Byron in Love (13 page)

In November 1816, on a foggy night, Byron entered Venice, ‘the greenest isle of [his] imagination', the black knots of the gondolas in the canal more beautiful to him than a sunrise, the fairy city of the heart in which he embarked on a spree of licentiousness. Everything about it was to his liking, the gloomy gaiety of the gondolas, the silence of the city, beauty inseparable from decay, and soon carnival, masquerade, balls and whores. Within four days he had secured a gondola, stabled his horses on the Lido, found an apartment close to St Mark's Square and enrolled in the monastery on the island of San Lazzaro, to take lessons in Armenian, his mind in need of something craggy ‘to torture [himself] into action'. He had also fallen in love with Marianna Segati, the wife of his landlord. ‘Pretty as an antelope, with large black oriental eyes, glossy hair, the voice of a lute, graces worthy of the Songs of Solomon' and the naïveté which he always found pleasing in a woman, which is how he described her to John Murray, adding that no twenty-four hours passed without ‘giving and receiving unequivocal proofs of mutual contentment'. Byron's letters to Murray are unique in the exchange between publisher and author; authors write about their angst, their families, their impecuniousness, but hardly the intimacies of the boudoir.

Marianna's nemesis came in the person of another fiery young woman, Margarita Cogni, the
Fornarina
, wife of a baker, also young, with tantalising black eyes, the Venetian looks and the spirit of a tigress. Murray would be told in gleeful detail of the contretemps between these two women, La Segati and her gossips discovering by the neighing of his horse that he had gone late at night to meet the
Fornarina
, whence they followed, staging an operatic brawl, screams, curses, the throwing back of veils and in explicit Venetian, the
Fornarina
telling his
amica
: ‘You are not his wife, I am not his wife, you are his Donna, I am his Donna', then stormed off. She then made herself indispensable to him in the running of the Palazzo Mocenigo, former home of the Doges, which he had rented for £200 a year, the
Fornarina
walking about in hat and feathers and a gown with a tail, intercepting his mail, paying a scribe to write letters for her, and servants continually ‘redding the fray' between her and any other feminine persons who visited. Her Medea traits and Venetian ‘pantaloonery' amused him for a time, but when she became ungovernable and he asked her to leave, she refused, wielding a knife, Fletcher had to disarm her. Boatmen carried her out whence she presently threw herself in the canal and was brought back intending to ‘refix' herself in the palace. Byron threatened that if she did not quit the premises then he would, and ultimately she was returned to her irate husband.

The nineteenth-century watercolour by W. L. Price depicts Byron in his
piano nobile
, reclining on a chaise longue, with his dog at his feet, but there are other less languorous glimpses of that eccentric ménage. Shelley gives a hilarious account:

Shelley had been introduced to Byron by Claire Clairmont in Geneva in 1816 and both he and Mary were instantly captivated, but by the time they met again in Venice the friendship was fractured. They were appalled by Byron's debaucheries, consorting with the most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted and the most filthy creatures, Byron bargaining with mothers and fathers for their daughters, brazenly naming his conquests from contessas to cobblers' wives and claiming to have ‘tooled' with two hundred women of one sort or another. But worse for them was his wilful and gratuitous cruelty to Claire and his cavalier treatment of the little daughter Allegra, who had come with her Swiss nurse Élise to live in the Palazzo Mocenigo, Byron's welcome less than fatherly, when in a note to Hobhouse he wrote: ‘My bastard came three days ago–healthy–noisy–& capricious.'

When Claire's daughter was born in England on 12 January 1817, Shelley wrote to Byron to say ‘the little being' was extremely beautiful, with the deepest blue eyes, and they had given her the name Alba, meaning dawn. After a year, following Shelley's enquiries about his plans for the child, Byron decided to ‘acknowledge and breed her' himself. He gave her the surname Biron, to distinguish her from Ada, his ‘little Legitimacy', and rechristened her Allegra. His conditions were that her mother would have no say whatsoever in the child's ‘personal, moral and doctrinal education'. Claire conceded, because she was young, penniless and at first led herself to believe that Allegra would have a more privileged upbringing with her father, never foreseeing the tragic and peripatetic fate of the child.

‘I have sent you my child because I love her too well to keep her,' Claire wrote aged twenty, having decided despite her misgivings to give the little girl up to Byron, believing that she would be guaranteed a brilliant future and not end up as a waif. From the moment the child was brought to the Palazzo Mocenigo by Mary Shelley's Swiss nurse, Claire was eclipsed. Allegra was pretty and precocious, but as Byron said, possessed of ‘a devil of a spirit'. Claire would write asking for news. ‘Do not make the world dark to me as if my Allegra was dead' she pleaded. He maintained his silence, and was caught up in the general dissolution of his life and entanglements with women.

Claire never saw the child again, even though she begged Byron to show mercy and at least be acknowledged as her mother, but she well knew that any word from her mouth was ‘serpents and toads to him'. She wrote reams of letters, pleading, menacing, reproving and heartbroken, but they were ignored. His monstrous cruelty was both to punish the young woman who had brazenly pursued him and for whom he had formed such an antipathy, and to compound his own convoluted guilt.

When the ‘adorable bambino' began to show the burning temperament of her father and her mother, Byron placed her in the care of the British Consul-General Richard Belgrave Hoppner and his wife, who was not particularly fond of her, and when they had to leave Venice she was entrusted to their servant Antonio and then transferred to Mrs Masters, wife of the Danish Consul, by which time she showed the remoteness of an abandoned child.

All Venice came to know the
stravagante
Lord, his black crimes written on his brow, stories of him jumping fully dressed at night into the canal, to seek out chance pleasures, carrying a torch to enable him to sight the oars of the gondoliers. The palace, as Byron conceded, was a ‘bacchante with pieces to perish in', but insisted that there were no feelings, all was ‘fuff-fuff and passades', and the women, by their own wiles or that of their mothers, extracted from him large sums of money and jewellery. England would be apprised of his harlotry, in a joint letter to Hobhouse and Douglas Kinnaird he recited the names–

As his Rake's Progress continued, he suffered bouts of giddiness, ‘flying rheumatism', syphilis, gonorrhoea and self-disgust, yet surprisingly found time to write, even though composition, as he told Murray, was akin to defecation and to him a great pain. George Steiner has noted that Venice was to Byron what Rome was for Corneille, a liberation, where ‘the wing stroke of his imagination' flowered. He wrote with the spirit of the bull when penned, a sport which entailed some good tossing and goring.
Beppo
, an ‘experiment in comic poetry', was written in 1817, depicting Venice as the ‘seat of dissolution'. The story, concerning the plight of a lady happily ensconced with a lover and surprised by the reappearance of her husband, whom she believed lost at sea, was relayed to him by the husband of one of his mistresses. Racy and protean, it was as well ‘full of politics and ferocity' and a precursor of his master work
Don Juan
, which Shelley predicted would be the greatest poem in the English language since Milton's
Paradise Lost
. How greatly it differed from the sensibility of his rivals, Shelley's ‘silver music', Coleridge's ‘wings of healing', Wordsworth's ‘wild unpeopled hills' and above all from Keats, for whom Byron's greatest venom was reserved, challenging Keats's principles of poetry and his inordinate self-love. Keats, for his part, in
The Fall of Hyperion
, deems Byron a mock lyricist and ‘careless Hectorer given to proud bad verse'.

The two hundred and twenty-two stanzas of Canto One of
Don Juan
were sent to John Murray with the claim that it was meant to be quietly facetious about everything. Quiet it was not, but blasphemous and bawdy, shot with indignation and a dazzling erudition, the high romance steeped in history and resonating with the influences of the Old Testament, Virgil and Homer. ‘Donny Johnny', as he liked to call his hero, ‘sent to the devil somewhat ere his time', was indeed derived from Tirso de Molina's
El Burlador de Sevilla
, but his peregrination differs greatly from that of Molina's and from Mozart's
Don Giovanni
.

The ‘scoundrel' Poet Laureate Robert Southey, to whom it was mockingly dedicated, was described as a ‘warbler', a careerist and ‘a dry Bob', a reference to his impotence; and Lord Castlereagh, former Lieutenant Governor of Ireland, an ‘intellectual eunuch', steeped in Ireland's gore. It is a satire on man's Fall interwoven with Juan's fall from sexual innocence. The ideal love for Haïdée, daughter of a pirate, is destroyed as Juan is sold into slavery and Haïdée, with her unborn child, dispatched to an early grave. The subjective pathos is set brilliantly against the larger cosmic catastrophes and ordeals. Juan witnesses the dehumanising effect of battle and shipwreck, the lust of those who peddle in war, suffers the embraces of rapacious empresses and ultimately delivers his savage indictment of the English society he moved in before being cast out. This boundless universe of love, ambition, cupidity, war and cannibalism all rendered with a throwaway ease, Byron sometimes asking his readers to furnish an opinion of what they had read. ‘Negligently great' is how Anne Barton describes it and Virginia Woolf would marvel at the ‘elasticity of form' allowing of such freedom so that everything and anything could be included. Augusta, merely hearing of it, said that if it were persisted with, it would be the ruin of him.

As the ‘rugged rhinoceros' John Murray received the cantos he was appalled; proposing cuts, omissions, suggesting asterisks for the more flagrant lines and summoning his synod, which included Hobhouse and Douglas Kinnaird. They railed at the barbarities, the indelicacies, the savage indictment of friends and acquaintances, but for Byron their imaginations were ‘mere dunghills'. His remaining ‘rags of patience' were cast off and he determined to battle his way like a porcupine, telling Murray that by such prudery he must also object to the works of Ariosto, La Fontaine and Shakespeare. He would not decimate. He would not mutilate.

If the poem was to be continued it must be in his own way as Murray was informed ‘–you might as well make Hamlet (or Diggory) “act mad” in a strait waistcoat–as trammel my buffoonery–if I am to be a buffoon–their gestures and my thoughts would only be pitiably absurd–and ludicrously constrained. Why Man the Soul of such writing is it's licence?' The delineation of Annabella as Donna Inez, mother of Don Juan, ‘each eye a sermon and her brow a homily', was too near the bone, as was his cold compassionless view of humanity. Too much the delineation of shipwrecked sailors, killing, then devouring a dog, too much a picture of English nobles who voted, dined, drank, gamed and whored, their ‘frolic ladies' doing exactly the same thing but with a great aptitude for deceit. An epidemic of disgust struck England, Hobhouse, Kinnaird, Samuel Rogers, Tom Moore, conceding to its brilliance, but saying that it must not be published and Augusta, who had not even read it, predicting that it would be the ruin of him.

Don Juan
was published anonymously on 15 July 1819, but there was never any doubt as to who was its author. Keats, it is said, threw the work away in disgust on his way to Rome and Wordsworth predicted it would do more harm to the English character than anything of that time. The couplet which Keats and others took such exception to concerned survivors in a longboat who had lost their comrades in a shipwreck, their grief however secondary to the pangs of hunger in their bellies:

Byron flinched at nothing, his view of humanity remorseless, his outlook radical. War was ‘a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art', mercenary soldiers were butchers and other soldiers recruited on half pay, merely there to satisfy the warmongering egos of their generals, from which Wellington was not exempt.