Anything to Avoid Having to Read Him (I)

19 Nov 2002

Looking at the cover of next week’s Radio Times makes me think what a pity it is that no photograph of the Duchess of York is displayed in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition (Mad, Bad and Dangerous – the Cult of Lord Byron) the opening of which I attended last night.  There is “Fergie” posing in a Lady-Macbethish make-up, lit in a sinister way, and showing that her need for self-publicity, her urge to flash at the public a (we hope) factitious persona, is one more clear spin-off from the cult of Byron.

Further reflection makes me worried that Elvis does not feature in the exhibition, or Joe Orton, or John Wilkes Booth, even Charles Manson – these were also notable self-advertisers, exploiters of their own image for personal, artistic, and financial gain, modelling themselves on the Byronic example.

Stalin created, as I understand it, a very successful “cult of personality”, as did Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung.  Byron would have been most disappointed not to find such avid and influential fans absent from the NPG exhibition.

Following the example of the man in the David Lodge novel who lectures on “T.S. Eliot’s influence on Hamlet”, why not go backwards, seeking retroactive self-modellers?  Lord Rochester is a prime example of one who, anticipating what Byron would do with his own image, exposed an artificial self to the public view.  Christopher Marlow was famous for his open-neck shirts, and such self-publicising statements as “All them as love not boys and tobacco be fools” – even Shakespeare, according to the Droeshaut portrait, preferred the ruffless, open-neck approach on public occasions.  Going further back still, Catullus, although the open-neck shirt was not available to him, was notorious at least for his open-neck togas, and, “within the limits of the available technology” (stylus, wax tablet, wooden sarcophagus-lid) a virtuoso exploiter of the way in which his publisher and agent chose to re-fashion him.  Anacreon’s private life was the subject of the most intense media scrutiny, and as for Sappho, rumours of her bisexuality proliferate to this day, encouraged by the tantalisingly and deliberately fragmented records she chose to leave.

Chaucer is thought to have travelled in Italy, and to have had a weight problem.

Julius Caesar sported, as would Byron, a receding hairline.

Jesus Christ probably died round about the month of April.

Hephaestus, Tamburlaine the Great, Richard III, Oedipus, and Professor Germaine Greer were and are all famous for their limps – would they have cultivated them so assiduously if they had not seen the example of Byron looming before and behind?

It is a rich exhibition, but one in need of expansion, as I hope I have successfully suggested.

We are in danger of confounding three things:

1. Byron’s vanity, which caused him to demand the destruction of one engraving, and to make hurt remarks about – but not to demand the destruction of – two busts.
2. Murray’s need to publicise his goods by circulating portraits of his most famous author.
3. What subsequent generations – whether from ignorance, enthusiasm, opportunism, a devotion to cliché and stereotype, sentimentality, idealism, or simple laziness, have created out of the great mass of Byronic evidence.

The exhibition is excellent, until it gets to Lawrence of Arabia, and I urge everyone to see it.  I shall be going again.

— P.C.

Anything to Avoid Having to Read Him (II)

Omnibus on Byron: “Exile on Fame Street”; Tx BBC1, 7 Nov 2002
1 Dec 2002

Ignore the poetry.  It’s the only way to make him into an acceptable Blairite consumerist item.  After all, he was “the patron saint of Hello magazine”.  But I’m afraid he never wrote anything as Hello-ish as that phrase about “sodomy in a bath” – he described a Turkish bath as “that marble palace of sherbet and sodomy”.  He didn’t say that he was “the most raped man in London”, either – he wrote, as it later emerges in the programme, that “I have been more ravished myself than any body since the Trojan war …”.  He’s always wittier than your version of him.

“Great poets like Byron belong to the whole of humanity …” intones the voice-over in the old news-clip they dug out, as the statue is unveiled at the Missolonghi Garden of Heroes (or is it the Borghese Palace? no-one seems to know) “…because they have felt and sung with a universal spirit.  They have been and are the greatest ambassadors to promote understanding between nations”.  And the Queen Mum, dreaming doubtless of when her next tipple’s coming, smiles like an automaton, showing that, like today’s Nottingham City Council, she doesn’t have the foggiest idea who this Byron person was, or why these weird foreigners have felt it necessary to put up a statue to him.

“When in doubt, print the myth”, says the programme towards the end.  It often ignores its own better insight.  Even when trying to give him historical dignity it gets the facts wrong.  It was not Lord Byron whom the Tienanmen Square protestors quoted, but Lord Acton (“Absolute power corrupts …”); and it was not Lord Byron whom the Gdansk shipyard workers quoted, but Byron filtered through the sentimentalisation of Mickiewicz.

A very strange decision is the one whereby all Byron’s words are read by an actor who sounds about thirteen years old.

The desire not to read Byron, not to find out who he was, or what he really did and said, wrote and thought, has a distinguished pedigree.  The three people closest to him over the longest period were Augusta, Hobhouse, and Teresa Guiccioli (these last two get no mention in the programme), and they all hated his funniest and most subversive writings.  Augusta anticipated the publication of “Don Giovanni”, as she called it, with horror; Teresa tried to prevent him from writing any more of it; and Hobhouse, having seen its first two cantos through the press, read no more of it till well after Byron’s death.  Hobhouse also initiated, of course, and very happily, the destruction of what may have been a prose masterpiece parallel to Don Juan, namely, his memoirs.  These were burnt by “five of Byron’s friends” as Sir John Betjeman says, astonishingly, in another archive clip.  They were by no means all his friends, and there were seven of them.

Yet again – after Frederic Raphael, Phyllis Grosskurth and Benita Eisler have demonstrated the barrenness of such an approach – the programme ladles it on about Byron’s life, and, for the most part, ignores his work.  His work, we protest in vain, was firstly great in itself, and secondly inspired Pushkin, Goethe, Heine, Mickiewicz, Stendhal, Verdi, Delacroix, Musset, Lermontov, Espronceda … the life, we protest in vain, was a disaster, propelled, by a sure instinct of destruction aimed both at self and others, to a premature death.  Three huge gestures of calculated unwisdom – the debts, the marriage, and the journey to Greece – cut him off from his home, his country and many of his friends, and drove him off on an endless Grand Tour with no shape or destination, in search of unachievable political triumphs, and only served in the end to alienate him from himself and from everyone about him, apart from his dogs.  It’s a wretched story, made bearable only by what he created from it in his poems and letters, and the humour he found even in the most hopeless situations.  Ignore the humour, the poems and the letters, as the programme by and large did, and what have you got …?

Well, yes, you have got what makes headlines in the supplements, and sells books – you’ve got loadsabonkin.  Well, well, so he was bisexual; we’ve actually known that for years, despite what the programme says.  Well, well, so he fucked lots of people – in Venice, a city whose entire population aimed at the world record in that line of activity.  Elsewhere he was as much of a one-lover-at-a-time person as most.  Yes, he probably loved his half-sister to excess … what no-one said was that he loved her because she found him funny, and sent him up all the time.  You wouldn’t know from the programme that he was funny.  Others of his time were as randy, and as unscrupulous.  What made him different from Michael Bruce?  From William Bankes?  From the Duke of Wellington?  From the entire Whig party, for goodness’ sake?  The answer – he was a great humourist, in the tradition of Shakespeare, Pope, and Fielding, and wrote great poetry.  If he hadn’t, what a minor figure he’d be.  Less interesting than Beau Brummel.

Clips from Robert Bolt’s nauseating movie Lady Caroline Lamb do nothing to show that he was anything other than a minor figure.  The Mills and Boon statement “He would … be extremely cruel to dozens of women … as many women as you can think of, really … he was a cruel lover” might have come from that script.  In fact, it comes, in the programme, from the lips of his latest biographer.

Now and again the programme cut to Anne Barton, but she appeared to be talking about a different person from everybody else – an important poet, who wrote (in one of the few quotations from his work that they allowed us to hear):

The stanza goes on:

If Hobhouse, Teresa, and the Omnibus programme-makers had had their way, Byron’s papers wouldn’t have survived his tomb, people would be thinking less, and we wouldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.  If all you knew about him was derived from the programme (which cut straight to the contemptuous Max Beerbohm cartoon straight after the above quotation, and which was, incidentally, riddled with factual errors, starting with where he was born) then you still wouldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

In any case, who cares, because as the programme’s last speaker said, “There are times when literature matters”, but “we’ve moved beyond all that now”.

President Bush and Mr Blair will be relieved to hear it.  And so would the Queen Mum have been, once the other two had explained it to her.

— P.C.