Byron and Women [and Men]
Edited by Peter Cochran
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788–1824) was the reigning male sex symbol of the early 19th century. His sporadic personal beauty (alternating between plumpness and emaciation), his flamboyant lifestyle, and his real and imagined affairs with women all fed the image. But Byron’s love life also included males. His bisexuality was known, not only within his own close circle, but “on the street.”
There is a cultural taboo against acknowledging homoeroticism in the lives and works of canonical authors. The homoeroticism in Walt Whitman’s Calamus poems was immediately recognized by such gay men as John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter, but biographers shied away from it. When Charley Shively proved that Whitman really did have sex with his boyfriends in two pioneering works—Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s Working Class Comerados (1987) and Drum Beats: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Boy Lovers (1989)—this should have settled things. But no, the “good gray poet” was until recently presented as straight or emasculated. Confronted with evidence of Byron’s bisexuality, Byron specialists have been hard-pressed to deny it outright, but they have done their best to minimize it.
Against this backdrop, Byron and Women [and Men]is a welcome contribution to gay studies. The editor, Peter Cochran, is a major Byron specialist, and he is at least gay-friendly. (Cochran’s website shows him on a sofa with his wife, two kids, and a cat.) The volume has twelve chapters, written by ten different authors, as well as the first new edition of the Don Leon poems since 1934.
First, a bit of background. Although the earliest accounts of Byron’s life, written by those who had known him personally, contained veiled hints about his gayness, most of his subsequent biographers disregarded them. The truth emerged in bits and pieces. In the first comprehensive English-language work on homosexuality, Xavier Mayne (The Intersexes, 1909) makes a strong case that in Byron’s poem Manfred the “unspeakable sin” is not incest, as is commonly assumed, but a hidden male relationship. Mayne writes: “Greek in his intellectual and sexual nature, [Byron] was Englishman by birth but Athenian by heart.”
In researching a three-volume biography of Byron (1957), Leslie A. Marchand was given access to the Byron archives of publisher John Murray, the largest in the world, but only on condition that he not allude to Byron’s bisexuality. Marchand partially rectified his omissions in a later, single-volume work (Byron: A Portrait, 1970), which disclosed that Byron had belonged to a gay circle at Cambridge whose members used coded language among themselves.
G. Wilson Knight, in Lord Byron’s Marriage: The Evidence of Asterisks (1957), examined Byron’s marriage, Lady Byron’s desertion, and the subsequent scandal. He addressed the incest hypothesis—that Byron had an “illicit relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh”—and rejected it as the primary reason for the separation, branding the incest hypothesis “a peculiarly effective red herring.” Rather, Knight concluded that “a more important and more consistently motivating secret of Byron’s life lay somewhere within the area of homosexuality.”
The most influential of Byron’s many female biographers was Doris Langley Moore, whose infatuation with Byron led her to attack anyone who discredited his heterosexuality. (In his chapter in Byron and Women, David Herbert informs us that when Ms. Moore was married, the ceremony was performed over Byron’s tomb in Hucknall Church.) Although Moore could not totally discount Byron’s homoerotic attachments, she cut them to the bare minimum, opining (in Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered, 1974) that for many years of his life “he was not interested in any male.” What she fails to grasp is that, when men in England could be hanged for having sex with other males, Byron necessarily concealed such relations.
In 1985, the gay historian Louis Crompton (Byron and Greek Love) connected the dots that he found throughout Mar-chand’s work and concluded that Byron qualified as a gay man in both desire and practice. Another Marchand successor, Fiona MacCarthy (Byron: Life and Legend, 2002), was given full access to the John Murray archives with no constraints. MacCarthy dared to assert that Byron was more strongly attracted to males than to females. As a result, her fine biography (reviewed in these pages, March-April 2003) was coldly received by the Byron establishment.
Against this background—with dozens of lesser books and thousands of articles on Byron—does Byron and Women have anything new to offer? Yes, it does. Peter Cochran has written prolifically on Byron and edited his complete works in thirteen volumes. In this book he unpacks the homoeroticism in Byron’s works that previous critics and biographers had overlooked or suppressed. For example, Cochran cites a female biographer, Ghislaine McDayter, who ponders why Conrad, the hero of The Corsair, persistently denies his desire for the heroine, Medora. Cochran comments: “But she does not take the analysis on its next logical step, which is to look at the possibility that the reason why Conrad’s desire has to be deferred is because it was never for Medora at all, but for the young sailor Gonsalvo.”
Byron’s readers and biographers not only blank out the homoeroticism in his poetry, they go on to fantasize nonexistent heterosexual elements. Again Cochran quotes McDayter, who portrays Byron or the Byronic hero “either striding toward a helpless [female]victim, cloak blowing and shirt open, or desperately trying to disentangle himself from his adoring herd.” Cochran comments dryly, with the authority of a Byron editor: “A man striding towards a helpless female victim occurs nowhere in Byron’s work. But in the post-modern twenty-first century, post-9/11, who needs evidence?”
Cochran turns the tables on this heterosexist fantasy of a bodice-ripping stud:
Byron’s most thorough portrayal of a bisexual (leaning towards the homo.) is in his notorious earlier creation, the Byronic Hero: though it’s a covert portrayal. The Byronic Hero is a stroke of marketing genius, even though he didn’t start out that way. Very sexy, he seems misogynist for much of the time, but possesses tender qualities which suggest that he might be redeemed by the Love of a Good Woman. This gave him an instant appeal to sentimental female readers. … But the Byronic Hero has no time for women.
Cochran convincingly argues that the Byronic heroes in The Siege of Corinth, The Corsair, and The Giaour not only reject females, but covertly attach themselves to their male companions.
Two stanzas of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage allude to Byron’s homoerotic adventures in 1811. These were bowdlerized by R.C. Dallas, “who introduced Byron to the market-conscious John Murray.” In consequence, “thanks to legions of pure, fastidious editors, the poem’s confessional message has been muted out of existence ever since.” In his Internet edition of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cochran has restored the expurgated stanzas. Here is one, describing the court of Ali Pasha in Albania:
Here woman’s voice is never heard—apart,
And scarce permitted guarded, veiled to rove,
She yields to one her person & her heart,
Tamed to her cage, nor feels a wish to move,
For boyish minions of unhallowed love
The shameless torch of wild desire is lit,
Caressed, preferred even woman’s self above,
Whose forms for Nature’s gentler errors fit
All frailties mote excuse save that which they commit.
Cochran concentrates on Don Juan, considered Byron’s masterpiece, a poem of over 16,000 lines that few people, I suspect, have read in its entirety. At times Don Juan can be tiresome, but at its best it is a brilliant satire on a wide range of themes, including, in Cochran’s words, “politics, war, literature, religion, and education,” as well as “love and sex.” The work is permeated with campy elements. For example, Russia’s Catherine the Great is described as “This modern Amazon and queen of queans.” Her conquest of Don Juan is explained thus: “Besides, the empress sometimes liked a boy.”
The women in Don Juan all have powerful sexual urges, which are directed towards the eponymous hero, Don Juan, who in the course of the poem passes from late adolescence to early manhood. “Juan, with his virgin face,” is pursued, but does not pursue; he is “always the seduced, but not the seducer … the passive victim of active women.” The male narrator is clearly in love with Don Juan—who loves only himself: “He, on the other hand, if not in love,/ Fell into that no less imperious passion,/ Self-love.”
Byron delights in dressing up Don Juan, just as in real life he enjoyed dressing up his boys—he called them “pages”—from Robert Rushton in 1808 to Lukas Chalandritsanos in 1824. In Russia, Don Juan is dressed up militarily to please the lusty and super-dominant Catherine the Great. In a long comic episode he’s kidnapped and held in a seraglio, where he is forced to wear women’s clothes. The poor guy didn’t really want to, but once dressed up he makes the best of it. When the Sultan inspects his seraglio, his eye immediately picks out Don Juan from among the hundreds of concubines:
His Highness cast around his great black eyes,
And looking, as he always looked, perceived
Juan amongst his damsels in disguise;
At which he seemed no whit surprized nor grieved,
But just remarked, with air sedate and wise,
While still a fluttering sigh Gulbeyaz heaved,
“I see you’ve bought another Girl, ’tis pity
“That a mere Christian should be half so pretty.”
Don Juan is filled with double entendres and in-group references hinting at male love. In four lines Byron discloses that he is writing for the “initiated”—a word that was used in Byron’s time (including by Shelley) as a code word for “gay”:
The grand Arcanum’s not for men to see all;
My Music hath some mystic diapasons,
And there is much which could not be appreciated
In any manner by the uninitiated.
Unless I missed it, Cochran neglected to cite one of Byron’s most significant hints to the initiated, the two lines: “But Virgil’s songs are pure, except that horrid one/ Beginning with ‘Formosum Pastor Corydon.’” Byron is camping it up here, with “horrid” a word for mock disapproval. The reference is to Virgil’s Second Eclogue, where the shepherd Corydon expresses his burning love for the boy Alexis, his master’s darling. This is significant because for centuries the Eclogue has been used by gay men to identify each other—along with such references as Shakespeare’s sonnets, Antinous, Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroklos, David and Jonathan, and so on. Byron is saying to the initiated that he is one of them.
Jack Gumpert Wasserman, in an essay titled “Homosexuality in Venice in the time of Lord Byron,” declares his intention to address “two broad questions: first, what was it about Venice that made it attractive to the homosexual, and second, how did the gay community comport itself in the public life of the City during Byron’s residence?” He offers six reasons for the popularity of Venice, of which the “[f]irst, and certainly foremost was the absence of all criminal and civil laws proscribing sodomy. It is worth emphasizing again that homosexuality was still a capital offense in England.” The other five reasons for Venice’s special appeal concern the city’s associations with the culture of antiquity, notably ancient Greece, the “topography of Venice, [which]provided unparalleled opportunities for clandestine meetings,” and the artificiality or “magic” quality of Venice.
Wasserman describes the Venetian Carnival, in which male-oriented men exuberantly took part. The traditional Carnival costumes, the volto and tabarro, disguised the features and physiognomy so that “it was impossible to tell whether the masked wearer was male or female.” As always in these matters, men with good bodies wore skin-tight outfits to show them off, going as Hermes, Eros, Pan, or Harlequin. Wasserman quotes a passage from Byron’s Beppo, which sings the delights of the Venetian Carnival:
The moment Night with dusky mantle covers
The skies (and the more duskily the better)
The Time—less liked by husbands than by lovers —
Begins, and Prudery flings aside her fetter,
And Gaiety on restless tiptoe hovers.
Giggling with all the Gallants who beset her;
And there are Songs, and quavers, roaring, humming,
Guitars, and every other sort of strumming.
Here we note Byron’s use of the word “Gaiety”—apparently a code word directed to the initiated. Indeed, Byron frequently used the words “gay,” “gaily,” and “gaiety” in homoerotic contexts. Rictor Norton (in Myth of the Modern Homosexual, 1997) has demonstrated that by Byron’s time the words “gay” and “lesbian” were already being used in roughly their current sense.
LIKE OTHER of Byron’s biographers, including the openly gay Louis Crompton, Cochran believes that Byron was not attracted to post-adolescent males. While it’s true that we lack forensic evidence of Byron’s sex acts with other adult males, we should not expect to find such evidence, considering that Byron’s very survival depended upon discretion, and that his writings were expurgated during his lifetime while his letters and memoirs were burned after his death.
In fact, there is some evidence that Byron was attracted to post-adolescent young men. Take William Fletcher, who (according to Fiona MacCarthy) “was at Byron’s side from 1804, when Byron was sixteen, almost without interval until his master died.” As a teenager, Byron had spied the teenage Fletcher plowing the fields, and had taken him on as his valet, a job that included taking care of his master’s clothes and attending to his personal needs.
In 1809, Byron and Fletcher were traveling in Portugal, where they visited a monastery: “Fletcher complained that the ‘benevolent faced clergyman’ had been teaching him Greek and kissing him” (MacCarthy). So, in his early twenties Fletcher was good-looking and didn’t resist being kissed by a clergyman. In 1814, Byron and Fletcher, then in their mid-twenties, were living in a Piccadilly apartment, where Byron would “get Fletcher to rub him down” after he exercised. When Fletcher was in his early thirties, he was still good-looking and had flaxen hair, according to a 1821 letter written by Shelley. At Byron’s funeral, overcome with grief, Fletcher collapsed and had to support himself against a pew.
Another of Byron’s servants was Giovanni Battista Falcieri, known as “Tita,” a muscular young gondolier he had acquired in Venice. It should be noted that Venetian gondoliers traditionally sold their sexual services. Apparently Tita had sex (for “broad silver pieces”) with one of Byron’s guests, William Bankes, who as a young man had initiated Byron into the gay world at Cambridge.
Whether or not he had sex with them, Byron liked the company of handsome young men. These would include his traveling companion, Dr. John Polidori; his companion for the last four years of his life, Count Pietro (“Pierino”) Gamba; and Edward John Trelawny, Percy Shelley, and Edward Ellerker Williams. In London Byron frequented a boxing club that was patronized by wealthy and aristocratic men. It’s very likely that the pro boxers did a bit of hustling on the side.
Cochran quotes from a letter that Shelley wrote to his good friend Thomas Love Peacock (dated December 17 or 18, 1818): “He [Byron] associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait & physiognomy of man, & do not scruple to avow practices which are not only not named but I believe seldom even conceived in England. He says he disapproves, but he endures.” Cochran merely comments that “Shelley may be being polite” in attributing the inconceivable practices to the malformed wretches rather than to Byron himself. Other biographers, including Crompton and Wasserman, have read homophobia into the passage, but this reflects a failure to appreciate the need to write defensively, not to say ironically. Cochran grasps the issue: “Fearful that his letters would be opened, C. S. Matthews [Byron’s gay friend at Cambridge] had to take refuge behind a façade of pretended horror.” Clearly, Shelley is writing defensively and tongue-in-cheek, as one of the initiated to another, feigning horror as Matthews did. His unnameable practices allude to the crime of sodomy (or buggery). “Seldom even conceived” is written in jest. Read with the proper inflection, the entire passage becomes high camp.
Perhaps as a sop to his less-than-gay-friendly colleagues, Cochran sometimes gratuitously bolsters Byron’s heterosexuality. After quoting from a letter in which Hobhouse describes Byron dressing in drag, Cochran writes: “But this is a rarity.” What is Cochran’s point?—that most of the time Byron did not dress in drag? The same could be said of Provincetown’s famous female impersonators, who only wear drag when performing (and some can be charmingly butch in their “boy clothes”).
After citing Byron’s letter to Kinnaird, which describes a “firm of flesh” Venetian woman, Cochran comments: “This is not the language of a man with an exclusive preference for other men.” True, but who ever claimed Byron had such an exclusive preference? To the point: it is to be expected that Byron would flaunt his female conquests while concealing his male relationships.
THE LAST 79 PAGES of Byron and Women [and Men]consist of Cochran’s attractive and heavily annotated edition of two poems, Don Leon and Leon to Annabella, attributed to Lord Byron and published in 1866 (though an earlier edition is lost). Don Leon is important as a powerful plea, the first published in English, for the reform of England’s sodomy laws, and offers information on Byron’s sexuality, most of which has since been shown to be true. And the best passages qualify as great literature.
Don Leon was rescued from obscurity by G. Wilson Knight, who made two main claims: that Don Leon tells the truth about Byron’s sexuality, and that “the quality of the writing is of the highest order. Indeed, no such brilliant manipulation of the rhymed couplet has been known since Pope.” Although parts of the poem are obscene by Victorian standards, its best passages are forceful, moving, and elegantly crafted. Don Leon is not just a neglected masterpiece, but one that has been rigorously suppressed. The Fortune Press edition of 1934 was immediately confiscated by the London police, and most of the copies were destroyed. (I have one that survived in my personal library.)
The authorship of Don Leon is contested. Although the 1866 Dugdale edition attributes it to Lord Byron, he cannot be the sole author, since the poem relates events that occurred after his death. Among the candidates for authorship commonly advanced are George Colman the Younger (by G. Wilson Knight) and Richard Paternoster (by Langley Moore). Louis Crompton begged the question, simply referring to the author as Byron. Cochran puts forward Byron’s often troublesome friend, John Cam Hobhouse, later Baron Broughton, the subject of his 2010 biography Byron and Hobby-O.
None of these writers seems to have considered that Don Leon may be a group effort, with Byron acting as one of the contributors. This hypothesis seems plausible given the poem’s variability in style and subject matter. Cochran does make a good case for Hobhouse, who had intimate knowledge of Parliamentary affairs, but he fails to convince me that Hobhouse had the talent to be the sole or major author.
Much of the earlier editions of Don Leon consist of notes, which appear to have been written by several hands over time. These notes include newspaper accounts of scandals and trials for homosexual offenses, excerpts from works advocating legal reform, and quotations from classical and contemporary literature. Hundreds of lines of the notes are in foreign languages, mostly Latin and French, and some of these are obscene even by present-day standards. Cochran deleted most of the notes, which is a shame, but probably done on economic grounds.
