Birthday: Max Beerbohm maintained, "People either born hosts or born guests."

Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (1872-1956)

Novelist, essayist, critic, caricaturist

The son of a Lithuanian grain merchant who married into a prominent London family (the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm-Tree was his half-brother by his father’s first marriage, to Max’s mother’s sister). Educated at Charterhouse and Merton College, Oxford, Beerbohm cut a dash for himself almost upon arrival, as a wit, a dandy, and a writer. He fell in with Oscar Wilde’s set, and was one of the few who emerged untainted by the association in his lifetime.

He found a market for his essays while an undergraduate (“I was a modest, good-natured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable”; “The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity”), and soon was doing so well he left Oxford without a degree. He is best remembered for his 1911 comic homage to the City of Dreaming Spires, Zuleika Dobson.

Beerbohm cheekily titled his first book, a collection of essays, The Works of Max Beerbohm, in 1896. In 1898 He replaced Bernard Shaw as theater critic for Saturday Review (it was Shaw who dubbed the younger man “the incomparable Max”), and held the post until 1910, when he married and moved to a villa in Rapallo, Italy. Except for sojourns in Britain in World Wars I and II, he lived there the rest of his life never learning Italian.

His caricatures of late Victorian and Edwardian figures made him famous all over again; his inability to draw hands or feet well somehow added to the effect effect of his sketches. Once you’ve seen a drawing by Max, you can spot them anywhere.

Max's Oscar Wilde

HIs witty letters have been collected into multiple volumes, and, throughout his long life, he remained, resolutely, a miniaturist. He wrote small pieces about small things, but each was so carefully and wonderfully wrought (“No Roman ever was able to say, ‘I dined last night at the Borgias’” that a new collection of his stories was published this year to enthusiastic new appreciations (of the Theban trilogy, he wrote, “A rather fraught family, the Oedipuses”).

In the 1930s Beerbohm turned to radio; his broadcasts were major morale boosters on the BBC during the Second World War. He was, to listeners, a shrewd old uncle, reminding them of the great days gone by and, perhaps, yet to return.

His personal life was enigmatic, even to his legions of friends and correspondents: debates raged about whether he was a Jew, and/or a homosexual (his first marriage was long, happy, and, apparently, sexless; his second, to his secretary, occurred shortly before he died). The journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who disliked Beerbohm, dined out on both rumors; Evelyn Waugh was certain Max was gay but loftily declared that in one so talented it hardly mattered.

Rapallo became a pilgrimage for generations of the literary and the celebrated; and Max Beerbohm died in hospital near there, after a short illness, in 1956. His ashes are interred in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

A 1954 recording of Max reading two stories is just below: