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."

An invitation to Byron, were he alive

Most of the pleasure of the correspondence between George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, aside from the pair's obvious joy in literary friendship, consists of pithy judgments, apposite and relatively obscure quotations, and references to books and authors long forgotten (a fate that seems to befall biographies, belles-lettres, and criticism with sad frequency). But once in a while there are unexpected gems of a different sort, such as the poem below, written by Duff Cooper, explains Hart-Davis in a letter of January 26, 1957, in response to a contest by “one of the newsweeklies,” asking for poems titled “On first hearing that Wordsworth had had an illegitimate child.”

I’ve written before about Wordsworth’s illegitimate child—and the tentativeness of judgment on the topic that mars Adam Sisman’s otherwise excellent book on Wordsworth and Coleridge, The Friendship—but I can’t imagine a better person to hammer the old Sheep of the Lake District for his hypocrisy than Byron, and I can’t imagine a better bugle call to the charge than this one:

Byron! Thou should’st be living at this hour, We need thy verse, thy venom and thy wit To castigate the ancient hypocrite. We need thy pith, thy passion and thy power— How often did that prim old face turn sour Even at the mention of thy honoured name, How oft those prudish lips have muttered “shame” In jealous envy of thy golden lyre. In words worth reading hadst thou told the tale Of what the Lakeland bard was really at When on those long excursions he set sail. For now there echoes through his tedious chat Another voice, the third, a phantom wail Or peevish prattle of a bastard brat.

The opening nod to Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron” makes up for the inevitable “words worth” pun. None of which should obscure the truth that Lyttelton notes in his reply to Hart-Davis’s letter:

Wordsworth . . . must have been uniquely dried-up, stiff, dull, self-satisfied, arrogant, but at his poetic best—Who was it said “He stumps along by your side, an old bore in a brown coat, and suddenly he goes up and you find that your companion is an angel”, i.e. is at home in a region where Byron saw only George III and Southey having their legs pulled.

That said, I think that despite the perils, had I a single dinner invitation to send, it’d be Coleridge or Byron, not Wordsworth, who’d receive it.

"Lloyd . . . manufactured conversations and speeches wholly out of his brain," or, Choose your friends with care!

In a comment to yesterday's post, R. T. pointed out that

By all accounts, Coleridge seems to have been a person quite a few others ought to have avoided because of his singular (and what I would generously call his egocentric and less generously call his parasitic) personality.

He's right: though Coleridge could be a good friend, and his encouragement was crucial to Wordsworth in his early years, he could also be untrustworthy, unreliable, and cruel (especially where his long-suffering wife was concerned). And the opium didn't help: as Adam Sisman puts it in The Friendship,

Dependence on the drug exacerbated all the most deplorable aspects of his character: self-pity, evasiveness, secrecy, duplicity, indifference, passivity, apathy, paralysis, self-loathing and shame.

Troubling as he may have been, however, Coleridge wasn't the worst person in the Lake District poets' orbit--and thus in Sisman's book--not by a long shot. That crown has to go to Coleridge's friend and former pupil Charles Lloyd, whose gossiping, backstabbing, and double-dealing is so deliciously horrible in Sisman's account as to bring to mind Les Liasons Dangereuses.

To some extent, Coleridge's typical emotional obtuseness--which so often bordered on outright cruelty--was to blame for the initial break with Lloyd. In 1797 he published a handful of parodies of the poetry of his contemporaries, Lloyd among them, telling his publisher, "I think they may do good to our young Bards." But as Sisman points out,

Lloyd in particular was not the sort of person who found it easy to laugh at himself. . . . He was sensitive, with "an exquisiteness of feeling" that, as Lamb commented, "must border on derangement." . . . Lloyd demanded regular attention, and became petulant or even hostile if he did not get it.

Feeling rejected, Lloyd mounted a campaign of malicious gossip and disinformation:

He wrote a letter to Dorothy [Wordsworth] in which he labelled Coleridge "a villain," and cited a conversation between the two of them (in which he may have repeated comments about her made by Coleridge) as proof that she concurred; in tears, she broughr the letter over to [Coleridge's home at] Nether Stowey from [her home at] Alfoxden, but Coleridge laughed it off. Lloyd inviegled himself into the homes of Coleridge's friends Lamb and Southey, and worked to turn them against him. He read Lamb extracts from Coleridge's letters that referred to lamb in less than flattering terms. He repeated to Southey what Coleridge had told him in confidence about their quarrel in Bristol two years earlier, reopening the old wound. . . . Southey began to talk ominously of the need to defend his character. Stung by what he heard from Lloyd, Southey retaliated by telling him stories of Coleridge's past, from which Lloyd was able to make more mischief.

If you can't follow all that, it might help to consult with the nearest middle-school student or soap opera fan, who should be able to walk you through it. About the only way Lloyd's troublemaking could have been bettered would have been by sleeping with everyone involved as well . . . then drunkenly blogging about it all?

Amazingly, despite such an impressively villainous round of pot-stirring, Lloyd remained a part of the Wordsworth-Coleridge milieu for several more years. The final break only came about, amusingly enough, only because of Wordsworth's notorious sensitivity to criticism:

Someone reported Lloyd as having publicly expressed the opinion that Coleridge was "a greater poet, & possessed of more genius by nature," than Wordsworth. "Instantly," as Coleridge recalled more than eight years afterwards, Dorothy pronounced Lloyd "a VILLAIN." For the next few years the Wordsworths avoided the Lloyds wherever possible. "We are determined to cut them entirely," Dorothy wrote to Sara Hutchinson.

There are lines, after all, that a friend of a prickly poet must not cross . . .

The fecklessness of young Wordsworth, or, Never trust a Romantic poet?

One of the most difficult tasks that faces a conscientious biographer is divining the intent behind his subject's actions. The messy, conflicted decisions with which we're all familiar from our own lives must at least to some extent be translated into a convincing narrative, the bare facts of a life given some sort of form and meaning. An honorable biographer will hedge where necessary--but delicacy and hesitation are not the stuff of biography, and ultimately judgment must be rendered, or the life under examination will remain amorphous at best.

Thus it's not hard to see why a biographer might occasionally offer a generous take on questionable episodes in his subject's life; when openly acknowledged, such generosity serves as a more effective form of hedging, reminding us that no matter the information we have available, we cannot fully claim to be the just judges that we would ask for our own lives--that, as Jean Renoir put it, "Everybody has their reasons."

That said, I think Adam Sisman takes that generosity a bit far in this passage about the young Wordsworth from The Friendship:

Wordsworth was preparing to return to England. By this time it must have been obvious that [his French paramour] Annette Vallon was pregnant; she would give birth to a daughter on 15 December. So why did Wordsworth leave France, just as he was about to become a father?

At this point, I can't help but imagine Jon Stewart reading this, his face set in a thoughtful, attentive look that slowly gives way to disbelief, bordering on scorn, as Sisman trots out each of the following possible reasons for Wordsworth's flight:

He was certainly short of money. He may have believed that the time was ripe to publish his poems. Maybe he felt that he must return home to secure his future, to establish himself in the Church or some other profession, so that he would be able to provide for Annette and his child. Possibly he intended to marry her once he was established; Annette's subsequent letters suggest that she expected him to do so. But she may have been deluding herself.

You think?
Sisman continues:

It would have been difficult for him to make a career in the Church, with a foreign, Catholic wife and a child born out of wedlock. Perhaps he made promises to Annette that he did not mean to keep. The frustrating truth is that there is not enough evidence on which to base anything more than guesses at Wordsworth's intentions.

That last statement, while, strictly speaking, true, reeks of weasel. We may not have enough evidence in this particular case, but we do have centuries and centuries of evidence of what relatively privileged young men are thinking when they disappear just before their girlfriends give birth to illegitimate children, and it's not, "Better hurry back and get my poems published!" Sure, it's possible that Wordsworth was more honorable than the typical feckless young man, but the fact that he ultimately let nearly ten years elapse before he again saw Annette, let alone their child, certainly suggests otherwise.

But that seems too sad--even angering--a note on which to end, so in closing I'll turn to a line that Dorothy Wordsworth wrote about her brother to a friend in 1791:

William has a great attachment to poetry, which is not the most likely thing to produce his advancement in the world.

An assessment with which all of us, poets and critics alike, can surely agree--but perhaps we can draw resolve to continue our chosen course from these lines from Emily Dickinson:

Reverse cannot befall
That fine Prosperity
Whose Sources are interior--
As soon--Adversity

A Diamond--overtake
In far--Bolivian Ground--
Misfortune hath no implement
Could mar it--if it found--

Are you listening, crazy finance guys who destroyed the world economy?

A most difficult walkback, or, The perils of drink! Even for the non-drinker!

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Pickwick Week deserves at least one more post, and I'll try to get to that tomorrow, but today I can't help but digress. I'm hip-deep in Richard Holmes's Shelley: The Pursuit (1974), and I've been brought to laughter by an explanatory note. In recounting the nineteen-year-old Shelley's sojourn in the Lake District in late 1811, Holmes tells of Shelley's disappointment when, having assumed he'd make the acquaintance of the Lake District trifecta of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and de Quincey, he instead managed only a meeting with the far less interesting Robert Southey.

"Coleridge," writes Holmes, "was away lecturing in London that winter, and Wordsworth remained deep in hibernation at Grasmere." To which explanation he appends the following note:

Both poets were in the middle of a bitter quarrel, which seems to have been started by a minor misunderstanding of certain remarks that Wordsworth made to Coleridge's host in London Basil Montagu, about Coleridge being "a rotten drunkard" and "an absolute nuisance in his family."

Now, I fully realize that I could with very little effort gain access to multiple accounts of this incident that would clarify the details of that quarrel; Holmes himself cites Mary Moorman's 1965 biography of Wordsworth, while just a couple of years ago Adam Sisman published a full (and, if Sisman's track record is any guide, well-written) account of the friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge.

That said, I prefer tonight to choose, however temporarily, ignorance--because that allows me to pose the question: how on god's green earth could a person possibly misunderstand a friend's description of him as "a rotten drunkard" and "an absolute nuisance"?! I imagine that Coleridge's eventual explanation had to be a bit tortured--perhaps he drew on this quotation from Samuel Butler's "Miscellaneous Thoughts," which he would later include in his Biographia Literaria (1817):

The metaphysic's but a puppet motion
That goes with screws, the notion of a notion;
The copy of a copy and lame draught
Unnaturally taken from a thought:
That counterfeits all pantomimic tricks,
And turns the eyes, like an old crucifix;
That counterchanges whatsoe'er it calls
B 'another name, and makes it true or false;
Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth,
By virtue of the Babylonian's tooth.

Oh, fine. If you insist, I'll go consult Sisman and report back.

P. S. Have I mentioned that I love footnotes?

"Your whisky has made you original."

Jenny Davidson's's great post a week or so ago at Light Reading on Lord Byron's letters about swimming (specifically, as you may have guessed, about swimming the Hellespont) led me to pick up, on her recommendation, the one-volume distillation of Harvard University Press's twelve volumes of Byron's correspondence, Selected Letters and Journals (1982).

On receiving the book, I turned to the index in search of some name that had recently been on my reading list; settling on James Hogg, I thumbed my way to a letter the twenty-six-year-old Byron wrote to the forty-four-year-old Hogg on March 24, 1814. After an introductory paragraph acquiescing to Hogg's request for some verse for a journal he was printing, Byron gets right down to the good stuff: strongly held opinions, exuberant scurrility, and wonderful bombast. I'm going to quote at more length than I usually do, simply because each paragraph contains at least a couple of lines so creative or ridiculous as to be well worth sharing.

You seem to be a plain spoken man, Mr. Hogg, and I really do not like you the worse for it. I can't write verses, and yet you want a bit of my poetry for your book. It is for you to reconcile yourself with yourself.--You shall have the verses

You are mistaken, my good fellow, in thinking that I (or, indeed, any living verse-writer--for we shall sink poets) can write as well as Milton. Milton's Paradise Lost is, as a whole, a heavy concern; but the two first books of it are the very finest poetry that has ever been produced in this world--at least since the flood--for I make little doubt Abel was a fine pastoral poet, and Cain a fine bloody poet, and so forth; but we, now-a-days, even we (you and I, i.e.) know no more of their poetry than the brutum vulgus--I beg pardon, the swinish multitude, do of Wordsworth and Pye. Poetry must always exist, like drink, where there is a demand for it. And Cain's may have been the brandy of the Antediluvians, and Abel's the small [?] still.

Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too hight and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots form old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn the plays back again into prose tales. That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny: but this was all. Suppose any one to have the dramatic handling for the first time of such ready-made stories as Lear, Macbeth, &c. and he would be a sad fellow, indeed, if he did not make something very grand of them. [As] for his historical plays, properly historical, I mean, they were mere redressings of former plays on the same subjects, and in twenty cases out of twenty-one, the finest, the very finest things, are taken all but verbatim out of the old affairs. You think, no doubt, that A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse! is Shakespeare's. Not a syllable of it. You will find it all in the old nameless dramatist. Could not one take up Tom Jones and improve it, without being a greater genius than Fielding? I, for my part, think Shakespeare's plays might be improved, and the public seem, and have seemed to think so too, for not one of his is or ever has been acted as he wrote it; and what the pit applauded three hundred years past, is five times out of ten not Shakespeare's, but Cibber's.

Stick you to Walter Scott, my good friend, and do not talk any more stuff about his not being willing to give you real advice, if you really will ask for real advice. You love Southey, forsooth--I am sure Southey loves nobody but himself, however. I hate these talkers one and all, body and soul. They are a set of the most despicable impostors--that is my opinion of them. They know nothing of the world and what is poetry, but the reflection of the world? What sympathy have this people with the spirit of this stirring age? They are no more able to understand the least of it, than your lass--nay, I beg her pardon, she may very probably have intense sympathy with both its spirit (I mean the whisky,) and its body (I mean the bard.) They are mere old wives. Look at their beastly vulgarity, when they wish to be homely, and their exquisite stuff, when they clap on sail, and aim at fancy. Coleridge is the best of the trio--but bad is the best. 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. Indeed I think you and Burns have derived a great advantage from this, that being poets, and drinkers of wine, you have had a new potation to rely upon. Your whisky has made you original. I have always thought it a fine liquor. I back you against beer at all events, gill to gallon.

By the bye, you are a fine hand to cut up the minor matters of verse-writing; you indeed think harmony the all-in-all. My dear sir, you may depend upon it, you never had name yet, without making it rhyme to theme. I overlook all that sort of thing, however, and so must you, in your turn, pass over my real or supposed ruggedness. The fact is, that I have a theory on the subject, but that I have not time at present for explaining it. The first time all the poets of the age meet--it must be in London, glorious London is the place, after all--we shall, if you please, have a small trial of skill. You shall write seventeen odes for me, anything from Miltonian blank down to Phillupian [sic] namby, and I a similar number for you, and let a jury of good men and true be the judges between us. I name Scott for foreman--Tom Campbell may be admitted, and Mrs. Baillie, (though it be not exactly a matron case.) You may name the other nine worthies yourself. We shall, at all events, have a dinner upon the occasion, and I stipulate for a small importation of the peat reek.

Dear sir, believe me sincerely yours,
BYRON

There's so much fun stuff there I don't even know where to begin. I've noted before Byron's slagging of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey 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.

It's amusing to note that in the poem he dismisses Coleridge for being drunk, while in the letter he dismisses Southey and Wordsworth for not being drunk. And what great phrases Byron casually tosses off throughout! Homer the wine-bibber; gill to gallon; when they clap on sail, and aim at fancy; the brandy of the Antediluvians; the peat reek-- by which I assume (correctly?) he means whiskey.

This letter alone has made the purchase of the whole volume worthwhile. I'm sure I'll share more in the coming months, but a more extensive reading will have to wait, as I'm hip-deep in Tom Jones. Until then, I'll leave you with this line from a letter Byron sent his publisher, John Murray (whom I like to imagine receiving letters of a very different sort from one of his other authors, Jane Austen), on October 15, 1816:

[B]ut poetry is--I fear--incurable--God help me--if I proceed in this scribbling--I shall have frittered away my mind before I am thirty,--but it is at times a real relief to me.