CHUMS
THE PORPOISE AND THE OTTER
The literary friendship of Max Beerbohm and G. K. Chesterton
WILLIAM BLISSETT
154pp. Rock’s Mills Press. Paperback, Can$40.
Would you rather be stuck in a lift with Max Beerbohm or G. K. Chesterton? In this diverting book William Blissett unites with tempered affection these “fortunate men and children of light”, writers and artists who began as Victorians, thrived as Edwardians and became celebrated for their wit – one urbane, modest and wry, the other explosively exuberant – at a time when history was not epigram, but a shout in the street. “To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine”, as Beerbohm remarked. The pair are vivid literary personalities in a masculine, clubbable print world where, to Ford Madox Ford, a critic need say little because “any intelligent reader will know the sort of fellow the fellow is”.
The two first meet in 1902, when “GKC is basking, Max chafing, in the bustle of Edwardian Fleet St”. Beerbohm invites Chesterton to dine, afterwards noting him as “volcanic”: “constant streams of talk flowing down – paradoxes flung up into the air – very magnificent”. Their “literary friendship”, though, is not close: the faux-offensive, mutually delighted correspondence of Beerbohm and George Bernard Shaw suggests that Shaw would have been a richer choice for Blissett. Yet each did relish the other: Chesterton placed a Beerbohmian figure in The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), and Beerbohm’s parody of GKC’s violent optimism and scattershot aphorisms in A Christmas Garland (1912) is peerless.
This slim, amiable ramble of a book is expanded from a 1987 talk, and the mood is cheerful, relaxed, urbane: “May I explain ... ?”; “Shall we surmise ... ?”; “But, hang it, ...”. Hackles can rise at criticism that employs such chummy modes when this very warmth is predicated on the exclusion of others, but Blissett knows this. He doesn’t fail to record some of his subjects’ sorry prejudices – of which Chesterton’s antisemitism is the best known. Women are still a blind spot; but not for Beerbohm, who, with characteristically selfundercutting finesse, recognized as culpable his own outmoded dislike of brainy, successful female writers in his essay “The Crime” (1920).
Blissett reliably introduces the pair’s best jokes and exuberances, contrasts and kinships, revealing, for instance, how Beerbohm’s probing reflections on Henri Bergson and humour deflate some Chestertonian excesses. The difference is between the belly laugh and the barbed riposte, but Blissett missed Beerbohm’s brilliant recognition that “laughter rejoices in bonds”, thriving best under prohibition. The author’s shrewd comparisons and vast range of references confirm the inadequacies of ChatGPT criticism: technology m
