Folly of an odd fellow

WILLIAM BECKFORD:

Composing for Mozart

by Timothy Mowl (John Murray, GBP 22) TIMOTHY Mowl is the eighth biographer of the 18th century multimillionaire sexual renegade, Gothic novelist and aesthete William Beckford. He is also - as befits his catlike name - easily the most feline of a pretty feline bunch. The subtitle of this biography nails Mowl's colours firmly to the mast. That Beckford once claimed to have been "composing for Mozart" was one of his sillier self-aggrandisements, but as a mythomane possessed of a great deal of ready cash, he felt free to fabricate whatever stories he liked. Mowl feels this to be evidence that Beckford was "a barely socialised psychopath" when all it actually means is that Beckford behaved as the superrich have done throughout history. He found it hard to relate to people. He was trapped in an airless world of fantasy and delusion. Mowl tells the story with a little less sturdy detail than his worthy predecessors, but makes up for it with a cheeky brio and a Beckfordian love of effect over fact. The facts seem as follows: Beckford was born in 1760 and inherited a mind-boggling sugar fortune at the age of 21. He was fully expected to follow the illustrious political career of his alderman father. Instead he wrote a camp, mock-oriental Gothic novel, Vathek, which has been read and admired from Byron to Borges. As a gifted musician and witty mimic, he was widely lionised by society in London, Paris and Geneva. But his absurdly pampered upbringing had given him little sense of how to behave; his scandalous love-affair with a younger boy was exposed by a political enemy of his late father. Though Beckford never stood trial, he became a social outcast overnight. Retreating to his family mansion in Wiltshire, he began a solitary life collecting art and building the huge Gothic folly of Fonthill Abbey. In general, William Beckford has been well served by his biographers, and most of these biographies have been written since the 1930s. But, as is so often the case, each is replete with all the prejudices and preoccupations of its decade - as indeed is Mowl's. Beckford's uncomfortable preoccupation with young boys has caused huge embarrassment to most of his well-heeled biographers, but with Mowl it produces a kind of waspish jubilation. "A paedophile as a literary hero" is the triumphantly mischievous (and reductive) title of one of his chapters. It can be said that biographers begin to resemble their subjects much as pets resemble their masters, but at least Mowl is thankfully immune to the canker of Beckfordian snobbery to which his biographers usually succumb. But he is not averse to constructing foundationless edifices, much as Beckford did at Fonthill. When he talks about Beckford's father having his house burnt down - "this was probably a genuine accident because the Alderman lost most of his paintings in the blaze" - he sets up a suspicion that the alderman was an insurance swindler without giving the slightest justification. The insouciance with which he uses the description "deviant" or the frankly ignorant way he uses "bisexual" to describe Beckford are minor irritants. On the plus side, he's fascinating about Beckford's exaggerations about his pariah-dom, and his many arch and offhand remarks, such as the one that Gore Vidal is the reincarnation of Beckford, are often spitefully amusing. Do we need another Beckford biography? Probably, but I have my doubts whether the catlike Mr Mowl has delivered anything but a violently expectorated literary hairball.

Copyright 1998
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