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

Автор: David Crane

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

Серия:

isbn: 9780007396269

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      Only a handful of Trelawny’s letters survive from this period, and yet colourful as they are, they need to be treated warily as evidence of his feelings. The temptations of so sympathetic a correspondent for a humiliated cuckold are too obvious to need spelling out, but what is more interesting is the impression his letters give that he had neither the education nor the vocabulary at this period to express or even understand the more complex aspects of his personality.

      Trelawny was a late and slow developer, and nowhere is this plainer than in his correspondence. With the mature Trelawny it is a safe bet that when he writes something he says precisely what he means to say, but in his early years there is an invariable sense of a man struggling for a voice and character, of a writer fumbling towards an identity that he has not yet made his own.

      In their very turbulence, however, their romantic theatricality, their heavy posturing, these letters remain the clearest sign of the inward transformation that Trelawny underwent during the unhappy years of navy and married life. There is no doubt that in the best traditions of romantic alienation he went out of his way to exaggerate his loneliness to any woman prepared to listen, but as in childhood the misery was real enough and the overriding consequence of his marriage was to drive Trelawny into an internalized world of the imagination in which he could take refuge from the disappointments of life.

      Collaborating in this retreat, shaping and colouring this inner world, were the books on which Trelawny glutted himself during these wilderness years in Bristol and London. If his grammar and spelling are anything to go by, he had left the navy as ignorant and illiterate as the day he entered, but in the first years of peace he set out on a bizarre but heroic course of reading and self-improvement that was to alter his life, immersing himself in the tragedies of Shakespeare and the romances of Scott, in the defiance of Milton’s Satan and the violence of Jacobean revenge, in Hope’s Anastasius and Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, in the poetry of Rogers, Cowper, Young, Falconer and Moore, but above all – ten of the fifty odd volumes in his library in 1820 – in the exotic, profligate and dazzling world of Byron’s poetry and tales.

      The influence of Byron on Trelawny’s development is a classic example of the sad paradox that while great art seldom made anyone a better person bad art can be profoundly dangerous. There were certainly aspects of Byron’s wonderful mature genius from which Trelawny might well have learned but it was the self-indulgent Byron of Childe Harold that lodged in his soul, the gloomily antisocial heroes of the Eastern Tales like Lara or Conrad, mysterious, violent and aristocratic outcasts from a petty world, in whom he found the model, mirror and philosophical justification for his own troubled personality.

      It seems almost too pat that also among his books at this time was Volney’s Ruins of Empire, the work from which Frankenstein’s monster, listening at the cottage window, learned all he knew of human society, but it is too potent a symbol of Trelawny’s plight to let pass. In old age Trelawny was to become an extraordinarily open-minded and intelligent judge of books, but the failed midshipman who fed off Byron in this way was above all an outcast, an intellectual and emotional outsider incapable of measuring a world of which he was largely ignorant, desperate only to find in his reading some echo or corroboration of his own feelings.

      There is nothing rare in men or women shaping their lives by some ideal but as one looks at the influence of Byronic Romanticism on Trelawny during these years it seems doubtful that anyone ever chose so spurious a model. He seems to have been able to read and re-read the great tragedies of Shakespeare, and learn nothing but quotations. Dryden has left no mark. Jane Austen appears never to have been read. Byron, however, filled his imagination, shaped his aspirations and confirmed him in his worst excesses, determined the way he talked and wrote, the way he dressed and behaved, until within a decade it was impossible for contemporaries to know whether he had spawned the Corsair or the Corsair him.

      It was under this influence, in the boarding houses of Bristol, Bath and London, that Trelawny now committed himself to that major deception which was ultimately to transform his existence. It is hard to imagine that the idea of actual imposture can have seized hold of him all at once, and yet as the failures became starker his youthful daydreams must have taken on a more urgent and adult significance, edging the innocent escapism of his naval days ever closer to a wholesale denial of a life which had let him down.

      It would be another dozen years before the fantasies of these years took on their definitive shape in Adventures, but it is still in its pages that we can best trace the genesis of a story that for the next century and more would enjoy the status of history. According to the version of his ‘autobiography’, Trelawny’s ship was in harbour in Bombay when he and a friend called Walter decided to desert, and formed a friendship with a man calling himself De Witt, but whose name turns out to be the equally fictional De Ruyter.* Trelawny’s devotion to him was immediate and complete. There was nothing De Ruyter could not do, nothing he did not know, no way either physically or mentally that he was not Trelawny’s superior. He was approaching his thirtieth year, could speak most European languages faultlessly, and all the native dialects from ‘the guttural, brute-like grunting of the Malay, the more humanized Hindostanee’ to the ‘softer and harmonious Persian’ with equal ease.21 In stature he was majestic, ‘the slim form of the date-tree’ disguising ‘the solid strength of the oak’.22 His forehead was smooth as sculptured marble, his hair dark and abundant, his features well defined, his eyes – the windows to his restless and brilliant soul – as various as a chameleon in their colour.

      Shortly after coming under De Ruyter’s spell, the incident occurred in this imaginary version of events that ended Trelawny’s naval servitude. The two men were playing billiards, when a Scotch lieutenant who had tormented his and Walter’s lives entered. He demanded to know when Trelawny was rejoining his ship, which was sailing the next day. At this Trelawny’s blood seemed to ignite with fire, and then congeal to ice. He dashed his hat in the man’s face, tore off the last insignia of bondage from his own dress, and drew his sword. The lieutenant broke into abject disclaimers of friendship, and begged his pardon. In his rage Trelawny struck him to the ground, kicking and trampling and spitting on him as the creature begged for mercy. ‘His screams and protestations,’ Trelawny wrote,

      while they increased my contempt, added fuel to my anger, for I was furious that such a pitiful wretch should have lorded it over me so long. I roared out, ‘For the wrongs you have done me, I am satisfied. Yet nothing but your currish blood can atone for your atrocities to Walter!’

      Having broken my own sword at the onset, I drew his from beneath his prostrate carcass, and should inevitably have despatched him on the spot, had not a stronger hand gripped hold of my arm. It was De Ruyter’s; and he said, in a low, quiet voice, ‘Come, no killing. Here!’ (giving me a broken billiard cue) ‘a stick is a fitter weapon to chastise a coward with. Don’t rust good steel.’

      It was useless to gainsay him, for he had taken the sword out of my hand. I therefor belaboured the rascal: his yells were dreadful; he was wild with terror, and looked like a maniac. I never ceased till I had broken the butt-end of the cue over him, and till he was motionless.23

      The young rebel who had suffered under his father’s brutality, under the cruelty of the Reverend Seyer, and in the navy, was at last free. The mysterious De Ruyter who had passed himself off in Bombay as a merchant, now revealed himself as a privateer operating under a French flag, an enemy to all tyranny and corruption, and in the seventeen-year-old midshipman recognized his spiritual heir and child.

      It was the beginning of a new life, and under the leadership of this man, Trelawny embarked on the imaginary career of adventure, excitement, bloodshed, romance and crime which forms the great bulk of his ‘autobiography’. There СКАЧАТЬ