by Edna O'Brien
His letters home were jaunty, asking for news of deaths, defeats, capital crimes and misfortunes of his friends. His mother learnt that if he married it would be with a sultana who had half a score of cities as a dowry.
In full ‘magnifique’ Albanian uniform, with a silver sabre, he was received at Ali Pasha’s court in Tepelene, a room paved with marble, a fountain playing in the centre, scarlet ottomans all around and a physician to conduct the colloquy in Latin. His Highness the Pasha, aged about sixty, was a short fat man with a long white beard, with a surprising mildness of manner, whose own head would one day be on a stake in Constantinople. He was immediately drawn to the young and beautiful Lord, ‘a pretty stripling’, whose small ears and very white hands bespoke the true rank of nobility. At first he enquired after Byron’s health, then respects were paid to Byron’s mother, then to Byron’s singular beauty, followed by a request that Byron would regard him as ‘Father’ for as long as he remained in the Empire and pay a visit to him at night when he would be at his leisure.
Byron and Hobhouse were assigned quarters in the palace, their every necessity gratis, and from Ali Pasha twenty times a day Byron was coaxed with gifts of sherbet, almonds and sweetmeats. In their honour each evening a feast was prepared, four fires blazed in the courtyard for kids and sheep to be roasted, black slaves, eunuchs and hundreds of soldiers in attendance, horses caparisoned and ready for action, couriers constantly entering and leaving with dispatches, the kettle drums beaten, boys calling the hour from the minaret of the mosque, whirling dervishes, and the boastful recital of great and barbarous deeds.
After a one-month stay, it was time for the travellers to take their leave and on a galliot with a crew of forty, provided by Ali Pasha, they set out but were almost shipwrecked on the way to Greece, the Turks being no great navigators. Byron, revelling in danger, described it graphically to his mother–
Two days ago I was nearly lost in a Turkish ship of war owing to the ignorance of the captain and crew…Fletcher yelled after his wife, the Greeks called on all the saints, the Mussulmans on Alla; the captain burst into tears and ran below deck, telling us to call on God; the sails were split, the main-yard shivered, the wind blowing fresh, the night setting in, and all our chance was to make Corfu, which is in possession of the French, or (as Fletcher pathetically termed it) a watery grave. I did what I could to console Fletcher, but finding him incorrigible, wrapped myself up in my Albanian capote, and lay down on deck to wait the worst.
They escaped drowning only because the captain allowed the few Greek sailors on board to manage the ship and make anchorage on the rocky coast of Suli in northern Greece.
SEVEN
‘Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!…Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth…?’ Byron’s plans were to spend a year in Athens to study modern Greek and then to set out for Asia. Travelling by land, through robber-infested passes, they arrived at Missolonghi, a flat marshy promontory with a few fishermen’s huts built on stakes in the water, where no Sphinx was there to foretell that some fifteen years later it would become the last fateful domicile of Lord Byron.
At the ancient site of what was left of Delphi, the aspiring men of letters, Hobhouse and Byron scratched their names on a broken column. At the foot of Parnassus, seeing a flight of eagles, which Hobhouse insisted were vultures, Byron took it as an auspicious sign from the god Apollo and there and then composed a stanza for Childe Harold.
On Christmas Day in 1809 Byron had his first view of the Plain of Athens, Hymettus, the Aegean, the Acropolis ‘burst upon the eye at once’ and a more glorious sight he had never seen. They took rooms in the house of Tarsia, widow of a Greek who had been a British vice-consul and mother of three beautiful daughters, all under fifteen, the ‘Divinities’, who with their red Albanian skullcaps and yellow slippers, behaved with infinite courtesy when they served at the frugal table. Like that other great specialist of the female form, Gustave Flaubert, whose libidinous genius was quickened when he went to Egypt, Byron noted every feature and gesture of the Divinities; in the evening doing needlework or playing the tambourine, they removed their slippers and tantalisingly gathered their limbs under their clothing on the divan.
‘Damn description’ he would say, but his bulletins to his friends and to his mother, swift and uncluttered, are marvels of observation, the waves of the Aegean sapphire and gold, the beauty of Illyria, the bogs of Boeotia, places without names, rivers not laid down in maps, discoveries to fuel his zest for adventure. The Troad, the plains of Troy, he described at first as a fine field where a good sportsman and an ingenious scholar could exercise feet and faculties. He went each day and sat on the tomb of Patroclus and read Book Eight of Pope’s translation of the Iliad, praising Pope’s genius and berating those coxcombs who had ‘topographised and typographised King Priam’s dominion in three days’, upstarts who questioned the siege of Troy, obliterating the greatness of Achilles, Ajax and Antilochus.
Byron’s curiosity was inexhaustible and his mind encyclopaedic. Julius Caesar wore a wreath of laurels to hide his baldness and not because he was a conqueror and Prometheus’s fire was a fire of the mind. In less classical mode, he noted that the Turks had no foreskins, that sodomy and smoking were the main vices and that St Paul need not have bothered with his epistles at Ephesus, as the church he preached in was converted to a mosque.
Heroic musings were mingled with regret at the loss of the golden age of Athens. The narrow streets were crammed and squalid, Turks, Greeks and Albanians jostling for a foothold and everywhere, ruins, ‘a nation’s sepulchre’ as he put it, the haunts of the gods no longer revered as shrines. At the Acropolis he saw and rued the crumbling pediments, columns defaced by elements, defaced by time, by conquest and by looters, ruins that mirrored the ruin within himself and the wounds that would magnify and that he sought to repress through love, through poetry and through action. He lashed out against the paltry and grasping antiquarians, filling their vessels with valuable and massy relics and his particular wrath was reserved for Lord Elgin, whose dastardly devastation of the Parthenon was a rape, marbles taken and dispatched to England ostensibly to enlighten aspiring architects and sculptors. In The Curse of Minerva, published in 1812, the goddess not only curses Lord Elgin but curses those he will sire and Byron likens the brazen robbery to the ravages of Turk or Goth. The honour of England, as he said, would never be advanced by the plunder of Attica.
Before sailing east for Constantinople in April 1810, Byron had ‘hot from the anvil’ completed the first draft of Childe Harold, which Hobhouse dismissed as having too much exaggeration and declamation. Byron put it in his travelling trunk and decided to seek glory otherwise. When the frigate Salsette anchored at the strait of the Dardanelles, he and Lieutenant Eakenhead swam the broad Hellespont, from Sestos to Abydos, a feat of which he was more proud than he could possibly be over any other glory, political, poetical or rhetorical. He had placed himself among the ranks of the mythic Greek hero Leander, who as Ovid said, ‘at the command of love’, swam each night to visit his love, the priestess Hero, in her tower at Sestos. Byron, in less mythic mode, decided that Leander’s conjugal powers would have been extremely depleted by the swim.
As they approached Constantinople in windy weather, Hobhouse described the ‘vast capital rising from the forests of cypresses and overtopped with innumerable domes and slender spires’, whereas Byron was struck by the gloom of the Seraglio walls that protected the empire of the ‘Eastern Caesars’. A proliferation of new, startling sights and sounds, streets bustling with thieves, jesters, trafficking women, teeming humanity, splendid things and shocking things, the dogs lapping up the blood of the slain, yet Byron shirking from nothing because as a poet his manifesto was that he would write ‘from the fullness of [his] mind, from passion, from impulse, from many motives, but never for the sweet voice’.
In the city in his gold-embroidered scarlet dress and feathered cocked hat he attracted attention, his delicate features however suggesting a
feminine appearance and even Sultan Mahmoud II, who received him on his throne in yellow satin, his turban alive with diamonds, was convinced that the English Lord was ‘a woman in man’s clothes’.
While in Constantinople, Byron learnt three essential Turkish words–‘pimp’, ‘bread’ and ‘water’. Hobhouse meanwhile was preparing to go home at his father’s most insistent summoning. In July 1810, the Salsette pulled in to the harbour of Keos in Greece and the two friends parted, Hobhouse describing it as ‘tearful’ as they divided a nosegay of flowers, whereas Byron rejoiced that the year of purgatory with Hobhouse was over. Yet before long he was resuming his affectionate tone in letters–‘After all I do love thee, Hobby, thou hast so many good qualities and so many bad ones.’
Byron returned to Athens and took lodgings in the fourth-century Capuchin monastery at the foot of the Acropolis, in the company of boys and men. He had wearied of the daughters and maids of Athens, because their mothers had tried to dragoon him into marriage.
Hymettus before him, Acropolis behind him, fed on woodcock and red mullet, drinking wine with the monks, he was blissfully happy, his days ‘a riot of one kind or another from noon till night’. In this Paradise of men and boys, he selected one of the ‘sylphs’, fifteen-year-old Nicolo Giraud, a pupil at the monastery, to be his pet, and writing to Skinner Matthews, he said he intended to relieve the boy of his very last inhibition.
As was true for all his deeds, Byron was credited or discredited with either acts of courage or blatant dissipation. One evening, on his ride back to the city from the woods, he saw that a girl sewn into a sack was about to be cast into the sea by the Turkish police for her crime of illicit love. With threats and ultimately with a bribe, Byron persuaded them to give up the girl and later that night he had her shipped in secrecy to Thebes. Rumours of this chivalrous rescue circulated in Athens among the English set. It was also insinuated that Byron had been the girl’s lover and hence the cause of her near-execution, something he was uncustomarily reticent about, except that the incident and the terror it instilled in him remained ‘icy even to recollect’, the feelings re-rendered in a poem, The Giaour, written in 1813.
The 35-year-old Lady Hester Stanhope, another indefatigable English traveller, besotted by the East, whom Hobhouse had described as a ‘violent peremptory person’, happened to be in Athens at that time, with her younger lover Michael Bruce. From her launch as she arrived in Athens, she sighted Byron diving at Piraeus harbour, where he swam each day, and while her lover would fall under Byron’s spell, Lady Hester did not. Byron was somewhat hesitant in her company, ever nervous as he said of ‘that dangerous thing a female wit’ and determined not to ‘argufy’ with her. She thought him a poseur. To her physician Dr Meryon, who travelled with her, she said that Byron ‘[was] all avarice and capriciousness, everything he [said] and [did had] an ulterior motive’. Hearing of the rescue of the girl, Lady Hester said Byron wanted to prove himself to be ‘a sort of Don Quixote’. Contrary to all the plaudits about his beauty, Lady Hester remarked on the vice in his looks, ‘his eyes set too close together and a contracted brow’. This would contrast glaringly with another description of Byron from the surgeon Dr Forrester, of the sloop Alacrity, who would say, years later, that the expressive furrows that streaked Byron’s forehead ‘disappeared with the fleeting rapidity of the Aurora Borealis’. Lady Hester mimicked Byron for her English friends, his habit of drawing a little curl over his forehead and speaking Romaic, modern Greek, to his servants with silly affectation.
So even as Byron was caught up in these several adventures, the elite circles in London were hearing glimmerings of him. His letters to his mother and Mr Hanson were increasingly summonses for remittances, yet his letters to Hobhouse and Scrope Davies brimmed with accounts of coitus, the sylphs, as he called them, ‘vastly happy and childish’. Nicolo, at ‘his own most pressing solicitation’, followed Byron everywhere and as he said to Hobhouse, it was padrone and amico and puppy-like sexual cavorts. Tom Moore, however, described these liaisons as ‘brotherly’.
For Byron Greece was ‘the Dome of Thought, the Palace of the Soul’. He loved the mountains, the blue Aegean and its isles, the stones, the fallen columns, skies redolent of heaven and everywhere the spectre of lost valour. It was also, he believed, the nation which made him a poet. Kindled in him then, at the age of twenty-two, was the necessity for Greek independence, Greece betrayed or pawned by Russians, French and English, needing but a convoy of arms, to rise up against the Ottoman tyrant.
If he could receive ‘cash and comfortable news’ he would not trouble ‘the foggy island’ of England again. The ‘comfortable news’ came as a summons from Scrope Davies, the loans he had guaranteed in 1809 had gone unpaid, as had the interest on them, for which Scrope was responsible.
‘I cannot sleep and much fear madness,’ Scrope wrote, adding that he was being hounded by annuitants and creditors and was subject to arrest day after day. Byron had written to him in the intervening time, the letters a miscellany of ramblings, sojourns, lubricities in bathhouses, ending with the insouciant hope that Scrope was ‘in good plight’, and that his agents had released him of any responsibility. Except that they hadn’t. His solicitor, Mr Hanson, had not communicated with him for over a year, leaving him to assume, in his make-believe fantasia regarding money, that Rochdale had been sold, that the lands in Norfolk had been sold, that debts were paid and that he was an affluent young man. It was not until Scrope wrote to say ‘Nothing but your return can relieve me’ that Byron, albeit lurchingly, realised that he must go home. He brought Nicolo Giraud with him to Malta. There he met, at her instigation, Mrs Constance Smith, who was holding him to a sacred promise, but the flame was quenched and moreover he was suffering from tertian fever, haemorrhoids and syphilis, having been ‘clapped’ as many of the English fraternity in Athens were, from Greek and Turkish women. Having enrolled Nicolo in a Jesuit school, in May 1811 Byron set out for England consumed with disgust and disenchantment, so that neither maid nor youth could delight him any longer.
In his journal he set down his mordant feelings–
At twenty three the best of life is over and its bitters double. I have seen mankind in various Countries and find them equally despicable, if anything the Balance is rather in favour of the Turks. 3dly I am sick at heart…4thly A man who is lame of one leg is in a state of bodily inferiority, which increases with years and must render his old age more peevish & intolerable. Besides, in another existence I expect to have two if not four legs by way of compensation. 5thly I grow selfish and misanthropical. 6thly My affairs at home and abroad are gloomy enough. 7thly I have outlived all my appetites and most of my vanities aye even the vanity of authorship.
The journey on the frigate Volage, from Malta to England, took six weeks, giving Byron ample time to recall the licentiousness and wonders of his travels, the Turkish baths, ‘those marble paradises of sherbet and sodomy’, and to contemplate his very precarious future. He must go to Notts to raise rents, to Lancs to sell collieries, back to London to settle debts and then board a cargo ship for anywhere. In a bristling letter to his mother he resumed his peremptory tone–
You will be good enough to get my apartments ready at Newstead; but don’t…consider me in any other light than as a visiter. I must only inform you that for a long time I have been restricted to an entire vegetable diet, neither fish nor flesh…so I expect a powerful stock of potatoes, greens, and biscuit; I drink no wine. I have two servants, middle-aged men, and both Greeks…I don’t suppose I shall be much pestered with visiters; but if I am, you must receive them, for I am determined to have nobody breaking in upon my retirement: you know that I never was fond of society, and I am less so than before. I have brought you a shawl, and a quantity of attar of roses.
A letter to Francis Hodgson gives a more candid picture of his despair–‘I am returning home without a hope, and almost without a desire’ he wrote on that long introspective voyage home. With him were two Greek servants,
his paraphernalia consisting of four ancient Athenian skulls, a phial of Attic hemlock and four live tortoises. On 14 July 1811 the frigate docked at Sheerness in the Thames Estuary on the Isle of Sheppey, two years after his departure. He did not hurry to Newstead or Rochdale to settle his ‘irreparable affairs’, but installed himself at Reddish’s Hotel in St James’s Street. His first and most pressing imperative was a trip to the moneylenders, though his former landlady, Mrs Massingberd, could no longer go guarantor for him, her own finances being catastrophic. Old friends rejoiced at his homecoming, Hodgson burst into appalling verse–‘Return my Byron to Britannia’s fair’–Scrope Davies arrived ‘with a new set of jokes’ and Byron, on borrowed money, set out for Kent to visit Hobhouse, who at his father’s insistence had joined the militia and was now Captain Hobhouse, about to be dispatched to Ireland with his regiment, to keep the precarious peace.
Regardless of his straits, Byron resumed his opulent ways, ordered a vis-à-vis, which he presently had to exchange for a carriage belonging to another Cambridge friend, the bold Sir Wedderburn Webster. Despite his lifelong and averred admiration for Napoleon and his dislike of the Duke of Wellington, he blithely informed his solicitor Mr Hanson that he might join the campaign in Spain. He spoke of his own lackadaisical quality at that time, but it could be more accurately described as a paralysing indecision. Money being the magnet, as he said in a letter to his sister Augusta, Hanson was also being instructed to squeeze remittances from the collieries at Rochdale and secure copyhold rights for the estates in Norfolk.
In his trunk there were two works, which he had penned abroad, the first, a satire, Hints from Horace, for which he had high hopes, and the second, Cantos One and Two of a long poetic narrative in Spenserian measure, which was called Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, having been previously named Childe Burun’s Pilgrimage. These he entrusted to a kinsman by marriage soon to become his self-appointed agent, Reverend Robert Charles Dallas, to get his opinion of them. Dallas thought the satire insipid, but having read Childe Harold and shown it to Walter Wright, who had been Consul-General of the Ionian Islands, they decided that Byron had ‘struck a vein of gold’. The mythologising and legendising of a young poet whose experiences, though manifold, still left him alone in the world, had a whiff of greatness and originality. Those scenes in the East of palaces and gardens and shipwrecks and decapitated bodies and slave women and thwarted love and wine bouts and Ottomans and Mussulmans had been put to thrilling use by the young Lord. For his ingratiating report Dallas was handed the copyright of the poem as a gift and so set about finding a publisher.
