Leaving Montana--Prologue

My father may have been a romantic. I have a picture of him around the time I was born, or maybe just before the War, leaning casually on one elbow on the open window of a Ford Roadster. He was wearing a tight white suit. He was lean, his hair was blonde and wavy, he must have been about 21 or 22. I can understand why my mother fell in love with him--if that is what happened. Or perhaps they got married because she was pregnant by him and marriage was what a man and a pregnant woman settled for at that time: walking away or abortion were not options.

I have always speculated that he was a romantic because he claimed that our family, the Noel's of Hannibal, Missouri--or was it Clarence, Missouri: those names were always thrown around when Dad talked about his family, but I never went to any of those towns or met any of the Missouri Noels--because he claimed that we were descended from Lord Byron, and that I was named for Lord Byron.

This didn't mean much to me when I was in the sixth grade and started reading seriously. At that time serious reading meant novels about the War or memoirs of submarine service or Hardy Boy mysteries or Jack London adventures. But when I got to high school, my home room teacher, Dan Low, was also my English teacher and my French teacher. He had been in the War and it was rumored that he abandoned his famous Massachusetts family to find peace and a simple life in Montana. With his New England upbringing and his Amherst degree he knew that Lord Byron had a complicated life and a complicated name, George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron. So it was Mr. Low who confirmed that I had been named after my Dad's claimed ancestor. I read a few of Byron's poems, but I was not yet ready at age 14 for the heroic mode, and I moved on to other literature.

I only saw Dad a few times a year, and I never asked him for evidence that the Noel's I came from were the Noels that gave Byron his middle name. Some years later I was avoiding writing my senior thesis on a renaissance poem called The Faerie Queen by prowling in the stacks of Widener Library and came across a biography of Byron. What I learned did not do anything to make me believe Dad's claim. It appears that Byron took his unhappy wife's family name in exchange for their settling a 1000 pounds a year on him so that he could keep up his family estate and look like an appropriate British Lord, which he was not. So perhaps we were descended from his wife's Nottingham family. And had we been descended from him directly it would have been no great distinction, since it was (and is) widely believed that he fathered three hundred illegitimate children.

Whether Dad knew the Byron story from family conversations or made it up himself after reading about Byron I never knew. I did not admire Dad for much, but I was impressed that he discovered the possibility of any connection with the famous British rake and poet. And I thought it was a sign of a romantic mind that Dad took it as a good thing to elevate himself by claiming a nobel ancestor in a place like Montana where no gave a damn.

All of which is a lengthy explanation of the name of this Blog, Pilgrimage, which is another, even longer story I won't tell you right now but has to do with one of Byron's most famous poems, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which I don't much care for, and the fabulous viola concerto that Berlioz wrote based on the poem, Harold in Italy, which I love.

Faced with a short time and the need to name a blog if I were about to write one, those were the connections that occurred over about two minutes that led to a title meant to suggest my long trip, from Montana in 1941, to now, that could have been called a pilgrimage if I had had any idea of where I was going when I left Montana, as I did not.