George Gordon, Lord Byron, to give him his full title, was all of twenty-one when he embarked on that first taste of travel. It was 2 July 1809 and he set sail from England’s white cliffs for Lisbon, going to Iberia and Greece, not usually on the Grand Tour itinerary, but because much of the rest of the usual European travel map—France, Germany, etc.—was at war thanks to that other big personality of the Romantic age, Napoleon. Travel became the grist for Byron’s mill. He wrote the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, one of his most lauded works. Though he insisted it was fiction, and though there was much of a fable in it, it was undeniably also his travel memoir in rhyme, recording, with instinctive poetic licence, his experiences, thoughts and the times through which he fared. He wrote its various stages progressively as he clocked up the miles.
When it was published it became the sensation that rendered him a superstar. ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous,’ he said of it. Suddenly, as suddenly as his statement suggests, it turned the twenty-something nobleman into the first, original rock star. Forget Elvis, the Beatles; Byron was the prototype for modern-style fame. He became arguably the world’s very first celebrity: sexy, provocative, groundbreaking, enigmatic, causing hysteria wherever he went. The young handsome poet who made lovers of both sexes blither, who caused actual swoons when he walked into rooms, whose looks, charm and charisma shone like an angel among mortals, whose audacious lack of a filter between his thoughts and social acceptability caused titillation, even shock, whenever he opened his mouth, was the most sought-after parlour guest in London and the most talked-about too.
So when he fell, he fell spectacularly. If he was once an angel among men, then he was Lucifer, his descent as dramatic as the descent of God’s one-time brightest. According to the tattletales, hypocrites, gossips and predators who had clamoured for a piece of Byron’s fame, and who now bayed for every last drop of his blood, he had become the devil himself.
Byron was said to have had an affair with his half-sister and fathered a child to her. He was rumoured to have made love to men. All that was put up with to some degree. But the thing that drove him out of England was society’s whispers behind their hands that he was a sodomite and had forced the young wife who had very recently borne him a daughter to do the unspeakable—leave him. Sodomy then was a hanging offence. An unholy, unnatural act. Leaving a marriage? Beyond reckoning.
The intensity of the vitriol at these transgressions—the very public split, the rumoured sexual act against her—drove him into self-imposed exile. In April 1816 he sailed away, still only twenty-eight as he set off for the second time. But he did not go with his (allegedly pointy red) tail between his legs. Though desolate over loss of family, friends and the familiar, he left with the spirit of the undefeatable, riding those waves triumphantly like a steed towards his fate, whatever it might be. It was a fate that would see him never return home. Though he always spoke of eventually going back, he would die without doing so, eight years after the voyage on which he greeted the ocean so vehemently. But on those travels, in those final chapters of his short life, he would create a body of work, moreover an existence, that would come to exemplify what it means to be authentic. Flawed, absolutely. Self-centred, undeniably. Indulgent, quite. Unbowed, fully expressed, utterly himself, yes, yes and yes again.
*
I wouldn’t have said my women friends who were married with young children were all unhappy. But I could have said that of late, each, virtually without exception, had looked at me and said, ‘You’re so lucky.’ For most of my forties I, as a single, childless woman, had found that view of my life patronising and insensitive. But I was beginning to think maybe they were right.
Here I was, living in a sunny little apartment by the beach, decorated the way I liked, with the TV remotes tucked away into a neat little silver box. That box some of my friends found a bit neurotic but I thought it was perfect when I found it at a market and I didn’t have to consult anyone about it when I installed it on my coffee table. When the remotes were allowed out of that perfect little silver box, I had full control of them. My duvet had unapologetically girly roses on it sometimes, other times more masculine chambray blue and white stripes; it depended on my mood and mine alone. I got to use the whole thing, scrunch it up under me, push it to one side, tuck it around me, while sleeping on whatever side of the bed I fancied, starfish in the middle if I so desired. I ate what I liked, slept when I liked, walked naked about the place whenever I felt like it (hello, neighbours across the way), listened to my music, from AC/DC to Mozart, without needing to gauge the mood of the crowd. I did not need to pick up anyone’s stuff but mine.
And I got to travel. Lots. I’d been a journalist and writer for over twenty years. That career had already taken me to some amazing places, from living in Los Angeles to the outback. But travel writing had opened the whole world to me, and it is true to say, it had opened me up. I had come to value travel not only for showing me who other people were, but also for the way it showed me who I was. And so I upped and left any time something was on offer, which was regularly, and I did so without needing to organise a damn thing. I left no one in the lurch, no child cried when I departed, no duties needed be reorganised, nothing, no one but me needed to be considered.
I didn’t see that my married friends were unlucky, though. In the absence of children and a partner there was always loneliness. I’d be tootling along completely fine, then, out of nowhere, it would slap me down. I’d been so lonely across my single years. But in being a largely independent unit, perhaps there was a gift: the gift of space to become more me. I thought marriage and kids seemed a wonderful path to becoming more one’s self, I sincerely did. Through family and companionship I thought I could learn a lot. But maybe one of these paths was no better than the other. They were merely different. Very different, but no better.
Well, maybe. There was a place somewhere inside me where I was unconvinced about this. But what I did know was I had once seen my unmarried, no-kids life as less of a journey, very much a destination: I am single, unmarried, childless. And I can be no more. And I knew married women who were similarly stuck: I am mother, wife, mortgage payer. End of story.
I was beginning to see it differently. I had found myself occasionally okay with my singledom. Accepting? I would get there, eventually. But back then when I was newly opening to the possibilities in it? Let’s just say okay. And from that okay was springing a curiosity for what was next.
My heart desired love, companionship and children in my life (maybe; they would probably need to be someone else’s) but I was also wondering: what if that was not on the cards for me? What if I was to be single for the rest of my life? I had spent a lot of time and energy bemoaning what wasn’t, wishing I woke up on Sunday mornings to a loving husband, a couple of happy kids, a dog and a big sunny house, instead of alone in my apartment followed by breakfast and the papers by myself at a local café. Would I spend the next forty years (God willing) lamenting that, wishing for something other than what I had while not appreciating that which was in front of me? What an awful thought.
Maybe I needed to embrace this. Perhaps celebrating the gift of my situation, honouring it, might be the way to the fulfilment I had been wishing for.
I wanted to grasp my freedom. I wanted to live it to its fullest. I wanted to fill it with beauty and art, literature, spirituality and culture, the things that had once made my heart sing: the things I loved as a kid.
Had I given up on love? No. But I needed to stop waiting for it. I needed to get on with it.
My favourite moments in my life so far, my happiest memories, always involved no one else but Mum and me: my feisty, energy ball of a mum, whose light was snuffed out way too young. She was sixty-nine, I was thirty-two when she had a massive heart attack with no one around to call paramedics. She was here, then she wasn’t. I missed her every day. So for the youngest child of a brood of six brought up by a woman who did the parenting singlehandedly and
who died when I was only just into my thirties, those memories of ‘her and me’ times were precious.
The most precious of all involved the two of us and the collection of old, leatherbound books, the one thing in the small, damp, falling-down home at number ten Lavender Street, Ringwood, Victoria, where I grew up that I considered worth anything. I particularly liked the poetry books. These were what Mum and I shared. I was in early high school and taking a keen interest in poetry and we read Browning and we read Shelley and we read Byron, when no one else, none of my five brothers and sisters, was there. I loved those times, Mum and me by the heater, in the evening, me reading out loud, her in her dressing gown doing her crossword puzzle in her chair in the corner, the warm glow of her reading lamp over her shoulder, her head tilted just so for her bifocals.
I discovered I loved Byron. I liked that he was funny, a bit naughty sometimes. Mum said he had a clubfoot. She said he was good looking, but a bit difficult, probably because of that foot. I had an image of him in my head as something like a faun, a man with a hoof for a foot: something that looked like the end of a golf club wood from the ankle down.
Mum always said she thought Shelley a superior poet to Byron but she knew a lot about Byron anyway. I always thought of him as the poet with that clubfoot. I loved the vividness of Byron, his floridness. Where Shelley was controlled, with light brush strokes of evocative detail, Byron was all splashes of vibrant metaphor—about as subtle as my heart-on-sleeve self. He also seemed more human to me than those lofty geniuses who lined the shelves of my childhood home: Wordsworth, Browning, Shakespeare of course. Byron was damaged. He had a clubfoot.
I had spent a lot of my life feeling damaged.
I put aside my love of Romantic poetry when I left university and took up the decidedly unromantic occupation of journalist. It went by the wayside with a lot of the things I loved, including aspects of my spirituality, especially as I secretly had a decidedly uncool-in-my-circles love of the Christ energy, something that had come to the fore in my teenage years, but which I had pushed well and truly down. ‘God-bothering’ this was sometimes called with journalistic cynicism. I loved journalism, but I changed to survive in it. Even then, my spirituality had proven irrepressible and those closest to me, very close, knew of this side of me. Those on the newsroom floor did not. I explored a lot of different angles on spirituality but none fitted quite right until my first trip to Italy. It was by going into Italy’s majestic churches, and finding myself moved by the genius of Renaissance religious art, that I found this amazing lost aspect of myself: my connection to the Christ energy. This fallen Catholic who hated so many things about the church suddenly discovered she was deeply moved by the compassion of Christ.
It was (and still is) awkward for me to say that publicly, so deep does my fear of what people might think of that run. It’s so okay to say you have an Indian guru, or you dig the Buddha. But such travesties have been carried out in the name of Christ, the most loving and peaceful man who ever lived, that saying you love him can seem like you’re saying you are an extreme right-wing war-mongering conservative. I think Christ was the original lefty myself, and his views on war are well known, but the point is that he was, I realised, intrinsic to who I was. It was not the church as an institution, certainly not Catholicism (though I began to enjoy the rituals and mysticism of mass for the first time in my life, especially the music at the cathedrals), it was not religion that moved me, but my relationship with Jesus and, through him, God. The deeply spiritual subtexts of all those paintings, by Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian and Michelangelo, that I saw for real in Italy, and the opportunity they offered to feel Christ in my own wordless interpretation of them rather than be told about him in a linear, dogmatic way, it was this that I responded to.
It was around the same time that my love of Byron began creeping back into my consciousness, turning up as references in those stories I wrote, particularly about Italy. They would appear on the page, typed by my fingers, but not essentially composed by me. They came out, from somewhere in the depths of my psyche, proving as irrepressible as spirit itself. My reconnection with Byron was in tandem with my spiritual emergence. And that got me thinking: maybe there was something more than poetry in his life and work for me.
There were things about his life that spoke to the way I wanted to be, and how I wanted to celebrate who I was. He expressed himself with abandon and passion. He lived his truth, courting controversy and infamy in the process. And he sought inspiration and pleasure, embarking on a European adventure that led to the legend he was to become. He was reviled and revered in equal measure. But he was not unrealised.
That was something to aspire to, especially now that I knew I was ready to live as myself, unfiltered. I desired to be me, unedited. I thought I could learn a thing or two from Byron. I wondered if following Byron’s odyssey through Europe might be the way to celebrate who I was, who I was becoming. At the very least, it would be quite a trip.
I was an experienced traveller. I should have known the universe’s idea of celebration of self and mine might be a bit different. I should have known I was invoking God, the universe, the waves of fate, inviting them to bring it on. But as I organised my itinerary, I had images of me in a convertible, scarf trailing joyously, driving the roads of Italy, men calling out ‘Ciao bella!’ everywhere I went, little figuring that the reality would prove to be something a wee bit more intense.
2
Family Influence
Stern death forbade my orphan youth to share
The tender guidance of a father’s care.
Can rank or even a guardian’s name supply
The love that glistens in a father’s eye?
Childish Recollections
Though we forge our own way in life, the path we begin down is carved by our times, circumstance and family. For George Gordon, Lord Byron, historic nobility dictated circumstance. The first Byron arrived in England from Normandy as a follower of William the Conqueror.
Family would bestow something decidedly less noble. Within a mere handful of generations the crazy factor would emerge. The first to show it, in the annals anyway, would be the ‘Wicked Lord’, the poet’s great-uncle, who got his nickname for his libertine and murderous ways, depression and episodes of insanity that plagued him as he plunged into debt so deep he leased or sold off the family’s most valuable assets.
His nephew, John Byron, the father of the poet, was equally troubled. Known as ‘Mad Jack’, he was sent to military school near Paris, where he sold his services rent-boy style after his folks cut him off for his waywardness. Back in England at twenty-two, he had a torrid affair with a rich married aristocrat, ran back to France with her and parented Augusta, George Gordon’s half-sister. When his scarlet lady died, Mad Jack went searching for a rich wife. He found one in England, in the chubby, socially awkward twenty-year-old, Catherine Gordon of Gight.
What a match. She too had a family history full of depression, suicides and other tragedy. When Catherine fell pregnant they were living barely ahead of debtors’ jail; Jack’s outrageous lifestyle had dwindled what Catherine had, which wasn’t as much as Jack had at first thought, anyway. So with bailiffs on his tail, Jack left her, and ran to France again, where he lived with his sister and his little daughter.
Catherine took a humble room in London and gave birth to a baby boy with a lame foot, George Gordon Byron, right at the time when Napoleon was tearing up Europe, defining the age in which the young man would mature with a heightened sense of war, politics, idealism and, in the end, disillusionment. Destitute from Jack’s leeching and Catherine’s weakness, mother and son would be forced to move back to Aberdeen, Catherine’s ancestral home, and rely on the kindness of outsiders and extended family to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs, a strange and awkward situation for people of noble lineage. Jack would seek them out now and then to harass money out of his wife. But the three would seldom live as a family again, although enough for
the poet to claim early recollections of two people, his parents, screaming at each other on these random opportunities.
Jack died in August 1791, when his little boy was not yet three. The paternal absence would leave an imaginative son free to romanticise his roguish dad. And the paternal ideal would also bond him to his half-sister Augusta, with whom he eventually would have a sexual relationship. He would always claim her his one true love, the only woman to understand him, the split of the same soul. That relationship would emerge in drawing-room whispers and contribute to his self-exile.
In May 1798, seven years after his father’s death, George Gordon inherited the title of Lord Byron thanks to the paternal side of the family having no heirs between him and the Wicked Lord. Life for George Gordon, only ten years old, changed.
Society viewed him one way, while the reality of his life was something quite different. He and his mother were only farthings away from poverty most of the time. His mother, admittedly stressed as a single parent, and under siege from the everyday expense of bringing up a lord, was hysterical, manipulative, at times mean and obsessed with her son. The estate he inherited, Newstead in Sherwood Forest, had been denuded of assets and the house had been let go to a Gothic shambles. In the Nottingham society to which he was introduced he was noted as a bright, witty boy. Behind closed doors, Lord Byron’s lush of a nanny was abusing him, beating him one minute, sexually interfering with him the next.
And so the young, brilliant man grows up to fear intimacy. He’s sexually dysfunctional, taking on lovers like others take showers. He’s angry at the system into which he is born, dismissive of the parlours that idolise him, shamed by his deformed leg and lethal in the use of his overcompensating cache of charms. What classic self-loathing, an open-and-shut case for a psychiatrist, and that will be one hundred and fifty dollars, thank you very much.
Me, Myself and Lord Byron Page 2
