‘I am ashes where once I was fire’
‘It was a pity,’ Walter Scott wrote in his Journal (22 November 1825), ‘that nothing save the total destruction of Byron’s Memoirs would satisfy his Executors — But there was a reason — premet nox alta.’ (Horace, Odes — ‘Deep night will cover it.’) Deep night indeed still casts obscurity on the sad business of the burning of the Memoirs in a fireplace in 50 Albemarle Street. Humphrey Carpenter gives as full an account as is perhaps possible in his newly published history of the seven generations of the House of Murray, but some things remain strange, others obscure.
The first oddity is that neither John Murray (II) nor Byron’s old and close friend John Cam Hobhouse seems to have read the Memoirs, though they were the two who insisted that the manuscript should be destroyed. Both were highly sensitive about Byron’s reputation and assumed that publication of the Memoirs would damage it irreparably. Murray, justifying his action, later pointed out that it went against his own interest: if he had published them he would have made ‘a very considerable profit’. But he ‘looked at the case with no such feelings’; his regard for Byron’s memory and
respect for his surviving family made me most anxious that the Memoirs should be immediately destroyed since it was surmised that the publication might be injurious to the former and painful to the latter.
He then declared that since he had ‘scrupulously refrained from looking into the Memoirs’, he couldn’t say ‘whether such an opinion of the contents was correct or not’. Did any publisher ever behave in so extraordinary a fashion?
The business was however even more bizarre. Naturally enough Tom Moore, to whom Byron had entrusted the Memoirs, and who had handed them over to Murray as security for a loan, believed they were publishable. So did Douglas Kinnaird, who was, like Hobhouse, one of Byron’s oldest and most faithful friends — and, unlike Hobhouse, he had actually read the manuscript which Moore had shown him. Then neither Byron’s half-sister (and lover) Augusta nor his estranged wife Annabella seems to have asked that the Memoirs (which they hadn’t read) should be destroyed. Though the opinion of others connected with both ladies was sought, all the impetus for destruction came from Hobhouse and Murray. To be fair to Hobhouse — not something one finds easy — he believed that Byron’s Greek ‘endeavour. . . certainly the most glorious ever undertaken by man’ would restore his reputation in England; he would be able to return and enter public life again. Hobhouse, himself a Radical MP, had prudishly disapproved of his friend’s masterpiece, Don Juan, and feared the Memoirs would be even more scurrilous and scandalous. Unlike most of Byron’s English friends and acquaintances, he knew of the poet’s bisexuality — and of course disapproved of that too. He had been Byron’s companion on his first youthful visit to Greece, and after his own return to England had been the recipient of decidedly indiscreet letters. Byron had told him of his affair with the beautiful boy Nicolo Giraud who expressed his desire that they should not only ‘live but “morire insieme” ’. ‘The latter,’ Byron wrote, ‘I hope to avoid; as much of the former as he pleases.’ Years later, when Tom Moore published his biography of Byron, Hobhouse scribbled ‘he has not the remotest grasp of the real reason which induced Lord Byron to prefer having no Englishman immediately and constantly near him’. Suppose there was more of this sort of stuff in the Memoirs — and knowing Byron’s love of shocking the respectable, he must have feared there would be. Yet you would think he might have read the manuscript and that, no matter how tender his care for Byron’s reputation, he might have then concluded that an expurgated edition could be published.
That too might have occurred to Murray. In any case, having got possession of the manuscript (which Byron’s will did indeed entitle him to), you might think that he too would have seen the case for bringing out an edited version, while locking up the unexpurgated text, so that it might be published in the future when all those who might take offence were safely dead. But apparently not.
Actually, later members of the Murray dynasty hoped — perhaps even believed — that he had indeed done this, and that the papers burned that day in Albemarle Street were not Byron’s manuscript. John Murray VII remembers that his father Jock Murray, was convinced that the manuscript was somewhere in the building: ‘Every time we had workmen in doing alterations he would be peering behind panels and under floorboards, still hoping it would turn up.’ Alas, it never did, and we must sadly conclude that the Memoirs were indeed burned. Byron’s shade may well mutter the Sicilian prayer, ‘God protect me from my friends.’
Allan Massie
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