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I had a standing joke with Turco, the concierge of the Hotel
Excelsior, in Rapallo. The joke originated during an earlier
visit to Rapallo, in the spring of 1953. I had asked Turco
to summon Charlie, the English-speaking driver who that
spring was driving me each day to call on Max Beerbohm, at
the Villino Chiaro, on the Via Aurelia. I invariably
appeared in the lobby on time, but Charlie was not as
punctual. Turco would reassure me. "Partito," he
would say, "ma non arrivato." Charlie had left the
garage that employed him, but he had not yet arrived; he
was, in other words, en route. I had told this to Max, and
he had been amused by it; he said it applied to so many of
his contemporaries—in fact, to almost everybody. Now, on a
cold, rainy January day in 1954, I stood again in the lobby
waiting for Charlie to take me to the Villino, and I took
the words of explanation out of Turco's mouth; we sang them
in unison. They were, indeed, the only Italian words I knew,
but I had full command over them. Charlie arrived and
drove me to the Villino. We compared notes. He wanted to
know whether I had received his Christmas card, and I wanted
to know whether he had received mine. He was full of
intimate information about our Ambassadress, Mrs. Luce, and
he asked me for whatever news (and it was marginal) I had of
Pittsburgh, where he had once lived.
I had sought domestic advice before I left New York, and
bore presents for Max and his secretary, Miss Elizabeth
Jungmann. Shielding the packages under my overcoat from the
rain, I rang the doorbell of the Villino. I looked at the
tree that leaned backward—like Swinburne, Max had observed
the last time we were together. Denuded, and lashed by the
rain, it seemed to have abdicated altogether. A young girl I
hadn't seen before opened the door for me. She bobbed and
nodded, and babbled in Italian. In the lunette at the far
end of the entrance hall, Miss Siddal, between Rossetti and
Swinburne, had still not made up her mind. With an air of
incredulity, she was still staring, as she had been doing
for all the years since Max had painted her, at Swinburne. I
went into the little library. Max's grandparents were there,
in their oval frames, and looked as handsome and well
adjusted as ever in their eighteenth-century clothes.
Carlyle was still striding dyspeptically along the Chelsea
Embankment.
Miss Jungmann came in and greeted me affectionately. I
handed her my presents. "Oh," she said. "I won't open mine
till Max comes in. He'll he in in a minute. He didn't have a
very good night. He had nightmares. He suffers terribly from
nightmares. I think all creative people are subject to
nightmares. Gerhart Hauptmann, when I was his
secretary, used to have nightmares. He remembered them in
detail and used to tell me them, but Max never remembers the
details—only a vague sense of terror. Perhaps he does
remember them but wants to spare me. But it's cold in here!
Come in and warm yourself by the fire."
I walked through the little library and into the equally
small living room, where a fire was burning in the tiny
grate. The Regency mirror noted my arrival; the bronze girl
with the averted head was on the mantel; in the photographs
flanking it the two girls in white were still confiding
romantic secrets to one another, and the little pug-nosed
girl was laughing at the Abbé's joke. Max came in. He was
wearing a blue skullcap. Miss Jungmann displayed the two
presents. Max was so ravished by the wrappings of the
packages that I urged Miss Jungmann not to open them, to
avoid an anticlimax. Max chuckled and encouraged Miss
Jungmann to risk it. But first he took the packages and ran
a hand over the glossy surfaces. "How beautiful!" he
exclaimed. "Scarlet and silver!" But there was a residue of
enthusiasm for the contents, too: a heavy sweater for Max,
and a woollen stole for Miss Jungmann. Miss Jungmann made
Max try the sweater on at once for size. "I'll try it on for
size," said Max, "but"—he smiled at me—"if you don't mind,
I'll keep it on for warmth."
Max, when it was agreed that the sweater fitted, settled
himself in his old Merton chair. Miss Jungmann hovered over
him solicitously. "Those dreadful nightmares of yours, Max!
Was this one awful?"
"Have you noticed," said Max, "there is never any third act
in a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and
then leave you there. They are the work of poor dramatists."
I asked whether he could remember them after they were done
with him.
"My nightmares are almost always abstract, don't you
know—not personal. The only personal ones are those
connected with my childhood."
Miss Jungmann, aware that I knew of Max's aversion to
psychiatry, chimed in, "Maybe a psychiatrist could help cure
you of those awful things?"
Max laughed. He turned to me. "What would they do to me?" he
inquired. "I adored my father and mother and I adored my
brothers and sisters. What kind of complex would they find
me the victim of? Oedipus and what else?" He reflected a
moment. "They were a tense and peculiar family, the
Oedipuses, weren't they?"
Miss Jungmann, explaining to me that the new servant was
inexperienced, went out to manage tea.
Max had had a fan letter, from an American schoolboy, that
had amused him greatly. He reached out to a little table
beside his chair and picked up the letter and gave it to me.
It was from Andover. The boy's English teacher, Dudley Fitts,
had read aloud to the class Max's obituary essay on Ibsen
from a collection of his drama criticism, "Around Theatres,"
as a stimulus to discussion at the next session. The boy,
who was evidently thorough, had read up on both Max and
Ibsen in the Andover library, and had found Max's
first-person parody of Edmund Gosse, called "A
Recollection," in his book of parodies "A Christmas
Garland." In this piece, Max, pretending to be Gosse, a
dedicated bringer-together of people who ought to meet each
other, describes how, in Venice, he took Ibsen round to have
Christmas dinner with Robert Browning, with disturbing
results. The boy, taking Max's use of the first person
literally, had written asking Max, as an old pal of Ibsen's,
to give him some inside information. "In 1878, when I
imagined this dinner to take place," said Max
apologetically, "I was only six years old. How can I tell
this young man"—he tapped the letter—"that I was scarcely so
precocious?"
In "A Christmas Garland," which is strung on a thread of
fantasy concerning the effect of Christmas on seventeen
famous authors, and which starts off with Max's parody of
Henry James, "The Mote in the Middle Distance," which is
perhaps the most famous of his parodies, Max, as the alleged
Gosse, relates that he called on Robert Browning, who was
spending the Christmas season in Venice. That same evening,
he had an inconceivable stroke of luck. He ran into Ibsen in
the Café Florian. As a student of Scandinavian literature
who had taken the trouble to master Norwegian, he had, of
course, been in correspondence with Ibsen, and had been
received by him sometime earlier, in Rome. Max's Gosse
picked up with Ibsen where he had left off, and there
followed a halcyon period for the young scholar; he spent
his afternoons with Browning, his evenings with Ibsen. He
was in seventh heaven. There was one ever-to-be-cherished
evening when Ibsen unbent so far as to read to the young
student—in Norwegian, of course—one of his plays:
He was staying at the Hotel Danieli, an edifice famous
for having been, rather more than forty years
previously, the socket in which the flame of an historic
grande passion had finally sunk and guttered out
with no inconsiderable accompaniment of smoke and odour.
It was there, in an upper room, that I now made
acquaintance with a couple very different from George
Sand and Alfred de Musset, though destined to become
hardly less famous than they. I refer to Torvald and
Nora Helmer. My host read to me with the utmost
vivacity, standing in the middle of the apartment; and I
remember that in the scene where Nora Helmer dances the
tarantella her creator instinctively executed a few
illustrative steps.
In an overflow of joy at the spectacle of Ibsen dancing the
tarantella, and in constant transit between the two colossi,
the young scholar became obsessed with a missionary zeal to
bring his two idols together. This ambition he whispered to
Browning. Browning had never heard of Ibsen, but so
expansive was his nature that he fell in with the plan at
once: "Capital! Bring him round with you at one o'clock
tomorrow for turkey and plum pudding!" The young middleman
ran right back to Ibsen with this invitation. Ibsen had
never heard of Browning, either. "It was one of the
strengths of his strange, crustacean genius," says the
narrator, in a hushed aside, "that he never had heard of
anybody." But the middleman prevailed on Ibsen to accept
Browning's invitation, and on Christmas Day Browning sent
his gondola to fetch Ibsen and his palpitating guide. It was
understandable that the youth should be nervous, and he
tried to give Ibsen some hint of Browning's scope,
translating meticulously into Norwegian Browning's slogan
"God's in his heaven—all's right with the world." When Ibsen
and the young man arrived in Browning's salon, their host
was thumping out a toccata on the piano. Browning swatted
Ibsen heartily on each shoulder, wished him "the Merriest of
Merry Christmases," and led his two guests in to dinner.
There, things went less well. Ibsen sized Browning up at
once as a lightweight; he dropped him even before he had
taken him up. At dinner, the student of Norwegian struggled
manfully to translate Ibsen's tenebrous remarks from
Norwegian into English; he went on interpreting like mad,
slanting his translations to alleviate abrasion, panting
after the receding mirage of rapport. The debacle occurred
over a nice question of interpretation:
The world of scholarship was at that time agitated by
the recent discovery of what might or might not prove to
be a fragment of Sappho. Browning proclaimed his
unshakable belief in the authenticity of these verses.
To my surprise, Ibsen, whom I had been unprepared to
regard as a classical scholar, said positively that they
had not been written by Sappho. Browning challenged him
to give a reason. A literal translation of the reply
would have been "Because no woman ever was capable of
writing a fragment of good poetry." Imagination reels at
the effect this would have had on the recipient of
"Sonnets from the Portuguese." The agonized interpreter,
throwing honour to the winds, babbled some wholly
fallacious version of the words. Again the situation had
been saved. . . .
I was fain to thank heaven when, immediately after the
termination of the meal, Ibsen rose, bowed to his host,
and bade me express his thanks for the entertainment.
Out on the Grand Canal, in the gondola . . . [he asked
me] whether Herr Browning had ever married. Receiving an
emphatically affirmative reply, he inquired whether Fru
Browning had been happy. Loth though I was to cast a
blight on his interest in the matter, I conveyed to him
with all possible directness the impression that
Elizabeth Barrett had assuredly been one of those wives
who do not dance tarantellas nor slam front-doors. He
did not, to the best of my recollection, make further
mention of Browning, either then or afterwards. Browning
himself, however, thanked me warmly, next day, for
having introduced my friend to him. "A capital fellow!"
he exclaimed, and then, for a moment, seemed as though
he were about to qualify this estimate, but ended by
merely repeating "A capital fellow!"
I told Max that Dudley Fitts had once written me that one of
his students at Andover had made the flat statement in a
paper that Pontius Pilate was one of the twelve Apostles.
Max was amused by this, but saddened, too. It led him into
some reflections on the passing of Latin in the schools and
the unfortunate effect this was having on the precise use of
English. "Gladstone used to quote whole strings of Latin
hexameters, mostly from the 'Aeneid,' in his parliamentary
speeches, and the House understood him," Max said. "Already
one discerns a debasement of English, and other debasements
will follow that. With the blunting of precision in
language, don't you know, come muddiness in political
policy, in morality, and in conduct." Max went on to deplore
the modernizations in translations of the Bible and the
classics, which, according to him, were vulgarizations. He
had been reading such a translation of Cicero's letters.
"The translator," Max told me, "seems to be saying to the
reader, 'Look here, this fellow Cicero is just like you and
me.'" Max gave me a consoling look to cushion the blow. "He
isn't!" he said firmly.
I then asked Max about Ibsen's obituary, which he had
written for the Saturday Review. At the mention of
this, his eyes darkened with an anxious look; his brow
furrowed; he leaned forward tensely in the Merton chair. His
strong, beautifully shaped, square forefinger tapped the
Andover letter uneasily, in memory of an importunity that
had been put upon him by the editor of the Saturday
half a century before. "Do you know, I remember that evening
so well. It was May, 1906. I had done my piece for that
week, and was settled down cozily with a book in my rooms,
on the top floor of my mother's house. I was luxuriating in
the prospect of an evening in which I didn't have to go to
the theatre. Then I was called to the telephone—an
experience I have never much cared for. It was the editor.
He announced that Ibsen had just died and that he wished me
to write an obituary article. It quite spoiled my evening,
you know! I am not a"—his hand waved into space—"a dash-off
writer. Writing is difficult for me, and over my weekly
articles I agonized. They cost me anxiety and pain. The copy
was always due on Thursday, and do you know that even on my
holidays, away from England, when Thursday came around I was
always conscious of this vague feeling of inanition, don't
you know, of impatience—the sort of feeling a clock may have
when it has not been wound up. And then, when I was
revelling in the fact that my weekly piece was done, then
came this telephone call—"
I could see that Max was hearing again, after half a
century, the knell-like sound of the telephone. I did my
best to reassure him.
"Well, Max," I said, "you really don't have to worry about
it now. The piece is in, and a well-known teacher at Andover
likes it well enough to recommend it to his pupils, so it
must have been pretty good and you needn't worry!"
Max relaxed a bit. He smiled, giving me his quick, innocent
look of gratitude for the relief of tension. Then he began
to tell about it. He had sat down at home and written the
piece in longhand. That was the first draft, and he gave it
to the waiting copyreader. (He spoke with affectionate
remembrance of the copyreaders of the Saturday. They
were charming and distinguished men, he said—scholars and
writers manqué. They knew Latin and Greek, so when he
used a tag from either language, he could be certain that it
would come out all right.) Ibsen had been dying for a very
long time; the stages of his disease had been minutely
reported in the European press. In the obituary essay, Max
wonders how the papers will keep coming out without the
sustenance of Ibsen's interminable moribundity. But it had
happened at last, and when it happened, Max took it
robustly. "Are we downhearted?" he asks in the obituary
essay, and has the spunk to answer "No." The obituary is
interesting, because it reveals something characteristic of
Max; he felt about Ibsen the way he felt about Shaw, except
that Shaw was funny and Ibsen wasn't. Even though he
recognized that both were great writers, what they were as
human beings mattered to Max—was, indeed, essential, in his
view. In his obituary, he quotes a letter that Ibsen wrote
to the Danish critic George Brandes. "Friends," confides
Ibsen chattily, "are a costly luxury, and when one invests
one's capital in a mission in life, one cannot afford to
have friends. The expensiveness of friendship does not lie
in what one does for one's friends, but in what one, out of
regard for them, leaves undone. This means the crushing of
many an intellectual germ." Max comments on this avarice for
intellectual germs:
Ibsen had no lack of friends, so far as his genius
attracted to him many men who were anxious to help him.
And he used these men, unstintingly, when he had need of
them. That volume of his correspondence, published not
long ago, reveals him as an unabashed applicant for
favours. Nor is this by any means to his discredit. The
world was against him. He was poor, and a cast-away. He
had to fight hard in order that he might fulfill the
genius that was in him. It was well that he had no false
delicacy in appealing to any one who could be of use to
him. But, throughout that correspondence, one misses in
him the sense of gratitude. One misses in him the
capacity for friendship. Not one "intellectual germ"
would he sacrifice on that altar. He was, indeed, a
perfect type of the artist. There is something
impressive, something magnificent and noble, in the
spectacle of his absorption in himself—the
impregnability of that rock on which his art was
founded. But, as we know, other men, not less great than
Ibsen, have managed to be human. Some "intellectual
germs" may thereby have perished. If so, they are to be
mourned duly. And yet, could we wish them preserved at
the price that Ibsen paid for them? Innate in us is the
desire to love those whom we venerate. To this desire,
Ibsen, the very venerable, does not pander.
Max doesn't think it is sentimental to accuse Ibsen of this
limitation. He compares him to Swift. He says, "Swift's
strength lay in his intellect, and in his natural gift for
literature; and a gigantic strength it was. But his
harshness was not symptomatic of strength. It was
symptomatic of a certain radical defect in himself. He was a
Titan, not an Olympian. So was Ibsen . . . he was an ardent
and tender lover of ideas, but mankind he simply could not
abide. Indeed, I fancy he cared less for ideas as ideas than
as a scourge for his fellow-creatures." Max goes on to
dissect the "purpose" of Ibsen's plays. Max doesn't think
that this much written-about "purpose" was to reform evil at
all. "Primarily he was an artist, pure and simple, actuated
by the artist's joy in reproduction of human character as it
appeared to his keen, unwandering eyes. But he had a joy
within a joy; joy in the havoc he wrought." Ibsen hated
peace, and he didn't care a snap of his fingers for liberty.
Max quotes another of Ibsen's letters to Brandes, written
after the proclamation of the Italian Republic:
Rome was the one sanctuary in Europe, the one place that
enjoyed true liberty—freedom from the political tyranny
of liberty . . . the delicious longing for liberty—that
is now a thing of the past. I for one am bound to
confess that the only thing about liberty that I love is
the fight for it; I care nothing about the possession of
it.
"At any rate," Max adds, in a sly postscript to Ibsen's
letter, "he cared nothing about other people's possession of
it."
I asked Max, who had told me something about how he had
happened to get his job as drama critic for the Saturday
Review, to tell me more.
"As you know, it was a kind of accident," he said. "I just
slithered into it. Frank Harris, who owned the paper, was
away in Athens when Shaw gave up the post; the suggestion
came to me from J. F. Runciman, the deputy editor." Max
wondered to Runciman how Shaw would feel about it, and
Runciman said that Shaw approved; it didn't occur,
evidently, either to Max or to Runciman to ask themselves
whether Harris, who was, after all, the editor, might
approve. But four years earlier, when Harris first took over
the Saturday, he had invited Max to write for the
paper—anything he liked—and Max had done just that, so both
he and Runciman assumed that it would be all right. Max
undertook the job without getting even his own approval. He
refused to give himself a reference; his first contribution
was a considered essay, "Why I Ought Not to Have Become a
Dramatic Critic," in which, without any conviction whatever,
he hazards the opinion that there are probably "many
callings more uncomfortable and dispiriting than that of
dramatic critic," continuing, "To be a porter on the
Underground Railway must, I have often thought, be very
terrible. Whenever I feel myself sinking under the stress of
my labours, I shall say to myself, `I am not a porter on the
Underground Railway.'" Bucked up by this negative solace, he
prepared to go to the Savoy to review "The Beauty Stone," a
musical comedy by Arthur Pinero, Comyns Carr, and Arthur
Sullivan. This was in May, 1898. He was twenty-five when he
took the job, and thirty-seven when he gave it up, in April,
1910.
Frank Harris seems to have been the perennial type of the
genius-charlatan, who appears meteorically, soars to the
top, gets everybody excited, seizes the general imagination
to such a degree that for a time nobody else is talked
about, and then proceeds to disintegrate with a completeness
that leaves, at best, only the merest possibility of a
shadow comeback. The reason, Max told me, is egomania. "When
you believe yourself omnipotent, it is hard, don't you know,
to reconcile yourself to mere potency. Like all deeply
arrogant men, Harris possessed little or no sense of
reality. His subsequent career proves it." Harris arrived in
London, after wanderings in America and Europe, in 1882, at
the age of twenty-six. He was little and ugly. Within five
years of his arrival, he had, according to his latest and
most comprehensive biographer, Vincent Brome, got to the
absolute top in the London literary world, had married a
rich woman older than himself, had a house in Park Lane, and
entertained the best people. He had been editor of the
Evening News, he was now editor of the Fortnightly
Review, and he was soon to be the owner-editor of the
forty-year-old Saturday Review. He shook that paper
up, got H. G. Wells and Shaw and Max and Cunninghame Graham
to write for it, and was—such men always are—the talk of the
town. He became known as the Voice. According to Max, he had
"a marvellous speaking voice—like the organ at Westminster
Abbey, with infallible footwork." He was also the Mustache.
Brome tells how, in Berlin, Harris saw Bismarck riding by in
a carriage. He envied Bismarck; that was the kind of power
he would like, and intended, to have. He trained his
mustache in imitation of Bismarck's ("It was a tremendous
affair," said Max, recalling Harris's mustache with
admiration), and for a time he achieved the power, too.
Max always took Harris with what he called "a stalactite of
salt." But women didn't. "Women like men to be confident,
and Frank did not lack confidence," Max said. This was
certainly a Maxian understatement about a man who thought
nothing of letting his voice boom out formal lectures on the
subject "Shakespeare, Shaw, and Frank Harris." Shaw, Max
remembered, liked Harris and, when Harris was on his uppers,
sent him an account of his love life, to help him finish his
biography of Shaw.
Max was interested in my account of Gabriel Pascal, the film
producer, whom Shaw also liked—who was, indeed, the
confidant and friend and entertainer of his old age. Max was
amused to hear that Pascal had once admitted to me, "When I
was nineteen, I was already a genius!" Max's narrow
shoulders shook; such examples of precocity delighted him.
I asked Max whether he had ever known Harris to tell the
truth.
"Sometimes, don't you know—when his invention flagged," Max
said.
After Harris got to the top, says Vincent Brome in his
biography, "there was no holding him." There never is any
holding them. These shattering careerists seem to follow a
single pattern. Once they've reached, by spasms of will, the
place where they want to be, some driving instinct
inexorably impels them to destroy the pedestals their
effrontery and egotism have erected, and to plummet to the
gutter. It is as if they were driven by some nostalgie de
la boue. During the First World War, when Harris was in
New York, editing Pearson' s Magazine, after he had
found it expedient to leave London, his magnetism was still
strong enough to attract crowds to his lectures. Harris took
it out on London for having put him in jail for contempt of
court in 1914 by becoming a German propagandist in the First
World War. At this, his friends, Arnold Bennett and Max
among them, wrote him off. But always and everywhere,
whatever he did and whatever his age, women abounded, caught
up in the wake of his confidence. After the war, Harris went
back to Europe, settling down in Nice, and there he wrote
the bulk of the four volumes of his pornographic
autobiography, "My Life and Loves." Actually, it is a funny
hook, of that peculiar variety that can be achieved only by
people who write about themselves with what Max called "a
sublimity of earnestness" his euphemism for a total lack of
humor. In it Harris tells, indiscriminately but with a nice
feeling for juxtaposition, about his many love affairs and
his adventures in the world of diplomacy and letters. At the
end of one chapter, Harris describes a sexual episode the
way an expert gymnast might describe an intricate maneuver
in calisthenics. And then, suddenly, you are confronted with
the heading of the next chapter: "How I Met Gladstone."
During the years that Max worked for Harris on the
Saturday, he found him admirable as an editor; everybody
agrees that Harris really was a great editor. It was after
Harris sold the Saturday, in 1899, that a little
problem arose between Max and Harris. Harris was then
editing Modern Society, one of the series of
fly-by-night tattle sheets that he tried to galvanize into
profit by the sheer power of his voice and mustache.
Blackmail was a source of revenue that could not he recorded
in the books, if there were any books. Brome tells
substantially the same story Max told me. The novelist and
playwright Enid Bagnold worked for Harris on this paper.
Miss Bagnold has written about what that was like:
We had a great schwärmerei for Frank which would come
like measles and go as completely. . . . He was an
extraordinary man. He had an appetite for great things
and could transmit the sense of them. He was more like
an actor than a man of heart. He could simulate
everything. While he felt admiration he acted it and
while he acted it he felt it, and "greatness" being his
big part he hunted the centuries for it, spotting it in
literature, poetry, passion, and acting.
While Harris was editing Modern Society, he was
arrested for contempt of court and sent to jail. Miss
Bagnold, desperate to get material for the next issue during
the enforced absence of her chief, appealed to Shaw and Max
for contributions. Shaw sent a nice letter refusing, but Max
responded magnificently with a cartoon he gave Miss Bagnold
"on the solemn promise" that it should never be used either
as a cover or as a poster. The cartoon, captioned "The Best
Talker in London—with one of his best listeners," is still
in Miss Bagnold's possession; it shows Harris seated at one
side of a table, expounding great ideas with large gestures.
On the table is a bottle of wine. In the other chair, Max is
sitting bolt upright, listening. He is listening hard but,
you feel, with a certain reserve. Under the drawing Max
wrote, "For my old friend Frank Harris this scribble in
record of a scene which, happily for me, has been so
frequent in the past twenty years." Miss Bagnold took the
drawing to Harris, in Brixton Gaol. Harris was not
pleased—either with Max for having made his stipulation or
with Miss Bagnold for having submitted to it—but he promised
that the restriction would be faithfully observed. Needless
to say, it was not. According to Brome, "Within twenty-four
hours the young girl who represented the 'Advertising
Department' of Modern Society visited the prison and
received instructions to 'go it strong on publicity' with
Beerbohm's drawing, 'and damnation take these fancy
promises.'" After fifty years, Max's gratitude to Miss
Bagnold for her share in circumventing the betrayal by the
advertising department was still acute. "It was Miss
Bagnold," he said, "who spared me from seeing that cartoon
on every hoarding in London." This is Brume's account of how
she did it:
Presently she drove furiously in a cab to his [Max's]
house, rang the doorbell and sent up an urgent message
via the maid. Still not dressed, the gracious figure
with the porcelain forehead came down "in a wonderful
dressing-gown," and listened, his "two very blue eyes .
. . serious with anger." Seeing how genuinely distressed
she was, he dressed quickly and hurried out beside her,
carrying a beautiful cane with a loop at the handle.
They drove back to the office, examined the posters,
dragged the roll into a cab and hurried round to the
printers. There, with some difficulty, they managed to
commandeer the block. Twenty minutes later, they walked
down the Savoy steps to the river, threw plate and
posters wholesale into the black water, watched the
block disappear and saw the posters unroll and begin to
submerge.
Max was grateful to Miss Bagnold, but Miss Bagnold has every
reason to be grateful to Max, because Max, just by his way
of listening to the Best Talker, cured her of her measles.
She recently wrote:
I lunched at the Savoy with Frank Harris and Max
Beerbohm and his first wife very shortly after they were
married. And I have never forgotten Max's peculiar
method of listening. His blue eyes wide with wonder, his
forehead pink with admiration, but somehow,
simultaneously, playing a ray of mockery—so light that
it fell unnoticed on the Talker. I, who was all eyes and
mouth open, learnt a lesson from that. It was the onset
of my cure.
Some time ago, in the London Sunday Times, I read the
announcement of a book, by Sandy Wilson, to he called "Who's
Who for Beginners," which was to consist of a series of
spoofs of young contemporary writers possessed of millennial
and cosmic vision, those writers whose vaticinations embrace
the future of the universe—dark, of course—and who offer
prescriptions for lighting it. One of the young men, Mr. Reg
Glupton, is nineteen years old and refers to himself as "a
mixture of the three 'K's—Kierkegaard, Kafka, and
Krafft-Ebing." It sounded promising, and I thought I should
like to buy the book when it came out, but an item in Mr.
Glupton's entry really warmed my heart. This was that
Glupton, while finishing his new book, "The Whip and the
Butterfly," was also contributing a series of articles to
the Onlooker called "World Disintegration—And After."
This warmed my heart because I knew immediately that Mr.
Wilson was a reader of Max. When readers of Max meet—even
when they don't meet—they experience a thrill of
recognition. Mr. Wilson, I knew at once, had read and
admired one of the juiciest of Max's pieces, his
biographical study of T. Fenning Dodworth. Prophecy on the
cosmic scale was T. Fenning Dodworth's stock in trade.
As we sat before the fire, I asked Max who had been the
model for T. Fenning Dodworth, and he waved a hand and said
vaguely, "Oh, a Parliamentary figure of the time. I took
quite a bit of trouble, don't you know, in the composing of
his name, and I was pleased with the result: the bold 'T.,'
like the statement of a portentous theme; the ominous and
brooding vestibule of the Fenning; and then the broad,
capacious good earth of the Dodworth." Max tells you that T.
Fenning Dodworth was a great wit and gives you examples of
that wit, although he admits that, personally, he is not
convulsed by them. He tells you that Dodworth, "quite apart
from his wit, seems to me one of the most remarkable, the
strongest and, in a way, most successful men of our time."
And yet when he comes to analyze his hero's career, it
emerges unblemished by the vulgar stigmata of success. He
tried the bar, but he had to give it up, because, says Max
simply, "he got so few briefs." He stood seven times for
Parliament, and, Max says, "he escaped, every time, the
evils of election. (And his good angel stood not less close
to him on the three occasions when he offered himself as
candidate for the London County Council.) Voters, like
jurors, would not rise to him. At length it was borne in
even on the leaders of his party that they must after all be
content to rely on his pen rather than on his tongue."
Max remembers having been molded, when he was a schoolboy,
by Dodworth's reasoned and weighty pronouncements in the
political weeklies: "The Franchise Bill—And After;" "The
Home Rule Peril—And After." "Both seemed to me splendid,"
Max says warmly, "partly perhaps because of their titles.
Dodworth was, I believe, the first publicist to use that
magical affix, that somehow statesmanlike, mysterious,
intriguing formula, '—And After.'" But later he grew more
critical: "Dodworth as a political thinker seemed to me
lacking in generosity, lacking even (despite his invariable
'—And After') in foresight."
Dodworth took over the editorship of a newspaper,
contributing to it his article—"substantially the same," Max
explains, "as every article he had ever written; but, like
some masterpiece of music, it never palled." The newspaper
folded. In the war, the Minister of Information naturally
summoned Dodworth, who came through at once with a pamphlet
that was translated into thirty-seven languages and
fifty-eight foreign dialects, and not read in any of them.
Max follows the rest of T. Fenning's career breathlessly,
through the peace that followed the war, and the resumption
of his top hat—for during the war he had "worn a thing of
soft black felt, which I took to be a symbol of
pessimism"—and he is with him on Dodworth's visits to the
House of Commons. Max took such delight in his witticisms
that Dodworth promised him a copy of his next book, "A Short
Shrift for Sinn Fein—And After." Dodworth wrote a play,
produced by Sir George Alexander, which Max attended, he
says, in his professional capacity. He reports on that
momentous opening:
All the leaders of both parties in both Houses were
present on the first night, and many of them (rashly, so
weak were they with laughter) were present also on the
second, third and fourth nights, and would probably have
been present on other nights, too; but (such was the
absenteeism of the vulgar) there were no other nights.
Dodworth was undaunted. At a dinner given him by the
Playgoers' Club, he taunted Max and the other critics with
their failure "to arrest the decay of dramatic art by
elevating the taste of the public." Dodworth returned to his
true field, article writing; "The Assault on the
Constitution—And After;" "The Betrayal—And After;" "The End
of All Things—And After." Max read them all, generously
recognizing, in spite of a dislike of the author that he
could not control, that Dodworth was at his best in all of
them. Max takes Dodworth to his apogee—a public dinner at
which the Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George, proposed his
health. The Prime Minister, when he was "a bare-legged,
wild-eyed, dreamy little lad on the Welsh mountains," had,
like Max, been nurtured on the prophetic writings of the
guest of honor.
Max writes on the assumption that T. Fenning Dodworth is the
most successful man he has ever known. Why? Because of his
indurated conceit, the enviable congenital astigmatism that
enabled him to see the world as an arena in which the puny
contestants failed pitifully to measure up to an ideal
visible only to him, Dodworth, and by him, uniquely, so
easily attainable. He had fought all the battles and won
them in the trophied caverns of his own self-esteem, and,
says Max, taking on the role of prophet himself for once,
"he will die game, and his last words will be '—And After?'
and will be spoken pungently."
I told Max that I had been looking at Fenning the night
before, in my hotel room, and that I had noticed, as I had
not when I first read it, that the last "And After," which
Max predicted would be uttered by Dodworth when he was
dying, had a question mark after it.
"Ah, yes," said Max. "It's the first time Dodworth wasn't
sure!"
"He died a failure, then," I said.
Max smiled. As an artist, he liked to get his effects
simply. And I could see that he was pleased that his
cataclysmic question mark had got over—a punctuation mark
that conveyed the swift transition from certitude to
agnosticism (a true deathbed conversion), and from success
to failure.
It was warm before the fire, but it was cold everywhere else
in the room. Miss Jungmann came in with the smallest
hot-water bottle I have ever seen and with a normal-sized
one. She put the normal-sized one on Max's lap—tucking it in
under the rug over his knees—and the small one behind his
neck.
"Have you ever noticed," asked Max, "that all hot-water
bottles look like Henry the Eighth?" He made the resemblance
clearer by taking out the larger hot-water bottle, picking
up a pencil, and sketching on it the lineaments of the
King—eyes, nose, mustache, and chin—and the resemblance
became indeed remarkable. "Holbein in rubber!" Max said,
smiling.
"Our sunny Italian Riviera," said Miss Jungmann, "is not so
sunny today. Max's room is so cold. I don't know
what to do about it." She mentioned to Max that I had
once suggested an electric heater, and she repeated to him
what she had told me, that the current provided by the
electric company was not strong enough. "Tea will be ready
in a minute," she said.
I asked Max to tell me about the station hotels in which he
used to stay on his visits to London. I had read Logan
Pearsall Smith on the subject. Smith once wrote that Max
would often, on his visits to London, after he had made the
rounds of all the friends who were eager to see him, say
formal farewells to them as if he were going back to Italy
and make straightaway for the Great Western Royal Hotel at
Paddington. Max would, Smith wrote, "remain there unknown to
all for weeks and sometimes months. He found the monstrous
horror of its 1860 decoration (a horror that must be seen to
be believed) and the awful insipidity of its cornstarch and
custard cooking very congenial to his mid-Victorian tastes.
He could hardly tear himself away from it."
"Yes, people used to wonder that I stayed in station
hotels," Max said. "They thought it quaint, I imagine. I
stayed in them because they were so comfortable. I adored
them. The early Victorians were great craftsmen, and they
made the furniture you find in the station hotels. Those
great chests of drawers! The drawers don't stick, as they
are likely to do in modern work; they come running out, like
puppies when you whistle for them, and run back at a touch,
as if you had thrown them a ball." He smiled at me. "I have
been faithful to the Charing Cross Hotel in my fashion, but
I confess to a long infidelity with the Paddington station
hotel—the Great Western, you know. I believe I have stayed
there longer than any man since it was built, and it was
built at about the time the first railroads were laid down.
And then the rooms! I am not a tall man, but in the modern
hotels, with their tawdry simplicity, the doors and ceilings
are so low. The public rooms are as big as the Albert Hall,
but they want to cram as many bipeds as possible into as
many stories as possible, while the station hotels—ah!—they
give a man headroom, even a tall man. And you look out of
the window and see the columns of smoke pressed down under
the station roof and escaping as well as it can, and you see
the travellers emerging from the trains and walking toward
the hotel, as to an inn, for a night's lodging after their
journeys. There is a faint thunder always, a reverberation
from the trains, catching all that movement, all that going
about. I like these Vulcan sounds. And in the lobbies—the
people who are sitting there are only there for the night,
don't you know, and in all that transitoriness, by virtue of
the fact that you are not travelling, you are not
running about, well, you get a sense of immobility, of
staying put, of tranquillity. Oh, yes, I loved dearly to
stay at the station hotels."
Max remembered with affection and exactitude the maître
d'hôtel at the Charing Cross Hotel. "He was tall and
somewhat gangling, and he wore a frock coat with no silk
facings on the lapels. He used to glide in and out among the
tables, noiselessly and with great adroitness." Max's hand
glided in and out among the tables. "My wife, Florence,
wherever she was, used to come back to the hotel to have
lunch with me. One day she couldn't come, but I neglected to
cancel our usual reservation; it was a small table for two,
in any case, and I lunched there alone. The maître d'hôtel
saw me and glided through to me. I said that I would be
alone this day. He made an incomparable gesture"—Max
imitated the gesture with both hands, palms upturned—"a
gesture of consoling me, don't you know, a gesture of
tolerant understanding between one man of the world and
another, a gesture connoting heaven knows what, but
counselling patience and tolerance in the face of such
lapses among womankind."
Even in Paris, Max ferreted out a station hotel and stayed
in it. He tells about the delights of these sojourns in an
essay he calls "Fenestralia." The view from the windows of
the hotel in the Gare du Nord, he says, affords him a
rapture he can't get anywhere else in Paris—not from
sightseeing, not from walking, not from dining out:
I looked forth early on my first morning, and saw a
torrent of innumerable young backs, flooding across the
square beneath and along the straight wide Rue Lafayette
beyond. The fullness and swiftness of it made me
gasp—and kept me gasping, while in the station behind
me, incessantly, for more than an hour and a half,
trainload after trainload of young men and women from
the banlieue was disgorged into the capital. The maidens
outnumbered the youths by about three or four to one, it
seemed to me; and yet they were one maiden, so
identically alike were they in their cloche hats and
knee-deep skirts and flesh-coloured stockings, and in
virtue of that erectly tripping gait which Paris teaches
while London inculcates an unsteady slouch. One maiden,
yet hundreds and thousands of maidens, each with a soul
of her own, and a home of her own, and earning her own
wages. Bewildering! Having seen that sight, I needed no
other.
Max is, in any case, partial to windows. He enlarges on the
allurement of girls, scenes, people seen through windows:
I have set eyes on many great men, in my time, and have
had the privilege of being acquainted with some of them
(not of knowing them well, understanding them well, for
to do that there must be some sort of greatness in
oneself). And of all the great men whom I have merely
seen the one who impressed me most was Degas. Some forty
years ago I was passing, with a friend, through the
Place Pigalle; and he, pointing up his stick to a very
tall building, pointing up to an open window au
cinquième—or
was it sixième?—said,
"There's Degas." And there, in the distance, were the
head and shoulders of a grey-bearded man in a red beret,
leaning across the sill. There Degas was, and behind
him, in there, was his studio; and behind him, there in
his old age, was his lifework; and with unaging eyes he
was, I felt sure, taking notes of "values" and what not
of the populous scene down below, regretting perhaps
(for he had never cast his net wide) the absence of any
ballet-dancers, or jockeys, or laundry-girls, or women
sponging themselves in hip-baths; but deeply, but
passionately observing. There he was, is, and will
always be for me, framed.
Max's favorite girls have what he calls "the charm of
windowhood"—the cottage girl at a small lattice window drawn
by Rossetti, Mrs. Patrick Campbell windowed in "Mélisande."
Gladstone and Disraeli, he says, were at their most
effective when they spoke through windows. The best sketch
he has ever seen of Goethe was drawn by Wilhelm Tischbein
while the great man was leaning out of a window of a Roman
inn and looking down into the street below. "It is a
graceful, a forceful, and a noble back that we see there in
that bedroom," writes Max.
Miss Jungmann brought in tea and left again, and while we
were sipping it, I returned to T. Fenning Dodworth and to
Max's fondness for writing about failures—Enoch Soames,
Savonarola Brown, Romeo Coates, and many others.
"I find failure endearing, don't you?" he said. "Touching.
And obsessive failure, from the point of view of the
non-obsessed, can be so funny that you forget that it is
touching." He reached out and took up his own copy of "Zuleika
Dobson," which was published in 1911. The volume was much
decorated by him. Among the publisher's notices printed on
the inside of the jacket was a list of books and their
authors. Max had drawn a little figure of himself standing
below this list. He is reaching up to the list with a
teacher's pointer and saying, "Perhaps you prefer one of
these?" Max stared at the list. "Do you know one of them?"
he asked.
I had to admit that none of the names, none of the titles,
meant a thing in the world to me.
"And yet," he said, "these authors agonized over their
works. There came a bright day when it was announced to them
that their books would be published. There came a day when
they were published. And now here we sit—it's not so
very long ago, is it?—and you don't know any of them,
and I myself, their contemporary, can scarcely remember
them."
I asked Max about a literary device to which he was
addicted, that of having his fictional characters constantly
involved with actual, historical ones: T. Fenning Dodworth
with Lloyd George and other statesmen and personalities of
the time; Enoch Soames with Sir William Rothenstein; Maltby
(of Maltby and Braxton) in a Sunday-morning encounter with
Arthur Balfour; the playwright Savonarola Brown appointing
him, Max, as his literary executor. In "The Happy
Hypocrite," an early-nineteenth-century allegory of good and
evil, Max uses footnotes, as if he were writing a historical
work, that refer to comments on his scapegrace hero, Lord
George Hell, by known contemporaries: Banastre Tarleton, in
an apocryphal work of his, "Contemporary Bucks," and Lord
Coleraine, in his "Correspondence"—both prominent Regency
figures. Max said, "The fantasist takes his imaginings
seriously, you know." When you wrote a fantasy, Max
believed, between the improbable premise and the still more
improbable conclusion you must be inexorably logical and
realistic. He pursued this method with "Enoch Soames" and
"The Happy Hypocrite," pegging them to actuality with his
contemporary references. On the inside back cover of his own
copy of "Zuleika Dobson" he pasted a page out of Bradshaw
(the English railway timetable), giving the hours of
departure from Liverpool Street Station of trains to
Cambridge. Around the departing hours he drew little
circles, presumably designed to make things easier for other
Zuleikas who have completed their dread work in Oxford to
get on with more of the same in Cambridge.
I went on to refer to the fact that in "Poor Romeo!," the
story of an early-nineteenth-century gentleman of means,
Robert Coates, who is known as Romeo Coates because of his
misguided ambition to play Romeo, Max has embedded in the
pathetic account references to actual memoirists of the
time. Here Max had me; here the references turned out to be
genuine. There really was a Romeo Coates, and he did play
Romeo, but the character is such a natural for Max that he
might as well have invented him. Romeo was right up Max's
street—a man obsessed with the wish to do something that he
was simply unable to do. "The lust for the footlights'
glare," Max says, "grew lurid in his mothish eye," and then
he settles down to describe Romeo's début:
The night came. Fashion, Virtue, and Intellect thronged
the house. Nothing could have been more cordial than the
temper of the Gallery. All were eager to applaud the new
Romeo. Presently, when the varlets of Verona had
brawled, there stepped into the square—what?—a
mountebank, a monstrosity. Hurrah died upon every lip.
The house was thunderstruck. . . . Those lines that were
not drowned in laughter Mr. Coates spoke in the most
foolish and extravagant manner. He cut little capers at
odd moments. He laid his hand on his heart and bowed,
now to this, now to that part of the house, always with
a grin. . . . The performance, so obviously grotesque,
was just the kind of thing to please the gods. The limp
of Hephaestus could not have called laughter so
unquenchable from their lips. It is no trifle to set
Englishmen laughing, but once you have done it, you can
hardly stop them. Act after act of the beautiful
love-play was performed without one sign of satiety from
the seers of it. The laughter rather swelled in volume.
Romeo died in so ludicrous a way that a cry of "encore"
arose and the death was actually twice repeated. At the
fall of the curtain there was prolonged applause. Mr.
Coates came forward, and the good-humored public pelted
him with fragments of the benches.
Informed by Max of Romeo's actuality, I later looked him up.
Max says, at the end of his essay, that he wishes he had
known Romeo, and I share his wish. He was very rich and
lived, says the English Dictionary of National Biography, in
extraordinary style: "His carriage, drawn by white horses,
was in shape like a kettledrum, and across the bar of his
curricle was a large brazen cock, with his motto, 'Whilst I
live I'll crow.'" He eventually played in London, and his
appearance there created such a sensation that a farce
written about him, in which a popular comedian of the time,
Charles Mathews, played Coates, had quite a success. Romeo
found himself, therefore, not only acting but being acted.
He returned to Bath, the scene of his first triumph, and
played again. But the fickle audience got tired of laughing
at him and began to hiss him. He died in a street accident
after going to the theatre, crushed between a hansom and a
private carriage. Max says of him, in summary, "As his
speeches before the curtain and his letters to the papers
show, he took himself quite seriously. Only the insane take
themselves quite seriously."
Max professed to be flattered at my thinking that he had
invented Romeo. I said it was natural, considering that he
had invented Enoch Soames and Savonarola Brown. Probably
those who haven't read anything else of Max's—except,
perhaps, "Zuleika Dobson"—know these two sad histories. They
are both masterpieces. Max's special method is beautifully
exemplified in "Enoch Soames." He begins:
When a book about the literature of the
eighteen-nineties was given by Mr. Holbrook Jackson to
the world, I looked eagerly in the index for SOAMES,
ENOCH. I had feared he would not be there. He was not
there.
Holbrook Jackson's book "The Eighteen Nineties" has a
chapter on Max—with the inevitable title "The Incomparable
Max"—and is dedicated to him. The book is a roster of
everyone who figured in the literary and art worlds of the
nineties. Max, saddened by the omission of Enoch from
Jackson's book, goes on to describe the "bolt from the blue"
that flashed down on Oxford in the summer of 1893: the
arrival of Will Rothenstein, It is a straight history of the
beginning of his friendship with Rothenstein. He tells how
Rothenstein introduced him to Aubrey Beardsley, to Chelsea,
to the Bodley Head, to Walter Sickert, and to that den of
iniquity the Café Royal. Max goes on to describe that "haunt
of intellect and daring," the famous domino room:
There, on that October evening—there, in that exuberant
vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those
opposing mirrors and upholding caryatids, with fumes of
tobacco ever rising to the painted and pagan ceiling,
and with the hum of presumably cynical conversation
broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of
dominoes shuffled on marble tables, I drew a deep
breath, and "This indeed," said I to myself, "is life!"
Max is having dinner there with Rothenstein when a shambling
fellow walks by and lingers, obviously wanting to meet
Rothenstein. "He had a thin vague beard—or rather, he had a
chin on which a large number of hairs weakly curled and
clustered to cover its retreat." This is Enoch Soames, a
poet, who has just published a little volume called
"Negations." Enoch wants to be painted by Rothenstein, but
Rothenstein snubs him. However, the fact that he has
published a book and has been to Paris impresses Max. "If
Rothenstein had not been there," Max says, "I should have
revered Soames." Soames is at work on another book. Max asks
what the title will be, and Soames says it will have no
title, for he trusts to the content to enchant the public.
Rothenstein objected that absence of title might be bad
for the sale of a book. "If," he urged, "I went into a
bookseller's and said simply 'Have you got?' or 'Have
you a copy of?' how would they know what I wanted?"
When Rothenstein refuses to draw him—it was Enoch's idea
that the drawing of himself by Rothenstein should serve as a
frontispiece for his book—Max is pained.
"Why were you so determined not to draw him?" I asked.
"Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn't
exist?"
"He is dim," I admitted. But my mot juste fell
flat. Rothenstein repeated that Soames was nonexistent.
But Max, in spite of Rothenstein's skepticism, makes you
believe in Soames' reality. He makes you believe so strongly
in Soames' aspiration to be a famous poet that you are
cheering for him to come through. Max keeps seeing Soames.
He finds out that he is a Catholic Diabolist. Max reads his
second book when it comes out—unadorned by a frontispiece by
Rothenstein. It has a title after all—"Fungoids." He quotes
several of the poems. One of them rather puzzles him:
TO
A YOUNG
WOMAN
Thou art, who hast not been!
Pale tunes irresolute
And traceries of old sounds
Blown from a rotted flute
Mingle with noise of cymbals rouged with rust,
Nor not strange forms and epicene
Lie bleeding in the dust.
Being wounded with wounds.
For this it is
That in thy counterpart
Of age-long mockeries
Thou hest not been nor art!
The poem worries Max. He writes:
There seemed to me a certain inconsistency as between
the first and last lines of this. I tried, with bent
brows, to resolve the discord. But I did not take my
failure as wholly incompatible with a meaning in Soames'
mind. Might it not rather indicate the depth of his
meaning? As for the craftsmanship, "rouged with rust"
seemed to me a fine stroke, and "nor not" instead of
"and" had a curious felicity.
How can you not believe in the reality of a writer who is
subjected to so fine an analysis by another writer? The
story of a man thirsting for immortality is carried out to
the end in ruthless fantasy. No other Catholic Diabolist had
ever to take such punishment. And Max punishes not only
Enoch but another contemporary, Bernard Shaw. After Soames
has made his deal with the Devil and been allowed to look
himself up in the reading room of the British Museum in
1997—only to find himself referred to as the subject of a
satirical essay by Max Beerbohm, and no mention whatever of
"Negations" or "Fungoids"—Enoch reports to Max on his
astonishing experience. Everybody in the Museum, he says,
was dressed as Shaw was—in Jaeger. Names had disappeared;
everyone was numbered. And the report in which Enoch read
about himself, by the Holbrook Jackson of 1997, T. K. Nupton,
was written in phonetic spelling, for which Shaw was even
then agitating and to which eventually he was to leave the
fortune that he didn't, at that moment, have. This is what
poor Soames had to struggle through:
Fr egzarmpl. a riter ov th time, naimd Max Beerbohm, hoo
woz stil alive in th twentieth senchri, rote a stauri in
wich e pautraid an immajnari karrakter kauld "Enoch
Soames"—a thurd-rait poit hoo beleevz imself a grate
jeneus. . . .
By this time, Max has made you feel so sorry for Enoch that
it is really impossible to read further what T. K. Nupton
will say about him, even aside from the pain of having to
read the sterilized English.
Writing did not, Max told me, come easily to him. He
suffered over it. "Writing was always painful," he told Inc.
"Whereas drawing I love—it comes easily to me, or did. My
hand wanted to draw. Many years ago, I found that my
caricatures were becoming likenesses. I seemed to have
mislaid my gift for dispraise. Pity crept in. So I gave up
caricaturing, except privately." He constantly rewrote,
because he could not bear to go on when he felt that what he
had already written fell short of his own standard of
perfection. "The only things I ever wrote with
joy—easily—were '"Savonarola" Brown' and the meeting between
Ibsen and Browning in 'The Christmas Garland,'" he told me.
"You see, Brown was such a bad writer that I was under no
strain. It was easy to write better than Brown."
As passionately as Enoch Soames wanted to be a poet,
Savonarola Brown wanted to be a playwright. Unlike Romeo
Coates, who could indulge his obsession to act, because he
was rich, Savonarola was poor and had to rely, like most
playwrights, on the market place. Max writes that he knew
him first when he was at school; his real name was Ladbroke,
his unimaginative parents having christened him for the
crescent on which they lived. Ladbroke dropped out of
school, and Max didn't see him for a great many years,
though he was occasionally tortured by the memory of the
ragging to which he and his schoolmates had subjected poor
Ladbroke on account of his unfortunate Christian name. Max
became drama critic for the Saturday Review, and
asked for second-night seats instead of first-night ones. He
found the audiences at second nights less showy and more
earnest. It was in this way that he ran into Brown again,
because Brown was a confirmed second-nighter.
In an entr'acte meeting, Brown confided to Max that he was
thinking of writing a play about Savonarola. "He had thought
of writing a tragedy about Sardanapalus; but the volume of
the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' in which he was going to look
up the main facts about Sardanapalus happened to open at
Savonarola." Brown was rather like that woman in Kaufman and
Hart's "You Can't Take It with You" who became a writer
because a typewriter had been delivered to her house by
mistake. For nine years, Brown kept working on the play, and
during those nine years Max kept seeking him out on second
nights to get progress reports. In this way, Max saw him
through four acts. But there was one to come, the final act,
and this Max couldn't seem to get out of him. Max was
impatient because Brown had refused to let him see the play
until it was finished. One night, Max met him and found him
rather glum. He had decided he must kill Savonarola in the
last act, and he had by that time conceived such an
affection for his protagonist that he hated to do it. As
they were walking away from the theatre, Max remonstrated
with him:
"But in a tragedy," I insisted, "the catastrophe must
be led up to, step by step. My dear Brown, the end of
the hero must be logical and rational."
"I don't see that," he said, as we crossed Piccadilly
Circus. "In actual life it isn't so. What is there to
prevent a motor-omnibus from knocking me over and
killing me at this moment?"
At that moment, by what has always seemed to me the
strangest of coincidences, and just the sort of thing
that playwrights ought to avoid, a motor-omnibus knocked
Brown over and killed him.
He had, as I afterwards learned, made a will in which he
appointed me his literary executor. Thus passed into my
hands the unfinished play by whose name he had become
known to so many people.
And this is how Max is able to present the four completed
acts of "Savonarola" to the reader. The four acts are
written in Shakespearean blank verse, some of which just
misses being good. The hero Savonarola is supported by a
distinguished cast: Dante, St. Francis of Assisi, Lucrezia
Borgia, Lorenzo de Medici, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo.
Even Pippa, in a stage direction, passes. The drama critic
Wolcott Gibbs once told me that after he read this
uncompleted tragedy all Shakespearean productions seemed
faintly funny to him.
Max knows that the one thing in the world poor Brown wanted
was a production. He offers the play to one manager after
another:
All have seen great merits in the work; and if I added
together all the various merits thus seen I should have
no doubt that "Savonarola" was the best play never
produced.
Since the managers all say they can't produce an unfinished
play, Max feels it his duty, as Brown's literary executor,
to supply a fifth act. He writes the scenario of one, which
seems to fit magically into Brown's own vein. But it doesn't
satisfy Max. Brown had endlessly reiterated to him what he
had heard—and what one still hears—from other playwrights;
namely, that they don't write the play, it is the characters
who write the play. The characters have such reality, so
much vitality, that they take over, they dictate, they tell
the author what to do. Max decides to wait for dictation
from Brown's characters:
I saw that Brown was, in comparison with me, a master.
Thinking I might possibly fare better in his method of
work than in my own, I threw the skeleton into a
cupboard, sat down, and waited to see what Savonarola
and those others would do.
They did absolutely nothing. I sat watching them, pen in
hand, ready to record their slightest movement. Not a
little finger did they raise. Yet I knew they must be
alive. Brown had always told me they were quite
independent of him. Absurd to suppose that by the
accident of his own death they had ceased to breathe. .
. . Now and then, overcome with weariness, I dozed at my
desk, and whenever I woke I felt that these rigid
creatures had been doing all sorts of wonderful things
while my eyes were shut. I felt that they disliked me.
In the end, Max throws in the sponge. He announces a
competition, open to everyone who wants to try his hand at
finishing the play. As a reward, he offers the winner a seat
for the second night.
Another failure Max took a deep interest in was an actual,
though anonymous, clergyman. From the immense realm of
Boswelliana, Max picked out a single sentence, a single puny
question put one day by a poor clergyman to Dr. Johnson, and
fixed it, in his essay called "A Clergyman," as an eternal
symbol of quenched human aspiration. The essay starts:
Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; glimpsed
and gone; as it were, a faint human hand thrust up,
never to reappear, from beneath the rolling waters of
Time, he forever haunts my memory and solicits my weak
imagination. Nothing is told of him but that once,
abruptly, he asked a question, and received an answer.
The two-line drama was played on the afternoon of April 7,
1778, in Mrs. Thrale's house. Johnson was feeling fine; he'd
had a ride in a coach, which for him was "the sum of human
felicity," and there was a good dinner in prospect, another
sum. How the poor little curate got there Max doesn't know;
Max thinks that perhaps he was attached to the neighboring
church. He should have been content just to be there,
but one can forgive him for wanting more, for wanting fame,
for wishing to make a debut, however modest, on the great
stage of Johnson's attention. Johnson was being asked by
Boswell for his opinion of the styles of the various famous
preachers of the time, whose deliveries were analyzed in the
eighteenth century much as we nowadays compare Olivier with
Gielgud, or Lunt with Guinness. Max describes the
electrifying fantasy of success that went through the little
vicar's mind as he sat there listening to Johnson:
He sits on the edge of a chair in the background. He has
colourless eyes, fixed earnestly, and a face almost as
pale as the clerical bands beneath his somewhat receding
chin. His forehead is high and narrow, his hair mouse-coloured.
His hands are clasped tight before him, the knuckles
standing out sharply. This constriction does not mean
that he is steeling himself to speak. He has no positive
intention of speaking. Very much, nevertheless, is he
wishing in the back of his mind that he could say
something—something whereat the great Doctor would turn
on him and say, after a pause for thought, "Why yes,
Sir. That is most justly observed" or "Sir, this has
never occurred to me. I thank you"—thereby fixing the
observer forever high in the esteem of all.
What did happen is almost too cruel:
"We have no sermons addressed to the passions, that are
good for anything; if you mean that kind of eloquence
[Johnson says, according to Boswell].
"A CLERGYMAN,
whose name I do not recollect: Were not Dodd's sermons
addressed to the passions?
"JOHNSON:
They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they
may."
Max continues:
The suddenness of it! Bang!—and the rabbit that had
popped from its burrow was no more. . . . In Johnson's
massive and magnetic presence only some very remarkable
man, such as Mr. Burke, was sharply distinguishable from
the rest. Others might, if they had something in them,
stand out slightly. This unfortunate clergyman may have
had something in him, but I judge that he lacked the
gift of seeming as if he had.
That was it. The clergyman was annihilated. He had had no
gift of selling himself, and Max's sympathy always went to
the great unsold.
Max never pretended to be as interested in success as he was
in failure. In fact, it was impossible for him to pretend to
feel anything he didn't feel. He could not pretend to admire
what he didn't admire, or understand what he didn't
understand. He has an essay, "On Speaking French," that
describes an awful experience which, perhaps, cured him
forever of pretending:
To listen and from time to time murmur "c'est vrai" may
seem safe enough; yet there is danger even here. I wish
I could forget a certain luncheon in the course of which
Mme. Chose (that brilliant woman) leaned suddenly across
the table to me, and, with great animation, amidst a
general hush, launched at me a particularly swift flight
of winged words. With pensively narrowed eyes, I uttered
my formula when she ceased. This formula she repeated,
in a tone even more pensive than mine. "Mais je ne le
connais pas," she then loudly exclaimed. "Je ne connais
pas même le nom. Dites-moi de ce jeune homme." She had,
as it presently turned out, been asking me which of the
younger French novelists was most highly thought of by
English critics; so that her surprise at never having
heard of the gifted young Sévré was natural enough.
At a time when Yeats was fairly generally revered, Max
admitted that he was bothered by the poet's preoccupation
with the occult. In a sketch on Yeats, written in 1914, he
says that he felt always "rather uncomfortable [with Yeats],
as though I had submitted myself to a mesmerist who somehow
didn't mesmerize me." Often, he says, Yeats engendered "a
mood in a vacuum." When Max first met Yeats, the latter was
full of the cult of Diabolism, to the Catholic branch of
which Soames was committed. Later, it was spiritualism. In
this same essay, Max uttered the blasphemy that the poetry
of Tom Moore conveyed more of Ireland to him' than Yeats's
did. Max was not ashamed to tell me that Freud, too, was
beyond his range. There were already some distinguished
visitors in the realm of his admitted incomprehension. In an
essay called "Laughter," he had written:
M. Bergson, in his well-known essay on this theme, says
. . . well, he says many things; but none of these,
though I have just read them, do I dearly remember, nor
am I sure that in the act of reading I understood any of
them. That is the worst of these fashionable
philosophers—or rather, the worst of me. Somehow I never
manage to read them till they are just going out of
fashion, and even then I don't seem able to cope with
them. About twelve years ago, when every one suddenly
talked to me about Pragmatism and William James, I found
myself moved by a dull but irresistible impulse to try
Schopenhauer, of whom, years before that, I had heard
that he was the easiest reading in the world, and the
most exciting and amusing. I wrestled with Schopenhauer
for a day or so, in vain. Time passed; M. Bergson
appeared "and for his hour was lord of the ascendant;" I
tardily tackled William James. I bore in mind, as I
approached him, the testimonials that had been lavished
on him by all my friends. Alas, I was insensible to his
thrillingness. His gaiety did not make me gay. His
crystal clarity confused me dreadfully. I could make
nothing of William James. And now, in the fullness of
time, I have been floored by M. Bergson.
Max was floored also by some of T. S. Eliot and the
"obscure" school of poetry in general. He referred to it as
"the woozie-poozie school." He was enchanted by Eliot
personally. "He is very modest and most impressive in
appearance," he told me, "with the look of a great man,
don't you know, but as for some of his poetry I can neither
read nor understand it." Max liked various of the Georgian
poets—Siegfried Sassoon especially. Of Robert Graves he said
to me, as if confiding a personal and probably—considering
the trend—an unbelievable idiosyncrasy, "My joy in him is
not diminished because he is intelligible." Max preferred
Wordsworth 's sonnets to those of Shakespeare. He said that
often he had no idea what Shakespeare's sonnets meant, and
he felt that many of their passionate admirers had very
little idea what they meant, either. Max didn't take any
more kindly to some contemporary art. Certain of its
manifestations seemed to him departures from sanity. Sir
Edward Marsh once wrote to Max on behalf of the Contemporary
Art Society "to find out whether there is any chance that
you would fall in with a strong desire they have formed
(prepare yourself for a shock) to commission Graham
Sutherland to paint your portrait—I expect you have heard of
his portraits of Willie Maugham and Max Beaverbrook, both of
which seem to me masterpieces. . . . I understand that in
Continental opinion he now ranks with Henry Moore, who for
the first time has put English sculpture on the map of
Europe. —Besides which he is a most charming fellow." Max
was later to express himself to me about Sutherland's
portrait of Maugham. Max said, "Maugham looks in it as if he
had died of torture." Having no wish to die that way, Max
wrote to Marsh refusing the honor. "My dear Eddie, I, with
my pencil, have been in my time a ruthless monstrifier of
men," he wrote. "And the bully is, proverbially, always a
coward. . . . 'Henry Moore,' you say, 'has put English
sculpture on the map of Europe!' This being so, the younger
Pitt would not now say 'Roll up that map!' It has been
squashed down flat for ever."
But what floored Max more than anything else was the
Freudian vocabulary that he kept increasingly hearing and
reading. The psychoanalytic argot his younger visitors so
glibly dispensed seemed to imply a mastery over the secrets
of the mind and the riddles of motive; these people, he
thought, were persuaded that vocabulary was an adequate
substitute for understanding. "They are so spendthrift,
don't you know, with complexes," Max said. "They fling them
about." As Max and I were finishing our tea, the
conversation got back to psychiatry, and from there we went
on to Freudian jargon. "Just the other day," he said, "I was
reading a biography of Kipling. Kipling liked to have high
hedges around his country house, at Rottingdean. The
biographer made a great thing of that. He traced it back to
Kipling's fight with Balestier in Vermont; he interpreted
the hedge in the light of that, and came to a bursting
conclusion that Kipling had a privacy complex. Well, what
fastidious man doesn't? I had to put the book down. I could
read no more of it. And then, in a biography of Tennyson, I
read an extraordinary interpretation of his elegiac poem on
his friend Hallam—I forbear to tell you of that! And
what do you think of this psychoanalytic interpretation of
Henry James's 'The Turn of the Screw'—that the whole thing
was a fantasy in the mind of the governess to alleviate some
psychic disturbance in her, that it was the
projection of some morbid complex within herself? Nonsense!
Henry James was simply trying to write a powerful mystery
story, that's all."
Miss Jungmann came in. She suggested that Max had been up
long enough. "And besides," she said, "I have been invited
to dinner! Unless"—she turned to me—"you have changed your
mind."
I said I hadn't.
"Do you mind," I asked Max, "if I take Miss Jungmann out to
dinner?"
Max reached out his hand to me. He smiled. "Not at all," he
said. "I have a giving-away complex!"
(This is the fourth of a series of seven articles.) |
