Vathek. By William Beckford. Translated by H. B. Grimsditch. Illustrated
by Ch. W. Stewart. (Bodley Head. 12s. 6d.) FROM the time of Alexander Pope till after Byron wearied, a steady flow of Oriental tales was kept up in Paris and London. Some authors wrote to raise the hair, some in an endeavour to give freshness to moral maxims which had grown intolerably stale; still more to raise the price of a drink.
William Beckford was neither poor nor a moralist. What is odd about his Vathek is the sustained Vigour of plot and narrative, and of the Eastern atmosphere of his extravaganza. His new Abbey at Fonthill was almost as ridiculous a failure as Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill, but his tale, unlike Walpole's absurd Castle of Otranto, has fire and passages of beauty among its satire and grotesqueries. Beckford wrote Vathek in French, and Mr. Grimsditch's translation, Mr. Stewart's admirable pictures and decoration, and Messrs. Lane's elegant format, have re-invigorated it.
What strikes a reader coming back to it is that, though not, one hopes, written from the heart, it was no fabrication, but was clearly the welling up of some troubled stream that ran deep in the unconscious. Mr. Grimsditch's rather prim introduction tells us next to nothing about that stream, but the account of Beckford in Miss Rose Macaulay's book on Portugal suggests at least some interpretations. Mr. Grimsditch, though reserved, does dispose of the legend that Vathek was written in three days and two nights. Underground streams can gush out surprisingly, but the richness of imagery and polish of the prose which characterise this tale are surely seldom, if ever, suddenly achieved. A. W.-B.
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