Byron in Love Read online

  On 24 September 1821, while still in Ravenna, Byron wrote his most scalding and relentless letter to his publisher. It is a masterpiece of rage, reproach, self-righteousness and ultimately the epitaph of a wounded man whose country had cut him off. ‘Dear Murray’ it began,

  …I wish to propose the following articles for our future–That you shall send me soda powders–toothpaste–toothbrushes…that you shall not send me any modern or (as they are called) new publications in English–whatsoever–save and excepting writing, prose or verse, of Walter Scott–Crabbe–Moore–Campbell–Rogers–Gifford–Joanna Baillie–Irving (the American) Hogg-Wilson (Isle of Palms Man) or any especial single work of fancy which is thought to be of considerable merit.

  The quantity of trash he had received as books was in his opinion incalculable and neither amused nor instructed him. Reviews and magazines were ‘but ephemeral and superficial reading’. In Italy very little was known of literary England except what reached them ‘through some garbled and brief extract in some miserable Gazette’. His closing words were even more haughty–‘I will keep my mind free and unbiased by all paltry and personal irritabilities of praise or censure…to let my genius take its natural direction.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  ‘I am going to Pisa’ Byron wrote to Augusta in October of that year, implying that things were different between him and Teresa, and in throwaway manner said, ‘You know that all my loves grow crazy–and make scenes.’

  The Gamba family, because of their imprudent revolutionary zeal, were banished from the Papal States, destined to permanent exile, seeking asylum in one place after another, stripped of their honour and whatever means they had had. Teresa refused and eventually only agreed after being told that by the orders from the Vatican, she would either be sent back to her husband or despatched to a convent.

  Byron, ‘not so furiously in love’ as at first, did not follow with the alacrity that Teresa would have wished. Packing, preparing, swearing, sweating, blaspheming, setting out across the Apennines, over bad roads and torrential rivers, was not at all conducive to his work. Also, the news of his intended departure from Ravenna was deemed a public calamity, the poor sending petitions to the Cardinal in order to persuade Byron to stay.

  ‘What are you doing, my Byron, what are you thinking?’ Teresa wrote, adding that the two hours before sunset were an unbearable agony for her, fearing that he would be assassinated in the woods by either the Vatican spies or the Austrian police. Indifferent to such a fate, he wrote back to say he had misgivings about going, foreseeing very serious evils for the Gamba family and for her in particular. At other times he clung to the unlikely belief that he might be able to use his influence with Comte Giuseppe Alborghetti, Secretary General of the Province, who had the trust of the papal legate, to have the family pardoned and reinstated. The Mother Superior in the convent at nearby Bagnacavallo, to which he and Teresa had placed Allegra a year earlier because she proved ‘obstinate as a mule and ravenous as a vulture’, had heard a rumour that he was leaving Ravenna and wrote to invite him to pay a visit. She enclosed a letter of Allegra’s: ‘My dear Papa–it being fair time I should so much like a visit from my Papa as I have many desires to satisfy; will you please your Allegra who loves you so?’ Byron found it lacking in flattery and merely a stunt to get ‘paternal gingerbread’.

  His procrastinations to Teresa were myriad, waiting for the post from England, an intermittent fever, a second application for permits as Lega, the buffoon, had let the others expire, carriers to be procured from Pisa for his furnishings, as those at Ravenna were too expensive. After two months a convoy set out with his saddles, his books and his bed on the long journey over the Apennines by Covigliaio, Pistoia and Pisana, but Byron still remained in the empty palace along with the servants, sleeping on straw beds and, as Lega was to tell Teresa, ‘Mylord is in very ill humour.’ His banker, Pellegrino Ghigi, was the unfortunate one to be donated most of Byron’s animals, a goat with a broken leg, an ugly peasant dog, a bird of the heron type which only ate fish, a badger on a chain, two very old monkeys, and any transactions pertaining to Allegra’s education.

  With his aversion to scenery, he set out on 29 October in the dark hours before dawn, and on the road between Imola and Bologna, half asleep, his carriage met with another carrying Lord Clare, his friend from Harrow, and the meeting of a mere five minutes seemed to annihilate all the years between, filling him with a sweet sensation as if rising from the grave, claiming he could feel Lord Clare’s heartbeats in his fingertips. On that same road further along his carriage passed a public coach, taking Claire Clairmont from Pisa to Florence to commence her duties as a governess, a last glimpse of the man she so vauntingly pursued and who had shattered her life.

  The carts carrying his possessions had arrived ahead of him, the officials of the Buongoverno, alerted to the danger that he might be, had sent their reports to the Grand Duke. A student by the name of Guerazzi wrote that an extraordinary man had arrived in Pisa, ‘one of royal blood, great wealth, sanguine temperament, fierce habits, masterly in knightly exercise and possessing evil genius’.

  On the road between Florence and Pisa and in the spirit of atonement, he had written a ‘versicle’ for Teresa, which by being in English, she perhaps did not see that it lacked the aching sentiments of ‘Stanzas to the Po’, written for her some two years earlier.

  Casa Lanfranchi, which the Shelleys had found for him, was a sixteenth-century feudal palazzo on the Arno, built of Carrara marble, which suited Byron’s sense of grandeur, as did the hearsay that Michelangelo had designed the staircase. Spacious it was, though not with sufficient stables to house his eight horses, his imperial carriage and the three other carriages necessary for conveying the coterie of friends which Shelley had gathered in order to establish a ‘utopian’ circle in Pisa. Fletcher was also convinced that it housed ghosts, so that it replaced Newstead in Byron’s gothic imaginings, Newstead, after so many long delays and bogus auctions, had been sold, much of the £94,000 it fetched swallowed by Byron’s debts.

  A translation of his poem The Prophecy of Dante had been submitted to the Commissioner of Pisa, who informed the Grand Duke that it would indeed ‘augment popular agitation and encourage fanaticism in youths’. The translator had added his own hackneyed opinion of the work for the Duke’s perusal–he had found it turgid, difficult to digest and had had to divest certain images of their prosaic garb, assuring the Commissioner that he had merely translated it to serve the Party. Circulation was promptly prohibited. Yet Byron carried on in his insouciant ways, sleeping till noon, having seltzer water and biscuits, then sometimes from sheer hunger downing a concoction of cold potatoes and fish with vinegar, to quell his appetite, but as he told Edward Trelawny, he had no palate. Trelawny, a Cornishman, dark with flashing eyes, the very epitome of a pirate, claimed to have slept with a copy of Byron’s Corsair under his pillow and had come to Italy expressly to join Byron’s circle. He would, in the fullness of time, vilify his benefactor and write a vicious memoir in which Byron was charged with a vacillating mind, self will, with being intolerant, peevish and vindictive, his apparent cordiality a fraud, his whole character contrasting vilely with Shelley’s sublimity of soul.

  Teresa had to be content with seeing her cicisbeo when he visited her and her family in the small villa, Casa Parra, on the Lung’ Arno, because Byron had entered a gregarious phase among the medley of expatriates that included Shelley, his cousin Tom Medwin, Trelawny, Captain Williams and Walter Savage Landor, who on principle spoke to no Englishman except Byron. Medwin encouraged Byron to reminisce, slyly gathering material for a book, which he published after Byron’s death and which Fletcher pronounced as containing ‘no conversation of his Lord’. Later, Leigh Hunt, with his petulant wife and yahoo children, would be added to the circle, living on the ground floor of Casa Lanfranchi, Shelley having conceived the idea that they would launch a magazine, The Liberal, which Augusta, now sedulously pious, predicted to Annabella would be
‘atheistical’. Hunt would also write a bilious and untruthful memoir of the man whom he troubled day after day, despite his ‘sorriest arithmetic’, for a cool hundred of his crowns. Byron, filled with avarice and cowardice, was in Hunt’s opinion the consequence of an unhappy parentage and ought never to have existed.

  Away from the Adriatic and unable to swim, Byron resumed his practice of marksmanship, only to discover when he applied to the Governor, from whom he could hardly expect leniency, that it was forbidden to carry or use firearms in the city. He rented a pasture from a farmer some few miles outside it, to which he and his boisterous friends repaired each afternoon, to compete with each other by shooting at silver coins wedged into forked sticks. When Teresa learnt that the farmer’s daughter was being decked with armloads of very pretty bracelets, she decided that she and Captain Williams’s wife Jane would ride there each day by coach to witness the boyish feats of their wanderlust men.

  Byron gave lavish dinners with all the refinements of Regency England, his staff of eight supplemented with extra help, quicksilver conversation and gossip, which was not at all to Shelley’s liking, who had envisaged metaphysical discussion but instead had his nerves shaken to pieces as the group regaled themselves with vats of claret until three in the morning. ‘I have lived too long near Byron’ Shelley wrote as he decided to extricate himself from Byron’s ‘detested intimacy’ and moved to Lerici on the Bay of La Spezia.

  Women were excluded from these soirées and Teresa in her little house on the Arno had to rely on the friendship of Jane Williams, whom she found ‘sweet’, and Mary Shelley, whom she found ‘prim’. Mary Shelley however was not immune to Byron’s magnetism, admitting that he had the powers to arouse deep and shifting emotions in her, but his ruthless behaviour towards Claire Clairmont and the subsequent abandonment of Allegra had stirred her soul to anger.

  TWENTY-TWO

  In his journal Byron had written that if he ‘erred’ it should be heart which would herald the way. The greatest blemish of that complex and tormenting heart was towards his Allegra, whom, though he called her his ‘natural daughter’, he treated with contemptible cruelty. She was the pawn by which to punish the ‘odd-headed’ and later, ‘damned bitch’ Clairmont who had come prancing after him and got herself pregnant.

  Allegra was a precocious little girl, given to vanity and love of distinction, traits he could surely ascribe to himself. In her Vie, Teresa Guiccioli would claim that Allegra reminded him too much of her mother and that he left the room in disgust whenever she came in. He had her sent from Venice to Ravenna and when he went to live in the Palazzo Guiccioli for a time Teresa made a show of loving her, taking her for drives in her carriage on the Corso, each afternoon. Allegra was a great favourite with everyone on account of the fairness of her skin, which shone, as Byron wrote, ‘among the dusky children like the milky way’. But she was also prone to fevers, which worried Claire exceedingly, blaming the climate of Ravenna which was as ‘objectionable’ as that of Venice. Byron told everyone that he would not tolerate such objections from that source, yet in the end it was Allegra herself who precipitated her own banishment. She was, as he told Hoppner, ‘perverse to a degree’ and with Teresa’s help he secured a place for her in the Capuchin convent at Bagnacavallo, twelve miles from Ravenna. It was Pellegrino Ghigi who brought the four-and-a-half-year-old child, in her nice dress and coral necklace, with her dolls.

  In a letter to Shelley, Byron said it was a temporary move and to Hoppner and all others there were the usual platitudes about inculcating learning, morals and religion in her. Shelley was her one visitor, bringing her a gift of a gold chain and finding her not so precocious as before, but ‘shy and serious’. She expressed the wish that her Papa and Mammina, meaning Teresa, would pay her a visit, while her real Mammina was writing Byron letters that veered from the imploring to the outraged. Byron was intransigent, vowing that Allegra would never quit his custody and Claire, becoming more desperate, thought up madcap schemes such as having Allegra kidnapped or forging a letter in Byron’s handwriting, saying he wished her to be sent home. After he left Ravenna for Pisa, Shelley asked him to place the child in a convent at Lucca, but Byron refused the request, because Allegra out of sight, could also be out of mind.

  In February 1822, Claire wrote a letter that was heartbreaking and weirdly prophetic–‘I assure you I can no longer resist the internal inexplicable feeling which haunts me that I shall never see her anymore. I entreat you to destroy this feeling by allowing me to see her.’ Byron did not respond, merely saying that Claire could not live without making a scene. Shelley, in an uncustomary outburst, said he would with pleasure knock Byron down and Mary saw that Byron was remorseless and unprincipled.

  In a strange twist of fate Claire had travelled secretly to Pisa, to join the Shelleys on the Bay of Spezia for the summer, when Byron received the first news from Ghigi that Allegra had been ‘ill, dangerously ill’. Byron sent a courier, requesting the nuns to send for Professor Tommasini of Bologna, but presently an express messenger arrived to say that the child had died ‘of a convulsive catarrhal attack’. It was Teresa who broke the news to him and in her Vie she wrote: ‘A mortal paleness spread over his face, his strength failed him and he sunk into a seat…He remained immovable in the same attitude for an hour and no consolation seemed to reach his ears, far less his heart.’

  To Shelley, Byron wrote that the blow was ‘stunning and unexpected’ but defended himself, brooking no reproach whatsoever in his conduct, his feeling or his intentions towards the child. The Shelleys alone with Captain and Jane Williams were debating how to tell Claire, except that she guessed it by their expressions, yielded to a hysteria and yet soon after, as Mary said, was ‘tranquil, more tranquil’ than she had ever been.

  ‘The body is embarked–in what ship–I know not–neither could I enter into details’ Byron wrote, adding that Teresa had to give instructions to Henry Dunn, a merchant at Leghorn, with regard to conveying the remains to England. Meanwhile he bombarded Murray with instructions–the hearse was to be conveyed from London Wharf to Harrow with no expense spared, a fine hearse and mourning coach, the horses decked with feathers and velvet coverings, wands for the pages and proper mourning garments for the clerk, sexton and beadle at Harrow Church. She was to be buried in a spot in the churchyard on the brow of a hill facing Windsor, where he had spent many boyhood hours. The funeral was to be as private as was consistent with decency. Yet in contrast to such elaborate arrangements he was having arguments with both the embalmers and the apothecary at Leghorn, claiming he was being overcharged on account of his rank, offering one-third of the fee they proposed, since the remains were those of a child and not an adult. When Ghigi’s brother-in-law, a priest, along with another emissary, came to Pisa to meet with Byron, they were turned away by Lega Zambelli, and in a greater breach of feeling, Zambelli asked if good truffes could be procured in the Romagna for his Lordship.

  Byron had also composed a eulogy for Allegra to be carved on a marble tablet and placed inside the church door, paraphrasing a verse from Samuel–‘I shall go to her but she shall not return to me.’ The Rector, the Revd John William Cunningham, along with the churchwardens did not welcome such impertinence and Murray was told that the inscription Byron proposed would ‘be felt by every man of refined taste to say nothing of sound morals to be an offence against time and propriety’. Eventually Allegra was buried inside the church door but without a tablet bearing her name. She was, after all, ‘a bastard child’.

  In the convent, nuns and pupils were in paroxysms of grief, a statue was made in Allegra’s honour, dressed in her clothes, with a white fur tippet and the gold chain that Shelley had given her. Byron was sent the remainder of her clothing, three coloured cotton frocks, a velvet frock, a muslin frock, a cap and gloves, a string of corals, a silver spoon and fork, along with her bed linen and furniture, while Claire had to be content with a likeness of Allegra which the Shelleys had to wrest from him, along with a lock o
f the child’s hair.

  A few months later, on her way to Vienna to work as a governess, Claire wrote to a friend saying that though she had tried to admire the scenery, she kept seeing in her mind ‘her lost darling’.

  A few months later, in July 1822, Trelawny came to tell Byron that Shelley, Captain Williams and a boat boy were missing at sea. Trelawny claimed that Byron’s lips quivered and his voice wavered upon hearing the news. The friendship with Shelley had turned sour not only because of Allegra and Claire but because of Shelley’s inadequacy in Byron’s company, Byron making no secret of the fact that he wished to be the greatest living poet and therefore eclipsing Shelley. Shelley’s anger and jealousy would have been magnified had he known that in a letter to Tom Moore Byron had nicknamed him ‘Serpeant–a siren voice of forbidden truth’.

  The ‘siren voice’ was no more.

  Their friendship may have ruptured but they had once been ‘brothers’ in their poetic aspirations, both disciples of Rousseau whose doctrines however did not impinge on their private and wayward mores. In their ‘Frankenstein summer’ of 1816 in Geneva when they met, the friendship was forged, they were kindred spirits and outcasts in pusillanimous English society. The two of them sailed each day in Lake Leman, debating God and free will and fatalism and destiny. Then in the evenings, to amuse themselves in that ‘curst, selfish, swinish country of brutes’ Byron decided that they should compose ghost stories and read them aloud. It was in Villa Diodati, on the lake shore, near Cologny. The group included Shelley, Mary, the persistent Claire and Polly Dolly, physician and embryo author. In that intoxicating environment Mary would conceive the idea of Frankenstein which was published two years later and which Byron extolled to Murray–‘Me thinks it is a wonderful book and remarkable for a seventeen year old girl.’