Byron

Lord Byron is one of those figures about whom I feel compelled to read--yet am very much glad never to have had to meet in the flesh. "He is as remorseless as he is unprincipled," wrote Mary Shelley, who was, let us remember, patient enough to put up with the all but intolerable Shelley. Were we to meet Byron, would his charm charm? Or would our (or my, at least) innate skepticism toward the hearty and demonstrative save us? It seems unlikely; it saved so few. Women, men--everyone fell for Byron. And no one loved Byron more than Byron. As Anthony Powell put it, "Shakespeare had an extraordinary grasp of what other people were like; Byron of what he himself was like."

I'm fresh off Fiona MacCarthy's excellent biography of the poet, which succeeds at the not simple task of making us see, at least to some extent, Byron's appeal, while never denying the ways in which he could be high-handed, unthinking, and cruel. She also helps us imagine his fame--which, rooted in a combination of class, scandal, a sense of generational change, and propelled by an epic poem published at the right moment, can be hard to grasp. Obviously no poets are parallel figures today--perhaps a particularly flamboyant film star? A Jude Law who also was the author of Infinite Jest? Yet however much we push ourselves to imagine a different era, when we open Childe Harold to its first lines we are instantly reminded of how vast is the gulf between then and now:

Oh, thou, in Hellas deemed of heavenly birth,
Muse, formed or fabled at the minstrel's will!
Since shamed full oft by later lyres on earth,
Mine dares not call thee from thy sacred hill:
Yet there I've wandered by thy vaunted rill;
Yes! sighed o'er Delphi's long-deserted shrine
Where, save that feeble fountain, all is still;
Nor mote my shell awake the weary Nine
To grace so plain a tale—this lowly lay of mine.

That's the poem that was such a sensation as to catapult its creator to stardom overnight. The later work Don Juan, at least, does open more promisingly--it's hard to top Byron's first lines there:

I want a hero, an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one.

But even it quickly descends into unpromising territory, its second and third stanzas dense with names of figures of contemporary fame. (To be fair, it does get much livelier.)

One reads about Byron today, however, not so much for himself--for the balance between his charm and his self-obsession is ever precarious, even in his truly wonderful letters and journals)--as for his place in his circle and his cultural moment, and for the way that everyone around him weighed in at some point. Mary Shelley's take is above; here's Claire Clairmont, writing a bitterly creative mock obituary:

He dead extended on his bed, covered all but his breast, which many wigged doctors are cutting open to find out (as one may be saying) what was the extraordinary disease of which this great man died--His heart laid bare, they find an immense capital I carved on its surface, and which had begun to pierce the breast--They are all astonishment. One says, "A new disease." Another: "I never had a case of this kind before." A third "what medicines would have been proper" the fourth holding up his finger "A desert island."

Then there's Byron's own takes on his contemporaries. Keats's poetry was "a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and onions"; after Wordsworth published Poems, in Two Volumes, he wrote, "I reviewed Wordsworth's trash of the time." And there's his incessant baiting of Southey. This comes rom a letter to James Hogg: "Southey should have been a parish-clerk, and Wordsworth a man-midwife--both in darkness. I doubt if either of them ever got drunk, and I am of the old creed of Homer the wine-bibber." Then there was the very public assault in Don Juan:

Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey.

Though I think we have to note that "mouthey" is little but a lazy answer to a thorny problem of rhyme, the charge of quaintness at least seems fair.

Now that I've finished MacCarthy's biography, and seen poor Byron safely dead in Missolonghi, I'm left with two outcomes: first, a desire, which I will probably act on this month, to read Don Juan for the first time in nearly twenty years, and, second, the list below, which I am beginning to think may be my greatest contribution to literary culture:

Mary Shelley: Kanga
Percy: Rabbit
Wordsworth: Owl
Keats: Piglet
Byron: Tigger
Charles Lamb: Pooh

My Twitter friend Hannah Hedgehog and my actual friend Caleb Crain both astutely noted that William Hazlitt can serve as Eeyore, at which point our Romantic Hundred Acre Wood is fully populated. As Anthony Powell wrote of some of the more scabrously satirical verses of Don Juan, "It surely must be admitted that this is the right sort of stuff."

William Morris and Co.

Ever since reading Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of Edward Burne-Jones last year, I've been vaguely circling the Arts and Crafts movement and their predecessors cum fellow travelers the Pre-Raphaelites. A. S. Byatt's lovely little new book-length essay on William Morris and the (essentially unrelated) artist and designer Mariano Fortuny pushed me a little further on the path, and now I find myself flipping back and forth between Fiona MacCarthy's bio biography of Morris and a volume of Morris's letters.

Both are rewarding in exactly the way that reading about that period and group tends to be: even when presented with warts, they're hard not to admire--serious but not self-serious, dedicated to beauty yet aware of its practical limits in the world, looking backwards for what could be reclaimed even as they (or at least Morris) tried to build a better future. And then there are the books: they loved, loved, loved books. Morris would buy them for his friends, a typical extravagance generated by his discomfort with his inherited wealth. Here, from MacCarthy's biography, is an account of how the set, in their Oxford years, received the publication of Ruskin's Edinburgh lectures in 1854:

"I was working in my room," wrote Burne-Jones, "when Morris ran in one morning bringing the newly published book with him: so everything was put aside until he read it all through to me. And there we first saw about the Pre-Raphaelites, and there I first saw the name of Rossetti. So for many a day after that we talked of little else but paintings which we had never seen."

At a time when it wasn't possible to simply look up an image of a painting after hearing about it, books were the next best thing--the fire Ruskin's descriptions kindled is palpable in Burne-Jones's account. No wonder the book was revered. As Fitzgerald wrote in her Burne-Jones book, "Without the concept of the book as hero, Victorian idealism can hardly be understood." In Morris's Novel on Blue Paper, a character "long[s] so much for more and more and more books." Little wonder that Morris turned to book making and literary translation.

Morris's designs, and particularly his wallpapers and stained glasses, continue to enchant more than a century later, drawing us in with their clear lines and repeating patterns, then surprising us with singular details. His letters, personable and lively, are also full of such detail. Complaining about the town of Lewes, he says that as you approach,

you can see Lewes lying like a box of toys under a great amphitheatre of chalk hills: the ride is very pleasant: Lewes when you get there lies on a ridge in its valley, the street winding down to the river (Ouse) which runs into the sea at Newhaven: on the whole it is set down better than any town i have seen in England: unluckily it is not a very interesting town in itself: there is a horrible workhouse or prison on the outskirts, and close by a hideous row of builders' houses: there are three old Churches in it, dismally restored, but none of them over-remarkable: there is the remains of a castle, 14th century: but it is not grand at all. Never the less it isn't a bad country town, only not up to its position.

Though I'd quibble with him about Lewes, at least as it exists today, there is a clarity of expression here that calls to mind a line I came across in Joseph Conrad's writing recently: "To take a liberty with technical language is a crime against the clearness, precision, and beauty of perfected speech." Morris isn't using technical language here, of course, but he is deploying a technical eye, one that sees detail that he then carefully conveys in words.

Here he is applying the same analytic clarity to the difficult-to-explain work of creating, in a letter to Georgina Burne-Jones:

I have perhaps rather more than enough of work to do, and for that reason or what not, am dwelling somewhat low down in the valley of humiliation--quite good enough for me doubtless. Yet it sometimes seems to me as if my lot was a strange one: you see, I work pretty hard, and on the whole very cheerfully, not altogether I hope for mere pudding, still less for praise; and while I work I have the cause always in mind, and yet I know that the cause for which I specially work is doomed to fail, at least in seeming; I mean that art must go under, where or how ever it may come up again. I don't know if I explain what I'm driving at, but it does sometimes seem to me a strange thing indeed that a man should be driven to work with energy and even with pleasure and enthusiasm at work which he knows will serve no end but amusing himself; am I doing nothing but make-believe, then, something like Louis XVI's lock-making? There, I don't pretend to say that the conundrum is a very interesting one, as it certainly has not any practical importance as far as I am concerned, since I will without doubt go on with my work, useful or useless, till I demit.

In one long paragraph, we have a version of the struggle that would define Morris's life: what does a man whose greatest skill is creating objects of breathtaking beauty--but often of little utility--do if he also believes powerfully that social and economic difference should be leveled? How to be for beauty in a world of utility? A century later, surrounded by far, far more objects of limited utility--and, for all the dross, a hitherto unimaginable access to beauty--we've not come close to answering that question.

Consigned to the Flames III: Lord Byron

{Lord Byron in Albanian dress, painted by Thomas Phillips, 1813}

You had to know I'd get to this one sooner or later. Here's how Fiona MacCarthy describes it in her Byron: Life and Legend (2002):

On 17 May 1824, after three days of agonized discussions, Byron's memoirs were burnt in the grate of [Byron's publisher] John Murray's Albermarle Street drawing room, in the most famous sacrificial scene of literary history. Of the six men assembled in the room--[Byron's friend Thomas] Moore and his supporter the sociable Irish poet Henry Luttrell, [Byron's friend John Cam] Hobhouse, John Murray, [Byron's half-sister] Augusta Leigh's ally Wilmot Horton, and Lady Byron's representative Colonel Doyle--only Moore and Luttrell had actually read the memoirs, if Murray had indeed resisted the temptation to do so in the years the manuscript lay in his possession. Moore was there under protest. He and Henry Luttrell had pressed the case for "the injustice we thought it would be to Byron's memory to condemn the work wholly, and without even opening it, as if it were a pest bag." Moore pleaded that at least the manuscript should be carefully perused and if necessary censored but that "what was innoxious and creditable to Lord Byron" should be preserved.

Those of us who love such unexpectedly revealing personal narratives as Boswell's journals can't help but imagine that we might have had something as entertaining from Byron. Compared to Byron, after all, Boswell was a prude, and Byron’s letters and journals themselves are such extravagant fun that it’s not hard to conjure up a book that would be a delectable, ridiculous mix of Casanova and Rousseau.

The available evidence, however, suggests that such a view may be overly romantic. If Byron's letter to John Murray initially proposing the memoirs--to be published after Byron's death, "for a man always looks dead after his own life has appeared"--is to be believed, the manuscript contained probably at least as much hinting and beating around the bush as it did explicit detail:

The Life is Memoranda not Confessions. I have left out all my loves (except in a general way) and many other of the most important things (because I must not compromise other people) so that it is like the play of Hamlet--"the part of Hamlet omitted by particular desire." But you will find many opinions, and some fun, with a detailed account of my marriage and its consequences, as true as a party concerned can make such accounts, for I suppose we are all prejudiced.

Byron gave the memoirs to his friend Moore in late 1819 (He joked in a letter to George Kinnaird that he “put my life (in M.S.) into his hands.”), telling Moore that he was free to share them with appropriate friends. Fiona MacCarthy estimates that Moore circulated them to about twenty people before--again with Byron's permission--selling them to John Murray for £2,000 (which Murray paid back following the burning). As for the contents:

A minority of readers found themselves outraged. William Gifford, who had read the memoirs at Murray’s request, reported that “the whole Memoirs were fit only for a brothel and would damn Lord B to certain infamy if published.” Lord John Russell found three or four pages “too gross and indelicate for publication.” But the consensus of opinion was that Byron’s memoirs were a bit of a damp squib. Two weeks after the destruction Mary Shelley wrote to Trelawny: “There was not much in them I know, for I read them some years ago at Venice, but the world fancied that it was to have a confession of the hidden feelings of one, concerning whom they are always passionately anxious.”

Is it possible that the memoirs consisted less of a catalogue of amorous adventures and more of an attempt to justify Byron’s indefensible behavior in his marriage, which Karen Joy Fowler has described well as “improbably gothic in its awfulness”? Byron did mention the marriage in his letter to Murray. MacCarthy also quotes a letter from Lord to Lady Byron in 1819, three years after she’d left him, in which Lord Byron expresses a wish that his ex-wife would read the memoirs for accuracy, noting however that

You will find nothing to flatter you—nothing to lead you to the most remote supposition that we could ever have been—or be happy together.

Could it all have been an unconvincing attempt to clear his name, if not completely, then at least a tiny bit?

In any case, it’s understandable that Lady Byron’s friends wouldn’t want to take the chance of an account of the marriage from Byron’s perspective coming to light; add in the concern of relatively respectable friends such as Hobhouse--who might have been worried in part about the possibility of Byron recounting homosexual adventures--and the fate of the memoirs begins to seem inevitable. As Vic Gatrell puts it in City of Laughter,

Byron and his ilk were laid low by somethign deeper than a passing spasm of moralizing. A cultural revolution was more like it, and Byron's lament for the shift from cunt to cant was no bad way of describing what had happened.

The prudes won out, and the match was struck.

I’ll let Byron himself have the last word, reminding us that whatever we may lose to the flames, we lose far more every day to the inevitable wear of time. In his “Detached Thoughts,” he wrote,

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us.—a year impairs, a luster obliteratres.—There is little distinct left without an effort of memory,--then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment—but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?