Byron burning

CORIN THROSBY

Byron knew, more than any author before him, the power of an ellipsis. Foreshadowing twentieth-century theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, who posited that it is primarily the reader who creates a poem’s meaning by navigating gaps in the text, Byron filled his work with tantalizing omissions to fire the imagination. One of his bestselling poems, The Giaour, a classically Byronic tale of a brooding hero avenging his murdered beloved, was subtitled “A Fragment” to create an illusion that the full story lay elsewhere. The poem is riddled with as­terisks that mark supposedly lost sections. “An outline is the best,” Byron wrote in his final epic Don Juan, “– a lively reader’s fancy does the rest”.
The poet invited conjecture not only about his work but also about his personal life. Readers were quick to see a link between Byron’s melancholic aristocratic heroes and the poet himself. In his preface to the work that made him famous in 1814, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron insisted that his character was not based on a “real personage”, but purely “the child of imagination”. Yet he continually gave his heroes the same dark hair and pale brow that readers were seeing in reproduced portraits of the poet that hung in countless print shop windows, and he often dropped in teasing autobiographical references to ancestral homes and heroic acts abroad. Readers looked for coded messages that they felt revealed the real Byron amid the gossip, and the Byronic hero was just ambiguous enough for them to see in him whatever suited them.
It is a wonderful dramatic irony, then, that Byron’s memoirs – which might have finally provided the “truth” about his life – were destroyed soon after his death. The story goes that three of his closest friends (his publisher, John Murray; his fellow celebrity poet, Thomas Moore; and his companion since his Cambridge days, John Cam Hobhouse), together with lawyers representing Byron’s half-sister and his widow, decided that the manuscript was so scandalous, so unsuitable for public consumption, that it would ruin Byron’s reputation forever. Gathered in Murray’s drawing room in Albemarle Street, they ripped up the pages and tossed them into the fire. The incident is often described as the greatest crime in literary ­history. It has certainly served to fuel curiosity and conjecture about Byron’s personal life for another couple of centuries. What was the damning secret his friends needed to protect? Domestic abuse? Sodomy? Incest? Probably all three, we imagine.
In the title essay of his collection The Burning of Byron’s Memoirs: New and unpublished essays and papers, Peter Cochran provides the full correspondence between the principal figures in the lead-up to the memoirs’ destruction. It is astonishing that not one of these letters expressed the view that denying the world a work by one of its most revered writers would be an act of barbarism. Instead, at a time when autobiography was considered slightly unseemly, Byron’s friends were zealously committed to “protecting” his family and “preserving” his fame. Cochran argues, however, that there were other reasons behind the decision, mostly involving self-interest and petty jealousy. Hobhouse, as a newly elected MP, was worried about the shadow his friend’s libertine adventures might cast on his own respectable image; he was also offended that Byron had entrusted the manuscript to Moore rather than to him. Murray presumably could have made a fortune from the memoirs, but Cochran supplies evidence that Moore was in fact shopping the manuscript to Longman, Murray’s rival; Byron had himself offended Murray by switching publishers before his death. Hobhouse’s and Murray’s wish to control Byron’s legacy, Cochran argues, reflected an acute sense of betrayal and a subconscious desire for revenge. Moore, meanwhile, emerges as the (relative) hero of the piece. He was the only one there to have actually read the memoirs in full and was aware of their value. After putting up a decent fight, however, he was overwhelmed by what he called the “hoity toity proceeding” – complicated issues of copyright and payment, and Hobhouse’s self-righteous bullying.
With its lengthy quotations, interjections in various typefaces, repetitions, diversions and jokes, Cochran’s introductory essay is a fitting opener for a collection that Byron might call a “strange mélange”. When he died last year, Cochran left over twenty full-length monographs on Byron, as well as countless articles and online study aids. To call the ­thirty-six essays and papers in this volume “new and unpublished” is a stretch, given that many have appeared in different guises before, but they provide a representative taste of the staggering breadth of Cochran’s knowledge. There are essays on everything from Byron’s dirty jokes to his use of Shakespeare, his little-known charitable works, and the books he kept in his personal library. The glee that Cochran takes in stirring up his readers and fellow scholars (his papers have titles like “Why the English Hate Byron”) and his pervasive humour, which at times verges on the puerile (he italicizes the first three letters of “Assyrian Tales” in a piece on Byron’s homosexuality), mirrors similar traits in Byron himself.
This delight in the profane is coupled, in the case of both men, with profound seriousness about poetry. The volume includes a set of biting comedic sketches that poke fun at academics earnestly spouting German theory and impenetrable jargon to mask what Cochran perceived as a lack of appreciation for Byron’s craft. Cochran shuns all “isms”, rooting his analysis in primary evidence from the poet and his contemporaries. Many of the essays assume a high level of familiarity with Byron’s life and work (Cochran takes as given that his readers have all thirteen volumes of the poet’s collected letters to hand), but his accessible, chatty voice means that there is plenty here for the uninitiated. In particular, there is a revised version of the essay that first sparked my own interest in Byron as a young student: a pedantic, messy, hilarious piece on the portrayal of the poet on film. Cochran shows how representations of Byron borrow from one another to feed the clichéd image of an “evil bisexual rake” who glowers as he manipulates and seduces the weak-minded. Most films, he notes, barely mention that he was a poet. Once again, any attempt to convey anything close to the “real” Byron is overwhelmed by fantasy.
Of all the mysteries that the burning of the memoirs left open, the one that was most fuelled by hearsay was Byron’s brief marriage to the pious heiress Anne Isabella “Annabella” Milbanke. Rumours had begun to circulate that the poet was in a relationship with his married half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and Byron – urged by his confidante, Lady Melbourne, who was also Annabella’s aunt – recognized that it was time to make an attempt at res­pectability. Annabella’s keen intelligence and handsome looks, not to mention her prospective fortune, made her a not unattractive pros­pect for the indebted poet. The two also shared a genuine friendship, swapping letters for over a year before their engagement. At first, Byron seemed smitten. Yet popular legend has it that, from the moment they exchanged their vows, the groom realized marriage was not for him. Samuel Rogers, who read at least part of the memoirs before they were burned, recalled a passage in which a nearby candle illuminated the crimson curtains surrounding the marital bed: “Good God, I am surely in Hell!” Byron is said to have exclaimed loudly enough to wake his bride. Throughout the marriage, Byron fell into rages and depressions that left friends worrying about his health, and Annabella seeking to have him certified. A year after they were wed, Lady Byron fled their London apartment with their newborn daughter. Soon after, Byron left England for ever.
For her entire life – and she lived well into her sixties – Lady Byron never published a word on why she left the marriage. Her silence created a void similar to that left by the destruction of Byron’s memoirs, fuelling speculation about her character and the nature of the separation. Byron was quick to adopt the role of unfairly abandoned husband: he described Annabella in one poem as his “moral Clytemnestra”, and in a letter as “the bitch my wife”. Although the press showed some sympathy for Lady Byron at the time, she has been described subsequently as cold, sanctimonious and unable to comprehend, let alone cater to, the complexities of her husband’s desires. The image works perfectly: the Romantic genius and great seducer trapped by a punctilious puritan.
Several biographies have attempted to resurrect Lady Byron’s image, showing her as the victim of an abusive relationship at a time when wives – even those of Annabella’s wealth and standing – had almost no legal recourse against their husbands. The first and most notorious, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Lady Byron Vindicated, appeared in 1860, less than a decade after her death. The American author had grown close to Lady Byron in her later life and was appalled to see her friend portrayed as “a moral monstrosity . . . of female hideousness” in a biography of Byron written by his mistress Teresa Guiccioli. She decided to end Lady Byron’s silence on her behalf. Stowe claimed that, before her friend died, she had confided to her that the poet had without question had an incestuous affair with Augusta Leigh and, moreover, had fathered her daughter, Medora. Stowe depicted Byron’s maltreatment of his wife – and the more general abuse of women by their husbands – as a kind of sexual slavery.
The book created a scandal from which Stowe’s career never recovered, although it did play a small role in the fight for American laws to protect married women, as the author had hoped it would. Many thought she had been played for a fool by the vengeful and deluded Lady Byron. Byronists rushed to defend their hero, pointing to a lack of hard evidence. Whatever the case, when subsequent biographers gained access to the “Lovelace Papers” – Lady Byron’s exhaustive collection of letters and writings – it became clear that she did in fact believe Medora to be her husband’s child.
The most recent biography, Julia Markus’s Lady Byron and Her Daughters, is a clear descendant of Stowe’s: this is a vindication, with all the gusto and partiality that implies. Markus acknowledges some of her subject’s weaknesses – her hopeless love for an abusive man and a misguided belief that she could “reform” him – but for the most part Lady Byron comes across as little short of a saint. The book is written in a casual, almost folksy style: there are chummy asides (the couple’s engagement is flagged with the line “Reader, prepare for a train wreck”), awkward modern references (alluding to Augusta’s relatively plain appearance, “in life a Camilla often aces a Diana”) and cutesy family nicknames (in one chapter Lady Byron is referred to almost exclusively as “the Hen”). It quotes far less extensively from the “Lovelace Papers” than previous biographies, is filled with inaccuracies that will exasperate the pedants (Augusta was lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte, not Queen Caroline etc), and the most spurious speculations are presented as fact. Markus is more interested in having fun with the sensational subject matter than maintaining a sense of rigour.
Nevertheless, Lady Byron and Her Daughters can be distinguished from previous biographies by its explicit endeavour not to let Lord Byron dominate the narrative. Annabella was defined by her marriage, and in true Victorian fashion considered herself to be “Byron’s wife” until she died (Markus describes her tidily as a “one-man woman whose man got away”). However, this book makes it clear that the union represented a relatively short episode in its subject’s involved and accomplished life. For decades Lady Byron worked as an energetic campaigner for educational reform. Using methods from Switzerland, she founded Britain’s first co-operative school – although, in a detail that Markus glosses over, she wasn’t quite progressive enough to admit girls. Furthermore, she raised her gifted, difficult daughter Ada as a single mother. In a particularly moving section, Markus reminds us that Lady Byron also unofficially adopted the twenty-year-old Medora Leigh, who was living in desperate poverty in France with an illegitimate child of her own.
Embracing Ada and Medora in its title, this biography is primarily about female rela­tionships – including Lady Byron’s complex friendships with formidable literary figures such as Stowe and Anna Jameson – and the legal and social restrictions placed on women in the nineteenth century. At a time when fathers had full custodial rights over their children, Markus shows that Lady Byron had to be silent and calculating in order to hold on to Ada. Her daughter managed to break free from conventionality to become a brilliant ­scientist (she is widely celebrated as having anticipated computer coding by over a century), but suffered from a gambling addiction and severe mood swings that were largely misunderstood. Ada’s eventful life gets little more than two chapters here, and her protracted death at thirty-six from uterine cancer is told from her long-suffering mother’s point of view.
Through all this Byron is depicted as the kind of Hollywood villain that Cochran jokes about in The Burning of Byron’s Memoirs, tormenting Annabella even from beyond the grave. Although the poet treated some women with genuine love and respect, including his last mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, there is no doubt that he behaved abominably towards his wife and several other women, including Claire Clairmont, the mother of his illegitimate child. There are plenty of psychological theories – all articulated with relish by Markus – as to why he at times displayed a vicious misogyny: his mostly repressed desire for men; his molestation as a child by his nurse; his strict and overbearing Calvinist mother; his guilty love for his sister. No one can say for certain if Byron’s lost account of the marriage would have revealed the truth about his behaviour. Even though the memoirs’ destruction is lamented for leaving the “Byron mystery” unsolved, there is no guarantee that they wouldn’t have simply fuelled more speculation.
What we do have – the best evidence of Byron’s point of view – is the extraordinary collection of letters he left behind when he died in 1824. These outpourings to friends and lovers may be the closest we get to the “true” Byron: generous, complicated, boastful, opinionated, egotistical, brilliant, quick-tempered, and very, very funny. Given all his later eye-rolling about his misjudged affair with Caroline Lamb, for example, it is unlikely his memoirs would have conveyed his enrapt feelings before things went sour. An early letter to her, however, betraying all the mawkish sentiment of any love-struck twenty-four-year-old, declares “If tears . . . have not sufficiently proved what my real feelings are . . . my love, I have no other proof to offer”. His characteristic wit is more evident in a pre-wedding letter to Annabella: “I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all”.
Byron often wrote to people several times per day, and a significant proportion of this huge number of letters has been preserved. In the 1970s and 80s, Leslie A. Marchand gathered them from all over the world and, together with some surviving journal entries, published them in what became a thirteen-volume resource of inestimable value to students and scholars of Byron and the period in which he lived. Considering Marchand also edited a single-volume Selected Letters and Journals in 1982 to enable easier access to the most interesting letters, many scholars will consider Richard Lansdown’s Byron’s Letters and Journals: A new selection somewhat redundant. Yet if this book brings Byron’s prose to a wider, younger audience, that can only be a good thing.
Lansdown includes almost twice as many letters in his selection as in Marchand’s – about 300 from the total of 3,000 – and focuses more on telling the story of a life. The collection begins with the earliest letter Byron wrote to his aunt, aged ten (“I hope you will excuse all blunders as it is the first letter I ever wrote”), and finishes with what is assumed to be his last: fittingly, given his long history of financial excesses and debts, an administrative letter to his banker. The chronology is divided into significant periods and places in his life, including his grand tour before he became famous, his numerous affairs in London, his marriage, his summer with the Shelleys in Switzerland, his many years in Italy, and his final months joining the Greek fight for independence. This is a hint of the autobiography we were denied by Murray, Hobhouse and Moore.
Cutting the letters down to 10 per cent must have been an excruciating task, and Lansdown does a valiant job of representing the thought processes and publishing dilemmas behind the major works, focusing particularly on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Giaour and Don Juan. Although it is understandable that he chose not to include excerpts from the letters to which Byron was responding, the one-way nature of the conversation can be a little disorienting. Even with Lansdown’s introductions at the beginning of each section, it is difficult to keep track of who’s who, and more contextualizing material – such as an alphabetical cast of characters – would have made things easier for those unfamiliar with the subject.
Although reading private letters and journals should feel like snooping, something about the immediacy of Byron’s prose makes it seem, as in his poetry, that he is sharing an intimate secret or amusing anecdote intended just for us. After his wedding, he wrote to his new aunt Lady Melbourne to say it went well apart from the uncomfortable cushions in the church, “which were stuffed with Peach-stones I believe – and made me make a face that passed for Piety”. Although the letters mostly convey the poet’s witty, self-deprecating side, there is also at times a quiet Romantic beauty. In certain sections, particularly those from his journals, Byron shifts seamlessly from vivid descriptions of nature to bleak introspection. After an Alpine walk, he writes:
very fine Glacier – like a frozen hurricane – Starlight – beautiful – but a devil of a path – never mind – got safe in – a little lightening – the whole day as fine in point of weather – as the day on which Paradise was made. – Passed whole woods of withered pine – all withered – trunks stripped & barkless – branches lifeless – done by a single winter – their appearance reminded me of me & my family.
Those dashes get increasingly frequent as Byron’s Letters and Journalsgo on – a Morse code for us to crack. And the more we search for the real Byron in their recesses, the more we realize that he will always remain tantalizingly out of reach.