This is by essayist, critic, broadcaster, and caricaturist Max Beerbohm (1872-1956), who became Sir Max in 1939. It was first published in 1911, and it's his only novel (some disagree as to whether it actually is a novel, but more on that later).

Its alternative title -- in full, it's Zuleika Dobson; Or, An Oxford Love Story -- is a bit of an indicator as to why I read it. We're hoping, on our upcoming odyssey, to revisit Oxford (an old haunt from long ago). Inevitably, you look for articles that recommend books on Oxford, and this was one of Val McDermid's Top 10.

Robert McCrum ranks it No. 40 in his 100 best novels. Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Evelyn Waugh all rated it highly.


Caricature of Beerbohm by Walter Sickert, 1897

The story is very simple. To the hallowed halls of Oxford comes Zuleika Dobson (in a note to the 1922 edition, Beerbohm helpfully indicates that Zuleika rhymes with beaker and not with biker, although he doesn't quite put it like that). She's the grand-daughter of the Warden of Judas College (made-up, but based on Merton College, where Beerbohm studied).

At the end of the day, Zuleika is fairly mediocre. "Not strictly beautiful", she is the proud owner of just two books (both of a practical nature). She earns her living by conjuring, and has become quite the celeb, "a spectator of her own wonderful life". But she's not actually that good... She has a "stale and narrow repertory", and her patter is cringe-worthy.

But she exerts a kind of fascination over men. Indeed, she has become addicted to their homage (and some, we are told, have already died for her). She desperately wants to fall in love, but her character is such that she will not love anyone who loves her.


Another terrible cover...

So when she meets the Duke of Dorset -- the brightest star in the Oxford firmament ("a very splendid youth... adroit in the killing of all birds and fishes, stags and foxes") -- and finds him absolutely indifferent to her, she falls, quite delightedly, head over heels.

But the next day, he confesses he DOES love her, and was just pretending he didn't. For her, that's a terrible anti-climax: "I was all afire with adoration of you. And now... now it is all over. The idol has come sliding down its pedestal to fawn and grovel with all the other infatuates in the dust about my feet... I thought you would take a listless advantage, make a plaything of me -- the diversion of a few idle hours in summer, and then, when you had tired of me, would cast me aside, forget me, break my heart. I desired nothing better than that."

The Duke declaims his entire pedigree before her: "I, John, Albert, Edward, Claude, Orde, Angus, Tankerton, Tanville-Tankerton, fourteenth Duke of Dorset, Marquis of Dorset, Earl of Grove, Earl of Chastermaine, Viscount Brewsby, Baron Grove, Baron Petstrap, and Baron Wolock in the Peerage of England, offer you my hand." (Beerbohm informs us that Tankerton is pronounced Tacton, and Tanville-Tankerton sounds like Tavvle-Tacton. This severing of the relationship between print and pronunciation is something the English upper classes excel at...)

Zuleika is unmoved. So he says he will die for love of her.

Alas, he's not the only one. Soon the entire student body of Oxford is awaiting the opportunity to throw itself corporately into the river for love of Zuleika.

And they do. They do.


Whitchurch-on-Thames, 2023. Another bit of the same river, hopefully unsullied by mass suicide

Zuleika briefly thinks of taking the veil ("I am an epidemic, grand-papa, a scourge, such as the world has not known..."). But this resolution doesn't last, and we leave her with plans to head for Cambridge the following day. There's no remorse: "Very lightly she slipped up into bed, and very soon she was asleep."

Those are the bare bones. But there's a lot more backwards and forwards to it than this. The Duke, for example, decides at one point that he doesn't want to die for this frankly not particularly deserving woman. Then a message arrives to say that two fateful black owls had spent the night on the battlements at Tankerton (he has told her all about this time-honoured augury of the lord of the manor's death). So he immediately telegraphs: "Prepare vault for funeral Monday." Although Zuleika knows he's dying because of the owls, she is satisfied. Officially, he will be dying for her.

All in all, it's a totally crack-pot, manically zany, brilliantly amusing book. On my first read through, I found it funny, but slightly weird. Clearly, it was a satire, but I couldn't quite work out what it was satirizing. On my second read through, armed with a bit more information, I started to understand how clever it was, and found it funnier still.

Not that you always have to "understand"... I came across this the other day, and I think there's a lot of truth in it:

"There is real joy to be found in not immediately understanding exactly what a book is doing. Joy in seeing that something outside of the narrative structure we’re familiar with is at play; joy in discovering a different sense of vastness and fluidity. Joy in waiting, patiently, with rich anticipation, for the seemingly disparate pieces of a narrative to mesh, to become something huge and beautiful. Joy in realizing, several chapters into a book, that you could not possibly say what it was 'about' until reading to the end, and maybe not even then."

But there's also a lot to be said for finding out, for cracking what you don't understand by consulting people who know better... I came across blog posts that basically said this was a bad book, purely because their writers had made no effort to figure it out. I find that hard to understand.



So, what is it about?

Firstly, there's an interpretation that we need to discount. Given what started to happen just three years after the publication of Zuleika Dobson, it's tempting to see it as a kind of prophetic allegory: Whole cohorts of young men hurling themselves to their deaths in the name of something that's not even that worthy... Yes, definitely recalls something...

McCrum, however, warns us off that explanation, which misinterprets 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."

J.G. Riewald, in 1953, produced a super-informative analysis of Beerbohm, available here. He describes him as a representative of "dandyism" (not a purely sartorial epithet: "He parades ideas, not clothes"). He was not an aristocrat, but admitted that his imagination was beguiled by that milieu; he was a conservative, an individualist, and a hedonist; he was also an escapist, drawn to the past. Ergo: "Even the casual reader cannot fail to be struck by the analogy that seems to exist between the portrait of the Duke and that of the author as it emerges from the rest of his works." He was a caricaturist, remember, and not just in terms of the visual.

In Zuleika, meanwhile, Beerbohm is caricaturing "the independence and hardness of the modern girl, the 'New Woman', to whose emergence in the Nineties the old files of, say, Punch bear such ample testimony".


Shock, horror, woman rides bicycle...

But the satire is more general than that: "According to Beerbohm's own statement in a note to the 1947 edition of the book, the story should be seen as a fantasy based on the solid reality of old Oxford... [It is] the active participants in this farce... whose every feature and action is exaggerated ad absurdum, so that even such a wholesale tragedy as the death of all the undergraduates leaves us absolutely unmoved. On the other hand the Oxford background against which they operate is less distorted... The raison d'etre of this dual scale is the author's desire to achieve a certain artistic contrast... The 'novel' may justly be called a caricature of that complex reality denoted by the word Oxford."

Beerbohm held that the best object for caricature is something you revere, ideally something that is "over-serious". Oxford qualifies on both counts.

Along the way, Beerbohm's piece mocks the herd instinct; snobbishness; popular education; the intelligentsia; titles bestowed by royalty; Rhodes scholars; and the busts of the Roman emperors which stare down from the Sheldonian. (The latter are great characters, by the way, acting as a kind of Greek chorus. For example: As the Duke and Zuleika emerge onto the street, "the Emperors exchanged stony sidelong glances... They saw the tragedy progressing to its foreseen close. Unable to stay its course, they were grimly fascinated now.")


One of Beerbohm's self-caricatures

I think Riewald is a little precious in refusing to call Zuleika Dobson a novel (or putting the word in inverted commas): It is, he says, "like Wilde's Dorian Gray, an 'essay on decorative art' rather than a novel, because, instead of a faithful portrayal of real life, he gives us a bold and wilful distortion of it. In his caricatures as well as in his 'novel' it is Beerbohm's object to exaggerate, in a beautiful, decorative way, some peculiar, characteristic feature. This means that Zuleika Dobson is not a novel, but a fantasy." I'm not sure a novel always needs to be quite so tethered to real life... But this I would definitely agree with: "Caricature being 'a form of wit', it is wit that one finds on every page, in almost every sentence of this book."

A few examples of comedic description that's underpinned by clever observation:

-- There's the story of Meg Speedwell, dairymaid, who marries one of the Duke's forefathers: "She began to realise her responsibilities. She was determined to do all that a great lady ought to do. Twice every day she assumed the vapours."
-- There's the Junta. A club. So exclusive that for a while it had only one member, the Duke.
-- "[The Duke] stared blankly out of the window, at the greyness and blackness of the sky. What a day! What a climate! Why did any sane person live in England? He felt positively suicidal."
-- "Byron! -- he would be all forgotten to-day if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to The Times about the Repeal of the Corn Laws."
-- The late Duke's landlady, mourning him, "gathered about her some sympathetic neighbours -- women of her own age and kind, capacious of tragedy; women who might be relied on; founts of ejaculation, wells of surmise, downpours of remembered premonitions".


The epitome of everything wrong with the world in 1899... Here's one of those New Women, reading a newspaper, wearing riding bloomers, and ready to jump back on her bicycle, while her husband is doing the WASHING...

What else?

Well, the evocations of Oxford are highly atmospheric. The bells, the meadows, the sobering walls -- it's all beautifully rendered.

There's also a wonderful leaven of the Gothic throughout. The Duke's place is full of ghosts, for example, all "quite noiseless and quite harmless". And the odd ghost turns up to observe episodes in the narrative. So we see the shade of Humphrey Gredon, founder of the Junta, longing to chastise the young club members of the day, but unable to do anything material: "With a volley of the most appalling eighteenth-century oaths he passed back into the nether world." The narrator himself becomes ghost-like at one point, floating out into the meadows, with Oxford like a map beneath him, in shades of grey and black and silver, and then floating through the silvery chimes of clock towers to the Broad. Additionally, we have the magic realist touch of the constantly changing pearls that Zuleika and the Duke exchange: Ear-rings, shirt studs. His, hers. White, pink, and black...

And the language is fascinating. Beerbohm employs a huge range of figures of speech, all nicely documented by Riewald (anyone for syllepsis, or periphrasis, or anastrophe?). It's an ornate and unusual style, but it's always amusing, never murky. Here's a little taste:

"The clock in the Warden’s drawing-room had just struck eight, and already the ducal feet were beautiful on the white bearskin hearthrug. So slim and long were they, of instep so nobly arched, that only with a pair of glazed ox-tongues on a breakfast-table were they comparable. Incomparable quite, the figure and face and vesture of him who ended in them."

In sum, this was a fascinating reading experience, and Beerbohm would be worth revisiting.


The older Beerbohm