Seven Men is a collection of five short stories written by English caricaturist, essayist and parodist Max Beerbohm. It was published in Britain in 1919 by Heinemann. In the United States there was a 1920 limited edition from Alfred A. Knopf with drawings of the characters by Beerbohm, followed by a popular edition in 1921. An enlarged edition, Seven Men, and Two Others, containing the new story "Felix Argallo and Walter Ledgett" interpolated as the last but one item, was published by Heinemann in 1950.
Seven Men contains Beerbohm's persuasive biographies of six characters from the fin-de-siècle world of the 1890s. Interacting with them, Beerbohm himself is the seventh man. As a leading member of the literary life of that past time, he writes "with such circumstantial detail and such gentle realism" that readers are lulled almost into accepting the fantastic events that he describes. [1]
Four of the five stories in the collection had previously appeared in The Century Magazine : "James Pethel" in January 1915, "Enoch Soames" in May 1916, "A. V. Laider" in June 1916, "Hilary Maltby" (under that title) in February 1919. [2] The story that was added to the enlarged edition of 1950 had originally appeared as "Not that I would boast" in the London Mercury in May 1927. [3]
The growing popularity of the collection, already described as "a little masterpiece" by Virginia Woolf, [4] was endorsed by the same judgment being repeated in a recent Encyclopædia Britannica. [5] Martin Maner has commented of Seven Men and Two Others that in it Beerbohm anticipated postmodernism and specifically that it is "a postmodernist fiction written before its time" in such features as "its narrative self-consciousness" and "its blurring of the boundary lines between fact and fiction", its use of parody and Beerbohm's insistence that the book's format "should be of a kind suitable to a book of essays". [6]
Seven Men includes three supernatural comedies, "Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties", "Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton" and "A. V. Laider".
In the first of these, Enoch Soames is the Decadent author of three "dim" works in various genres that go completely unrecognised. Convinced of his own genius, he makes a pact with the Devil to go a century forward in time so as to read what others have written about his work. All he could find, however, was an account of Max's story of their friendship in which the critic described him as an imaginary writer. The story was frequently adapted for radio performance between 1939 and 1998. [7]
"Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton" are novelists of contrasting character who achieve literary success at the same time. Both then sink into obscurity and Max only learns the reason decades later when he runs into Maltby in a small Italian town. Maltby admits that after he had been invited to an aristocratic country house weekend he had persuaded his hostess not to invite Braxton. The envious Braxton revenges himself by sending a doppelgänger who ruins Maltby's social success. The story has been described as "semi-autobiographical", in that the location and characters are based on reality. [8] In 1950 it was adapted for performance on the BBC Third Programme by Douglas Cleverdon. [9]
Max meets "A. V. Laider" while convalescing from influenza at a seaside hostel one February. In a very English way, they manage to avoid speaking to each other for almost their entire stay and only start on Max's last evening there. Then a chance remark about palmistry leads Laider to admit once foreseeing the future death of his companions in their palms on a return by train from a stay in the country and not warning them through weakness of will. At the same time the following year, Max meets Laider again at the hostel and the latter admits that he is a fantasist and that his story was untrue. They pass the rest of their stay in comfortable silence until on the final evening a chance remark reminds Laider of something awful that had once happened to him. "It was", says Max, "a very awful thing indeed." The story was later adapted for both radio and television performance. [10]
It is in the casino at Dieppe that Max encounters the gambler "James Pethel" and, though he finds most gamblers repulsive, warms to Pethel because he is not typical. Over the course of the next day, which Max spends with Pethel and his family, it becomes clear to Max that it is risk-taking in all departments of life that appeals to Pethel – in his investments and business dealings and in leisure activities like swimming in rough seas and motoring at speed. Disgusted that Pethel risks not only his own life but those he loves for the sake of experiencing the keenest of thrills, Max refuses to follow up Pethel's demonstrations of friendship. In Joseph Epstein's opinion, the portrait drawn in the story is "the best literary work on the subject of gambling … written by an outsider". [11]
The later interpolated story, "Felix Argallo and Walter Ledgett", is largely set in the Edwardian era. Max attempts to play the good angel to Ledgett, a popular author whose reputation is being ruined by deprecating remarks made about him in the posthumously published letters of the great. To restore Ledgett's confidence, Max persuades Argallo, a late literary success, to write four letters addressed to Beerbohm that praise the writer's work. Shortly afterwards, Argallo commits suicide and Beerbohm submits the letters to a memoir of him. Since the letters refer to incidents involving Argallo and Ledgett together, of which Ledgett naturally has no memory, Max then has to persuade him that he is suffering from a rare form of amnesia.
"'Savonarola' Brown" is a hybrid work consisting of a farcical introduction to a farcical Shakespearian tragedy. A clerk with dramatic leanings intended to take Sardanapalus as his subject but, because the encyclopedia he consulted had opened first at Savonarola, took him as subject instead. Max is named his literary executor after Brown is run over by a bus. He then discovers an unfinished verse drama full of anachronisms, not the least of which are modern idioms adapted to Elizabethan English – "Seeming hawk is dove/ And dove's a gaol-bird now. Fie out upon 't!" Read on the page, with time to reflect on it, the script is extremely funny. But when the BBC put on a performance in March 1939 the reviewer in The Listener thought that a mistake. [12] Nevertheless, there were additional performances between 1945 and 1947. [13]
Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humourist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel, a sequel to Three Men in a Boat; and several other novels. Jerome was born in Walsall, England, and, although he was able to attend grammar school, his family suffered from poverty at times, as did he as a young man trying to earn a living in various occupations. In his twenties, he was able to publish some work, and success followed. He married in 1888, and the honeymoon was spent on a boat on the Thames; he published Three Men in a Boat soon afterwards. He continued to write fiction, non-fiction and plays over the next few decades, though never with the same level of success.
Girolamo Savonarola, OP or Jerome Savonarola was an ascetic Italian Dominican friar from Ferrara and a preacher active in Renaissance Florence. He became known for his prophecies of civic glory, his advocacy of the destruction of secular art and culture, and his calls for Christian renewal. He denounced clerical corruption, despotic rule, and the exploitation of the poor.
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Sir Rupert Charles Hart-Davis was an English publisher and editor. He founded the publishing company Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd. As a biographer, he is remembered for his Hugh Walpole (1952), as an editor, for his Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962), and, as both editor and part-author, for the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters.
Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm was an English essayist, parodist and caricaturist under the signature Max. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist. He was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910, when he relocated to Rapallo, Italy. In his later years he was popular for his occasional radio broadcasts. Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. His caricatures, drawn usually in pen or pencil with muted watercolour tinting, are in many public collections.
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Lord Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil, CH was a British biographer, historian, and scholar. He held the style of "Lord" by courtesy, as a younger son of a marquess.
"Enoch Soames" is the title of a short story by the British writer Max Beerbohm. Enoch Soames is also the name of the main character.
Ada Esther Leverson was a British writer who is known for her friendship with Oscar Wilde and for her work as a witty novelist of the fin-de-siècle.
The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men is a short story with moral implications, first published in a separate volume by Max Beerbohm in 1897. His earliest short story, "The Happy Hypocrite" first appeared in Volume XI of The Yellow Book in October, 1896. Beerbohm's tale is a lighter, more humorous version of Oscar Wilde's 1890 classic tale of moral degeneration, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
"The Lagoon" is a short story by Joseph Conrad composed in 1896 and first published in The Cornhill Magazine in January 1897. The work was collected in Conrad’s first volume of short stories Tales of Unrest (1898).
The Incomparable Max is a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. It is based on the stories "Enoch Soames" and "A.V. Laider" in Seven Men by Max Beerbohm.
Helen Venetia Vincent, Viscountess D'Abernon was a British noblewoman, socialite and diarist.
A Song at Twilight is a play in two acts by Noël Coward. It is one of a trio of plays collectively titled Suite in Three Keys, all of which are set in the same suite in a luxury hotel in Switzerland. The play depicts an elderly writer confronted by his former mistress with facts about his past life that he would prefer to forget.
The Works of Max Beerbohm was the first book published by English caricaturist, essayist and parodist Max Beerbohm. It was published in 1896 when Beerbohm was aged 24.
Mark Samuels Lasner is an American researcher. He is an authority on the literature and art of the late Victorian era. He is also a collector, bibliographer and typographer. Samuels Lasner is senior research fellow at the University of Delaware Library.
Reginald Turner was an English author, an aesthete and a member of the circle of Oscar Wilde. He worked as a journalist, wrote twelve novels, and his correspondence has been published, but he is best known as one of the few friends who remained loyal to Wilde when he was imprisoned and who supported him after his release.
A Peep into the Past is a 1923 unauthorized and privately printed essay on Oscar Wilde by caricaturist and parodist Max Beerbohm.
Robert Forbes Felton, known professionally as Felix Felton, was a British film, television, stage and voice actor as well as a radio director, composer and author.