Book Review
On a Voiceless Shore / Byron in Greece
by Stephen Minta
292pp. Marion Wood / Henry Holt. $25. 0 8050 3778 0
When they were at Malta in September 1809, Byron and his friend Hobhouse took eleven lessons in Arabic from the Abbate Giacchino Navarro, Librarian at the Valletta Public Library. This seems a sure sign they had arrived with no firm intention of going either to Greece or to Constantinople, for in neither place would Arabic be of any use. They bought an Arabic grammar on September 2nd, and started their lessons on the 3rd. Also on the 3rd, however, they met a man who, seeing two young, impressionable and directionless Englishmen, one of whom was of striking beauty, decided to charm them into his circle, and to send them to Albania, to Ali Pasha.
The man was Spiridion Foresti, sometime English Consul on Corfu, but now out of a job. By a secret clause in the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit, the Ionian Islands been restored to the French, and he’d had to leave. He was now assisting Admiral Collingwood, C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet, in a plan to take the Islands back. This would not be difficult, for the French were very unpopular there, and the islanders were anxious to put themselves under English protection (some of their merchantmen had forced the Foreign Office’s hand in April, by raising the Union Jack in Constantinople harbour). The difficulty lay with Ali Pasha – the criminal parasite and mass-murderer often described as the Third Most Unpopular Man in Modern Greek History, after Hitler and Stalin. Ali had been casting a favourable eye on the Ionians for years – particularly on Santa Maura, and the coastal town of Parga. If the English were to take the Islands, he needed sweetening.
In the twenty-one-year-old Byron, Foresti had found his sweetener. A smooth cosmopolitan, he (together with his son George) took Byron and Hobhouse bathing, entertained them at the theatre, and regaled them with salacious rumour and gossip about the courts of Europe, about Angelica Catalani, and about Napoleon. On September 4th he introduced them to Constance Spencer-Smith, with whom Byron started an affair. By September 15th Byron and Hobhouse had succumbed to his persuasions, and were ready to go to Prevesa, and thence to Tepellene, Ali’s Albanian H.Q. They’d no other plans, and Ali sounded exciting. They sailed on the 19th. Whether or not they knew that an English force of 1800-plus men was only three days behind them, aiming at the Ionians, is a point on which both men kept quiet for the rest of their lives.
Compromised by all this was the English Consul at Ioannina, William Martin Leake, topographer, archaeologist, numismatist, and secret agent. He had been instructed by Collingwood to encourage Ali in his lust for Santa Maura and Parga. Now he would have to carry the can for Albion’s perfidy. The plan for the English to take the Ionians, wrote Admiral Collingwood to the Foreign Office, “… will at least preserve them, from a fate more dreaded, than their present condition, – but is diametrically opposite to the assurance Captain Leake is directed to give him [Ali]”. On September 24th Ali sent Leake a letter, full of sadness and subtextual threat. “You haven’t written me anything new,” he wrote. “Especially now with the coming of these English I was waiting for some news from you after everything we had talked about all this time.” When Byron and Hobhouse arrived at Ioannina, Leake refused to see them – but when their political innocence became clear he thawed a bit, and was more hospitable.
Such was the speed of communication even in 1809 that Ali was expecting his guests. His agents welcomed them in Ioannina, and provided transport for the difficult journey to Tepellene. Leake had told Ali that “an Englishman of great family” was in his dominions – a flattering description of Byron, whose family had never been great, and who had become a lord by accident, but who had the style to carry it off. As they approached Tepellene, Hobhouse drew parallels between Ali and the eighteenth-century reformist Portuguese tyrant, the Marquis de Pombal. It was wishful thinking. Ali reformed roads, but nothing else. Mostly he just killed people, horribly. But he knew a fait accompli when he saw one, and congratulated Byron and Hobhouse on the conquest of the Islands, saying how happy he was to have the English for his neighbours.
Exactly what else happened at Tepellene between Ali and Byron, no-one will know – and no-one is anxious to think about it. Part of Byron’s motive in travelling was to satisfy his homosexual needs, upon which English law and custom frowned, and Ali’s bisexuality was notorious. I doubt very much whether they hit the sack together, but Byron was probably entertained by Ali’s Ganymedes, while Ali looked on benignly, and Hobhouse snored away down the passage. Cecil Y. Lang would have us believe that the event was the single most important in Byron’s life, and that his poetry – Don Juan in particular – is an encoded confession of the guilt he felt when later political sophistication made him realise how he’d been used.
Six weeks after leaving Tepellene, Byron, waiting at Patrass for a favourable wind to cross the Gulf of Corinth, and climb Parnassus, shot an eagle. On the same day (December 10th) Hobhouse recorded, as if with surprise, “… we have observed the profess’d hatred of their masters to be universal amongst the Greeks”. Byron was often to use the eagle in his poetry as an image of freedom, either exercised or denied – it is as if his killing the eagle, and the dawning of political awareness for both him and Hobhouse, coincided. His conscience was to be pricked at intervals by various islanders, especially the Karvellas brothers from Zante, whom he met at Geneva and at Pisa, and who told him of the brutal maladministrations of “King Tom” Maitland, the drunken English Governor-General. I find it hard to believe that Byron’s shame at the way he had allowed himself to be prostituted by Foresti was not an important ingredient in his motive for returning to Greece at the end of his life. He certainly atoned then.
Stephen Minta’s On A Voiceless Shore is an excellent book, concentrating on Byron in Greece, but acting in effect as a complete biography of the poet. As such it is much more skilfully written, and has its subject much more clearly in focus, than the recent, regrettable Byron The Flawed Angel, by Phyllis Grosskurth. The poetry is kept on the book’s periphery, as in Grosskurth, but, as is not the case in Grosskurth, is valued as it should be. Minta’s narrative is interspersed with accounts – discreetly anticlimactic for the most part – of his own experiences in the modern Greek locations. But, expert as he is on every other aspect of Byron’s Greece, he has nothing to say about the politics of the Ionians, or about Byron’s feelings relating to the “mission” Foresti sent him on, to keep Ali Pasha happy.