Beerbohm always drew himself with outsize head and small body, like a baby. Mark Samuels Lasner Collection / University of Delaware Library

The essayist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm was one of the great figures of the late Victorian and Edwardian era in London—and then had a surprising Indian summer in America in the early nineteen-sixties, when Edmund Wilson wrote at length in his praise, and the playwright S. N. Behrman serialized a book of conversations with the very elderly Max (his admirers always call him by his first name, a not entirely honorable honor) in this magazine. John Updike and W. H. Auden, too, wrote about him, here and elsewhere. Since then, his reputation, like that of most of his contemporaries, has not so much collapsed like a house of cards as shrunk like a boiled head. It remains sharply chiselled, feature by feature, but on a much smaller scale: still intently animate to those who want him, invisible to those who don’t.

Now N.Y.R.B. Classics, which had previously reprinted “Seven Men,” a collection of stories presented as memoirs, with an introduction by Updike, has published a larger anthology of Beerbohm’s work, with the unfortunately patronizing title “The Prince of Minor Writers.” The anthology, on the whole well chosen, begins with a loving if not terribly insightful introduction by Philip Lopate, whose gifts as a New York-style essayist—a troubled intelligence and a blunt talent for heartfelt statement—are so at odds with Beerbohm’s high masquerading style that we are left without much of a feel for the thing inspected. (At one point, he refers to Beerbohm as “a clotheshorse,” although no term could be more ill suited to a writer whose dandyism is so subtly and purposefully differentiated from the dandyism of an Oscar Wilde or a Reggie Turner, not to mention a Beau Brummel.)

I discovered Beerbohm when I was a teen-ager, stumbling on a collection called “The Incomparable Max.” (The nickname came from Bernard Shaw.) Having since read, I think, pretty much every line he ever published—including his theatre criticism, not represented here, his radio broadcasts, and even his verse—I was for a long time a passionate Maximilian, even making a failed college effort to turn his novel, “Zuleika Dobson,” into a musical comedy, an enterprise at which Wolcott Gibbs and George and Ira Gershwin also failed. As the years have gone by, Beerbohm has remained a beacon, but he has also become something of an exasperation. The question is why a writer of almost Proustian gifts has so much less than Proustian achievements; and the answer may rest in a certain catastrophic form of Englishness, in the cult of the little, the diminutive, and the unambitious, a dread of pretension raised to an aesthetic principle. Beerbohm is as English a writer as there can be—fleeing England as soon as he could for Italy, a very English thing to do, while never in forty years learning more than a few words of Italian, also a very English thing to do. Reading Max, you can sense why Paris, in that last great exhalation of writing before the Great War, remade human consciousness, while London, during the same time, remade only its manners. Dandies, it seems, are dandy; but belles-lettres is better.

Beerbohm’s writing tends to be treated by his critics, and even by his admirers, as being all of a piece; minor implies monotone. But it comes in three very distinct colors. There is a period of Pater- and Wilde-style aestheticism, which made him famous on his emergence from Oxford, in the eighteen-nineties, when, at the age of twenty-four, he cheekily published his collected “Works”—highly mannered and unreal and full of Pateresque turns and a purposeful superficiality, counselling cosmetics for women and symmetrical neckcloths for men. Then, there is the journalism, which he began when, in 1898, mostly for money, he succeeded Shaw as the drama critic of Frank Harris’s Saturday Review—a body of writing far more functional, intelligent, impatient, and, often, ill-mannered than his reputation might suggest, the outstanding instance of the form between Shaw and Tynan.

Max was a fine critic of drama. But even better were his forays into dramatized criticism: close reading set in motion as narrative. This includes the stories in the 1919 “Seven Men,” about the dire effects of reading and storytelling on the human soul, along with occasional essays like “A Clergyman” and “Quia Imperfectum,” the first on Dr. Johnson and Boswell, the second on Goethe and German Romanticism. The parodies in “A Christmas Garland” (1912), generally thought to be the best such collection in English, are also criticism of a kind, less genial and more pointed. The tones tend to reappear as needed: “Zuleika Dobson” (1911) is, with its po-faced climax of mass suicide among the Oxford undergraduates in despair at Zuleika’s beauty, very much in the first, aesthetic manner. His BBC broadcasts from the Second World War are written in the style of his brisk, confiding drama criticism, popular journalism of a high order, simple narratives well related.

Beerbohm was a major caricaturist as well—Bernard Berenson called him, hyperbolically but not ridiculously, “the English Goya.” Though his practice was rooted in the French fin-de-siècle practice of caricature, with its emphasis on elegance and animation, more than on Daumier-like grit and grime, Max gave his caricatures a particularly English kind of narrative flair: the series he did of older authorial selves meeting their younger ones, including Henry James and Arnold Bennett (Old Self: “All gone according to plan.” Younger One: “My plan, you know”), is a high-water mark in the history of literary cartooning.

Though geniality is the mood, malice is the savory ingredient—malice passed through a sieve of manners. Beerbohm is in fact quickly disputatious and highly opinionated, on subjects from Strindberg to the music hall. Watching Sarah Bernhardt perform in French to rapturous audiences provoked him to write a sort of angry exposé, “Hamlet, Princess of Denmark.” (Not atypically for the period, there could often be an unhappy vein of misogyny in Max’s brand of malice.) Criticism, in all its guises, is the leitmotif of his art, the place where he breathes most easily. His two best books, “Seven Men” and “A Christmas Garland,” are exclusively about criticism, about reading with a purpose. All seven of his seven men, himself among them, are writers who have an obsessive relationship with texts. Max’s real subject is the one that, in his years in exile, he lived—the pathos of how passionate readers come to be made up of words, which eventually seem far more real than their lives.

The provocateur Malcolm Muggeridge, back in the Beerbohm-infected sixties, once stirred outrage by insisting that Beerbohm was both Jewish and gay, and in denial about both. This has been strenuously refuted by his biographers, who claim, following on Beerbohm’s own account, that his ancestors, merchants who arrived in England from what is now Lithuania in the mid-nineteenth century (sometimes the background is said to be Dutch), were somehow pure Protestant stock—which is exactly what a Jewish family that didn’t want to admit to it would have said in the period. Certainly, the enclosing tone of Max’s relationship with his mother sounds less Dutch or Lithuanian than Ashkenazi. His best friend, Reggie Turner, came from an assimilated Jewish background, while both of Max’s wives were Jewish—first, the American Florence Kahn, and then Elisabeth Jungmann (though by that point he was essentially marrying his nurse). Ezra Pound, a neighbor in Italy, caricatured him as Jewish, and, though hate is hate, hate at times has eyes to see. And the very buttoned-up front that Max showed the world was typical of the closeted Jews of his time. It was a distinguished theatrical family: his half brother, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was one of the great actor managers of the day.

“I don’t know—seems like a lot of work.” Facebook

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As for his homosexuality, the very touching letters he wrote to Florence, around their engagement make it plain that he will remain unable to perform sexually with her: “The other sort of caring is beyond me,” he wrote. “It is a defect in my nature.” Biographers declare him a “natural celibate,” but the tone of his early letters to Oscar Wilde and his circle tends to be casually, if cautiously, “Uranian,” as they called themselves. He writes to Wilde’s intimate Bobbie Ross, for instance, urging him cheerily not to introduce their mutual friend Reggie Turner to “the love that dares not tell its name,” adding, “You are a person of stronger character and it doesn’t affect you the way it would affect him.” The tone is not that of an outsider looking in. Homosexual in his inclinations, but seeing what a mess it could make of life then, he may well have chosen celibacy. And it is certainly Wilde’s example and scandal that hang over all his early work and, in many ways, over his life. Max came to fame within Wilde’s orbit, if not directly under his aegis—“The gods bestowed on Max the secret of perpetual old age,” Wilde said of the young Beerbohm. Max writes about Wilde again and again, returns to him obsessively even as an old man, is still scribbling caricatures of him, and hostile ones, to be sure, at the end of his life. Perhaps only Hemingway in the twenties ever had the kind of attraction-repulsion for a generation of writers that Wilde did for his.