The lines are immaterial
Jane Gardam
BYRON: LIFE AND LEGEND by Fiona MacCarthy John Murray, £25, pp. 674, ISBN 071955621X Ionce met a thoroughly heterosexual old naval officer who had been a midshipman on the ship that sailed to Gallipoli with Rupert Brooke on board, the voyage during which Brooke died. I asked him what Brooke had been like. He said at once, 'He was a god. Extraordinary beauty, law to himself. Like Lord Byron, I expect. There are these people.'
Fiona MacCarthy says towards the end of her thoroughly researched and very readable 600-page biography of Byron, the first to come from John Murray, keeper of the Byron flame, for nearly half a century, that `there are always private reasons behind the choice of a biographical subject'. She does not tell us hers, but examination of the godlike image is bound to have been one of them, for she gives us Byron in all his sound and fury, his 'madness', drunkenness, arrogance, melancholy, irreverence and of course his Olympian excesses in love. For six years she has had the freedom of the Byron archive at John Murray, still in the same panelled room at 50 Albemarle Street which Byron knew well. The splendid Phillips portrait of Byron at the height of his fame hangs over the fireplace — tender and most gloriously handsome except for the incipient double chin that worried him (Brooke was never to be old enough!) and for which he sometimes went on a diet of boiled potatoes and water, which he found effective.
There are very many icons and votive offerings at Albemarle Street. The different-coloured tresses of several mistresses' hair. The cornelian ring that passed between Byron and his 'purest' love, the Cambridge choirboy Edelestone (`Edelestone, Edelestone, Edelestone', Byron has scribbled above a poem on one scrap of paper). MacCarthy says the ring is 'poignantly small'. Even more poignantly small is the slipper of Byron's illegitimate daughter by Claire Clairmont, the pillar-topost little girl, Allegra, whom Byron dumped in an Italian convent before she was four and never visited though she wrote yearning letters. She died at five.
In this room on Byron's death his execu
tors gathered to decide what to do with his unpublished, scandalous memoirs which were among the other manuscripts. The gods tend to let their scandals lie about. But the memoirs were burnt.
If the memoirs had been allowed to settle, find their level in the rest of the archive (it's usually better to marry than to burn) it might have been the right way, and might have made any new biography more able to concentrate on other things, such as Byron's development as a poet rather than the development of his depravity. The depravity after all has been long known — the incest, sodomy, infidelity, adultery — it was all there on Olympus. Old news. Whatever else could there have been?
MacCarthy has an assured grasp of the complex pattern of Byron's life and has admirably assembled the crowded scenes of his 36 years. She has not stayed all the time at Albemarle Street but has visited all the sites, from Byron's miserable quarters as the child of a poor widow in Aberdeen to the muddy battlefield of Missolonghi, where he died at the hands of three ignorant doctors before there was even a battle. She has examined the making of the legend and the development of the Byronic hero, and she is particularly good and vivid on the knife-edge unhappy years around the marriage, in Piccadilly Terrace, and on his youthful love affair with the image of Napoleon. At one point Byron almost became Napoleon, bought the state coach with 'NB' emblazoned on it in gold (Byron was 'Noel Byron) and trundled it across Italy. Byron could be great fun, with a wit that was like Wilde's — or even Noel Coward's. She also shows his eventual disillusion with Napoleon, his turning to a greater cause than king and country, and becoming 'the first really European Englishman'. However — back to the scandals. It is Byron's sexuality that tends to dominate this book. MacCarthy believes that he was basically homosexual and that Don Juan, his `autobiographical' great poem, is a feint. She believes that as the result of being sexually and physically abused by a nursemaid for several years until he was at least ten he was also subconsciously revolted afterwards by the idea of sex with a woman — he mistrusted religion because the nursemaid had always been reading her Bible. Though he had a multitude of mistresses, he preferred them boyish, flatchested and ready to cross-dress. He found the physical habits of women disgusting and hated even to see a woman eating (his wife was required to eat alone). MacCarthy explains the full misery of Byron's marriage, his halting journey up to Northumberland to the rich Annabella Milbanke (who comes out of this book well) and his hysterical flight south again on honeymoon, to the arms of his half-sister and mistress, Augusta Leigh — a sort of travesty of the Wordsworth triangular nuptials in Yorkshire a few years earlier, but with much less happy results. In London Byron lived under the same roof as both women, who were both pregnant. His wife walked out — though sadly. Byron, says MacCarthy, was incapable of domesticity. Yes.
And yet, one wonders? Although it now appears that all Byron's most beautiful love poems were written to boys ('So, we'll go no more a-roving' "Tis time this heart should be unmoved') they still speak to women. We've long been used to Mr W. H., after all. And if Byron only loved boys, how do we explain his undoubted sexual passion for Augusta? His doting nostalgia for the sensuous girls of his youth in Southwell? And his later love for 'the gorgeous Lady Blessington', which certainly could not have been occasioned by the flatness of her chest? His longest enduring mistress, the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, he was writing to with love just before he died, his heart shredded by the horrible Greek 'page' who thought him an old man and robbed him on his death bed. And if he was homosexual, why did he on arrival at an inn in France 'immediately fall on the chambermaid'?
What would be more interesting than all this would be to hear more about the poetry. Where did the apparently effortless flood of Don Juan, Childe Harold and Manfred, and the mighty rest all come from? The sweep of Byron's knowledge of romantic literature in several languages? The extent of his knowledge of the classics? The musicality? Byron's father was an Irishman, 'mad Jack Byron', always on the run from creditors. He scarcely saw his son and soon cut his own throat, leaving Byron with a poor and unsympathetic mother. He was a backward child. At Harrow he had to have extra coaching. He left Cambridge after three terms, despising the place for giving him a degree. Where did the inspiration spring from? Was it simply an ability to sing in tune? Inborn?
I would think not, and that it might have been set going by the great Dr Drury at Harrow who saw in the peculiar, beautiful, ill-tempered, lame boy (the boy who was soon to swim the Hellespont) a huge potential, and by the Cambridge friends, particularly the wonderful John Hobhouse who, as heterosexual as my midshipman, adored Byron and was his Horatio to the end.
It is other poets who should really have the last word on the life of Byron. At his strange, ramshackle funeral they were out in force in the most extraordinary way. John Clare, who we thought never strayed from his East Anglian furrow, was wandering about Oxford Street. George Borrow was in Tottenham Court Road. Mary Shelley was looking out of her window in Kentish Town and as the cortege reached the fields of Hertfordshire the tiny, passionate old flame, Caroline Lamb, was taking the air. She asked, foolishly, for whom the bell tolled — and collapsed.
But MacCarthy has missed the greatest spectator of the great poet's passing, Coleridge. He was standing outside the pharmacy in Highgate where he obtained his supplies of opium and on hearing whose funeral it was he 'broke into a spontaneous funeral oration that lasted a quarter of an hour in the middle of the pavement'. The pharmacist was moved that Coleridge spoke 'only of Byron's greatness and that his "satanic" reputation was ephemeral'. Would it were true!
Mad, Bad and Dangerous: The Cult of Lord Byron, an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallo}, curated by Fiona MacCarthy; runs until 16 February 2003.
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