НАШАТА БИБЛИОТЕКА: WILLIAM BECKFORD "Vathek"

 Д-Р ИЛИЯНА БЕНИНА   Д-Р НИКОЛА БЕНИН

Този роман на Бекфорд, преведен от Самюъл Хенли, е написан първоначално на френски, когато авторът е на 21 години. Написан е на френски език в началото на 1782 г., а след това е преведен на английски от преподобния Самюъл Хенли, в който вид е публикуван за първи път през 1786 г. Това е историята на халиф Ватек, чието око може да убие с един поглед, който сключва договор с Дявола, Еблис. Халиф Ватек е разпуснат и покварен, жаден за знания. Когато мистериозният Гяур му предлага безгранични съкровища и несравнима сила, той е готов да пожертва своя бог, живота на невинни деца и собствената си душа, за да задоволи манията си. Необикновеното пътешествие на Ватек до подземния дворец Еблис и ужасяващата съдба, която го очаква там, е завладяваща история за магия и ориенталска фантазия, внезапно насилие и покварена любов, чиято смесица от морална басня, гротескна комедия и въздействаща красота не се поддава на класификация.

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

WILLIAM BECKFORD

Vathek

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

ROGER LONSDALE

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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

VATHEK

WILLIAM BECKFORD was born, probably in London, in 1760. On the

death of his father, a famous Lord Mayor of London, in 1770 he

inherited an immense fortune. At the age of nineteen he left for a

tour of Holland, Germany, Italy, and France and over the next forty

years he was often away from England, at times in order to escape

scandal. In 1783 he married, and in the following year he became

the Member of Parliament for Wells. In 1786, soon after the birth of

a second child, his wife died. Beckford spent large sums in collecting

works of art and curios and in the building and extravagant

decoration of his mansion, Fonthill Abbey. He died in 1844 from a

severe attack of influenza.

Beckford was eccentric, extravagant, and of undoubted

intellectual ability. Vathek, first written in French at the age of

twenty-one, was translated under his supervision and published in

England in 1786. His other books include Dreams, Waking Thoughts,

and Incidents (1783, revised 1834) and Recollections of an Excursion

to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalka (1835).

ROGER LONSDALE is Professor of English Literature at the University of

Oxford, and a Fellow of Balliol College. His publications include Dr

Charles Burney: A Literary Biography (1965), The Poems of Gray,

Collins and Goldsmith (1696), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-

Century Verse (1984), and Eighteeenth-Century Women Poets: An

Oxford Anthology (1989).

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

NOTE ON THE TEXT

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

A CHRONOLOGY OF WILLIAM BECKFORD

VATHEK

EXPLANATORY NOTES

APPENDIX I. Prefaces to Vathek

APPENDIX II. Account of Vathek from d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque

Orientale (1697)

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INTRODUCTION

I

THE long and extravagant career of the author of Vathek would

surely have impressed Samuel Johnson as a notable and sustained

illustration of what his Imlac had called (in his own very different

‘oriental’ tale) ‘that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly

upon life’. The son of a famous radical Member of Parliament for the

City of London (and twice its Lord Mayor), inheriting at the age of

nine his father’s huge income from his West Indian plantations,

‘England’s wealthiest son’ (as Byron called him) was to be driven

from England in his early twenties after a scandal over an

adolescent boy, to wander restlessly round Europe for a number of

years, to return to virtual ostracism by respectable society, to

become a celebrated and fastidious collector of books and paintings,

to publish some brilliant travel books, and to build at prodigious

expense the most famous if least substantial of his monuments, the

huge Gothic edifice known as Fonthill Abbey, which was to collapse

three years after Beckford sold it in 1822 for £300,000. Beckford

himself survived until 1844.

Inevitably Vathek, written in French in 1782 when Beckford was

twenty-one, has often been considered as merely one more

manifestation of a brilliant but baffling personality. The story of its

origins and publication is a bizarre episode almost as strange as the

tale itself; and the difficulty of attaching any clear meaning or

satiric purpose to Vathek has also tended to force its readers back on

the author himself for enlightenment. What is known about the boy

after the early death of his father can easily come to seem a

preparation for Vathek. There is plenty of evidence of the rapid

growth of his escapist longings for the exotic and beautiful,

especially the oriental. John Lettice, his tutor, had to force him at

the age of thirteen to burn a ‘splendid heap of oriental drawings

etc.’, but Beckford’s appetite for such reading matter as the Arabian

Nights and its imitators, for the more substantial imaginative

literature which he read voraciously, as well as for any works

concerned with the sadistic exploits of famous despots of all ages,

remained irrepressible. An important influence on the boy was

Alexander Cozens, his Russian-born and widely travelled drawingmaster, who encouraged Beckford’s exotic interests and who became

the recipient of a remarkable series of rhapsodic letters in his pupil’s

adolescence and early manhood. An influence of a different sort

may be attributed to his possessive and autocratic mother, with her

Calvinistic leanings: Vathek itself, both in its defiant, over-insistent,

sometimes childish ridicule of all religion, and in the unexpected

power and conviction with which the Caliph’s final damnation is

represented, may embody a complex reaction to her.

Beckford soon became an author. In Switzerland in 1777 he

wrote The Long Story (published in 1930 as The Vision), an

extraordinary if somewhat indigestible achievement for a seventeen-

year-old boy, compounded of spectacular Alpine scenery, Beckford’s

apparent interest in some local occultist philosophers, and his own

unusually powerful and fertile imagination. Other tales, still largely

unpublished, followed his return to England in 1778, and between

1780 and 1783 he worked spasmodically on translations from the

Arabic manuscripts which had belonged to Edward Wortley

Montagu (now in the Bodleian Library). His own additions to these

tales (discussed at length by Professor Parreaux)1

 reveal the

characteristic alternation in Beckford of moods of longing for

secluded, prelapsarian innocence and the indulgence of sexual and

sadistic fantasy.

The young Beckford was always claiming for himself an amoral,

childish innocence: ‘I am like one of those plants which bloom in a

sequestered crevice of the rocks, and which but few are destined to

discover’, he wrote at the age of twenty.2

 In April 1781 he wrote to

Lady Hamilton: ‘I fear I shall never be ... good for anything in this

world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens,

collecting old Japan, and writing a journey to China or the moon.’3

In October 1781 he pleaded with the Countess Rosenberg: ‘Don’t

call me illustre ami and homme unique. I’m still in my cradle! Spare

the delicacy of my infantile ears. Leave me to scamper on verdant

banks—all too ready, alas, to crumble, but rainbow-tinted and

flower-strewn.’4

 Inevitably the escapist was in constant danger of

collision with the real world. His hostess in Naples during his Grand

Tour in 1780–1, Lady Hamilton, horrified to learn of a homosexual

entanglement in Venice, pursued him with well-intentioned advice:

‘infamy, eternal infamy (my Soul freezes when I write the word)

attends the giving way to the soft alluring of a criminal passion.’5

Back in England, Beckford found his family and friends concerned

about his conduct and planning an illustrious political career for

him. Ignoring such expectations and the conventions of English

society for as long as possible, Beckford was before long involved in

two complex relationships. By the summer of 1781 Louisa Beckford,

the wife of his cousin Peter, was in love with him and, by the

following autumn, Beckford himself was passionately attracted to

William Courtenay, the thirteen-year-old son of Lord Courtenay.

The later months of 1781 were therefore a curiously intense

period in Beckford’s life, marked by emotional entanglements and a

confrontation between his own irresponsible longings and the

responsibilities carried by his wealth and social position. MidSeptember 1781 brought celebrations at Fonthill of almost oriental

magnificence to mark his coming of age. But the event which has

always seemed most closely related to the conception of Vathek was

the houseparty at the old Fonthill House at the following Christmas,

to which Louisa Beckford and her sisters, some boys under their

tutor Samuel Henley, William Courtenay, Alexander Cozens, and

other guests were invited. Music was performed by famous singers,

and the contribution of Philip de Loutherbourg, who had designed

scenery, lighting and other theatrical effects for Garrick at Drury

Lane, is also evident in Beckford’s own, no doubt exaggerated,

memories of this occasion, contained in a note dated 9 December

1838:

Immured we were ‘au pied de la lettre’ for three days following

—doors and windows so strictly closed that neither common day

light nor common place visitors could get in or even peep in—

care worn visages were ordered to keep aloof—no sunk-in

mouths or furroughed foreheads were permitted to meet our eye.

Our société was extremely youthful and lovely to look upon.…

The solid Egyptian Hall looked as if hewn out of a living rock—

the line of apartments and apparently endless passages extending

from it on either side were all vaulted—an interminable stair

case, which when you looked down it—appeared as deep as the

well in the pyramid—and when you looked up—was lost in

vapour, led to suites of stately apartments gleaming with marble

pavements—as polished as glass—and gawdy ceilings.… Through

all these suites—through all these galleries—did we roam and

wander—too often hand in hand—strains of music swelling forth

at intervals.… Sometimes a chaunt was heard—issuing, no one

could devine from whence—innocent affecting sounds—that stole

into the heart with a bewitching languour and melted the most

beloved the most susceptible of my fair companions into tears.

Delightful indeed were these romantic wanderings—delightful

the straying about this little interior world of exclusive happiness

surrounded by lovely beings, in all the freshness of their early

bloom, so fitted to enjoy it. Here, nothing was dull or vapid—

here, nothing ressembled in the least the common forms and

usages, the ‘train-train’ and routine of fashionable existence—all

was essence—the slightest approach to sameness was here

untolerated—monotony of every kind was banished. Even the

uniform splendour of gilded roofs—was partially obscured by the

vapour of wood aloes ascending in wreaths from cassolettes

placed low on the silken carpets in porcelain salvers of the richest

japan. The delirium of delight into which our young and fervid

bosoms were cast by such a combination of seductive influences

may be conceived but too easily. Even at this long, sad distance

from these days and nights of exquisite refinements, chilled by

age, still more by the coarse unpoetic tenor of the present

disenchanting period—I still feel warmed and irradiated by the

recollections of that strange, necromantic light which

Loutherbourg had thrown over what absolutely appeared a realm

of Fairy, or rather, perhaps, a Demon Temple deep beneath the

earth set apart for tremendous mysteries—and yet how soft, how

genial was this quiet light. Whilst the wretched world without lay

dark, and bleak, and howling, whilst the storm was raging against

our massive walls and the snow drifting in clouds, the very air of

summer seemed playing around us—the choir of low-toned

melodious voices continued to sooth our ear, and that every sense

might in turn receive its blandishment tables covered with

delicious viands and fragrant flowers—glided forth, by the aid of

mechanism at stated intervals, from the richly draped, and amply

curtained recesses of the enchanted precincts. The glowing haze

investing every object, the mystic look, the vastness, the intricacy

of this vaulted labyrinth occasioned so bewildering an effect that

it became impossible for any one to define—at the moment—

where he stood, where he had been, or to whither he was

wandering—such was the confusion—the perplexity so many

illuminated storys of infinitely varied apartments gave rise to. It

was, in short, the realization of romance in its most extravagant

intensity. No wonder such scenery inspired the description of the

Halls of Eblis.1

II

Beckford later stated more than once that Vathek was written in

immediate response to the imaginative and emotional stimulation of

the events at Fonthill at Christmas 1781. After the description just

quoted, he added: ‘I composed Vathek immediately upon my return

to town thoroughly embued with all that passed at Fonthill during

this voluptuous festival.’ After a similar account, he noted again: ‘I

wrote V immediately upon my return to London at the close of this

romantic villegiatura.’2

 Since he was back in London by January

1782, the date of composition might seem to be unambiguously

established. Elsewhere he noted that ‘The fit I laboured under when

I wrote Vathek lasted two days and a night.—W.B.’1

 Slightly longer

was allowed in an account recorded by Cyrus Redding, according to

whom Beckford stated: ‘You will hardly credit how closely I could

apply myself to study when young. I wrote “Vathek” in the French,

as it now stands, at twenty-two [sic] years of age. It cost me three

days and two nights of labour.’2

If the first draft of Vathek in French was written with unusual

rapidity, it seems clear that Beckford then spent some months

writing a full version. His unpublished ‘Histoire de Darianoc’ was

written in obvious haste in cryptic, fragmentary and ungrammatical

French, in contrast with the fair copy of the opening pages which

also survives. The possibility that Vathek was drafted in a similar

manner seems to have been confirmed by Professor Parreaux’s

recent discovery of a fragmentary draft of passages which occur

towards the end of the tale.3

 The first dated reference to Vathek is in

a letter to Henley on 1 May 1782: ‘The Tale of the Caliph Vathec

goes on surprisingly.’4

 At about the same time, it may be assumed,

Beckford told Henley: ‘My Caliph advances in his journey to

Persepolis, alias Istekar; but want of time, I believe, will force me to

stop his immediate proceedings.’ But by 15 May 1782, when he left

for the Continent, Vathek was almost certainly complete. His friend

Lady Craven had read it by 29 May and thought it ‘very fine,

horribly fine’.1

 At about the same time Beckford wrote to her: ‘quel

Calife—pardonnez ma vanité; j’avoue que je suis un peu fier de son

voyage—je l’ai même damné avec assez de magnificence’.2

 Further

revision lay ahead in the various French and English editions, but

Vathek was basically conceived and written between January and

mid-May 1782.

From this point an increasingly significant figure in the history of

Vathek is the Revd. Samuel Henley, formerly a professor at William

and Mary College in Virginia, who had returned to a career as

schoolmaster and private tutor after the American Revolution.

Henley’s scholarly interest in oriental literature inspired Beckford’s

confidence and he came to rely heavily on the older man’s

willingness to assist his literary enterprises. Henley was not,

however, meant at first to be the translator of Vathek into English.

On 15 September 1782 Beckford’s tutor, John Lettice, began a

translation which breaks off less than half-way through, a clumsy,

literal version which nevertheless usefully indicates the nature of

the French text at this early stage. But Beckford turned eventually to

the more accomplished Henley. Writing from Geneva on 18

November 1783, Beckford referred to Henley’s agreement to

translate Vathek, ‘the only production of mine which I am not

ashamed of, or with which I am not disgusted’. He also promised to

‘bring you some Caliphs not unworthy to succeed your beloved

Vathec’—a reference to his progress with the ‘Episodes’, the

additional tales which he planned to add to Vathek shortly before

the final catastrophe. Working on the ‘Episodes’ in Paris, London,

and at Fonthill, he inquired regularly about the translation of

Vathek: ‘I suppose by this time you are deep in the halls of

damnation, hear the melancholy voice of Eblis in the dead of night,

& catch moonlight glimpses of Nouronihar. I long eagerly to read

your translation’ (19 May 1784).

In June 1784 Henley promised a complete transcript of the

translation, but it was apparently not until early 1785 that Beckford

began to see it. The intervening scandal over William Courtenay had

no doubt distracted him. In a letter of about 26 February 1785 he

wrote to Henley: ‘Your translation had all the spirit of the Caliphs &

their daemons. I long for the continuation.’ On 21 March he wrote

even more warmly in a passage which may be quoted as some

indication of his approval of the English translation:

You make me proud of Vathec. The blaze just at present is so

overpowering that I can see no faults; but you may depend upon

my hunting diligently after them.

Pray send the continuation… the original when first born scarce

gave me so much rapture as yr

 translation.

Were I well & in spirits I should run wild among my rocks and

forests, telling stones, trees & labourers how gloriously you have

succeeded. My imagination is again on fire.

Beckford later made some changes to the translation and his

letters with Henley discuss the handling of specific episodes in

the novel and material for the annotation which it had been

decided Henley should provide. Beckford’s superior knowledge is

always evident, as he advises the sometimes puzzled Henley

about various scholarly sources for oriental material; but it was

undoubtedly Henley who wrote most of the extremely elaborate

notes which were to appear in 1786. Such was Henley’s zeal that

in late April or early May 1785 (misdated 13 April 1786 in the

Morrison Catalogue) Beckford had to restrain him:

Upon my word you pay Vathec much more attention than he

deserves, & do you not think we shall usher him too pompously

into the world with a dissertation on his parts & machinery?

Notes are certainly necessary, & the diss[ertation] I myself should

very much approve, but fear the world might imagine I fancied

myself the author, not of an Arabian tale, but an Epic poem.

Beckford also urged on Henley ‘a light, easy style, that Misses, &c.,

may not be scared—for, after all, a poor Arabian story teller can

only venture to say Virginibus Puerisque canto’. Significantly,

Henley’s enthusiasm was becoming proprietorial.

In July 1785 Beckford submitted to family pressure and left for

Switzerland, leaving the English translation of Vathek with Henley.

He was still working on the ‘Episodes’ and on 9 February 1786

wrote to Henley to stress unambiguously that Vathek was not to be

published without them. He expected they would take about a year

to complete. Henley had perhaps been pressing for the separate

publication of the tale for which he had laboured so hard but

Beckford was firm: ‘The anticipation of so principal a tale as that of

the Caliph would be tearing the proudest feather from my turban.’

He planned to publish the complete French text first, to be followed

by Henley’s annotated English version, which Beckford assured him,

‘I doubt not, will be received with the honors due to so valuable a

morsel of orientalism.’ Beckford wrote again on 1 August 1786. He

was awaiting the manuscript of Henley’s ‘notes & illustrations’ to

Vathek, but the death of his wife had depressed him and he had not

completed the ‘Episodes’. There was no hope of Vathek’s publication

during the coming winter. He again emphasized: ‘I would not have

him on any account come forth without his companions.’

Such instructions were already futile, as Beckford soon learned,

for Henley’s English translation had in fact been published in

London on 7 June 1786. Whether or not we believe Henley’s later

claim that he had not received Beckford’s letters forbidding

publication, it is possible to feel some sympathy for his desire to see

his labours in print. In a letter to Beckford’s legal adviser, Thomas

Wildman, on 23 October 1786,1

 Henley defended his action on the

grounds of Beckford’s enthusiasm for his translation, especially in

contrast to his disapproval of Lettice’s earlier attempt. Beckford ‘not

only supervised and corrected my manuscript, but retained the

variations and additions I had made’. Even so, Henley was clearly

dishonest: just how dishonest is indicated by an inscription in a

copy of his translation in the Bibliothèque Nationale: ‘From the

Author/Revd

 S Henley.’ Beckford’s name was not mentioned in this

translation, Henley’s ambiguous preface implying that the work was

a translation from a genuine Arabic original. Henley’s proprietorial

attitude was revealed again when he replied to the suggestion by

the antiquary Stephen Weston (Gentleman’s Magazine, lvii (Jan.

1787), 55) that the tale had been ‘composed as a text for the

purpose of giving to the publick the information contained in the

notes’. Henley’s reply in February 1787 (p. 120) does nothing to

suggest that the work was not a translation from the Arabic or that

it was not the entire concern of one man, the editor himself.

Beckford, who was in Lausanne, retaliated as best he could. Until

recently an ingenious hypothesis has been accepted according to

which Beckford was forced to commission a clumsy retranslation of

Henley’s English into French, and that this was the text printed at

Lausanne in late November or early December 1786 (with 1787 on

the title-page). Professor Parreaux’s careful investigation finally

disposed of this theory in 1960. The Lausanne text undoubtedly

represents Beckford’s own French text, from a manuscript which he

must have had with him, in a slightly earlier state than that

translated by Henley. Before publication this text was corrected by

Jean David Levade, according to his own statement. None of

Henley’s notes appear in this edition and Beckford’s authorship is

established in the prefatory note. At the end of June 1787 an

extensively revised version of the French text, in which sentences

were made shorter and less complex and the style generally was

lightened, was published at Paris (a second issue can be dated 4

September 1787). The evidence suggests that this edition was

supervised by François Verdeil, Beckford’s doctor who was

accompanying him on his travels. The revision was no doubt

basically Beckford’s own but Verdeil’s advice may have been

important: at the same time Verdeil was probably responsible for

the many errors and defects of this edition, especially in the notes, a

selection from Henley’s edition now being translated for the first

time.

III

While the publication of Vathek ended in confusion and

disappointment for Beckford, it is not true to say, as do Chapman,

Parreaux, and other writers, that the publication of his youthful

masterpiece passed virtually unnoticed in England. Indeed, since it

is central to Professor Parreaux’s argument that Beckford was in

revolt against the social and literary conventions of his time, which

were unsympathetic to his genius, the actual reception of the tale is

worth summarizing.1

Vathek was in fact reviewed at length, and on the whole

enthusiastically, in at least five of the leading literary journals. No

reviewer took seriously Henley’s claim that the tale was a

translation from the Arabic, but its literary affiliations were readily

apparent. The Monthly Review in May 1787 (lxxvi. 450) stated

calmly enough that Vathek ‘preserves the peculiar character of the

Arabian Tale, which is not only to overstep nature and probability,

but even to pass beyond the verge of possibility, and suppose things,

which cannot be for a moment conceived’. It was ‘written with

spirit, fancy, and humour, and will afford much entertainment to

those who are fond of this kind of reading’. The notes, ‘which are of

a character entirely different from that of the work’, contained

‘many learned quotations, elegant criticisms, and judicious remarks’.

The Critical Review in July 1786 (lxii. 37–42) had speculated, as did

other reviews, about the nature of our pleasure in the supernatural.

It went on to detect in Vathek ‘the acute turns of modern

composition, so easily learned in the school of Voltaire’, but thought

that it was told with ‘elegance and spirit’. Its moral was praised as

applicable to ‘every climate and religion’. The only criticism of the

notes was that they were ‘too short’.

The European Magazine in August 1786 (x. 102–4), after

congratulating the author on his knowledge of eastern customs and

his handling of ‘the marvellous’, praised Vathek for its superiority to

genuine Arabian Tales in that it inculcated ‘a moral of the greatest

importance’: i.e. the fate of those who pursue unlawful and immoral

pleasures. The ending was acclaimed as ‘picturesque description,

which more than borders on the sublime’. This writer also suspected

that the tale was of French origin and again praised the notes.

Henry Maty’s A New Review in June and July 1786 (ix. 410–12, x.

33–9) could not have been more enthusiastic: ‘it is not often that

works of real genius appear. Whenever, therefore, a literary comet

visits our hemisphere, it becomes a duty in us to point it out. As a

phenomenon of this sort we regard the history of Vathek.’ The

moral, character portrayal and impressive knowledge of the

manners and customs of the East were praised and the ‘sublime’ was

once more adduced: ‘A machinery, not only new, but wild and

sublime, seizes on the mind, and pervades the whole composition.’

In summary, ‘the author, in the diversities of writing, appears to

display at pleasure the caustick quickness of Voltaire; the easy

sportiveness of Ariosto; the sombrous grotesque of Dante; and the

terrific greatness of Milton’. The reviewer hoped that a favourable

reception would encourage the author ‘to publish the whole suite of

Tales to which Vathek belongs’.

The English Review in September 1786 (viii. 180–4) was alone in

questioning Beckford’s ‘moral’, which the other reviewers gratefully

accepted at face value. This writer first praised the tale for its

characters (‘strongly marked, though carried beyond nature’), its

suitably ‘wild and improbable’ incidents, its use of the supernatural

(‘solemn and awful, though sometimes horrid’), and the ‘bold and

shocking’ catastrophe. The ending was once more ‘striking, and

sometimes sublime’. In objecting to the moral, however, this

reviewer was pointing—even if clumsily, more sensitively than his

colleagues—to the personal implications of the tale for Beckford:

‘Indolence and childishness are represented as the source of

happiness; while ambition and the desire of knowledge, so laudable

and meritorious when properly directed, are painted in odious

colours, and punished as crimes.’

In spite of the praise of the reviewers, the evidence suggests that

Vathek did not at first sell particularly well (the 1809 edition

consists of the unsold sheets of the 1786 edition). In any case, such

praise as it received was inevitably soured for Beckford, if it ever

reached him as he travelled on the Continent, by the unpleasant

circumstances of its publication. A certain ‘A. V.’ paid Beckford a

curious compliment by contributing a long versification in couplets

of the conclusion of the tale to the Gentleman’s Magazine between

January and March 1790 (lx. 69–70, 163–5, 258–9), in the belief

that it was ‘a subject more adapted to Poetry than to Prose’. But

now that his authorship was known, interest in the novel tended all

too easily to turn to gossip about Beckford’s character. Thus, Mrs.

Thrale-Piozzi wrote in her journal on 3 January 1791:

I have been reading Vathek, ‘tis a mad Book to be sure, and

written by a mad Author, yet there is a sublimity about it—

particularly towards the Conclusion.

Mr

 Beckford’s favourite Propensity is all along visible I think;

particularly in the luscious Descriptions given of Gulchenrouz…1

Yet, in one way or another, Vathek was soon exerting a definite

influence on the next literary generation. Henley’s voluminous notes

were quarried by such writers as Isaac D’Israeli (Romances, 1799)

and John Hamilton Reynolds (Sofie, An Eastern Tale, 1814), and the

oriental fantasies of such poets as Southey, Moore, Landor and Barry

Cornwall are also indebted to the tale itself. Novelists in whose

work, to a greater or lesser extent, the influence of Vathek has been

detected, include Benjamin Disraeli (Alroy, 1833), Hawthorne (The

Scarlet Letter, 1850), and Meredith (The Shaving of Shagpat, 1855).

Beckford’s most enthusiastic admirer among the Romantics was

Byron, who referred warmly to Vathek in the final note to The

Giaour (1813) and on other occasions imitated a passage from it and

mentioned Beckford himself in his poetry. Byron’s recorded

conversation bears further testimony to his admiration. A colourful

series of later admirers, including Poe, Mallarmé and Swinburne,

sustained interest in Beckford’s minor masterpiece; and its

popularity is sufficiently indicated by the number of editions in the

later nineteenth century. More recently, the appearance of

unpublished material has helped to increase interest in his life and

writings. The ‘Episodes’ intended for Vathek were translated into

English in 1912; The Long Story was published (as The Vision) in

1930; and a number of translations from Arabic, still unpublished,

were described in full for the first time as recently as 1960 by

Professor Parreaux. Beckford’s correspondence and journals are still

being published, his scope and achievement as a collector

reassessed, and, with the appearance of each mass of new material,

his puzzling character re-examined.

IV

The fascination of Beckford’s inscrutable personality and the

difficulty of relating Vathek securely to contemporary literary

conventions have resulted in a great deal of discussion of the novel

as a manifestation merely of the author’s own psyche. Ultimately,

this approach may be justified, but various comments made by the

early reviewers, as they tried to find their bearings with this strange

tale, can provide guidance in the purely literary consideration of

Vathek. Most of the reviewers, while refusing to believe that Vathek

was a genuine Arabian tale, had no difficulty in relating it to the

Arabian Nights, first translated into English early in the century.

Here was the precedent for wild, extravagant, and sometimes

savage, incidents, super-natural agencies, and exotic settings. The

eighteenth-century reader to some extent rationalized his delight in

the Arabian Nights by telling himself that it was also instructive as a

genuine depiction of Eastern manners and Eastern genius. If this was

not true of the numerous European imitations of the Arabian Nights

which had subsequently appeared in France and England, it is clear

that Vathek impressed its reviewers as markedly superior to the

usual ‘oriental’ imitation. The author’s apparently detailed

knowledge of Eastern manners and customs, his careful attention to

local colour and to what Byron was to praise as the ‘costume’ of the

tale, had no precedent in English. Henley’s elaborate annotation

undoubtedly reinforced this impression; but this was a different

matter from Beckford’s own ability to combine an imaginative entry

into the East with detailed, even if second-hand, knowledge of its

life and literature. (Cf. A New Review, cited above: ‘Perpetual

references to the opinions and doctrines of the Orientals are every

where interwoven with the incidents of the narrative. Traits of

nature are discernible, in every page, through the veil of

associations and habits dissimilar from our own.’)

Equally heartening, of course, to several of the reviewers was the

‘moral’ framework of Beckford’s tale, which seemed to justify its

more bizarre and grotesque incidents. Such didacticism, inevitably

of a more simple-minded character, had been an especial feature of

English ‘oriental’ tales and earlier writers had more than once

similarly described the punishment of unrestrained longings and

aspirations, sometimes reinforced, as were Vathek’s, by defiance of

Mahomet. But the contrast between Vathek and what had preceded

it can be easily emphasized by reference to another literary work

with the same title, the existence of which seems to have been

hitherto unnoticed. This long-forgotten Vathek was a comedy

written in French by the Countess de Genlis and translated into

English in her Theatre of Education by Thomas Holcroft in 1781, only

a year before Beckford’s Vathek was written. This sentimental,

sententious, humourless and didactic drama on the education of the

young Vathek makes clear the chasm between what could so

perfunctorily pass for ‘oriental’ literature at this period and

Beckford’s ability to start from Vathek as an actual historical

personage as described in d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale (1697)

and create around him a world which had its own imaginative

intensity and coherence. Beckford certainly exploited what the

Arabian Nights guaranteed: an escape into an exotic, voluptuous,

sometimes cruel world of fantasy. Yet his treatment of ‘oriental’

elements went beyond the traditional in several ways: at times he

burlesques the world he describes and its literary conventions and at

times he indulges in fantasy more potent and evocatively sensual

than had yet appeared in the English ‘oriental’ imitations. In

addition, Vathek looks ahead in its awareness of the genuine oriental

scholarship which was beginning to appear through such scholars as

Sir William Jones, for example, and which would eventually inhibit

the purely fanciful ‘oriental’ fiction which had been popular for so

long.

To its first reviewers Vathek seemed an admirable imitation of the

genuine Arabian tale, revealing ‘picturesque’ and ‘sublime’

descriptive powers of an unusual kind, while the extravagances

proper to the form were counterbalanced by an emphatic moral and

a convincing knowledge of the East. If there was little to relate it to

the numerous earlier English oriental tales, there was nothing in

Vathek which obliged the reviewers to connect it with contemporary

‘Gothic’ tendencies in the novel. Although later literary historians

have frequently resorted to the assertion that such a relationship

exists, it is not easy to see that Vathek sets out to exploit the

imaginative terror, the suspense or psychological shock tactics

which were entering the English novel at about this time (the most

powerful contributions to the kind were yet to appear, in the novels

of Mrs. Radcliffe and M. G. Lewis). Potential melodrama and horror

are almost invariably undermined and deflated by Beckford’s

detached, urbane, and often comic tone. When Nouronihar pursues

a strange light up a mountain and hears mysterious voices

promising her infinite riches, if she will desert Gulchenrouz for

Vathek, we may seem to be close to the ‘Gothic’; but even here

Beckford is less concerned to exploit the ‘terrific’ possibilities of the

scene than to expound the choice facing Nouronihar. When Carathis

and her companions visit a cemetery and its ghouls, the result is

ludicrously grotesque comedy. The final scenes of the tale are

serious enough, but the sudden sombre power and sustained

intensity of this vision of damnation transcend anything achieved by

the Gothicists.

More instructive is the suspicion of the early reviewers that

Vathek was of French origin. While the English version of the tale

approved by Beckford has its own authority, it is significant that he

did choose to write it in French (which he wrote and spoke with

unusual facility)—a fact which only emphasizes that his real kinship

is with such French writers of ironic oriental tales as Anthony

Hamilton and Voltaire. Two reviewers detected in Vathek the ‘acute

turns’ and ‘caustick quickness’ of Voltaire and parallels and

similarities can be detected, although Beckford’s often gratuitous

comedy does not ultimately seem very close to Voltaire’s purposeful,

penetrating, rational irony. The real clue may be found in what

Voltaire himself told the young Beckford: ‘Je dois tout à votre oncle,

le comte Antoine Hamilton.’ Anthony Hamilton was indeed an

ancestor (if not an uncle) of Beckford, but the literary kinship with

the ironic pseudo-oriental tales which Hamilton wrote early in the

century, supposedly to satirize the vogue for the Arabian Nights and

their imitators at the French court, is even more striking. On 25

April 1782, while Vathek was being completed, Beckford wrote to

Henley: ‘By the bye, my Arabian tales go on prodigiously, & I think

Count Hamilton will smile upon me when we are introduced to each

other in paradice.’ Beckford had a natural affinity with Hamilton’s

witty, ironic tone, his far-fetched and ludicrous episodes, his

fondness for grotesque humour, his juxtapositions of the magnificent

and commonplace, his alternation of evocative and farcical, even

brutal, episodes, and his derisive subversion of conventional

expectations, in such tales as Fleur d’Epine and Les Quatres Facardins.

Many of Beckford’s stylistic effects, his fondness for zeugma and

bathos, the frequent deflationary touches at the end of paragraphs,

the ludicrous hyperboles, as well as much of the comic tone as a

whole, can be related more closely to Hamilton than to any earlier

fiction.

The influence of Hamilton’s opportunistic and casual burlesques

perhaps made it inevitable that the tone of Vathek would not be

consistent and the tale itself not very clearly unified. But beneath

Beckford’s elegant, urbane and lucid prose (not unsuccessfully

imitated in Henley’s slightly more ponderous English), ambiguity

and even uncertainty of a different kind can often be detected. If

Beckford enjoyed burlesquing the conventions and incidents of the

traditional oriental tale and various features of the oriental world

itself, the comic exaggeration cannot conceal strong elements of

private fantasy. Brutal farce, perverse and gratuitous derision of the

aged and pious, grotesque comedy centred around Carathis, childish

sarcasm and cynical irony are strangely mingled with an

imaginative sympathy with Vathek’s sensual and intellectual

aspirations, with Nouronihar’s longings, and with Gulchenrouz’s

amoral innocence. Vathek himself is handled in a number of

different ways in the tale: unrestrained in the indulgence of his

senses and appetites, restless, impatient, and insatiably curious, his

self-importance is frequently comic, his childish exasperation and

fury that of a buffoon. He can be flung like a sack of dates over the

shoulder of one of his Ethiopian women, or appear a majestic and

‘noble’ lover to Nouronihar, can be stung by bees in revenge for his

desecration of Rocnabad or approach a tragic defiance in his

impiety and acceptance of his evil fate, when warned to repent by

the Good Genius.

Beckford wavers between identification with the magnificent

pursuit of forbidden knowledge (treated seriously in The Long Story

in 1777) and self-conscious, Hamiltonian detachment from Vathek’s

predicament, just as some of his descriptions of scenes of oriental

magnificence are strangely interrupted by bawdy farce. And just as

the tone at times seems unsteady and distractingly variable, the

tale’s ‘moral’ is itself ambiguous. It is not enough simply to regard

the supposed lesson—that the indulgence of unrestrained appetites

and the pursuit of forbidden knowledge will be punished by Heaven

—as a perfunctory gesture or parody. Admittedly, most of the

original reviewers accepted it at face value and only one of them

pointed out the other aspect of the ‘lesson’, the recommendation of

Gulchenrouz’s dubious, amoral, childish ‘innocence’ as some kind of

good in itself. The official moral framework is in practice constantly

subverted by the conduct of the tale, for Beckford clearly enjoys

Vathek’s constant excesses and crimes against the pious and sacred.

But his final vision of the lonely damned ultimately succeeds in

fusing Beckford’s sense of his own predicament with the ostensible

message of his story.

Perhaps no more definite meaning should be sought for in Vathek

than is suggested by its role as a vehicle for the imaginative

projection of private fantasy and emotional turmoil, which the

obtrusive comic tone and polished style essay to keep under some

kind of control. Enough has already been said in biographical terms

about the origins of the tale, although it may be repeated that

Beckford himself explicitly related it to the events and setting at the

old Fonthill House, especially the great ‘Egyptian Hall’, at Christmas

1781. Indeed, he was prepared to admit later that real persons were

portrayed in his story, and commentators have not hesitated to

descry aspects of his parents and other members of his circle,

including William Courtenay and Louisa Beckford, in its characters.

Such literal interpretation, whatever its limitations, is perhaps

preferable to Professor Parreaux’s elaborate expansion of the

meaning of Vathek to the point where it becomes a myth of

aristocratic defiance of bourgeois morality in the England of the

Industrial Revolution. If Beckford did come to dislike intensely the

changing world into which he survived (he did not die until 1844),

most of the embittered statements to illustrate that dislike have to

be found at a later period than Vathek. At the age of twenty-one,

Beckford was still ‘basically too irresponsible to write a convincing

myth of the doomed future of irresponsibility’.1

 Most of his defiance

is directed against narrower and more immediate threats to his own

self-indulgence: family disapproval of his extravagant aestheticism

and irresponsibility, his mother’s Methodistical rigour, the

expectation that he embark on a purposeful political career.

Combined or alternating with such defiance, which often seems

childish or gratuitous, is the troubled fantasy which enters the story

with Nouronihar and Gulchenrouz, in which Beckford appears to

identify variously with the perplexities, frustrations and longings of

all three of his main characters. From this point on, the comic tone

is less assured, something close to a genuine apprehension of

unhappiness can be felt, and most of the grotesque comedy is

transferred to Carathis.

Beckford’s elegant, ironic prose may in itself go some of the way

to draw into a workable unity the various elements of youthful

irresponsibility, self-indulgent fantasy, occult speculation and

fastidious orientalism. Yet it is only in the final pages of Vathek that

Beckford’s nervousness at being caught taking his own story

seriously disappears. This vision of damnation in the Halls of the

melancholy Eblis, himself so striking and acceptable a recreation of

Milton’s newly fallen Satan, attains a conviction and unexpected

tragic power (in part the ‘sublimity’ unanimously recognized by the

early reviewers), which will always leave the reader with the

impression that he has been reading a greater book than has in fact

been the case. It remains a remarkable achievement for so youthful

an author, a partial manifestation at least of powers which were

never to be fully revealed in any of the preoccupations of his long

and lonely life: fascinating and yet unsatisfying, hardly more

substantial than the fastidiously assembled and now dispersed

collections of paintings and books, or the fallen tower of Fonthill

Abbey itself.

The young Beckford had always envisaged some grand or

dramatic fate for himself. At the age of seventeen he had asked:

‘What will be my Life? what misfortunes lurk in wait for me? what

Glory?’1

 He wrote a partial answer in his journal some ten years

later: ‘How tired I am of keeping a mask on my countenance. How

tight it sticks—it makes me sore.’ That mask came to present to the

world defensive pride, elaborate self-indulgence, and, at last, cold

cynicism. Vathek, described by Marcel May as ‘songe et confession

d’un Gulchenrouz, récit magnifique et puéril d’un enfant de génie

qui ne voulut point grandir’, had offered one glimpse, and not an

entirely illuminating one, behind the mask. Perhaps Swinburne,

writing on 9 June 1876 to another significant admirer of Vathek,

Stéphane Mallarmé, best described the tantalizing talent of the tale

and, bringing us back as ever to its author, the sad predicament of

the Caliph of Fonthill:

Etre millionnaire et vouloir être poète et ne l’être qu’à moitié,

—se sentir quelque chose comme du génie, qui n’est après tout et

ne sera jamais qu’un à peu près,—réussir presque à trouver le

chemin de l’artiste créateur, puis retomber sur ses richesses, cela

doit faire de la vie d’un poète manqué quelque chose de plus

triste que la salle d’Eblis.1