LIFE of Byron, that much-studied man, has to make sense of three main things: the poetry, the itinerant existence in exile in Italy and Greece, and the turbulent private life. It would be a fair criticism of Phyllis Grosskurth's book that she offers no real assessment of the poetry.
Was it true, as Auden argued, that Byron's true sensibility was not that of his fellow Romantic poets Shelley and Keats, but related rather to the 18th-century vein of savage indignation found in Voltaire and Swift?
Disappointingly, Grosskurth has nothing to say about any of this, but she redeems herself by providing a scintillating parable on the motif of Eros and Thanatos.
Byron's early demise at 36 seems foreshadowed in a death-driven existence. On his 32nd birthday he wrote in his journal: "I go to my bed with a heaviness of heart at having lived so long and to so little purpose. His hero was the Assyrian tyrant Sardanapulus, who reputedly tasted all pleasures and found them wanting. But in Byron's case taedium vitae was not the only factor: death almost seemed to walk with him and pounce on those around him.
Apart from his mother, who died young, and his daughter Allegra, who died aged five, there was the man with whom he was infatuated at Cambridge, John Edelston, who died of TB in his 20s, Edward Long, his best friend at Harrow, his other Cambridge friend Charles Matthews and, of course, Shelley.
What is bizarre is that so many of them drowned (Shelley, Long, Matthews), even the sea captain who acquired Byron's birth caul in the mistaken superstitious belief that it would save him from a watery death. I say bizarre, because, almost by compensation, Byron himself was a notable swimmer and could well have perished in the same way, either when swimming the Hellespont in 1810 or when attempting the more difficult but less-touted feat of swimming from the Venice Lido across the lagoon and up the Grand Canal (it took him three-quarters of an hour).
If the Thanatos facet of Byron's life is not well known, the Eros side assuredly is. On this aspect of his life, Grosskurth is quite simply outstanding. After his death Byron's executors burnt his memoirs so that we cannot put names to the more than 200 women Byron claimed to have slept with in Venice. But we still know about his dozen major amours, including those with Lady Caroline Lamb, Lady Oxford, Frances Webster, Claire Clairmont, Marianna Segati, Margarita Cogni and Teresa Guicciolo. The most intriguing part of his tangled sexual life was the disastrous marriage he made with Annabella Milbanke (it lasted less than a year) and the incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh.
It is difficult to praise too highly the assurance with which Grosskurth navigates these notoriously tricky waters. She makes a wholly convincing quasi-Freudian case that by his "love `em and leave `em" Don Juanism, Byron was working off his resentment towards his unbalanced mother, whose violent tempers and unbalanced behaviour had made his childhood a hell. Like many womanisers, it seems, Byron was at heart a misogynist.
Grosskurth argues that Byron's fundamental sexual orientation was bisexual. She claims that he was not particularly highly sexed but suffered from what D.H. Lawrence would have called "sex in the head". Byron was indeed, in Caroline Lamb's formulation, "bad, mad and dangerous to know". He was prone to mad fits and sudden eruptions of temper, as unpredictable as attacks of epilepsy. He was a neurotic who spent his life evading responsibility and ended up as the would-be saviour of Greece - a task for which he was ludicrously inadequate.
But by dying so dramatically at Missolonghi, he turned himself into a mythical figure, enraptured all Europe and so in the end secured independence for Greece. The sub-text of Grosskurth's fine book is really, pace Auden, the triumph of fantasy over reality.
