Me, Myself and Lord Byron

by Julietta Jameson

  The truth of his spirituality showed in his writing. He had a sense of the divine, a marvellous affinity with God’s gifts, especially in the face of nature’s bloom. Such was the Romantic poet’s way. But few did it with such beauteous gusto as Byron in full flight.

  The morn is up again, the dewy morn,

  With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom,

  Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,

  And living as if earth contain’d no tomb,—

  Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III

  He saw God in the small, natural things.

  But he also often felt forsaken by God and most often troubled by hypocrisy in his name. As someone thought to be the devil himself by his own pious society, he had firsthand experience.

  He was, a lot of the time, a man torn between hedonism and mysticism. Even while he was spending his Venetian evenings engaged in feasting and ‘fair fucking’ as he called it, for a period of time he daily rowed his gondola to the Isola di San Lazzaro to study with the Armenian monks who had colonised it. The Mechitarists were a Christian order exiled from their homeland by the Ottomans. Lord Byron had empathy for their statelessness. He found in their scholarliness welcome cerebral relief from the ‘pantaloon humour’ of many of his associates. He met a challenge in learning their language, which he described as having a ‘Waterloo of an alphabet’. And he had the fallen Christian’s love of the Old Testament legends with which Armenia was associated. It was on the Ararat Range in Armenia that the Book of Genesis claimed Noah’s Ark came to rest.

  The islet’s isolation, too, made it an ideal spot for its long-past use as a leper colony, and as a hermitage for Lord Byron, in stark contrast to his other daily outing, a trip to the island of Lido for horse riding.

  In physical exercise there was for him communion with nature, and in exercise of the mind and soul connection with the divine. In them he could still feel his realness, when all about him was masks and folly. We all need that. When the storms of the world’s distractions batter us, our connections to earth and sky are what anchor us and soothe us after the bruising is done.

  Lord Byron would have a hard time galloping his horse along the Adriatic shoreline on Lido these days. Getting past the changing sheds and umbrellas, even on May days, when Lido is still quiet, would be like an Olympic dressage event. The fleshy summer onslaught of June and July would rule it out completely.

  Lord Byron came to Lido at the same time most days for a good strong equestrian workout and for swimming in the ocean, his routine leaving him open to looky-loos who knew exactly when they would get a gander at him. Some would come up close and examine him as if he were a museum piece. He handled it okay. In some of those later days he craved the glory of his early success, I suppose, and any attention became good attention.

  We all just want to be loved.

  Lido is the largest of Venice’s islands and the most resort-like, with an old-fashioned beach holiday vibe due to the fact that its eastern extreme faces out to sea with a proper sandy shoreline. It is flat and sprawling and so I did the next best thing to riding a horse on Lido. I rented a bike for a couple of hours, cycling from one end to the other. The sea air did me the world of good, as did the unwitting contribution of the proper cyclist who lapped my no-gears, basket-on-front Hollander and me several times on his high-tech bike. He was wearing white Lycra, and with each lap, he perspired more, thus making his excellent bike-toned derrière more visible through his increasingly diaphanous shorts. I’m no letch, but what a gift, right in front of me like that. And eh, when in Italia … He did have a nice bum.

  I returned my bicycle to the rental place and walked down Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta, Lido’s main strip where the gaudy Grande Albergo Ausonia & Hungaria with its candy-coloured art nouveau façade pins the place to yesteryear, despite the internet cafés and fast food joints placing the island decidedly in today. I arrived at the vaporetto pier and discussed, in my usual mix of charades, monosyllables and capito-non-capito coaxing of the same from an official, the next part of my itinerary for the afternoon. I wanted to go to the monastery of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, where Lord Byron had studied with the monks. We established that my desired vaporetto was coming in ten minutes. Grazie mille, I would go to the toilet across the way in the meantime then.

  When I got to the facilities the attendant was in an intense phone conversation and crying loud and uninhibited. She hung up when by the shuffling in my purse it became clear I didn’t have the right change. Once I had her attention, I tried to use my charades and monosyllables to console her. But she was fine five seconds after the end of the call anyway. Such is Italy and her emotional openness.

  I took the opportunity to straighten myself up a bit and looked in the mirror to discover that, while I was cycling merrily, a bug had met its demise on my forehead, like a billion of its brethren on windshields. The bug was squished and smeared across my shiny, unveiled forehead in plain view as I had my fringe back in a scarf. Why didn’t people tell you when you had a dead bug smeared across your face? Maybe the vaporetto man did and I missed it. Maybe this is what cheered up the washroom attendant so quickly.

  If you’re going to be a monk, the monastery of San Lazzaro is a good place to be one. Smack dab in the middle of the Venetian lagoon, it’s a graceful conglomeration of orange stucco and green-shuttered lodgings overlooked by a distinctive clock-faced campanile and surrounded by trees, lawn and lavish hot-pink climbing roses that seemed to grow ever bigger before my eyes.

  The tour was nice, though not very satisfying. I liked visiting the room where Lord Byron studied. But I got annoyed, as I always do at such things, that there was an Egyptian mummy in the middle of it, a donation from some wealthy Armenian to the monks. It was there apropos of nothing but show and tell.

  I left the tour and the monastery and sat on the pier in the late afternoon sun waiting for the vaporetto to come back. I was joined by a man, about my age, balding, slicked hair, black architectural glasses, a thin flatness to his mouth, like a frog. He was impeccably dressed, in pressed chinos and a pale-pink polo. He had a leather Armani shoulder bag and a lithe femininity to his gestures. I pegged him gay.

  ‘You did not like the tour?’ he asked. His accent was Italian.

  ‘Oh, well, you know, when the Italian version of the commentary about something goes for ten minutes and the English goes for one, you can’t help but feel you are missing out on something.’

  ‘Ah.’ He shrugged. We sat in silence for a minute.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Australia.’

  ‘I knew it,’ he said, a smile on his face, an animated self-congratulation to his gestures. ‘I hear your accent before, inside. Why you come here, to this place? Your family from Armenia?’

  ‘No, just curious,’ I said.

  ‘Are you Christian?’

  It was a bit like the ‘have you ever been married’ question for me. It still felt uncomfortable to answer. Because the truth was, I was, though not in any conventional sense. And the word ‘Christian’ was so loaded.

  We were a church-at-Christmas-and-Easter family, though for a while there Erin and I were packed off to mass while everyone else slept in of a Sunday. We’d make our appearance on behalf of the wayward Jamesons, before skedaddling off to 21 Flavours near the clock tower for a milkshake. At some stage when I was very small we must have gone semi-regularly as a family, though, because there was a young parish priest, Father Noonan, who used to be a fixture at parties at our house. (He ended up leaving the priesthood.)

  I was all of fifteen when I was home alone at Lavender Street one Friday night watching the movie of Jesus Christ Superstar on TV. Strangely, halfway through, that movie awoke in me a deep feeling I didn’t understand. I was so moved by the portrayal of Jesus’ life, his service and betrayal, I cried inconsolably. What Sunday school could not do, that seventies rock opera certainly did. The crying went on for days in secret, in my bedroom, in t
he high branches of the willow tree I loved to climb, in the bush behind the Catholic school just down the road where I would ride my bike into solitude, or in a cubicle in the school toilets at lunchtime.

  I couldn’t talk to anyone. Religion was material for comedy at home. Jesus was the height of non-cool at school. Those Christian kids, though pleasant enough, were not my bag. Plus, I suspected they would have no empathy at all with me. Hand clapping, weekend camps and good deeds for the neighbourhood elderly had nothing to do with the seismic disturbance at my core. It was baffling and debilitating.

  I went up to the church on my bike and knocked on the presbytery door. The housekeeper answered.

  ‘Can I see a priest?’ I was sobbing again as soon as I opened my mouth. This alarmed the blue-rinsed little old lady, who said nothing and scurried for assistance, no doubt thinking I was a pregnant teen. I heard some mumbling and whispering, then after a while, a youthful priest came to the door with an expression of apprehension behind a fixed smile.

  He invited me into a parlour where a bunch of home-grown roses in a cut crystal vase were losing a battle with the pervasive smell of fried meat and Gravox.

  I blurted out my story with a sense of camaraderie and relief. At last, a person who understood, who felt the same. ‘All the things he did for us, then what they did to him,’ I said between sodden hiccups and gasps. Yet I was worried. I had put myself in a gap between my daily life and this new one, whatever it was. That was a feeling that would come back to me when I first walked into AA. But this man in front of me, he understood how my heart broke for Jesus. He could tell me what to do with myself from here on in.

  I looked into his face to receive my guidance. I saw terror, legs tightly crossed, hands tightly clasped in his lap and an expression that telegraphed his internal dialogue: ‘Okay, Father, hold it together. Try not to look alarmed. We were told in the seminary about hysterical teenage girls. All you need to do is remember what you were taught, but dear God, what is she on about?’

  The passion that was erupting inside me meant it took a moment to comprehend what was happening. But soon enough, it was clear to me that he and I were not going to be the thirteenth and fourteenth apostles. ‘Go home and read the Bible,’ he said with that same fixed smile, trying to force a gentle, benevolent tone and instead sounding patronising and like he had an urgent need to be elsewhere.

  The spiritual rush had been corked.

  I rode home feeling like an idiot, hoping no one would find out that I’d been up at the church voluntarily talking to a priest. A priest! I’d done something murky, shameful, something so derisible and disloyal to the beliefs and values of my family and friends. The person I could be had betrayed the person I needed to be. Again. I didn’t give Jesus another thought. I’d forgotten about the whole thing by breakfast the next day.

  Knowing what I know now, it looked like a very powerful moment of spiritual awakening. But what would a fifteen-year-old from Ringwood, Victoria, have done with such a state of being in 1978 anyway? Joined the convent? If the priest’s reaction was any indication, this was not the way forward for me.

  My reconnection came on my first visit to Italy, after the magazine job went belly up. And it arose after a week of steeping in Rome’s vividness. I had gone to the train station to buy a ticket to Florence. I was walking back towards my hotel when I saw the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli across the road from Rome Termini. I didn’t know anything about it but there was a sign outside explaining how this orange brick, crumbly, near-ruin of a building was originally built as Roman baths and had been appropriated by the Catholic church and given its current interior in the sixteenth century. I stepped inside and found an altogether different environment where the Renaissance had had its way. It was such a shocking contrast. This was amongst Michelangelo’s last works. The magnitude of inspiration in the marble and mosaics caused my body to convulse in a way I had hitherto not known art could engender. I sat down in the nearest pew, in total awe. And then I settled into the magnificence and sat in true, unadulterated wonder. It was the singularity of state you hope to find in meditation. There was nothing between my soul and the essence of what had been created there. And I knew about divine inspiration then.

  It was like the end of a long joke, the punch line being ‘but you knew that all along’. I had pursued New Age leaders, gone to a Sai Baba ashram in Sydney, flirted with the teachings of another Hindu guru, read up on Buddhism, learned Tibetan meditation, consulted the I-Ching, runes and every spiritual practitioner I could lay my hands on, only to find out that the bloke in the Friday night movie was my guru.

  The challenge had been how to integrate that into everyday life. It would take my crisis, when I realised I could no longer drink the way I did, for me to discover the place of the Christ energy in my life. It was everything and nothing all at once. Nothing had changed, but everything had. Life went on, but now I understood, I had support always. And I always had had it. I’d now opened up an opportunity for myself to call on it. To experience it in an understandable way.

  I think that’s what gives our crises meaning: the moment at which they reintroduce us to what we knew all along. In that, even during my darkest days, I considered myself very lucky.

  And so on this, my third trip to Italy, there at the vaporetto stop on San Lazzaro, to the man’s question of whether I was Christian or not, I simply answered, ‘Yes.’ That in itself felt like a significant achievement in claiming my power: to say it and not be afraid of the assumptions of others that might arise as a result.

  ‘Would you like to eat with me tomorrow?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. A meal out with a gay Italian in Venice might be fun.

  Not that I was short on opportunities for food outside the home. Five minutes from my apartment towards San Marco was Nobile Pasticceria. Their marmalata, a flaky, buttery croissant, or cornetto as the Italians called it, filled with marmalade, was pure genius. And then there was the Gelateria Leonardo; it should have been criminalised. The damn place was right on my corner. I’d walk down the stairs from my front door, down the alleyway, and into the tiny Campo San Leonardo, and there it was. Right there on the corner with a very popular pizza place on the other corner, so it was just as well I’m not all that into pizza. I had Gelateria Leonardo’s limone my first visit. It was bitter and creamy and gelatinous and generally unbelievable. Their fragola, strawberry, caused delirium, popping with fruit and the sweetness of summer, and they did a yoghurt and honey that would have knocked my socks off were I wearing any. Their vanilla was strange and tastebud tickling and I am not a chocolate ice cream person usually but theirs had a nostalgic balance to it, not too rich, but mild and soothing, like you might have got as a kid when you had your tonsils out.

  So no, not short of good food. But company, that was a whole other issue.

  12

  The Bells of Venezia

  Here’s a sigh to those who love me,

  And a smile to those who hate;

  And whatever sky’s above me,

  Here’s a heart for every fate.

  To Thomas Moore

  Lord Byron had a great big ‘heart for every fate’, an openness and a willingness to move forward. Even though the past dragged on him, he did not allow those ropes to hold him still, choosing instead to ride the tides of fortune and fate like the sailboats he so loved bearing up on a windy Lac Leman. Sometimes his kinesis was about avoiding boredom. The pursuing forces of expectation and responsibility would propel him further. When they caught up with him, he could display confronting callousness and a ready punch. Even then he was giving full expression to the evolution of his being. For better or worse, he was not afraid to go with life.

  But he would have been a handful for those who loved him, or sought to be loved by him. That’s for sure. Likewise for those who hated him and whom he hated, because he was impossible to ignore.

  His final years in Venice were marked by fateful changes, for him and those closely connecte
d to him. In early 1818 he was negotiating with Claire Clairmont over bringing their illegitimate daughter, Allegra, only one year old, to live with him in Italy. He was resigned to the fact that Lady Byron was never going to let him near their child, Ada. Allegra seemed his only hope at some sense of dynasty. His wish came true purely through the fact of Percy Shelley’s ill health. Physicians had suggested the consumptive poet seek warmer climes than England. Claire and Allegra came along with Shelley and Mary, and when Allegra was on the Continent, Lord Byron sent for her. By eighteen months old, she had fully joined the circus at Palazzo Mocenigo, where her papa doted on her, amidst the human and animal menagerie. She quickly began speaking Venetian and learned even more quickly to swim, when her proudly amphibious father, who had famously swum the length of the Grand Canal, threw her over the side of his gondola. And sometimes she’d be suddenly packed off to the home of friends for periods of time when his parental attention span ran out.

  It was around this time that Lord Byron began Don Juan, his tour de force and, in many ways, his downfall in England. He was still the most talked about man in London. His poetry still sold well. Now here came the first stanzas of this epic, going where no man of his standing had gone before: into a place where women were sexual aggressors, and older women towards younger men at that, where society was satirised more directly than ever before, important living poets and peers were named and shamed, and where a man openly took pot shots at his ex-wife. There was dark, cutting humour and explicit sex, bawdiness and bad temper. There was only so much of that 1800s Britain could take—and over the next five years there would be seventeen cantos to come, some over 200 stanzas long.

  The decisions we make, the choices we take; we are the sum of them. At any given moment in time, there are a million directions we can go. Perhaps all that is asked is that in making the choices we do, we commit to them as fully as we can, and try not to harm anyone along the way. But it’s so hard to do that, especially as first and foremost we must try to not harm ourselves. To balance the needs and wants of those around us with our own, that is a trapeze act, and the tightrope on which we delicately step is a thin line running between self-respect and selfishness.