"Well, in the beginning he was the most enchanting company, don't you know. His conversation was so simple and natural and flowing — not at all epigrammatic, which would have been unbearable. He saved that for his plays, thank heaven. My brother Herbert [Beerbohm Tree] produced Oscar's play A Woman of No Importance. During rehearsals, at the Haymarket, we used to go to a little bar around the corner where they served sandwiches. Oscar asked for a watercress sandwich. When the waiter brought it, it seemed to Oscar excessive. 'I asked for a watercress sandwich,' he said to the waiter — oh, in the friendliest manner possible, smiling at him as if asking for, and being sure of, the waiter's sympathy — 'not for a loaf of bread with a field in the middle of it.'" . . .
"But, you know" — Max's eyes darkened with regret, and his brow furrowed — "as Oscar became more and more successful, he became . . ." Max paused, as if he couldn't bear to say it, but he did say it. "He became arrogant. He felt himself omnipotent, and he became gross not in body only — he did become that — but in his relations with people. He brushed people aside; he felt he was beyond the ordinary human courtesies that you owe people even if they are, in your opinion, beneath you."
-- Max Beerbohm, quoted in Behrman, S. N. Portrait of Max: An Intimate Memoir of Sir Max Beerbohm. New York: Random House, 1960.
This blog used to be the reactions of a reader of the conservative Catholic journal First Things to the many fine articles to be found therein. Now it's just another minor blog of staircase wit, from just another minor blogger who doesn't realize that blogging is dead. About the only notable thing about me is that I am a Christian conservative who loathes creationism in all its forms. Enjoy your visit.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Charlie Sheen reminds me of Oscar Wilde...
...only in this regard:
Labels:
arrogance,
Charlie Sheen,
oscar wilde,
television