The Spectator

Max Beerbohm

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Having begun a personal resurgence of interest in Max Beerbohm (exhibition, article) it would be remiss not to also allude to the special role he had with regard to Oscar Wilde.

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Max Beerbohm first met Oscar in 1888 while a student at Charterhouse School, but it was not a moment likely to engender an immediate affinity. For Max it was just a brief introduction. And, as for Oscar, he was a decade removed from the callow superficiality of college days and currently set to decamp to the decayed remove of serious Bunburying.

It was not until years later when Max’s half-brother, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, staged Wilde’s play A Woman of No Importance (1893) at the Haymarket, that Max’s relationship with Oscar really began. Or, perhaps the word ‘relationship’ over-embroiders the label for what passed between them—despite Max and Oscar being cut from the same cloth of dandyism.

This is because, by this time, a more febrile Oscar had been forged in the fire of 90s decadence, and Max never fell actively into the role of acolyte—admiring though he was,

Max was too much like Oscar, as Willie Wilde once noted—and perhaps his meaning was as an individualist and artist. Instead, Max was more apt to take up his pen, both as writer and cartoonist, to record the spectacle that was Oscar Wilde. And it was from this guarded vantage point that Max would prove to be a prolific and equivocal spectator.

For instance, after marveling at Wilde’s ability as a conversationalist while dining with him at Willis’s, Max’s produced magnified sketches of the Master’s growing physique, while at the same time writing magnanimous letters to Reggie Turner expressing concern about Oscar’s over-socializing and to lament the critics’ abuse of him.

Oscar became a patron and a saint to Max. His first published work was a panegyric to Oscar entitled “Oscar Wilde” by An American”¹ which, not surprisingly, was published in America.² Also not surprising to anyone who knew him, Max was not actually an American—this being an early example of his partiality for posing as an outsider. Such inscrutability once led Oscar to ask of Ada Leverson, “tell me, when you are alone with him, Sphinx, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?³

Max proudly reported that Oscar had taken very kindly to his essay, reporting:

A curiosity about Max was this ability to switch effortlessly between grave praise and gentle parody.

In 1894 he produced a satire of Oscar which was intended for the first number of The Yellow Book. It imagined Oscar as a former celebrity now living a life of quiet retirement in Tite Street—the irony being a retort to Oscar who had said that “the gods bestowed on Max the gift of perpetual old age.”⁵

However, in view of the atmosphere surrounding Wilde, Beerbohm’s essay was held over, and his less Oscar-centric piece A Defence of Cosmetics, “an ironic defence of decadence”⁶, appeared instead. The original spoof did eventually reappear with the title A Peep into the Past.⁷ —but not until society had reached the safer outpost of 1923, and even then it was privately printed.

In a subsequent essay for The Yellow Book entitled ‘1880’⁸ Beerbohm’s again invoked Oscar but this time with a kindly nostagia. The essay was a wistful view of the culture of the year 1880 referring to Oscar as “this remarkable youth,” and placing him central to influencing the dress of the period, Incidentally, it was this issue of The Yellow Book that Wilde was reading, (and took with him) when he was arrested in 1895. [The long-held notion that Wilde was reading a yellow-covered copy of a French novel (e.g. Aphrodite by Pierre Louÿs which was not published until a year after Wilde’s arrest) has now been disproved, and the implicit certainty that it was, after all, a copy of The Yellow Book has been re-asserted,]⁹

Upon Oscar’s downfall Max would spend days in attendance at Wilde’s second trial, describing Oscar’s famous defense of ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ as “simply wonderful.”¹⁰

But he never lost sight of what he saw as the vulgarities of Oscar’s dissipation—and perhaps that is what lay behind his continually making Oscar the subject of his characteristically uncharitable caricatures.

Max’s interest in Oscar persisted through his imprisonment, and in 1896 he wrote a short story entitled The Happy Hypocrite,¹¹ It was again Wildean but, despite the title, it was not aimed at him. Rather, it was a comic inversion of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray—far less gothic and cleverly utilizing the device of a mask rather than the mirror of a painting.

Max also got to know Wilde’s lover Alfred Douglas quite well—having contributed an article to first number of The Spirit Lamp which Douglas later edited—and he remained sympathetic to both of them.

As an indication of the extent to which Wilde’s influence stayed with Max over the years, he produced this drawing of Oscar lecturing in America, but it was not published until 40 years after the event.¹²

An Afternoon with Max

Having thus painted Beerbohm as an arch-spectator of Oscar Wilde, it is perhaps fitting to note that the last interview Max gave about him was to the Spectator magazine.

The interview took place in a vine-covered corner of Max’s garden during the last year of his life.

Conducting the interview, appropriately, was the all-around man of the world, Wilde biographer, and chronicler of the period, H. Montgomery Hyde,

During the interview, which appeared on October 5, 1956, Max made several insider observations recalling Oscar’s manner as a host, and noting his first meeting with Vyvyan Holland in which Oscar’s son demonstrated that he had inherited a little of his father’s penchant for mock gravitas:

You can read the full interview at the link below.

LINK: The Spectator Interview

© John Cooper, 2023.

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Footnotes:

1. Max Beerbohm’s letters to Reggie Turner. Philadelphia, Lippincott (1965), p33:
   My article on Oscar has been accepted by the Anglo-American, a very good paper of recent birth. I have just been curtailing it for them. It is very brilliant, and consists of fulsome praise of the Master and filthy abuse of his disciples: of whom I say that “sitting eternally at the feet of Gamaliel, they learn nothing but the taste of boot-polish.” You must read it. Behold, high and sheer into the air rise the walls of the Temple of Fame: against them is a ladder placed and on the first rung of it rests my foot. ↩︎
2. Anglo-American Times, March 25, 1893. ↩︎
3. Letter to Ada Leverson [Sphinx] recorded in Letters To The Sphinx From Oscar Wilde and Reminiscences of the Author,(1930). ↩︎
4. Max Beerbohm’s letters to Reggie Turner. Philadelphia, Lippincott (1965), p37. ↩︎
5. Vincent O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde (New York, 1936) p68. ↩︎
6. Karl Beckson, The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia, AMS Press, New York, 1998. ↩︎
7. A Peep into the Past at. Archive.org. ↩︎
8. The Yellow Book, vol. 4, January 1895, pp. 276-283. ↩︎
9. ‘A Case of Jaundice: what was Wilde really reading while awaiting his arrest’, by Simon Casimir Wilson. The Wildean 58 January 2021. ↩︎
10. Max Beerbohm’s letters to Reggie Turner. Philadelphia, Lippincott (1965), p102. ↩︎
11. The Happy Hypocrite at Archive.org. ↩︎
12. It is one of a series of twenty-three drawings made by Max Beerbohm between 1916—17, which were published in book form by Heinemann in 1922 as Rossetti and His Circle. ↩︎

Related:
The Comparable Max (The New Yorker).