BYRON
A Life in Ten Letters
by Andrew Stauffer
Cambridge University Press
401 pages, $29.95
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON was not only a brilliant correspondent but something that seems no longer possible, at least since the death of Rod McKuen—a best-selling poet—though Byron, as an aristocrat, refused to accept the money earned from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. It was only his debts and his desire to finance a campaign to free Greece from the Ottoman Empire that forced him to demand his royalties years later.
Byron is probably not read today the way he was in the early 1800s. Keats, who envied Byron his success, is considered the great Romantic poet these days. But it was Byron who was the famous genius during that period in early 19th-century England known as the Regency. And now, the 200th anniversary of his birth has brought forth a burst of books like Andrew Stauffer’s recent biography, though Byron may be of interest today more for the rainy summer he spent on the shores of Lake Geneva in a villa near a house rented by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Godwin Shelley than for his own work—a summer made famous for Mary writing Frankenstein and Byron’s doctor John Polidori writing the short story “The Vampyre”—two landmarks in the history of Gothic fiction.
Byron was born with a deformed foot—turned inward—a handicap that, a friend said, was something he thought of every day of his life. He compensated, perhaps, by taking very long swims—heroic swims, quite literally, since they were inspired by the ancient story of Leander swimming the Hellespont to be with Hero, one of the legends Byron discovered as a youth who read voraciously. In the water he must have felt his handicap disappear. On land he was enraged when he overheard one of the women he was pursuing ask her maid: “Do you think that I could care anything for that lame boy?” Yet when he grew up, that lame boy was catnip to women. His face transfixed them—though it’s hard to tell from the many illustrations in Stauffer’s book what he really looked like. The paintings turn him into a swarthy sheik. Only one drawing, seen from behind, conveys good looks. The others are all over the place. He had, for instance, a tendency to put on weight, which led to strict diets and purges he called “Reductions.” But women were mesmerized by his wit, reputation, appearance, and conversation.
Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand. His other novels include Grief and The Beauty of Men.
