A supernatural anniversary today, for at precisely 2.10pm on 3 June 1997, an apparition appeared in the British Museum’s reading room, just as Max Beerbohm had said it would in 1916 — the shade of Enoch Soames, who had once done a deal with the devil…
“About a dozen” people had gathered in the old, round reading room that day, according to one source, and saw a man exactly as Beerbohm had described him in Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties, which appeared in The Century Magazine in 1916.
Set in 1897, it was collected in a 1919 book, Seven Men, and told of an unsuccessful poet, for who Beerbohm feels sorry. He reads some of the man’s work, including one which shows that Soames has an interest in diabolism.
One day, Beerbohm runs into Soames in a Greek Street restaurant, the Vingtième, sitting near “a tall, flashy, rather Mesphistophelian man…”
Nonetheless, they allow him to introduce himself. He is a man of wealth and taste…
He offers Soames a “pleasant … little deal”. Literary fame sometimes takes a while to arrive, and he can arrange for Soames to be in the British Museum Reading Room on 3 June 1997, to look in the catalogue and see what has become of his reputation. He will then magically return to the restaurant that evening. There is, though, of course, a price:
Some of those who read Beerbohm’s tale during the 20th century thought they’d head to the Reading Room that day just in case. One of them, photographer Allan Hailstone, took a camera:
The spectre appeared at 2.10pm exactly, the precise moment he had vanished from Beerbohm’s pages, emerging from the stacks and going directly to the catalogue marked ‘SNOOD to SOBOS’. Leafing through, he found just one mention of his name, on a slip of paper, fixed with tape
The tragedy of Soames was complete. His slim volume, Fungoids, had sold three copies in his lifetime, and now, here he was, his soul sold, eternity in hell awaiting him, to find that he only existed in a short story published 81 years earlier.
Well, obviously. He was a fictional character. The question is: how the hell did he get there, on that day, to be seen by the gathered faithful? The answer may lie in the authorship of this article, published later in 1997:
It’s by Raymond Teller, “the shorter, quieter half of the noir comedy magic team Penn & Teller” — a man who had, as many of us do, a favourite teacher in his youth…
Thirty-four and a half years ago I was sitting in a nearly empty high school classroom in Philadelphia under the spell of my English teacher and drama coach, D. G. Rosenbaum. I idolized Mr. Rosenbaum (or “Rosey,” as we Drama Society brats called him). He had a dark, resonant voice. He had a widow’s peak and a moustache and goatee that made him look like Mephistopheles; he hinted that his ancestors were Scottish warlocks. He wore trim black suits, blood-red vests, and pince-nez. He smoked black cigarettes with gold tips, and made them vanish by sleight of hand when the principal was nearby. Rosey knew psychoanalysis. He quoted Aristotle, Kenneth Burke, and Ezra Pound in everyday conversation. He ordered his milkshakes spiked with raw eggs.
One afternoon, Rosenbaum read them ‘Enoch Soames’, and Teller realised that
anyone in the Round Reading Room of the British Museum at ten past two on June 3, 1997, would be able to verify Beerbohm’s memoir, and see an authentic, guaranteed, proven ghost.
It was remarkable, though, that the library and its catalogue were still there. They had been scheduled to depart for new premises on the Euston Road years before.
Anyway, Teller was one of those who’d gathered, speaking to some of his fellow seekers. As Allan Hailstone — who got the only visual evidence that the incident ever happened — says, “I consider myself lucky to have heard his voice.”
Was he merely an observer, though? His Atlantic article skirts around the issue, that mention of ‘homework’ coming closest to a claim of responsibility. In 2012, however, Esquire did a long piece on him, and mentioned that day…
And all the while, Teller watched with a small smile on his face. He didn’t tell anyone that he might have looked through hundreds of pages in casting books before he had found the perfect actor. He didn’t tell anyone that he might have visited Angels & Bermans, where he had found just the right soft black hat and gone through countless gray waterproof capes. He didn’t tell anyone that he might have had an inside friend who helped him stash the actor and his costume behind a hidden door in the stacks. Even when Teller later wrote about that magical afternoon for The Atlantic, he didn’t confess his role. He never has. “Taking credit for it that day would be a terrible thing — a terrible, terrible thing,” Teller says. “That’s answering the question that you must not answer.”
Well, whoever did it must have had a penchant for planning elaborate ruses, a flair for performance, and the faith that if you put on a show, people will be there to see it… Ah, well. I suppose we’ll never know.
