Max and Biography

Book Reviews Max and Biography J. G. Riewald. Remembering Max Beerbohm: Correspondence, Conversations , Criticisms. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1991. 236 pp. DfI. 59.50 ANYONE WHO has ever written analytically about comedy and satire has experienced the double discomfort of seeming at once ridiculous and dull, for there are few things more solemnly asinine than explanations of jokes. As a rule, the critic's risk of seeming leaden and foolish rises in direct proportion to the brilliance and wit of the text he is analyzing. Thus it is particularly daunting to write a critical analysis of anything by Max Beerbohm. His gloss shames the lesser writer, and his lightness of touch has made many an academic seem ham-fisted by comparison. This pitfall is one that J. G. Riewald did not escape when he wrote his pioneering dissertation, published as Sir Max Beerbohm, Man and Writer: A Critical Analysis with a Brief Life and a Bibliography (1953). Between the factual, scholarly tone of this work and the fanciful, ironic wit of Beerbohm's writings there is an inescapably comic incongruity. Even Riewald admits, perhaps too generously, that his work was "careful , worthy, and just a little dull" (Remembering 150). In Remembering Max Beerbohm Riewald now gives us an account of Beerbohm's involvement in the production of Sir Max Beerbohm, Man and Writer. At the heart of the present volume is a fifty-page summary of the jottings and verbal comments Beerbohm made on the unpublished typescript of Riewald's critical study—a typescript which Beerbohm kept and which is now housed in the Haliburton Fales collection at New York University. Riewald uses the typescript and his own notes from his 1952 meetings with Beerbohm to reconstruct Beerbohm's response to the original work. Throughout Riewald's new book, one is grateful that the author's sense of humor tempers his adulation. Riewald describes his introduction to Beerbohm, for example, in mock-sublime terms that recall Boswell's allusive "Look, my Lord, it comes": "Miss Jungmann at once ushered me into the tiny living-room, and introduced me to the presence ." Similarly, in describing his first visit, Riewald says that "my decision not to take the bus but to walk there must have been prompted, subconsciously perhaps, by Max's tongue-in-cheek recommendation in Ά Point to Be Remembered by Very Eminent Men' that there should be 73 ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 a longish walk from the railway station to the hero's home. I opened the iron gate, climbed the flight of stone stairs leading to the entrance of the villino, and, uncertain and apprehensive, and conscious of the slightly ridiculous figure I cut, rang the doorbell." The dryly self-deprecatory humor is pleasing, although a curious note of pedantry intrudes. After all, who but the author would know whether he was prompted or not? It is as though the biographer is so used to speaking cautiously and questioningly about motivations that he forgets he is the only person who can answer his own question. Here and elsewhere Riewald's gentle self-mockery is imperfectly managed. While Beerbohm wields a verbal wit as devastating as Johnson's, Riewald only partly shares Boswell's happy knack of being consciously and willingly comic. The faint echoes of Boswell reminds one of the potentially comic nature of the relationship between biographer and subject, with temptations toward sycophancy on one side and self-aggrandizement on the other. Beerbohm refused to help his would-be biographer Bohun Lynch, for he well knew how ridiculous an author can look when he aids and abets his portraitist. For his part, Riewald seems aware of the risk of unintentional comedy, yet somehow his tone keeps going awry. He denies that his letters to Beerbohm are "too fulsome, too reverential." But his attitude toward his subject is reverential, as appears not only in the letters but also in the narrative sections. After his first day's conversations with Beerbohm, for instance, he returns to his hotel in the chilly night air, "overwhelmed by feelings of gratitude and pride" because Elisabeth Jungmann has allowed him to wear Beerbohm's overcoat. In another place, one cannot help wincing...