Childish Loves (14 page)

I began by going over Byron's letters, sentence by sentence, and looking for anything Peter might have used. This turned out to be dispiriting. The letters are twelve volumes long. Any life, even a life as vivid as Byron's, contains a great deal of material unsuitable for fiction; and I waded through pages of description, in-jokes, plans, apologies, printers' corrections, and intimate references to people I had never heard of. But there were discoveries that made the task bearable. Throwaway lines from the letters would suddenly reverberate, because I had read them before in one of the novels. And I still remember the excitement I felt on coming across, in one of the later journals, the following entry:

At some point Peter had read this passage: I felt him almost looking over my shoulder. But the excitement didn't last. I wanted discrepancies, not facts, and most of Peter's discrepancies turned out to be trivial. He left Mrs Clarke at home and widowed her; brought only one of the Miss Wollastons, but all of the Pigots; and included John Musters, whom Mary Chaworth eventually married. All of this proved dispiriting in a different way. It's true that I was getting closer to Peter, to the way he worked. I saw him again and again take a line from a letter or biography and spin it out into a scene or a piece of analysis. Mary, for example, really did refuse to dance with Byron at Matlock Bath; he was heartbroken. The line employed by Peter to do the breaking –
What, do you think I could care anything for that lame boy?
– was lifted almost verbatim from Marchand's
Portrait
. But Byron didn't overhear her saying it at the ball and she was probably speaking to her maid, not John Musters. Novelists write shorthand, I knew that already; but finding out the facts behind Peter's story broke whatever spell, of truth or truthfulness, it had cast on me.

Phrase after phrase, as I made my way through the letters and
Lives
, bounced faintly off its echo in ‘Fair Seed-Time.' ‘I have looked into the de Ruthyns,' Mrs Byron declares in the opening scene, ‘and cannot find their title in the peerages of England, Ireland or Scotland. I suppose he is a
new
peer.' Peter copied this from a note she wrote to the family's financial adviser, John Hanson. But the change of context matters. She wasn't gossiping; she was looking into the credentials of a tenant. Peter played around with characters, too. Musters, for example, figures in Peter's story as ‘quiet' and ‘mysterious.' In fact, the best account of him we have comes from a hunting journal, which remembers him as someone who could have ‘leaped, hopped, ridden, fought, danced and played tennis with any man in Europe.' Far from the sinister ‘Man of Method' Peter has painted, Musters seems to have been the Regency equivalent of a frat boy: good-natured, good-looking, idle and a little stupid. The ‘hunting' he wasted his time on was just the ordinary, innocent, violent kind of hunting.

The significance of that word ‘mysterious' (which is the quality that makes Peter's Byron so ‘uncomfortable' around Musters) may have been taken from Louis Crompton's book
Byron and Greek Love
– published in 1985, and the first to address the question of his homosexuality. Peter probably picked up all references to ‘the Method' in it, too. This was the term Byron's college set used to describe their pursuit of boys; a necessary code, because homosexuality was still punishable by death. When Byron boasted to his friend Skinner Matthews, shortly before setting off for the Continent, about the pleasures to be had from the boys (or ‘hyacinths') of Falmouth, Matthews congratulated him ‘on the splendid success of your first efforts in
the mysterious
, that style in which more is meant than meets the Eye.' In the same letter, he requested that anyone ‘who professes
ma methode
' should ‘spell the term wch designates his calling with an e at the end of it –
methodiste
, not methodist, and pronounce the word in the French fashion. Everyone's taste must revolt at confounding ourselves with that sect of horrible, snivelling fanatics.'

Peter leaves out this e when Lord Grey describes John Musters as ‘a Man of Method.' Maybe to avoid drawing attention to the phrase, which is already suggestive enough. But the word itself shows only that Peter had read Louis Crompton's book. I began to see how shallow the waters of his imagination were. Still visible beneath its surface: the junk or detritus of misplaced facts. Little details like the chicken-wire box also struck me in a new light – as the kind of rich ‘effect' a writer strives for to suggest something real. ‘All anybody wants to know about is how much is true,' I had complained to Steve Heinz. But once you figure out how much
is
true, I don't know what you're left with. ‘Pure invention is but the talent of a liar,' Byron once wrote. But what should we make of the talent of impure invention?

*

Still, there was one incident that Peter dwelt on in greater detail and with greater certainty than any of Byron's biographers. The longer I looked at ‘Fair Seed-Time' the more I came back to it. By this stage my desk was littered with opened books and loose papers; a real mess. A half-dozen cups of emptied tea were growing moldy, but some of them held down the papers and others propped open the books. To walk into an office like that, every morning, always suggested to me the outward expression of some internal disorder: an obsession here, an inattention there. But the truth is, I liked being there. October had come, and a few chilly mornings had pinched the blood back into the edges of the leaves – they stood out shyly against the green of the Radcliffe lawn.

Nothing I had read suggested that John Musters in real life was guilty of anything worse than attracting Mary Chaworth to him and making her unhappy in marriage. But something
did
happen between Byron and Lord Grey. On his return to Southwell in the spring of 1804, Byron refused to see him.

‘I am not reconciled to Lord Grey,
and I never will
,' he wrote to his sister Augusta. ‘My reasons for ceasing that Friendship are such as I cannot explain, not even to you my Dear Sister (although were they to be made known to any body, you would be the first,) but they will ever remain hidden in my own breast … He has forfeited all
title to my esteem
, but I hold him in too much
contempt
ever
to hate him
.' When they were reconciled, partly at least, in the summer of 1808 (they had some business to discuss together, as landlord and tenant), Byron wrote, ‘I cannot conclude without adverting to circumstances, which though now long past, and indeed difficult for me to touch upon, have not yet ceased to be interesting. – Your Lordship must be perfectly aware of the very peculiar reasons that induced me to adopt a line of conduct, which however painful, and painful to me it certainly was, became unavoidable.'

Lord Grey in his reply pretended or professed to understand nothing of Byron's
peculiar reasons
. The only third-party reference to whatever it was that took place is a note written by Byron's university friend, John Hobhouse, in the margin of a copy of Thomas Moore's
Life of Byron
– which was published some ten years after his death and more than thirty since the incident in question. ‘A circumstance occurred during this intimacy,' Hobhouse remarked, ‘which certainly had much effect on his future morals.'

Almost all Byron's biographers agree that Lord Grey made a pass at Byron in the autumn of 1803. What's less clear is whether Byron reciprocated – whether his subsequent revulsion had something of the guilt of acquiescence in it. Lord Grey insisted to the end of his short life (he was dead by 1810) that he did not know why Byron had cut him off. Which suggests either that he was lying or that nothing had happened, or that something
had
happened which was perfectly mutual, or which he thought was perfectly mutual. Hobhouse's note is the best evidence we have. He didn't know Byron in his boyhood, but they traveled the Continent together after leaving Cambridge and became very intimate. During this tour, Byron allowed himself, for the first time, to indulge freely his homosexual inclinations – which Hobhouse neither shared nor sympathized with. But Hobhouse's comment is more suggestive than explanatory. A ‘circumstance occurring' doesn't say much about agency; and the ‘effect' of it could have been great even if Lord Grey did nothing more than give Byron ideas. In Peter's account, something
did
happen, and that something is pretty close to rape.

Rape scenes had featured in both of Peter's novels, scenes of sexual initiation, but this one struck me as a departure from the others: it was the only one involving a man and a boy. (Lord Grey was eight years older than Byron, which makes a difference, at twenty-three and fifteen.) I don't want to say a writer can't write a scene like that without drawing on personal experience. But if there has been some personal experience, I also don't see how he can leave it out entirely.

That said, the incident in ‘Fair Seed-Time' poses a couple of problems. Peter has chosen to tell it from the point of view of the boy, and a boy who is more or less silent throughout the whole … transaction, which doesn't take more than a page. Some of the language belongs obviously to the period, to Byron's and not Peter's. And at the heart of the scene lies an image whose source is clearly Byron's own life: ‘I had the strong impression of being again in the narrow boat with Mary, and the rock pressing heavily down upon me.' An image of such natural symbolic power that Byron himself continued to recur to it two decades later. It seems too suspiciously
literary
to be true, even for him: the sexual rite of passage made literal, in a boat, with darkness and wetness and Death (‘a sort of Charon') conducting the whole experience. This is the stuff of fiction, not life; and yet it was life, too, and the whole point of my project, my fellowship, was that I could learn to distinguish between them.

In the end, I managed to make a few distinctions between Peter's treatment of the facts and the facts themselves. He downplayed the friendship between Byron and Lord Grey. Byron once referred to him as ‘the best of Friends,' but in Peter's story, they didn't know each other well and never moved far beyond their practical relationship – of landlord and tenant, or host and guest. The mention of their school days struck me, too. Then there were all the little decisions Peter made about how to ‘play' the scene. The boy is silent and unwilling, but not unresponsive. He looks for comfort from the source of his discomfort. Coldness seems important, physical coldness and the warmth of coercion. Most suggestively, Peter chose to tell ‘Fair Seed-Time' from the victim's point of view, and not Lord Grey's. Maybe this was the purpose behind his fiction: to imagine, out of curiosity or remorse, what he had done to other people; to see himself through another's eyes. Or I needed to go farther back into his life than Beaumont Hill.

*

I suffer worse from jet lag than Caroline does, and on our first day in Boston, around six a.m., I put some clothes on my daughter and together we ventured out into the new world. A blue, later-summer morning, still drippy with dawn. Our apartment was in an upscale neighborhood only slightly over-run by student digs. There were American front yards and American front porches. We stopped sometimes on their steps, to jump down them, and glimpsed the evidence of American lives being lived behind the glass-fronted doors. On one end of our street was a bagel chain, where we sat together for half an hour along with the other early risers: commuters, shift workers, and retirees, who have forgotten how to sleep in. Shared a bagel and a bottle of apple juice through a straw. Then we wandered to the other end and found the neighborhood park: a couple of basketball courts; a field already lined for little-league soccer; a fenced-in corner for the garden co-op; and a children's playground.

There was another young girl at the park that morning, who had flown in with her parents from London the day before – on our flight. Her mother and I talked about the strangeness of this coincidence, and the pleasantness of middle-class American neighborhoods, which seemed to us equally strange. Especially at that time of the day, with the park sprinklers coming on, wetting the dew-wet grass, and the first joggers on foot. It feels like it would be a sin to be unhappy in a place like this, I said.

I spent a great deal of that year in children's playgrounds, sometimes with a book or a newspaper in hand. Sometimes with my daughter asleep in the stroller beside me, and my lunch in a bag. New England fall, which comes so highly recommended, lived up to its reputation; but the decline towards crisp bright November weather from heavy bright August weather was particularly gentle that year. As late as Thanksgiving, I could take my daughter to the park in nothing more than the wine-red jumper her dead great-aunt had knitted her. I could sit myself comfortably down on a bench, without chasing after her to get warm, for as long as it took me to read the opening section of the
New York Times
. The grave concerns of the newspaper print were spread out against a background of colored bars, loose leaves, and sand.