Max Beerbohm: a kind of life by John Hall

Ian Irvine celebrates the wit and ingenuity of a peerless parodist

It was not a life crowded with incident. The dramatic fates of other artists of the 1890s – drink, drugs, sexual scandal, disgrace, early death – did not fall to Max Beerbohm. A writer and an artist at a time when decadence might have seemed a moral imperative for a creative life, he lived in blameless domesticity with his mother and sister in Upper Berkeley Street. Only on his marriage at 37 did he move to the villa at Rapallo on the Ligurian coast, where he lived modestly for the rest of his long life.

Despite this deplorable lack of courtesy to his biographer, Beerbohm deserves attention; though he always insisted on the smallness of his talents, he now appears one of the major artists of the period, surpassed only by Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley (both were his friends).

His was a precocious talent. On leaving Oxford, Max flourished in the Wilde circle. In 1892 his caricatures began to appear in The Strand Magazine; his early essays were soon published, most notably in The Yellow Book. By 1896, after Wilde's fall, Max had published his first book of essays and a collection of drawings. At 24 he was now famous and successful. Until his self-exile to Italy in 1910, he lived in the rich world of London literary society, dining out most nights, reviewing plays for the Saturday Review (in succession to Shaw), writing and drawing at leisure. These years became the capital on which he drew for the remainder of his career.

Though Max had begun writing under the influence of Wilde, he soon created an inimitable voice. His prose is famous for its wit. Mastery of tone and perfect ear made him the greatest parodist in the language; but the greatest pleasure is himself, or rather our sense of a conscious personality moving through the writing.

A dandy in life, he was a dandy in his work: the appearance is everything, the ironical pose and the urbane sensibility. ("I was a modest good-humoured boy, it was Oxford that made me insufferable"). Yet this persona never seems cold or heartless. Max saw the world as a comedy, accepting its absurdities.

An official biography by David Cecil appeared in 1964. In this volume N John Hall, with a touch of that graceful modesty which is such a feature of Max's self-presentation, does not presume to supplant it. He deplores any suggestion that he might speculate about "the inner man" and is content to assemble extant material, particularly Max's own words, and arrange it thoughtfully. The result is a pleasant, short account of the life and works. (Yale has also republished his comic novel: The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson is a facsimile of Max's own copy, which he lavishly decorated.)

No important letters or papers are turned up, though I was startled to discover that the late Oliver Reed was Max's great-nephew, by way of his elder brother, the exuberant actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Also startling was the appearance of the names of Lacan, Derrida and Barthes in the index. This is possibly a tease by the author; in fact, they are mentioned only to be dismissed.

Though at first sight he seems an unlikely recruit in the ranks of critical theory, Lawrence Danson, the most incisive of Max's modern critics, observes "his essays turn into fiction as we read them, his fiction turns into parody, his parody into criticism, his criticism into caricature, his caricatures into essays". As Max also often places himself as a character in his works, it's hard to resist the claim that he is one of the precursors of postmodern, self-reflexive, polysemous metafiction. If only Salman Rushdie were even half as amusing.