The English writer and artist Max Beerbohm lived between 1872 and 1956, nearly 84 years in all. But early on, he cultivated his career like a man with little time to lose. Fresh from Oxford, he began contributing witty articles to the Yellow Book, a lively quarterly associated with Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats. By age 25, he was George Bernard Shaw’s pick to succeed him as drama critic for the Saturday Review, a transition that occasioned Shaw’s famous remark about passing the torch to “the incomparable Max.”
“Note that I am not incomparable,” Beerbohm protested some years after Shaw had crowned him with that prickly laurel. “Compare me. Compare me as an essayist (for instance) with other essayists. Point out how much less human I am than Lamb, how much less intellectual than Hazlitt, and what an ignoramus besides Belloc; and how Chesterton’s high spirits and abundance shame me.”
Beerbohm’s plea to hold down the applause was all for naught. Nearly six decades after his death, a bright comet trail of superlatives continues to follow the man and his work. The third edition of Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, a reference work not known for giddy effusion, uses the word “brilliant” (or its variants) three times in a one-paragraph summation of Beerbohm’s oeuvre. (In its two-page take on Shakespeare, “brilliant” doesn’t appear once.) The Norton Book of Personal Essays flatly declares that Beerbohm “is the greatest English essayist of the twentieth century,” which might make fans of George Orwell and Virginia Woolf wonder how Beerbohm snagged the blue ribbon from those masters of the form.
Woolf, though, would be the last person to dispute Beerbohm’s reputation. Although a demanding critic, she was fairly gaga over the incomparable Max’s prose. “If you knew how I had pored over your essays,” she gushed to Beerbohm, “how they fill me with marvel—how I can’t conceive what it would be like to write as you do!—this is sober truth.”
It seems that the more Beerbohm has been lauded, the less he’s been read. His reputation for greatness is, perhaps, off-putting, suggesting the remoteness of a legend, not the warmth of a man. But as Virginia Woolf noted, Max Beerbohm’s humanity, rendered matter-of-factly on the page, was his chief gift. In the 1890s, she wrote,
It is this Max Beerbohm that editor Phillip Lopate captures in The Prince of Minor Writers, the most comprehensive selection of Beerbohm’s essays to be published in many years. Note the title’s reference to the minor key, a nice note of restraint that helpfully removes Beerbohm from the arid pedestal where Shaw exiled him generations ago. Lopate’s sampling of Beerbohm’s essays is the best survey of his writing since Lord David Cecil’s Max Beerbohm: Selected Prose was published in 1970. The seventies were not, alas, the most promising decade for a Beerbohm revival: The decade’s let-it-all-hang-out sensibility, expressed by confessional essayists such as Joan Didion, Edward Hoagland, and even Lopate himself, didn’t chime with Beerbohm’s Edwardian reserve.
With Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram making personal disclosure into a national pastime, these days might seem an equally unlikely home for Beerbohm’s elegantly reticent style. But Lopate argues that Beerbohm’s essays offer a valuable corrective precisely because self-revelation can be overdone. “Today,” he writes, “when the memoir and the personal essay stand (rightly or wrongly) accused of narcissism and promiscuous sharing of information better left private, it becomes all the more necessary to ponder how Beerbohm performed the delicate operation of displaying so much personality without lapsing into sticky confession.”
“The Crime,” a 1920 essay included here, is a good example of this balancing act. Its opening paragraph sets the scene:
Notice how quickly Beerbohm establishes intimacy, bringing us across the threshold of his rented house and into a room where our host feels smaller than the objects around him. It’s vintage Beerbohm, a man so conditioned to self-effacement that, lacking anyone else in his story, he plays second fiddle to the furnishings. But then, within this quaint English setting, comes a shock. Peeved by a rivalry with a female author, Beerbohm commits a small act of vandalism. Detailing more here would spoil the essay, but Beerbohm points to his petty crime as proof of a few things. He’s irritated by the idea of women sharing his literary profession and succeeding at it, a bias he admits is misguided. In confessing his crime to his readers, yet conceding that he’s made no attempt to come clean about his transgression to the wronged party, Beerbohm acknowledges that his conscience, though persistent, has its limits. He also reveals that crime, once indulged, can be a great deal of fun.
If he had been following contemporary literary fashions in “The Crime,” Beerbohm might probe his psyche at this point in the essay, sorting out possible motivations for his behavior. A bad childhood? Existential alienation? An anxiety disorder? Instead, he shrugs: “What I had done I had done,” he mentions casually. What he seems to say is that moral imperfection is simply part of the human condition, something so common that contemplating it clinically would amount to conceit. In this way, self-disclosure in Beerbohm’s essays points not indulgently inward, toward the navel, but outward, into the shared and often comic predicament of existence.
As “The Crime” illustrates, Beerbohm was generally skeptical about great schemes of reform. Lopate’s selections also include one of Beerbohm’s most widely anthologized essays, “Going Out for a Walk,” in which he dissents from the health police, already sounding their sirens in 1918, who wanted to make sure everyone was exercising daily: “It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter. Even while I trotted prattling by my nurse’s side I regretted the good old days when I had, and wasn’t, a perambulator.”
That little pirouette at the end of the sentence, in which Beerbohm makes “perambulator” work as both a baby carriage and one who walks, underscores one of the reasons that Beerbohm is celebrated as a genius. His prose comes packed, like nesting dolls, with exquisite surprises. But Beerbohm’s literary art, though strenuously polished, didn’t aspire to grand themes. The Prince of Minor Writers opens with “A Relic,” in which Beerbohm reflects on an argument he had witnessed years before between a rare beauty and her older lover—the kind of scene, he reckons, worthy of a short story by Maupassant. Beerbohm tries his hand at crafting the tale, but it comes to nothing—nothing, that is, except the beautifully executed essay in which he recounts his failure.
“A Relic” serves as an apt keynote for the rest of this book, suggesting that although Beerbohm left behind no great body of fiction or epic poetry, his essays deserve an enduring place in literature. Beerbohm was also a celebrated caricaturist and master of literary parody, his deft mimicry of authors ranging from Dickens to Chesterton to Henry James assembled in A Christmas Garland. His comic novel, Zuleika Dobson, and Seven Men, his collected fictional portraits of men of letters, each have devoted followings. But none of that material is excerpted in Lopate’s collection, which focuses exclusively on Beerbohm’s essays. “What I really am is an essayist,” Beerbohm said.
Beyond that, he made few claims for himself, and once he’d achieved his early fame, Beerbohm showed little interest in keeping it. In 1910, at the height of his powers, he married an American actress, Florence Kahn, and moved to Italy, largely out of the public eye. He returned to England during both world wars. In World War II, his lyrical BBC radio commentaries about English life helped soothe a weary nation. “I felt, when I was listening to them, that I was listening to the last civilized man on earth,” Rebecca West said of Beerbohm’s radio talks, some of which are included in Lopate’s selections. In our own time of partisanship, fanaticism, and strife, Beerbohm remains the sane voice, conversing with charm and wit and civility, doing what he always did: patiently talking the world off the ledge.
Danny Heitman is the author, most recently, of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
