Mad about the Girl

On the front cover of my copy of Zuleika Dobson, a magnificently dressed young man maintains an impeccable posture as he topples backwards off a barge and into the Isis. As he plunges towards the water, apparently ready to shatter on impact, he gravely doffs his hat to a smiling girl on the deck. This girl, naturally, is Zuleika.

Caricaturist, essayist and dandy, Max Beerbohm only ever wrote one novel. The delicious final product, published in 1911 and subtitled An Oxford Love Story, was described as a literary burlesque by H. L. Mencken: not serious enough to be a straightforward fable, it’s too gentle in its irony and too politically disengaged to be true satire. Recommended by my grandmother as I was about to start university, my tatty Penguin quickly became a constant companion, sitting on my shelf, following me back to Londonduring vacations and providing me with bedtime reading ever since. Zuleika is an underwhelming professional magician and the granddaughter of the Warden of Judas College; her true talent lies in her infinite sex appeal. By the time her train pulls into Oxford station, she is already ‘the toast of two hemispheres’, kept in lavish style by legions of besotted admirers ranging in rank from Russian aristocrats (the Grand Duke Salamander Salamandrovitch among them) to anonymous waiters. She can soon add herds of impressionable undergraduates to the list. But Miss Dobson, for all her mystique, suffers from the familiar human trait of desiring only what she cannot have, and she meets her match in the form of a cold and effortlessly superior aristocrat, the Duke of Dorset. They alternate in pursuit of one another, until theircourtship finally culminates in the suicide by drowning of the university’s entire undergraduate population in a futile display of adoration, all of which naturally leaves Zuleika feeling rather flattered. Edwardian Oxford is already a strange enough place to modern eyes, and this resolutely silly plot pushes the novel into the land of affectionate parody. Callow young men are no sooner out of boarding-school than they are cloistered away in colleges; with literature their only guide to women, it’s hardly surprising that they deal with Zuleika’s arrival by casting themselves as romantic heroes, and her as the incarnation of ideal love. Witness the Duke, having decidedly warmed to her by now:

‘My heart is a bright hard gem, proof against any die. Came Cupid, with one of his arrow-points for graver, and what he cut on the gem’s surface never can be effaced. There, deeply and for ever, your image is intagliated. No years, nor fires, nor cataclysm of total Nature, can erase from that great gem your image.’ ‘My dear Duke,’ said Zuleika, ‘don’t be so silly.’

Even the novelist’s art, and with it his own writerly ambitions, are targets for Beerbohm’s caricature. Every cliché and literary excess makes an appearance, as owls prophesy doom and the narrator invokes the Muses, all in richly purple aestheticist prose.

The moon, like a gardenia in the night’s buttonhole – but no! why should a writer never be able to mention the moon without likening her to something else – usually something to which she bears not the faintest resemblance? . . . The moon, looking like nothing whatsoever but herself, was engaged in her old and futile endeavour to mark the hours correctly on the sun-dial at the centre of the lawn . . .

If Zuleika Dobson has a major flaw, it is Beerbohm’s refusal to take his novel seriously. In the age of hipsters and postmodernism, sophisticated ironic posturing is starting to seem rather passé. However, for the modern reader there is a darker and far more poignant irony in the timing of the novel’s publication. Beerbohm could not know of the imminent and this time very real destruction of the same young men who potter about blissfully in its pages. Three summers on, and Larkin’s ‘moustached archaic faces’ would still be smiling as they queued outside recruiting offices, unable to grasp that they might now have something worth taking very seriously indeed. With hindsight, Zuleika’s silliness and Beerbohm’s self-indulgence start to seem more like doomed innocence. The old train station, which could once ‘whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age’, has long since been torn down, and Oxford has lost its unhealthily monastic tendencies. But Beerbohm’s burlesque remains as enchanting as ever, and he would no doubt have been delighted by Zuleika’s 1950s adaptation into that most kitsch of artistic forms, the West End musical. Not too long ago, when some interview in the Sunday papers prompted me to ponder what items I would save from a house fire, I realized the extent to which Miss Dobson had insinuated herself into my affections. So perhaps it’s no surprise that when I eventually found myself packing to move to the other end of Europe, I decided I couldn’t very well leave her behind.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 42 © Constantine Fraser 2014