Ten years ago N. John Hall published his first biography, a life of Anthony Trollope. Now he has brought out a biography of Max Beerbohm. At first sight the contrast is a piquant one. On the one hand, the prolific commonsensical novelist, on the other the exquisite caricaturist and wit. It looks like switching from beef and pudding to caviar.

In fact the gap between the two men is not as wide as their respective reputations suggest. There was a robust, even conventional side to Beerbohm. His reaction to the First World War, for example, was staunchly patriotic; he loved music-halls (one taste at least which he shared with his bête noire Kipling); he had no problem about writing a column for the mass-circulation Daily Mail. He was very fond, for that matter, of the novels of Trollope. And those novels in turn, when you get down to them, display far more delicacy than they are generally given credit for.

Still, a Trollope biography and a Beerbohm biography remain very different undertakings, and, in turning to Beerbohm, Hall has adopted a much lighter and more informal approach. Where possible he lets Beerbohm speak for himself, but he also pops up all over the place, making it clear that he is the one who, in his own phrase, is “putting on the show.” He recounts the main events of Beerbohm’s career in roughly chronological order, but he also zips around as the fancy takes him. A minor essay gets a chapter to itself. The chapter on the parodies in A Christmas Garland turns into a quiz. Beerbohm’s alleged faults are set out in an indictment (the device and some of the actual accusations are borrowed from Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot) and dealt with point by point. There are fascinating digressions, and a “necrology” that traces the eventual fate of Beerbohm’s friends and acquaintances. If it weren’t for the comical near-rhyme, the book could well be described as a Beerbohm album.

The result takes a little getting used to. The tone is often skittish. There are too many exclamations and asides. (“Ah ha, what is this?”; “As I don’t do this sort of thing very often, please bear with me”—“this sort of thing” is quoting a passage from E. H. Gombrich.) But such faults are forgivable, especially if you are willing to think of them as no more than the price that has to be paid for a general liveliness.

Hall’s account of Beerbohm’s writings is tactful and shrewd. He sets them in their biographical context; he steers you towards the best things—Seven Men, A Christmas Garland, a handful of perfect essays, “Enoch Soames”—and at the same time reminds you of lesser pleasures that might easily be overlooked. (There is an especially fine chapter on Beerbohm’s largely forgotten career as a broadcaster, in the golden age of BBC radio.) He also has some rewarding comments on literary influences and techniques—on the neglected affinity with Thackeray, for instance—but without attempting any systematic analysis. And it would have been a mistake if he had. The nimbleness of the wit would only suffer if you slowed it down for the purposes of demonstration.

There is one area, however, where he might have dug deeper. Beerbohm’s early prose is often horribly mannered—it can be much more off-putting, I think, than Hall allows. And though Beerbohm soon purged it of its worst excesses, even his mature work is liable to be disfigured by the occasional facetious archaism or piece of preciosity—“clomb” instead of “climbed,” say, or “belike,” or a stilted subjunctive (“to adapt it were harder than all the labours of Hercules rolled into one”). Coming from someone who had such a deadly eye for affectation in others, this is a great puzzle, and it deserves to be explored.

There is no such problem with the caricatures. Here you hardly ever encounter a dud. The brilliance of the line is matched by the subtlety of the conception, and it is a brilliance which is all the more winning for not advertising itself. There is almost always an art that conceals art in the draughtsmanship—a suggestion of the dashed-off or the unfinished, a slightly amateur feel that is reinforced by the restricted color range (pale blues, sandy reds) and the squiggly handwriting of the captions.

Hall is an expert on the drawings, and he has some valuable points to make about them. His account of the remarkable, many-layered collection Rossetti and His Circle is particularly rewarding. He has also chosen the book’s illustrations with care. Most of them have a direct biographical bearing (there is a superb double portrait of a dapper Beerbohm and his bulky half-brother, the actor Beerbohm Tree, for instance), but he permits himself a few general caricatures as well. An especially striking one, which bears the title “Illustrating the force of ancient habits,” shows King Edward VII visiting a convent during his statesmanlike European tour of 1903. Inspecting a line-up of youthful nuns, he turns to the Mother Superior, with his thin, predatory proboscis in profile, and says: “Enfin, Madame, faites monter la première à gauche.” Not that we feel he is likely to get anywhere. The Mother Superior is a very stern figure: to my eyes she bears a distinct resemblance to Gladstone.

In just one respect I think Hall misjudges the caricatures. Of the eight hundred subjects whom Beerbohm drew in the course of his career, the great majority are unknown today, and in comparison with his contemporaries, Hall argues, we are “decidedly handicapped” when it comes to appreciating his portrayals of them. We may admire the image, but we don’t really get the point.

Clearly our response to the drawing of a famous figure is conditioned by what we already know about his appearance and personality. But how much do we lose by not being able to judge whether the drawing of an unknown figure is a good likeness? If the artist is Beerbohm, I’d submit, very little. To say that we “admire” his images, as Hall does, seems rather weak. In most cases, we positively rejoice in them—in the arch of an eyebrow, the droop of a moustache, the swell of a bulbous nose. The men and (occasionally) women depicted have the satisfying quality of characters in a good novel. And given what we have seen Beerbohm achieve with major figures, we are prepared to take his ability to capture the essence of minor ones on trust. (The same is equally true of the lesser lights who are guyed in A Christmas Garland. You may not know anything about Maurice Hewlett or A. C. Benson, but by the time you have finished reading Beerbohm’s parodies of them you feel you know quite a lot.)

The figure to whom Beerbohm returns most frequently in the drawings is Max Beerbohm. As Hall puts it, he was “his own favourite subject by a good margin.” He also had his favorite ways of presenting himself. The Max of the caricatures is quizzical, heavy-lidded, elegantly turned out, imperturbable. He often gives the impression of being a small man (though in fact, as Hall points out, he was a respectable five feet eight and one half inches), and, in the early drawings, at least, there is more than a touch of the wise child. You feel that he is above all detached—ready to make periodic raids on life in the form of parody or burlesque, but then content to draw back into himself again.

And the man behind the mask? Not so very different, as far as one can tell, from the man with the mask. No doubt every personality has its unknowable core, but the private Beerbohm to whom a biographer has access, the one who stands revealed in letters and reminiscences, sounds pretty much what you would expect him to be from his public writings. He was married for over forty years to the American actress Florence Kahn, and the marriage brought him happiness, but it makes a dull story. Elizabeth Jungmann, who moved in after Florence’s death, when he was seventy-eight, was a more interesting woman, but her relationship with him might best be described as a pleasing epilogue. The twentieth century impinged on his life more brutally than legend might lead you to suppose: during the Second World War he was nearly killed by a German flying bomb. But there are no great dramas in Hall’s book, and no intimate revelations. For the most part, he sticks to territory that was mapped out more fully forty years ago, in the biography by David Cecil.

Were there any “secrets”? Hall considers two possibilities, which were urged most vehemently—indeed, venomously—by Malcolm Muggeridge, in a review of Cecil’s book. Muggeridge claimed that Beerbohm was “in panic flight through most of his life” from his Jewishness and his homosexuality.

Beerbohm himself twice dealt in writing with the question of whether or not his family had originally been Jewish—in a letter to Bernard Shaw, who had raised the issue, in 1903, and in a letter some fifty years later to Beerbohm Tree’s biographer, Hesketh Pearson. On both occasions his reply was a calm, urbane, philosemitic but very firm “no.” In the letter to Pearson he supplies details about his ancestry—Dutch via Germany—which settle the matter beyond reasonable doubt.

One might add, however, that the notion of Beerbohm as crypto-Jew has been given permanent literary form (or something like it) by Ezra Pound, in the section of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley entitled “Brennbaum”:

The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the
forty years,
Showed only when the daylight fell
Level across the face
Of Brennbaum ‘The Impeccable.’

But then the poem’s parallel suggestion of a Brennbaum/Beerbohm “never relaxing into grace” is equally off-target.

The question of whether Beerbohm was heterosexual, homosexual, or (as some have claimed) asexual is naturally harder—if not impossible—to resolve. He was romantically drawn to women, and his forty-year marriage, in whatever fashion, worked well. On the other hand, his close involvement with the Wilde circle and some of his early camp attitudes make you wonder whether he wasn’t just a little bit homosexual—to use an old-fashioned phrase, “query-queer.” But so what? As Hall rightly says, we don’t need to know.

There is one aspect of his work that we might admittedly look at in a somewhat different light if incontrovertible proof of his homosexuality suddenly showed up—his caricatures of Wilde. He admired Wilde and began by imitating him. When he was twenty-one years old he wrote a fairly risqué “insiderish” piece about him, in which he imagined paying him a visit in his old age (“I fancied I heard the quickly receding frou-frou of tweed trousers … ”). Later on, he undoubtedly felt the pity of Wilde’s downfall. Yet the most powerful drawings he made of him are ugly and aggressive. They are not images we rejoice in. (The same is true of most of his drawings of Shaw, but here his aversion can readily be accounted for as part temperamental and part political.)

The puzzle about sexuality apart, the story is straightforward. It is impressive, too. You cannot help admiring a man who made such a success of living life on his own terms, when those terms were so civilized. He achieved a kind of perfection; the mere thought of him gives pleasure.

But perfection came at a price. Abjuring the idea of greatness in himself, he found it hard to avoid chipping away at it in others. Ridiculing solemnity, he can leave you wondering whether there is much point in seriousness, either. Hall quotes from his essay on laughter, in which he brushes aside the theories of Bergson. Perhaps he is right. But then he feels impelled to record his resistance to “fashionable philosophers” in general, and two of them in particular—Schopenhauer (“I wrestled with him for a day or so, in vain”) and William James: “His gaiety did not make me gay. His crystal clarity confused me dreadfully. I could make nothing of William James.” By this time you want to protest that James was as much a master of English prose as Beerbohm himself, and that Schopenhauer has qualities that would have made a longer wrestle worthwhile: he is even quite witty.

Elsewhere in the book Hall quotes a passage from Auden, who admired Beerbohm immensely, but also considered him “a dangerous influence”:

“Good sense about trivialities,” he once wrote, “is better than nonsense about things that matter.” True enough, but how easily this can lead to the conclusion that anyone who attempts to deal with things that matter must be a bore, that rather than run the risk of talking nonsense one should play it safe and stick to charming trifles.

This is something that needed saying.

But it isn’t the last word. The dangers of which Auden speaks, the incitements to flippancy, lurk in all kinds of other places as well. The pleasures Beerbohm offers are unique.