On the caricaturist and essayist Max Beerbohm’s birthday, revisit Adam Gopnik’s 2015 essay on the modest, pretension-dreading genius. “Everything good he writes is about how books, after building us up for life, let us down once we’re in it.”
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.
The trick is that, like Kipling, he understood that the sound of spoken English might be anything but blunt—that spoken English tends to be more circuitous, touched by asides, than the self-consciously simplified kind. There are two kinds of extended sentences: one depends on expanding an idea, the other tries to detail a consciousness. The first is argumentative, the second exquisite.
This new talking style—so remote from the languorous undergraduate writing of the collected “Works”—fills “Seven Men,” a true masterpiece of English prose, where the conventional, ever so slightly stuffy sound of the literary memoir slides magically into the elaborately unreal plots of the storytellers. Each story is a study, almost medieval in its neat balance of temptation and punishment, of a literary sinner.
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