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."

Byron, the Shelleys, and the rough wake of cruel genius

How many times can we read again of Byron, the Shelleys, Lake Geneva, and the Year without a Summer? Surely the topic has been exhausted by now?

Perhaps. Perhaps there's nothing truly new to be discovered from that stormy sojourn. But that doesn't keep me from hungrily devouring yet another account, if it's well told--which Andrew McConnell Stott's The Poet and the Vampyre certainly is. Stott improves on the usual tale of hothouse creativity by simultaneously broadening his lens--telling of the months leading up to and following the Lake Geneva stay--and focusing it on characters usually seen as peripheral, John Polidori and Claire Clairmont. We've always known that Byron and Shelley are, in their distinct ways, largely monsters, but close attention to Polidori and Clairmont renders the poets' darkness and insensitivity utterly comprehensible. Neither Polidori nor Clairmont is anywhere near wholly sympathetic as a character--indeed, while Clairmont has a certain magnetism, it takes an act of serious historicization, of remembering the limitations he faced in society, for us not to find Polidori almost entirely unlikeable, short-tempered and full of ill-founded self-regard. Yet Clairmont and Polidori are both, importantly, familiar: we all know that feeling of wanting, more than anything else in the world, to have a secure place in the orbit of someone more popular, charming, and talented than we are--and of having that person capriciously tack from friendship to dismissal. In Stott's hands, the desire that fuels both Polidori and Clairmont becomes palpable, its off-hand rejection cruel beyond belief.

At the same time, the reason we come back to Byron again and again is that charm, that heedless, headlong selfishness, that insistence that the world is there for him to play with. And the book is full of that, too: anecdotes, scenes, and quotations that further cement Byron as a larger-than-life figure, a man of whom it seems reasonable of a woman who meets him in Rome to say to her daughter, "Don't look at him, he is dangerous to look at."

Today, however, I'll turn away from Byron and focus instead on Polidori and medicine, the field to which he ill-fatedly committed himself young. First, I'll share this jaw-dropping anecdote from Polidori's time at the University of Edinburgh:

The neglect of practical studies was responsible for some of the worst abuses at the university, specifically in the case of anatomy. Edinburgh's professorship in this key area had been occupied for a total of 126 years by three men, all of whom had been named Alexander Munro: father, son and grandson. This was not unusual in a nepotistic age when, of the ten professors hired in the two decades prior to John's arrival, eight were the sons of professors already in residence. By sheer good fortune, the first two Alexander Munros had been men of parts, but by the time John was there, the post had devolved to Alexander Munro III, who treated it as a tiresome inheritance. Appearing in class with his clothes in runkled disarray, Munro mumbled through the notes his grandfather had written almost three-quarters of a century before without even bothering to omit such obvious anachronisms as the phrase "when I was a student in Leyden in 1714"--a passage that took on such a mythic status that its annual utterance became something of a fete, the students showering the professor with peas when they heard it while Munro sputtered on.

Extra credit to Stott for using "runkled," which I was pleased to have to look up.

After such stellar instruction, Polidori graduated from the University of Edinburgh at twenty . . . only to discover that he couldn't practice medicine in London until he passed the boards, which no one under twenty-six was even allowed to sit. Thus, when Byron was looking for a physician to accompany him on his European exile, Polidori jumped at the chance, income and idol-worship creating a compelling combination.

After Byron fired Polidori, largely because of his irritability, profligacy, and jumped-up pretensions (which Byron alternately encouraged and scoffed at), Polidori attempted to latch on with a number of nobles as a personal physician, without much luck. In Pisa, he briefly succeeded in building a practice, but either his Edinburgh training or his faulty stars showed through:

None of [his patients] lasted long. Lord Guilford died first, falling to chronic alcoholism and such tumorous guts that John had to remove his intestines and embalm the body before it could be sent back to Britain for burial. In February 1817, Francis Horner succumbed to a heart condition, followed shortly afterwards by Thomas Hope's young son, who died of scarlet fever.

Byron was no more understanding than usual, writing to his friend Scrope Davies that Polidori was

on his way to England with the present Lord Guilford--having actually disembowelled the last at Pisa and spiced and pickled him for his rancid ancestors.

"Rancid ancestors"--it's phrases like that which bring me back, again and again, to Byron's letters. In another letter, Byron suggested to John Cam Hobhouse that Polidori might suit Lady Westmorland, whose service he hoped to enter. Her eye for young men was on Byron's mind as he offered a vulgar assessment:

He suggested to Hobhouse that John might be on the verge of securing his fortune, the key to which lay in his handling of "Lady W's Clitoris, which is supposed to be of the longest", and ability to talk her into a quick marriage, "if only to fill up the gap which he has already made in the population."

I'm now about 100 pages from the end. Byron, untouched by anything as always, is resident in Venice, drunkenly swimming its canals. Clairmont, meanwhile, is in despair, having borne Byron's child and surrendered it to him; Polidori has returned to London, tail between his legs, and is trying to figure out his career from there. Will they recover some equilibrium, or will they be more like the suicides strewn in the Shelleys' wake? Even knowing the outcome, I find I want to race through Stott's telling to learn more. If you're half the sucker for this story that I am, you should grab this book and do the same.

"I presume you have heard that Mr. Shelley & Capt. Williams were lost on the 7th Ulto."

{Photos by rocketlass.}

If you don't have Bill Peschel's Reader's Almanac in your RSS reader, you should: it offers an interesting and well-told story from literary history every day. The lead item for this past Monday, August 18th, an account of the cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley on a beach in Italy in 1822, was gruesome enough to send me back to my bookshelves to learn a bit more. I recommend you go read Peschel's account now, then come back here.

Shelley had drowned a week earlier, along with his friend Edward Williams, and worries about disease led Italian officials to order the pair temporarily buried where they washed up until a proper funeral could be arranged. Shelley's opportunistic and somewhat irritating--but, one has to admit in this case, loyal--friend Edward John Trelawny took charge, and Williams was burned first. In her biography of Lord Byron, Fiona MacCarthy relates Byron's description of Williams's pyre:

"You can have no idea," he told Tom Moore, "what an extraordinary effect such a funeral pile has on a desolate shore, with mountains in the back-groudn and the sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frankincense gave to the flame."

The next day, the men set out in search of Shelley's grave, which, according to MacCarthy, was poorly marked:

It took about an hour to locate it, by which time Byron and Leigh Hunt had arrived from Pisa, accompanied by two mounted dragoons and four foot soldiers to keep prospective sightseers at bay.

They finally found Shelley's body, which had been rendered grotesque by the water, and set about their work. Peschel points out that Trelawny forbade Byron to take Shelley's skull, which ultimately disintegrated; yet, when Shelley's heart, in Byron's words, "would not take the flame," Trelawny himself eventually grabbed it. MacCarthy goes into detail, drawing on Trelawny's later Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author:

Trelawny's recollections of the scene provide more details: the heart "although bedded in fire--would not burn." They waited an hour, continually adding fuel, until "it becoming late we gave over by mutual conviction of its being unavailing--all exclaiming it will not burn--there was a bright flame round it occasioned by the moisture still flowing from it--and on removing the furnace nearer to the sea to immerse the iron I took the heart in my hand to examine it--after sprinkling it with water: yet it was still so hot as to burn my hand badly and a quantity of this oily fluid still flowed from it."

Mary Shelley ultimately ended up with the heart, but not before Leigh Hunt tried to put in a claim that is astonishing in its presumption and lack of feeling:

[T]he next day [he wrote] indignantly to her, "With reagrd to Ld B. he has no right to bestow the heart, & I am sure pretends to none. If he told you that you should have it, it could only have been from his thinking I could more easily part with it than I can."

An interesting final note to all of this is that, though Byron earlier that month, in writing to his publisher, John Murray, had praised Shelley extravagantly--

You are all brutally mistaken about Shelley who was without exception--the best and least selfish man I ever knew.--I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison.

--he later that year wrote to Mary Shelley an unexpectedly distant account of their relationship:

As to friendship, it is a propensity in which my genius is very limited. I do not know the male human being, except Lord Clare, the friend of my infancy, for whom I feel any thing that deserves the name. All my others are men-of-the-world friendships. I did not even feel it for Shelley, however much I admired and esteemed him; so that you see not even vanity could bribe me into it, for, of all men, Shelley thought highest of my talents,--and, perhaps of my disposition.