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In June of 1955, I visited Max Beerbohm in Rapallo for the
last time. He was by then nearly eighty-three, and it was
perhaps natural that on one of the afternoons when we sat
talking together in the tiny living room of the Villino
Chiaro—he in the chair his father had given him for his room
in Merton College, at Oxford—he should bring up his series
of caricatures called "The Young Self and the Old Self," and
that afterward we should discuss them again and again. This
series—one of the most striking and Maxian of Max's
achievements as a caricaturist—shows his subjects
simultaneously in youth and in age, the Young Self
confronting the Old Self. They are like little novels, done
in a single drawing and a line or two of dialogue—Max's
convex mirror miniaturizing a lifetime. By collapsing time
altogether, by wiping out the inconvenient gap between the
present and the past, by bringing the Young Self and the Old
onto the stage at the same moment and letting them exchange
a few words, he was able to dramatize the passage of time
and catch the essence of a man's character.
The Old Self of Arnold Bennett, in white tie, oozing
affluence, immense of girth, toothy, a figure of dishevelled
elegance, befobbed and wearing a pleated shirt, his pudgy
hands clutching his white waistcoat, and his face bearing an
expression of not entirely convinced complacency, is
addressing his Young Self, a scrawny, stubborn yokel from
Staffordshire:
OLD
SELF:
All gone according to plan, you see.
YOUNG
SELF:
My plan, you know.
The young Stanley Baldwin looks at his pipe-smoking elder
self, who has one of those consciously "strong" faces with
not much behind them, and is astonished that so much could
have been accomplished by so little:
Prime Minister? You? Good Lord!!
The young George Moore, rubbery, amorphous, stands
obeisantly, silk hat in hand, before the old George, more
rubbery still but sitting. This dialogue ensues between
them:
YOUNG
SELF:
And have there been any painters since Manet?
OLD
SELF:
None.
YOUNG
SELF:
Have there been any composers since Wagner?
OLD
SELF:
None.
YOUNG
SELF:
Any novelists since Balzac?
OLD
SELF:
One.
The Old Self of Sir William Rothenstein is so offended by
the materialization of the Young Self, bumptious and
cravatted and ugly (the two selves are actually very much
alike), that, in front of a bevy of his students at the
Royal Academy, he thunderously orders the unwelcome
apparition to disappear:
Take off your hat, Sid—and leave the room!
The young Joseph Conrad bursts out in Polish—a gibberish
invented by Max, but it certainly looks like
Polish—and the old Conrad, splendid and goateed and monocled,
replies to his Young Self's harangue:
Mais oui, mon enfant—and what's more, I was a Master
Mariner! And I've written some books, too . . . but you
are hardly old enough to understand them.
The Young Self of H. G. Wells, a calmly impassioned
zoologist, asks the Old Self of H. G. a purely scientific
question:
Did you ever manage to articulate the bones of that
microglamaphoid lizard?
But the Old Self has soared into the empyrean; he rather
brushes his Young Self off:
I'm not sure. But I've articulated the whole past of
mankind on this planet—and the whole future, too. I
don't think you know very much about the past, do you?
It's all perfectly beastly, believe me. But the future's
going to be all perfectly splendid . . . after a bit.
And I must say I find the present very jolly.
In a drawing Max captioned "A Momentary Vision That Once
Befell Young Millais," the ardent, idealistic young artist
is appalled by what he is to become—a country squire, well
fed, successful, very "county," in shooting clothes, with a
Sherlock Holmes cap. Max's awareness of the penalties
exacted by success is acute. In one of his many caricatures
of, or involving, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he shows Lord
Leighton, the president of the Royal Academy and the most
successful painter of his time—a man who was himself eroded
by the knowledge that he had made an easy
compromise—haranguing Rossetti, urging him smoothly to do
the right thing, get in the swim, join the swirling traffic
of the drawing rooms where commissions are bred. Of
Rossetti, habitually recumbent, you see only his slippered
feet, and these seem not to be listening. Of Leighton, you
feel that his harangue is mechanical, that he has turned it
on, it is his "line," and, for all his look of success, you
sense the wish that he himself, as his Young Self, had not
listened to it. Max, in his own volume of "Zuleika Dobson,"
drew an impromptu caricature of an Old Self that never
existed—Byron at sixty, plump, spectacled, with muttonchop
whiskers, respectable. He looks as if he were president of
the Birmingham board of trade and were about to take the
chair at a weekly meeting. The drawing is called "But for
Missolonghi." Elsewhere, Max speculated about what would
have happened to Byron if he had lived on; he would, Max
said, have spent his time "writing very long and able
letters to the Times on the Corn Laws, and much
exacerbated by Queen Victoria's refusal to sanction his
appointment to a post in Lord John Russell's government."
As a youth, Arthur Balfour was persistently valetudinary. In
the Young and Old series, Max shows the interminable
elongation that was the young Balfour swooning, on the
longest chaise longue in history. The dying swan looks up—it
is, you feel, his last mortal effort—at the old Balfour, in
flannels, with open-necked shirt and horn-rimmed glasses,
and carrying a tennis racket. He just barely addresses him:
YOUNG
SELF
(faintly): Who are you? You look rather like Uncle
Salisbury, shaved. And what is that curious thing you're
holding? And won't you catch cold, with so little on?
But don't answer: I don't really care. And don't let me
talk: I don't fancy I've long to live; and I want to
devote the time to thinking—not that I suppose my
thoughts to be of much value, but—oh, do, please, go
away.
In reality, Balfour's Old Self refused to go away; he went
on and on. The historian Oscar Browning, in his memoirs,
remembers Balfour's telling him, when the future Prime
Minister was twenty-two years old, that "the doctors had
assured him that he could not possibly live to the age of
thirty, a fact of which I have now and again reminded him
during his career." With time, according to Max, the
prolonged valetudinarianism became transformed into a
passion for longevity. Having arranged for his funeral in
his twenties, he postponed it long enough to become an
aggressive Chief Secretary for Ireland. Stimulated by this
unexpected show of strength, he became Prime Minister. As
his friends, acquaintances, and colleagues died, he clocked
them off—the milestones of his own
survival. To Max, he was unbeguiling but fascinating, and
Max never stopped drawing him. When he didn't formally draw
him, he doodled him; the early manuscript of "Zuleika
Dobson" is dappled with him. There is a remarkable
difference in the physical appearance of the two drafts of "Zuleika
Dobson"—the first, unfinished, written in London in 1898,
and the second completed in Rapallo in 1911. Both drafts are
owned by Mr. Robert H. Taylor, of Yonkers, who also owns the
greatest collection of Trollope in the world. Max would have
felt very cozy in the society of the Trollopes; there is
surely no one in the world he would rather have had Zuleika
marry than Anthony Trollope. The early manuscript is
scraggly, written in random columns and riddled with
doodles—of Balfour, Disraeli, Reginald Turner, Henry James,
Oscar Wild; Henry Irving, Lord Ribblesdale, Edward VII.
Winston Churchill's perky nose keeps jutting inquisitively
into the various scenes. The London manuscript is written in
pencil, the Rapallo one in ink. There are no doodles in the
Rapallo manuscript, but there are tremendous erasures, which
Max made with a paintbrush; the pages present a fascinating
and often decorative spectacle, covered with great solid
promontories of black ink, with islets, peninsulas, and
sometimes continents. In the earlier manuscript, however,
you may watch the struggle between Max's dual careers. Often
the graphic seems to gain the upper hand; several times, Max
seems to have forgotten that he was writing a novel, and
whole pages are devoted to drawings, some of them sketches
for caricatures that later became famous. When le mot
juste proved elusive, he doodled Balfour.
Max never did a drawing of his own Young Self and Old Self,
but if he had done one, it might have resembled to some
extent the drawing of Arnold Bennett. The Old Self might
again have said, "All gone according to plan, you see," and
the Young Self might have answered, "My plan, you
know." In 1895, Max, then twenty-three, and in Chicago as
his brother Herbert Beerbohm Tree's press agent, wrote the
essay he eventually called "Diminuendo," in which he said
farewell to literature. It was here he set down his vision
of the life he was to lead, and to a large extent he did
lead it. He would retire, he said, to the country and
contemplate existence:
I shall look forth from my window, the laburnum and the
mountain-ash becoming mere silhouettes in the foreground
of my vision. I shall look forth and, in my remoteness,
appreciate the distant pageant of the world. Humanity
will range itself in the columns of my morning paper. No
pulse of life will escape me. . . . Tragedy, comedy,
chivalry, philosophy will be mine. I shall listen to
their music perpetually and their colors will dance
before my eyes. . . . I shall have friends. . . . And I,
who crave no knighthood, shall write no more.
"I shall have friends," Max promised himself, and the
promise was fulfilled. Max had friends, and his friends
loved him. For forty-five years, they came in a stream to
visit him in Rapallo. When they weren't visiting, they wrote
to him. Even when, as he grew older, he didn't always keep
up his end of the correspondence, they still wrote to him.
When he went to London on visits from Rapallo, staying at
the station hotels he so admired, his friends gobbled him
up. Max inspired a peculiar devotion in people; his
presence—his very existence—was a delight. It was not only
that he was witty and that his speech was exquisite but also
that he had, in social intercourse, no axe to grind. In
1922, Sir William Rothenstein, speaking, in his "Men and
Memories," of Max's talent for friendship, wrote:
Indeed Max, of later years, especially, shrinks from
offending people; the once pitiless satirist has become
the most human and understanding of men. I know so many
with wandering eyes, who feel their time wasted with any
but important persons. Max, who charms everyone, finds
most people charming. And how quickly he discovers the
essence of each personality.
Max's friends were aware of his habit of saying, in the
voice of one asking for tutelage, "Tell me" to anybody he
was talking to, as if only you in all the world could
divulge the secret. He was leisured, he was in no hurry to
express himself, he wanted to listen. The fact that there
was not in him any trace of the impulse for
self-aggrandizement made him eager to elicit the essential
quality of his interlocutors. He could tell you, all
right, and he did, but, equally, he wished to he told. To
have dinner with Max, wrote Edith Wharton, "was like
suddenly growing wings." Elizabeth Russell, the novelist and
the author of "Elizabeth and Her German Garden," lived for a
brief period in Portofino. Her biographer Leslie De Charms,
to show what her talks with Max meant to Countess Russell,
quotes from her diary:
December 31 Florence-Rapallo. Tea at Max Beerbohm's on
way. . . . I was blissfully happy at hearing such
delicious talk after the Cannes acidities. . . . They
begged us to go again after supper, when the
Granville-Barkers will be there and an Italian pair, but
we don't want to spoil the perfect memory. A delightful
finish to the year.
In Rapallo, Max was scarcely ever not anticipating some
visitor—Arnold Bennett, Compton Mackenzie, Somerset Maugham,
Constance Collier, Desmond MacCarthy, Osbert Sitwell,
Reginald Turner, S. C. Roberts (the Master of Pembroke), the
Hamish Hamiltons, the Selwyn Jepsons, the Christopher
Sykeses, Gordon Craig, Ada Leverson, Siegfried Sassoon. His
sisters and his nieces, the daughters of Herbert Tree, and
their children came. One of those children was Ivan Moffat,
the son of his favorite niece, Iris Tree. Ivan Moffat, a
film writer, and his mother were both old friends of mine,
and every time I visited Max he would ask whether I had seen
them. From time to time, I could give him news of them. I
once teased Max by saying Ivan had told me that his
Great-Uncle Max had given him a bad moment on one of his
family visits in London. "In fact, Max," I said, "I am not
sure you didn't, out of your goodness of heart, induce to—
use a word you're not fond of—a trauma in Ivan."
Max stroked his mustache tranquilly. "Really!" he said. "And
how did I do that?"
I repeated for him Ivan's anecdote. Max's visits, were, of
course, a great event in the Tree family. On this occasion,
various grandnieces and grandnephews were assembled for
Max's inspection. There were David, Dennys, Virginia, and
Ivan, who was then fourteen. "The others were all older and
taller and more renowned than I was," Moffat recalled.
"Their accomplishments were paraded for Max, in athletics
and in scholarship." Ivan kept his gaze fixed on the little
figure at the head of the table, and saw Max's clear blue
eyes reflecting wonderment at so much erudition, so many
prowesses. Ivan became terribly self-conscious about his own
anonymity in such a welter of celebrity. There was a bowl of
English walnuts on the table, and to assuage his nervousness
and self-consciousness he began cracking these walnuts and
eating them without intermission. A nervous hunger assailed
him, a compulsion to swallow. Nut followed nut. "The
crepitation was tremendous," Moffat continued. "I knew what
a racket it was making, but I just couldn't stop. The babble
went on, important and clever, and as every moment passed
and I still hadn't made any contribution to it, I knew, with
a sort of panic, that I could not and that I would not. Max
took everything in, including my self-consciousness and my
desperation. As the virtues and greatnesses of the others
were paraded, Max, in turn, courteously saluted them.
Suddenly there was a silence, and in that silence the nuts
cracked like a fusillade. Max turned his mild glance on me;
I became the center of attention, because everyone's eyes
followed Max's. 'And you, Ivan—tell me—what about you?' Max
said. 'Are you a Great Nuttist?'"
Another of Max's promises to himself was fulfilled. "I shall
look forth," Max promised at the age of twenty-three, in
Chicago, "and, in my remoteness, appreciate the distant
pageant of the world." He certainly did, and, sitting in his
niche in Rapallo, he recorded that pageant in caricatures
that cover, in their penetration and diversity, much of the
vast range of human character. Even the vanished politicians
and other celebrities one has never heard of still stand out
arrestingly as individual human beings—personalities. You
want to know about them; you want to know them. In
1954, the eminent American critic Edmund Wilson paid a visit
to Max at the Villino. As he and I sat in the Excelsior
Hotel afterward, he told me that he had just seen Andre
Malraux in Paris, and that in the cases of both men—a
startling juxtaposition, it seemed to me—he had been much
impressed by their self-confidence and strength of
character. "He's quite sure of himself," Wilson said of Max.
"He knows the value of what he has done, both as a writer
and as an artist. He doesn't give a damn about having all
his caricatures collected and published, as I suggested to
him they ought to be. He doesn't even know where many of
them are. He knows very well that somebody else will have to
worry about all that someday." In connection with a mural
that Max had painted in his bedroom, Wilson was struck by
the fact that he had brought to Rapallo with him all of his
favorite characters: Balfour, of course, and G. K.
Chesterton, George Moore, and so on. "It is a kind of Divine
Comedy that he has been working at all his life," Wilson
said. "The celebrated men he has been caricaturing have come
to play significant roles. There is a whole hierarchy of
values: people like Joseph Conrad and Henry James, whom he
both admires and likes; people like Bernard Shaw, whom he
admires but doesn't like; people like some of the
politicians—Lloyd George, for example—whom he neither
admires nor likes." He said that he thought Max was the
greatest caricaturist of the kind—that is, portrayer of
personalities—in the history of art.
For a time, Max was concerned lest his separation from the
"au-courantism" of London affect the veracity of his
caricatures. He needn't have worried. Although Max lived the
last forty-five years of his life in the remoteness of
Rapallo, in spirit he lived in London, and he kept drawing
and redrawing the important London figures. I have never met
anyone more stubbornly English than Max. When he bitterly
satirized England during the Boer War, it was because, as he
has said, "on se moque de ce qu'on aime." The changes
in London, its wanton deterioration, which he mourned in his
moving B.B.C. broadcast "London Revisited," were for him
personal bereavements. The more he lived away from England,
the more he became infatuated with her. England as an idea
seemed to him unique in the world, and he was proud of her.
In all the years Max lived in Italy, he never drew a
caricature of an Italian. He was eternally drawing Balfour,
Disraeli, Byron, George Moore, King Edward VII. He couldn't
even write about a foreign country. He could write only
about England. During the two world wars, he couldn't bear
to be out of England, and he lived there through both of
them. For a time during the Second World War, he lived in
the country house of his friends the Sydney Schiffs, at
Abinger. While he was there, he contributed some pieces to a
local paper, the Abinger Chronicle, circulation three
hundred, and he worked at them as carefully as if the
Abinger Chronicle had had a circulation of a million.
Certain reproaches about not living up to the Chicago
contract might have been levelled by the Young Max at the
Old Max. As the Young Max didn't level them, I did. On my
final visit to Rapallo, I pointed out to Max that he had not
stuck to his promise not to achieve a knighthood, having
received one in 1939. Max met the charge with good humor; he
had done his best to prevent it, he said, since he had not
spared the Royal Family when he was in the mood to lampoon
it. He had not, I went on inexorably, stuck to his promise
not to do any more writing. Here, too, Max defended himself,
saying he had done pretty well, considering the
importunities that were put upon him by magazine editors and
publishers. A London publisher once invited Max to allow a
famous essay of his to be included in an "Omnibus of
Contemporary English Literature." "I do not care to be
omnibussed." he wrote the publisher. The publisher then
pointed out to him that as the anthology was to be edited by
and have a preface by W. Somerset Maugham, it would probably
bring him to the attention of three or four hundred thousand
readers. That settled that. The prospect of such a crowd
frightened Max. "There are only fifteen hundred readers in
England and one thousand in America who understand what I am
about," he wrote back. For the fifteen hundred readers in
England and the thousand in America, Max went to enormous
pains to make his meaning clear. He did everything for
readers except get them.
I stubbed my own toe hard, once, against the bulwark of
Max's fastidiousness. The National Broadcasting Company had
begun a series of filmed television broadcasts, under the
title "Wisdom," by distinguished old men and women. The
N.B.C. people wanted Max badly. They had sent their Italian
representative, Miss Gioia Marconi, and an American
representative, Mr. Davidson Taylor, to the Villino to sound
him out, but he had proved not resonant. An N.B.C. man who
happened to be a friend of mine asked me if I would try to
persuade Max. Knowing that Max needed money and that the
network was willing to pay him three thousand dollars, I
agreed. I thereupon wrote him a letter. I paraded the great
names that N.B.C. had already signed— Bertrand Russell,
Arnold Toynbee, Robert Frost, Pablo Casals—and urged Max to
queue up to enter the geriatric pantheon. "Now, dear Max," I
wrote, "I hate to introduce a vulgar note, but they will pay
three thousand dollars. They want to send their
representative, who is a very nice man, to see you. . . .
And, you know, they tell me you won't have to leave your
niche, they'll do it all while you're sitting in the niche.
It seems to me this is a lot of money to get for not leaving
your room, as I've seen you not leave it so often for
nothing." The letter went, airmail. I waited. N.B.C. waited.
Max's reply came very promptly. In his beautiful,
crescent-paragraphed handwriting, he wrote, in pencil, as
follows:
I look forward to seeing your friend and communing with
him, but I am, alas, quite incorrigibly opposed to any
idea of being televised. Mr. Davidson Taylor was here
recently and wished me to revoke the unwillingness I had
expressed last year to Miss Marconi even after she had
shown me on the wall the immensely mobile features of
Bertrand Russell amplifying the artful modulations of
his voice.
This was a shocker. I had been so confident. But when I
showed my friend Max's letter, he was not too badly let
down. "I am going there anyway," he said. "You can't do
these things by letter." His confidence restored mine.
Later, I heard an account of what happened in Rapallo.
Max received the N.B.C. emissary cordially. The television
man was admitted to the niche. He was smooth and
ingratiating. "You see, Sir Max," he said, "it will be very
simple. Our people will come and arrange everything. You
will sit, if you like, as you are sitting now. You will
simply say, 'My dear friends, I am very happy to be here
addressing you.'"
"Do you wish me," asked Max courteously, "to start with a
lie?"
It had been a near thing, but Max won out. With that remark,
the flood of affluence that had threatened to inundate him
was dammed forever.
When I saw Max again, he apologized for having snuffed out
my effort, and went on to explain why he had done it. "I
could not but dash their hopes," he said. "Had I been
televised, it would have been impossible for the viewers to
concentrate on what I was saving. They would have
concentrated on me. How fortunate, how very fortunate, that
Goethe or Browning—whoever you like—was not televised in his
old age. Now we can have our idea of them, our imagination
of them, but had they been televised— No, television is not
literature, it is actuality." I asked Max why, when he had
been so adamant in his refusal to be filmed for American
television, he had been willing to do a number of B.B.C.
radio broadcasts during the Second World War. He replied
that in written prose the sound was always important to him,
that he laid great emphasis on the acoustics of prose, and
that in radio broadcasting it was paramount. The human voice
had always fascinated him. Even his caricatures, he said,
had been influenced by the voices of his subjects; Balfour,
for example, had a shrill, high-pitched, unmelodious voice,
and its vibration was always in his mind when he caricatured
him.
It is odd that one of the least popular writers in the world
should have become, next to Winston Churchill, the most
popular broadcaster in England during the most critical
moment of its history. Max may have had few readers, but he
had millions of listeners. Of his B.B.C. broadcasts, Rebecca
West has written, "I felt, when I was listening to them,
that I was listening to the voice of the last civilized man
on earth," adding, "Max's broadcasts justify the entire
invention of broadcasting." In January of 1942, while London
was blacked out, and a vast number of its inhabitants were
sleeping in the subways and in shelters, and the fires lit
by incendiary bombs furnished the only illumination, Max
treated his listeners to the broadcast called "Music Halls
of My Youth." In a letter to Sir Sydney Cockerell, the poet
Siegfried Sassoon wrote of this broadcast, "Max's talk I
listened to with delight. For me it was and will be the only
B.B.C. half-hour worth remembering in 1942. No words can
express what I feel about it. I laughed aloud—but there were
tears in my eyes too."
It must have been a curious instinct of self-interest that
had caused me, in Rome in 1954, to send Max a little
phonograph, along with some recordings of his favorite
composer, Puccini, for now, one afternoon in June of 1955,
sitting in Max's niche, I was able to hear all his
broadcasts, which had been recorded on special discs and
sent to him by the B.B.C. Max and his secretary, Miss
Elizabeth Jungmann, enjoyed the phonograph almost as much as
I did. It constituted a singular contemporary, mechanical
intrusion into the niche, which had theretofore been
dominated by the bronze girl with the averted head and by
the pair of photographs on the mantelshelf—the two girls in
white whispering romantic secrets to one another under great
beeches in the park of an English country house on a summer
night, and the little girl laughing at the Abbé's joke. It
was installed beside the Merton chair. It played Puccini and
Max. On this phonograph I now listened to Max's music-hall
broadcast. He delivered this one when it was well past his
own bedtime. He assumes, he says, that most of his
contemporaries are, as he should be, already asleep, and
that those of his listeners who are up and doing will "know
little of the subject on which I am going to dilate with
senile garrulity." After talking about Dan Leno, Little Tich,
Albert Chevalier, George Robey, Marie Lloyd, and others, Max
ends with a few words to his listeners on how he had come to
squander his youth drinking in the words and music of these
vanished ghosts:
Perhaps you will blame me for having spent so much of my
time in Music Halls, so frivolously, when I should have
been sticking to my books, burning the midnight oil and
compassing the larger latitude. But I am impenitent. I
am inclined to think, indeed I have always thought, that
a young man who desires to know all that in all ages and
in all lands has been thought by the best minds, and
wishes to make a synthesis of all those thoughts for the
future benefit of mankind, is laying up for himself a
very miserable old age.
Good
night, childrenn . . . everywhere.
Max's whispered voice dwindled away at the end. The
broadcast was thrilling and funny and moving; I understood
perfectly why Sassoon had written about it as he had, Max
had a tremendous mastery of the dynamics of his own voice.
He set his own threshold in decibels, rationing them
shrewdly. His normal speaking voice was soft, small,
infinitely courteous, and musical. By talking twice as loud,
he gave the effect of shouting. Alan Dent, the London drama
and film critic, has written a description of Max's delivery
on the air, in the album note for the phonograph record of
one of Max's B.B.C. broadcasts—"London Revisited." The
Maximilian Society of London was Mr. Dent's idea. It was
founded on Max's seventieth birthday, with seventy admirers
of Max as members, including William Nicholson, Sir Edwin
Lutyens, William Rothenstein, Philip Guedalla, Robert Lynd,
and Desmond MacCarthy. The idea was to add a member on each
of Max's birthdays. Mr. Dent, animated by Max's constant
reference to himself in his broadcasts as a Cockney, writes:
It is like him to refer to his Cockney or
low-London accent, even though his diction is so precise
that be gives "perambulator" five clear vowels, and
bestows upon such a word as "initiation"—which the
vulgar, both rich and poor, slur into something like "inishation"—its
full consonantal complement. It is like him to
reveal that this same sedulous care in speaking the
English language can turn a word like "poetry" into a
poem.
One Sunday night in 1942, Max did a broadcast on
"Advertisements," and now Miss Jungmann put the record of
that one on the phonograph. In it, Max says he wishes that
he were not incurably ironic in his manner of expressing
himself; he wishes that, for once, he could be
straightforward. But perhaps, he reflects, it's as well that
he can't, for on the subject of advertising "my language
might be overstrong for Sunday evening." Max doesn't mind
want ads. To "these spontaneous cries from the heart" he is
sympathetic. What he can't abide are the "you do
want, and woe betide if you don't get" ones. He remembers
the want ads of his youth. He read them, when he was a
child, with fascination. He cherishes one that he read in
the Church Times: "Medical Man in Cheltenham can
accommodate one female resident patient. Epileptic
Churchwoman preferred." But though he loved it, he has
become, in retrospect, suspicious even of that. Perhaps it
was the thin edge of the wedge:
Somewhat later, a wonderful soap swam into my ken. Sir
John Millais had painted a great picture of a little boy
with golden curls and a green velveteen suit, and
upturned eyes, blowing bubbles; and this picture bad
been acquired by the vendor of the soap and widely
reproduced on the soap's behalf. My elders, in those
prehistoric days, wondered that Sir John should have
authorised this use of his great gifts. And they were
shocked, too, that the beautiful young Mrs. Langtry had
for the soap's sake allowed engravings of a photograph
of herself to be sown broadcast in the Press, with the
admonition "For look you, she is fair as a lily!" Mrs.
Weldon, the famous litigant, had gone even further. Her
portrait was subscribed by her, "I am forty-seven, but
my complexion is seventeen." I wonder what my elders
would think of those perfectly well-brought-up and
non-litigious young ladies of rank and fashion who
nowadays let their photographs be reproduced in favour
of some unguent used by them and ecstatically praised by
them, with an accompanying diagram of their features and
a laudatory description of each feature by the
unguentarian?
An American driving along English roads is particularly
struck by the merciful fewness of road signs. But Max,
without benefit of the American standard, is irked by what
has happened in England:
And now for a matter which agitates me far more than the
effect that advertisements have on newspapers. Though
newspapers without advertisements could not nowadays
survive, I see no reason for believing that without this
support the streets and squares of our cities, and the
roads and hills and valleys of our countryside, would
presently disappear. On the contrary, they are by way of
disappearing already behind the insistences on what we
ought to purchase, Beautiful architecture and beautiful
scenery are things far more important to the soul of man
than even the best newspaper.
Max, in spite of all his protests, is himself not free from
the itch to advertise. He wishes he were rich, so that he
could place an ad. He is even more ambitious. He wants to
start a whole advertising campaign:
Meanwhile, if I were endowed with wealth, I should start
a great advertising campaign in all the principal
newspapers. The advertisements would consist of one
short sentence, printed in huge block letters—a sentence
that I once beard spoken by a husband to a wife: "My
dear, nothing in this world is worth buying."
As Max and I sat by the phonograph in the niche, Miss
Jungmann kept bringing in more discs. Max tried to restrain
her, on the ground that he did not wish to bore me, but Miss
Jungmann and I prevailed. He accepted our interest as a
compliment. "The best compliment I have ever received," he
said, "was from the headwaiter at Berners Hotel, where I was
staying, after a B.B.C. broadcast. He came up to me and
said, 'I congratulate you on your broadcast, sir. May I sy,
you speak such mervlus English!'"
We now listened to Max on George Moore. Max met George Moore
at Nevill Holt, the country home of Lady Cunard. "There was
something about Moore," Lady Cunard said later, "that evoked
a fish, a large, distinguished carp." Moore was a natural
for Max. Max immediately made a caricature of him, showing
him in the drawing room at Nevill Holt—the first of the many
caricatures Max did of Moore. His broadcast on Moore he had
written in 1913, as a sketch for his unfinished
autobiographical novel "The Mirror of the Past." It
contains, besides much else, a description of Moore's face:
His Parisianism, grafted upon an imperishable brogue,
gave to his utterance a very curious charm. Aided by his
face and his gesture, this charm was irresistible. I say
his "gesture" advisedly; for he had but one. The
finger-tips of his vague, small, inert, white hand
continually approached his mouth and, rising thence,
described an arc in the air—a sort of invisible
suspension-bridge for the passage of his i-de-a to us.
His face, too, while he talked, had but one expression—a
faintly-illumined blank. Usually, when even the most
phlegmatic of men is talking, you shall detect changes
of expression. In Moore you never could. Usually the
features of the most vivacious man's face retain the
form that Nature assigned to them. But in Moore's face,
immutable though the expression was, by some physical
miracle the features were perpetually remoulding
themselves. It was not merely that the chin receded and
progressed, nor merely that the oval cheeks went
rippling in capricious hollows and knolls: the contours
of nose and brow, they too, had their vicissitudes. You
think I exaggerate? Well, I myself, with Moore there
before me, did sometimes doubt the evidence of my own
eyes. It was possible that my eyes had been deceived.
But the point then is that no face save Moore's ever
deceived them in just this way.
I looked up at the small convex mirror on the wall—the
mirror, of "The Mirror of the Past," which had hung in his
nursery when Max was a child and had been with him ever
since. I said that it was a keen observer.
Max chuckled. He began to talk about Moore. Moore had no
learning at all, Max said; for him everything was a sudden
discovery, and Oscar Wilde had once complained to Max that
"George Moore is always conducting his education in public."
Max quoted Samuel Johnson on talkers—those who talk from a
tank and those who talk from a stream. Irishmen, Max said,
talk from a stream, Anglo-Saxons from a tank. Moore talked
from a stream, and marvellously when he was in midstream,
but he allowed himself to be diverted into backwaters that
were sometimes muddy. Once he had got stuck in an inlet, he
could not extricate himself. The thing in his conversation
that Max liked best was his descriptions of scenery; Moore
had an extraordinary feeling for natural scenery and an
extraordinary gift for describing it. It irritated Max that
invariably, when Moore was describing some field or wood or
stream, he would bring into it a lady—met accidentally or by
assignation—who swooned over him. In the years when Max was
a drama critic, he developed a neat device for getting Moore
onto the subject of scenery. Moore was a playwright, and he
would ask Max what play he had been reviewing. Artfully, Max
would say, "Well, the play wasn't anything at all, but,
really, never in my life have I seen such wonderful
scenery." This would ignite Moore, in a damp way: "Ah,
the scenery was wonderful, was it?" And off he would go, to
Max's joy, on scenery—"perhaps some lovely vista in Ireland,
don't you know, or in France, and it would be delightful.
But after a time, inevitably, the shepherdesses would come
in. Never was a man so importuned by imaginary women! I have
never met a shepherdess. Have you? But Moore was
always running into them—rather, they kept running into
him. Evidently, they revived their craft just to conquer
Moore. He was modest; they were not conquests by him,
they were victories over him. In the same limp voice
and Frenchified brogue, he would go on about it. He would
have satisfied the democratic ideal, don't you know; he
wasn't snobbish—barmaids, duchesses, waitresses, ladies of
easy virtue, who forgot commerce, apparently, when they met
him, and, in his idyllic moods, to which I often
incited him, shepherdesses."
Miss Jungmann brought in tea. Knowing that I was
particularly interested in all those broadcasts that had
been written thirty years before for "The Mirror of the
Past," she put on a record of one about H. B. Irving, the
son of the great Henry. It turned out that H. B. Irving was
the Oxford undergraduate who influenced Max more than anyone
else there. Max describes the tremendous impact the young
Irving had on Oxford. Max and I listened to a record of the
broadcast. Irving, Max says, had the "bent strut" of his
father. He had a way of clapping you on the shoulder and
saying "Ha!" at you that was stupefying. Max describes an
undergraduate scene, a Sunday breakfast in one Bancroft's
rooms:
As he [Irving] crossed the threshold, he said in a deep
voice, "Ha!" He clapped a hand on Bancroft's shoulder,
rather in the manner of a very eminent detective
arresting a very unimportant thief. Then, with that hand
still on that shoulder, he distributed nods and "Ha!"s
among the company—the company of "supers." His gaze
alighted on me.
"This," said Bancroft (with the pride of a "super" who
has a line to speak) "is Mr. Beerbohm of Merton."
"Ha?" He had a way of looking at one trough his
pince-nez, less intimidating only than a way he had of
looking at one over his pince-nez. "Ha!" he
repeated. And then "A brother of Beerbohm Tree, aren't
you?"
"A half brother," I said faintly.
"Ha!"
It was as though he had said "That may or may not be an
extenuating circumstance, I will consider it."
Max doesn't remember much that Irving said during the
breakfast, but he does remember that what Irving said "had
at the moment the effect of a Standard Work condensed by him
for the occasion." For the rest of that memorable Sunday,
Max went around saying lightly to everyone he met, "I met
Young Irving at breakfast this morning." There came a moment
when Young Irving actually invited Max to lunch the next
day. "I quaked," Max recalls, "as at the service of a writ,
and was gratified as by a royal command." That lunch changed
the whole course of Max's life. His brother Herbert had
encouraged him to go in either for diplomacy or for the Bar.
Max, who knew that he had to go in for something, had rather
decided on the Bar. To his horror, when he came to lunch he
found himself alone with Young Irving. He was in panic. To
bolster his morale, he remembered a report that one of his
masters at Charterhouse had written about him. "'Has natural
abilities of a rare order'—this phrase from a form-master's
report came floating into my brain. Why should I not impress
myself on Irving today as a man with abilities of a rare
order?" But he couldn't. The pince-nez did him in. The "Ha"s
did him in. "I felt," says Max, "I had no abilities of
any order. That form-master had been a fool." After
lunch, there came a critical moment, a moment that Max had
felt from the beginning would come—a question he dreaded.
"And what," he [Irving] asked, "are you going to do in
after-life?"
"Well," I said—and the poor monosyllable came out as a
polysyllabic bleat, "we-e-e-e-ell," after which the
other poor words came out in three separate gasps sped
by a weak smile—"as a matter of fact I'm—I'm thinking
of—being called to the Bar."
And these words, at the very moment of utterance, became
untrue. I had, up to that moment, vaguely destined
myself for the Bar. But in expressing to Irving this
ambition, I saw the full absurdity of it and for good
and all dropped it before he had time to say (as he did
with more than his usual gravity say) "Ha!"
Miss Jungmann next put on "Nat Goodwin—and Another." Again,
it had originally been written as a sketch for "The Mirror
of the Past." The other was Hall Caine. Max tells how, in
the eighteen-nineties, he had arrived at Jackwood, his
brother Herbert's country home, very late on a Saturday
night. He was confronted by an appalling sight: Hall Caine's
hat was standing on an oaken chest. Max felt terror at the
imminence of confronting its owner. Herbert was doing a play
of Caine's, and the two of them were upstairs in Herbert's
study, conferring. Max had never met Hall Caine, but this
had not prevented him from drawing widely publicized
caricatures of him:
I knew the hat. I had often caricatured it—it and its
wearer. I knew them both well by sight. . . . With all
the ribaldry of youth, I had persecuted Hall Caine. And
here be was, under this roof. Here was his hat. . . .
[One caricature] showed Hall Caine, with frenzied eyes
and hair, bearing a sandwich-board on which his name was
inscribed in lavish capitals. It had been reproduced on
a small scale in one of the English papers. . . . He
went to lecture in America, and, into whatsoever city he
entered, always that presentment stared him in the face.
It cropped up, with nerve-shattering iteration, in every
local paper, often magnified to the scale of a full
page.
Hall Caine was born, in 1853, with a great asset for success
in life—the total absence of a sense of humor. This enabled
him to turn out, with complete sincerity and in the
conviction of greatness, a series of novels and plays, which
had tremendous popularity. He wrote "The Deemster," "The
Christian," and "The Eternal City," the last of which
Herbert Beerbohm Tree put on at His Majesty's. It was "The
Eternal City" that Caine and Herbert were discussing
upstairs while, below, Max was being pulverized by the
author's hat. Seldom has a writer launched himself on a
fabulously successful career by the simple device of writing
a fan letter, but that is what Caine did. He wrote such a
letter, when he was working in an architect's office in
Liverpool, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti answered; how
could you not answer a letter full of such appreciation and
detailing the efforts made by the writer to popularize his
correspondent in Liverpool? One thing led to another, and
the first thing Rossetti knew, Caine was staying with him,
in his dishevelled house at 16 Cheyne Walk.
After we had listened to the Caine record, Max talked a bit
about what is a perennial literary phenomenon—the vast
discrepancy between writers who attain popular success and
are anathema to the cognoscenti and those who are approved
by the cognoscenti and have no public at all. In his youth,
Max said, the great popular successes were Marie Corelli,
Ouida, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and Hall Caine. At the parties he
used to go to, he said, you could get a laugh just by
saying "Hall Caine."
Max then went on to discuss other members of the Rossetti
Circle, It was characteristic of Max that in speaking of the
Rossetti Circle he should tell me he admired Dante Gabriel's
sensible brother William Michael and, of the ladies—that is,
the models employed by the Pre-Raphaelites—preferred the
healthy Fanny Cornforth to the doomed Elizabeth Siddal. It
must have been hard work for the Pre-Raphaelites to be
constantly ethereal, and Miss Cornforth was bosomy and
earthy. She afforded the Pre-Raphaelites a nice change from
Pre-Raphaelitism; she was Rubensy. In the mid-thirties, Max
had received from Sydney Cockerell several photographs of
the Rossetti brothers, Swinburne, and Miss Cornforth.
Cockerell had at that time just bought three drawings of
Max's for the Fitzwilliam Museum, which he directed, and Max
wrote, in acknowledgment of both benefactions:
DEAR
MR.
COCKERELL,
It is a grand thing to be represented in the
Fitzwilliam; and I am so glad that this honour is to
befall me, and glad that I have been deemed worthy of it
by you. . . .
Meanwhile I return, with very many thanks for the joy
they have given me, those wondrous little photographs.
Miss Cornforth is incredible. Credo accordingly—and
indeed am but confirmed in a belief I already had—that
she must have been just like that and almost like what
(reading between the lines of D.G.R.'s presentments of
her) I had made of her in one of those cartoons of which
you were speaking in such kind terms the other day.
William Michael is decidedly the most distinguished in
aspect of the figures in that group of four. You and I
were arguing, in Nicholson's studio, that William
Michael had been underrated because he happened to be
the one (superficially) dull man in a bevy of brilliant
ones. Perhaps a time will come when he will he overrated,
as having been the one sane man among lunatics!—for
there was, wasn't there? a silver thread of lunacy in
the rich golden fabric of 16 Cheyne Walk.
In a drawing of Hall Caine in "Rossetti and His Circle," Max
represents the time when Caine was living with Rossetti.
Theodore Watts-Dunton, the chronic caretaker of genius, is
admonishing Caine, who is truculent. They are in the studio
at 16 Cheyne Walk, Caine red-headed, red-mustached,
red-goateed, and with a fanatical gleam in his eye—the gleam
of a man who knows that he carries greatness in each hand,
in the shape of two manuscripts of his own, which he is
determined to read to Rossetti. He is, plainly, not going to
take the advice that Watts-Dunton is offering him. Frederick
Shields, a painter friend of Rossetti's, is standing near
Watts-Dunton, backing him up. In the background,
lying-sitting on a sofa, is Rossetti, corpulent, brooding,
hearing the argument that concerns him but not listening.
The caricature is called "Quis Custodiet Ipsum Custodem?"
and Max's caption reads:
THEODORE
WATTS
[-DUNTON]:
Mr. Caine, a word with you! Shields and I have been
talking matters over, and we are agreed that tonight and
henceforth you must not and shall not read any more of
your literary efforts to our friend. They are too—what
shall I say?—too luridly arresting, and are the allies
of insomnia.
In another caricature in "Rossetti and His Circle," Max
shows Rossetti embarked on an exciting project for a set of
murals in the Oxford Union—"The Quest for the Holy Grail."
Rossetti, in brown smock and trousers, has one foot on a
ladder, on his way to put the finishing touch on a symbolic
Miss Siddal, who, with outstretched arms, is ready,
presumably, to receive the find. Benjamin Jowett, a little
man in a flat hat, is standing at the foot of the ladder.
Max's caption is:
THE
SOLE
REMARK
LIKELY
TO
HAVE
BEEN
MADE
BY
BENJAMIN
JOWETT
ABOUT
THE
MURAL
PAINTINGS
AT
THE
OXFORD
UNION.
"And what were they going to do with the Grail when they
found it, Mr. Rossetti?"
It was in the winter of 1917 that Max, re-creating a
vanished milieu that he had never known first-hand, drew the
caricatures for "Rossetti and His Circle," while staying in
a rented cottage at Far Oakridge, in Gloucestershire, near
the home of William Rothenstein. The Beerbohms took their
meals with the Rothensteins. To Rothenstein, who worshipped
Giotto, Max once sent a sketch he had made of the
Rothenstein family. He apologizes for what his sketch may
make various members of the family suffer. "But," he goes on
to say, "there is in the whole design a sense of a family,
I think—something spiritually real, though not up to the
mark of our old friend Giotto—(I say our old friend,
because I regard any friend of yours as a friend of mine)."
Sir William describes in his memoirs how Max, wearing gloves
and with a cane over one arm, used to walk over the snow
carrying the Rossetti drawings carefully protected in a
portfolio. "No wonder Max was nervous of leaving his
Rossetti caricatures in an empty cottage," he writes, "for
they are now regarded as classics. What a remarkable
reconstruction of a period! So intuitively truthful, that
one of William Michael's daughters wrote that no person
living within their circle had given so accurate a picture
of its physical and spiritual composition. Max, with his air
of delicate sprightliness, is the profoundest critic of men
I have known."
As Max saw things, the silver thread of lunacy that wound
through 16 Cheyne Walk also wound through the lives of many
of his friends and acquaintances. From the Rossetti Circle,
we went on to talk about D. H. Lawrence. Max leaned forward
a bit in his chair. "Oh, Lawrence," he said. "Poor D.
H. Lawrence!" The adjective was not uttered in condescension
but in true sympathy for the afflicted. "Poor D. H.
Lawrence. He never realized, don't you know—he never
suspected that to be stark, staring mad is somewhat of a
handicap to a writer."
I told Max that I had been tremendously moved by "Sons and
Lovers" when I first read it, and that I had tried two later
novels, which I couldn't read.
"Oh, of course," Max said. "'Sons and Lovers'! Although his
prose style was slovenly, he was a man of unquestionable
genius. But then he became afflicted with Messiahdom, don't
you know. Now, what equipment had poor D. H. Lawrence for
Messiahdom? He was, in so many ways, a foolish man. He was
not fastidious in his friendships. Anyone who took him for a
great man he would welcome. He did not stop to question,
don't you know, what other qualifications a person had.
Anyone who would commune with him on Destiny"—Max
capitalized the word with his voice—"he would welcome. As a
result, he was always involved with quite inferior people.
He was one of those unfortunate men who think that merely
because they have done something, it is at once first-rate.
Simply because they have done it. He had a glowing
gift for nature, a real feeling for nature, and in this he
was at his best. But through his landscapes cantered
hallucinations."
About the other Lawrence, T. E., the Arabian one, Max said
he couldn't talk much, because in that Lawrence the mixture
of genius and insanity was too heady for him to do more than
sample it. Lawrence had translated the "Odyssey" and then
denounced it, as "pastiche and face powder." "He confused
the 'Odyssey,' you know, with his translation of it," Max
said to me. About Lawrence's translation of the "Odyssey,"
Max once wrote Rothenstein:
What a strange thing, to be a super-eminent genius and
hero, as Lawrence was, plus such streaks of sheer
silliness. . . . I have read various extracts from that
translation—read them with gasps. And I would rather not
have been that translator than have driven the Turks out
of Arabia.
Tracing the silver thread led Max to Ezra Pound. Pound had
lived for a time in Rapallo, and Max used to sec him. He
laughed in recollection of one of those meetings. "Ezra
idolized his parents, you know, and they idolized him," Max
said. "They thought the sun rose and set in him. They came
from Idaho. He brought them here, and very nice, simple,
unaffected people they were, too. Anyway, one afternoon we
were all sitting down there on the terrace of one of the
cafés"—Max waved a hand toward downtown Rapallo and the sea
front "and Ezra was talking away. Very entertaining! He was
fond of making extravagant statements to amuse his friends,
which, of course, he didn't expect them to take seriously.
He was in one of those moods. His parents were staring at
him, rapt, while he made these utterances. Ezra said, 'The
greatest master of French literature was Louis the
Eighteenth.' Ezra's father, who was sitting next to me,
nudged me and beamed at me. 'That kid,' he said, `knows
everything!'"
I told Max that I had been shown an anti-Semitic poem
written by Pound against him. In it the spelling of Max's
name was distorted. Max was interested, and not at all
surprised. "I am not Jewish," he said. "I cannot claim that.
But then, you know, he is crazy. He greatly admired
Mussolini. All that Fascist business! He did have one trait,
though, that I didn't much care for." Evidently, Max
expected crazy people, outside of their craziness, to live
up to some code of gentlemanliness. "He would start out to
rave about some friend, and you thought you were in for a
paean of praise. And then the qualifications would creep in.
And then you realized that he had begun with the paean in
order to conclude with the denigration. The treacle of
admiration, don't you know, was always strongly tinctured
with the vinegar of envy."
Max distinguished between people he considered all-out
cranks and lunatics and those who were simply idiosyncratic.
In his introduction to "Rossetti and His Circle," he wrote:
Byron, Disraeli, and Rossetti—these seem to me the three
most interesting men that England had in the nineteenth
century. England had plenty of greater men, Shelley, for
example, was a far finer poet than Byron. But he was not
in himself interesting: he was just a crystal-clear
crank. To be interesting, a man must be complex and
elusive.
On this ground, Max found neither Pound nor Lawrence
interesting. Two complex men Max greatly admired as writers
and liked as friends were G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire
Belloc. "They had blind spots," he said, "but outside of
that they were delightful men. Such enormous gusto, you
know, such gaiety, and feeling for life." Max was merely
amused by people who had blind spots. Sometimes, when he
mentioned a blind spot in conversation, he would tap his
forehead to indicate it. Max conveyed the idea that
Chesterton and Belloc were men whose minds were vast and
hospitable houses, with little dark closets in the attic
into which—there were so many other rooms, gay and sunny—you
didn't have to go. Robert Speaight, in a biography of
Belloc, quotes Max as saying to his hero, "When you really
get talking, Hilary, you're like a great Bellocking ram, or
like a Roman river full of baskets and dead cats." Speaight
also repeats a dry observation of Max's when he was told
that Belloc had been to a cricket match: "I suppose he would
have said that the only good wicketkeeper in the history of
the game was a Frenchman and a Roman Catholic." Max told me
he felt that Belloc was, on occasion, a victim of monomania.
"He had the conviction that there was only a single lane to
Heaven," Max said. "It suited him, for example, to believe
that Dreyfus was guilty. Ergo"—Max tapped his
forehead—"Dreyfus was guilty."
Somerset Maugham, in a series of articles on ten great
novelists he wrote some years ago for the London Sunday
Times, made the flat statement that Balzac was the only
one of them to whom he would without hesitation ascribe
genius. Commenting on this, Max told me that he thought it
was absurd to single out Balzac. "Tolstoy and Dostoevski had
great genius," he said, "and Dickens had it, too, in spite
of his dreadful faults." Nevertheless, except for Turgenev
and, at times, Tolstoy, Max had serious doubts about the
Russian novelists. He felt that too much of what they wrote
was also touched by lunacy. He knew that Dostoevski was
terrifying, and even majestic, but then so was Mont Blanc,
and Max wouldn't have liked to live on Mont Blanc. In 1913,
Max wrote an essay, "Kolniyatsch," in which he lampooned the
vogue for the Russian novelists among the British
intelligentsia. Kolniyatsch (the word is a Russification of
Colney Hatch, which was once London's most famous lunatic
asylum) is a Russian writer—a composite of Dostoevski and
Gorki. Kolniyatsch, says Max, developed slowly: "It was not
before his eighteenth birthday that he murdered his
grandmother and was sent to that asylum in which he wrote
the poems and plays belonging to what we now call his
earlier manner." Was Kolniyatsch an optimist or a pessimist?
Max analyzes:
By more than one critic he has been called a pessimist,
and it is true that a part of his achievement may be
gauged by the lengths to which be carried
pessimism—railing and raging, not, in the manner of his
tame forerunners, merely at things in general, or at
women, or at himself, but lavishing an equally fierce
scorn and hatred on children, on trees and flowers and
the moon, and indeed on everything that the
sentimentalists have endeavoured to force into favour.
On the other hand, his burning faith in a personal
Devil, his frank delight in earthquakes and pestilences,
and his belief that every one but himself will be
brought back to life in time to be frozen to death in
the next glacial epoch, seem rather to stamp him as an
optimist.
Max's great enthusiasms in literature were for Jane Austen,
Trollope, Turgenev, George Meredith, Charles Lamb, Henry
James, E. M. Forster. He adored Meredith's early manner—"The
Adventures of Harry Richmond" particularly—and Henry James's
later. "The Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove" were,
Max thought, James's greatest achievements. These writers
had no chalets on Mont Blanc, but they took him into realms
where he did want to live. Max was on especially good terms
with Trollope. "He reminds us," said Max, "that sanity need
not be Philistine." Max told me he thought "The Warden" a
perfect novel, and the cello-playing Mr. Harding was one of
his favorite musicians, especially when he was playing a
cello he didn't have with him. The literature of epilepsy,
of cosmic soul-searching, of uncontrollable violence simply
had no appeal for him. About the Elizabethans he felt
something of what he felt about the Russians. In a Rede
Lecture he gave at Cambridge, in which he paid tribute to
Lytton Strachey, the only reservation he made was about
Strachey's "Elizabeth and Essex." He said that it was a
"brave" thing for Strachey to have tried but that, at best,
it was only "guesswork." To Max, that far-off world, where
murders, sudden decapitations, rushings off to the Tower
were part of the climate, as natural as April showers, was
incomprehensible and unseizable, and he felt that it must
have been so to Strachey also, who was a master of style,
and hence of form. He said, "A very robustious, slapdash
writer might convince me that he was in close touch with the
souls of those beings whose actions and motives are to me as
mysterious as those of wild animals in an impenetrable
jungle. You rightly infer that I am not a Sixteenth
Century man. And I make so bold as to say 'Neither was
Lytton Strachey.'"
Max shied away from lunacy not only in its violent forms but
also in its milder forms, one of these being utopianism.
"Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about
things that matter," he once said. He had a horror of
utopians, a suspicion of "big" ideas. Some of Shaw's
writings bored him, because they were impressments into what
he called "the strait jacket of panacea." The effort to
force men into this strait jacket had caused untold misery
and suffering to the human race, he thought. Rothenstein
once said of Max that he was always amiable except when his
sense of sanity was outraged. For Max, even to take oneself
entirely seriously was a form of insanity. Listening to Max
on the subject, I came to see that what for him constituted
sanity was a recognition of one's own limitations. He
had—without ever formulating it—a Theory of Limits. Max
countered Browning's "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed
his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" with the statement that
many of his friends had gone to hell in just that way. Max
liked the attainable, the tangible, the comprehensible, the
small in scale.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Max said that it had
made life "epical," but he indicated a distaste for the
epical. He wanted life to be livable rather than epical.
When he was a boy, he hero-worshipped statesmen—he later
recalled those days of veneration in a broadcast, "A Small
Boy Seeing Giants"—but he gradually came to be suspicious of
"giganticity." Napoleon, as an example of overwhelming
giganticity, repelled him. Caricatures that Max drew, as a
young man, of the great aristocratic politicians of his day
were so vivid that he was discharged from two magazines he
worked for, the Bystander and the Sketch,
because of objections from the advertisers. He cared just as
little for "giganticity" when it doffed its silk hat and
assumed the cloth cap of Labour. Labour resented his
delineations more than the aristocrats did. The latter went
hunting, but Labour, without this resource, stewed in
grievance. Max was on neither side; he punctured the
vanities of the aristocrats, and he didn't see why he should
spare those of the Labourites.
In 1921, he dedicated to Britannia his book of caricatures
called "A Survey," addressing her formally:
Madame, I venture to dedicate this volume to you because
you have always been kind to me, and because I cannot
think why you have always been so kind to me.
In the dedication, Max is aware that his career as a
satirist must have occasionally irritated his lady. He does
not defend himself but tries to explain:
In my youth, and indeed until quite recent years, the
Court was a very dominant factor in your life. A
satirist, instinctively, goes for what is very strong:
the weaker things he derides with less gusto, or not at
all. But you, Madame, have a great respect for strength,
and it is the weaker things that are aptest to tickle
your sense of humour. I myself have a respect for
strength, but also I am inclined, in my fallen nature,
to look for the weak points that all strength has, and
to point them rudely out I used to laugh at the Court
and at the persons around it; and this distressed you
rather. I never laughed with you at Labour. Labour
didn't seem to me quite important enough yet. But Labour
is very important now, very strong indeed; as you have
found. And I gathered, this year, from a certain mild
downward curve of your lips when I laid out for you in
the yellow sands those of my new drawings which referred
to Labour, that you thought me guilty of not the very
best taste in failing to bow my knee to your new Baal.
Perhaps I ought to exclude these few drawings from a
book dedicated to you. Do I compromise you by their
inclusion? I hope not. I think not. You have but
to say to Labour, "O honoured and darling and terrifying
Sir, I know you're perfect Don't blame me for
some drawings done by an utterly absurd man who lives
ever so far away in a country shaped like a jack-boot."
But if such words avail not, and you deem it expedient
to reject the dedication, then reject it, dear
Britannia: I shall not be thereby the less
affectionately your old servant,
MAX
BEERBOHM
Max's aversion to giganticity ran through his views on
everything—not only on the aristocrats and labor but on
dictators, intellectual as well as military (he shrank
especially from totalitarians of the intellect), on
skyscrapers, on cities. The London that Max loved was not
the big city but, rather, what he called the "congeries of
villages." He wrote about Bloomsbury, Chelsea, and Bayswater
as if they were different countries, each with its own
flavor and idiosyncrasy, producing different races of
people. Bloomsbury he deplored; the pedestrians there didn't
seem to have confidence in themselves. Chelsea he loved,
because it had a river, always a freshener, and Bayswater
because it had Kensington Gardens. He felt that cities, like
egos, became unmanageable when they got too big. They were
no longer on the human scale; you couldn't live in or with
them. His aversion extended even to motorcars that, in a
temporal form of bigness, went too fast. At the end of a
B.B.C. broadcast he called "Speed," which he and Miss
Jungmann and I listened to that afternoon in 1955, he
offered consolation to those whom he had just berated for
exceeding the speed limit:
But here is a heartening fact for you. We are all of us
travelling at a tremendous rate, and we shall always
continue to do so. We shall not, it is true, be able to
get rid of our speed-limit. But it is a very liberal
one. Eleven hundred and ten miles a minute is not a
limit to be grumbled at. Our planet is not truly
progressing, of course: it is back at its starting-point
every year. But it never for an instant pauses in its
passage through space. Nor will it do so even when, some
billions of years hence, it shall have become too cold
for us human beings to exist upon its surface. It will
still be proceeding at its present pace: eleven
hundred and ten miles a minute.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is indeed a beautiful and a
consoling thought—a thought for you to sleep on, to
dream of. Sleep well. Dream beautifully. In fact—Good
night.
Max's attitude toward bigness was essential to his own view
of himself as an artist. He had a severely topiary
intelligence; he knew where he could go and where he
couldn't go, what he could do and what he couldn't do. "I am
not creative in a big way," he said to me that day. "I
haven't any powerful invention; I used up all I had. What I
really am is an essayist." In an admiring essay on
Whistler's prose style, he wrote, "An exquisite talent like
Whistler's, whether in painting or in writing, is always at
its best on a small scale. On a large scale it strays and is
distressed. . . . For no man who can finely grasp a big
theme can play exquisitely round a little one." Max
ungrudgingly acknowledged the greatness of the wild geniuses
who brought up the big guns; at the same time, he felt no
obligation to like all that they wrote, and no regret that
he was not one of them. Discussing the fact that Lytton
Strachey was not one of them, either, he wrote, "Very
exquisite literary artists seldom are men of genius. Genius
tends to be careless of its strength. Genius is, by the
nature of it, always in rather a hurry. Genius can't be
bothered about perfection." Max did bother.
That June, on the next-to-last day I spent with Max, as we
sat in our traditional spot in the niche, he talked about
his old college, Merton. Once more it was teatime, and once
more Miss Jungmann brought us tea. Max told me he thought
that of all the novels written about Oxford the best was
Compton Mackenzie's "Sinister Street." "There is no book on
Oxford like it," he said. "It gives you actual Oxford
experience. What Mackenzie has miraculously done is to
make you feel what each term was like; it was
different in each term. Mackenzie notes the separate color
of each term. It evokes for me, more powerfully than
anything else that has been written about Oxford, my own
years at Merton. It is the epitome of a lifetime, you
know—one's history as an undergraduate. It is a life span,
from youth in your first year to old age in your last. When
you begin, you look up to the upperclassmen; they are your
heroes. By the time you're an upperclassman yourself, those
heroes are gone, you see yourself inroaded by a horde of
younger men, you feel your own youth gone, your time past;
you have become a survivor into a time you do not know.
Merton was one of the smaller colleges and, with two
exceptions, the oldest. It was the most intimate." Max
looked at me almost with an air of apology. "I still, you
know, spend much time in Merton."
He spent a good deal of time, too, I learned, with his
mother and his sisters in Upper Berkeley Street. From
Merton, the talk went to those early days in London, and his
eyes brightened in recollection. "Let me tell you about a
phrase that was current in our family," he said. "My mother,
you know, was very amusing and very amusable. When she and
my father were separated, they used to write each other long
letters, which they tried to make as delightful as they
could. Such letters are not written nowadays. It was
traditional for my friends to come to Sunday lunch when we
lived in Upper Berkeley Street. My friends adored my mother
and sisters. My sister Dora was dreamy and abstracted. She
became a nun when she was nineteen years old. But my sisters
Constance and Agnes were very gay. I still see my mother
presiding at those lunches. She was small, you know, and had
alert eyes; she always wore a black silk dress and a lace
cap—very dignified—but what my friends knew was that she had
a volatile humor, and they used to be very gay, those
lunches, animated by my mother. Well, we had a catch phrase
in the family that had a protean use, for praise or for the
reverse—'It's a first-class thing.' It came from Johnston
Forbes-Robertson. He was somewhere, in some drawing room,
and he noticed a mezzotint of some eighteenth-century
admiral that hung on the wall. He reflected how dreary it
was. Mrs. Patrick Campbell sailed in. Her eye went at once
to the admiral. She began rhapsodizing about him; she became
aerated about that admiral—to the delight of the host, of
course, who was a bigwig and hadn't realized he had such a
masterpiece on his wall. Mrs. Campbell couldn't say enough
about the mezzotint—it made the room, it transported you.
When she had done, she swept down on Johnston. 'Don't you
agree?' she demanded. Johnston was determined to puncture
the tire of Mrs. Campbell's ecstasy. 'Yes,' he said calmly,
'it's a first-class thing.' We never stopped using it. When
I was drama critic on the Saturday and came back to
Upper Berkeley Street after a play and my mother asked me
about it, that phrase would save me more ample criticism. It
was a wonderful short cut for settling so many questions. My
sister Constance came home one day and summoned my mother
and me; she was quivering to tell us what had happened. She
knew in advance it was the kind of thing my mother would
adore. Well, Constance had been walking along the street and
met Willie Wilde—Oscar's brother. In one hand he was
carrying a huge leg of mutton by the narrow part; with his
free hand he swept off his hat and bent over double in a
grand, ceremonial bow. There was something so grotesquely
funny in the way she did it, conveying both the mutton and
the bow. We decided it was a first-class thing.
"Willie Wilde, in one of those rare intervals when he was in
funds, took my sister Dora to lunch. Willie was in one of
his euphoric moods." Max, who loved to imitate the
grandiose, slid into an affectation of grandiosity. "'Dora,'
Willie said, 'I feel most imperial this morning, rampantly
imperial. I like the feeling of getting up in the morning
and thinking, Well, I've got Egypt, I've got Ceylon, I've
got Singapore, I've got large areas in Africa. . . . '" Max
brought his hands to the little tea table in front of him in
a climactic gesture that was almost devotional; his voice
dropped to an awesome whisper. "'And now, dear Dora, you are
the first to know—I've got India!' In something of a flurry,
Dora reported the whole thing to Constance. Constance
comforted her. 'Well, my dear, don't worry. Willie hasn't
really got India, you know.'"
I had lent Max a book about Mrs. Frank Leslie, the widow of
an American nineteenth-century newspaper tycoon. Mrs. Leslie
had married Willie Wilde, and for this reason I thought the
biography might interest Max. He had the book on the tea
table next to his chair. He picked up the book and a pencil
and, on the inside of the back cover, rapidly sketched Oscar
and Willie for me. These are probably the last drawings Max
ever did, though he did not regard them as drawings.
"Scratches," he called them, and yet they are quite
remarkable, too. You see that the two men are brothers, all
right: Willie, flabby and amiable, hoping for the best, and
doomed; Oscar, grinning in Hades, ghastly, and doomed. After
giving me the now illustrated book, as a kind of thanks for
lending it to him, Max went on talking about Willie Wilde,
who, I found, interested him more than Oscar did. Even when
it came to failures, he preferred the small ones to those on
the heroic scale. There in the niche, he brought back to
life a scene in a restaurant between him and Willie.
"I made an engagement with Willie to have a drink in a
little restaurant we used to like to go to," Max said. "The
waiter, who was an old friend of ours, was called Bismarck.
He did not resemble the other Bismarck in any way; his name
just happened to be Bismarck. Well, we were sitting there
talking about literature and life when, abruptly, Willie
revealed that his mind was not really on aesthetics.
'Beerbohm,' he said, 'I'd like you to lend me ten
shillings.' I said that I would. Exhilarated by a sudden
feeling of affluence, Willie decided to order something, and
whistled for Bismarck. He didn't mean anything by it. It was
just that he had been put off balance—he was childish, you
know—by the prospect of unearned increment; it was pure high
spirits. But Bismarck was affronted. He turned angrily on
Willie. 'Don't you whistle for me,' he said. 'I am not a
dog. My name is Bismarck.' You know, I will never forget it.
Everything went out of Willie. He began to stammer out
apologies to the waiter. 'But, my dear fellow,' he kept
mumbling, 'my dear fellow . . . I didn't mean . . . I meant
nothing. . . .' It was awful, you know—that sudden
capitulation. In that moment, I believe, he really saw, and
perhaps for the first time, the dingy failure of his life;
even behind the bulwark of that ten shillings, he saw
himself facing tragedy and defeat, he saw that there was
nothing ahead for him, that he would never recover, that he
would never find a clearing in the shambles he had made for
himself. He saw the end, and I saw it, too. It was very
painful."
Max told me some more about Willie. "He was, as I said,
childish. I mean childish in the sense that a child is
happily free of any thought of the future and seizes upon
what is immediately before him and desirable. It is curious
how often one encounters the phenomenon among grown men.
Willie had been working for the Telegraph, but after
going to America to marry Mrs. Leslie, and then being
divorced and returning to England, the Telegraph no
longer wanted him. He began doing drama criticism for
unimportant papers and writing general articles in which he
would mention trades-people and get perquisites; I daresay
that's how he got the leg of mutton he was carrying when he
met my sister in the street. He came to know a delightful
lady, a widow with two children, who was greatly interested
in him. She was very well off, and we thought we should no
longer have to worry about Willie. Willie had really a
wonderful way with children. He used to go up to the nursery
and play with these two children, and they couldn't wait for
his visits, because his affection for them was genuine and
they felt it. He used to impersonate a bear. He was
enormous, you know, but he would get down on his hands and
knees, and he made a really wonderful bear. He was a tame
bear, and the children rode him. One day he came—it was just
before Christmas—and said, 'Now I am a burglar come to rob
you, and you must catch me and tame me just as you did when
I was a bear.' There was a bank affixed to the wall in which
the children, all year, had collected pennies, and from time
to time their elders had dropped into it coins of larger
denomination—even sovereigns. It was not to be opened till
Christmas. The burglar advanced on the bank. The children,
in a state of great excitement, were about to catch him and
denounce him. And then, suddenly, obeying some imperious
impulse of childhood, Willie ripped the bank off the wall
and ran out of the room and out of the house, and was never
seen there again."
Miss Jungmann had told me that between my last visit to
Rapallo and this one two old friends had come to call on Max
at the Villino—Somerset Maugham and Max's onetime fiancée
Constance Collier. I asked Max what he and Maugham had
talked about.
"Oh, old times," Max said. "Maugham and I recalled a couple
we knew—the Davises. Mr. Davis was a questionable character
from the City, who took pride in his vulgarity. Still, the
Davises were art collectors and patrons, and very
hospitable, and Maugham and I used to enjoy their
hospitality. They were very kind, for instance, to Charles
Conder. He was an exquisite artist, Conder. He used to go
in, you know, for glades, with princesses and fairies
appearing at intervals. People would flock to the Davises'.
They were always giving fancy-dress balls. For one of them I
engaged a costume at the costumier's; I went as a cardinal—a
rather second-rate cardinal. When I arrived, I found Mr.
Davis on the steps of a throne, dressed as Queen Elizabeth.
He used to take these costume parties very seriously. He
would put on his costumes the night before so as to get used
to them; he had probably been Queen Elizabeth all night.
Also on the steps, just below Mr. Davis, there was a really
magnificent cardinal. I was fascinated by what I saw. The
cardinal on the steps was, I knew, a business rival of Mr.
Davis's. Mr. Davis had been hounding him, and now, as Queen,
he had him by the throat. The cardinal had come to plead;
the Queen forced him to the wall and told him that the only
resolution of his dilemma was to commit suicide. Mr. Davis
had worked the whole thing out. He had suggested to his
rival to come as a cardinal; he wanted to have his revenge
in style. When the magnificent cardinal passed me on his way
out, his face was ashen. He was a lost man. And, do you
know, he did commit suicide. I told Maugham it was a story
after his own style; I wondered he had never used it."
A Mr. and Mrs. Steevens emerged from the shades. "When
Maugham and I were young, we were both hard up, you know,"
Max said, "and we used to go every Tuesday night to dinner
at the house of a delightful couple named Steevens. Mr.
Steevens was quite a different cup of tea from Mr. Davis. He
was a first-rate classical scholar and became a prominent
journalist; he was really a remarkable man. At the end, he
was working for Lord Northcliffe, who sent him to South
Africa at the time of the Boer War. Mrs. Steevens was an
American, and owned a fortune. She devoted herself to
general and private philanthropies—especially on Tuesday
nights. It was a great comfort in those days to know that on
Tuesday night you could count on a really good dinner. Mrs.
Steevens would invite Maugham, G. S. Street, Reggie Turner,
and myself. Maugham and I recalled those Tuesday nights.
Among Mrs. Steevens' public philanthropies was an orphanage
she supported; when her charges grew up and went out into
the world from the orphanage, she used to employ various of
them on her household staff. She had a very well-run house,
don't you know, but I remember that it used to be somewhat
disconcerting to hear her say to the butler, for example,
'Dearest, will you bring in the cocktails?' or 'Darling,
will you give Mr. Beerbohm one of those nice little cakes?'
Of course, she had known all her staff from their infancies.
Still, it used rather to startle us. When Maugham was here,
he and I laughed over it."
"And what about Constance Collier, Max?" I asked. "Elizabeth
tells me that just a few months before she died she sat in
this very chair and had tea with you."
"We talked mostly of our days in Dieppe, when the future was
becomingly veiled, don't you know, and when youth seemed a
natural state, the only imaginable state," Max said. "Dieppe
was a simple fishing village then, and very cheap. Constance
used to come there with her mother. It was there that
Constance and I became engaged. It was also in Dieppe that I
finally decided to be a writer. Maupassant and Meredith were
my heroes. Meredith I could not hope to emulate, but
Maupassant, since he was so cunningly simple, deceived me
into thinking that I could emulate him. I have
described it all in an essay."
The essay is called "A Relic." Max describes how, rummaging
about in an old trunk, he came upon the fragments of a fan.
The moment he came upon these fragments, he heard himself
murmuring a sentence: "Down below, the sea rustled to and
fro over the shingle." He goes on to recall an incident of
his youth. Max was nineteen. He was sitting at a table of
the café on the terrace of the casino in Dieppe, drinking a
glass of bock, when he beheld a startling scene. A woman of
about thirty rushed by him, pursued by a short, fat man of
about fifty-five. "Écoute,
Angélique,"
gasped the perspiring bourgeois. "Écoute
je te supplie."
But Angélique wouldn't. She rushed through the swinging
doors, the suppliant following. The waiter picked up the
remnants of a fan Angélique had broken in her anger. Max,
after he had paid for his bock, followed them, but they were
nowhere to be seen. Next day, he waited for them, but they
did not appear. He never saw them again. Nevertheless, the
vision of their faces, Angélique's "positively dull with
rage," made an inescapable impression on him. He tried to
reconstruct their story in his imagination, and this
reconstruction, he fancied, would make a conte, like a conte
of Maupassant's. He decided to call it "The Fan"—very
Maupassantish. Maupassant would have needed no more; why
should he need more? He felt very cynical and worldly, and,
after all, Maupassant was so simple; Maupassant was just an
observer, like him. Of course, Maupassant was much older
than Max and had observed more, but Max had the advantage of
having picked up all of Maupassant's observations in
Maupassant. Day after day, Max sat at the table of the
terrace café, with a bock and the fan fragments before him,
and at last he wrote the first sentence of the first story
by the English Maupassant: "Down below, the sea rustled to
and fro over the shingle." Max liked these words; he liked
them so much that he decided they would end his story, too.
He began to feel sorry for Maupassant. Could Maupassant
brook a rival? He had the "chose vue," just as
Maupassant so often had; the problem was to get the "chose
à figurer."
He went to the café every night, he kept fingering the
fragments of the fan, but, he is forced to confess, "the
plum did not ripen." He had the provocative beginning ("Down
below, the sea rustled to and fro over the shingle"), he had
the mournful ending ("Down below, the sea rustled to and fro
over the shingle"); what he couldn't get was the intervening
material. Max could never finish that story, but he did
finish the essay he wrote about not finishing it: "The chord
this relic strikes in me is not one of curiosity as to that
old quarrel, but (if you will forgive me) one of tenderness
for my first effort to write, and for my first hopes of
excellence."
I told Max that I knew the essay, and that it was lucky he
hadn't finished "The Fan," because it would have deprived us
of "A Relic."
Max smiled. Then he said, "Please find Elizabeth and ask her
to give you the little snapshots of Dieppe."
When I brought in the snapshots, Max took them and we looked
at them together. He concentrated on one in particular.
"There it is," he said. "The very terrace, the very café—not
the very bock—and Constance and myself sitting there. Walter
Sickert, I believe, took this snapshot." Constance is
wearing a beribboned, flowered, floppy straw hat and a light
summer dress. A parasol is slung over her shoulder. Max is
wearing a white flannel suit, with a flower in the
buttonhole; his straw hat is in front of him on the table,
and his hand is resting on the head of his walking stick.
Somehow he endows the plein-air costume with an aura of
urban elegance.
I remarked on how lovely Constance looked.
"Doesn't she? Doesn't she?" Max said. "She was beautiful,
you know, and with everything before her. My brother Herbert
had great plans for her; Coquelin adored her and gave her
acting lessons. And I— well, I was on the verge of
supplanting Maupassant."
During her recent visit, Max said, Constance had reminded
him of a "wicked joke" he had played on her in Dieppe.
"Wicked," Max repeated, full of unashamed guilt.
I inquired, of course, about this lapse.
"Well, you know, there used to be visiting theatrical
companies who came there from Paris and played," he said.
"It was a holiday for the actors, too. I took Constance to a
matinée of one of these performances—a comedy. Now,
Constance didn't know a word of French. The audience started
to laugh, and as Constance hadn't the faintest idea of what
was going on and as I imagined she felt stupid at not seeing
anything to laugh at, I began to improvise the play for her.
I converted it into a drama, so there would be nothing to
laugh at. My drama was so heartbreaking, you know, that
Constance began to cry. But the audience kept laughing, and
this laughter seemed callous and incomprehensible to
Constance. She asked me what the others were laughing at. I
explained to her that this was a provincial audience, very
crude and insensitive to pathos. By the time the curtain
fell, Constance was so emotionnée that I confessed
what I had done. It took some time before she forgave me,
but the other day we laughed over it."
I asked Max whether Constance had mentioned the man she
finally did marry, the actor Julian L'Estrange.
"No, we didn't talk about anything, really, that happened
after Dieppe," Max said. "We remembered all the people who
used to come to Dieppe: Aubrey Beardsley and his sister; the
painter Pissarro—he was an old man then; Reggie Turner, who
went there before we did; Charlie Chaine; Will Rothenstein;
my brother Julius. We remembered the English church where
Constance and I decided to be married and where we weren't.
We remembered them all—and it was delightful to remember
them. We talked about Titine."
"Who was Titine?" I asked.
"She was Mme. Lefèvre and ran the hotel Chez Lefèvre, where
we all lived in those days," Max said. "Sicken was very
taken with her. Titine was the soul of Chez Lefèvre. She was
enchanting, Titine. We did everything through Titine. We all
shamelessly curried favor with her. The food was wonderful.
When I was in favor, Titine would see to it that I got
something special. I would crow over Sickert. Since Sickert
would share the dish, I was not slow to point out the
advantage to him of having me for a friend."
I asked Max whether he had shown Constance the snapshots.
"Oh, yes," he said. "She was very shortsighted, you know.
She held them close to her eyes. 'Is that us, Max?' she
said. 'Are they really us?' "
Miss Jungmann came into the room to pick up the tea things,
and Max and I, half in Dieppe, half in Rapallo, said good
night.
The following day, a friend of mine, Mr. Stanley Marcus, of
Dallas, Texas, who is a lover and collector of books,
arrived in Portofino, and called me to ask if he might meet
Max. Mr. Marcus had with him a sheaf of assorted,
non-consecutive pages of a printing of Max's story "The
Happy Hypocrite" by the eminent typographer Bruce Rogers.
Rogers had done these as sample pages for a fine edition,
had been unable to find a publisher, and had done no more.
Mr. Marcus hoped that Max would write his name in this
curiosity. Max said that he would be delighted to receive
Mr. Marcus, and that he knew and admired the work of Bruce
Rogers. As it happened, I was at that time called away from
Rapallo for several days, but the visit took place and, Miss
Jungmann later reported, went off handsomely. Max asked Mr.
Marcus to leave the Bruce Rogers with him, because he wished
to make certain emendations in it.
Max's careful labor on these random pages was the last
literary task that he ever undertook. The task he set
himself was to make the sense carry over from one page to
the next as if he had originally written them that way, and
it required great ingenuity. For example, one page ended,
"And in the middle of this vain galaxy hung the pre-" The
next page, since it was far away, gave you no idea of what
it was that hung in the middle of the vain galaxy. At the
bottom of the first of these pages, Max added, in his strong
and beautiful handwriting, "sent writer's eviscerated book."
One page ended, "Presently he heard a footstep in the hall
beyond, and a pair of" The next page began, "soon forgot
him." Max caused these disparities to coalesce: "Presently
he heard a footstep in the hall beyond, and a pair of
boots appeared with nobody in them, and at sight of them he
uttered a piercing scream. But he soon forgot them—and they,
it appears, soon forgot him."
Max was to work for weeks on this. When it was finished, he
was to send it to Mr. Marcus, in Texas, with the following
inscription:
DEAR
MR.
STANLEY
MARCUS:
Here is the book that you left with me. I have dared to
amend, here and there, what seemed to me a lack of
continuity in the narration.
Yours very sincerely,
MAX
BEERBOHM
Rapallo, 1955
When, long before Max's self-imposed task was completed, I
came back to Rapallo, it turned out to be for only one day.
I found that I had to leave immediately for New York. That
afternoon, I went to the Villino to bid Max goodbye. Miss
Jungmann, without saying much, took me to the terrace. We
stood in the middle of it.
"Look," said Miss Jungmann, pointing to the open door of
Max's blue-walled study.
I looked. Max, completely unaware of us, was bent over his
worktable, writing. He was wearing glasses; he looked very
tiny. He was using pen and ink, and the pen kept dipping
into the inkpot. He was supplying Bruce Rogers' sample pages
of "The Happy Hypocrite" with a continuity. He was working
with the avidity and the concentration of a writer slaving
to meet a deadline at the end of which glitters a pot of
gold. Again, and for the last time, he was working to amuse
one reader.
"I hate to disturb him," I said.
"Oh, no," said Miss Jungmann. "He knows you are going. He's
waiting for you. Go in. I'll wait for you downstairs."
I walked into the study. Max finished the sentence he was
working on, and looked up. He showed me what he had done to
the Rogers pages. I told him that I thought it was ingenious
as well as funny, and he was pleased at having solved a
technical problem of a kind that had not theretofore been
presented to him. We walked out onto the terrace and took up
our familiar post at the parapet, and looked for a moment or
two at the tree that leaned backward like Swinburne. For
once, a silence fell between us. I became conscious—and, I
feel sure, so did he—that this might be a long farewell. To
quench this feeling, to stave it off, I began asking him
about "The Happy Hypocrite."
"The Happy Hypocrite" is a fantasy, set in the time of the
Regency, about a dissolute nobleman, Lord George Hell, who
falls in love with a stage performer of great beauty and
innocence named Jenny Mere. Jenny won't have anything to do
with Lord George; his reputation, not unearned, is truly
dreadful, and his personal appearance, which reflects his
dissoluteness, is also dreadful. Lord George suddenly sees
himself in the light of Jenny's aversion and shares it. He
goes to a famous mask-maker and commissions from him a
saintly and beautiful mask, which is fitted to him so
cunningly that none of his friends know him. Miss Mere
herself doesn't recognize him. Wearing his mask, he proposes
to her, and she accepts him. Lord George gives away his
money, his houses, and all his other possessions, and lives
with Jenny in the country, idyllically happy. At the end, a
former mistress exposes him to Jenny. The mask is removed,
and—lo and behold!—Lord George's face has been transformed
into what the mask was; he is saintly, and he is
beautiful.
I said to Max that Jenny Mere seemed to me like one of the
two girls in white in his cherished photograph, and like the
little girl laughing up at the Abbé, only without freckles.
Max looked pleased. He stared out across the Gulf of Genoa,
still and blue. "I have always been interested in masks, you
know," he said. "So was Yeats. I once began to collaborate
with Aubrey Beardsley on a book about masks. We never
finished it."
"It would be easy," I said, "if just by buying a mask of
goodness, a mask of beauty, you could achieve them both."
"But, oh, you have to live up to the mask, you know,"
said Max. "Lord George lived up to the mask. His love
for Jenny made it possible for him to do it."
I remembered, not with total irrelevance, a caricature of
Max's on good and evil. It is called "Things in General." It
shows "The Principle of Evil," a satanic figure in a kirtle,
doing a Devil's dance around the personification of "The
Principle of Good," a matronly woman, with plaited braids,
who is obese from being habitually sedentary. In fact, she
is plain slobby. The legend reads:
THE
PRINCIPLE
OF
GOOD:
How is it that you always seem to get the best of it?
THE
PRINCIPLE
OF
EVIL:
Because I'm active, my dear.
I mentioned this caricature to Max. He stroked his mustache.
He was staring across the gulf as if it were eternity.
"Well," he said, "Lord George Hell found a way of making The
Principle of Good active, I suppose. Of course, we're all
caught up in a chaos of evil impulses. There are many Lord
Georges. In fact, there are more Lord Georges than there are
masks."
Another silence fell between us. I knew I had to leave. I
hated to leave. Max went on, "Do you know my favorite line
of Henry James?"
I could see that he was not really expecting an answer from
me—that he was communing with himself.
"It is 'Be generous and delicate and pursue the prize.'"
Max's eyes were still fixed on the sun-dotted sea. "He
didn't always live up to it, of course. Who can? But in his
work he did live up to it. It was his mask." There
was a pause. Max looked at me and smiled. "If you live up to
a good manner long enough, don't you know, perhaps it will
become first nature to you, instead of second, or third."
Miss Jungmann called from the foot of the stone steps.
Charlie, the local driver, had arrived and was waiting with
my taxi.
I shook hands with Max. I told him that I was planning to be
in France for the winter, and that it would be a happy day
for me when next I crossed the threshold of the Villano.
"I wish you everything you could wish for yourself," said
Max.
We stood in silence for a moment. Max looked across the
gulf. He turned to me again, with a little smile and a
little gesture toward the horizon. "The same old sea," he
said.
It was not until April of 1956 that I was able to sail for
France, and from there I planned to go immediately to
Rapallo. The letters I had been receiving from Miss Jungmann
were alternately depressed and cheerful, depending on Max's
spirits and how he seemed in strength on a particular day.
In the last letter I received from her before I sailed, she
asked me to bring a special kind of vitamin pill, which was
unobtainable in Rapallo. I stocked up on these pills. Just
after I checked into my hotel in Paris, on the seventeenth
of April, I put in a call to Miss Jungmann. There was no
answer at the Villino. Several hours later, she returned my
call. Max had been taken to a hospital in Rapallo. He had
not been sleeping, and his heart was weak; he had consented
to go. She asked me if I had the vitamin pills. I told her
to tell Max that I had enough to make it possible for him to
enter the Olympic Games. She asked me please to come, and I
said that of course I would. She did not seem unduly
depressed; she felt that Max had a good chance to pull out
of it.
I left the next morning, by car. From the road, I called
Miss Jungmann at the hospital. She said Max was delighted
that I was coming, and had laughed at the idea of entering
the Olympic Games. In the evening of the next day, as I was
having dinner at the Grand-Hôtel du Cap, in Antibes, I was
called to the telephone. Miss Jungmann said that Max had not
had a good night, that he was scarcely eating anything, that
he was suffering. I told her I was leaving in the morning by
car and would arrive at the hospital in the early evening.
Next evening, I was there, in Rapallo and at the hospital.
Miss Jungmann had a small room next to Max's, on an upper
floor. Max was asleep. She felt that I probably shouldn't
see him that evening, even if he woke up; she was afraid
that the excitement might be harmful. The next evening might
he better, she said. As things turned out, I was never to
see Max again. That first evening, she told me everything
that had happened. The week before, Dr. Rau, Max's doctor
from London, in whom she and Max both had great faith, had
come for a few days. He had wanted to take Max to London,
but Max had refused to go. "I do not wish to go back to
London as an invalid," he had said. Dr. Rau had then
suggested taking him to a hospital in Rome, but Max had not
consented to go there, either. The Rapallo hospital, Miss
Jungmann told me, was understaffed and underequipped. Max
suffered acutely. He suffered from bedsores, and she
knew—Dr. Rau had told her—that modern hospitals have a kind
of electrified bedding that, by making a ripple of tiny
undulations, somehow prevents bedsores. Miss Jungmann had
been on practically twenty-four-hour duty since they had
arrived at the Rapallo hospital. Max did not have a private
nurse; it was impossible to get one. She was the private
nurse.
Everything came out of her in geysers of speech. There was
the terrible problem of getting Max to eat anything.. When
she had prepared his tray that day and put it before him, he
had made a little sound of distaste. She had reproached him
for his attitude toward the food. "It's not exactly the
sound that lions make when they are confronted with food, is
it?" he had admitted. He had made an effort to eat, but it
hadn't come to much. The bedclothes bothered him. His
covering, Miss Jungmann assured me, was very thin, like
gossamer, but he was conscious of great protuberances; he
couldn't find a comfortable way to lie. The sound of the
spoon on the glass when she brought his medicines grated on
him. Miss Jungmann put gauze on the spoon to muffle this
sound. There was a green label on the hospital glassware,
and this irritated him. "An ugly green, isn't it?" he said.
After that, Miss Jungmann turned the utensils so that he
couldn't see the green label. "And yet, you know," she said,
"with all his suffering, only the other day I came in at
about sunset and he called my attention to a beautiful
lavender shadow cast by the cupboard, and be wouldn't let me
put the light on, to give that shadow a slightly longer
life."
Every once in a while, Miss Jungmann would go out into the
hall and peer into Max's room, She would return and tell me
he was sleeping, and then continue her story of these awful
weeks. She reproached herself for having gone to Milan
nearly two months before, to see a performance of Max's own
dramatic version of "The Happy Hypocrite." It was her first
evening out in two years. The local doctor had been there
that day and had said that it was all right for her to go,
since there was a maid in the house who could call him, if
necessary. Miss Jungmann went. She did not find out until
the next day that Max had had some sort of attack and that
the maid had had to summon the doctor again. When she
returned from Milan, Max said nothing about this second
visit of the doctor. He reached out his hand to her and
said, very casually, "Oh, you're back, are you?" There had
been some puppets before "The Happy Hypocrite" went on, and
when Miss Jungmann told Max this, he sat up in bed. His eyes
lit up at the mention of the puppets, and he began to talk
about the singular enchantment of puppets, and recalled a
puppet show he had seen in Venice when he was young, and
described the effect of it at great length. "He remembered
the puppets in 'Don Quixote' and asked me to bring him the
book," Miss Jungmann said. "He read me the passage—how Don
Quixote is so carried away by the puppet show, it is so real
to him, that he jumps on the stage and slashes the poor
puppets to pieces. When he came to Sancho's protests—'What
do you mean, Sir? These are no real Moors that you cut and
hack so, but poor harmless puppets made of pasteboard'—he
let the book fall on his lap."
Miss Jungmann complained about the difficulty of reaching
the busy local doctor. She had long since—and this I
knew—urged Max to consult another doctor, one from Santa
Margherita. But Max wouldn't. He felt that it might offend
the local doctor. Sometimes the local doctor came when he
was sent for; sometimes he couldn't come. "He blows in and
out of harbor," Max said of him. Miss Jungmann asked me to
call Dr. Rau, in London, and ask him if he wouldn't come
again. I said I would. Then Miss Jungmann thought better of
it and suggested that I wait until morning, because the good
sleep Max was having might make him feel stronger the next
day. Miss Jungmann had been standing; I asked her to sit
down and to try to rest for a few minutes. "Once, the doctor
came," she said—and I was happy to see her smile, almost.
"Max had taken to reading Swinburne, the 'Poems and
Ballads.' The doctor, you know, has almost no English and
Max less Italian. Max was reading aloud to me from 'The
Garden of Proserpine': 'That even the weariest river/Winds
somewhere safe to sea.'" Miss Jungmann stopped for a moment,
as if to catch her breath, and got up, went into the hall,
and returned. "The doctor came, and Max read those lines to
him, and the doctor, who didn't know what Max was talking
about, said, through me, as interpreter, 'What I want to
know is how you are feeling, Sir Max,' and Max, with his
eyes far away, recited another verse."
A nurse came in and said that Max was stirring. I embraced
Miss Jungmann and left, telling her that I would call her in
the morning.
The next morning, Miss Jungmann asked me over the telephone
if I could get Charlie to pick her up at the hospital and
drive her to the Villino, because she had to fetch some
things. She was somewhat calmer; Max had had a good night.
The reason she had been in a state the night before, she
said, was that Max had said to her, before he fell asleep,
"I do not see how I can possibly live through this night."
But he had; the doctor had given him a sedative, and he had
slept peacefully. She had told Max that I was there, and he
had been pleased. She said nothing more about calling Dr.
Rau. It was to Dr. Rau that Max said, the last time the
doctor saw him, "I have watched my mother die, I have
watched my sister die, but this is different."
I had said that I would come along with Charlie, and on the
way to the Villino Miss Jungmann told me some of the
troubles she had had since Max entered the hospital; it was
as if by dwelling on these little things she found relief
from the contemplation of the appalling, unfaceable fact
that was facing her. Later, we sat in the living room of the
Villino. I sat in my usual place, beside the Merton chair.
The niche was as it had always been. The bronze girl with
the averted head, the two girls in white, the little girl
and the Abbé were on the mantelshelf. Miss Jungmann had
packed in a small valise what she had come to get. I asked
her whether she would mind if I sent Charlie back to the
hospital with her, because I wanted to sit in Max's study
for a few minutes. Then I would come on to the hospital,
and, if she could manage it, I would take her to lunch. She
readily consented to my staying behind, but she did not feel
that she could go out to lunch.
"Do you know what was worrying Max before he left for the
hospital?" Miss Jungmann said. "You wouldn't believe what
was worrying him!"
I asked what it was.
"Well," she said, "you know, he had a letter from your
friend Mr. Marcus, to thank him for what he had done with
the Bruce Rogers. You remember?"
I said I remembered perfectly.
Miss Jungmann went on, "Well, it was such a nice letter. It
couldn't have been nicer. Mr. Marcus was so appreciative of
what Max had done. And still it worried Max."
I asked why.
"Because," she replied, "he said he couldn't tell from your
friend's letter whether he had realized that what Max had
done was funny. He didn't say that it had made him
laugh."
I assured Miss Jungmann that Mr. Marcus probably had laughed
but, since Max was, perhaps as much as any writer in the
world, the personification of the comic spirit, had thought
it infra dig to say so.
Miss Jungmann felt better. "I'll tell Max," she said. "He'll
be so relieved."
She was on the point of leaving the room when she hesitated,
returned, and sat down beside me. She took my hand in hers
and pledged me to secrecy about what she was going to say.
She then told me her news. She had been married to Max some
days before, in the hospital room. She was Lady Beerbohm.
I said it was wonderful.
"It is wonderful," she said, her eyes brimming with
tears.
I asked her how it had come about.
"Oh, you mean the proposal?" she said. "Well, darling Max,
out of a clear sky— He was lying there, and looked so
serene, and I heard him say, 'What would you think of the
idea of our getting married?' I was startled, but when I
recovered I said that I adored him more than anyone else in
the world and that I thought it would be a good idea.
And Max said, 'I am so delighted you think it is a good
idea.'"
There was a moment's silence. "I must return to Max," she
said, and went out. The new Lady Beerbohm was to survive Max
by less than three years.
I went out and walked up the stairs to the terrace. It was
flooded with sunlight. There I remembered a line of Max's:
"The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose
ends." I crossed the terrace and went into Max's blue study,
where I sat for a few minutes. It was cool there. I walked
around the bookshelves. Max's sense of fun had been so
exuberant that, with convincing draftsmanship, he had
applied it even to his bookcase. I was again tempted to take
out "The Poetical Works of Thomas Henry Huxley" and "The
Complete Works of Arnold Bennett," both slim volumes—as
slim, in fact, and as immovable, as the wooden partitions of
which they consisted. I picked a book at random—a real
book—from the shelf. It was a presentation copy of Henry
James's "The Aspern Papers." Max had drawn James on the
title page; the drawing showed him doubled up in a state of
acute physical discomfort, and Max's neatly written legend
below explained why: "Mr. Henry James in the act of
parturiating a sentence."
I walked out of the study and crossed the terrace to the
parapet. Charlie had returned; his taxi was standing against
the wall of the Villino. I looked across the road; the
Swinburne tree was leaning far backward, and beyond it
stretched the same old sea.
Three weeks later, on the twentieth of May, Max died. That
day, the Old Self could safely have taken off the mask of
the character that the Young Self had created—the character
of Max Beerbohm. The discrepancy between the man and the
mask was always slighter in Max than in most people, and by
that time the two had become indistinguishable. Under the
Maxian mask was, ultimately, Max.
(This is the last of a series of articles.) |
