by Kirk Woodward
[I
should no longer need to explain why I post articles by my friend Kirk Woodward
on Rick
On Theater. First, I’ve known him for over 55 years;
second, starting ROT in 2009 was largely Kirk’s idea. Most important, though, and really all the
rationale that’s necessary, is that Kirk’s thoughts on a variety of topics and
ideas are invariably and reliably interesting and informative.
[He knows as much about theater as I do, if not more—and he’s practiced more of the theater arts than I could ever even attempt: acting, directing, teaching, playwriting, lyric-writing, composing, reviewing and criticism, and some I probably haven’t mentioned (but should). He’s also a musician himself, principally a keyboardist, and plays in a band and has played for both musical theater rehearsals and performances.
[Perhaps most significantly as far as ROT is concerned, Kirk writes excellently—and especially articulately—about all his fields of interest. He also writes quickly and concisely, much to my envy.
[I’ve never done a count of Kirk’s contributions to this blog. The topics he’s covered would make a long list as well. He always seems to land on a surprising and provocative perspective for his articles. That’s what he’s done again here: his choice of subject is Max Beerbohm, called by the old-fashioned term “a man of letters,” a phrase that suggests a literary jack of many trades. It’s both a perfect description of Beerbohm—and monumentally inadequate.
[As you’ll read, George Bernard Shaw dubbed him simply “the incomparable Max”; the label stuck. Kirk hints at what made Beerbohm such a figure, but focuses on only one aspect of his long life and career—his theater reviewing. He succeeded Shaw at London’s Saturday Review (1898-1910), but you’ll see that he had his own inimitable view of “the fabulous invalid.”
[So read, learn . . . and, above all, enjoy. ~Rick]
Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) was a notable figure in a London, England, full of notable figures. He met the flamboyant Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) at Oxford; his half-brother, Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917), was a celebrated actor; and he married a respected actress, Florence Kahn (1878-1951).
In person he was small, quiet, and ironic. (“I was a modest, good-natured boy,” he said; “it was Oxford that has made me insufferable.”) But he forged a path for himself in numerous areas, among them as a caricaturist, as a parodist, and as a drama reviewer.
He also wrote a novel, Zuleika Dobson, or, An Oxford Love Story, published in 1911, which is still respected, and beginning in 1935 he also made a series of popular radio broadcasts. In each of those three areas, he was remarkable. The novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) considered him the first important essayist in decades.
[You can also catch glimpses of many of them online. (Image at right is an 1897 self-caricature by Beerbohm.) ~Rick]
The American writer Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) defined a caricaturist as a “portrayer of personalities,” and that’s exactly Beerbohm’s greatness – once you’ve seen his sketch of George Bernard Shaw (1956-1950) dancing the Highland Fling, or the reviewer William Archer (1856-1924) kissing the toe of the shoe of playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), or G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) as an enormous balloon at the dinner table, you know exactly what they were like, and what Beerbohm thought they were like.
One can’t draw a good caricature (his are much better than “good”) without a deep understanding of its subject matter, and the same is true for the writer of parodies, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that Beerbohm excelled in both. Dwight MacDonald (1906-1982), who compiled the splendid volume Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm – and After (1960), calls Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland (1912)
a set of variations on a theme which I am not alone in thinking the best single book of parodies in our language. The chief drawback to it . . . is that about half the eighteen parodees are no longer of interest. And yet even so one gets such a vivid impression of the literary personalities . . . that one is able to reconstruct these extinct forms of life from the single parodic bone thrown to one, and perhaps to enjoy them even more than their contemporaries did.
I would love to quote endlessly from Beerbohm’s parodies, but I will only cite as an example his “P.C., X, 36,” a parody of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) that incorporates Kipling’s often-so-masculine tone, his fascination with men in uniform, and his ear for dialects, in a story about a London cop on Christmas Eve who arrests Santa Claus:
The captive sniveled something about peace on earth, good will toward men.
“Yuss,” said Judlip. “That’s in the Noo Testament, ain’t it? The Noo Testament contains some uncommon nice readin’ for old gents an’ young ladies. But it ain’t included in the librery o’ the Force. We confine ourselves to the Old Testament – O.T., ’ot. An’ ’ot you’ll get it. Hup with that sack, an’ quick march!
Would a gift for caricature and a mastery of parody be useful to a theater reviewer? As it turns out, if the reviewer is Beerbohm, the answer is yes. He became the “critic” for the influential weekly London paper The Saturday Review in 1898, succeeding the brilliant George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), who was moving on from reviewing to greater things, and who in his last column gave Beerbohm a soubriquet that would stick:
Still, the gaiety of nations must not be eclipsed. The long string of beautiful ladies who are at present in the square without, awaiting, under the supervision of two gallant policemen, their turn at my bedside [he was ill], must be reassured when they protest, as they will, that the light of their life will go out if my dramatic articles cease. To each of them I will present the flower left by her predecessor, and assure her that there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. The younger generation is knocking at the door; and as I open it there steps spritely in the incomparable Max.
For the rest, let Max speak for himself. I am off duty for ever, and am going to sleep.
“The incomparable Max” Beerbohm was then twenty-six years old.
He stayed at The Saturday Review twelve years – four times as long as Shaw. He wrote over five hundred reviews, selected the best of them for a book called Around Theatres in 1930, and a smaller selection of those was published by Simon & Schuster as A Selection from Around Theatres in 1960.
He begins, on May 28, 1898, with a bang, in an essay called “Why I Ought Not To Have Become A Dramatic Critic.”
Frankly, I have none of that instinctive love for the theatre which is the first step towards good criticism of drama. I am not fond of the theatre . . . in drama I take, unfortunately, neither emotional nor intellectual pleasure. I am innocent of any theories on the subject. I shall have to vamp up my first principles as I go along, and they will probably be all wrong and all dull. . . . My self-respect and my ignorance of bygone formulae of drama will prevent me from the otherwise easy task of being an academic critic. . . . In a word, I don’t quite know what to do with the torch that G. B. S. has handed to me.
Immediately one wonders, is this true? He is clearly lowering expectations, but for what reason – out of serious awareness of his own limitations? As part of a game played with the reader? Both? Or can he simply not avoid writing droll and humorous essays – caricaturing, perhaps, himself?
Whatever the answer, he has neatly differentiated himself from his predecessor, Shaw, who had definite and well worked-out opinions about everything:
I have not that well-considered attitude towards life which gave a kind of unity to G.B. S.’s worst inconsistencies about art. In a word, I don’t quite know what to do with the torch that G. B. S. has handed me.
One sees, slyly inserted into that sentence, a very definite attitude toward Shaw. Beerbohm is certainly not as ingenuous as he presents himself. What’s more, in an oblique fashion he establishes his right to craft his reviews in the way he wants, not according to someone else’s pattern. In any case:
I daresay that there are many callings more uncomfortable and dispiriting than that of dramatic critic. To be a porter on the Underground Railway must, I have often thought, be very terrible. Whenever I feel myself sinking under the stress of my labours, I shall say to myself, “I am not a porter on the Underground Railway.”
As I read Beerbohm’s reviews, the first thing I think of, unlikely as it seems, is a passage from the mystery novel The Case of the Amorous Aunt by Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) in which the lawyer Perry Mason tells a junior attorney:
Take him on, Duncan. There’s not very much you can do with him. Don’t generalize. Pounce on the one point that you can emphasize and then let him go.
The last sentence in that quotation summarizes the approach Beerbohm generally takes in writing his reviews: he pounces on one point to emphasize, and the discussion of that one point takes up most of the review. To put it another way, the underlying genre of Beerbohm’s reviews is the essay.
Quite likely this approach would not have worked for him if he were a reviewer on a daily newspaper; the pressure to get an immediate response into print would have made it difficult for him, or anyone, to write a meditative piece, and it is also likely that an ordinary editor might have instructed the reviewer to stick more to the play, and less to his ideas about drama.
Beerbohm’s editor, however, was anything but ordinary. He was Frank Harris (1855-1931), a bull in the china shop of journalism with a shrewd eye for talent. Harris had spotted Shaw and been richly rewarded. To choose Beerbohm as Shaw’s successor had to be more than good luck. Beerbohm’s unusual approach and style made him a “main attraction” well able to follow Shaw.
There are aspects of Beerbohm’s reviews that may strike the reader as irritating. He takes all the time he wants to make his points. Someone looking for “a quick quote” might have to read a long time to find one.
He also has an irritating habit of referring to actors as “mimes” and to characters in plays as “puppets.” As far as I can determine, silence was thoroughly associated with mimes by the time Beerbohm wrote, and actors in plays typically are not silent. Furthermore, the dramatist whose characters come across to the audience as “puppets” is probably not a very good dramatist, “wooden” being another word for such characters.
On the other hand, it is a pleasure to read the work of someone who writes superlatively well – and for a weekly magazine at that! – and although his first column gives the impression that he has no opinions worth writing about, that is actually not the case. Reviewing a play by the novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) he writes that
What I want from art is some kind of emotion. It matters not at all to me whether the emotion be in itself one of pleasure or one of pain. In whatever way I be quickened, I am grateful. I pity the critics who can find no aesthetic pleasure in “One Day More.” They ought to give up criticism.
Further in the same review he writes:
And that, I insist, is the keenest, truest kind of aesthetic emotion to which we can attain – simply to be “bowled over.”
Throughout his twelve years of reviewing, despite his claims to be bewildered by the theater, he expresses numerous definite opinions, although he is not beyond changing them. For example, he finds it almost impossible for a dramatist to put on stage a convincing portrayal of a writer:
The playwrights seem to be almost as hazy as actors in their notion of what literary men are like. I search my memory in vain for one passable presentment of a literary man in modern drama.
(He had not seen the Tony Award winning performance of Christian Borle (b. 1973) as the manically insecure rock star playwright William Shakespeare in the musical Something Rotten! (2015), but that exception, I would say, proves the rule.)
[There are two reports on Something Rotten! on Rick On Theater—one by me, posted on 14 May 2016 and one by Kirk himself, on 11 May 2016. Both posts have similar praise of Borle as The Bard. ~Rick]
On principle he is not excited about the 1908 equivalent of what came to be called “kitchen sink” or determinedly realistic drama:
The relation of a playwright to his audience is the same as the relation of any one to the friend whom he button-holes, to tell him something, in a room. The playwright wants to interest his audience, just as I want to interest my friend. The more abnormal the matter of the communication, the likelier is interest to be aroused.
While Shaw and his fellow reviewer William Archer (1852-1924) championed and promoted Ibsen’s plays, Beerbohm, a member of the next generation, is considerably more objective about them:
[Ibsen’s] was a strange mind, this mind into which I have been peering. Posterity, too, I think, will always, from time to time, peer into it, with something of my own awe. Even when time shall have robbed the plays of the sharp savour that for us they have, Ibsen himself will be as dominant a figure as he is for us. Against his lack of love may be set the fact that he loved not even himself… Perhaps it is but another instance of Ibsen’s egoism that he reserved his most vicious kick [in When We Dead Awaken] for himself.
He is extremely skeptical of plays written by actors such as William Gillette (1853-1937), because those plays tend, in the words of Shaw (who agreed with him), to be “a tissue of effects:”
I must find such solace as I can in my prevision of the time when Mr. Gillette will have ceased to write anything but stage directions.
He argues, logically if futilely, for the use of the soliloquy in modern drama:
Though in real life we do not talk to ourselves, we do think to ourselves, and many of these thoughts we could not or would not divulge to any other creature, however dear a friend he might be. Perhaps these incommunicable thoughts are the most important we ever have – the thoughts which, if they were divulged, would best elucidate our characters and our actions.
He scoffs, or claims to scoff, at the label of the “hard-working” actor:
To walk and talk for half an hour in the course of the evening makes no great strain on your physique, even though you have to walk gracefully and to talk in a loud tone. Moreover, the amount of brain-power you require for “studying” the average creation of the average dramatist is – well, not above the average.
He suggests that mornings are the best hours for watching serious drama:
The morning always has been recognized as the time when the functions of the brain and the heart are best performed. In the morning all our faculties are agog. We are fresh from sleep. . . . And just as our emotions are in proper trim, so are our brains. We celebrate clearly, cleanly, assimilating facts, detecting fallacies, at a glance. We are as receptive as tiny children, yet, unlike them, able to reason from our learning. Like the shining day itself, we are young.
Nor is Beerbohm incapable of changing his mind. He jousts with Shaw throughout his twelve years of reviewing, at first speaking of Shaw as a sort of pamphleteer who uses actors. Many have expressed this opinion about Shaw’s plays. It is certainly inaccurate or at least incomplete, as I have tried to describe elsewhere in this blog [see Kirk’s “Bernard Shaw, Pop Culture Critic,” posted on ROT on 5 September 2012; “Eric Bentley on Bernard Shaw,” 3 December 2015; and the 5-part “Re-Reading Shaw,” 3 & 18 July, 8 & 23 August, and 2 September 2016]. Beerbohm at first agrees with the criticism but eventually comes to the understanding that
[the reviewers] still maintain that Mr. Shaw is not a playwright. That theory might have held water in the days before Mr. Shaw’s plays were acted. Indeed, I was in the habit of propounding it myself. . . . I wrote here a special article in which I pointed out that the plays, delightful to the reader, would be quite impossible on the stage. This simply proved that I had not enough theatrical imagination to see the possibilities of a play through reading it in print. . . . To deny that [Shaw] is a dramatist merely because he chooses, for the most part, to get drama out of contrasted types of character and thought, without action, and without appeal to the emotions, seems to me both unjust and absurd. His technique is peculiar because his purpose is peculiar. But it is not the less technique.
Like Shaw he thinks continually, if sometimes fancifully, about the role of the reviewer:
No critic is able to criticize a play rightly after seeing it but once. If he write for a daily paper he has to exhaust himself with the effort to remember every turn of the plot, in order that he may write a clear precis. If he write for a weekly paper, he has to be on the alert for something which will make the basis for a theory – some salient feature on which he can fasten an idea. . . . Will the critics, I wonder, be swayed by this counsel of perfection? Not I, for one. Few plays deserve to be seen at all; on the other hand, I grow more and more fond of first nights.
It seems to me that the word “incomparable” fits Beerbohm well. Who can we compare him to? In an era when reviews seem, as a matter of style, to be much the same, Beerbohm shows that a great deal more is possible. Of course it helps to be Max Beerbohm.
In 1939 he became Sir Max. I cannot think of any other drama reviewers who have been knighted. That surely must indicate something.
[Kirk notes that Beerbohm, who was knighted in 1939, was apparently the only theater reviewer to receive that honor from the British Crown. It’s interesting to note, however, that Beerbohm’s predecessor on the drama desk of the Saturday Review, George Bernard Shaw, was offered a knighthood in 1925, but he declined the honor.
[The year of the offer is somewhat in doubt, apparently, as other sources put it sometime “during the 1930s and 1940s.” Furthermore, some references say the offer was never formally made, “but that he was sounded out.” (It almost certainly would have been for his playwriting more than his drama criticism.) I couldn’t pin this down, but it’s more certain that an offer of an Order of Merit award was considered in 1946, but Shaw let it be known that he wouldn’t accept the honor so it was never officially offered.
[Shaw refused most other honors and awards as well; he basically disparaged such recognition, feeling that it should be left to posterity. Nonetheless, he’s one of only two people ever awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award (the other double-winner was Bob Dylan). Shaw won his Nobel for Literature in 1925 and the Oscar in 1938 for the screenplay adaptation of Pygmalion. (Dylan's academy award was in 2001 for his song "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, recognizing the poetry of his song lyrics, in 2016.)
[Reportedly, Shaw wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize, too, but his wife urged him to accept it as an honor for Ireland; however, he refused the concomitant monetary award (usually around $1 million or €850,000), requesting that it be used for the English translation of Swedish books.]
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