THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF WILLIAM BECKFORD
BOOKS OF THE DAY
By JOHN HAYWARD
I: seems unlikely that we shall ever know the whole truth about Beckford's life. There were periods in it, just as there are passages in his voluminous papers, that are beyond inter- pretation now. Mr. Guy Chapman is far too modest, however, when he speaks of his attempt to penetrate the mystery as " no more than a tentative essay," designed to clear up " certain misapprehensions." It is true, as he admits, that a number of questions remain to be investigated, such as Beckford's corre- spondence with Franchi and Beckford's muddled finances ; and it is possible that the Hamilton archives have still a few fragmentary secrets to give away. These crumbs from Mr. Chapman's table can be left for the hungry research student. But the possibility of anyone writing a better book on Beckford, whether in the near or in the distant future, seems to me extremely remote. Mr. Chapman's biography is a work of the first rank, with ten years' scholarship behind it, learned and yet human, sensitive and intelligent in its interpretation of fact, imaginative but never wild in its surmises, and written with just that degree of elegance and formality which its subject requires.
Mr. Chapman, moreover, has done a good deal more than clear up certain misapprehensions. For, apart from the fresh information he is able to give about Beekford's early life from some seventy hitherto unpublished documents; he has suc- ceeded, as no one else has, in collating the extraordinary and, indeed, almost fabulous events of his career with his personality and character ; and, in doing so, he has turned Beckford from the legendary monster of popular tradition into in in- telligible human being. This is • a remarkable achievement, for Beckford's reputation has suffered from the absurd extrava- gancies of admirers and detractors who have been perfectly happy to argue with each other for the last hundred years through :the haze of legend and mystery that Beckford deliber- ately created to screen himself from the world.
It is all the more remarkable when one realises how little has survived apart from the legend and his few books. The stones of Fonthill are scattered, the tower and gardens on Lansdown Hill have been incorporated into a publid burial ground, the splendid collections have been dispersed and redispersed, and not even the name of Beckford has been transmitted. To make the biographer's task more difficult Beckford, as Mr. Chapman shows, deliberately falsified some of the most inter- esting parts of his correspondence with Louisa Beckford and completely destroyed a major clue—possibly the most valuable —in his letters to and from Alexander Cozens. And yet, in spite of these difficulties, Mr. Chapman has managed to give a convincing account of the man behind the legend.
When Mr. Chapman speaks of Beckford in his iimling youth as " a child misled by his inheritance," he suggests where the key to Beckford's character lies. As a child, he was never allowed to forget that he was a creature apart, the heir to an immense fortune, the fathef of the man who should one day astonish the world with _his extraordinary gifts. His two chief remembrancers in the family councl of aunts, trustees and tutors were his mother; the formidable " Begun," and Alexander Cozens. Of the dangerous influence of the former on an extremely highly strung, precocious child it is enough to say that it was, in Mr. Chapman's words, " a terrific pressure, coercive and emotional," exerted far beyond childhood and still effective at her death when Beckford was already middle-aged.. The inference that in such circum- Beckford. By Guy-Chapman. --(Cape: 15ss) stances he never really matured, either emotionally or sexually, seems to me irresistible. Of Beckford's relations with Cozens too little is known, although the fact that Beckford was careful to destroy every scrap of written evidence suggests, if it does not imply, that they shared a guilty secret. If, therefore, the Begum was indirectly responsible- for driving her son into the fatal company of " Kitty " Courtenay, Cozens was almost certainly the Sinister figure behind the shady incidents which are supposed to have taken place at Fonthill during the critical Christmas week of 1781. Both, indeed, may be said to have precipitated the scandal which drove Beckford into exile, snatched back the proffered peerage and frustrated for ever his Disraelian ambition to shine resplendently in Society and in affairs of State.
Mr. Chapman's sober examination of the evidence relating to the so-called Powderham scandal, in the autumn of 1784, which led to an =formulated charge against Beckford of criminal perversion, is not only profoundly interesting in itself, but of great significance on account of the inferences he draws from it. Mr. Chapman does not believe that Beckford's inclinations were either homoseival or even bisexual ; his affair with William Courtenay, he maintains, was nothing more than the emotional outburst of a romantic, self-centred adolescent., whose mother had never allowed him to grow out of the sentimental attachments of the nursery. And he offers, for the first time, a satisfactory explanation of Beckford's failure to deny the rumours of his guilt or to proceed against the libels published in the Press. He argues, and I believe rightly, that in order to establish his innocence Beckford would have had to divulge what he and Kitty and Cozens were up to in camera at Christmas three years earlier ; that such an admission, there is sufficient reason to suppose, would have revealed the practice of some form of black magic ; and that Beckford knew perfectly well that capital punishment was the penalty at that time for such practices. Faced with this appalling dilemma, his only course was to sacrifice his future to the past.
He left the country as Byron was to leave it some thirty years later, only for him there was no Missolonghi to crown the end. When at last he was able to creep back to Fonthill, embittered and a widower, he was, as Mr. Chapman says, " disciplined to solitude, and he remained where he had been thrust, cold and remote." In the first rush of pride he all but ruined himself with the fantastic projection of himself (in space though not, alas, in time) in the soaring towers of Wyatt's jerry-built Abbey. But he was to occupy it long enough before his final retirement to Bath for the legend and mystery he intended to leave behind him to take root.
This period of his life has often been described, and if Mr.
Chapman describes it better than anyone it is because he does not adorn the facts, or enhance the mystery ; and above all because he is able to discuss it in terms which are consistent with his penetrating analysis of Beckford's character during youth and early manhood. His life was of a piece throughout. At the age of 21 he had written : " I shall never be good for anything in the world but building towers, forming gardens, collecting old Japan and writing a journey to China or the moon.",. His forecast was strangely accurate. More than half a century later, an exile, morne et malingre in the pays des chimires to which his vanity and an uncomprehending world had driven him, he was still building, planning, cola. lecting and scribbling—to no purpose.
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