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.
6th Baron Byron, Poet. Government Art Collection (UK).
He used the word “motility” to explain his extreme mood swings. By this he meant his acute impressionability—he felt too deeply—but feeling is what the Romantic Age was all about. He was variously kind, generous, egotistical, arrogant, effeminate, depressed, gay (in the old sense), and possibly bipolar. His friend Lady Blessington said that “if ten individuals undertook the task of describing Byron, no two of the ten, would agree in their verdict describing him, or convey any portrait that resembled the other … and yet the description of each might be correct.” In her own estimation, she wrote: “were I to point out the prominent defect of Lord Byron, I should say it was a flippancy and a total want of natural self-possession and dignity.” Which we can take to mean that he was funny. He loathed what he called “cant” (hypocrisy), and all one has to do is read his satires to appreciate the stinging sense of humor.
He mocked his fellow poets for their “rabies of rhyme” in a book he published early in his career attacking the Scotch and English critics who had dismissed his youthful endeavors. But Byron’s poems rhyme as cleverly as those of his predecessor Alexander Pope, though their subject matter is very different. His two long narrative poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, were taken to be what we would call autofiction—a thinly veiled record of the author’s life. And this made Byron the original Byronic man—“mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” in the famous words of Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his many conquests as a “broken dandy” (his own self-description) in the adulterous roundelay of Regency London.
Like his father, whose nickname was “Mad Jack,” Byron committed incest, fled abroad to escape his debts, and died at 36—though his father was probably a suicide, while Byron died of a malarial fever in Greece, exacerbated by the bleedings and purges ordered by doctors that Byron detested. He had been molested as a child by a nurse who not only imbued him with Scottish Calvinism’s sense of innate sinfulness, but also, when Byron was nine, “used to come to bed to him and play tricks with his person.” This went on for two years before she was discovered and dismissed.
His first great love was for a youth named John Edelston, who sang in a private choir created by a friend of Byron’s at Cambridge, which led classmates to wonder: “What does he do with those choirboys?” Before that, there was a circle of friends Byron called The Band of Thebes—friends he made at Harrow before matriculating at Cambridge (from which he graduated without ever having to take an exam, simply because he was an aristocrat). Erotic friendships at Harrow were hardly unusual; such crushes were part of an English upper-class education. But Byron went on to have a yearlong affair with a Greek-born French teenager named Nicolo Giraud when he moved to Athens, which was after an affair with his half-sister Augusta in London. The latter caused a scandal.
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Andrew Stauffer’s extremely readable biography Byron: A Life in Ten Letters is based on a simple but very effective design. Stauffer, who seems to have read everything there is to read about his subject, has selected ten letters (out of 3,000) that Byron wrote at different stages of his tumultuous career, and has then proceeded to tell us what was going on in Byron’s life when he wrote them.
In Stauffer’s view, Byron was attracted to taboo sex. The orgies with prostitutes and actresses that he took part in as a young rake were standard fare for the time, but youthful frivolity gave way eventually to adultery with married women, until Caroline Lamb’s vengeful novel about her own obsession with him (along with rumors of sodomy) ruined his reputation in the drawing rooms of London. So he fled to the Continent. In Italy, things were reversed: you could have sex with a woman as long as she was married, but not before, which would ruin her prospects. The love of Byron’s life was an Italian countess whose husband allowed Byron to live with them in one of the many villas Byron moved among over the course of his brief life.
Byron was always ambivalent and at times tortured by his failure to achieve what Stauffer sees as his desire for a stable family life. It was this search for a home, in Stauffer’s view, that led Byron to marry the heiress Annabella Milbanke, with whom he had a daughter Ada, who was removed from his influence not long after their marriage, after his half-sister revealed the truth about their affair.
Once Byron left England, he was even freer, as an English lord, to do what he wanted. In Athens he had the affair with Nicolo Giraud. And when he really began to travel—to Greece, Albania, and Turkey—he discovered the pleasures of the Turkish baths: palaces of “sherbet and sodomy.” But his real enthusiasm was for married women, especially Italian ones. He was attracted to dark skin—and tight vaginas, we learn in one youthful letter—though he had a phobia about watching women eat. Still, the bisexuality, the incest, the sheer sexual appetite (“I fucked her twice!” every day, he boasts of his first Venetian affair in a letter to a friend), seem superhuman.
Lady Caroline Lamb was not the only one to call Byron “mad.” Wordsworth said he was insane and warned that his epic poem Don Juan was a threat to the English character. His half-sister Augusta assured his estranged wife that Byron was “a maniac.” The poet Percy Shelley called Byron both “mad” and a “genius.” Goethe agreed with the latter. Part of the madness was what seems to have been a sexual mania. Sex was linked in Byron’s life to what he considered the two pillars of his being: a love of freedom and a hatred of “cant.” Sex was life—“Is it not life,” he asked a friend about something he had just written, “is it not the very thing?”—no matter how many people got hurt in the mêlée. The most touching case was his illegitimate daughter Allegra, who was handed off to various people as a child and finally stashed in a convent, which, at the age of five, she begged her father to visit; instead he left town. This led to a great depression when she died soon after that of cholera while still in the convent. Children could be inconvenient.
Because homosexual acts were punishable by death in England, those who could afford it had to live abroad during those years, and Byron was among them. But he was notorious even in a society that was especially venereal (gonorrhea is mentioned frequently in his letters). And then there was the drinking and the gambling. Byron was in almost constant debt for most of his life. Like the Bloomsbury set whose members were hopping from bed to bed a century later without regard to gender, Byron refused to be confined by middle-class morals. Even today, it’s hard to reconcile the man who could write that pæan to the vagina with the one who fell in love with fifteen-year-old choirboy John Edelston, and later with Nicolo Giraud. Perhaps homosexuality gave him some sort of freedom that he couldn’t find in relationships with women. How often he frequented the Turkish baths and brothels is unknown. But on his final trip to Greece to help finance its war of independence from the Turks, conscious of his fading powers, he returned to adolescents—including a fifteen-year-old page named Loukas Chalandritsanos. Loukas, though happy to accept Byron’s money and favors, did not return the poet’s amorous interest.
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So what do we make of Lord Byron today? Was Byron simply the first sex tourist—an oversexed British aristocrat fornicating his way across Europe? Tennessee Williams put him in his play Camino Real as one of several figures from literature to whom Williams was drawn. (Proust’s great homosexual character Baron de Charlus was another.) But what Byron stands for now, if anything, is debatable. The Romantic movement, which Byron epitomized, is usually characterized as a reaction to the 18th century’s Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution. We too are living in a scientific age, of lithium batteries and algorithms, and are so industrialized that we cannot find ways to dispose of the products with which we have trashed the earth. But we’re not as comfortable with sexual mutations as Byron was. Contrast any of his letters with an essay The New York Times recently ran on polyamory, which read somehow as if an open marriage was a new way to prepare meatloaf. Gone are the days of Boyd McDonald’s Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts! Each addition to the LGBT lineup (Q, I, A, et al.) seems to make us less free, not more, because they all turn into identity politics, and there’s nothing less fluid than identity politics. Byron seems unimaginably slippery in comparison. All that we know for sure is that, when he made an effort to settle down and married Annabelle Milbanke, he soon discovered that he couldn’t stand the uxorial role, and he gave up his wife and their baby daughter (Ada Lovelace, who grew up to be a mathematician responsible in part for the development of the computer).
He was, to say the least, conflicted: a man whose sex life still astounds us for its plenitude and indifference to societal norms. And yet, while described as having an effeminate voice by one of his observers, his masculinity seems never to have been questioned, even when he was in love with a beautiful young man (he was never attracted to older men). Was he ever penetrated, or was he always the penetrator? Byron may have escaped the binary by just ignoring it. But what aspect of Byron’s sexuality is heroic today? Adultery is commonplace, bisexuality is still regarded with skepticism and rarely discussed, and trans issues have come to be the new battleground. Byron was his own sexual identity. He and the nonbinary movement may have nothing to do with each other.
Yet Byron’s indifference to sexual classification, along with his lordly command of the English language, makes his life and work rejuvenating today—and shockingly contemporary. Today he may seem like a character in Bridgerton, but consider the following excerpt from Canto the Eleventh of Don Juan, in which Juan is presenting his credentials to the diplomatic establishment of England:
Juan presented in the proper place,
To proper placemen, every Russ credential;
And was received with all the due grimace
By those who govern in the mood potential,
Who, seeing a handsome stripling with smooth face,
Thought (what in state affairs is most essential)
That they as easily might do the youngster,
As hawks may pounce upon a woodland songster.
Unless I’m crazy, he’s describing in the last two lines what we would call chicken hawks.
Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand. His other novels include Grief and The Beauty of Men.
