'Yet I Read and Re-read Max Beerbohm'

Humorlessness coupled with stridency is fatal in a writer, any writer, whether novelist, poet or hack journalist. Even Tolstoy had a sense of humor, though not about himself. A writer I once admired extravagantly for his industriousness and range of interests was Edmund Wilson. He lived up to Kingsley Amis’ boast: “Any proper writer ought to be able to write anything, from an Easter Day sermon to a sheep-dip handout.” Now Wilson has settled into that literary limbo at the back of my mind reserved for writers I neither detest nor have any wish to reread. His prose is serviceable, often written in a journalistic dialect. He had no lyrical gift. His public tantrums with Nabokov are an embarrassment. In memory, his best book is Patriotic Gore (1962), despite its ridiculous introduction. 

Wilson took on an unlikely subject, Max Beerbohm, whom he visited in Rapallo in 1954, two years before the essayist’s death. The conversations recounted in “Meetings with Max Beerbohm,” published in the December 1963 issue of Encounter, contain little of the ironic wit I would have expected. Wilson is more interested in Beerbohm’s caricatures than in his writing. We’re left with the impression that Beerbohm is a modestly charming, gossipy old man with a phenomenal memory. To his credit, Wilson begins by praising the drawings:

 

“[S]eeing them there made me recognise as I had not quite done before the completeness and vitality of this vision. Has there ever been anything like it in the realm of caricature? Gillray has his recurrent characters and a grotesque world in which they move, but he is brutal and crude beside Beerbohm. Sem is perhaps the nearest thing; but he does not have Max’s historical sense or his intellectual insight. Though Max makes all his subjects absurd, though no one is ever idealized except in a comic way, there is a hierarchy of values here: men he despises and men he admires, men that he rejoices in and men that he likes to make ugly. His work as a caricaturist is in general on a higher imaginative level than his stories, his essays, and his parodies.”

 

That’s where Wilson is wrong. The essays are Beerbohm’s central accomplishment, especially those collected in And Even Now (1920). About so many subjects – George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf – the two men are at odds, speaking different languages.  Only in his final paragraph does Wilson evaluate Beerbohm’s achievement in prose:

 

“Yet I read and re-read Max Beerbohm as I do not do any other British prose writer of the period in which I grew up, with the exception of Bernard Shaw. It seems to me queer when I find Max Beerbohm speaking, as he does in some essay, of G. K. Chesterton as ‘a genius’ whose brilliance quite put Max in the shade. The paradoxical epigrams of Chesterton, which became so mechanical and monotonous, are mostly unreadable today. But Max Beerbohm’s prose has endured. Since it never asserts itself --except perhaps in the exuberance of his early preciosity--one can always forget and find it fresh.”

 

[“Meetings with Max Beerbohm” is collected in Wilson’s  The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965 (1967).]