Word: max
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Max Beerbohm barely deserved, and did not desire, a place in English literature. His was an ephemeral talent, applied to composition so frail that the winds of time have blown most of his work away. The literate Beerbohm is remembered chiefly for Zuleika Dobson, his comic novel of Oxford, and his graceful caricatures of the leading figures of his day. Sir Max was also one of the most delightful human beings who ever lived: tolerant, unassuming, a witty conversationalist, unfailingly kind. To know Max was to cherish him, and as a consequence, his friends and admirers have converted his niche...
Touching Glimpses. Now Lord David Cecil, whose earlier works apostrophized such eminences as Melbourne, Dickens, Cowper, Thackeray and Hardy, has lighted a long memorial candle for little Max. It is entirely a labor of love, suggested to him by Lady Beerbohm in 1956, the year Max died. "She told me," says Cecil in the preface, "that her husband had wished me to write his biography." Cecil regarded it as both an honor and a command...
Discharging the commission proved difficult in one respect. "Max's life was so uneventful," Biographer Cecil soon discovered, "that it is almost impossible to make a story of it." Max took the role of elegant bystander, frequenting the best tables, polishing a few literary trifles, contentedly obscure in the shadow of greater men. In 1910, at 38, he married Florence Kahn, a painfully shy American actress, and left England for Rapallo, Italy. Forty-six years later, still in retirement, he died...
This undramatic story is warmed by the affection that Biographer Cecil clearly felt for Max and that Max so easily kindled in all who knew him. The book is much too long, fleshed out by generous excerpts from the Beerbohm works, each analyzed and explained to the point of tedium. But in between, there are touching glimpses of the top-hatted dandy whose means were as slender as his gifts: the impeccable Max was compelled to iron his own suits...
Graceful Gestures. "Oh, please treat it as a loan!" cried the young Max, in an agony of embarrassment when the firemen who had quenched a chimney fire in the Beerbohm parlor coldly declined a tip. An admirer of Oscar Wilde, Max unhesitatingly and uncritically stood by him in his time of disgrace. A kindred tolerance let him forgive Constance Collier, the actress who jilted him almost as soon as they became engaged. "Of course I don't blame her the very least," he wrote to a friend...