'The Way of the Transgressor is Hard'

Like Borges, Max Beerbohm is no fawning respecter of genres. He casually blurs essay and fiction, guided by fancy not form. He published “The Crime” in the August 25, 1920 issue of The New Republic and later that year collected it in And Even Now. Nominally an essay or even an embellished anecdote, we’ll never know if the events described took place. He takes a modest premise – a man alone in a borrowed cottage during a rain storm -- and turns it into a parable of – what? Literary criticism? As usual, Beerbohm includes no “topic sentence” or, in journalese, “nut graf.” And he makes us sympathize with, of all things, a book burner: “I had an impulse which I obeyed almost before I was conscious of it.”

Beerbohm makes clichés ridiculous by quoting them, seemingly withholding judgment. From the shelf he takes one of the novels written by a woman he has met but never read: “I knew nothing of them that was not good. The lady’s ‘output’ had not been at all huge, and it was agreed that her ‘level’ was high. I had always gathered that the chief characteristic of her work was its great ‘vitality.’” The blurbs he quotes might have been written last week. He heaves the book into the fireplace but it resists the inferno and burns only slowly and incompletely:

 

“Ever and anon my eye would be caught by some sentence or fragment of a sentence in the midst of a charred page before the flames crept over it. ‘lways loathed you, bu,’ I remember; and ‘ning. Tolstoi was right.’ Who had always loathed whom? And what, what, had Tolstoi been right about? I had an absurd but genuine desire to know. Too late! Confound the woman!—she was scoring again.”

 

Beerbohm was born on this date, August 24, in 1872. On the sesquicentennial of his birth, do him the honor of reading “The Crime,” or listen to him reading it and “London Revisited.” Here is the story/essay's conclusion:

 

“I felt no bitterness against her as I lay back in my chair, inert, listening to the storm that was still raging. I blamed only myself. I had done wrong. The small room became very cold. Whose fault was that but my own? I had done wrong hastily, but had done it and been glad of it. I had not remembered the words a wise king wrote long ago, that the lamp of the wicked shall be put out, and that the way of the transgressor is hard.”