William Beckford: An English Fidalgo, and: William Beckford: Composing for Mozart (review)

Building a biography on a ruling metaphor can be risky, especially when the metaphor becomes an a priori position conditioning the selection, weighing, and presentation of evidence. Plausible biographers distract critical readers from noting how facts are channeled to support partial constructions. Less facile biographers betray the weakness of their method in errors of argument: assertion substitutes for demonstration, speculation on one page is certainty on the next. Still, metaphor may focus on what was truly important to the subject; this works for Jack, but decidedly not for Mowl.

Malcolm Jack focuses on the sojourns in Portugal, where Beckford’s wealth and imagination nearly set him up in the manner he deemed appropriate to a man of his tastes and talents. Forced into exile by scandal, Beckford reinvented himself as a noble, wealthy, expatriate aesthete. Beckford is slippery because of his chameleonic self-reconstructions, and treacherous because he spent years tampering with evidence. The temptation for Beckford scholars is to doubt everything. But not everything Beckford said about himself was false, and not every public statement concealed secret designs. Willing to accept Beckford’s insistence on the paramount importance of beauty, Jack provides a sensitive reading of Beckford’s travel writing. Beckford progresses from concrete description into passages imparting “mystery, movement, and natural richness,” then shifting into powerful responses to rugged landscape, and just as suddenly fading into melancholy. In this strain of writing, Beckford emphasizes “the immediate and passing nature of beauty, a beauty often informed by a profusion of sensual impressions. There is a constant mood of philosophical dreaminess so poignant that the distinction between reality and illusion is blurred. We are left with the feeling of a lost moment of joy or peace” (81–2). Other scholars have mined the travel writings for factual detail, complaining when they discover inconsistencies. Jack reasonably counters that Beckford should be allowed license to mingle the real and the imaginary, necessary for Romantic artistic expression.

Jack presents a compelling vision of the force of Beckford’s charismatic presence and imagination. Much later in his life, Beckford reworked the Portuguese journals to exaggerate his standing and influence in Portugal, allowing him “to live out his own fantasy about his Lusitanian adventures” (140) as an aristocratic community that ratified his putative nobility and a zone of of sensuous, romantic indulgence. It also remained an imaginative zone out of which he drew his finest descriptive writing.

Timothy Mowl’s metaphor is the fraudulence of Beckford’s claim to have written a melody later taken up by Mozart. The first chapter is a fictionalized account of an actual visit paid to the elderly Beckford:

The air was ‘Non piu andrai.’ It was not only one of Mozart’s most celebrated but also, and this was Beckford’s cleverness, one which, with its simple repetitive marching step, could just conceivably have been composed, in its basic notes, by a very precocious six-year-old. Even now, while few believe the story, no one can put hand on heart and confidently swear that Beckford could not possibly have been the original composer. A legend was in projection. ‘He struck the notes with energy and force, he sang a few words’ and, so his listener reported, ‘his eyes sparkled, and his countenance assumed an expression which I had never noticed before.’ It could have been one of delighted mischief

(15).

Mowl imputes mendacity to Beckford by praising the “cleverness” of his choice. Beckford may have told the truth; Mowl’s words “few believe” imply scholarly consensus without the bother of citation. Granted, that the story has not been disproven does not mean it is true (historians scorn the Argument from Ignorance, when lack of evidence supports a contention because it has not been refuted). Mowl reverses the argument, suggesting that his claim of fraud must be true because only a fallacious argument opposes him. Mowl brings to...