The Prince of Minor Writers

 

Max [Sir Henry Maximilian] Beerbohm was an essayist, a comic verse writer, and an author of literary parodies; he also drew caricatures for Punch and other magazines. He was part of a circle of literary and artistic dandies that included Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Unlike Wilde, he was never an object of scandal, though he might have been homosexual; the doubt indicates his discretion. And unlike Beardsley, he was never associated with end-of-century decadence. In fact, he was widely popular. Shaw named him “the incomparable Max” and Virginia Woolf, who praised him in her reviews, called him “the prince of minor writers.” And he was knighted in 1939, an honor that everyone thought had been delayed because Beerbohm hadn’t spared the royal family in his satiric verse.

            He wrote one novel, Zuleika Dobson in 1911. Zuleika is a not-very-talented magician but a literal mankiller for whom the Duke of Dorset and all the undergraduates of Oxford kill themselves. Zuleika can only love someone who does not love her, and since all the men fall in love with her on sight, she has never been in love, and in this book is only so for a few hours and by mistake. “Death cancels all engagements” is one memorable quote. Beerbohm makes fun of Oxford dons, who barely notice that all the undergraduates have disappeared, of student societies, of Rhodes Scholars, and of various styles—including his own: Zuleika says she talks the way she does because of an evening spent in the company of a writer named Beerbohm.

            Philip Lopate published a collection of Beerbohm’s writings in 2015 under the title The Prince of Minor Writers. Lopate collects most of the essays from And Even Now, which he considers Beerbohm’s best collection, and some pieces from seven others in “the only collection of Max Beerbohm’s writings to feature his essays alone.” Lopate’s introduction is splendid.

            In “Dandies and Dandies” (1896), Beerbohm writes about Beau Brummel, the Regency dandy, asserts that “English society is always ruled by a dandy,” and shows his essential sympathy with dandyism. In “Laughter” (1920), he makes fun of Bergson’s famous essay on the subject, and remarks that he finds himself laughing less as he ages. Beerbohm is hard on lady crime writers (“The Crime,” 1920), the British penchant for Russian writers (“Kolniyatch,” 1913), and the public’s idea of what’s funny (“The Humour of the Public”), but he writes straightforward appreciations of his brother Herbert Beerbohm Tree and of Aubrey Beardsley.

            Beerbohm’s art can be self-conscious (“If I were writing in the past tense I might pause here to consider whether this emotion were a genuine one”), self-deprecating, and apt to surprise with his take on a subject. Lopate points out that he liked to portray himself as a lover of the past—even as far past as the Regency and Beau Brummel—but in “The Naming of Streets” (1923) he drops nostalgia for a no-nonsense assertion that “For a street one name is as good as another” and new names for new streets will do as well as the old. A similar turn may be seen in his homage to the old Swinburne in “No. 2, The Pines” (1920) followed by his sendup of the young admirer’s visit to the old lion, literary or otherwise, in “A Point to Be Remembered by Very Eminent Men,” (1923). Accepting a knighthood himself, he made fun of the idea in “Arise, Sir – –!”(1899).

            In “How Shall I Word It?”(1910) he satirizes model books of letters by making up a few of his own outrageous model letters. Beerbohm wants to set up a museum of unfinished works of art and house it in Michelangelo’s Baptistery of San Lorenzo (“Quia Imperfectum,” 1918); he spends a lot of time in this essay on Goethe and Tischbein’s unfinished portrait of him.

            Lopate includes a few examples of Beerbohm’s theater criticism and one funny review of Sarah Bernhardt’s memoirs. There are also selections from the radio talks Beerbohm did for the BBC.

            Aside from Zuleika Dobson, I don’t think there was much of Beerbohm still in print before the Lopate book. In the past, when he was mentioned in my reading, I assumed that he was one of those people who was famous for being famous, without much there there. But he’s very entertaining, and although his subjects often make him seem dated, he can surprise, and frequently reveals a more than usually interesting mind.