Lord Byron's Novel (29 page)

Wonderful are the ways of the mind, for no sooner had Ali remembered this tale, that had for so long lain unnoticed in a corner of
his,
than he knew very clearly where now he would go, and with what purpose.

NOTES FOR THE 11TH CHAPTER

1. a gaunt grey place:
   My parents were married at Seaham, in Durham, which indeed is situated upon a cliff overlooking the North Sea. It is a place I love, and where I spent my earliest years. It was in the garden of that house (I remember) as I was walking with my mother, that I asked why I had no papa, as other girls had—it was a matter of curious interest to me—whereupon she sternly and in an almost threatening manner instructed me never to speak of it again. I think a sort of dread thereupon entered my mind, which I had not known before, and have never been wholly free from since—I know it turned upon my mother, though I know not its name, nor wholly its source.
   
2. electrified:
   It was an entertainment of our grandparents, to gather a large number of people in a circle, either holding hands or all holding to a metal chain, and a shock being administered from a Leyden jar or similar device to the first person, all the persons in the circle leapt at once, to the general amazement and amusement. Lady Byron says that Lord Byron had a peculiar fear of shocks, even the little ones that come from touching hands after crossing a thick carpet, and once resigned from a gentlemen’s club because it was thus carpeted, and hand-taking a necessity.
   
3. crimson Curtains:
   So, apparently, were the curtains of Lord and Lady Byron’s marriage-bed at Halnaby. That evil-minded man Samuel Rogers (the ‘Banker Poet’), who called himself a
   friend
   of my father’s, spread the tale that, awaking in the night and seeing the fire through the curtains, Ld. B. believed himself in Hell, and wedded with Proserpine.
   
4. an acid and an alkali…Fire and Ice:
   I have no doubt whatever that this paragraph is not less than an exact description, with no fable added, of my father’s feelings at that time—feelings he could not then own, and perhaps could not have described, till some years had passed. All his wit, that kept away grief, now put aside. Pity it summons—Pity for what he then felt—pity too that he could so honestly limn it.
   
5. desperation:
   Ld. B. frankly reveals, to anyone who has heard the gossip about his relations with his wife, that he was at fault, as often as he was the injured party, and
   when
   at fault, was guilty of the worser things (at least until Lady Byron and her agents and supporters conspired—as he saw it—to take
   me
   from him, and put an end to his marriage). The picture of these events that he painted in his
   Memoirs
   must have been carefully designed to increase his own credit, and this is
   not
   —how strange then that the
   Memoirs
   should be burned, as injurious to his later fame, and
   this
   should survive—if it survives!
   
6. the child he could not own as his:
   On some days I know not why I continue these notes. Here do I appear, it seems—or my simulacrum, now born to him—yet
   not
   to him, for he has divided himself, as the writer of novels perhaps must do, into a worser and a better half, and pitted the one against the other—and I am the child of the worser half. No heartlessness of his behaviour toward me
   in life
   seems today as cruel to me as this—that he cares not what fate, or what harm, or what disgrace, come to those who loved or knew him, when he enlists them for his tale. Sticks and stones, so the children cry, may break my bones, but
   names
   shall never hurt me. Ah no. He said it himself: words are things.
   
7. untruths:
   It was always Ld. B.’s contention that he left England because the rumours of his sins and crimes at the time of the Separation from Lady Byron made it impossible for him to live in Society, without constant affront, or embarrassment—cut by old acquaintances—whispered about—ostracized. It may be so, yet I have heard old friends of his aver, that they all knew men about whom worse was said, who lived comfortably enough, and were not despised; and Ld. B. had many defenders, who would not believe the worst of him. I know not. We make our persecutions the cause of what we would do in any case.
   
8. Brougham:
   Lord Byron was convinced that Mr. Henry Brougham, who acted as a legal advisor to Lady Byron at the time of the Separation, was the one who argued against reconciliation, and that he was also the source in society of all the rumours (both true and false) of what had passed between Lord and Lady Byron that occasioned the parting. Indeed he was known as
   ‘Chronique scandaleuse’
   for his willingness to bear tales, but Ld. B.’s obsession with him was perhaps unfair. (It was he of course who later defended Queen Charlotte in her trial before the House of Lords, a marital dispute of quite another order.) Byron told Thomas Moore that if ever he came back to England he would be obliged for his honour’s sake to fight Henry Brougham.
   
9. skirling:
   This word indicates the sound of the bagpipe, shrill and continuous. I know not why Ld. B. uses it here, perhaps an error, though for what word I know not, or because he sees the curling ribbon of a line of ink resembling a curling line of continuous sound.
   
10. fonder of it than I am:
    I hear in this post-scriptum my mother’s own voice as though indeed she once wrote so to him and he never forgot or never relinquished the letter. I weep and know not for whom
    
11. a wicked magician:
    I know not if this tale be an old one, an Albanian one, or Ld. B.’s own.
    
12. America:
    I remember, reading just now this word, that I dreamt this day of a future state—not my own but a future state of the world—and this book there opened—studied—& I thought perhaps these notes too should be enumerated—as too quickly giving the key. In that future, I saw that the possessors of the text read numbers as we do letters, and equations as we do sentences. The book was clear to them at a glance. Absurd idea. I saw their fingers pass over the pages and the numbers, as the fingers of blind men pass over the raised letters of those texts made specially for them, and the numbers became words thereby to their eyes What if I have counted wrongly all nonsense then too late to recast it now But what if all was wrongly encypher’d and yet when decypher’d returned a book, but a different book unknown written by no one absurd what odds of a single true sentence even appearing too high to calculate but what book what book
    

From: “Smith”
To: [email protected]
Subject:

Lee—

I got the new pages. Are we still not surprised? Is this still a Gothic?

I see what Ada’s notes mean now. What this meant to her, to have this. I read some pages to Georgiana (that’s the lady with the originals). She said What an awful shit he was. I don’t think so. I don’t know what I think.

S

From: [email protected]
To: “Smith”
Subject: Gothic

Well it
begins
as a Gothic—the ruined abbey in the moonlight, the somnambulation—interaction with scary animals—immurement—a family curse, or evil taint—flight in the dark. There is the monstrous parent, huge (his great shadow thrown up on the wall comes right from another famous Gothic, but I can’t remember now which one). Parricide, or apparent parricide; a mysterious pursuer, the hero’s double. Thomas Medwin, a gossip and something of a fool whom Byron entertained a few times in Pisa and who thought of himself as a Byron expert ever after, says that Byron told him of a narrative he wanted to write or had written, about a man pursued by a mysterious other, who keeps interfering with his plans, seems to know all about him, seduces his beloved, etc., and when finally the hero finds him and kills him in a rage, he pulls away his cloak and discovers the pursuer to be himself—and dies in horror. So maybe Medwin got a whiff of the novel and got it cockeyed. In the usual Gothic all the apparent supernatural events turn out to have reasonable causes—they’ve been staged by the villain, or have been misunderstood, or are the result of an episode of epilepsy, etc. (I don’t know yet about this one—Ada’s notes suggest the story’s going to come out nonsupernatural.) But then the story seems to lose the Gothic furniture and becomes a society novel about marriage and affairs. Combining these things is a bit odd, but we are here at the beginning of the popular novel—all these things were new in this form, and Byron’s trying them all out, along with some I’ve never seen deployed before: his Ali is a character in a situation I think is unique.

Let me know what
you
think.

Lee

From: “Smith”
To: [email protected]
Subject: Who

I don’t know what to think—it’s such a strange voice to me—such a combination of jaunty and formal—sort of “earthy” or whatever and highfalutin. I don’t know who I’m listening to. But I wonder what’s going to happen, and I guess that’s the main thing, right? And underneath always I hear my own voice asking Who is this guy speaking to me? What is he, what does he think really? And I don’t know.

S

From: [email protected]
To: “Smith”
Subject: RE:Who

One thing I find fascinating is that it’s about an alienated boy with a monstrous father, who’s never known a mother. Byron’s case was the reverse—he never knew his father, and his mother always loved him and smothered him, which he hated—they had huge battles. Throughout all his writing (as far as I remember) there’s nothing much about fathers and sons, much less huge threatening fathers—everyone in Byron tends to be Byron-sized. Whether he was repressing all that, and it only came out this one time, or—well leave it to Uncle Sigmund to determine. It did give me pause—like you (maybe for different reasons), I wondered who I was listening to.

It’s also interesting to me that the novel turns on a failed marriage that’s so like Byron’s and yet motivated in completely imaginary ways—ways that spare both parties—not his fault, or hers, only the fault of this pursuing Fate, whose identity I think I can guess at. Most autobiographical novels work the other way: the causes, the resentments, the blames are all retained even though the events might be all imaginary.

Byron really believed that Annabella was entirely truthful and frank, and that it was those evil women around her that turned her against him. He always said he had no idea—beyond his admitted reckless self-indulgence, or melancholic fits, or occasional rages—why Annabella determined on a separation. Actually he had a
very
good idea of what things in his past—his sister Augusta, those boys in Greece, the Cambridge chorister—would have been impossible for Annabella to accept; what he didn’t know—what accounted for his air of injured innocence—was that Annabella actually knew about them. Caroline Lamb had told her, and Augusta eventually confessed. Neither one told Byron that they had betrayed his secrets. And Annabella kept her counsel.

It wasn’t like my story, police, arrest, all over the papers. Your mother not only knew, she knew everybody else knew too. And you know too, unlike Ada, who for years had only her mother’s word. You do know, don’t you?

From: “Smith”
To: [email protected]
Subject: Know

I know. That is I know what I read. I know the statute of limitations on child rape is fifteen years from the time the child is sixteen, and that ran out a long time ago. But there’s still a bench warrant out for you for fleeing prosecution or whatever it’s called, and if you come back you’ll get arrested, and you don’t know what will happen then, maybe nothing, maybe not nothing. And people are a lot angrier about these things than they were then even. All those boys and their priests. People want to repeal the statute of limitations, and they also want to make the repeal retroactive, but that might not be constitutional. See I’ve kept up. I can read the news, and I can imagine you reading the same news and thinking Oh what the hell, and logging on to Expedia and buying a ticket home. I know you have dual citizenship too, so you have a passport. I know. I’ve given it some thought. Over the years, as they say.

But here are the questions you have to answer:

1. When do you think he wrote the book
   
2. Why do you think that
   
3. When did he stop (I don’t know how to look for hints in any papers if I can’t limit it a little)
   

S

From: [email protected]
To: “Smith”
Subject: RE:Know

I want to answer your new questions, but much more I want to tell you the history of my absence from your life. I wrote letters long ago but they were sent back to me unopened (a thing Lady Byron used to do, by the way, to baffle those she couldn’t control): a letter to your ten-year-old self, and one to your sixteen-year-old self (it should have come with the Javanese devil sculpture I sent that year, but it seems that wasn’t given to you). For a number of years I just forgot it all, and you: that is, I rarely thought of you for long enough at a time that the thought would force a commitment to do something, say something—you’d come into my mind and I would right-quick open another door for you to go back out by. I got good at that. And I had work that kept me busy and that I loved. I knew people in the industry who had kids from early marriages they never saw, kids they sometimes talked about when they were drinking at day’s end—as I did—and the fact that
they
had these lost kids made it seem all right that I did, and maybe their selfishness made mine seem all right, or at least normal. They were—they
are,
some of them—monsters of egotism, great white sharks, blue whales of egotism, and mine seemed like nothing beside theirs.

The first thing that kept me away from you was the law, as you say: since I had skipped, there was no way I could see you, unless your mother had somehow decided to run with me, bringing you; but she was in fact the other thing then that kept me from you. She was so angry at me for what I’d done, or was accused of doing, and then for not staying to face the music, that the last thing she wanted was to be by my side. If I had gone to trial, it wouldn’t have been one of those you see on TV, where the scumbag who has murdered the secretary he’s been having an affair with shows up in court or at the microphones with his wife (dark dress, dark glasses) and kids beside him to “support” him. I neither claimed nor expected that kind of support. I would have been ashamed to take it even if it were offered. I am not good at repentance. Regret, yes: very thorough in that regard. But I have always thought that public repentance was actually closely akin to self-exculpation. I don’t think myself guiltless, and see no way to get guiltless. Ada’s mother would have found me a hard case.

So I missed your early years, never saw you after your fourth birthday. And even later on, when the memory faded (though not the statute of limitations) and your mother might have felt more tolerant—after all as far as she knew I’d led a blameless and even selfless life since then—she wouldn’t bring you to see me, because—well, this is going to sound almost impossible to believe, but irrational feelings can run very deep, irrational loathing and distaste and revulsion at least as deep as irrational love and sympathy—because she didn’t want you near me when you were reaching puberty. She didn’t want to
bring
you near me. Maybe she didn’t even know this. Actually though I think she did. And she got a lot of support for that distaste, a lot of theoretical support, from the feminists she associated with. Just as (okay, this is a stinger, I admit it) Lady Byron got support for her unkindness, her lack of charity, from the evangelical ladies and ministers she gathered around her. In fact I wonder if she wasn’t just a little glad, or relieved, to learn you weren’t likely to have much to do with my sex at all. Some of those women she knew were plenty glad, if their published writings are any guide: in their rogues’ gallery I have my mug shot and number. I hope—I want to believe—they didn’t make it impossible for you to ever love me, or even like me.

Well I can’t write more after all. More to come.

From: “Smith”
To: [email protected]
Subject: Love

what do you think, that mom and her friends made me a lesbian? Is that what you didn’t say but thought? You know, funny thing, but mom was the girliest girly-girl ever, except that instead of the barbie way it was the hippie-moongoddess way. She sure didn’t hate men. Maybe you don’t know. After all you didn’t know either of us all that long. I can tell you that first with Jonah and then afterward with Marc she tried
every day
to show me what a good relationship with a good man is like, how much fun it is when they treat you right, how much fun it is to treat them right, how they ought to be
true
and
kind
and kick every little stone and sharp object out of your way and try their best to see that no harm ever comes to you. I am what I am because I just am. And I know what love is, and ought to be.

From: [email protected]
To: “Smith”
Subject: RE:Love

Sorry. Email is awful. I’m not used to using it yet. The message flies out from under your fingers as fast as thought (as B. might have said) and then you push one button and it’s mailed. If I’d had to pull it from the typewriter, sign it, fold it, find an envelope and a stamp, I probably wouldn’t have sent it.

I spend all that time showing that I’m not bitter—and I’m not—and then say dumb bitter things. It’s because you’ve come to Europe at last, where I could actually see you and touch you, just at a time when it’s quite impossible for me to get there. Tell me why you can’t just keep going east—take some time off—see the world—and me too. Don’t come so near (well a thousand miles nearer) and then slip away. Don’t worry about the money either.

Now I’ve reread this and it looks okay. So here it goes. Except I see I need to add—

Love

L

From: “Smith”
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE:Re:Love

I didn’t love you or hate you. You weren’t there. You know, half the kids I knew growing up had parents who were divorced, or not married, or not men, or whatever, it was just so usual. A lot of them never saw one parent or the other, and got stuck too much with the one they didn’t like as much, the one that was “better for them.” It was okay to ask somebody, So where’s your dad? (Or mom, sometimes.) But if they just shrugged, or evaded, it wasn’t polite to pursue: if somebody didn’t know, or didn’t care, then it was none of your business. And you usually weren’t that interested anyway. But it was different if every now and then you saw a thing about your father on TV, and there he was. His picture anyway. And they would always bring up the CRIME, which you (I mean me) didn’t really get, not when I was little, and Mom snapping off the TV and putting out some distraction, Oh let’s go make a
corn doll
! Let’s go read
Pippi Longstocking
! Let’s go have a
bubble bath
! What I learned from that was that if I wanted to find out about you—and I did—then Mom couldn’t know about it.

There were things I thought you should be there for—certain moments when I felt you ought to have been there but weren’t—I can’t describe what made them so, but I don’t mean the big things, like graduations and birthdays, well maybe those too but other things, random times, just a picnic by the river or fireworks or even just nothing, finding a dead baby bird, watching the water truck spray to lay the road dust, and I would say
My daddy should be here. Why isn’t Daddy here?
And I’d wonder.

S

From: [email protected]
To: “Smith”
Subject: Corn doll

Alex—

That’s devastating. Honestly.

I’m sorry. I haven’t got further with the research today or yesterday. Tonight I went out and had some sake and ate noodles. And then more sake. And a long bath, hot as hell. Maybe tomorrow.

Sorry.

Lee

From: “Smith”
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE:Corn doll

Don’t feel bad. That was basically a lie. I can’t really ever remember saying
Why isn’t Daddy here?
I just thought I’d tell you I did. The fact is you were gone so completely and from so far back that it was easy to think you
ought
to be gone. The dreams where you came back were always disappointing, messy and wrong, sometimes even horrible. I remember one. Well never mind. You know how you can remember certain dreams you dreamed when you were less than ten, that are as real to you as memories? Especially bad ones. But awake I thought you were supposed to be gone, and if you stayed gone that was okay, because I liked things to be the way they are supposed to be. I still do.