Me, Myself and Lord Byron

by Julietta Jameson

  I was soon to leave Italy and on the following Monday I had the thought, as I cycled to Mario’s bar, that I was going to miss men in pastel pants. A bloke was cycling the opposite way to me down a lane and he looked fantastic. He was wearing a well-cut pair of lemon trousers, low slung at the hips and narrow at the ankle, teamed with a blue and lemon pinstriped shirt. Ciao, bello. Only in Italy.

  ‘This Lord Byron,’ said Mario. ‘He also stayed a while in Montenero, no?’

  It was true. He had taken a house in the hills above Livorno for a few months to beat the Pisan summer heat. I hadn’t gone there, but I wasn’t going to Genoa either. I felt my time roaming around Italy was up.

  ‘I will take you to Montenero,’ said Mario. ‘We go tomorrow.’

  It was only a half hour’s drive, but a world away from Pisa. ‘Truly, he had an eye for real estate,’ I said to Mario. We had driven to the tiny town of Montenero, taken the steep little funicular up to a Catholic sanctuary where a portrait of the Madonna performed many miracles, and we now sat perched at an airy lookout affording views over the seaside sprawl of Livorno, then across the Ligurian Sea towards Corsica. There was bougainvillea in bloom and cypress trees whispered a deep, long exhale.

  ‘Yes, it is very beautiful,’ said Mario. ‘What is the most beautiful place in Italy you have been?’

  ‘Rome,’ I said. ‘No question. Saint Peter’s is the most sublime thing I have ever seen.’

  ‘Ah, Vaticano,’ he said reverentially. ‘I hope to go one day.’

  ‘You haven’t been to Rome?’ I was stunned. And then I felt bad. He looked embarrassed and said nothing. ‘Well, you have all the time in the world to go. And you must.’

  Something shifted then. I saw the vast difference in our life experiences.

  ‘Why you follow this man? You never tell me why,’ intuitive but inexperienced Mario asked.

  ‘Because he is, for me, a person who lived truth. I want to live truth. And you know what? I’ve learned to do it, following him. I really have.’

  ‘You not live truth before?’

  I let out a big sigh, in time with the cypress trees.

  ‘Tell me, Julietta, why you not married?’

  ‘So many reasons. Not through deliberate choice. But still, I chose it.’ I was not sure he understood.

  We were both silent for a while.

  ‘You deserve happy.’

  Maybe he did understand, after all.

  ‘Now that, I do know. Yes, Mario, I know that now.’

  He took my hand and we sat and watched that azure view sparkle and change as the clouds moved and the breeze blew, and misty air currents drifted across it.

  ‘I will miss you very much when you go,’ he said.

  My crush deepened then, to an immense respect. He saw, as clearly as I did in that moment, what was right for me. And what wasn’t. And I knew what I wanted: someone to walk next to me along life’s path, not behind or in front. Otherwise, I would walk it alone. And assuredly, confidently, contentedly so.

  I left Pisa, on the train for Florence, with one emotion: gratitude. And maybe that was all I needed.

  My Florence hotel, the Regency, was a genteel affair on a big green piazza with a carousel in the middle of it and surrounded by wide, well-maintained footpaths and villas of grace and elegance, not a piece of peeling paint in sight, not a skerrick of crumbling plaster. It looked more like London’s Bloomsbury than Italy.

  I walked straight from my hotel to the Duomo, coming at it from the rear, where there was hardly anyone. I stood next to that ornate wonder of a cathedral in a big, sunshine-drenched corner of piazza that I had all to myself, opened my arms out wide, turned my face up to the sun, and let a sense of achievement reign. A nice moment for me, if a touch alarming for the—thankfully few—passers-by.

  Florence delivered fantastic gelato straight off the bat. Ridiculous. New favourite flavour, mandarino from Coronas Gelateria, not far from the Piazza della Signoria. It was true, after all. How I felt about this place really was about my state of mind. I loved Florence now.

  Later, I was sitting at dinner when a letter to Lord Byron appeared in my notebook.

  Dear Lord Byron,

  I had no idea, in truth, why I set out after you in the beginning. I wasn’t even looking for an idea when you landed on my head. But once I let the idea of you in, the quickening was astounding. Miracles began dropping in. It moved forward so fast. I had no time to reconsider. I am still unsure as to who picked whom and why. It seems trite to thank you after all I’ve been through and I have no words to come close to the gratitude I feel. So I might just use the words you once wrote to your good friend and travelling companion, Cam Hobhouse.

  You are my friend, ‘one whom I have known long, and accompanied far, whom I have found wakeful over my sickness and kind in my sorrow, glad in my prosperity and firm in my adversity, true in counsel and trusty in peril—to a friend often tried and never found wanting …’

  Thank you, Lord Byron.

  On my way back to my hotel, I decided to walk a different route to the way I’d come.

  I was slurping on unbelievably excellent gelato, new flavour of fig, which I got from a place called Festival del Gelato as an after-dinner punctuation mark. When I needed to discard my cup I opened one of the street-side bins, such as had been the bane of my Pisan existence. To my amazement, it was a silent bin. It had constructs on the side of the lid that eased it up and down, thus avoiding noisy slamming. I was so taken with it I tried every bin I passed. Way to go, Florence. Now, to invent the silent bottle.

  Strolling up a peaceful residential road, I came across a space lit by candles and furnished in a not-too-shabby shabby-chic style. It was a tiny exquisite hotel. I walked in. The design spoke to me. The vibe made me feel like it was home. It was how I wanted my life to look. A friendly man behind the desk showed me through the beautifully decorated public rooms, to much oohing and aahing from me. I told him that next time I was in Florence I would stay there.

  As we came back into the lobby he handed me a brochure. It revealed the name of the place to be The J and J Hotel. I am known to many, if not most people, as JJ.

  Walking out, I heard music ahead. A gospel choir was in a piazza singing, an unusual thing to find in Italy. They were doing a fine, swinging job of ‘This Little Light of Mine’, a song I regularly sang to myself to help let my little light shine.

  I got to the square where they were doing their impromptu performance and where a crowd of people were gathered, hanging out, listening, enjoying the night, and I sang and clapped along, and promised myself that as much as I could, I would always let my little light shine.

  Waking in the middle of the night, I realised there was poetry in that walk home. Maybe it was Lord Byron’s letter back to me. The silent bins certainly suggested his sense of humour …

  I took the train to Rome and as soon as I arrived I knew once and for all that the city dotted the ‘i’ and crossed the ‘t’ in ‘love it’ for me. It energised me immediately. I was only staying in a decent room near the railway station in transit, but even there, I felt a different kind of alive. The exhilaration was so significant because I had yet to find it anywhere else. Rome was home for me. A home, anyway, and here’s what I knew about home. I would never give up looking for home, spiritual and physical. I believed it was in the journeying, openly, optimistically, hopefully, courageously, that I was finding out who I truly was. And that, of course, was really home.

  I hadn’t intended to go out in Rome, as I’d arrived late and had an early train to catch. But I couldn’t resist visiting my fat little friend, the Pantheon. On the way, I came to Piazza Sant’Ignazio, an apricot and pale-blue perfection of jigsaw-puzzle-piece Baroque buildings around a Corinthian columnal church dedicated to the founder of the Jesuits. There was a restaurant there with outdoor tables and, before I knew it, I’d asked to be seated. A signora put me at a table with a great view of the church. A huge edifice, with elegant scrolls and ca
ndles made of stone at the top, its little angels in mischievous motion, holding up a shield above the door, captured my attention. I watched the setting sun change them from cream to yellow, through deepening shades of orange. The antipasti were delicious: buffalo mozzarella, olives, artichokes, the bread dense with a snappy crust, the house vino a nice drop from Montepulciano. Handsome men gave me the look, as only Italian men can. Women of my age looked in another way that said, I couldn’t do what you are doing, sitting there by yourself, but I wish I could. It was one of the best meals of my life.

  ‘You deserve happy,’ Mario had said to me. That quick jolt of Roma energy made me think that city might be where I would find that happy. It was a possibility for me—and who knew? Maybe I’d move there and invite Mario for a visit. It was time to make plans for the future, my future of choice.

  Very early the next morning I boarded the train to Brindisi in Puglia, where I would board an overnight public ferry to the Ionian island of Cephalonia.

  It wasn’t the slow travel of Lord Byron, but it was slowish travel. It was a six-hour train trip. Dio mio, the scenery. We passed through the arid otherworldliness of Puglia and all I could think was that I adored this country. With my soul.

  Later, from the deck of a Greek ferry, I watched Italy’s coast glittering as the sun set behind it while we sailed north along it. I felt no sadness to be leaving. The ache of love and longing. But no sadness. I knew I would be back. But moreover, I knew, with every atom in my body, that Italy was part of me and I it. It had been the backdrop of remarkable transformation for me. And even if I never went back, it would always, always, remain a base ingredient in the essence of me. It was true love that I felt for Italy. I think it loved me back.

  20

  Greece

  Well—well, the world must turn upon its axis,

  And all mankind turn with it, heads or tails,

  And live and die, make love and pay our taxes,

  And as the veering wind shifts, shift our sails;

  The king commands us, and the doctor quacks us,

  The priest instructs, and so our life exhales,

  A little breath, love, wine, ambition, fame,

  Fighting, devotion, dust,—perhaps a name.

  Don Juan, Canto II

  Sailing along the Italian coast, the Hercules had to draw into land three times for bad weather and repairs. In Livorno, then called Leghorn, Lord Byron met with Greeks and was dismayed to learn their main concern was money, not glory. Though the journey had its light moments and though Lord Byron clearly enjoyed strutting the deck in the brass-buttoned uniform he’d had made for the journey, sudden episodes of darkness would come over him, a foreboding perhaps.

  Two weeks after leaving Genoa, Lord Byron arrived at the port of Argostoli on the island of Cephalonia. The Ionians were then under British rule. Preparing for war, preparing for Greece, he had inadvertently found himself in a situation that was comforting and familiar. He would be six months there. His days were spent planning and strategising, but also partaking of English colonial life. On Cephalonia he became painfully aware of the complexities and seemingly insurmountable difficulties that would face him on the Greek mainland. But there was also a welcoming back into English society. He attended dinners and drinks and won the admiration of British military men and other officials, representatives of aspects of his home life he had come to criticise and rail against. Now, he found himself delighting in salons, picnics and in his own welcome by people who might have once believed the worst of him.

  But the Greek cause remained at the forefront of his thoughts. While funding and finding housing for refugees, he met fifteen-year-old Loukas, who became his page, and a lamentable love. At the same time, he experienced rising panic about how foreign his surviving daughter, Ada, was now to him, which he expressed in letters to Augusta. Lord Byron always needed someone to love and love him back, especially when his insecurities arose. Though Byron fell for the young man, lavishing gifts and attention on him, his affections were not returned. However, while Lord Byron had all but given up poetry by now, Loukas did inspire a few final, lovely bursts.

  Two days before the end of 1823 he set off, finally, for the Peloponnese and strategically crucial Messolonghi, a swampy city on the Gulf of Patras. On 5 January 1824 he disembarked wearing a scarlet military jacket and full regalia, hoping to put forward an appearance of authority and inspire faith. He was soon to find a not unexpected harshness to life there: the landscape itself, malarial and dank; the mood of the people, bleak; the threats on the horizon, ominous; the constant stream of military seeking his aid, relentless; the beseeching for money, duplicitous; the demanding of his support, genuine but complex.

  On 22 January 1824 Lord Byron turned thirty-six. Three weeks later he fell deliriously ill. He recovered, but by the latter stages of March, with many plans for action in the war thwarted or abandoned, spring rains set in. Lord Byron’s need for physical exertion saw him set out riding despite the inclemency. On the evening of 9 April, after riding through a deluge, he fell terribly ill again and collapsed. Two doctors, both members of his party, both inexperienced, recommended bleeding; Byron refused. As he was worse the next day, one of the doctors fed him castor oil, causing him diarrhoea. Again bleeding was recommended, again refused. The next day, he was well enough to ride again. The following day he was worse still. By 16 April, he acquiesced to being bled. His speech became incoherent, his fever off the scale. On 17 April they fed him purgatives and bled him again. On 18 April, Easter Sunday, winds howled and rain pelted. Lord Byron was in spasms, vomiting and moving in and out of delirium. He consented, though not with any conviction, to more bleeding. The doctors put leeches on his forehead. Some time during that day, he spoke his final coherent words. Becoming conscious of the gathered mournful around his bed he said, ‘Oh, questa è una bella scena’, oh, this is a beautiful scene. He was unconscious for the next twenty-four hours, breathing with difficulty, convulsing. In the seconds before he died, on 19 April, he opened his eyes and closed them again. And that was it.

  Though of course, not. The hoopla surrounding his untimely death reads not unlike that surrounding Princess Diana’s: theories and blame-shifting over the cause, regrets from those who had turned on him, accusations from his cronies and, worst of all, the burning of his autobiography by a committee of his closest who felt the contents too hot, both for the sake of his reputation and probably their own. The refusal of the crown to have him buried at Westminster Abbey, crowds of people, weighted towards female, along the funereal route as his body was taken to the family plot for burial. A celebrity to the last, and beyond.

  His legacy is complex, like his life. Dichotomies abound: love and hate, light and darkness, the sublime and the ridiculous. In that, it is a complete life. One lived at the edge of passion, pushing itself to its extreme, for better or worse, a blazing beacon of gusto. And self-acceptance of a sort. He took pride in his strengths, and remained aware of his weaknesses. And though he did not resolve or even try to remedy his failings, he saw them, and himself, as part of a greater whole, part of a world that is, after all, ambiguous itself.

  To be ourselves, flaws and all, to be not fearless, but courageous in the face of all of whom we are, I think that’s all that’s asked of us. And I think Lord Byron shone, and still shines, as a courageous soul in full expression. Oh, questa è una bella vita.

  I can think of no more beautiful a life than his.

  It was 6 a.m. on a July morning. My approach—through a narrow gulf between the islands of Ithaca and Cephalonia—was mystical. There was no moon but the morning star was bright and big. It was pulsating, or seemed to, through the air currents. The islands were solemn black monoliths, save for little patches of twinkling lights. There was a rainbow glow around Ithaca, like the rainbow glow around Jesus’ head in the mosaics at Ravenna’s San Vitale, my favourite of that city’s churches. God was in full, unsubtle expression that morning. It looked like the dawn of time. The ferry glid
ed silently through placid water, like it was travelling through space.

  I had watched Italy’s coast until dark, eaten some dinner, gone to sleep in my little cabin and then, suddenly, I was in Greece.

  Though I sailed to Sami on the east coast of Cephalonia, not Argostoli to the west as he did, I felt a sense of Lord Byron as soon as I got to the island. It was so very early and a café had opened up on the main street along the water, selling coffee and pastries to the sleepy coming ashore. I sat on the water’s edge reading about Lord Byron from Fiona McCarthy’s wonderful book, waiting for a man called Melis from a car hire place called Greekstones, apparently a Flintstones reference, to come and pick me up.

  I realised that, early on, I’d misread Lord Byron’s affinity with the Greek people, thinking he was only in the Greek cause for the glory. Now I had come to know Lord Byron. He was not in anything only for the glory. I could also understand his affinity with the Greek people. They were worry free in some ways, frenetic in others, a fun, down-to-earth bunch with a robust spirituality and a love of life. Hard not to love. I knew. My longest relationship, of seven years, had been with a man of Greek heritage. I didn’t pretend to understand their character entirely, but I definitely knew a thing or two about their psyche from that relationship. It took coming to Cephalonia to remember that, and to realise it was an aspect of that relationship which I actually cherished: that window, often intense and complicated, into another culture.

  I did not believe it a coincidence that windows into other cultures were what I had sought in my writing ever since that relationship ended. We are the sum of our experiences. To regret was to deny that. It didn’t mean sugar-coating memories or denying damage or hurt. It was about seeing the divine plan and, in the places where that was not possible, understanding there were greater forces at work and trusting, when all was said and done, that they knew what they were doing.