Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life By N. John Hall Yale, 284 pp., $24.95 Buy this book more books most popular most commented A G.I.'s Strange War Tale by Sean Gardiner Horacio Castellanos Moya Does the Twisted by Jed Lipinski The 2008 New Yorker Cartoon Standings by BRIAN PARKS Sasa Stanisic Turns Gruesome History Beautiful by Sidra Durst Rivka Galchen's Twisty Mistaken Identities by zach baron Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (14) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

Beerbohm's precociousness—he succeeded Shaw as the Saturday Review's drama critic at the age of 25—and eerie imperturbability ("When you are alone with Max," Wilde once inquired, "does he take off his face and reveal his mask?") stemmed partly from his upbringing. As the half-brother of the flamboyant impresario Herbert Beerbohm Tree (producer-cum-star of Wilde's plays), he moved in cosmopolitan circles from childhood on; as an adult, the impeccable dandy graced London high society, numbering Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh among his fans. But his closest friends exemplified the gay Nineties—loyal Wildeans Robbie Ross and Reggie Turner, the brilliant illustrator Aubrey Beardsley—which led to inevitable speculation about his sexuality. (He lived with his doting mother until he was 38, when he married an actress and moved permanently to Italy.) Author N. John Hall, following the historian Rupert Hart-Davis, concludes that the fastidious Beerbohm likely remained celibate all his life (call it the Henry James syndrome), despite his mildly romantic feelings toward women.

"It is Oxford that has made me insufferable," boasted the young Max. While his arch, ironical manner, with its elaborate flights of fancy, absurd classical tags, and quaintly archaic diction, indeed seems Oxonian, it also owes much to Lamb and Hazlitt. Beerbohm tells of a friend who "felt of a sudden his hat assume plumes and an expansive curl, the impress of a ruff about his neck, the dangle of a cloak and sword. I, too, have my Elizabethan, my Caroline moments." Hélas! then, that such moments grew increasingly rare. By his fifties he'd stopped writing, despite becoming Sir Max in 1939 and giving popular BBC radio talks in his old age. In the first biography of Beerbohm in 40 years, Hall's sound research and well-marshaled quotes bring his subject back to life: the "ex-Arcadian" and exquisite personality whose work, if minor, still repays reading.