Notes on the Effect of Mr. Max Beerbohm on a Woman Writer
It is the special hardship of women that it is their destiny to make gifts and that the quality of their giving is decided by the quality shown by those who do the taking. No matter how full their hearts may be of tenderness and generosity as they hold out their gifts, if the taker snatch it without gratitude, then the givers count as neither tender nor generous, but merely easy. (West, Harriet Hume 55–56)
1 To love and not be loved in return is never pleasant. To reveal one’s ardor publicly —indeed, in print—and then to be taken for granted or scorned is doubly humiliating. It does not matter whether the type of love expressed is romantic, erotic, spiritual, filial, or merely the admiration of a devoted fan. Being rejected hurts—all the more if, like Dame Rebecca West (1892–1983), the sufferer still bears a wound from childhood, inflicted by a father who inspired worship, then turned away from the family and vanished. Yet for an unhappy lover who is also a novelist, an essayist, and professional journalist with a regular column, vengeance is, quite literally, ready to hand. It can take the form of laughter at the one who has let her down; done successfully, it can make him not merely unlovable, but ridiculous.
2 In her “Introduction” to The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor (1996), the feminist critic Regina Barreca laments the “misplaced anxiety” felt by most women, who “have been brought up to be so concerned with putting the welfare of others before our own that we can’t let ourselves triumph with a great comeback” and who, therefore, refuse to engage in joking at the expense of those who have hurt them (8). That was never true of Rebecca West. The tone of the joking, moreover, that underpins West’s “Notes on the Effect of Women Writers on Mr. Max Beerbohm,” from her 1931 collection of essays and book reviews, Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log, is very angry indeed. Hers is an essay that uses anger in the service of feminist politics and implies throughout that the narrator is laughing in support of women. The particular women whom she defends against the sneering remarks of a man, Max Beerbohm, are those in the literary profession. Her larger interest, though, is in asserting the “dignity” (73) of middle-class women in general who choose careers—those who wish to be modern, self-sustaining, and competent human beings, rather than anachronistic ornaments. We can find here an early and admirable example of what Frances Gray, in Women and Laughter (1994), would later urge every feminist to do, if “feminism is to change all that needs to be changed”: that is, to recognize and consciously to “harness” the “power” of humor, which can be akin to “nuclear energy,” and “to engage with laughter as a social force” in the service of a just cause (33)
3Yet this political impulse is only part of the story, for the undercurrent of rage which fuels the ridicule in this essay also sprang from a personal source. It was the fury of the spurned admirer, who had made a public spectacle of her adoration for a figure from an earlier literary generation—not “Mr. Max Beerbohm” the man, but Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) the artist—and who had poured out as a gift her words of effusive praise of his work. In return, she had received nothing, or worse than nothing—merely a reminder from him that she was ill suited to offer such judgments about literature and art in the first place, because of her gender.
4 This blow landed in a spot already tender from previous injuries. Certainly, these were due to many experiences which had taught her, as she put the matter decades later in an interview for the Paris Review, that “people . . . feel much softer towards the man, even though he might be a convicted criminal,” whereas they always had been “very rude” to her, “just because they’d heard I was a woman writer” (qtd. in Plimpton 85). But the snub she encountered in the late 1920s from Max Beerbohm, who had been her object of recent praise, also registered in terms of class. It was a slight from someone who had enjoyed all his life the easy privileges of the upper-middle-class rank to which West felt she was entitled by birth and from which she had been wrongly shut out by circumstances (especially, by the familial poverty resulting from her father’s desertion of his wife and young daughters). That Beerbohm not only failed to take her seriously as an artist, because she was a woman, but expressed disapproval of her for seeking a career and supporting herself financially by writing, was intolerable, and she hit back. She did so, moreover, in a way perfectly designed to show that her talents were equal to his in the same genres at which he excelled—parody, satire, caricature, and also lyrical, nostalgic invocations of the past. To do so was more than a face-saving measure; it was a way actively to put her own work in conversation and even in competition with his, as she had also done a year earlier, through her fantasy novel about love, death, and London—Harriet Hume (1928)—which responded to his classic 1911 comic fantasy about love, death, and Oxford, Zuleika Dobson.
5West’s article about her encounter with Max Beerbohm at a literary occasion—a dinner party at London’s Carlton Hotel for Du Bose Heyward (1885–1940), American author of the 1925 novel Porgy—may be familiar to some now through its republication in 1931 in Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log. It first appeared, however, under the title “Mr. Beerbohm and the Literary Ladies” in one of her monthly “A London Letter” columns for the June 1929 issue of the Bookman, a magazine issued in the United States that also circulated in Britain. But the origins of this article lay in an earlier review (which was never reprinted), from 14 October 1928, for the New York Herald Tribune, of Max Beerbohm’s volume, A Variety of Things. Beerbohm’s book was, as its title implied, a collection of miscellaneous pieces, some of them dating back to the 1890s, the time when he first appeared on the London literary scene as a witty, dandified young contributor to the Yellow Book and a member of Oscar Wilde’s circle of friends and acquaintances. Several of the stories in A Variety of Things, such as the wry portrait of an imaginary politician named T. Fenning Dodworth, were in the style of Beerbohm’s more famous Seven Men (1919). Others, including a fantasy about the dawn of civilization, “The Dreadful Dragon of Hay Hill,” showed the influence of Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic, yet also bitingly satirical, late-Victorian fairy tales. A Variety of Things was, however, a disparate and rather slight volume, especially when compared with the more focused and wittier A Christmas Garland (1912), which had skewered one contemporary author after another with brilliant parodies of their work.