1997 The wittiest fantasia on the ‘decadent’ fin de siècle is Max Beerbohm’s short story, ‘Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties’. A doomed poet (doomed less by genius and debauchery than utter mediocrity), steeped in absinthe and feeble depravity, Enoch sells his soul to the devil. He does so in return for a diabolic passport that will enable him to visit the Round Reading Room of the British Museum, 100 years after his death, to relish what he is confident will be posthumous fame, on the basis of his slim volumes Negations and Fungoids. His soul is a small price to pay. The narrator (Beerbohm himself) gives a sample of Enoch’s verse, commemorating his Faustian pact:
NOCTURNE
Round and round the shutter’d Square
I strolled with the Devil’s arm in mine.
No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was there
And the ring of his laughter and mine.
We had drunk black wine.
I scream’d, ‘I will race you, Master!’
‘What matter,’ he shriek’d, ‘to-night
Which of us runs the faster?
There is nothing to fear to-night
In the foul moon’s light!’
Then I look’d him in the eyes
And I laugh’d full shrill at the lie he told
And the gnawing fear he would fain disguise.
It was true, what I’d time and again been told:
He was old – old.
Not much has changed in the library, AD 1997, Enoch discovers, when he makes his trip into the future. It’s a bit like H.G. Wells’s far future in The Time Machine: egg-hairless people, all wearing woollen ‘sanitary’ uniforms and as indistinguishable from each other as battery chicks.
Enoch’s time-trip turns out disastrously. After a desperate scour of the catalogues, the only reference to himself he can discover is on page 234 of ‘Inglish Littracher 1890–1900 bi T.K. Nupton, publishd bi th Stait, 1992’, where he reads that:
a riter ov th time, naimed Max Beerbohm, hoo woz stil alive in th twentith senchri, rote a stauri in wich e pautraid an immajnari karrakter kauld ‘Enoch Soames’ – a thurd-rait poit hoo beleevz imself a grate jeneus an maix a bargin with th Devvl in auder ter no wot posterriti thinx ov im! It iz a sumwot labud sattire, but not without vallu az showing hou seriusli the yung men ov th aiteen-ninetiz took themselvz.
Enoch Soames, that is, survives as a fictional character in ‘Enoch Soames’. Trapped in the text: Jacques Derrida could not invent it.
Enoch Soames Day, 3 June 1997, was celebrated in the magnificent Round Reading Room – where Karl Marx, George Bernard Shaw, and innumerable Soamesian literary forgettables had worked, but neglected to make any deal with the Prince of Darkness for their return. Soames himself was eagerly looked for, but did not appear. He would, as the story predicts, have recognised the magnificently unchanged structure: the brainpan of the nation, as Thackeray called it.
A year later, that structure ceased to exist when, in June 1998, the new St Pancras site opened and the old ‘RRR’ was converted into a tourist canteen and souvenir boutique area. Some cynics alleged (and most Soamesians would like to think) that the removal was deliberately delayed – so that the luckless Enoch would not land in a building site. There was enough disappointment awaiting him without that.