Biography: Fiona McCarthy comes to Byron as a cultural historian and structure her book conventionally as a sequence of episodes from birth to death. Her method is neutral summary to which she responds with obersavtions that are unusually astute and clear-eyed, writes J.C.C Mays.
Byron: Life and Legend. By Fiona MacCarthy. John Murray,
674pp. £25
The bare facts are as follows: Byron was born in London in 1788 and spent his early years in Aberdeen before he inherited a title and a dilapidated estate. He proceeded from Harrow to Cambridge, where he gained some notoriety. He left London in 1809 to travel in the Mediterranean and returned in 1811 to become the author of a best-selling poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." Women rivalled one another to seduce him and his fame burgeoned even while it was overtaken by scandal. He left England in 1816 amid rumours of incest and pederasty to live in exile in Geneva, Venice and other Italian cities, where he continued to write and to live a life of excess. In 1822, he became involved with the Italian patriot movement and then with the movement for Greek independence. He died a patriot's death at Missolonghi in 1824.
Byron's Corsair sold 10,000 copies on the day of publication in 1814. His features were as familiar to his fans as Elvis Presley's or Mick Jagger's today. His political martyrdom at the age of 36 made his memory as sacrosanct as Che Guevara's. In retrospect, he was the wild romantic lord who went out of his way to upset established norms, whose behaviour was scandalously titillating though shadowed by rumours, who eventually laid down his life for the cause of freedom. Dubbed "mad, bad and dangerous to know" by one of his many lovers, he was charismatic, dissolute, brilliant, self-destructive, yet he ultimately redeemed himself. He drank wine from a goblet fashioned from a skull, kept a house-menagerie that included monkeys and a bear, boxed, swam the Hellespont, and went on bulimic binges, yet he befriended the idealist Shelley and wrote lyrics, epics, dramas and wonderful letters. The combination of waste, scandal, sacrifice and poetical achievement combusted when he died a martyr. He was hailed as the literary equivalent of Napoleon, with whom he identified, by a successive array of writers, composers and painters. But this is where the questions begin.
From a broad European viewpoint, Byron is the great English Romantic writer, alongside Sir Walter Scott. He stands behind Pushkin and Adam Mickiewitz, he inspired Delacroix and Berlioz. From the contrary Anglo- American perspective, whatever about Byron's attraction for biographers and the whirlwind decade of Regency notoriety, it appears that Goethe, Heine and others got it wrong because they were dazzled by extraneous factors and because, as foreigners, they overlooked the carelessness of Byron's style: Wordsworth and Jane Austen contributed more to the central native tradition. Only during the past few decades, as long-established views have been interrogated, has the example of the restless, satirical Byron come to present a viable alternative. Thus, Byron's modern editor, Jerome McGann, has called into question the whole Romantic ideology, with its pretensions to attain an illusory unity, its grand ideals of sincerity and maturity, its regressive impulse to rediscover the underlying status quo. The difference in perspective amounts to contradiction, and who is to say which is right. The question involves more than whether Wordsworth or Byron is central to the literary tradition that followed after them. The answer is determined by opposite ways of responding to the modern world.
Fiona MacCarthy's new biography succeeds well by ignoring this larger problem. She comes to Byron as a cultural historian, with an interest in design and art history, turned professional biographer. She structures her book conventionally as a sequence of episodes extending from birth to death, shaping and balancing them to maintain a brisk pace. Her method is neutral summary to which she responds with observations that are unusually astute and clear-eyed; for instance, the way Byron took Allegra, his child by Claire Clairmont, into his household as if she was an addition to his menagerie. Her present-day comparisons are often unexpected and always refreshing, and they confirm her judgement. She sensibly ignores the wrangling over Byron's private life, which has followed successive revelations during the past half-century, so as to establish continuity with Leslie Marchand's 1957 biography, published by the present John Murray's father. She draws on material in the Murray family archive (known to but unusable by Marchand) to confirm the way Byron's sexual behaviour was determined by his lifelong preference for boys. She uses it to throw light on his view of women as sexual predators and his cognate awareness of the emptiness of proto-Victorian idealism, on his incestuous relations with his sister, on the break-up of his marriage, on his feelings towards England and on his necessary exile abroad - buggery then being a capital offence. Byron thereby emerges as an outsider more akin to Oscar Wilde than to civic Goethe.
However, to return to the contradiction described above, MacCarthy's quotations from the poetry are illustrative. They acknowledge its power but are not concerned with how it works, using it instead to decorate the story of a life. If this seems appropriate, it is because writing was evidently not enough for Byron: he felt it must be completed by action. The feeling is connected with his capacity for boredom and irritability, his sense of "craving void". Byron was most dangerous as a writer because he was without literary ambition. He could be so alarmingly truthful because he was fuelled with a sense of pointlessness; he protested that "Cant is so much stronger than Cunt" and the reply comes back that camp is counterpoint to contradiction, a hollow echo. Death in action makes "a good finish to a very triste existence" to such a one seeking a role, but the death of a celebrity does not make an action in the Aristotelian sense. Thousands may mourn, but they similarly mourned the deaths of JFK and Princess Diana whose legacy is likewise ambiguous. MacCarthy reflects that if Byron had not died at Missolonghi, he would have contributed less to the Greek cause. It is also uncertain whether or not he had abandoned his satirical masterpiece, Don Juan. Shortly before his death, he entertained plans to settle in America, or even Tasmania.
J.C.C. Mays is professor of modern English and American literature at UCD. His six-volume edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works was published by Princeton University Press last year; his Fredson Bowers and the Irish Wolfhound has just been published by Coracle Press.
J.C.C. Mays