Lord Byron's Novel

by John Crowley

  You know I recently read the memoirs of a man who’d been an officer in the French army in some colonial war. (I often find myself reading odd things for good reasons. Like you do for your work. We’re alike in that.) He wrote of how he and his company had fought a daylong battle through some North African settlement, perhaps Berber, I don’t remember. His company were outnumbered and many killed, but eventually the other side broke and fell back, and left the settlement to the French. He remembered going through the smoke of the burning bazaar and the streets feeling exalted, smeared in blood, sword in his hand, alive; and at one place he pushed in through the curtains, and found a young girl, a very young girl, alone, and afraid, and (he thought) quite aware of what would now become of her in the hands of the victors; and this officer says it was her abjection, her knowledge in innocence, that made it impossible for him not to take her—that and the battle he’d fought; he was, he said, as though possessed by a god of battle. And I thought I understood for the first time rape in war, and the intensities of battle too. I’ve been close enough to battle, and all that it causes, to think I’m right.

  Around the time of that party in Hollywood in 1978 I’d been lifted into an atmosphere unlike anything I’d ever known—I mean of course I knew about it, it was everywhere to read about, but I’d never experienced anything like it. These were people with so much self-love, so much money, so much of the world’s attention and respect (not all for trivial reasons either), that they almost seemed freed from the requirement to care, or regret, or mend anything. Some of them were intensely spiritual, of course, but that only seemed to mean that they believed that everything was all right, and nothing truly bad could be done by anybody they knew personally, least of all themselves. “Bad” wasn’t even a word they could use. So long as I said the right things to them, they would talk to me about moving forward my projects as though by magic. I would say to one of them that I wanted to explore the possibility of making a film in Nepal, about Buddhism and the mountains, with an all-Nepalese cast, but starring this man, one of these fabulous monsters, sprawled on a leather couch before me. And he’d say, We can do that. Just say it, like that.

  So there was a sudden freedom from all restraint, and I don’t mean just moral restraint, I mean all physical restraint, as though common biological limits didn’t matter. A lot of drugs powered this feeling too, of course. And then it was late at night in these huge rooms with wide windows and Los Angeles—surely you’ve seen the pictures, you’ve been there yourself for all I know about you—laid out below as though you inhabited a high tower or a spaceship. And this child. And I thought: I can do anything, and no harm can come of it. That was really the thrill.

  I can tell you absolutely that I didn’t rape her, in the sense of forcing sex on her that she didn’t invite. I wasn’t even the only one who had relations with her, if that’s the right word, that night and morning. She wandered everywhere in that place, like Alice, fetching up against these scenes as we called them then, as though they were imaginary, or unreal. Knowledge and innocence: I can see her eyes now, at once taking in what she saw and at the same time so blind to it. No, I wasn’t the only one. Just the one whose wallet she took, which she was found with later, in another part of town. So I was the one who could be charged, when those impossible parents at last showed up to retrieve her. I don’t know what she really thought, then or later. There’s no more reason to believe what she told the police than to believe what she told me. You certainly couldn’t believe both.

  I didn’t know I could write an email this long. It wasn’t easy. I’m going to stop.

  Lee

  From: “Smith”

  To: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  Subject: RE:Her

  Lee—

  Interesting story.

  Are you going to be able to answer those questions?

  S

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject:

  All right. No more, if not wanted. Just answers. All I have. I think he began writing it where Ada thought, at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, and that he continued in the subsequent months—dropped it and picked it up again later on—that’s likely, for reasons that Ada has already perceived: its contents seem to reflect, now and then, things that were going on in his life as he wrote—first the separation (or Separation as it would come to be called everywhere, as though it were the only one, or the paradigmatic one), which had just been finalized; then Venice, and his relations with the Carbonari.

  So here are the reasons:

  First, the Mary Shelley challenge, which got him thinking about prose, and prose romances. Next, right then he got a visit from Matthew Gregory Lewis, “Monk” Lewis, the author of the most successful Gothic novel ever written, The Monk. Lewis was gay, an old chum of B.’s, who was always glad to see him; Lewis was rich, not from his royalties mostly, but from his sugar plantations in the West Indies, the Caribbean as we say, where he ran a large number of slaves. (Byron doesn’t need to have got the idea of zombies from Southey, as Ada guesses; he could have learned it from Lewis, who surely would have been very interested in it.) Maybe because he’d been talking long with Shelley, but Byron on the occasion of this visit actually convinced Lewis to add a codicil to his will providing funds to alleviate the condition of his slaves and freeing at least some of them on his death. You can imagine the negotiations—come on, Lewis, why not free them all?—and Shelley and Byron actually witnessed him signing it.

  So Byron was thinking about slaves and the West Indies.

  Then there is the fact that just about that time, he was sent the three volumes of that novel by Caroline Lamb I wrote about before. It was called Glenarvon, and was a huge seller. So he was reading—and we know he read it—a fictionalized account of himself, pictured as the villainous/glamorous Lord Glenarvon, guilty of a thousand crimes, and she the innocent unspoiled Calantha. Here’s what he wrote to Thomas Moore, his friend and later biographer: “It seems to me that if the authoress had written the truth, and nothing but the truth—the whole truth—the romance would have been not only more romantic, but more entertaining.” So maybe he thought about that, and decided he would try again with a story in prose, but turn it more in the direction of a roman à clef of his own, only truer to his nature as he perceived it, and the story of his adventures.

  More to come.

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: Ghost novel

  A—Okay—I keep reading—you see how hard I work for you, and on my vacation too—Anyway I’ve been reading Marchand, the great biog of B., and here it says—September 1816, same time & place as the Shelley/Polidori thing—that “he had begun a prose tale, a thinly veiled allegory of his marital difficulties, and when he heard that Lady Byron was ill, he cast it into the fire.”!!! No note about where Marchand learned this.

  So maybe he didn’t cast it into the fire. Planned to. Thought he ought to. But didn’t. Just an idea.

  Lee

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: Stop

  Alex—

  Okay—3: When did he stop.

  When he laid it down for good I can’t tell, but I wonder if maybe it had something to do with his discovery of a comic epic by a poet named Frere, who wrote as “William and Robert Whistlecraft,” rare instance of a double pseudonym. (You’ve noticed Frere gets a brief nod in the pages set in Spain, where he really was the British consul.) Frere’s “epic” was a poem in ottava rima, the same stanza Byron would use in Don Juan, and like those poems it was full of jokey Ogden Nash rhymes and mockery of various pretensions. Frere actually based the style on the Venetian wits like Pulci, whom Byron had read in Italian. Byron’s publisher sent Frere’s thing to him, and said he thought it was remarkable and difficult; Byron said he th
ought it was remarkable but not difficult, and in a few days he’d written Beppo. (He says a few days; he always minimized how hard he worked at writing.) And that was it: Don Juan could be written, a poem that could include everything Byron knew and had experienced. Maybe he felt that he’d found a way to do what he had tried to do in this novel, only better, and using all his talents, and dropped the novel. Well. Wonderful as DJ is I find I can’t read very much of it at a sitting. I wish he’d finished this—if it is unfinished—and then done another, better one, and then another. Don Juan is sui generis, and the long narrative poem was running out of steam in that period, but the novel was just getting under way. He might be read now, today, like Jane Austen. Oh well.

  I don’t know at what point Byron decided the story couldn’t appear, but he obviously made the decision because of how frank and unmediated (as we critics say) his account of the marriage was. When he used the facts of his own life and of others’ lives in Don Juan, he knew how to transform them—retain the truth of them but not the tale of them. It was a challenge he was very much aware of—maybe you noticed the epigraph to DJ, which is from Horace: Difficile est proprie communia dicere, it’s hard to speak rightly about commonplace things—things we all share. And it is. When people thought about Byron it was the uncommon things they relished, bad or good. But he thought he was made of domestica facta like everybody else.

  Alex, I’m tiring of email. I want more than this epistolary novel we’re making together. Have you thought at all about that offer I made? It may be that by now you’d rather go in the other direction—west not east—and I’m getting word myself from various sources that I might be going to New Guinea soon, which is so far east it’s almost west again. And I’m afraid too—not of you exactly—of the past and time and my inadequacy, maybe—but still I’m going to hope. There’s got to be something more for us. It’s more up to you than me, but if there’s anything I can do, I think you ought to tell me.

  With all my heart

  Lee

  • TWELVE •

  In which the Beginning is returned to, inasmuch as it may ever be

  ON THE COAST OF EPIRUS, at the Port of Salora, the fishermen mend their nets through the afternoons, or perchance do not, and instead nap in the shadow of an upturn’d boat—smoke a pipe—make their prayers to one Divinity, or several (Allah and the Virgin at a minimum) so as to avoid the ire of any one. Their ancient forebears did the same, and parcelled out their sacrifices with even hand upon several Altars. One day upon these shores, beneath that dome that bluely turns above, is much like another—few are the Ships, or the folk who step ashore from ship’s boats, who are strange to these fisherfolk—but on this afternoon there is such a boat, and bearing a stranger too—a man in the dress of a European, and yet who, when he has hailed them, speaks in the tongue of Albania (tho’ haltingly) and not that of the Infidel. The net-menders answer him, but the young man seems not to hear—he looks about himself as one who wakes from a Dream, and yet knows not if this palpable world is any the more substantial. What does he here? He intends, he says—as though for his own ears, to inform himself—to travel North, to the lands of the Ochridans—he is in need of a guide, and a man or two, and horses—and the fishermen direct him to a place where such may be bargained for. They see no more of him—yet but a day and an hour have gone by when a greater wonder still intrudes upon their indolence—for another man, likewise in the dress of Europe, also alights there upon their obscure shore—and asks certain questions, to which the fishers know the Answers—though they look upon one another in amaze, that they should—and when the man has gone, the Christians among them cross themselves, not knowing why, as though an uncanny being has passed among them.

  The first of these strangers is of course our Ali—here he has come, to the peninsula of Hellas, by stages, over a half-year’s time, while knowing it to be his last destination, as it is his Destiny. After departing the shores of England in consequence of his all-too-successful exploit upon the field of Honour, he landed firstly upon the shores of France, where in a cold Inn’s worst room he wrote to Catherine, and to Una—for he wished his Lady to know, that he has defended himself from certain slanders, which he would not repeat to her, and what the consequence was; and his Daughter, to know that though she saw him not, his love to her was constant, and he would one day hold her in his arms, and kiss her lips again. To Mr. Piper next he sent such Authorities and Powers as he could imagine—having no Law-book by—by which the Honourable might extract from his Bankers and Agents the wherewithal for a long journey—for such he even then intended to go on, and when return, he knew not—if within the bounds of his mortality, ’twould be all too soon—such was his thought, as there his candle guttered, and his breath appeared before him like smoke.

  From France alone on horseback he travelled across the well-named Low Countries, and almost without noticing, he found himself upon a Battle-field—mark’d by a Monument—more, mark’d by Harvest rich, still fertilized by that disintegrating bone and sinew, so generously cast about upon a day not long past. Waterloo! I will not memorialize thee yet again—nor that man, yet both more and less than Man, who threw all that he had gained for Mankind upon the green table of this field, to see it snatched up by his fellow Gamesters—the one Hazard he could not recoup! Ali pondered there, drawn out for an hour from the toils of his own mind to contemplate Mankind’s, and he considered—’twas not Pride, nor Vanity, but only a humour of that moment—that all the difference between himself and that great man was, that he had less treasure to expend, yet not less of guilt that it was spent. He had not ‘slain his thousands’ nor yet his ‘tens of thousands’—he had laid but one man beneath the earth by his own hand—yet nos turba, any one or two of us is a multitude, and all the suffering there is when blood runs like a tide is not more than the soul and nerves of one man bears—there is no multiplication, for we each suffer and die alone, though we thrive and grow together—ask the Indian gymnosophist how it may be—’tis so!

  He left the Field behind—he crossed the Rhine—climbed the Alps—he saw the Avalanche—the mountain torrent—the Glacier—but since in the midst of these scenes he remained himself, and lost not that Self in them, he gained little peace in what he beheld. By such removes, by horse and ship and foot, he came at length to the shores I have described him reaching, the shores of home, a word he knew not in any language—not as to its meaning to his heart.

  He set out with his small company from Salora, and he had passed a number of days in the saddle, sleeping where he might and eating what he could acquire, and paying little attention to either, when he began to taste in the air, or see in the wisps of white cloud, or feel in the coarse earth underfoot, something that awaken’d his sleeping sense. On a certain evening he saw, as though heavenly avengers pursued him from his former dwelling-place, a long bolt of grey cloud unfurled above, and a wind as cold as any that crosses Salisbury Plain blew in his beard and clothes. He had reached the partial shelter of an old Turkish cemetery when the storm broke in unexampled fury—the rain lashed, and the thunder sounded with all the majesty and reproach with which God speaks to Job, to remind him of his littleness, and the Creator’s might. When the tear of the lightning across the sky illumined the stones and the claws of the branches, he saw another figure, or thought he saw—not one of his party—a Brigand, or Robber, but that they never come singly—and on the next flash, ’twas gone!

  At Jannina he paid and bade farewell to his dragoman and servants, and there put off his European dress and put on instead the garb of that land. In the wide leathern belt he thrust the sword that the Pacha had once given him, which he had carried from England, now far away and baseless as a dream. Alone he set out, and ascended from the plain into the Albanian foothills, until he came one eve to stand on the pass above the Capital of that Pacha, whom once he had served—whose sword he wore. The sun going down still gilded the minarets, and the windless air tasted of dust, and the stones of the way had not chan
ged—but the town was not as it had been. The reign of that Pacha had ended, and where once the crowds of supplicants had gathered, to wait upon his Favour—and the Turks had strutted, in their black pelisses, bearing messages from the Sultan—the black slaves, and the caparisoned horses—all marching to the rhythm of the great Drums, and the calling of the boys from the Minaret—now there was silence, the courtyards empty, save for some few malingerers too poor or too indolent to find other employment, and a spavined nag or two in the place where 200 of the Pacha’s steeds once shook their high heads, and jangled their trappings!

  Not long did Ali linger there to ponder the transitory nature of earthly splendour. He changed his mount, and filled his panniers, and all alone went on, into the empurpled heights beyond the town; at night he wrapt him in his capote, and slept upon the ground, if he could not beg shelter in a Barn or Cot; went on, until—tho’ he could say not by what signs he knew it, could point to no single peak or valley, no turn of the way or clutch of houses, that called out to him—he stood upon the hills of home! Yet they were not the same hills—for ‘We cannot step in the same river twice’—the river is not the same river, and we are not what we were then. Ali look’d now in vain within him for that boy who once roamed here, who beneath this sky adventured, loved, fought, eat & slept—but he is nowhere to be found. A grown man—whose thoughts, even to his own soul, are spoke in English—looks out upon dry stones, and bare promontories—and thinks, How bleak all is!—And yet how fierce within him does he feel its claims! As he rode down to the plain, along a slope cut by a water-course and burdened with tumbled stone, he began to think to himself, ‘There I walked—There I followed my flock—There I sheltered from a storm, in that high fort, so long deserted—And there—and there—’ But even to his heart he will not speak a name, of the one who there went with him; and yet his breast was with that name, as a woman is with Child—and it grew.