by Edna O'Brien
Shelley may have noted that Byron was ‘mad as the wind’ but timber-headed Fletcher, Byron’s valet, decided that it was Mr Shelley himself who was loopy, succumbing as he did to hallucination in one of their séances, believing that Mary’s nipples were about to be metamorphosed into a pair of eyes. Fletcher had to douche him with water and then administer ether. From a ghoulish sketch of Byron’s Polly Dolly stole the idea for his ‘Vampyre’ which he published in pamphlet form, three years later in England, making it seem it had been written by Byron.
Now Shelley was missing, along with Edward Williams and the boat boy, Charles Vivian, somewhere off the coast of Lerici. Captain Daniel Roberts, the retired naval officer who had built the boat, had warned Shelley not to set out, pointing to the black rags of clouds hanging from the heavens, which always presaged a storm. But they were in a hurry to get to La Spezia, their wives were waiting and Shelley, ever proud of his little skiff, believed that it sailed ‘like a witch’.
It was an eighteen-foot open craft to which Roberts had to add sails and a false prow so as to compete with Byron’s more elegant vessel, the Bolivar with its soaring masts, guns and crested cannon. Hardly had they left the shore than a sea fog descended and thunder burst from the skies. Roberts, from a tower at Leghorn, was the last to sight the little boat bobbing on rough seas and soon after it disappeared from sight.
It would be ten days before the bodies were found, fleshless and mutilated, washed up on different parts of the beach, where according to Tuscan quarantine law they had to be buried in the sand and interred in quicklime. Shelley was recognised by the binding of a copy of Keats’s Lamia in his pocket and Edward Williams by his black silk necktie, tied in sailor fashion.
Trelawny arranged a Hellenic funeral inspired by Aeschylus and for this he had to receive permission to have the two men exhumed and cremated on the shore, though the unfortunate boat boy received no such honours. On a boiling hot day, the sands literally melting from the heat of the furnace, the party had foregathered, Trelawny having brought oak boxes for Shelley’s ashes to be deposited and placed in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, next to their infant son William, as Mary had requested. It was a gruesome and public spectacle, mounted dragoons on guard, foot soldiers with spades and mattocks, health officials and well dressed curious spectators watching from their carriages, though not Mary Shelley and not Jane Williams.
Williams was the first to be placed on the pyre and Byron tried to mask his grief with defiance, identifying Williams by his teeth, and looking at the mass of putrid flesh fed piecemeal to the fire, he said it might just as easily have been the carcase of a sheep. Then to rid his body of ‘black bile’ Byron decided ‘to test the power of the waves’ and swam a mile or so out, when presently he was sick.
Next day as Shelley was exhumed from the sands, Byron was even more outrageous, asking that he be given Shelley’s skull as a souvenir, but it became shattered by the impact of the mattocks. Trelawny, ever theatrical, poured oil, wine and frankincense onto the flames, which made them glisten, then summoning the forces of earth, air and water, he prophesied that Shelley, though changed to a different form, would not be annihilated. In his book Records of Shelley, Byron and The Author (published in 1878), he would write of the lonely majestic scenery all about, which harmonised with Shelley’s genius, while in the next breath he described the brain, which ‘literally seethed, bubbled and boiled’. Shelley’s heart although bedded in fire refused to burn and as Trelawny snatched it from the fiery furnance, Leigh Hunt, with unwonted egotism, claimed it as his.
That evening, the three men, Byron, Hunt and Trelawny, went by carriage to Viareggio where they dined and drank to great excess and according to Hunt ‘laughed and shouted, engendering a morbid gaiety’ to efface their sorrow.
It was Byron who would accord to Shelley the most beautiful epitaph, describing him in a letter to Tom Moore as ‘clear living flame…a man about whom the world was ill-naturedly and ignorantly and brutally mistaken’.
TWENTY-THREE
Casa Saluzzo, in the hills of Albaro, overlooking the harbour of Genoa, was to be Byron’s last abode in Italy. The journey from Pisa in his ostentatious coach, with his furnishings and menagerie of animals, had the extra whimsicality of three pet geese in a swinging cage hanging from the back. It was late September, roads were flooded, the coach lumbering over mountain passes and past steep precipices, Byron’s irritation compounded by their being stopped by customs officials at the various borders. In the towns which they passed, the ‘damned Englishers’ threw open the windows of their inns to gape at the infamous and saturnine Lord, while he for his part hid in his carriage, because of his morbid dread of them.
The spies appointed by the Vatican seemed to have known more of Byron’s moods and movements than he did himself. Torelli, the master spy assigned to him in Pisa, wrote to his colleagues in Genoa to apprise them of his arrival–‘Mylord has at length decided to leave for Genoa. It is said he is already tired of his new favourite the Guiccioli. He has expressed his intention of not remaining long in Genoa but of going to Athens to purchase adoration from the Greeks.’
At Lucca, by arrangement, he met with the Gambas, Count Ruggero, Count Pietro Gamba and Teresa, who had gone on ahead, then a journey by sea to Lerici, where they met with Leigh Hunt and his ‘blackguard’ family, who had travelled with Trelawny on Byron’s boat, the Bolivar. In a reckless moment, Byron challenged Trelawny to a swimming competition, a feat which left him sick for four days, confined ‘to the worst room in the worst hotel’, dosing himself with purgatives and compresses.
Casa Saluzzo had two separate apartments, one for him and one for the Gamba family. He had rented a second house, Villa Negrotti, for the Hunts, which they shared with Mary Shelley, and relationships became somewhat rancid all round, what with Hunt a hypochondriac, his wife confined to her room and seven untamed children running wild on the marble stairs. Hunt still believed himself to be the rightful keeper of Shelley’s heart and was refusing to hand it over to Mary. Moreover, he accused her of never having shown Shelley enough love, goading her to repent. Trelawny, a braggart and mischief maker, carried malicious stories and said unfairly that Byron’s treatment of his friends was ‘shameful’.
The 23-year-old Teresa chafed at being stranded in that unheated villa with stone floors and high ceilings, rain and storm outside, her father and brother despondent at being uprooted from their beloved Romagna and she visiting Byron only by invitation, for a stroll in the lemon gardens. His letters no longer brimmed with tender effusions, instead short bulletins about a head cold, or his swollen eye or the discrepancy between his ‘tottle’ of the household expenses and that of Lega Zambelli, his bookkeeper, whom he now distrusted.
Byron was at a nadir, believing himself to be ‘the most unpopular writer going’, yet as he told Douglas Kinnaird, increasingly in love with lucre because one must love something. He needed the lucre as he maintained three families and this in turn made him somewhat miserly and, as he said to Kinnaird, driven to curious fits of accounting and retrenchment of his financial affairs. Hunt complained that the allowance Byron had promised him was coming in ‘driblets’, Trelawny needed bonds for the upkeep of the Bolivar and Mary Shelley, grief-stricken and shattered by the loss of her husband, had turned against Byron, unfairly accusing him of ‘unconquerable avarice’.
Trelawny described him as ‘peevish, sickly and indifferent’ and it is true that he kept more and more to himself. He ate alone and sparingly, worked through the night on Don Juan, ten cantos of which were now completed, fuelling his brain with gin and water. He had grown churlish with his English friends, tried to have loans repaid, including the thousand pounds from the ludicrous Wedderburn Webster, whose languid wife Frances had long since left him, her beguilements rumoured to be the reason why Wellington arrived late on the field of Waterloo. With his publisher John Murray he quarrelled increasingly, threatening at times to withdraw; Murray understandably aggrieved, pointed out that it
was impossible for Byron to have a more attached friend, unwisely adding that their ‘fame and [their] names [were] interlinked’. His hope that Byron might write a ‘Volume of manners’ of his adopted country was met with scorn.
Conviviality came in the person of Lady Blessington, an ‘Irish Asphasia’ who contrived to meet him when she came to Genoa with her ménage a trois, a husband, Count Blessington, something of a tippler and the young French ‘Cupidon dé-chainé’ Count D’Orsay, whom husband and wife referred to, dotingly, as ‘Our Alfred’. Lady Blessington has been vilified as a social climber, one who lied about her lineage and as a writer had a mere ‘gossip-columnist skills’. She saw that Byron was flippant, easily put into bad humour but that also he was a lonely man. She was the first woman to write about him and to depict him in unheroic guise, his clothes hanging off him, his hair going grey, a broken dandy, with his outdated Regency slang. In her book Conversations with Lord Byron published in 1833, she said her intention was ‘to palliate rather than darken his errors’. It was she who got from him his most candid and perspicacious opinion of women. She and he rode together in the Lomellini Gardens where she noted that he was not nearly so accomplished a horseman as he had pretended. She sensed as well, his unquenchable thirst for celebrity, which he was not always nice in procuring. She dined with him in the evening and soon won his confidence so artlessly that she incurred the wrath of Teresa, who refused to be introduced to the ‘Blessington Circus’. He was four years into his ‘foreign liaison’ and as he said, ‘Exceedingly governed and kept tight in hand.’
Even at the very zenith of his passion he was ambiguous about it, on the one hand telling Hobhouse in a letter from Ravenna, in 1819, that to leave Teresa or be left by her would drive him quite out of his senses, yet at the same time smarting at his cicisbean existence, saying that a man ‘should not consume his life at the side and on the bosom of a woman’.
For Byron Lady Blessington’s visit was a little renaissance, as he warmed at hearing the latest London gossip, her salon a rival to Lady Holland’s, stories of amours and treacheries, a nostalgia for his heydays, as he recalled this or that gathering, Madame de Staël talking folios, asking the valet de chambre at Lady Davy’s to pull out the protruding basque of her corset, much to the disdain of other ladies.
Lady Blessington was the daughter of an impecunious wastrel in County Tipperary, who had sold her off to a Captain Farmer to pay his gambling debts. She soon escaped, bettered herself, changed her name from Margaret to Marguerite and infiltrated the London circles where she earned the appellation of ‘gorgeous’, capturing Lord Blessington, from whom there were seemingly no great conjugal demands. Being a snob, she felt compelled to draw comparisons between her bed and Byron’s, which his Genoese banker, a Mr Barry, had allowed her to glimpse. Her silvered bed, she tells us, rested on the backs of large swans, every feather in alto-relievo, chastely beautiful, whereas Byron’s bed was the most gaudily vulgar thing, emblazoned with his family motto and canopied with a hotchpotch of fussy draperies.
But as he did with everyone when he chose, Byron bewitched her. On their rides she describes his voice, high and effeminate, his musical laughter, his wit, his indiscretions, his eagerness for gossip and the small ribbings that he could never resist, saying that Tom Moore’s verses were so very sweet because his father, a Dublin grocer, had fed him sugar plums as a child, and Hobhouse, now a Member of Parliament, had become tedious from listening to parliamentary mummeries. But she was not without insight and saw a man in whom ebullience, sarcasm and melancholy were inextricably wedded. She noted his rages, which when they struck were ungovernable, yet his believing himself to be a victim of persecution wherever he went, insisting that there was a confederacy out to get him and then next day asking her with childlike contrition if she thought he was mad.
To her also Byron opened his mind about love, ‘the never dying worm that eats the heart’. Worn out with feelings, he admitted that his disposition and his habits were not those requisite to form the happiness of a woman. He needed la chasse, but he also needed solitude and as for many another poet before or since, the first throes of love were the most sublime. Sixteen years after he had lost Mary Chaworth to Mr Musters, and exiled from England, Byron wrote with an aching poignancy of that parting–
I saw two beings in the hues of youth
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,
Green and of mild declivity.
He did not discuss every woman with Lady Blessington, but only those with whom he had been emotionally involved. Believing himself to have been a martyr to ‘absurd womankind’, he gave voice to contradictory, adoring and searing sentiments. Byron besotted was one thing, but Byron thwarted was quite another.
Upon seeing his cousin, Lady Anne Wilmot, at Lady Sitwell’s gathering in London in 1813, he was struck by her appearance in mourning, her black dress shot with dewy spangles, and though he had not spoken a word to her, went to his rooms in Albany, and that night fortified with brandy he began his most beautiful and crystalline lyric–‘She walks in beauty, like the night.’
Byron’s evaluation of women tended to be severe. They hated anything stripped of its tinsel of sentiment, their bursting albeit fickle hearts desponding over their idols, but not for long. The reading or non-reading of a book, he said, never kept a single petticoat down. True, they kissed better than men, but that was because of an innate worship of images. Moreover, he looked on love as a hostile transaction because of the necessary spice of jealousy. Angels and fiends, he could not trust women, any more than he could trust himself.
Sentiment, he believed, constituted women’s entire empire because they failed to understand the comedy of passion. He scoffed at blue-stockings, and chancing on a treatise on the state of women in ancient Greece, who were only permitted books of piety and cookery, allowing for a little gardening, he jovially added, ‘why not some road mending, ploughing, hay making and milking?’ He was romantic and avowedly anti-romantic, but in the one half of his eroticised psyche, women were essential to him and apart from his time at Harrow he was never without their favours and their persecutions. Even in the Levant, along with youths and rouged jugglers, he took mistresses, landladies or their daughters, prostitutes or the disaffected wives of aristocrats.
His sexual initiation was a compound of the pure and the prurient. The mooning love for cousins contrasted starkly with his nurse May Gray’s secretive and lewd advances, something he reluctantly confided to his lawyer Hanson, describing how she came to his bed to ‘play tricks with [his] person’. In daytime she fed him dire Calvinist sermons, providing an uncomprehending brew of guilt and desire, alternating with scenes of jealousy as she brought home drunken coach boys from Nottingham to carouse with.
Before he was twenty-one he fathered a son by Lucinda, a maid at Newstead Abbey, to whom he gave an annuity of £100 to save her from the workhouse. In a poem, the child, a son, was hailed as ‘Fair cherub, Child of love’, but he never referred to it again. His next relationship was also with one of his Newstead servants, the ‘ornamental’ Susan Vaughan, ‘a witch and intriguer’ who betrayed him with a younger and more vigorous man. His verses were then laden with reproach and self-pity, his wounds like no others, and writing to his friend Francis Hodgson he said never to mention a woman to him again or to allude to the existence of that sex.
From every woman he derived something that would fuel his embattled and ambiguous feelings. From Mary Ann Chaworth he bore the bitter brunt of humiliation, having overheard her dismiss him as ‘that lame boy’, from Caroline Lamb he had his fill of demented possessiveness, from Augusta, love and then as he saw it, abnegation of love, and from Annabella Milbanke, with her ongoing construct of righteousness, a woman’s unforgivingness. Even when his blood was ‘all meridian’ with regard to Teresa, he was somewhat disparaging about her in a letter to Augusta. Despite Teresa’s manifest adoration, he guessed that without him she would fasten her affections on another, which indeed she did, ‘phila
ndering lightly’ with other Englishmen, including Henry Fox, Lord Holland’s son, and later the Earl of Malmesbury. When she was enamoured with the French poet Lamartine, she helped him on his sequel to Childe Harold, which he called Le Dernier Chant du pèlerinage d’Harold, and at the age of forty-seven she married the forty-nine-year-old Marquis de Boissy and lived opulently. According to her stepson Ignazio Guiccioli, her face was so enamelled that it impaired her smile, as she was driven around Paris in a green carriage lined with white satin, modelled on Lady Blessington’s carriage. Having elevated herself and Byron to the spheres of Petrarch and Laura or Dante and Beatrice, she would in time commune with him at séances, so as to enable her to write her own account of their life together. In the Vie de Lord Byron, published in Paris in 1868, the dissimulating Teresa, as Iris Origo tells it in The Last Attachment, painted a picture of a relationship with Byron that was ‘romantic and idealised’. To the end, surrounded with her various relics, letters, pressed flowers and a full-length portrait of Byron, she persisted in the fiction of their love being pure and unstained.
But in 1823 Lady Blessington, by not being his lover and by not wishing to be, was the one who noted his parched spirits and his heart running to waste for want of being allowed to extend itself. It was to her he first confided his plan to go to Greece as an emissary of the Greek Committee in London and unnervingly, he dreamt that he would die in Greece.