But a poet – even an outlaw poet – has a poetic existence to support.
The poet’s debts piled upon themselves. His new extravagances ran deep into his few remaining lines of credit. I realised that he was trapped in his unaffordable opulence.
It was part of the legend. He had to spend money like water. A Byronic hero does not go begging, does not economise, does not go about in a second-hand carriage. Reading between the lines of the letters I received, and the newspapers I read, I saw that Byron was slipping, floundering and drowning in his debt.
Chapter 6
L’allegria fa scampar
e passione fa crepare.
Light-heartedness makes you feel free,
and passion makes you perish.
VENETIAN PROVERB
I did not need to worry about money, unless I wanted to do so, for I had lately acquired an aristocratic suitor, Maurizio, who for his pains truly loved me. He was the son of the elderly nobleman Maurizio Mocenigo, into whose care Casanova had tried to consign me when he left Venice for the last time. I had, of course, refused the father, but the son walked into my studio one day, and in a weak moment I decided, belatedly, to accept the kindness that Casanova had meant for me. I did not need Maurizio’s financial protection, but I needed to know that I was loved, whether I triumphed or failed. Or so I thought.
There are so many ways to be loved badly! Maurizio was tall, handsome, well-built with the wide green eyes and the outspread cheekbones of north Italy. His torso was perfectly triangular, like that of an ancient Greek athlete. But he was the anemone style of lover – inanimate apart from wildly flailing limbs, eternally and ineffectually swishing nourishment towards itself. Wherever I was, Maurizio wanted to be there too. And he took the concept of ‘being with’ to extremes. In my presence he seemed bound to me with an inflexible short cord, so that if I moved an inch, he would move an inch and a half in the same direction, sincerely believing, in the warm sludge of his brain, that I would not notice the encroachment.
I had a feeling that he would stop being lonely for me only when his blood was forcing mine around my heart and his fingernails were neatly inserted under mine. Even then he would still be needy. He could not understand how unlovely this was for me, and how it made my blood and fingernails tingle with loathing sometimes. I was not flattered. I had been loved properly, and I knew the difference.
Predators come in all forms. No one is as hunted as those who feel under sexual pressure. I kept telling myself that Maurizio filled the great vacancy in my life for tenderness and fidelity. Indeed the gap had existed since Albania, as I was not even allowed to be Girolamo’s mother in any demonstrable sense. I was so certain that I needed, that I was due, emotional nourishment.
But Maurizio, by his behaviour, forced me to think that to be alone was the thing I longed for above all others. Of course it was true that I needed love, but the screaming of my blood and fingernails when Maurizio loomed around me made me unable to think clearly. I so much wanted to love him and accept his dogged love, but his engulfing greed for me forced me to hate him when he was with me.
When he was away from me, I would rehabilitate the memory of his presence, tell myself I was fortunate to be loved by a decent person, and I would arrange to be with him again. And so we continued.
Maurizio was a kind man, but he had been bred for uselessness. It was not his fault. Sometimes, I thought I could teach him how to make love to me, but when I ventured a few suggestions, he was so nervous that he was unable to retain the information, too convulsive in his gratitude. He was unable to keep my words and his joy in the same place. When he touched me, it was with hard, sweating fingers, which did not so much stroke as prod me, not to gain pleasure but to reassure himself that I was there. He could not kiss. He knew that his tongue had something to do with the act, but when it jabbed at my mouth in little sorties from his pursed lips, I was simply repulsed and turned my head. It was easier to distract him with a more basic manoeuvre. He was too agitated to be able to take more than the most primitive pleasure, and had little control of his own climactic events. Sometimes, when I was away from him, I planned a simple voluptuous education for him, but, when he was with me, I balked at the humiliation for both of us.
Maurizio was difficult. But I had my work. And that didn’t fail me. Since Albania, I had painted more crowned and plumed heads from the East to the West. I travelled, I met people who pressed their love and friendship upon me. I had painted the celebrated Mrs Thrale in 1789, and Stendhal in 1815. I had, of course, painted Napoleon, and anyone who was anyone in Venice. Into my studio had walked Goethe, once, as you know, in 1786, and then again this same year of 1815. Later he would write to me about Byron’s Manfred, complaining loudly about Byron’s rape and pillage of his great Faustus. ‘The English poet has taken my Faustus for himself and sucked out of it a fine nourishment for his own hypochondriac humour!’ Grudgingly, though, he admired what Byron had done, for his audacity and his methodical stripping of all that was useful, and the dark turn of his mind on what he had stolen.
The foreign sitters were fascinating but I still preferred to paint Venetians. I did not think to leave Venice now: I would not leave Girolamo. Fortunately, as Casanova had foretold, the clients came to me. Venice is a wonderful place for a portrait painter because there are few trees to cast their variegated shadows into our light. For my portraits of Venetians, I would try to find out where the portrait would be hung, and make it harmonise with that space. So during the day, I inhabited the great palazzi of the Grand Canal, painting their owners, the wives of their owners, and their children, surrounded by the emblems of their wealth and nobility: treasure chests, model boats and family jewels.
But in my studio, at night, I painted the same owners, with their lovers, surrounded by red roses and flesh-coloured silk. And when I finished them, I took out my old Albanian portrait of Byron, and caressed it with my brush.
Chapter 7
Quando Dio vol castigar un omo, el ghe mete in mente de maridarse.
When God wants to punish a man, he puts him in mind to get married.
VENETIAN PROVERB
It is only now that I can tell you everything. It has taken years to piece this picture together. You already know that I have had all the best sources. By the time I met Hobhouse again, years after Albania, he was stuffed with useful information. He seemed to feel he owed it to me to tell me everything I wanted to know about Byron. As you know, there were others, too. Through what they wrote, which I later read, I also became the unknown confidante of Lady Caroline Lamb, and even Annabella Milbanke herself, in matters regarding the man they both loved, almost to their destruction, as I did.
I took it all, this information flavoured with love, jealousy and hatred, and I distilled a more piquant truth when I mixed it with my own knowledge of Byron. What did I want to do with this truth? Nothing good. In my heart, I had not parted company with Byron.
I still had that one unfinished painting of him from Albania. Every year, as my skills increased, I added just a little to it. I considered it my masterpiece. So those mere days of intoxication, followed by seven years of pain, had birthed one great portrait – a bargain, some would say, looking to the wider scheme of things. No matter how often I told myself that the portrait was finished, I always went back to it. I had not been able to let him go. Now, starved of his presence, I tried to find a more distant and accurate perspective. After all, it is only when your lover unwraps his hands from round your eyes that you really start to see again. So, unwittingly and involuntarily, everyone who knew Byron helped me to see more clearly.
From my various witnesses, I now saw Byron in trouble and heading towards catastrophe. When not with Augusta, Byron was yet again with the beautiful young men of his youth. To the repertoire of his rumoured perversions with his half-sister was added this new one, subject of crude jokes in the places of men and whispered horror in the drawing rooms of London.
I knew from the English newspap
ers, that, unlike incest, Greek Love was neither fashionable nor remotely acceptable. Sodomy was a capital crime, as brutal and abhorred as rape. I read one account of a low-life sodomite who was hanged on separate gallows so as not to contaminate other condemned prisoners. Murderers all, the others were still to be spared the presence of a homosexual in their midst. And after the Greek Lover was cut down, they burned the rope. Greek Love, it was becoming clear to me, was the one allegation that Byron could not survive. I realised that it would blight the romance of his misery. The secretive remorse of the Byronic hero would be rendered sordid if it turned out to be shielding a mere sodomite from the rightful disgust and revenge of the world.
Now the whispers were of Byron’s homosexual initiation at Harrow, where, it was rumoured, fifty pubescent boys were locked up in their dormitory at night without supervision. The gossip was that Byron had personally initiated three schoolfellows there. Byron did nothing to mitigate the case against him. He was still writing poems about the beating of his heart at the sound of the word ‘Clare’. Everyone knew that it was not a feminine Clare of whom he wrote: it was the lovely Earl of Clare, one of his great teenage passions.
At Cambridge, Byron had shown great interest in all matters of Greek Love. Stories of this time were now excavated and re-presented, in leering innuendo, in the gossip columns. There was more. New tales emerged of the lovely John Edelston, angelic chorister and undoubted bedfellow. There was the journey to Albania, the months in Greece and Turkey. Why else, the scandalmongers asked, had Byron gone to the barbaric East, avoiding the normal Grand Tour highlights of Paris and Rome, if not to satisfy his addiction to the ‘revolting passion’ that flourished there?
The hornets’ nest of rumour started to fashion itself into an arrow pointing at Byron. It seemed obvious, even to me, thousands of miles away, that Byron was about to be exposed. He needed to act. He needed a wife, quickly. Marriage was the only thing that could protect him from the threatened scandal. I heard from my English clients of the various heiresses who were proffered and considered, on a more urgent basis than before.
In the end, Byron married Caro’s cousin, Annabella Milbanke, a neat, clever, self-satisfied personage, whom he later dubbed the Princess of Parallelograms. She was chaste – prudish, in fact. She even wrote a few poems. She presented nothing unknown, nothing out of control, no challenge, no excitement: she seemed a safe haven. He was fond of her, I believe, and mildly attracted, that is, until she became his bride. It appeared that he had even proposed to her once or twice before. Annabella had turned him down, as had other heiresses, when he was running around London with the shameless, mad Caro Lamb. She had watched his relationship with Caroline, and pursed her lips, blaming her cousin, and not Byron. But now, with Caro discarded, Annabella apparently felt herself ready to ‘do her duty’, and bring the mad, bad Byron to heel.
‘But how did he feel about it?’ I would ask Hobhouse.
‘Byron had a healthy inkling of her resolve. At first he joked that he had resigned himself to becoming Lord Annabella.’
‘But why her?’
‘For years,’ Hobhouse told me, ‘Annabella had seemed the only woman in London capable of keeping Byron at arm’s length. I think he liked that.’ Hobhouse shook his head and added, ‘But even Annabella was not capable of leaving him alone.’
‘How did they become close?’
‘They did not. Instead of getting to know each other, they wrote letters.’
An arch, fey correspondence had grown between them, in which Annabella hinted delicately at a position vacant – saviour of his immortal soul – and in which he revelled in his depravity, enjoying shocking her. ‘There is no doubt that Annabella was one of the many women who fell in love with Childe Harold, and looked for him in Byron,’ said Hobhouse. ‘She just suffered for it more than most.’
‘Was she beautiful?’ I asked Hobhouse. ‘Was she fascinating?’
Hobhouse was not a portrait painter, nor even a man to revel in the beauty of women. From him, I gleaned merely that Annabella was pretty enough to be enjoyed but not so glaringly beautiful as to attract rivals in the case of neglect. Hobhouse confirmed this, in his ponderous way, concluding, ‘No, Annabella was not unworthy of attention.’ Such lukewarm descriptions! Attention would not be Annabella’s portion, however. Byron’s matrimonial creed, I already knew from our conversations in Albania – and Hobhouse would have known it too – was that one should marry a woman of good birth and fortune, whom one did not love, and breed children with her. And then leave her alone, to pursue one’s passions and one’s destiny.
‘Did Annabella not read what he wrote of Conrad, or Harold?’ I asked Hobhouse, wonderingly. ‘Did she not see what was in store for her?’
‘Oh, Annabella was full of self-confidence. She thought that, being with such a good person as herself, he would start to become good by association. She thought decent family life would soon help him forsake his bad ways.
‘Or so she justified it. I think the truth was that Annabella, despite herself, had fallen in love with Byron, just like every other girl. Then, when the engagement became public, for the first time in her life she found herself envied and talked about.’ Hobhouse added, thoughtfully, ‘She had taken first prize in the great shooting match of London high society: she had scored Lord Byron. I think that much of what happened afterwards can be explained by Annabella’s need for the kind of attention that warmed her in the engagement. Certainly, she had need of warmth, later.’
Compliments and congratulations had flooded in. Even Lady Caroline wrote to Byron. It was a letter heavy with sarcasm. Hobhouse told me, ‘She claimed to love him like a sister, like Augusta. Evil woman!’ (Ecco qua! I thought, a sister, an English lingua biforcuta!) Caro spread the word in the gossip columns that ‘a certain Lord B would not be able to survive his marriage to a certain mathematical Miss A, it not being his style to pull with a woman who went to church punctually, and understood statistics and had a bad figure’.
Secretly, Caroline was preparing an explosive wedding gift for the couple. She was putting the finishing touches to a masterpiece of her own, an expansive work of ‘fiction’, entitled Glenarvon. She had written the novel in four weeks, while locked up in disgrace for injuring a servant by throwing a hard ball at his head.
‘If you want to know about Byron’s marriage to Miss Milbanke, you should read Glenarvon,’ Hobhouse told me. ‘There you have it: how it came to be, and how it would be. Caroline is a worthless writer, but she knows her subject.’ I had my own green-bound copy, of course, within days of publication, with the usual affectionate dedication from my English client – ‘Here’s what all London is talking about now, Madame Cecilia, with love.’
Slowly, I made my way through Caro Lamb’s Glenarvon. It was a melodrama, but even its excesses brought me to tears. I cannot describe it better than to say it was like reading my own diary transcribed by some effeminate buffoon and set in a far-off country. The names were changed, but the pain was the same. So much of it, albeit expressed so badly, was true to my own experience.
In Glenarvon, Caroline left nothing to the imagination. As a lover, and now as a writer, she had always scorned subtlety. She depicted herself as Calantha, a wayward but innocent young woman swept up in the corrupt society of London hostesses and their nibbling poetic parasites. Poor, wild Calantha is seduced by the evil but fascinating Glenarvon. He is depicted as a mad anti-hero, complete with demoniacal laugh and sweeping black cape. Murder, kidnapping and seduction are his modi operandi. After ruining Calantha, Glenarvon abandons her with the coldest of cruelty for a cynical affair with a sophisticated married woman. (Caroline interspersed her story with extracts from the real letter Byron had sent her when he was staying with Lady Oxford.) Finally, Glenarvon sends Calantha to her death with the news that he is about to marry a prim little heiress, Miss Monmouth.
Caroline wrote:
Her youth, her innocence, a certain charm of manner and of person, rare and pleasing
, had already, apparently, made some impression upon Glenarvon. He had secretly paid her every most marked attention. He had even made her repeatedly the most honourable offers. At first, trembling and suspicious, she repulsed the man of whom rumour had spoken much … but alas! too soon she was over-reached by the same fascination and disguise which had imposed upon every other.
As yet happily ignorant of Caroline’s literary exertions, Lord Byron and Miss Milbanke continued with the extensive formalities. The engaged couple were nearly strangers to each other.
‘How could they let it go on like that?’ I asked Hobhouse.
‘Ah Cecilia, remember that we are not Italians. Annabella remained absorbed in her fantasy of redemption, Byron in excesses he felt justified by the coming sacrifice of his liberty. It seems to me now that neither wanted to break the shell of their remoteness: what lay beneath was too troubling to contemplate. Annabella did not want to know that he did not love her. He did not want to know that she adored him. So they hid their secrets in letters. It was fatal for both of them.’
‘So they hung themselves on their separate gallows?’
‘Yes, you could say that,’ said Hobhouse, with a sad smile. ‘It certainly seemed more like a public execution than a wedding.’ Even the proposal and the acceptance had been made by post, and Byron did not hurry to the side of his new fiancée. It was clear to everyone that he had no desire to take physical possession of her, or to rejoice in that possession. Post-engagement letters from her were frequent, as if to reassure herself of the decision. His were sparse, superficial, theatrical. I read in an English newspaper that people had started laying bets at Newmarket as to whether the marriage would actually take place.
But the deed was to be done. Byron (‘to the utter disbelief of his friends,’ commented Hobhouse) moved slowly, slowly towards his shackles. Via pilgrimages to Augusta, and Newstead, Byron made his way to his fiancée. At Newstead he carved his initials, entwined with those of Augusta, upon an elm in the ancestral park. Finally, there was nothing else to be done. Byron set off for his marriage. Never, as Hobhouse observed, was a bridegroom in less haste to claim his bride.