Zuleika Dobson

by Max Beerbohm

  Her jewel-box stood open, to receive the jewels she wore to-night. She went very calmly to it. There, in a corner of the topmost tray, rested the two great white pearls—the pearls which, in one way and another, had meant so much to her.

  “Melisande!”

  “Mademoiselle?”

  “When we go to Paris, would you like to make a little present to your fiancé?”

  “Je voudrais bien, mademoiselle.”

  “Then you shall give him these,” said Zuleika, holding out the two studs.

  “Mais jamais de la vie! Chez Tourtel tout le monde le dirait millionaire. Un garcon de cafe qui porte au plastron des perles pareilles—merci!”

  “Tell him he may tell every one that they were given to me by the late Duke of Dorset, and given by me to you, and by you to him.”

  “Mais—” The protest died on Melisande’s lips. Suddenly she had ceased to see the pearls as trinkets finite and inapposite—saw them as things presently transmutable into little marble tables, bocks, dominos, absinthes au sucre, shiny black portfolios with weekly journals in them, yellow staves with daily journals flapping from them, vermouths secs, vermouths cassis …

  “Mademoiselle is too amiable,” she said, taking the pearls.

  And certainly, just then, Zuleika was looking very amiable indeed. The look was transient. Nothing, she reflected, could undo what the Duke had done. That hateful, impudent girl would take good care that every one should know. “He put them in with his own hands.” Her ear-rings! “He kissed me in the public street. He loved me” … Well, he had called out “Zuleika!” and every one around had heard him. That was something. But how glad all the old women in the world would be to shake their heads and say “Oh, no, my dear, believe me! It wasn’t anything to do with her. I’m told on the very best authority,” and so forth, and so on. She knew he had told any number of undergraduates he was going to die for her. But they, poor fellows, could not bear witness. And good heavens! If there were a doubt as to the Duke’s motive, why not doubts as to theirs?… But many of them had called out “Zuleika!” too. And of course any really impartial person who knew anything at all about the matter at first hand would be sure in his own mind that it was perfectly absurd to pretend that the whole thing wasn’t entirely and absolutely for her … And of course some of the men must have left written evidence of their intention. She remembered that at The MacQuern’s to-day was a Mr. Craddock, who had made a will in her favour and wanted to read it aloud to her in the middle of luncheon. Oh, there would be proof positive as to many of the men. But of the others it would be said that they died in trying to rescue their comrades. There would be all sorts of silly far-fetched theories, and downright lies that couldn’t be disproved …

  “Melisande, that crackling of tissue paper is driving me mad! Do leave off! Can’t you see that I am waiting to be undressed?”

  The maid hastened to her side, and with quick light fingers began to undress her. “Mademoiselle va bien dormir—ca se voit,” she purred.

  “I shan’t,” said Zuleika.

  Nevertheless, it was soothing to be undressed, and yet more soothing anon to sit merely night-gowned before the mirror, while, slowly and gently, strongly and strand by strand, Melisande brushed her hair.

  After all, it didn’t so much matter what the world thought. Let the world whisper and insinuate what it would. To slur and sully, to belittle and drag down—that was what the world always tried to do. But great things were still great, and fair things still fair. With no thought for the world’s opinion had these men gone down to the water to-day. Their deed was for her and themselves alone. It had sufficed them. Should it not suffice her? It did, oh it did. She was a wretch to have repined.

  At a gesture from her, Melisande brought to a close the rhythmical ministrations, and—using no tissue paper this time—did what was yet to be done among the trunks.

  “We know, you and I,” Zuleika whispered to the adorable creature in the mirror; and the adorable creature gave back her nod and smile.

  They knew, these two.

  Yet, in their happiness, rose and floated a shadow between them. It was the ghost of that one man who—they knew—had died irrelevantly, with a cold heart.

  Came also the horrid little ghost of one who had died late and unseemly.

  And now, thick and fast, swept a whole multitude of other ghosts, the ghosts of all them who, being dead, could not die again; the poor ghosts of them who had done what they could, and could do no more.

  No more? Was it not enough? The lady in the mirror gazed at the lady in the room, reproachfully at first, then—for were they not sisters?—relentingly, then pityingly. Each of the two covered her face with her hands.

  And there recurred, as by stealth, to the lady in the room a thought that had assailed her not long ago in Judas Street … a thought about the power of example …

  And now, with pent breath and fast-beating heart, she stood staring at the lady of the mirror, without seeing her; and now she wheeled round and swiftly glided to that little table on which stood her two books. She snatched Bradshaw.

  We always intervene between Bradshaw and any one whom we see consulting him. “Mademoiselle will permit me to find that which she seeks?” asked Melisande.

  “Be quiet,” said Zuleika. We always repulse, at first, any one who intervenes between us and Bradshaw.

  We always end by accepting the intervention. “See if it is possible to go direct from here to Cambridge,” said Zuleika, handing the book on. “If it isn’t, then—well, see how to get there.”

  We never have any confidence in the intervener. Nor is the intervener, when it comes to the point, sanguine. With mistrust mounting to exasperation Zuleika sat watching the faint and frantic researches of her maid.

  “Stop!” she said suddenly. “I have a much better idea. Go down very early to the station. See the station-master. Order me a special train. For ten o’clock, say.”

  Rising, she stretched her arms above her head. Her lips parted in a yawn, met in a smile. With both hands she pushed back her hair from her shoulders, and twisted it into a loose knot. Very lightly she slipped up into bed, and very soon she was asleep.

  AFTERWORD

  BY SARA LODGE

  Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm, first published in 1911, is a quintessentially English comic novel: sparkling with irony and affectionate critique of a country constrained by decorum, where form is always more important than content. It tells the story of an Edwardian “it” girl, sultry granddaughter of the Warden of Judas College who takes Oxford by storm during a short visit in which she snubs all her admirers while parading about in flamingo-pink dresses and pink and black pearl earrings that have a habit of finding their way into men’s shirt studs.

  So electric is her effect upon the male undergraduate population that, in a couple of short days, she becomes the toast, the idol, and then the nemesis of the university, as the student body by common consent plunges into the river, determined to die for what it cannot possess: shouting the name “Zuleika” (pronounced “Zu-lee-ka,” not “Zu-lye-ka”) from lips that can come no closer to her than her name. Zuleika is momentarily contrite, considers entering a nunnery, but then on reflection instructs her maid to book a Special Train to Cambridge—presumably to wipe out Britain’s second-oldest university, too.

  Mass suicide is rarely hilarious. But Beerbohm makes it so. He is, of course, teasing. His novel instructs us from its first pages that it isn’t to be taken at face value: Like Zuleika herself, it is an essay in style, so artful that it remains always just beyond the reader’s reach.

  In the story, Zuleika’s grandfather disinherits her parents. She is a poor orphan, forced unwillingly to work as a governess and accidentally learns a few cheap conjuring tricks. Given the extraordinary magnetism of her appearance, however, she becomes a sensation as a female magician, breaking hearts from New York to St. Petersburg. In a sense, her trip to Oxford is a revenge mission. She is about to disinherit her gran
dfather. He will be left presiding over a college that exists only in form: a bastion of classical tradition whose students are as extinct as Latin and Greek. The lesson Zuleika Dobson teaches the academic establishment is quite similar to the lesson Eliza Doolittle will teach Henry Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion, written in 1912: Looks trump books.

  In a sense, Zuleika Dobson is also Max Beerbohm’s loving revenge on Oxford. He read classics at Merton College in the 1890s, but failed to take a degree. Instead, he was busy sketching and writing ironic essays with precocious flair. This was the era of Oscar Wilde’s reign as the leading wit, dandy, and intellectual of the hour. Aesthetics ruled. Realist novels were hypocritical and (worse) dull. Life imitated art, and beauty, not truth, was the end of art. Max drew an imaginary Oxford exam paper; it was on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Implicitly, it argued that posing your own questions was much more interesting than answering other people’s.

  Beerbohm never left off questioning The Picture of Dorian Gray: it is the text with which his own mature fiction remains in dialogue. This is most evident in The Happy Hypocrite (1897), which was published while Wilde was in prison. But it is also an underlying current in “Enoch Soames” (1916) and “Maltby and Braxton” (1919), both stories that blur the boundaries of life and art. Zuleika Dobson can also be seen as a reworking of elements of Wilde’s story. Like Dorian, Zuleika is somebody whose personality has no depth: she is selfish, vain, capricious. But her glittering surface is such that she is an irresistible icon onto which others project the unreasonable nature of their own desire. Like Dorian, once she wins the love of her ideal—once the figure becomes real, and vulnerable—she discards him in a manner that leads to his suicide. Like The Picture of Dorian Gray, Zuleika Dobson is a metafictional striptease: it self-consciously signposts and dismantles its own mode of representation. It is all about the superiority of surface to content, artifice to truth, aesthetics to ethics.

  After Oxford, Beerbohm—a slight, camp figure, impeccably dressed—became himself a celebrated character, publishing quirky essays in literary magazines, reviewing theater, and drawing brilliant caricatures. He settled in Italy and lived quietly at this cultural remove, pretending to be outdated while producing Zuleika Dobson, a novel that is, despite its pretensions to triviality, an important work in the history of the comic novel in English.

  Beerbohm’s brilliance lies in his self-conscious play with the conventions of genre, voice, and plot. He pretends to have got special permission from Clio, the muse of history (who is a secret pulp fiction addict), to be both factual and omniscient. He depicts himself floating fairy-like above Oxford, hovering at windows and observing men and women arranging themselves in front of the mirror. He deploys language theatrically, creating magical scenes while simultaneously inviting us to peek behind the curtain and acknowledge the artifice in which we collude.

  Zuleika’s appearance, for example, is described in terms of pastiche and exaggeration, the very qualities Beerbohm’s own prose purveys:

  Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes were a trifle large, and their lashes longer than they need have been. An anarchy of small curls was her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule, every hair asserting its rights over a not discreditable brow. For the rest, her features were not at all original. They seemed to have been derived rather from a gallimaufry of familiar models … The mouth was a mere replica of Cupid’s bow, lacquered scarlet and strung with the littlest pearls. No apple-tree, no wall of peaches, had not been robbed, nor any Tyrian rose-garden, for the glory of Miss Dobson’s cheeks. Her neck was imitation-marble. Her hands and feet were of very mean proportions. She had no waist to speak of.

  Each of the heroine’s faults is in fact an erotic magnet. She is unoriginal—and irresistible. Beerbohm plays with paradox. Zuleika is smitten with the Duke of Dorset, the very model of an English aristocrat, precisely because he pays her no attention. His indifference is wildly arousing. When, however, he falls in love with her, Zuleika is bitterly disappointed. She can only adore a man who doesn’t adore her.

  The Duke of Dorset, meanwhile, finds himself in an equally impossible situation. Honor demands that, spurned by the only woman he has ever loved, he should commit suicide. But Zuleika clearly isn’t worth it. He wrestles with the quandary and decides to live. But too late. According to tradition, the night before a Duke of Dorset dies, two black owls perch, hooting, on the battlements of his ancestral castle. On the morning when he has decided not to drown, the Duke of Dorset receives a telegram from his butler:

  Deeply regret inform your grace last night

  two black owls came and perched on battlements

  remained there through night hooting

  at dawn flew away none knows whither

  awaiting instructions

  Jellings

  This is a masterstroke. The Duke of Dorset is a figure titled by and belonging to history. Hence his decision to change his mind in the present and give himself a future is completely futile. He has been prescripted. He thus dresses himself in the full regalia of a Knight of the Garter and plunges into the river, followed by all but one of the remaining male undergraduate population. Beerbohm here is commenting slyly on the self-defeating aspects of the British class system. As Zuleika says, when the Duke proposes to her, offering her land, ceremony, and peasants: “I think you are an awful snob.” On the whole, although Zuleika is shallow and vain, we don’t blame her for her disastrous effect on Oxford because we perceive that the love she inspires is essentially narcissistic and has deep roots in the institution she has overwhelmed. It is a love of the unobtainable ideal—the paradox of self-fulfillment in self-destruction—which originates with Romanticism, with Byron and Shelley, and finds its apotheosis in the decadent pose of Wilde: his open self-love, yet self-destructive wantonness and preoccupation with death.

  Zuleika Dobson is, then, partly a commentary on Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic cult in Oxford. Beerbohm channels Wilde’s theatrical energy: his self-conscious love of epigram, irony, and pastiche. But he also parodies the excesses of the late Romantic frisson in Oxford: the susceptibility to sentiment, to celebrity, to style above every other consideration.

  Beerbohm’s text is constantly twitting aspects of Romanticism. The name “Zuleika” is linked to Potiphar’s adulterous wife in the Bible, but also calls to mind Byron’s exotic poem The Bride of Abydos (1813). In Byron’s poem, Zuleika is a heroine of astounding beauty who is loved by her half-brother Selim but has been betrothed to another by her cruel father. Selim tries to escape with Zuleika but is murdered by her father, and Zuleika dies heartbroken. Zuleika Dobson is a complete reversal of Byron’s tragic heroine. Her very name is an indication that a memory of Romanticism (Zuleika) has been united to a solid, no-nonsense middle-class history (Dobson).

  The Duke of Dorset, meanwhile, is in certain ways identified with Byron in the novel. He has swum the Hellespont; he is an aristocrat but also a writer and artist, skilled in classical and modern languages; he is a dandy, whom all men admire and women adore. The fact that Zuleika is responsible for Dorset’s death, then, performs an ironic reversal in which a character from a Romantic poem takes her revenge on a Romantic author.

  It is a delicious twist that after the mass drowning of undergraduates, Zuleika is described thus:

  Her face lay upturned on the water’s surface, and round it were the masses of her dark hair, half floating, half submerged. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were parted. Not Ophelia in the brook could have seemed more at peace.

  We recall John Everett Millais’s famous painting of Ophelia, about to die a watery death, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lover—Lizzie Siddal—who posed for Millais’s picture and who died young, perhaps by suicide. But then we learn that, far from killing herself in remorse, Zuleika is actually having a nice hot bath, prior to dressing for dinner. Beerbohm has put the “bath” back into bathos. This is one comic heroine who refuses to be cast as a tragic muse.

  It is intriguing
that Beerbohm’s novel, in which an overwhelmingly male university is sunk by female power, was published in a decade when women were fighting for the vote and for equal rights in education. Zuleika Dobson could be seen as espousing the cause of the New Woman, determined to enter the male Establishment. The character of Zuleika is, however, far from intellectual. Her arts are very traditionally female: she adorns her body, she performs tricks that draw attention to her own bewitching form. Indeed, in one of Beerbohm’s illustrations to the novel, it is very noticeable that Zuleika and the Demon Egg-Cup, her conjuring tool, are identical in shape.

  Rather than arguing for a new deal for women, Beerbohm’s novel raises a camp eyebrow at classical ideals of masculinity. The Duke of Dorset is a model of masculine virtue, who excels at every sport and study; but he loves nothing better than to dress up in his cape and garters, and when he catches a cold (Zuleika having poured cold water on him), he is terrified that he will expire. Beerbohm compares the undergraduates’ enthusiasm when they all swear to die for Zuleika to “the noise made on the verge of the Boer war.” Zuleika inspires a kind of hysterical virility—which turns them into a “great passive monster” bent on pointless self-sacrifice.

  It is an oddly prophetic text. Between 1914 and 1918, Oxford, like every other town in Britain, was emptied of its young men. The novel’s blackly comic finale became a tragedy of real and devastating proportions as men flung themselves, at Britannia’s bidding, into the jaws of death. It is too much to say that Beerbohm foresaw the needless self-slaughter of World War I, but he does point a suspicious finger at jingoism and the mob effect.

  Although Zuleika Dobson was a popular success, some critics were mystified by it. Arnold Bennett wrote Beerbohm a letter complaining that: