Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life

by Professor N. John Hall, N. John Hall

Max Beerbohm was widely celebrated as the wittiest mind of his age. And it was a very long age he became famous in the mid-1890s and remained so until his death in 1956. His wit manifested itself in both prose and caricature, and his writings and drawings are keenly interesting. Max’s life, however, was relatively uneventful, and of interest, he said, only to himself. This biography of Beerbohm, the first in forty years, enlivens his story by quoting him whenever possible, and the result―thanks to Max himself―is a scintillating and entertaining book.

John Hall moves quickly through Max’s schoolboy; college undergraduate; London caricaturist, journalist, and critic; Edwardian social butterfly; married man and self-exile to Italy in 1910, where he produced numerous books, essays, and caricatures; and, from 1935 to 1956, occasional BBC radio broadcaster. Hall notes that although all Max’s work during his fifteen early years on the London scene concerned contemporary art and life, after his “retirement” in 1910 his writings and drawings harkened back to the late-Victorian/Edwardian era and even to the Pre-Raphaelites; he became, he said, an “interesting link with the past.”

This book, like Beerbohm’s work, highlights his connection with various eminences over three Algernon Swinburne, J.A.M. Whistler, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Written in an idiosyncratic, opinionated, lively, quirky style, it is just the kind of biography of which Max might have (for the most part) approved.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2002

Reviews

[Edward Champion · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the goofiest literary biographies I've read in some time -- a vast improvement over the smug pronouncements of Lord Cecil. And I'm not even sure it's a proper biography -- although Hall does nimbly reject Ellmann's rumor that Beerbohm was an accessory to Wilde's arrest. And he also dredges up a section from Julian Barnes's FLAUBERT'S PARROT to attempt to ding Max on certain points without much success. He also confesses his anxieties at times in assessing Max. But that's part of the charm. I wish more biographies were written like this. Certainly I have tried to do my part on the silly digression front for dozens of essays on Modern Library titles that nobody reads!

[Louise Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written, fascinating, and accessible.