Yet Again by Max Beerbohm
Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - If I were seeing over' a house, and found in every room an iron cage let into the wall, and were told by the caretaker that these cages were for me to keep lions in, I think I should open my eyes rather wide. Yet nothing seems to me more natural than a fire in the grate. oubtless, when I began to walk, one of my first excursions was to the fender, that I might gaze more nearly at the live thing roaring and raging behind it; and I dare say I dimly wondered by what blessed dispensation this creature was allowed in a domain so peaceful as my nursery. I do not think I ever needed to be warned against scaling the fender. I knew by instinct that the creature within it was dangerous - fiercer still than the cat which had once strayed into the room and scratched me for my advances. As I grew older, I ceased to wonder at the creature's presence and learned to call it the fire, ' quite lightly. There are so many queer things in the world that we have no time to go on wondering at the queerness of the things we see habitually. It is not that these things are in themselves less queer than they at first seemed to us. It is that our vision of them has been dimmed.
Sir Henry Maximilian Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) was the youngest of nine children born in London to well-to-do Lithuanian immigrants. As a boy he showed no propensity for writing or artwork, but despite the lack of formal training, upon entering Merton College, Oxford, he quickly became known for his essays and caricatures (and for being a dandy). When The Strand Magazine published thirty-six of his drawings in 1892, his career took off, and he left school without a degree. (Oxford would later give him an honorary degree.) He went to America briefly, to write press releases for his brother's theatrical company, then returned to England and wrote essays and drew caricatures for his friend Aubrey Beardsley's The Yellow Book magazine, among other publications. Some of his work around this time concerned the trial of Oscar Wilde, whom he'd befriended while a student. The trial, particularly Wilde's defense of the love that dare not speak its name, moved him greatly. In 1896, he published his first book, a collection of his essays called The Works of Max Beerbohm, and the first of many collections of his caricatures, Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen. Two years later he succeeded George Bernard Shaw as drama critic for the Saturday Review, a position he retained until 1910, when he married American actress Florence Kahn (Evelyn Waugh speculated it was a mariage blanc), and moved to a house overlooking the Mediterranean in Rapallo, Italy. Despite Florence's death, in 1951, and despite becoming popular in England as a BBC commentator, Beerbohm would remain in Italy until his own death, decades later at age eighty-three, just after marrying his former secretary and companion, Elisabeth Jungmann.
Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English at the University of St. Andrews, is the author of Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics and Jane Eyre: A Reader's Guide to Criticism.
Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English at the University of St. Andrews, is the author of Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics and Jane Eyre: A Reader's Guide to Criticism.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780648590552 |
| ISBN 10 | 0648590550 |
| Title | Yet Again |
| Author | Max Beerbohm |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Michael Walmer |
| Year published | 2023-07-25 |
| Number of pages | 318 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |