Joy Unconfined

by Ian Strathcarron

  Ah, quarantine. Every traveller’s worst dread, where the perfectly healthy were imprisoned in close conditions which could have been designed to make them equally unhealthy in the three weeks of confinement. But Lord Byron or no, like all travellers from the East he was unceremoniously sent into quarantine in the local lazaretto, a bit like an unpassported pet being offered up on arrival at Heathrow.

  All ports then had their lazarettos but Malta had a Lazaretto, an imposing two-storey sandstone structure of cells and courtyards, surrounded by colonnades and pivoted around capitals. The location still is perfect, the prime waterfront position on Manoel Island looking over to Valletta across Marsamxett Harbour. Ancient history is the view. One view across the harbour was the Chapel of St. Roque, the patron saint of plague protection, which the Knights had built with a wide open frontage so worshippers from the Lazaretto could follow the service and so be spared spiritual isolation too.

  Curiosity about the Lazaretto leads me to the site but it is rather rustily padlocked, more a token than a serious attempt at securing the plot. I think about giving the old lock some percussive engineering but then see a large notice board with the diagram of the Lazaretto- to-be and the architect’s telephone number. The following morning, a sprightly, trendily unkempt young architect arrives with an equally rusty key, but we find the lock broken open anyway.

  ’Hello, I’m Edward Said,’ he says and we start the tour. He is full of enthusiasm for his new project. The Lazaretto is not one building, but a collection of palaces, warehouses and customs offices that were sequestered by the Knights in 1663 to make a quarantine centre for their newly acquired slaves and an isolation centre for those other slaves in transit. By the time the Byron party arrived history had moved on and it was wealthy passengers and their servants who slept where slaves once slept. It turns out that Edward is a bit of a Byron buff too.

  We turn a corner and there is a large triangular space, totally flattened.

  ’What happened?’ I ask.

  ’Bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1941,’ he replies.

  ’Not very sporting of them, any particular reason?’

  ’A very good one actually. In the war we turned this into HMS Talbot, a submarine supply base.’

  ‘Ah. And what was it before?’

  ’This was called the Profumo Office. Here they used to fumigate everything that belonged to the inmates.’

  One can imagine Byron, who as we have seen always sported a huge baggage train, himself fumigating as all his letters and manuscripts,books and journals, finery and mementos were smoked and hung to air like so many kippers. But in an age and place where strange and unknown diseases were random and rampant, when the last plague in Malta was in living memory, such precautions could not be gainsaid.

  Nevertheless Byron, already feverish, found the whole experience ghastly from top to bottom. For a start it was annoyingly democratic: it was one thing to have Nicolo Giraud pouting and whining in the next cell, but to have the two Greek servants slouching around in adjoining cells was clearly intolerable. Then the place was run by the worst sort of British martinet, a crazed Ulster Protestant enthusiast called Colonel Bryant MacBrearty, who rejoiced in the title of Superintendent General of the Palace, Captain of the Lazaretto and Adjudicator of His Majesty’s Quarantine Regulations. Byron’s detestation of crazed Protestants was only equalled by MacBrearty’s detestation of foppish poets. Regulations were strictly enforced, much to MacBrearty’s delight, including the ultimate sanction ‘Death without the Benefit of Clergy.’

  We climb upstairs to look at the cells. There are about a dozen, each about three metres square, either side of a gloomy passage. The layout is repeated alongside and above. To the left lies a slightly larger cell, for captains, rich merchants - and by legend, Lord Byron.’The inmates had to pay to stay here,’ Edward explains, ‘not just their board and lodgings but the wages of their guards too. The guards themselves were convicts.’

  ’So they would trade time off for hoping not to catch anything catching?’

  ’That’s right, and you can bet they charged for every little extra too.’ He leads me outside to the exercise yard. ‘Here they took some air. There wasn’t much to do except carve their names in the sandstone.’

  ’I’ve seen a photograph of Byron’s graffito.’

  ’Yes, it’s long been washed away by the rain and sun, I’m afraid.’

  Even if Byron had known that Cardinal Newman, William Makepeace Thackeray and Benjamin Disraeli were later to suffer similar inconveniences as Lazaretto alumni in future years his mood would not have lightened. Made worse actually, he would have told himself he was just being used, and brutally, as an experiment for the drifters and chancers who were to follow in his wake.

  Next Edward shows me the Parlatorio. ‘Visitors and salesmen could only be received here in the Parlatorio. They had to stand on opposite sides of the hall with guards in the middle to keep them apart.’

  Cardinal Newman had one such visit on Christmas Day 1831, and he noted ‘the strange dresses, the strange languages, the jabbering and the grimaces, the queer faces driving a bargain, without a common language, the solemn, absurd guardians with their staves in the space between them, the opposite speaker fearing nothing so much as touching you, and crying out and receding at the same time.’

  The tour over Edward and I repair to the Royal Malta Yacht Club for a well-earned lunch. I explain how Byron was not well when he arrived, having contacted an ague, which sounds like an unreliable cousin of malaria, further east. He described the ague to Hobhouse: ‘Avillainous quotidian tertian it killed Falstaff and may me. It returned in quarantine in this infernal oven and the fit comes on every other day, reducing me first to the chattering penance of Harry Gill, and then mounting me up to a Vesuvian pitch of fever, lastly quitting me with sweats that render it necessary for me to have a man and horse all night to change my linen.’

  When he could find pen and paper his mood was maudlin. He jotted down Four or Five Reasons in Favour of a Change in his life:

  1stly, at twenty-three the best of life is over and its bitters double.

  2ndly I have seen mankind in various Countries and find them equally despicable, if anything the Balance is rather in favour of the Turks.

  3rdly I am sick at heart (and then misquoting Horace’s ode To Venus) Nor Maid nor Youth delights me now.

  4thly A man who is lame of one leg is in a state of bodily inferiority which increases with years and must render his old age more peevish & intolerable. Besides in another existence I expect to have two if not four legs by way of compensation.

  5thly I grow selfish and misanthropical, something like the jolly miller - I care for nobody - no not I - and nobody cares for me.

  6thly My affairs at home and abroad are gloomy enough.

  7thly I have outlived all my appetites and vanities - aye even the vanity of authorship.

  Eighteen days later he was released from the Lazaretto; several hours later Edward and I stagger off in our various directions. At least I only had to enjoy a siesta; Byron now had to face the dire task of two very different adieus: a finale to Constance Spencer-Smith and a coda to Nicolo Giraud.

  He had feared the worst with the former, feared that she would be there waiting for him, her passion, unlike his, still in bloom. She had written to him only weeks before their rendezvous in Malta: ‘I should feel happy to repeat to you how much I am sincerely yours.’ One can imagine Byron’s lack of joy at being reminded in writing of Anglo-Saxon emotional rigidity and formality after the freewheeling and spontaneous light-heartedness further east. Constance, Florence, who had seemed so free and wilful, so exotic to him on his way out of England, now seemed prim and needy, and demanding a part of him he had long left behind. He had anyway some time before quite recovered from his New Calypso’s charms, writing of their affair in Athens in January 1810:r />
  The spell is broke, the charm is flown!

  Thus it is with life’s fitful fever:

  We madly smile when we should groan;

  Delirium is our best deceiver.

  Yet a meeting with the lady there had to be, a scene that had to be obliged, and he told Hobhouse ‘the Governor... was kind enough to leave us to come to the most diabolic of explanations. It was in the dog-days, during a sirocco (I almost perspire now at the thought of it), during the intervals of an intermittent fever (my love had also intermitted with my malady), and I certainly feared the ague and my passion would both return in full force.’ What this diabolic explanation was history does not relate. Most Byronists conclude he shocked her with explanations of his sexual ambivalence, possibly throwing in an unmentionable disease; my feeling is that there was no diabolic explanation, doesn’t seem like his style, just awkwardness and illness on his part and anxiety and intelligence and maturity on her part, and obvious conclusions, with relief and sorrow accordingly, drawn all round.

  Byron feared the worst after their meeting as well, and noted that when she wrote her memoirs he would ‘cut a very indifferent figure; and nothing survives of this most ambrosial affair, which made me on occasion risk my life, and on another almost drove me mad, but a few Duke of Yorkish letters and some baubles....’

  His last and most dreaded act on Malta was to part from his Greek delight Nicolo Giraud. Nicolo was beside himself with grief, sobbing gratuitously and pledging undying, unswerving devotion to his master. As usual, as with Constance Spencer-Smith a few miles away, once Byron had parted with his passion, his passion parted too. Although Nicolo Giraud was to write to him in Latin, Greek and English (‘I pray your Excellency to not forget your humble servant which so dearly and faithfully loves you’, ‘My most precious Master, I cannot describe the grief of my heart at not seeing you for such a long time. Ah, if only I were a bird and could fly so as to come and see you for one hour, and I would be happy to die at the same time.’ etc, etc) Byron had moved on to passions new and Giraud’s Labrador love was never answered at all, let alone with fondness or affection. Nicolo was to finish his schooling in Malta at Byron’s expense but left for Athens after a few months after falling out with the monks; ‘I never did like monks anyway,’ he wrote in one his letters to his padrone back in England.

  It was hardly surprising then that Byron left Malta with what he called his ‘hudibrastics’, the poem ‘Farewell to Malta’:

  Adieu, ye joys of La Valette!

  Adieu, sirocco, sun, and sweat!

  Adieu, thou palace rarely enter’d!

  Adieu, ye mansions where I’ve ventured!

  Adieu, ye cursed streets of stairs!

  (How surely he who mounts you swears!)

  Adieu, ye merchants often failing!

  Adieu, thou mob forever railing!

  Adieu, ye packets without letters!

  Adieu, ye fools who ape your betters!

  Adieu, thou damned’st quarantine,

  That gave me fever, and the spleen!

  Adieu, that stage which makes us yawn, Sirs,

  Adieu, his Excellency’s dancers!

  Adieu to Peter - whom no fault’s in

  But could not teach a colonel waltzing;

  Adieu, ye females fraught with graces!

  Adieu, red coats, and redder faces!

  Adieu, the supercilious air

  Of all that strut ‘en militaire’!

  I go - but God knows when, or why,

  To smoky towns and cloudy sky,

  To things (the honest truth to say)

  As bad - but in a different way. -

  Farewell to these, but not adieu,

  Triumphant sons of truest blue!

  While either Adriatic shore,

  And fallen chiefs, and fleets no more,

  And nightly smiles, and daily dinners,

  Proclaim you war and woman’s winners.

  Pardon my Muse, who apt to prate is,

  And take my rhyme - because ‘tis ‘gratis.’

  And now I’ve got to Mrs. Fraser,

  Perhaps you think I mean to praise her -

  And were I vain enough to think

  My praise was worth this drop of ink,

  A line - or two - were no hard matter,

  As here, indeed, I need not flatter:

  But she must be content to shine

  In better praises than in mine,

  With lively air, and open heart,

  And fashion’s ease, without its art;

  Her hours can gaily glide along,

  Nor ask the aid of idle song. -

  And now, O Malta! since thou’st got us,

  Thou little military hothouse!

  I’ll not offend with words uncivil,

  And wish thee rudely at the Devil,

  But only stare from out my casement,

  And ask, for what is such a place meant?

  Then, in my solitary nook,

  Return to scribbling, or a book,

  Or take my physic while I’m able

  (Two spoonfuls hourly by the label),

  Prefer my nightcap to my beaver,

  And bless the gods I’ve got a fever.

  The five-week journey back to England was deeply depressing. He knew he would have to deal with debts and creditors and the hypocrisy of polite society. He did not know how Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage would be received; he had greater hopes for Hints from Horace. He wrote to his friends and mother, talking up his plans, trying to be cheerful. When he couldn’t cheer himself up any more, he levelled with Hobhouse: ‘Dear Hobby, you must excuse all this facetiousness which I should not have let loose, if I knew what the Devil to do, but I am so out of Spirits, & hopes, & humour, & pocket, & health, that you must bear with my merriment.’

  ***

  The feeling is shared. I should have been behind him trudging up the Channel, back to the Big Grey. The original idea was to follow Byron home, deal with the publishing, and then set off again in the spring- this time across the Atlantic in the wake of my favourite author Patrick Leigh Fermor. The great man had written his first book, The Traveller’s Tree, about his early post-war travels around the Caribbean and Vasco da Gama, Gillian and I were to island hop in his footsteps.

  I blame it on the Lazaretto. Reflecting quietly in Byron’s cell a few days after Edward’s tour, thinking about Byron’s seven reasons not to be cheerful, I came up with seven of my own and they all related to returning to England and the realities that would have to be faced; realities that could be easily avoided by staying away. I thought about the Strangelove/Rumsfeld rumination: ‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. These are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we don’t know we don’t know.’ I knew that the known knowns were bad enough and the unknown unknowns were all likely to be ungood and make me unwell.

  Also, our relationship had changed. The first inkling was on the promontory at Kea where Hobhouse and Byron parted. Until then I felt that Hobhouse was keeping an eye on Byron, keeping him in some sort of orbit, but after Hobhouse left Byron was fluttering vulnerably and I worried, as a father to a son, about him. This was a new emotion, and I must admit that up to Kea I felt detached: Lord Byron was a bit too pleased with Lord Byron for me to be drawn willingly towards him. But after Kea I wanted to be closer, in part to protect him from himself, in part because the tables had turned: he was now following in my footsteps, early-twenties debauchery-wise, and I felt protective, albeit helplessly protective. Sitting in his cell in ’the infernal oven’ in the Lazaretto I knew that if I followed him back to England I’d be sucked into his world like so many others and I’d follow him ou
t again to the Alps, the Adriatic and the Aegean.

  There was one other reason not to follow Byron home: Mark Twain. In Athens I bought a wonderful reference book called Travellers’ Greece, about literary visitors to Greece when it was still an Ottoman province. Many writers contributed: apart from Byron and Hobhouse and many others, there were chapters by Bulwer Lytton, Chandler, Chateaubriand, Lady Craven, De Pouqueville, Lear, Melville, Lady Stanhope, Thackeray, Trelawny - and Twain. The latter stood out as being brash and wry, and freshly observed. His visit to Greece was part of his own Grand Tour - this one as a journalist to the Holy Land, also Ottoman controlled, and resulted in the book The Innocents Abroad.

  And so as Vasco da Gama sailed past the Lazaretto and out of Marsamxett Harbour we parted our ways. Byron turned to port for the long dread back to England and we turned to starboard for the promise of the Holy Land, for the prospect of having one’s lotus and eating it. I remembered Hobhouse on Kea, ‘taking leave of this singular young person.’ We had no nosegay on board to divide with him, only some stalks of thyme, but I offered them to his westbound wake - also non sine lacrymis. It had been fun.

  ***

  The Grand Tour was nearly over, and heading into northern climes all around him Byron saw grey seas, grey skies, and soon there would be grey people with their grey conventions. Finally, on 11 June, the party was over. He disembarked at Sheerness; still, it could have been worse, it could have been Gravesend.

  Epilogue

  LORD BYRON, POST-TOUR

  1 4 JULY 1811 - 25 APRIL 1816

  A very different Byron arrived back in England on 14 July 1811 from the one who had left Falmouth twenty-five months earlier. In the days when all experiences had by necessity to be firsthand, he returned having mingled with despots and spies, tyrants and ambassadors, prostitutes and paedophiles, grandees and brigands. He had seen for himself war and execution, beauty and squalor,snobbery and serfdom, sites of myth and sites of wonder. He had been shipwrecked, adored, humiliated and castigated. He had explored within himself the depths of licentiousness and decadence to which he could sink without shame, along with the summits of the sublime and creativity to which he could rise without effort. And if he suspected before he now knew he could write and write beautifully, write like the angel he wasn’t, write about emotions he would never feel and write about life’s ways with an ease and fluency he rarely experienced once his pen was back in its well. The Grand Tour had given him the raw material of experience with which to fashion Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage, the manuscript of which was in his portmanteau, and whose publication was to lead, event by event, over the next five years to his rise to the heights of fame and adoration - what his wife called Byromania - and to the depths of disgrace and exile.