Benjamin Markovits
A QUIET ADJUSTMENT
328pp. Faber. Paperback, £10.99.
978 0 571 23334 2
The traditional view of Lord Byron’s marriage to Annabella Milbanke in 1815 is
that this was a disaster waiting to happen. For most biographers, the blame
for it has lain with the bride rather than the bridegroom. The “Princess of
Parallelograms”, runs the conventional wisdom, should have been wiser in
addressing her mission to reform and domesticate such a reluctant husband.
Byron himself has received the occasional half-hearted admonition for his
callousness and self-indulgence, but it is easier to blame the victim,
especially one who in this case seems so conspicuously lacking in the
sulphurous glamour surrounding her celebrated spouse.
Recently, however, the perspective has made a significant shift in Annabella’s
favour. This is partly as a result of fresh evidence which suggests that she
was less priggish and lacking in savoir faire than Byron’s sympathizers
liked to imagine, and also because decorum no longer restricts discussion of
the poet’s bisexuality or, crucially in this case, of his incestuous
connection with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Far from being a charmless
prude insufficiently grateful for the privilege of marrying a cultural icon,
Annabella can now appear as both tougher and more worldly and genuinely
vulnerable to her husband’s petulance, selfishness and greed.
Benjamin Markovits’s new novel A Quiet Adjustment takes this more complex
angle on the Byrons’ short-lived marriage, mediating the whole experience
through Annabella, rather than seizing what seems the easier option of
assuming the poet’s viewpoint. This is the second instalment in Markovits’s
projected trilogy involving different phases of the Byronic trajectory. Its
predecessor Imposture (2007) adopted a similar narrative stance, filtering
our awareness of Byron through the embittered gaze of John Polidori, the
young doctor swept up by the poet in his flight from England after an all
too public matrimonial breakdown; who was inspired by him to write The
Vampyre and committed suicide in 1821. Both of Markovits’s novels offer
versions of the Byronic original, as if this were the kind of academy figure
studied in drawing schools of the same period as the events described. We
are given elevations and projections of Byron and encouraged to assess their
impact, but the novelist sedulously avoids trying to enter his state of mind
or to imitate his voice, familiar to us though it is from a memorably
idiosyncratic correspondence.
Finding an appropriate register has nevertheless been an essential
consideration for each of these first two phases of the trilogy. Unlike most
present-day novelists involved in the process of reanimating the past,
Markovits has immersed himself so thoroughly in his chosen world as to
reproduce its preferred literary forms and idioms without a hint of
self-consciousness. For Imposture he chose the type of framework narrative
favoured by Sir Walter Scott, whereby a tragic fiction, compounded from
elements of fact, “an ower true tale” like that of The Bride of Lammermoor,
is encased within the circumstances of its supposed discovery among the
papers of a modern writer. A Quiet Adjustment takes this assimilatory
process a stage further, casting its story and characters in the fictional
mode of an early nineteenth-century novel of manners, divided, what is more,
into the statutory three volumes in sections entitled “Courtship”,
“Marriage” and “Separation”. Markovits, we may be fairly certain, has gone
beyond Jane Austen and looked at such practitioners as Mary Brunton, Susan
Ferrier, or the early exemplars of the Silver Fork school in his search for
the just cadence.
Syntax and sentence structure both play their part in a process of mimicry
which always somehow manages to avoid the archness of pastiche:
"Yes, she was young. She had little sense of the force that her ideas would
achieve in their reality, and her tone suggested most clearly the
imaginative luxury to which a spoilt daughter had become accustomed. But the
contradictions in her description had been only too faithfully played out in
the conflicts of fact; and though the free expression of them had not, at
first, been without its ironies, it was a mistake to dismiss out of hand the
sharpness of her vision."
The analytical expansiveness here seems entirely appropriate to the person who
indulges it, a member of a class with too much time on its hands. Though
Markovits is not concerned with establishing socio-historical signifiers,
his chosen style assists our awareness of what commentators on Regency
culture have called “a crisis of leisure”, in which the aristocracy, failing
to cope with its increasing problems of ennui and wasted energy, forfeited
the respect of the echelons below it.
More effectively employed than either the Byrons or the Milbankes is George
Eden, a clergyman with “sensible tastes and two thousand pounds a year to
satisfy them”, fancied at first by Annabella but rejected because he
“presumes to know”, whereas she “had rather be doubted more”. Ironically it
is Eden to whom she later turns for advice as her marriage begins to fall
apart. One of Markovits’s few solecisms is to allow this Church of England
parson to speak of “the confessional”. We are a good twenty years away from
Pusey and ritualism, and Miss Milbanke, who was a member of a communion in
which confession was general and public, did not, so far as we know, nurture
Popish inclinations. Although he is a minor character, Eden is essential to
the novel as a moral arbiter, and his final encounter with Annabella forces
her to confront the true extent of the compromise she has made with Byron
and Augusta.
A heroine in the authentic sense, Annabella Milbanke first meets Byron at a
morning assembly, invited by Lady Caroline Lamb to the house of Lady
Melbourne where instruction is being offered in the fashionable new dance
known as the waltz. He is accompanied by his sister Augusta Leigh, whose
face is a rounder, softer version of her brother’s and whose presence
uncomfortably reminds Annabella of her own status as an only child. Smug,
spoilt and armed with private literary aspirations, she sees life as a game
for the winning and is unrepentant in setting aside key issues of honesty
and sincerity when securing the poet as a husband. “Lord Byron’s name had
the power, for Annabella, of all stolen treasure: it brought freedom with
guilt.”
The question of who exactly this treasure has been stolen from gains sharper
relief as the novel progresses. Lady Caroline, in this respect, is an ignis
fatuus, though she is not without her significance in the narrative’s final
section. The key player, once the solemnization of the Byrons’ marriage in
the drawing room of the Milbankes’ country house in the North of England has
taken place, is apparently Augusta, for all her tearfulness and timidity. A
visit by the newlyweds to the Leigh household at Six Mile Bottom is
catastrophic, revealing Byron at his most devilish in exploiting both
Annabella’s nascent consciousness of the criminal intimacy between brother
and sister and Augusta’s anxious parade of delicacy towards her new
sister-in-law. Markovits is inclined, nevertheless, to play down the more
grotesque aspects of their union’s swift implosion, so enjoyed in the past
by Byron’s biographers. No explanation is either offered or, in Annabella’s
case, solicited for his sudden indifference to his wife, their newborn
daughter Ada, or the prospects for their marriage’s survival. Over their
final encounter, which Augusta has in some measure stage-managed, there
broods an icy remoteness for which Annabella’s belief in the value of
carrying on as usual can scarcely compensate.
In his “Lines On Hearing Lady Byron Was Ill”, the poet savagely accused
Annabella of being “the moral Clytemnestra of thy lord”. Here she becomes
quite the opposite, not a murderess but a slightly forlorn figure who “never
had within her the capacity to live up publicly to her own private sense of
significance”. Her role, after Byron’s death at Missolonghi, will be that of
living up to the name he has bequeathed her and taking care of the
increasingly pathetic Augusta.
Throughout Benjamin Markovits’s consummately successful realization of the
most controversial protagonist in the Byronic drama, apart from its hero, he
never loosens his control of stylistic resources or relaxes his often
chilling scrutiny of the motives and aspirations governing the Regency caste
to which both Byrons belonged. A Quiet Adjustment achieves authenticity
through the refinement of its emotional discourse rather than set-dressing
period details. Such artistry allows us to read it as both a resonantly
modern novel and as a fiction whose truth has been stifled for almost 200
years.
Jonathan Keates’s The Siege of Venice was published in 2005. His second
novel, Smile Please, appeared in 2000.
