Enoch Soames

About Enoch Soames

Enoch Soames by Max Beerbohm is a 1919 a satirical and uncanny literary tale of failed authorship, reputation, futurity, vanity, occult bargaining and the terrible wish to know one's posterity. Ideal for readers interested in Edwardian wit, literary style, social comedy, parody, self-conscious narration and the art of elegant comic prose, it shows Beerbohm's distinctive balance of polish, irony and humane mischief.

Genre: Parody and Satire Fiction

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Why Read Enoch Soames?

Enoch Soames is worth reading because it is one of Beerbohm's most haunting and ingenious literary tales. Its premise is comic and uncanny at once: a minor, unsuccessful writer longs to know how posterity will remember him, and the desire leads into a supernatural bargain. Beerbohm turns the anxiety of authorship into a story about time, reputation, vanity and the awful possibility of being remembered only as a footnote.

Readers who enjoy literary satire will find the tale especially sharp. Soames is ridiculous, but Beerbohm does not treat him with simple cruelty. The failed writer's hunger for recognition is comic because it is vain, yet it is also painfully recognisable. Anyone who writes, performs or hopes to leave a trace can understand the temptation to look ahead and discover the verdict. Beerbohm makes that temptation absurd, eerie and sad.

The story also works as a brilliant piece of meta-fiction. It plays with the future, literary scholarship, libraries, names and the instability of reputation. Its wit depends partly on the reader's awareness that fiction itself can create the posterity it pretends to predict. Modern readers continue to enjoy Enoch Soames because it feels both Edwardian and strangely modern in its self-consciousness. For EBTA readers, it is an essential Beerbohm title: concise, polished, funny, melancholy and memorable as a fantasy about the costs of wanting to be known.