GLR September-October 2024

ESSAY

The Broken Dandy A NDREW H OLLERAN

G EORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON was not only a brilliant correspondent but something that seems no longer possible, at least since the death of Rod McKuen—a best-selling poet—though Byron, as an aristocrat, refused to accept the money earned from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage . It was only his debts and his desire to fi nance a campaign to free Greece from the Ottoman Empire that forced him to demand his royalties years later. Byron is probably not read today the way he was in the early 1800s. Keats, who envied Byron his success, is considered the great Romantic poet these days. But it was Byron who was the famous genius during that period in early 19th-century England known as the Regency. And now, the 200th anniversary of his birth has brought forth a burst of books like Andrew Stauffer’s recent biography, though Byron may be of interest today more for the rainy summer he spent on the shores of Lake Geneva in a villa near a house rented by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Godwin Shelley than for his own work—a sum mer made famous for Mary writing Frankenstein and Byron’s doctor John Polidori writing the short story “The Vampyre”— two landmarks in the history of Gothic fiction. Byron was born with a deformed foot—turned inward—a handicap that, a friend said, was something he thought of every day of his life. He compensated, perhaps, by taking very long swims—heroic swims, quite literally, since they were inspired by the ancient story of Leander swimming the Hellespont to be with Hero, one of the legends Byron discovered as a youth who read voraciously. In the water he must have felt his hand icap disappear. On land he was enraged when he overheard one of the women he was pursuing ask her maid: “Do you think that I could care anything for that lame boy?” Yet when he grew up, that lame boy was catnip to women. His face transfixed them—though it’s hard to tell from the many illus trations in Stauffer’s book what he really looked like. The paintings turn him into a swarthy sheik. Only one drawing, seen from behind, conveys good looks. The others are all over the place. He had, for instance, a tendency to put on weight, which led to strict diets and purges he called “Reductions.” But women were mesmerized by his wit, reputation, appear ance, and conversation. He used the word “motility” to explain his extreme mood swings. By this he meant his acute impressionability—he felt too deeply—but feeling is what the Romantic Age was all about. He was variously kind, generous, egotistical, arrogant, effemi nate, depressed, gay (in the old sense), and possibly bipolar. His friend Lady Blessington said that “if ten individuals undertook Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand. His other novels include Grief and The Beauty of Men .

Thomas Phillips. George Gordon Byron (1788–1824), 6th Baron Byron, Poet. Government Art Collection (UK).

the task of describing Byron, no two of the ten, would agree in their verdict describing him, or convey any portrait that resem bled the other ... and yet the description of each might be cor rect.” In her own estimation, she wrote: “were I to point out the prominent defect of Lord Byron, I should say it was a flippancy and a total want of natural self-possession and dignity.” Which we can take to mean that he was funny. He loathed what he called “cant” (hypocrisy), and all one has to do is read his satires to appreciate the stinging sense of humor. He mocked his fellow poets for their “ rabies of rhyme” in a book he published early in his career attacking the Scotch and English critics who had dismissed his youthful endeavors. But Byron’s poems rhyme as cleverly as those of his predecessor Alexander Pope, though their subject matter is very different. His two long narrative poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan , were taken to be what we would call autofiction—a thinly veiled record of the author’s life. And this made Byron

TheG & LR

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