Lord Byron's Jackal: A Life of Edward John Trelawny by David Crane, HarperCollins, 398pp, £19.99 in UK.
Edward John Trelawny was a 19th-century English Romantic coloured by the self-promotional inventiveness of Baron Munchausen and Toad of Toad Hall. However, David Crane writes, "As the poet James Michie once remarked, the fact that a man lies most of the time does not mean he lies all of the time."
The task challenging Trelawny's enthusiastic but careful biographer was to disentangle the facts from the fictionally enhanced "autobiographies" left behind by an unscrupulous, talented literary swashbuckler. Trelawny based his scavenging-jackal career on the reputations of Byron and Shelley. Crane has succeeded in putting together a plausible and highly entertaining account of a life that always seemed, until now, larger than it really was.
Trelawny was descended from a well-to-do West Country family. Ancestors fought at Agincourt and against the Spanish Armada. He usually claimed to have been born in Cornwall, but, in fact, according to Crane, he was "almost certainly" born, in 1792, in his grandfather's house in Soho.
In his largely fictional first volume of pseudo-autobiography, Adventures of a Younger Son, one of the true disclosures is that Trelawny hated his father and rebelled against all authority. Charles Trelawny, an impoverished lieutenant-colonel in the Coldstream Guards, married, his son wrote, "a dark masculine woman ... with nothing to recommend her but an inheritance".
Trelawny described himself in boyhood as "callous", "sullen", "vindictive", "insensible" and "indifferent to shame and fear". His father cut short the boy's education at the age of thirteen and committed him, as "a gentleman volunteer", to service as a midshipman in the Royal Navy. At the time of the Napoleonic Wars, as Crane comments, "the life in the midshipman's cockpit of a man-of-war was harsh and brutalising".
Trelawny played no part in Nelson's victory at Trafalgar, but he was transferred to Colossus, a ship that was there, and sailed with her back to acclaim in Portsmouth. In a key passage on Trelawny's early conditioning, Crane writes:
For the rest of his days Trelawny would bitterly regret that he had missed the greatest battle ever fought under sail and the hurrahs of the ships' crews anchored at Spithead lodged deep in his soul. Throughout the whole of his life and instinctive movement of Trelawny's memory would always take him to the centre of great events, cavalierly annexing whole scenes and achievements as if they had been his own ...
He jumped ship in Bombay and deserted from the Navy. His first marriage was a humiliating disaster, ended by a divorce case in which his wife's adultery was publicly described in squalid detail.
After such inauspicious beginnings, although he was an outsider by conventional standards he contrived successfully to associate himself with the most romantic aesthetic and political causes of the age. An ardent autodidact, he did a lot of reading and was mesmerised especially by what Crane calls "the exotic, profligate and dazzling world of Byron's poetry and tales". Byron's autobiographical romantic hero Childe Harold was a model irresistibly seductive to a 20-year-old of Trelawny's escapist and melodramatic temperament.
Physically powerful, handsome in a wild gypsy mode, and charming, Trelawny managed to insinuate himself into Byron's circle in Pisa. Having helped design the boat that caused Shelley's death by drowning, Trelawny presided over Shelley's funeral pyre on the beach and kept some fragments of the poet's bones as souvenirs.
"Byron asked me to preserve the skull for him," Trelawny wrote, "but remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinking cup, I was determined Shelley should not be so profaned." (See Byron's poem "Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull", with its reasonable argument, "Better to hold the sparkling grape,/Than nurse the earthworm's slimy brood.")
Byron liked Trelawny sufficiently to invite him, in 1823, to accompany him to Greece to help fight against the Turks. Like other ardent but ill-organised alien Philhellenes, Byron and Trelawny had only the vaguest idea of how best to serve the cause. Byron got himself killed at Missolonghi and Trelawy set himself up as a supernumerary "Greek chieftain", in company with a genuine chieftain, Odysseus Androutses, in a wellstocked, impregnable cave high up on Parnassus. During his months in this snug redoubt, Trelawny evidently performed no useful military function whatsoever. However, he took Odysseus's thirteen-year-old half-sister as a temporary bride and begot a child by her - his one contribution to Greece's future.
It was there also that a fiercely idealistic young fellow countryman attempted to assassinate Trelawny, without success.
Rescued from the Greek civil war, Trelawny recovered from his bullet wounds and survived for more than fifty years, progressing from "suffering victim to architect of his own reputation". Perhaps the most interesting feature of Crane's biography is his account of how Trelawny exploited his sentimental friendships with Byron and Shelley to achieve literary renown.
Mary Shelley told Trelawny that he belonged "not to any one woman but all womankind". Swinburne described Trelawny in old age as "as magnificent old Viking". At 85, he was like "some semi-extinct volcano", according to Edward Carpenter. Even then, as always, Trelawny fitted Lady Caroline Lamb's famous diary summation of Byron as "mad, bad and dangerous to know".