Noted novelist Edna O’Brien’s 216 page biography of Lord Byron is too condensed and too hurried to do the most famous poet since the Renaissance justice.
Nevertheless, it is a must read if you want to know about Byron, and you just have to be patient with O’Brien’s narrative, which improves tremendously in the second half of the book. This is particularly true because it is only late in the biography that O’Brien tries to make sense of Byron’s poetry in the context of his loves and sexual escapades.
The book needs to be twice as long as it is to explain the importance and role of the bewildering number of lovers, male and female, who got entangled with the spoiled and temperamental genius. Flow charts and mathematical tables are required to explain who is having sex with whom; think night time orgies intermingled with individual daytime flings. The names are so numerous that you find yourself going back to when a person is first mentioned to make sure which lover O’Brien is talking about, and where he met him or her, and how the seduction unfolded.
Sometimes a writer needs to be repetitive, no matter how that technique is frowned upon by editors and critics. This failure to reintroduce the reader to a particular lover becomes further complicated in a literary biography because it becomes almost impossible to remember which lover Byron ends up memorializing in his romantic poems and why.
Alfred Kinsey’s popular reports on sex in America suggested sexuality was a sliding scale with 100 percent heterosexuality and 100 percent homosexuality at the extremes. Byron’s monstrous and cavalier behavior and insulting language toward women will sometimes make you think he was a homosexual who merely had sex with women for a kind of perverse variety, instead of being a bisexual, which you would think by the long roster of male and female lovers. He treats the unplanned children of his conquests with mostly contempt, apparently seeing them as inconvenient animals who must be put out to pasture and out of his sight. And he is not very complimentary about the roles women should play in life, although not an uncommon attitude of the time.
Yet then some of his most passionate poems are written about and for specific women; he wrote honestly and openly to women about his most intimate feelings his entire life, and you are brought around to the idea that he was bisexual after all. I guarantee that contemplating Byron’s sexual proclivities will keep you entertained through every paragraph of this book.
Context is everything and you have to understand that Byron was openly and notoriously having sex with men at a time in which the death penalty was an option for the conduct. It explains why he was refused burial in Westminster Abbey upon his death in Greece and disowned by polite society, a lot of whom had been part and privy of Byron’s sexual escapades.
On the other hand, the end of the 18th century, when Byron was born to a womanizing libertine, was a period in which marriage was an economic transaction, not a romantic one, and those who could afford it found love and sex in extramarital affairs. It was also a time in which 13 and 14 year olds became married and therefore had sex, making Byron’s sexual exploits somewhat less shocking than our present day, in which it is usually illegal to have sex before 17, and most states in the United States, for example, punish relations between such “under aged” lovers and older people under the rubric of statutory rape.
Byron’s androgynous, unisexual face was considered the epitome of beauty at the time and men and women were drawn equally to his soft, light, somewhat puffy, skin. The curls of his hair were described as almost babyish. What may have set him apart from his contemporaries as an ideal of beauty, however, may have been his teeth. He was described as having a smile so winning that nobody could resist his charm. This suggests that, in a world in which dental hygiene was practically nonexistent, Byron must have displayed a dazzling set of teeth.
Byron was born with a deformed, club foot, but after suffering in childhood he was fitted with an elevated shoe that allowed him to walk more or less normally, and he successfully kept the foot hidden in his adult life.
Drama and melodrama were the genre of Byron’s high profile life. He was not born a Lord but became one in his youth upon the death of an uncle. Sexually active in his teens with boys at his private school, the greatest love of his life was probably his half- sister Augusta Leigh, five years older, with whom he fathered a child and returned to again and again for wildly passionate sex, in between his many dalliances. Byron lived a life of dissipation and was often selfish and cruel, and was prone to excesses, whether it was drinking or indulging himself not only with a harem of lovers by a coterie of pet animals that he lived with and traveled with, at great expense.
The one lover who stood up to him was his first wife Annabella, a woman whom he married for her innocence and quickly tired of it. She threatened to expose his incest and sex with men in her divorce suit, forcing Byron to flee England and go into an exile that would last until his death in Greece, at age 36.
A remarkable feat accomplished by Byron was to keep the life- long loyalty of many of his lovers, even as he spurned them, one by one. Whether it was their recognition of his poetic genius, or his need to WRITE, write to anybody, that brought them continually back into his life, many of them supported both his poetry and his well- being until the very end.
Although fiercely antiwar in his poetry, he died in Greece in a farcical attempt to finance his own army to free Greece from Turkish rule. The pleasures of his extravagant self- indulgences were balanced, in some kind of moral payback, by suffering a hideous death as he was bled painfully by doctors in the marshy Greek town of Missolonghi. His memoirs were burned by his nervous publisher and caretakers as they feared his outrageous confessions which confirmed the shocking erotic implications of his poems.
His autopsy report upon his death revealed a damaged liver, an oversized heart, and a damaged stomach and kidneys. The examining doctors said Byron had the cranium of an 80 year old man.
Almost lost in the stories of Byron’s indulgences was his active relationships and letter writing with the leading poets of his time, which remain among the leading poets of all time. He corresponded with Goethe and lived for a time near Pisa with Percy and Mary Shelley. While English high society scorned him in his death, his fellow poets of the world did not. His death was greeted with cries of anguish by Victor Hugo, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Thomas Carlyle.
The harsh moral condemnation in England at its death was to give way, O’Brien explains, when “he was resurrected as a legend.” In a book that begins so slowly, O’Brien leaves her finest paragraph until the very end as she tries to answer the question of why Byron’s poetry endures so powerfully into our modern age:
“Why? We may ask. Why him above the legion of poets down the years? He was the embodiment of Everyman, human, ambitious, erratic, generous, destructive, dazzling, dark and dissonant, but yet there is the unfathomable that eludes us, and perhaps even eluded him. It is not simply that he was a poet whose poetry burst upon the world or that he was a letter-writer of consummate greatness, he reincarnates for each age as an icon with a divine spark and all-too-human flaws.”
[Hansen Alexander’s new book is ONE BRAVE MAN, How Roger Clemens Risked Everything to Prove he died not take Anabolic Steroids.]
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