There seems monumental disconnection from self in that story, yet there’s breathtaking honesty in his writing—not only his poetry, but his letters too. He saw much and felt deeply. He lived a life unedited, a big, flawed, full-tilt life, despite all the pain and dysfunction.
And perhaps he would not have done that, had he lived in an age when psychiatry would have prevented Napoleon and a bunch of mad, wicked relatives being the pointer in his hand of fate. There’s something to be said for exorcising one’s demons through art. As long as the exorcism works and the powerful combination of demons and art does not consume their host alive.
I spent the twenty-odd years between my parents divorcing and me first going to see a therapist absolutely believing I had not been affected at all by events in my childhood. For instance, as a twenty-something I would say when the opportunity arose, ‘I wasn’t affected at all by Mum and Dad’s divorce. Erin was, but I wasn’t,’ referring to the sister just a bit older than me. I honestly thought I was this perfectly well-adjusted, above-it-all creature. I did. It was hilarious, now I think about it.
I was in my mid-thirties when a psychologist pointed out that my childhood was quite awful. It was a rude shock. I walked out of her practice in the inner east of Sydney feeling like someone had dynamited the foundations out from under my house of self. Every single thing I believed about me was null and void. Every single premise upon which I had built a life, the way I defined myself, all was gone.
I had visited her after my relationship of the better part of a decade had broken up. I had recently returned after being in Los Angeles for two years, where I had lived a crazy, exciting, busy life as a foreign correspondent. My mother had died only in the past few years and I had been feeling unhappy. Just unhappy. That was all. And I just wanted to feel happy again. Instead, I was dismantled.
I didn’t go back to that psychologist, and to her credit, she did ring me a few times to try and get me to. But she had frightened me beyond that which I was equipped to handle. I did not feel safe with her. I think she was very new to the game, though I didn’t know that then. The way she told me point blank that my life was a lie, and whoops, time’s up, there’s the door, was naïve, to be kind about it.
It was around this time that I began drinking heavily alone. I’m not blaming her, the therapist, for that. It was probably coming anyway, in some form or another. And she was right; I did need to get past that whole Miss Well-adjusted 1998 thing I had going on and face up to all the stuff it was covering up. But it would take me another ten years to do that. Another ten years of drinking that took hold and shook me, like a crazed dog does its prey. Lucky for me, a hand would come down and pull me from those jaws in the nick of time.
It was astonishing when it did, at the beginning of 2008. Suddenly, I mean really out of the blue, I wanted to quit drinking. One minute I had absolutely no power over alcohol. The next, I did. The catalyst: a terrible hangover from what was actually a good night during which I had not been drinking by myself but with others at a dinner party. And I’d enjoyed myself. But there was something about this hangover, an energy in the self-berating that had life change on a pinhead.
I had been to that precipice before. I had promised myself all kinds of things on many a morning, and yet, come five or six o’clock in the evening of the very same day, I would find myself buying a bottle of wine. I would quieten the misery of losing to liquor’s lure with the first sip, and then annihilate it for the night, with the tipsy fantasy that a life lived drinking expensive wine out of an expensive glass was a life lived well.
This was entirely different. There were no ifs or buts. In a flash I had the clarity to see that I was faced with a critical either/or situation. Keep going the way I was going, choosing alcohol as my comfort and friend, and die a living death. Or choose an undefined something different. I didn’t know what I was choosing by choosing to say ‘enough’ but I knew I could no longer deny the grave spiritual, emotional and physical danger that I had been courting. Here I was at a turning point, a moment of truth. Life or death: that was the choice. This drinking compulsion, it was not who I really was. I saw that, and in the time it takes to move from one moment to the next, I had put one foot on the path to recovery and, hey, look at that—it was a moving walkway. A momentum beyond my control began to steer me away from the mindless misery into which I had been descending.
I gave up drinking completely for eighteen months, toying with the idea that I might have been alcoholic. Toying, I say, but I never did anything more serious in my life. I went to AA meetings, read all the amazing literature, before I realised the fellowship, though wonderful and powerful and a miracle, was not for me. But that was not before AA recommenced the excavation job that had been started by that psychologist’s wayward stick of dynamite.
I was born the last of six children and grew up in a small weatherboard house in what was orchard land, now suburban sprawl, in the outer east of Melbourne. That house was built over a filled-in creek with nothing between the floorboards and the dirt that blocked that waterway but a tract of musty, damp space we called ‘under the house’. Cats would have kittens under there. We’d hear them mewing, then my father would do something. And no more mewing. We had strange, often darkly dramatic, but also fun times in that house, though I knew as soon as I knew anything that things were falling apart: the house, our frayed old towels, my parents’ relationship.
I chose to not fall apart in any way. Hold my breath. Play nice. But everyone around me was barely coping. I could see it. If only I was like this, or like that, then I wouldn’t cause these people trouble. Those people were my siblings, the two boys fifteen and fourteen years older than me, the sister twelve years my elder, who was a teenager but had to take some care of us younger kids. Then two little girls—me, my sister Erin, nearly three years older than me—and another boy six years older. And Mum, of course. Dad caused her enough grief. She didn’t need it from me.
This is actually painting an inaccurate picture, though. I tried to not cause trouble, but I was terrible at it. I was always falling out of trees, falling off things, cutting my knees open, banging myself about. And as I got older, more rubbish would spill over and out. I couldn’t keep a lid on life, ever. Drama began to follow me, despite my best efforts to run from it. I seemed to run into it, more than away.
I had passed six months without a drink in late 2008 when I stopped running. When I turned for the first time and faced the marauding throng of emotions that had been chasing me for years and years. I had no intention of doing so. I was at my job at Fairfax newspapers like any other day, when management announced via email that there was to be large-scale retrenchment. The whole place went into a panic. The big immediate outrage among staff was over a perception that management had moved without consultation. No consultation was happening post the announcement, either. They had their reasons, I’m sure. But I was on deadline, editing a large feature section for the Sunday paper, and had no choice but to keep going with what I was doing.
I was sitting at my desk, looking at my screen, and then I wasn’t. I had fallen into a hole. The world went black, all I heard was my ears ringing, and with an aching pang I wanted to drink. I came back to the world, petrified and just so sad. The immensity of the moment was threatening to swallow me.
A few days later, I was sitting in a women-only AA gathering at the Bondi Junction Crypt, where I’d gone to my first ever meeting. I was listening to a woman share a story of childhood misery when a box, marked ‘Do Not Disturb’, packed away in a dark recess of my subconscious, came into view and sprang open. It was this box that had been lurking down the bottom of that tunnel. It was what was in it that had made me black out then want to drink. In that box was the frozen moment in time when I decided that my needs and emotions would never matter, that the needs and emotions of others would always override them.
Inside was me, a child of about three, lying in bed listening to my parents scream at each other, my father drunk,
moving back and forth between caustic and sharp, laughing and derogatory. And my mother at the height of a focused murderous mania vomiting out the contents of a poisoned heart. It was loud and relentless and oblivious to the other people in that small, damp house. If any pretence of civility had been left between them, it was gone that night.
Erin slept on in the bunk above me. I could hear her lightly snore. One of the boys suddenly yelled from the room next door, ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it!’
I don’t remember it stopping. But it must have and the sun must have come up the next day. To my recollection, no one ever spoke about that night. We never did speak of such things. We moved on and got on with it. And I filed it away, very securely indeed.
It is a difficult concept for me, the one of soul contracts and of choosing our experience. If I chose the parents I had, I also chose to be that traumatised child who shut that night away and then began an epic marathon of running to keep from releasing it. I had long known there was something unacknowledged in the shadows, some moment at which an important part of my ability to function had been damaged. When it welled up at AA that day, after I got over my amazement at the ability of the human mind to block out something so resolutely and for so long, I was a bit disappointed. Was that it? No abuse like Lord Byron had endured? Not that I was wishing that upon myself. It was just that a blue between my parents, albeit a raging, foul, bile-spitting hate fest, was not exactly Charles Dickens.
The feeling of insignificance and powerlessness I felt then though was a big one. I sensed other people feeling that, there in the newspaper office on that day when the retrenchments were announced, and it triggered the memory of the original time when I felt my needs didn’t matter.
And the drinking? Why did I want to drink in that moment? The same reason I ate too much as a kid and, sadly, ate too much until the end of that year of not drinking. To push it all down.
I used to be terrified of hunger. It took twelve months of not drinking to let me see that. I ate huge dinners. Healthy food, mostly. But lots of it. Being full to distended was one of my chosen anaesthetics.
I reached a point where I didn’t want to be anaesthetised any more. Spirit had found a way through, and it felt so good I wanted to clear a path for it. And so my eating changed. I lost eleven kilos in six months. It was a spiritual manifestation, no question.
I did think then that I had it all sorted. That I was healed, cured, complete, had entered happily ever after … and numerous other fallacies. Where I actually was, was at the very beginning of re-emergence and I had a long road in front of me. Travelling it would reveal a mosaic of reasons for why I drank the way I drank: that therapist, my parents’ divorce, their vile argument, but more besides. And there would be a centrepiece to it, a surprising to me, completely buried centrepiece, which, like that box springing open, would come to light when I least expected it.
3
Geneva
Fare thee well!–thus disunited–
Torn from every nearer tie–
Seared in heart–and lone–and blighted–
More than this, I scarce can die.
Fare Thee Well!
At the end of March 1812, Lord Byron was at the height of his social cachet in London. Women went into conniptions when he walked into rooms. Men were entranced. He was a tall, long-necked, luscious-locked, pouty-lipped, gorgeous creature with big heavy-lidded eyes, alabaster skin, and the standoffish aloofness women so love combined with a praeternatural social charm when he chose to turn it on. And of course, a sexual energy that radiated. In uptight English society, he was a beacon of desire and desirability.
But his kind of fame, the celebrity kind, had brought to him what it always does: infamy. And though he clearly enjoyed the attention, it did also trouble him. He took his peerage and his poetry very seriously and, like every modern artist who has become a source of fascination as much for their personal myth as for their art, he wanted to be taken as seriously as he took himself.
He had been entangled with Lady Caroline Lamb. A married society figure with a wild streak, she would turn something of a stalker when Byron broke it off. She spread tawdry stories about him but she coined the most famous, and wonderful, of all descriptions of Byron: ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know.’
Annabella Milbanke was Caroline’s cousin from the country, religious, academic, moralistic and disapproving—Caroline’s polar opposite. Self-sacrificing Annabella, in London to be at the bedside of a sick friend, accepted an invitation to Lady Caroline’s Easter party, even though she was vocal in her disdain for society and its participants. It was there she met Lord Byron.
In letters between Annabella and Lord Byron it’s clear that there was an intellectual connection. But Lord Byron had reached one of those junctures in his life at which human beings do something because they think they ought, not because it resonates as truly right for them on a soul level. Enough with the married ladies, the young men, the swooners and strumpets. It was time to take a wife. He married Annabella. It was inevitable that for someone as passionate as Byron, ‘the right thing’ would be so very much the wrong. It would have life-altering consequences.
Society was all a-chatter about his sexual cruelty to her. There’s no excusing brutishness, but living a lie can make beasts of angels, and Lord Byron was no angel. Annabella was a handful herself, not the most stable of human beings, but she was dealing with another deception: Byron’s affair with Augusta Leigh, his half-sister, allegedly continued during their marriage. Given that, these days it wouldn’t be surprising that a year after marrying him and having borne him a daughter, Ada, Annabella left Byron. But it was a drastic move for the time. And it was the scandal ensuing from her leaving that drove Lord Byron into self-imposed exile.
We die to ourselves at times in our lives, attempting to live as something we are not. I like to think there is a point to these deaths: to resurrect a better version, become truer to ourselves by facing up to that which we are not, and so become closer to who we really are, an expression of God’s loveliness. They can be painful, drawn-out episodes, though. And some of us never make it through to resurrection. We walk through the rest of life in a spiritual death state.
My trip to Geneva was via Singapore Airlines A380 to London. Business class. I was perched in a ridiculously big leather seat, with gorgeous flight attendants acting as if I was the most important person in the world. There was yummy food and lots of sleep. This did little to correct my misguided notion that I’d entered happily ever after. Then I took the Eurostar from London to Paris and felt exactly like a rock star. Was that Anna Wintour in the row up ahead? I boarded one of those super-fast trains from Paris to Geneva and felt more international than I ever have before when, at Paris Gare du Nord, I saw a formidable-looking African gent and, following him, a large, worried-looking bodyguard, an assistant in a strange bottle-green suit, a wife in a long flowing caftan and veil, and a trolley full of Louis Vuitton luggage. They got on my carriage and I tried to resist staring. I was unsuccessful. It’s a wonder the bodyguard didn’t move me on.
But I soon had other things to look at when we entered the French countryside. At Mâcon Loché station I saw a young couple kissing passionately as if their lives depended on it, the black and white poster cliché. A woman carrying a perfect bunch of lilies of the valley, their stalks wrapped in tin foil, walked by them, looking this way and that for the person for whom the bouquet was intended. It was all so charming and I was duly charmed.
I pulled one of my Byron books out of my bag to make use of the travel time, like all the laptop-clacking diplomats around me. But I caught a glimpse of contented woolly sheep resting by a brook down the hill from a ramshackle stone farmhouse and I pressed my nose to the window again. In green, green pastures, fat, glossy cows in small groups looked for all the world like the happy cow on Laughing Cow cheese packets. I saw donkeys, hedgerows, paths begging to be followed into woodland. We streamed by fly fishermen thigh deep in excitable
rivers. There were fruit trees in full blossom and the sun sent silver glitter down onto them. There were clusters of alpine wildflowers and irises growing by the side of the train tracks at Culoz.
Why would anyone fly across this?
It was curious to be in Geneva, Lord Byron’s first port of call on his exile. For me too, it was the city that had signified the beginning of my own, unconscious attempts at self-exile.
In my two decades as a journalist, I had covered an eerie murder of a tiny American child beauty queen, a mass shooting, even a mass suicide. I’d covered bush fires and all manner of misery. But nothing prepared me for flying to Indonesia on New Year’s Eve 2004, five days after a massive tsunami, when the world was beginning to realise that the country’s northern province of Aceh was the place hit hardest by the disaster. The afternoon before I left, the man I had only recently finally broken up with after several years of on–off mayhem popped over to my place to say, I’m not sure what: happy new year, bon voyage, hope you don’t get typhoid? There was nothing appropriate to say. The man was the man I was in love with, my heart was ripped to shreds and, on top of that, I was scared like I never had been before.
I had become adept at not showing the depths of my pain. So when he asked me to drive him in his car up to the shops and cruise around the block while he did the banking for his small business, saying, ‘It will be impossible to get a park up there on New Year’s Eve,’ I had no one to blame but myself. I carried out the errand, and on the third lap of the block as I waited for him, asked myself why. When he got out of the passenger seat at my place, promptly replaced me at the wheel and left without so much as a ‘May I drive you to the airport on the hardest afternoon of the year to get a taxi?’, that ‘why’ had been replaced by a ‘Why, for God’s sake, woman, why?’
I bought at an airport newsstand He’s Just Not That Into You and read the entire thing on the plane to Jakarta. But it did no good. There was always something that stood invisibly between me and the way things should be. It was a wonder I was ever surprised that things did not turn out the way they seemed to for other people.
Me, Myself and Lord Byron Page 3