Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame. By Benita Eisler. Hamish Hamilton. 835pp, £25 in UK
Biography is not a form in which women have tended to excel. It used to be thought that those big square doorstops celebrating the lives of dead white males were a thing best left to men, who would have the steady eye and calm hand necessary for the task, with the result, as John McGahern has remarked, that reading biographies was like going through a thick file of newspaper cuttings. Lately, however, a new breed of women biographers has quietly been emerging, who bring a female sensibility to bear on their usually male subjects, with illuminating results.
There is, for instance, Selena Hastings's life of Evelyn Waugh of a few years ago, which presented an entirely new version of her prickly subject; Francine du Plessix Grey's recent domestication of the Marquis de Sade; Ruth Brandon's perceptive studies of Houdini and, this year, the Surrealists; and now, Benita Eisler's vast new biography of George Gordon, sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, in which the poet, his character, work and doings - the latter, especially - are analysed with clarity, boundless zeal, and an almost maternal sympathy, of which no subject ever had more need.
Byron was born in 1788, into a dissolute family, in a debauched age. His father, Captain "Mad Jack" Byron, was a wastrel and a rake, who as a youth would supplement his meagre allowance by prostituting himself to aristocratic lovers, and later, in prophetic strain, carried on an enthusiastic affair with his own sister. At the age of 22 he ran off with the wife of the Marquess of Carmarthen, Amelia d'Arcy, an heiress in her own right, whom he later married and, if reports are to be believed, helped to kill by "ill-usage" when she was 29. By then she had borne him three children, only one of whom, Augusta, the poet's beloved half-sister, was to survive infancy.
In need of another heiress, Mad Jack next fixed on Catherine Gordon of Gight, near Aberdeen. The corpulent Catherine - "Mrs Byron Furiosa", as her exasperated and probably Oedipally-driven son would call her - was an orphan with an attractive inheritance of some £30,000, the bulk of which her husband lost no time in squandering. By the time of her son's birth she was living, alone, in a furnished room over a perfumer's shop in London's Holles Street. Lord Byron was never to forget, or forgive, those humble beginnings, even after his accession to the family title, at the age of 10, on the death of his great-uncle, known as the Wicked Lord. In Aberdeen on that momentous day, hearing his name on the grammar school roll called out as "Georgius Dominus de Byron", the boy burst into tears.
Those tears were soon dried, for the young lord gloried in his new-found grandeur. He moved with his mother to Newstead Abbey in Lancashire, the run-down pile which he inherited, and which was to be a millstone round his neck for much of his short life. He went to the aptly named Harrow school, where he learned savagery, sodomy, and the classics, and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, an altogether more accommodating alma mater. Here he swam, boxed, attended cock-fights, learned to drink and carouse, and in his spare time studied and continued to broaden his already wide reading. And there was love, of course, or the next best thing to love. As a young boy at Newstead Abbey he had been introduced to the secrets of the flesh by a nursemaid, May Gray, who would take him into her bed and play sex games with him, later allowing him to watch while she indulged in drunken debauches with servants and coachmen. However, as Benita Eisler convincingly shows, Byron's most passionate attachments, certainly in adolescence and early adult years, were male. In particular he fell for a Trinity chorister, the 15-year-old John Edleston, whom he loved with what he insisted was a "violent tho' pure passion". Certainly, Edleston was one of the enduring loves of his life.
At this remove it is difficult - though when would it ever have been easy? - to be clear as to the precise nature of Byron's sexuality. The homoerotic element in him was very powerful, and may help to explain many of the contradictions and tensions in his personality. He was at once cruel and tender, a passionate lover and, as he said of himself, echoing Johnson, a "great Hater"; immensely self-confident and yet paralysingly shy, he never could reconcile himself to the affliction that he dragged with him through his life like a tin-can tied to a cat's tail: his club foot.
Byron's other - inherited? - erotic compulsion was incest. He conducted a long affair with his half-sister, Augusta, and had at least one child by her. Augusta was quite open about this forbidden attachment, yet her real feelings remain enigmatic. It is likely that the poet found in her a means of escape from his troubled adult life of tangled loves, debt and artistic uncertainty, into a cosy, prelapsarian world of baby-talk and unchallenging, but certainly not safe, sex.
Some of the most gruesomely fascinating pages in Eisler's biography describe the triangle formed between Byron, Augusta, and Byron's long-suffering wife, Annabella. The two women formed between them a sort of sorority based on their tormented love for Byron. Annabella confided intimate details of the woes of marriage to her sister-in-law, and seems at times to have been uncertain which of the two siblings she felt most passionately toward. Indeed, though Eisler does not go so far as to suggest as much, it is possible that the three may have indulged in the odd bout of troilism. Autre temps, autre moeurs.
Do not mistake: despite exhaustive accounts of Byron's many love affairs, especially the notorious collision with Lady Caroline Lamb, Eisler's book is not all scandal and "fair fucking". She is illuminating on two areas where previous biographers have tended to let the shadows linger: Byron's thwarted political ambitions - one of his three major speeches in the House of Lords was in favour of Catholic Emancipation - and his artistic achievement. On the latter she is particularly persuasive, especially in her lengthy and enthusiastic account of the poet's master-work, the long narrative poem Don Juan, in which, as Virginia Woolf put it, he "escaped his evil genius of the false romantic". In her final chapter, "Afterlife", Eisler advances some startling and, on reflection, compelling judgments:
Don Juan [and this might be said of much of his mature work] speaks to us in a language new to poetry, an idiom of puns and wordplay, tweaked pronunciation, free association, and syncopated rhythm; sometimes, Byron can sound like the first rap artist. But there is another facet of the man and poet that vaults him squarely into our own celebrity-driven era: his uneasy relationship to his own success. He manipulated his image with the skill of an army of press agents, playing hide-and-seek with the me/not-me questions raised by his heroes. At the same time he recognized the damage that came from playing Byron; the life kept upstaging the poetry.
Byron died, at the age of 36, of marsh fever, at Missolonghi, where he had gone to aid the Greeks in their battle for independence from Turkish rule. It had been a foolhardy venture, but as he said himself, seeing Death approach, "it were better to die doing something than nothing".
John Banville is a novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times