Books: Childe Edward

TRELAWNY—Margaret Armstrong—Macmillan ($3).

Edward Trelawny knew Shelley some six months, Byron two years, but he wrote (30 years later) the most colorful firsthand report of their strange doings—Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. Last fortnight Margaret Armstrong (Fanny Kemble) reported the even stranger doings of Edward Trelawny, showed him to have been more Byronic than Byron.

Born in 1792, Edward Trelawny, like all the Romantics, was a spiritual child of the Great French Revolution. When (age 9) he beat up a schoolmaster, his father signed him up for a trick in Nelson’s Royal Navy. At navigation school Edward went birding one day with another boy, shot him, was shipped off to sea.

In Bombay the young sailor met a mysterious American named De Ruyter, one of several men for whom he was to develop romantic attachments. He shipped with him in a privateer. Armed with six 9-pounders, manned by a miscellaneous crew of Arab, Dutch, English, American adventurers, the “lovely little craft” was also stocked with a library. By night De Ruyter and Trelawny (dressed as an Arab) lay on deck, gazing at the Southern Cross during “endless discussion of freedom and revolution.” By day they sank other ships, rescued no survivors. Trelawny rescued a sheik’s daughter from African pirates, married her, took her privateering around the Indian Ocean until she died (of poison). Brokenhearted Trelawny burned her body on a pyre.

His return to England was perfectly timed. Byron had written the early cantos of Childe Harold. Young ladies were dreaming of giaours, Manfreds, Mazeppas, with wild eyes, black mustaches, long cloaks, wicked pasts. In Lausanne one day Trelawny read Shelley’s Queen Mab. He rushed to Pisa to meet the satanic author, was astonished at Shelley’s “flushed, feminine and artless face,” soon felt as romantic about Shelley as he had about De Ruyter.

Trelawny also met Byron. Yachting, Trelawny found, was almost as popular among the Pisan expatriates as poetry and revolution. He got a boatbuilder friend to construct the Bolivar for Byron, the Ariel for Shelley. One day Shelley, a very bad sailor, sailed off with two friends and copies of Sophocles and Keats. A few days later their bodies were washed ashore. Trelawny built more funeral pyres. While Byron and Leigh Hunt tossed incense, salt, sugar and wine, Trelawny lit the flames under Shelley’s fish-eaten, livid corpse. Said Trelawny: “I restore to nature, through fire, the elements of which this man was composed. . . .” Said Byron: “Why, Trelawny . . . you do it very well.” But when Trelawny handed Mary Shelley her husband’s “little black shrivelled” heart, the authoress of Frankenstein was horrified.

Trelawny and Byron decided to liberate Greece. But when Byron died at Missolonghi, Trelawny was not with him. He had met another “glorious being,” a patriotic Greek outlaw named Odysseus, “a Bolivar who might become a Washington.” They hunted bears and Turks together. Soon Trelawny (in a Greek kilt) was living with the Odysseus family in their mountain cave, had married Odysseus’ half sister. But she was too fond of European fashions, and they parted. “Marriage,” wrote Trelawny, “is a most unnatural state of things.”

At 60 Trelawny published his Shelley and Byron. The book caused a storm. Says Authoress Armstrong: “Admirers of Shelley believe every word. Admirers of Byron and Mary Shelley pick and choose.” The book was really an epitaph on Romanticism by a last survivor. “We blunder and brag,” wrote Trelawny, “die and are forgot, and some other fool takes our place.” But the biographer of the romantics makes a more romantic biography than either of his subjects.