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.

Now it’s mine, and I’m insanely proud to own it. The Teachout Museum contains no better-loved piece.

A reader writes:

Since you often blog about the process, I’d be interested in how you accumulated the almanac quotes. And I bet some of your other regulars would like to know, too.

Glad to oblige. I noticed long ago that the standard books of quotations didn’t contain very many of my favorite quotes (other than the obvious ones that everybody likes). It used to be my practice to dogear the relevant pages of my copies of the books in which those quotes appeared, but that was both inefficient and aesthetically displeasing. Then, fifteen years ago, I purchased at more or less the same time my first personal computer and a copy of H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources, a wonderful book about which I wrote as follows in The Skeptic:

[Mencken] had long kept a card file of quotations for his own use, and in 1932 he had gotten the idea to expand it into a full-scale dictionary; Charles Angoff worked on it with him for two years, after which he carried on alone. Though not generally recognized as such, it is one of his major achievements, comparable in scope to The American Language and no less personal in its method. “The Congressman hunting for platitudes to embellish his eulogy upon a fallen colleague will find relatively little to his purpose,” he warned in his preface, and many readers have thus concluded that he compiled the New Dictionary of Quotations with tongue in cheek. Like Dr. Johnson’s dictionary, it is wrongly remembered for its eccentricities, among them an extensive selection of invidious remarks about the Jews and a sprinkling of unattributed “proverbs” that sound as though they had been coined by the editor himself. In fact, it contains a vast number of well-chosen, well-organized, accurately attributed and dated quotations on every imaginable subject, ranging widely among both familiar and arcane sources. The only important author missing from its 1,347 pages is Mencken himself, who told Time that “I thought it would be unseemly to quote myself. I leave that to the intelligence of posterity.” Yet the New Dictionary bears the dark stamp of his skepticism on every page, and at least one critic, Morton Dauwen Zabel, was quick to grasp the fact: “The impression soon becomes inescapable that what Mencken has produced as a

“She was thirty-two but she looked like a woman of forty so well-preserved she could pass for thirty-two.”

Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

At the risk of inspiring God of the Machine to further parody, I checked a little while ago and saw that “About Last Night” was being read in fourteen different time zones. I believe that’s an all-time record for worldwide ubiquity. Hello, everybody!

(I know, I know–what’s the deal with the other ten?)

I didn’t realize it until after the fact, but I spent ten straight hours writing yesterday–first my Commentary essay on the life and music of Sir Edward Elgar, then my “Second City” column for this Sunday’s Washington Post. I’d say I’m healthy again, wouldn’t you?

– When it was all over, I needed a change of pace, so I tottered out to find myself a leisurely evening meal, a copy of the bound galleys of Just Enough Liebling (a new A.J. Liebling anthology forthcoming this September from North Point Press) tucked under my arm for dinnertime reading. No comment–I’ll probably review it–but Liebling has long been one of my favorite authors, which is no secret. (The very first magazine piece I ever published, way back in 1981, was a review of a Liebling biography.)

– After dinner, I decided to watch an unchallenging movie to cool off my brain, and settled on The Longest Day, a Darryl Zanuck film about D-Day that I’d previously seen only in disconnected fragments. It turned out not to be very good, so since I’d stored it on my DVR, I found myself doing a little personal editing, in the process chopping at least a half-hour off the overly protracted running time. Dull, dull, dull, but at least it helped ease me out of the mental tunnel vision produced by Tuesday’s writing marathon, my first since I got sick last week.

– I listened to Benjamin Britten’s marvelously intense 1971 recording of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (currently out of print in the U.S., alas) while writing my Commentary piece. In addition, I was inadvertently exposed over dinner to Norah Jones’ first CD, which has been taken up with a vengenace by Upper West Side restaurants, sigh.

Today’s workload shouldn’t be nearly so burdensome: I’ll be finishing up my drama column for Friday’s Wall Street Journal, then hauling myself across town for a doctor’s appintment. No show tonight, thank God–I’ll spend an hour or so back at my desk figuring out what plays I’ll be seeing over the weekend, followed by TCM’s Cary Grant special, which I recorded last night. Further blogging is possible, but not certain.

Till whenever.

“Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.”

A.J. Liebling, “Quest for Mollie”

In case you didn’t drop by yesterday, I’m back from the dead, and I blogged a lot. Take a look!

If you already did, I don’t think I’ll have much time to blog today. I have a piece-and-a-half to write, and I’m only hitting on about five-and-a-quarter cylinders. As soon as I have some spare time, though, I’ll be right back at you.

Yesterday’s only consumable, by the way, was the Criterion Collection DVD of Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, starring Barbara Stanwyck (mmm), Henry Fonda, and a whole bunch of terrific supporting players. I think it’s probably the best of Sturges’ films, though not my personal favorite (that would be Sullivan’s Travels). At any rate, I watched it in ten-minute chunks in between working on yesterday’s piece, and loved every second of it.

Later.

“I know that there are many people–and very intelligent people, too–who love this kind of fast-action movie, who say that this is what movies do best and that this is what they really want when they go to a movie. Probably many of them would agree with everything I’ve said but will still love the movie. Well, it’s not what I want, and the fact that Friedkin has done a sensational job of direction just makes that clearer. It’s not what I want not because it fails (it doesn’t fail) but because of what it is. It is, I think, what we once feared mass entertainment might become: jolts for jocks. There’s nothing in the movie that you enjoy thinking over afterward–nothing especially clever except the timing of the subway-door-and-umbrella sequence. Every other effect in the movie–even the climactic car-versus-runaway-elevated-train chase–is achieved by noise, speed, and brutality.”

Pauline Kael, “Urban Gothic” (a review of The French Connection), 1971