Hazard and burgundy
Philip Ziegler
Byron's Letters and Journals: In My Hot Youth Vol. I, Famous In My Time Vol. II, Edited by Leslie Marchand (John Murray, £4.75 each).
'Byronic,' like 'inspissated,' is a word traditionally only used as a prefix to 'gloom.' This linguistic quirk reflects the labours of romantic novelists — sometimes disguised as biographers — film makers and other manufacturers of popular myths. They have , perfected an image of a Byron perpetually melancholy; a brooding, saturnine figure who roused himself from apathy only to flash out into rage or extreme exhibitions of romantic feeling; 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know' — and to any rational human being an infernal bore.
The image is, of course, not wholly fictitious. Byron was prone to depression and violent temper, did enjoy mystifying young ladies, frequently showed off by playing the abstracted poet in London ball-rooms. It ignores, however, the gaiety, the sense of the comic, the capacity of self-mockery, which made Byron one of the most delightful of companions and of correspondents. When suffering agonies from gall-stones, he could comfort himself by observing: "what a pleasing posthumous hope for a man to be able to have his rnbnument carved out of his kidneys." Though painfully sensitive about his own lameness he could still joke about the bigamous Captain Dalrymple: "He is no beauty, but as lame as myself — he has more ladies than legs, what comfort to a cripple!"
His high spirits bubbled up in wild verbal extravagance: "The man is mad, Sir, mad, frightful as a Mandrake, lean as a rutting Stag, and all about a bitch not worth a Bank token." No one could read his letters without being exhilarated by the impact of his personality.
We have here the first two of a series of seven or perhaps eight volumes. Anyone proposing to acquire the complete collection is therefore committing himself to considerable expense. What will he get for his money? If he already possesses the major collections of Byron's letters, then not much that is absolutely new. Mr Marchand estimates that of three thousand odd letters, some 2,500 have already been published in whole or in part. On the evidence of these two books, not much of the first importance has not previously appeared, though often previous texts were truncated or bowdlerised. The journals will not start until Volume III but here too little entirely new material will be forthcoming. What is offered is, however, incomparably the most comprehensive collection available. The editing, as is guaranteed by the name of Leslie Marchand, is thorough and scholarly, yet free from the sort of pedantic fussiness which irritates more than it informs.
The first hundred letters or so cover Byron's time at Harrow and Trinity, Cambridge Neither of these institutions greatly appealed to him. About Harrow he wrote with striking disloyalty to a young Etonian: "I never even in my boyish days disputed your superiority.'' Cambridge was still worse: "a villainous Chaos of Dice and Drunkenness, nothing but Hazard and Burgundy, Hunting, Mathematics and Newmarket, Riot and Racing." It was with relief that he passed on to "carve a way to grandeur," as he had grandiloquently proclaimed his intention several years before. He had published five volumes of verse by the time he was twenty-one and incidentally driven his publishers almost mad with his exigencies, perpetually tinkering with his texts and finally removing an entire poem when the book was almost manufacturedBut finally he deserted them and took his wares to the house of Murray, which has cherished him and his reputation ever since.
Financial troubles and wanderlust now combined to send Byron abroad. For readers of his letters the results were disappointing. Byron was no Mary Wortley Montague to squander his substance in riotous correspondence. Instead he hoarded it for future poetry. He wrote only one full-blooded travelogue from Constantinople, economically serving up his choicer items to half a dozen correspondents. And so it was back to England and glory. His first idea was to start "a periodical paper, something in The Spectator or Observer way." Byron as editor of The Spectator is a pretty fancy but it was not to be. In March 1812 Childe Harold was published and he became overnight London's leading literary lion. The disasters which his fame brought upon him have become part of the national folklore.
Though the growth of a poet is always a theme of fascination, the most interesting feature of these letters for many readers will be his education sentimentale or perhaps lack of it. Like most young men he found it obligatory to boast of his sexual exploits: form one of a very sad set, consisting of Captain Wallace, Sir Godfrey, Sir B. Graham, and other sensual sinners, we have kept it up, with the most laudable systematic profligacy ... I saw Mahon last night, he made up one of a party of ten at a house of Fornication." But, whores apart, his distaste for marriageable women was always apparent. No doubt a psychiatrist would seek some link with his attitude towards his mother: "my Tormentor whose diabolical disposition . • seems to increase with age .. , The more I see of her, the more my dislike augments." The idea that any woman was fit to be his corn panion seemed to repel him: "I hear she is clever, a very great defect in a woman, who becomes conceited in course . ." Marriage, when envisaged, figured only as an alternative to exile. He bragged of his conquests hot for real feeling and sensibility the reader must turn to his lament for the death of the choirboy, John Edleston, or his letters to the young Harrovian, Williatn Harness.
The second volume covers the most celebrated of his affairs, that with Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron would have been outraged to know that today many people remember him largely by this tawdry episode. For two months, indeed, he loved her as completely as he could love any woman: "the cleverest, most agreeable, absurd, amiable. Perplexing, dangerous, fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2,000 Years ago." But "this dream, this delirium" quickly faded and left only stale distaste. She tried him high but nothing could condone the brutality with which he sought to drive her from his life.
In his cruelty he was abetted by Caroline's mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne; No more extraordinary correspondence can exist between a. woman of sixty and the Cuckolder of her son. Byron was fascinated by her wit, her sophistication, her unique blend of gran* .ciame and pout(' de luxe; she Played him with cool authority, detached from Caroline and eventually reeled him in, married to her niece Annabella Milbanke. But for this, and for the disasters which ensued, we will have to await the third and subsequent volumes. It is a measure of Byron's fascination that one finishes Volume II with a sensation of having been cheated, unkindly cut off in mid-story With the best still to come..
Philip Ziegler is the distinguished historical biographer, who is (711TC11/1y working on a Of Melbourne,
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