Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny. David Crane

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and in January 1817 she gave birth to his daughter. The following March the baby was christened Clara Allegra Byron, but other than giving the child his name the father was unmoved. Boredom with Claire had long turned to an uncharacteristically implacable dislike of what he called her ‘Bedlam behaviour’, and even when the following year he agreed to assume responsibility for his daughter, it was an arrangement from which the mother was ruthlessly excluded.

      It was this unstable, passionate and generous woman, with a past and pedigree to match – the step-daughter of Godwin, the sister-in-law of Shelley and the ex-mistress of Byron – with whom Trelawny now fell violently in love. Claire was still only twenty-three when they first met at the house of the Williamses in February 1822, a gifted linguist and musician, dark haired, clever and attractive enough – whatever the evidence of Amelia Curran’s Rome portrait – to have inspired at least one brilliantly shallow lyric of homage from Byron.

      In her journal Claire recorded this first meeting without comment, and yet even had she felt any reciprocal interest at this time, the sudden death from typhoid of her daughter Allegra in the convent where Byron had placed her was soon to eclipse all else. In the immediate aftermath of the news Claire seems to have behaved with a dignity and calm that surprised everyone, but the silence of her journal over the next five months is an eloquent measure of a grief which only grew with the years.

      It was a grief, too, which no one around could ignore, an event about which no one could remain neutral, and Allegra’s death marks the first major split in the Pisan Circle that had gathered around Byron and Shelley, the first bitter issue over which those battle lines were drawn that were to hold their partisan shape way beyond the deaths of the main protagonists.

      At a time of such drama and tension it is difficult to see Trelawny remaining indifferent, but there is no clue to the way his relationship with Claire developed until in a sense it was all over. In the wake of Allegra’s and Shelley’s deaths his kindness must have brought her closer in the same way it did Mary and Jane, and yet as Claire prepared over the summer of 1822 to leave Italy there is nothing in any surviving correspondence that could possibly suggest a crisis in their friendship, and still less the torrent of passionate letters from Trelawny that followed her into her long exile as a governess.

      That crisis is cryptically marked in her journal. The last prosaic entry had been for 13 April, just six days before Allegra’s death. It resumes again on Friday 6 September 1822, with a simple note of the date and nothing else. Three years later, however, while Claire was living on the country estate of her employers at Islavsk, outside Moscow, another entry gives some hint of what that date had meant to her. ‘Tuesday August 25th. Septr. 6th.’ she recorded, using both calendars

      Lovely weather. I think a great deal of past times to-day and above all of this day three years, but the sentiments of that time are most likely long ago, vanished into air. This is life. So five to nothing but toil and trouble – all its sweets are like the day whose anniversary this is – more transitory than a shade – yet it had been otherwise if Inwalert had been different and I might have been as happy as I am now wretched.¹⁹

      In Trelawny’s letters over the autumn and winter of 1822–3, however, the crackling fallout of that day in September has left a less ambiguous trace. It is impossible to say with any certainty what happened when they met for the last time on the banks of the Arno, but the bond that it established and its devastating impact on Trelawny are beyond question. Over the next months he sent letter after letter to Claire in Vienna, violent and tender, demanding and conciliatory, histrionic and emotionally truthful by turn. ‘A gnarled tree may bear good fruit,’ he gnomically declared from the back of his horse in one undated letter soon after, ‘and a harsh nature may find good council …’

      let us be firm and staunch friends we both want friends – you have lost in Shelley one worthy to be called so – I cannot fill his place – as who can – but you will not find me altogether unworthy the office. Linked thus together we may defy the fate that separates us for a time – with united hearts – what can separate us … In solitude silence or absence I think of your words – and can even make sacrifices to reason … ²⁰

      The last six lines of this letter have been scratched out by Claire, but enough of Trelawny’s correspondence remains uncensored to underline the Byronic tenor of his courtship. You ‘tortured me almost into convulsions,’ he told her in a letter written from Pisa when he realized she was irreparably lost to him, ‘have left me fetid, morbid, and broken hearted.’

      Why have you thus plunged me into excruciating misery by deserting him that would – but bleed on in silence my heart – let not the cold and heatless mock thee with their triumphs.²¹

      ‘Your weak impress of Love was a figure Trenched in ice; which with an hour’s heat dissolved to water!’ he complained on 4 October,

      you! you! torture me Claire, your cold, cruel heartless letter has driven me mad – it is ungenerous under the mask of love – to enact the part of a demon … you have had my heart, and gathered, and gathered my crudest, idlest most entangled surmises … I am hurt to the very soul. I am shamed and sick to death to be thus trampled on & despised, my heart is bruised … much as endurance has hardened me, I must give you the consolation of knowing – that you have inflicted on me an incurable wound which is festering & inflaming my blood.²²

      ‘I have used no false colours,’ he again told her with more emotional than literal truth, ‘no hypocrisy – enacted no part.’

      I have as dispassionately as I could – disclosed my feelings … I loved you the first day, – nay before I saw you, – you loathed and heaped on me contumely and neglect till we were about to separate – Clare I love you and do what you will – I shall remain deeply interested for you. I think you are right in withdrawing your fate from mine – my nature has been perverted by neglect and disappointment in those I loved – my disposition is unamiable. I am sullen, savage, suspicious & discontented – I can’t help it – you have sealed me so.²³

      Somewhere behind the grief, the mortification and the posturing at Claire’s abandonment, however, Trelawny probably knew, as he suggests here, that she was right to keep their two fives apart. There seems no need to question the intensity of his feelings for her, and yet it is difficult to resist the sense that it was her history as much as herself that attracted him, or that his love was something that could flourish more easily in absentia.

      This was something Claire, despite her genuine and lasting fondness for him, also recognized. ‘I admire esteem and love him;’ she wrote to Mary Shelley eight years later, when experience had damped down those passions that had ruined her life,

      some excellent qualities he possesses in a degree that is unsurpassed but then it is exactly in another direction from the centre of my impetus. He likes a turbid and troubled life; I a quiet one; he is full of fine feelings and has no principles; I am full of fine principles but never had a feeling (in my life). He receives (every) all his impressions through his heart; I through my head. Che vuol? Le moyen de se rencontrer when one is bound for the North Pole and the other for the South.²⁴

      It is characteristic of Trelawny that at the same time as he was berating Claire for her inconstancy, he was consoling himself with other affairs, but without her or the circle that had gathered round Shelley and Mary, his life threatened to lapse back into the brainless rhythms of former days. On 22 November, he wrote half-heartedly to her of his plans. Byron’s boat, the Bolivar, which СКАЧАТЬ