Hobhouse came shuffling back into the room, uncertainly. He noted the expression on my face, my brush lying idle on the palette.
He asked me if I would be unhappy to paint Lord Byron. I asked him if I had a choice.
‘Not really. Unless Ali Pasha forbids it. In that case, Byron will find a way to say that he did not wish it anyway. But if you do paint him, have a care to his nose, for God’s sake.’
‘Why?’
‘He is very sensitive as to its length. Several portraits have been torn apart lengthwise that have not succeeded in conveying its delicacy and, well, shortness.’
I remembered Byron’s comments about the nose of the Pasha’s granddaughter. Obviously it was only Byron’s own nose that concerned him so. I began to be unwilling to do this portrait. I said as much to Hobhouse.
‘You may be right,’ he agreed.
However, the Pasha approved the planned portrait enthusiastically. He even demanded a copy. Sittings were to commence immediately.
The next day, Byron arrived in my apartments. He gave me a business-like smile and began to set up the scene for his portrait. I was not consulted about anything. Byron chose his chair, his costume, the angle of his head. I said nothing, but determined on the usual revenge, to be extracted later in my detailings. Byron had already decided what to wear. To further flatter his host, and to indulge his taste for exoticism, Byron had ordered extravagant Albanian costumes made for himself and his retinue. It was in this guise, finer than a pheasant in its courting plumage, that he wished to be painted. He carried in his arms a large bundle of papers, all closely written.
‘These, I shall explain later,’ he said. ‘You may begin to sketch me now.’
I drew up my stool, and prepared to gaze. To put him at his ease, I asked him to tell me about his journey to Albania.
The last party at Newstead took place in May. Byron and Hobhouse left in June.
Preparations for the journey had been eccentric, expensive and extreme. There was no hope of paving the creditors so Byron made his debts deeper and more glamorous. Hobhouse had quarrelled with his father and had no money. No matter! Byron would cover all the costs, and more. Filled with Vathek-style visions of his journey, everything became an allegory for Byron. Vathek’s sumptuous progress towards the Jewel of Giamschid was always at the back of his mind. Danger, filth and disease did not frighten him. He was terrified only of the tiny humdrum inconveniences of travel. Hobhouse was to shelter him from these.
Byron took with him painted miniatures of his beautiful boy friends, and the living, breathing version of the young page boy Robert Rushton, with whom he posed for a full-length portrait while they waited for their ship at Falmouth. It was a fine picture, he told me. Byron also took with him his unprepossessing little valet, William Fletcher, whom I had met that morning. I could not understand a word Fletcher said. After that, I would often come across him, scuttling around the palace, muttering incomprehensibly to himself in some strange English dialect.
At the end of June Byron and Hobhouse embarked from Falmouth for Lisbon, just as Beckford had done thirty years before. Byron, now safely on his way, had announced in letters to his friends his intention to help Hobhouse with a book project. He would contribute a chapter on the state of morals and a treatise entitled ‘Sodomy simplified or Paederasty proved to be praiseworthy from ancient authors to modern practice’. Falmouth, a sailor’s town, had proved a delectable region, with plenty of opportunities for what he described as Plenum et optabilem Coitum– usually abbreviated to Plen & opt C — that is, full and desirable acts of sexual intercourse. It was a phrase, he explained, that he had borrowed from Petronius’ Satyricon, in which it is used to describe the provision of a boy for sexual use.
Silently, I marvelled at how heedlessly Byron had set off into a Europe still embroiled in war and bloody revolution. I myself had not dared to visit Spain or Portugal during this turbulent period, though I had received invitations from their courts. It seems that this prospect of danger merely added spice to Byron’s excitement. His concerns, like Beckford’s, were reserved for his internal journey, the alchemy that the new environments would work on his own state of mind. Physical danger seemed something clean, something raw, which might wash away the unpaid debts and compromising memories. As the sea carried them further from England, Byron, he told me, felt calmer.
In Lisbon, where the Inquisition had not yet ended, they saw horrors. Byron described how corpses lay in churches with begging bowls upon their breasts. Until enough money was put inside these bowls, the priests would not bury them. They visited Montserrat, the Moorish palace where Beckford had sheltered in the wake of his scandal. Then they travelled to Seville on horseback, passing the crosses of the murdered on every hill. They continued to Cadiz, Gibraltar and then by boat to Malta.
In Malta Byron took lessons in Arabic from a monk. He enjoyed what he told me was a platonic love-affair with the cultured, exotic, sylph-like Mrs Spencer Smith. She was hard to leave, but the East beckoned, even more strongly than before, because now Byron could smell spicy breads baking on the Turkish boats moored in the harbour, and hear their crews at night keening their homesick songs as they crouched around their fires.
Robert Rushton had been sent home because ‘Turkey was in too dangerous a state for boys to enter’. Byron was moody, missing his beautiful playfellow. In Malta, they heard stories of Gothic horror about Ali Pasha, the vizier who ruled Albania and all western Greece with Vathek-like cruelty. It was Byron’s passion to meet him, though no Englishman had vet done so.
In the middle of September, Hobhouse and Byron embarked on the brig-of-war Spider, bound for Albania. The nature of the journey had suddenly changed for Byron, he told me. He was writing all the time as the little boat crested the blue Ionian Sea. Each hour he fattened his portfolio of scribbled lines and verses on assorted sheaves of paper. One windless evening, he laid them out on the deck, and paced around them. There seemed to be a pattern, a framework, waiting to accept a decoration of poetry. It was suddenly obvious to Byron what was needed: a single, long heroic poem. How like Beckford, I thought. I understood immediately the design and purpose of the proposed poem: it would transform him, turn this voyage into an epic and Byron into an epic hero.
I imagined how Byron, as he folded the scraps of paper to his breast that night, must have breathed a new life into them. A new Byron was being born.
Byron was tired of sitting still, and jaded with talking. He rose and came to examine my sketchbook, where I had pencilled a dozen likenesses of him, and also vignettes of the journey he had described. I showed him sitting on the deck, quill in hand, at work on his poem while the sun swooped into the sea behind him. I did not sketch the languid beauties of Mrs Spencer-Smith.
‘A good start,’ he said condescendingly, looking at my pictures of him. In my mind, I promised him a little blemish on the final portrait for that.
We walked out on to the terrace, to stand in the last glimmer of the dying light. Byron clutched his manuscripts to his breast. I have always been vulnerable to that time of the day. Byron, too, looked frail in that keen light. How narrow his outline seemed against the evening glow of the hills! The sunset came suddenly and violently. As we watched, the sun seemed to suffer a black cloak thrown over it from behind. Shafts of loud orange darted from the black sky; it seemed as if the shrouded sun were being dragged, screaming, off to prison.
Hobhouse joined us, with his new admirer Mouchar beside him. Byron became animated again.
‘Ah Hob, you have arrived at just the right point. I am telling Cecilia about the moment I became a romantic poet. Quite possibly the romantic poet.’
Hobhouse, Mouchar and I slapped at mosquitoes on our arms. Byron was untroubled. I had already noticed that the insects never feasted on his skin the way they had devoured Casanova. What did they know? I asked myself.
Byron unfurled his manuscripts. I saw that he had sketched a rough approximation of a frontispiece. ‘I present Childe
Birun, Tragic exile, Adventurer, Lover, the Young Poet of the new century.’
Hobhouse explained in more details than I needed that ‘birun’ was the antique spelling of his friend’s name. Then he asked, ‘Are you really going to use your own name for this poem?’
I remember Byron looking out over the mountain passes as he replied, ‘I use my real pain, my real sweat, my real seed, when I write, so why not?’
Hobhouse remonstrated, ‘Think of your mother, Byron.’
‘You’re right. That fat bitch does not deserve to be immortal. Let’s call me Childe … Harold.’
‘That’s not what I meant, Byron, but yes, Harold will do very well. May he make you rich and famous, and enable you to pay your creditors.’
‘Lords do not take payment for literature. And if I did, I would not use it to pay the damned tailor.’
‘Or the carriage-maker, or the furrier, or the vintner …’
‘None of them. Women, though. Plen & opt C, cunts at any price. What I earn with my brain, I shall spend on my bollocks.’
‘Byron!’ exclaimed Hobhouse, turning to look and me; then, ‘Cecilia!’
For I could not help myself. I was laughing. It was a bare, dark laugh, ringing out like a slap upon the face.
Chapter 7
Al lume de candela
no se varda nè dona nè tela.
By the light of a candle,
you do not judge women or paintings.
VENETIAN PROVERB
If you ask me today why I fell in love with Byron then, I would tell you that it was because I could not paint him. He eluded me. And therefore won me. I, the cacciatrice, the huntress of men’s faces, could not capture his on canvas, and perhaps that was because his essential personality was verbal and not physical. His words hung around me, refusing to be lured to my brush. It is a problem we portrait painters have. We always paint a still, silent image. The act of speaking splits the human face in half. So we do not paint it, though we may elongate the mouth a little and expand the wings of the nose just slightly to suggest its possibility. But we cannot capture the act of conversation, which is the act in which we know each other. Even the best portrait is therefore always a likeness in which something is just a little wrong around the mouth.
There is another aspect of portrait painting that conspired to make me unable to paint Byron, and unable not to love him. When you paint a portrait you sum up a life. With Byron, you could not do this, because he was one person one instant and of a completely different species the next. His nature was irreducible. For an addict of novelty, such as Casanova had taught me to be, this aspect was irresistible. It was impossible to be bored by Byron, though you might easily be outraged by him. Every quality was spiced by an infusion of its opposite. Every sentence was a confessional and a mockery of that confession. A portrait must reveal all the qualities that are the sitter’s alone. No one painting could express that of Byron. Even a triptych, of angel, devil, man (which I considered, and then feared the consequences of this profanity in Ali Pasha’s violent court) would not have expressed it properly. Byron, Hobhouse warned me, delighted in the failure of others, so he constantly dangled his image in front of portrait painters. Now it was for me to try to grasp him.
Casanova had not liked overmuch to be painted; he was not sufficiently fond of the shape of his own skin to keep it constantly in his sight. He offered himself humbly as a model, to help me. When he studied the results, he was looking chiefly at the progress of my technique. I think Casanova felt that it had been enough, by the time I met him, to carry about that image of himself, which he had not designed, and merely accepted, let alone to have it carried around for posterity. Remember, he had told me, ‘To tell you the truth, I have always looked like a great sinner.’ And there was a weariness in his voice, as if his appearance had forced him endlessly to enact the sins it promised.
Byron was exactly the opposite. He wanted himself stamped all over the future. He had mirrors everywhere, to catch himself. He loved any kind of water, particularly water in which he could see himself. He loved the dusty windows at Newstead, which trapped his image in reflection. But those mirror-portraits were merely ghosts of Byron’s present reality. When he did not look at them, they vanished.
So he commissioned portraits: oils, engraving, pencil sketches. From his earliest years, he collected images of himself. And these portraits gave him access to himself: to angles he could not always capture in the mirror; to poses he could not always hold; to a youth that would not ever fade. They could preserve forever a sexual attractiveness that would never fatten or slacken from its glamour. Portraits caught him at his moment in time, and stretched that moment of supremacy into the infinite. No one could ever forget George Gordon, Lord Byron, with a portrait of him in the room.
I had finished my preliminary sketches. I was ready to start the main work.
Byron thought he had set his own scene, but, experienced sitter that he was, he did not see my infinitesimal adjustments to what he thought he had prescribed. He wanted a life-sized picture. But I did not paint people to their full size. I always painted them a fraction smaller. This is because, even in sociable Italy, we tend to stand a little distance from each other, so we see each other just a little smaller that we really are.
I usually painted with three-quarter light upon the face. This is the most flattering illumination because it avoids the asymmetry usually revealed by a full-face view. Asymmetry is antipathetical to our notion of perfect beauty. I hasten to add that almost no one is perfectly beautiful, in a technical sense, and those who are often in fact appear to have something lacking.
Sometimes I lit my subjects from underneath, which could create a sense of drama and even of the occult. To imitate Rembrandt I would hang a chandelier directly over the head of the sitter, perhaps two and a half feet above it. For people with a luxuriant coiffeur, this was a gift, for it made of their hair a spun jewel. I always worked in the dim light of a candelabra so that I could exaggerate to myself and therefore lie convincingly in oil about the beauty of my sitters. Candlelight erases wrinkles but preserves the essential structure of the facial bones. It enables the painter to be faithful and to flatter at the same time.
So, although it was morning, I drew the curtains, and lit the tapers when Byron came in and assumed his pose with studied carelessness. His body was comfortably disposed on the Pasha’s sofa. He presented his left profile, upraised to eliminate the incipient double chin I had already detected. He turned his head this way and that in the wash of candlelight till he found the place where the little flames burned out the shadows of his nose, leaving it pure, delicate, tulip-like. As if unconsciously, he ran his fingers through his hair. Afterwards, a feather of hair crested his delicate ear and a small curl lay upon his neck like a caress. He knows all the tricks, I thought, he has left me no blemishes to subdue.
I myself had one more trick to cajole a dazzling portrait out of him. I put on my hat with little clips around the crown. To each clip was affixed a tiny lighted taper. Now I approached Byron, gazing as languidly as a Madonna. I did not meet his eyes, but let mine slide slowly over every angle of his face.
Without actually touching him, I nuzzled him with the pinpoints of light on my crown of thorns. The tenderness of my examination, the caress given only in silhouette upon the wall, had its effect. I felt the coolness on my throat when he drew in his breath. He forgot to be beautiful. He let me describe him in light. I circled him, gentling touching his eyes, his eyelashes, his brows, his lips, with the points of my light. Then, as I had hoped, he raised his eyes to me in what seemed a visionary gaze. That was what I would paint, and I knew that it would sit well with him afterwards.
When I withdrew to paint my first colour sketches of Byron, he seemed dazed. He had watched me all morning, with tiny motions of his eyes. He was too expert a sitter to move his head. He had some hours to recover his thoughts. As I opened the curtains to show him that the first sitting was over, he announced his ow
n findings: ‘Today I studied your mouth – it was more inviting than I had thought before. You know, Madame Cecilia, you should allow me to kiss it, for the sake of the painting. How can you paint my lips unless you know bow they feel?’
The kiss again, traduced again, I thought. I said, ‘You can tell me about Low they feel. When I am painting your eyes, or some other part.’
‘Some other part? Which other part? May I choose? We ought to talk less and feel more, Madame Cecilia.’
‘But you are a writer, my Lord – your trade is words. From your own lips, of your own lips, I will believe what you say of them, and paint it. Other than that, you must allow me to practise my own trade as best I can.’
‘But you need my help lake my lips. Your painting can show the world how they looked in the moment of execution, but it cannot show how they got to be that way. You see my lips: they are full, they are bruised with kisses, they turn slightly at the corners because of the tragedies I have suffered. Now that you have heard this from me, and also because’ – he was so sure of himself — ‘you have already heard these things about me, you will paint those lips better than before.’
He paused. ‘But you are still not doing your best work, because you have not kissed them yourself.’
Byron did not like sexual aggression in his women. He was stupefied when I calmly put down my brush and conducted a perfunctory act of research upon his lips. I already knew from my long researches that beautiful lips do not always taste ambrosial. I found Byron’s tinny to taste and unyielding in their surprise. There was a faint smell of vinegar. I returned to my easel and said, ‘Now I continue in full knowledge of your lips. I hope you will be satisfied with the result.’
His voice was high and agitated. The words spilled out of him. ‘No I am not satisfied, you have not given satisfaction, you have not even taken it. It was a horrible kiss. I thought you Catholic women kissed better than anyone. I thought that worshipping your little idols made you experts in osculation. How could you kiss me like that? It was a cold kiss. Perhaps you prefer your own kind?’