BOOK: Max Beerbohm, "Zuleika Dobson"

Max Beerbohm: The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson. With an introduction by N. John Hall. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. 0300097328. xxviii + 352 pp.

Another book that has been waiting unread on my shelves for quite a long time — almost twenty years, in fact. I don't remember what made me buy it, but I'm glad I did. I must have been vaguely aware of the author, Max Beerbohm, due to my interest in the 1890s, though his career continued for a long time after that decade, and I thought of him more as a cartoonist than as a writer. In fact the present edition (first published, it seems, in 1985) combines those two aspects of his work; it's basically a photo reprint of the original 1911 edition of the novel (incidentally, archive.org has scans of the 1922 reprint, as well as of the 1912 American edition), but in addition it also includes a number of illustrations that Beerbohm had drawn in his own personal copy of the book. Apparently Beerbohm objected to illustrated fiction, and most of these illustrations have not been published before the present edition, but I think they complement the text very nicely.

The publisher's description on the back cover describes the novel as “whimsical”, and having now read it, this strikes me as the best single-word description one could reasonably ask for. I couldn't help feeling that the author must have had a very good time writing it, and I was glad to find that I also had quite a good time reading it. Much of the time, the author affects a mock-heroical style, with all sorts of inversions of the word order to make the tone of the book seem elevated, which then stands in a very sharp contrast with the silliness and ridiculousness of much of the story. Beerbohm delights to take a great interest in costume, interior design and other such fripperies, which is very fitting when you remember that one of his best-known works is an essay titled “A Defence of Cosmetics”. He makes frequent reference to the Greco-Roman gods, who apparently charged him with the task of recording his little chronicle, and temporarily blessed him with the requisite omniscience which will enable him to write it. He introduces purely fantastical elements: Zuleika's earrings and the studs on Dorset's shirt change colour according as the wearer falls in or out of love. Ghosts make brief appearances on more than one occasion. Beerbohm likes to break the fourth wall, address the reader directly, and sometimes anticipate his complaints and argue against them. In short, he seems to write whatever the hell pleases him, and fortunately the result is always charming and delightful.

<spoiler warning>

The eponymous Zuleika is perhaps not exactly conventionally beautiful, but somehow all men (or all young men, at any rate) lose their heads for her wherever she goes. This, combined with a (very) modest skill as a stage magician, suffices to make her a star, travelling from one capital to another and winning fame and fortune with her conjuring show. In the present novel, however, she is in Oxford, visiting her elderly grandfather, who is the Warden of Judas College (a fictional college, according to the Wikipedia, which unsurprisingly turns out to have a list of such things).

All the undergraduates promptly fall in love with Zuleika, but she has a peculiar mental hangup: she is so tired of men throwing themselves at her feet that she can only love someone who doesn't love her. For a brief while she thinks she has found such a man, the young Duke of Dorset, who is ridiculously over-the-top-perfect in every conceivable way, and also a dandy who seems unlikely to be in love with anyone but himself. But alas, he, too, professes his love to her, and even proposes to marry her, so she promptly falls out of love. He resolves to die for her, by suicide, a plan which she thoroughly approves of. Word of this spreads, the Duke's example is contagious and before long all the other undergraduates at Oxford decide to commit suicide as well.

At one point, the Duke actually changes his mind and figures that staying alive would be a better form of revenge; but then he receives news that two owls have appeared at his ancestral estate, owls which according to family tradition always appear shortly before a Duke of Dorset dies. He is enough of a stickler for tradition that he now feels he has no choice but to die after all. On the day of one of the great inter-college boat races, the Duke jumps into the river and drowns, promptly followed by all the other students. Imagine fishing all those corpses out of the river — it is much too absurd to be tragic.

The novel ends on a few more absurd notes. One of the students actually chickened out at the last moment and didn't drown himself; but finally shame drives him to jump to his death from a building. Zuleika's grandfather, the Warden of the College, notes the curious absence of students at a college dinner, but pays it no further attention. And Zuleika, her visit to Oxford having now come to an end, takes an early train — to Cambridge!

</spoiler warning>

I wonder if we are meant to extract any meaning out of the violent emotional rollercoaster rides that the characters of this novel routinely subject themselves to; or is it all meant to be just pleasant silly nonsense that the author makes up as he goes along? Well, if it's anything more than that, I'm certainly not the right person to notice it, but fortunately that doesn't have to prevent me from enjoying the novel. But I couldn't help feeling that if there's anything in this novel that the author really cared about, it wasn't the protagonists and their feelings, but the location. Oxford is the one thing he seems to be really fond of (see esp. pp. 189–90), and if he pokes fun at the silliness of the whole setting he does so in an affectionate way. I rather liked that, and felt it was actually rather touching, even though I know nothing about Oxford myself, have never been there even as a tourist, and the university where I studied could hardly have been more different from it than it was. So I couldn't relate to it otherwise than in the most abstract sense, but even so I thought it was nice that a place as pleasantly absurd as that existed, and that it was possible for people to be as fond of it as Beerbohm clearly was when he wrote this novel. It was a very pleasant read and a glimpse into one or two worlds that I otherwise knew absolutely nothing of.