THE READING RHEUM: VATHEK (1786)

 

Following the first European translation of a version of The Arabian Nights in the early 1700s, various European authors attempted to emulate the freewheeling charms of the famous Oriental story-collection. The English lord William Beckford produced one of the most enduring such works of the period. Apparently he fell in love with the Nights in his early twenties and wrote VATHEK in a white-hot expression of literary ardor. Then Beckford never wrote fiction again, according to Lin Carter, who edited the Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperback of this unique effort, a favorite for such authors as HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

I say "unique effort" advisedly, because I don't consider VATHEK great literature, even of the sort produced by Lovecraft and Smith. The book feels a bit like Marlow's Faust festooned with Oriental tropes and suffused with Beckford's perception of the casual cruelty in the original stories. Beckford also copies the paper-thin characterizations and wandering narratives of the Nights, and though neither of these is necessarily a bad thing, one does have to be prepared for this style of writing. VATHEK doesn't capture the wilder fantasies of the Arabian Nights, though, because the main narrative-- as well as three side-stories-- all share the theme of the Satanic overreacher. 

The Caliph Vathek, ruling in the city of Samarah in the Abbasid period, only appears to be the defender of the Muslim faith. In truth he's a thoroughgoing hedonist who thirst after forbidden knowledge, much like his mother Carathis, a sorceress who follows the fire-worship attributed to the Zoroastrians (frequent villains in the Nights). One day Vathek is visited by a Giaour ("non-Muslim foreigner") who slowly draws the caliph into renouncing Allah to gain knowledge. That the Giaour is clearly not a human being is shown by an amusing scene in which he somehow morphs into a ball and lures Vathek and the rest of his subjects into becoming a huge soccer-team, kicking the animated ball all the way out of Samarah and up to the edge of a cliff. Beneath the level of the cliff is a literal doorway to the Islamic Hell, where rules the Islamic Satan "Eblis." At the cliff's edge Vathek receives a private message from Eblis' servant The Giaour: Vathek can gain supreme knowledge if he will sacrifice fifty Muslim children to Hell.

That Vathek does not succeed in delivering this sacrifice is not for lack of trying. But in Vathek's single-minded, impious quest, a lot of innocents do perish-- including fifty Samarah citizens who attempt to save Carathis from what they think is a raging fire, and who all end up getting killed by the witch's servants. Vathek and his mother make excellent, utterly conscience-less villains.

Unfortunately, in the second half Beckford's narrative vacillates. He has Vathek and a great entourage leave Samarah to visit an Emir, whose daughter Vathek eventually weds. This romantic subplot drags the narrative pace downward, partly because Beckford initially suggests that the Emir's daughter Nouronihar will resist Vathek because she's in love with her nancy-boy cousin Gulchenrouz. Then for no clear reason Beckford changes Nouronihar's character, so that she joins Vathek because of greed. Carathis, hearing about the effeminate Gulchenrouz, thirsts to sacrifice the youth. However, a beneficent genie rescues the cousin and takes him into a bower of immortal existence, along with the fifty children Vathek tried to sacrifice to Eblis. (Beckford does not explain why the genie didn't return the children to their parents in Samarah.)  Then eventually Vathek and Nouronihar make their way to the Islamic Hell, thinking they're going to enjoy the fruits of paradise, only to become, like all other damned souls, bereft of joy and hope.

Before coming to this dolorous conclusion, Vathek listens to the testimonies of three other damned souls about what deeds brought them to Hell. I lost interest in the first, "Prince Alasi," which just seemed like a reprise of Vathek's own career, and so have little to say about it. The third story, "Princess Zulkais," is a little better. It starts out with another tyrant who goes to extremes to push his only son into becoming a great ruler. The trouble is that son Kalilah really has a passion to stay in the company of his twin sister Zulkais. Beckford never shows any incestuous act, but Zulkais also goes to extremes to stay within the orbit of her brother, makes a deal with the devil, and so they both end up hopeless in Hell.

The middle story is meatier if still uneven. The eponymous narrator of "Prince Barkiarokh" is like Vathek an overreacher who hungers for anything he cannot have. By dumb luck a female peri, Homaiouna, falls in love with Barkiarokh at first sight, and maneuvers things so that he marries her and she sets up him up to ascend to the throne of Berdouka. However, Prince B. doesn't want to live the virtuous life Homaiouna expects him to observe. He betrays her with a mortal woman, hires thugs to knife his peri-wife over and over just to make her go away (he's aware it won't kill her), and finally falls in lust with his grown daughter by his mortal wife. Again, the main attraction of this story is much the same as the main one: to see just how ruthless a villain Barkiarokh can be, just as the main story focuses on the iniquities of Vathek and Carathis.

Scholars of the period have seen Vathek as a precursor of the obsessed Byronic hero (not least because Byron admired the book and wrote a narrative poem called "The Giaour") and of the Gothic villains who arose mostly in the 1790s (in belated reaction to Walpole's OTRANTO in 1764). But I find Beckford's concentration on over-the-top intense sadistic scenarios to have more in common with the works of the Marquise de Sade. Beckford began VATHEK four years before it was published, and the year after VATHEK was published in 1786, Sade wrote the work that made him famous, JUSTINE, which when published four years later would comprise an introduction to his doctrine of libertinage and Sadean excess. I'm not arguing direct influence. But it seems as if something was in the wind around that time, even though Beckford and Sade were in most other respects utterly unalike.      

             

THE READING RHEUM: THE GOLDEN SCORPION (1918)

 

In my review of Rohmer's 1931 novel DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU, I quoted a Wikipedia article about the fourteen-year gap between that novel and 1917's HAND OF FU MANCHU. However, this was a slight oversimplification, for two novels appeared after HAND that indirectly invoked the devil-doctor. This may mean that in the late nineteen-teens Rohmer had not yet decided to abandon the Fu-series. One of the two novels, which I may review in future, is 1913's QUEST FOR THE SACRED SLIPPER, though the allusion to the doctor is circumstantial. However, 1918's GOLDEN SCORPION makes much more than an allusion, though Fu's appearance is still in the nature of a "guest-starring role,"  of the type I addressed in this crossover-essay.

GOLDEN SCORPION takes its title from a scorpion-shaped token by which members of a criminal organization recognize one another, though the proximate reason for using the icon is that the group's mastermind is named "The Scorpion." GOLDEN is also the second of four prose novels whose main hero is the French detective Gaston Max, following directly on the heels of 1915's THE YELLOW CLAW. The two novels make an interesting contrast in that in the 1915 work, the villain is named "Mister King" and he's never seen except for his hand, which is the "yellow claw" of the title, for all that a few later comic books used the phrase for the names of super-villains. The Scorpion may be one of the few Rohmer characters who resembles a *costumed* super-villain in that he's always seen in a concealing robe and cowl, and he like Fu Manchu-- implicitly a mentor-- commands an array of super-science weapons. Further, though "Mister King" escapes at the end of CLAW and apparently never resurfaces, Gaston Max hypothesizes that both King and the Scorpion work for a great Oriental organization, albeit in different capacities. Strangely, Rohmer does not drop the name of the Si-Fan, which had just appeared in HAND, but calls the overall organization "the Sublime Order."

GOLDEN opens in a manner familiar to Rohmer readers, with an ordinary British man, medical doctor Keppel Stuart, finding his ordinary life invaded by Oriental intrigue. Significantly, because Stuart is a bachelor at age 32, Rohmer mentions that Stuart got left at the altar, a detail inserted to reassure anyone who might harbor ill suspicions of a thirty-something bachelor. Unbeknownst to the doctor, he was surreptitiously visited by famous disguise-artist/criminologist Gaston Max, who left an item of interest in Stuart's care. This causes the Scorpion's organization to target Stuart by having a comely Eurasian beauty, Miska by name, spy on the doctor by becoming his patient. As is usually the case, Oriental intrigue also breed Oriental romance, as both Miska and Stuart fall for each other. This eventually breeds retaliation in the form of a disintegrator ray that blasts into Stuart's house and almost zaps the doctor's head off. (The ray is linked to a missing scientist, Henrik Eriksen, and both the name and the creation show up much later in 1939's DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, suggesting that Rohmer had thoughts of introducing such super-science early in the series but didn't end up doing so.)

Gaston Max contacts Stuart and the local cops and relates a long story about how he Max first began investigating the Scorpion's misdeeds. causing him to encounter both Miska and her assigned guardian Chunda Lal. Max mentions that even though the Hindu is not that large, he's able to subdue a larger opponent using "jiu-jitsu," which seems to be one of the few times Rohmer ever mentioned any form of Asian martial art. During Max's consultations with the police, he manages to talk about the Si-Fan in a roundabout way, even though he's familiar with the cases investigated by "Inspector Weymouth," whose history with Fu Manchu dated back to the first novel. 

Some time after this conference, Miska contacts Stuart and warns him to keep clear of The Scorpion's menace. By this act, she shows that, like Karameneh before her, her passion liberates her from her slave-like status under an Eastern master. It's during Miska's backstory that she details not only her first encounter with the cowled Scorpion, but also with the Scorpion's superior in the Order. Miska only beholds Fu Manchu-- denoted by both his emerald-green eyes and his avowed status as "the greatest scientist in the world"-- because Fu stops by the Scorpion's HQ to inspect Miska as a new acquisition for the Order's usages. (Ironically, though Fu approves of the Scorpion's choice of Miska, the devil-doctor has no more luck with his female pawns than does the Scorpion; both end up losing said pawns to the charms of sturdy Brit males.)

Stuart of course keeps pursuing the villain, and ends up working with Max and the cops in investigating an opium-house. This is the novel's dullest part, though the section concludes with an interesting scene: Stuart is taken prisoner by a Chinese thug who strangles the doctor unconscious with the thug's long queue of hair (!) Stuart wakes up a captive in the Scorpion's lab, and like his mentor, the villain's lab combines such visceral "Asian" horrors (a pit full of killer ants) and hyper-advanced marvels (a special chair rigged to disintegrate anyone who sits in it with the Eriksen ray). While waiting for the preparation of a serum to fling Stuart into catalepsy, the mastermind informs the physician that he will soon be transported to China, where he will be brainwashed to serve the Order. Stuart asserts that he will see the villain hanged, and the urbane evildoer calls the gallows "cruel and barbaric," contrasting that Western method of execution with such a "poetic" concept as his "Throne of the Gods." This remark is in keeping with the methods of the Si-Fan, which use exotic and clever gimmicks to carry out their crimes.

I won't disclose the exciting climax, though anyone reading this will probably intuit that Miska will end up choosing to betray her master in favor of her new amour. A further connection with the Fu-series is seen when Chunda Lal attempts to kill the Scorpion to save Miska, and the mastermind resorts to a 1918 version of a Jedi mind-trick, mentally dominating the Hindu with the arcane powers gained from the Tibetan arts of "Rache Churan." When Max and the police come to the rescue, the Scorpion ends both his life and all resemblance to Fu Manchu, taking his own life through the agency of the disintegrator-chair. He unlike Fu Manchu never returns. Still, even without my having read the last of the Max novels, I imagine the cowled super-criminal rates as the foremost opponent of the French detective. 

ADDENDUM: I should also mention that at the beginning of the chapter "The Red Circle," the author, speaking through Gaston Max, attempts to distance himself and his characters from what one of the cop-characters calls 'that defunct bogey, "the Yellow Peril.''' Max responds to this jibe:

'No, I speak of no ridiculous "Yellow Peril," my friends. John Chinaman, as I have known him, is the whitest man breathing...'

Despite the incorrect nature of the phraseology for today's audience, the speaker's intent is to place the average "yellow man" on the same level of the average "white man," at least in terms of being a law-abiding citizen, unlike the Asian criminals that Max and his allies are discussing. 

Even in those early days, had Rohmer received enough negative response about Fu Manchu to make him disassociate himself from the Yellow Peril? And did any such negativity play a role in Rohmer's decision to table Fu Manchu for the next decade, until Hollywood showed some interest in a revival? Only the foremost Rohmer experts may have a clue...

THE READING RHEUM: THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT (1856)

In my never-ending quest to search out examples of combative narratives that stand as ancestors to the superhero idiom, I re-read THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT in its 1970 edition as a Ballantine paperback (a popularization only possible after the Tolkien boom made fantasy-novels hot items).

After the novel was published to absolutely no acclaim in 1856, its author George Meredith never did another fantasy, but did find some fame in his day with naturalistic romances. I don't know that he would have been a particularly great fantasy-author had SHAGPAT succeeded. The novel suggests that Meredith had an abiding love for the wild fantasy-content of THE ARABIAN NIGHTS, as well as for the comic attitude of many of the stories.

The name "Shagpat" is pure faux-Arabian, being the name of a corrupt ruler who hasn't had his hair or beard shaved in many a moon, so that he bears a "shaggy pate." Unknown even to Shagpat himself, he owes his temporal power to a single hair, called the Invincible, which got transplanted onto his scalp in a very involved fashion. It seems a sorceress, one Noorna, was seeking to destroy the hair in order to overthrow its original owner, a tyrannical genie who wants Noorna to marry him. After she fails to destroy the Invincible, she decides that the only way to eliminate the genie's power for all time is to give Shagpat a shave-- and for that, she needs a barber.

The viewpoint character is just such a barber, with the equally faux name of Shibli Bagarag, and he alone can wield the mystic "Sword of Aklis" to cut down the Invincible. To say the least, a fantasy about a barber advertises his status as a comedy, but there are a number of combative elements in the story, not least assorted magical battles between Noorna and her nemesis, the witch Goorelka. This may be the aspect closest to the original Arabian Nights, since there are a number of stories in which sorceresses of great powers play major roles.

Like the Oriental stories that inspired the novel, SHAGPAT wanders from wonder to wonder, and doesn't have a lot of coherence overall. Still, it does stand as one of the earliest novels of combative fantasy since the days of the courtly romances, and though it didn't have any influence on the evolution of the superhero idiom, SHAGPAT does make an interesting footnote.