'His Style Never Falters'

Gibbon taught us long ago that a writer’s best stuff is often tucked away in a footnote, where only the curious or pedantic will find it. Conventionally judged, footnotes are nothing more than bibliographic sanction, like a driver’s license, though certain writers treat them as opportunities to set booby traps, sometimes comic (see Joyce, Borges, and Philip Roth in Sabbath’s Theater). N. John Hall plants a good one on Page 60 in Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life (Yale University Press, 2002):

“The closest Max himself came to sound (very quietly) like the Sermon on the Mount was at a party given by the novelist G.B. Stern in 1931. She and he had disagreed about the character of a mutual acquaintance, and she, on saying goodbye to Max, apologized for her spirited defence of the man. Max told her, `No, if two people can’t agree about a third person whom they both know, the one who likes him is right, always.’”

Seldom are the proportions of irony and gentlemanliness so exquisitely balanced. Beerbohm’s tone is invariably hushed. He possesses the rare gift of being funny without offending, though a certain sort of reader will find his irony undetectable. Ours is a strident, anti-Beerbohmian age in which humor is not a rapier but a trench knife. Hall’s footnote is found in a chapter devoted to “Whistler’s Writing,” an essay in Yet Again (1909). It begins:

“No book-lover, I. Give me an uninterrupted view of my fellow-creatures. The most tedious of them pleases me better than the best book. You see, I admit that some of them are tedious. I do not deem alien from myself nothing that is human: I discriminate my fellow-creatures according to their contents. And in that respect I am not more different in my way from the true humanitarian than from the true bibliophile in his.”        

Has a double-negative ever been so delicately deployed? Or the hoary chestnut from Terence so civilly refuted? And not a word in the passage is “true” or “sincere.” Beerbohm’s tone is light, like Lester Young’s, and he floats over the rhythm of his sentences. He has been mistakenly associated, through a coincidence of history, with the Decadents, with whom he shares nothing. When Beerbohm describes Whistler’s prose style in “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” he touches on his own:

“His style never falters. The silhouette of no sentence is ever blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear vocal cadence. . . . For his every effect he must rely wholly on the words that he chooses, and on the order in which he ranges them, and on his choice among the few hard-and-fast symbols of punctuation. He must so use those slender means that they shall express all that he himself can express through his voice and face and hands, or all that he would thus express if he were a good talker.”

Near the end of the essay, Beerbohm again quietly reveals something about his own gift: “An exquisite talent like Whistler’s, whether in painting or in writing, is always at its best on a small scale. On a large scale it strays and is distressed. [A shrewd and tactful assessment of his only novel, Zuleika Dobson.]”

Beerbohm was born on this date, Aug. 24, in 1872.