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also read to him from the Bible. The majesty of biblical language fueled Byron’s ambition to achieve a similar mastery of the English language. The fact that the nurse maid was a trusted member of the family who conferred benefits, but only at a cost, complicated matters. The nursemaid was fired, but not immediately. She left with a rich parting gift. Byron remained angry with his mother for having subjected him to the nursemaid for so long. Byron was born with a deformed right foot and narrowed lower leg. He walked with a limp. He wouldn’t let his wife see the foot on his wedding night or his doctors see it when he was dying. The braver part of him was able to make jokes about the foot in his writing. He told a clergyman who tried to persuade Byron that our bodies would rise to heaven after death: “And our carcasses that are to rise again, are they worth raising? I hope if mine is, that I shall have a better pair of legs than I have moved on these two and twenty years, or I shall be sadly behind in the squeeze into Paradise.” Similarly, although male-male sexuality was dangerous to mention, let alone in print, Byron returned to the topic frequently. Much of his juvenilia is about the love teenage boys feel for one another. He wrote these poems while attending an all-male

boarding school and soon thereafter. An other poem is about a male friend at Cam bridge who gave Byron a ring. The autobiographical hero of Byron’s Childe Harold has committed a secret crime, one that almost certainly has a sexual dimen sion. The only crime that Byron himself had conceivably committed at the time he wrote it was sodomy. His Don Juan refers to same-sex sexuality in the work of the Roman poet Virgil. Several of his works in the original versions had open praise for William Beckford, the best-known sodomite of that era. Byron was a swimmer. The little brother of one of his close friends remembered Byron and his brother stripping off their clothes and jumping into a swift, tidal river. The current carried them far out to sea be fore they could swim back to shore. Byron also swam the Tagus in Lisbon and from the Venetian Lido across to the Grand Canal. He was proudest of crossing the Dard anelles Strait, a passage from the Aegean Sea leading toward Istanbul. He was imitat ing the mythological Leander, who swam the strait nightly to visit his female lover Hero. Christopher Marlowe’s version of this myth has a lusty sea god mistaking Leander for Ganymede, the boy-lover of Zeus. In Western art, Leander is almost always de

picted, even in death, as desirable, young, andnaked. Byron’s deformity disappeared in the water, as did prejudice that associated his ef feminacy with weakness. In the water, he became an athlete capable of great feats. One of the most famous passages in his work begins: “And I have loved thee Ocean.” It ends with Byron comparing swimming to writing on the page: “as I do here.” The writer, the poet, and the man who understood the appeal of the sea god’s at traction to naked Leander all came together in his notion of himself as a swimmer. Byron invites us all to think of ourselves in a long history of storytelling that puts same-sex romance at its center. Byron looked to Leander, to Virgil, and to Beck ford. Similarly, we may gain strength when we look to him as an ancestor. He encour ages us to defy adverse public opinion. Even though he had to pay a price for his defiance, he found ways in his work not only to embrace and express his sexual dif ference, but also long to outlive his 36 years. William Kuhn, author of Swimming with LordByron , wrote a biography of Benjamin Disraeli called The Politics of Pleasure and a novel titled Mrs Queen Takes the Train .

May–June 2024

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