Click below for an illustrated book tour of Vathek, the 1786 pioneering Arabian Nights-style Gothic horror novel by William Beckford—who was at the time, England’s richest man.
How did Beckford become England’s richest man at 21? Well, his father died, and he inherited sugarcane plantations, in Jamaica. His grandfather was Governor of Jamaica, and according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “the family owned 20 estates.” Neglecting to mention that on those 20 estates lived and worked some 1200 slaves, whom they also owned. That kind of money.
Vathek, the main character of Beckford’s novel, is what we now call a billionaire, or an oligarch. Vathek is a “caliph”—which, historically, means a descendant of Muhammad or his close intimates. But in this 18th-century novel, it means a man whose wealth and power knows no bounds. This is, essentially, what Beckford was. And what Musk is today. It’s both a sly satire, and a self-own—which is part of what makes it so fascinating.
So what is the book about? It’s about Vathek, and his evil mother, Carathis. Beckford’s father died when he was 11, leaving him, according to the ODNB, “under the day-to-day control of his possessive and tyrannical mother.” Beckford himself is on record as saying “that all the females in the book were portraits of those in the domestic establishment of old Fonthill… ‘their fancied good or ill qualities exaggerated to suit my purpose’” (Melville, 142). And she is a great villain. Absolutely ruthless in her pursuit of occult knowledge, and power.
But really, all the main characters in this book are villains, or craven, obsequious enablers of those villains. Vathek, we are told, “had studied so much, in order to banish boredom, that he was learned; but at last he wished to fathom all things, even the sciences which do not exist. He liked to argue with learned men… and was never found to support the opinion which was looked upon as orthodox. By this he put all the pious against him: so then he persecuted them, for he wished at all costs to be in the right.” It’s a book for our age, every bit as much as it was for Beckford’s own.
The plot is episodic—but the episodes move faster than the news cycle during a Trump presidency, and they’re equally insane. It’s essentially a series of tricks played upon Vathek by the Giaour—the infidel—sent for this purpose by Mohammed—and these tricks undermine the caliph’s blind thirst for knowledge and power, continually reducing him to a state of illness or lethargy or pain or humiliation, until his mother once again rescues him or revives him with her magic.
You’d almost call him hapless, except this thoroughly unprincipled man is willing to sacrifice anything and everything to meet the Giaour’s demands, always in exchange for promises of power and knowledge. In one of these episodes, the Giaour promises to open the gates of the Palace of Subterranean Fire, where he will reveal to him the dark sources of his magical power—which will make Vathek all-powerful. In exchange, however, the Giaour demands the blood of fifty children, to slake his thirst. Fifty!
Vathek asks his viziers and nobles which of them possess the most handsome young sons. “Immediately each father went out of his way to extol the merits of his own sons above all others; and the debate became so heated that they would have come to blows had they not been restrained by the presence of the Caliph, who pretended that he wished to judge for himself.” He announces that to celebrate his return to health—from a previous episode—he is going to throw a lavish party for these fifty boys and their families and friends.
He then throws a lavish party in the countryside where, to separate the boys from their parents, he has them line up to each receive a gift—with a dark crevasse where the Giaour is waiting nearby. Vathek hesitates, and the Giaour shouts at him (he alone can hear) “A plague on thy soft-heartedness, chatterer! Give them to me, and right speedily, or my portal shall be closed to thee forever!”
“While with one hand he presented the gift to the eager child, with the other he pushed the recipient into the chasm, where the Giaour, incessantly growling, repeated without intermission the word: ‘More! More!’” Even Vathek’s right-hand man, the Grand Vizier Morakanabad loses two of his children to this diabolical ruse. (The children are eventually rescued by a good-hearted genie, but Vathek never learns this.)
Again, satire. You could see this as the politician sacrificing the best and brightest of our youth for his own political aims, especially when it comes to war—and parents lining them up for the privilege. Or Beckford’s own guilty conscience as a massive slave owner bubbling to the surface. How many slaves on his plantations were sacrificed every year to continue adding to his already enormous fortune?
Of course the parents are outraged; Vathek flees to his mother, and once she learns of the Giaour’s promises, she says, “this Giaour is somewhat bloodthirsty” but “no crime is too great when such treasures are the reward.” She opens the Caliph’s coffers, and showers the parents with gold coins until they leave. But now Carathis, his mother, is involved, and equally determined to learn the powerful, horrible secrets of the Palace of Subterranean Fire. (Sounds much more appealing than “Hell,” doesn’t it?)
Vathek in his wanderings eventually encounters Nouronihar, the beautiful daughter of Emir Fakreddin, who hosts Vathek and his entourage. Nouronihar is betrothed to her cousin, the equally beautiful Gulchenrouz. Gulchenrouz, for all his good qualities—he can write, he can sing, he’s beautiful—is a child, and effeminate, as he spends all his time in the harem, with the women. He is no match for the wealthy, ruthlessly womanizing Caliph. There’s a bit of a Romeo and Juliet ruse, where the Emir gives the two young betrothed, his daughter and his nephew, a sleeping potion that he hopes will convince Vathek that they have died, so the Caliph will go away and leave him and his daughter alone. Unaware of this plan, Nouronihar and Gulchenrouz are wakened, but in a hut, and they are told that they are actually in the land of the dead. Vathek is told of their death as well, but he is so distressed that he doesn’t want to leave.
Nouronihar is an interesting character. She’s not at all your typical passive pretty princess. She’s not content—like Gulchenrouz is—to accept her fate and live out the rest of her days with her cousin, in this hut, by the lake with the melancholy storks. “Although she loved Gulchenrouz, and although she was left free to spend her time in his company in order to increase her affection, she looked upon him as a toy… Sometimes she even had doubts as to her state, and could not understand how it was that the dead should have all the needs and all the caprices of the living.”
One morning, while her cousin sleeps, she sets out to explore… and comes across Vathek, of course. They realize they’ve been duped, and they set off together. The Caliph has his entourage screen off an entire valley just for him and Nouronihar, and there “the Caliph enjoyed the charms of Nouronihar in full measure… he listened with transport to her beautiful voice and to the harmonies of her lute. For her part she was enraptured with his descriptions of Samarah and of his tower and the wonders to be found in it.
Led on by the Giaour’s lies, they descend into the Palace of Subterranean Fire. The Giaour leads them to Eblis—and he’s awesome. This whole last section is great. Sublime. They meet Solomon son of David, and hear his sorrowful story. They see that “his bosom was of transparent crystal, through which could be seen his heart consumed in flames.”
Carathis, riding on the back of an afrite (efreet), joins them—impatient and demanding as always. “Why aren’t you sitting on the throne already?” is basically what she asks her son.
But he knows, by now, what’s coming for him.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that all three are condemned—like those they meet there—to an eternity of suffering. “Their hearts had burst into flames, and it was then that they lost the most precious of the gifts of Heaven, hope! These unhappy creatures had recoiled from each other with looks of fury. Vathek no longer saw in Nouronihar’s glance anything but rage and vengeance; and she read in his eyes nothing but aversion and despair.”
The publication history of Vathek
The history of Vathek’s composition and publication is tangled. As a youth, Beckford was a fan of the Tales of the Arabian Nights and the myriad imitators that were then in vogue. So much so, that his tutor locked away these books and forbid him from reading more of this sort of thing. But when he came of age, and could do as he pleased, his friend and mentor, Samuel Henley, reignited this passion, and even encouraged him to write a story of his own in this vein.
So we have a letter from Beckford to Henley, from 1782, when he was 21: “You are answerable for having set me to work upon a Story so horrid that I tremble whilst relating it.” By September of 1783 he had finished the story, and sent it to Henley from Geneva, and writes “You proposed likewise to translate Vathec, which I left in your hands.” The next year, he writes, “I long eagerly to read your translation.” Finally, in the spring of 1785, Beckford writes raving to Henley about his translation: “You make me proud of Vathek… the original when first born scarce gave me so much rapture as your translation.”
It's in 1786 where things start to go off the rails. Not only had Henley translated the work into English, he’d also advised on revisions to the story, and contributed extensive, and rather pedantic scholarly notes on each of Beckford’s off-hand references to places, people, costumes, customs, flora and fauna. By this time, he’d probably invested more time on this tale than Beckford himself. And yet Beckford kept putting off publication. “The publication of Vathek must be suspended at least another year,” he writes in February, 1786. “I would not have him on any account precede the French edition… The Episodes to Vathek are nearly finished, and the whole thing will be completed in 11 to 12 months… I must repeat, therefore, my desire that you will not give your translation to the world till the original has made its appearance.”
At the end of May in that year, 1786, Beckford’s wife of three years died two weeks after giving birth to their second daughter, leaving him devastated. In August he writes to Henley, “My spirits and rest are broken… I fear the dejection of mind into which I am plunged will prevent my finishing the other stories, and of course Vathek’s making his appearance in any language… this winter.”
The “other stories” or “Episodes,” that Beckford refers to were tales that were going to be told to Vathek and Nouronihar by four men and one woman whom they meet once they enter the Palace of Subterranean Fire. These five had preceeded them, and had their own tales of woe that Beckford wanted them to tell, sort of in the style of the Canterbury Tales or the Decameron. He never included these, and I’m glad he didn’t—these characters are introduced three pages from the end, and their long stories would’ve interrupted the climax intolerably, in my opinion, and dragged things out and away from the two whose comeuppance we actually want to see by this point in the narrative. So between the amount of work that Henley had invested—and Henley was not a wealthy man, like Beckford—and the prospect of a grieving Beckford putting off publication indefinitely, until he'd finished these other three long “Episodes”… I can almost understand Henley taking his translation and his notes to a publisher and having them published anonymously, under the guise of it being a translation from the Arabic.
Almost. At least, I can empathize with Henley.
Beckford was furious, and sued Henley—but it was too late. The caliph was out of the bag. Beckford raced to publish his French original, to claim authorship, and denounce the fraudulence of Henley’s claim that this was translated from the Arabic. He published it in Lausanne, in French, early in 1787—without the unfinished Episodes. Some scholars suspect, though, that this was not actually the original French, but a rushed translation back into French that Beckford made from the English edition that Henley sent him, as a courtesy. Because it’s possible that Beckford hadn’t made a copy of his original, which he’d loaned to Henley. This argument is based on anglicisms found in the Lausanne edition that were smoothed over in the Paris edition that appeared later that same year. (Although, even there, some have made the case that the Paris edition precedes, though that seems less likely.) So Henley’s pirated English translation appeared first, and the first French edition might not even be the original, but a translation of that translation. At any rate, it wasn’t until 1815 that Beckford issued his definitive French edition—in London.
Regardless, “Immediately on its appearance Vathek secured for Beckford so great a reputation that he may well have hesitated subsequently to print anything of the same kind… Certainly he never entirely gave up the idea of publishing the Episodes, and in the last decade of his long life, was willing to let Bentley have them… even eager that he should have them—at a price. ‘I will not let the manuscripts go under 1000 pounds,’ he said to Cyrus Redding in 1838 [more than 50 years after Vathek first appeared!] ‘I will not let my writings go for nothing’” (Melville, 145). Apparently 1000 pounds was too steep for Bentley. The Episodes disappeared, and were rediscovered and finally published in 1912. You’ll sometimes see them included in editions of Vathek.
Two illustrated editions of Vathek
Many of the black-and-white illustrations you’ve been seeing are by Mahlon Blaine, illustrator of the 1928 John Day edition. He’s fantastic, and this is certainly one of his best books, from his best period. His drawings match the grotesque and decadent tone of the material perfectly. There are dozens of illustrations in this edition, and I like the way several of them sequence over two pages, or even over four. The full-page illustrations in particular are excellent, and the endpapers: wow.
The other black-and-white illustrations are by Charles W. Stewart, for the 1953 Bodley Head edition. His are more restrained, but working in a similar vein. He’s great as well. There are only eight full-page illustrations, which makes me wish there were more, whereas the Blaine edition is stuffed full—perhaps even overstuffed. Stewart apparently was working on a series of illustrations for Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan—one of my all-time favorites, and certainly an author and a book we’ll get to on this channel—and while of course you want Peake’s illustrations for his own book, Stewart’s are really good, too. They were never published, but you can find them on the internet. He’s excellent.
The color illustrations are by Rene Bull, Edmund Dulac, and Maxfield Parrish, and their illustrated editions of the Arabian Nights.
The 1928 John Day/Blaine edition uses that 1786 Henley translation, which is a bit stiff and archaic. “Elephantine,” as the Bodley Head foreword describes it. It’s certainly readable, but I prefer the 1929 translation from the French by Herbert Grimsditch—great name—as the language is more modern. Easier to read.
Do I recommend Vathek? Absolutely.
If you are a fan of horror, or fantasy, or the weird, this is a pioneering work. You just have to bear in mind that this is from a time well before genres were even a thing, and it tumbles from satire to horror to picaresque to farce to romance to morality tale and so on. The tone varies widely, and like I said there isn’t so much a plot as a series of vaguely related episodes. It owes as much to Voltaire’s Candide as to the Arabian Nights or early gothic tales of that time. (Beckford actually met an aging Voltaire in Switzerland, on his first trip abroad, when he was only 17 or 18.)
Byron was a big fan of Vathek, and of Beckford. He tried to arrange a meeting, but the older man declined. “Oh! To what good could it possibly have led,” Beckford said. “We would have met in full drill—both talked at the same time—both endeavored to have been delighted—a correspondence would have been established, the most insufferable and laborious that can be imagined, because the most artificial.”
Could Musk have written Vathek? Should Musk read Vathek? Or might that give him ideas…
Comments