "But these are merely biographer's fancies...

...Cecil quotes a letter from Beerbohm to Oscar Wilde's friend Robert Ross in which he asks Ross to keep Reggie Turner from the clutches of the creepy Lord Alfred Douglas: "I really think Reg is at a rather crucial point of his career—and should hate to see him fall an entire victim to the love that dare not tell its name...

...He had no delusions about the breadth of his appeal...

...Asked to give the 1941 Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, Beerbohm responded, "I have views on a number of subjects, but no coordinated body of views on any single subject...

...His left leg is crossed over his right...

...Asked by Shaw if he had any Jewish ancestors, Beerbohm replied: "That my talent is rather like Jewish talent I admit readily...

...and the result is that I've made a charming little reputation...

...But when haven't they been...

...Ten or so feet behind my back, three of his caricatures (of Byron, Matthew Arnold, and Dante) hang above a bookcase...

...Of the small number of fairy tales Beerbohm wrote, Hall suggests: "These three stories may be easily avoided by even the most devoted of Maximilians, if only they will try...

...and his book of short stories got up to read as if they were memoirs, Seven Men and Two Others...

...In his lifetime, he was knighted, praised by everyone whose praise mattered (T.S...

...Now Hall is back with a prose work that he has chosen to call Max Beerbohm: A kind of a life...

...Our biographer is immensely companionable, admitting his ignorance when it arises and deciding that many things really are not worth going into...

...and mature years have done nothing to remedy this...

...Nothing lightweight about any of this—quite the reverse, I'd say...

...Ref-ereeing the dispute in Max Beerbohm: A kind of a life, N. John Hall says, at one point, that Beerbohm's private life doesn't matter—but then, later in the book, sides with Hart-Davis in thinking him asexual despite his marriage...

...his perfectly polished final collection of essays, And Even Now...

...George Bernard Shaw, when turning over the job of drama critic on the English Saturday Review, said he was making way for "the incomparable Max...

...Like all impressive cults, the Beer-bohm cult is small, very small, and always in danger of guttering out—but never, I'm happy to report, quite doing so...

...As a young man, he was on the periphery of the Oscar Wilde circle...

...I first began reading Max Beerbohm the year before his death...

...Although Beerbohm claimed he rather wished he had Jewish blood, in fact the Beerbohm family was part Dutch, German, and English in origin...

...He claimed to be without either envy or ambition, wanting only "to make good use of such little talents as I had, to lead a pleasant life, to do no harm, to pass muster...

...Writing about Aubrey Beardsley, he noted the aloofness of many artists, which allows them to see "so much" and "the power to see things, unerringly, as they are...

...Max Beerbohm was the world's greatest minor writer, with the full oxy-moronic quality behind that epithet entirely intended...

...But he reminds us that Beerbohm always found drawing easier than writing...

...On this subject, in an early book on Beerbohm, John Felstiner, the biographer of Paul Celan (to have written books on Max Beerbohm and Paul Celan: talk about the comedy of incongruity) rightly says that "generally Beerbohm's caricatures tend to ridicule, while his judgments in writing are less direct—the rough distinction is between satire and irony...

...Forster, Edmund Wilson, and W.H...

...Always audacious and often utterly wrong, the old Mugger this time out missed on both counts...

...He felt that a goodly portion of such success as he enjoyed was owing to his not having "tired people...

...On the first count, David Cecil writes that of the Beerbohm family "it has often been suggested that they were Jewish...

...and we know that, after he ceased to write for publication in his late thirties with his permanent move to Italy, he devoted himself almost wholly to the delicate and (in his hands) often devastating art of caricature...

...As for Muggeridge's second count, that Max Beerbohm was attempting to hide his homosexuality, here the evidence appears to be purely guilt by association...

...Max Beerbohm tended to worry about the cruelty of his caricatures and claimed not to be able to explain it, since only in rare cases—Shaw, Kipling, a now-forgotten novelist named Hall Caine—did he feel a murderous impulse behind his work in this line...

...His hooded eyes peer out of deep sockets, his thick white mustache does not droop...

...The ironic tone of that sentence is reminiscent of Beerbohm himself once writing that, apropos of the need for historical background to write about the year 1880, "to give an accurate account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine...

...His "gifts were small," he felt, and he told his first biographer, a man named Bohun Lynch, that he "used them very well and discreetly, never straining them...

...The combination of common sense and whimsy that were his special literary blend continues to work its magic...

...But reputations for charm do not usually long survive the lives of those who exhibit them, however well and discreetly...

...and one has never grown less tired of a man who wrote so much in the first person, for he knew the difference, as he once told his wife, between "offering himself humbly for the inspection of others" and pushing himself forward through egotism...

...Biography, ideally, operates at three depths: The biographer shows how a man appears to his public, how he appears to his friends and family, and how he appears to himself...

...Fel-stiner goes on to say that his innovation as a caricaturist was in bringing "the dynamics of parody into caricature," and it is quite true that the captions to Beerbohm's drawings are often quite as brilliant as the draftsmanship...

...Paul's Cathedral, along with a very select company of roughly three hundred other English heroes of war, politics, and culture...

...Ever the dandy, he is wearing a boater at a jaunty angle, a light-colored and slightly rumpled suit, a white waistcoat and dark tie with a collar pin...

...Hall's judgments of Beerbohm's works are quite sound...

...They eschew anger and love small perfections...

...Wilde had a high opinion of Beerbohm, but it was not always returned—"he was never a real person in contact with realities," Beerbohm wrote—and some of his most brutal caricatures are of poor Wilde run to bestial fat...

...He was, in the phrase of Henry James, whom he much admired, "infinitely addicted to 'noticing.'" The result, issuing from the end of his pencil, was laughter, usually, in the nature of the case, at the subject's expense...

...It's a powerfully useful and important law, one that Max Beerbohm helped write and that must never, not ever, be allowed to go off the books...

...Perelman, James Thurber, Frank Sulli-van—his is the only one, nearly fifty years later, whose comedy holds up for me...

...Beerbohm's best friend, Reggie Turner (a novelist remembered now only for his quip that his rarest books were his second editions), was also homosexual...

...and the notion gains color in Max's case from his brains, taste for bravura, and his propensity to fall in love with Jewesses...

...All is presented in a calm and unfaltering style of what I think of as formal intimacy...

...This is a very useful power...

...David Cecil writes that, "though he showed no moral disapproval of homosexuality, [Beerbohm] was not disposed to it himself...

...Finally, there was his essentially comic approach to life...

...Drawing on other biographies, his book is a vade mecum of Beerbohmian information...

...Behrman what he thought of Freudianism, he replied: "A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipus-es, were they not...

...Tired of the sobriquet, Beerbohm more than once implored, "Compare me, compare me...

...He almost never drew women...

...I should so like to express myself in a straightforward manner...

...The publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, an editor of Beerbohm's letters and a cataloguer of his caricatures, thought him asexual and his marriage to Florence Kahn a mariage blanc...

...His tact was consummate...

...Something of the intimacy of his style seems to make calling him "Max" rather less objectionable than, say, calling Shakespeare "William," or Joyce "Jim...

...He added that the latter were very much in the minority in England then, and, of course, now...

...I shall keep this book relatively short," he writes, "and I shall not attempt to ferret out the inner man...

...His countenance, slightly dour like that of so many great comedians, is that of a man on whom, right up to the end of life, not much has been lost...

...Membership in the cult requires a strong penchant for irony, a skeptical turn of mind, and a sharp taste for comic incongruity...

...Chesterton said of him that "he does not indulge in the base idolatry of believing in himself...

...His own detachment allowed him a serene objectivity that easily spotted the pretensions and comic self-presentations of others...

...and there have been various studies, none of them silly or obtuse: To be drawn to Beerbohm as a subject almost automatically insures one against pomposity, humorlessness, or academic pretentiousness...

...I know this is so because they agree with my own—always, of course, the best evidence for high intelligence in others...

...He thinks the early essays, written in the (Oscar) Wildean manner, more than a touch precious, and he believes the volumes of drama criticism suffer from having been written chiefly about second- and third-rate playwrights...

...If he did look deeply into himself— and I don't believe he did so very often—he did not tell us about it...

...Some are born to juggle with golden balls...

...In his two books on Beerbohm, N. John Hall calls him Max, but I should say that Hall has earned the right to do so, having served him so sedulously...

...He produced a book in every way worthy of its subject: modest, elegant, charming, and useful—a keeper, as fishermen like to say...

...Ten perfectly aimed words and—poof!—a large and highly fallacious school of thought crumples to dust...

...A case cannot be made for Max Beer-bohm as a notorious heterosexual, but I would like to weigh in with the fact that, in his essay "Laughter," he wrote that "only the emotion of love takes higher rank than the emotion of laughter...

...What he believed was that "many charming talents have been spoiled by the instilled desire to do 'important' work...

...For those of us who do not quite believe in biographical truth, but are much more impressed by (in W.H...