Lord Byron's Jackal: A Life of Edward John Trelawny

Dismissed by a contemporary as ""Lord Byron's jackal,"" Trelawny (1792-1881), the 19th-century adventurer and companion of the English Romantics, traded on his celebrity as a survivor all his life. He had burned Shelley's drowned body on the beach at Viareggio and accompanied Byron to Greece, reinventing afterward the Missolonghi deathbed scene he had actually missed. Crane's biography (his debut) is more detailed and more melodramatic than William St. Clair's 1977 life, devoting much of its space to the two years and 10 days of Trelawny's escapades among the motley volunteers helping to liberate Greece from the Turks. In Trelawny's last 50 years, he made the most of his hard-won notoriety, producing two compelling, if mendacious, memoirs--Adventures of a Younger Son (1831) and Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858). Tough and stoic, brutal and brave, he was an attractive scoundrel who had a way with women. He married one of his four wives when she was 13, and had mistresses into very old age. He also won literary admirers among the Victorians, and was memorably painted by Millais (in North West Passage) as the old sea captain he never was (he had been a midshipman before his encounters with the romantics). Although Trelawny's own propensity to romanticize tempts Crane into verbal excess, most strikingly when the adventurer at 40 allegedly attempts to swim the rapids of the ""Hudson"" (actually the Niagara) below Niagara Falls, Trelawny's vitality keeps one engrossed. 55 b&w illus., two maps. (Sept.)