by Rick Gekoski
But it was quite impossible, on that sunny day, the room warm and bathed in light, imaginatively to reconstruct what Byron’s biographer Fiona MacCarthy has called ‘the most famous sacrificial scene in literary history’, an overstatement that is somehow appropriate to the Byron legend, in which everything is written in bold, and of the utmost consequence.
The death of one manuscript by fire brings to mind the death of many others, for there is a long tradition of great literary work perishing amongst the flames. Often the author himself is responsible for the destruction, the burning of a manuscript being an old-fashioned way of pushing the Delete button. James Joyce burned a play and the first sections of Stephen Hero (some of the pages were rescued from the fire by his brother), while Gerard Manley Hopkins burned many of his early poems. There seems nothing wrong with either of these acts – and many like them – for it is a writer’s prerogative to distinguish what they wish to transmit from what, for whatever reason, they do not. That’s their job.
The troubles arise when the act of destruction is done by someone else. Frequently it happens through executors or relatives anxious to protect the reputation of the author and/ or the feelings of their relations. The Marquis de Sade’s son burned all of his father’s many unpublished works, following his death, though it is hard to imagine that the Marquis had much reputation left to protect. One might well feel the same about Richard Burton’s widow’s destruction of the surviving manuscript translation of The Perfumed Garden, the sort of Eastern erotica which now seems rather tame, with which he will always be associated. More intriguingly, the relatives of Lewis Carroll, known for his sexualised photographs of little girls, destroyed four volumes of his diaries, perhaps ensuring that his reputation, though compromised by the survival of these images, was not undermined entirely by more revealing material.
The two volumes of the Byron Memoirs were burned by a group of his friends and executors after three days of feverish comings and goings following the poet’s death, during which few of them made an effort actually to read the material. By some accounts, a quick look through the contents was enough to convince the majority that – given what was already known about Byron’s proclivities and activities – the material could not be published. Their disapprobation may have been justified – who knows? – but the fact that the work was deemed unpublishable seems scant reason to burn it. There seems something punitive about this over-response, as if the papers were being consigned to damnation.
Unlike the diaries of Philip Larkin, which were destroyed at his own wish, Byron’s Memoirs were intended for publication and were burned, one supposes, in order to respect the reputation of others, largely women, whose names (if remembered at all) we recall now only because of their association with Byron. Minor Regency aristocrats, catapulted into specious immortality because they were lovers of the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ Byron. Indeed, Caroline Lamb’s description of him is virtually all we remember of her.
So who cares if the work would have exposed more lovers and illicit acts, more peccadilloes, more cavalier and caddish escapades? Surely there was little that could add to the myth of Byron, and the worse the behaviour and incidents recorded, the more, well, Byronic Byron becomes.
We’d quite like him to be worse. It’s a reasonable enough desire, but unfortunately there is little convincing evidence that the contents were sensational, which makes the question of why they were destroyed even more puzzling. Byron’s Memoirs, unlike Larkin’s diaries, were not in any sense private. The two people who had a glance at the Larkin volumes were agreed that they were intensely and unpleasantly self-revealing, and that there would be no great loss to literature if they were destroyed. But Byron didn’t merely envisage the posthumous publication of his Memoirs; he had offered an early look at them to those people whom he termed ‘the elect’ – a category that, curiously, did not include his most intimate friend, and one of his literary executors, John Cam Hobhouse, who was deeply offended by his omission from that exalted category, and whose subsequent attitude to the fate of the Memoirs – burn! – may well have been an expression of this pique.
Byron died in Missolonghi, in western Greece, on the evening of 19 April 1824, at the age of thirty-six. It took almost a month for the news to reach England, a period in which Greece went into a paroxysm of national mourning. The poet was revered in his adopted land, which he had led in its fight for independence against the Turks. But Byron was increasingly reviled at home, his decision to live abroad taken as proof of guilt. The obituary notice in John Bull, on 16 May, was not atypical of this mood:
He has … quitted the world at the most unfortunate period of his career, and in the most unsatisfactory manner – in voluntary exile, when his mind, debased by evil associations, and the malignant brooding over imaginary ills, has been devoted to the construction of elaborate lampoons.
His embalmed body was returned to England, though legend has it that his lungs and larynx remained in Greece, to be buried like the relics of a saint. In England there were calls for him to be interred in Westminster Abbey, which were refused on the grounds of his ‘questionable morality’, and it wasn’t until 145 years had passed that a memorial plaque was set there in his honour.
John Galt, a snobbish and obtuse early biographer, conveyed pretty accurately the image of Byron that was to pertain in the years after his death, as his reputation as a poet began to wane:
It would have been wonderful had he proved an amiable and well-conducted man, than the questionable and extraordinary being who has alike provoked the malice and interested the admiration of the world. Posterity, while acknowledging the eminence of his endowments, and lamenting the habits which his unhappy circumstances induced, will regard it as a curious phenomenon in the fortunes of the individual, that the progress of his fame as a poet should have been similar to his history as a man.
Which is to say, a bit of a rotter, justly forgotten. It’s no wonder that his executors and close associates had tried to preserve what was good of him, and to burn the rest.
The volumes of his Memoirs were never read by the three main players in the ensuing drama: Augusta Leigh, Byron’s half-sister, Lady Byron and his publisher John Murray. The two women, of course, had much to hide from public scrutiny, though their ‘secrets’ were commonplaces of contemporary gossip: Augusta Leigh had an incestuous relationship with her half-brother, while Lady Byron’s separation from her husband was, indeed, because he was mad, bad and dangerous to know, and the possibility of sensational divulgations loomed. There were suggestions that Byron had attempted ‘unspeakable intimacies’ with his wife, code at the time for buggery. The allegations were almost certainly true – no one intimate with Lord Byron was likely to rise ano intacto – but which he heatedly denied, for the act was regarded not merely as an abomination but was punishable by law.
In a gentlemanly spirit of conciliation, the poet had offered Lady Byron a chance to read the material, which she, fearing that even an edited version would then bear her imprimatur, had declined to do. After the manuscript was destroyed, however, her response was more equivocal than might have been expected by those friends of hers who thought themselves to be protecting her interests:
I do concur now in the expediency and propriety of the destruction, but had the question been then submitted to me, they certainly would not have been consumed by my decision. It is therefore perhaps as well it was not.
John Murray, too, had been in a difficult situation. The Memoirs had been gifted by Byron to his friend the Irish poet Thomas Moore in 1819, on the clear understanding that he might choose to sell them. They were undoubtedly valuable property, and when Moore sold them to Byron’s publisher in November 1821, he received 2,000 guineas (roughly equivalent to £180,000 now, which, while it seems a lot, is certainly a lot less than James Patterson will get as an advance for his next novel).
Murray would have known that, even at the price, he was still likely to be onto a large profit. But even this p
otential gain was not enough to convince him to actually read the manuscript. Byron’s previous works, especially Cain and (his masterpiece) Don Juan had scandalised those readers who devour shocking material and then publicly disavow it. The likelihood, then, is that Murray, who was increasingly uneasy about Byron’s output, had decided not to publish before buying the Memoirs. I presume he conceived himself to be ensuring against some other firm publishing them, and thus safeguarding Byron’s posthumous reputation.
Yet Murray’s attitude was curious, for Byron had written to him in October 1819 to offer him a chance to read the manuscript, with the assurance that
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.
Though he admitted to having given ‘a detailed account of my marriage and its consequence’, he apparently regarded his account as fair comment. It included, according to one reader of the manuscript, an account of the poet making love to his wife on the sitting-room settee on their wedding day. But he was confidently unrepentant: ‘I cannot pretend to be impartial, no, by the Lord, not while I feel.’
Of the ‘elect’ who had in fact read the manuscript, opinions differed. Most found it relatively unobjectionable – Lord John Russell finding only ‘three or four pages … too gross and indelicate for publication’ – though Hobhouse noted in his journal that ‘Gifford of the Quarterly who read it at Murray’s request said the whole Memoirs were only fit for a brothel and would damn Lord B. to everlasting infamy.’ This cannot have been entirely accurate, for by most accounts the erotic escapades were all to be found in the second volume.
Surely the presence of such salacious material would add little to our image of Byron? But its absence titillates and provokes speculation that something genuinely new and sensational might just have been revealed. The absence of the diaries casts a beguiling shadow across the Byron myth, and tantalises us with possible untold stories, extra badness.
On 17 May the six principals in the decision to burn the Memoirs met in Murray’s office, soon to be joined by his son, all of them warmed by the fire that was soon to engulf the offending manuscript. The party was by no means unanimous in its conclusion: Hobhouse and Murray were keen for the coming conflagration, though the publisher had previously suggested that the volumes be returned to Byron’s half-sister (a further suggestion that they be placed in the hands of ‘some banker’ was also rejected); Thomas Moore and Henry Luttrell, both of whom had actually read the material, argued for its preservation; Wilmot Horton and Colonel Doyle, there to represent what they conceived to be Lady Byron’s interests, were mildly inclined to side with Murray and Hobhouse. After an hour’s discussion, and what Hobhouse described as ‘a good deal of squabbling’, hotter heads prevailed, and Horton and Doyle consigned the pages to the flames.
Yet even if one sympathises with the decision to protect the world from this potentially explosive material, there surely were other ways to act. The problem with burning something, as Joan of Arc might have observed, is that you can’t take it back. Might they not have been published in some expurgated form? An even better result would simply have been to preserve the material, keep it in a safe place in the firm’s archives, and in the fullness of time – perhaps a great deal of time – look at the issue again.
That, after all, is what archives can be for: for tucking stuff away until the time is right for someone to take a proper look at it. Sometimes material that is potentially private or controversial can, on agreement, be placed under seal for a certain period of time. The Murray archive, which has since the earliest days been kept with considerable diligence, eventually came to house almost all of Byron’s manuscripts and letters to his publisher, but also a great deal more. Hobhouse inherited a mass of Byron papers following the author’s death in 1824, as well as having his own letters from the poet. All of this material was eventually bequeathed to Murray’s, as well as further substantial material from a number of Lord Byron’s closest friends. From such sources came not merely manuscripts and letters but a vast array of personal memorabilia: further portraits, clothes, medals and a host of incoming letters from swooning women admirers and former lovers, many of whom sent tresses of their hair, which the poet duly packaged individually. All of the manuscripts were included in the sale, in 2005, of the Murray archive to the National Library of Scotland for the much-discussed, and frequently criticised, price of £31 million (which seemed a bargain to me).
George Gordon, Lord Byron – the Byron of myth and legend – was born on 23 March 1812. He was twenty-four at the time. Oh, he’d been around before then, and was a well-known and respected, independently wealthy man about town, a promising author and (reputedly) bon viveur. But following the publication and unanticipated success of the first two Cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he observed, some three days later: ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous.’ Not famous as in extremely well known. Famous in a new way, which carried with it a hint of infamy too. Famous as in celebrated, dreamed of, fantasised about, feared and admired, the kind of notoriety that makes women swoon and their husbands clench their fists, or sphincters. The kind of fame that thrills: ‘Byronic’. There are few comparable adjectives in our literary lexicon that carry the same weight or resonance. ‘Orwellian’ casts a deep shadow, but ‘Byronic’ rearranges the light.
Contemporary portraits of the poet, the most famous of which were done in the few years succeeding the success of Childe Harold, show an idealised figure, already indistinguishable from how he was widely imagined. Richard Holmes’s description catches the figure perfectly: ‘The large head with its dark curls, mocking eyes and voluptuous mouth distracted from the stocky body that was always tending to overweight and the distinctive limp with its hint of the cloven hoof. He was Apollo combined with Mephistopheles.’
He was ravishing, as irresistible as a force of nature: being in his presence, Coleridge noted in a letter of 1816, was like seeing the sun. In the famous Richard Westall image of 1813 (which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London) a highly sensitive Byron is turned to the right, showing a thoughtful profile as his chin rests in his hand. He is pouting slightly, as if some pleasure were denied or merely contemplated, and his hand seems enlarged, as if it could grasp whatever it desired. His lips are full and deeply coloured – anticipating the even redder lips in portraits by Thomas Phillips (1814), James Holmes and G. H. Harlow (both 1815), in which the lips are so red as to suggest the application of artistic licence, or of lipstick. It is hard to find the equivalent until we come to some of the memorable images of Marilyn Monroe.
This is Byron as he would have wished, and was widely conceived, to look, but there is evidence against any portrait of him – as these all are – as a sensitive sensualist. He was disposed, we know, to run to fat: no one with his imperious desires could have been lacking in appetite. Fearing the worst, he had himself weighed regularly on the scales made available to anxious gentlemen of portly disposition at the St James’ wine merchants Berry Bros and Rudd. At eighteen years old he had ballooned up to almost fourteen stone (his height is variously estimated at between five feet eight inches and six feet), and with his congenital deformity, often mis-described as ‘a club foot’, he was largely unable to take the requisite exercise. Instead, on going up to Cambridge, he dieted. Fasted is perhaps a better term – his biographer Fiona MacCarthy actually describes him as ‘anorexic’ – for a regime that consisted largely of biscuits, soda water and potatoes soaked in vinegar, which he believed would not only slim him down but also sharpen his mind.
It seems to have worked. Within five years he had lost some five stone, produced a great deal of poetry and could certainly report undiminished sexual desire, and success. His most famous conquest, Lady Caroline Lamb, was besotted with him, and when Byron eventually cast he
r adrift, she languished, wept and diminished, causing him cruelly to observe that he was being ‘haunted by a skeleton’.
After leaving England he continued this extreme self-denial, eating bread, tea and vegetables, with an occasional weak spritzer, though he was later to acknowledge that his dieting (and perhaps the constant cigars that he used as a substitute for food) was ‘the cause of more than half our maladies’. An anonymous amateurish portrait of him done in 1822, still revealing his left profile, reveals, with the integrity of a Graham Sutherland, the truth of an emaciated and unhappy man, haunted by his own skeleton, in poignant contrast to the pictures of him less than ten years earlier, of the heady few years of fame and notoriety following the publication of Childe Harold.
It is hard, quite, to explain the impact of that poem. It opens particularly badly:
Not in those climes where I have late been straying, Though Beauty long hath there been matchless deemed . . .
The reader might suppose its author both metrically and physically lame-footed. The lines are almost impossible to recite without faltering and gagging, and the rest of the poem, though intermittently witty and engaging, is mostly long-winded pedestrian stuff, as darkly unappealing as its hero himself.
Childe Harold is a high-born, relentlessly self-referring young man, and his pilgrimage is clearly an autobiographical travelogue (the hero was originally called Burun). On leaving England to see something of the world, Harold is ‘more restless than the swallow in the skies’, as the poem badly puts it. (Are swallows ‘restless’?) He has embarked on these travels because of some unspecified ‘crime’ – of the kind, perhaps, of which Byron himself was frequently accused: incest? buggery? paedophilia? – which has sundered him from the only woman whom he has loved and rendered him, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, isolated and bereft: