by Edna O'Brien
BYRON IN LOVE
BYRON IN LOVE
A Short Daring Life
EDNA O’BRIEN
W. W. Norton & Company
New York • London
Copyright © 2009 by Edna O’Brien
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Brien, Edna.
Byron in love: a short daring life / Edna O’Brien.—1st American ed.
p.cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07127-6
1. Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788-1824. 2. Poets, English—19th century—Biography. I. Title.
PR4381.O47 2009
821'.7—dc22
[B] 2009007109
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
For Ann Getty–
a Byron admirer
‘In the career of writing, a man should calculate upon his powers of resistance before he goes into the arena.’
LORD BYRON—LETTER TO SHELLEY, 1821
‘Everything connected with the life and character of so illustrious a bard as the late Lord Byron is public property.’
J. MITFORD—LES AMOURS SECRETES DE LORD BYRON, 1839
‘But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.’
LORD BYRON—DON JUAN III.88
‘The more Byron is known, the better he will be loved.’
TERESA GUICCIOLI, 1873, on her death bed
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Byron left a great and enduring portrait of himself to posterity, in his Letters and Journals, edited first by R.E. Prothero (1898) and more extensively by Leslie A. Marchand (1973–4). Professor Marchand’s three-volume Life of Byron (1957) is essential reading for all Byron aspirants.
I am also deeply grateful to a host of other authors–biographers, scholars, poets and yes, even scoundrels, who have written with passion, erudition and far-fetchedness, yet the relationship with their subject always fascinating and symbiotic, while being sometimes territorial. They include Tom Moore, R.C. Dallas, John Galt, John Cam Hobhouse, Thomas Medwin, Edward Trelawny, Leigh Hunt, William Parry, Colonel Stanhope, Julius Millingen, Count Pietro Gamba, Teresa Guiccioli, John William Polidori, Samuel Rogers, John Mitford, George Ticknor, John Drinkwater, Ralph Milbanke Lovelace, André Maurois, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Malcolm Elwin, Iris Origo, Thomas Macaulay, Lady Blessington, Harriette Wilson, George Patson, Peter Quennell, Harold Nicolson, Michael Foot, Jerome J. McGann, Doris Langley Moore, Elizabeth Longford, Anne Barton, W. H. Auden, Phyllis Grosskurth, Benita Eisler, Fiona MacCarthy, Megan Boyes, Anne Fleming, Michael and Melissa Bakewell, Kay Redfield Jamison. I also consulted journals and periodicals of the time.
The wonderful staff at the London Library and the British Library were untiring in their help.
INTRODUCTION
In his seminal essay on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Harold Bloom cites Cleopatra as ‘the archetype of the star and the world’s first celebrity’, one who eclipsed her lovers, Pompey, Caesar and Antony, never straying from the empiric necessity of playing herself. Byron must surely rank as her counterpart in life, the first and ongoing celebrity, hero and villain, wooer and narcissist, shackled with a label that has entered everyday currency of being ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’.
It is the same Byron who wrote–
What is the end of fame? ’Tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper
…
For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,
And bards burn what they call their midnight taper,
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture and worse bust.
There is a legion of books, treatises, essays and biographies on Lord Byron–scholarly, probing, affectionate, discursive, titillating, scurrilous and fantastical, some raising him to an apotheosis and others consigning him to the gutter. Professor Leslie Marchand’s biography, published in 1957, was Herculean, unearthing much that was hidden and debunking some of the more preposterous claims and fancies.
So why another book on Byron?
Years ago, reading a remark of Lady Blessington that Byron was ‘the most extraordinary and terrifying person [she had] ever met’ whetted my interest. Writers writing about other artists has always appealed to me–Rilke on Rodin, addressing that mysterious mediation between the life and the art. Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader, providing those quick, deft glimpses that give us the human quotidian and a whiff of the genius within; Hardy watering the ink or Dorothy Wordsworth trudging up a wet road with dear William, to seek out a waterfall.
Similarly with Byron, I wanted to follow him in his Rake’s Progress and his Poet’s Progress, playing billiards in an English country house and passing clandestine notes to a young bride under the very watch of her pontifical husband, Sir Wedderburn Webster, Byron reading Madame de Staël’s Corinne in the garden of his Italian mistress and writing her a love letter in English, which neither she nor her jealous husband would understand. Byron in love, Byron seized with melancholia and Byron in intermittent ‘phrenzy’ with his forbearing publisher John Murray. Byron who mapped for himself a great and tragic destiny, going as he thought ‘to the seat of war’, when he set out to join in the cause for Greek independence, and instead dying of a fever in a swamp in Missolonghi at the age of thirty-six, the face that had been the Adonis of all Europe covered in leeches and bandages.
So I immersed myself in the twelve volumes of his letters and journals, in which he variously reveals himself as a passionate man, an intellectual man, a wounded man, a jesting man and the archetype for Napoleon, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Richard Lovelace, Richard III, Richard II and ultimately a Lear surrounded by knaves and fools. I read the numerous biographies of him and those of Lady Byron, the histrionic accounts of a marriage of just over one year, that not only served as fascination for the tabloids and cartoonists of his time, but even intrigued such an elevated mind as Goethe’s.
Byron with his odes and his dithyrambics, his scoffing at litteratoor, coupled with his lifelong service to it, his banter and colloquy with men and women, his excruciating dissection of his own delinquencies, proved to be a very great and unnerving companion.
ONE
Lord George Gordon Byron was five feet eight and a half inches in height, had a malformed right foot, chestnut hair, a haunting pallor, temples of alabaster, teeth like pearls, grey eyes fringed with dark lashes and an enchantedness that neither men nor
women could resist. Everything about him was a paradox, insider and outsider, beautiful and deformed, serious and facetious, profligate but on occasion miserly, and possessed of a fierce intelligence trapped however in a child’s magic and malices. What he wrote concerning the poet Robert Burns could easily serve as his own epitaph–‘tenderness, roughness–delicacy, coarseness–sentiment, sensuality…dirt and deity–all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay’.
He was also a gigantic poet, but as he reminds us, poetry is a distinct faculty and has no more to do with the individual than has the pythoness when she is off her tripod. Byron, off his tripod, becomes Byron the Man, who by his own admission could not exist without some object of love. His passions were developed very early and generated excitement, melancholy and foreboding at the loss that was bound to occur in the ‘terrestrial paradise’. He loved men and women, needing the ‘other’, whoever she or he might be. He had only to look at a beautiful face and was ready to ‘build and burn another Troy’.
The word Byronic, to this day, connotes excess, diabolical deeds and a rebelliousness answering neither to king nor commoner. Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, reaching beyond race, creed or frontier, his manifest flaws redeemed by a magnetism and ultimately a heroism, that by ending in tragedy, raised it and him from the particular to the universal, from the individual to the archetypal.
TWO
His beginning was not propitious. In January 1788 London was frozen over, frost fires and frost fairs on the Thames for weeks, the severe weather attributed to an Icelandic volcanic eruption. It was in a rented room above a shop in Holles Street, London, to which the 22-year-old mother, Catherine Gordon, had repaired for her accouchement, attended by a midwife, a nurse and a doctor. The labour was tortuous, the infant born with a caul over his face, a supposed emblem of good luck; alarm however at discovering that he had a club foot.
The father, ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, was not present because had he returned to England he would have been imprisoned for debt. Mr Hanson, a young solicitor, had been dispatched by Catherine’s trustees from Aberdeen as a sign of solidarity for the mother, alone in London without her vagrant husband. The foot was contracted to a stump, the lower calf wasted and thin, an affliction that would bring torment, derision and humiliation to the future young Lord, fitted as he was with leg irons, trusses and various contraptions down the years on the advice of quacks and orthopaedic doctors. Various causes for the deformity had been suggested, including a deprivation of oxygen to the lungs, but Byron ever quick to castigate his mother would put it down to her vanity in wearing a too-tight corset during pregnancy.
For him, the lame foot would become the mark of Cain, a symbol of castration and a stigma that blighted his life.
Money, or rather the acute shortage of money, dominated the minds of both parents in those wintry weeks. Writing from France to his sister Frances Leigh in England, Mad Jack, in dire need of money, added that as for his son’s walking ‘’tis impossible for he is clubfooted’. Catherine herself was pressing the executor of her trustees in Edinburgh, outlining her straits, adding that the twenty guineas they had sent her for her accouchement was not enough and she was in need of one hundred guineas. She hoped as well that the rakish and reckless husband would reappear and that mother, father and infant could repair to somewhere in Wales or the north of England, where they might live cheaply, the fleeting happiness of her courtship in Bath a mere three years earlier rekindled. Her hopes were futile. After two months she was writing again to the executor in Edinburgh, her plaints more extreme–‘Leave this House I must in a fortnight from this day so there is no time to be lost and if they will not remit the money before that time I don’t know what I shall do and what will become of me.’
The child had been christened George Gordon, named after her father, in Marylebone Church, which had served as an interior for scenes in Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress. The highborn but estranged Scottish relatives, the Duke of Gordon and Colonel Robert Duff of Fetteresso, named as godparents, were sadly absent. Catherine was a descendant of Sir William Gordon and Annabella Stuart, daughter of King James I. The Gordons of Gight were feudal barons who had kept the north country in terror and bondage, begetting illegitimate children, raping and plundering. Some were executed on the scaffold, some were murdered and some died at their own hands. Her grandfather had thrown himself in the icy Ythan River, just below the walls of the castle of Gight, and her father’s body had been found floating in the Bath Canal. Her mother had died young, as had her two sisters, leaving Catherine sole heir to a fortune worth thirty thousand pounds’ income a year from shares in vast tracts of lands, the Bank of Aberdeen salmon-fishing rights and the rent from coalmines.
At the age of twenty she had gone to Bath, one of the many expectant heiresses in search of a husband. She was not beautiful and according to Byron’s friend and first revering biographer Tom Moore, she was short, corpulent and ‘rolled in her gait’. She had little intellectual prowess to compensate for that plainness. Also, she was impressionable and seemingly had had a presentiment, because a year earlier at a theatre in Scotland, when the famous actress Mrs Siddons in a play called The Fatal Marriage exclaimed ‘Oh my Biron, my Biron’, Catherine’s hysterics were such that she had to be carried from her box. In Bath she met her ‘Biron’, Mad Jack, recently widowed and broke. He had previously wooed Amelia, the enchanting wife of the Marquis of Carmarthen, who eloped with him to France, her fortune, along with her health, soon to be ruined by his profligacy and philandering. His courtship of Catherine was soon accomplished. Her Scottish cousins, knowing her to be impetuous and probably guessing that the future husband was a bounder, tried to persuade her against the marriage but she was adamant and she was besotted.
They married, went back to the castle of Gight, where Jack orchestrated a life of grandeur, horses and hounds, gambling, excesses so ostentatious that they were famed in a ballad. On a hurried visit to London in the same year as their marriage, Jack was seized for debt and taken to the King’s Bench Prison, his tailor being the only person in the vicinity able to bail him out. Soon, like many debtors, the married couple fled to France, the money gone, the castle and much of the estate sold to a cousin of Catherine’s, Lord Aberdeen, and the young wife not only without her kin but destitute of their respect for having come down so shamefully in the world.
Byron barely saw his father and yet, all his life, he was in thrall to the colourful and daring exploits of his paternal ancestors, born and bred in arms, having led their vassals, as he boasted, from Europe to Palestine’s plains. The vivid narrative of a shipwreck off the coast of Arracan written by an ancestor provided the stimulus and inspiration for Canto Four of Don Juan. With regard to his mother’s family, he would be more judgemental, going so far as to claim that all bad blood in him had derived from those bastards of Banquo.
As Tom Moore tells us ‘disappointment met him on the very threshold of life’–a mother quick-tempered and capricious, the softening influences of a sister denied him. Moore says that he was deprived of the solaces that might have brought down the high current of his feelings and ‘saved them from the tumultous rapids and falls’. Except that these selfsame rapids and falls characterised his ancestors on both sides. The Byrons, mentioned in the Domesday Book, were the de Buruns of Normandy, liegemen of William the Conqueror, reaping titles and lands in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Lancashire for their prowess in land and sea battles. A John Byron of Colwyke, in the year 1573, acquired Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire from Henry VIII, the house, church and cloisters, on three thousand acres of grounds, for the sum of £810, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I some six years later. He remodelled Newstead to suit his secular and lavish tastes, even installing his own resident troupe of players. At Byron’s birth his grand-uncle, known as the Wicked Lord, was living in seclusion at Newstead, the family seat. He had been a wild man, but with life’s vicissitudes he had grown
reclusive. He built a folly castle and stone forts on the lake that were fitted with a fleet of toy ships, where he conducted naval battles with his servant Joe Murray, who had to act as factotum and second officer and was said to have taught the crickets in the chimneypiece to speak back to him.
In 1765, in a tavern in Pall Mall in London, the squires and nobles of Nottinghamshire, many of them relatives, had assembled for a levee. The Wicked Lord and his cousin, William Chaworth, fell into an argument on how best to hang game; the acrimony became so extreme that the two men repaired to an upper room, where by the light of a single candle the Wicked Lord plunged his shortsword through the belly of his opponent. He spent a brief spell in the Tower of London for murder before being pardoned by his fellow peers and was discharged after paying a modest fee. The Wicked Lord returned to Newstead, became increasingly embittered, his wife having left him; he begot a child by one of the servants who gave herself the pseudonym of Lady Betty. His son and heir William was due to marry an heiress but instead eloped with a first cousin and, in spite, the Wicked Lord had the great oak woods stripped and the two thousand deer that roamed the woods were slaughtered and sold at Mansfield market for a pittance. In a last spree of vengeance, he leased the rights of coalmines he owned in Rochdale, depriving all future heirs of their income. Yet, Byron would boast of the nobility of his lineage, forgetting to add that many of them were brutes, vagabonds, given to episodic madness, and as Thomas Moore put it, never free from ‘the inroads of financial embarrassment’.