The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays by Max Beerbohm

The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays Reviews

• 
  Tristan

  "A public crowd, because of a lack of a broad impersonal humanity in me, rather insulates than absorbs me. Amidst the guffaws of a thousand strangers I become unnaturally grave."
  
  -- Max Beerbohm, from 'Laughter'
  
  
  
  (William Newzam Prior Nicholson, Portrait of Sir Max Beerbohm, 1905)
  
  
  Primarily associated with the Edwardian period, theatre critic, author and caricaturist Max Beerbohm managed to live well into the 1950's. After announcing himself as a member of the - then in vogue - dandy crowd of 1890's London among such enfants terribles as Oscar Wilde, he quickly - even if just partially - distanced himself from them and carved out an identity of his own: that of the rugged individualist and amused spectator, free to teasingly criticize whomever and whatever he pleased.
  
  So he did, and succeeded wildly in this pursuit, for roughly thirty years. With an air of erudite detachment (Oxford education, can't beat it), and aided by a sense of (self) deprecating, dryly witty humour, he deftly scrutinized modish fads, stupefying societal customs, creeping modernity and even the - on the whole - banal nature of the human species itself. He managed to achieve this while still exuding affability, showing respect for the intelligence of and, perhaps surprisingly so, confiding in his audience (i.e. not coming of as an elitist prat drenched in misanthropy).
  
  Yet Beerbohm doesn't make it easy. One moment he seems approachable and intimate, at another he retreats into ambiguous aloofness, proclaiming unreachability, while still keeping the reader hungry for more. Admittedly, this is a mighty tough trick to pull off for any essayist.
  
  Sadly, his voice in written form fell eerily silent for the last 30 years or so of his life. The only contact with the broader public which Beerbohm felt like engaging in, were a series of broadcasts he did for BBC radio during the years of WW II. In 1956, at the blessed age of 83, he passed away in Rapallo, Italy.
  
  The Prince of Minor Writers turned out to be quite the collection. A veritable treasure trove of stylish magnificence in prose. Editor and essayist Phillip Lopate did an admirable job collating the very best of the - oft neglected - essays of Beerbohm, which were previously spread out across multiple volumes (most of them now long out of print).
  
  After the incisive - for newcomers very much needed - introduction, we see both Beerbohm the critic and the (multifaceted) man in all their unfettered glory. It's as close to an autobiography we will ever get of him in a single volume.
  
  It must be said, Beerbohm often is an absolute riot to read. For instance, Old Maxie had an odd sort of fascination with fires, to the extent that he abhorred those awfully gallant fire brigades, which invariably deprived him of his enjoyment of them. I couldn't resist quoting from the (half-serious?) essay 'An Infamous Brigade', about the burning down of a wharf:
  
  

  "Yet, under my very eyes, there was an organised attempt to spoil this fair thing. Persons in absurd helmets ran about pouring cascades of cold water on the flames. These, my cabman told me, were firemen. I jumped out and, catching one of them by the arm, bade him sharply desist from his vandalism. I told him that I had driven miles to see this fire, that great crowds of Londoners, poor people with few joys, were there to see it also, and I asked him who was he that he should dare to disappoint us. Without answering my arguments, he warned me that I must not interfere with him "in the discharge of his duty." The silly crowd would not uphold me, and I fell back, surreptitiously slitting his water-hose with a penknife. But what could I avail? The cascades around me were ceaseless, innumerable. Every moment dashed up fresh firemen, imprecant on cars, behind wild horses. In less than an hour, all was over. The flames had been surrounded, driven back and stricken, at length, as they lay, cowering and desperate, in their last embers. But, as they died, there leapt from my hearts core a great residuary flame of indignation. It is still burning."

  
  
  
  
  This is just one of many examples of Beerbohm's mischievously humourous passages springing up in wild abandon throughout. Luckily, this collection touches on a great variety of subjects, not all going for mere comedic effect. His more personal, introspective essays and the tributes to deceased friends or artists (like Aubrey Beardsley and Algernon Charles Swinburne) I found particularly touching.
  
  One initial concern of mine was that the antequated prose -and references to late 19th/early 20th century specific subjects - would hamper my enjoyment, but those fears were soon laid to rest. Once in a while I was indeed forced to resort to a quick internet search - which singular creature these days knows what the 'Forster Act' is? - but it didn't irk me too much. Sure, strategically inserted explanatory notes perhaps could have served well at certain places, but it doesn't dramatically degrade its value as a book. We should be thankful this exists in the first place, given the niche audience for essay writing.
  
  Both as a time capsule of a lost, to us seemingly alien era and a revealing portrait of a masterful, gravely neglected essayist, The Prince of Minor Writers serves as an indispensable publication.
  
  Good form, New York Review Books. Good form indeed.
• 
  Margaret

  Late 19th/early 20th century humorist's essays holds up over time, and are still pretty funny more than a century after they were written.
• 
  Ken

  He's a hell of a writer. Who else can spin a longish (and fascinating) essay out of staring at a fire?
  
  Still, sometimes a little goes a long way. The prose is rich... This is not a book to be gobbled down but savored over time. The last section is particularly interesting. It's his theater reviews. His thoughts on Shaw and Ibsen are spot on, even a century later, and asa writer he's so good that a review of a play stands up a century later.
  
  But even with this praise, be aware some of the essays bore one. A mixed bag, but on the whole very good.
• 
  Edmund Pickett

  If you can comfortably read one hundred year old British prose, then you'll probably enjoy this collection of Beerbohm essays. The sentences are long but the phrases are compacted to gem-like hardness. There can be so many layers of irony that it is often difficult to know whether the author is serious, semi-serious or only conditionally serious. Most 21st century readers will find the social customs of that time and place strange and confusing, but if Trollope and Thackeray are your cup of tea, then you'll like Beerbohm even though he's a generation or two later. Those who study English prose seriously will find treasures here, but not much that can be transported to the present day. The pieces included range from humor and whimsy to straight memoir. The account of Beerbohm's visits to the aged and deaf Swinburne is moving even if, like me, you are unfamiliar with his poems.
• 
  Jennifer McLean

  
  I so looked forward to reading this collection of Beerbohm’s essays after having read one of them, “Going Out for a Walk”, in Phillip Lopate’s anthology The Personal Essay.
  
  Beerbohm’s essays are full of wit and erudition, and the convoluted sentence structure of the Oxford-educated elite is fun to follow (most of the time). My problem with Beerbohm is that he is dated and, I would argue, purposefully exclusive in a way that many other elites of his era are not. Just when you thought you were beginning to make friends with Beerbohm he drops in a quotation in Greek, getting winks and nudges from his Oxbridge pals and shutting the door on everyone else.
  
  I admit that I agree with some of his rather conservative, even curmudgeonly views; for example, that children shouldn’t be given everything they want at every moment as if they were miniature princes and princesses. But his frank sexism and bigotry – no matter how much you excuse it as a product of the time – can be off-putting and just plain cumbersome. His condescending, even offensive, tone with respect to non-Brits and to women, globally, is like a background hum that shuts off for a few pages and starts up again. I put up with this with many other writers because the pros outweigh the cons and I am willing to put my historical goggles on. The problem I have with Beerbohm is not his actual opinions but the way they are always muscling their way onto the page like cultural bouncers whose job it is to keep 99% of readers out of his sphere. You’ll find the same snobbery in many other writers of the time – Virginia Woolf, for example, but you have to dig into her personal letters to find it. It’s not so apparent in her fiction or essays.
  
  The thing with Beerbohm is that so much of what is “personal” for him is a product of his class. I can easily forgive that—embrace it even, in a memoirist like Samuel Pepys, a complicated man to say the least and not at all nice--but somehow with Beerbohm this same warts-and-all approach does nothing but dispel the conversation. So, at Beerbohm’s best he shines for a paragraph or two before bluntly, uncouthly, reminding his reader that he (the reader) must have come in the wrong door and should now leave. At his worst, Beerbohm is just a plain bore, an Oxford-educated Archie Bunker.
  
  It disappoints me that I can’t be a wholehearted fan of Beerbohm because there are so many gems of keen perception in his essays. I like best that shade of the personal that isn’t shellacked over with his self-awareness of his class and his place in it. You see this kind of personal in “Relic”, a touching explanation to his reader and himself of how he could not be a story writer, how he tried but could not write like Maupassant; although he then gives us a perfect vignette of a quarreling couple. I can laugh (chuckle?) with him too when he shows us what’s what with “Hosts and Guests” and “Sympat”. And, yes, I loved his depictions of the tight clumps of artists, writers, and dandies of his youth, even if I don’t have the cultural references. I read his essays without having seen his cartoons (he was a famed caricaturist and defended caricature drawing as high art). I do enjoy his sharp perception of truths we half-know but don’t easily admit: the cruelty of laughter, the boredom of walking with others, the inevitable reality check if ever you meet one of your childhood idols.
  
  At times I agree with Lopate that Beerbohm’s style is conversational, and I can enjoy this conversation for brief stretches when I’m not tripping and stumbling over boulders of elitism and chauvinism he is constantly rolling behind him like a defense. It becomes just plain tiresome after a while.
  
  By all means, read Beerbohm if you are a student of his times and/or an anglophile of a certain type. There is rich material here that might be worth the annoyances.
  
• 
  William Huber

  Read this whenever in the mood for a long, discursive essay on art, literature, and manners, bit by bit, over a six-month period. Reading the essays straight through is not possible for today’s attention span and the wit is probably too dry for most –but he was and remains funny. Beerbohm was an Oxford dandy who loved clothes, style, cigarette holders, and drinking. At Oxford, he was friends with Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, and Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas published his first essay “The Incomparable Beauty of Modern Dress.” And then he got to know everybody.
  He was by reputation gay and Jewish but wasn’t either. He lived in Italy with his first and second wives for 50 years and never learned how to speak Italian. His friendship with George Bernard Shaw lasted for years despite his criticisms of Shaw’s plays and socialism. Sarah Bernhardt was also a friend and he delighted in her eccentricities, gift for tragedy, and fake fainting spells. All in all, an amazing historical archive when one considers it spans from Edwardian horse and buggy days to the nuclear age, two world wars, a pandemic that killed 50 million when the world population was one-seventh its current size, and the astonishing inventions of cars, planes, radios, movies, television, etc. etc. etc. Well worth the effort.
  
• 
  Al

  Like many collections, this one reacts best to being sampled rather than read through. Handled in this way, it is excellent. Mr. Beerbohm was an acclaimed essayist, critic and even cartoonist, and perhaps the early twentieth century's foremost practitioner of the familiar essay. It could be that the best familiar essayist of our era, Joseph Epstein, owes some of his skill to studying Mr. Beerbohm's technique. In my opinion, though, Epstein is far superior because his style is less precious and self-conscious, but then that's only my preference and certainly not the last word. Perhaps the differences between the two are accounted for more by the hundred or so years and and nationalities which separate them. However you take him, though, Beerbohm is brilliant and his constructions are scintillating, polished and informative.
• 
  Roz

  Some i liked, a few I didn’t. There’s a few that are hilarious, but a few that probably would appeal more to serious Anglophiles than myself. As a prose stylist, Beerbohm is particularly old fashioned, but in a way that’s charming in small doses. Which is how if recommend this: read an essay in the bookstore before you buy it, see what it does for you. As the lay says, your mileage may vary
• 
  Mugren Ohaly

  The first line of the introduction quotes Beerbohm as having said, “There are only fifteen hundred readers in England and one thousand in America who understand what I am about.”
  
  That says a lot about how bad this book is.
• 
  Garret Cahill

  As with the author's caricatures, the cover photo conveys just the slightest sense of the sharp claws hidden under the exquisite tailoring.... The essay on Doctor Johnson and the obscure cleric is a marvel. And I can't get enough of the nyrb books, the design is delightful.
• 
  Lukas Evan

  More of a duke or viceroy.
• 
  Gabriel Congdon

  Max! Wow, max! Wowsers. Wowsers indeed.
  
  It’s, they, it’s… I mean, like, how enjoyable.
  
  Adroit. Very adroit. And funny. Funny as hell
  
  It’s like that DaveFostWallec prose that reads so well as thought..to an extent, I guess. Max tap dances whereas DFW’s work is more balletic.
  
  Max’s observations of human character still very much tuned to the key of now.
  (I'm not much for compliments. I'm not much beter form ribbing and/or razzing.)
  (See, that's a Beerbohm quip I gave the ol paraphrase twirl.
  It's a book of em.)
  It’s, it’s, all, woof, so good.
  
• 
  Tom Wascoe

  An excellent collection of essays by "a minor writer" who was both an essayist and a drama critic. His essays move from cynicism (his early works) to humorously sarcastic (his mid-life works) to nostalgic (his late life works). Most are interesting although many are filled with names that are meaningless today.