So many posts start like this, but here I go again – more than forty years ago … I was given as a birthday present a novel, actually the only one he wrote, by Max Beerbohm. The donor was a university friend, we are still friends and I still have Zuleika Dobson.
It was published in 1911 and though some of the satire passed over my head, I enjoyed it without bothering about Sir Max, as he became, again. Now another friend whose parents have recently died has given me And Even Now, a book of his essays published in 1920, from their library.
They are well-written, clever, sometimes funny but dated in a way that makes Beerbohm seem a different generation from Saki, Sassoon or Wodehouse. His contemporary, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, is similarly dated. I think their style is too mannered and it’s a way of writing that is no longer admired. In this age of short attention span they seem fussy and prolix. However, within that constraint, they both write beautifully and I am enjoying Sir Max’s mastery of English and his leisurely discourse.
Here he is on Servants:
Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder is deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have declined ever since. I do not dispute the stastics … what I refuse to believe is that the wearing of powder has caused among footmen an ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced on them by their employers because of the French Revolution, but their subsequent fewness is traceable to certain ideas forced by that Revolution on their employers.The Nobility had begun to feel that it had better be just a little less noble than heretofore.
When the news of the fall of the Bastille was brought to him, the first Lord Lansdowne (I conceive) remained for many hours in his study, lost in thought, and at length, rising from his chair, went out into the hall and discharged two footmen. This action may have shortened his life, but I believe it to be a fact that when he lay dying some fifteen years later, he said to his heir, “discharge two more”. Such enlightenment and adaptability were not to be wondered at in so eminent a Whig.
Max Beerbohm has gone out of fashion as an author and now is better known as a caricaturist. Here is a self-portrait and another example of his work.
It’s hard to read the small print but I think all of the Clubs depicted above have folded, except for Brooks’s, appropriately positioned top and right. I attended a Memorial Service yesterday at The Temple Church. One of the readings was Bustopher Jones by TS Eliot.
The Turf Club, bottom left, was alive and well a few years ago. I believe it is still at 5, Carlton HouseTerrace. Temple of sobriety!
There is (or was when I was last there) a good collection of Beerbohm caricatures in the Savile Club, where he was a prominent member. He clearly decided not to lampoon the generality of his fellows members in Club Types but didn’t spare some of them individually. His caricatures of H. G. Wells were not flattering but his written assessment was in a different league: “There’s an evangelist and a seer, indisputably. But his writing!! Have you ever seen a cold rice pudding spilt on the pavement of Gower Street? I never have but it occurs to me as a perfect simile for Wells’s writing.”
I will look out for them when I go to the Savile this evening.