Word: beerbohm
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...topic, who claims "competences in Philologik, Linguistik, Pedagogik, Psycho-Analytik and Aerobik," but whose command of English is not so confident as his manner of address. "What I like is to take your 'campus-novels' . . . and compare them with the works of your better competitors -- as, Thom. Hardy, Max Beerbohm, J.I.M. Stewart . . . and David Lodge." Bradbury cannot resist compounding the young man's confusion ("It was clever of you . . . to work out that in fact I am several if not all of the authors you mention") while offering him a few biographical scoops ("It has been a difficult business, especially...
Throughout, Reilly maintains the properly ironic tone. There is no special pleading about British homophobia; Wilde is a collaborator in his own misfortune. Shaw, Max Beerbohm, Frank Harris and the Edwardian elite are given delightful cameo roles, and the prose has the appropriate drawing-room astringency: Shaw and Wilde might have been close friends "if they only had less in common." If this is a novel with an excess of surface, that was, after all, its subject's salient feature. The important part, as Wilde would insist, is that the thing glitter. And so it does...
...wrote Cyrano; he seasoned this tale of a 17th century cavalier with the dash, sweep, idealism and tireless eloquence of youth. In 1898, when the original French production played London, it arrived like a gust of rose-scented air in the stolid cathedral of naturalism. Proclaimed Critic Max Beerbohm: "Even if Cyrano be not a classic, it is at least a wonderfully ingenious counterfeit of one." And even if, in this century, the counterfeit has become more evident than the ingenuity, Rostand's rhapsody has attracted new generations of star actors, from Walter Hampden to Ralph Richardson...
...author-just as the poet wished. A Cambridge don who shunned any mention of his verse, Housman hid behind a late-Victorian mask of colorless propriety. The flamboyant London literary scene of the turn of the century left him cold. "He was like an absconding cashier," recalled Max Beerbohm. "We certainly wished he would abscond...
Pritchett is a master of the casual apothegm. He accounts for Max Beerbohm's cultivated eccentricities by noting the "foreign strain" in his parentage: "Expatriation allows one to drop a lot of unwanted moral luggage, lets talent travel lightly and opens it to the histrionic." He speculates on the Edwardians' taste for the novels of George Meredith, for satire and high comedy: "One can see why: an age of surfeit had arrived. The lives of the upper classes were both enlivened and desiccated by what seems to have been a continuous diet of lobster and champagne-a diet...