Enoch Soames, personage

Hypocrite lecteur

You can always spot the newbie. Not so much by the greenish tinge about the ears as the golden, starstruck expression and the ever-earnest gaze. Newbies gravitate towards unremarkable planetoids like Rothenstein like short-circuited satellites, meant to survey the heavens but caught instead by a nearby gravitational well of massive self-importance.

Newbies are an inevitability, yes, but pity them at your peril: they’re gaseous giants in training, and one will take the place that is rightfully yours before you can raise an ironic eyebrow.

Beerbohm was our newbie. But like all newbies he was starstruck at all of us, even me, even if the others were not aware that I included myself in the “us.” And so he worked at it, you know. Read my books, sought me out, remarked intelligently. Not that I let on that I appreciated that. I was too too for that. But I did, I definitely did. At first. Yes, if Rothenstein wouldn’t take me up properly, perhaps I’d rise with the newbie usurper instead.

Had I only known how he would betray me! The inevitability, the chagrin, the excess! Ah, sincerity, you are the most fickle mistress of all!

Special Guest, Enoch Soames

I was on TV!  That proves I’m real. Well, you probably didn’t see my interview with Charlie Rose, but Hilobrow has published an edited transcript.

from the transcript:

“Charlie Rose: Enoch, you have a Twitter feed, and a blog. Let me just jump right in and ask the question at the top of everyone’s mind, how were you able to return? Did you make another Deal with the Devil?

Enoch Soames: No, I exploited a legal loophole. Basically there was nothing in the contract about virtual reality. There is now of course, He’s gone over everything with counsel and made sure to close that gap. But we were grandfathered in, all of us from the Faustian Era. No Tiger Woods-style rewriting of the pre-nup, in Hell! I can’t walk around, like you; well except for that one time at the British Museum in 1997. That was what the original Deal was about, of course. But, I can hang around cyberspace all I want. It’s really similar to down south, except a little colder. Luckily I still have my cape. Look: not only waterproof, Polartec!

[Shows features of cape]

CR: You’ve been in cyberspace? This whole time?

ES: No, I only became interested once the web really took off. I’ve been hanging around and surfing and watching videos; you know, the usual, just from the other side of the screen. But then once Web 2.0 arrived I realized I didn’t just have to be a voyeur, I could be a writer again! It was the perfect opportunity to re-tell my story.

CR: We know the Max Beerbohm version of course; now obviously we can see that that was biography, and not fiction as was thought for over a hundred years …

ES: Beerbohm! That wannabe! That paparazzo! That, that – insect! Every time I turn around, there he is again! No, not down there, in here. [Points] When I Google myself, which of course I do on a regular basis, everywhere I look his name is tethered to mine. I remember in London, it took me months to gain admittance to the back room at the Café Royal (where all they did, I can assure you, was gossip and play dominos. Dominos – please! ) – anyway, months, and once I got in, there he was already, entrenched like a tick. Wouldn’t leave me in peace! Always with the naive questions, the buttering-up – well he did actually buy my books, yes. I believed he was sincere, at first. But he turned out to be worse than all the others …

CR: But without Beerbohm’s short story, Enoch Soames, we wouldn’t know you at all, would we? Your own books went out of print long ago and there are no –- “

… at this point I got a little upset and they had to break for an underwriting infomercial. But check out the entire thing at Hilobrow!

The Devil Went Down to the British Library

I do try, from time to time, to make a stronger impression. In December I was featured on Levi Asher’s LitKicks blog!

A little about who I am and what I’m doing here, from LitKicks:

“Enoch Soames, a Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties (1919) tells the story of Max Beerbohm, the author-as-character-within-the-novel, and his encounter with Enoch Soames, an unsuccessful writer and hanger-on in the London cafe scene in the 1890s. Enoch is frustrated that no one recognizes his genius, so he makes a deal with the devil to go forward in time and read about himself in the future where, he is sure, history will vindicate him. In due course he and Max meet the devil himself in one of the cafes, and Enoch disappears, to pop up in 1997, where he searches the British Library to find out what we’ve thought of him. Some time later, he reappears back in the cafe, despondent. Before the devil spirits him away he explains to Max that he found only one reference to himself, in a work of fiction — a short story by Max Beerbohm! And then he and the devil disappear. Max-the-character explains that he feels compelled to write this story about Enoch, as it will be the only way his friend will be known at all, despite the fact that it will be classified as fiction. He begs us to take it as biography.

The philosophical problem is, who and what is Enoch Soames? Within the framework of the story, are we to take him as fictional (as we do, and as the author-as-author does), or as “real,” as both Enoch and the author-as-character insist that we should? The logical knots in this seemingly simple puzzle have yet to be fully untangled.”

More …

And then what happened was

So I moved to London, as I said. It took me about forever to find anyone. I really had the sensation that people were looking right through me, even more so than Paris. At least in Paris they would acknowledge me when they wanted something! Social town, you know. In London everyone was very intent on their own Newtonian trajectories, described by private polynomials.

I finally found them. Eventually I heard where Rothenstein had installed himself; that man, like every striving mediocrity, makes waves everywhere he goes. You don’t even need to scan the horizon, he’ll pop up right in your viewfinder, soon enough. He’s one of those who looks at you through closed eyes, for emphasis, confident that you’ll still be there at the end of his point. And, irritatingly enough, you will.

So anyway, at least Rothenstein was my friend.

Well, because he’s everyone’s friend, so I’m factored in.

They had all holed up in the Cafe Royal in Chelsea, in the back, in the domino room. Dominos! Those irritating binary bricks. Puzzles are for tiny minds. What does it matter, if you can arrange things this way or that, if the game is solid or linear, if you win or lose. Only ants in their off-hours would find this amusing.

Well anyway, Cafe Royal served absinthe, and they were all there, so there is where I went. It’s where I met Beerbohm, not long after. My frenemy.

My story so far …

Look, I’m not going to waste time on a lot of trivia. What do you care what my childhood was like, I’ve been trying to forget it ever since I escaped! Plus, I know ALL ABOUT future biographers. They don’t do you any favors. None. So the Hell with them. They’ll get what I give them, nothing more.

I was in Paris. We were all in Paris, if you weren’t there then I’m sure I don’t know what was wrong with you. I guess it was fine, for awhile; there was a lot of activity, things were happening! Just around the corner. I raced around along with everyone else. I turned so many corners I squared the circle! Circled the squares. Whatever. But I started to feel invisible, like I was on the outside of things, looking in, like they could see right through me. What the hell? I mean, I had published the first edition of Negations while those slackers were stumbling around the streets after closing time, shouting bad poetry, sobbing and spending their parents’ money. After awhile you kind of want to take things seriously, you know?

And the painters. Everywhere! Crawling out of the woodwork, haunting the cafes, clogging up the thoroughfares, impressing the girls. Always claiming they were broke, always making vague pronouncements about Art and Life and Love, then scuttling back to their garrets to attempt green scribbles with a claim on trees. I mean, please! And calculating: they had the souls of accountants. They’d wait around until I was on my third glass of the green fairy, which is a sacrament, really, and ought to be respected as such—anyway my third glass, and then they’d start hitting me up for “rounds for the house!” “Enoch, mon ami!” and “voila le Maestro Vert!”

After awhile I noticed I was the only one left. Me and that rabble of painters. All the smart people had moved to London! Free of the infernal artists, free of the beautiful avenues, free of the cursedly lovely weather—well obviously I couldn’t blame them. So I joined them.