No tooth-powder!
Olivia Manning
So Late into The Night The fifth volume Of Byron's letters and journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand (Murray £5.95) What more brilliant figure in literature than Lord Byron ?—the public persona, that is. Aristocrat, handsome to a fault (the fault being in the foot), a poet whose name is spoken together with the great whom he Patronised, `magnificent in sin', noble, possibly wronged and remote from human contact with the icy remoteness of his own heroes.
And what do the letters reveal ? The complete and unexpurgated text' is now aPPearing and So Late into The Night is the fifth volume. It covers one of the most talked-about periods of Byron's life: his Marriage, his separation from his wife, his exile abroad and his love life in Venice. There is not much greatness here and less nobility. Referred back to the poems with their easy jingles and easy sentiments, one Wonders if Byron was a poet at all. He was certainly a satirist but his satire does not reach the fury of the Dunciad. I wonder Which would interest the reading public most: a new edition of Don Juan or a newly discovered document which told exactly Why Annabella Byron went to stay with her Parents and never returned.
The scandals that circulated—including a privately printed poem that suggested Byron preferred his wife's back passage to her front—made his name a by-word. These days this would merely have increased his social success. In 1816 he was ostracised. Only Augusta stood by him and he cele- brated the fact in a long vapid set of verses Which she chose not to have published. There is nothing in the letters to show that their association was criminal; rather the contrary. He writes to her from Ouchy: What a fool I was to marry—and you not very wise—my dear—we might have lived SO single and so happy—as old maids and bachelors . . .' Abroad, he is, he adds, removed from the only being who could ever have loved me . . .' Had they been 811'11Y, surely, in the privacy of a letter, the ,
'net would be clearly intimated ?
There is sensitivity here, but it is the sensitivity of the ego. The smallest slight roused Byron to fury and hatred. Even Augusta experienced the rough side of his Pen. A mere housekeeper (Torn in the garret, in the kitchen raised'), thought to , have influenced Annabella against her hus- band, is so vehemently cursed, one has doubts of Byron's sanity. These doubts Were shared by Lady Byron. Byron's credi- tors, hearing he had married a rich wife, came down on him, driving him into such a
rage that some authorities think she left him believing him to be deranged. These days, when many a peer totters to the House solely to draw a daily dole of £12, there is something ridiculous in Byron's belief that nobility was an entitlement to riches. Credi- tors were dogs and b-g-rs. Alas, creditors also have to live and the dogs sniffed at his heels until, in the last pages of this volume, Newstead was sold for £94,500.
Poor Claire Clairmont, the old lady of The Aspern Papers, gets short shrift when pregnant with Byron's child. He wrote to Douglas Kinnaird : 'You know—& I be- lieve saw once that odd-headed girl—who introduced herself to me shortly before I left England . . 1 never loved her or pre- tended to love her—but a man is a man— and if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours—there is but one way—the suite of all this is she was with child . . The next question is, is the brat mine ?—I have reason to think so . . .' At the time of her brief affair with Byron, Claire was seven- teen, an age not much above that of today's screaming pop fans. Byron was an ex- perienced man of twenty-nine. After Alle- gra's birth, he contemplates taking the girl over to be a useful companion to him in old age. Allegra did not live to perform this service. Sent to a convent against Claire's will, the little girl died.
Byron was, as Symonds said, well born without being well-bred: a disastrous com- bination and one commonly found in satir- ists. His habit of stealing or desecrating antiquities—his name is writ large on the temple at Sounian, he managed to get a hair from Lucretia Borgia's golden lock, he took pieces of Juliet's (probably bogus) tomb—betray the arrogant and over-bear- ing aristocrat. His poetry fails for us not simply because his metre is unfashionable. Coleridge said: 'It seems to my ear, that there is a sad want of harmony in Lord Byron's verses.' He cuts a poor figure beside Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge and even Landor.
Recently on television a question was asked in the language of our time: 'Would he have pulled all those birds if he hadn't been lame?' Perhaps not. Women love the vulnerable romantic. They take possession through the gap in the wound. And, in the end, it is as a romantic that Byron survives. He demanded from friends and lovers the sort of attachment that he found only in the mysterious Thyrza (who had the good sense to die young) and his dog Bosun. He was inconsolable when a young man, summoned to a dramatic farewell, excused himself on the grounds that he had to take his mamma shopping. Byron's unreality in life is shown when, his creditors in. pursuit, he travelled the Continent with a personal physician (admittedly it was only poor, vain, silly, young Dr Polidori), a train of servants and a menagerie of animals.. The letters cry for tooth-powder and the sale of Newstead in equal desperation but the sale is the most necessary or 'I am one degree further in the latitude of hell.'
In the main, the letters are not dull but taken en masse they have a dispiriting and depressing effect because of their carping annoyance with humanity, their gossipy triviality and the endless complaints. This volume takes us up to December 1817. A long way to go yet before all is made well by an heroic death. Meanwhile: No Manual, no letters, no tooth-powder, no extract from Moore's Italy concerning Marino Falieri, no nothing—as a man hallooed out at one of Burdett's elections, after a long ululatus of No Bastille! No Governor Aris! No '. . . . God knows what'—but his ne plus ultra was, 'no nothing!'
Still, in Athens during the war I saw a young man carried shoulder-high in Constitution Square for no better reason than that his name was Byron. To be so remembered is no mean feat.
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