Max Beerbohm's devilish classic "Enoch Soames"
commentary by rbadac
This story is everywhere; you can hardly throw a rock without hitting an anthology that features it. It most recently surfaces in Nightshade edited by Robert Phillips, an antho that irritates me for being 4/5 good stuff & 1/5 crap, like a seed cake the flies have walked on. Bleiler has an interesting assessment of Max -- while he appreciates his ability, he calls Beerbohm's style "overdone", saying "what Beerbohm takes five paragraphs to say, John Collier could have said in five lines." I find this a curious comment from someone who has read Eugene Sue's The Wandering Jew in its entirety.
Perhaps in Bleiler's reflection upon the similarities between Beerbohm & Collier he merely means that Collier is better at their shared qualities, which is true enough. But while I admire Collier's sharper edge, I had no trouble enjoying Beerbohm's more leisurely pace -- I certainly didn't feel like he overstated beyond natural limits, & didn't get the impression he needed an editor, but that's just me, good old easygoing rbadac, he's not hard to please, he's grateful for any crumb of literature that gets thrown his way, though maybe he's more grateful when it isn't another damn vampire commandos saga, or portent-laden "true" ghost story, or half-baked ramble with a cheap shock for an ending.
Not much to the tale, plotwise; the Faustian bargain goes extra cheap. Soames only wants a few hours in the future of 100 years hence to see how his literary reputation will fare. Striking, almost Wellsian touches distinguish the trip: the actual date June 3, 1997 is named; its people described as uniformed & hairless, rather like George Lucas' first film THX-1138; the literary criticism of the future is written in (shudder) "modified spelling" -- we had a spell of that around here awhile back, but everyone got over it, thank goodness, though they were on a diet of chicken soup & crackers until their intestines returned to normal. More interesting than the outcome is the character of Soames himself as he is pictured early on, a dabbler & a Decadent who barely exists on the fringes of notoriety, who doesn't exist at all in the eyes of some.
Convinced of his own genius, Soames defiantly publishes his writings without encouragement or solicitation, & survives solely by dint of his prodigious vanity. It takes insight to provide actual examples of such a character's "work", & Beerbohm does so, in one poem creating the "black wine" image to which the 1986 Campbell/Grant Dark Harvest collection refers. Even Soames' mumbled, bilious remarks ring authentic, while Beerbohm amusingly plays himself as a naive admirer of this down-at-heel Huysmans, who calls himself a "Catholic diabolist", one of the more memorable oxymorons I've seen lately.
Whether an afternoon in the British Museum library is worth an eternity in Hell depends, I suppose, on what one really wants as opposed to what one has. Some of the older among us might wonder for instance if they could even relate to the younger version of themselves should the two versions be privileged to meet, & such a meeting be possible. Would there be any recognition? understanding? would they even like the person they once were? "Memory gropes in a greyer gloaming", & that may be a clue. How our own reputations fare with ourselves sometimes acquires form to the extent that they have been forgotten.
"...an authentic, guaranteed, proven ghost, but -- only a ghost, alas! Only that. In his first visit, Soames was a creature of flesh & blood, whereas the creatures into whose midst he was projected were but ghosts, I take it -- solid, palpable, vocal, but unconscious & automatic ghosts, in a building that was itself an illusion. Next time that building & those creatures will be real. It is of Soames that there will be but the semblance..."
copyright © 2000 by rbadac, all rights reserved
Notes & Counterpoints by J.A.S.
The ideal book by which to obtain this tale is Max Beerbohm's Seven Men (Ln: Heinemann, 1919), which has had many reprints. With this collection you'll have the full range of Sir Max's short stories & his satiric illustrations to boot, & including two other supernatural comedies, "Hilary Maltby & Stephen Braxton" a tale of invisibility, & "A. V. Laider" a tale of prevision. But "Enoch" is by far Beerbohm's best story & still original even in the wake of the thousand diabolical comedies it spawned. In my estimation John Collier's takes ("Half Way to Hell" "After the Ball" &c) are amusing but slight, written only for the sake of the jest, whereas Sir Max commented on, while exemplifying, an entire era. Most of Bleiler's comments on Yellow Nineties authors tend to reveal less fondness for such rebellious & extreme style, while prefering a Saturday Evening Post fictional style; although, to be fair to Bleiler, his brief comment quoted by rbadac was meant to compare the fuller range of Beerbohm to Collier, not just Sir Max's one great diabolical tale to Collier's minor variants. Of the really classic tales of Decadence & Diabolism, only Vincent O'Sullivan's "The Bargain of Rupert Orange" is so grand as "Enoch Soames."
Besides Robert Phillips' workmanlike Nightshade: 20th Century Ghost Stories (1999) cited by rbadac, the tale is also to be found in Philip Van Doren Stern's commonly encountered The Moonlight Traveler (1943), Sterling North & Clarence Boutell's wondrous overview of a theme Speak of the Devil (1945), Joseph Margolies' easily found Strange & Fantastic Stories (1946), Basil Davenport's uniformly well-chosen Deals with the Devil (1958), Alberto Manguel's vastly superior international selection Black Water (1983), Frank J. Finamore's Devilish Doings (1997), & many others including even Luis Borges's lovely The Book of Fantasy (1989) giving further evidence of the tale's international influence. Watch for these or similar books to turn up in the Catalog of Vintage Weird Fictions For Sale.
The most horrible but instantaneous way to access "Enoch Soames" is via the web. I'd recommend a trip to your local library to check out a Real Book before settling for an Enoch Soames E-Text, or downloading the Project Gutenburg Seven Men Texts in their entirety. Last of note, Teller, of the comedy team Penn & Teller, has written a knowing sequel to Sir Max's story & that can be accessed on-line here: A Memory of the 1890s by Teller.