'Belonging So Bleakly to To-day'

It’s reassuring when a writer one admires gratifyingly admires yet another writer one admires, however grudging the admiration. It lends the world a certain rightness or symmetry. But sometimes it sours and disappointment follows. Here is Rebecca West on meeting Max Beerbohm, c. 1930. First, his appearance:

“He presented himself at the party, looking extraordinarily like one of those little Chinese dragons which are made in the porcelain known as blanc de Chine. Like them he has a rounded forehead and eyes that press forward in their eagerness; and his small hands and feet have the neat compactness of paws.”

Access the tone. Is she mocking Beerbohm? Eagerness, as opposed to do dull lassitude, is certainly desirable in a man approaching sixty. And dragons suggests ferocity. But what about those paws? West continues:

“His white hair, which sweeps back in trim convolutions like one of these little dragon’s manes, his blue eyes, and his skin, which is as clear as a child’s, have the gloss of newly washed china. He is, moreover, obviously precious, and not of this world, though relevant to its admiration: a museum piece, if ever there was one.”

Perhaps West, a writer not yet forty, is aping Beerbohm’s style, his nuanced weave of ironies. “Precious” teeters nicely. And try parsing “not of this world, though relevant to its admiration.” We learn that Beerbohm does not like “literary ladies,” but the claim seems half-hearted. He shows no anger but the dinner party they are attending is clearly a trial:

      

“He was looking round with surprise, with distaste--and I perceived that his eye was lighting on members of my own sex, on members of my own profession. Yes! He confessed it, in his gentle courteous voice, which has about it something of a Chinese calm, he did not like literary ladies.”

Beerbohm was born in 1872; West, twenty years later. The difference shows. West says Beerbohm moves her to “lachrymosely remember the appearance of my mother and father.” What we have is the male/female divide, of course, but also a generational disparity. West is a modern woman who values independence. Beerbohm, West says, insists on making the past “his present.” West introduces him to her friend the writer G.B. (Gladys Bronwyn) Stern:

“With glowing eyes she sat down beside the author whom she admires perhaps more than any other of the living. His courtesy was perfect, his response to her adoration exquisitely gracious; yet the sense that he was not happy in this atmosphere made itself apparent. Impossible for his sensitive interlocutor not to feel guilt at being part of the atmosphere, at belonging so bleakly to to-day.”

West’s essay, “Notes on the Effect of Women Writers on Mr. Max Beerbohm,” written for the Bookman, is collected in Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log (1931). How accurate is her reading of Beerbohm the man? Hard to say. He was no loutish bigot but very much a man of his time – this is, the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. And writers as a tribe are notoriously suspicious of rivals. How sad that Beerbohm and West, two of the last century’s masters, couldn’t have sat down and had a quiet, mutually admiring chat.