Lord Byron's Novel (38 page)
‘I cannot see how this tale applies to me.’
‘That you cannot, seems to make plain that it does not.’
‘What do you offer, should I be willing? What do I gain?’
‘I offer nothing.’
‘Nothing will come of nothing.’
‘Yet I think something may. I have hopes that, though I have nothing to offer, still the challenge may interest, and the hope inspire. I say it
may
. Understand that I am aware how unlikely is this gambit of mine to succeed. You may judge how desperate is the case, by my willingness to try it.’
When Ali made no response, Ængus continued thus: ‘You have heard of the Societies of Italy. It may be that you have heard of similar brotherhoods, in other lands.’
‘I cannot say so. Perhaps they know better than the Italians, how to keep their secrets
secret
.’
‘I shall now tell you of something I have sworn upon my life to tell to no-one but him who shall be numbered among us. So much do I trust your silence.’
‘Have a care. You know not what beliefs I hold, nor what allegiances I have sworn. How do you know I am not, myself, an agent of that Empire against whom you contest? Or of some ally of it? Or a seller of information, and of
men
?’
‘I know, Brother, because no man could be more transparent than yourself—you ever were—it maddened me, that you were so, and naught I could do, would
darken
or
cloud
you. Listen to me now, and I shall tell you of a thing known to few. Over the wide world—at least that part of it, from our own Isle even to the throne of the Czar, where the spirit of Liberty is not killed—there has been built a Society whose members are united by a singular purpose, or but a few, and who are vowed to aid all others who are so dedicated, whatever their Nation. In short they intend to see the end of Kings, and hereditary Lords—and all Churches and Courts, whose Virtue and Justice consist solely in serving Kings and Lords—indeed all those borne on the backs of the peoples of the world as a burdened Ass bears his load. If it take a Century—and they believe it will take no such number of years—there will in the end be none, and so (it is held) all peoples will be free of
unnecessary
sufferings: for there are sufferings enough everywhere that none among the living can avoid.’
‘Can this be true?’
‘It is true. In each country where they are established, they are known by a name of their own, but universally they bear but
one
—would you hear it?’
‘You seem intent that I should.’
‘They are called Lucifers.’
Ali laughed to hear this, and his laughter both alarmed and delighted his Brother by him—who thought he had not heard the man laugh before—certainly not at the curious ways of the world, and the doings of that great God without a Religion,
Circumstance,
who delights to bring about such jokes as this one, having in his keeping some for each of us—who in homage to him may well laugh, or weep!
‘I thought,’ Ali then said, ‘that the former Emperor of the French was dedicated to this same work—to sweep away the old Oppressors—break open the Prisons—unburden men, and women too—free slaves—and Jews. Yet he stands now upon a rock in the middle of the sea, and all the old Perukes have come back in.’
‘Indeed. All those young firebrands, who burned to free their Nations and Peoples from tyranny, joined perforce with their toppled Kings and Nobles, to rout Napoleon and his pasteboard Monarchies—even those who had at first adored the man. Now they have seen through that trick—and they will forge a Liberty from within, not one imposed from without—a
German
liberty, different from a
Hungarian,
a
Greek,
a
Venetian
—Liberty, and self-government, to each his own!’
‘I own it is a dream I too have dreamt. Yet is it
but
a dream?’
‘They may change the world,’ quoth his Brother—‘Indeed I am certain they will—tho’ for the better or the
worse
I am not so vain as to assert. I have read in the Italian press that the two greatest examples of Vanity the present world affords are Buonaparte, and an English poet. Think how
flattered
the old Emperor on his sea-rock should be, were he to hear of the comparison—as only
he
had power to hurt—the other only to
limn
.’
‘I know not if I should make a success of revolution,’ Ali said then in seeming thoughtfulness. ‘I am not cold-blooded—or hot-blooded—enough. The plain humanity of the man before me, be he the soldier of a king—or a King—or the Pope himself—if he be not personally an enemy of mine, I am likely to think him a good enough fellow to
live,
at the least. And I will approve a brave and honourable man, whichever side he stand upon.’
‘It is creditable to you,’ said his brother, without much conviction. ‘But let it not dissuade you, if you lean to this. My own case is the reverse of yours—the Company and the contemplation of any lot of my fellow Humans always becomes for me, and soon enough, a perfect
ipecacuanha
. Yet I have worked long on their behalf, and somewhat prospered in the trade, as well.’
Ali was thoughtful then again, and clasped his hands behind him and lowered his head—glanced with careful eye to where his companion in white waited motionless upon his horse, like the Statue of a Ghost. Then he said: ‘A man who took upon himself these tasks—would he not risk all, even those he loved? Such a one ought not to be burdened with parent, or wife or
child
—lest his ruin, which seems likely enough, should be theirs.’
‘I think it to be so.’
‘I am not thus burdened.’ This Ali said, yet without
complacency
—as his Brother saw.
‘Do you dare then to do these things?’
‘How can I know what I dare? When I have done what I shall do, then should you know what I have dared—or failed to dare.’
‘Well said,’ quoth Ængus. ‘It is all that I would ask.’
‘Your Lady—I assume she knows but little of this—’
‘Nothing. Knowledge even in the slightest would endanger both of us. I confess to you—no matter that my object is clear, and the means likewise—I am pained that I must leave her thus—vanish upon the instant—and she never to know where—well—it troubles me, though I know not what name I may give to this troubling. She has been loyal to me, as I to her—and believe me, there are not so many who would look long with favour on such as myself.’
‘And where will you go? Into what land, to what shore?’
‘That I know not, so it be far enough. I am a marked man, and once marked, I may not be
unmarked
—for you see, I am what I am—no police spy, no enforcer of the Laws, no border guardian, could mistake me—and
their
network is as wide, as far-flung, as well-informed, as our own. Where I go must be far, if they are not to follow—a place their Power reaches not.’
‘To the Antipodes, then. Or China.’
‘I say I care not—somewhere this side of Hades—that is all.’
‘Very well,’ then said Ali with sudden force. ‘I will accept your proposal—I will remain here—I will execute what Duties I am called upon to perform, to the best of my abilities, if you will instruct me in them—’
‘Aha!’ cried Ængus, and clapt his hands. ‘Splendid fellow you are!’
‘But with this condition—that you likewise take up a piece of work—a dangerous one as well, though not to Life, perhaps, or Limb—yet doubtful of success—and also secret. One which by my
pledge
duly made I ought to do, but which perhaps by
rights
belongs to you.’
Ængus knitted his brows in question at this, and he demanded to know of what Ali spoke. For answer, Ali returned a question—‘Tell me,’ he asked his brother, ‘do you ever give thought to your Daughter?’
At the word, Ængus looked sharply away, as though stricken—but only for a moment. ‘Of what daughter do you speak?’ said he then, coldly enough.
‘You have but one, to my knowledge,’ said Ali.
‘I may have several,’ responded Ængus. ‘There is hardly a
slave-driver
of the West Indies who may not own to a dark-skinn’d pup, or to many.’
‘You know of whom I speak.’
‘Then I know not if I
have,
or only
had
,’ said Ængus, and he flung into the quiet wave the stone he had before picked up. ‘She may well be dead—only think how much a child must pass through to grow even to a few hands high—convulsions—fevers—black vomit—diarrhœa—cough—consumption—galloping this and foudroyant that—not one in six achieves it—why should I suppose she would?’
‘I assure you that she lives,’ said Ali.
‘Is she,’ asked Ængus, and his eye still avoided his brother’s, ‘well-formed? I mean to ask—’
‘She was perfect,’ said Ali, ‘and I hear that she remains so.’
‘Well then,’ said Ængus, and again—‘Well then’—not as if in answer, or assent, but as though he answered a question from within himself—and deep within.
‘Let us,’ Ali said, ‘mount again, and I will tell you of this Condition I mean to make, and how you may meet it—if you chuse.’
‘Then let us ride together,’ his brother said; and they mounted, and together rode along that strand. Rosy grew the snow-clad tips of the far Alps as the Sun declined—the prints of their horses’ hooves dotted the sand along the hush’d sea—and long the Brothers spoke, of many things.
NOTES FOR THE 15TH CHAPTER
- no horses:
Lord Byron’s horses were famous in Venice, where indeed they are rare, and quite useless. He stabled them upon the Lido, the great strand that faces the Adriatic, and rode them almost daily when he lived there. Certainly he loved riding, as he did swimming, for on horseback he was anyone’s equal. - Carbonari:
Lord Byron was himself inducted into this society, and attended its meetings; in his house he stored their weapons, and a deal of Mantons’ powder too, that he bought for them. He always regarded the Italian conspirators with a cold eye, and understood well their disabilities—their Latin impulsiveness, &c.—yet he espoused their cause, and never wavered. One among them though one among them. - Jacques-Armand:
I find the tale is told in the
Memoires sur la vie privée de Marie-Antoinette,
by Mme Campan (1822). I know not if Ld. B. found it there. - an English poet:
Such a note did appear in an Italian newspaper, making an association that Lord Byron might have aspired to, but on a basis that, hardly creditable to him, must have amused him a good deal. To receive the right notice for the wrong reason—the vanity of human wishes. - may well be dead:
Lord Byron had, as is well known, a daughter by Claire Clairmont, a half-sister of Mary Shelley’s, whom he named Allegra. She died at the age of five of a fever, in the convent to which Ld. B. had remanded her for her education. I know not, and there is no way to tell, if this tale was written to this point before her death. Ld. B. had taken the child in the first instance from the Shelleys, who had lost more than one child to various illnesses; perhaps he believed she would surely die in
their
company. He loved her, indulged her, and found her uncontrollable, vain, disputatious—a child. Yet his giving her over to the nuns was not to rid himself of her so much as to ready her for the only life he could imagine for her: an Italian life, marriage to an Italian, for which he had already supplied a dowry before she—What if it had been me That child my sister but a year and a month younger than myself he loved her and he could not or he would not keep her he talked of taking her with him to America What if by some means he had contrived to take me from England, and on his journeys?? I think of this or once thought, and often too Would
I
then have died, in an Italian convent—been sent home as she was in a small coffin—buried as he requested in the church at Harrow the Rector refusing to have her in the Church or to have a Monument put up on the church wall, so she is somewhere unmark’d in the church-yard He wrote for her
I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me
no it is not I who lies in Harrow church-yard without a name to mark the place - perfect:
It is said he thus asked after
me,
and asked the nurse to lift my clothes to see my legs and feet from this may have come the untrue tale I know it to be untrue that when my mother was brought to bed & I was delivered of her he came to the door of the room drunk and asked
Is it dead? Is it dead, then?
He did not do so my mother will not say he did He asked if I were
perfect
It was natural to ask—for
he
was not.——
great pain today mother’s Bible by
From: [email protected]
To: “Smith”
Subject: RE:Gravitas
[My dear—How’s this—the Salutation is part of the gravitas:]
Dear Alexandra:
I am extremely grateful to you for having entrusted me with the news of your astonishing discovery of a heretofore unknown prose fiction by Lord Byron. The discovery, when it can at last be made public, will alter our picture of Byron, his work, and above all his relations with his wife and his daughter. I can think of few discoveries of comparable importance related to writers of the period. When I completed my doctoral dissertation on Byron at the University of Chicago, he was in as deep eclipse as it is possible for a major poet to be, and yet his life, and his career, have never ceased to intrigue and excite commentators, biographers, and the reading public—even while his written work has become less and less familiar. During my tenure at two universities (you’ve asked me for a CV, and I am faxing it under separate cover) I of course worked to make students and others aware of his worth—the list of my papers, studies, monographs, and addresses are evidence of that. It seemed important then to rescue Byron from his legend, and thus I wrote studies with titles like “How Byronic was Byron?” and “Saving Byron from his Friends.” Even that enterprise now seems somewhat recondite to me, and perhaps convinced few. I myself turned away from Byron, and the university, to pursue other interests and imperatives—for the past twenty years I have worked on a series of film projects designed to bring the calamities, struggles, and daily lives of people in many “remote” places in the world (not remote to those who live there, or those who want something from them) to the attention of that world I myself spring from. (I am proud of these films, and glad of the awards they have garnered, though there is no scientific way of measuring their real impact—any more than there was a way to measure Byron’s influence on the course of Greek independence.)
Now, when even to me Byron sometimes seems part of the unreclaimable past, the world has discovered new reasons to be interested in him. There is his complex sexuality, which it is now permissible to ponder and inquire into without evasion or moral horror (or other bias)—he doesn’t need exculpation, or championing, at least on those grounds. But above all there is his daughter, and the way the world has gone in the last decades, which has made her seem a kind of prophet, someone who, clearly if not in detail, saw the future. Ada really did see what few others saw in her day—really,
no
others—that machines of the future would compute, manipulate symbols, write music, store data, and perform activities that it was assumed in her lifetime only human minds could do.
She saw herself as doing more than that, however: she saw herself as in pursuit of a new kind of science altogether, a science that would bridge molecular and atomic physics and human mentality, a science in which investigators were their own laboratories, as poets are their own smithies, where they forge new realities from their selves. From the beginning her high-minded (and vengeful, and wary) mother had kept her from poetry and anything that smacked of the imaginative, the self-regarding, the emotional—the Byronic. What Ada came to know—what her mother couldn’t have imagined—is that science is a realm of passion and dream as great as poetry. She saw herself, in other words, as the continuer of her father’s personal experiments with the possibilities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—only in different terms, terms that his time could not conceive, and that she herself could not fully articulate. She believed there could be a molecular science of mind, a cosmology of thought, a true science beyond mere self-examination and reflection, indeed a science that without reductionism would transform self-examination itself—and that those computing machines would be a necessary component of it, both as tools and as subjects. Well, she was right—
is
right. The neuroscience of our day, which is impossible without the digital tools she envisioned, is doing exactly the work she wanted to do—and coming to conclusions, or envisionings, that she would have understood. (The phrenology she was devoted to, which came to seem inadequate to her, was an early attempt to found a science of the mind on the physiology of the brain.) In fact it’s hard
not
to think that, in her recovery, rescuing, enciphering, and annotating of her father’s work (a very uncharacteristic piece of it, by the way) she was consciously furthering that work, by a self-experiment in memory and heredity. She was apparently, if your research is correct, at work on it nearly till the day she died.
So the interest of what you’ve found isn’t only for us aged Byromaniacs, if there really are any unreconstructed ones left. The interest is in the light (and warmth) it sheds on Ada—not on what she did do, of which the rather inconclusive records exist, but what she
was,
and
might have
been
—which is more important to us, who live in the world she longed to glimpse—and did glimpse.
Yours
Lee
[So do you think that’s what’s needed? Less? More? I can spin it differently if you want. You may not think so, reading this note, but I actually believe every word of it—L]
From: “Smith”
To: [email protected]
Subject: Thanks
Good. Thanks. Really thanks.
I believe it too, every word.
I’m just going to add this: “It would not only be a loss to literary history, or Byron studies, if this work didn’t see the light. Above all it would be a loss to our knowledge of Ada, for whom the sources are so much slighter than for Byron. She collaborated in this work [piece? story? project?] with her dead father, and both are illuminated by what they did, but Ada especially.”
Okay? It’s not as pisselegant as yours. I never learned to do that. Or did it just come naturally to you?
You’ll get a picture soon.
S
Ashfield
April 25, 2002
My darling Alex,
Well, the spring has come at last here, the tulips are out now and the orioles have returned to make a nest (or refurbish the old one) in the quince bush. Their orange against the scarlet of the quince blossoms is so intense it almost clashes—though I guess no colors in nature can clash really.
You know I was only afraid for you: not afraid that
he’d
hurt you, though he might believe I thought that. I was afraid that sorrow would hurt you. Sorrow for yourself, and for him too, and for the damage he
suffered,
as much as the damage he did—and for that poor child on that night above all. Sorrow, that could kill you it seemed, like a late frost can kill things just starting so hopefully. I know that’s wrong. Marc and I watched a butterfly coming from its cocoon the other day—my God this is so strangely corny I can’t believe it’s so—and butterflies come out, you know, all wet and folded up like a stuffed grape leaf, and then start to unfold. It takes such a long time, and it looks so difficult—the poor little thing was just panting, or so it looked—and straining to set these sails. I wanted to help, and tug them open for it, and Marc said—I suppose he’d know—that if you do that, and the butterfly doesn’t do it for itself, then it can’t fly: it’s the process of stretching and airing and waving and panting and drying out that activates the muscles, or whatever passes for muscles in butterflies. Only then it can fly.
I know all that, and I knew it then; I wanted you to fly, and with your own wings, and I knew how little I could help. I just wanted to keep sorrow away, until you had to face it. I knew you had to. I just wanted you to be stronger first. People say that troubles and grief can make you strong, but I don’t believe it—I think that love and happiness make you strong, they feed you and wrap your soul in healthy tissue, in
love-fat,
so you can stand things, and abide the cold. Of course I know now it might have been really me who needed to get stronger. And from your loving me, I did. I hope you’ll forgive me.
Love
Mom
From: “Smith”
To: “Thea”
Subject: Hey you
My dearest dear:
Faxed you my flight schedule, or shed-jewel as they say here. Virgin Air (!) Omigod I can’t wait.
You know what I thought today: that if Ada had lived now, or even a little later than she did, she might have been allowed to see her father. If
he
hadn’t been so badly treated by doctors in Greece he might have lived, at least a few more years, and she might have just packed up and gone abroad to find him. If if if. I wish I were a real historian because they don’t think if if if.
I want to find a letter from him, to someone, someone who was near him when he died, that says
Take these pages and give them to my daughter
. He wanted to tell her that he would have come for her if he could have, and taken her away with him to somewhere they couldn’t follow. But I think he just lost them.
She
had to be the one, the one who did the work of finding and saving the book. It was nothing but a letter meant for her, and she was the one who was supposed to get it, and then in the end she did get it. That’s what I have to say when I write about this, that she was the one.
It’s like Babbage’s miracles. Did you read about this? Babbage used to invite people to his house to see the Difference Engine work. He would set all the wheels to zero, and then turn the handle, and one wheel would go to 2. Then turn the handle and it goes to 4. Then 6. And everybody gets it—the rule is, “add 2.” At 8, the wheel turns to 0 and the next wheel turns to 1, and you get 10. He’d go on and on maybe a hundred turns. Then suddenly the number jumps not by two but by a huge number, like 100. Everybody reacts—a break! An oddity at least! Babbage explains, no—he instructed the machine in advance to do that—after a certain number of turns to advance by 100 instead of by 2. In other words the break was built in from the beginning—it was a rule and not a break. That’s what Babbage said divine miracles were—they were natural rules too, but just rules we didn’t know about till they were manifested. See I think that too.
The miracle of Ada is not that she saved the novel. The miracle is the love she didn’t know about, that would make her do that: love coming at the hundredth iteration, a sudden advance, programmed from her childhood maybe, but only just then showing up in her life, when she was at Newstead Abbey, and at the tomb where her father was, and his father too.
The book’s in digital form now, Word Perfect format, haha, and I can deal with it anywhere. Georgiana’s not mad anymore. She told me she wrote Lee
a card
thanking him for his advice and encouragement. I knew it. She probably sprayed it with perfume, or scent, they say here. Lilith is still pissed tho.
See you and the Honda at JFK. I can’t say what I think in my heart.
Smith
