by Max Beerbohm
I must be serious and raise great issues about this book, as it raises great issues in our art … Can a humorous work end tragically, with propriety? I doubt it. By which I mean that I know damned well it can’t.
Bennett hadn’t understood that Beerbohm’s novel was deliberately thumbing its nose at the kind of po-faced social realism that Bennett himself practiced. It dared to mix the plausible and the absurd, the comic and catastrophic. In doing so, it unpicked the rules of the Victorian novel (where orphan governesses advance through marriage) and opened the door to something much more modern. Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh were among those who understood and learned from Beerbohm’s style. Woolf wrote to Max in 1928 that, alongside Tristram Shandy, Zuleika Dobson was one of her favorite works. To Waugh, Beerbohm was simply “the Master.” Waugh’s ruthless comic precision owes much to Beerbohm’s influence.
If you take a trip to Oxford now you can see the room in Merton College that is devoted to Max’s wonderful caricatures. Here are Dante Gabriel Rossetti (a plump Machiavelli) and Algernon Swinburne (a long-haired elf). Here is the be-whiskered Warden of Merton College from Beerbohm’s undergraduate days, and here is Max himself, making fun of his own bad habits. One drawing shows the youthful Max stealing a book from the Merton library and a bent, white-haired figure (Max in imaginary old age) finally bringing it back.
Beerbohm loved appropriating books, in various senses: His copies are full of doodles and fake footnotes, sketches of the author and other graffiti—he transforms existing literature into something of his own making. In his world, books outsmart their authors and fictional characters often prove stronger than their inventors.
You might take the opportunity to do a Zuleika tour of Oxford. You can see the spot outside the Sheldonian Theatre where Zuleika performed her magic tricks; wonder which house on Broad Street was inhabited by the Duke of Dorset; and visit Wadham College, with its Judas tree, which some say is the original of Judas College. You could indulge in a decadent afternoon tea with champagne in the Randolph Hotel, which is adorned with Osbert Lancaster’s 1952 illustrations to the novel.
If you do, I hope you will raise a toast to Beerbohm’s wayward but winning heroine. Siegfried Sassoon pronounced Zuleika Dobson “perfect.” The lady herself would have accepted the adjective as no more than her due. After all, Helen of Troy only launched a thousand ships. Zuleika capsized an entire generation.
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