SEVEN MEN AND TWO OTHERS

The celebrated aesthete (1872–1956)—less well known than he once was for his parodies, his cartoons, and his friends (Wilde, Beardsley, et al.)—first published this collection of comic profiles and unforgettable character studies in 1919, eight years after his most reprinted book, the novel Zuleika Dobson. In his introduction to this new edition, Nigel Williams argues that the pieces represent Beerbohm’s best work and remain as fresh as they ever were. And he’s right: the author’s good-natured view of literary pretense, artistic vanity, and aesthetic arrogance underpins these mock memoirs of a motley group of frauds, phonies, and eccentrics. Anticipating the more self-conscious modernists that were to come, Beerbohm injects himself into these tales of failure, despair, and pomposity, playing a role not unlike a figure from Borges. In the “Argallo and Ledgett” (added to the collection in 1950), Beerbohm ghostwrites a series of letters from a famous writer (with his consent) to a lesser-light, a hapless hack who’s been trammeled in memoir after memoir; and the result of the letter-writer’s clever deception is unexpected and hilarious. As is the unfinished play of “Savonarola” Brown, whose lifework is a theatrical spectacle (in blank verse) worthy of Monty Python. Timeless satire on the literary life.