Joy Unconfined

by Ian Strathcarron

  I felt myself degraded back to them,

  And was all clay again.

  As Byron’s thoughts turned from poems to passion it is also quite possible that he was pining after his pageboy Robert Rushton. At the start of his third seven-year cycle Byron was as casually bisexual as he was ever going to be. He loved beauty in the round, as a unity; dividing beauty into male or female entities, limiting it thus, was not in his nature.

  From his own letters and earliest biographers one can sense that he was bimental as well as bisexual; in fact the former would surely have caused the latter. His vegetarianism, vulnerable limp and dandy style with cloaks and scarves would have added to the hermaphroditic quandary experienced by those he met. His first biographer, Thomas Moore, who knew him well and sympathetically, noted that he talked like a man and thought like a woman, and others had commented to him on his ‘soft, voluptuous character’, and ‘that there was a great deal of the woman about Byron, in his tenderness, his temper, his caprice, his vanity.’ Hobhouse from Malta noted that a female friend had’ picked out a pretty picture of a woman in a fashionable dress, and observed she was vastly like Lord Byron.’ Sir Harold Nicholson in his biography notes that his subject held ‘a catalogue of false positions. His brain was male, his character was female.’

  Lady Blessington, who was to know him well - but only socially - after the Grand Tour, observed that ‘his voice and accent are particularly clear and harmonious, but somewhat effeminate; his laugh is musical,’ and that his feminine side encouraged ‘the perfect abandon with which he converses to recent acquaintances, on subjects which even friends would think too delicate for discussion.’

  The historian George Finlay, writing in relation to later events in Greece noted that: ‘it seemed as if two different souls occupied his body alternately. One was feminine and full of sympathy; the other masculine, and characterised by clear judgment. When one soul arrived the other departed. Hence he appeared in his conduct extremely capricious, while in his opinions he had great firmness. He often, however, displayed a feminine turn for deception in trifles,while at the same time he possessed a feminine candour of the soul,and a natural love of truth, which made him often despise himself quite as much as he despised English fashionable society for what he called its brazen hypocrisy.’

  Later on the Grand Tour in Istanbul an anonymous Englishman saw him in the souk. In a long description of Lord Byron he noted that ‘his features were remarkably delicate, and would have given him a feminine appearance, but of the manly impression of his fine blue eyes... and head of curly auburn hair, which improved in no small degree the uncommon beauty of his face. The impression which his whole appearance made on my mind was such that it has ever remained deeply engraven on it.’

  He appealed to the woman in a man, and the man in a woman; if these qualities in others were repressed he brought them nearer openness. If already open, a flirtation, dalliance or affair would have seemed only natural. Other, more sensitive conventions such as the taboo of incest were sacrificed to the gods of beauty, a trait he and his sister Augusta inherited from their father ‘Mad Jack’ Byron and their aunt Frances.

  Nowadays men - New Man, Metro Man - are encouraged to listen to women and empathise accordingly. Self help books and glossy magazines shout it from the rooftops. Emotions are to be discussed. Tone down those solution orientated instincts. Relationships are to be explored. Sex is to be shared. Cherish is an idea whose time has come. Understand her pain; give reassurance; commit, devote, care. We all do our best, some more reluctantly than is wise in these troubled times. But two hundred years ago men and women inhabited exclusively male and female worlds, and Byron and his bimentality and bisexuality must have been a rare bird to traverse so freely and seamlessly between the two worlds.

  ***

  Back on board the Townshend, now nearing Cagliari, the south coast of Sardinia would have reminded Byron then as it does the writer now of the west coast of Scotland. Barely inhabited, with wide open rugged bays for lochs, one has the feeling of sailing in ancient seas where galleys, caïques and brigantines have plied before. The fishermen then still used dhows, a throwback to Carthaginian days, and these beautiful lateen sailed craft would have been Byron and Hobhouse’s first sight of anything Eastern. Now the few fish left are chased by the few fishermen who can be bothered roaring around in dayglo RIBs with screaming outboards. Many of the sailing dhows themselves have been beautifully restored, or even more encouragingly recently built, for the pleasure of the newly affluent Sardinians.

  Typically, as any yachtsman will confirm, the only wind of any use came as they turned north for the destination and it came right on the bow. They had a long day tacking across Cagliari Bay, as indeed do we. Nowadays the western shore is blighted by the obligatory oil refinery and tanker terminal but then it would have been just marshes. For us there is hardly any wind at all. We see wind farms on the northern shore going lazily through the motions, and Mr. Perkins, our third crew member whose quirk it is to dress up as a diesel engine and live in the dark, is not discouraged to bring these two souls more swiftly in to Cagliari, just as patience brought the eighteen souls on board the Townshend safely to port two hundred years ago.

  Chapter Six

  SARDINIA, SHORE LEAVE

  26-27 AUGUST 1809 | 27-28 AUGUST 2008

  The Townshend packet only spent two nights and a day - Sunday 27 August 1809 - in Cagliari, and the passengers fairly raced off board after being cooped up for eleven days on the slow drift over from Gibraltar. Byron and Hobhouse had every expectation of being presented to the royal family, and had had appropriate outfits made in Gibraltar for the occasion. From there Byron had written to his mother: ‘My next stage is Cagliari in Sardinia, where I shall be presented to his Sardinian Majesty, I have a most superb uniform as a court dress, indispensable in travelling.’ As usual, that which to our poet is ‘indispensable’ is to everyone else a mad extravagance, but then most would not see themselves on a ‘stage’ in the first place. Whereas Byron had spent £50 on a suit of full regimentals and regalia, Hobhouse had had himself tailored a more modest bright red morning suit - itself an act of derring-do sartorial extravagance from our fogeyish diarist.

  And why should they expect to meet the King of Sardinia, Vittorio Emanuele I? So far Sardinia had escaped involvement in the Napoleonic wars, whereas Vittorio Emanuele’s dukedoms of Savoy and Piedmont had already been confiscated and denuded by the French. Napoleon had made a rather, for him, half hearted attack on Sardinia, and as Hobhouse later observed: ‘The (Sardinian) army is in a deplorable state, with officers for 30,000 men and only about 2,000 soldiers; yet the French attacked this place without effect, landing in two places, and fighting each other in the night.’ Further attacks were unlikely as long as the English navy controlled the Mediterranean, and it has to be said that, then as now, Sardinia for all its size and beauty and secrets is of no great strategic, cultural or prestigious importance. Its neutrality evolved not as part of some grander treaty but from its sleepy irrelevance to grander designs.

  Yet there was a more prosaic reason for Vittorio Emanuele to receive his English visitors. As Hobhouse further noted: ‘At this time there are seven or eight hundred men, bands of robbers in arms, in the mountains - the King cannot collect his taxes - and is chiefly supported by £12,000 per annum, which he receives from England. He is next Catholic heir to our crown.’ And so he was, being directly descended from Charles I. Luckily for him, in 1800 George III had granted Cardinal York, the Jacobite heir, a pension of£12,000 a year. The cardinal had died in 1807, and by the labyrinth in elegacy of Catholic succession it was Vittorio Emanuele I, who took up George’s pension, a pension without which his court could not function.

  In the event Byron and Hobhouse were not presented to the royal family personally, probably because their arrival and very short stay could not have been anticipated, but there were royal family sightings
at the royal church for mass and later at the royal theatre for an opera. Hobhouse became quite the court reporter. Apart from the king there was the queen, Maria Teresa, daughter of Archduke Ferdinand of Modena and Maria Beatrice, Duchess of Massa and Princess of Carrara. There was also ‘their daughter Madame Beatrice, rather pretty’, and the king’s brother Carlo Felice, who later took over the throne when Vittorio Emanuele abdicated. Hobhouse noted that Carlo Felice looked ‘very like the Duke of York (that The Grand old Duke of York, second son of George III). The Duke of Orleans, I was told, observed the same thing.’

  The visitors’ first impressions of Cagliari were favourable: ‘Cagliari, from the shore, looks like Lisbon in miniature - it is a fortified town, and the King’s house is situated on the higher part of the hill on which the city is built. The streets are narrow, but have no unpleasant stench in them, at least not very generally diffused.’ Sailing into Cagliari today one has the same impression, and the city has spread surprisingly little in the last two hundred years beyond the ramparts, now known as the Castello district, which defined it then. Hobhouse’ walked out to ramparts on both sides of the city - saw a country divided into gardens well-cultivated, which, however, Lord Byron, who rode into it, told me was not so agreeable, he having seen nothing particular but three heads nailed to a gallows.’

  Between Castello and the shore is Marina, where all the expensive shops and the more intriguing restaurants lie, and around Castello some small suburbs made worse by the usual hideous sixties tower blocks. The main development in Sardinia has been away from the capital, in the tourist resorts around the coast, most famously in the Aga Khan’s exclusive and sympathetic development of the Costa Smeralda on the north-east of the island. Sailing around the coast as we did, the remarkable point is how little it has been developed, especially the south coast which has the grandeur and emptiness of the Scottish isles and lochs, but without the midges, mist and chippy locals.

  If an ambassador is no longer needed here in Cagliari, the theatre at which he arranged for his visitors to see the opera is still very much alive and thriving. Now called the Teatro Civico in Castello, it has recently undergone a major refit, or rather de-fit as it no longer has a roof or boxes but is a beacon to democracy with open brickwork, unscrubbed floorboards, sky above, hard single seats in the stalls and sumptuous sofas in the gods above. The director, Marcello Borhy, had arranged for me to have a guided tour by his assistant, the amply bodied and named Leonora Pelicciotti di Castellammare. ‘Just say Lea,’ she advises, advice upon which I readily agree.

  It takes only a few moments to tour the new fresh air theatre and considerably longer to view Lea’s archives, a process I’m not in a mood to hurry. From the earliest photographs and contemporaneous sketches it is clear that the theatre which Byron, Hobhouse, Galt, the ambassador and the royal family attended has only the same floor area in common with today’s theatre. The seating area in the centre occupied only a third of the floor area, with an equal amount given to twelve large boxes on two levels along each side. From the evidence it seems that audience participation was part of the proceedings.The opera that night was La Nina (o sia La Pazza per Amore), the first time Byron had heard an opera in Italian. Nina (or the girl driven mad by love) was written by Giovanni Paisiello twenty years previously. The writer has not been able to find anyone who has seen it, but Ogden is rather sniffy about it, describing it as an over-sentimental comedy without humour, which may explain why no one known has seen it.

  In the days of the Napoleonic Wars Sardinia merited a full ambassador, in this case The Hon. William Hill. On landing Byron and Hobhouse headed straight for his residence, described as a rather splendid Spanish-owned house in Castello, now sadly unidentifiable. Not expecting them, he too was away but later sent word back to the Townshend that they should all attend the opera that evening.

  Mr. Hill evidently had two boxes as he placed Hobhouse and the others in one of them and took Byron as his personal guest in the other, smarter, one next to the king’s box. However Byron and the king did not seem to meet; I’m sure we would have heard if they had done so.

  Nowadays Sardinia does not merit an ambassador, nor even a consul, but an honorary consul, so I contact our man in Cagliari, Andrew Graham, MBE, and we arrange to meet. Not having an office as such - we are represented from his home, which is out of town - we meet at the Ristorante Italiano on Via Sardegna in the Marina district. I ask him if there is much call for Byron research.

  ’None at all,’ he replies. ‘Quite frankly, until you enquired I didn’t even know he had been here.’

  ’Well, it was only for a day,’ I offer defensively. ‘Which Brits do people enquire about?’

  ”Nelson, of course. Benjamin Piercy. D.H. Lawrence. Those are the big three.’

  ’Benjamin Piercy?’

  ’Yes, he’s an interesting one, he built the Sardinian railways. Hehad been building railways in India, and there he married an Indian lady called Chilivani. The railways here are a miracle of engineering through the mountains. It’s hard to think of worse ground. They named a village in the mountains along the route Chilivani out of respect for them both.’

  ’And D.H. Lawrence?’

  ’To hear people here talk about him you would think he had spent his whole life here. Actually it was just a week, but he did write Sea and Sardinia. It’s well translated in the Italian, very popular.’

  ‘By yourself ?’

  ’Unfortunately not.’

  I ask him about himself, and his work as an honorary consul. Hemet and married a Sardinian girl when she was a language student in London twenty-five years ago, and jumped at the offer of working in Cagliari for a multinational construction company building the new container port. The company went bust, but by then he had fallen in love with Sardinia as well as his wife and he took up work where he could find it. A series of coincidences and retirements found him in Rome being offered the job of honorary consul in Cagliari, ‘Our Man in Sardinia’.

  He is responsible for the welfare of Brits on his patch. Before the advent of cheap flights there was not a lot to do, the odd lost passport, the odd wedding certificate. But since Ryanair and easyJet have arrived the quantity of British visitors has increased enormously. I ask about the quality. Mostly educated, he’s pleased to say, and I’m pleased to hear, both of us having been embarrassed by the stag and hen party brigades throwing up all over each other in Mallorca, Prague or the Baltic states. The cruise ships have brought in many more visitors too, and with them hospital visits to these more ancient mariners who have fallen ill on passage. It’s clearly a job he loves, and does with pride and care. ‘Although job is not exactly the right word as it implies a salary and pension, some continuity.’

  ’But you must be paid, surely?’ I ask.

  ’Honorary consuls receive an honorarium. £2,700 is the current figure...’ I do a quick calculation and think that thirty odd thousand a year ain’t too bad. ‘...plus expenses, of course. Not a lot in a year.’

  In spite of this derisory figure he is fiercely defensive about the Foreign Office and all who sail in her, so I bite my tongue about Margaret Beckett. I show him Hobhouse’s report of Ambassador Hill’s views on Sardinia:

  At Mr. Hill’s I learnt that the property was feudal - that murders were every day committed and often by men of rank, that one seigneur would often steal three or four hundred sheep, and shoot the horses of another - as formerly in the highlands of Scotland - that no man therefore travelled, not even five miles from the town, without a gun, which is a weapon at which they are very expert. He said that men procured their pardons by the distribution of money, which they all kept for these occasions.

  Hobhouse added from his own observations:

  I saw a low cart drawn by oxen surrounded by six ill-looking fellows with guns - two prisoners from the villages were tied in the cart. Executions are frequent - the manners of the w
omen very licentious, so much that there are no common whores. Money is scarce, but provisions exceedingly cheap - beef two pence a pound, and a bushel of grapes for a dollar - bread exceedingly fine, three times as cheap as in England - the appearance of men and women and houses and of everything most miserable.

  Andrew smiled at the familiarity of then and now. ‘Italian politics have always been rugged. Don’t forget it’s a very well paid job here, starting around €25,000 a month, plus plus plus, and the corruption is open and expected. Just last week the local strong man, Renato Soru, who made his fortune starting and selling Tiscali, stood up in parliament in front of all the public and media and openly told his MPs that if they didn’t support his two-kilometre coastal development exclusion zone he would make sure they all went back to their previous clerical jobs at €1500 a month. With that reminder they all voted for him.’

  ’Funnily enough I had lunch with Prodi in Bergamo last May when he was still prime minister. He had the personality of a stick. And now Berlusconi is back.’

  ’Yes,’ says Andrew, ‘and you know you will never find an Italian who will admit to voting for him. But clearly a lot of them did. The most interesting person in politics right now is Beppe Grillo. Have you heard of him?’

  ’Only in the headlines,’ I reply, ‘what’s the small print?’

  ’A third of all politicians have been convicted, and that’s just the ones that have ended up in court. There’s at least another third who should have ended up in court, but the system is paralysed. He wants them limited to two terms. But he’s banned from state TV, and of course Berlusconi’s channels too, so he does it all through his website and blog. It’s the most popular one in Italy.’

  ’So why doesn’t he stand himself?

  ’He did, but lost badly.’

  ’How come?’

  ’It’s the Berlusconi syndrome in reverse. Everyone says “oh yes, I voted for Beppe,” but clearly no one did. In the dark of the voting booth they want a fixer. Welcome to politics Italian-style. Hard not to love it though.’