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Fonthill: A Comedy
. with dustjacket, 1975 front end paper missing, clean copy
223 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
8 people want to read
About the author
Aubrey Menen
31 books18 followersSalvator Aubrey Clarence Menen was born in 1912 in London, of Irish and Indian parents. After attending University College, London he worked as a drama critic and a stage director. When World War II broke out, he was in India, where he organized pro-Allied radio broadcasts and edited film scripts for the Indian government. After the war ended, he returned to London to work with an advertising agency's film department, but the success of his first novel, The Prevalence of Witches (1947), induced him to take up writing full-time. Aubrey Menen’s writings, often satirical, explore the nature of nationalism and the cultural contrast between his own Irish–Indian ancestry and his traditional British upbringing. Apart from his novels and non-fiction works Menen wrote two autobiographies titled Dead Man in the Silver Market (1953) and The Space within the Heart (1970). He died in 1989 in Thiruvananthapuram.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 25, 2025
"As hero for his first novel in nine years, Aubrey Menen has chosen William Beckford, whose private life and scandalizing nineteenth-century fantasy 'Vathek' shocked British sensibilities. Byron refused to visit him; Gibbon publicly insulted him; Lord Chancellor Thurlow was ruined politically by seeking a peerage for him.
"Wagging tongues could not be silenced even when the future King George IV tried to give him respectability by attending the christening of his nominal daughter. What the gossips found even harder to forgive than his reputation was the fact that he was rich, with money enough to satisfy his whims and the taste to match his money.
"Certainly no whim could have attracted more attention than Fonthill, the grandiose abbey that Beckford built and within whose walls nameless vices were allegedly practised. Yet this novel offers a picture of the supposed satyr that is at striking variance with the popular image. For Aubrey Menen's Beckford is a charming Peter Pan who has refused to grow up. And the devotion he inspired in Lady Margaret Gordon, his innocent wife, and in Franchi, his not so innocent Portugese lover, is as fine a monument as the abbey itself. Here is a novel, witty, civilised and intelligent - naughty in its urbanity, comic in its delight. From the flyleaf of the jacket from the 1975 hardback edition from Hamish Hamilton.
It is impossible to review this delightful, funny and still well worth reading novel without discussing its author, Aubrey Menen, but I will do that later and deal with the novel first. It is charming and anyone who has an interest in Beckford and Fonthill will be unable to resist it. The novel plays fast and loose with dates, facts and personalities to create Menen's version of Beckford - but then Beckford was more than willing to create legends (see 'William Beckford: Composing for Mozart' by Tim Mowl) - and though he has had many biographers in many ways he is a character best served by fiction (there are many sites on Beckford but I strongly recommend Rictor Norton's at: https://rictornorton.co.uk/beckfor1.htm. I would also suggest reading https://william1768courtenay.com/will... on William Courtney because Menen plays particularly fast and free with facts relating to him). That Menen's novel is not 'historically' accurate is less important than whether he captures the spirit of Beckford - and I believe he does. It is a short novel and subtitled 'A comedy' and it is - there is a great deal of Beckford that was comic, but also tragic. It is a short novel and a wonderful introduction to the author.
Now to the author - he is almost completely forgotten in English speaking countries, which is a pity because although he was a minor writer he was a very good minor writer. Again I strongly recommend reading https://caravanmagazine.in/reviews-es... and https://maddy06.blogspot.com/2013/04/..., because they give a wonderful flavour of the man and of his complex background.
I read 'Fonthill: A Comedy', and owned a copy (lost but subsequently replaced) in my youth though I don't think I knew anything about the author. But for nearly fifty years I never forgot the novel entirely - that is a testament to good writing.
The basic facts about the author are below:
Aubrey Menen was a writer, essayist, broadcaster, journalist, drama critic and activist. His work explored the question of nationalism and the cultural contrast between his own Irish-Indian ancestry and his traditional British upbringing. He was born to an Irish mother and an Indian father in 1912 and was brought up in Islington, later moving to Forest Hill, south London. He studied philosophy at University College London (UCL), where he formed his own drama group, and befriended the artist Duncan Grant who introduced him to many members of the Bloomsbury Group, including John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. He persuaded H. G. Wells to allow him to adapt The Shape of Things to Come, even though Wells had already sold the rights to Alexander Korda. Korda agreed to three closed performances, which caused a sensation. At UCL he was rejected for the Rosa Morrison Bursary by the then Jewish Master of the college on the grounds that he was not of 'pure' English descent.
After graduating in 1932, Menen became the drama critic for The Bookman from 1933 to 1934. He also became involved with Krishna Menon's India League and toured the regions as a speaker. So that he would not be confused with Menon, a friend of his father's, he anglicized his name to Menen. In 1934, Menen, together with the actor Andre van Gysegham, founded the Experimental Theatre, which sought to create a politically engaging theatre in alternative performance spaces. His radical plays regularly ran into difficulties with the Lord Chamberlain and he was sued for blasphemy and obscenity for his 1934 play Genesis II. From 1937 to 1939 he worked as director of the Personalities Press Service. In April 1939 he moved to Bombay, finding work at All-India Radio. During the Second World War, he worked as a script writer and editor for propaganda broadcasts for the Government of India. He also broadcast regularly on the radio and became a leading radio personality in India. He subsequently worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson's film department. In the late 1940s, after the war, he became a full-time writer. He briefly returned to Britain in the autumn 1947 to oversee the publication of The Prevalence of Witches. In 1948 he moved to Italy, to live in what he described as a space midway between India and England. He lived there until 1980. He spent his final years living in Kerala, where he died in 1989.
Menen's output was prolific and covered a variety of genres. Starting his career as a dramatist and critic, he moved to radio journalism. He authored nine novels, several travel books, autobiographical works, essays and reviews. He also published a version of The Ramayana, Rama Retold, which was banned in India but, despite its radical implications, performed in London amidst some controversy. His fiction is driven by a caustic satire and his essays reveal a passionate desire to break down the falsity of racial myths of 'Aryan' superiority, whether in India amongst Nairs or in Nazi Germany; a similar perspective is evident in relation to the hypocrisy of racial stereotyping in Britain. Menen expresses in his non-fiction the advantage of dual vision: born to Indian and Irish parents, brought up as a brown Englishman in Britain, and in India always a foreigner. This liminality takes on sexual dimensions throughout his autobiographical essays which reflect, despite his conversion to Catholicism, a radical homosexuality.
"Wagging tongues could not be silenced even when the future King George IV tried to give him respectability by attending the christening of his nominal daughter. What the gossips found even harder to forgive than his reputation was the fact that he was rich, with money enough to satisfy his whims and the taste to match his money.
"Certainly no whim could have attracted more attention than Fonthill, the grandiose abbey that Beckford built and within whose walls nameless vices were allegedly practised. Yet this novel offers a picture of the supposed satyr that is at striking variance with the popular image. For Aubrey Menen's Beckford is a charming Peter Pan who has refused to grow up. And the devotion he inspired in Lady Margaret Gordon, his innocent wife, and in Franchi, his not so innocent Portugese lover, is as fine a monument as the abbey itself. Here is a novel, witty, civilised and intelligent - naughty in its urbanity, comic in its delight. From the flyleaf of the jacket from the 1975 hardback edition from Hamish Hamilton.
It is impossible to review this delightful, funny and still well worth reading novel without discussing its author, Aubrey Menen, but I will do that later and deal with the novel first. It is charming and anyone who has an interest in Beckford and Fonthill will be unable to resist it. The novel plays fast and loose with dates, facts and personalities to create Menen's version of Beckford - but then Beckford was more than willing to create legends (see 'William Beckford: Composing for Mozart' by Tim Mowl) - and though he has had many biographers in many ways he is a character best served by fiction (there are many sites on Beckford but I strongly recommend Rictor Norton's at: https://rictornorton.co.uk/beckfor1.htm. I would also suggest reading https://william1768courtenay.com/will... on William Courtney because Menen plays particularly fast and free with facts relating to him). That Menen's novel is not 'historically' accurate is less important than whether he captures the spirit of Beckford - and I believe he does. It is a short novel and subtitled 'A comedy' and it is - there is a great deal of Beckford that was comic, but also tragic. It is a short novel and a wonderful introduction to the author.
Now to the author - he is almost completely forgotten in English speaking countries, which is a pity because although he was a minor writer he was a very good minor writer. Again I strongly recommend reading https://caravanmagazine.in/reviews-es... and https://maddy06.blogspot.com/2013/04/..., because they give a wonderful flavour of the man and of his complex background.
I read 'Fonthill: A Comedy', and owned a copy (lost but subsequently replaced) in my youth though I don't think I knew anything about the author. But for nearly fifty years I never forgot the novel entirely - that is a testament to good writing.
The basic facts about the author are below:
Aubrey Menen was a writer, essayist, broadcaster, journalist, drama critic and activist. His work explored the question of nationalism and the cultural contrast between his own Irish-Indian ancestry and his traditional British upbringing. He was born to an Irish mother and an Indian father in 1912 and was brought up in Islington, later moving to Forest Hill, south London. He studied philosophy at University College London (UCL), where he formed his own drama group, and befriended the artist Duncan Grant who introduced him to many members of the Bloomsbury Group, including John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. He persuaded H. G. Wells to allow him to adapt The Shape of Things to Come, even though Wells had already sold the rights to Alexander Korda. Korda agreed to three closed performances, which caused a sensation. At UCL he was rejected for the Rosa Morrison Bursary by the then Jewish Master of the college on the grounds that he was not of 'pure' English descent.
After graduating in 1932, Menen became the drama critic for The Bookman from 1933 to 1934. He also became involved with Krishna Menon's India League and toured the regions as a speaker. So that he would not be confused with Menon, a friend of his father's, he anglicized his name to Menen. In 1934, Menen, together with the actor Andre van Gysegham, founded the Experimental Theatre, which sought to create a politically engaging theatre in alternative performance spaces. His radical plays regularly ran into difficulties with the Lord Chamberlain and he was sued for blasphemy and obscenity for his 1934 play Genesis II. From 1937 to 1939 he worked as director of the Personalities Press Service. In April 1939 he moved to Bombay, finding work at All-India Radio. During the Second World War, he worked as a script writer and editor for propaganda broadcasts for the Government of India. He also broadcast regularly on the radio and became a leading radio personality in India. He subsequently worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson's film department. In the late 1940s, after the war, he became a full-time writer. He briefly returned to Britain in the autumn 1947 to oversee the publication of The Prevalence of Witches. In 1948 he moved to Italy, to live in what he described as a space midway between India and England. He lived there until 1980. He spent his final years living in Kerala, where he died in 1989.
Menen's output was prolific and covered a variety of genres. Starting his career as a dramatist and critic, he moved to radio journalism. He authored nine novels, several travel books, autobiographical works, essays and reviews. He also published a version of The Ramayana, Rama Retold, which was banned in India but, despite its radical implications, performed in London amidst some controversy. His fiction is driven by a caustic satire and his essays reveal a passionate desire to break down the falsity of racial myths of 'Aryan' superiority, whether in India amongst Nairs or in Nazi Germany; a similar perspective is evident in relation to the hypocrisy of racial stereotyping in Britain. Menen expresses in his non-fiction the advantage of dual vision: born to Indian and Irish parents, brought up as a brown Englishman in Britain, and in India always a foreigner. This liminality takes on sexual dimensions throughout his autobiographical essays which reflect, despite his conversion to Catholicism, a radical homosexuality.
June 1, 2018
Fonthill: A Comedy. A rather strange title for a rather strange book.
Telling the true story of William Beckford and the eponymous neo-gothic folly he build in Wiltshire in the early years of the 19th C., the book is light-hearted in tone but somehow suffused with melancholy and a sense of foreboding. The structure of the book, a mixture of expositions, explaining dialogues and flashbacks, is clumsy to say the least.
While most of the male characters and the author himself are gay, the reader is presented with some rather dodgy views on homosexuality, and the discussions of it and of sexuality in general are anachronistic both in the way they are conducted and in the vocabulary used to conduct them.
Despite all this, Fonthill is a highly endearing book with a marvellous cast of eccentric characters, all trying to find a space in a hostile world, and not being too earnest about it.
Telling the true story of William Beckford and the eponymous neo-gothic folly he build in Wiltshire in the early years of the 19th C., the book is light-hearted in tone but somehow suffused with melancholy and a sense of foreboding. The structure of the book, a mixture of expositions, explaining dialogues and flashbacks, is clumsy to say the least.
While most of the male characters and the author himself are gay, the reader is presented with some rather dodgy views on homosexuality, and the discussions of it and of sexuality in general are anachronistic both in the way they are conducted and in the vocabulary used to conduct them.
Despite all this, Fonthill is a highly endearing book with a marvellous cast of eccentric characters, all trying to find a space in a hostile world, and not being too earnest about it.
November 28, 2019
Having liked The Abode Of Love despite its having been "based on a true story", I thought I would try another Aubrey Menen novel in the same vein.
Fonthill loosely concerns itself with the life and opinions of William Beckford, author of Vathek and builder of the neogothic folly, Fonthill Abbey. Harried in his lifetime for his homosexuality, Beckford and his token (though much loved) wife Lady Margaret Gordon were forced to live abroad for many years until Margaret’s death, after which Beckford came quietly home and hid himself away at Fonthill. Menen (himself gay) pens a sympathetic portrait of Beckford as an engaging Peter Pan figure – a lost boy who, thanks to his immense wealth, never had to grow up. Hence, apparently, his pederasty...for which of course he would be harried today. Much of the novel imagines encounters and conversations between Beckford, now eager to sell Fonthill, and Farquhar, its ultimate purchaser and (fide Menen) equally gay and in his own way equally eccentric. It is all a little lightweight, but engagingly written and often witty – especially when the Prince Regent and his long-term mistress are on the page.
"'What's that damned song they're making everybody sing nowadays? About Us.'
'You mean, God Save the King...'
'That's it,' said Prinny. 'Of all the damned lugubrious...'"
Menen called Fonthill “a comedy” and, with a pinch of mild satire, that’s about the sum of it. Not great, but entirely readable.
Fonthill loosely concerns itself with the life and opinions of William Beckford, author of Vathek and builder of the neogothic folly, Fonthill Abbey. Harried in his lifetime for his homosexuality, Beckford and his token (though much loved) wife Lady Margaret Gordon were forced to live abroad for many years until Margaret’s death, after which Beckford came quietly home and hid himself away at Fonthill. Menen (himself gay) pens a sympathetic portrait of Beckford as an engaging Peter Pan figure – a lost boy who, thanks to his immense wealth, never had to grow up. Hence, apparently, his pederasty...for which of course he would be harried today. Much of the novel imagines encounters and conversations between Beckford, now eager to sell Fonthill, and Farquhar, its ultimate purchaser and (fide Menen) equally gay and in his own way equally eccentric. It is all a little lightweight, but engagingly written and often witty – especially when the Prince Regent and his long-term mistress are on the page.
"'What's that damned song they're making everybody sing nowadays? About Us.'
'You mean, God Save the King...'
'That's it,' said Prinny. 'Of all the damned lugubrious...'"
Menen called Fonthill “a comedy” and, with a pinch of mild satire, that’s about the sum of it. Not great, but entirely readable.
September 11, 2017
What a curious book! I bought it at a thrift store for the Edward Gorey cover, and then, having nothing else to read at a local cafe, I began to read it right then and there. Sometimes I don't get to unusual books like this for ages... The writing is masterful. Light, witty, urbane, with deft reflections on human nature. The flashbacks and life histories should not work, according to any book on writing, but they do. The suspense of the whole is based simply on whether or not one of the men will buy the other man's estate. The topic of pederasty in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is treated with a refreshing frankness that is unapologetically detailed without, somehow, being lewd. The most surprising aspect of the book, however, is that it is based on fact. Menen himself seemed to have lived a fascinating life, so the entire book from contents to composition is thoroughly curious and unique.
There are better books in the world, but this one gets 5 stars from pure originality and exceptionally readable craftsmanship.
There are better books in the world, but this one gets 5 stars from pure originality and exceptionally readable craftsmanship.
May 28, 2023
Fonthill seems to set itself quite a challenge – to get the reader to like and root for a character who inherits obscene wealth, owns hundreds of slaves and a has a more than academic interest in pederasty. William Beckford, author of Vathek and creator of the impossible Fonthill Abbey was also driven out the country for his reported intrigue with titled schoolboy, William Courtenay.
Beckford is first introduced through his vaulting folly (and title of the book) Fonthill Abbey. A huge, impressive building of astonishing scale and whimsy, a gaudy but flimsy building whose central tower collapsed several times in building and finally in 1825, bringing down a large chunk of the building. In imagination and artificiality, there’s something very Disneyland about the place. The reader joins a group touring the building, ostensibly with an eye to buying it at an auction by Christie, though most of the party are just there to be nosy at a famous den of iniquity and vice.
There’s one surprising visitor, the scruffy and dirty Farquhar, an eccentric millionaire who Beckford visits. He listens to Farquhar’s story, of being a young man in India and they discover they share an interest in pubescent boys and activities they can enjoy with them either naked or in flimsy trousers. Beckford wants to sell Fonthill Abbey to Farquhar without the bother of the Christie auction because he recognises “the only man I’ve met as original as myself.”
Fonthill is a fascinating novel in how it makes its central theme of pederasty both a constant source of conversation whilst also dancing around it. Beckford’s current young lover is now approaching fifty, both his and Farquhar’s paramours are in the past. What’s more, it’s depicted as larky and victimless. Beckford’s own initiation as a teenage boy, under the tutelage of Alexander Cosins are held as treasured memories that belong to halcyon days. The bodies of young men/old boys are reduced to body parts and the sexual exploitation of them a pleasantly bloodless and aesthetic enjoyment.
What’s more, not only does pederasty in the book not harm any of the boys, it’s only of minor inconvenience to Beckford’s wife, Margie. She is introduced as an innonent, being schooled in the ways of men (and boy-loving men especially) by the Prince Regent’s mistress, Harriet. She is a wonderful character, wise in the ways of both world and court, with a frankness to be explicit. She encourages Margie to pity Beckford, declaring that men who love twelve-year-old boys do so because they themselves never grow beyond twelve. She instructs Margie on how to be a good beard and how to put up with being sexual second (or third, fourth, fifth) fiddle. Oddly, Margie is very successful at this and the two have a relationship that is surprisingly supportive and loving in everywhere but the bedroom.
Harriet’s appearance also allows for Prinny himself to make a few entrances in the story, both as Regent and as King. He’s depicted as rather stupid but proud of his cannyness, with Harriet’s main attraction to his spouting nonsense. Prinny says he’s excited about the plans for the Brighton Pavilion because the domes remind him of huge breasts - Beckford’s fondness for ludicrously large towers speaks for itself.
In fact, the only people that seem to be truly harmed by pederasty in this book are the poor, innocent pederasts themselves. A Chancellor with a spanking fetish known as Full Bottom finds himself removed from office, while Beckford has to run off to the continent (where he hung around with William Hamilton’s first wife, Catherine). It isn’t his sexual practises that prove his real undoing though, the abolition of slavery and the excesses of Fonthill do that - and then not the the extent that Beckford still owns two houses in Bath and builds another tower. The book also elides pederasty and homosexuality, with the case of the Vere Street Molly House and the gruesome end of some of its patrons.
Beckford himself is depicted to be rather charming, at least to those who aren’t his staff. He lives in a a partial ‘eastern’ fantasy where he is Vathek, Sultan of all. While Fonthill was gothic, a style that Beckford felt fit into the landscape better, his instincts are to imagine in baroque, orientalist fantasies. As such, the character in the book is always a twelve-year-old-boy inside, winning in his whimsy and eager to share his fantasies with those around him. The book also claims a deep innocence, which is winning in the fictional character but hard to reconcile with the real man.
The book contains a number of claims which seem libellous but having not read a biography of Beckford, it became a game of guessing which claims were likely true and which were not. Were there really rumours that his first child was the result of his wife and underage boy-lover having their own relationship - or that the second was a result in a three-in-a-bed romp? It then ends bathetically with the Fonthill tower falling down and Beckford erecting another.
The book is titled Fonthill: A Comedy by Aubrey Menen, but it’s hard to decide whether the book is really a comedy or not. It’s certainly not laugh-out-loud funny yet neither does the book adopt a tragic tone. I suppose it’s intended in the more abstract notion of a human comedy, a squint-eyed look at the terrible scrapes us humans get in through the strange curlicues of our own brains and desires.
Beckford is first introduced through his vaulting folly (and title of the book) Fonthill Abbey. A huge, impressive building of astonishing scale and whimsy, a gaudy but flimsy building whose central tower collapsed several times in building and finally in 1825, bringing down a large chunk of the building. In imagination and artificiality, there’s something very Disneyland about the place. The reader joins a group touring the building, ostensibly with an eye to buying it at an auction by Christie, though most of the party are just there to be nosy at a famous den of iniquity and vice.
There’s one surprising visitor, the scruffy and dirty Farquhar, an eccentric millionaire who Beckford visits. He listens to Farquhar’s story, of being a young man in India and they discover they share an interest in pubescent boys and activities they can enjoy with them either naked or in flimsy trousers. Beckford wants to sell Fonthill Abbey to Farquhar without the bother of the Christie auction because he recognises “the only man I’ve met as original as myself.”
Fonthill is a fascinating novel in how it makes its central theme of pederasty both a constant source of conversation whilst also dancing around it. Beckford’s current young lover is now approaching fifty, both his and Farquhar’s paramours are in the past. What’s more, it’s depicted as larky and victimless. Beckford’s own initiation as a teenage boy, under the tutelage of Alexander Cosins are held as treasured memories that belong to halcyon days. The bodies of young men/old boys are reduced to body parts and the sexual exploitation of them a pleasantly bloodless and aesthetic enjoyment.
What’s more, not only does pederasty in the book not harm any of the boys, it’s only of minor inconvenience to Beckford’s wife, Margie. She is introduced as an innonent, being schooled in the ways of men (and boy-loving men especially) by the Prince Regent’s mistress, Harriet. She is a wonderful character, wise in the ways of both world and court, with a frankness to be explicit. She encourages Margie to pity Beckford, declaring that men who love twelve-year-old boys do so because they themselves never grow beyond twelve. She instructs Margie on how to be a good beard and how to put up with being sexual second (or third, fourth, fifth) fiddle. Oddly, Margie is very successful at this and the two have a relationship that is surprisingly supportive and loving in everywhere but the bedroom.
Harriet’s appearance also allows for Prinny himself to make a few entrances in the story, both as Regent and as King. He’s depicted as rather stupid but proud of his cannyness, with Harriet’s main attraction to his spouting nonsense. Prinny says he’s excited about the plans for the Brighton Pavilion because the domes remind him of huge breasts - Beckford’s fondness for ludicrously large towers speaks for itself.
In fact, the only people that seem to be truly harmed by pederasty in this book are the poor, innocent pederasts themselves. A Chancellor with a spanking fetish known as Full Bottom finds himself removed from office, while Beckford has to run off to the continent (where he hung around with William Hamilton’s first wife, Catherine). It isn’t his sexual practises that prove his real undoing though, the abolition of slavery and the excesses of Fonthill do that - and then not the the extent that Beckford still owns two houses in Bath and builds another tower. The book also elides pederasty and homosexuality, with the case of the Vere Street Molly House and the gruesome end of some of its patrons.
Beckford himself is depicted to be rather charming, at least to those who aren’t his staff. He lives in a a partial ‘eastern’ fantasy where he is Vathek, Sultan of all. While Fonthill was gothic, a style that Beckford felt fit into the landscape better, his instincts are to imagine in baroque, orientalist fantasies. As such, the character in the book is always a twelve-year-old-boy inside, winning in his whimsy and eager to share his fantasies with those around him. The book also claims a deep innocence, which is winning in the fictional character but hard to reconcile with the real man.
The book contains a number of claims which seem libellous but having not read a biography of Beckford, it became a game of guessing which claims were likely true and which were not. Were there really rumours that his first child was the result of his wife and underage boy-lover having their own relationship - or that the second was a result in a three-in-a-bed romp? It then ends bathetically with the Fonthill tower falling down and Beckford erecting another.
The book is titled Fonthill: A Comedy by Aubrey Menen, but it’s hard to decide whether the book is really a comedy or not. It’s certainly not laugh-out-loud funny yet neither does the book adopt a tragic tone. I suppose it’s intended in the more abstract notion of a human comedy, a squint-eyed look at the terrible scrapes us humans get in through the strange curlicues of our own brains and desires.
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