Books: To the Dark Tower

BYRON IN ITALY — Peter Quennell —Viking ($3.59).

One morning in 1816 an Englishman with a godlike face and a deformed foot registered at a Belgian inn, and, ‘”as soon as he reached his room . . . fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid.” It was George Gordon Lord Byron, “for whom foreign travel had a psychological significance which his traveling compan ions could not long ignore.” His com panions: Dr. John (“Polly dolly”) Polidori; his “querulous” valet, Fletcher; his sparring partner. Next afternoon they all set off for Switzerland via the year-old battlefield of Waterloo where Byron, an insatiable souvenir hunter, bought some scraps of old iron to send home.

Thus Biographer Peter Quennell (Byron: the Years of Fame} starts Byron and his retinue, like latter-day Canterbury pilgrims, on a sentimental journey that was to take the Poet away from England for ever, lead him at last to Greece and death at the age of 36. Byron in Italy is an account of what Byron did while he was waiting for death — his friendship with Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; his affairs with various Venetian slum women and men ; his services as a gigolo-extraordinary to dumpy, dull, married Countess Teresa Guiccioli. It is also an account of his most active years as a romantic revolutionist, and of some of his most productive years as a poet.

One of the world’s great legends, the Byron story will stand almost any amount of retelling. Retold by Peter Quennell, the result is a minor literary event. Reason: Peter Quennell probably knows more about Byron and the romantic movement than any man alive, tells what he knows in a cadenced Bloomsbury prose that is only now & again too self-consciously elegant. As no one appreciates better than sly Author Quennell, a biography of Byron is ipso facto a novel by Proust.

Eyes for Nipples. When Byron reached Switzerland, he wrote on the hotel blotter after the question Age?: 100. He was 28. But his thick reddish hair was already greying, though “darkened by the lavish use of macassar oil.”

He was not the only Englishman at the hotel. Already installed was the son of the “exceedingly respectable Member for New Shoreham,” Percy Bysshe Shelley, together with his mistress, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and her stepsister, Byron’s ex-mistress, Claire Clairmont. “Like many professional libertines,” says Author Quennell, “Byron had a deep regard for the domestic proprieties,” distrusted Shelley’s brand of radicalism—”all green tea and fine feelings. …” But he was reassured when he observed that Shelley was “as perfect a gentleman as ever crossed a drawing-room.” Soon they were having a fine romantic time together. One midnight Byron was reciting Coleridge’s Christabel, had reached the lines

Behold! Her bosom and half her side—A sight to dream of. . . .

when “he was interrupted by a piercing shriek from Shelley.” The author of Rise like lions after slumber grasped “his ruffled head between desperate hands” and staggered from the room. “Pacified with a douche of cold water and a whiff of ether,” he explained that he had been staring at Mary, suddenly remembered a story about a woman who “had eyes instead of nipples, which taking hold of his mind horrified him.”

The circle was shortly joined by Matthew Gregory (“Monk”) Lewis, a “boyish-looking man, with large, bulging, curiously flattened eyeballs which projected from his cranium like the eyes of an insect.” Lewis was the author of the best-selling shocker, The Monk. So shocked was Byron that he complained that the book was filled with “the philtered ideas of a jaded voluptuary.”

Chief discomfort for Byron was Claire Clairmont, an “assiduous concubine,” who could not understand that “he had succumbed through boredom.” Once Byron showed her some of his sister’s letters. Claire told Mary and Shelley that they were written in cipher. Shelley saw nothing unusual in that, thought the ciphers “most likely were used to convey news of his [Byron’s] illegitimate children.” While Claire went off to England to have one by him, Byron went off to Italy.

Nothing Like It. “I know not how it is,” Byron was soon writing from Venice, “my health growing better, and my spirits not worse, the ‘besoin d’aimer’ came back upon my heart . . . and, after all, there is nothing like it.” This time the besoin d’aimer took the form of Marianna Segati, wife of Byron’s landlord, who ran a draper’s shop at the sign of Il Corno (the horn), soon changed by his apprentices into II Corno Inglese (horns by Byron). Marianna has been described as a “demon of avarice and libidinousness.” But Byron found that her hair had “the curl and colour of Lady Jersey’s.”

Life became even more exciting when Byron met Margarita Cogni, La Fornarina (the Little Oven), “a fierce product of Venetian slums and backways.” Marianna tried to ‘defend her prior rights against Margarita, but was crushed by superior logic.

Cried Margarita: “You are his donna, and I am his donna; your husband is a cuckold, and mine is another. … If he prefers what is mine to what is yours, is it my fault?”

Said Byron: “An amazon … a fine animal … a gentle tigress. . . .”

When Marianna moved in as Byron’s housekeeper, his expenses were cut in half. Byron employed “about fourteen servants . . . besides a floating population of Venetian parasites. Unnamed and unnumbered his concubines came and went. . . .” He was surrounded with harlots and pimps and gondoliers and their . . . families. Shelley remarked with chill disdain that among Byron’s boon companions were “wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices which are not only not named, but I believe even conceived in England.”

By this time Byron was 30, looked 40. His face was pale, bloated, sallow. “The knuckles of his hands were lost in fat. . . . With his long, greying curls, his rings and brooches, the outmoded clothes he wore, he suggested … an expatriate of dubious propensities but distinguished origins. . . .” He also suggested Proust’s Baron de Charlus.

Cicisbeo. Meanwhile Byron had found time to write The Prisoner of Chilian, several cantos of Childe Harold, Manfred, Beppo, was working on Don Juan. One day at a party he met the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, wife of a big Romagnol landowner.

She was 19, tactless, “a sort of Italian Caroline Lamb.” She horrified one gathering, wrote Byron, “by calling out to me ‘mio Byron’ in an audible key, during a dead silence. …” Mary Shelley found Teresa “a nice, pretty girl” but “her legs, in fact, were far too short for the weight they carried.”

Presently Byron moved in with the Guiccioli at their Ravenna palazzo. At last he was a full-fledged cavaliere servente, a cicisbeo, an official gigolo whose prior rights, by old Italian custom, are fully recognized by the husband. Wrote Byron: “I have been an intriguer, a husband, a whoremonger, and now I am a Cavaliere Servente—by the holy! it is a strange sensation.” Sometimes he grumbled: “I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan War.” He added that he was “drilling very hard to learn how to double a shawl”—a gallantry all well-trained cicisbei were supposed to perform.

This pleasant boring life might have continued but for Italy’s Risorgimento. Everywhere patriotic Italians, with deathless heroism and the blessings of English liberals, were conspiring to upset the rudiments of order which Austria had almost succeeded in imposing on parts of the Peninsula. Teresa Guiccioli’s father and brother, the Gambas, were patriots and revolutionists. Encouraged by them, Byron joined the Carbonari.

To the annoyance of his mistress’ husband, Byron’s rooms at the Palazzo Guiccioli were soon “full of conspirational gear and mysterious documents . . . local liberals.” Once, when the police were active, the Gambas even let Byron keep “a bag full of bayonets, some muskets, and some hundreds of cartridges.” When the revolt finally fizzled (Byron always suspected it would), Byron, Teresa and the Gambas were exiled, at last settled down at Pisa.

There once more Byron could be close to the Shelley circle, which had gained a new recruit in dark, hawk-nosed, piratical Edward Trelawny (The Adventures of a Younger Son) who, to Byron’s annoyance, looked and acted like a Byron hero. Trelawny discovered that Byron had nicknamed Shelley “The Snake.”

“Shelley reminded him (he said) of a serpent that walked on the tip of its tail —so strange and rapid were his movements, so remote his habits—glistening, ubiquitous, and hard to capture.” Trelawny did not discover that of him Byron had said: “If they could teach Trelawny to wash his hands and tell the truth, they would have some hope of turning him out a gentleman.”

Life in Pisa was seldom dull. Sometimes Shelley saw visions. He alarmed one friend by pointing to the sea one day and saying: “There it is again—there!” He said he saw “a naked child,” Byron’s dead daughter, Allegra, “rise from the sea and clap its hands as in joy. . . .” Once in an absent-minded moment he “glided” stark naked through the room where his wife was entertaining friends.

When the sailing fad set in, Shelley and his friend Williams went tacking and tipping up & down the coast. One day their horribly waterlogged, fish-eaten bodies were brought ashore and buried. Then they were dug up for cremation on the beach. “Is that a human body?” asked Byron. “Why, it’s more like the carcass of a sheep.” Shelley’s brains, “cupped in the broken cranium,” seethed and boiled as in a cauldron for a long time. Byron felt sick, went for a swim. Driving home, Byron and Leigh Hunt felt a “hysterical gaiety . . . drank in the carriage . . . sang and shouted like men possessed.”

Shocked by Shelley’s death, bored by Teresa Guiccioli, worn out by living with the Leigh Hunts (whose very modern children Byron called a “draal of Hottentots”) Byron decided to go to Greece. Author Quennell does not believe that he really wanted to go. “The idea of death might leave him calm; he shuddered . . . at the prospect of moving house.” To Lord and Lady Blessington who saw him just before he left, he made farewell presents, demanded “a corresponding gage d’amitie.” He made “some sarcastic observation on his nervousness.” He had wept “and made no effort to conceal his tears.”

Perhaps as he began his last journey, he remembered the two epitaphs he had seen at Ferrara on another journey and whose “modesty” he had found “deeply moving”: Said one: Martini Luigi

Implora pace

Said the other: Lucrezia Picini

Implora eterna quiete

“The dead,” he wrote, “had had enough of life; all they wanted was rest, and this they ‘implore.’ “