Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  When I was fifteen years of age – it happened that in a Cavern in Derbyshire – I had to cross in a boat – (in which two people only could lie down – ) a stream which flows under a rock – with the rock so close upon the water – as to admit the boat only to be pushed on by a ferry-man (a sort of Charon) who wades at the stern stooping all the time. – The companion of my transit was M[ary] A. C [haworth] with whom I had been long in love and never told it – though she had discovered it without. – I recollect my sensations – but cannot describe them – and it is as well. – – We were a party – a Mr. W. – two Miss W’s – Mr. & Mrs. Clarke – Miss R. and my M.A.C. – Alas! why do I say My? – our Union would have healed feuds in which blood had been shed by our fathers – it would have joined lands – broad and rich – it would have joined at least one heart and two persons not ill-matched in years (she is two years my elder) and – and – and – what has been the result? – She has married a man older than herself – been wretched – and separated. – I have married – & am separated. – and yet we are not united. –

  At some point Peter had read this passage: I felt him almost looking over my shoulder. But the excitement didn’t last. I wanted discrepancies, not facts, and most of Peter’s discrepancies turned out to be trivial. He left Mrs Clarke at home and widowed her; brought only one of the Miss Wollastons, but all of the Pigots; and included John Musters, whom Mary Chaworth eventually married. All of this proved dispiriting in a different way. It’s true that I was getting closer to Peter, to the way he worked. I saw him again and again take a line from a letter or biography and spin it out into a scene or a piece of analysis. Mary, for example, really did refuse to dance with Byron at Matlock Bath; he was heartbroken. The line employed by Peter to do the breaking – What, do you think I could care anything for that lame boy? – was lifted almost verbatim from Marchand’s Portrait. But Byron didn’t overhear her saying it at the ball and she was probably speaking to her maid, not John Musters. Novelists write shorthand, I knew that already; but finding out the facts behind Peter’s story broke whatever spell, of truth or truthfulness, it had cast on me.

  Phrase after phrase, as I made my way through the letters and Lives, bounced faintly off its echo in ‘Fair Seed-Time.’ ‘I have looked into the de Ruthyns,’ Mrs Byron declares in the opening scene, ‘and cannot find their title in the peerages of England, Ireland or Scotland. I suppose he is a new peer.’ Peter copied this from a note she wrote to the family’s financial adviser, John Hanson. But the change of context matters. She wasn’t gossiping; she was looking into the credentials of a tenant. Peter played around with characters, too. Musters, for example, figures in Peter’s story as ‘quiet’ and ‘mysterious.’ In fact, the best account of him we have comes from a hunting journal, which remembers him as someone who could have ‘leaped, hopped, ridden, fought, danced and played tennis with any man in Europe.’ Far from the sinister ‘Man of Method’ Peter has painted, Musters seems to have been the Regency equivalent of a frat boy: good-natured, good-looking, idle and a little stupid. The ‘hunting’ he wasted his time on was just the ordinary, innocent, violent kind of hunting.

  The significance of that word ‘mysterious’ (which is the quality that makes Peter’s Byron so ‘uncomfortable’ around Musters) may have been taken from Louis Crompton’s book Byron and Greek Love – published in 1985, and the first to address the question of his homosexuality. Peter probably picked up all references to ‘the Method’ in it, too. This was the term Byron’s college set used to describe their pursuit of boys; a necessary code, because homosexuality was still punishable by death. When Byron boasted to his friend Skinner Matthews, shortly before setting off for the Continent, about the pleasures to be had from the boys (or ‘hyacinths’) of Falmouth, Matthews congratulated him ‘on the splendid success of your first efforts in the mysterious, that style in which more is meant than meets the Eye.’ In the same letter, he requested that anyone ‘who professes ma methode’ should ‘spell the term wch designates his calling with an e at the end of it – methodiste, not methodist, and pronounce the word in the French fashion. Everyone’s taste must revolt at confounding ourselves with that sect of horrible, snivelling fanatics.’

  Peter leaves out this e when Lord Grey describes John Musters as ‘a Man of Method.’ Maybe to avoid drawing attention to the phrase, which is already suggestive enough. But the word itself shows only that Peter had read Louis Crompton’s book. I began to see how shallow the waters of his imagination were. Still visible beneath its surface: the junk or detritus of misplaced facts. Little details like the chicken-wire box also struck me in a new light – as the kind of rich ‘effect’ a writer strives for to suggest something real. ‘All anybody wants to know about is how much is true,’ I had complained to Steve Heinz. But once you figure out how much is true, I don’t know what you’re left with. ‘Pure invention is but the talent of a liar,’ Byron once wrote. But what should we make of the talent of impure invention?

  *

  Still, there was one incident that Peter dwelt on in greater detail and with greater certainty than any of Byron’s biographers. The longer I looked at ‘Fair Seed-Time’ the more I came back to it. By this stage my desk was littered with opened books and loose papers; a real mess. A half-dozen cups of emptied tea were growing moldy, but some of them held down the papers and others propped open the books. To walk into an office like that, every morning, always suggested to me the outward expression of some internal disorder: an obsession here, an inattention there. But the truth is, I liked being there. October had come, and a few chilly mornings had pinched the blood back into the edges of the leaves – they stood out shyly against the green of the Radcliffe lawn.

  Nothing I had read suggested that John Musters in real life was guilty of anything worse than attracting Mary Chaworth to him and making her unhappy in marriage. But something did happen between Byron and Lord Grey. On his return to Southwell in the spring of 1804, Byron refused to see him.

  ‘I am not reconciled to Lord Grey, and I never will,’ he wrote to his sister Augusta. ‘My reasons for ceasing that Friendship are such as I cannot explain, not even to you my Dear Sister (although were they to be made known to any body, you would be the first,) but they will ever remain hidden in my own breast … He has forfeited all title to my esteem, but I hold him in too much contempt ever to hate him.’ When they were reconciled, partly at least, in the summer of 1808 (they had some business to discuss together, as landlord and tenant), Byron wrote, ‘I cannot conclude without adverting to circumstances, which though now long past, and indeed difficult for me to touch upon, have not yet ceased to be interesting. – Your Lordship must be perfectly aware of the very peculiar reasons that induced me to adopt a line of conduct, which however painful, and painful to me it certainly was, became unavoidable.’

  Lord Grey in his reply pretended or professed to understand nothing of Byron’s peculiar reasons. The only third-party reference to whatever it was that took place is a note written by Byron’s university friend, John Hobhouse, in the margin of a copy of Thomas Moore’s Life of Byron – which was published some ten years after his death and more than thirty since the incident in question. ‘A circumstance occurred during this intimacy,’ Hobhouse remarked, ‘which certainly had much effect on his future morals.’

  Almost all Byron’s biographers agree that Lord Grey made a pass at Byron in the autumn of 1803. What’s less clear is whether Byron reciprocated – whether his subsequent revulsion had something of the guilt of acquiescence in it. Lord Grey insisted to the end of his short life (he was dead by 1810) that he did not know why Byron had cut him off. Which suggests either that he was lying or that nothing had happened, or that something had happened which was perfectly mutual, or which he thought was perfectly mutual. Hobhouse’s note is the best evidence we have. He didn’t know Byron in his boyhood, but they traveled the Continent together after leaving Cambridge and became very intimate. During this tour, Byron allowed himself, for the first ti
me, to indulge freely his homosexual inclinations – which Hobhouse neither shared nor sympathized with. But Hobhouse’s comment is more suggestive than explanatory. A ‘circumstance occurring’ doesn’t say much about agency; and the ‘effect’ of it could have been great even if Lord Grey did nothing more than give Byron ideas. In Peter’s account, something did happen, and that something is pretty close to rape.

  Rape scenes had featured in both of Peter’s novels, scenes of sexual initiation, but this one struck me as a departure from the others: it was the only one involving a man and a boy. (Lord Grey was eight years older than Byron, which makes a difference, at twenty-three and fifteen.) I don’t want to say a writer can’t write a scene like that without drawing on personal experience. But if there has been some personal experience, I also don’t see how he can leave it out entirely.

  That said, the incident in ‘Fair Seed-Time’ poses a couple of problems. Peter has chosen to tell it from the point of view of the boy, and a boy who is more or less silent throughout the whole … transaction, which doesn’t take more than a page. Some of the language belongs obviously to the period, to Byron’s and not Peter’s. And at the heart of the scene lies an image whose source is clearly Byron’s own life: ‘I had the strong impression of being again in the narrow boat with Mary, and the rock pressing heavily down upon me.’ An image of such natural symbolic power that Byron himself continued to recur to it two decades later. It seems too suspiciously literary to be true, even for him: the sexual rite of passage made literal, in a boat, with darkness and wetness and Death (‘a sort of Charon’) conducting the whole experience. This is the stuff of fiction, not life; and yet it was life, too, and the whole point of my project, my fellowship, was that I could learn to distinguish between them.

  In the end, I managed to make a few distinctions between Peter’s treatment of the facts and the facts themselves. He downplayed the friendship between Byron and Lord Grey. Byron once referred to him as ‘the best of Friends,’ but in Peter’s story, they didn’t know each other well and never moved far beyond their practical relationship – of landlord and tenant, or host and guest. The mention of their school days struck me, too. Then there were all the little decisions Peter made about how to ‘play’ the scene. The boy is silent and unwilling, but not unresponsive. He looks for comfort from the source of his discomfort. Coldness seems important, physical coldness and the warmth of coercion. Most suggestively, Peter chose to tell ‘Fair Seed-Time’ from the victim’s point of view, and not Lord Grey’s. Maybe this was the purpose behind his fiction: to imagine, out of curiosity or remorse, what he had done to other people; to see himself through another’s eyes. Or I needed to go farther back into his life than Beaumont Hill.

  *

  I suffer worse from jet lag than Caroline does, and on our first day in Boston, around six a.m., I put some clothes on my daughter and together we ventured out into the new world. A blue, later-summer morning, still drippy with dawn. Our apartment was in an upscale neighborhood only slightly over-run by student digs. There were American front yards and American front porches. We stopped sometimes on their steps, to jump down them, and glimpsed the evidence of American lives being lived behind the glass-fronted doors. On one end of our street was a bagel chain, where we sat together for half an hour along with the other early risers: commuters, shift workers, and retirees, who have forgotten how to sleep in. Shared a bagel and a bottle of apple juice through a straw. Then we wandered to the other end and found the neighborhood park: a couple of basketball courts; a field already lined for little-league soccer; a fenced-in corner for the garden co-op; and a children’s playground.

  There was another young girl at the park that morning, who had flown in with her parents from London the day before – on our flight. Her mother and I talked about the strangeness of this coincidence, and the pleasantness of middle-class American neighborhoods, which seemed to us equally strange. Especially at that time of the day, with the park sprinklers coming on, wetting the dew-wet grass, and the first joggers on foot. It feels like it would be a sin to be unhappy in a place like this, I said.

  I spent a great deal of that year in children’s playgrounds, sometimes with a book or a newspaper in hand. Sometimes with my daughter asleep in the stroller beside me, and my lunch in a bag. New England fall, which comes so highly recommended, lived up to its reputation; but the decline towards crisp bright November weather from heavy bright August weather was particularly gentle that year. As late as Thanksgiving, I could take my daughter to the park in nothing more than the wine-red jumper her dead great-aunt had knitted her. I could sit myself comfortably down on a bench, without chasing after her to get warm, for as long as it took me to read the opening section of the New York Times. The grave concerns of the newspaper print were spread out against a background of colored bars, loose leaves, and sand.

  Occasionally I saw the little English girl again with her nanny, but never her mother. There were plenty of others though. My own mother is German, and I try to speak German to my daughter as much as I can. This tends to attract questions, and questioners. The neighborhood we lived in had a good supply of home-grown Germans, employed by the universities and the local tech industry. So I practiced my Deutsch on them, which is for me really the language of my childhood and calls up childish feelings and memories.

  Another youthful association: one of the mothers I met was a woman named Kelly Kirkendoll, recently divorced, with two children. She looked familiar to me when I first saw her, lifting her boy off a slide he was climbing up, to let another kid go down. And I wondered if we’d been at college together. But Kirkendoll is a good Texan name, and her maiden name turned out to be even more familiar: Manz. The Manzes lived in the posh colonial house, red bricks and white columns, on the corner at the top of our road – a baseball throw from the house I grew up in. We used to get the bus to school together in the morning. But Kelly was pretty and fair and naturally sociable and unreserved, and I was none of those things and never said more to her than a few words. She seemed to me more approachable now.

  ‘I’m a mess today,’ she tended to announce when she saw me – as a matter of habit. A kind of apology for being thirty-three instead of thirteen. As if to say, what must you think of me, I’ve gotten older.

  She had moved to Cambridge with her husband a few years before for the sake of his job. Which meant giving up her own job, as an elementary-school teacher. She wanted to get back to work, and Austin, Texas, but it was complicated for legal reasons, and her divorce had only just come through. So she was ‘treading water’ – her phrase, though it summed up what we both felt about those playground days. The first time I saw her she had both kids in tow. Later, once the older boy was settled in school, our three-year-olds learned to occupy each other. We could sit more or less peacefully on one of the park benches and let the afternoon go by.

  Sometimes my work-thoughts carried over uncomfortably. My daughter was only three, but there were eight-, ten-, twelve-year-olds, who came to use the swings after school or climb up the more ambitious slides. Byron was said to have corrupted his page-boy, Robert Rushton, when he was not much older; and the subject of one of his most famous love poems, ‘The Maid of Athens,’ was hardly ten when Byron and Hobhouse lodged briefly with her mother on their first Continental tour. Childe Harold itself was dedicated publicly to a young girl, about whom he wrote, ‘I should love her for ever if she could always be only eleven years old – and shall probably marry her when she is old enough & bad enough to be made into a modern wife.’ By our own modern standards he was probably a pedophile and certainly a rapist, at least of the statutory kind; and it was hard not to imagine that Peter’s interest in him contained an element of something unpleasant.

  *

  Caroline found work interning four days a week at a local public radio station, which suited her, she said, much better than TV. So we hired a nanny for three of them and split the other two days of childcare. Every morning I watched her leave the hous
e in a smart professional jacket and modest skirt. The same leather briefcase clutched against her side. Then she got in the car and drove to WBNW, which was housed in an industrial park off the highway to Needham. The station she worked for had a books program, and she managed to get me an invitation to it. This made her very excited. (I used to tell her, in the first few years of our relationship, that she brought me luck.) So one morning we shared the commute and I saw her at work in the office. Thin false walls and stippled ceilings, a water keg, a few plants. Windows that couldn’t be opened overlooking the parking lot, and the heating already on in October. She sounded to me much more efficient and English than she had sounded in years, and I was reminded again of the girl I used to know, whom I didn’t know well. Afterwards, she forgot to give me a kiss, and I got in the taxi she had called for me and was driven away.

  When she came home she wanted to talk about my impressions. We always had a lot to do, from about five thirty in the evening to half past seven, when our daughter went to sleep; and these sorts of conversations would be interrupted by cleaning up, making her dinner, running the bath and so on. If one of us had something we wanted to talk about we could be easily offended. The thing I said that pleased her most was: ‘You seem really to like the job.’ To her ears, this meant that she looked natural and happy in it. But when I asked her if there was any chance it could turn into something more than an internship, she became upset. ‘I don’t want to stay here,’ she said.

  Over our own dinner, when the house was quiet again, she asked me if I ever ‘cared that our parents are friends. I mean,’ she said, ‘did it ever change what you feel about me?’

  ‘I don’t know what the right answer is. I think it probably did. It meant that I wanted to know more about you, because I liked your family. I wanted to know what it was like to be a member of your family. Is that the right answer?’