“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.”
–William Beckford, 1781
It’s impossible to discuss Beckford’s 1786 novel Vathek without discussing Beckford himself. The weird guy and his weird book: they are inseparable. Beckford’s father, also named William Beckford, had been Lord Mayor of London and owned a plantation and three thousand slaves in Jamaica. A precocious youth, Beckford indulged in his many talents, thanks to his father’s vast wealth: collecting books and works of art, drawing, and studying music, at one point under the tutelage of none other than Mozart himself.
Beckford was bisexual, and while married to Lady Margaret Gordon, he carried on some sort of relationship with William Courtenay, who would later become the 9th Earl of Devon. (I don’t think we can even call a relationship between a 24 year old and 16 year old a “relationship.”) After the two had an explosive argument over Courtenay’s letters to another man, Beckford’s uncle published Beckford and Courtenay’s letters in the newspaper. Scandalized, Beckford exiled himself to Europe, dragging his poor wife along with him. She would die in childbirth a few years later, while Beckford would live into his 80s.
The sordid details of his life—a libertine, an expatriate, a man wealthy enough to devote himself to his passions—are inextricable from the book he wrote. Just as the horrors of slavery funded Beckford’s own lifelong pursuit of knowledge, Vathek sacrifices fifty children and burns to death hundreds of his faithful subjects in the course of his own quest for knowledge. All of Beckford’s fears and anxieties, whether about his relationship with his religious, “possessive and autocratic”1 mother or the revolutionary fervor of the masses in the years before the French Revolution, are laid bare on the page.
Vathek was a hugely influential novel, leaving its mark on Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Swinburne, and HP Lovecraft, among others. Stéphane Mallarmé wrote the preface to the 1876 French edition, and Jorge Luis Borges wrote an essay on Vathek in which he called its depiction of hell “the first truly atrocious Hell in literature.”
Given the book’s reputation, I was expecting the ancestor of Tanith Lee’s unsettlingly dark eroticism, a 1780s Bataille, something like black metal. What I got was more black comedy, a campy Arabian Nights fanfic in which a demon is kicked around a palace like a football and one of Vathek’s wives saves him from a tiger by throwing him over her shoulder and carrying him away. It’s humor and wry tone make Vathek more a precursor to Jack Vance than Clark Ashton Smith.
Things get increasingly weird as the story unfolds, and it’s worth reading just for the carnivalesque second half, especially those last few pages as Vathek descends into the Palace of Subterranean Fire. It’s a much more interesting book to think about than to actually read, which perhaps is why it was so inspirational to so many. Beckford put something into the world, as flawed and misshapen as it was, and others nurtured it to its potential.
What can I take from this book as a writer? What interested me the most was the form. While the narrative itself is only about 30,000 words long (the average novel is anywhere between 70,000 and 100,000 words long, with those classic fantasy doorstoppers of the 80s, 90s, and 00s stretching upwards of 250,000 words per volume), a series of footnotes add another 15,000 words to the text.
The work presents itself as an authentic Arabian tale, and the footnotes, composed mostly by Beckford’s tutor Samuel Henley, are intended to lend the story an air of academic authenticity. They define Arabic terms in detail and provide contextual information on Islam and Islamic culture (as filtered through the understanding and prejudices of a pair of 18th century Englishmen), as though this were an educational work of historical importance. But this literary device fooled few contemporary critics. They praised the story’s fidelity to its source material while recognizing that this was by no means an authentic story.
Typical for this book, the story of its composition is more interesting than the book itself. Henley went a little overboard with his footnotes, writing so many that at one point in the book’s genesis the wordcount of the footnotes outstripped that of the narrative itself, and Beckford had to dial them back. It’s as if Henley was using Beckford’s novel as a vehicle for his own interests. I could imagine a Vathek-inspired story looking like this: a story by two fictional authors that purports to be based on an older document, one writing the narrative while the other composes copious footnotes, the two authors working at cross-purposes, creating a complex and contradictory picture of reality.
The moral of the story, stated in its closing paragraphs, is that “the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious deeds” awaits those who would “transgress those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge.” This theme will come up again and again in Gothic literature, and I’ll probably talk about it more when I write about The Monk and Zofloya.
- Lonsdale, Roger. “Introduction.” Vathek by William Beckford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 8. ↩︎
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