The fraught dichotomy between fact and legend is said, by the cynical journalist Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, to become less complicated once the latter has attained the de facto status of the former. A provincial murder mystery furnishes a useful aphorism, but it's clear that Scott didn't have Lord Byron in mind because fact and legend were, in most instances concerning the great Romantic poet, synonymous. In Slate, Katha Pollitt examines the amorous side of Byron's curriculum vitae and comes up wondering when he had any time for writing poetry.
In his short life (1788-1824), George Gordon, Lord Byron, managed to cram in just about every sort of connection imaginable—unrequited pinings galore; affairs with aristocrats, actresses, servants, landladies, worshipful fans, and more in almost as many countries as appear on Don Giovanni's list; plus countless one-offs with prostitutes and purchased girls; a brief, disastrous marriage; and an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. And that's just the women!
That Byron vigorously swung both ways was well established by Fiona MacCarthy in her 2002 biography (he seems to have nursed, just before his demise at Missolonghi, a bad crush on a Hellenic boy who didn't return the favor), but in a sense, it's not at all surprising. Byron's nature was a tempest of paradox and ambivalence, a feature of his personality that Edmund Wilson, writing in the 20's during the height of one of the cyclical Byron revivals in American literary culture, tied to the poet's Calvinist conscience "gnashing its teeth" against the erotic thrills and mysteries of Venice. (It was this conscience, Pollitt fails to realize, that accounted for Byron's hasty and ill-fated marriage to the priggish Annabella Milbanke, cousin to his former conquest Lady Caroline Lamb, who famously described him as "mad--bad--dangerous to know.")
Byron had an unrivaled talent for having things both ways, and being all things to all people. It would had to have been a radical aristocrat who could dash off a letter to his half-sister--the one he later bedded--that life at Cambridge University made him feel "independent as a German Prince who coins his own Cash, or a Cherokee Chief who coins no Cash at all, but enjoys what is more precious, Liberty." The scandalized milord with an exorbitant retinue and a traveling menagerie could nonetheless raise a small army to battle the Ottoman Empire in the name of Greek independence. And the earnest defender of his own literary talent could nonetheless poke fun at his slightly absurd bearing of it. The "Isles of Greece," Byron's still-quoted tribute to a colonized people with ancient glories to redeem, which appears in Don Juan, is nothing if not a self-parodying monument to a purposefully indecipherable character:
In France, for instance, he would write a chanson;
In England a six canto quarto tale;
In Spain, he'd make a ballad or romance on
The last war—much the same in Portugal;
In Germany, the Pegasus he'd prance on
Would be old Goethe's (see what says De Staël);
In Italy, he'd ape the 'Trecentisti;'
In Greece, he'd sing some sort of hymn like this t'ye:
Alexander Pope managed to fuse the role of the critic and poet in his "Essay on Criticism," pioneering a tradition that has been admirably upheld from T.S. Eliot to Adam Kirsch. But it was Byron who, in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, embodied the duality of creator and destroyer most hilariously by taking an entire generation of fashionable versifiers and their professional fault-finders to task in what even the fustiest of the latter contingent would have to admit was perfect rhyme and meter. (Another paradox: Byron's provocative content was always expressed in the most conservative form.)
Wordsworth never quite recovered from the lashing the more permanent revolutionary gave him, or from being included in the school of nature-obsessed Romantic poets Byron termed the "Lakers" after their cloying affection for the Lake District in northwestern England. ("Delight in the height of the night" is how Kingsley Amis would satirize these tender-headed bucolics in the 1950's.)
Thus saith the Preacher: "Nought beneath the sun
Is new," yet still from change to change we run.
What varied wonders tempt us as they pass!
The Cow-pox, Tractors, Galvanism, and Gas,
In turns appear, to make the vulgar stare,
Till the swoln bubble bursts -- and all is air!Next comes the dull disciple of thy school,
That mild apostate from poetic rule,
The simple Wordsworth, framer of a lay,
As soft as evening in his favourite May,
Who warns his friend "to shake off toil and trouble,
And quit his books, for fear of growing double";
Who, both by precept and example, shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose;
Convincing all, by demonstration plain,
Poetic souls delight in prose insane;
And Christmas stories tortured into rhyme
Contain the essence of the true sublime.
Thus, when he tells the tale of Betty Foy,
The idiot mother of "an idiot Boy";
A moon-struck, silly lad, who lost his way,
And, like his bard, confounded night with day;
So close on each pathetic part he dwells,
And each adventure so sublimely tells,
That all who view the "idiot in his glory"
Conceive the Bard the hero of the story.
Pollitt suggests that Byron's great insight to was to understand that women are as often the pursuers in matters of the heart and bedroom as they are the perused, which is true enough but inadequate. His smarter observation was one that was pilfered to tremendous political significance by an idolater named Benjamin Disraeli: namely, that relationships with older women paid handsome dividends. In Disraeli's words, a "female friend, amiable and clever, and devoted, is a possession more valuable than parks and palaces, and, without such a muse, few men can succeed in life, not be content." For Disraeli, the key figure here was his own wife, Lady Henrietta Sykes, who gave him the money he needed to escape his creditors and maintain a successful parliamentary career; for Byron, it was Lady Melbourne, mother-in-law to Caroline Lamb, who ran interference on their psychotic romance on behalf of the cad Melbourne so admired. Indeed, older women facilitated Byron's liaisons, advised him against the more hazardous kind, and exampled for him what the fairer (and deadlier) sex would be like once all libidinal aspects had been exhausted, a misogynist reading of which lesson may explain his apparent preference for young men.
Nevertheless, Byron knew women, all right, in all their splendid variety. Has there ever been a better evocation than the following of that maddeningly attractive species now known as the tease?
There's also nightly, to the uninitiated,
A peril--not indeed like love or marriage,
But not the less for this to be depreciated:
It is --I meant and mean not to disparage
The show of virtue even in the vitiated--
It adds an outward grace unto their carriage--
But to denounce the amphibious sort of harlot,
Couleur de rose, who's neither white nor scarlet.
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