by Edna O'Brien
That fluke when a writer chances on a situation, whereby the sluice gates of the unconscious are thrown open, is seismic. Waterloo was for Byron what the madeleine was for Proust. Ploughed fields, unmarked graves, importune boys selling swords, helmets, buttons and cockades, and yet standing there and in the next days returning to gallop over it was an apotheosis. In a note to Hobhouse he wrote how he ‘detest[ed] the cause and the victors’ and yet Waterloo wrung from him his greatest poem, contrasting the gaiety of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels with the cannons’ opening roar and the eight-hour battle in which fifty thousand lives would be lost–‘Rider and horse,–friend, foe,–in one red burial blent!’ It shows Byron at his most profound, signalling the horror of war, the pity of war and above all, the madness of war. In this he was akin to Goya, who at that very same time was painting his greatest, most searing and indignant canvases, depicting the battlefields where the Spanish militia and Napoleon’s soldiers had inflicted such barbarities on each other.
But while Byron was brought face to face with the gravity of history, Augusta stood on less hallowed turf at home. Children with colds and chilblains, Augusta Charlotte showing signs of retardedness, Georgina having fidgets and Medora still in the nursery, Colonel Leigh bilious and with a belated suspicion of her intimacy with Byron. Their debts were so exorbitant that they were endeavouring, but without success, to sell Six Mile Bottom to one Reverend William Pugh, only to find that though they owned the house, they did not own the paddocks in front of it. Her reputation almost in shreds, Augusta knew that her post as Lady of the Bedchamber to the Queen and the small stipend that came with it, were in jeopardy.
Byron did love her, was haunted by memories of her, that summoned trees and brooks and flowers, but he could also summon the Promethean strength that propelled him into poetry, whereas Augusta could not. Aeneas loved Dido and he trembled when her shade reached him far out at sea, yet he went on to great conquests, whereas Dido impaled herself on the sword that she had taken from him. Augusta did not impale herself, but what she did was to throw herself on the mercy of Annabella, who had joined an evangelical sect and whose prime motive now, with the collusion of Theresa Villiers, was to establish Augusta’s criminality. She wanted from Augusta an admission of the irreparable damage she had done to Byron, a confession to the crime of incest. ‘Do not suppose that I wish to exact any confession,’ Annabella wrote, but that was exactly what she resolved to do. However, Augusta did not utterly crumble under these interrogations and in a hasty scrawl she protested her innocence: ‘Dearest A, I have not wronged you, I have not abused your generosity…intentionally I have never injured you.’ Annabella, now assigned as ‘Guardian Angel’, went on to tell her that she must relinquish the pernicious hope of ever seeing Byron again or of being his friend. How quashed Augusta must have been to learn that Byron had betrayed her by showing the babbling letters she had written him to two of her greatest enemies, Caroline Lamb and Lady Melbourne. Her pyrrhic victory was to send Annabella copies of the letters she was receiving from Byron, leaving the outraged wife to declare to Mrs Villiers, ‘They are absolute love letters.’
Unaware of these conspirings, Byron continued to send Augusta gifts, crystals, jewellery, toys for her children and for Ada, along with humorous vignettes of his adventures: the imperial calèche breaking down again and again, the deroute to Brussels, the visit to the fields of Waterloo, pastured rich with the blood of the dead; music and waltzing in Brientz, Flanders a place of pavements, Cologne with a repository containing the bones of eleven thousand virgins and Verona housing the supposed tomb of Juliet. In Milan he was fêted as successor to Petrarch, where he also met the shy young Stendhal and was enraptured at being able to read the love letters and verses between Lucrezia Borgia and her uncle Cardinal Bembo, in the Ambrosian library. ‘And beauty draws us with a single hair’ he wrote, because of their shared affinity for Pope, promising to bribe the curator to let him take a strand of Lucrezia’s hair to send to her.
He had written for Augusta a journal of the Alps, the ‘Jungfrau with all her glaciers; then the Dent d’Argent, shining like truth; then the Little Giant (the Kleine Eigher), and the Great Giant (the Grosse Eigher); and last, not least, the Wetterhorn’, yet reminding her that neither these, the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor glacier nor cloud lifted the weight upon his heart. In ‘Stanzas to Augusta’ she is referred to as the ‘solitary star’, the ‘gentle flame’ by which he is buffeted against total destruction. But it is Manfred, a three-act drama, begun in Switzerland and completed in Italy, that is the most naked admission of his love of her.
‘A very wild, metaphysical and inexplicable thing’ as he said, inspired by the vastness of the Alps, Goethe’s Faustus, and fuelled with the lava of his rage, regret and vengeance. Astarte, named after a pagan goddess, is the sister whom Manfred loved but his embraces were fatal to her. Alone in his Gothic castle in the high Alps, he summons the magical deities to grant him obliteration. Instead, Astarte appears but is numb to his agonised pleadings and vanishes as he endeavours to embrace her, at which he swoons. His battles continue on those cold heights, his suicide thwarted by a chamois hunter who gives him the wine of life, the spirits and the Witch of the Alps mocking him as a creature convulsed with passions and seeking things beyond mortality. With Promethean determination he wrestles with these supernatural forces, including the Giant Steed Death, vowing that ‘his torture be tributary to his will’, and in death he speaks defiantly to an abbot–‘Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die.’
Goethe might praise Manfred’s ‘heavenly hue of words’, but in England the repercussions were vicious and once more the gossip regarding his incestuous relationship circulated. When it appeared in 1817, it was savaged. The Day and New Times reported that ‘Manfred has exiled himself from society…he has committed incest…Lord Byron has coloured Manfred with his own personal features.’ Mrs Villiers, in a letter to Annabella, claimed never to have been so disgusted, so horrified, and that by its publication Byron must surely be damned in the eyes of the world. The indictment of Annabella herself, who appears as the ‘other woman’, with ‘cold breast and serpent smile’, could hardly have escaped her. Yet to Augusta Annabella wrote imperiously, telling her how she must reply to Byron regarding this pernicious work–‘You can only speak of Manfred with the most decided expression of your disapprobation. He practically gives you away and implies you were guilty after marriage.’ Augusta did write to Byron, but true to what Annabella would call her ‘glissant’ character, the disapprobation was muffled.
Augusta’s replies to Byron’s letters became more and more evasive, ‘full of megrims and mysteries’, so infuriating him that he asked her to rise above ‘commonplace people and topics’, except that she was the prisoner of commonplace people and topics.
From Venice, in 1819, he wrote Augusta a letter that must stand as the deepest testament of his feelings–
My dearest Love–I have been negligent in not writing, but what can I say. Three years absence–& the total change of scene and habit make such a difference–that we have now nothing in common but our affections & our relationship.–But I have never ceased nor can cease to feel for a moment that perfect & boundless attachment which bound & binds me to you–which renders me utterly incapable of real love for any other human being–what could they be to me after you?…we may have been very wrong–but I repent of nothing except that cursed marriage–& your refusing to continue to love me as you had loved me–I can neither forget nor quite forgive you for that precious piece of reformation–but I can never be other than I have been–and whenever I love anything it is because it reminds me in some way or other of yourself.
She sent it to Annabella with a categoric request: ‘Burn it.’ Annabella did not burn it, she copied it for the lifelong ‘Histoire’ of the man she had spent thirteen months with and returned it to Augusta with a semblance of grace that had long deserted her.
EIGHTEEN
Marianna’s nemesis came in the person of another fiery young woman, Margarita Cogni, the Fornarina, wife of a baker, also young, with tantalising black eyes, the Venetian looks and the spirit of a tigress. Murray would be told in gleeful detail of the contretemps between these two women, La Segati and her gossips discovering by the neighing of his horse that he had gone late at night to meet the Fornarina, whence they followed, staging an operatic brawl, screams, curses, the throwing back of veils and in explicit Venetian, the Fornarina telling his amica: ‘You are not his wife, I am not his wife, you are his Donna, I am his Donna’, then stormed off. She then made herself indispensable to him in the running of the Palazzo Mocenigo, former home of the Doges, which he had rented for £200 a year, the Fornarina walking about in hat and feathers and a gown with a tail, intercepting his mail, paying a scribe to write letters for her, and servants continually ‘redding the fray’ between her and any other feminine persons who visited. Her Medea traits and Venetian ‘pantaloonery’ amused him for a time, but when she became ungovernable and he asked her to leave, she refused, wielding a knife, Fletcher had to disarm her. Boatmen carried her out whence she presently threw herself in the canal and was brought back intending to ‘refix’ herself in the palace. Byron threatened that if she did not quit the premises then he would, and ultimately she was returned to her irate husband.
The nineteenth-century watercolour by W. L. Price depicts Byron in his piano nobile, reclining on a chaise longue, with his dog at his feet, but there are other less languorous glimpses of that eccentric ménage. Shelley gives a hilarious account:
Lord B’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels as if they were masters of it…later I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean palace was defective, I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane.
Shelley had been introduced to Byron by Claire Clairmont in Geneva in 1816 and both he and Mary were instantly captivated, but by the time they met again in Venice the friendship was fractured. They were appalled by Byron’s debaucheries, consorting with the most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted and the most filthy creatures, Byron bargaining with mothers and fathers for their daughters, brazenly naming his conquests from contessas to cobblers’ wives and claiming to have ‘tooled’ with two hundred women of one sort or another. But worse for them was his wilful and gratuitous cruelty to Claire and his cavalier treatment of the little daughter Allegra, who had come with her Swiss nurse Élise to live in the Palazzo Mocenigo, Byron’s welcome less than fatherly, when in a note to Hobhouse he wrote: ‘My bastard came three days ago–healthy–noisy–& capricious.’
When Claire’s daughter was born in England on 12 January 1817, Shelley wrote to Byron to say ‘the little being’ was extremely beautiful, with the deepest blue eyes, and they had given her the name Alba, meaning dawn. After a year, following Shelley’s enquiries about his plans for the child, Byron decided to ‘acknowledge and breed her’ himself. He gave her the surname Biron, to distinguish her from Ada, his ‘little Legitimacy’, and rechristened her Allegra. His conditions were that her mother would have no say whatsoever in the child’s ‘personal, moral and doctrinal education’. Claire conceded, because she was young, penniless and at first led herself to believe that Allegra would have a more privileged upbringing with her father, never foreseeing the tragic and peripatetic fate of the child.
‘I have sent you my child because I love her too well to keep her,’ Claire wrote aged twenty, having decided despite her misgivings to give the little girl up to Byron, believing that she would be guaranteed a brilliant future and not end up as a waif. From the moment the child was brought to the Palazzo Mocenigo by Mary Shelley’s Swiss nurse, Claire was eclipsed. Allegra was pretty and precocious, but as Byron said, possessed of ‘a devil of a spirit’. Claire would write asking for news. ‘Do not make the world dark to me as if my Allegra was dead’ she pleaded. He maintained his silence, and was caught up in the general dissolution of his life and entanglements with women.
Claire never saw the child again, even though she begged Byron to show mercy and at least be acknowledged as her mother, but she well knew that any word from her mouth was ‘serpents and toads to him’. She wrote reams of letters, pleading, menacing, reproving and heartbroken, but they were ignored. His monstrous cruelty was both to punish the young woman who had brazenly pursued him and for whom he had formed such an antipathy, and to compound his own convoluted guilt.
When the ‘adorable bambino’ began to show the burning temperament of her father and her mother, Byron placed her in the care of the British Consul-General Richard Belgrave Hoppner and his wife, who was not particularly fond of her, and when they had to leave Venice she was entrusted to their servant Antonio and then transferred to Mrs Masters, wife of the Danish Consul, by which time she showed the remoteness of an abandoned child.
All Venice came to know the stravagante Lord, his black crimes written on his brow, stories of him jumping fully dressed at night into the canal, to seek out chance pleasures, carrying a torch to enable him to sight the oars of the gondoliers. The palace, as Byron conceded, was a ‘bacchante with pieces to perish in’, but insisted that there were no feelings, all was ‘fuff-fuff and passades’, and the women, by their own wiles or that of their mothers, extracted from him large sums of money and jewellery. England would be apprised of his harlotry, in a joint letter to Hobhouse and Douglas Kinnaird he recited the names–
the Tarruscelli–the Da Mosti–the Spineda–the Lotti–the Rizzato–the Eleanora–the Carlotta–the Giulietta–the Alvisi–the Zambieri–the Eleanora da Bezzi–(who was the King of Naples’s Gioacchino’s mistress–at least, one of them) the Theresina of Mazzurati–the Glettenheimer–& her Sister–the Luiga & her mother–the Fornaretta–the Santa–the Caligari–the Portiera–the Bolognese figurante–the Tentora and her sister–cum multis aliis? & some of them are Countesses–& some of them Cobblers wives–some noble–some middling–some low–& all whores.
As his Rake’s Progress continued, he suffered bouts of giddiness, ‘flying rheumatism’, syphilis, gonorrhoea and self-disgust, yet surprisingly found time to write, even though composition, as he told Murray, was akin to defecation and to him a great pain. George Steiner has noted that Venice was to Byron what Rome was for Corneille, a liberation, where ‘the wing stroke of his imagination’ flowered. He wrote with the spirit of the bull when penned, a sport which entailed some good tossing and goring. Beppo, an ‘experiment in comic poetry’, was written in 1817, depicting Venice as the ‘seat of di
ssolution’. The story, concerning the plight of a lady happily ensconced with a lover and surprised by the reappearance of her husband, whom she believed lost at sea, was relayed to him by the husband of one of his mistresses. Racy and protean, it was as well ‘full of politics and ferocity’ and a precursor of his master work Don Juan, which Shelley predicted would be the greatest poem in the English language since Milton’s Paradise Lost. How greatly it differed from the sensibility of his rivals, Shelley’s ‘silver music’, Coleridge’s ‘wings of healing’, Wordsworth’s ‘wild unpeopled hills’ and above all from Keats, for whom Byron’s greatest venom was reserved, challenging Keats’s principles of poetry and his inordinate self-love. Keats, for his part, in The Fall of Hyperion, deems Byron a mock lyricist and ‘careless Hectorer given to proud bad verse’.
The two hundred and twenty-two stanzas of Canto One of Don Juan were sent to John Murray with the claim that it was meant to be quietly facetious about everything. Quiet it was not, but blasphemous and bawdy, shot with indignation and a dazzling erudition, the high romance steeped in history and resonating with the influences of the Old Testament, Virgil and Homer. ‘Donny Johnny’, as he liked to call his hero, ‘sent to the devil somewhat ere his time’, was indeed derived from Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador de Sevilla, but his peregrination differs greatly from that of Molina’s and from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
