Shelf Life - Brief Article

National Review, April 30, 2001 by Mike Potemra

For the past four decades, The New York Review of Books has tirelessly championed liberal causes. It comes, therefore, as a welcome surprise that the magazine's new book-publishing imprint-New York Review Books Classics-is performing a nonpartisan service, excellently.

The NYRB Classics imprint is dedicated to making available, in inexpensive paperback format, neglected literary treasures of the past. Last year came the three-volume uniform edition of the fiction of once- renowned New Yorker writer J. F. Powers-winner of the National Book Award for his novel Morte D'Urban in 1963, but since fallen into unmerited obscurity. This year's list includes otherwise unavailable titles by Turgenev and Colette, and a few important classics from the early part of the 20th century.

Max Beerbohm was once a widely beloved satirist, and his elegant parodies have kept alive his literary status (as, at least, a cult figure) in recent decades. NYRB is republishing his Seven Men (208 pp., $12.95), a collection of five longish short stories about the literary life. The best is "'Savonarola' Brown," about a spectacularly awful dramatist who is killed before being able to complete his five-act play about the impassioned 15th-century Italian religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola; the story allows Beerbohm to let loose with a clever, funny, and sustained 37-page parody of Shakespeare. He captures exactly the sound of Shakespearean wordplay, as it might be practiced by an untalented playwright: "I thank thee, Brother, yet / I thank thee not, for that my thankfulness / (An such there be) gives thanks to Heaven alone." Beerbohm's fictional playwright is also spot-on in his murdering of other Shakespearean conventions, such as the act-closing rhyming couplet: "'Tis time that I were going. Farewell, Monk, / But I'll avenge me ere the sun has sunk."

Another important new NYRB Classic is Hadrian the Seventh (401 pp., $14.95), a baroque 1904 novel by "Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo)." Hadrian is the barely disguised autobiography/fantasy of Rolfe, who was neither a priest-the "Fr." is for Frederick-nor, in all likelihood, a baron. In the novel, a penurious British intellectual who was prevented by evil Catholic schemers from becoming a Catholic priest is suddenly elevated to the papacy, and engages in a whirlwind of reforms-some of which are remarkably prescient of the changes that would actually occur later in the century.

The Rolfe surrogate is called, in the book, George Arthur Rose, and he is given to pronouncements of arch misanthropy, e.g.: "As for the Faith, I found it comfortable. As for the Faithful, I found them intolerable." He is asked, in confession, whether he loves his neighbor. He responds: "No, I frankly detest him, and her. Let me explain. . . ." In short, what we have here is camp of a rather high order, and it's an amazing achievement that Rolfe ends up making his main character fundamentally likable in spite of himself (both character and author). As he examines his conscience, judges his enemies, and issues his papal encyclicals, George Arthur Rose is a bitchy ancestor of Saul Bellow's (much kinder) letter-writer, Moses Herzog: to the world a nebbish, in reality a mensch, and never less than fascinating as he explains the world to us.

NYRB is also republishing A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo (289 pp., $12.95), one of the all-time great literary biographies. Most readers of Hadrian will be very curious as to what kind of person could write such a book; Symons recounts not just the Rolfe story-as well as it can be known-but also his own adventures in trying to ferret it out.