Lord Byron's Novel

by John Crowley

  From: “Smith”

  To: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  Subject: No sense

  Lee—

  We got it and we don’t know what to do next. Look at what it looks like:

  That’s part of the first page. What Ada did was copy out the whole manuscript, translated into numbers and enciphered. She got sheets printed with numbered lines, fifty to a page, and then started filling them in with her cipher numbers, four groups of ten on every line, with a dot after every two to make it look sort of mathematical. Every ten numbers stood for five letters (two numbers to a letter, if you think about it you’ll see why). But instead of writing right across the page she wrote down the page in columns, until the whole page was filled, and then started another. To read it you read down a column and then down the next.

  It was enciphered with a Vigenere square, which means that you keep changing the alphabet you use to substitute with. You change the alphabet according to a keyword. You know what Ada’s keyword was? AMERICA. She wanted us to decipher it, and made it as easy as she could. All you had to do was guess what it was.

  I think Ada made some mistakes in copying (three o’s in moon) but Thea says the text seems to be all there. All the punctuation got stripped out though and I don’t and Thea doesn’t know how to put it back in or what punctuation would be right. In a way it doesn’t matter and I know it doesn’t; we got it, the thing. But I have a question. Would you have any interest in helping to edit this? To make some guesses about the punctuation at least, and turn it into English? Figure out where the sentences end and start? It would be a big help to me.

  You don’t have to. Really you don’t have to, and I’m not saying that just because I want you to think I’m not being pushy but really am being pushy. I do mean it. I know there are other people who could do it, and you’ve got a life. The main reason is so that only a few people will still know about it. I’m so scared that the story will get out and Georgiana will go and burn it herself. Oh my god I wish I hadn’t said that. I didn’t think it, I just said it. Now I know it might be true.

  S

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: RE:No sense

  Importance: Normal

  My dear—yes—I can read it—how strange—I even started in and respaced this. And sat a long time before it.

  I will do what I can in the time I have, and if it appears that it will take a longer time—scholarly decisions about periods and dashes aren’t made in a trice as my own father used to say (you met him when you were one)—then I will find some other time somewhere. I can’t tell you how eager I am to read it all, even in this Babel form. Did I tell you that when I first saw on the shelves of the university library here the collected volumes of his letters and journals—I was looking for the volume with the letters from Switzerland—I put my hand on a volume, and thought, No, no, that’s the last—and suddenly a real, palpable grief came over me: The last. He’s dead, he died, it can’t be made better. That’ll happen again, when I don’t expect it. The dead we love keep on dying for us again and again, and he is one of those I love.

  Lee

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: Query

  You’ll not believe how I’m flying along. A story is emerging, that’s a version of his own life, but as in a masquerade. It has its wild barbaric parts but also a lot of scenes set in London, the London he knew. I try not to look ahead to see where he’s going, I’ll just go nuts if I don’t progress through it methodically—though I can tell you I’ve got pretty good at reading without spaces between words. You know that those spaces are recent—ancient writing didn’t have them, and they don’t seem to have felt the need.

  I’ve come on one problem. There are some numbers showing up in the middle of text, often the same 3-digit numbers repeated, in places where text seems to be missing. I have no access to the originals and I wonder if there’s some way to study the places in the original where these bits occur, and see what’s up. Do you think you could put me in touch with your friend who did this deciphering?

  Lee

  From: “Smith”

  To: “Thea”

  Subject: FWD:

  Thea—

  Here’s a letter from Lee I’m forwarding. I know this isn’t easy but can you work with him on this. It might be a quick fix. Really he’s okay.

  PS Please when you write try to put in a few periods etc. Remember he’s old and an English professor, or once was.

  I’ve got a date to leave. I talked to Lilith. One month. I love you. (Now see once you start you have to keep on saying it, or it looks like you don’t anymore. I remember this from high school. Boys worried. It was funny.)

  S

  From: “Thea”

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: him again

  yike but okay i think i got an idea anyway its obvious do i at least get to be icy cold oh well do my best to do my duty

  btw you know hes gone thru like four girlfriends in the last 3 years arm candy thats what they say i saw it on cable man the stuff on cable DISGUSTING why didnt you warn me

  t

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Thea”

  Cc: “Smith”

  Subject: Query

  Dear Dr. Spann:

  Thanks for your offer (relayed through Smith) to help clear up these little problems. I’m faxing some of the pages where this stuff shows up, and have underlined the places. The difficulty is I can’t compare them with the original enciphered version—not that I’d learn much if I could. What do you think?

  Also—now that I can—I want to offer you much greater thanks for your brilliant guess about what this thing was, and your work in breaking the cipher. I wish there were something I could offer in return.

  Yours

  Lee Novak

  From: “Thea”

  To: lnovak@metrognome.net.au Cc: “Smith”

  Subject: RE:Query

  hey—

  i cant tell you what it means but the cipher shows that sometimes she uses an extra number a 3-digit number which couldnt signify a single letter so the computer left it as a number but what about this we talked about compression what if shes just using shorthand annotations for common stuff like peoples names or phrases like i dont know what phrases common ones if she had a list like 100 means one of the characters names or 556 means a common phrase like THE NEXT DAY or it might be THUS WE SEE or anything youd have to guess look at the context

  hope this helps

  i dont want any thanks be nice to have this over tho

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Thea”

  Cc: “Smith”

  Subject: RE:Re:Query

  Dear Dr. Spann:

  I think that’s it! She did do that. They seem to be numbered in order, starting with the first time she thinks of compressing them. Actually old-fashioned shorthand worked that way—shorthand books were full of business and legal phrases you could represent by a single stroke. She probably kept a book of her compressions. The clue is that the first time she uses one of these she puts it after the phrase it stands for—then the next time she just substitutes. It must have saved her a lot of time not having to spell out “Albania” (101) or “his Lordship” (214) or lots of others.

  I’m back in business.

  Lee

  From: “Smith”

  To: “Thea”

  Subject:

  Omigod you’re so smart.

  And see he didn’t insult you or make a smarmy remark or anyt
hing. Maybe he used to be bad and now he’s not.

  S

  From: “Thea”

  To: “Smith”

  Subject:

  yeah ok you go think that but hes not coming to my wedding

  t

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: Flying along

  Your friend Thea is quite brilliant though perhaps a little spacey. Does all her email have that robot look? Never mind—I’m very grateful. I’m flying along now.

  You know I actually assumed—I was a little cautious in actually asserting it—that this was probably a forgery, either from back then, or from now—probably now, the story of how it was preserved was so unlikely. But now I don’t think so. I think I’d know, which is maybe pride on my part, if I heard his voice, or his mind, and I really think I do. I don’t know how to characterize it, really—it’s a comic view that also grants authority to feelings of desire, loss, and pain; it ascribes events to Fate without really believing that Fate is anything different from the awful or hilarious muddles brought about by ignorance and coincidence; he mocks, but he almost always smiles, and almost never hates. Nil alienum humani—he thought nothing humans could do or desire was alien to him, though he was both honorable and generous, and you can hear that too in this. I’m sure.

  The punctuation question is interesting. Should I give it the punctuation I think it might have had? Or modern standard punctuation? Byron was himself a careless punctuator, and more than once in his letters asks John Murray his publisher to have a manuscript “pointed,” or punctuated. Printers in those days could all punctuate. Imagine. Now hardly anybody can.

  L

  From: “Smith”

  To: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  Subject: RE:Flying along

  Not a forgery!! I’m glad you’re sure, but we’ve got to do all the tests still, right? I know that now you can certify whether a piece is by an author by computer analysis of the vocabulary.

  You make him sound so nice. I wonder if you identify. I mean how could you not, you couldn’t have studied him so long.

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: Identify

  I don’t know what you mean exactly by “identifying.” Do you suppose I think he was like me, or I am like him, and that’s why I’m drawn to him? It’s not so. I’m not very much like him. If we were to meet, in hell or wherever, I would not say, You know, you and I are a lot alike. No—we’re not alike, though I confess I like him. It’s more that—for reasons I can’t exactly state—I can apprehend him as a human person, and in that apprehension understand myself as human. I can’t do that with Shelley, or Franklin Roosevelt, or Ted Williams, or Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Robert Flaherty, or most other people I’ve admired and loved and strained to understand. But Byron, yes. Byron’s humanity is open to me, and through it I see my own—as you can with your best friends, whom you would never confuse with yourself (“identify”) but whose souls are open—not to everyone, but to you.

  Watch out for that computer analysis thing. It recently certified a couple of anonymous poems as by Shakespeare, even though any real reader/friend of Shakespeare could tell in an instant they weren’t his.

  L

  From: “Smith”

  To: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  Subject: RE:Identify

  Lee—I’m thinking of you sitting up and struggling with those weird pages—let’s split the job—tell me how far you’ve got, and I’ll figure out where I can start—heck I’ve got all night and all I do then is sleep. And send me pages as you finish them—I can’t wait till you’re all done to start reading—I almost started in on it myself till I thought, no stupid—so that’s why I’m sending this letter. I don’t even know why I care so much. I think of Ada encoding it all, hiding it. Enciphering I mean (that’s what Thea says it is).

  S

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject:

  No I will not share. I want it all to myself, and I am not struggling. Your job is a different one: you have to find out what Ada did, and how she thought about it, and where this thing was for all those years, and (by the way) who the guy is who sold it to you and what’s become of him. And you have your Strong Women still to do, right? You can’t lose your job over this.

  My god do you know what I sound like here? A parent. I seem to have just sort of blacked out for a minute, and when I came to it was all written there. I ask your forgiveness. I have no right, and no desire. On the other hand it’s true, you know, and good advice…

  I tried at first working with it as a computer file but it turns out actually to be easiest to just copy it out with pen and paper. So I will end up with a manuscript or what the Victorians called a Fair Copy. Weird. I am beginning to see how Ada’s notes go with the text. The fact that it is coming to be out of this scrambled matrix before my eyes—and that I am doing it on your behalf as well as his and hers—makes me feel almost as she might have, only backward, if you see what I mean—I’m sure you do.

  Love

  Lee

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: 100

  Hooray. I’m sending an attachment—this is a first—with nearly 100 pages of text I’ve reset and roughly punctuated. I’m sure that Byron—as he did in his letters—used mostly the all-purpose dash—which all the writers of his period did—maybe they thought it went with their impulsive, spontaneous natures—they were being, literally, dashing. I’ve gone through a few boxes already——have to buy more—

  We’ll lose things in the process. Byron had his own way of capitalizing words seemingly at random, though when I read his letters I seem to sense why he does it when he does—for emphasis, or to express a kind of rank the word possesses for him in the thought. That’s all gone and can’t be re-created. Capitalization was going out as Byron wrote; a hundred or even fifty years before the rule was, capitalize all nouns, but he wouldn’t want us to do that.

  Lee

  Attach: Byron1.wpd

  From: “Smith”

  To: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  Subject: RE:100

  Okay. I read what you sent. Thanks. I didn’t know what to expect but I don’t think it was this, exactly. I haven’t read all the poetry (it’s tough, it’s tough, I can never decide if I’m more bored or more pissed off ) but shouldn’t this novel we’ve got be, I don’t know, a little more satanic? I thought there would be more sex, for one thing, with all kinds of people. Didn’t he like de Sade? Sex and death? Where’s all that stuff? I keep thinking the thing can’t be real because it’s not like what I thought it would be.

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: Satanic

  Actually I’m not surprised. There’s a lot of misunderstanding here. A lot of it arose at the time, in Byron’s lifetime I mean, and was doubled or tripled by later misunderstandings of those misunderstandings (and then the Annabella spin machine). There’s actually not a lot of wild or violent or miscellaneous sex in Byron’s poetry. Juan in Don Juan has relations with four or five women in the course of hundreds of pages, and they seduce him. In the Oriental tales (where I imagine you are fuming or nodding just now) sex is singular and intense and purified by love, as in all Romantic poetry: disappointed or misunderstood lover/heroes go off and commit nameless crimes or lead lives of nonspecific sin, but never forget their true loves. Beppo and Juan are casual about sex, adultery, etc., but not satanic or Sadean: the opposite of compulsive.

  The confusion arises because in his time Byron was seen as shocking because he was irreverent:
he mocked religion and the religious establishment, made fun of heaven and the afterlife, sneered at the king, willingly voted in favor of hell over servitude, etc., etc. So he’s a mocker, and then he was fabulously attractive, and women fell for him continuously—and so, QED, he must have been raping and swiving and seducing constantly.

  Then there was the Separation, and all the rumors that swirled around it. Byron was deeply unhappy in his marriage—he knew he’d made a big mistake, that he’d talked himself into believing that he loved or could love Annabella, and found he couldn’t, and he blamed her (I think) for the end of his relations with his half sister—even though he’d married her in large part for that reason, to put a stop to that affair. So he was cruel and awful to her, though all we have is her account, largely, of what he said, and what he meant. She found a bottle of laudanum and a copy of de Sade’s Justine among his things, the snoop, and that did it for her. She told her lawyers and advisers, of whom she had many, that she believed Byron might be insane, and if he was, then she felt obliged to stay with him and nurse him—but they convinced her (or she pressed them to convince her) that he wasn’t insane, and therefore he must be wicked, so she had to leave him. So there were the rumors of incest around him, and rumors of madness too. One of her lawyers, a person named Henry Brougham, spread the tale that the real reason for the separation was “too horrid to mention,” by which he meant what? I don’t know, but it certainly left the imagination free to ponder.