The Countess Tolstoy had no more need for self-defense than a barking dog. But the eminence of Tolstoy brought the very existence of her frazzled nerves into question. The dazzling scrutiny they directed upon their marriage left behind a rich dustheap of experience, but the documentation was not a court of judgment, as she imagined. It was simply their life itself.
In his beautiful reminiscence of Tolstoy, Gorky tells of walking along the beach with the “old magician,” watching the tides roll over the stones. “He, too, seemed to me like an old stone come to life, who knows the beginnings and the ends of things. . . . I felt something fateful, magical, something that went down into the darkness beneath him . . . as though it were he, his concentrated will, which was drawing the waves and repelling them.” No doubt the Countess felt also that Tolstoy controlled the tides. What she often could not do was to flow and ebb in the certainty of nature, like a wave.
Lady Byron: from her short union with Byron she got her name and a lifetime of poisonous preoccupation. In her bad faith, deceits, and, above all, in her veiled intentions, so veiled indeed that gazing about with her intrepid glance she could not find the purpose of her intense lookings, there is nothing of the tragic exhaustion of the Countess Tolstoy. Lady Byron is unaccountable. She is self-directed, dangerously serious, and became a sort of Tartuffe in petticoats. “Marry Tartuffe and mortify your flesh!”
Lady Byron’s industry produced only one genuine product: the hoard of dissension, the swollen archives, the blurred messages of the letters, the unbalancing record of meetings, the confidences, the statements drawn up, and always the hints with their cold and glassy fascination. The hinter, Lady Byron, was in a drama upon which the curtain never came down, and never will. An eternity of first acts. Her marriage lasted one year, ending in 1816; Byron, the perpetrator, as the police now refer to the accused, died in 1824, a century and a half ago. But the story of the marriage and the separation knows no diminishment. Instead it accelerates, develops, metamorphoses: all of it kept bright by its original opacity, all enduring forever out of the brevity.
No doubt, Byron, hard up, capriciously married Annabella Milbanke for her money and for the weary interest aroused by her first rejection of him. (When she at last accepted his offer, he is supposed to have said: “It never rains but it pours.”) She married Byron for the fame of his notoriety and because of its engaging unsuitability to her own nature. But most of all they seemed to have married in order to create the Separation.
The story is well known, but the details, told and retold so many times, are unknowable. “So here we must beware of ignoring the sharp incompatibility of Lady Byron’s original attitude and that which so suddenly took its place.” Or “Compare that with Lady Byron’s statement in 1830: the discrepancy, already observed by Drinkwater (1,54) is highly significant.” (These tangles quoted in G. Wilson Knight’s Lord Byron’s Marriage are but a few among hundreds in his book, and cannot indicate the manifold puzzlements in the huge number of important Byron studies, each with its dazed laborings to cope with the hoard.)
As for Byron, “On the sixth Byron cheerfully assured Lady Melbourne that ‘Annabella and I go on extremely well.’ ” However, “His opinion changed completely during the following week as he wrote to Lady Melbourne on the thirteenth: Do you know I have grave doubts if this will be a marriage now; her disposition is the very reverse of our imaginings” (Lord Byron’s Wife by Malcolm Elwin). Marry they did, allowing Hobhouse to make his famous remark, “I felt as if I had buried a friend.”
The Separation—often called The Campaign—followed the next year, after the birth of a daughter, Ada. The legal inferiority of women and wives gave a good start to the rise of Lady Byron’s litigious temperature and to the onset of symptoms of “proof.” She also wanted custody of the child, even though most scholars think she greatly “overused” this point since it was hard to imagine Byron assuming the care. (He had once written his half-sister Augusta Leigh that the sound of her squalling children gave him “a great respect for Herod.”)
Byron had been throwing bottles of soda water on the ceiling (stains never found), posing with his pistols and bottle of laudanum by the bedside, and speaking of “crimes unimaginable.” Murder, sodomy, incest? None of these? All of these?
So began the vivacity of the separation months, the deliriums of dissimulation, the doctors consulted, the families, the meetings and the refusal of meetings, the solicitors and their huge bills, the advice of friends, the decisions taken and rescinded, the demands countermanded. All of this gave witness to the resonant incompatibility of the two persons, even though each might sometimes pretend for purposes of the “case” to warmer emotions drifting in and out.
The incongruity of Lady Byron was to have devoted a long life to a short marriage that ended in her youth. She had, at the church, taken an injection of poison into her veins. To Byron’s fame and uncertain character, to the charm and scandal of it, she would oppose her rectitude, her virtue, her injuries. But she did this in the most complicated, insinuating way, finding as she did that the achievement of a virtuous appearance in the midst of her accusations of horrors is to ground oneself on ice. She slipped and slid, tottered and regained her balance with an almost admirable audacity and endurance.
The incest of Byron and his half-sister, Augusta: Lady Byron brought to her suspicious concentration on this an imagination in flame, a motive of the left and right, like the blinders worn by a horse, and behavior so shadowed with contradiction that it is only her pursuit of the theme that can be counted on. She was determined to prove the incest and yet was not quite sure when she preferred it to have taken place—the problem being an uncertainty about the usefulness of its continuing during her marriage.
“Now, she had two objects in view: one, to establish the fact absolutely, preferably by getting Augusta to confess, and thus to know for certain whether Byron had ever persuaded her to repeat the crime after his marriage (that was important to her). . . . The jealousy which her principles would not allow her to acknowledge found sublimation in a truly sadistic zeal to extract the sin from Augusta’s life and save her” (Byron: A Biography by Leslie A. Marchand). Lady Byron was also sliding about on the wish to discover a secret and to insist she would not divulge what she had discovered. An insane complexity of effort went into divulging while not divulging. Byron thought her purpose was to “sanction the most infamous calumnies by silence.”
Lady Byron maintained a careful “friendship” with Augusta, broken only for a period late in life and even then mended. She was driven by a curiosity deeper than she knew and also by fear of losing control over any of the large cast of actors. Augusta experienced for years the most painful dilemmas of confusion. “Lady Byron presumably wants a confession of incest: Augusta, still not seeing the point, assumes she is merely being accused of some kind of disloyalty” (G. Wilson Knight).
Lady Byron had so many confidantes, advisers, doctors, and lawyers that of course the accusation was known to everyone—and, in any case, it had been spread about by Lady Caroline Lamb. Still, Lady Byron, talking and insinuating with a violent energy that left no gap, took moral refuge in the legalistic balm of never having publicly stated or “confirmed” what she had spent so much time proving.
Toward the end of her life, she had her operatic encounter with Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. One could play a scene and the other could write it. They sequestered themselves after a luncheon in 1856, now forty years after the Separation. The “silent widow” spoke: “The great fact upon which all turned was stated in words that were unmistakable: ‘Mrs. Stowe, he was guilty of incest with his sister!’ ”
Lady Byron was “deathly pale.” H. B. S. nodded, saying, yes, she had heard as much. Lady Byron went through her drama once more, starting with her childhood to set the stage. At one point she was asked by her American sympathizer whether Augusta was beautiful. Lady Byron answered, “No, my dear, she was plain.”
All of this appeared in Mrs. Stowe
’s Lady Byron Vindicated, published after the death of the subject. There had been a Lord Byron Vindicated published the year before.
Lady Byron suffered in her calculations from the promptings of an outlandish pride. Her dilemma was that she took pride in the marriage to Lord Byron and pride in the Separation. In the various positions she assumed, many deforming conditions were working against one another. No sooner was she secure in her virtuous behavior than she was thrown from the ladder by the shakings of Byron’s fame, which could turn every scandal into an attraction. She had always to be wary and wariness wore down her command of strategy. “Public outcry against Byron” could be punishing to him but it could not be depended upon. She understood this from the surest knowledge: her own peculiar attraction to and pursuit of him, a man she deeply disapproved of.
Lady Byron, an arrogant, intelligent heiress, appears to have needed a daily, yearly exercise of power and to need it in union with moral superiority. She feared no one, unless it may be said that she feared the shade of Byron. Byron’s Memoirs, his account of the marriage and separation, was destroyed by a murky alliance of his own friends and Lady Byron’s supporters. In life it cannot be said that she feared Byron. When asked if she were not afraid of the madman, she said, “My eyes can stare down his” (G. Wilson Knight).
It was her own life rather than history Lady Byron was most zealous to conceal and color—and a good thing too. She, voluble, alert, devious, has been looked at subsequently with a devastating alertness to motive, wish, contradiction that rather resembles her own deep archival diggings for “proof.” In Doris Langley Moore’s new biography of the daughter, Ada, Lady Byron is standing naked under an avalanche of falling rock. Her ill-health, her charities, her friendship with Augusta, her resistance to publicity, her jealousy of kind servants, her devotion to her daughter, her truthfulness: every noun except jealousy must from Mrs. Moore’s researches be put within impugning quotation marks.
Lady Byron brought up her daughter, in relation to Byron, with a dreary contrariness, always displaying the will to retain and the will to renounce at the same time. Thus, a portrait of Byron hung in the house “perpetually covered by a green cloth.” Ada was made to know she was the daughter of a renowned poet, “but all specimens of his handwriting were locked away from her.”
Ada, an interesting result of the cynical union, was a good deal like her mother. She inherited from her mother—“the princess of parallelograms” as Byron called her—a genuine gift for mathematics. She had ambitions, too, and studied with the distinguished Professor Babbage, who was working on ideas later developed into computer mathematics. Ada married an agreeable, suitable man, who fell under the insistent domination of her mother.
There was much that was promising in the girl’s beginnings, but she began somehow to sink into the mud of maneuver, manipulation, and her own marked self-satisfaction. Her mathematical skill turned toward the race track and she soon lost money, went into lying and debt, and squirmed around miserably in the pit of blackmail. From badly diagnosed illness, and the for-once inattention of her mother, who was intent upon her own notorious hypochondria, Ada went to larger and larger doses of morphine, to glittering eyes and vague drug elations and depressions. She suffered an excruciating death from cancer, dying when she was thirty-six and leaving Lady Byron to carry on for eight more years. To persevere with new problems of denial and blame, new ruptures, as Ada’s gambling debts were revealed.
Both Ada and Lady Byron were afflicted with the wrinkles of class arrogance. Ada’s belief in her own “phenomenal brain” inhibited the progress of her learning. Mother and daughter loved themselves too ardently. Mrs. Moore writes that Ada had a strong “desire to collaborate with Babbage in developing the intricate machinery to bring the computer to a state of practical usefulness, which would have been an unprecedented triumph for a woman.” But Ada was often high-handed with the great Babbage and wrote him letters in “an air of conceit which is not to be found in any claim her father ever made, even in his artless boyhood.” Riches, flattery for every cleverness, the oppression of her mother’s rule, cut Ada off from serious work while leaving her the comfort of a boastful superiority.
What was Lady Byron’s wish? If she was a victim, she was a most active one, responding long to Byron’s fame and her short connection with it. Byron, of course, fared better in the time he had to live after the separation. He soon produced an illegitimate child elsewhere, he traveled, wrote poems, occupied himself with ideas and certainly with life. He had other affairs, also “historic,” and also remembered and “published.” The Countess Guiccioli, “the last alliance” as Iris Origo calls her, wrote her own recollections for the world. After she was widowed, she married the Marquis de Boissy who, the report went, used to introduce her as “La Marquise de Boissy ma femme, ancienne maîtresse de Byron.”
Katherine Mansfield wrote in a letter to Middleton Murry: “Did you read in The Times that Shelley left on his table a bit of paper with a blot on it and a flung down quill? Mary S. had a glass case put over same and carried it all the way to London on her knees. Did you ever hear such rubbish!”
Tolstoy, after a miserable time, said about his wife: “She offers a striking example of the grave danger of placing one’s life in any service but that of God.” True—not that he meant it.
II
The loved ones—what a sinking it is from the high-flying insistence of the miserable to the slow, steady hum of affirmation. Egotists of affirmation have problems of form spared the truculent and the misrepresented, who carry their injuries about on their persons like a glass eye. In the pastoral mode, the drama will often come from without, from the obstructions of others, from the recalcitrance bred into the very nature of things, from bad reviews, the envy of rivals, tyrannies of the social order.
My Years With —— are likely to form a part of the title. Blank must be one whose years with are of interest to others besides oneself. For compositions in the pastoral mode, friends perform more felicitously than family members or lovers: the gloss need not be so radiant. In love memoirs, psychological inquiry is either missing or inadvertent; one does not usually loiter over the question of why he might be loved. It is the loss of love that arouses the speculative faculty and its rich inventions.
Anna Dostoevsky and Nadezhda Mandelstam are in no way similar, except that both by character and intelligence survived marriage and devotion to great writers without loss of common sense. The diary kept by Anna Dostoevsky is a plain reminiscence of a life of singular shape. The gambling in German towns, the epileptic attacks, the composition of the great novels, the bitter contest with debts, greedy relations, thieving publishers, the raising of children: all of this survives in her modest intelligence and truthfulness. One cannot leave a record of another without leaving a record of oneself.
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two large volumes, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, are of such brilliance and passion they cannot rightfully be called “memoirs.” Her books are a battle against tyranny and death. The poet, Mandelstam, was extinguished in the flesh during the Stalin purges. It was his widow’s determination to keep his poetry from extinction, to discover the awful circumstances of his murder in a prison camp, to write the history of the tyranny as she lived it, and still lives it, to analyze the circle in which they lived and Russia itself. In doing this, she has produced her own monument, one of the outstanding literary and moral achievements of her time.
Olga Ivinskaya, the mistress of Boris Pasternak, has written her book. It is called A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak. A florid, obsequious composition, issuing from an uncertain and harsh life. Her love memoir of her fourteen years as the mistress of Pasternak brings to mind that “fat brute of a word”—poshlust—as Nabokov examines it in his book on Gogol. “What the Russians call poshlust is beautifully timeless and so cleverly painted over with protective tints that its presence (in a book, in a soul, in an institution, in a thousand other places) often escapes detection.”
Gogol tells the story of a German gallant, trying to conquer the heart of his Gretchen. “Every evening he would take off his clothes, plunge into the lake and, as he swam there, right under the eyes of his beloved, he would keep embracing a couple of swans which had been specially prepared for him for that purpose.” Here, as Nabokov has it, “you have poshlust in its ideal form and it is clear that the terms trivial, trashy, smug and so on do not cover the aspect it takes in this epic of the blond swimmer and the two swans he fondled.”
Pasternak met Olga Ivinskaya in 1946. He was fifty-six and she was thirty-four. The writer who, as Tsvetaeva remarked, “looked like an Arab and his horse,” was a revered, romantic figure. His beautiful work attracted to him the positive radiance that shines around the poet in Russian society, an effulgence matched by the negative reverence of the state, which displays itself in constant surveillance and oppression such as other countries would think a waste of time.
All young girls may have been in love with Pasternak, and many not so young. In any case, when Olga first attended a Pasternak reading she went home with her book and greeted an interruption by her mother with, “Leave me alone, I’ve just been talking to God!” They met, they met once more, fell in love, and ushered in, like a reign in history, the fourteen years.
It settled into a triangle, in which all suffered—he the least. Pasternak had been married to his second wife, Zinaida, for ten years. This second marriage took place from materials near at hand, perhaps one could call them, since Zinaida’s first husband was Pasternak’s friend, the pianist Neigaus. That indeed was a “move.” The first Pasternak wife was a painter and they had one son. So there was his life—choices, consequences, things settled in the past.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 33