Joy Unconfined
Page 7
The three immediate enthusiasms amongst Gibraltarians would seem to be the collective hatred of anything and anyone Spanish, the corresponding jingoism for a pre-service industry Britain and the subsequent careful cultivation of the bloody-minded tree. Bloody mindedness here is a statement of identity where the perfection of placing imaginary obstacles in the way of anyone wanting anything to be done has as many precious subtleties in its rules and variations as does Mornington Crescent.
First stop after mooring was to find another connection for the hose - the taps on Gibraltar’s quays being quite exceptional - and I drift into the only chandler, the famously customer averse Sheppard’s, to buy same.
’Good morning, have you the marina tap-to-hose connection please?’
’No, mate.’
’Do they have them in the marina office?’
’No, mate.’
’Ah, so where do you think I could find one?’
’Don’t know, mate.’
I eventually find one in British Home Stores, of all places, which still maintains its pride of place among Gibraltarian shoppers (the smart set use the Marks and Spencer). In fact Gibraltar is a Tardis of the fifties, the fifties of bread fried in the morning and thin white sliced and margerined in the afternoon, with sauces red or brown to suit, of the conscription mentality and the subsequent perfection of skiving, and of chippiness ranging from dumb insolence to outright obstreperousness.
So, enthused by the purchase of the hose connector I leave in search of the other priority, a spare boat key as I have already nearly lost our only one twice. Ah, there’s the Tourist Information Office, they’ll be able to help. A chubby young woman with heavy mascara, crimson lipstick and the inevitable gum in full chew, and wearing a crimson nylon cardigan - the air conditioning is maxed and deafening- deigns to interrupt her study of a glossy celebrity magazine. ‘Yes?’
’Good morning, where can I have a key cut please?’
’This is Tourist Information.’
’Well, I’m a tourist and I would like some information, if that were possible.’
’We only give out tourist information, not general information.’
’Alright, so where can I find general information?’
An annoyed sigh, then ‘Citizen’s Advice Bureau, maybe?’
’Where would that be, as a tourist enquiry of course?’
’In Cadogan Street.’
’And the best way there?’
’It’s off Pelham Street.’
’Let me ask you this: you live here, am I right?’
A wary ‘Ri-ight’. She even slows down the chewing in her wariness.
’If you ever need a spare key, where do you go to get one cut?’
More cheerfully now, ‘Oh, that will be Barrett’s, just opposite BHS.’She looks at my British Home Stores bag, ‘you know where BHS is then?’
’Just been there.’
’That’s it, right opposite. Why didn’t ya go there in the first place?’A shake and a tut and she returns to the intense study of OK Heat.
Charming parts remain in the little back alleys off Main Street - Baker’s Lane, Turnbull’s Lane, Cooperage Lane, Fish Market Lane - where little Moroccan grocery stores, tiny houses with an open front door, rub along side by side with Indian restaurants and Kosher markets. There’s a tiny piece of history still alive and well in the non-Anglo element, the Genoese names, the Maltese Association,the synagogue and mosque and Hindu temple, the dignified dress code, but mostly they are swamped by the flabby white trash with short attention spans from the cruise ships, and by the Anglo element Gibraltarians who hold them all in such disdain.
But for Byron and Hobhouse on Friday, 11 August 1809, the Relief of Gibraltar was in sight. As Hobhouse recorded with some delight:’Today was an important day - Byron entered in the morning and informed me with an embrace that the Triumph Schooner was arrived. I embraced him for his news. Fletcher came - informed me that my black case had been stolen, but recovered, at Lisbon.’ The reason for the delay soon became clear: the Triumph’s captain Mackinnon, or in Hobhouse’s view ‘the wretch Mackinnon, a detestable Yankee Scot’, did not leave Lisbon until six days before - no doubt waiting for a fuller cargo.
The entourage were now reunited: Byron and Hobhouse, the page Robert Rushton and the guide Sanguinetti already in Gibraltar, and the valet Fletcher, the retainer Murray, the linguist Friese and the all important trunks and chests of books and clothes and stationery and uniforms and comforts and presents needed on a Byronic baggage train. But by now Byron had decided that young Robert Rushton was not up to the rigours of travelling, and however decorative he may be he should be returned to England. Byron told Hanson it was because Turkey was too dangerous a state for boys to enter, and wrote to his mother that ‘you know boys are not safe amongst the Turks’ and that’ he is my great favourite’. He had already made some provision for Robert in his will, and he now increased this further - not that he had the money to do so - so that the boy could be independent. We learn that the pageboy was desperately sad to leave his master, but we can imagine the master may have been tiring of this particular pageboy with the promise of further and more exotic pageboys as they headed eastwards.
Rushton was to be accompanied by old Joe Murray, whom Byron thought too ancient for further travel, and so the one too young and the other too old were sent home from Gibraltar. The others, Fletcher and the German guide Friese, would join Byron and Hobhouse on board the Malta packet Townshend, due to leave in five days time. There was still idle time in the heat and dust ahead.
Chapter Five
FROM GIBRALTAR TO SARDINIA
15-30 AUGUST 1809 | 23 JULY - 29 SEPTEMBER 2008
The reduced party left Gibraltar on 15 August, 1809. The Townshend packet was due to deliver mail at Cagliari in Sardinia and Girgenti, now Agrigento, in Sicily and then sail on to Malta. Of course there was no timetable. The Mediterranean famously has either too much wind for sailing or too little, and in the middle of August it was always likely there would be much more ‘too little’ than ’too much’. The 700-nautical mile, or 800-regular mile, voyage from Gibraltar to Cagliari took eleven days, a drearily slow average of only 2.5 knots or 3 mph. Having covered the same waves at the same time of year I can report that they would have spent hours on end generally drifting followed by quick bursts of progress in the gusts and squalls.
Byron had chided Hobhouse about his ‘woundy preparations for a book on his [Hobhouse’s] return; 100 pens, two gallons of Japan Ink,and several volumes of best blank, is no bad provision for a discerning public.’ But for reasons unknown Hobhouse put his pen away when at sea, and so we have to rely on another passenger, John Galt, for impressions of the voyage. Galt was a Scottish businessman who was in the Mediterranean looking for ways to break Napoleon’s embargo on British goods. When that failed he became an author of sorts and twenty-one years after their short voyage together and six years after Byron’s death he suddenly had a rush of rather patchy recollection and published his Life of Lord Byron. Personally I don’t much like the cut of the Galt jib, and not just because of the self-aggrandisement after this fortuitous meeting with Byron on the Townshend. Galtre members Byron being aloof from his fellow passengers and spending only one evening conversing and playing cards in the mess area with the others. Byron would just stand outside throughout most of the night, leaning on the rigging and gazing at the moon and stars. This at least certainly has the ring of truth, as Byron was famously nocturnal throughout his adult life.
What was he doing, what was he thinking, leaning back on the rigging, gazing at the sky and sea through the night? Was he being a lord spiritual or a lord temporal? Seers, if not most peers, know that it was not through the individual mind, through thinking, that the miracle of life was created or is being sustained, but through a far greater intelligence or imagination.
As with life so with art. The seer, the lord spiritual, looks to the sea and sees the sea as an almost perfect metaphor for eternity. There is the one substance, water, the metaphor for One, the Absolute: ‘That which can have no name because it cannot be limited by description or definition.’ The sea is still when it is deep, it is just the sea being the sea. On the surface there are waves, with the illusion of movement, just as man identifies with the illusion of change rather realising the constancy of That, but the waves are still the sea. On the waves are ripples, just like man’s lives - lasting mere moments and seemingly of dubious consequence - which miraculously arise from That, are sustained by the will and circumstance of That and return inevitably to That, yet they too are still the sea.
But the seer will know that the sea is only a useful metaphor because ultimately, no matter how seemingly timeless, it must have had a beginning and eventually it will have to have an end, and so can never be eternal, Absolute, That. For the seer That - the ultimate Existence, Knowledge and Bliss, the Sat, Chit and Ananda, is real; thus the finite universe is not real but merely existing for now. That and Atman, the cosmic mind resting and awaiting realisation in each of our souls, are one. ‘Thou art That ‘. One only has to look, as did another poet, T.S. Eliot: ‘The river is within you; the sea is all around you.’
Yet although Byron’s words could take some readers beyond the literal and transcend the labelling limitations of the intellect, he himself was not remotely religious, let alone spiritual. Catholic theologians recognise a quality called ‘gratuitous grace’ as an aspect of cosmic consciousness. Gratuitous grace - the power of healing or prediction, or spiritual insights - can descend on anyone. One thinks of Mozart, or indeed Wordsworth. One walks on cut glass to judge another’s spirituality, but as Aldous Huxley has observed, there is no biographical evidence that Byron developed his gratuitous grace, his theophany, beyond his poetry: ‘Byron was as fascinatingly Byronic after he had beheld the One in all things as he was before.’ As he wrote to Hodgson, the latter starting to wear his religious tendencies on his sleeve:
I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating on another. If men are to live, why die at all? And if they die, why disturb the sweet and sound sleep that “knows no waking”? I am no Platonist, I am nothing at all; but I would sooner be a Paulician, Manichean, Spinozist, Gentile, Pyrrhonian, Zoroastrian, than one of the seventy-two villainous sects who are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord and hatred of each other. Talk of Galileeism? Show me the effects - are you better, wiser, kinder by your precepts?
If Byron was ‘none of the above’, what, if anything was he?
Leaning back on the rigging looking out to the moonlit sea, he would surely have reflected on destiny, elevated it to Destiny, and if anything he would be a Destinyist. One image of his life which stays in the writer’s mind is of him, aged ten, looking through the gates at Newstead Abbey and its Park for the first time and seeing somewhere from a dreamy planet far, far away. What an extraordinary and random change, and a change for which there had been no preparation. Up until then he had lived with his tire some mother and sexually abusive Calvinist maid in humblish circumstances in Aberdeen, learning Latin by rote by day and hearing his mother bleat on about how grand her family used to be before she met his father by night. She would remind him that his father was from grand stock too when she married him, but look at them now! All around Aberdeenshire were her rich relations, relations she was too embarrassed to visit, a precept with which she burdened her son frequently too.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, came an event which changed everything. He had, in effect, won the lottery of life. An obscure relative, one he had never met, died on a battlefield somewhere equally obscure and wee George not only became Lord Byron in title but the owner of 3,000 acres of parkland, an abbey and at first sight much else besides. The story is told of his mother and him arriving at Newstead for the first time. Their carriage pulled up to the gates and his mother asked a passer-by who lived in such a magnificent mansion. The reply was: Lord Byron, but he is dead. We hear it now belongs to a young boy in Scotland. ‘This is he!’ squealed his mother in excitement, preening herself through her son.
The image of the ten-year-old looking through the gates at Newstead for the first time is made sharper by the lack of preparation. Hereditary peers by and large know they are going to inherit from the earliest age, and by tuition or observation know what to do and when to do it; equally what not to do and when not to do it. When their predecessor dies they seamlessly slip into their new role, knowing - we hope - full well that it is just a role. If there is land too, they will know how to husband it; if there is politics or clergy or regiments too, they will know the rungs on the ladders and the lairs of the snakes. But young George Byron had none of this preparation, and it showed to his disadvantage throughout his life. He took his status as a peer as automatically entitling him to jump hierarchies and insist on protocols where he had no business to do so. If he had earned his peerage, or even paid or whored for it, one might understand this grandstanding, but the fact that he won it in a hereditary lottery he didn’t even know he had entered should have attracted more modesty, less self-importance.
It is an irony of his life that although in his poetry he seemed instinctively to understand that in reality ‘all the world’s a stage and all the actors in it only players’, in the illusory world we take for real he should conduct himself so self-seriously just because of an arbitrary title - and that is another contradiction to add to the long list that made the man.
Destiny, bordering on Serendipity, gave him two roles: peer and poet, and if he loved being a peer, he adored being a poet, and especially the adored poet he was to become. ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous,’ he said after the first edition of Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage was published. He had been reading poetry studiously in classical and modern languages since he was ten, and writing it seriously since he was thirteen. He knew from sixteen that he could summon words and turn them into verses, and that when poems they had the power to take the reader somewhere beyond the original words.
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
He may well have already known on those Mediterranean nights that it would not be just poems but epic poems that would fulfil his concord with Destiny. And Destiny would serve him well as after the Grand Tour and the publication of Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage it was his celebrity as a poet rather than as a peer which made him compulsory company in the best drawing rooms in London.
Resting on the rigging, gazing at the moonlit seascape, hearing the rush and settle of the bow wave, smelling the salted timber, I imagine he was just ‘letting go’ and allowing the words, the phrases, the lines and the verses to come to him as they may. There is active authoring and passive authoring. Byron, when on active duty, would write deep into the night and often until dawn. His manuscripts are a scribbling mass of revisions and alterations. He called himself ‘the mighty Scribbler’. On passive patrol he would just let the words come on the breeze, love them and discard them for the ethereal notions that they are. Phrases or passages with meaning would be retained and brought back to light later. Childe Harold‘s Pilgrimage was written in Spenserian stanzas: eight lines of doubled iambic pentameter followed by a doubled alexandrine, with rhymes ababbcbcc. Byron composed by phrases, usually mid-line or bi-line. There cannot be a more natural rhythm to rhymes composed than the steady sound of a boat plying a sea, so the Spenserian stanza structure flows:
The free, the easy flow of bow on wave
The voice beyond the silence prompts to hear;
From where the rolling word becomes a stave
To phrases, which within themselves
are clear
Intent of what the stillness tells the ear.
Moon too! and timeless stars and wake combine
With phosphorescence prompting well the seer.
I do nothing, forsaking me and mine;
I just observe! and let Life’s rhythm be the shrine.
Eight years after those Mediterranean nights he published Manfred: a Dramatic Poem, and this passage about Manfred at the same age as Byron was when en route to Malta must have been self-reflective:
My spirit walk’d not with the souls of men,
Nor look’d upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine;
The aim of their existence was not mine.
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers,
Made me a stranger. Though I wore the form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh.
My joy was in the wilderness - to breathe
The difficult air of the iced mountain’s top.
Where the birds dare not build, nor insect’s wing
Flit o’er the herbless granite; or to plunge
Into the torrent, and to roll along
On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave
Of river, stream, or ocean, in their flow -
In these my early strength exulted; or
To follow through the night the moving moon,
The stars, and their development; or catch
The dazzling lightnings till my eyes grew dim;
Or to look listening on the scatter’d leaves,
While autumn winds were at their evening song; -
These were my pastimes - and to be alone.
For if the beings, of whom I was one -
Hating to be so - cross’d me in my path,