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Sunday, November 27, 2022

Book Review 040 / Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm

Zuleika Dobson

by Max Beerbohm

1911

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 40 / Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1911)

November 15, 2016

I finished this novel in something of a bad mood. It is a very bad book, and I resented the effort required to find any redeeming features. The fact that I found some in many ways made my mood worse! As I reflected on the text, I slowly came to accept that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as I originally thought. Don’t you hate it when that happens?

Quotes / Max Beerbohm / Zuleika Dobson

Zuleika Dobson

by Max Beerbohm

Quotes

Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.
- Ch. II

She was a young person whose reveries never were in retrospect. For her past was no treasury of distinct memories, all hoarded and classified, some brighter than others and more highly valued. All memories were for her but as the motes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future.
- Ch. II

He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.
- Ch. III

For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of the next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is the sun’s bright message to him, and "Why not indeed?" his answer.”
- Ch. IV

The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
- Ch. IV

One has never known a good man to whom dogs were not dear; but many of the best women have no such fondness. You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men. For the attractive woman, dogs are mere dumb and restless brutes — possibly dangerous, certainly soulless. Yet will coquetry teach her to caress any dog in the presence of a man enslaved by her.
- Ch. VI

He heard that whenever a woman was to blame for a disappointment, the best way to avoid a scene was to inculpate oneself.
- Ch. VII

Oxford walls have a way of belittling us; and the Duke was loath to regard his doom as trivial. Aye, by all minerals we are mocked. Vegetables, yearly deciduous, are far more sympathetic.
- Ch. VII

Death cancels all engagements.
- Ch. VII

It is so much easier to covet what one hasn’t than to revel in what one has. Also, it is so much easier to be enthusiastic about what exists than about what doesn’t.
- Ch. VIII

She was one of those people who say "I don't know anything about music really, but I know what I like."
- Ch. IX

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a whole flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilization. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost —- he becomes a unit in unreason.
- Ch. IX

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.
- Ch. IX

Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful.
- Ch. XIII

Just as "pluck" comes of breeding, so is endurance especially an attribute of the artist. Because he can stand outside himself, and (if there be nothing ignoble in them) take pleasure in his own sufferings, the artist has a huge advantage over you and me.
- Ch. XV

The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.
- Ch. XV

Everywhere he found his precept checkmated by his example.
- Ch. XV

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

Note to the 1946 edition

Wikipedia

Max Beerbohm / Enoch Soames
Quotes / Max Beerbohm / Zuleika Dobson
The 100 best novels / No 40 / Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1911)

Max Beerbohm / Enoch Soames

Enoch Soames

A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties

by MAX BEERBOHM

Quotes / Max Beerbohm / Zuleika Dobson

The 100 best novels / No 40 / Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1911)

When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for Soames, Enoch. It was as I feared: he was not there. But everybody else was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or remembered but faintly, lived again for me, they and their work, in Mr. Holbrook Jackson's pages. The book was as thorough as it was brilliantly written. And thus the omission found by me was an all the deadlier record of poor Soames's failure to impress himself on his decade.

I dare say I am the only person who noticed the omission. Soames had failed so piteously as all that! Nor is there a counterpoise in the thought that if he had had some measure of success he might have passed, like those others, out of my mind, to return only at the historian's beck. It is true that had his gifts, such as they were, been acknowledged in his lifetime, he would never have made the bargain I saw him make—that strange bargain whose results have kept him always in the foreground of my memory. But it is from those very results that the full piteousness of him glares out.

Not my compassion, however, impels me to write of him. For his sake, poor fellow, I should be inclined to keep my pen out of the ink. It is ill to deride the dead. And how can I write about Enoch Soames without making him ridiculous? Or, rather, how am I to hush up the horrid fact that he WAS ridiculous? I shall not be able to do that. Yet, sooner or later, write about him I must. You will see in due course that I have no option. And I may as well get the thing done now.

The 100 best novels / No 40 / Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1911)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 40

Zuleika Dobson

by Max Beerbohm (1911)

The passage of time has conferred a dark power upon Beerbohm's ostensibly light and witty Edwardian satire

Max Beerbohm / Enoch Soames

Quotes / Max Beerbohm / Zuleika Dobson

Robert McCrum

Monday 23 June 2014

Zuleika Dobson is a brilliant Edwardian satire on Oxford life by one of English literature's most glittering wits that now reads as something much darker and more compelling. Readers new to Max Beerbohm's masterpiece, which is subtitled An Oxford Love Story, will find a diaphanous novel possessed of a delayed explosive charge that detonates today with surprising power.

Zuleika, the granddaughter of the warden of Judas College, is a female sleight-of-hand magician, a "prestidigitator", renowned from New York to St Petersburg. She is also a femme fatale, a turn-of-the-century It girl and a minor celebrity. This fascinating young woman of extraordinary beauty arrives in Oxford, a privileged all-male academic society, and immediately devastates the student body, becoming first its icon and then its nemesis. Having fallen in love with Zuleika, the undergraduates, happy to die for what can never be theirs, plunge en masse into the Isis shouting "Zuleika" (this, instructs Beerbohm, is "pronounced Zu-lee-ka not Zu-like-a").But that is not the whole story. The Duke of Dorset, an absurdly accomplished peer – "He was fluent in all modern languages, had a very real talent in watercolour, and was accounted, by those who had had the privilege of hearing him, the best amateur pianist on this side of the Tweed" – and emotionally backward golden youth, has fallen in love with her, and she with him. But since Zuleika cannot commit to anyone remotely responsive to her charms, she rejects him – whereupon he, too, commits suicide, in full Garter regalia.

This middle part of the novel, narrated as the fantasy of Clio, muse of history, gives the book an experimental flavour that it soon abandons in favour of high comedy. Once Oxford's undergraduates are extinct, Zuleika has few options. The novel ends with her ordering a special train – bound for Cambridge.

Beerbohm was a friend and admirer of Oscar Wilde. The scintillating heartlessness of this novel is deeply Wildean in its instincts. His celebrated line "Death cancels all engagements" is pure Wilde, and Zuleika herself – selfish, vain and capricious – is a fictional cousin to Dorian Gray (No 27 in this series). Beerbohm's text, indeed, provides a satirical commentary on the aesthetic movement of the 1880s and 1890s, and continued to reverberate throughout the dark decade following publication. Its influence on the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, and possibly the Mayfair stories of PG Wodehouse, is unmistakable. Possibly, too, "the Incomparable Max", as George Bernard Shaw called him, was also looking back to Vanity Fair (No 14 in this series) and to Becky Sharp, another self-willed minx-cum-monster.

Several critics have noticed that Beerbohm's hilarious fantasy about the untimely slaughter of a generation of young men spookily prefigures the carnage that would soon break out on the fields of France. That is, I think, to mistake the essence of Beerbohm's wit. He was a farceur, not a seer. His novel was intended to divert, not educate. Zuleika Dobson is the finest, and darkest, kind of satire: as intoxicating as champagne, as addictive as morphine, and as lethal as prussic acid. Rarely has a minor book by a minor writer made such a claim on posterity.

A note on the text

Zuleika Dobson was published in 1911 by William Heinemann, and quickly acquired some influential admirers. Virginia Woolf wrote: "Mr Beerbohm in his way is perfect… He is without doubt the prince of his profession." Another Edwardian, EM Forster, declared: "Zuleika Dobson is a highly accomplished and superbly written book whose spirit is farcical. It is a great work – the most consistent achievement of fantasy in our time… So funny and charming, so iridescent and yet so profound." Later, Evelyn Waugh echoed these verdicts, writing: "Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art."

As a footnote, I must mention Zuleika in Cambridge by SC Roberts, a parody. Fittingly, the students at the more cerebral, hearty and less romantic university pay her no attention, never give suicide a second thought, and send her on her way – rejected, and possibly even humiliated.