Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land

by John Crowley

  perfect: It is said he thus asked after me, and asked the nurse to lift my clothes to see my legs and feet from this may have come the untrue tale I know it to be untrue that when my mother was brought to bed & I was delivered of her he came to the door of the room drunk and asked Is it dead? Is it dead, then? He did not do so my mother will not say he did He asked if I were perfect It was natural to ask—for he was not.——

  great pain today mother’s Bible by

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: RE:Gravitas

  [My dear—How’s this—the Salutation is part of the gravitas:]

  Dear Alexandra:

  I am extremely grateful to you for having entrusted me with the news of your astonishing discovery of a heretofore unknown prose fiction by Lord Byron. The discovery, when it can at last be made public, will alter our picture of Byron, his work, and above all his relations with his wife and his daughter. I can think of few discoveries of comparable importance related to writers of the period. When I completed my doctoral dissertation on Byron at the University of Chicago, he was in as deep eclipse as it is possible for a major poet to be, and yet his life, and his career, have never ceased to intrigue and excite commentators, biographers, and the reading public—even while his written work has become less and less familiar. During my tenure at two universities (you’ve asked me for a CV, and I am faxing it under separate cover) I of course worked to make students and others aware of his worth—the list of my papers, studies, monographs, and addresses are evidence of that. It seemed important then to rescue Byron from his legend, and thus I wrote studies with titles like “How Byronic was Byron?” and “Saving Byron from his Friends.” Even that enterprise now seems somewhat recondite to me, and perhaps convinced few. I myself turned away from Byron, and the university, to pursue other interests and imperatives—for the past twenty years I have worked on a series of film projects designed to bring the calamities, struggles, and daily lives of people in many “remote” places in the world (not remote to those who live there, or those who want something from them) to the attention of that world I myself spring from. (I am proud of these films, and glad of the awards they have garnered, though there is no scientific way of measuring their real impact—any more than there was a way to measure Byron’s influence on the course of Greek independence.)

  Now, when even to me Byron sometimes seems part of the unreclaimable past, the world has discovered new reasons to be interested in him. There is his complex sexuality, which it is now permissible to ponder and inquire into without evasion or moral horror (or other bias)—he doesn’t need exculpation, or championing, at least on those grounds. But above all there is his daughter, and the way the world has gone in the last decades, which has made her seem a kind of prophet, someone who, clearly if not in detail, saw the future. Ada really did see what few others saw in her day—really, no others—that machines of the future would compute, manipulate symbols, write music, store data, and perform activities that it was assumed in her lifetime only human minds could do.

  She saw herself as doing more than that, however: she saw herself as in pursuit of a new kind of science altogether, a science that would bridge molecular and atomic physics and human mentality, a science in which investigators were their own laboratories, as poets are their own smithies, where they forge new realities from their selves. From the beginning her high-minded (and vengeful, and wary) mother had kept her from poetry and anything that smacked of the imaginative, the self-regarding, the emotional—the Byronic. What Ada came to know—what her mother couldn’t have imagined—is that science is a realm of passion and dream as great as poetry. She saw herself, in other words, as the continuer of her father’s personal experiments with the possibilities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—only in different terms, terms that his time could not conceive, and that she herself could not fully articulate. She believed there could be a molecular science of mind, a cosmology of thought, a true science beyond mere self-examination and reflection, indeed a science that without reductionism would transform self-examination itself—and that those computing machines would be a necessary component of it, both as tools and as subjects. Well, she was right—is right. The neuroscience of our day, which is impossible without the digital tools she envisioned, is doing exactly the work she wanted to do—and coming to conclusions, or envisionings, that she would have understood. (The phrenology she was devoted to, which came to seem inadequate to her, was an early attempt to found a science of the mind on the physiology of the brain.) In fact it’s hard not to think that, in her recovery, rescuing, enciphering, and annotating of her father’s work (a very uncharacteristic piece of it, by the way) she was consciously furthering that work, by a self-experiment in memory and heredity. She was apparently, if your research is correct, at work on it nearly till the day she died.

  So the interest of what you’ve found isn’t only for us aged Byromaniacs, if there really are any unreconstructed ones left. The interest is in the light (and warmth) it sheds on Ada—not on what she did do, of which the rather inconclusive records exist, but what she was, and might have been—which is more important to us, who live in the world she longed to glimpse—and did glimpse.

  Yours

  Lee

  [So do you think that’s what’s needed? Less? More? I can spin it differently if you want. You may not think so, reading this note, but I actually believe every word of it—L]

  From: “Smith”

  To: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  Subject: Thanks

  Good. Thanks. Really thanks.

  I believe it too, every word.

  I’m just going to add this: “It would not only be a loss to literary history, or Byron studies, if this work didn’t see the light. Above all it would be a loss to our knowledge of Ada, for whom the sources are so much slighter than for Byron. She collaborated in this work [piece? story? project?] with her dead father, and both are illuminated by what they did, but Ada especially.”

  Okay? It’s not as pisselegant as yours. I never learned to do that. Or did it just come naturally to you?

  You’ll get a picture soon.

  S

  Ashfield

  April 25, 2002

  My darling Alex,

  Well, the spring has come at last here, the tulips are out now and the orioles have returned to make a nest (or refurbish the old one) in the quince bush. Their orange against the scarlet of the quince blossoms is so intense it almost clashes—though I guess no colors in nature can clash really.

  You know I was only afraid for you: not afraid that he’d hurt you, though he might believe I thought that. I was afraid that sorrow would hurt you. Sorrow for yourself, and for him too, and for the damage he suffered, as much as the damage he did—and for that poor child on that night above all. Sorrow, that could kill you it seemed, like a late frost can kill things just starting so hopefully. I know that’s wrong. Marc and I watched a butterfly coming from its cocoon the other day—my God this is so strangely corny I can’t believe it’s so—and butterflies come out, you know, all wet and folded up like a stuffed grape leaf, and then start to unfold. It takes such a long time, and it looks so difficult—the poor little thing was just panting, or so it looked—and straining to set these sails. I wanted to help, and tug them open for it, and Marc said—I suppose he’d know—that if you do that, and the butterfly doesn’t do it for itself, then it can’t fly: it’s the process of stretching and airing and waving and panting and drying out that activates the muscles, or whatever passes for muscles in butterflies. Only then it can fly.

  I know all that, and I knew it then; I wanted you to fly, and with your own wings, and I knew how little I could help. I just wanted to keep sorrow away, until you had to face it. I knew you had to. I just wanted you to be stronger first. People say that troubles and grief can make you strong, but I don’t believe it—I think that love
and happiness make you strong, they feed you and wrap your soul in healthy tissue, in love-fat, so you can stand things, and abide the cold. Of course I know now it might have been really me who needed to get stronger. And from your loving me, I did. I hope you’ll forgive me.

  Love

  Mom

  From: “Smith”

  To: “Thea”

  Subject: Hey you

  My dearest dear:

  Faxed you my flight schedule, or shed-jewel as they say here. Virgin Air (!) Omigod I can’t wait.

  You know what I thought today: that if Ada had lived now, or even a little later than she did, she might have been allowed to see her father. If he hadn’t been so badly treated by doctors in Greece he might have lived, at least a few more years, and she might have just packed up and gone abroad to find him. If if if. I wish I were a real historian because they don’t think if if if.

  I want to find a letter from him, to someone, someone who was near him when he died, that says Take these pages and give them to my daughter. He wanted to tell her that he would have come for her if he could have, and taken her away with him to somewhere they couldn’t follow. But I think he just lost them. She had to be the one, the one who did the work of finding and saving the book. It was nothing but a letter meant for her, and she was the one who was supposed to get it, and then in the end she did get it. That’s what I have to say when I write about this, that she was the one.

  It’s like Babbage’s miracles. Did you read about this? Babbage used to invite people to his house to see the Difference Engine work. He would set all the wheels to zero, and then turn the handle, and one wheel would go to 2. Then turn the handle and it goes to 4. Then 6. And everybody gets it—the rule is, “add 2.” At 8, the wheel turns to 0 and the next wheel turns to 1, and you get 10. He’d go on and on maybe a hundred turns. Then suddenly the number jumps not by two but by a huge number, like 100. Everybody reacts—a break! An oddity at least! Babbage explains, no—he instructed the machine in advance to do that—after a certain number of turns to advance by 100 instead of by 2. In other words the break was built in from the beginning—it was a rule and not a break. That’s what Babbage said divine miracles were—they were natural rules too, but just rules we didn’t know about till they were manifested. See I think that too.

  The miracle of Ada is not that she saved the novel. The miracle is the love she didn’t know about, that would make her do that: love coming at the hundredth iteration, a sudden advance, programmed from her childhood maybe, but only just then showing up in her life, when she was at Newstead Abbey, and at the tomb where her father was, and his father too.

  The book’s in digital form now, Word Perfect format, haha, and I can deal with it anywhere. Georgiana’s not mad anymore. She told me she wrote Lee a card thanking him for his advice and encouragement. I knew it. She probably sprayed it with perfume, or scent, they say here. Lilith is still pissed tho.

  See you and the Honda at JFK. I can’t say what I think in my heart.

  Smith

  • SIXTEEN •

  Wherein all is ended, tho’ not concluded

  FROM LONDON IN ENGLAND there came to Venice on the Adriatic a letter addressed to The Honourable Peter Piper, and enclosed within that letter another letter, which the Honourable was charged to transmit—by other means than the well-watched Post—to its intended recipient, who, upon receipt, opened and read as follows:

  MY BROTHER,—When we two parted, my question to you was, Why you should trust me, that I would do what you asked, and why you thought that I could do a better thing for that child, than her present Guardians? For in myself I saw naught, that would cause me to think I was capable of it—of the deed, I had no doubt, but of the rest, not at all. I shall tell you all that has occurred, and you may judge for yourself as to whether your trust in me was well placed. Alas—unless you fail, and are hanged in some public square—I shall never learn as much of thee.

  To my tale.—My visit to the Temple chambers of Mr Wigmore Bland, bearing the papers you were good enough to supply me with—the power of Attorney, and the rest—produced upon the inert mass of our affairs the right Leavening. The Estates of the Sanes are dissolved for ever, or soon enough shall be—and we shall be Landless—tho’ richer in Cash than we have been these several years—the disposition of which shall be as we agreed, provision being made for all Servants, Tenants, cats and dogs too that your tender heart desired to see pensioned. Thus shriven, I set out for the house of the imprisoned child—Mr Bland was well-furnished with details upon the matter of her confinement, which he deplored most fittingly—indeed, he became almost melancholy—for a moment—before recovering himself. From him I learned that Lady Sane—as your lawful wedded Wife is still styled—has not recovered her Wits, though she has been treated by a succession of doctors of every persuasion, who fasten upon her, and her Cheque-book, with all the tenacity of the Leech they employ so freely; Mr Bland was certain that one at least, and in all likelihood several, were not Doctors at all, except perhaps once in Pantomime.

  Upon my arrival in the neighbourhood of that house where Una was confined, I soon learned that I would not be called upon to free the child from those who held her prisoner, if so they did—for even as I came to the house, the talk upon the roads and in the Village was of how she had freed herself. You may not know—I think, indeed, that you know nothing at all of her—that like her father’s brother, she is subject to Sleep-walking. I know not if this condition had made itself known before, or if the Guardians, set at her gates like a three-headed Cerberus, knew of it, but perhaps they did not—for the locks on all their doors were upon the inside, to keep intruders out, but easily undone from within—and so out she went, upon the middle of the Night, and set out upon the Highway, like the Piper’s son, over the hill and far away. In the morning, her absence having been discovered, a Hue and Cry was raised, but she having been gone many Hours, and observed by none as she walked unconscious among them—a sleeper awake, among the sleeping-unawake!—the worst was suspected. Weirs were to be dredged, and Rivers watched; hay-stacks were poked into, and woods beaten—to no avail. You may imagine that in this search I made not myself conspicuous—you have evidence yourself, of a quality I have, or a Talent I may employ, of being, when I choose, invisible, or at least unnoticed, despite all that is distinctive about me.

  For my part—it is my natural bent—I considered accident or mischance less likely to have been her fate than Evil—I think that those who sleep-walk are commonly able to avoid falling into ponds or stepping off from cliffs—but a Child alone at midnight in her nightdress is a temptation to some—and a green county in England is as likely to show one or two such as any spot on Earth.

  Shall I keep you upon tenter-hooks, dear Brother, as to how this tale continues, or concludes—or have you gone already to the last page, and seen the outcome, as a maiden with a French romance will do, to learn that the lovers live ‘happily ever after’? The events of the succeeding weeks are perhaps worth the ink & paper to recount, but I shall not expend them—I have not the time, for the Thames is on the turn, and the tide is about to go out, carrying the nation’s Trade (and some of its Populace) to far corners. A cool calculation, made at the Inn of the town where the Child had lost herself, gave me odds of an hundred to one about finding her—lower, of finding her before her Relations did—lower still, of finding her unhurt. Nevertheless I did so, and that because—as it fell out—a fellow who was as cool a calculator as myself was the first who chanced upon her that night. In the widening circle of my investigations, I learned that in the next town a Gentleman, thereabouts unknown, had got on the London coach with his sleeping child in his arms—a dark-headed child—and thence I myself hastened.

  You may know that in that City, in company with a certain Friend of long standing—anciently a companion of our Father’s—I enjoy’d a brief career in the show business, and found that as to mobility, and freedom of s
eeing and hearing—which last will include overhearing, eavesdropping, and related Arts—it has no equal. For sure a Hunchback with a Bear may seem quite remarkable—but in fact he is invisible to most—because expected—no more regarded than the paving-stones, or window-sashes, or any thing ordinary—and such a one may stand about by the hour, and collect intelligence—along with a few coppers—which are not to be despised neither. Moreover, among the Brotherhood of show-men much may be learned of the former lives of those now appearing upon the larger stage of Life—they acknowledge their old friends the Countess who once danced at Drury Lane, the fashionable Preacher who lately told fortunes in Green Park, the rich Landlord whose fortune began in a House of indifferent reputation. From the gossip at inns and fair-booths, I learned much concerning the former history of one who now in Mayfair drawing-rooms was making a great stir—a Mesmeric Doctor who had cured many young ladies of maladies that some of them had not even known they were afflicted with, until the Doctor examined them—his Magnets, Coppers, jars, fluids, and Ætheric Engines had effected miracles. He is not the first or last who have made a success in such enterprises, but those who talked of him to me, who knew how far the Doctor had risen, were admiring. What caused me to inquire further was, ’twas said he was accompanied by a Child, who was the centre of his experiments—a Child whom he could, with but a pass of his hand, or the use of a bit of magnetised Nickel, put deep asleep, yet remaining alert and upright, able to follow commands, and—what is far more—to speak upon question, and to tell others present something of the Name and Nature of their diseases, and uneases.—What Science now purports to do, has been done in past centuries by Saints and Priestesses, who spake truths in trances—but no—the Doctor’s lectures claim’d a new revelation, drawn out of Mesmer, Puységur, Combe, & Spurzheim—his young Pythoness was subject to no old-fashioned Delphic transports, but methods never granted Man before. Well! I know not, nor ever will, aught of such things—tell me that all has changed forever, and there are truly new things under the Sun—despite Solomon’s observation—and that soon enough a Steam-engine will conduct man to the Moon—I am happy to suppose it—yet may not change my behaviour—nor invest my Money.