Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land

by John Crowley

  At some time in these months—the note describing it has no date—she wrote to her mother to say that the manuscript of her father’s novel had been burned. (A transcription of this letter can be found in the Appendix.) I can find no documentary evidence of Ada’s informing her that the manuscript existed, or that she had acquired it, but the papers of the Lovelace family are so extensive that it might still turn up, not having been understood for what it is. I have found no document in her mother’s hand expressing a desire, or an order, that the MS be burned. But it certainly was her wish, if Ada is to be believed.

  So all was done. She had surrendered to her mother as to death. And yet still she didn’t die: throughout that autumn she lingered, unwilling or unable to go. Meanwhile her mother prayed with her, and discussed her “errors” with her (she wrote to her Christian correspondents how gratifying it was that Ada saw them and confessed them): these no doubt included her gambling, her pawning of the family jewels, and her single adultery, but it’s likely they also included all the irreligious and skeptical things she’d thought. She lived in a kind of twilight, scribbling notes only her mother could read, terrified that she would be buried alive, asking over and over who stood at the door, who stood at the end of the bed, when no one was there. Charles Dickens really did come to visit her, at her request (they had been friends for years) and read to her from Dombey & Son, the scene where little Paul Dombey, dying, sees a vision of his mother come to stand at the end of his bed. When Babbage came to visit her, Lady Byron turned him away.

  In October Ada’s son Byron, now Viscount Ockham, whom she had above all wanted near her, had been sent away by Lady Byron, because in what Lady Byron called “this state of suspense” he might “receive injurious impressions.” Now he was brought back, for one last visit before returning to his naval duties and his ship at Plymouth. It was decided—by Lady Byron—that the boy should not bid a final farewell to his mother, as she would not be able to bear it; he only went to the door of her room, and looked inside a last time. It’s uncertain whether she knew he was there.

  But Ockham didn’t return to his ship. He packed his midshipman’s uniform in a carpetbag, and sent it home to his father. Then he disappeared. Lord Lovelace, distraught, called the police and hired a detective. This is the description of Ockham he ran in the London Times, with an offer of a reward for the boy’s discovery:

  nearly 17 years of age, 5 foot 6 inches high, broad-shouldered, well-knit active frame, slouching seaman-like gait, sunburnt complexion, dark expressive eyes and eyebrows, thick black wavy hair, hands long and slightly tattooed with a red cross and other small black marks…

  This description, including those dark, expressive eyes that somehow seem to have come from his grandfather and namesake, was circulated at the principal ports of embarkation for America—Bristol and Liverpool—as though Lord Lovelace had reason to think his son would be found there, and he was—at an inn in Liverpool, where he was living with “common Sailors” and trying to get a passage to America. He didn’t resist the detective who found him, and came home again.

  This much of Ockham’s story has been known for some time. Some of Lady Byron’s connections and relatives found it shockingly hard-hearted of young Byron to cause this grief to his family at just this moment. What has not before been known was that at some time during his stay there—possibly when he guessed he would be caught—he put into a Liverpool bank vault the chest containing his seaman’s papers, some letters and other personal mementos, and the enciphered novel and the notes for it which his mother had committed to him. How clear it must have been to her—for she had her moments of clarity, those awful and pitiless and wondrous moments that do light up final illnesses, as anyone who has witnessed one knows—that he would try his best to preserve it. Did she want him to escape, as well? What was it she told him—to go straight from her house and her room, where she lay dying, away from everything, and to America?

  He never did. He was put back into the Navy. He eventually won a discharge, or deserted, it’s unclear what happened. After more unhappy years—at home under Lady Byron’s care, then under the direction of the famed Victorian schoolmaster Thomas Arnold—he ran away again, and this time wasn’t pursued; he worked as a coal miner and then as a laborer in a shipyard, living under the name of Jack Okey. He died in 1862 of consumption, aged twenty-six. The dead can’t learn or change, but the one thing I would like Lord Byron to hear, the story I would most like to get a letter from him about, is the strange and sad story of his grandson, who wanted not to be a lord.

  What follows then, I believe, is the result of a triple honoring. I want to say, of a triple love—the love of a father for his daughter, a daughter for her father, a son for his mother—but I can’t see into hearts long dead, and one of those involved left no record at all.

  IN JUNE 1816, IN Switzerland, as he began the novel he would at some point call The Evening Land, Byron completed canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In the last stanzas he spoke directly to his faraway daughter—while knowing of course that his wife, and the whole reading world, were listening in. “The child of love, though born in bitterness,” he calls her. “Yet, though dull Hate as duty should be taught / I know that thou wilt love me…” Perhaps he did know this; certainly he seemed to know he would never see her again:

  I see thee not,—I hear thee not,—but none

  Can be so wrapt in thee; thou art the friend

  To whom the shadows of far years extend:

  Albeit my brow thou never should’st behold,

  My voice shall with thy future visions blend,

  And reach into thy heart,—when mine is cold,—

  A token and a tone, even from thy father’s mould.

  And so it did; his voice did reach into her heart. Lord Byron also never got to America, nor did he ever return to England; Ada never went abroad to see him—as she might have today, if her father could have been properly treated for his illnesses, if her mother had not retained a lifelong horror of her husband, if the world then had been more like the world now, if things weren’t as they are and were. But his voice reached into her heart, as it would have done, I believe, whether or not she had ever found the novel that here follows.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TO ALL those scholars and investigators who helped to authenticate and account for the manuscript of The Evening Land may be found following the Textual History. I would myself like to express here my own debt to two people for their help to me in solving the puzzle of The Evening Land and its fate: Dr. Lee Novak, for his editing of the deciphered manuscript, for his annotations of Ada’s annotations, but much more for his many insights and his encouragement; and Dr. Thea Spann, whose cunning and constancy were both indispensable, and whom I can’t find words to thank.

  Kyoto

  June 10, 2003

  * Benjamin Woolley, The Bride of Science (1999).

  Acknowledgments

  THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE to acknowledge those who aided him in the foregoing piece of impertinence, among whom are Ralph Vicinanza, Jennifer Brehl, L.S.B., Ted Chiang for thoughts about codes, Mary Irwin for French perhaps more correct than Byron’s, Benjamin Woolley for The Bride of Science (his biography of Ada, Countess of Lovelace), Doron Suede for The Difference Engine, and above all Paul Fry for his meticulous and sympathetic reading. The great dead need no acknowledgment from me.

  P. S.

  Insights, Interviews & More...

  About the author

  Meet John Crowley

  JOHN CROWLEY is the author of nine novels and two collections of short fiction. His first published novels were science fiction:The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer, nominated for the American Book Award in 1977, appears in David Pringle’s authoritative Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. Crowley’s next book, Little, Big, won the World Fantasy Award for best novel in 1982; Ursula K. Le Guin called it a book which "all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy." Also that year, Crowley embarked on an ambitious mu
ltivolume novel called Ægypt, of which three volumes have been published: Æegypt, Love & Sleep, and Daemonomania. (The final volume is in preparation.) Both this series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. Crowley is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. The Translator, published in 2002, received Italy’s Premio Flaianno.

  Crowley’s short fiction is collected in three volumes: Novelty (including the World Fantasy Award-winning novella Great Work of Time), Antiquities, and Novelties & Souvenirs, an omnibus volume containing almost all his short fiction (a new novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, appeared in 2005). A volume of essays and criticism will appear in 2006.

  “Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.”

  For much of his working life Crowley has written scripts for short films and documentaries, including many historical documentaries for public television. His work in this medium has received numerous awards and has been shown at the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and several other venues. His scripts include The World of Tomorrow (about the 1939 World’s Fair), No Place to Hide (about the bomb shelter obsession of the 1950s), The Hindenburg, and FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body (about American fitness practices and beliefs over the decades, cowritten with Laurie Block).

  About the book

  A Conversation with John Crowley

  THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW was conducted by Nick Gevers in May 2005, shortly before the publication of Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land. A resident of Cape Town, South Africa, Gevers reviews for Locus, interviews authors for Science Fiction Weekly, and edits science fiction and fantasy titles for PS Publishing in Britain.

  Let’s begin with your quite remarkable new book, Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land. You’ve clearly been interested in Byron for a long time, as your 1990 short story, "Missolonghi 1824," attests. Why this fascination? What do you find especially compelling about Byron as a writer and as a personality?

  The fascination actually goes back a lot farther than that. In the late 1960s I wrote a play—maybe it would have evolved into a screenplay—about Byron and [Percy Bysshe] Shelley in Pisa and the death of Shelley. It set Byron as an homme moyen sensuel and ambivalent realist against the pure Utopian vision of Shelley—and details how they evolved a deep friendship despite the difference. It was a tale for those times, I guess. But I came to love them both—Byron more profoundly, or intimately. He seemed to me—as few historical characters ever do—a whole man, a man whose interior was as knowable as any living person I could know intimately. Because he was so unguarded, his poses and his personae were evident as what they were and he was always ready to mock himself for projecting them—mock himself as smilingly and tolerantly as he did the rest of the world. I came to think of him as a friend.

  “Byron seemed to me—as few historical characters ever do—a whole man, a man whose interior was as knowable as any living person I could know intimately.”

  The core of Lord Byron’s Novel is exactly what the title promises: The Evening Land, a brilliant pastiche of the novel Byron might plausibly have written. This raises two questions: First, why engage in such elaborate literary impersonation when your own prose style is justly celebrated in its own right? And second, how difficult was it to master Byron’s voice in such depth and in such idiosyncratic detail?

  The answer is the same for both questions. I really enjoy ventriloquizing or channeling other voices and I think I’m good at it, within some distinct limits. The long eighteenth-century erotic poem pastiche in Daemonomania called "Ars Auto-amatoria, or, Every Man his Own Wife," was a delight to write. (I managed a career as a publicist and writer of public relations and instructional films by imagining myself the kind of person who wrote such things and writing what he’d write.) It was like turning on a faucet to reproduce the voice. (Of course I also kept notebooks full of turns of phrase, terms, bits of slang, Latin tags, etc., to draw on at need.) Byron’s letters and journals fill thirteen volumes, and I have them all—they’ve been my pick-it-up-when-nothing-else-suits reading for years. They are lots funnier and swifter and eccentrically individual than my imitation.

  Byron has been a favorite subject of historical novelists—one thinks of such books as Robert Nye’s The Memoirs of Lord Byron (1989) and Tom Holland’s The Vampyre (1995). Nye reconstructed Byron’s memoirs, which were in reality destroyed after his death, and Holland took him in the direction of supernatural legend. Did the fact that those approaches had already been exploited point you toward the idea of a novel amounting to Byron’s fictionalized autobiography?

  No, actually—though there are even more than you name. I glanced at Nye’s book after conceiving my own and found it unconvincing—I’m not being dismissive; I didn’t want to have my own attempt clouded by his. I particularly objected to Bruce Sterling and William Gibson’s otherwise delightful The Difference Engine [1990] for its suggestion that Byron could have initiated a police state. Harder to put down was Paul West’s wonderful Lord Byron’s Doctor [ 1989], which was convincing, though his Byron wasn’t mine and I quickly had to avoid it too. I didn’t want to write about Byron or his real or imaginary adventures.

  Why do you have Byron in The Evening Land couch his own life story in indirect yet eminently recognizable terms (as he himself did in his long poems "Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage" and "Don Juan")? Is his career still generally misunderstood to the extent that he must be given afresh opportunity for self-defense?

  Well, I don’t think any but the learned will be able to compare in any detail his life and the tale I’ve written for him. I think the goal wasn’t defending him or explaining him so much as it was imagining the story he would tell. Byron was a modern man in many ways, but he was a modern writer because of his naked employment of his own life in his fictions—always knowing that because of his (also modern) media fame his readers were going to make the comparisons and try to guess at the (scandalous) truth.

  Also along those lines: The Evening Land is supposedly written by Byron circa 1816 to 1822, during which time he, of course, changed—perhaps maturing, certainly evolving in outlook. The novel itself undergoes shifts in tone from the Gothic onward. . . . How precisely do the differing modes and moods of the chapters of The Evening Land map Byron’s ongoing psychological and literary development in those years?

  I’m not sure I was entirely conscious of doing this, though I am happy to think that it strikes you that way and it would certainly be what I want the book to do. I think I was as much conscious of the growth and maturity of Byron’s characters (that is, those I invented for him) as he would have been. It could be thought that the historical progression of Byron’s own life—childhood in Scotland, years at Eton and then at Cambridge, early visit to Albania and elsewhere abroad, raising hell in London, bad marriage, debts, fleeing England, long residence in Venice as the lover of a married woman, growing involvement in the European revolutionary movements—is very intentionally mapped against my invented story. Of course the resonances are intentional, but—I guess it’s a different kind of channeling—in the writing these just seemed to be the inevitable matters to which a novelizing Byron would be drawn. And (as my imagined Ada notes) he is more nakedly undefended here, in some ways, than he was likely to have been in his self-justifying memoirs.

  An additional layer of Lord Byron’s Novel is the later notes and commentary of his daughter Ada on the text of The Evening Land. Ada, dying herself of cancer, reaches out to her dead father; it becomes clear just how determined Ada’s mother Lady Annabella was to destroy her husband’s reputation and to poison Ada’s mind against him. Was Annabella really this monomaniacally vicious? And how did you conceive of the masterstroke of having Ada, a highly gifted mathematician in real life, perform a certain cryptographical maneuver on The Evening Land?

  Lady Byron—Annabella—was indeed as far as I can tell a dreadfu
l woman. I have most of my information from the books of Doris Langley Moore, The Late Lord Byron and Ada, Countess of Lovelace. Nothing in my account of her in the various notes and letters is invented. She deserves a novel of her own, but I doubt Moore’s nonfiction could be bettered. Regarding the inclusion of Ada in my account, many years ago I conceived a book that would be solely Byron’s novel. My then agent Kirby McCauley was discouraging; he was pretty sure this was a highly rarefied sort of treat and my idea that everyone of course knew the details of Byron’s life and would get the subtext was mistaken. I see now he was right. When I revived the idea, my editor at Morrow also believed there had to be some armature of explanation for the reader and some account of how and why the book existed. Who could supply that? It was my present agent Ralph Vicinanza who said "How about Ada?" This instantly started a chain of thinking. What I didn’t want to do was novelize Ada in a standard sort of way. The idea of notes was my way out of doing that. What I liked was that the present-day idea of Ada as a mathematical expert and computer prophet sends my sleuths off in the wrong direction in the attempt to understand what she’s done.