“Note that I am not incomparable,” he said once to Behrman, protesting the “incomparable” label. “Compare me.”

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 of his sketches. Once you’ve seen a drawing by Max, you can spot them anywhere.

Max’s friend, Oscar Wilde

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’”; 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 books cover literary and theatrical criticism, both parodic and serious. He wrote stories and drew his little pictures, and wrote letters that read like champagne tastes. The world, he said, was divided into two classes: "hosts and guests."

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). Evelyn Waugh was certain Max was gay but loftily declared that in one so talented it hardly mattered. Adam Gopnik’s insightful New Yorker appreciation recalls a later, double-barreled assault:

The provocateur Malcolm Muggeridge, back in the Beerbohm-infected sixties, once stirred outrage by insisting that Beerbohm was both Jewish and gay, and in denial about both. This has been strenuously refuted by his biographers, who claim, following on Beerbohm’s own account, that his ancestors, merchants who arrived in England from what is now Lithuania in the mid-nineteenth century (sometimes the background is said to be Dutch), were somehow pure Protestant stock—which is exactly what a Jewish family that didn’t want to admit to it would have said in the period. Certainly, the enclosing tone of Max’s relationship with his mother sounds less Dutch or Lithuanian than Ashkenazi. His best friend, Reggie Turner, came from an assimilated Jewish background, while both of Max’s wives were Jewish—first, the American Florence Kahn, and then Elisabeth Jungmann (though by that point he was essentially marrying his nurse). Ezra Pound, a neighbor in Italy, caricatured him as Jewish, and, though hate is hate, hate at times has eyes to see. And the very buttoned-up front that Max showed the world was typical of the closeted Jews of his time. It was a distinguished theatrical family: his half brother, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was one of the great actor managers of the day.

As for his homosexuality, the very touching letters he wrote to Florence, around their engagement make it plain that he will remain unable to perform sexually with her: “The other sort of caring is beyond me,” he wrote. “It is a defect in my nature.” Biographers declare him a “natural celibate,” but the tone of his early letters to Oscar Wilde and his circle tends to be casually, if cautiously, “Uranian,” as they called themselves. He writes to Wilde’s intimate Bobbie Ross, for instance, urging him cheerily not to introduce their mutual friend Reggie Turner to “the love that dares not tell its name,” adding, “You are a person of stronger character and it doesn’t affect you the way it would affect him.” The tone is not that of an outsider looking in. Homosexual in his inclinations, but seeing what a mess it could make of life then, he may well have chosen celibacy. And it is certainly Wilde’s example and scandal that hang over all his early work and, in many ways, over his life. Max came to fame within Wilde’s orbit, if not directly under his aegis—“The gods bestowed on Max the secret of perpetual old age,” Wilde said of the young Beerbohm. Max writes about Wilde again and again, returns to him obsessively even as an old man, is still scribbling caricatures of him, and hostile ones, to be sure, at the end of his life. Perhaps only Hemingway in the twenties ever had the kind of attraction-repulsion for a generation of writers that Wilde did for his.

Max never betrayed Wilde, as so many of his friends did, and had the courage, while the scandal was still fresh, to insist that “The Importance of Being Earnest” was the masterpiece it is. But he always blamed Wilde for his own imprisonment, and saw it as a crime, or a tragedy, of hubris. Max wrote, near the end of his life, “I suppose really it was better that Oscar should die. If he had lived to be an old man he would have become unhappy. Those whom the gods, etc. And the gods did love Oscar, with all his faults.” The generosity is typical; so is the shrug of that “etc.”

Max remained ever an elfin character, always in what Gopnik called “his high masquerade style”, intimate and opaque in adjoining breaths.

Rapallo- to which Beerbohm retired in his forties- became a pilgrimage for generations of the literary and the celebrated.

Max Beerbohm died in hospital near there, after a short illness, in 1956. His ashes are interred in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.