'I Have Little Theories About It'

One of the unforeseen benefits of reading many books across a lifetime while trying to remain open to their potential charms is discovering new “favorites.” Some writers we stick with for life. In my case that would include Swift, Dr. Johnson, Henry James and Chekhov. I have loved them all, without flagging, since our first encounters. Reading them is like a happy marriage. With others it’s more of a crush or adolescent infatuation. I’m smitten but eventually turn fickle and unfaithful. I won’t take their calls, and I cross the street when I see them approach. Prominent on that lengthy list are Thoreau, Camus, Kafka and Whitman. No regrets but keep your distance, please.

Since starting Anecdotal Evidence fourteen years ago, a small number of writers, all of whom I had read before, have entered that exclusive, until-death-do-us-part category. Certainly Yvor Winters. And C.H. Sisson. And Max Beerbohm. What this unlikely trio have in common is my initial and longtime misunderstanding. I misread them and thought of them as something they are not. This is especially true of the way I read Beerbohm. I resist calling him “Max,” as many admirers do, just as Miles Davis will always be “Davis” to me, not the overly familiar “Miles,” as though he were my brother-in-law. Beerbohm was a lightweight comedian, I thought, and a Dandy, a sort of watered-down Oscar Wilde.

Recently, I reread S.N. Behrman’s Conversation with Max (1960), which was excerpted in The New Yorker. That’s when it occurred to me that in reading books by and about Beerbohm I was seeking his company, as though he were an especially old and trusted friend. I sought his voice, the reliably straight-faced irony of his wit. His humor and mine have increasingly overlapped. I wasn’t ready for him when I was younger, any more than I was ready for Proust. My taste in comedy back then was more raw and raucous. There’s nothing Swiftian about Beerbohm. His is a gentler spirit than Swift’s, though he should not be mistaken for a feel-good Pollyanna. One of the few writers he genuinely detested was Kipling. The Beerbohmian irony is that I rank Kipling above almost every other short story writer and I love Kim. Seasoned readers are complicated people.

Now I’ve been slowly reading the two volumes of Beerbohm’s collected theater criticism, Around Theatres (William Heinemann, 1924). In 1898, at age twenty-five, Beerbohm succeeded George Bernard Shaw as the drama critic for the English Saturday Review. Shaw’s designation of Beerbohm as “the incomparable Max” stuck and became a cliché. He titled his first column “Why I Ought Not to Have Become a Dramatic Critic,” in which he writes:

“Frankly, I have none of that instinctive love for the theatre which is the first step towards good criticism of drama. I am not fond of the theatre. Dramatic art interests and moves me less than any of the other arts. I am happy among pictures, and, being a constant intruder into studios, have learnt enough to know that I know nothing whatever about painting—knowledge which, had I taken to what is called ‘art-criticism,’ would have set me head-and-shoulders above the great majority of my colleagues. Of music I have a genuine, though quite unenlightened, love. Literature I love best of all, and I have some knowledge of its technicalities. I can talk intelligently about it. I have little theories about it. But in drama I take, unfortunately, neither emotional nor intellectual pleasure.”

I’m no critic but that’s a critical credo I could sign my name to.