Un-Byronic
Peter Quennell
Byron Frederic Raphael (Thames & Hud- son £8.95)
Athough Byron's portrait has always occupied a large and brightly il- luminated niche in the history of English literature, a quarter of a century ago many revelatory details had not yet been added. Lady Wentworth, the poet's eccentric and strong-minded great-granddaughter, still
• sit, like a treasure-guarding dragon, upon a huge accumulation of Byronic archives; and, despite the fact that, towards the end of her life, she relented and allowed the gifted writer and brilliant literary in- vestigator Doris Langley Moore to begin ex- amining and copying out her hoard, she died suddenly in 1957.
Since then, however, many sources of in- formation have been opened, and several important works published. Miss Langley Moore has given us two absorbing volumes, The Late Lord Byron, a description of the `posthumous dramas' that followed Byron's heroic end at Missolonghi, and Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered, the sur- prising story of his difficult financial background; while a patient American scholar, Professor Leslie A. Marchand, has both edited his unexpurgated letters and journals and produced a definitive biography — a somewhat pedestrian book, it is true, but, as Sir Thomas Lawrence once said of Blake's drawings, certainly `damned good to steal from ...'
At the moment, is there room for another biography? Frederic Raphael, prolific novelist and biographer of Somerset Maugham, evidently thinks there is. His contribution to the subject, a publisher's blurb tells us, `arises out of a highly original television special' (which, I must admit, I failed to see); but clearly he believes that the popular aspects of his theme have not been properly exploited; and his first lines set the general tone of his narrative: Byron's was a life which, as the movie trailers used to promise, had everything. No one, he was to boast, lived faster than he. In thirty-six years, he covered a pro- digious amount of ground and paper.
One has to cut briskly from this scene In that ... in order to accommodate his careering career. He was more often like an actor ... than a reliable literary type.
Entirely new material Mr Raphael does not pretend he has provided; nor, so far at least as I can make out, does he throw any stimulating new light on Byron's complex personality. His book, in some ways, resembles a much-extended 'film' treatment' — the preliminary draft with which a screen-writer seeks to whet the .iad" ed producer's appetite, and re-assure an anxious businessman that there is nothing too esoteric about his style or point of view. Bits of contemporary slang and scraps of newspaper-jargon abound in Mr Raphael 's text. Byron's nurse, we learn, was 'a randY woman'; but then, 'the curly-haired lad had probably done his winsome best to seduce his seducer'. Elsewhere we read that `those who have difficulty in achieving a pat pay- off have less of a stake in the social order which values polish'; that Shelley, unlike Byron, lacked `a snappy gift for spontano; ty'; that 'even Lady Melbourne gagged when she heard of the poet's incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh and its extremely shocking sequel;; that Augusta had `scatty humours'; and that Annabella Milbanke, Byron's future wife, did not share `the knowingness of 3 modern virgin, prematurely primed by paperbacks. She had no access to those bland guidebooks which deal with anal In- tercourse as nicely as boy scout manuals il- lustrate the variety of knots ... ' Chronicling Byron's separation from All' nabella and attempting to probe its causes, Mr Raphael becomes particularly exPane sive. Among the scandalous rumours that circulated at the time were a story, Put about by his discarded mistress Caroline Lamb, that he had homosexual tendencies (which no biographer would now deny) and a vague suggestion, advanced by the elderly Lord Holland, that he may have tried to sodomise his wife. Mr Raphael, who is always much concerned with Byron's effect upon `the ladies', and who assumes that Regency London was `accustomed to seri" suality on a scale that might make Soda.' and Gomorrah by-words for decorum' Byron, after all, was a Regency rake allows Lord Holland's hypothesis some degree of credit. Anal intercourse, he reminds us, has been practised throughrnIct history; and `it requires a severe notion of natural proprieties to maintain a sense of outrage over Byron's erotic practices • • Annabella perhaps may not have objected.
`What others call vicious or unforgivable is often both exciting and unforgettable; it is only when publicity demands that words be attached to acts that privacy is ruptured and debased'.
Faced with this lengthy saga of Byron's loves and sins and, once he had abandoned the pursuit of pleasure, his vain efforts to liberate the unhappy, yet, alas, unready Greeks, the reader may well forget that Mr Raphael' s subject was a magnificent if, now and then, imperfect poet and an extraor- dinarily accomplished prose-writer. In 214 Pages I find six quotations from his verse the earliest on page 78 — and no really il- lustrative extract from his letters or his diaries. The result is a popular presentation of a great artist rigorously cut down to size for a 'television special'.
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