Examining a self-confessed rake

“Don’t look at him -- he is dangerous to look at,” Lady Liddell warned her daughter when they encountered Lord Byron high above Rome on the roof of St. Peter’s. This is surely an echo of the infamous description of the poet by his most notorious conquest, Lady Caroline Lamb: “Mad, bad and dangerous to know.” He was certainly dangerous to women. They hurled themselves at him, like groupies offering their favors to a rock star. After the publication of his “Childe Harold” in 1812, the 24-year-old Byron acquired “a quasi-royal charisma”; women were said to have gone “stark mad” about him. Aristocratic ladies maneuvered frenziedly to gain access to him, some disguising themselves as chambermaids. He became “the greatest trophy of the age.” As well as seducing hundreds, perhaps thousands of women -- including, it was rumored, his sister -- he also had affairs with several boys, both at school at Harrow and, it seems, afterward. What was the secret of his appeal? It was surely not his physique: He was short and slight, one of his feet was deformed, and all his adult life he struggled against being overweight.

Byron himself supplied one answer. “I had the character of being a great rake, and was a great dandy -- both of which young ladies like.” His scandalous reputation acted as an aphrodisiac; the whiff of sexual ambiguity only increased his attractiveness. Annabella Milbanke, the woman who became his wife, was one of several who believed, on very little foundation, that they could reform him. Female readers fantasized about the author of “Childe Harold” and “Don Juan,” believing his poems to be confessional, indeed shockingly autobiographical, a confusion he encouraged. “No avowal could be more absolute,” declared an outraged Mrs. Villiers on reading his poetic drama “Manfred,” having detected its theme of incest. Some women were emboldened by the emotional intensity of his verse into writing importunate fan letters, convincing themselves that they were addressing a “feeling Heart.” As his latest biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, shrewdly observes, the overwrought response to Byron’s poetry discloses a “whole small world of early nineteenth century female isolation.”

Byron’s premature death on foreign soil at age 36, while trying to organize Greek resistance to their Turkish rulers, ensured that his memory would stay forever young. Indeed, it comes as a shock to realize that he was of the same generation as such Victorian dignitaries as Sir Robert Peel or Lord Palmerston. Like Rupert Brooke, Byron died while he was still beautiful, in the most Romantic of circumstances (though not in action). Had his Greek adventure succeeded, he might have been offered the throne of a newly free nation. As it was, his death galvanized opinion in support of Greek independence across Europe. And he became an icon. MacCarthy describes him as “the first European cultural celebrity of the modern age.”

Byron’s body was brought back to England, where it lay in state for two days before the burial, provoking displays of near-hysterical emotion. The news of Byron’s death had shocked all England. The 14-year-old Alfred Tennyson, for example, remembered it as “a day when the whole world seemed to be darkened”; he carved the words “Byron is dead” into a sandstone rock outside his home. In the years that followed, the Byron cult gathered momentum. Among the legion of his admirers have been the Bronte sisters, Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Oscar Wilde, Harold Nicolson and W.H. Auden. The term “Byronic” has entered the language as a synonym for dashing, glamorous youth.

Not surprisingly, there is no shortage of Byron biographies. The standard life is in three volumes by Leslie Marchand, published in 1957. For this new biography MacCarthy has been able to draw on previously untranscribed letters in the archive of Byron’s publishers John Murray, and other new material, including a trunk of manuscripts and letters abandoned by Byron’s friend Scrope Davies and discovered more than 150 years later in a bank vault. As she showed in previous books about William Morris and Eric Gill, she is a skillful biographer and a fluent writer. This book is a pleasure to read.

This is the biography of a writer rather than a literary biography, analyzing the verse only insofar as it illuminates the life. MacCarthy places great stress on Byron’s sexual relations with boys. She argues that Byron’s sexual development was distorted by what we would now term abuse at the hands of his nurse. “The memories of female dominance, the large nurse in the small bed, affected his later attitudes to sex with women. Byron found a mature woman a complicated structure, threateningly flabby. He preferred the physique of young teenage boys, or the girls dressed as boys that became a feature of his early days in London.” According to MacCarthy, therefore, boys were his “main emotional focus.” This interpretation of Byron’s sexuality guides her narrative, and to support it she is often forced out onto thin ice. She relies heavily on the tainted evidence supplied by the lunatic Lady Caroline Lamb and the embittered Lady Byron. The problem with MacCarthy’s theory is that the opposite could be argued with equal conviction. Indeed, a recent book by Doris Langley did just that, maintaining that Byron’s relations with boys were no more than diversions. Often, MacCarthy appears to bend the facts to suit her case. She cites the very abundance of Byron’s mistresses -- perhaps as many as 200 during his three years in Venice, for example -- as evidence of his covert preference for his own sex. If such a man was not heterosexual, one wonders, who is?

One of MacCarthy’s arguments is that Byron was hounded out of England in 1816 in a homophobic reaction to rumors of sodomy. But this is to ignore the political clamor against him, in a society that was fast becoming increasingly intolerant. As a prominent liberal, as an unapologetic admirer of Napoleon, as one who courageously defied convention, Byron presented a challenge to the strengthening arm of reaction in Lord Liverpool’s England. The nation felt under threat; Byron had to be sacrificed. It is chilling to read Wordsworth -- of all people -- joining in the calls to “hunt down” those dangerous Radicals, Byron and Shelley.

David Crane’s exuberant, eccentric book is a study of Byron’s posthumous reputation. In this tale of incest, bastardy, betrayal, love and hate, he identifies a story “of Aeschylian grandeur.” He shows how much of the evidence for Byron’s sexual aberrations was assembled by his wife because she feared (wrongly, as it turned out) that he would seek custody of their daughter -- and how, after he died, his reputation was further distorted in Lady Byron’s struggle with her sister-in-law, Augusta Leigh. The climax of Crane’s book is a dramatized account of a meeting between these two women that took place in the White Hart Hotel at Reigate on April, 8, 1851, 27 years after Byron’s death. Unfortunately, this daring narrative experiment falls flat; the play within the biographical story is incomprehensible unless one has already read what comes afterward. Nevertheless, this is a valuable, even exhilarating book, full of insights. Crane makes a plausible case that Dickens based his character of Miss Havisham on Byron’s widow, and he argues that, in Dorothea Brooke, George Eliot showed how Lady Byron’s life might have been had she not succumbed early to a form of “moral death.” Is it legitimate to place so much emphasis on Byron’s private life? Crane, who is generally sympathetic to Byron, thinks the life and the work are inseparable, “his personality and life validating or threatening the poetry in ways that have no obvious parallel.” For Crane, there is no one else “who has so completely made his life the measure of his art.”

Byron’s correspondence is difficult to interpret because of its boastful, teasing, sometimes outrageous quality. Many of his letters to his Cambridge friends are in the high camp style, peppered with playful allusions to “Greek love.” MacCarthy makes much of this, but it may be nothing more than the common parlance of the claustrophobic all-male societies of Harrow and Cambridge. I am not convinced that she has penetrated the deepest layers of his facetious personality. In modern times we have come to think of sexuality as central to an understanding of the individual. Now that sexual behavior can be described without inhibition, so the argument runs, biography can provide a more complete, more truthful portrait. But perhaps this is an illusion. We now know a great deal about Byron’s sex life, but his personality remains enigmatic. It may be that trying to define Byron’s sexuality is a waste of time. Perhaps the most that can usefully be said is that he was highly sexed.

There is still much about Byron that remains obscure. We do not even know for certain which of his feet was deformed, for example. Had the manuscript of Byron’s memoirs not been burned in John Murray’s fire grate, some of the many remaining questions about him might have been resolved -- but the memoirs could simply have posed fresh questions. MacCarthy’s thoroughly researched, well written and beautifully produced book will not therefore be the last word on Byron. As Crane writes in his conclusion, “every age ... invents its own Byron, but it is always a Byron that is smaller and more manageable than the original.” *