The Square Pegs Read Free Page A

widow named Caroline Feroe, and to an Egyptian serving girl known as Ayesha.
    At the age of sixty-three Montagu advertised for one more wife, demanding only that she be of “genteel birth, polished manners and five, six, seven or eight months gone in her pregnancy.” This startled no one since, only three years before, at sixty, he had asked to be circumcised arguing that Abraham had been circumcised at ninety-nine so that he might make a pilgrimage to Mecca. His gaudy attire forever attracted crowds. He wore a turban and an embroidered coat with diamonds for buttons, but that was not all. “The most curious part of his dress,” said Horace Walpole, “is an iron wig; you literally would not know it from hair.” He was aware of his oddity, and no less proud. “I have never committed a small folly,” he once remarked. He died in 1776.
    William Beckford was sixteen years old when Montagu, whose Oriental manuscripts he would collect and translate, expired in Italy. Beckford followed in the capricious footsteps of his idol. When Beckford was still a child he inherited his father’s West Indies plantations, one million pounds, and the family estate near the village of Fonthill in Wiltshire. His education was acquired through private tutors. He learned Arabic and Persian from an Orientalist, and he learned to play the piano from Wolfgang Mozart. He traveled to France, Portugal, and Italy. In Venice he supported an elderly mistress who had earlier entertained Casanova. Though he had married a lady of title, and had had four children, he was publicly accused of homosexuality. Scandalous rumor, which he never legally denied, revealed to the world that he had been seen committing perversion in Powderham with a young man named Courtenay.
    Beckford wrote ten or eleven books, two under women’s names. His masterpiece, admired by Lord Byron, was an Oriental romance entitled Vathek . He composed it in French, and then had a clergyman translate it back into his native English. He collected books both rare and popular, scribbled brilliant criticisms in their margins, and then offered these jottings for sale to the publisher Richard Bentley under the title of Fruits of Conceit and Flowers of Nonsense , but they were rejected as too controversial. He was certainly, as Richard Garnett remarked, “the most brilliant amateur in English literature.” As such, he decided to build a monument to himself. In 1790 he told Lady Craven: “I grow rich and mean to build towers.” He determined to abandon Fonthill and nearby erect the tallest private residence in all Europe.
    Beckford hired the leading architect of the day, James Wyatt, and had him construct a wall twelve feet high and seven miles in circumference to keep out sightseers. This done, work was promptly started on the Great Tower. Because of Beckford’s impatience to see his monstrosity completed, 500 laborers were employed to work in two shifts half by sunlight and half by torchlight. In 1800 the flimsy timber-and-cement structure, set on a narrow base, was done. It rose 300 feet into the air and the very first mild wind broke it in two and sent it crashing to the ground.
    Undeterred, Beckford ordered another Great Tower built on the rubble of the old. At an expenditure of 273,000 pounds, stone was added to the timber and cement, and the new 300-foot structure was finished in less than seven years. Beckford moved into one of its eighteen cramped, unventilated bedrooms. Here, with a Spanish dwarf in livery receiving guests, he entertained his friends, among them Lady Emma Hamilton, but refused to invite the curious Prince Regent. After fifteen years, having lost his income and his fortune, Beckford sold the tower for 330,000 pounds to a munitions dealer named John Farquhar. He was not surprised to learn that, shortly after his own removal to Bath, the tower again collapsed in a gale. On a hillside near Bath, Beckford built a third tower, this one a mere 130 feet in height, and