The Intimate Byron

...What Byron was put on this earth to prove, it would seem, was its quotidian plausibility...

...Annabella Milbanke was smug, moralistic, prissy—and, as he learned afterward, she would not even inherit as large a fortune as he had counted on...

...In contrast to the usual epistolary style of his time, and to his own romantic-agony poems, Byron abstained from figurative embroidery and purple self-indulgence in his correspondence...

...Even Byron's masterpiece, Don Juan, that astonishing mockery of sex and politics and himself, intimidates us by its length, allusive erudition, and topicality, though its rollicking colloquial irreverence can seem as natural and modern to the 20th-century ear as a poem by W. H. Auden, who made no secret of his enormous debt to the work...

...Unfortunately, Byron and Annabella were both too self-absorbed to see the danger signals until it was too late...

...covering Byron's disastrous short-lived marriage and the eight years of exile in Italy and Greece, where, as every schoolboy used to know, he died in 1824, at the age of 36...

...Byron was no less profligate than any other high-spirited undergraduate, but behind the mask of dissipation he was reading and writing with concentrated energy and purpose...

...Byron's House has of late years been so implanted in my Soul, that I dreaded the Approach of the vacations as the Harbingers of Misery...

...He was quick to disabuse those who thought he was permanently consumed by the "Byronic" anguish and intensity of Childe Harold...

...IV, due this summer, is entitled "Wedlock's the Devil...

...Tossing discretion to the winds, he rarely changed or blotted out a word to confound gossip or stifle malice...

...As he observed to her mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne, his great friend and confidante: "I know not whom I may love but to the latest hour of my life I shall hate that woman...

...Then, hounded by creditors and living dangerously beyond his means, he reluctantly decided to find a wealthy wife, half-seriousIy insisting: "You know I hate women, and for fear I should ever change that opinion, I shall marry...

...For this reason, as much as for their coruscating wit and vitality, Byron's letters—cautiously estimated at some 3,000—have an excitement that goes beyond their rushing splendor as prose and their incalculable value as the raw material of biography...

...his premature death seems almost preordained...

...He relied, instead, on candor and directness, self-mockery, and the deflation of cant through hyperbolic ridicule and sinewy common sense...

...If their sheer bulk is unbelievable, their often homely and mundane evidence of the way Byron spent his time is not, and for each letter that runs on obsessively about Caroline Lamb, there is one to his publisher, John Murray, that is strictly and soberly about the business of poetry...

...Everything happened to Byron at a much more rapid rate than it does to lesser men—he was fat and gray by 30...

...By the same token, his energy was literally fantastic, as was his insatiable appetite for poetry, and women, and scandal, and wine, for the theater, and friends, and politics, for life taken at full gallop with lusty audacity...

...the letters that streamed from his hand with fiery speed at this time are marvelously funny, epigrammatic, scornful sketches of his tumultuous rounds, particularly of his catastrophic involvement with Lady Caroline Lamb, a beautiful and half-demented leech who could not be pried loose once he tired of her...

...Within three years he had published three books of poems, and in 1809, at the age of 21, he embarked on a grand tour of Spain, Greece and Turkey, sending home brilliantly descriptive accounts of the hazardous journey and somehow managing to work on the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage...

...Yet he could add, with characteristic generosity: "To her I do not express this because I have no desire to make her uncomfortable...

...Flouting his better judgment—and English law-Byron fell in love with his half-sister Augusta, and was tortured by nightmares of the ruin that could come of this criminal intimacy...

...There will be five or six further volumes (No...

...Harvard University Press, 285 pp., $11.50), with the poet just short of his 26th birthday, has now come out...

...Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state...

...The Love of Women...

...The letters, and the five journals Byron kept at various times, are being collected, with the deletions of earlier squeamish editors restored as much as possible, by Leslie A. Marchand, the author of the definitive three-volume Byron: A Biography and a man who has dedicated his own life to the reconstruction of Byron's...

...One is constantly astounded, in these early volumes, by the precocity...

...Once he had tasted freedom at Harrow, he poured out his filial loathing, and at 17 announced to John Hanson, his business agent: "I declare upon my honour that the Horror of entering Mrs...

...Yet should we be tempted to think him superhuman, made of different stuff from ordinary mortals, the letters bring us back to earthy reality...

...the third, "Alas...

...The first two volumes of the letters and journals-In My Hot Youth" and "Fame in My Time"?appeared in 1973...

...Yet what has never grown stale and will never become inaccessible—because it corresponds so perfectly to a crucial aspect of the life of man in every era, and because it is so powerfully seductive to the imagination—is the Byronic personality at the heart of the Byronic legend...

...As Jacques Barzun reminds us in his tonic book Classic, Romantic, and Modern, "We forget, often willfully, that a biography or autobiography records only a few moments of a man's life, his spectacular encounters with mankind or the universe...

...He loved, but he also shaved...

...Though Cambridge provided a refuge from his "maternal persecutor," he was generally contemptuous of the "wretched" place, "a villainous Chaos of Dice and Drunkenness the intellects of her children are as stagnant as her Cam...

...On returning to England in 1811, the pace of his literary endeavors, his love affairs, his anxieties about money, and his self-destructive flirtations with disgrace, quickened to fever pitch, climaxing one year later when Childe Harold was published and he "awoke to find himself famous...

...His mother was a hysterical virago, hurling violent rage at her son one minute, only to turn cloyingly affectionate in the next, and at a tender age Byron came to detest her...

...Marchand remarks that "she thought it her destiny to befriend and reform this fallen angel," although a more intuitive woman might have been warned by his deliberately shocking declaration: "The great object of life is Sensation—to feel that we exist—even though in pain—it is this 'craving void' which drives us to Gaming—to Battle—to Travel—to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishments...

...They disclose the Fatal Man (as Mario Praz describes the Byronic hero) whose spectacular life has a mysterious, inhuman logic of tragic inevitability, together with a particular man who was lame, weak, selfish, good-natured, unprincipled, inconsistent, hard-working, and as fallible as he was eloquent...

...The best is yet to be, but the letters we already have are extraordinary...

...Apart from undergraduates forced to keep up with the assignments in Romantic-literature courses, or poets—another and professional matter—how many people turn these days to the Weltschmerz-posturing of Childe Harold or the tormented grandiosity of the poetic dramas Manfred, Cain and Sardanapalus...

...The subversive idea of the poet as adversary, in word and deed, was scarcely novel in Regency England...

...As Byron confessed to Mary Shelley, "I am not a cautious letter-writer and generally say what comes uppermost at the moment...

...While still in his teens, Byron was writing with phenomenal self-assurance and a shrewd grasp of essentials, untouched by sentimentality or any childish desire to please...

...To Thomas Moore he confided: "I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever...

...After all, Byron may have lived for sensation, but he wrote far more than most poets who lasted twice as long...

...He set his sights, naturally, on precisely the woman who was sure to make him utterly miserable...

...Not yet 25, he had become the toast of Regency London, swept up in the buzzing high life and intrigue of Whig society...

...The short, frenetic career of George Gordon Byron not only added an indispensable word to the language, it provided us with a dramatic realization of the poet-rebel, the scandalous genius...

...Going from peak to peak, it does not explore the valleys where the quiet work is done, even on a day of storm and stress...