Almost
everyone knows something about Lord Byron.
Unfortunately,
like many things “everyone knows” these are, at best, distortions of the facts
“He was one of the Romantic poets - like Wordsworth, Coleridge and
Shelley.”
Byron
hated the “Lakers” as he called Wordsworth and the similar Romantic poets. He admired classic form and rules, the
poetry of Pope and satire. Shelley
became a personal friend and he influenced Byron’s poetry.
“His early poems are trash.”
Many of
his earliest poems are funny and lovely - and display his trademark
facetiousness and passionate emotion.
“He was a drunk and drug addict- they all were - smoked opium.”
He was
not a heavy drinker. He drank wine with
dinner, champagne with women and brandy with friends. He smoked cigars and took laudanum when ill - to doctor’s
prescription. After returning from
Turkey in 1811, he drank only water and did not eat meat. His contemporaries criticized him for being
abstemious.
“He had a clubbed foot.”
He had
a congenital defect in his leg (the right - probably - although there is
argument about which one) that caused his foot to turn in. He had poor medical treatment as a child
that aggravated the problem. He walked
with a limp and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) dance - especially not the waltz, but he
could run and played cricket for Harrow against Rugby.
“He was a lonely outsider - had no friends - nobody knew him.”
His
school and college friends were aristocrats and the son’s of politicians and
were devoted to him. He had a
widespread reputation as a rake and was elected a member of the gambling club
Watiers. He was one of the original
Dandies and a friend of Beau Brummell. He had a solid reputation as a poet by
the age of twenty.
“He was homosexual.”
He had
passionate “romantic” friendships with other boys at school at Harrow. He fell in love with John Edelston, a boy
chorister in the church at Cambridge.
He discussed “paederasty” and proposed writing a “treatise” on it. When
he was in Greece he wrote letters to England about sexual conquests of boys and
his last, but unrequited passion was for a Greek boy of fifteen. He also “had “ several hundred women - so
bisexual or hyper-sexual is more correct.
“Lady Caroline Lamb wrote that Byron was “mad, bad and dangerous to
know.”
Lady
Morgan wrote it. She said
Caroline Lamb had told her she had written
“mad, bad and dangerous to know” in her diary the first evening she saw
Byron.
“Byron was a cad and abandoned his heartbroken lover, Lady Caroline
Lamb.”
Caroline
Lamb was older than Byron and a married woman.
She seduced him when he became a famous and admired poet. She was bold about it and wanted everyone to
know of her “conquest”. They were
lovers for about three months but her behaviour embarrassed Byron and her
family, especially because her husband was a politician. Her mother in-law,
Lady Melbourne, befriended Byron and convinced him to break off the relationship. Her family take her away to Ireland to break
up their love affair and Byron moved on to be lover of the famous beauty Lady
Oxford.
“He was exiled to Europe.”
He left
England because he wanted to. He was
being hounded by the press and public after his separation from his wife, but
he had been planning to leave for three or four years, and intended to return.
He preferred to live in Italy because of the climate and because it was
inexpensive.
“He was very extravagant, but miserly to friends”
He was
in debt all his life. He did not have a
great fortune even though he had an estate of thousands of acres because of law
suits and low rents. Just before he
died the law suits were settled and he was rich. Byron had got into debt when he was seventeen years old and had
borrowed money at exorbitant rates. He
took many years to pay it off, which required the selling of the family
estates. None the less, he was very
generous to family, friends, and strangers and embarrassed when he could not
afford to help people financially.
“He slept with his sister.”
He
loved his sister - and wrote several poems about her love for him and a verse
drama about incestuous love. He wrote many passionate letters to her from
Italy. Did he make love with her?
Read
the rest of this journal and decide for yourself.
Anne
Ridsdale Mott
January 22, 1998
A Conversation
with Bernard Beatty of the University of Liverpool,
editor
of the Byron Journal ,
on implications of
Childe Harold’s “pure love” for his sister
A.R.M.:
Byron changed his mind but I don't think he ever lied -----
using Childe Harold as evidence ---- he stated in stanza LV of Canto III
“though unwed, That love was pure” of his love for his sister ---- so I've always believed
it WAS so, and probably she was deprived, poor thing ! ! ! !
It's always the unconsummated loves that burn into the soul. In which
case, what DID bother him and Lady M. in the summer of 1813?
B.B.
I don't see that 'That love was pure' necessarily implies
the absence of sexual relations. He may simply have meant 'wholly meant', 'not
lustful' 'still continuing' 'bound up with an idea of purity'.
In the ‘Thyrza’ poems he talks of a pure kiss which forbore
the warmer wish.
I suppose that tells for you since it may imply that the
warmer wish would not be pure but it could imply the possibility of the
conjunction of purity and intercourse. Byron calls (I think, doesn't he?) the
love of Juan and Haidee 'pure' but that is certainly sexual.
So the argument still has to be made there.
A.R.M.
Maybe so - but I
think that Juan and Haidee have 'pure hearts' not a 'pure love'.
In my edition of C.H.[Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage] the word 'That'
is italicised - indicating a difference from other loves that were not
'pure'. He would have been well aware
at that time that many people believed the opposite of his love for Augusta and
may have been trying to put a 'spin' on things. He was usually, however,
painfully truthful to the point of masochism.
Of all men I doubt Byron would separate lust and physical
intercourse. He seems very clear about
it, and not very troubled by it.
Lust and love, on the other hand really screwed him up (pun
intended). He loved John Edelston emotionally, physically, but apparently not
“warmly “(meaning 'carnal knowledge'?). He "esteemed" Annabella and
'had her on the sofa before dinner' then got her with child in no time ('pure'
because married?). He went to Venice
and (calling a whore a whore) indulged in his hobby of 'carnal recreation' -
and then along came Teresa who wouldn't even accept a brooch, but jumped him as
fast as she could - and inventively too - and he found himself very close to
becoming the whore in that relationship himself. But he loved her and that made
it all right - but definitely not 'pure' in any way.
B.B.
The present Pope annoyed lots of people by saying that some
marital intercourse was lustful and some wasn't. He wasn't saying anything new.
Aquinas argues with great perspicacity that it would be very difficult to get
rid of an intrinsically separable concupiscence in love-making though you could
very nearly do so (before the Fall, concupiscence would be wholly incorporated
into amor, and sex would be much better-- i.e. more pleasurable).
I suspect Lord B would agree with this. Probably he entertained
contradictory views on the coincidence of purity and sexual love (or took the
advantage of available rhetorical forms of expression).
So the argument still has to be made there.
A.R.M.
I'm trying ! ! !
When it gets down to
defining 'the conjunction of purity and intercourse' you have an argument to
make too ! ! ! ! with every prude and puritan in the world on the other side.
What then would be impure? sexual contact without love I suppose - like Byron
with his wife (at least at first).
The Pope's observation mystifies me - I can't comprehend
pleasurable lust free 'amor'ous sexual intercourse in or out of marriage. What
would this loving but cold sex be like? What do they DO of an evening? If it exists it seems ghoulish - and
deviant. It doesn't sound as if old St.
Thomas A. managed it, either.
Why are the Fathers of the Church (Augustine, St. Tom, His
Current Holiness) so disturbed by lust anyway?
To be upset by it, it must not be godly, if not godly then of evil, if
of evil then of the Devil.
If one believes in the personification of evil as having
concrete or even psychological powers then monotheism has to be abandoned and
with it the teachings of Christ. This
would seem a greater danger than ecstasy of the flesh.
Bernini did a nice job of summing it all up in his altar
piece of St. Teresa. Have you read that stuff of the ecstatic nuns? - decidedly
concupiscent - all about dissolving into the body of Christ as his bride. (a
metaphor? - balderdash ! ! ! )
Love without lust is easy - and everywhere - many women
claim to prefer it. Lust without love? I think our hero called it 'carnal
recreation'- In my opinion, he was comfortably consistent in his paradoxical
views.
B.B.
See above. Neuha in The Island is, if not pure in the sense
of Aurora, certainly not impure. cf Angiolina in Marino Faliero (despite
Steno's accusation). Parisina's love is not pure cf. Paolo and Francesca. an
example that influenced Byron a lot (I think) is Dryden's version of
Boccaccio's 'Sigismonda and Guiscardo' (Boccaccio in Dryden's Fables).
Sigismonda is a model for Marina in The Two Foscari. She is both pure and
aggressively sexual.
A.R.M.
I am nervous analysing the MAN's opinions by analysing the
POET's characters.
I much prefer to rely on letters and journals to get at his
(personal) thoughts. My reasons are exactly those 'rhetorical forms of
expression' you referred to above.
Hasn't our discussion of "pure" deteriorated into
semantics? Denotations and connotations
shift with the wind.
B.B.
I
don't agree with you about connotations. WE disagree. It's not a matter of
psyche (connotations, different experience) but of possible argument-- we don't
get into the merely subjective that quick.
I don't agree also, I'm afraid, that we get at Byron's views
more exactly from his prose rather than his poetry. Of course, poetry is not
the straight expression of his views. But conversely, the straight expression
of views,-for anyone but especially Byron--is itself stylised and extremely
limited it only uses a small bit of him. Poetry uses more and reveals more.
I've always thought this. We should read his prose in the
light of his poetry and not the other way round.
A.R.M.
I am a painter. I have strong opinions of the relationship
between artists, their creations and their audience. My work, if done to be
sold, is not the same as work done for myself. It takes the audience into
account, even if only unconsciously.
When we approach a work of art, as audience, we bring along our
vocabulary - and read into it what we can.
The essence of genius, to me, is the ability to create works
that resonate with many audiences.
Byron was - is - a genius. I
'know' what he meant by 'That love was pure', and so do you, but we disagree
about it because our connotations are different. I think the only word of those
four that can be easily agreed on is 'was' ! ! ! ! ! !
But for me, as a lover of Lord Byron the man, not the poet,
those words are a message across the centuries. The same words about 'Thyrsa' are too. He is fiercely proud, and
does not want to be misunderstood.
B.B.
I seem to have become ultra rational in a way. Yes language
is slippery and resonates differently but the relativism you imply is simply
not so -language can't work at all if we were to take that absolutely
seriously.
Thus now there is a that in which we talk (can't point to it
but if it wasn't there there could not even be a talk which claimed to be
relativist and connotatory). The old word for this 'that in which' was 'truth'
and I don't see that we can do without it. Byron, especially in Don Juan,
insists on the slippery doubt-filled procedures of thought and language but,
equally, he insists on the truth of his poetry and is careful to relate
imagination to fact. He detested Wordsworth and distrusted Shelley and Keats's poetry
because they drove a wedge between these things. He did not like an appeal to
art which implied simple subjectivity or the unmitigated play of connotation.
So I suppose that does get us back to where we started. . .
But in the process we seem to have blundered into a larger question about Byron
and other things.
