Enoch Soames - Incredibly...
Max Beerbohm
Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm was born on 24th August 1872 in Kensington, London.
Beerbohm was educated at Charterhouse School and Merton College, Oxford and by now was already writing and drawing to a professional standard.
By 1894, having developed his personality as a dandy and humorist, and a rising star in English letters, he left Oxford without a degree but began to publish, initially in the Yellow Book.
Having been interviewed by George Bernard Shaw in 1898 he him as drama critic for the Saturday Review, on whose staff he remained until 1910.
In 1904 Beerbohm met the American actress Florence Kahn. In 1910 after marrying they moved to Rapallo in Italy, partly as an escape from social demands and the expense of London. Here they remained for the rest of their lives except for the duration of World War I and World War II, when they returned to Britain, and occasional trips to England to take part in exhibitions of his drawings.
From 1935 onwards, he was an occasional but popular radio broadcaster for the BBC. His wit expressed in his caricatures and his letters with a carefully blended humour—a gentle admonishing of the excesses of the day—whilst remaining firmly tongue in cheek.
Beerbohm's best-known works include A Christmas Garland (1912), a parody of literary styles, Seven Men (1919), which includes "Enoch Soames", the tale of a poet who makes a deal with the Devil to find out how posterity will remember him, and Zuleika Dobson (1911), a satire of undergraduate life at Oxford. This was his only novel, but was nonetheless very successful.
Beerbohm's career as a professional caricaturist began when he was twenty: in 1892 The Strand Magazine published thirty-six of his drawings of 'Club Types'. Their publication dealt, Beerbohm said, "a great, an almost mortal blow to my modesty".
He remembered: "The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment, in the most beautiful manner."
His Rapallo caricatures were mostly of late Victorian and Edwardian political, literary and theatrical personalities. The court of Edward VII had a special place as a subject for affectionate ridicule. Many of Beerbohm's later caricatures were of himself.
Beerbohm was knighted by George VI in 1939; it was thought that this mark of esteem had been delayed by his mockery in 1911 of the king's parents, about whom he had written a satiric verse, "Ballade Tragique a Double Refrain".
Max Beerbohn died on 20th May 1956 at the Villa Chiara, a private hospital in Rapallo, Italy. He was 83. He was cremated in Genoa and his ashes interred at St. Paul's Cathedral on 29th June 1956.
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