Books: Twilight of a Dandy

PORTRAIT OF MAX (317 pp.)—S. N. Behrman—Random House ($6).

“The gods have bestowed on Max the gift of perpetual old age,” quipped Oscar Wilde when Max Beerbohm was all of 25. It is difficult to know precisely when Max’s old age began. Perhaps, since he “detested change of any kind,” it began at birth. He was the ninth and last child of a late-fiftyish father; a faintly melancholy, autumn mood came as first nature to Max. Then again, his old age may have begun at 23 when his first book, archly titled The Works of Max Beerbohm, was published, and he announced (prematurely) his retirement from the literary scene to make way for “younger, men.” The last possible launching date for his career as an old party is 1910 when, after twelve years as drama critic for London’s Saturday Review, the 48-year-old Max took his actress-bride Florence Kahn to Rapallo, Italy for a life of almost unbroken retirement.

Sempiternal Edwardia. Thus the man whom Playwright S. N. Behrman came to know as a friend in 1952, when Max was almost 80, was merely biologically old. Essentially, he had not changed for more than four decades: he had not retreated to the past; he had simply refused to leave it.

Behrman found him doodling caricatures of Balfour, Oscar Wilde and Henry James as if he inhabited a kind of sempiternal Edwardia. He also found him talking. Apart from copious quotations from Max’s own writings and a generous sprinkling of his superlative caricatures, Portrait of Max is a graciously spliced tape recording of the twilight talk of a minor, but finely mannered, man of letters.

How Odd of Oedipus. The silhouette of Max that emerges is “incomparable” (as Shaw lastingly dubbed him), partly because the 20th century was not comparable to Max. Temperamentally, Sir Max (as he came to be in 1939) was an aristocrat; sartorially, he was a dandy; intellectually, he was a conservative. Even less appealing to an age of total inflation was Max’s insistence on “limits,” especially his own: “My gifts are small. I’ve used them very well and discreetly, never straining them; and the result is that I’ve made a charming little reputation.” Bigness, grandiose gestures, Utopian schemes, monumental successes not only terrified Max; they affronted his household god, common sense.

If there was a touch of malice in him, there was no envy; it was merely that Max’s inner mirth and an ingrained cosmic uncertainty committed him to the unimportance of being earnest. D. H. Lawrence struck Max as a lunatic. He cheerfully confessed to Behrman that Freud was beyond him and added reflectively, “They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, weren’t they?” Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique irritated him: “All of us have a stream of consciousness; we are never without it—the most ordinary and the most gifted. And through that stream flows much that is banal, tedious, nasty, insufferable, irrelevant. But some of us have the taste to let it flow by.” After reading Lawrence of Arabia’s translation of the Odyssey, Max, who pursued stylistic perfection like a grail, wrote: “I would rather not have been that translator than have driven the Turks out of Arabia.”

The English Goya. Max always found failure “endearing,” and it led him into a lifelong reverse snobbishness about himself. When an American publisher had had the “intrepidity” to reprint one of his books of short stories, and managed to sell only a handful of copies, Max was delighted. He needed to believe that his work was caviar to the general; else perhaps it wasn’t caviar. Caviar or not, he proved durable. His Zuleika Dobson, one of the best comic novels ever written, sells well in the Modern Library edition (though not as a Giant, which he would have deplored). In his caricatures, he not only impaled his era but showed such a sure instinct for the jugular that Bernard Berenson once dubbed him “the English Goya.” And in short stories like Savonarola Brown and Maltby and Braxton, he became a kind of prose laureate of failure as he fashioned penetrating portraits of mediocrities who poignantly did not recognize their own limits.

When Behrman saw Max for what proved to be the last time in 1955 (he died a year later), the aged dandy was still wearing his straw boater at a jaunty angle, his plum-colored suit with the lowcut, wide-lapel vest. In parting he waved a fondly diffident hand at the Mediterranean and said, “Same old sea,” scarcely memorable words. He had said his say, and he probably knew that the gods had indeed given him the gift of perpetual old age, immortality—in a small sort of way.