A discussion about the movie, "Unknown" (directed by Jaume
Collet-Serra with Liam Neeson, Bruno Ganz, Diane Kruger, Quilty and
others), brought other films to my mind, such as Frankenheimer's "Second,"
or Dmytryk's "Mirage," but I couldn't recollect, initially, who was
it that wrote a story about a pact with the devil in
which there was a guy named Nupton, another
called Fulmerford and a writer or a poet - Soames, was
he? Searching about, I finally reached Max Beerbohm's 1919
short-story,* here summarized by Alberto Manguel:
"In Beerbohm's story, set in 1897, Soames, who has sold only three copies
of his book of poems, ''Fungoids,'' makes a pact with the Devil. In exchange for
his ambitious soul, he asks to visit the (British Museum's) Reading Room a
hundred years hence, to see how posterity had judged him. Unfortunately for
Soames, posterity has not judged him at all; posterity has merely ignored him.
In the story, he finds no record of his work in the library's voluminous
catalog, and in a literary history the only mention of his name was a note
describing him as an imaginary character in a Beerbohm story." ** No Fulmerford,
though! And what about Nupton?
According to Beerbohm, T.K Nupton is the scholar who failed to
identify Soames, thereby turning him into a "nobody." Carolyn Kunin
once wrote to Nab-L about Botkin's name, as a mirror image of
“nikto b”, which might be translated “he
would be nobody”. And
there's also a remark by Nabokov
(SO?) about searching for his own name and
stumbling upon "Nobody." However, in SO, there's
Nabokov's 1964 Playboy interview in which
he was asked about what he wanted to accomplish or leave
behind in the future,. Nabokov answered:
"Well, in
this matter of accomplishment, of course, I don't have a 35-year plan or
program, but I have a fair inkling of my literary afterlife. I
have sensed certain hints...With the Devil's connivance, I open a newspaper
of 2063 and in some article on the books page I find:
"Nobody reads Nabokov or Fulmerford today." Awful
question: Who is this unfortunate Fulmerford?"
Beerbohm's report about the "devil's connivance" with a
poet (and its mise-en-abime strategy) might have
haunted Nabokov's time-travels - and with greater success than poor
Enoch Soames's or Fulmerford's.
......................................................................................................................................
wikipedia's plot summary for "Enoch Soames": the story is
narrated by Beerbohm himself; he presents himself as a moderately successful
young English essayist and writer in London during the 1890s. He purports to
relate the fate of a friend of his named Enoch Soames, an utterly obscure,
forgettable, miserable and unsuccessful English writer.Obsessed with the idea
that he was a great author of literature and poetry and keenly curious about his
sure future fame, Soames one day in 1897 makes a contract with the devil to be
able to spend one afternoon (from 2:10 to 7 PM) in the Round Reading Room of the
British Museum library exactly one hundred years in the future, on the 3rd day
of June in the year 1997 CE—just to know what posterity thinks about him and his
work. When he returns, he tells Beerbohm that the only mention of himself he
could find was a scholarly article which mentions (using a phonetic spelling
apparently adopted by the late 20th century) a story by one Max Beerbohm "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!" ("in which he portrayed an imaginary character
called "Enoch Soames"—a third-rate poet who believes himself a great genius and
makes a bargain with the Devil in order to know what posterity thinks of him!").
With characteristic delicacy, Beerbohm quotes the author as saying "It is a
somewhat labud sattire" and adds "And 'labud'—what on earth was that? (To this
day I have never made out that word.)" ...Beerbohm, shocked, denies that he
would ever write such a thing. Soames, before being taken to Hell by the Devil,
scornfully requests that Beerbohm at least try and make people believe that he,
Soames, actually existed. Beerbohm concludes his narrative by calling down the
author of the scholarly article in question for shoddy work; he notes that T.K
Nupton must not have finished reading Beerbohm's story, otherwise he would have
noticed Soames's (through Beerbohm) flawless predictions about the future and
realized the story was not fiction. Beerbohm then notes that Soames had
mentioned his presence in the reading room causing a great stir, and writes "I
assure you that in no period could Soames be anything but dim. The fact that
people are going to stare at him, and follow him around, and seem afraid of him,
can be explained only on the hypothesis that they will somehow have been
prepared for his ghostly visitation. They will have been awfully waiting to see
whether he really would come. And when he does come the effect will of course be
- awful."
** Alberto Manguel ( Sept.1998, NYT) on "The Writers' Wish List"
reports that on " June 3, 1997, a group of literary aficionados gathered in
the Reading Room of the British Library in London to welcome the arrival of
Enoch Soames, a fictional poet in a short story by the English humorist Max
Beerbohm. Perhaps not unexpectedly, he didn't appear [...] It can only be
assumed that, for those of us who awaited his appearance in the British Library,
even his ghost was invisible. So much for the fruits of ambition. "
Wikipedia mentions Teller's "A memory of the nineteen-nineties"
("Being a faithful account of the events of the designated day, when the man who
had disappeared was expected briefly to return") which was published in the
November 1997 in "The Athlantic Monthly" in which he describes what
happened to the people who went to the museum to see if Soames showed
up. "...at 2:10 PM, a person meeting Soames' description appears, and begins
searching through the catalogue and various biographical dictionaries. A few
dozen minutes later, he slips out of sight of the watching Teller and audience,
and disappears."