Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny. David Crane

heroes of the Eastern Tales like Lara or Conrad, mysterious, violent and aristocratic outcasts from a petty world, in whom he found the model, mirror and philosophical justification for his own troubled personality.

      It seems almost too pat that also among his books at this time was Volney’s Ruins of Empire, the work from which Frankenstein’s monster, listening at the cottage window, learned all he knew of human society, but it is too potent a symbol of Trelawny’s plight to let pass. In old age Trelawny was to become an extraordinarily open-minded and intelligent judge of books, but the failed midshipman who fed off Byron in this way was above all an outcast, an intellectual and emotional outsider incapable of measuring a world of which he was largely ignorant, desperate only to find in his reading some echo or corroboration of his own feelings.

      There is nothing rare in men or women shaping their lives by some ideal but as one looks at the influence of Byronic Romanticism on Trelawny during these years it seems doubtful that anyone ever chose so spurious a model. He seems to have been able to read and re-read the great tragedies of Shakespeare, and learn nothing but quotations. Dryden has left no mark. Jane Austen appears never to have been read. Byron, however, filled his imagination, shaped his aspirations and confirmed him in his worst excesses, determined the way he talked and wrote, the way he dressed and behaved, until within a decade it was impossible for contemporaries to know whether he had spawned the Corsair or the Corsair him.

      It was under this influence, in the boarding houses of Bristol, Bath and London, that Trelawny now committed himself to that major deception which was ultimately to transform his existence. It is hard to imagine that the idea of actual imposture can have seized hold of him all at once, and yet as the failures became starker his youthful daydreams must have taken on a more urgent and adult significance, edging the innocent escapism of his naval days ever closer to a wholesale denial of a life which had let him down.

      It would be another dozen years before the fantasies of these years took on their definitive shape in Adventures, but it is still in its pages that we can best trace the genesis of a story that for the next century and more would enjoy the status of history. According to the version of his ‘autobiography’, Trelawny’s ship was in harbour in Bombay when he and a friend called Walter decided to desert, and formed a friendship with a man calling himself De Witt, but whose name turns out to be the equally fictional De Ruyter.^* Trelawny’s devotion to him was immediate and complete. There was nothing De Ruyter could not do, nothing he did not know, no way either physically or mentally that he was not Trelawny’s superior. He was approaching his thirtieth year, could speak most European languages faultlessly, and all the native dialects from ‘the guttural, brute-like grunting of the Malay, the more humanized Hindostanee’ to the ‘softer and harmonious Persian’ with equal ease.²¹ In stature he was majestic, ‘the slim form of the date-tree’ disguising ‘the solid strength of the oak’.²² His forehead was smooth as sculptured marble, his hair dark and abundant, his features well defined, his eyes – the windows to his restless and brilliant soul – as various as a chameleon in their colour.

      Shortly after coming under De Ruyter’s spell, the incident occurred in this imaginary version of events that ended Trelawny’s naval servitude. The two men were playing billiards, when a Scotch lieutenant who had tormented his and Walter’s lives entered. He demanded to know when Trelawny was rejoining his ship, which was sailing the next day. At this Trelawny’s blood seemed to ignite with fire, and then congeal to ice. He dashed his hat in the man’s face, tore off the last insignia of bondage from his own dress, and drew his sword. The lieutenant broke into abject disclaimers of friendship, and begged his pardon. In his rage Trelawny struck him to the ground, kicking and trampling and spitting on him as the creature begged for mercy. ‘His screams and protestations,’ Trelawny wrote,

      while they increased my contempt, added fuel to my anger, for I was furious that such a pitiful wretch should have lorded it over me so long. I roared out, ‘For the wrongs you have done me, I am satisfied. Yet nothing but your currish blood can atone for your atrocities to Walter!’

      Having broken my own sword at the onset, I drew his from beneath his prostrate carcass, and should inevitably have despatched him on the spot, had not a stronger hand gripped hold of my arm. It was De Ruyter’s; and he said, in a low, quiet voice, ‘Come, no killing. Here!’ (giving me a broken billiard cue) ‘a stick is a fitter weapon to chastise a coward with. Don’t rust good steel.’

      It was useless to gainsay him, for he had taken the sword out of my hand. I therefor belaboured the rascal: his yells were dreadful; he was wild with terror, and looked like a maniac. I never ceased till I had broken the butt-end of the cue over him, and till he was motionless.²³

      The young rebel who had suffered under his father’s brutality, under the cruelty of the Reverend Seyer, and in the navy, was at last free. The mysterious De Ruyter who had passed himself off in Bombay as a merchant, now revealed himself as a privateer operating under a French flag, an enemy to all tyranny and corruption, and in the seventeen-year-old midshipman recognized his spiritual heir and child.

      It was the beginning of a new life, and under the leadership of this man, Trelawny embarked on the imaginary career of adventure, excitement, bloodshed, romance and crime which forms the great bulk of his ‘autobiography’. There is no summary of Adventures that can possibly do justice to the colour and imaginative profligacy of his fantasies, nothing that can capture either the compelling immediacy of Trelawny’s fictional world or the visions of violence and domination with which he took his revenge on Caroline and a world that stolidly refused to come up to expectations. As a lonely and unhappy young midshipman, he had daydreamed with his friend Walter of a life without parents, patrimonies or ties ‘amidst the children of nature,’²⁴ but the dreams now were more sinister. Crazed stallions, Malay peasants, naval officers, ugly old women are all brutally mastered, bullied, beaten, burned, killed or crushed like toads beneath his feet. The vegetation and landscape of the east which so prosaically reminded Lord Minto of a Chinese wallpaper, takes on a vivid almost surrealistic life. Wild animals fill his vision with the same haunting, threatening force that they have in Othello. It is wish fulfilment on the grand scale. In De Ruyter the emotional orphan has found a father; in the lovely Zela, shy and beautiful as a faun, devoted to Trelawny until she expires in his arms after a shark attack, the cuckold at last finds the bride he deserves; and in the excitement, colour and violence of his adventures, the unemployed midshipman wins the recognition the Royal Navy had denied him.

      After the public humiliations of the King’s Bench and Consistory Courts, Trelawny was ready to face the world, a Byronic hero with a history and personality to match. In the depths of his imagination he had forged an identity which seemed more vividly true to his sense of self than the reality he had left behind, and if the same might be said of every creative liar, what distinguishes him from a Savage or Baron Corvo is that for the next five years life was to give him what he wanted with an almost Faustian prodigality – years in which invention became a self-fulfilling ordinance, and events danced to the tune of the imagination until fantasy and life pursued each other in an unbreakable circle.

      If psychologically he was prepared for a new life, financially, too, he was at last able to expand his horizons. Through all the rows with his father he had continued to draw an allowance of three hundred pounds a year, and while that was scarcely enough to support a family in comfort, for a single man ready to live abroad it opened up possibilities of leisured and gentlemanly self-indulgence. On 19 May 1819, the Royal Assent to his divorce was given, freeing him of those domestic ties which had shackled his turbulent spirit. The seven lean years were over. Caroline, at last, was out of his life, taking their younger daughter, Eliza, with her. The elder child, Julia, had been farmed out to friends of the Whites. He seems to have backtracked too from the brief intensity of his friendship with Augusta, allowing it to mellow into a mutual warmth which lasted throughout their lives.

      The disappointment and failures of the navy and marriage, the first-floor parlours and bedrooms, were not just forgotten but buried. Mentally he had toughened