|
The hero of J. D. Salinger's novel "The Catcher in the Rye"
judges authors by the simple test of whether he has an
impulse, after reading something, to call the author up. It
seems to me that all my life I have felt like calling up Max
Beerbohm. I first made Max's acquaintance, one might say, in
the Public Library on Elm Street, in Worcester,
Massachusetts, when I was a boy, and I later deepened it in
the Widener Library, at Harvard, so that long before the
Maximilian Society was organized by his devotees on his
seventieth birthday, in London, I was already a Maximilian.
When, as a young man making my first visit to Italy, I
looked out the window of my compartment on the Paris-Rome
Express and caught a flashing sight of the station sign
"RAPALLO" (the Paris-Rome Express does not stop in Rapallo
unless you arrange it beforehand), I felt a quick affinity
for the place because I knew that Max Beerbohm lived there.
I felt like getting off, but the train was going much too
fast. On subsequent trips to Rome, I always looked for the
flicker of that evocative station sign. That I would one day
actually get off at Rapallo for a prearranged meeting with
its renowned inhabitant never remotely occurred to me. But
life is seething with improbabilities, and so, in the summer
of 1952, it came about.
Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm, probably because from the
beginning he signed his caricatures "Max," was known
everywhere by that brief, familiar name, but this does not
mean that he was hail-fellow-well-met. Many years ago, I
learned from old friends of his that with age he had become
more and more reclusive. I didn't know his telephone number,
but even if I had known it, and used it, there would have
been no likelihood that he would run to answer the phone. He
tolerated the instrument, but he didn't coddle it. Moreover,
he habitually didn't answer letters. Sir William Rothenstein,
one of Max's closest friends, told in his "Men and Memories"
how he used to address his letters to Max, so little did he
hope for an answer: "Sir Max Beerbohm, The Caves of Silence,
Rapallo." Once, one of Max's friends, reproaching him for
the intervals in his correspondence, said, "No wonder people
think you are dead, Max. No one ever hears from you." "I am
not dead, am I?" inquired Max, always on the qui
vive for interesting information. This bit of dialogue
did nothing to change Max's ways. As long as he could be
alive, he was rather pleased to be thought dead. I assumed
that Max enjoyed his reputation of exaggerated mortality
because it kept visitors away; I was reconciled to the
austerity of "respecting Max's privacy," as his friends put
it, and to whizzing through Rapallo for the rest of my life.
Then, one day, although I had not called Max up, or even
written to him, I heard from him. He had liked
something I had written, and wrote me a warm letter about
it. This letter led to an exchange of letters between us,
and to Max's inviting me to visit him. On my next trip to
Italy, my railway ticket read, "Paris-Rapallo." It was the
first of many visits, and the beginning of a friendship. The
first time I called on Max was on the eve of his eightieth
birthday, four years before he died. It is uncommon, I
believe, to make a new friend at eighty. In fact, even
though I was twenty years younger than Max, I was not on the
lookout for new friendships myself. Yet somehow the
conditions, if not the chronology, were right for a new
friendship. During these last years, Max was frail and
tended to isolate himself. "I am what the writers of
obituary notices call 'an interesting link with the past,'"
he had said on one of several B.B.C. broadcasts he made when
he was in London during the Second World War. But he had an
immense and lively interest in the present, and especially
the present in America. And to Max I seemed to arrive
bearing reports of the American present. He couldn't hear
enough about the New York theatre and the personalities and
styles of contemporary American writers and artists. He even
wanted to hear about the fantasies of Senate investigations;
he confessed to a "macabre" interest in Senator McCarthy.
Max was, of course, one of the most amusing talkers who ever
lived; he was also, to use one of his own words, one of the
most amusable listeners. To my delight, I found that I was
able to amuse him. The atmosphere generated by mutual
amusability was one that enabled Max to talk freely about
everything and everybody; it made conversation easy. Because
I would like to set his side of our conversation down, to
record it as fully as possible, I shall on occasion quote
myself, and for doing that I hope I'll be forgiven. I had
the good fortune, late in my own life and later in Max's, to
filch this clear friendship from the welter of improvisation
and uncontrolled circumstance that engulfs us, and now I
wish to recall some of the hours we spent together.
In London, in the summer of 1934, I bought from Sir William
Rothenstein a charming pastel he had done of Max at the
Villino Chiaro, Max's home in Rapallo. This pastel has hung
in my various workrooms ever since. It shows Max, a
diaphanous slight figure, leaning over the parapet of the
flagged terrace of the Villino and contemplating the
Mediterranean. Great vases of mimosa are set in the corners
of the terrace; behind Max is the door to the blue-walled
study in which he finished writing "Zuleika Dobson" and
"Seven Men" and in which he drew innumerable caricatures. I
remembered Rothenstein's saying, "Max presumably goes to the
terrace to work, but usually he does what I show him
doing—just contemplates." The drawing has been, through the
years, a comfort, a delicious justification for doing
nothing. Strenuous writers with a big output might find it
enervating; for me it has been a palliative. It was clever
of Rothenstein to make Max's figure diaphanous; that was a
way of conveying the impression of incorporeality one always
got from Max. I have often reflected as I looked at the
relaxed figure leaning over the parapet that Max must
occasionally have straightened up, crossed the terrace, and
immured himself in that workroom. He must have sat at a desk
and exhaled some writing. But the mere possibility of such
exertion seems remote in Rothenstein's drawing. It is a
study in contemplative—even sensuous—immobility. It conveys
the spirit of a man who knows how precious the passing
moment is, containing, as it does, an expanse of sea and
sun, of mountains in a blue haze, of villas purring at the
water's edge—who cherishes too intensely this evanescence,
this miracle of sight and sound, to replace it with the
vulgar self-assertion of work.
In June of 1952, sitting in my compartment on what I now
thought of as the Paris-Rapallo Express, staring out at the
calm, innocently blue sea that had drowned Shelley, speeding
by the summer resorts that line the coast—the
rainbow-colored houses, the almond, lemon, and orange
trees—some lines of verse that I had learned in German class
at the Classical High School in Worcester came droning
through my mind:
Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blüh'n,
Im dunkeln Laub die Goldorangen glüh'n,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,
Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht.
Kennst du es wohl, kennst du es wohl?
Dahin! dahin möcht' ich mit dir,
O mein Geliebter, zieh'n,
Dahin! dahin mit dir, o mein Geliebter, zieh'n.
We had been made to sing this in Schumann's setting. The
teacher told us of the "Drang" toward Italy, with its
sun and colors, that had been irresistible to northern
Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Had
Max also obeyed that Drang when he quit London for
this ineffable shore? Suddenly remembering that those lines
were by Goethe, I opened my travelling bookcase, took out
Max's book of essays "And Even Now," and read again the
slyest, perhaps, of all his pieces, and surely one of the
most Maxian—"Quiz Imperfectum," which he wrote in 1918.
Reading it now, I wondered how my nice teacher in Worcester,
who dilated so expansively and minutely on Goethe's
greatness, would have responded to Max's insinuation that,
however great Goethe was, he was also a bit of a bore. I
shuddered.
Max starts by sighing for a museum of unfinished
masterpieces:
Mr. Pickwick and the Ancient Mariner are valued friends
of ours, but they do not preoccupy us Like Edwin Drood
or Kubla Khan. Had that revolving chair at Gad's Hill
become empty but a few weeks later than it actually did,
or had Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the act of setting
down his dream about the Eastern potentate not
been interrupted by "a person on business from Porlock"
and so lost the thread of the thing for ever, from two
what delightful glades for roaming in would our fancy be
excluded! The very globe we live on is a far more
fascinating sphere than it can have been when men
supposed that men like themselves would be on it to the
end of time It is only since we heard what Darwin had to
say, only since we have had to accept as improvisible
what lies far ahead, that the Book of Life has taken so
strong a hold on us and "once taken up, cannot" as the
reviewers say, "readily be laid down." The work doesn't
strike us as a masterpiece yet, certainly; but who knows
that it isn't—that it won't be, judged as a whole?
Among the uncompleted masterpieces Max wants in his
museum—where "the public shall throng to steep itself in the
splendour of possibilities"—are Penelope's web, the
"half-done marvel of the Night and Morning" of Michelangelo,
the original designs for the Tower of Babel, the draft made
by Mr. Asquith for a reformed House of Lords, and the notes
jotted down by the sometime German Emperor for a
proclamation from Versailles to the citizens of Paris. He
thirsts for the score of an early unfinished Beethoven
symphony and for the manuscript of Racine's fragmentary "Iphigénie."
The unfinished score is his favorite Beethoven symphony, in
preference to the completed nine, and his longing for the
partial canvas of Whistler's "Miss Connie Gilchrist" would
he unbearable were it not for the existence of an incomplete
masterpiece that makes him forget any others. This is an
unfinished portrait of Goethe by a painter named Wilhelm
Tischbein, who was Goethe's cicerone
when the latter made his famous and highly documented tour
of Italy. Max dotes on Tischbein. He dotes on him
particularly in relation to Goethe. Where life throws the
lion and the mouse together, Max's heart is invariably
captured by the mouse, and in this case Tischbein is the
mouse. Max takes you into his confidence about Tischbein:
Wilhelm Tischbein is hardly a name to conjure with,
though in his day, as a practitioner in the "historical"
style, and as a rapturous resident in Rome, Tischbein
did great things; big things, at any rate. He did crowds
of heroes in helmets looked down at by gods on clouds;
he did centaurs leaping ravines; Sabine women; sieges of
Troy. And he did this portrait of Goethe. At least he
began it. Why didn't he finish it? That is a problem as
to which one can but hazard guesses, reading between the
lines of Goethe's letters. The great point is that it
never was finished. . . . Goethe has more than once been
described as "the perfect man." He was assuredly a
personage on the great scale, in the grand manner,
gloriously balanced, rounded. . . . Endearing though
failure always is, we grudge no man a moderately
successful career, and glory itself we will wink at if
it befall some thoroughly good fellow. . . . Of Goethe
we are shy for such reasons as that he was never
injudicious, never lazy, always in his best form—and
always in love with some lady or another just so much as
was good for the development of his soul and his art,
but never more than that by a tittle. . . . Yet, in the
course of that pageant, his career, there did happen
just one humiliation—one thing that needed to be hushed
up. There Tischbein's defalcation was; a chip in the
marble, a flaw in the crystal, just one thread loose in
the great grand tapestry.
Max, reading between the lines of Goethe's letters, goes on
to develop the theory that what happened between Tischbein
and Goethe was a comedy, which began with Tischbein's
proposal that Goethe pose for a heroic portrait sitting on a
fallen obelisk while draped in a white mantle, and ended
with Tischbein's abandoning Goethe, the obelisk, and the
portrait in order to pursue the young and pretty Emma Hart.
Miss Hart then lived in Naples and managed the household of
the English Ambassador, Sir William Hamilton. She also
managed to be more attractive to Tischbein than Goethe was.
Tischbein began to play a tantalizing game with Goethe,
which is exactly what Miss Hart was doing with Tischbein. At
one point, Tischbein returned to Rome to go on with Goethe's
portrait. Goethe, happy, resumed his seat on the obelisk. He
was very comfortable on it when Tischbein skipped out on him
again to go back to Naples and to Miss Hart. The incident
knocked Goethe out. It knocks Max out also:
Incredible! We stare aghast, as in the presence of some
great dignitary from behind whom, by a ribald hand, a
chair is withdrawn when he is in the act of sitting
down. Tischbein had, as it were, withdrawn the obelisk.
I sat, with the book in my lap, watching the flying
Zitronen blüh'n.
Thinking of Goethe, Tischbein, Beerbohm, and posterity, I
began to feel faintly apprehensive. Was I intruding on Max's
privacy? Was I an intruder from posterity? As the phrase
"intruder from posterity" occurred in my mind, quotation
marks formed around it. Where had I read it? It tantalized
me, but only for a moment. I picked up "And Even Now" again,
and turned to the essay "No. 2. The Pines," where I quickly
found it. That's what Max felt himself to be when, in 1899,
he made his first visit to Swinburne, in Putney. Max's
description of his own tribulation before ringing
Swinburne's doorbell rather bucked me up. He had sent a
little book of his to a friend of Swinburne's, and had got
an invitation to come to lunch. When Max received the
invitation, he felt as if he had been asked to meet
Catullus.
On the day appointed "I came as one whose feet half
linger." It is but a few steps from the railway-station
in Putney High Street to No. 2. The Pines. I had
expected a greater distance to the sanctuary—a walk in
which to compose my mind and prepare myself for
initiation. I laid my hand irresolutely against the gate
of the bleak trim front-garden, I withdrew my hand, I
went away. Out here were all the aspects of common
modern life. In there was Swinburne. A butcher-boy went
by, whistling. He was not going to see Swinburne. He
could afford to whistle. I pursued my dilatory course up
the slope of Putney, but at length it occurred to me
that unpunctuality would after all be an imperfect
expression of reverence, and I retraced my footsteps.
No. 2—prosaic inscription! But as that front-door closed
behind me I had the instant sense of having slipped away
from the harsh light of the ordinary and contemporary
into the dimness of an odd, august past. Here, in this
dark hall, the past was the present. Here loomed vivid
and vital on the walls those women of Rossetti whom I
had known but as shades. Familiar to me in small
reproductions by photogravure, here they themselves
were, life-sized, "with curled-up lips and amorous hair"
done in the original warm crayon, all of them intently
looking down on me while I took off my overcoat—all
wondering who was this intruder from posterity.
The train slowed down at Rapallo just as Max was taking off
his overcoat in Swinburne's front hall. It was a
considerable relief to realize that Max had been as edgy
when about to meet Swinburne as I was when about to meet
Max. Intruder or not, I got off the train and asked a
taximan to drive me to the Excelsior Hotel.
At the Excelsior, I quickly tried to establish myself with
Signor Turco, the concierge. I had travelled enough in
Europe to know how important it is to get on the right side
of the concierge. Signor Turco is an impressive figure. Tall
and solid, yet agile, he has the easy authority of a man who
knows he is master of all the intricacies of his trade.
Turco, I found out later, is the president of the Italian
Society of the Golden Keys. The Golden Key is the
conciergish symbol. Turco lives on his presidential eminence
comfortably and with humor; I eventually got to calling him
Il Presidente. As a short cut to ingratiation, I let
him know casually that I was in Rapallo to see Max Beerbohm.
Turco has an expressive face, with lively dark eyes, but it
expressed nothing when I made this portentous announcement.
It developed that he had never heard of Max. This ignorance
seemed to me astonishing, considering that Max had moved to
Rapallo in 1910 and had, except when he returned to England
during the wars, been living there ever since. The year
before, I had travelled by car from Venice to the French
Riviera to visit Somerset Maugham. When the French customs
man at the frontier asked my destination and the purpose of
my visit, and I told him, he at once gestured to a colleague
who was examining my luggage to close the bags. That was
that! I reflected on the curious paradox that although Max
had been well known in the Elm Street Public Library in
Worcester in 1910, he was not known by the concierge of the
leading hotel in his adopted town in 1952. If Max had
transplanted himself to Rapallo to achieve privacy, he had
certainly achieved it.
My room had a balcony, and I stepped out to look at the
town, the bay, and the surrounding mountains. I saw the same
view that Max was staring at in Rothenstein's pastel in my
workroom in New York. I took out Max's letter and read it
again. It was written in pencil, in the calligraphy with
which I had long been familiar, from the legends that
accompany his caricatures. This letter and the ones I
received from him subsequently take a curious and invariable
form; the paragraphs balloon outward on the left-hand side,
the first line short, the second a little longer, and the
widest line at dead center; then the lines begin to draw in
again, so that the left side of each paragraph makes a
perfect crescent. The letter was written, on the stationery
of the Villino Chiaro, from a Catholic hospice that took
paying guests and that he was temporarily living in, on
Montallegro, outside Rapallo, and it concluded as follows:
I am in weak health, and the air down in Rapallo has
been stifling, and I am therefore on this higher and
more salubrious level—which is reachable by motorcar or
(in 6 minutes or so) by a funicular railway. I am looked
after with very great care and kindness by Miss
Elizabeth Jungmann, of whom you will have heard. I am
already better for having come from the above address to
the far abover one where I am now.
Will you please telephone to her saying when you could
come to luncheon or to dinner?
I telephoned to Montallegro and asked for Miss Jungmann, who
had been Max's secretary since Max's wife, Florence, died,
the year before. She was most gracious, and said that Max
would be very happy if I could come to lunch the next day.
She gave me instructions on how to get there, and we
exchanged forward-looking courtesies. In Paris, on the day I
left, I had had lunch with an old friend of mine from
Hollywood, a cultivated film scenarist and humorist. When I
told him where I was going, he asked me to convey his thanks
to Max, because he, Max, had paid for my friend's education,
in Philadelphia. I inquired how this long-range philanthropy
had come about, and he told me. There was a rich
Philadelphia bibliophile who was very eager to obtain the
original manuscript of "Zuleika Dobson." Knowing that my
friend, then a college student, was more literate than he
was, and wishing to give the young man a business
opportunity, the collector asked him to become the
intermediary between himself and Max. My friend wrote to Max
to ask whether this manuscript was for sale and how much.
Max wrote a polite letter—decorated with a few pencil
drawings—telling him that he had no idea what to ask and
suggesting that his London publisher might know. The patron
bought this letter on the spot. My friend saw a new way of
life looming; he kept writing to Max and getting short but
decorated replies. He did not take up Max's suggestion about
writing to his London publisher, because he feared that this
might terminate the negotiations. The bibliophile never got
the manuscript of "Zuleika," but he did acquire all of Max's
adorned letters, and my friend was able to complete his
education. I wondered whether Max might enjoy hearing the
story.
Turco arranged for a taxi-driver named Charlie to be
assigned to me during my stay in Rapallo, knowing that I
spoke scarcely a word of Italian and that Charlie did speak
a kind of English. Charlie, a chunky little man with
bright-red cheeks, had once worked in Pittsburgh and now had
two married daughters living in the Bronx. The trip by car
to the hospice is breathtakingly perilous. Montallegro
seemed to me, as we were climbing it, to be the highest
mountain in the world. We made it through a terrific
thunderstorm that shut out everything but the very edges of
the abysses we skirted; they seemed bottomless, and the
mountain itself topless. We finally got there, however, and
on time. The hospice—a modest two-story stucco house fronted
by a yard—looked forlorn. I made my way across the yard,
choosing the lesser puddles, and pushed the door open. In
the lobby were some busy nuns and some cooped-up children of
guests. I made my presence known. At the same moment, a tall
woman came up and introduced herself as Miss Jungmann. She
apologized for the weather. She was stricken that the view
she had intended to show me of the valley below, which, she
assured me, was "like a valley in the Bible," should have
been made invisible by the awful torrent. I told her that I
could easily dispense with it, that the view I had come for
was of Max. At this, as if in reward for my having said
something that pleased her, she offered me a Cinzano and led
me to a sofa beneath one of the streaming windows. "Darling
Max," she said. "He hasn't been at all well. He'll be down
in a few minutes. He is so looking forward to seeing you. We
hardly ever sec anyone these days, you know."
The Cinzanos arrived, and as we sipped them I got a chance
to observe Miss Jungmann. In her middle fifties, she was not
only tall but very strong-looking, with clearly defined
features, fine blue-gray eyes, and thick brown hair slightly
touched with gray. Miss Jungmann told me that, without Max's
knowledge, she was making certain changes in the interior of
the Villino for his convenience, and she wished these
changes to be completed before she brought him back. "Max
hates changes," she said. "Any changes. But I know
that he will be more comfortable after he gets used to them,
and then he will forget that they are changes. Poor Max, he
doesn't know anything about practical matters at all; he's
never so much as had a lira in his hand. Nor does he speak
Italian. I had a job in the Foreign Office in London, but I
gave it up in a minute—there was never any question in my
mind—when I felt that Max needed me. It is wonderful to be
able to do things for him."
I said I could understand that.
"The trouble is, you see, that the heat in Rapallo in the
summer is unbearable, and in the winter it is so cold. The
heating in the Villino is inadequate. I have thought of
putting in a new heating system, but that would be so very
expensive. We can't afford it."
I suggested electric heaters.
"I've thought of that," said Miss Jungmann, "but the current
is too weak. The town doesn't do much about supplying
current."
We seemed to have reached an impasse on the heating problem
in Rapallo in the winter.
Miss Jungmann said, "Max told me how distressed he was that
you should be coming on such a day as this. And he is
worried about the lunch, because"—her voice dropped, so that
no passing nun would hear—"the food here isn't very good."
I said that the lunch didn't matter at all, that I would be
perfectly content just to listen to Max.
"Max," Miss Jungmann responded quickly, "says that he
doesn't like listeners who never talk and talkers who never
listen."
This came out with such precision that I knew it was a
direct quote. My heart sank. I had been prepared just to
listen. Miss Jungmann's remark had the effect of a red flag,
waved warningly on the very edge of the declivity of boredom
down which, at any cost, I must not let Max slide.
I gradually discovered Miss Jungmann's story. She had been
for many years the secretary of the German playwright
Gerhart Hauptmann. Hauptmann lived en prince; he had
three homes—one in Germany, one on an island in the Baltic,
and one, rented, in Rapallo. "Hauptmann loved Rapallo," Miss
Jungmann said. "Rothenstein, on a visit here, introduced Max
to Hauptmann. That is how I met Max. We used to have such
good times. But then the war came and it all ended. I got a
job with the British Foreign Office."
I remarked on how lucky it was for Max that he had her to
look after him, and inquired how it had come about.
Miss Jungmann laughed. "Oh, Max! I always adored him when
Hauptmann was alive. Hauptmann adored him, too. Max used to
call me Diana. . . ." Her voice trailed off for a moment, in
memories of the happy past. "Well, you know, Florence became
very ill. She was ill for a long time. Everybody said, 'What
will become of Max when Florence dies?' I made up my mind. I
dropped everything. I came to the Villino. There Max was,
sitting before the little fireplace in the Villino—you'll
see it when you visit us there. I said to Max, 'Max, if
anything happens, you have only to call me and, wherever I
am, whatever I'm doing, I'll come the moment I hear from
you—the moment.' He said, 'Oh, Elizabeth, that's
awfully nice of you, it's most tremendously kind of you.'
Then I went back to London. When Florence was dying, and the
time came for me to return to the Villino, I found Max
sitting where I had left him sitting. There were tears in
his eyes. Three hours later, Florence died. I have never
left Max since that day.”
Miss Jungmann jumped up. "But here he is. Darling Max!"
I stood up also. Walking down the stairs, slowly, was a
frail, elegant little figure. One hand slid along the
balustrade; the other carried a cane. It was hot and close
in the room—a bit steamy from the downpour and one felt like
taking one's jacket off, but Max was dressed
à quatre épingles,
in the style of 1910. He wore a double-breasted suit of gray
flannel with a primrose sheen, and a low-cut vest that had
wide, soft lapels. On his head was a stiff straw hat set at
a rakish angle. His costume suggested that he was going for
a promenade on a fashionable boulevard in Nice; it defied
the facts of his present environment—an isolated house on a
mountaintop in a driving rain. Also, he was wearing neat,
well-fitting patent-leather pumps and white socks, and these
contradicted any ambulatory ambitions his suit may have had.
Miss Jungmann and I walked to the foot of the stairs,
waiting for him. Since Max, concentrated on his descent, did
not look at us until he reached the floor, I was able to
observe him. He looked as I had imagined he would look; his
looks were just right for him. There was no frailty in his
face. His skin was pinkish and clear; it did not have at all
the parchmenty look that the skins of old men often have, as
if held in place by a fixative. His mustache was white and
trim, his forehead serene. But what struck me was his eyes.
I knew those eyes. I had seen those eyes. Where? Whose? Then
I remembered. Some years before, 1 had seen a colored
photograph of Max as a child of six or seven—Max Minimus. I
had been struck, in the photograph, also, by the eyes—blue,
candid, inquiring, slightly protuberant, innocent. They were
the same eyes; it was the same look.
Max smiled at me when he reached the bottom step. We
exchanged greetings. Max's voice also was what I had
expected—beautifully modulated, soft yet edged, and with a
vibration of exquisite courtesy. His diction was lapidary.
He made one aware of how beautiful spoken English can sound.
Max put his hat and cane on a chair, and we went into the
dining room, a bleak refectory. Miss Jungmann talked about
the weather; Max suggested that perhaps there was nothing to
be said about it that wasn't readily observable. A waitress
came up and consulted Miss Jungmann about the order, in
Italian, which Miss Jungmann spoke perfectly. Max, with an
experienced look at me, said that this ceremony occurred
twice daily—at lunch and at dinner—and that while there was
an illusion of choice, actually there was very little
choice. "The food, I am afraid, is inevitable," he said.
Remembering Miss Jungmann's briefing—that Max liked
listeners who talked—I jumped in. Before I left New York,
having found Max's books unobtainable except in libraries, I
discussed with a friend the possibility of getting all of
Max's works together in a Modern Library Giant. I now told
Max about this project. I explained to him that there were
Giant Faulkners, Giant Hemingways, and so on.
"How would you like to be a Giant, Sir Max?" I asked.
"I should have to get an entirely new wardrobe," he said
regretfully, with the air of a man who already had all the
clothes he wanted. "Many people have tried to make a success
of me," he added, by way of apology for having doused a
well-meant effort. "It cannot be done. Lord Northcliffe was
one of those who tried. He failed."
I inquired about the details of this, and learned that Lord
Northcliffe had believed in Max, and had sent him to Italy,
in 1906, to write pieces for the Daily Mail, and that
Max had gone and done them, and Northcliffe had printed
them, but they were no good. Max hadn't liked them and, of
the ten he wrote, had printed only parts of two of them in a
book. But at least he had discovered Italy, and had
determined on that visit to come one day and live there.
The talk veered to writing and publishing and making a
living by writing. I decided to tell him the story of my
friend the scenarist. Max became very animated. "Would you
like to see a publisher's statement?" he asked, and turned
to Miss Jungmann. "Elizabeth! Do get that publisher's
statement that came from Knopf."
Miss Jungmann rose and left the table.
"Mr. Knopf has had the intrepidity to reissue a book of my
essays called 'Yet Again,' " Max said.
I said that I had just been reading his later book of
essays, "And Even Now," on the train. I ventured into a
story about Goethe that had been told me by Franz Werfel.
The greatest of the German annotators of Goethe had
annotated a new edition of Goethe's autobiography. After
Goethe's confession "With her, for the first time in my
life, I really fell in love!," the scholarly editor had put
an asterisk that drew you to an authoritative footnote:
"Here Goethe was in error." Max chuckled. Whenever he
chuckled, his narrow shoulders shook with mirth. He took
time off to laugh; he devoted himself to it. And his eyes
held you while he laughed.
"Thackeray, you know, said that an audience he had with
Goethe was like a visit to the dentist," Max said. "'If
Goethe is a god,' he said, 'I'm sure I'd rather go to the
other place.'"
Miss Jungmann returned with the publisher's statement.
Obviously, Max couldn't wait to show it to me. "There's
a publisher's statement!" he carolled as he handed it to me.
His soft but penetrating voice conveyed the jubilance of an
author whose book has just been accepted by the
Book-of-the-Month Club. Prepared for astronomical figures, I
stared at the statement. On the right-hand side was an
unbroken column of zeros. "Not one copy!" crowed Max in
triumph. "NOT ONE!" It was an understandable paean from a
man who cherishes privacy.
As Giantism didn't appeal to Max, I tried another tack. I
spoke to him about an undertaking in which a friend of mine,
Wolcott Gibbs, had been for some time passionately engaged
the preparation of a stage version of Max's novel about
Oxford, "Zuleika Dobson." As Max knew, I said, Gibbs was a
devotee of his writing, and was also, as Max himself had
been, a well-known drama critic. With all the kindness in
the world, Max was bearish about this undertaking, too. He
was aware of it, he said, but he was not optimistic about
it. He felt, he said, a bond of sympathy with a fellow drama
critic, and he asked me to advise Gibbs that the attempt to
dramatize "Zuleika" was bound to be a failure. "One of my
books, 'The Happy Hypocrite,' I dramatized," he said "It was
produced by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, as a curtain-raiser. My
friend William Archer turned traitor"—Max smiled at me—"and
condemned it in the London World. He condemned it in
two columns; the critique was longer than the poor piece
itself, don't you know. To amuse him, and to avenge my
ruffled feelings, I did a caricature of him, which I sent
him." I was familiar with this caricature. It is called
"Breaking a Butterfly," and shows Archer, a blindfolded
entomologist, pushing a wheel and aimlessly waving a
butterfly net to capture a butterfly that has flown far
behind him. The legend reads, "My dear W.A. Breaking a
butterfly on a wheel is all very well, but you must 'first
catch your' butterfly! Yours ever, Max."
"Well, as a curtain-raiser 'The Happy Hypocrite' did fairly
well," Max went on, "but years later Ivor Novello, satiated
with success, determined to play Lord George Hell, the
hero-villain of 'The Happy Hypocrite.' Clemence Dane made a
full evening's version of it. Novello received great praise,
but he had to be content with that. The financial report of
Novello's earnings"—Max leaned forward, somewhat excited, as
if financial statements were the medium in which he
flourished—"read something like this: '1928, profit,
thirty-five thousand pounds: 1930, fifty thousand pounds;
1934, sixty-five thousand pounds.'" He paused to let this
formidable figure sink in. "And then—'The Happy Hypocrite.'
The unfamiliar spectre—loss. Forty-three pounds eleven
shillings"—his voice dropped to an awed and reverential
whisper—"and tuppence." Max leaned back, elated at having
worked up to this superb climax.
After lunch, Max and Miss Jungmann and I sat in the rather
bleak lobby of the hospice. I referred to a letter Max had
written to Bohun Lynch, who subsequently included it in a
biography he wrote called "Max Beerbohm in Perspective."
Probably no subject has ever written more discouragingly to
a prospective biographer. The letter is dated Villino Chiaro,
Rapallo, June 18, 1921, and begins:
DEAR
BOHUN
LYNCH,
—
The sky is very blue here this morning, as indeed it
usually is, and your letter came like a bolt from it.
After I had read the first 2 or 3 lines I instinctively
sat down, somewhat blasted. I then read the whole letter
manfully. And now I take up my pen. But I don't (it is a
sign of the condition to which you've reduced me) know
what to do with it. I don't quite know what to write.
You are a much younger man than I am, and I think you
might have waited for my demise—instead of merely
hastening it. Had you said you thought of writing a
little book about me, I should have said simply "Don't!"
But as you give me to understand that you intend
to write a little book about me and have already been
excogitating it, what shall I say? I know, at any rate,
what I shan't say. I shan't say "Do!"
I shan't offer you the slightest assistance—except of
the purely negative and cautionary kind that now occurs
to me. I won't supply you with any photograph of myself
at any age, nor with any scrap of corrected MS. .
nor with any caricature of myself for a frontispiece
(you yourself have done several brilliant caricatures of
me, and I commend these to your notice), nor with any
of the things you seem to think might be of interest.
You must forage around for yourself. I won't even try to
prevent you from using anything you may find. I eschew
all responsibility whatsoever. I disclaim the horrid
privilege of seeing proof-sheets. I won't read a single
word till your book is published. Even if modesty didn't
prevent me, worldly wisdom would. I remember several
books about men who, not yet dead, had blandly aided and
abetted the author; and I remember what awful asses
those men seemed to me thereby to have made of
themselves. Two of them were rather great men. They
could afford to make awful asses of themselves. I, who
am 100 miles away from being great, cannot afford such
luxuries. My gifts are small. I've used them very well
and discreetly, never straining them; and the result is
that I've made a charming little reputation. But that
reputation is a frail plant. Don't over-attend to it,
gardener Lynch! Don't drench and deluge it! The contents
of a quite small watering-can will be quite
enough. This I take to be superfluous counsel. I find
much reassurance and comfort in your phrase, "a
little book." Oh, keep it little!—in due proportion
to its theme. Avoid such phrases as "It was at or about
this time that the young Beerbohm" etc. My life (though
to me it has been, and is, extremely interesting) is
without a single point of general interest. Address
yourself to my writings and drawings. And surtout pas
de zèle,
even here! Be judicial. Make those reservations without
which praise carries no weight. Don't, by dithyrambs,
hasten the reaction of critics against me. . . .
I suppose that it was because I wanted to get Max talking
about Shaw that I adverted particularly to a later passage
in this letter, in which he referred to the slogan that Shaw
had attached to him and that tagged him all his life—"the
incomparable Max." When, in 1898, Shaw gave up his job as
drama critic of the Saturday Review, in London, he
was asked by the deputy editor John F. Runciman to endorse
the appointment of Max as his successor. In his valedictory
article, Shaw wrote, "The younger generation is knocking at
the door; and as I open it there steps spritely in the
incomparable Max." I told Max that recently an American
humorist had written of him as "the comparable Max." He was
delighted. "Just what I told Lynch to do," he said. "To
compare me."
The passage reads:
Years ago, G.B.S., in a light-hearted moment, called me
"the incomparable." Note that I am not
incomparable. Compare me. Compare me as essayist (for
instance) with other essayists. Point out how much less
human I am than Lamb, how much less intellectual than
Hazlitt, and what an ignoramus beside Belloc; and how
Chesterton's high spirits and abundance shame me; how
unbalanced G. S. Street must think me, and how coarse
too; and how much lighter E. V. Lucas' touch is than
mine; and so on, and so forth. Apply the comparative
method to me also as caricaturist. . . .
I was not inclined to do any of the things Max had asked
Lynch to do, but I did venture to remind him that at least
one of his standards of comparison was completely unknown
except for the place he had among the writers Max parodies
in his book "A Christmas Garland!" G. S. Street, I
suggested, had the kind of immortality achieved by the
imaginary Enoch Soames (one of the title characters in Max's
"Seven Men"), who was to be discovered by readers in the
British Museum at the end of the twentieth century under the
card-catalogue entry "Beerbohm, Max." I then referred to
another letter of Max's, which I had seen in a
Festschrift volume on Shaw's ninetieth birthday. It was
written to Stephen Winsten, the editor of the book, and
reveals a distinct ambivalence in Max's feeling for his old
friend and laudator:
DEAR
MR.
WINSTEN,
I like your idea very much. "I suppose that the world
itself could not contain all the books" that have been
written about G.B.S., and I think it is high time that a
book should be written to him. I wish I could be among
the writers of it. But I think that no great man at the
moment of his reaching the age of ninety should be
offered anything but praise. And very fond though I am
of G.B.S. and immensely kind though he has always been
to me, my admiration for his genius has during fifty
years and more been marred for me by dissent from almost
any view that he holds about anything. I remember that
in an interview published in Frank Harris's "Candid
Friend" G.B.S., having commented on the adverse
criticisms by his old friends Archer and [Arthur
Bingham] Walkley, said, "And Max's blessings are all of
them thinly disguised curses." I remember also a
published confession of my own that I was always
distracted between two emotions about him, (1) a wish
that he had never been born, (2) a hope that he would
never die. The first of those two wishes I retract. To
the second one I warmly adhere. Certainly he will live
forever in the consciousness of future ages. If in one
of those ages I happen to be reincarnate I shall write a
reasoned estimate of some aspect of him and of his work.
But now I merely send him my love.
Yours sincerely,
MAX
BEERBOHM
I asked Max whether it was true, as someone had remarked,
that although Shaw hadn't an enemy in the world, none of his
friends liked him.
"Well, he had a powerful brain, don't you know, but he was a
cold man," Max said. "It's true I never had anything but
kindness from him. Though I had written, in the Saturday,
several sharply critical articles about him, it was Shaw
who, in the absence of Frank Harris—Harris was on holiday,
or whatever, in Athens—approved Runciman's slipping me in,
rather, to the post of drama critic. Shaw was not
vindictive. There was no element of vindictiveness in him.
This is an admirable quality. In his case, it may have
emanated, don't you know, from his absolute conviction—a
conviction so manifest that it did not require
assertion—that there was no one living who was worthy of his
animosity. He was—" Max paused on the brink of an epithet,
then decided to take the plunge. "He was a coarse man. I
remember his inviting me to lunch in his flat at Adelphi
Terrace to meet Mark Twain. Barrie was there, three or four
others. At the end of a very agreeable lunch, Shaw jumped
up, said he had an appointment with his dentist, and rushed
off, leaving us alone with his guest. It was somewhat
embarrassing, don't you know. Might he not have told us in
advance that he had an engagement, so that we should be
prepared? In his plays, I really enjoy only his stage
directions; the dialogue is vortical and, I find, fatiguing.
It is like being harangued; it is like being a member of one
of those crowds he used to exhort on street corners. He uses
the English language like a truncheon. It is an instrument
of attack, don't you know. No light and shade, no poetry.
His best work, I think, appears in his books of drama and
music criticism and his stage directions. When I was living
with my mother and sisters in London—I had just come down
from Oxford—Shaw made an immense journey by bicycle to see
me, because he had heard that I had done some caricatures.
He came to be caricatured. I had indeed done some
caricatures, I was beginning to achieve a little reputation
as a caricaturist, but I hadn't really, at that time, done
anything very good, you know. Still, Shaw would rather have
had a presentment by anybody, no matter how incompetent, no
matter how malicious, than no presentment at all. One day, I
visited Mme. Tussaud's, in preparation for an essay I was
writing on that gruesome establishment. To my astonishment,
I was confronted by the waxen effigy of G.B.S. A few days
later, I dined with him and twitted him about it. He rather
flushed with embarrassment, don't you know, but he said that
Mme. Tussaud had wished to add him to her chamber of horrors
and that he felt that it would be snobbish to refuse.
Considering that it was the proudest day of his life, I
think his account of it was rather touching, don't you? Shaw
was not, in those early days, very attractive—dead white,
and his face was pitted by some disease. The back of his
neck was especially bleak—very long, untenanted, dead white.
His hair was like seaweed. In those days, you were lucky not
to see G.B.S. from the back. But in later years, with that
wonderful white beard, he became very handsome and
impressive-looking. In a day when everybody carried a
walking stick, I used to see him, in Hampstead, strolling
without a walking stick, just to be conspicuous.
Instead, he was eternally accompanied by female Fabians in
jibbahs and amber beads. They were always cinctured with
great ropes of amber beads. When he died, he stipulated that
his ashes be sprinkled among the roses in the garden at Ayot."
Max leaned forward, in distress. "Imagine! Among the
roses!" It took Max a moment to get over this affront to
the roses, and then he went on, as if in explanation, "G.B.S.
had no sense of beauty. That is why he couldn't appreciate
Henry Irving. One night at dinner at Sir Philip Sassoon's, I
found myself sitting next to Mrs. Shaw. G.B.S. was a safe
distance down the table, don't you know, and I ventured to
say this to her. After spraying G.B.S. with every variety of
praise, I murmured, 'But you know, Charlotte, G.B.S. has no
aesthetic sense. He is not an artist.' She leapt at this!
She said that she was always telling G.B.S. that. She said
that what he really was was a reformer."
Miss Jungmann was alert to Max's distress. "Shall we show
our visitor the Henderson?" she suggested, clearly feeling
that this would be a restorative. She was right.
Max chuckled. He looked at me tentatively. "If you think it
might amuse him—?"
I expressed an instant desire to see the Henderson. Miss
Jungmann left us to fetch it.
Max leaned forward again, reanimated, as gleeful as if he
had another perfect publisher's statement to show me. "I did
it for William Archer. I thought it might amuse him. I
believe that, off and on, I worked on it for a year, don't
you know. And then, when Archer came to stay with me just
before he left for America to produce his play 'The Green
Goddess,' I gave it to him as a going-away present. I never
thought I should see it again, but Archer was such a
considerate man; when he died, he stipulated in his will
that it should he returned to me. Did you know that Archer,
who always wished to demonstrate that, though a drama
critic, he could write a play, had one night of triumph when
he felt that he had achieved a beautiful play? He told me
this himself. One night, between sleeping and waking, it
seemed to him that he had evolved a perfect plot, saw the
whole thing from beginning to end. He saw that it only
remained to write it—like that!" Max snapped his fingers.
"Then he fell into a blissful sleep. When he wakened, he
went over the whole plot again in his mind. He had a
disillusioning, a frightful revelation. What he had dreamt
was 'A Doll's House.' But some time later he had a luckier
dream. He dreamt 'The Green Goddess,' and that was a great
success, you know. It made things easy for Archer for the
rest of his life, and his friends were all delighted. He
made a great deal of dreams; I believe he was writing a book
about them when he died. He was a great follower of Freud. .
. ." Max passed his hand over his forehead, as if in
bewilderment at the eccentricity of a beloved friend who had
indulged in a pastime in which he himself couldn't see the
fun. "But here is Elizabeth with the book. I do hope
it won't bore you. It amused Archer, and it was so agreeable
to amuse him—he was so responsive, don't you know."
Max rose and we went to a long table in the back of the
lobby to examine the book. It was an early edition of
Professor Archibald Henderson's worshipful "George Bernard
Shaw, His Life and Works." On the first page, over the
title, in Max's own tiny handwriting, is written, "For W.A.
with affectionate regards from Max, Rapallo, June 1920."
Below the title, in a forged and entirely different
handwriting, large and splashy, is an additional dedication:
"And from me too—Archibald Henderson [a great
extrovert curlicue in ink], North Carolina." The book has
more than twenty-five full-page illustrations. Following
some random impulse, this later Henderson—the one Max
creates in the dedication—has redrawn every illustration in
the book, often adding color, and has written elaborate
notes on the reincarnations. The redrawings transmute the
subjects violently—not only Shaw but Granville Barker,
Sidney Webb, William Archer, William Morris, and even a
London street crowd that Shaw is addressing—from the
sobersides they were in the original edition into a motley
of somewhat macabre grotesques, and they have had an
extraordinary effect on the later Henderson's prose style
also. Facing page 116, for example, is a full-page
photograph of Shaw as the Socialist, and the change in the
Socialist's appearance is startling, even diabolical. He
coruscates with lurid color: his teeth are incandescent; his
green billycock hat sports a feather; below his chin are a
vast dotted ascot, a pear-shaped pearl; and his eyes gleam
like Dracula's. No wonder the later Henderson abandoned
sober academic prose for another style altogether, in a note
surrounding the photograph:
NOTE
BY
PROF.
HENDERSON:
When Shaw rummaged out this coloured photograph and
handed it over to me, I suggested that it should not
be reproduced in the book. Shaw was adamant. He insisted
that nothing in his career should not be known. Let it
be frankly said then that there came a time when again
Shaw's Puritanism was latent. In the Spring of '91
Eleanor Marx had given to him, as a token of esteem, a
green billicock hat which had belonged to her father in
his bourgeois days. "It went," says Shaw, "to my
head." He feverishly applied himself to the task of
dressing "up to" it. Having succeeded in doing this, he
offered himself as a candidate for admission to the
Marlborough House Set, but, owing to the influence of
Baron Hirsch (who could not, or would not, forget that
the hat had belonged to Karl Marx), he was rejected. In
deep bitterness of spirit he fell back on the Tivoli
Bar, where he perceptibly coarsened. This was a very sad
time for all Shaw's friends. In vain did the Sidney
Webbs tempt him with the most exquisitely cooked
statistics. Vainly did John Burns square up to him and
threaten to break every bone in his body. To no purpose
did that sterling fellow, J. M. Robertson, offer to take
him along on an Atheistical Mission Tour among the Fiji
Islanders. Shaw adhered to the T.B. (as he
affectionately called it): at length, on the advice of
Wm. Morris, recourse was had to that expert in salvage,
Theodore Watts [-Dunton]. Where others had failed, this
remarkable man succeeded. Shaw, without knowing just how
it happened, awoke one morning to find himself an inmate
of The Pines, Putney. He says that he was kept there for
several months, but his friends assure me that he was
there only for several days. Whatever the period of his
detention, he went back into the world a wiser and a
water-drinking man. But the strange contrariety of his
nature had not been wholly in abeyance even at The
Pines. It was there that he contracted that prejudice
against the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists which
gave such lasting pungency to his articles in The
Saturday, Review. A. H.
Max laughed when I told him that I found the later Henderson
more readable than the earlier one, that, indeed, I had not
at all suspected Henderson of having in him a vein so
tangential and a literary visage so deadpan—an Americanism
that I had to explain to Max. Miss Jungmann, too, laughed as
she turned the pages, and Max and I bent over the book.
A caricature of Shaw by Max is reproduced in the Henderson
book. Max's caption reads, "Magnetic, he has the power to
infect almost everyone with the delight that he takes in
himself." The caricature shows Shaw in slippers standing
with his legs crossed. In the margin, the later Henderson
devotes himself to an archeological comment on Max's
caricature:
NOTE
BY
PROF.
HENDERSON:
A certain license is allowed to comic draughtsmen. But
they must be careful not to overstep it. Shaw readily
yielded to my request that I should, to prevent
Posterity from a grave error, take a plaster-cast of
each of his feet. I did so. It was a labour of love.
Models were made, at Shaw's own suggestion and expense,
in bronze, and have a place of honour in the museum of
the University of North Carolina, but are so small that
visitors often overlook them. Shaw's feet are the envy
of all Chinese ladies. One can hardly call them feet.
They are tootsica. A. H.
Considering that the photograph of Shaw at the age of
twenty-three, taken in Dublin in 1879, now makes him look
distinctly foppish—he has carefully frizzled hair, a
monocle, a stickpin, and a boutonniere, and a cigarette
dangles below his curled mustache—the later Professor
Henderson had, perforce, to explain this unwonted dandyism.
He writes:
This photograph, like the one that faces page 18, was
taken by the afterwards-notorious Richard Pigott.
Shaw—let it be frankly confessed—had got into a bad, a
"fast" set, and was in the habit of drinking, smoking,
and dressing, to excess. "I wanted," he writes to me,
"to be the best-dressed man in Dublin, and I was."
Pigott himself, though no longer a young man, was a
member of Shaw's set—and indeed, by reason of his
seniority, a leader of it. "He played Falstaff," says
G.B.S., "to my Hal." For a time it seemed likely that
the young Shaw would himself become a forger, but the
latent strain of Puritanism in him suddenly asserted
itself. He gave up tobacco, he signed the pledge, he
sold his wardrobe, he shook the dust of Pigott's studio
from his shoes; at one bound he ceased to be the
Alcibiades of the Liffey.
The printers of the Henderson biography put under each
illustration, in heavy type, the number of the page the
illustration faces. Around the photograph of Shaw's rather
ungainly country house, at Ayot St. Lawrence, the Professor
muses, in afterthought:
Shaw never ceases to surprise you. He is what the French
call imprévoyable.
With him you must always "expect the unexpected." The
ordinary successful man chooses a country house facing
South. Shaw chose one [Facing p. 418].
But it was not only about Shaw that Professor Henderson had
afterthoughts, doubtless inspired, in many cases, by the new
aspect of the illustrations. Confronted by a photograph of
Sidney Webb with a string hanging from each lens of his
glasses, the later Henderson makes an appropriate comment:
"Webb," writes Shaw, "is the most generous of geniuses.
'Shaw,' he has often said to me, 'when your
Quintessence of Ibsenism shall have become the Bible
of the whole internationalised human race, I shall be
remembered only as the inventor of the double-stringed
pince-nez.'"
On one of the illustrations, the later Professor Henderson
made no comment, although Shaw is here transformed into a
kind of Horatio Bottomley demagogue. The illustration is
captioned "The Cart and Trumpet" and shows Shaw addressing a
street crowd, which reaches as far as the eye can see. The
printed sub-caption explains, "Shaw addressing the dockyard
men outside dockyard gate on behalf of Alderman Sanders.
G.B.S. is annoyed with the interruptor, but is ready with an
instant retort." But if the later Professor Henderson was
not moved to comment, Max, as the three of us leaned over
it, was. He ran his hand over the glossy surface of the
crowd—workmen in caps, looking content or sullen or merely
vacuous. The questions he asked seemed to be addressed to
himself, rather than to Miss Jungmann or me. "What has
become of all of them?" he said. "What are they doing now?
What are they thinking? Are they better off? Do they
remember what G.B.S. said to them? Has it clarified their
minds? Are they kinder, more thoughtful, more civilized,
happier?" He peered at me. "What do you think? Is it a
happier time?" He paused a moment to weigh it. "G.B.S.
himself, you know, was disappointed with the final effect of
Fabianism on the Fabians."
Miss Jungmann spared me from having to answer a difficult
question. "Max," she said, "you have missed your nap. You
have overdone. You must go up and rest."
Max and I followed Miss Jungmann toward the front of the
lobby. "Do you know," Miss Jungmann said to me as we were
walking out, "that a representative of one of your great
illustrated magazines was good enough to come here to see
Max just a little while ago? A most charming man. He wished
to pay quite a handsome sum to have this book photographed
and reproduced in his weekly."
"Why not?" I asked.
"Oh, quite a staggering sum," she said. "But Max wouldn't
have it!"
I said that it was a pity Max hadn't allowed it, since it
was a unique volume. I said that the new Henderson was a
kind of comic masterpiece, and that it was too bad more
people couldn't see it.
"I did it to amuse Archer, don't you know . . ." said Max,
with the implication that you couldn't amuse Archer and at
the same time make money out of what had amused him, And
then he added, "I shall probably leave it to the Ashmolean."
We had reached the front of the lobby. Max was inclined to
linger, to talk, but Miss Jungmann admonished again. "You
mustn't overtire yourself, Max," she said.
The afternoon was indeed advanced. It was after four. Miss
Jungmann turned to me. "I'll just go upstairs and make Max
comfortable."
Max gave me his hand and smiled; he said he had enjoyed my
visit and hoped that it could be repeated. He picked up his
straw hat and his cane, put on his hat at the Maxian angle,
and started upstairs. Miss Jungmann accompanied him,
carrying the Ashmolean legacy. I watched him—an air of
elegance clung about his tilted narrow shoulders, about the
slightly stooped back in its snug Edwardian jacket—as he
made his way slowly up the stairs, following the balustrade,
as he had when he came down, with his free hand. When he
reached the landing, he paused a moment and then began the
promenade to his room.
(This is the first of a series of articles.) |
