'Frivolous Subjects?'

“Frivolous subjects? Well, and thank God for it, not everybody can be writing about big, so-called important issues: population, genes, semantics, sex, death. Surely there is value in anything that makes us laugh, that makes us understand ourselves more.” 

These wise words are taken from one of my favorite biographies, N. John Hall’s Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life (2002). The book is written in a conversational manner, as though Hall were a friend who happened to be learned and able to write good prose and recognize it in others. “Important” does not necessarily mean “interesting.” Witness the dreary flood of overheated articles about AI.

 

Hall quotes an 1898 letter Beerbohm wrote to Henry Arthur Jones, suggesting his manner of writing was changing: “[M]y writing, though it will never be savage or bold, is easier in style, less ornate, than it used to be. At least I think so.”  In fact, Beerbohm [one is tempted to call him “Max” out of fondness and familiarity, but that sounds terribly familiar, like a jazz fan calling the trumpet player “Miles,” as though he were your live-in uncle] was entering his most accomplished period as an essayist. Hall notes that the change becomes evident in his 1909 collection Yet Again and quotes the opening of his essay “The Humour of the Public”:

 

“They often tell me that So-and-so has no sense of humour. Lack of this sense is everywhere held to be a horrid disgrace, nullifying any number of delightful qualities. Perhaps the most effective means of disparaging an enemy is to lay stress on his integrity, his erudition, his amiability, his courage, the fineness of his head, the grace of his figure, his strength of purpose, which has overleaped all obstacles, his goodness to his parents, the kind word that he has for every one, his musical voice, his freedom from aught that in human nature is base; and then to say what a pity it is that he has no sense of humour. The more highly you extol any one, the more eagerly will your audience accept anything you may have to say against him.”.

 

Here is the mature Beerbohm voice. No rancor, no sermonizing, just a steady unwinding of irony subverting conventional wisdom and clichés. Imagine trying to tersely summarize Beerbohm’s “message,” complete with “topic sentences.” Hall then quotes “Seeing People Off,” also from Yet Again, which begins: “I am not good at it. To do it well seems to me one of the most difficult things in the world, and probably seems so to you, too.”

 

The tone is confiding. The speaker understands we might be reluctant to admit that such an inconsequential act can be difficult. Beerbohm is a master of making the seemingly trivial amusing and revealing of human nature. We can’t imagine him writing an essay about, say, the Russo-Japanese War. He specializes in subjects with little intrinsic importance and making them worthy of our attention.

There’s a tradition of this among essayists, especially the English. Often the mark of a good essay is the seeming innocuousness of its inspiration. Big, topical ideas tend to wither this reader’s interest. In the right hands, unlikely premises blossom: Hazlitt on juggling. Lamb on roast pig. Stevenson on umbrellas. Chesterton on chalk and cheese. Liebling on boxing. Beerbohm on almost anything. As Chesterton puts it in “The Puritan and the Anglican,” “Little things please great minds.”

[I’ve just discovered Hall’s Musings of an Honorary Alte Kaker, “a blog about the view from age ninety-two.”]