Childish Loves (30 page)

Edleston died in May, but the news didn't reach Byron until October. After the sexual freedom of his Continental travels, he let three months go by without looking up the young man he had once described to Elizabeth Pigot as ‘the only being I esteem.' There's an echo of that phrase in his response to Edleston's death. He wrote to Francis Hodgson, an old Cambridge friend, who had known both Matthews and Long, ‘I heard of a death the other day that shocked me more than any of the preceding, of one whom I once loved more than I ever loved a living thing, & one who I believe loved me to the last, yet I had not a tear left for an event which five years ago would have bowed me to the dust; still it sits heavy on my heart & calls back what I wish to forget, in many a feverish dream.' In spite of his shock, he manages to avoid any pronouns. Hodgson was about to take orders and used to argue with Byron about religion.

A few days later, in a letter to Hobhouse, Byron gave an account of his feelings for Edleston that was both less guarded and more equivocal: ‘At present I am rather low, & dont know how to tell you the reason – you remember E at Cambridge – he is
dead
– last May – his Sister sent me the account lately – now though I never should have seen him again, (& it is very proper that I should not) I have been more affected than I should care to own elsewhere.' He can't leave the subject alone and a week later, from Cambridge this time, writes again: ‘I am very low-spirited on many accounts, & wine, which however I do not quaff as formerly, has lost it's power over me. – We all wish you here, & well wherever you are, but surely better with us … The event I mentioned in my last has had an effect on me, I am ashamed to think of, but there is no arguing on these points. I could “have better spared a better being.” – Wherever I turn, particularly in this place, the idea goes with me, I say all this at the risk of incurring your contempt, but you cannot despise me more than I do myself. – I am indeed very wretched, & like all complaining persons I can't help telling you so.'

Something has happened to his ‘esteem' for Edleston, which he formerly boasted of; his own self-esteem has suffered in the drop. Part of the poignancy of this last letter lies in the fact that the only person he can talk to about his grief disapproves of it. Hobhouse had traveled through Turkey and Greece with him, understood his inclination for boys, and ‘despised' him for it. And Byron, hearing of Edleston's death, can open his heart to no one else; he is desperate to see him.

As I worked my way cold-fingered along the stacks, I wondered why Peter had chosen the Cambridge choirboy – picked him out of the hundreds of Byron's lovers, to tell his story. Was it because they
didn't
sleep together? Edleston himself emerges from Peter's account with a very definite character: petulant, shy, vain, soft-hearted, manipulative. None of these qualities can be found in the rather blank young man described by the letters and biographies. ‘He is nearly my height,' Byron wrote, ‘very thin, very fair complexion, dark eyes, & light locks. My opinion of his mind, you already know, I hope I shall never have reason to change it.' But he changed it quickly enough after Edleston died.

*

The last time I saw Henry Jeffries was at a reading he gave in November at the Harvard Book Store. He was reading from his new book,
The Art of Fiction
, which was more or less a collection of essays about novels he liked and the way they ‘worked' – Jeffries' word for it, by which he meant the negotiation a novel makes between the formally satisfying artificiality of art and the unshaped reality of the world. Jeffries read very well. He wore a jacket but no tie, spoke in audible ordinary tones and told lots of jokes. The bookstore had set up a dozen rows of chairs in one of the side rooms, but it turned out that there weren't enough seats. A number of people (I was one of them) squatted beneath the shelves or crouched under the low ceiling of the staff exit. Someone even rigged up a TV in the front room to broadcast his talk to the rest of the store. Afterwards I bought one of the books and joined the queue of people lining up for his signature. I waited maybe fifteen minutes. When my turn came to approach him, he very gallantly shook my hand and pulled me aside for a brief conversation.

Over the weekend before we had lunch I finally got around to reading
The Art of Fiction
, and I brought my copy along with me to Sandrines. Jeffries was late, and as I sat at a table in the window, waiting, I felt the need of something to read; but somehow I couldn't bring myself to take out his book. It would look too pushy. He came in a few minutes afterwards, with an air of mild hurry, which was really just his air of apology. I had met him two or three times, but the impression he makes in my memory always differs a little from the effect of his presence. For one thing, he generally turns out to be better groomed: clean-shaven; expensively and modestly dressed. Sitting down, he crossed his legs and I noticed his shoes – a pair of brown brogues without laces.

Sandrines, as Jeffries promised,
looks
like a Harvard institution, at least from the inside. The building it belongs to is unprepossessing, flat-faced, vaguely modern, but the restaurant has taken over the ground floor and fronts the street with an elegant wall of glass. There is a curved bar in a corner of the room, backed by a mirror that reflects the irregularities of the bottles lined up against it. The barman wears an apron. White table-cloths heavily cover the small scattered tables. Women in pearls lunch there; retired men in suits. Jeffries ordered the special without looking at the menu, said he ‘felt like a beer,' and asked me if I'd join him. ‘What a lovely idea,' he repeated, as we waited for our food. I told him I had been reading his book.

‘That's one of those phrases, isn't it,' he said. ‘Like
I couldn't possibly eat another bite.'

Jeffries was maybe five years older than me, but I couldn't help feeling around him, as I often felt towards successful people, that he had thought more seriously than I had on certain important questions, and that this was the reason for his success. (While I was so out of it I didn't even know what the questions were.) The few times we had met before, I had the sense of some affinity between us, which was partly just the effect of his charm – the charm of the modest, famous man. But it was also the effect of shared tastes. Jeffries grew up in York, a pretty, provincial middle-class English city. His father was a civil servant; his mother painted watercolors and organized events for the local chapter of the WI. They scraped enough together to send him to Winchester, pushing him ‘bottom first' (his own phrase for it), and with some difficulty, one or two rungs up the class ladder. My childhood was Texan, Jewish, classless. I grew up playing basketball in the backyard. But we had read the same books and that fact counted for more than the other differences.

When the food arrived, he pushed back his chair to make room for the waiter. After he had gone, Jeffries said, ‘Although, as it happens, I have been reading yours. In some ways they're not dissimilar, though I must say I've never taken the idea … quite as far as you.'

‘What idea is that?'

‘All this business about Peter's life, and what you can read into it from the novels. I'm sympathetic, but has it occurred to you what it will look like to people who aren't?'

‘How will it look?'

He didn't answer at first, so I went on. ‘Maybe you're right about the critics. But most readers assume automatically that writers write novels to write about themselves. It's harder to persuade them that something in a book
isn't
true than that it is.'

‘It's almost a relief to hear you say that,' he said. ‘You make me feel very reasonable. Even so, I would hesitate to do what you're doing. Deciding, for example, on the strength of three novels whether twenty years ago a high-school teacher slept with one of his students. I'm also not sure why you care.'

‘I don't care much if he did or not,' I said. ‘I just want to know.'

‘But what does it matter, at this stage.'

This was an argument I'd been waiting to have, so I gave him the answer that I had ready. That Byron himself treated fiction as a kind of code, which allowed him to refer more or less openly to the facts of his life: to his divorce, for example, in the opening canto of
Don Juan
. Everybody knew what he meant, and what's moving about the poetry isn't the story it tells but the real history it refers to. He could be surprisingly even-handed and forgiving. This is how
his
fiction works, I said. ‘It seems natural to apply the same standard to Peter.'

‘That sounds to me more clever than honest.'

‘Let me put it another way then. What I know about Peter Sullivan is that he grew up in Charlestown in the lodging house run by his mother. Never had girlfriends or boyfriends, never took anyone home. Went to BU though maybe he got into Harvard. Landed a job at a private school outside Boston and lived in a dorm room on campus, until he was kicked out for allegedly improper relations with one of his students. Moved to New York, where he got another job at a private school, which is where I met him. Never talked to any of his colleagues. His only friends seem to have been members of the Byron Society, which meets up maybe once a month. Sometimes he went on holiday with them. In his spare time, which he must have had plenty of, he writes these novels, which aren't published until he is dead. This is why I'm curious about what happened at Beaumont Hill, because nothing else seems to have happened to him at all.'

There was a silence; I had the feeling I was talking too much. Outside, across the shadows of the street, a typical college-town figure made his way: either a bum or a professor. Uncut beard, untied shoelaces – leather boots. In spite of the cold he wore only dirty chinos and a tweed jacket. Jeffries pointed him out to me. We watched his progress through the large restaurant window. ‘One of your vivid types,' Jeffries said. And then, ‘Memoir seems to be the form your thoughts are taking these days.'

‘Probably because of Peter. I find it disheartening, going through these stories and working out what he made up and what he didn't.'

‘I've told you already I don't think there's any need to.'

‘Whenever I give a reading of Peter's work, this is what everyone wants to know.'

Jeffries called for coffee and while we were waiting for it, he said, ‘I rather enjoyed seeing myself as a character, by the way. Even if the role was small.
Balding
I particularly liked.'

‘I should have warned you. I never remember what I put in these books.'

‘I wondered about that, after
Playing Days
. If anybody was offended. I was wondering if your wife has seen what you've written here? Forgive me. I'm being presumptuous.'

‘Presumptuous?'

‘Personal, I suppose, is what an American would say. You seem to be writing a book about yourself.'

After a moment I said, ‘I don't understand what you're getting at.'

‘When we met at dinner, I remember you felt quite strongly that writing was not a profession that should compromise any of one's other duties …'

‘I don't see that it has.'

‘Then, she doesn't mind?'

‘Being in a book? I can't say she likes it, but it doesn't matter much. It's only a book. Byron liked to say that going naked was the best disguise.'

‘Not Byron, someone else. Congreve maybe; Walter Scott. But being in a book isn't what I meant.'

Suddenly I saw what he
did
mean. ‘Oh, that's just because you read too much into everything. You'd be surprised how many women I meet and don't have affairs with. Kelly's just one of a crowd.' He didn't say anything, and for some reason I kept talking. ‘People tend to overstate the importance of sex. They want to persuade everyone else how much they're having. In fact, our culture has to work pretty hard just to get us to have sex at all. The technology keeps getting better. Movies and magazines replace pictures and dirty novels. Along comes the Internet. The trouble is these things only make us consume more sexual substitutes, because we don't really want the real thing. But you think I'm saying all this for your amusement.'

‘No,' he said, because he had been smiling unhappily, ‘I was only thinking what an odd pair you are, you and Peter, to be writing about Lord Byron. Because he quite liked sex.'

When the bill came, Jeffries paid it, making the excuse of a company card. Afterwards, on our way out, I told him, ‘I've gone about this in a very odd way. I wanted to persuade you to publish an excerpt from Peter's new book. But I don't think that's what I've persuaded you of.'

He rested his hand on my shoulder. ‘If I can't it isn't because I don't want to. It will only go to show how much my voice counts for at the magazine. Not much, I'm afraid. The fiction crowd are really running the show.'

We walked together as far as Harvard Square, against the stream of tourists and students. ‘I think we part company here,' he said and shook my hand. ‘What an excellent idea this was. We must do it again.' From the steps of the station a man stopped to ask us for change. He needed to get back to his sister in Needham. She had called him to say that she'd been in a car accident, but then his phone ran out. When he tried to buy a train-ticket he discovered his credit card had just expired. He didn't have any money on him; he was stuck. A youngish black man with an educated voice – he wore a collared shirt and jeans. Only his shoes gave him away, a pair of dirty sneakers with holes in the toes and the rubber soles pushing out the seams. Jeffries dug out a dollar bill from his pocket. ‘You poor man,' he kept repeating; afterwards he gave me a look. I had waited awkwardly a few steps ahead of them until the transaction was complete, then I shook Jeffries' hand again and said goodbye.