The incomparable and inexplicable
Victoria Glendinning
MAX BEERBOHM: A KIND OF A LIFE by N. John Hall Yale, £16.95, pp. 224, ISBN 0300097050 THE ILLUSTRATED ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm, with an introduction by N. John Hall Yale, £9.99, pp. 432, ISBN 0300097328 ax Beerbohm wrote a tale called The Happy Hypocrite, a reversal of his friend Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. It's about a rake who puts on a saintly mask in order to win the love of a pure girl. When his mask is torn off, his former, dissolute face has become saintly underneath. The man has become his mask. One is reminded of this story while reading N. John Hall's Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life because readers of N. John Hall's previous work will find him revealed here in a completely new aspect. Which is the real N. John Hall? Happily and unhypocritically, the answer has to be: both.
Professor N. John Hall of New York is the author of a distinguished biography of Trollope, and has edited, superbly, Trollope's letters in two volumes. His other special interest has long been Max Beerbohm, and in 1997 he published a big anthology of Beerbohm's best caricatures, finely reproduced and with an analytical commentary. Professor Hall is, in short, a serious academic player with a complete command of scholarly discourse and practice.
But in this new book he is writing, perhaps, as Jack Hall (which is how he is known to his friends, among whom your reviewer counts herself). His book is short, selective and extremely personal — 'some would say quirky' as he writes. (Some would, and maybe it should have been left for us to do so. Who needs hand-signals these days?) While he gives a lucid account, in a series of essay-like chapters, of the incomparable Max as essayist, critic, parodist, fiction writer and caricaturist, he declines to 'ferret out' the inner man: 'The "inner man of Max Beerbohm" sound oxymoronic. Sometimes this resolution slips, but only by a millimetre. On Max's hostility to Shaw, for example:
Well — and here comes the inner man stuff— yes, Max's antipathy to Shaw may
have come partly from a vague sense of Shaw as his principal rival.
He is writing as an enthusiast, and conversationally, for readers who may not yet be in 'the club', or cult, of devoted Maximilians; and he is careful not to alarm them with cultural overload. 'Today most of us don't know much about Catullus,' he says reassuringly; and, embarking on a reference to the art historian Ernst Gombrich: 'I don't do this sort of thing very often, please bear with me.' The book is so unthreatening and user-friendly (`Let's try a little quiz') that it reminded me sometimes of my computer manual Word for Windows for Dummies.
By these multiple acts of unilateral disarmament the most nervous reader will be disarmed. The less nervous reader too will receive a vivid sense of how and what Max was. He was the youngest of nine children — his eldest brother was Beerbohm Tree, the actor manager and entrepreneur — and he lived at home with his mother and sisters until he was 37. (I'd have liked a bit more about this family and their domestic life.) He was famous by the time he was 24. His best friends were Reggie Turner and the artist Will Rothenstein, and he and Lytton Strachey admired one another extravagantly.
He always looked young for his age, and was always dapper and dandified. He had beautiful manners, was a good talker and listener, and he was one of nature's guests. 'Even when technically a host, Max remains, fundamentally, a guest.' He liked to be comfortable, he liked routine, he liked to be in the sun. Wilde was his earliest prose model, and, in his maturity, Thackeray. He moved in homosexual circles and in his youth had romantic feelings for women, especially actresses. He was clearly not a man of strong, if any, physical passions.
'I am nervous about what comes next,' confesses Jack Hall, starting in on Max's marriage to Florence Kahn, a Jewish
actress from Memphis with Pre-Raphaelite good looks. One thousand letters to her from Max survive. Max's sophisticated friends did not like her. 'They found her nervous, shy, timid, retiring, humourless, moralising, idealising, prudish, frequently sad and depressed, and anti-social.' My guess is she just got fed up with all the friends coming to stay. Sometimes she interrupted Max's anecdotal stream in midtlow. She sounds pretty interesting, but Jack Hall seems to side with the friends.
It was an extremely successful marriage. They went to live in Italy, and remained contentedly in the same house, on the coast road near Rapallo, for the rest of their lives. 'I wanted to be alone with Florence,' Max said. Obviously she had what he needed. It might be interesting to work out what that was, but it would involve fingering the 'inner man', and so the marriage is left as 'the great oddity in Max's life, the jarring note, the unexplainable dimension'.
She was certainly good for his work, The fantastical Oxford love story Zuleika Dobson and his classic book of parodies A Christmas Garland were completed soon after the move to Italy. Zuleika Dobson is being reissued in a facsimile of the first edition, decorated with Max's later watercolour illustrations, in tandem with this 'kind of a life', and with an introduction by the same author. (The pronunciation of `Zuleika' is sometimes problematic. Max once sent a telegram, ZULEIKA SPEAKER NOT HIKER, which settles the matter.) Max's England was Edwardian and, as a long-time expatriate, it remained so. His career had a late and successful flowering as an occasional BBC broadcaster, elegantly recalling those times. All his gifts were small but perfectly formed like his essays. 'In essay writing', he wrote, 'style is everything. The essayist's aim is to bring himself home to the reader ... Himself is the thing to be obtruded.' This entertaining, 'some would say quirky' book is the perfect Maximilian hornmage.
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