There is something determinedly self-destructive about all these heroes – another trait that ever since the ‘tales’ were first published has appealed to those seeking the secrets of Byron's own life. The metaphor of the scorpion, supposedly turning its venom on itself, duly appears in The Giaour, even though tempered by Byron's sceptical note.11 And it is not only their lives that they destroy. These heroes have forfeited any claim on posterity either. The ‘giaour’ leaves no memorial other than his story, which is protected by the secrecy of the confessional. Selim's rebellion claims ‘no land beyond my sabre's length’. When he is killed, his body is washed out to sea and never found, any more than Conrad is, alive or dead, at the end of The Corsair. Lara, too, ends with all three main characters ‘gone, / Alike without their monumental stone’.12 The Greek klefts, like the Homeric heroes before them, had at least been compensated for an early death by having their deeds commemorated for generations afterwards. But even this is denied the protagonists of the ‘tales’. As one modern study puts it, ‘The heroes of the Tales live in an existential and moral cul-de-sac.’13
They do have one other quality, though, that may have a bearing on Byron's own subsequent trajectory. Lara is described, by the dispassionate narrator, as ‘Lord of himself’, a phrase that Byron had first tried out in a fragment of 1812, the time of the gestation of the tales.14 The heroes of these tales have the power to invent or transform themselves. The ‘giaour’, actually, we are meant to suppose, a Venetian nobleman, at one point becomes an Albanian leader of a band of klefts when he ambushes and kills his enemy Hassan (Plate 3), at another a hermit living among Catholic monks. Selim, in Bride, first appears as the rather dandified son of the pasha, who dotes on his sister. Then in a dramatic reversal – the setting is at night, in a cave ‘hewn / By nature, but enlarged by art’ – he reveals himself to Zuleika in pirate clothes and tells her a story that entirely reinvents his past, and even his relationship to her.15 Lara seems visibly to create his own public persona in the first part of the poem, but nothing in it prepares us or anybody else for the violent transformation of the second, as he takes up arms against his fellow nobles.16 The Turkish champion Alp was once Lanciotto, in Venice, and in love with the lovely Francesca. Along with his political allegiance, he has changed his name, his religion, his costume, we must suppose even his language. Identity is not stable in these poems, but willed by the protagonists – or the controlling hand of their creator.
Throughout the ‘Turkish tales’, the political is very firmly subordinated to the personal. A fragment from 1812, usually understood today as the abandoned starting-point for the tales, suggests that Byron may have begun with an idea of balancing what he called the ‘private woes’ of an individual character with the idealised historical struggles of the Greeks in modern times, as he had heard about them on his travels.17 But, as the tales developed, the balance came down decisively in favour of the ‘private’. The rebel hero is not a revolutionary, even when he seems to behave like one.18 Most revealing of all is Lara, who cynically adopts the cause of the oppressed populace to take up arms against his own class, in what is actually only a private quarrel:
By mingling with his own the cause of all,
E’en if he failed, he still delayed his fall…
What cared he for the freedom of the crowd?
He raised the humble but to bend the proud.19
The conflict implied in these ‘tales’, between the private and the public spheres, between rebel and revolutionary, between the claims of poetry and the claims of political action, would play itself out across the rest of Byron's life and work.
In only one of the ‘Turkish tales’ does Byron break new ground in his thinking about Greece, past and future. This is in The Giaour, the earliest to be written. The question that had preoccupied Childe Harold and the Byron of the ‘Notes’ to that poem is asked again at the beginning. Passing by an ancient Athenian's grave, the poet-narrator demands to know, ‘When shall such hero live again?’
This is in Byron's earliest version.20 When he began to prepare the poem for press, he introduced an entirely new and disturbing idea about what it might mean to ‘live again’. He added a self-contained passage in which an unnamed Muslim, perhaps the mother of the murdered Hassan, lays a curse on the ‘giaour’ who has killed him (Plate 3):
But first, on earth as Vampire sent,
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent;
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race,
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corse[.]21
Plate 3. The Defeat of the Pasha, Antoine Charles H. Vernet, 1827, oil on canvas, based on Byron's poem The Giaour (Athens: Benaki Museum, Collection of Paintings, Drawings, and Prints)
On his travels, Byron had been deeply impressed by the superstition, prevalent in eastern Europe and particularly in Greece, about the living dead, or vampire. In his notes to this passage, he cites a literary source, The Curse of Kehama by Robert Southey. But Southey had never been to the east. Byron had, and drew his readers’ attention to the fact: ‘I recollect a whole family being terrified by the scream of a child, which they imagined must proceed from such a visitation. The Greeks never mention the word [“vampire”] without horror…The stories told in Hungary and Greece of these foul feeders are singular, and some of them most incredibly attested.’22
It had been Hobhouse who first came into contact with these stories, while he and Byron had been in Athens, at the end of 1809. Hobhouse had come back one day from exploring below the Acropolis and would have reported to Byron, as he wrote in his diary, that he had ‘passed by the Turkish burying ground where the headstones are composed of pieces of ancient small pillars, and where is the carved turban of a Mussulman who is buried at Constantinople and at Smyrna likewise, and is said often to appear amongst the living’.23
The classic account, at the time, of the modern Greek superstition had been published a century earlier by the French traveller Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. Byron's note to The Giaour reproduces this passage, in translation, from Southey's notes to his poem, where he had no doubt looked it up.24 But the volumes of Tournefort's travels had accompanied Byron and Hobhouse around the Levant. One of these was certainly with them on that sinister visit to Ephesus, when they rested, not once but twice, in Turkish graveyards.25 Thanks to Hobhouse, Byron too would have been familiar with Tournefort's account of the vampire superstition at the time when they toured the spooky remains of Ephesus.
Having introduced this macabre theme into his poem, Byron was not yet done with it. In his next revision, included in the first edition, he considerably expanded the end of the story. Confessing the visions that continue to haunt him, six years after the events, in the monastery where he has found refuge, the dying ‘giaour’ refuses the blessing of religion:
I would not, if I might, be blest,
I want no paradise – but rest.
The curse has struck home. Life for him has become a living death. He already anticipates his future condition as ‘That lifeless thing the living fear’ – invoking the physicality of the recently dead corpse. He cannot accept the loss of his beloved, believes that he still sees her even though he knows she is dead. ‘I knew ’twas false’, he cries out in the frenzy of his vision, ‘she could not die!’26 He still speaks of Leila and Hassan in the present tense. He refuses to let go of the dead. It is Leila's corpse that he clasps in his vision, and prays in his last reported words never again to be parted from.27 The Giaour ends not with the redemption dear to Romantic poets, but with the prolongation, in death, of the appearance of life, which is the essence of the vampire – ‘’twas a hideous tale!’ indeed, as the hero himself exclaims.28
It was not until June 1813, after the first edition of The Giaour had been published and there was immediate demand
for a second, that Byron went back to the beginning and added almost a hundred new lines, most of the prologue in which the poet in his own person meditates on the fate of Greece:
’Tis Greece – but living Greece no more!
So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,
We start – for soul is wanting there.
Hers is the loveliness in death,
That parts not quite with parting breath;
But beauty with that fearful bloom,
That hue which haunts it to the tomb –
That Byron was still thinking about vampire stories when he wrote these lines is evident from their similarity to one of his notes to the passage he had already written: ‘The freshness of the face, and the wetness of the lip with blood, are the never-failing signs of a Vampire.’29
The prologue continues:
Spark of that flame – perchance of heavenly birth –
Which gleams – but warms no more its cherish'd earth!
A few lines on, the Greeks of today are urged: ‘Snatch from the ashes of your sires / The embers of their former fires.’30 What, Byron was implicitly wondering now, would it mean, if that heavenly spark were somehow to be rekindled? In Childe Harold, the ruins of Greece had reminded the poet of human remains, but quite lifeless ones: the bones in a burial urn, the skull, ‘a lover's dust’. Here, there is something newly sinister about a corpse that is ‘coldly sweet’ and ‘deadly fair’. Looking back with hindsight, and perhaps remembering moments like his first sight of Parnassos, or his swim across the Hellespont, Byron imagines the entire ancient world of Greece as still having the deceptive appearance of life.
Commentators on the finished poem have noted a parallel between the narrator's devotion to the idea of Greece and the hero's to his idealised beloved. Both, it is sometimes suggested, are vindicated, if not quite saved, by a form of Romantic transcendence.31 But the idea behind The Giaour is much darker. Recalling the heroes who fought for freedom in ancient Greece, the poet celebrates the ‘graves of those that cannot die!’ No more could Leila die, in the obsessive fantasy of the ‘giaour’.32 The equivalence is a deadly one. Supposing that the dangerously fresh, ‘fair’ corpse of ancient Greece could be brought back to life, as enthusiasts like Londos and Marmarotouris had seemed to want, would not the result be a kind of living death, a monster like the vampire of modern Greek superstition? Would not a modern champion, were he to take up the cause of a Greek ‘revival’ in the political world of the second decade of the nineteenth century, end up like the obsessed ‘giaour’, whose inability to let go of the dead drags him down to insanity and an early death?
Here would be no victory in the fight against mortality, but only a horror story. These reflections might well explain why Byron lost interest in the political cause of Greece, during his ‘years of fame’. He had progressed no further when, three years after The Giaour was published, in the course of his flight from England in 1816, he met the Shelleys, and the greatest of all modern horror stories was born in his house.
Creatures of Prometheus
It was the year without a summer. Violent eruptions on the other side of the world are now believed to have been the cause of the freak weather that affected all of Europe, that summer of 1816. Byron's party travelled in a grand coach drawn by four horses, that he had had built in imitation of Napoleon's. With him went his faithful retainers from earlier years, Fletcher and Rushton, and a new recruit, the young and impressionable half-Italian doctor, John Polidori. Since landing from Dover at Ostend in April, Byron had written approximately half of a new canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. This continues the adventures of a now grown-up ‘childe’ with the immediate impressions of its author's travels as he embarked on his new, self-imposed exile.
They arrived at Geneva on 25 May 1816, and put up at the Hotel d’Angleterre in Sécheron, on the lakeside not far from the city. It was there, on the doorstep of the hotel, two days later, that Byron for the first time met Percy Bysshe Shelley. With Shelley was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (not yet the second Mrs Shelley), their infant son William, and Mary's step-sister Claire Clairmont, who then went by the name Clara Godwin. Claire is often wrongly described as Mary's half-sister. In fact, she was not a blood relation at all, but the daughter of William Godwin's second wife by a previous relationship. Claire had been brought up in Godwin's household along with Mary, Mary's half-sister Fanny, and Claire's half-brother William. Confusion was understandable.
It was Claire who had brought this meeting about. Byron had met Clara Godwin before. Probably he was not best pleased to find her here, in Geneva. He had had a brief affair with her while he had been preparing to leave London. She was now blatantly pursuing him, under the pretext of introducing him to her stepsister and her stepsister's poet-lover.
Shelley was not quite twenty-four. He stood at least a head taller than Byron. He had probably not yet developed the stoop to his long sinuous body that later would remind Byron of a snake. His broad, open face and curly brown hair exuded an air of youthfulness. Shelley's appearance in those days, as remembered by a friend, was ‘wild, intellectual, unearthly; like a spirit that has just descended from the sky; like a demon risen at that moment out of the ground’.33 In his lifetime, Shelley was better known for his heterodox opinions than for his poetry. It had been his enthusiasm for the political radicalism of William Godwin, the author of Political Justice, that had brought him into contact with Godwin's daughter, Mary (causing him to abandon his first wife, Harriet, and their two small children). Shelley professed to be an atheist. A pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism had been the cause of his being sent down from Oxford. Free love, though Shelley never quite called it that, was another of his principles whose notoriety had preceded him. Polidori's initial idea of Shelley would have been Byron's too, at that first meeting: ‘separated from his wife; keeps the two daughters of Godwin, who practise his theories’.34
Much has been written about the web of personal and literary entanglements that began that day and would leave none of the five unscathed, and about the fraught and elusive poetic dialogue between Byron and Shelley that it set in train.35 Within a fortnight of that first meeting, the two parties had rented houses some ten minutes’ walk from one another on the lakeside, near the village of Cologny on the opposite shore from Geneva. Byron's was the spacious Villa Diodati, that had been built on four floors in the first half of the seventeenth century, with a view over the lake. Shelley, with the two women, the infant William, and their servants, found more modest accommodation in the hamlet of Montalègre.36 Day after day, thunder, lightning, rain, and unseasonal cold kept the whole party cooped up together in the Villa Diodati, often sitting up very late into the night. The evanescent conversations of those days and nights left traces in the letters and reminiscences of those who were there, and have been seized on by biographers ever since. But one subject that was present throughout, and would prove to have a lasting effect on the future lives and work of Byron, Shelley, and Mary has barely surfaced in all the subsequent retellings. That subject is Greece.
Shelley already had his own passionate idea of Greece. It could hardly have been more different from Byron's. Shelley saw in ancient Greece nothing less than the proof of the perfectibility of the human race. Shelley knew Greece only from books, and through the ancient language, which he loved and knew far better than Byron did. The possibility of Greece as contemporary and actual had probably never occurred to Shelley before he met Byron. In turn, for Byron, Shelley's enthusiastic Hellenism rekindled memories, and set him thinking again about his own never-resolved dilemma about ‘ye. Greeks’. The two poets had much to learn from one other, that summer.
On one of their first boating expeditions together on the lake, Byron regaled the company with ‘a strange, wild howl’ that ‘he declared, was an exact imitation of the savage Albanian mode’.37 This made such an impression that, ever afterwards, the private nickname for Byron in the Shelley household would be ‘Albè’ (short for ‘Albaneser�
��).38 When Claire gave birth to Byron's daughter the following winter, their first name for her would be ‘Alba’. Then, on the night of 13 June, they all watched a spectacular thunderstorm. The thunder and lightning seemed to emanate from all over the lake, from the peaks of the Jura on one side and the Alps on the other, all at once. Byron would have made to his friends the comparison that he later put into a note to the third canto of Childe Harold: ‘I have seen among the Acroceraunian mountains of Chimari several more terrible, but none more beautiful.’39 He was remembering, and would have recalled for his friends, his journey with Hobhouse, from Ioannina to Tepelena.
Three days later, when the talk turned to the supernatural and at Byron's instigation they each agreed to write a ghost story, he at once launched into a tale based on his adventures in the east. In a few pages, drafted on Monday 17 June, Byron recaptured for his friends the atmosphere of sinister desolation that he remembered from his expedition with Hobhouse from Smyrna to Ephesus. The narrator of Byron's unfinished story is a young man travelling with an older companion, named Augustus Darvell. On their way to visit the ruins of Ephesus, Darvell is mysteriously taken ill. They stop, as Hobhouse and Byron had done, in a deserted Turkish graveyard. There, amid strange portents, Darvell dies in the narrator's arms – but not before he has extracted from him a bizarre promise. This is as far as Byron progressed with his tale.40
Byron's War Page 6