Max Beerbohm

Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (24 August 1872 – 20 May 1956) was an English essayist, parodist and caricaturist under the signature Max. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist. He was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910, when he relocated to Rapallo, Italy. In his later years he was popular for his occasional radio broadcasts. Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. His caricatures, drawn usually in pen or pencil with muted watercolour tinting, are in many public collections.

Early life

thumb|150px|left|[[Blue plaque at 57 Palace Gardens Terrace, Kensington, London]]

thumb|right|200px|Beerbohm as a child

Born in 57 Palace Gardens Terrace, London which is now marked with a blue plaque, Henry Maximilian Beerbohm was the youngest of nine children of a Lithuanian-born grain merchant of Dutch and German ancestry, Julius Ewald Edward Beerbohm (1811–1892). His mother was Englishwoman Eliza Draper Beerbohm (c. 1833–1918), the sister of Julius's late first wife. Although the Beerbohms were supposed by some in Britain to be of Jewish descent, on looking into the question in his later years Beerbohm told a biographer:

Beerbohm was close to four half-siblings, one of whom, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was already a renowned stage actor when Max was a child. Other older half-siblings were the author and explorer Julius Beerbohm and the author Constance Beerbohm. His nieces were Viola, Felicity, and Iris Tree.

thumb|Max Beerbohm, self-caricature (1897)

From 1881 to 1885, Max – he was always called simply "Max" and it is thus that he signed his drawings – attended the day school of a Mr Wilkinson in Orme Square. Wilkinson, Beerbohm later said, "gave me my love of Latin and thereby enabled me to write English". Mrs Wilkinson taught drawing to the students, the only lessons Beerbohm ever had in the subject.

Although he was an unenthusiastic student academically, Beerbohm became a well-known figure in Oxford social circles. He also began submitting articles and caricatures to London publications, which were met enthusiastically. "I was a modest, good-humoured boy", he recalled. "It was Oxford that has made me insufferable." In March 1893, he submitted an article on Oscar Wilde to the Anglo-American Times under the pen name "An American". Later in 1893 his essay "The Incomparable Beauty of Modern Dress" was published in the Oxford journal The Spirit Lamp by its editor, Lord Alfred Douglas.

By 1894, having developed his personality as a dandy and humourist, and already a rising star in English letters, he left Oxford without a degree.

In 1895, Beerbohm went to the United States for several months as secretary to his half-brother Herbert Beerbohm Tree's theatrical company. He was fired when he spent far too many hours polishing the business correspondence.

Writer and broadcaster

thumb|right|Beerbohm caricatured by [[Walter Sickert in Vanity Fair (1897)]]

On his return to England Beerbohm published his first book, The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896), a collection of his essays which had first appeared in The Yellow Book. His first piece of fiction, The Happy Hypocrite, was published in volume XI of The Yellow Book in October 1896. Having been interviewed by George Bernard Shaw himself, in 1898 he followed Shaw as drama critic for the Saturday Review, on whose staff he remained until 1910. At that time the Saturday Review was undergoing renewed popularity under its new owner, the writer Frank Harris, who would later become a close friend of Beerbohm's.

It was Shaw, in his final Saturday Review piece, who bestowed upon Beerbohm the lasting epithet, "the Incomparable Max"

In 1904 Beerbohm met the American actress Florence Kahn. In 1910 they married and moved to Rapallo in Italy, partly as an escape from the social demands and the expense of living in London. Here they remained for the rest of their lives except for the duration of World War I and World War II, when they returned to Britain, and occasional trips to England to take part in exhibitions of his drawings.

Beerbohm and his wife Florence spent the period of the First World War (1914 to 1918) in a cottage belonging to William Rothenstein, next to Rothenstein's own residence Iles Farm, in Far Oakridge, Gloucestershire. The Arts and Crafts architect Norman Jewson remarked on his dapper appearance there: "At first it amazed me to see him, in the depths of the country, in war time, always perfectly groomed and immaculately dressed as if for a garden party at Buckingham Palace, but as I got to know him better I realised that he just could not do anything else." Beerbohm never learned to speak Italian in the five decades that he lived in Italy. The first public exhibition of his caricatures was as part of a group show at the Fine Art Society in 1896; his first one-man show at the Carfax Gallery in 1901. Explaining his system for caricature, Beerbohm wrote: "The whole man must be melted down in a crucible and then, from the solution, fashioned anew. Nothing will be lost but no particle will be as it was before." He concluded: "The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment, in the most beautiful manner."

Beerbohm was influenced by French cartoonists such as "Sem" (Georges Goursat) and "Caran d'Ache" (Emmanuel Poiré). He was hailed by The Times in 1913 as "the greatest of English comic artists", by Bernard Berenson as "the English Goya", and by Edmund Wilson as "the greatest ... portrayer of personalities – in the history of art".

Usually inept with hands and feet, Beerbohm excelled in heads and with dandified male costume of a period whose elegance became a source of nostalgic inspiration. His collections of caricatures included Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen (1896), The Poets' Corner (1904), Fifty Caricatures (1913) and Rossetti and His Circle (1922). His caricatures were published widely in the fashionable magazines of the time, and his works were exhibited regularly in London at the Carfax Gallery (1901–08) and Leicester Galleries (1911–57). At his Rapallo home he drew and wrote infrequently and decorated books in his library. These were sold at auction by Sotheby's of London on 12 and 13 December 1960 following the death of his second wife and literary executor Elisabeth Jungmann.

David Cecil wrote that, "though he showed no moral disapproval of homosexuality, [Beerbohm] was not disposed to it himself; on the contrary he looked upon it as a great misfortune to be avoided if possible." Cecil quotes a letter from Beerbohm to Oscar Wilde's friend Robert Ross in which he asks Ross to keep Reggie Turner from the clutches of Lord Alfred Douglas, "I really think Reg is at a rather crucial point of his career – and should hate to see him fall an entire victim to the love that dare not tell its name."

There was also some speculation during his lifetime that Beerbohm was Jewish. Muggeridge assumed that Beerbohm's Jewishness was certain. Beerbohm responded by saying that, disappointingly for him, he was not. However, both of his wives were Jews of German origin, although Florence was born and reared in Memphis, Tennessee, in an immigrant family. She is described as an American.

When asked by George Bernard Shaw if he had any Jewish ancestors, Beerbohm replied: "That my talent is rather like Jewish talent I admit readily... But, being in fact a Gentile, I am, in a small way, rather remarkable, and wish to remain so." In his poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Ezra Pound, a neighbour in Rapallo – and later a supporter of fascism and anti-Semitism – caricatured Beerbohm as "Brennbaum", a Jewish artist.

The Maximilian Society

Beerbohm was knighted by George VI in 1939; it was thought that this mark of esteem had been delayed by his mockery in 1911 of the king's parents, about whom he had written a satiric verse, "Ballade Tragique a Double Refrain". In August 1942, on the occasion of Beerbohm's seventieth birthday, the Maximilian Society was created by a London drama critic in his honour. It had seventy distinguished male members, including J. B. Priestley, Walter de la Mare, Augustus John, William Rothenstein, Edward Lutyens, Osbert Lancaster, Siegfried Sassoon, Osbert Sitwell, Leonard Woolf, John Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, and Laurence Housman, and planned to add one more member on each of Beerbohm's successive birthdays. At their first meeting, a banquet was held in his honour, and he was presented with seventy bottles of wine.

Bibliography

Written works

The Works of Max Beerbohm, with a Bibliography by John Lane (1896)
A Defence of Cosmetics (1896)
The Happy Hypocrite (1897)
More (1899)
Yet Again (1909)
Zuleika Dobson; or, An Oxford Love Story (1911)
A Christmas Garland, Woven by Max Beerbohm (1912)
Seven Men (1919; enlarged edition as Seven Men and Two Others, 1950)
Herbert Beerbohm Tree: Some Memories of Him and of His Art (1920, ed. Max Beerbohm)
And Even Now (1920)
A Peep into the Past (1923)
Catalogue of an Exhibition of Caricatures by ″Quiz″ [Powys Evans] With an Introductory Note by Mr. Max Beerbohm (1923)
Around Theatres (1924)
A Variety of Things (1928)
The Dreadful Dragon of Hay Hill (1928)
Lytton Strachey (1943) Rede Lecture
Mainly on the Air (1946; enlarged edition 1957)
The Incomparable Max: A Collection of Writings of Sir Max Beerbohm (1962)
Max in Verse: Rhymes and Parodies (1963, ed. J. G. Riewald)
Letters to Reggie Turner (1964, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis)
More Theatres, 1898–1903 (1969, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis)
Selected Prose (1970, ed. by Lord David Cecil)
Max and Will: Max Beerbohm and William Rothenstein: Their Friendship and Letters (1975, eds Mary M. Lago and Karl Beckson)
Letters of Max Beerbohm: 1892–1956 (1988, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis)
Last Theatres, 1904–1910 (1970, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis)
A Peep into the Past and Other Prose Pieces (1972)
Max Beerbohm and "The Mirror of the Past" (1982, ed. Lawrence Danson)
Collected Verse (1994, ed. J. G. Riewald)

Collections of caricatures

thumb|right|'[[Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back-Garden' from The Poets' Corner (1904)]]

Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen (1896)
The Poets' Corner (1904)
A Book of Caricatures (1907)
Cartoons: The Second Childhood of John Bull (1911)
Fifty Caricatures (1913)
A Survey (1921)
Rossetti and His Circle (1922)
Things New and Old (1923)
Observations (1925)
Heroes and Heroines of Bitter Sweet (1931) five drawings in a portfolio
Max's Nineties: Drawings 1892–1899 (1958, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis and Allan Wade)
Beerbohm's Literary Caricatures: From Homer to Huxley (1977, ed. J. G. Riewald)
Max Beerbohm Caricatures (1997, ed. N. John Hall)
Enoch Soames: A Critical Heritage (1997)

References

External links

Artcyclopedia entry
Victorian Web: Max Beerbohm
Enoch Soames bibliography
Max Beerbohm Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
Mary Lago Collection at the University of Missouri Libraries
Max Beerbohm Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.