Not many readers
expect or even want perfection in literature. Some would deny it exists, even
theoretically, and others wouldn’t recognize it if it bit them on the leg. Often,
there’s a reverse snobbery at play, a rejection of such qualities of perfection
as elegance, wit and musicality. This helps explain the enduring popularity of
Charles Bukowski and Joyce Carol Oates. Perfection is somehow uppity, even judgmental of its readers. For others there’s something
forbiddingly cold and inhuman about perfection. Men and women are irredeemably
flawed, goes the reasoning; so are their creations. They haven’t read Max Beerbohm.
The
Anglo-Irish essayist Robert Lynd (1879-1949), author of the sentence quoted at
the top, is writing in 1922, two years after Beerbohm published his finest
essay collection, And Even Now, which
is perfect (as is Lynd’s sentence), though "starch" and "shirt-front" might need
explanations for younger readers. Lynd continues:
“‘Max’ takes
what may be called an evening-dress view of life. One would not be surprised to
learn that he writes in evening dress. He has that air of good conversation without
intimacy, of deliberate charm, of cool and friendly brilliance that always
shows at its best above a shining and expressionless shirt-front.”
Lynd tells us
Beerbohm is in danger of being canonized: “In order to avoid this unseemly
canonization—or, at least, to keep it within the bounds of reason—one would
like to adopt the ungracious part of advocatus
diaboli and state the case against ‘Max’ in the strongest possible terms.
But, alas! One finds that there is nothing to say against him, except that he
is not Shakespeare or Dr. Johnson.”
Other
perfect works? Anthony Hecht’s “Green: An Epistle.” Nabokov’s “A Guide to Berlin.” Yvor Winters’ “Time and the Garden.” Gulliver’s Travels (a rare long-form specimen of perfection, as are
Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and Willa Cather’s
Death Comes for the Archbishop). La Rochefoucauld’s
Maxims. J.V. Cunningham’s “For My Contemporaries.” Feel free to add a work or two. It will never be a long list.
[Lynd’s
essay on Beerbohm is collected in Essays
on Life and Literature, published by Everyman’s Library in 1951.]
2 comments:
Pleasantly surprised to see "Guide to Berlin" here. It's always seemed to me to share some of its author's most essential insights.
What is perfection in a literary work? In epigrammatic forms -- Cunningham's or la Rochefoucauld's -- a perfection might be achieved that would be impossible for Swift's Gulliver or the Cather novel. These must include "wrong notes that sound right," to accomplish their full effect. Or are these wrong notes then themselves perfections?
I presume Lynd is blaming The Impeccable Max for "mere" perfection, which is to say, for superficiality. He's not exactly wrong. But if such perfection is a flaw, the work isn't perfect after all, and Max is cleared of the charge. Oh dear, these paradoxes.
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