BOOKS

But perfectly formed

Ferdinand Mount

LETTERS OF MAX BEERB OHM 1892-1956 edited by Rupert Hart-Davis

more upset by caricatures of themselves? Why do they beg the artist for the original and proudly hang it in their lavatory? A Passing word of criticism will leave a lasting scar on their psyche, but draw them with the most grossly distorted features — balloon bellies, crocodile teeth, pig's snout, yak's hair — and you merely tickle their vanity. For the cartoonist who frets that his vitriol seems to be as harmless as Ambre Solaire, it may be some comfort that Max Beerbohm suffered similar ago- nies. When he set out to guy 'the volleyed- out platitudes of that appalling bounder' Teddy Roosevelt or tried to satirise Shaw's megalomania or Kipling's imperialism,

my groans sound just like ripples of rather good-humoured laughter. By some kink in my endowment, I can't express pain and abhorrence. Nor can I express reverence and joy. I revere and rejoice in Henry James, very truly and deeply. But this I can't express at all in drawing: Henry James comes out just as ludicrous as . . . Roosevelt. In fine, my talent is a horribly limited one. I want to bless and (more often) I can only giggle!

It is the incomparable style which makes Beerbohm's universe so enchanting — those bulbous heads rearing tremulously on wispy legs, the observation seeming all the sharper because the line is so soft, the atmosphere so pea-soupy — but its very incomparability takes away the sting. The beloved Henry James becomes part of the same unique menagerie as the abhorred Rudyard Kipling. The charm levels all.

Not that Beerbohm ever set out to cause pain, or lasting pain anyway. He was always anxious for news of how his victims were taking it, as delighted when he heard that Henry James loved 'The Mote in the Middle Distance' as he was distressed by Kipling's umbrage. He had no pretensions as a public scourge, or as a public anything. Never did author so disarm his critics by insisting on his personal inconspicuousness and insignificance (the paradox was that the insisting went on so very publicly). He Prided himself on being 'the smallest suc- ce. ss of both the 19th and the 20th centur- ies.

In 1898, he told Bernard Shaw that 'my Mind is not very fertile, and any success I might have had is due to my own shrewd- ness in not doing much'. Comparing him- self with the great actress he considered his future wife Florence to be, he told her: 'I ant a very small writer though highly accomplished.' Twenty years later, he ex- horted a friend who wanted to write his biography: `My gifts are small. I've used them very well and discreetly, never strain- ing them; and the result is that I've made a

John Murray, £16.95, pp.244

charming little reputation. But that reputa- tion is a frail plant. . . . Don't drench and deluge it! The contents of a quite small watering can will be quite enough.' In his speech at his 70th birthday party another 20 years on, he was still embellishing the same theme: My brain is not at all a powerful one. . . The act of thinking has always been uphill work to me. And I am not sure that it is a really healthy function even for men who excel in it. These men never seem to me very happy, or even very well.

Need one look any further for the secret of Max's undying popularity with the Eng- lish? The thought of him serene and indolent and modest in his little villa at Rapallo — not at all a grand place like Berenson's, nor luxurious like Maugham's — was an image of civilisation at its most English. And more endearing still, he let on that he was not really much of a reader either, even of Shakespeare: 'I don't think 1 have ever read a play of his straight through: I have always felt the need of plenteous skipping. And a good half of the plays I have never even dipped into.' Nor could he be counted a Janeite: 'I have always been intending to read Jane Au- sten, and have several times tried one or another of her books; but she has always left me cold — or, rather, hot with shame at not being able to read her.' He did not get on much better with Virginia Woolf s novels, although he liked The Common Reader, and told her (being so modest, Max could say the bluntest things): Your novels beat me — black and blue. I retire howling, aching, sore; full, moreover, of an acute sense of disgrace. I return later, I re-submit myself to the discipline. No use: I am carried out half-dead.

He thought Diaghilev's Russian ballet 'over-lush' and as for Proust: But why not like the late Marcel?

Perhaps he wrote not very well?

. . . I only know that all his Swanns Are now, as ever, geese to me.

Never came music sweeter or more seductive to English lowbrow ears, never more welcome the assurance that Litera- ture need not be heavy going.

Apart from a weakness for the convolu- tions of the later Henry James, Beer- bohm's own tastes were predominantly of the sturdy sort we used to call masculine: Thackeray and Trollope and Conrad and Arnold Bennett (he thought The Old Wives' Tale 'the finest novel published in my time'). He revered common sense, the only virtue he allowed himself to claim. The Russians were too freakish for him.

He described himself as a Tory anarchist, but his ecstatic relief at the outcome of the General Strike suggests that the anarchist part was really for show. I think a more accurate description of him would be as an old-fashioned patriotic liberal who hated pompous bullies of all sorts: stuffy royal- ists, jingo imperialists, trade union mili- tants. All such overmightiness seemed to him a perversion of the English spirit, which he fashioned in his own image as modest and conciliatory but stubborn and resolute when pushed or provoked. Be- neath the frail exquisite in boater and primrose suit, there was a meat-and-two- veg sort of character which communicated itself to his audience never more surely than in his radio talks during the war.

Augustus John was not alone in being deeply moved by the sound of that precise, clear voice: 'It was the voice of England one heard!. . . I like best old and seasoned things. Max is old and seasoned. He was born so. Hence his endurance, his indes- tructibility and the inviolable innocence of his genius.' This is not the first collection of Beer- bohm letters to be produced by that tireless editor, Sir Rupert Hart-Davis. We have already had Max's letters to Reggie Turner and his correspondence with Siegfried Sas- soon. Some of the present collection has been previously printed, in whole or in part, in David Cecil's Life and S. N. Behrman's Conversation with Max. The attentive reader will note that this book is scrupulously entitled 'Letters' rather than 'The Letters'. We await a bumper collec- tion of the whole lot. I hope that it will be better produced than this one. Beerbohm's line is often faint, but some of the repro- ductions here look as if they had been run off on an old Xerox that was short of ink. Nor are the drawings always clear or closely related to the relevant letters. It may seem unkind to refer to Beerbohm's letter to Sir Rupert where he insists on the highest possible standards of book produc- tion, but on such matters Beerbohm was merciless, and so should we be.

These flaws do not begin to ruin the delights: the scrawls and teases and fan- cies, the devotion to family and friends, the almost obsessive consideration for other people's feelings, and the sharpness of his personal, literary and artistic judgments. Beerbohm's views on Kipling may be familiar: 'All the ye-ing and the Lord God-ing and the Law-ing side of him seems to me a very thin and trumpery assump- tion; and I have always thought it was a sound impulse by which he was driven to put his "Recessional" into the waste-paper basket, and a great pity that Mrs Kipling fished it out and made him send it to the Times.' But in the same letter, he de- molishes a less frequent target, William Morris, with equal brio: He is splendid, certainly, by reason of the bulk and variety of his work. But when it comes to the quality of any part of that work . . .? . . I like, in visual objects, lightness and severity, blitheness and simplicity. A gloomy complexity is no doubt equally a noble thing to strive for. Morris achieved it in his wall-papers. He achieved it too in his Coleridge page. But how poorly! Compare the gloomy complexity of Aubrey Beard- sley's border for the Morte d'Arthur . . . There . . . you have strength and rhythm. Then look back at the muddled and fuddled, tame, weak, aimless, invertebrate and stodgy page done by Morris.

His teasing had the same assured quali- ty. In his twenties, he sent the foremost Shakespearian scholars of the day scurry- ing to the British Museum to track down the entirely fictitious Hort's Compleat Book of Antient Heraldrie and the Devices in which, he alleged, were to be found examples of 'a flourish transfix', the flour- ish being a wing-like appendage to the escutcheon signifying 'a noble place or poste under the Crown' — which, howev- er, might have a line drawn through it if the privilege had been forfeited by a misde- meanour. This was, he claimed, the ex- planation of that troublesome line in the Sonnets:

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth.

I also liked Beerbohm's description of the initiation formalities at the Athe- naeum, to which Lytton Strachey had just been elected:

You go straight to the hearth-rug, turn your back on the fireplace, and say, 'I am Giles Lytton Strachey, a Rule II man, and author of the following books.' Having named your books and given the date of each, you ring the bell and order the waiter to bring a magnum of champagne. When this is brought, the senior man present proposes your health, and you respond briefly — quite briefly; ten minutes at the outside.

Everyone at the time noticed how Beer- bohm seemed to have sprung on to the scene fully armed with this self-assurance, possessed from childhood with an unshak- able certainty of who he was. Much can be made of the way he was looked after through life, first by his mother and sisters, then by his wife Florence, then, when she became ill, even more devotedly by Eli- sabeth Jungmann, whom he married a month before he died. Sir Rupert plausibly sees his marriage to Florence as asexual, quoting Beerbohm's letter to her during their courtship:

I like you better than any person in the world. But the other sort of caring is beyond me. I realise quite surely now that I shall never be able to care in that way for any one. It is a defect in my nature. It can't be remedied.

From that point of view, Beerbohm remained a bachelor all his life and perhaps thereby enjoyed all the more freedom to turn his life into that celebrated master- piece in miniature. The move to Rapallo, when he was still in his late thirties, was certainly a masterly act of self- preservation. He thus protected himself and his world against the hazards of age and fashion. This iron-willed application to the business, noticeable in all artists of substance, seems infinitely more piquant in one whose business was the perfection of leisure.

And yet — how Beerbohm would seize on that stale reviewer's conjunction, that clumsy hoicking of the rusty stiletto out of its sheath at the last moment — there is something a bit depressing about the unre- lenting perfection of the exercise, the refusal to stray beyond one's limits, the exactness of the self-knowledge. Lingering damply in the air, there can be detected a certain smugness, a contempt for the reck- less, which gradually becomes suffocating. One begins to itch to smash the china and be appallingly rude and pretentious. I

notice much the same symptoms coming on after prolonged exposure to the Lyttelton- Hart-Davis letters. Perhaps one should take a little holiday in Rapallo, out of season.