Volume 34, Number 17 · November 5, 1987
Mocking the Immemorial
By V.S. Pritchett
Rossetti and His Circle
by Max Beerbohm, a new edition with an introduction by N. John Hall
Yale University Press, 128 pp., $19.95
The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson, or an Oxford Love Story by
by Max Beerbohm, with 80 illustrations by the author and an introduction N. John Hall
Yale University Press, 350 pp., $22.50
'Exhaustive accounts' of his period, Max Beerbohm once wrote, 'would need far less brilliant pens than mine.' Elect among British parodists and cartoonists, he was both writer and painter, as insinuating in his prose as with his playful brush. He seems also to have decided to be an adult enigma even in his pram: one can imagine his nurses going to him for worldly advice, very much the opposite of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. On the contrary, he was already a subtle actor. In Lord David Cecil's biography there is a suggestion that in childhood Max set up as a rival to his world famous eldest brother Beerbohm Tree, to become a master of asides in watercolor and prose. Alternatively, it may strike us that coming from a gifted family of Baltic extraction he had a foreign sense of the absurd. He would never be as savage as the British Gilray or the foreign Grosz: except in his drawings of Kipling and Edward VII he mocked only what he loved.
Review, 1758 words
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