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Paolo Bugliani
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Max Beerbohm
Diminishing Figures: Spectral Simulacra of Authors in Henry James’s and Max Beerbohm’s Decadent Short Stories
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Essays
2022-11-24
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Paolo Bugliani
2022/11/24
10.13125/2039-6597/5171
103
2039-6597
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Max Beerbohm
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urn:nbn:it:unica-28843
Diminishing Figures: Spectral Simulacra of Authors in Henry James’s and Max Beerbohm’s Decadent Short Stories
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12
                Diminishing Figures:
            Spectral Simulacra of Authors
             in Henry James’s and Max
             Beerbohm’s Decadent Short
                        Stories

                               Paolo Bugliani

Abstract

     This paper analyses two stories by Henry James and two others by Max
Beerbohm whose protagonists are, at the same time, writers and ghosts. Such
a diegetic scenario is interesting because it seems to point at a disguised
metaliterary treatment of current ideas about fin-de-siècle authoriality and
a peculiar metalepsis of the concept of ‘the death of the author’, later dis-
seminated by post-structuralist thinkers. After a contextualization of Henry
James’s and Max Beerbohm’s dissimilar but equally significant contribution
to the genre of the ‘Decadent short story’, the essay illustrates the features
of their writer-ghosts, in order to illuminate their inherent theoretical and
aesthetical value.


Keywords

    Fin de siècle; Author; Ghost story; Aestheticism and Decadence; Henry
James; Max Beerbohm




Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/5171
Paolo Bugliani, Diminishing Figures




         Diminishing Figures:
Spectral Simulacra of Authors in Henry
James’s and Max Beerbohm’s Decadent
             Short Stories

                                  Paolo Bugliani



                                      Put a novelist into a novel.
                                      He justifies aesthetic generalizations.

                                      A. Huxley, Point Counter Point


      1. Between April 1894 and January 1897, The Yellow Book’s columns
were regularly filled with contributions by two writers who might seem
quite at odds with each other. Henry James’s “The Death of the Lion”
opened the first issue, followed by “A Defence of Cosmetics” by Beerbohm.
The same happened with the second issue, where “The Coxon Fund” was
accompanied by “A Letter to the Editor”. Beerbohm was keener on conti-
nuity though, contributing to issues three and four with “A Note on George
the Fourth” and “1880”, respectively. James returned on board in July 1895
with “The Next Time”, but it was not until April 1896 that Beerbohm de-
cided to submit to Harland his “Poor Romeo” and, later that year (in the
eleventh issue), “The Happy Hypocrite”. James then closed the circle by
participating in the magazine’s penultimate issue with “She and He: Re-
cent Documents”. The often simultaneous presence of these two authors is
telling, and can be interpreted from various perspectives. The aspect that
will be investigated here, although circumscribed, can be interesting in
many ways, since it concerns their use of short fiction to depict the artist
as a character, thus creating a sort of mise en abîme of one of the most fre-
quent topics in the literary criticism of that period. This topic dealt with



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the role of the author in such a way that it would arguably culminate in
the ground-breaking contribution by Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”
(Furness 2013: 344-345). As The Yellow Book remains among the most noto-
riously influential voices in the fin-de-siècle period (Brake 1994, Stetz 2007),
its participants were indisputably apt at foreshadowing the incumbency
of modernity which was to become the prime impulse underlying early
20th-century modes of expression (Evangelista 2021: 164-205).
      As contributors to such a cultural landmark, James and Beerbohm
seemed to be very interested in etching a new profile of the author, sug-
gesting a novel aesthetic space for such a character. Although James and
Beerbohm had very different approaches to the Aesthetic Movement and
late 19th-century Decadent culture1, they can both be considered as repre-
sentatives of that period’s fertile ideological unrest. At the time of the Yellow
Book, James, already known as “the Master”, and Beerbohm, a young man
blessed with early success, shared such a stage where they could showcase
their ability to produce fiction that responded to the coeval cultural and
literary ferment. Their presence in the columns of Harland’s periodical tes-
tifies to their commitment to a crucial phase of Anglo-American literature.
As a matter of fact, The Yellow Book, in addition to its connection with the
Aesthetic Movement, also elicited a formal interest in the short story. When
Henry Harland first invited James to collaborate, he specifically requested
short contributions. Yet, he refrained from imposing on the constraints nor-
mally endorsed by periodical publications, prompting the Master’s elation:

           For any idea I might wish to express I might have space […] elegantly
        to express it – an offered licence that, on the spot, opened up the
        millennium to the ‘short story’. One had so often known this product
        to struggle, in one’s hands, under the rude prescription of brevity at
        any cost […] that my friend’s [Harland’s] emphasized indifference to
        the arbitrary limit of length struck me […] as the fruit of the finest
        artistic intelligence. We had been at one […] on the truth that the forms
        of wrought things […] were […] the things; so that, for the delight of
        mankind, form might compete with form and might correspond to
        fitness […]. Among forms, moreover, we had had, on the dimensional
        ground – for length and breadth – our ideal, the beautiful and blest
        nouvelle; the generous, the enlightened hour for which appeared thus
        at least to shine. (James 1937: 219-220)




    1
         See, for James, Mendelssohn 2007, and, for Beerbohm, Mahoney 2015.


                                                                                      105
Paolo Bugliani, Diminishing Figures



     The brevity of the nouvelle, its «reviving, refreshing, confirming, con-
secrating» (James 1987: 54) ability to «touch so many subjects» and «handle
so many of the threads of life» (ibid.: 57), seemed thus to gain a chance to
bestow on British letters the prestige it had granted continental literatures,
especially thanks to Harland’s brilliant project and active involvement in
the dissemination of the form (Hunter 2007: 33). Max Beerbohm, on his
part, dramatized in a short story his own desire to write brief narratives
with ‘cunning subtlety’, a quality that immediately betrays the Aesthetic
Movement’s influence on the genre:

          I was determined to make a story of what I had seen – a conte in
      the manner of the great Guy de Maupassant. [He] was an impeccable
      artist, but I think the secret of the hold he had on the young men of
      my day was not so much that we discerned his cunning as that we
      delighted in the simplicity which his cunning achieved. (Beerbohm
      2015: 3-4)

      Maupassant’s allegedly effortless simplicity is something that James
was also very keen to achieve, as he concluded his reflection on the nouvelle
underlining «the effort to do the complicated thing with a strong brevity
and lucidity – to arrive, on behalf of the multiplicity, at a certain science of
control» (James 1937: 231). The reference to multiplicity also calls to mind
Walter Pater’s comments on modern existence as «fissiparous, formed of
tenuous, infinitely divisible impressions» (Hunter 2007: 9) that are «in per-
petual flight [and] limited by time» (Pater 1980: 188).
      Fin-de-siècle short fiction, or what has been labelled ‘Decadent short
story’, is interesting to study as a «distinct category» in its own right, since
it presents itself as «a phenomenon of immense cultural and aesthetic sig-
nificance in Britain», as «a sentinel of stylistic acuity [that] evolves out of
Aestheticism and feeds into twentieth-century Modernism» (Boyiopoulos
- Choi - Tildesley 2015: 1). Short stories seemed the perfect harbour for
many of the crucial themes that proved pivotal in the late 19th- and early
20th- century, especially when dealing with artists, writers and, more gen-
erally, creators of aesthetic objects: in other words, authors.

     2. Despite adjustments and revisions, Roland Barthes’ “The Death of
the Author” still remains a most influential document when looking at the
process of dissolution of the traditional idea of the author as an irrefutable
source of authority. Barthes’ analysis starts with an essential and succinct
genealogy where he highlights the (French) cultural landmarks that first


106
                                     Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



called the author concept into question, namely, Stephane Mallarmé, Mar-
cel Proust, Paul Valéry and the Surrealist Movement. At the same time, the
image that Barthes conjures up – that of «the Author diminishing like a
figure at the far end of the literacy stage» (Barthes 1989: 51-52) – can as well
be fruitfully positioned in a historiographical process of redefinition of the
author’s role in Anglo-American literature. If Barthes’ theoretical provoca-
tion seems designed to fit future developments of Modernist impersonal-
ity (Ellmann 1987: 6), I argue that the metaphor of a waning author could
also be profitably contextualized within the late-19th-century production
of Decadent short stories. From this perspective, authors who chose to
represent artists as diminishing figures might have recognized that the ca-
nonical image of the author as a demiurge – crystallized by positivist biog-
raphism – was in demise. Such an awareness was to lead to a thematization
of the loss of authority and a consequent metamorphosis of the figure of
the artist. As the two examples from James and Beerbohm analysed here
illustrate, when an author decided to portray an artist on the page, such a
decision might have entailed a loss of corporeity, which would eventually
transform the fictionalised artist into a posthumous entity comparable to
the unstable, liminal presence of the ghost in short stories.
      In fact, the fin-de-siècle ghost, freed from its extravagant and some-
times camp gothic features, began to be recast as «an ethical category that
destabilizes the traditional ontology of the humanist subject» (Vinci 2020:
20) and it thus turns out conceptually useful for our analysis. Such ghosts,
with all their proleptically Derridean and Levinasian ‘otherness’, are theo-
retically intriguing when associated with the late-19th-century artistic pan-
orama. Before long, the impending crisis of the 20th century was to usher
in an epistemological horizon where the artist – after the Symbolist dream
of immortality through creation and the Positivist promethean exaltation
of the scientist as a discoverer and saviour – was forced to yet again «kneel
down […] to the archaic altar of the dead» (Villa 1989: 34, my translation).
In the literary sphere, this shift would result in an image of the artist that
became less and less titanic, as the Romantic Faustian ideals of an almighty
author waned towards what would later coagulate in the notorious Pru-
frockian ineptitude.
      Migrating from the realm of the gothic romance to the psychoana-
lytical domain of the Freudian unconscious, the ghostly element under-
went a momentous metamorphosis, acquiring, as James’s oeuvre tellingly
encapsulated (Lustig 1984), a major relevance. In this sense, James’s and
Beerbohm’s use of the ghostly can be read in the light of Elisa Bizzotto’s
reflections on the «aesthetic fantastic», as they both blend «an urgency to


                                                                                 107
Paolo Bugliani, Diminishing Figures



redefine the role of art and artist» with a «use of the fantastic as a device to
facilitate this exploration» (Bizzotto 2016: 39). As Henry’s brother William
turned to the occult domain of spiritism while presiding over the Psycho-
logical Society, writers such as Henry and Beerbohm seemed to be fasci-
nated by the ghost story as a literary device able not only to probe and
explore the changing scenario of early-20th-century modernity, but also to
supply an apt analogue to the figure of the literary creator.
      Clare Vawdrey, Ashton Doyne, Enoch Soames, and Stephen Braxton,
as will be argued shortly, represent some porous catalyzers of an idea of
the author that was faded enough to be perceived as questionable, but
whose crisis was not ripe enough to be forthrightly labelled as a proper
death. These characters became fictional representatives of an idea of au-
thoriality which, after a Positivistic climax, was clearly becoming obsolete.
It is as though James and Beerbohm were toying with 19th-century ideals
of authors seen as demiurges, apparently in consonance with the views
Proust would condense in his crucial “Against Sainte Beuve” pamphlet2.
By relegating the figure of the author to the realm of the ghostly, James and
Beerbohm seem to be willing to create a sort of new entity one may refer
to as the ‘writer-ghost’ or the ‘ghostly writer’, forcedly separated from the
material world of society and partaking in the mystery and impalpability
of the aesthetic sphere of pure creation. Before presenting the case stud-
ies, though, it is crucial to anticipate that, as often happens when literary
authors are represented in fiction, these writers are enveloped in a comic
aura. A similar satirical vein would be shown by a number of Modernist
authors when choosing to give life to characters who shared their condi-
tion as writers3.

    3. Henry James’s “The Private Life”, first published in The Atlantic
Monthly in 1892, is a glaring example of a fictional response to factual stim-


      2
        It should be noted that Proust’s posthumously published work started as
a short narrative as well. After a maxim-sounding beginning («Every day I set
less store on intellect», Proust 1958: 17), Proust stages a tea ceremony that he will
again deploy in the famous Madeleine episode in Swann’s Way.
     3
        Modernist fiction is literally overflowing with writer characters, and
examples abound. The question of the representation of a writer poses some se-
rious theoretical problems to the reader, who naturally tends to equate character
and author. On this issue, that might be regarded as complementary to the one
investigated in these pages, see the still relevant chapter about Death in Venice’s
‘second author’ in Cohn (1999: 132-149).


108
                                        Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



uli provided by the author’s contemporary intellectual scenario. Here, a
recognizable ‘Robert Browning character’ lurks behind the Claire Vawdrey
of the tale. In James’s words, this character was inspired by «that most
accomplished of artist and most dazzling of men of the world whose effect
on the mind repeatedly invited to appraise him» as a figure whose inherent
divided nature would engender doubts about his having a proper «pri-
vate and domestic ego» (James 1937: 250)4. James’s decision to address the
tension that he perceived between Robert Browning the man and Robert
Browning the poet could have just followed the (beaten) track of the Ro-
mantic Doppelgänger. Yet, James is able to find a balance between tradition
and innovation. The writing eidolon working in a gloomy room while Vaw-
drey the socialite is entertaining guests outside is a passive entity, devoid
of any agency whatsoever, of even a proper voice, a characteristic that sets
him apart from the more popular fictional doubles of the coeval narrative.
Vaudrey the writer is a mere working machine, a sort of writing automaton
existing as a justification of an inexplicable fact, i.e. the unfathomable abyss
that appears to separate a sublime author from an utterly unpleasant hu-
man being. These «water-tight compartments» (James 1937: 250) signal and
highlight the presence of an ontological cleavage between the disembodied
aesthetic creator and the historical writer, a motif that fascinated the 19th
century as a whole and that was further conceptualized by Marcel Proust,
who, less than a decade later, set out to portray this fracture through the
character of Bergotte in his In Search of Lost Time5.
     What is interesting in James’s portrayal of Vawdrey is his crafting of
a ghostly presence not so much connected with the realm of death as with
an idea of spectrality capable of generating «machine simulacra» (Micali
2019: 125). If this connection is not incompatible with Romantic writing, it


    4
        James had expressed his disappointment in a letter addressed to his sister
Alice almost two decades before he started working on the tale (8 April 1877):
«His transparent eagerness to hold de la conversation & a sort of shrill interrump-
tingness which distinguishes him have in them a kind of vulgarity. Besides whi-
ch, strange to say, his talk doesn’t strike me as very good. It is altogether gossip
& personality» (James 1999: 87). On this aspect, see also Lind 1951.
     5
        A trait that unites Vawdrey and Bergotte is their almost unnatural fame
(McDonel 2015). Proust builds upon the theme of the deceptive nature of artistic
celebrities in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, where, even before the encoun-
ter with the writer Bergotte, the narrator has a very disappointing impression of
the Berma. Also, Mann’s Aschenbach in Death in Venice is a well-established and
respected writer enjoying the peak of his success.


                                                                                    109
Paolo Bugliani, Diminishing Figures



also seems to foreshadow modern(ist) instances of alienation and dehu-
manization associated with an impersonal poetic voice, such as those that
crowd Ezra Pound’s early poem “The Flame” and bafflingly masquerade
behind historical figures:

          […] O thou anxious thou,
          Who call’st about my gates for some lost me; […]
          If thou hast seen my shade sans character,
          If thou hast seen the mirror of all moments,
          That glass to all things that o’ershadow it,
          Call not that mirror me, for I have slipped
          Your grasp. I have eluded. (Pound 1982: 172)

      The Vawdrey unconventional revenant-automaton is immediately
emblazoned as «a travelling-rug thrown over a chair» (James 1948a: 227).
Despite the absence of the event of death, the initial description that the
narrator gives of him, that is, of his social self, is deeply connected to the
semantic area of the graveyard: his talk conveyed «a sense of our speaking
of the dead» (ibid.: 219) and his reputation is compared to a «gilded obelisk,
as if he had been buried beneath it» (ibid.). This explanation is intertwined
with his celebrity: in a sense Vawdrey, being a famous writer, carried with
him a sort of «prefigurement» through which «the legend paled then before
reality» (ibid.). Vawdrey is a posthumous entity, and the objectification of
his writing activity via the travelling-rug sounds like a literalization of the
act of writing itself, an absolutization of that practice. Such an allegorical
metamorphosis6 clearly emerges when the narrator sneaks into the room
only to find «the other Vawdrey bent over the table in the attitude of writ-
ing» (ibid.: 227), giving no sign whatsoever of having noticed the intruder.
When the narrator recounts this fact to Mrs Adney, a very famous actress
from the company in Switzerland, their exchange gradually envisages it in
terms of an utter alterity bordering on animality:



      6
       An analysis of James’s resort to allegory would require a separate paper.
Suffice it to say here that anything allegorical relating to James’s short fiction
has to be redirected to his tight bond with his ‘forefather’ Nathaniel Hawthorne.
On the subject, see the pages James dedicated to Hawthorne in his monographic
study of 1879, in particular those where he discusses Hawthorne’s short fiction
(which he labelled «these delicate, dusky flowers», 1887: 59). An interesting rea-
ding of James’s use of allegory is also provided by Intonti (2006).


110
                                           Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



            ’Are you absolutely certain it was Vawdrey?’ my companion asked.
            ‘If it wasn’t he, who in the world was it? That a strange gentleman,
        looking exactly like him and of like literary pursuits, should be sitting
        in his room at that hour of the night and writing at his table in the dark,’
        I insisted, ‘would be practically as wonderful as my own contention.’
            ‘Yes, why in the dark?’ my friend mused.
            ‘Cats can see in the dark,’ I said.
            She smiled at me dimly. ‘Did it look like a cat?’
            ‘No, dear lady, but I’ll tell you what it did look like – it looked like
        the author of Vawdrey’s admirable works. It looked infinitely more
        like him than our friend does himself,’ I pronounced. (Ibid.: 231)

     In this manner James is conceiving and concocting a type of charac-
ter who is able to reach his audience and deliver a poignant reflection on
the independence of the work of art from the actual, and often unrefined,
human maker. This conceptual dimension unfolds through the canonical
integument of the ghost story, which, in spite of its apparent simplicity,
can cope with difficult aesthetical issues (Edel 1948: xxix)7.

      4. The other nouvelle where James revisits the issue of the corporeity
of the author is “The Real Right Thing”, first published in Collier’s Weekly
in 1899, which is essentially a dramatization of the work of the biogra-
pher. The ghost around which the tale revolves is, unlike Vawdrey, a
more traditional revenant from the kingdom of the dead. As happened
with “The Private Life”, the tale is filled with reflections on metaliterary
questions, even more direct ones in this case, as when the protagonist-bi-
ographer, George Withermore, muses upon the act of writing someone’s
life in these terms:

           Great was the art of biography, but there were lives and lives,
        there were subjects and subjects. He confusedly recalled, so far as that
        went, old words dropped by Doyne over contemporary compilations,
        suggestions of how he himself discriminated as to other heroes and
        panoramas. He even remembered how his friend would at moments
        have shown himself as holding that the ‘literary’ career might – save
        in the case of a Johnson and a Scott, with a Boswell and a Lockhart to
        help – best content itself to be represented. The artist was what he did –
        he was nothing else. (James 1948a: 556)



    7
         For further reflections on these issues, see Walton 1992.


                                                                                       111
Paolo Bugliani, Diminishing Figures



      This statement is quite telling as it calls into question the legitimacy
of life writing as a literary task. The preoccupation with the disclosure
of the private life of the author has been a prime concern for James, so
much so that it was one of the central themes around which novelist and
critic David Lodge built his fictionalized life of the Master in Author Au-
thor (Perkins 2010). Quite early in the narrative, Lodge’s Henry James
expresses the wish to attain a sort of post-mortem inaccessibility to the
prying eyes of readers, considering such a curious attitude as most perni-
cious and unwholesome:

         There is no privacy, no decency any more. Journalists, interviewers,
      biographers – they’re all parasites, locusts, they strip every leaf. The
      art we lavish – the pains we take – to create imaginary worlds – is
      wasted on them. They care only for trivial fact. I feel it is our duty to
      deny them, to defeat them. When we are dead, when we can no longer
      defend our privacy, they will move in with their antennae twitching,
      their mandibles gnashing. Let them find nothing – only scorched earth.
      Ashes. (Lodge 2005: 87)

      Ashton Doyne, the writer-ghost in “The Real Right Thing”, did not
destroy his private papers, and thus his wife asks Withermore to pen a
biography that might rummage around in the deceased author’s private
effects. The biographer becomes the sort of insect that Lodge so accurately
portrays. His intrusion in that hallowed harbour of privacy is narrativized
as an actual trespassing that summons a guardian spirit returning from the
dead to protect the precious realm of his personal life. The last exchange
between the biographer and his commissioner, Doyne’s widow, is clear in
this respect:

         ‘I give up.’
         ‘Then you’ve seen him?’
         ‘On the threshold – guarding it.’
         ‘Guarding it?’ She glowed over her fan. ‘Distinct?’
         ‘Immense. But dim. Dark. Dreadful,’ said poor George Withermore.
         She continued to wonder. ‘You didn’t go in?’
         The young man turned away. ‘He forbids!’ (James 1948a: 556)

    From a sociological angle, this nouvelle fits into a line of famous pro-
nouncements of authors in matters of privacy, such as George Santayana’s




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                                       Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



meditation in his Soliloquies in England8. Withermore’s agency is more and
more blatantly represented as one of parasitical usurpation, as «it threat-
ens to turn ‘the master’ into a mere ‘mystic assistant’ to his own liter-
ary labors» (Teahan 2011: 175). Exposing the details of a private existence
without the interested party’s consent amounts to thievery, to an assault
into a sacred space that is of a piece with the realm of the homely (Despo-
topoulou 2011: 81). In this tale, the biographer’s activity is scrutinised as a
vampirical practice, as James was to further elaborate in The Sacred Fount.
If in this seminal ‘anti-novel’ he apparently aimed to represent the mod-
ern author’s «moment of torturous and absolute doubt about the actual
residual possibilities of a novel […] constructed on plot alone» (Perosa
1980: 104, my translation), in “The Real Right Thing” the theme of vam-
pirism is instrumental in associating the creative act with an attempt to
seize hold of an absent quality. In addition to the image of the vampire
as a lymph-absorbing entity, its revenant nature reinforces the notion of
life-writing as a coerced summoning of the dead that demands a repara-
tion for the wrong inherent in that very summoning9.

      5. Although the narrative structure informing James’s two stories
might be loosely associated with Postmodern – and thus post-Barthesian –
works such as Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes or the short-story collection
Angels and Insects by Antonia Byatt – it is true that the choice of inserting
a literary forebearer into a fictional context has been a transhistorical con-
stant, from Virgil in The Divine Comedy to Goethe in Thomas Mann’s Lotte in
Weimar. This interesting phenomenon remains «situated at the crossroads
between the historical novel, biography and the Künstlerroman», and its
indeterminacy and oscillation between fact and fiction engender a «tension


    8
        In a very interesting study, Ross Posnock has traced Santayana’s and Ja-
mes’s relation to the concept of the «genteel yoke of respectability» (1991: 193)
and investigated the repressive mechanism lurking behind their response to the
ruling social restrictions imposed on them by their similar backgrounds.
     9
        Some readings of this short story have argued that James’s practice of bio-
graphy was deeply linked to his perception of life writing as a somewhat ‘obscene
act’, surreptitiously connected to his latent homosexuality (Stevens 1999). More
neutral points of view see James’s engagement with life writing (both his own
and that of others) as an effort «to represent the reach of his memory as much
as his memories themselves» (Maunsell 2018: 49). In other words, the (auto)bio-
graphical act is seen as more of an experiment in the exploration of the past than
as the yielding to a confessional impulse.


                                                                                   113
Paolo Bugliani, Diminishing Figures



between the autobiographical impulse and the recognition of the other as
other» (Franssen and Hoenselaars 1999: 20-21). Although Vawdrey and
Doyne are not factual authors, the many implications linked to their pres-
ence pose questions related to novel-writing itself, as James suggested in
“The Art of Fiction”:

         A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other
      organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in
      each of its parts there is something of each of the other parts […] What
      is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but
      the illustration of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it?
      (James 1948b: 13)

     According to James, the gallery of characters finds itself in a sort of
forced balance with the more dynamic realm of incidents, in an intercon-
nection that recalls his well-known, parallel reflections on the dichotomy
between showing and telling. However, it is also true that, when analyzing
The Ambassadors, E. M. Forster lamented its characters’ inconsistency, their
being «incapable of fun, of rapid motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths
of heroism» (Forster 1955: 160). The only activity in which these «maimed
creatures» seem to be engaging is observation, i.e. the same action that
James himself had mentioned in the preface to the New York Edition to
The Princess Casamassima, connecting it, quite significantly, to the pole of
spectrality:

         Nothing would doubtless beckon us on further, with a large leisure,
      than such a chance to study the obscure law under which certain of a
      novelist’s characters, more or less honourably buried, revive for him
      by a force or a whim of their own and “walk” round his house of art
      like haunting ghosts, feeling for the old doors they knew, fumbling at
      stiff latches and pressing their pale faces, in the outer dark, to lighted
      windows. (James 1937: 73)

      If such characters underwent a depleting process of spectralization, ul-
timately metamorphosing into ghosts who haunt James’s Balzacian ‘house
of fiction’, the case of Vawdrey and Doyne appears even more significant
in this sense, being imbued with an autobiographical desire of reassuring
concealment.

      6. Max Beerbohm, as anticipated above, was a sort of Decadent Mod-



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ernist, a condition which was far from infrequent. His works might be
approached alongside Ada Levenson’s, Vernon Lee’s, Ronald Firbank’s,
Harold Acton’s and even, in some respects, W. B. Yeats’s, given their pro-
clivity to envisage the literary act in a manner that was not alien to the
context of the fin de siècle (Mahoney 2015: 15-22). An artist responsive to an
aesthetic vocation rooted in the “Yellow Nineties”, even in the face of the
sharp break with tradition that characterized the early 20th century, Beer-
bohm was admired and celebrated in his time and beyond, so much so that
he became one of the building blocks of Susan Sontag’s «canon of camp»
(1982: 106). Beerbohm’s art has often been interpreted in terms of a parody
of the fin-de-siècle Aesthetic Movement, although it must not be forgotten
that Beerbohm’s interest in late-19th-century forms of artistic expression
was serious. For instance, his only novel Zuleika Dobson is both a turgidly
pompous descendant of Wilde’s Salomé and Keats’s Belle Dame and an
ironical fantasy of their rebirth in early-20th-century Oxford. Beerbohm’s
irony could be both ruthless and delicate. His treatment of the Aesthetic
Movement is a case in point: by adopting «the insider point of view» (Dan-
son 1989: 35), he could be fierce in his criticism without being offensive,
thus managing to highlight the productive and constructive core of the
movement itself. This view definitely runs counter to the irksome portrait
that Ezra Pound gave of him in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), just the year
after Seven Men was given to the press, where Beerbohm was alluded to as
“Brennbaum, the Impeccable” and was thus introduced:

       The skylike limpid eyes
       The circular infant’s face
       The stiffness from spats to collar
       Never relaxing into grace. (Pound 1957: 67)

      In opposition to Pound’s caustic (and antisemitic) attack, Beerbohm’s
art of parodying his contemporaries resided in a fine balance between
fierceness and bonhomie, a combination that also connoted his activity
as a caricaturist. One example of this can be found in the story “Hilary
Maltby and Stephen Braxton”, first published in 1919 in The Century Maga-
zine, where Beerbohm plays on complementary portrayals of Dickens and
Thackeray along the lines of a dialectics gravitating around the extremes
of light vs. darkness and cheerful vs. sulky. These qualities are respectively
embodied by Maltby and Braxton, two competing authors. After they both
fell by the wayside owing to two unsuccessful books, the narrator – a fic-
tional double of Beerbohm himself – encounters Maltby in Lucca, who tells


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Paolo Bugliani, Diminishing Figures



him about an odd incident that happened to him during a country-house
party, many years before his downfall. Invited by the Duchess of Devon-
shire to spend a weekend in the countryside, Maltby, who had maliciously
persuaded the aristocratic lady not to involve Braxton, would be haunted
by a simulacrum of his rival, typically rendered through the topos of the
mirror:

         No one was there. Yet this I knew: Stephen Braxton had just looked
      over my shoulder. I had seen the reflection of his face beside mine
      – craned forward to the mirror. I had met his eyes. (Beerbohm 1966:
      68-69)

      This strange meeting does not prevent Maltby from accepting his so-
cial commitment as «Literature’s Ambassador» (ibid.) at the Duchess’s res-
idence. Yet the soirée turns out a complete failure, as he utterly disappoints
her plan to have a fashionable man of letters to lionize among her guests.
When Braxton re-appears in Maltby’s bedroom, «[h]is body made not the
least furrow along the bed» (ibid.: 76) and his image «wasn’t tangible», al-
though «realistic». In short, the rival author «wasn’t real» (ibid.) After this
dreadful night, the ghost of Braxton became a sort of mischievous polter-
geist causing many mishaps to Maltby. The ghost would stop his malevo-
lent tricks only when Maltby left the country house, in a sort of desperate
race:

         I did but clutch my hat from beneath the seat and hurry distraught
      from the aisle, out of the porch, into the open air. Whither? To what
      goal? I didn’t reason. I merely fled – like Orestes; fled like an automaton
      along the path we had come by. And was followed? Yes, yes, glancing
      back across my shoulder, I saw that brute some twenty yards behind
      me, gaining on me. (Beerbohm 1966: 88)

      This time, then, the encounter seems to be marked by a peculiarly de-
humanizing quality that contrasts with Beerbohm’s more generally humor-
ous bonhomie. The most striking feature of the tale, though, is the effect
that such a haunting weekend produced. After the event, Maltby decides to
go incognito and wander around Europe to forget his loss of respectability
within the aristocratic world. He thus ends up writing a novel about sub-
urban life, a very different work from the one whereby he had originally
gained the sympathy of the aristocratic reader. On the other hand, Braxton
authors a «savage indictment of the British aristocracy» (ibid.: 93), perhaps


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as a form of retaliation for not having been invited to Keeble by the Duchess.
      The story comes to a close with a sort of witty and comical apologue
that tones down the harshness of the rivalry between the two authors. This
apologue is also tinged with a baffling note of humour as the reader un-
derstands that, despite his attempt to distance himself from the aristocratic
world that had rejected him, Maltby finally marries his «padrona di casa-
»in Lucca, a certain «Contessa Adriano-Rizzoli», a «lineal descendant […]
of the Emperor Hadrian» (ibid.: 94).

      7. When compared to “Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton”, Beer-
bohm’s “Enoch Soames” – which first appeared in The Century Magazine in
May 1916, a few months after Henry James’s death – seems more profound,
being symptomatic of the persistence of the Decadent short story at the be-
ginning of the new century and also revolving around a character that is a
direct descendant of James’s Vawdrey and Doyne. Yet, despite the some-
what subtler architecture, its dry humour strongly reminds of the Maltby/
Braxton vaudevillist story. The writer-ghost in it, the eponymous Enoch
Soames, is cast with manifestly laughable traits in accordance with Beer-
bohm’s «art of satirizing, lambasting, insulting with impeccable decorum»
(Lopate 2015: xii). A Decadent poet and the author of two utterly ignored
collections, Soames is portrayed as a writer who is highly committed to
his ideal of Art and who is endlessly hovering around his more successful
colleagues, from whom he gets neither approval nor recognition.
      Soames seems to objectify a parody of the Decadent writer, a fig-
ure that, at the time Beerbohm was focusing on this story, was already
a faint dream. The narrator, who is again a spokesperson for Beerbohm
himself, provides a fitting account of this odd character, who stands out
as a sort of unrealistic macchietta, embodying the stereotypes of bohemian
poètes maudits in his decrepit paltry demeanour of «a stooping, sham-
bling person, rather tall, very pale» (Beerbohm 1966: 6). Such a colourless
simulacrum of an author, when confronted with more successful ‘people
from the Nineties’, withdraws into an attitude of haughty indifference
that makes him look like a «dumb animal» (ibid.: 7). His existence is in-
extricably bound up with the painful awareness of not being part of the
celebrated group of writers that animated what, in his book published in
1911, W. G. Blaikie-Murdoch called The Renaissance of the Nineties. Max
the-fictionalized-author asks his friend William Rothenstein – another
historical connection in a short story otherwise characterized by a flashy
fantastic quality – about that queer character, wondering why Rothen-
stein had refused to paint him:


                                                                                117
Paolo Bugliani, Diminishing Figures



         ‘Why were you so determined not to draw him?’ I asked.
         ‘Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn’t exist?’
         ‘He is dim,’ I admitted. But my mot juste fell flat. Rothenstein
      repeated that Soames was non-existent. (Beerbohm 1966: 9)

      As the tale unfolds, we understand that Soames was also allegedly
excluded from Holbrook Jackson’s influential The Eighteen Nineties (1913),
a book where Beerbohm had been hailed in a chapter tellingly entitled
“The Incomparable Max”. The diegetic versions of Rothenstein and Jack-
son assess Soames in a negative way, indeed almost like a non-entity, as
the emphasis on his paleness and dimness seem to suggest.
      A dramatic change occurs after many years, when the narrator meets
Soames in a restaurant and they begin a conversation that touches upon
a vexed issue in literary studies, i.e. «neglect [and] failure» (Beerbohm
1966: 23). Overhearing the gloomy remarks of a rather disenchanted So-
ames is «a tall, flashy, rather Mephistophelean man» (ibid.: 21) who, in a
Faustian twist, proposes to bring Soames forward in time to 1997, in order
to allow him to see what posterity remembers of him, via a canonic check
in a literary encyclopedia. The result is a comical redefinition of Soames’s
existence carried out by Beerbohm himself:

         Fr. egzarmpl, a riter ov th time, naimd Max Beerbohm, hoo woz
      stil alive in th twentieth senchri, rote a stauri in wich e pautraid an
      immajinari karrakter kauld “Enoch Soames” – a thurd-rait poit hoo
      beleevz imself a grate jeneus an maix a bargin with the Devvl in
      auder ter no wot posterriti thinx ov im! It iz a sumwot labud satire
      but not without vallu az showing hou seriusli the young men ov th
      aiteen-ninetiz took themselvz. Nou that the littreri profeshn haz bin
      auganized az a department of public servis, our riters hav found
      their levvl an hav lernt ter doo their dutu without thort ov th morro.
      (Beerbohm 1966: 36)

      Even in this futuristic hotchpotch language, Beerbohm confirms his
reputation as a witty observer of the literary scene. If Soames is only a
figment of Beerbohm’s imagination, the Faust-Mephistopheles framework
conveys a sense of the final devaluation of the figure of the author at large,
now – that is, in the early 1910s – even incapable of asserting his own ex-
istence and selling his soul to the Devil only to be reminded of his artistic
failure and existential void. The metamorphosis reaches its climax in the
last passages of the story, when a dejected narrator thinks about his unfor-



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tunate friend and provides a final, sympathetic portrait of him:

       An authentic, guaranteed, proven ghost, but – only a ghost, alas!
     Only that. In his first visit, Soames was a creature of flesh and blood,
     whereas the creatures into whose midst he was projected were but
     ghosts, I take it – solid, palpable, vocal, but unconscious and automatic
     ghosts, in a building that was itself an illusion. (Beerbohm 1966: 42)

      The whole fin de siècle could be said to become a swirling kaleidoscope
of spectral presences consisting in fictionalized authors, automata able to
write in the dark, revenants protecting private papers and, eventually,
Decadent poets who thrive on the subtle line between fact and fiction. The
idea of the author’s fading, if read under this lens, should then be seen as
less of a rupture than Barthes’ seminal essay would suggest.




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Paolo Bugliani, Diminishing Figures



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                                      The author
      Paolo Bugliani

     Paolo Bugliani is a Tenure-Track Lecturer in English at the Universi-
ty of Rome “Tor Vergata”. He has been postdoctoral researcher and ad-
junct professor at the University of Pisa, and Visiting Scholar at the Oxford
Centre for Life Writing (Wolfson college). His main research area is the



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study of the representation of the self in literary nonfiction, with particular
attention to the Early Modern, Romantic and Modernist periods. During
his post-doctoral years at the University of Pisa he was also active in the
study of Anglo-Italian and Anglo-French literary relations in the late 18th
and early 19th centuries. While at Oxford he started a project on the legacy
of Romanticism on Modernist writers.

     Email: paolo.bugliani@gmail.com



                                The article
     Date sent: 31/03/2022
     Date accepted: 31/07/2022
     Date published: 30/11/2022



                        How to cite this article
       Bugliani, Paolo, “Diminishing Figures: Spectral Simulacra of Authors
in Henry James’s and Max Beerbohm’s Decadent Short Stories”, Entering
the Simulacra World, Eds. A. Ghezzani - L. Giovannelli - F. Rossi - C. Savet-
tieri, Between, XII.24 (2022): 103-123, www.betweenjournal.it




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