A Man of Letters, page 18
In his essay on ‘Dandies’ Max Beerbohm asks whether a dandy’s clothes can be seen responding to the emotion of the wearer. Needless to say, an instance of this sartorial melancholia is known to him:
I saw with wonder Lord X’s linen actually flush for a moment and then turn deadly pale. I looked again and saw that his boots had lost their lustre. Drawing nearer, I saw that grey hairs had begun to show themselves in his raven coat. It was very painful and yet, to me, very gratifying. In the cloakroom, when I went for my own hat and cane, there was the hat with broad brim and (lo!) over its iron-blue surface little furrows had been ploughed by Despair.
‘Deadly pale’, ‘lost their lustre’, ‘gratifying’: only such epithets from a dead usage could release the protest of fantasy that is alive. The art of Max in that passage is shown in a single word: the grey hairs appear ‘in’ the coat, not ‘on’ it, as many a comic, careless of the full terror of his effect, would have said.
Beerbohm’s detachment must have owed something to the fact that his father came of a distinguished Baltic German family. He had had two English wives: one died, so he married her sister secretly in Switzerland – it was illegal in Great Britain to marry a deceased wife’s sister at that time. The father was an amiably slack and cultivated man: the mother engagingly eccentric with a talent for erratic minor alterations in English metaphors. She would say ‘I feel as old as any hills’ – to be old, seemingly, was as important to her as it was to her youngest son. The foreign strain was just the thing to give an edge to Max’s talent and that of the family. Expatriation allows one to drop a lot of unwanted moral luggage, lets talent travel lightly and opens it to the histrionic. For his own talents Max Beerbohm could not have chosen a better time. Putting aside, for the moment, such matters as Dandyism, the Aesthetes, the Decadents, the acquaintance of Oscar Wilde, Beardsley, the fading Pre-Raphaelites and the last remorses of the Romantic Agony, no place could have been luckier than London for the wits. The city had many clever newspapers and reviews, the theatre had Shaw and Ibsen to deal with, Pinero and others to insult. It was the time for the fancy of the essayist, for fantasy, the comedy of manners, hoaxes, impersonations, caricature and for carrying on an artist’s war with England’s fleshly Philistinism, led by a Prince of Wales who looked like a licentious grocer, and for attacking the blustering side of British imperialism, by exaggerating the size of Kipling’s chin and the bushiness of his eyebrows. Max’s eyebrows were impeccable question marks. The amount of theatre criticism and essay writing he did as a young man, and the delightful trouble it stirred up among the respectable, is remarkable.
The famous ‘Defence of Cosmetics’ written when Max was still at Oxford, and his closeness to the Wilde and Beardsley set, led some to suspect that Max was on the then dangerous edge of homosexuality. In fact, Max was horrified by the scandalous intimacies of the flesh; his sexual temperature was low – perhaps, as Lord David Cecil suggests in Max: A Biography, because he was the last child of elderly parents whose vitality had declined. His temperament was narcissistic – as his innumerable caricatures of himself show – and he seems not even to have attained the narcissism of adolescence, but to have sat with the scrupulous prudence of the demure child in front of any mirror he could find, experimenting in poses and grimaces.
He lived by the eye and – as one can see by his drawings – discreetly beyond touch of hand. Two caretaking wives looked after him in middle and late life and – to all appearances – treated him tenderly if overwhelmingly, as a dangerous toy. And then – how typical this is of an intelligent and sensitive man who is without roots – he turned to literature and the arts for his nationality. Among other things, in the wide-eyed persona he invented, there is sadness. Was it the sadness of not being a genius on the great scale, like his admired Henry James? Possibly. Was it the sadness of knowing that his work must be perfect – as that of minor writers has to be – because fate made him a simulacrum? Or was he simply born sad?
And now to Beerbohm’s centenary year in times that are so unsuited to him. Piously Rupert Hart-Davis has done a large catalogue of all Beerbohm’s caricatures that have been framed or suitably reproduced, a volume useful to collectors. (It is amusing that Beerbohm’s devastating caricatures of Edward VII and George V, done in his ‘black’ period, are among the treasures in Windsor Castle.) A selection of essays, A Peep into the Past, has also been made by Hart-Davis, and serves to show the development of the essayist. In later essays the charm has become benign and thin, but three of them are excellent: the remarkable spoof portrait of Wilde done when Beerbohm was still an undergraduate and suppressed after the trial, in which occur the well-known lines: ‘As I was ushered into the little study, I fancied that I heard the quickly receding froufrou of tweed trousers, but my host I found reclining, hale and hearty, though a little dishevelled upon the sofa.’
The other, written on De Profundis, denies the comforting view of many English critics of the time that Wilde had undergone a spiritual change after his imprisonment. Beerbohm saw him as still an actor but with a new role.
Yet lo! he was unchanged. He was still precisely himself. He was still playing with ideas, playing with emotions. ‘There is only one thing left for me now,’ he writes, ‘absolute humility.’ And about humility he writes many beautiful and true things. And, doubtless, while he wrote them, he had the sensation of humility. Humble he was not.
And there is the hilarious pretence in another essay that a powerful bad poet of the period – Clement Shorter – had spent his life writing love poems not to a lady but to one of the awful British seaside resorts.
The best American essay on him, in my opinion, was by Edmund Wilson, dry and to the point. There was no mellifluous English nonsense about the ‘inimitable’ and ‘incomparable’. I feared what would happen to Max if he was put through the American academic mangle. There seems to be a convention that this machine must begin by stunning its victim with the obvious, and when I found Mr Felstiner saying, in his study The Lies of Art, about the notorious essay on cosmetics that ‘Cosmetics were a perfect choice to join the teachings of the moment, aestheticism and decadence,’ I understood what Max meant when he said that exhaustive accounts of the period ‘would need far less brilliant pens than mine’. But, as I went on, I found Mr Felstiner a thorough, thoughtful, and independent analyst of Max as a caricaturist and parodist. He has good things to say about Beerbohm’s phases as an artist in line and water colour, about his absolute reliance on the eye. He is admirable on the parodies in which Max reached the complete fulfilment of his gifts, and his comments on Zuleika Dobson are the most searching I have ever read.
Beerbohm caricatured Americans, the working class and the bourgeoisie automatically as part of the impending degradation of civilisation and the arts.... John Bull is the crucial figure throughout, shaming himself in Europe, vilely drunk or helpless in the face of British losses, and deeply Philistine. On the evidence of these cartoons, Shaw called Beerbohm ‘the most savage Radical caricaturist since Gillray’.
His Prince of Wales is a coarse, tweedy brute, imagining a nunnery is a brothel. His pictures of royalty were savage:
What angered Beerbohm during the Boer War was not Britain’s damaged empire – he was indifferent to that: ‘the only feeling that our Colonies inspire in me is a determination not to visit them.’ It was the self-delusion and debasement of conduct at home, the slavish reliance on grandiose national myths.
But he was no Gillray, nor was he a Grosz. He ‘enjoyed with an eye for what men are individually – for their conceits, contradictions, deadlocks, excesses. Beerbohm drew more for fun than in the hope of changing attitude or behaviour. In fact he depended as man and artist on the survival of the context he satirised.’
Edwardian literature has many, many sad stories, stories whose frivolity half discloses the price a culture is paying for its manners and illusions. Zuleika Dobson is one of the funniest and most lyrical and sad of these tales. As in all Beerbohm’s fantasies, literary cross references are graceful and malign. Fantasy states what realism will obscure or bungle.
Yet in comparison with previous jocular or sentimental treatments, he could claim to have given ‘a truer picture of undergraduate life’. His book points to real elements of conformity and sexual repression.... By chance the river itself has the name of Isis, Egypt’s greatest goddess, all things to all men. So what emerges is an allegory of Youth forsaking Alma Mater, the Benign Mother, for the consummating love of woman.
Zuleika seems to have been modelled in part on the famous bareback rider whom Swinburne knew, and she has a close connection with ‘the Romantic Agony’. She is a ‘Volpone of a self-conceit: her mirror is the world’, i.e. she is the male dandy’s opposite number. Mr Felstiner writes of her rapture when she is spurned by the Duke:
All the world’s youth is prostrate with love but she can only love a man who will spurn her.... ‘I had longed for it, but I had never guessed how wonderfully wonderful it was. It came to me. I shuddered and wavered like a fountain in the wind’ – sounds like the joys of flagellation. The Duke even finds himself wanting to ‘flay’ her with Juvenalian verses. ‘He would make Woman (as he called Zuleika) writhe.’
The element of parody insures the tale: Beerbohm’s excellence and his safety as an artist are guaranteed because, unfailingly, he is writing literature within literature. Parody, as Mr Felstiner again puts it, is a filter. It drains both literature and life.
Beerbohm rarely drew from photographs. He drew from memory. The recipe for caricature was ‘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.’ So Balfour’s sloping body becomes impossibly tall and sad in order to convey his ‘uneasy Olympian attitudes’. Carson, who prosecuted Wilde, is a long curve like a tense whip, whereas Balfour is a question mark. Beerbohm thickened Kipling’s neck and enlarged his jaw to stress the brutality he saw in him. Pinero’s eyebrows had to be ‘like the skins of some small mammal, just not large enough to be used as mats’. One difficulty, he noted in How They Undo Me, is that over the years a subject may change – the arrogant become humble, the generous mean, the sloppy scrupulous. Yeats had once seemed like a ‘mood in a vacuum’ but the youthful aspect changed: ‘I found it less easy to draw caricatures of him. He seemed to have become subtly less like himself.’ As Mr Felstiner adds, a shade unnecessarily, ‘The truth is that he [Yeats] had become more like himself.... An evolving discipline made his themes and his style more tough-minded, idiomatic, accountable.’
Mr Felstiner has noticed that in Max’s caricatures the eyes of the politicians are generally closed – public life has turned them into blank statues in their own life-time – but the eyes of the writers and artists are open. The eyes of James are wide open – sometimes in dread. Beerbohm wrote a sonnet to him: ‘Your fine eyes, blurred like arc lamps in a mist’. Beerbohm’s admiration for James and his closeness to his belief in the primacy of art are responsible for the excellence of his well-known parody in The Christmas Garland. It required an art equal – if for a moment only – to James’s own to get so keenly under the skin; and, like all good things, it was not achieved without great trouble. Indeed, Max added to the famous Christmas story, one more turn of the screw.
He constantly revisited his subjects. His parodies are indeed criticisms and the silent skill with which nonsense is mellifluously introduced, without seeming to be there, is astonishing. James’s manner has often been mimicked, but never with Beerbohm’s gift for extending his subject by means of the logic of comedy. I do not share Mr Felstiner’s admiration for the Kipling parody: Max was blind to Kipling’s imagination though he was daring in suggesting there was something feminine in Kipling’s tough masculine worship of obedience. Max here disclosed a violence on his own part. Kipling was as good an actor as he; had been brought up by a pre-Raphaelite father and had as much regard for form and style as Beerbohm had. But, of course, like greater artists, the parodist celebrates his own blindnesses as well as his power to see.
He could even show open schoolboy coarseness in a way that is surprising in one of his circumlocutory habit. There are a few lines on Shaw, an old love-hate, in J. G. Riewald’s edition of rhymes and parodies, Max in Verse:
I strove with all, for all were worth my strife,
Nature I loathed, and next to Nature, Art;
I chilled both feet on the thin ice of Life,
It broke and I emit a final fart.
This book has some of Beerbohm’s best things: the parody of Hardy’s Dynasts, the pseudo-Shakespeare of Savonarola Brown – only Max could have seen what could be done by splitting iambic pentameters into banal dialogue. The Shropshire Lad is told abruptly to go and drown himself, and for those puzzled about the origins and pronunciations of English place names like Cirencester, there is a gently malicious ballad. Thirty-four of these poems have not been published before, partly because Max was very tactful, at the proper time, about hurting people’s feelings – he repressed the keyhole James until after James’s death – and partly because he knew when his own juvenile phase had lasted too long.
(1984)
Joseph Conrad
Conrad and Destiny
Conrad exists in English literature, but he is a harsh exotic who can never quite be assimilated to our modes. No English novelist has his peculiar accent in psychological and moral curiosity; it is like the knowing accent of Kipling, a foreigner’s acquired slang, but expressing a far more elevated sensibility than Kipling had; only Henry James, another alien, with his pursuit of fine consciousness, approaches Conrad’s fencing with extremes. Yet here all Conrad’s critics have been dissatisfied. They have felt, as Forster did, that he was following extremes into a fog of argument or rhetoric; or they have been obliged to agree with the comment of Dr Leavis – the most substantial of Conrad’s critics – on the inequalities of Heart of Darkness and that ‘he is intent on making a virtue out of not knowing what he means. The vague and unrealisable, he asserts with a strained impressiveness, is the profoundly and tremendously significant.’
Even in Nostromo, where Conrad’s powers of concretion were married to a great subject, we shall not exactly know where we stand. We are always liable in his work to lapse from the certainties of art into the restless brilliance of opinion, to find the matter in hand being explored with the cleverness of the café writer and the moral dilettante. We shall be haunted by the special and tragic brilliance of the exile who, as he exhibits himself and plays his role, is never unconscious of the fact. As Mr Douglas Hewitt says in Conrad: A Reassessment, his novels are not tragedies – they resemble tragedies. They are, generally speaking, one must add, inhibited from tragic fullness by his famous, defensive and histrionic irony. He is, at bottom, a rather sadistic and sardonic writer. His irony is ultimately perverse – or, as earlier critics used to say, morbid – because it is a personal irony and does not always lie in the nature of the events he describes. Is Nostromo a great classical novel or a brilliant commentary? That is to say, superb as it is, does it not strike one as being a commentary on the kind of novel or dramatic work that could, at some time, be written on its subject?
Nostromo is the most strikingly modern of Conrad’s novels. It might have been written in 1954 and not, as it was, in 1904. All the issues of the economic exploitation of a backward country are here; the politics of Costa-guana over two or three generations are telescoped in depth without losing the focus on the present. We see both the ideal and fraud in colonial exploitation, in the fight for liberalism, progress, reform, the bent to revolution and the advent of a foreign power. Even the rise of two of the now dominant forces in his kind of situation is clearly noted: the desire of America to take over everything in the world and, against or with that, the rise of the masses. Conrad did not set these things down in a political or historical essay, nor in a novel of propaganda, but in the impure detail of a large sceptical and imaginative work. Every moment is physically realised not by a right-minded and insensitive political reporter with a mind hardened-off (or softened) by his programme, but by an artist dealing, as art must, in the waste, the elusive, the incalculable. It is one of the prophetic felicities of this work that it is pervaded by a profound, even morbid sense of insecurity which is the very spirit of our age, and that sense is (as it must always be) personal. Before anyone else – though we may pause to give Mr E. M. Forster his due – Conrad the exile foresaw that in half a century we should all become exiles, in a sense.
One or two reflections follow from our astonishment with Nostromo. The first is a general reflection on the social soil in which the modern English novel is planted. The great English subject – one is inclined to say – and at any rate the great subject which includes a picture of society, lies outside England, simply because English life itself has for long been parasitic on life abroad and does not wish to recognise the fact. ‘Abroad’ is where English institutions have been put to the test and not in South Wales, Tyneside, Birmingham or Surrey. As I say, apart from Conrad, only E. M. Forster seems to have known this; possibly Lawrence, too, in a book like Kangaroo. The second reflection is one that throws a light on some of Conrad’s defects as a novelist. He suffers from being before his proper time. It is a freak of time that he is a Romantic. Even in small yet not unimportant matters like the use of dialogue, Conrad was unlucky. If he could be writing The Secret Agent or the bandit pages of Victory now, he would certainly not write the wooden Cockney or the ludicrous melodrama of his gangster’s dialogue; the intellectual energies of the refugee would not have been spent on acquiring literary English, but the English of speech.
Conrad is a man in what we may call the post-1940 situation, but who is obliged to conceal the fact under a dramatic fog of rhetoric. He loved rhetoric, of course, and became – as Mr Hewitt says – more prone to it when his talent went to pieces from Chance onwards; vaguely emotive words like ‘unspeakable’, ‘nameless’, ‘inscrutable’, ‘horror’, ‘pure evil’, ‘mystery’, ‘Woman’ are the well-known pedals of the Romantic organ. Behind them lay things which, a generation or so after, he could have named, and as an incipient nihilist he would have been bound to name them. He would have been obliged to live or set down in precise physical detail, the nihilism which he feared so much in his nature. It would have been drawn out by a nihilist age. The case of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, the case of Heyst in Victory, or Decoud in Nostromo, is contemporary, but now the full glare of the interrogator’s lamp is on their faces. Conrad would have been drawn out of the grandiloquent shadows that exasperate us and which seem to exasperate him; he would have found less to opine upon and, more cruelly, to state. The morbidity of which early critics complained – quite rightly; before 1914 certain values seemed impregnable – would not strike one in our imaginary Conrad who had been drawn out by times that would fit his temperament like a glove. Betrayal, guilt, isolation, the double self, corruption, the undisguised sadism that has appeared in our life, the anarchy, are not matters of speculation and pious lament. They are contemporary facts.
