'His Work Must Be Perfect'

How do we reconcile the saddest of English writers being at the same time among the wittiest? And when I say “saddest,” I don’t mean depressed or suicidal; rather, wistful, ever aware of human ephemerality, calibrating his words until they attain the precise edge of irony he seeks, which is never cold or savage. It is, rather, sad, and not a psychiatric diagnosis to be treated pharmaceutically. 

I’ve heard from a reader who tells me his idea of a great essayist is Susan Sontag. I won’t touch that. He questions why I value the essays of Max Beerbohm. “He’s a lightweight,” my reader writes. “His effects are cheap. He seems to know nothing about the world around him. He’s a minor humorist.” I won’t deny “minor” but “cheap” is way off. I dare you to detect a wrong note anywhere in Beerbohm’s prose, even a single clunker. Consider “No. 2. The Pines” (And Even Now, 1920), written in 1914. Beerbohm is describing his youthful visits with Charles Algernon Swinburne, beginning in 1899. The essay’s title refers to the address of Swinburne’s home in Putney. Beerbohm writes:

 

 “It is odd how little remains to a man of his own past--how few minutes of even his memorable hours are not clean forgotten, and how few seconds in any one of those minutes can be recaptured... I am middle-aged, and have lived a vast number of seconds. Subtract one third of these, for one mustn't count sleep as life. The residual number is still enormous. Not a single one of those seconds was unimportant to me in its passage. Many of them bored me, of course; but even boredom is a positive state: one chafes at it and hates it; strange that one should afterwards forget it! And stranger still that of one’s actual happinesses and unhappinesses so tiny and tattered a remnant clings about one!”

  

Few writers could sustain that tone of melancholy reflection without resorting to self-pity. It reminds me of Msgr. Ronald Knox beginning his essay “Birmingham Revisited” (Literary Distractions, 1958) like this: “It is alleged by a friend of my family that I used to suffer from insomnia at the age of four; and that when she asked me how I managed to occupy my time at night I answered ‘I lie awake and think of the past.’” Beerbohm might have written that. V.S.  Pritchett writes in “A Dandy” (Complete Collected Essays, 1991):

 

“Among other things, in the wide-eyed persona he invented, there is sadness. Was it the sadness of not being a genius on the great scale, like his admired Henry James? Possibly. Was it the sadness of knowing that his work must be perfect – as that of minor writers has to be – because fate made him a simulacrum? Or was he simply born sad?”