Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land

by John Crowley

  Friends: Lord Byron had a curious superstition, that if he had quarrelled with anyone he cared for, that person was in danger somehow, or in harm’s way, till the quarrel was made up, and they were friends again.

  Evening Land: There is always a West into which the heroes of the older age may go. Just beneath this word, in the small dictionary that I have, is another, Abentreuer, which means generally an Adventure, but is more exactly or loosely a journey West. Where dawn comes, of course, as everywhere. No end to the West till those who journey thence come round again at the last.

  drawn my pen across: The paragraph is not struck out, nor of course was meant to be—though whether it will see ink another age will know.

  A strange thought now occurs. Might it not have been the case, that this MS was not taken from Ld. B. nor lost or misplaced by him—but was bestowed by him upon one whom he had reason to believe would preserve it—and its message of Liberty. Could he have guessed that it might thus come to England that his daughter being his daughter might grow up to love liberty as he had wd befriend those Italians in London and thus acquire that which he had attempted thus to transmit to her no no I rave here why did he not send to me his thoughts a letter to tell me there wd have been a way never now I wd give all this tale for it

  apple: The pages have not met so mean a fate as that yet they have indeed their ‘enemies’—they will not themselves survive to be found. Some of the sheets must have been infused with salts of copper, or other fulminates, in their manufacture—they burned blue and green Lights are said to burn low and blue when ghosts are by. The words turned white upon a black page then gone. I would not watch all. One sheet only I have saved—William could not refuse me one at least to keep

  I had a last thing to say to all who read this I cannot say it. Finis

  From: “Smith”

  To: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  Subject: Oscar etc.

  Lee:

  Congrats about the Oscar nomination for the East Timor film. Are you going to take a chance on coming to the US in case you get it? I’ll buy you lunch if you come by way of Boston, and I promise not to lure you into a trap.

  S

  PS The book’s due out in six months—a little more maybe. Would you have any interest in writing an introduction?

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: RE:Oscar etc.

  No, not coming. It’s a long shot to say the least. And my tuxedo no longer fits. And no I will not write an introduction to the published book; my credentials are a little old, Alexandra, by now, and anyway wouldn’t it look a little funny? And no, I don’t know anyone you might ask—that is to say, I know some names, but they are all from a long time ago, and I don’t even know which are alive and which are dead. Harold Bloom? A wise man; I met him once or twice…I see that lately there have been a couple of what seem to me rather invidious new biographies of Byron by women, who have some very definite ideas about what Byron was up to; it would be nice (anyway I think it would be nice) to have this piece of his introduced by someone who likes him. But never mind all of that anyway: the only person who can, or must, or ought to, write any kind of introduction is you. Ada’s written hers; it’s your turn.

  I’m going back to East Timor in another couple of weeks. There are people there who need to know the news about how the film has been received—it counts as security for them, or at least I hope it does—the whole world is watching, at least on Oscar night, except the doc awards are when people get up and go for beer.

  Then the new project—I’m going to New Guinea for some months. It’s a place I’ve been reading about and talking to people about for years, and some money has come through at last. I have bad dreams about it, too, or at least unsettling ones. Anyway I’ll be way out of touch, probably, for some months, though I guess now there’s nowhere on earth that’s out of touch. If I can find a phone I can send a letter. Probably. I’ll be back in Tokyo again then for the editing and postproduction as they call it, which is going to take longer than the shooting. I don’t know what your plans are. I’m just letting you know. Now that I’ve caught you in the Web (or wasn’t it rather you who caught me?) I will sit down beside you, and hope I don’t frighten you away.

  I love you, Alexandra, even more than I knew. I don’t—I wouldn’t dare—hold you to the standard that Byron set, that you must love me for my crimes if you are to love me for myself; I hold you to no standard. I wish only that I could sign this differently, with a title—an honorific—not just a name. But I know I haven’t earned that, and probably never will; and so I am—

  Yours ever

  Lee

  PS: I note that there’s a Byron conference being held in Kyoto—beautiful city—in the spring of 2004. Good place for a launch?

  From: “Smith”

  To: “Thea”

  Subject: FWD:Congratulations

  Thea—

  Look what I got in the old in-box this morning. When I tried to reply, I got the Mailer Daemon: No such address at AOL. He’s not on the Web either, but we already knew that, and we also knew that it’s not his name anyway.

  From: “RoonyJ”

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: Congratulations

  Ms. Novak—

  I see by the noise in the press and the literary sites that a lost novel of Byron’s, or part of one, is to see print soon. I wanted to congratulate you, and tell you how pleased I am, that you and your associates (?) discovered the secret of The Evening Land and Ada’s devotion. It is indeed a remarkable tale. I am also thrilled and not a little awestruck that you have, apparently, overcome any doubts you might (must?) have felt as to the authenticity of the book, its provenance, etc. I only assume you have gone through the rigmarole of having the paper carbon-dated and the ink chemically analyzed etc. so that doubters may be confounded. The lingering doubts—e.g., how easy it would be to fill pages of old printed forms (found by chance, say, and blank) with numbers (so much easier to forge than a whole cursive handwriting)—these will be overcome by the overwhelming “internal evidence” that the work is by Byron, and that it is the work that Ada destroyed—I mean, did not destroy. And as no one in any case has any reason to forge a document that is then practically given away, no real questions can afterward remain.

  I am of course mad with eagerness to read the whole in your transcription. From what I hear, or read, about its contents, it would seem that the book does put the old Cloven Hoof in a new and flattering, or at least not hellish, light. I couldn’t be more pleased. I have always believed that when I reach Paradise—and I am sure of my election, Ms. Novak, as I am of his—I will be able to prove to myself that he was the man I even now know him to have been—a flawed and inconsistent but ultimately a great-natured and good and endlessly, wisely entertaining man. And I shall sit on my cloud or my flowery mead, and listen to his talk, and be very, very happy. Until then (not, it would appear, too long a time from now) I will have The Evening Land.

  Yours

  “Roony J. Welch”

  Wow, huh? I felt this rush of shit to the heart at first to read this, but now—I don’t know. Not anymore.

  Smith

  From: “Thea”

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: RE:FWD:Congratulations

  wow this is the guy who started it all sinister very makes you wonder what if yeah its sort of like ada when she was wondering if she enciphered it all wrong wrong numbers but then got a book anyway this book that wd be a coincidence that wd make anything babbage programmed into his engine look like nothing

  well i am deciding we are good here mr welch can go back to hell or where he came from

  babe heres whats important

  ily

  lol

  and btw w
hats for dinner

  t

  INTRODUCTION

  Alexandra Novak

  In the winter of 2002, I was invited to London to research the lives and work of a number of British women of science, including Mary Somerville and her younger friend Ada Lovelace, for an online virtual museum of women of science (www.strongwomanstory.org). In the course of that research I was privileged to make, or to be part of making, a number of discoveries. Some were of no interest to anybody but me, but one is of very general interest, and it is here presented as fully as possible—which is perhaps not as fully as it might be in future. The story that follows must, in other words, remain tentative, and the reader is asked to suspend disbelief for the present, as a novel or a romance asks us to do, and only attend.

  Ada Augusta King, Countess of Lovelace, Lord Byron’s only legitimate child, traveled to Nottinghamshire in September of 1850 to visit the ancestral seat of the Byrons, Newstead Abbey—which Lord Byron had sold years before, and which was then in the possession of a Colonel Wildman, an old schoolmate of Byron’s. Returning south, Lady Lovelace and her husband went to the races at Doncaster: they were both, as it was then said, devotees of the turf. Ada backed Voltigeur, which won an upset over the favorite, Flying Dutchman. The win didn’t come close to canceling Ada’s racing debts, which she kept secret from her husband. In May of 1851, the Crystal Palace exhibition opened in London; in August of that year, Ada was told that the illness she had been for some time suffering from was serious, indeed fatal—it was cancer of the cervix, for which there was then no treatment. Sometime in that autumn (Ada was careless in dating her letters) she mentioned to her mother, Lady Byron, that she was at work on “certain productions” involving music and mathematics. In November of 1852, after much suffering, she died of cancer; she was then thirty-six years old (her father died in the same year of his life). Between the date of her visit to Newstead Abbey and her death she acquired, transcribed, annotated, enciphered, and destroyed—at her mother’s request or order—the manuscript of the only extensive piece of prose fiction ever written by her father.

  The story of the rediscovery of Ada’s enciphered manuscript after 150 years, its acquisition by the Hon. Miss Georgiana Poole-Hatton, its deciphering and authentication, is told in as great detail as is presently possible in the Textual History and Description which follows this Introduction. Of course it is still possible that what is presented here as the work of Lord Byron, annotated by Ada Lovelace, is not that at all. It might be that Ada herself wrote the novel as well as the notes; that someone else wrote the novel and sold it to her (or to those who then sold it to her) as Byron’s; that both the novel and the annotations are forgeries, dating from sometime between Byron’s or Ada’s time and now. All that can have been done to eliminate these possibilities has been done. Tests indicate (though they can’t prove) that the ink and paper date from before the middle of the nineteenth century; internal evidence in the novel does not point toward a date later than Byron’s death, nor a date later than Ada’s in the notes. The handwriting in the notes is demonstrably Ada’s, though it differs in certain ways from other writings of around the same period, perhaps because of her hurry, or because of the effects of the drugs she was taking almost continuously in ever larger amounts. For reasons explained in the Textual History, it is not possible at this time to trace the physical provenance of the manuscripts or the trunk in which they were allegedly found. For the moment each reader must decide for herself whether she is indeed in contact with these two persons, the poet and his daughter, and hearing their voices in these writings. I think I do hear them; I can’t imagine that they could be anything but what they seem to be.

  If the novel is what it purports to be, then where was it before Ada got it, and who acquired it for her? In her own introduction to the manuscript of the novel (pages 46–62 of the present book), Ada states that she arranged to see the man who had the manuscript, an Italian who had acquired it from another who had acquired (or perhaps stolen) it in Italy, when she visited the Crystal Palace. I thought at first that the man who accompanied Ada on that visit must have been Charles Babbage; it was just the kind of thing that Babbage was forever doing for her. He did show her around the site of the Great Exhibition as it was being constructed; but Babbage had had a public controversy with the planners and been entirely excluded from all the planning for the Crystal Palace exhibition; his famed Difference Engine wasn’t displayed there. It seemed unlikely that he would have been eager to go there with her. So who was the go-between, who negotiated with the Italians, who then later went to get the manuscript? It seemed impossible to know, until I came upon an undated note from Ada to Fortunato Prandi, who was one of those in the émigré Italian circle she and Babbage knew—something between a radical activist, a spy, and an agent, maybe a double one. Here is the note, which is in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library.

  Dear Prandi. I have a more important service to ask of you, which only you can perform…I can in writing explain nothing but that you must come to me at 6 o’clock, and be prepared to be at my disposal till midnight. You must be nicely yet not too showily dressed. You may have occasion for both activity & presence of mind. Nothing but urgent necessity would induce me thus to apply to you;—but you may be the means of salvation. I will not sign. I am the lady you went with to hear Jenny Lind. I expect you at 6.—

  “A more important service” implies a previous service, which might have been the visit to the Crystal Palace and the glimpse of the man with the gold earring; the present service would then be the actual acquisition of the MS. This is all merely speculative. It certainly seems that something conspiratorial was afoot, but in those years Ada worked up a lot of plots and entanglements. There is much further exploring to do among the Italians in London, and in Ada’s papers, and in Babbage’s too. There are for instance the several mentions in the Babbage/Ada correspondence of a “book,” not further described, that must be passed back and forth between the two of them at intervals, with care taken over its delivery, etc. When I found these I wondered if I had actually caught Byron’s novel in transit, so to speak. A recent biographer of Ada* suggests that the “book” may rather have been the betting book Ada was keeping: she had become consumed by horse racing, and ended by selling her family jewels to pay her gambling debts—and then reselling them again after they had been redeemed by her baffled and compassionate husband. (So the story has always run: and yet now we have to wonder if those family jewels weren’t also the source of the money Ada needed to buy The Evening Land from its possessors.) In any case the mentions of this book predate the opening of the Crystal Palace and therefore the period in which the book of Byron’s was acquired.

  What is certain is that it was from Babbage that Ada learned about codes, ciphers, and enciphering. The cipher Ada used for enciphering Lord Byron’s novel is a variant of the Vigenère cipher, a cipher known since the sixteenth century, which a contemporary of Babbage’s rediscovered without knowing it had long been used though never cracked. When Babbage pointed this out to him, he challenged Babbage to solve a text he encoded with it. Babbage was able to break the cipher, but he never published his solution. He also designed a wheel, like a circular slide rule, that made it easier to set up a cipher and then read off the substituted letters; maybe Ada had one, and used it for The Evening Land. Babbage looms over, or lingers behind, the story of Ada like a stage manager or trickster, or like one of the busy mechanical people he loved to show off, whose motives are unreadable, maybe nonexistent, and whose powers are unguessable. In the end (of the story, or of our ability to understand it) he merely bows, and draws his curtain.

  Ada, as noted, was very lax about dating her letters, and there are no dates given in her annotations of Byron’s manuscript, and none on the single note to Francisco Prandi. But it seems to be just before the manuscript came into her possession that Ada’s relations with her mother took a new turn. Her biographers trace this change to her visit
to Newstead Abbey, her father’s former estate, which somehow awakened her feelings for her father and her Byron ancestors. “I have had a resurrection,” she wrote a little incautiously to her mother. “I do love the venerable old place & all my wicked forefathers!” It’s hard to know what would have happened to this manuscript if Ada had discovered it earlier—if she had found no reason in her own heart to protect it. Clearly her mother (like Snow White’s) wouldn’t have allowed it to exist within her kingdom.

  But she did preserve it. Whether she perceived that her mother would eventually find it, either among her papers when she died or as she worked over it to make a fair copy; or if she only set about enciphering it after Lady Byron discovered it, and before she agreed to destroy it, can’t be known. The labor of recasting the whole fifty-thousand-plus words of the manuscript into her cipher was so huge that it must have taken her months. My sense is that it wasn’t long after Lady Byron discovered its existence that it was given up to be burned, and that Ada knew it would be, and by that time she was ready, with a pile of “mathematical and musical work” in her desk that no one would inquire about.

  In that month she summoned her husband to her, and made him promise that she would be buried beside her father in the Byron family vault at Hucknall Torkard church, where she had seen and touched his casket on her journey to Nottingham in 1850. It had been her secret that she had decided even then to be buried there. She chose an epitaph too, that she told her husband she wanted put on her own casket. It was from the Bible, in which she had evinced so little interest during most of her life. It comes from the Epistle of James: You have condemned, you have killed the righteous man; he does not resist you. The first meaning of this remarkable choice is so obvious—she believed her father (whose remains would be lying next to her own) was a righteous man, unjustly condemned and exiled by the society around him—that it seems we discover its second meaning for ourselves: that Ada, though herself dying, would no longer resist those who condemned her. She ceased altogether to resist her mother; she wrote out, at her mother’s instruction, pledges of affection for her mother’s friends, including those she had called the Furies, who had so willingly constrained and punished her when she was a child. She agreed that her mother should have control over all her papers. She confessed her “errors,” and confessed them again. She jettisoned her life.