It is almost two hundred years since the death of Lord Byron. He succumbed to a fever on April 19, 1824, in the town of Missolonghi, on the west coast of Greece, at the age of thirty-six. As was far from unusual at the time, medical professionals did much to hasten the end that they were supposed to prevent. In Byron’s words, “There are many more die of the lancet than the lance.” Leeches, enemas, and blistering—the deliberate raising of blisters on the skin—were part of the treatment. Byron was reluctant to be bled by his physicians, whom he slighted as “a damned set of butchers,” but eventually surrendered to their efforts. One modern expert has estimated that, in his final days, they drained at least two and a half litres of his blood. It is surprising that the patient lasted as long as he did.
Byron had come to Greece the previous year, sailing from Italy, where he had been living since 1816. He was a British peer, and his poems have lodged him in the canon of English verse, yet the last eight years of his life were spent in exile. His liberal sympathies had always been fierily provocative, and his hope, on arrival in Greece, had been that he might lend his name, his title, his legendary lustre, and his considerable wealth to the cause of Greek independence in the fight against Ottoman rule. A naval officer, Captain Edward Blaquiere, had assured him that “your presence will operate as a Talisman—and the field is too glorious,—too closely associated with all you hold dear, to be any longer abandoned.” Yet here was Byron, expiring not in glory but in delirium, with an unavailing gaggle of doctors and servants, amid a Babel of English, Italian, and Greek, and, outside, the shout of a thunderstorm. “Half smiling,” one onlooker reported, the dying man said, “Questa è una bella scena.” Or, “What a beautiful scene.”
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That clear note of the theatrical—of the self-dramatizing reflex, ringing out even at the last, on a dismal deathbed, far from home—is what we should listen out for, two centuries on, as we consider the case of Byron. Seldom is the drama unattended by the half smile. However heated the moment, and no matter whether the action is carnal, domestic, military, meteorological, or fashionably social, Byron, at his best, takes care to cast a cool, appraising glance at how the spectacle must appear to the passing ironist:
Such is the pretty picture presented by the hero and his paramour (one of many) in the second canto of “Don Juan,” Byron’s uncontested masterpiece. He began it in 1818; the fifteenth and sixteenth cantos were published shortly before his death, a fragment of a seventeenth long afterward. Notice how the quip at the stanza’s end—a comical counterpart, you might say, to the vision of arrested beauty in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—provides something other than cynical deflation. The fact that the lovers conform to a type, in their sighing and gasping, seems to buoy up, not to pop, the erotic mood. For all his lofty status, Byron tends to look askance rather than down. Ever generous, he bequeaths to us his craving for sensation. Just because there is nothing original under the sun doesn’t mean that adventurous souls should not be over the moon. Tomorrow to fresh beds, and battles new.
But where to start? Should you wish to tackle Byron, now is the time, as the bicentenary of his death draws near; there’s no denying, however, that his collected works loom like a fortress in your path. He claimed to detest the act of writing: “I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.” Join the club. Somehow he mastered the torment and plowed ahead. A fine new Oxford edition of his poetry and accompanying material, edited by Jonathan Sachs and Andrew Stauffer, omits great swathes of Byron’s output, but still runs to some eleven hundred pages. (And costs a hundred and forty-five dollars. Could one request a small discount, perhaps, given that there’s a typo on the first page of the introduction?) As for his letters and journals, they have struck devotees as the most unflagging in the language, but these days they need to be hunted down secondhand, and, be warned, they fill thirteen volumes in all. To read straight through them would ruin your sleep, imperil your relationships, and entail trading your life for Byron’s. Sounds like a fair swap to me.
Luckily, there is an alternative. Stauffer is paying double homage, not just co-producing the Oxford edition but also giving us “Byron: A Life in Ten Letters” (Cambridge). This is a compact biography, elegantly structured around a few choice pickings from the poet’s correspondence. Each letter affords Stauffer a chance for a ruminative riff on whichever facet of Byron’s history and character happened to be glittering most brightly at the time. We are presented, for instance, with a jammed and breathless communication from Byron to his London publisher, John Murray, almost three thousand words long, sent from Ravenna, in 1819, and centered on “La Fornarina”—Margarita Cogni, a tempestuous baker’s wife with whom Byron had been involved in Venice. Stauffer comments, “One gets the sense that he could have kept going indefinitely with more juicy details, except he runs out of room.”
The person whom we know as Lord Byron made his entrance into the world, in 1788, with a plainer name: George Gordon Byron. The baby’s mother was Catherine Gordon, a Scottish heiress, and his father was Captain John Byron, commonly referred to as Mad Jack (not to be confused with his father, an admiral known as Foulweather Jack), a spendthrift who did his best to burn through his wife’s inheritance. The child had a misshapen foot and lower leg, which was to cause him lasting pain and lent him what one biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, calls a “sliding gait.” Even here one finds a spasm of unlikely comedy: among his adult acquaintances, there was some disagreement as to which foot was actually deformed.
Young George was three years old when his father died. The boy was taken to Scotland by his mother, who was anything but temperate—“haughty as Lucifer,” as he later recalled. From first to last, there is no sense of placidity, let alone swampy flatness, in Byron’s existence; he was either forcing things to happen or having them befall him, and, in following every twist, you constantly need to remind yourself that this is a real being and not a fictional character. (He may have suffered the same confusion himself.) When he was six, the plot took another turn. The great-nephew of Foulweather Jack was killed by a cannonball in Corsica, the upshot being that Byron was now the heir presumptive to a title. He acceded to it in 1798, becoming the sixth Lord Byron, and his earliest biographer, Thomas Moore, tells us that, at school roll call, the word “Dominus” was prefixed to Byron’s name. According to Moore, the ten-year-old child “stood silent amid the general stare of his school-fellows, and, at last, burst into tears.”
With his change of status came an ancient house, Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, which still stands today. Grand and gloomy, with monastic ruins built into its structure, and three hundred acres of parkland, it is almost a parody of a Gothic dwelling; Washington Irving, having paid a visit, described it as one of “those quaint and romantic piles, half castle, half convent, which remain as monuments of the olden times of England.” No less absurd is the notion of its having been the fiefdom of a lad. A poem titled “On Leaving N—st—d,” written when Byron was fifteen, shows how the place ignited his flammable imaginings:
The precocity did not end there. Something murkier occurred as well. Byron had a Scottish nurse, May Gray; it was reported, by one of his guardians, “that she was perpetually beating him, and that his bones sometimes ached from it; that she brought all sorts of Company of the very lowest Description into his apartments.” Byron later confessed to a friend that, when he was nine, “a free Scotch girl,” meaning Gray, “used to come to bed with him and play tricks with his person.” Byron added, in his journal, “My passions were developed very early—so early—that few would believe me.” The tone here is highly distinctive, entwining a perverse boastfulness with traumatic dread. As if that mixture weren’t dense enough, the boy’s abuser had a habit of quoting Scripture to him. The commingling of the sacred and profane in Byron’s mature verse has no single root cause, but any inquiries should start with May Gray.
Byron went to Harrow School, and from there, “as unsocial as a wolf taken from the troop,” to Trinity College, Cambridge. “I am now most pleasantly situated in Superexcellent Rooms,” he wrote, in 1805. “Yesterday my appearance in the Hall in my State Robes was Superb.” Behind the snort of the italics, you hear a smart young beau trying too hard to carry off an aristocratic swagger. Hop ahead two years and you discover, as so often with Byron, that the edge of enthusiasm has been dulled. The first letter in Stauffer’s selection has a jaded air: “This place is wretched enough, a villainous Chaos of Dice and Drunkenness, nothing but Hazard and Burgundy, Hunting, Mathematics and Newmarket, Riot and Racing.”
For all the wretchedness, Cambridge provided Byron with what he later called “the happiest, perhaps, days of my life.” It also furnished him with new acquaintances, including an undergraduate named John Cam Hobhouse, who would grow into a lifelong friend; a young chorister, John Edleston, for whom Byron conceived “a violent, though pure love and passion”; and, notoriously, a bear—Byron’s way of cocking a shaggy snook at the authorities, who forbade the keeping of dogs. But he was genuinely fond of animals, and the bear was the prelude to a rolling bestiary. Years afterward, Percy Bysshe Shelley went to stay with Byron in Ravenna and met “five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane” on the stairs.
At Cambridge, Byron attended no lectures, as far as we know. And yet, despite the demands of dissipation, he wrote. For him, poetry was no sequestered art; more aflame than aloft, it had to hold its own among competing ardors, any one of which could burn itself out. The trick was to catch and to kindle it when the opportunity arose, as he explained to Thomas Moore:
By the time Byron left university, he had produced no less than three volumes of verse, two of them privately printed. The third, tellingly titled “Hours of Idleness,” earned a review so infuriating to Byron that his response developed into yet another book, “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” which launched a broadside against his contemporaries and hymned the praises of Alexander Pope, who had died sixty-five years earlier. In homage to Pope, Byron vented his spleen in heroic couplets:
The joke is that Byron was all of twenty-one when this was published. Upon coming of age, he was able to take his place in the House of Lords. By then he was residing in London, “buried in an abyss of Sensuality,” as he admitted, from which there was but one reliable escape. Thus it was that he set off, in June, 1809, together with Hobhouse, for Portugal. The new Oxford edition, ever dutiful, treats us to the poet’s earnest envoi, its stanzas stiff with respectable yearning. (“And I will cross the whit’ning foam, / And I will seek a foreign home” and “I go—but wheresoe’er I flee / There’s not an eye will weep for me.”) No fun at all. What the editors leave out, and what gives us a much saltier splash of the departing Byron, is a farewell letter that he sent to a pal named Francis Hodgson. Imagine receiving this in the mail:
If you want to track the to-and-fro of Byron’s life, you need a map. This would show his first batch of peregrinations: Lisbon, Seville, Cádiz, Gibraltar, Malta, Albania, Missolonghi (fifteen years before he died there), Athens, Constantinople, Athens again, and back to England. Five years in and around London, so fraught with incident that they would have filled another man’s life to overflowing. The final adieu to his native land, in 1816. Brussels, Waterloo, and a villa on Lake Geneva. Venice, Rome, Venice once more, this time for a deep dive. Ravenna, Bologna, Pisa, Genoa, and Greece. Embarkation to the underworld.
And the cast list! Abroad, there was a teen-ager who taught Byron Italian—“I am his ‘Padrone’ and his ‘amico’ and Lord knows what besides,” Byron said—and a Greek with “ambrosial curls hanging down his amiable back.” (A bright thread of bisexuality runs through Byron’s career.) In England, there was Lady Caroline Lamb, with whom Byron conducted a barely concealed affair, and whose husband was later, as Lord Melbourne, to be Prime Minister. Byron also enjoyed an epistolary closeness to Caroline’s mother-in-law, who was rather more discreet; in 1815, briefly and catastrophically, he married the latter’s niece, Annabella Milbanke. One cause of the marital split was Annabella’s well-grounded suspicion that Byron was having sexual relations with his own half sister, Augusta, whose third daughter may have been his. If so, he was following the example of his father, Mad Jack, who had consorted with his sister. Fiona MacCarthy remarks that incest “clusters within families.” No kidding.
For anyone who likes to have intimate miseries from long ago unpacked and clarified as if they were current affairs, MacCarthy is your guide. In regard to Byron’s sundering from Annabella, for example, Stauffer wisely suggests that “the total narrative is elusive, perhaps as it would be for any relationship placed under such intense scrutiny by so many interested parties.” Thomas Moore alludes to “some dimly hinted confession of undefined horrors.” MacCarthy, though, dispenses with the dimness:
Byron, for his part, took a poised approach to the rumors. “If they were true I was unfit for England, if false England is unfit for me,” he wrote. We find ourselves bumping headlong into the Byron problem—not the question of what he did or might have done with whom, and when, but the remorseless way in which, during his lifetime and ever since, what you might call the higher gossip has trapped him in its claws. In the process, he is at once idolized and belittled. You could say that this procedure awaits all major poets; they are doomed to be more talked about than read, and, even when they are read, the poetry is parsed as a coded transcription of the life. Byron, however, remains the most extreme case. People who have never encountered a line of his verse may be able to cite Caroline Lamb’s verdict on him (“mad—bad—and dangerous to know”), and, in common with Machiavelli, he has had the disturbing honor of spawning his own adjective. Google the word “Byronic” and up, with a toss of the forelock, comes this: “alluringly dark, mysterious, and moody.” The Devil take him!
But Byron was Byronic. One observer, Lady Mildmay, is said to have felt the full force:
Then, there was Lady Falkland, the widow of a friend. “It is not a loveless heart I offer you, but a heart where every throb beats responsive to your own,” she wrote to Byron, in 1812, after “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” his first hit, had commenced publication. “I awoke one morning and found myself famous,” he recalled, and that fame seems to have quickened the birth of fan mail. In order to feel the throb, you didn’t need to be a Lady, or even to have met the poet in the flesh. His presence on paper was sufficient, as shown by the outpourings of another reader: “Sir, I have just finished the perusal of your incomparable works—an impulse grateful as irresistible impels me to acknowledge your Pen has called forth the most exquisite feelings I have ever experienced.”
In truth, much of Byron’s earlier verse—including “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” with its protagonist roaming across Europe, powered by the perpetual motion of unsatisfied longing—leaves one struggling to fathom what all the fuss was about. “The Corsair,” a roistering tale of piracy, sold ten thousand copies on the day of publication, in 1814. (“I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do,” Jane Austen wrote in a letter.) Murray said that every man in the street had either read it or heard of it. How come? The autobiographical shading helped, for sure. The fact that Byron was known to have ventured far afield played into the voguish lust for the “exotic,” and he, in turn, went along with it, posing for a “Portrait of a Nobleman in the Dress of an Albanian.” To modern senses, “The Corsair” gives off a heavy whiff of Orientalism:
Reading this now is like standing in front of a richly hued and glossily varnished old oil painting. So, in an era of mass tourism, when we can check out Coron (now Koroni, in southern Greece) on Instagram, and when celebrity—a concept that Byron, as much as anyone, brought into being—has gained in frenzy but lost its individuating glow, how can we summon the shock of Byronism? I would advise retracing his steps not in verse but in his letters and diaries, where wonders forever cease in order to make room for anticlimax. The dashing Lord is never more himself than when he charges into a forest of dashes, as in these Swiss jottings from 1816:
Alternatively, sit down and read “Don Juan.” I have it in an old Penguin paperback that can be stuffed into a coat pocket, carried around, and devoured like a nineteenth-century novel. Which, in many ways, it is.
In September, 1818, Byron told Moore of a new undertaking: “It is called ‘Don Juan,’ and is meant to be a little quietly facetious upon every thing. But I doubt whether it is not—at least, as far as it has yet gone—too free for these very modest days. However, I shall try the experiment, anonymously, and if it don’t take it will be discontinued.” Safe to say that he continued, taking advantage of that freedom to cram into the poem pretty much anything that came to mind: shipwreck, cannibalism, lobster, cross-dressing, violent slurs upon the Duke of Wellington. In the ranks of the gallivanting, Don Juan makes Childe Harold seem sedentary, and Byron, as a narrator, keeps interrupting his story and whipping himself back into line: “Hail, Muse! et cetera,” or, “But I’m digressing.”
All told, the result is the most conversational epic ever penned, and certainly the only one with punch lines. Such is its Shakespearean capaciousness that Byron finds a use even for the dregs of his own experience. His biographers may be preoccupied by the ill will that brimmed between him and Annabella, but “Don Juan” distills the entire disaster into one sparkling phrase, (“that moral centaur, man and wife”), and proposes this:
Notice how the second line requires us, especially if we’re reading aloud, to slow down and relish the ruefulness. The ensuing pages are littered with similar aperçus, too pensive to be gags, too light of spirit for sententiousness: “Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, / He would have written sonnets all his life?” Or, “Wives in their husbands’ absences grow subtler / and daughters sometimes run off with the butler.”
What’s going on here? The poem, as its creator says, “Turns what was once romantic to burlesque,” catching up with the garrulously jocund strain that had animated Byron’s letters from the start. But how, precisely, did he manage to leap from this, in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” in 1816—
—to this, from “Don Juan,” only three years later?
One answer is technical. The first passage is a Spenserian stanza, nine lines long, the last line being an Alexandrine—consisting of six feet, that is, and thus metrically a foot longer than the iambic pentameters that precede it. The effect is to stretch out the march of the verse, and to apply a calmative or an uplift. In contrast, “Don Juan” is, a few interludes excepted, in ottava rima: eight lines of equal length, rounded off with a resounding snap. As often as not, the snap is an undercut, slicing off solemnity at the knees. Byron dreams up rhymes with a cunning and a candor that are specifically designed to jolt: “martyrs hairy” / “Virgin Mary,” “resurrection” / “dissection,” “the loss of her” / “philosopher,” or the splendidly mischievous “intellectual” / “hen-peck’d you all.” Both Childe Harold and Don Juan are restless wanderers, but only the latter inspires Byron to unloose this meaty insult: “But here I say the Turks were much mistaken, / Who hating hogs, yet wished to save their bacon.”
Here and there, “Don Juan” oversteps the mark. No one has ever been more cavalier than Byron about plunging face first into the melee of desire, on the page as on the rumpled couch, and he is equally honest when faced with the sheer nastiness of combat—“a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art,” as he says in “Don Juan.” His accounts of slaughter, wrought by Russians against Turks, in the poem’s eighth canto, verge on the Tolstoyan: “Sliding knee-deep in lately frozen mud, / Now thawed into a marsh of human blood.” It is when he jumbles war and sex together that trouble stirs: “But six old damsels, each of seventy years, / Were all deflowered by different Grenadiers.”
That is outrageous, now more than ever, and even the most ethically relaxed reader will feel like collaring the poet and exclaiming, “Hang on, Your Lordship, that’s not funny.” But the outrage is the point. Byron is surveying rout and pillage, and the terrible ease with which the laws of civil society, such as respect for the elderly, are flung aside. The clinching rhyme is like a pair of pincers, gripping to make us flinch. Byron is an equal-opportunity satirist, refusing to let go until we have agreed to examine our own prejudices for flaws: “Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded / That all the Apostles would have done as they did.” God knows that’s true.
In a letter to Murray, Byron referred to “Don Juan” as “Donny Johnny.” It’s like Tolstoy saying that “Annie Karrie” is coming along nicely, or Shakespeare muttering about “Tony and Cleo” in the back of a pub. What allowed such insouciance to flourish, I would argue, was not just the Italian model of ottava rima but also Italy itself—Venice, above all, where Byron slipped his leash. “What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, / Is much more common where the climate’s sultry,” he wrote, and rarely has the bond between couplets and coupling been demonstrated with such alarming stamina. In a typical letter, Byron mentions a recent acquaintance, and adds: “fucked her twice a day for the last six—today is the seventh—but no Sabbath day—for we meet at Midnight at her Milliner’s.—” As if to balance the books, he also spends time on the island of San Lazzaro, in a community of monks, learning Armenian. “My mind wanted something craggy to break upon,” he explains.
But Venice was more than a set of challenges. To Byron, as to generations of uneasy admirers, it was the city of show. One word or deed could always mask another, and the waters offered both a sporting chance (he swam over the lagoon from the Lido and up the Grand Canal) and a rippling threat of dissolution. Everything, in the end, would melt away. Hence his newfound ability, in “Don Juan,” to stand back from reputation, martial triumph, pledges of undying passion, and other mainstays of romantic renown, and to fool with them like toys:
The name of Byron, for a long while, tolled like a bell. On hearing the news of his passing, the teen-age Tennyson carved the words “Byron is dead” on a rock. “Let not my body be hacked, or sent to England,” Byron had ordered, and he was promptly disobeyed. Many folk wanted a piece of him. His lungs and larynx were plucked out, placed in an urn, and kept in Missolonghi. The rest of him was ferried back to London, where his open coffin was displayed before being borne to a church near Newstead Abbey for interment. (Poets’ Corner, in Westminster Abbey, was not an option: the dean had refused to accommodate such a blaspheming ne’er-do-well.) Byron’s fellow-nobles, by and large, did not condescend to grieve him publicly. Thomas Moore noted, instead, “the riotous curiosity of the mob,” with “few respectable persons among the crowd.”
Byron would have rejoiced in such an irony: the blue blood revered by commoners. In a sense, it was not unexpected. His readership had already been broadened by the temptingly scandalous aura of “Don Juan.” (I have seen shelves of cheap editions from the period, many of them pirated, and some no bigger than a pack of cigarettes.) As late as 1916, in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce’s hero is pummelled by schoolmates for supporting Byron, who is, to the assailants, “only a poet for uneducated people.” The fact is that Byron had spoken up for the downtrodden. His maiden speech in the House of Lords, in 1812, is still a clarion call: a rousing defense of the Luddites, who had smashed machinery that was taking over their jobs and were facing the death penalty. In Greece, likewise, Byron’s faith in the self-determination of the country—“I dream’d that Greece might still be free”—has not been forgotten. To mark the bicentenary of his death, the Greek Ambassador to the United Kingdom will lay a wreath at Byron’s statue in Trinity College.
Byron the philhellene is but one Byron among many. The limping boy, the wag with the bear, the cad with the under look, the Londoner, the libertine, the would-be liberator: take your pick. Although Byron defined himself as “a broken Dandy,” and despite the portraits that depict him wearing a supercilious sulk, his loyal Cambridge friend Hobhouse clung to a more heartening vision. Of all Byron’s peculiarities, Hobhouse wrote, “his laugh is that of which I have the most distinct recollections.” Anyone who believes that radical politics have to be stern and humorless, for maximum impact, should consult Byron. He would cheer our progressive causes, but shame us into unpursing our lips.
What, if anything, binds all these Byrons together? Why does he not fall apart in our hands? Perhaps because his appetite for life, though contagious, is not insatiable; he, and his most compelling poems, are alert to the ways in which our hunger can be slaked. Very little matters as much as we like to pretend it does: “When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation),—sleep, eating, and swilling—buttoning and unbuttoning—how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.” Melancholy and failure are part of the deal, and there is a profound comedy to be had from pressing on regardless. As he wrote, closing a letter to a friend:
I find it impossible not to be thrilled by that freshly minted verb, and by its promise of a day that is dying to be spent, or misspent, as fortune and fancy dictate. Byron was not a contented soul, yet a chapter of civilization is told by his discontents. Let him be unshadowed once again. ♦
