The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons. David Crane

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СКАЧАТЬ influenced everything in his life, his strengths and weaknesses, his politics and social manner – the awkward mix of arrogance and uncertainty – and above all the poetry that can often seem an emanation of childhood alienation. In the last great poem of his life he returned to Newstead with a freshness that underlines its importance to him, but if it is impossible to imagine the satirist of Don Juan without acknowledging the role Newstead played in his development it is as hard not to see its influnece in the lack of ‘place’ that is such a glaring weakness of his descriptive verse.

      Nothing is ever as simple as that with Byron, of course, but his deliberate, ‘aristocratic’ obtuseness about the business of poetry that clouds the issue here was ultimately no more than a manifestation of the same insecurity. One only has to think of the ease with which Keats can move through an English landscape in darkness and identify every scent and sound to see what is missing from Byron’s verse, but in some adolescent way it would have seemed beneath him to look with that kind of particularity. ‘“Where is the green your friend the Laker talks such fustian about”, Trelawny recalled in an anecdote which – true or not – neatly brings Byron’s hostility to a world with which he was at odds and poetic sensibility into a single focus,

      “Who ever”, asked Byron, “saw a green sky?”

      Shelley was silent, knowing that if he replied, Byron would give vent to his spleen. So I said, “The sky in England is oftener green than blue.”

      “Black, you mean,” rejoined Byron; and this discussion brought us to his door.¹⁸

      This insensitivity to his surroundings might seem an odd criticism of a poet whose evocation of the Greek landscape inspired a generation to fight and die for its freedom, but even then it was an idea of landscape rather than landscape itself that quickened his creativity, a sense of decline and loss that was as much imaginative projection as classical association.

      It is no coincidence, either, that the one place that could genuinely vie with Greece in Byron’s mind was Venice, and again it was the palpable air of decay that clung to the Serenissima in her dotage that gripped his imagination. There are times in fact when this almost reflex melancholy can strike an oddly adolescent note in a writer of his wit and sophistication, and yet it is precisely this quality of arrested growth that links boy and man, and – critically – man and poet in a sense of alienation that found its first and deepest expression in Newstead.

      The greatness of D.H. Lawrence’s novels, as F.R. Leavis remarked, was the proof they give that he lived, and the same could be said with even more validity of Byron’s poetry. In the wonderful satires of his last years he produced some of the finest comic poetry in the English language, and yet for all its brilliance and fun the ultimate fascination of his verse lies in the testament it offers to the courage and defiance with which Byron lived his life.

      It was a defiance that darkened everything, from the wounded bitterness with which he responded to rejection, to the reckless and self-destructive exhibitionism with which he greeted success. There are other outsiders for whom success comes as a kind of belated membership card, but it was perhaps the defining hallmark of Byronic rebellion that triumph only propelled him from the defence onto the attack, driving him in an ascending trajectory from Newstead on an inevitable collision course with the community he despised.

      This is not another biography of Byron – nor even of the notorious marriage that led to his final rupture with England – but an exploration of this timeless battle between the values he stood for and those of the community. There are any number of English authors around whose lives a similar argument might be built, but the unity of his life and art and the fame which surrounded Byron make him the one writer whose history defines in some permanent way what it means to be English.

      At the height of the marriage crisis, it was claimed with a breathtaking simplicity that men and women’s attitudes to him demonstrated whether they were ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and nearly fifty years after his death Harriet Beecher Stowe berated the English nation for any softening in its attitude to him. It seemed to the American novelist that the moral sinews of the nation had been radically weakened by his verse and life, and while she was in some ways a case apart, there was too much agreement on all sides of the political spectrum to dismiss hers as the naïve voice of New England puritanism.

      ‘England, England!’¹⁹ she lamented, and if she was wrong in her diagnosis, she was right that the threat Byron offered had not died with him. For the dozen years which followed the triumph of Childe Harold, his poetry and personality had sent his contemporaries scuttling for cover behind the city walls, and yet it was only in death that his rebellion was revealed in its full destructiveness, consuming and maiming lives with all the inexorable power of Greek tragedy until it reached its final, savage climax in the ‘High Noon’ of Byronic Romanticism that forms the core of this book.

      This was the first and last confrontation in twenty years between the two women who had been brought together by his marriage and fought over his corpse, the sister he had loved and the wife who had brought about his exile. It took place at the White Hart at Reigate, a small town some twenty miles south of London, on 8 April 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, the year Victorian England gloried in its prosperity and moral superiority with a complacency Byron would have loathed.

      Byron, though, had been dead for almost twenty-seven years. Of his great contemporaries, Shelley had been gone for twenty-nine, Keats thirty, Coleridge seventeen, even Wordsworth – the ‘Wordswords’ of Don Juan as he had long since become – one.

      And thirteen years into Victoria’s reign, it was a different world. Tennyson, who as a schoolboy had carved Byron’s name into a rock on hearing the news from Missolonghi, had just been presented to the Queen as the new Poet Laureate, his tortured frame tightly trussed in the same court dress that Samuel Rogers had once lent his predecessor. Matthew Arnold – that other representative voice of the mid-century – had just become engaged. Trollope was wondering if he would ever make a novelist. Dickens, never one to be seduced by national prosperity, was beginning Bleak House, Mayhew publishing his London Poor. George Eliot was editing at the Westminster Review, Charlotte Bronte squabbling with Thackeray, her sisters Emily and Anne, already dead. Byron’s half-sister, Augusta Leigh, was sixty seven; his widow, Annabella Byron, fifty-eight.

      Byron had been dead for almost as long as he had lived, but for the two women who met at the White Hart his memory had all the sharpness of recent bereavement. For the best part of forty years his presence or legacy had alternately enriched and shattered their lives, and this Reigate meeting was the final testament to his dominance, one last dramatic demonstration of the fear and adulation that had convulsed a generation and for which in their polar antagonisms Annabella Byron and Augusta Leigh stand the perfect surrogates.

      It is this that gives both the fascination and significance to this meeting, because the battle that climaxed at Reigate is also in miniature the archetypal struggle of the outsider and the community that had raged around Byron ever since the first publication of Childe Harold. The secret histories of these two women have a misery that no repetition can dim, and yet for all the melodrama of the story this book tells, it is the representative quality that gives a kind of Aeschylian grandeur to the history of incest, bastardy, betrayal, love and hate that in Byron’s name and memory bound them together.

      If this focus on the Reigate meeting needs no justifying, the form that has been adopted here requires some explanation. In the first and last parts of this book the methods are those of any conventional biography, but if there is a single episode in the whole Byron saga that demands a freer, more speculative approach, it is this last confrontation between Annabella and Augusta at the White Hart.

      With СКАЧАТЬ