A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  Annabella was almost glad to note, in her sister, the return of what she judiciously thought of as a sting in her tail, although the words carried for Lady Byron no offence. They seemed rather a testament to those qualities she did possess, of perseverance, of single-mindedness. Without her husband’s grace or eloquence—she was, after all this time, perfectly equal to the admission—she had nevertheless managed to get what she wanted in the course of ten difficult years. A period of her life (and there was consolation in the thought) that had at least this merit: she would never, thank God, have to live through such years again. A reflection that brought home to her just what it was, in the long years ahead, she still intended to take from him. He had really, in his own way, offered himself to her, however reluctantly, once more. His side of the story had gone up in smoke. What was left was hers, and she felt, not unlovingly, the duty this imposed on her. She reached for the album in which she kept her husband’s memorabilia. It was almost as if, she thought, slipping Augusta’s letter inside it, they had been married again.

  A QUIET ADJUSTMENT

  Benjamin Markovits

  AN INTERVIEW WITH BENJAMIN MARKOVITS

  Why Lord Byron?

  He was the first celebrity writer. As he said himself, after the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.” One of his works sold more than ten thousand copies on the day of publication, to a reading public a fraction of the size of the one we have now. Men imitated him; women threw themselves at him. The poetry itself described how wide his experience of life was; there was nothing he didn’t dare to try. Eventually, this got him into trouble: his relationship with his half-sister Augusta, and the resulting separation from his wife, forced him into a kind of exile. A Quiet Adjustment tells the story of his marriage, from the point of view of his wife; he told the story so well from his own point of view, the best way of adding something to it was telling it from hers. Also, Annabella Milbanke was an interesting woman in her own right: intelligent, pretty, sought after, ambitious. My novel is an account of what happens to her ambition when it’s forced to confront the scale of Lord Byron’s.

  How much of the story is true?

  This is not a question that writers like to answer honestly. It was more important for me to get the story right, on its own terms, than to get the history right. That said, the history itself was compelling enough to be useful, and in A Quiet Adjustment, more than in Imposture, I followed it more or less faithfully. That “more or less” accounts for a large part of this novel, of any novel whose truthfulness depends on something other than historical fact: on what it feels like to be stuck inside the head of a human being. Readers can judge for themselves how accurately I capture that. Of the facts: Lord Byron did marry Annabella Milbanke, after first being refused by her. Their honeymoon, marriage, and separation played out along the lines I sketch in the novel. Annabella also, in real life, successfully broke up the intimacy of Lord Byron and his sister; and Augusta was a much-diminished woman afterwards. In fact, there was a little more history than I knew what to do with, and the two sisters-in-law survived to have a death-bed reconciliation that sounded too much like the stuff of fiction for me to make use of it.

  What I wanted to do, really, was to write a novel in keeping with the spirit of the Romantics, with the spirit of writers like Jane Austen and Walter Scott. The Romantic style offered these writers a wonderful freedom: it allowed them to discuss moral questions and interior lives with a sort of detachment and precision that one hardly dares to now. There’s a kind of pressure these days to be colloquial, which can be limiting, too. Romantic novelists often used pacy and dramatic plots to argue out interesting philosophical questions. It was one of these questions that led me to write A Quiet Adjustment: Can we overcome the limits of our own personalities?

  Imposture has quite an elaborate preface; A Quiet Adjustment has none at all. We’ve already asked you how much of the book is true, so we won’t ask it again. But can you discuss what part the story of that preface will play in the trilogy as a whole?

  Imposture needed a preface because there were facts I didn’t want to include in the book that readers needed to know. The reason I didn’t include these facts in the novel itself is that I wanted to write a historical novel that sounded like a contemporary novel—contemporary to the nineteenth century. I didn’t want to interrupt the story with background facts that everybody at the time would have known.

  As an ambition this may seem a little strange. On the other hand, it seems to me the job of a novel to enter the language and way of thinking of its characters, and I am interested in the language of the Romantics just as I might be interested in, say, a particular American idiom. The preface to Imposture and Peter Pattieson, the “author” of these novels, allowed me to question the extent to which people are creatures of their times. Not much, Peter wants to say, and I have a lot of sympathy for his view. Peter also allowed me to tie in this trilogy with Fathers and Daughters, to show how the concerns of each book relate to one another. As it happens, such prefaces were a peculiarly Romantic device. Walter Scott, for example, to keep up his anonymity, played on the idea of narrative frames in a way that might seem distinctly modern to us now.

  A Quiet Adjustment stood more naturally on its own two feet than did Imposture, and it didn’t need the help of any preface to make it understandable. But Pattieson will reappear in the third book—and allow me to address more explicitly questions about authenticity and history.

  These novels have a lot to do with writers and writing; that’s probably inevitable in stories about Lord Byron. Were you worried, though, that writing about writers might involve you in a kind of shoptalk—interesting to novelists, but not so interesting to other people?

  I was a little worried, yes. In fact, though, the personal experience that had the most to do with Imposture had nothing to do with writing. I spent a year after college playing basketball for a small second division team in Germany. The star of our league was a young kid named Dirk Nowitzki—he has since gone on to greater things. What’s terrible about basketball, I quickly realized, is that it leaves you nowhere to hide your failures. The better players are pretty easily separated from the worse. Athletes, even at that level, are competitive and ambitious people; it’s hard for them (it was hard for me) to live with the self-knowledge that the game forces on you, especially since the hierarchies of talent that grow up on the court also play their part off it.

  The leader of our team was a former CBA (Continental Basketball Association) player trying to work his way back home through the European leagues. He was wonderfully talented, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit just how much better than he could ever dream of being Nowitzki was going to get. (He himself is the subject of my next novel, Playing Days, which is about the world of minor league professional sports.) His delusions were sometimes painful to watch. On the other hand, basketball leaves a lot of room for other kinds of consolation and pride. What would it be like, I wondered, for a writer to feel such a contrast—which is when I stumbled on the idea of a novel about Polidori.

  What does it mean for him to be a worse or a lesser writer than Lord Byron? Did he see the world less clearly? Did he feel it less richly? understand it worse? love it more clumsily? These are all questions, of course, that might be expected to bother writers. On the other hand, I think they have a broader reach, too—and could trouble anyone who has ever compared himself to a sibling, a lover, a colleague, a friend, etc. These are some of the questions I wanted to write about in Imposture.

  I see A Quiet Adjustment as a kind of answer to Imposture. If Imposture is the story of someone who feels his inferiority to Lord Byron and succumbs to this knowledge, A Quiet Adjustment is a novel about a woman who admits the same inferiority, but through sheer force of will, bloody-mindedness, etc., gets what she wants from Byron and from her life with him. I admire this persistence,
even though it isn’t always likeable, and wanted to write about it.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. Mr. Eden’s warm, steady, reliable personality contrasts sharply with Byron’s brash “artistic temperament.” Feel free to bring into the discussion other books or films (contemporary or classic) that set these two personality types against each other. What do you make of Annabella’s decision to pursue the “bad boy”?

  2. After Annabella rejects Byron’s first proposal, she says, “What was offered was much larger than marriage—call it fame if you like. And I didn’t suppose I should miss it, but I do.” What is it about the prospect of fame, or the prospect of being close to fame, that appeals to Annabella? Is her desire to stand in Byron’s spotlight a sign of her ambition or of her too-great dependence on him?

  3. Why would Annabella invite Augusta on her honeymoon?

  4. How are Annabella and Augusta alike, and how are they different? Is their love for Byron the only thing they truly have in common?

  5. Why would Augusta have an affair with her half-brother? Why would she end it when he got married, even though she didn’t let her own marriage stand in the way?

  6. Is the incestuous relationship between Byron and Augusta the real love story at the heart of this novel?

  7. The setting, style, and especially the dialogue of A Quiet Adjustment transport us to nineteenth-century England, but this is, in a way, a very modern narrative. How much about human behavior has changed in the past two hundred years? What has stayed the same?

  8. Why is it so important to Annabella and her friends that Augusta confess something that they already know (the nature of her relationship with Byron)?

  9. “An equality of sins, [Annabella] reasoned, as well as virtues, is what the harmony of a marriage depended on.” Do you agree?

  10. To what does the book’s title refer? If you could create an alternate title, what would it be?

  11. Did you find it unusual that Annabella would want to “save” Augusta after everything that’s happened? Are her intentions genuine or self-serving? What is the real source of companionship between these two women?

  12. Toward the end of the book, Annabella refers to “the dazzle of Lord Byron’s reflected brilliance.” Does he remind you of a particular modern celebrity? How has the creation of and reaction to fame evolved since Byron’s time?

  13. Annabella’s friend Mary comments on Annabella’s desire to be “less perfect” than she is. Why would people, and Annabella in particular, choose to be less perfect?

  14. What do you think about the fact that Byron’s memoir was burned after his death?

  15. Is it a sign of weakness or strength when Annabella sends Byron the portrait he requested? How would you answer the question Annabella asks herself after his death: “What had he meant to her?”

  16. A Quiet Adjustment, for the most part, tells Annabella’s side of the story. Can you imagine what Byron’s would have been like?

  17. Do you like Annabella? How does your opinion of her change during the course of the novel?

  More praise for

  A Quiet Adjustment

  “With epigrammatic brevity . . . [Markovits] offers insights of such startling acuity that they sometimes make you gasp. This is prose of extraordinary richness and subtlety, rich in nuance and irony. . . . [A Quiet Adjustment is] a hypnotic, impeccably researched, and dazzling glimpse into a psyche which has fascinated the world for nearly 200 years—and will no doubt continue to do so.”

  —Christina Patterson, The Independent

  “In this dazzling literary mix of directness and metaphor, author Benjamin Markovits brings 19th-century England to life and in the process captures the centrifugal isolating forces that make up the tumultuous marriage between the infamous so-called libertine Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbank. . . . [An] exquisitely written novel.”

  —Michael Leonard,

  Curled Up With a Good Book (www.curledup.com)

  “Most extraordinary about Markovits’s achievement . . . is the sustained voice, a careful imitation of 19th-century prose that barely sounds a wrong note.”

  —Stephanie Merritt, The Observer

  “This is a truly remarkable novel. Taking its time from the beginning, it gently hooks us into Annabella’s world, a complex, contradictory one of personal insecurities and moral absolutes, to show, ultimately, what an abusive relationship looks like. . . . What Markovits has achieved here . . . is a startling, psychologically terrifying portrait of an individual with the capacity to destroy lives.”

  —Lesley McDowell, The Independent on Sunday

  “A Quiet Adjustment is a lovely novel, as finely textured, nuanced, and vivid as Balzac. . . . Benjamin Markovits writes with an uncanny sensibility that is at once classic yet contemporary.”

  —Katharine Weber, author of Triangle

  “A Quiet Adjustment achieves authenticity through the refinement of its emotional discourse. . . . Such artistry allows us to read it as both a resonantly modern novel and as a fiction whose truth has been stifled for almost 200 years.”

  —Jonathan Keates, Times Literary Supplement

  “Extremely well judged and a more even handed account than any biography. Markovits’s insight is more than matched by his eloquence. . . . [A Quiet Adjustment] sheds light on the murkiest depths of the female psyche. [Markovits’s] novel proves that some lives are better suited to fiction than biography.”

  —Duncan Wu, Daily Telegraph

  “The complexities of Byron’s life and character are perfectly suited to the canniness of Markovits’s mind, and the skill of A Quiet Adjustment confirms his mastery of the genre. I await with anticipation what he does next.”

  —Frances Wilson, Sunday Telegraph

  “[The novel’s narration] is brilliantly achieved. It asks the reader to relish its artifice . . . and the artifice repays the attention it demands.”

  —John Mullan, the Guardian

  “A bevy of biographical tidbits in a tasty format.”

  —Santa Cruz Sentinel

  “What makes these books remarkable is how skillfully they take all the grand and shameful exploits of their subject as the backdrop for a subtler study that centers on the many sacrifices of character and conscience made by his friends and lovers in order to be near or even just feel near his genius.”

  —Robert Ontiveros, Austin American Statesman

  “A worthy addition to the literature of the Byron legend, and an excellent novel in its own right . . . an absorbing portrait of the celebrity couple and an unworkable marriage to an exhilarating but unmanageable man.”

  —Toby Lichtig, The New Statesman

  “A sophisticated and intelligent novel.”

  —Nick Rennison, Sunday Times

  “Markovits tells his tale with incredible style . . . an uncomplicated delight. . . . Incomparable.”

  —Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

  “If you’re a fan of Romantic stories—with a big ‘r’ or a little one—you won’t be disappointed by this novel.”

  —Charity Vogel, Buffalo News

  “A spirited, controlled act of ventriloquism that . . . communicates a very modern sensibility.”

  —Mark Tewfik, Sydney Morning Herald

  “[A Quiet Adjustment] is a study of human frailty . . . a triumph and a worthy complement to its predecessor.”

  —Peg Hughes, London Paper

  “The tempestuous, abusive year of their [Byron and Milbanke’s] unhappy union is chronicled in a book that astounds with its stylistic precision, written as it is in pitch-perfect 19th-century English prose by a 21st-century Texan. Markovits so deftly recreates the consciousness of a precocious 19-year-old girl coming of age in Romantic England that her devotion to the mercurial poet is as convincing as her subsequen
t steely emergence from his fierce hold. The novelist uses his obvious intimacy with his subject and the period as a springboard for a broader examination of notions of innocence and experience, moralities prescribed and unlearned, and questions of celebrity and ego that resonate today.”

  —Fiona McCann, Irish Times

  Copyright © 2008, 2009 by Benjamin Markovits

  First American Edition 2008

  First published as a Norton paperback 2009

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions,

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Markovits, Benjamin.