by John Crowley
Then there were the stories of what he did abroad, particularly in Venice, where he did have a lot of lovers, several of them married, a lot of them pros or semipros. He gave the number as 200 at one point, but he liked to exaggerate almost everything about himself, his faults and his successes and his excesses. I think (this is personal observation, that is observation of myself and my own observation of others) that men are at their horniest and most intense about sex in their early 30s, which Byron was then. But remember he thereupon fell in love, and became a cavalier servente, and was, apparently, domestic and faithful the rest of his life—except for one last Grecian boy who never returned his feelings.
I actually think of him not as seducer or (certainly) rapist but more often as object of seduction. I mean Paul McCartney and John Lennon surely had a lot of sex when young, and for the same reasons as Byron, but you don’t think of them as satyrs. They just had a lot of girls who wanted them. And older women. It was like that. Or even like Elvis, a kind of faintly femmy or passive object of adoration—Elvis liked his buddies, and he liked girls too, but mostly for cuddling, it seems. I have a paperback anthology of Byron’s poems here that I found in the airport bookstore—how weird what you find in those, especially in faraway airports—and the introduction, by a poet named Tom Disch, makes the suggestion that in his Oriental tales and early success and the way women (and men) felt about him, he most resembles Valentino. I think that’s just right. Valentino’s great ability was the way he could suggest being overwhelmed by feeling, erotic feeling above all, and it might make him do bad things, but the women were swept away by the feelings they seemed to cause in him, and they went along gladly. Like that.
It might be (you know I keep expecting this computer to forbid me to go on and on like this, but it’s patient, don’t know about the reader) that Byron was one of those men who seemed to attach all their need for warmth and comfort and physical reassurance to sex. It happens. To men who grow up without mothers, or maybe whose mothers are very intense, I don’t know. It’s as though all the delight we all take in contact, in hugs and touches and being held, the delight children and parents take in each other that way, all goes into sex. I think that when it does, the person (I’m speaking generally here, or objectively, you see) might be a pretty generous and unhurtful lover, just a constant and continuous one. And maybe such a person might sometimes pick some oddly assorted partners, or allow himself—or herself too, I don’t know, surely the condition applies to women, it would, wouldn’t it?—to be picked by some very odd or very wrong ones, or by any, or almost all.
I’ve never said these things to anyone. Actually I’ve never said them to myself. I hope you’re still reading. I kind of hope. I mean I want to go on talking to you, and to hear you too. In my mind’s ear.
More, more to come, more that’s relevant or at least concrete.
Lee
From: [email protected]
To: “Smith”
Subject:
A couple of further notes on sex (sorry).
At least one author recently asserted that for all the scandal and wild carryings-on, assignations and plans to run off together and the page outfits etc. etc., it might be that Byron and Caroline Lamb never actually “consummated” as they say. She really didn’t like sex much, apparently. Said her husband had brutalized her and turned her off for good. Wonder if she was gay, despite B. Well I don’t know, and neither finally does anybody.
And Augusta, half sister. What Byron liked best about Augusta was that he could with her revert to a kind of childhood: they laughed together a lot and talked and joked in a silly way that Lady B. could never enter into. Chums. You know I think that Byron had all the prejudices about women that men of his time had, and he died too soon to find out that he didn’t believe them, and never had.
Lee
From: “Smith”
To: [email protected]
Subject:
So do you mean he and Augusta never did anything? I mean never had sex? It’s not what I read.
S
From: [email protected]
To: “Smith”
Subject:
No. They had sex, though probably Lady Byron was wrong about how much. Augusta apparently stopped it before B. got married. Lady B. thought that one of Augusta’s children was Byron’s but that’s unlikely—more of her fascination with his sins. Ada seems to have believed it too—convinced by, or at least agreeing with, her mother. This child (Medora Leigh) was quasi-adopted by Lady Byron when she ran away from her mother’s house, and Lady B.’s attempts to use her as evidence against Byron and Augusta were matched by Medora’s equally ferocious attempts to get money out of Lady B. Awful person.
It was impossible in their day not to regard what Augusta and Byron had done as a great sin—mostly a sin of his. Now, of course, it’s impossible not to regard it as a crime, or a wrong (abuse) that he committed against her. Augusta, under Lady B.’s later tutelage, came to regard it as a nearly unforgivable sin herself, one that she had committed, though she could never go along with Lady B.’s conviction that in her degradation and vice she had deliberately destroyed the Byron marriage, which is an untenable claim anyway. I think Byron considered that he had committed a sin, but not that he had done a wrong—which made him defy the power that named it a sin—for how could something really be a sin that wasn’t a wrong done to somebody? What I think is—and I want you to know that I say this in full consciousness of its unacceptability now, especially coming from me—that it probably wasn’t a sin OR a crime, however unfortunate it turned out to be for everyone.
Lee
From: “Smith”
To: [email protected]
Subject: My name
Did you write me a while back saying that before I was born you wanted to name me Haidée? After the pirate’s daughter in Don Juan? Gee. I was glancing through Don Juan—that’s the one you think is his best, right? Maybe you forgot that in the poem Haidée is killed by her father, when he finds out that she’s married Juan. Or did you not care?
S
From: [email protected]
To: “Smith”
Subject: RE:My name
My dear—
Read it again. You misunderstood what happens at the end of that canto. Haidée dies, but not because her father kills her. She dies of what used to be called a burst blood vessel, brought on by seeing her father’s henchmen wound (not kill, of course) Juan. Haidée (though she’s all girl, in all the ways girls were conceived of by English men in 1820) is obviously a person Byron regards with the greatest affection. I am always moved by her death, and especially the death of her unborn child: closed its little being without light. Authors can feel very sorry about the characters the plot or story says they must do away with. Byron more than once says it—he even says it in this book we’ve got. You’ll see.
But I don’t want to confront you on this. Suppose I say it was a little careless and unfeeling of me to think of naming you for someone who dies young and in extremities. (A lot of saints’ names have the same drawback, of course.) I was a lot younger then—not a lot older than you are now.
L
From: “Smith”
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE:Re:My name
So are we supposing this or are you actually saying it?
Never mind
Anyway you’re right, I’m wrong about Haidée. Reading too fast, I guess. I get embarrassed sometimes at it—as though I’m stuck in a locker room or somewhere with a guy, who’s not a bad guy at all, but I’m stuck and he remains a guy. I admit I did stay up late to see what happens. I liked this:
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thous
ands, perhaps millions, think;
’Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper—even a rag like this,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.
Smith
• ELEVEN •
In which the path is trod that may not be retraced
WE MAY THINK THAT a great gulph is fixed between Comedy and Tragedy, yet it is but a matter of outcome that distinguishes them—for may not Othello have seen through the shifts and impostures of mad Iago soon enough, and set a counter-trap for him, as Malvolio is trapped in 12th Night, all ending in laughter, and the villain’s discomfiture? Likewise, without the machinations of the Duke, Measure for Measure must end in as terrible a doom as Romeo & Juliet—the Friar of that play being given to comic inventions involving letters and sleeping-draughts that might have just as well succeeded! But the Bard—however long of two minds he remains—at length decides whether his Sock or Buskin be on, and thenceforward is compell’d to declaim & brood, or to laugh and be witty. Imagine then that we live in a Play, one filled with such engines as his are—bed tricks, and counterfeits, and tyrannical fathers, and doubled lovers—shall we believe ourselves in a Tragedy, or a Comedy? Shall we jest, pun, and believe Love to be all-conquering, however rough his course may run? Or shall we talk of ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune’, and think ourselves but ‘as flies to wanton boys’?
Thus far, as regards the fates of Ali, and Catherine, and the child to be born something too soon to them, we know not what we ought to think—for the Author has not finally decided—he but taps his lip with his pen’s end, and contemplates the melting scene outside his window—the thermometer shows eighty degrees, Fahrenheit—anon he considers a Brandy, or perhaps a limonata, or a segar—and if he be unable to choose among those, how is he to decide if his be a Comedy of Errors, or a Tragedy of Fate—or the one, with the other’s conclusion?
The wedding that, as soon as was convenient, was to join the two young people, was not to be a great or a public affair, but was instead to be conducted with but the few who must needs attend—a Parent or two upon the one hand, rather more grave than gay, and upon orphan’d Ali’s side, the Honourable Peter Piper as groomsman, to hand him the Ring, and shore him up, at need. A special licence having been obtained, with the help of a Bishop in collusion with a Barrister (Mr Wigmore Bland), the ceremony took place in a suitably remote house of the Delaunays, a gaunt grey place above a rocky shore, whereon the cold sea beat unconsoled—and yet somehow the fashionable papers in faraway London learned all its Particulars, the dress of the Bride, the fortune of the Groom, the wise words spoken by the man of Religion there attending, and would soon report these in absorbing detail. Ali for his part suffer’d on that morning the common anxieties of a man about to be a husband—but with some especial additions quite uncommon. ‘You appear to have lost a dear friend,’ spoke the Honourable, upon seeing Ali appear in his blue coat, ‘and not as though you gained today your dearest.’ ‘I would that we might be wedded and married in an instant,’ whispered Ali, ‘as people are electrified in company, by holding the same chain—I fear I shall not be suitably transformed else.’ ‘Depend upon it,’ said the Honourable, whilst aiding Ali’s nerveless hands to don white gloves, ‘the lady shall be the agent of all needful transformation; I have seen the miracle worked a thousand times.’ ‘You assert this, yet have not taken the step yourself.’ ‘Ah well—perhaps there is no hope for me—I have found too much entertainment in the marriages of others—as the Methodist preacher admonished his hearers, on perceiving a profane merriment among them, No hopes for them as laughs. Shall we go in?’
So with Pledge and Ring do Pantomimes end, and lovers are returned again into their own skins, and the confusions of Venus resolved—and yet in life we know it to be no ending—only a further Transformation, into more trials for all. At eve, having signed the Parchment, and partaken of a Repast, the Bride and her Groom departed in Ali’s coach for a month of Solitude—snow was upon the way, and the iron clouds hung close enough to touch. Silence too, as of a Winter’s day, obtained within the Coach and between the Couple—and not only because the Bride, in an extremity of propriety (so it seemed to her Husband), had ordered her Maid into the coach with them, rather than on the seat above. What were their thoughts, who had wed so, under such circumstances? Might not silence be best, when all the thoughts we have are of what might have been—of what we might have done, and did not do—or did, and should not have done—that led to here, where we had not thought to be? And yet—no matter where they begun—all now lies before them, as on every morn until the last it does, and (it was indeed the thought of each, though unformed in either) they might still be happy—quite happy—as happy as if they had never wed at all.
‘If we have erred,’ at length said Ali—and he said it with a sound intended for a merry laugh—‘I hope you will not hate me. I make promise I will not!’
‘With all my heart I will love you,’ said she, with a calm certainty that any new Husband might be reassured to hear, but which only caused Ali to retire again into silence—for he could think only how his own heart is divided, and that, for her all, he can not give all—and knows not if he or she be the cause of that.
Not soon enough did they reach that hall of the Delaunays set aside for them, where their wedded life was to commence. Faithful servants welcomed them with smiles, and had warmed the place as well as it could be warmed, and prepared a chamber for the couple, and laid a suitable supper—indeed Ali and Catherine were quite fussed over, as though they might be overcome with Joy, and unable to act—Ali whispered to her that he wondered if paper crowns were to be brought out, and a song sung in their honour—at which Catherine laughed—she laughed, as she had not in all the time that had pass’d with them for courtship. Yet when all the house was still, and retirement unavoidable, they could not but fall again into a silence—for they seemed each as strange to the other as two beings both in human skins could well be, notwithstanding they considered that they knew each other in all the senses which may apply to that word know—and yet (it may be stated) in fact they knew not—and knew not that they knew not. Indeed it was a question, whether they should share a bed—the Bride being in that condition before described, and she having had from learned female relations the strongest warning that this delicate condition must on no account be endanger’d—but at length, like two children afraid of the dark, they crept together within the crimson Curtains of the bed denominated theirs, well bundled, and—and here I must let fall a Curtain too.
In the midnight tho’—awakened she knows not how—Catherine finds herself alone in that bed—yet without, in the room, the Fire has been stirred, and a shape moves against the glow of it, which she sees through the bed-hangings—a shape that grows larger, approaching—and then the curtain is pulled roughly aside, and she gasps in horror—before her stands her Husband, in a dressing gown—glaring as in rage, yet seeming not to see—and in his hand a pistol!
‘My Lord—what do you do?’—Only this could she think to say—and he, as though he had been unaware another soul was near, started, and looked on her amazed—and she knew that she had awakened him from sleep even at that moment—and her ‘fell of hair’ rose in uncanny dread.
‘I heard a sound,’ said he. ‘I knew not what—I rose—’
‘Do you know me?’
‘Catherine! How should I not?’
‘I beg you—think that I am with child—with your child—do not shock this heart, that not one but two suffer for it—perhaps irrevocably—I beg you have a little kindness—for your Child if not for me!’
‘Calm—calm yourself,’ said he, and uncock’d and laid down the pistol. ‘Look—there is no danger—I was perhaps foolish to think so—I know not what it was.’
‘Come back to bed, then—’tis deep in the nig
ht.’
‘Yes.’
‘Pray with me—’twill soothe us both.’
And so he did—or listened, at the least, to her prayers—and yet when he was again within the bed-clothes, his Cap on his head, and his Cheek against the Pillow—still his eyes closed not, from wonder. For in truth, he had heard no sound—he knew not why he had left his bed, dressed, or armed himself—only that it was for reasons appertaining to another realm, where he had been at other tasks—yet that was all gone—realm, tasks, self, and all—run away from him like water from a sieve—and waking he had not been able to account for himself to his wife, except to say I heard a sound, when there was none!
NO SOONER HAD THEIR treaclemoon closed, and the Lord and his Lady returned to London, than they were called upon in their new Lodgings by Lawyer Wigmore Bland. No less smiling than ever, no less delighted with himself and the world that lay about him to bustle in, he brought news that, while the prospects remained sunny for Ali’s success (which would be the great Barrister’s as well) in breaking the entailment of the Abbey, it now appeared that more months and years must fly away before those parchments were signed and sealed.
‘I know not how it may be,’ said Mr Bland—and now his face seem’d to dim, as when a scarf of palest cloud dims the Sun—‘but new presentments have been delivered to the Courts involved, bringing in question your sole claim upon the lands and incomes to which, by your Title, attach to you—asserting that other claimants live, and that proofs of this will be forthcoming in the course of time—which assertions the Courts concerned may not ignore, however inconsiderable they prove to be.’