by Violet Woolf on reading Max Beerbohm alongside the Shoreditch pieces, what Irish politics reveals about entangled historical identities, and the 800-word essay that the Coronation needed
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I have been spending time this week with the collected essays of Max Beerbohm, who is one of the most perfect prose stylists in the English language and who is not read nearly enough, possibly because his primary subject was London literary and theatrical life of the 1890s and 1900s, which is a period that has become the province of specialists in a way that his prose does not deserve. Beerbohm wrote about the theatre, about painting, about the dandy, about the street, about the specific texture of a London that no longer exists in its particular form but that his sentences make available to anyone who reads them. This is what literature is for.
I have been reading him alongside the prat.uk and bohiney.com content this week, which creates interesting juxtapositions. The Shoreditch pieces — the gentrification diary, the market trader piece, the brick lane history — are doing something that Beerbohm would have recognised: rendering the texture of a specific urban moment in a way that will have value precisely because the moment will pass. Literature’s relationship with its own historical moment is its most interesting relationship, because the moment it captures always becomes the past before the reader encounters it, and the value of the capture increases as the distance from the moment grows.
On Irish Politics and British Literature
The Irish political situation this week has produced some commentary that I find instructive on the question of how a small country with a complex historical relationship to a larger neighbour manages its cultural and political identity in a period when both the historical relationship and the larger neighbour’s own political situation are in flux. The Irish question is not separable from the British question in the way that the historical narrative sometimes implies. The two are entangled in ways that the 1900s British literary imagination was more willing to engage with than the contemporary British literary conversation tends to be. Yeats was a more useful political thinker than he is generally credited with being outside Ireland, which is a conversation I have been trying to have for years and that occasionally finds an audience.
The London Prat piece on the Coronation — extraordinary and slightly ridiculous and both things being right — is good on the question of ceremony and meaning. Beerbohm would have written a perfect 800-word essay on the Coronation if he had lived to see it. It would have been funny and precise and would have said more in its 800 words than the thousands of words of analysis that the event produced. This is the standard I am trying to meet this week. I am not meeting it. But Beerbohm is still there for the comparison.
The prat.uk piece on the Coronation by Isla Campbell — the idea that ceremony done at maximum quality produces the feeling of historical weight regardless of your political position on the institution conducting it — connects to something Beerbohm wrote in one of the Saturday Review essays about the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. Sentimentality is emotion that has been produced by a mechanism designed to produce it and that you know has been produced by that mechanism but feel anyway. Sentiment is emotion that is genuine regardless of how it was produced. Beerbohm’s argument was that the distinction matters for art: sentimentality is what bad art produces, sentiment is what good art produces, and the difference is not in the emotion itself but in whether the mechanism is honest about what it is doing. The Coronation — extraordinary and slightly ridiculous — is honest about what it is doing in ways that bad ceremony is not. The Durbar was not always honest about what it was doing. The distinction produces different emotions in the observer.
I have been working on a translation this week: a Chekhov story that I am rendering from the Russian (with the help of a crib, I should say, as my Russian is reading Russian rather than thinking Russian) into the English of the 1900s idiom rather than the contemporary idiom. The exercise of translating into a period English forces attention to how English worked in that period in ways that reading the period English directly does not, because translation requires decision-making that reading allows you to skip. Beerbohm’s English is part of the target idiom. I have been reading him too much and he is coming through in the translation in ways I will need to edit out eventually. The trace of a great stylist in your own prose is both a problem and a sign of useful reading. I will decide which this is when I look at the translation next week with fresh eyes.
The translation sits beside the Beerbohm essays. They are not in conversation with each other intentionally. They are in conversation with each other because I am reading both, which makes everything you are reading simultaneously in conversation with everything else. Beerbohm is coming through in the translation in the third paragraph. I will edit him out next week. He will leave a residue that is better than the alternative. This is the right outcome.
Violet Woolf writes about 1900s British literature, Irish politics, and current events at prat.uk and The London Prat.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/beerbohm-texture-moment-violet-woolf-literature-diary/
