Vathek and Other Stories

by William Beckford

  Much has been made of the influence of the Christmas party held at Fonthill in 1781 on his next and greatest venture into the eastern tale, Vathek, reproduced in full in this book. Many years later, Beckford told Cyrus Redding that the circumstances of the party, held in the dead of winter of 1781 in the extraordinary Egyptian Hall at Splendens, suffused by the special ‘necromantic’ lighting created by de Loutherbourg, when the young people were on their own away from the critical eyes of their elders, had had a great impact on his imagination and had inspired him with the idea of Eblis or Hell as it appears in Vathek.1 It may be that he was exaggerating its effects just as he exaggerated when he claimed that writing Vathek had only taken him a few days when we know he was working on it throughout the spring of 1782.2

  In fact Vathek shows every sign of a well-crafted work that is most unlikely to have sprung from anyone’s pen for the first time in its full-blown form. It consists of a complex amalgam, the prototype of which we have seen in the Long Story, of well-observed oriental customs (now supported by learned notes) and an atmospheric creation of vivid, exotic scenes. As critics have noted, elements of the comic and burlesque are used at crucial points to provide a paradoxical undertone to moments of high drama. The very character of Vathek is a mixture of a real, historical person, Caliph al Wathik Bi’llah, a ninth century potentate, and the personality of a cruel and sadistic tyrant, Ike Mulai Ismail, a much later Emperor of Morocco.3 Careful about his facts, especially in the detail of oriental habits and dress, Beckford nevertheless uses considerable artistic licence to tell his story and shows no hesitation in moulding whatever material he has to hand to the purpose of a powerful drama, at times parodying its own seriousness.

  Like The Vision, Vathek is the story of a journey, this time Caliph Vathek’s journey to the halls of Eblis or Hell, spurred on, as in the earlier tale, by an unquenchable thirst to discover, a curiosity that is determinant of the protagonist’s behaviour. But there is a marked change in tone from the earlier tale, a development that exhibits a maturity in literary style and sophistication. Although we are still presented with a series of dream-like visions, they are now handled in a confident, even detached manner. The sense of naivety that hung over the earlier work has vanished; instead there is a polish and finesse which is the hallmark of a mature artist. Symbolic of this change is a shift from first person to third person narration: Beckford is now able to distance himself from his own created work and to employ a sardonic humour in mocking what formerly he had presented with such high seriousness.

  The complex imagery of Vathek, its richness of mood and its lushness of detail have led to many interpretations of the text. The most obvious has been to emphasize the autobiographical character of the work.1 Carathis is an obvious Begum, Nouronihar an orientalized Louisa and, of course, the Caliph a projection of Beckford himself. Others, abandoning this approach, with its simplistic psychoanalytic undertones, have looked to more intellectual influences. Vathek has been described as an exposition of Burkean principles of sublimity and beauty, itself derivative from the sensationalist psychology of Locke whom Beckford studied as a child. Links have been made with the physics of electricity and the biology of vegetables beloved of Erasmus Darwin. When the genre of the oriental tale is the main conceptual reference, there have been suggestions that Beckford’s contribution, though apparently concluding with a moral about the need for humility, is not a moralizing tale in the spirit of Voltaire or Dr Johnson. Some have ascribed this deviance to Gothic elements which led Beckford to a perverse enjoyment of black arts and crafts, even more strongly exposed in the Episodes, later intended to be part of Vathek, and whose subjects – homosexuality, incest and necrophilia – took him to the world of the wholly heterodox and bizarre. The Gothic tale involves the inversion of moral values and even of reason itself: the hero’s journey is made through a frightening, dark universe with demonic forces ready to destroy him at every turn. In its landscape are towers, caverns and grottos, as well as fearful abysses into which a hero may tumble at any moment.2

  Vathek remains a puzzling work. Crafted into a polished whole, its internal dichotomies are inescapable: reverence is mixed with humour, elegance with vulgarity; the oriental with the occidental; damnation with a sense that Vathek’s quest was not entirely irrational; detachment with a decadent feeling that the unnatural and the strange have an allure and perfume of their own.3 The brilliance of its prose, its caustic wit and brittle, wistful comment on life suggest the moraliste writings of France. It is significant that Beckford chose to write Vathek in French: we feel the sophisticated ghost of Count Hamilton, smiling over its artfulness. Even so, Vathek is not easily ascribed to one literary genre. It is an idiosyncratic mixture of an oriental tale of detailed imagery (identified with Persian sufism by one critic1), one whose plot and tempo is strictly regulated. While the author is steeped in English and French moralizing literature, he appears to have no moral conviction of his own. We can find in Vathek characteristics of the Gothic novel, yet its taut form, its very miniaturism make it recognisably an eighteenth-centurytale. Like Beckford himself, dressed as an eighteenth-century gentleman inVictorian England, Vathek displays the influence of different period styles. Its power is in the dazzling virtuosity with which its unique and florid eclecticism is put before its reader.

  3. THE SATIRIC MODE

  If Vathek shows distinct touches of humour in its ironic treatment of the Caliph’s fate and its bathetic contrast between drama and absurdity, Beckford’s other early writings are more fully in the humorous or parodying mode. As much as young William tended to dreamy and romantic wistfulness, he also had a high-spirited and mischievous side which attracted him to jests and jokes, albeit of a literary sort. Even so his satirical forays are seldom unalloyed: we find the darker tones of what is more distinctly Gothic in his most mordant prose. Indeed, his sense of mischief was linked to his feeling of rebelliousness, his artistic frustration at being prevented from exploring themes in art and literature of which his elders did not approve. Making fun of life and laughing at its upsets was a way of protecting his private hidden world from invasion by unwelcome grown-ups.

  Beckford wrote his Biographical Memoirs, from which we have selected extracts, before his seventeenth year, although there is some evidence that one of the stories, Watersouchy, was added at a later date.2 There are two versions about the origin of this fun-poking, satirical set of essays on imaginary artists. The first comes from Cyrus Redding, Beckford’s friend and first biographer who, unfortunately has never been known for his reliability. According to Redding, Beckford used to overhear an old housekeeper at Splendens, telling visitors who had come to see the Alderman’s famous collection of paintings, an improbable jumble of stories and anecdotes about the artists who had painted them. From these ramblings, the witty young master of the house composed his Biographical Memoirs.3 The other version of the story comes from H. V. Lansdown, who also knew Beckford in his Bath days and who claims that Beckford told him that the caretaker, embarrassed by persistent questions that she could not answer, asked the teenage boy to write down something that she could read out to the visitors about the artists whose works they so much admired. Beckford produced his Biographical Memoirs as a response and, if this account is true, must have derived a great deal of amusement from hearing them read out to the unsuspecting and gullible visitors.1

  Whichever story is true, part of the inspiration for the Biographical Memoirs is a high-spirited sense of fun and a determination, on the part of William, to mock all that is held serious by his elders. The tone is set in the very first story – Aldrovandus Magnus is an ‘illustrious’ artist, especially venerated because of the ‘superior glow of his varnish’ and his amazing knowledge of demi-tints which surpassed that of all his predecessors. While Beckford was anxious to show off his familiarity with the technical terms (which he had no doubt learnt from Cozens), it soon becomes apparent that he is ridiculing Aldrovandus for putting such importance on technique. The heavy,
provincial society of the Low Countries, which Beckford would parody in his first travel writing, Dreams, was the perfect setting to indulge in the old sport of épater le bourgeois. This parody is done with many amusing asides and flourishes. While abstract youth is lightly censured for inconstancy and a fondness for roving, the heavy figure of middle-aged respectability is lampooned for a love of money and honour and a thirst for praise, however sycophantic. Aldrovandus’ master, Himmelinck, is killed eating a pike; when his paramour, Ann Spindlemans is compared to a bottle of dressing, it is more for her sharp than her oily flavour; when he himself is honoured, it is with the absurd order of the Ram. At the height of his powers and success, attended by his disciples, Andrew Guelph and Og of Basan, Aldrovandus dies when he has news that the warehouse, crammed full of his own pictures, has been destroyed.

  The next story which we have extracted is that of Sucrewasser of Vienna who is linked to the disciples of Aldrovandus by a chance meeting. While the old master himself never set foot in Italy, with its ‘ancient grandeur so interesting to a picturesque eye’, his disciples travelled far, taken by the cascades, caverns and grottos of the delightful Tyrol and impressed by the urbane cosmopolitanism of Venice which Beckford himself found so alluring. There they met Sucrewasser, an accomplished artist of the Arcadian style, one who had had his training in the classical masters but whose pale imitations of nymphs not nimble enough, of cupids too everyday and furies veering to the lean, only managed to banalize the grand classical themes. Trapped by the need to pander to the dubious taste of his clients, Sucrewasser had given up all attempt at vigour or quality, resorting instead to second-rate, sugary reproduction.

  The last two characters in our group fare a little better. Blunderbussiana has the Beckfordian virtue of coming from a colourful background: his father was a Croatian bandit living in caves hollowed out of the lofty summits of Dalmatia. Picked out on account of his precocious talent, Blunderbussiana makes the most of his childhood experience, filling his pictures with scenes of lofty mountains, gloomy caves and perfecting a sgraffito or greyish melancholy tint which he learnt from the Italians. He is only lampooned for adhering strictly to anatomical forms in figure painting, a style that bored the vivacious Beckford.

  Finally Watersouchy (an old Dutch word for boiled fish) represents artists of still life, particularly prolific in the Flemish school whose ‘academy’ was the table where, in Beckford’s eyes, unworthy, lifeless objects were made the subject of art. Like his celebrated master, the real life Dutch painter Gerard Dou, Watersouchy had spent many years perfecting his technique, spending hours at laborious tasks such as copying point lace and other intricate patterns. By this application he came to acquire a complete control of the brush and an ability to produce paintings exhibiting the kind of ultra-realism that Beckford found tedious and uninspiring. The collar of a lap dog or the head of a dead fish did not seem an edifying subject of painting to the young master of Fonthill. Concentrating on minutiae left artists like Watersouchy incapable of appreciating, let alone expressing, the heroic.

  Biographical Memoirs is a jeu d’esprit which should not be judged too seriously as a work of art criticism. It was written, after all, at a very tender age and although we can read a serious, adolescently portentous purpose in it – to refine the artistic sensibility of the English collecting classes – only at a loss can its facetiousness be put aside. That is not to say that the work fails to portray those characteristically complicated Beckfordian hallmarks of emotional paradox, swiftly changing mood and sinister undertone, but these elements have not yet been synthesized into a mature literary style.1 Underlying Beckford’s writing is a technical grasp of his subject – just as in his oriental tales he applied an unrivalled scholarship – and his judgement about painting is radical and impressive. But he is still searching for that fine blend of the real and the fantastic that would give Vathek and his travel writing their unique stylishness.

  The sardonic tone of the Biographical Memoirs never entirely left Beckford: it can be found in the savage humour of Vathek, in the ironic observations of the travel diarist or in the pithy asides that embellish his correspondence. Just as we find his dreamy romanticism becoming wistful and airy, this sharper, more malign2 side comes to the fore and we are treated to a taunting remark about men or manners in the style of the French moraliste writers who followed Montaigne.3 Beckford is seldom in one mood for long but in the novels that he wrote in the 1790s, his satirical stance is most marked.

  Although it may be doubted that Beckford intended to refer to an ideal when he was exposing society,1 there are two principal strands to his satirical attack in Modern Novel Writing – one that is a broad caricature of social manners; the other a distinctly political thrust, directed against his enemy, William Pitt. The plot of Modern Novel Writing is more of a pastiche than an attempt to tell a story; by tackling his subject in this way, Beckford also intends to make fun of the sentimental novel of the moment, the kind of sugary romance that his half sister, Elisabeth Hervey, specialized in writing.

  Beckford’s work tells of the amorous life of Arabella Bloomville, a conventional chocolate box heroine who is languishing after Henry Lambert, a soldier who is on duty abroad. A series of somewhat unconnected and scarcely credible episodes is hung on this thin thread. Characters come and go led on by misunderstandings, confusion and their own lack of grip on reality. Ludicrous, mawkish scenes add to the fun: when the Countess of Fairfax ‘rediscovers’ her daughter (none other than Arabella), the celebrations to mark the event include a party in which the servants and tradesmen are arranged in alphabetical order. In between the disjointed sequences, Beckford provides pen portraits of famous characters, like Mrs Piozzi, or he shows up the foibles of high society, whose members are obsessed with making money and gaining social recognition. Sometimes the action descends to mere slapstick; for once Beckford seems to allow himself to indulge in a touch of vulgarity, albeit of a restrained sort.

  A second thread in the narrative was his altogether more overt and caustic attack on Pitt, his erstwhile childhood companion, whose intransigence prevented Beckford from becoming socially re-established and from gaining the peerage after which he still hankered.2 In the course of conducting the war against France, Pitt had resorted to somewhat draconian measures, one of which, the Traitorous Correspondence Act, affected Beckford directly. By the terms of the act, anyone still in contact with the enemy could be liable to be regarded as a traitor; it certainly meant that staying on French soil was out of the question and its passing precipitated Beckford’s return to England in 1793. In the somewhat relaxed conditions of the eighteenth century when it was not unknown for nationals to travel through countries with which their governments were at war, this was a fairly severe measure. Even more restrictive of personal liberty was the suspension of Habeas Corpus, something that Englishmen always regarded as an inviolable right. While Beckford did not really share the radical politics of his father, indeed he went as far as to describe himself as an autocrat,3 these illiberal measures made Pitt an easier target for attack.

  Beckford opened fire on the British Critic, a journal which, purporting to be a defender of public morality, was in fact an organ of government propaganda. It was rumoured that the British Critic was funded out of secret service money. Certainly its support for Pitt was wholehearted and its praise for his policy fulsome. As our extract shows, Beckford attacked the journal rather than Pitt himself, but when he came to write Azemia, his tone became more personal probably because by that time it was clear that his offers of acting as a mediator in the war or as an ambassador to Portugal had been brusquely rebuffed. In the ‘Ode Panegyrical and Lyrical’, Pitt is portrayed as a monster whose policy is to pursue war at any cost with a resultant scale of misery and squalor unknown to Englishmen before. The verses are set to the tune of a ditty; after cataloguing one crime or another, each ends with a sarcastic refrain to praise or honour Mr Pitt.

  Although we may find the tone of satire and par
ody more venomous in Azemia, the whole book is not written in that mood. To show the way in which Beckford jumped from one mode of expression to another, his tale ‘Another Bluebeard’ which purports to be a ‘history’ well known in Lincolnshire, is included in the extracts. This ‘history’ turns out to be a horror story in the full-blown manner of Mrs Radcliffe,1 with a frightening and grim setting, cloistered rooms in turrets, dark passages and secret stairways, horrendous murders leaving bloodstains that cannot be wiped out. The tale is told seriously and although it ends well, with the heroine’s escape, both she and the reader are numbed, in true catharsis, by the harrowing train of events that has unfolded in the plot. Beckford shows himself master of all the arts and stratagems of the horror story: creating a gloom-ridden atmosphere, capable of maintaining suspense by keeping his reader guessing as to what will happen next, dashing his hopes each time it seems that the heroine is about to escape her imprisonment and torture. A feeling of claustrophobia and of sinister, unforeseeable mischief hangs over the reader throughout the telling of the tale. There is all the control of pace and tempo that we have already seen developed in his oriental tales; the movement and dash that sweeps the reader along one locale to another.