The Arabian Nights - A Companion, page 28
Clara Reeve took an ancient Arab legend as the basis for an oriental-cum-biblical novel, The History of Charoba, Queen of Aegypt (1785). This tale of a King Gebirus who invades Egypt, but who is subsequently defeated by magic and by women’s wiles, was later to inspire Walter Savage Landor’s epic poem Gebir (1798). Besides producing a novel in the oriental mode, Clara Reeve had also tried her hand at the Gothic novel, with The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story (1777). However, it was left to William Beckford to unite the two genres in a single work.
It is possible to discuss Beckford’s Vathek as if it too was a moral tale, but, as we shall see, its conformity to the conventions of the genre was purely formal, and this novel is the first oriental tale to have any real and lasting literary worth.10 William Beckford (1760–1844) was the son of one of England’s wealthiest merchants. His father had made his fortune in Jamaican sugar and went on to become Lord Mayor of London and a leading Whig politician. Alderman Beckford had hoped that his son would follow him into politics, but William was to achieve fame in other, less edifying areas. As a child, he had been fascinated by the Nights and he had begun to collect oriental paintings. His godfather, William Pitt, Lord Chatham, concerned at the boy’s unhealthy interest in things oriental, wrote to his tutor instructing him to ensure that the boy have no further access to the Nights. Beckford’s Indian paintings were burnt, but tales of oriental vice and despotism had already worked upon the boy’s imagination, and Beckford’s early interest in the Near East was to be reinforced later by his drawing master, the painter Alexander Cozens. Cozens (1717?–86), who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Tsar Peter the Great, had grown up in Russia, where he had met many Persians and acquired oriental interests. He was consequently nicknamed ‘the Persian’ by his pupil.
Beckford’s parents died while he was a child. Thereafter, under the faltering guidance of tutors, he became accustomed to having his extravagant and arbitrary tastes gratified without demur. In 1781 a three-day party was held to mark his coming of age. The stage designer, painter, spy and occultist Philippe de Loutherbourg assisted in preparing the setting for one of the most magnificent masquerades to be held in eighteenth-century England. Loutherbourg’s magical lighting effects transformed the family home at Fonthill in Wiltshire, and behind closed shutters and curtains Beckford’s party of revellers and gilded youths wandered through an exotic dreamscape. As Beckford later put it:
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 on 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.
Stagecraft helped to confer a labyrinthine Nights complexity upon Fonthill House:
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 anyone 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 storeys of infinitely varied apartments gave rise to.11
Beckford was later to acknowledge that it was this masquerade which inspired his novel, one of the strangest in English literature. In turn, Beckford’s work on this novel, Vathek, inspired a further party in 1782 in which Fonthill was transformed into the Palace of Alkoremi and the Hall of Iblis. Beckford claimed that he wrote Vathek in three days and two nights, which may be true, but it took longer to produce a final version; and during the early 1780s, while he polished and revised the novel, he also worked with the assistance of a Turk, Zemir, on a rather loose translation into French of some stories in a manuscript of the Nights, which had been brought to England by Edward Wortley Montagu. (This translation, including ‘The Tale of the Envier and the Envied’ and ‘Uns al-Wujud’, was published for the first time in 1992.) There were rumours that William and his cousin Louisa Beckford had dabbled in black magic in these years. The rumours were perhaps unfounded, but in 1784 another scandal became public knowledge. It was reported in the London journals that Beckford had been discovered in bed with his young cousin, William Courtenay. Beckford was forced to travel abroad until the scandal died down, returning to England only in 1796.
Though Beckford was to publish accounts of his travels and other short pieces, from then on he concentrated on collecting books and paintings and he became an architectural patron. He had his father’s mansion, Fonthill House, pulled down and used his rapidly dwindling fortune to build a palace to house his treasures. James Wyatt was commissioned to build the mock-Gothic Fonthill Abbey, described by Pevsner as ‘the most prodigious romantic folly in England’. The frantic pace of building went on by day and night. As Beckford wrote to a friend: ‘I listen to the reverberating voices in the stillness of the night and see immense buckets of plaster and water ascending, as if they were drawn up from the bowels of a mine, amid shouts from the depths, oaths from Hell itself, and chanting from Pandemonium or the synagogue.’ Fonthill Abbey was built in the form of a cross, the arms of that cross meeting in the stucco vaulted great hall. The whole construction was overlooked by a 276-foot tower. Twelve miles of twelve-foot-high walls secluded the master of this place from the gaze of the curious, and there he ruled, like a secluded oriental despot, as ‘the Caliph of Fonthill’. But debts forced him to sell the place in 1822, and the great tower, built without proper foundations, collapsed in 1825. Beckford spent the last years of his life as an increasingly eccentric and misanthropic recluse. Although he left a body of travelogues and miscellaneous writing, Vathek is the masterpiece for which he is remembered.
Written in French originally, in or around the year 1782 (and published in English in 1786), William Beckford’s Vathek has become a classic of English literature. Its author announced in the preface that it was a ‘story so horrid that I tremble while relating it, and have not a nerve in my frame but vibrates like an aspen’. Vathek, a young Abbasid prince, grows up bored and dissolute under the influence of his sorcerer mother, Carathis. He recognizes no good other than the achievement of his desires. ‘His figure was pleasing and majestic; but when he was angry, one of his eyes became so terrible, that no person could bear to behold it; and the wretch upon whom it was fixed instantly fell backwards, and sometimes expired.’ A sinister Indian giaour (Turkish for ‘infidel’) appears, acting as emissary for Eblis, the Devil. The giaour offers Vathek the treasures of the pre-Adamite sultans, but first Vathek must slaughter fifty innocent children. Vathek makes the atrocious sacrifice and sets out for the ruined city of Istakar where, he has been told, the treasures are to be found. On the way, Vathek rests with the Emir Fakreddin, one of his most loyal subjects. Fakreddin has a daughter, Nouronihar, who has been betrothed to her effete harem-raised cousin, Gulchenrouz:
Nouronihar loved her cousin, more than her own beautiful eyes. Both had the same tastes and amusements; the same long languishing looks; the same tresses; the same fair complexions; and, when Gulchenrouz appeared in the dress of his cousin, he seemed to be more feminine than even herself. If at any time, he left the harem, to visit Fakreddin, it was with all the bashfulness of a fawn, that consciously ventures from the lair of its dam.
Despite Fakreddin’s attempts to hide Nouronihar and Gulchenrouz from Vathek, the latter abuses his hospitality by seducing the daughter and stealing away with her. Together, Vathek and Nouronihar complete the last stage of the journey: ‘they advanced by moonlight till they came within view of the two towering rocks that form a kind of portal to the valley, at the extremity of which rose the vast ruins of Istakar.’ Descending steps of marble and passing through ebony gates, they enter the Palace of Subterranean Fire:
The Caliph and Nouronihar beheld each other with amazement, at finding themselves in a place, which, though roofed with a vaulted ceiling, was so spacious and lofty, that, at first, they took it for an immeasurable plain. But their eyes, at length, growing familiar to the grandeur of the surrounding objects, they extended their view to those at a distance; and discovered rows of columns and arcades, which gradually diminished, till they terminated in a point as radiant as the sun, when he darts his last beams athwart the ocean.
The treasures of the pre-Adamite sultans are indeed heaped up all around, but amidst these treasures ‘a vast multitude was incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their hearts, without once regarding anything about them: they had all the livid paleness of death. Their eyes, deep sunk in their sockets, resembled those phosphoric meteors that glimmer by night in places of interment.’ After three days of this gloomy contemplation, they are brought before Eblis: ‘His person was that of a young man, whose noble and regular features seemed to have been tarnished by malignant vapours. In his large eyes appeared both pride and despair: his flowing hair retained some resemblance to that of an angel of light.’ Eblis condemns Vathek and Nouronihar to wander through his halls for all eternity with their hearts in flame.
Additional episodes for Vathek were written but never published in Beckford’s lifetime. Two and a half episodes – tales told by sufferers encountered by Vathek in the halls of Eblis – were only rediscovered in the twentieth century. These tales of the damned reveal Beckford’s characteristic preoccupations. ‘Histoire des deux princes amis, Alasi et Firouz’ features homosexual love. ‘The Story of Prince Barkariokh’ includes scenes of what is effectively necrophiliac rape. ‘The Story of the Princess Zulkais and Prince Kalilah’ treats of incest. In this story, Zulkais joins her twin brother, who is also her lover, in hell, and she tells Vathek how
at last, I reached a chamber, square and immensely spacious, and paved with a marble that was of flesh colour, and marked as with the veins and arteries of the human body. The walls of this place of terror were hidden by huge piles of carpets of a thousand kinds and a thousand hues, and these moved slowly to and fro, as if painfully stirred by human creatures beneath their weight. All around were ranged black chests, whose steel padlocks seemed encrusted with blood.
Vathek is a weird fantasy, but since it was written by a weird man it is not difficult to see it as an autobiographical fantasy – or not wholly fantasy at all. In this roman à clef, Beckford’s grim Calvinist mother has been transformed into the sorceress Carathis. His father’s fierce rages and intimidating gaze have been transferred to Vathek, but that caliph’s quest for illicit knowledge and forbidden pleasures are based on the author’s own desire to dedicate his life to unbridled pleasure and on his interest in exotic things. Nouronihar is surely based on Beckford’s cousin Louisa. The effete Gulchenrouz bears more than a passing resemblance to William Courtenay. The giaour is perhaps, in part, a portrait of the sinister artist Alexander Cozens. The Palace of Subterranean Fires has features in common with Fonthill.
Beckford’s assistant and collaborator, the Reverend Samuel Henley, took the uncorrected draft of Vathek to Paris, where he laboured to provide the fantasy with footnotes which had the dual purpose of establishing the fantasy’s basis in genuine oriental lore and instructing the reader in the manners and customs of the Orient (in much the same way as Lane’s annotations to the Nights were later to do). D’Herbelot’s encyclopaedic Bibliothèque orientale was referred to frequently in the notes. It was indeed in the Bibliothèque orientale that Beckford had first read of the historical Abbasid Caliph Vathek (or Wathiq) and learned that ‘le Khalife Vathek avoit l’oeil si terrible, qu’ayant jetté un peu avant sa mort, une oeillade de colere sur un de ses Domestiques qui avoit fait quelque manquement, cet homme en perdit contenance, & se renversa sur un autre qui étoit proche de luy’. The Koran, The Tales of Inatuulla (in Dow’s translation) and travellers to the East such as Chardin and Thevenot are frequently cited in the notes.
The notes also suggest that Beckford was indeed indebted to the Nights for certain details and motifs in his novel, and the episodes certainly draw on stories from the Nights. ‘The Story of Princess Zulkais and Prince Kalilah’ borrows an episode from ‘The Second Dervish’s Tale’, and ‘The Story of Prince Barkariokh’ is in part adapted from ‘The Second Shaykh’s Story’. But, although Beckford had some competence in Arabic and had laboured on a translation of some of the stories in the Nights, most of his knowledge of those stories seems to have come via Galland, and there is little or no sign of any wider influence of Arabic literature on Vathek. Henley’s mock-learned glosses to Beckford’s fantasy started a fashion for annotating oriental fictions, and Vathek’s example was to be followed by Southey in Thalaba and Moore in Lalla Rookh.
Vathek was the most richly realized of all oriental tales to appear in English or French up to that date and the most accurate in its details about life in the Islamic lands. Even so, it was not very accurate, and much of the erudition suggested by the footnotes was really rather bogus. The work almost certainly owes more to pseudo-oriental fictions in English and French than to Arabic sources. The Caliph Vathek in his unbridled pursuit of selfish desires and exercise of arbitrary power certainly owes something to Hawkesworth’s despot, Almoran. When Almoran proclaimed, ‘If I must perish, I will at least perish unsubdued. I will quench no wish that nature kindles in my bosom; nor shall my lips utter any prayer, but for new powers to feed the flame’, he anticipated Vathek’s carefully tended cult of the arbitrary will. Many of Vathek’s most striking images were borrowed from Guellette’s pseudo-oriental tales. Even more pervasively, the tones of deflationary irony and mocking exaggeration which Beckford employed from time to time to punctuate a narrative of sombre terror and atrocity were surely modelled on those of his distant kinsman, the urbane and witty romancer Anthony Hamilton.
Despite the exotic detail and parade of Islamic lore, the grandiose and horrific depiction of the hellish domains of Eblis owes very little to the Nights, but a great deal to European literature. Vathek’s temptation and his quest for the forbidden surely owes something to the Faust legend, and his interrogations of the damned must, in part, have been inspired by similar episodes in Dante’s Inferno. Then again, Beckford’s youthful but ruined Eblis recalls Milton’s description of Lucifer in Paradise Lost:
His form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined and th’excess
Of glory obscured.
Since the novel ends with Vathek and Nouronihar consigned to hellish suffering for all eternity, it might be argued that Beckford’s fantasy is a moral tale in the tradition of such earlier orientalist writers as Guellette and Hawkesworth. However, such an argument can carry little conviction, for the author’s intense enjoyment both of his protagonists’ vices and of their punishment is not really consistent with a genuinely Christian sensibility. Vathek’s sombre tones, morbid themes and sinister imagery suggest affinities with such early examples of the Gothic novel as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) and M.G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Admittedly, the tone is not uniformly serious, and exaggeration and excess are at times pushed to parodic extremes. Many of Beckord’s touches of Gothic horror may originally have been intended as parody; but by the time Vathek and Nouronihar reach Istakar, their creator has allowed himself to be betrayed into conviction, and private nightmares have assumed an oriental garb. Despite Beckford’s multifarious borrowings from earlier tales in western and eastern languages, Vathek had no real precursors. However, it was to have many imitators and admirers, among them Byron, Disraeli, Poe, Melville and Lovecraft.
‘Read Sinbad and you will be sick of Aeneas,’ the Gothic novelist Horace Walpole had urged. Beckford’s choices in reading and writing had been part of his revolt against the classics of Greek and Roman literature which ‘fell flat upon his mind’. The oriental and the Gothic were closely allied in the eighteenth-century revolt against classical canons in literature. The origins of the Gothic novel in English literature should probably be sought chiefly in the growing interest in the old English ballads, in the institutions of chivalry, in the architecture of the Middle Ages and in the growing interest in antiquarianism generally. Nevertheless, Reeve and Beckford were not the only Gothic writers to have fallen under the spell of the Orient. There are traces (albeit fainter traces) of the influence of the Nights and other collections of genuine or pseudo-oriental tales on almost all the writers in the Gothic genre. Horace Walpole, who produced a collection of Hieroglyphic Tales (1785) in imitation of Anthony Hamilton, was a great enthusiast for the stories of the Nights, proclaiming that ‘there is a wildness in them that captivates’. It is surely significant that when he produced his famous novel in the Gothic mode, The Castle of Otranto, he described that too as ‘so wild a tale’. Familiarity with the oriental storytelling tradition had a liberating effect on writers in the late eighteenth century, freeing them from the constraints of plausibility and encouraging them to experiment with supernatural effects (as when, in The Castle of Otranto, Bianca rubs her ring and a giant figure appears). Matthew Gregory Lewis translated Anthony Hamilton into English and was a great admirer of Vathek. ‘Monk’ Lewis’s novel The Monk is set in eighteenth-century Spain and is devoid of obvious oriental trappings. However, this dubiously edifying Gothic schlock-horror novel, a tale of a lascivious and murderous monk who misguidedly sells his soul to the Devil in order to escape human justice, is a romantic reworking of the story of ‘Barsisa’, from the old Turkish story collection The Forty Viziers.
