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June 4, 2004
TT: Percy, Max, and me
I hung a caricature by Max Beerbohm on my living-room wall late yesterday afternoon--and thereby hangs a tale.To begin with, please don't be embarrassed if you don't know who Max Beerbohm was. He liked to claim that there were only 1,500 people in England and another thousand in America who understood and appreciated his work. I don't know whether he would have admitted me to their rarefied ranks, but he's certainly one of my all-time favorite writers, an essayist of uncommon elegance and wit who was also a wickedly funny drama critic, the greatest parodist who ever lived, and--this is where it starts to get interesting--a caricaturist of lethally comic exactitude.
I can think of more than a few distinguished artists, musicians, and choreographers who have also been very good writers, but the list of distinguished writers who were also distinguished artists is short to the point of invisibility. James Thurber qualifies--if anything, his drawings are better than his essays--and so, needless to say, does Max. (He signed his caricatures with his first name only, and as a result is customarily referred to in that manner by his admirers.) Being a superior writer, it stands to reason that Max should have left behind this typically lucid explanation of his artistic method:
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....The whole man must be melted down in a crucible and then, from the solution, fashioned anew. Nothing will be lost but no particle will be as it was before.
No verbal description can begin to suggest how well Max practiced what he preached. You have to see for yourself, so go here, here, and here to look at his caricatures of three eminent Edwardians, Oscar Wilde, John Singer Sargent, and Frank Harris.
I've seen reproductions of hundreds of Max's drawings, but I don't know the last time his work was exhibited in this country. Most of his best-known caricatures now belong to museums and other public institutions in England. I've never seen a Beerbohm on display in any American museum, major or otherwise, and the only one I've seen in private hands was hanging in Whit Stillman's Greenwich Village living room when I interviewed him in 1998 for an article about The Last Days of Disco (it's reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader). It seemed almost too good to be true that Whit should have owned one--he is, like Max, something of a dandy--and when I saw it on his wall, I found myself in the grip of an attack of envy so powerful that I feared I might have to take up grand larceny on the spot.
It never occurred to me, then or later, that I, too, might someday own a Beerbohm, so I was astonished when I looked him up on eBay last month and found that one of his lesser-known efforts, a 1913 drawing of Percy Grainger playing piano for a group of society ladies, was being offered for sale by an auction house in Dallas. A quick scan of my bookshelves confirmed that it was a rarity: Grainger is nowhere mentioned in N. John Hall's Max Beerbohm Caricatures or Lord David Cecil's Max: A Biography, nor is Max's name to be found in any of the various books about Grainger that I own. At the same time, I thought it more than likely that they had met at one time or another. Max, after all, was one of Edwardian London's most inveterate diners-out, while Grainger first made a name for himself as a society pianist who played regularly at the fashionable soirées musicales where Max often found himself after dinner, hobnobbing with Sargent and Henry James. In any case, the photographs posted on eBay (including a closeup of the tiny signature) left no doubt that this was the real right thing.
Aside from the intrinsic attraction of owning a Beerbohm--any old Beerbohm--I was bowled over by the prospect of acquiring this particular one, since Percy Grainger happens to be one of my all-time favorite musicians. Like Max, Grainger was a switch-hitter. Though he's best known as the composer of such delightful folk-flavored orchestral miniatures as "Shepherd's Hey," "Handel in the Strand," "Molly on the Shore," and "Irish Tune from County Derry" (that's "Danny Boy" to you), he was also one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. A pupil of Ferruccio Busoni, he performed the music of Bach, Chopin, and Debussy in a lively, extroverted style, and his 1927 recording of Grieg's Wedding Day at Troldhaugen bears eloquent witness to Harold C. Schonberg's description of his playing:
He was one of the keyboard originals--a pianist who forged his own style and expressed it with amazing skill, personality and vigor, a healthy, forthright musical mind whose interpretations never sounded forced and who brought a bracing, breezy and quite wonderful out-of-doors quality to the continuity of piano playing.
In addition, Grainger was also, as Danny DeVito says of another character in L.A. Confidential, "a powerful behind-the-scenes strange-o." John Bird revealed in his excellent 1982 biography that the composer of "Country Gardens" was in private life a violent sadomasochist who liked to photograph himself after his whipping sessions...but that's another story.
I knew, of course, that no drawing by Max would fit neatly into the Teachout Museum, which is mainly devoted to prints by American modernists--but what of it? To pass up a once-in-a-lifetime chance to acquire a caricature of one of my favorite musicians, drawn by one of my favorite writers, would have been scrupulous to a fault, and then some. Besides, the auction house's estimate was so absurdly modest that I took it for an omen. Accordingly, I placed an absentee bid for slightly more than the high estimate, then received in due course an e-mail informing me that I'd been outbid by what for me was a stiff sum. I shrugged, chalked it up to experience, and moved on.
Two weeks later, I received a second e-mail from Dallas, this one saying that the original purchaser had changed his mind, and might I possibly be interested in buying the Beerbohm at the price the other fellow had offered? I came dangerously close to saying yes on the spot, but having read Phil Schiller's Buy What You Love: Confessions of an Art Addict, I knew better than to obligingly reply, "Jeepers, I'd be more than happy to fork over all that money." Instead, I took a deep breath, left the auction house hanging for a day, then lowballed them mercilessly. Three days later, they agreed to sell me the caricature at a price lower than my own original bid. No sooner was the deal done than I fired off an e-mail to my friend Joseph Epstein, an essayist of Beerbohmesque charm who is also a Percy Grainger fan, informing him of my coup. I knew the author of Envy wouldn't be at a loss for words, and he wasn't. An hour later, Joe replied, "I regret to inform you, sir, that our friendship must cease forthwith."
Which brings us to yesterday afternoon, when the UPS man knocked on my door and handed over a medium-sized box whose contents didn't disappoint me in the slightest. In the description of his style that I quoted earlier, Max makes a point of saying that a caricature should be executed in "the most beautiful manner," and while it's true that his Grainger caricature is very funny--especially the society ladies clustered around the piano, who range in size from wasp-waisted to preposterously portly--it's also quite beautiful indeed. The composition is cunningly balanced, the line deft and clear, the light touches of watercolor wash miraculously subtle.
One last question remained: where to hang my prize? Beerbohm's caricatures are too pale in color to read well from across a room, so I knew I should try to hang this one fairly close to the couch where I usually sit when reading or listening to music. Alas, that would place it cheek by jowl with a pair of abstract-expressionist prints by Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. Max wouldn't have liked that at all--he hated modern art--but I assured myself that he would at least have been amused by the incongruity. I hung it on the north wall, curled up on the couch, took a long look, and emitted a soft sigh of satisfaction at the sight of a lifelong dream come true at last.
That's the story of how I acquired my very own Max Beerbohm caricature. It isn't the most expensive piece of art in the Teachout Museum, nor is it the most beautiful, but I think it might well be the most special thing I own, and I wouldn't be surprised if I end up loving it best of all. Believe it or not, I've already given some thought to where I'd like it to go after my death. Assuming that Joe Epstein predeceases me, I suppose I really ought to leave it to one of the two Grainger Museums. (One is in Melbourne, Australia, the city of his birth, while the other is in the suburban house an hour north of Manhattan where he lived between 1921 and his death forty years later.) It might also be appropriate to give it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, unless they already own a good Beerbohm. I suspect they don't: Max has never been fully accepted as a Truly Serious Artist, and I wouldn't want my caricature to go to an institution that didn't properly appreciate its significance. Nor do I want it to end up in England, where there are already more than enough Beerbohms to go around.
What, then, to do? For the moment--and for many more moments to come, God willing--I plan to do nothing whatsoever. Instead, I expect to gaze lovingly at my Max several times each day, and show it with pride to everyone who visits the Teachout Museum. As a matter of fact, I think I'll go into the living room right now, put on a Percy Grainger CD, sit on the couch, and revel in the magical chain of coincidence by which a Max Beerbohm caricature drawn in 1913, the year in which Marcel Proust published Du côté de chez Swann and Igor Stravinsky composed Le Sacre du printemps, has made its circuitous way from Max's hands to mine. How lucky am I? Very, very lucky indeed.
UPDATE: Joseph Epstein writes:
The thought of you gazing upon the Maxian caricature while listening to the music of its subject is almost enough to becalm my envy. If only I could draw, I would do a sketch of Teachout listening to Grainger while gazing upon Beerbohm, with of course a sketch of the caricature itself in the drawing.
That's a drawing I'd gladly hang.
Posted June 4, 2004 9:01 AM
