I finished a novel recently. In Eileen McHugh, a life
remade, I created a character called Alice, an art teacher close to retirement,
as the principal character’s sculpture teacher during her first year as an art
student. The structure of the book demanded that the story, set in the 1970s,
should be told by contemporary survivors from today’s perspective. Alice would
not have lived until now, so I passed the responsibility of her character to
her son, a physics professor in a university in the north of England. I had
already decided on the surname of the artistic household in which the son grew
up. It was, by chance, Childe. These two artist parents, one three-dimensional,
the other two, would certainly have chosen a one-dimensional name for their
son, so I called him Harold, Harold Childe. It was a joke.
Then, a few days later, I heard a performance of
Harold in Italy, the viola concerto in all but name by Berlioz. Somewhere in
this drug-fuelled Romanticism there was an account, or perhaps the mere
reflection, on Byron‘s Childe Harold’s travels through Italy. It occurred to me
that I should re-read the poem. I read it first when I was the age that my
character, Eileen McHugh, was in her art college. I could now remember next to nothing
about it.
It’s an heroic poem by the equally drug-fuelled Lord
Byron, written in nine lines stanzas, eight pentameters followed by the
terminating Alexandrine. It rhymes ABABBCBCB, meaning that five lines in every
stanza rhyme in a traditional manner. In it, our eponymous hero traverses the
Mediterranean by sea, if that’s linguistically possible, and visits many places
where an artistic education might recall classical allusion. Throughout the
journey, he calls in to places with millennia of evident history and proceeds
to show off much of what he knowns, all learned within the confines of an
English private education. Childe Harold remains self-obsessed, always eager to
place his own responses at the forefront of his thoughts, often in spite of
external stimulation. But that’s Romanticism, isn’t it? And I had not just
written about Eileen McHugh, a 1970s concept artist who imagined meaning into
everything she might choose to juxtapose?
Some years ago, I wrote a novel that attempted a loose
parody of Don Quixote. It was called A Search for Donald Cottee. I am the
person who wrote it, so you will be unsurprised by my estimation of success. I
was particularly proud of my updating of the episode in the Caves of
Montesinos. I began to wonder how one might parody Byron’s Harold some 200
years on from its conception.
So rather than review Childe Harold, which has
probably been done, what I offer here is a plan of parody that may never be
written. The first two stanzas, for me, if experienced today, would be a
Mediterranean cruise. Let’s not experience much at first hand but take pleasure
in being dropped off for a passing couple of hours in the protected zone of
somewhere famous, visited, historical, as specified in the brochure. A diary,
kept by our cruiser, written in verse, is Childe Harold 2020, with sections
copied from the handouts given on the onshore day trips. It’s not Childe
Harold’s nor any other passenger’s reflections on experience that forms the gist
but grab quotes from the tourist notes supplied to anyone who was paid for the
excursion.
The later stanzas do travel inland. How we get from A
to B is largely ignored, but Byron rarely strays anywhere off the Grand Tour. In
contemporary terms. it’s surely a bus trip, a 50-strong group of the kind that marches,
chattering, past the wonders of Neapolitan art in Capodimonte, to be loudly lectured
in front of the Caravaggio, in Milan ignores the Brera to marvel at the Last Supper’s
peeling plaster and congregates surround the copy of David in front of Florence’s
Palazzo Vecchio. I think I jest. But Naples is rather too dirty to walk around,
isn’t it?
What interest me in 2020, is the fact that the
coronavirus pandemic would make both cruise and bus trips rather difficult to
pursue. The barriers are obvious and I will not even try to list them. So how
would Childe Harold 2020 manage to suffer his cascaded paroxysms of emotion?
Online, that’s how. WebCams, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor,
Airb’n’b reviews, restaurant evaluations complete with owner’s apologetic
comments about the service, that’s how our lockdown 2020 Childe Harold might
play his viola. Imagine the locked-down pensioners at home. Where did you go
today dear? I had a walk around the Uffizi. Ignored the crap. Just looked at
the Canalettos. Read about them as well. Views of Venice, apparently. The poem
will be epic.