Two hundred years ago, on April 19, 1824, Lord Byron died unexpectedly in Greece. Banished from British society for his shocking behaviour towards his wife, Byron had settled in Italy, but in 1823, sailed from Genoa to support the Greeks in their battles against the Ottoman Empire. Even in exile he was probably Britain’s most famous writer, and certainly its most infamous. His poetry sold tens of thousands of copies in his lifetime and inspired generations of artists, from Pushkin and Tchaikovsky to Schumann and Delacroix. As Andrew Stauffer notes in his excellent new biography, moody fictional males from Emily Brontë's Heathcliff to Neil Gaiman’s Dream owe a debt to Byron’s haunted protagonists.
While Byronic presences are everywhere, how many readers can name, let alone recite, one of his poems? In 1813, Byron was offered the extraordinary sum of £1000 (about £57,000 or NZ$120,000, today) for his poem The Giaour. He turned down the payment, thinking it unseemly for a peer of the realm. Like many of his works, it became hugely popular. Today, few can even pronounce its title (hint: it rhymes with power).
Admiration for Byron’s works may have faded, but fascination with his life remains. And no wonder: the man who was once called “mad, bad and dangerous to know” lived an extraordinary and deeply contradictory life. Stauffer’s biography gives us that contradictory character in Byron’s own words, drawing on his poetry but particularly his letters.
Byron was only 36 when he died; yet, because of his fame, more than 3000 of his letters survive. By comparison, we have about 250 of John Keats’ letters, and a mere 160 from Jane Austen. The Byron biographer has rich material to work with; the challenge is in choosing the best.
Stauffer tells Byron’s story, guided by 10 of those missives. Each chapter begins with a full letter written by Byron. Stauffer then fills out the period of Byron’s life represented in the letter, calling on his considerable knowledge of the original manuscripts and nearly two centuries of Byron scholarship. The result is a compelling introduction to one of the great poets and letter writers of the 19th century.
A series of unexpected deaths led to George Gordon Byron, at age 10, inheriting his title. The first letter was written in 1807, when Byron was 19 and enjoying the privileges of wealth and status while a student at Trinity College, Cambridge. (Yes, he kept a bear, and yes, he had a fondness – perhaps more than that – for younger students).
Already a published poet, Byron attained literary celebrity with the 1812 publication of the first instalment of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which featured a brooding protagonist travelling across Europe, stopping in many of the same places that Byron himself had visited. The poet further blurred the borders between fact and fiction by sitting for a portrait dressed in Albanian finery.
Fame turned to infamy when rumours spread of his bizarre behaviour (his newly-wed wife thought him insane) and barely hidden relationship with his half-sister. Leaving England in a carriage modelled after Napoleon’s own, he spent the dark and stormy summer of 1816 in a mansion beside Lake Geneva with new friends Percy and Mary Shelley. Mary was moved to write Frankenstein, while Byron’s doctor John Polidori wrote a vampire story that borrowed from one of Byron’s unfinished manuscripts. According to Stauffer, “Every dangerously attractive, aristocratic vampire from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Anne Rice’s Lestat can be traced back to Byron and Polidori.”
Byron was energised by his relationship with Percy (who nevertheless declared his friend “as mad as the winds”). But he soon shifted to Venice, where his profligate behaviour reached new heights. In a long letter that he knew would be shared among British male friends, he told his publisher John Murray that, over two years, “I had … more women than I can count or recount.” There were probably a few male lovers as well.
And yet his poetry became even more remarkable. “Taking the low road forward,” writes Stauffer, “Byron was undergoing a transformation that would enable his greatest and most ground-breaking poetic achievements.”
Best of all is Don Juan (another tricky title: Byron goes for the English mispronunciation, rhyming “Juan” with “true one”), his extraordinary book-length poem narrating a young man’s journey from Spain to Russia and England, through dangerous battlefields and even more dangerous liaisons, all interlaced with the poet’s cheeky comments and digressions.
While Stauffer highlights key passages of Byron’s poetry, he’s equally interested in finding poetry in the letters. He notes the verb doing double time when, after passing a love letter to a married woman, Byron informs his correspondent that “she kept her countenance & the paper” when her husband appeared. Elsewhere, he compares Byron’s description of a misty alpine view (“like the spray of the ocean of hell”) to one from near contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“like a cloud of incense from the Earth”). While the latter sees nature’s piety, Byron reaches “instinctively toward the infernal”.
Somewhat unexpectedly, Byron fell in love with the young, married Countess Teresa Guiccioli and spent several years as her cavalier servente, a sort of husband-sanctioned lover and guardian. In Pisa, among friends, with grey hairs starting to appear, Byron was, according to Stauffer, “feeling himself on the far side of the storms of passion that had shaken him since his marriage”. But chaos and tragedy – often of his own making – were never far away; and when they returned, Byron departed for Greece, where illness rather than battle finally took his life.
Don Juan was unfinished at Byron’s death. His memoir, however, was awaiting posterity. Years earlier, he had entrusted the manuscript to fellow poet Thomas Moore but after his closest friends read it, they decided to burn it. It was a relief to many of Byron’s survivors but an inestimable loss to literature. Fortunately for us, most of his letters were spared a similar fate.
Byron: A Life in Ten Letters by Andrew Stauffer (Cambridge University Press, $50 hb, ebook) is out now.
