Compton Mackenzie

THAT tribute to Oscar Wilde's talk from Sir Max Beerbohm printed in last week's ` Sidelight ' set me thinking about that well-loved figure now in his eighty- third year.

I first met Max at Oxford fifty years ago. Robbie Ross brought him to breakfast with me one morning at 43 High Street where I had collected half a dozen awestruck under- graduates to help me pass him bacon and eggs and marmalade. And what I remember of Max at that breakfast party is not his conversation but his cuffs. We all thought he was bored and perhaps a little contemptuous of us after his dazzling compeers at Oxford in the Nineties. It never occurred to us that what we considered this elderly man almost thirty-two years old might be feeling shy in the society of undergraduates.

So nothing can be recorded of that breakfast-party except Max's ,cuffs, fastened tightly round the wrist and encroaching on the hand.

When I visited Max at Rapallo in September, 1913, he was no longer wearing such cuffs; perhaps he had discovered that Hall Caine wore similar cuffs. However, he had grown a moustache almost as heavy as those with which dragoons armed themselves in the Eighties. It is a Savile tradition that when Max first came into the Club with it, member after member kept exclaiming : ' Hullo 1 Max I I hardly recognised you since you've grown that moustache.' At last Max anticipated this exclamation by saying to Edmund Gosse: 'Hullo, Gosse, I hardly recognised you since I've grown this moustache.'

Max himself was aware of his military aspect, for when sending me some prints of a snapshot taken of him and me on his white terrace he wrote that the title would be 'A Major of the Volunteers in Conversation with a Faun.' Photography was occupying much of his attention at this date, and it was photography which had first enabled him to carry through with the most scrupulous ingenuity an enchanting trick at the expense of Bernard Shaw. There had recently appeared a number of the Bookman devoted to Shaw, and such special numbers were usually illustrated with photographs of the hero at different periods of his life. Max had cut out each reproduc- tion of an early aspect of Shaw and with a very fine nib had slightly altered every one of them. Thus' if there was a photo- graph of Shaw in knickerbockers. Max would slightly prolong these knickerbockers till the wearer of them looked something Worse than merely absurd. He would exaggerate Shaw's eyebrows in one, bulbify his nose in another, give him spots in a third, and thus turn every single portrait not into a caricature but into a very slight distortion of the original which was more ludicrous than any caricature. But this was only the beginning of an elaborate joke. After the portraits in the magazine had been thus treated they were cut out, pasted on cardboard, and sent to a photographer in Genoa, who re-photographed them and printed them off with the faded appearance of portraits in a family album of thirty or forty years earlier. No sign was any longer perceptible of Max's elfin pen. The effect was of genuine photographs in which Shaw's clothes were even uglier than the clothes of anybody else when he was a young man, that Shaw's nose at the age of twenty-four testified to many hours spent in tap- robms, that in fact Shaw if he ever intended to be a famous man should never have allowed himself to approach within a hundred yards of a camqa. And not even yet was the joke finished. These apparently genuine contemporary photographs were now sent one by one at intervals to various friends in America and England with a request to mail them back to Shaw himself in Adelphi Terrace accompanied by a letter from some mythical devotee saying that he had coma across the enclosed photograph of Mr. Bernard Shaw in an antique shop in Buffalo or had discovered it on a boarding-house mantel. piece in Bloomsbury and begging the original to be so kind as to sign it and return it to the sender in the stamped addressed envelope enclosed.

Max had played a joke of the same kind on Herbert Trench, who used to take himself very seriously. He suddenly put into my hands Trench's poem Apollo and the Seaman,' saying, 'You know this, don't you?' or something like that, and I murmured something vaguely and turned over the pages. The poem is a longish one—a dialogue between the God Apollo and ..a seaman who talks rather like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. Then I looked harder at the page. f had not remembered that Trench had made his seaman talk like one of W. W. Jacobs's bargees.

Apollo : In what green forest inlet lay Her cradle and her keel ?

Seaman: I think some arm of the sea-gods Framed us 'er stormy frame, And ribbed and beamed and staunchioned 'er, And gave 'er strength a name.

Never, Sir Traveller, 'ave you seen A sight the 'alf as fine As when she 'ove up from the East On our 'orizon-line !

I turned more pages.

By no man's 'and unfurled was 'ea ven ! . . . That was the pit of 'ell ' Curious,' I said, I never remembered that Trench made the seaman drop all his aspirates.'

Max smiled.

'I took them out myself with a penknife very Carefully, pat in an apostrophe, and then sent the book to Trench, saying I had not seen this edition before.'

'He must have thought he'd gone mad.'

'He was a little offended about it,' Max admitted, in that tone whose gentle suavity of utterance is familiar to so many thousands of listeners.

Most of the two or three days at Rapallo Were passed on * big white terrace, behind which the hills sloped up in boscages of olives and cypresses to some remote hills beyond in that dear and familiar landscape which welcomes us to the riviera di levante. In one angle of the terrace was a diminutive roorn which would just hold Max standing up to draw on a sloping desk his examples of the pretensions, follies, and absurdities of our epoch. Above the door was a pale blue porcelain tile on which was enamelled it white, The Study.' When perhaps I was looking a little awed by what to me was a sacred place. remember that Max dismissed his drawing with a kind of impatience, blew as it were the diminutive study off the terrace like a plume of thistledown and said that if only he could write with as little effort as he could draw. ... after which we returned to our chairs on the terrace and to drinking the sweet wines of Sicily that appeared at intervals all through those sunny September days.

The visit came to an end, as so many other jolly things came to an end in 1913, and soon I was travelling southward Clown through the dusky Maremma with a delightful sense of security about the future, remembering my host's encouraging com- ments on the first volume of Sinister Street which had been published at the beginning of that month, and had in fact been the cause of my visit because Max found it so much easier to tell somebody what he thought about his book than to write a letter about it. And that is what I feel myself nowadays.