Consigned to the Flames III: Lord Byron

{Lord Byron in Albanian dress, painted by Thomas Phillips, 1813}

You had to know I'd get to this one sooner or later. Here's how Fiona MacCarthy describes it in her Byron: Life and Legend (2002):

On 17 May 1824, after three days of agonized discussions, Byron's memoirs were burnt in the grate of [Byron's publisher] John Murray's Albermarle Street drawing room, in the most famous sacrificial scene of literary history. Of the six men assembled in the room--[Byron's friend Thomas] Moore and his supporter the sociable Irish poet Henry Luttrell, [Byron's friend John Cam] Hobhouse, John Murray, [Byron's half-sister] Augusta Leigh's ally Wilmot Horton, and Lady Byron's representative Colonel Doyle--only Moore and Luttrell had actually read the memoirs, if Murray had indeed resisted the temptation to do so in the years the manuscript lay in his possession. Moore was there under protest. He and Henry Luttrell had pressed the case for "the injustice we thought it would be to Byron's memory to condemn the work wholly, and without even opening it, as if it were a pest bag." Moore pleaded that at least the manuscript should be carefully perused and if necessary censored but that "what was innoxious and creditable to Lord Byron" should be preserved.

Those of us who love such unexpectedly revealing personal narratives as Boswell's journals can't help but imagine that we might have had something as entertaining from Byron. Compared to Byron, after all, Boswell was a prude, and Byron’s letters and journals themselves are such extravagant fun that it’s not hard to conjure up a book that would be a delectable, ridiculous mix of Casanova and Rousseau.

The available evidence, however, suggests that such a view may be overly romantic. If Byron's letter to John Murray initially proposing the memoirs--to be published after Byron's death, "for a man always looks dead after his own life has appeared"--is to be believed, the manuscript contained probably at least as much hinting and beating around the bush as it did explicit detail:

The Life is Memoranda not Confessions. I have left out all my loves (except in a general way) and many other of the most important things (because I must not compromise other people) so that it is like the play of Hamlet--"the part of Hamlet omitted by particular desire." But you will find many opinions, and some fun, with a detailed account of my marriage and its consequences, as true as a party concerned can make such accounts, for I suppose we are all prejudiced.

Byron gave the memoirs to his friend Moore in late 1819 (He joked in a letter to George Kinnaird that he “put my life (in M.S.) into his hands.”), telling Moore that he was free to share them with appropriate friends. Fiona MacCarthy estimates that Moore circulated them to about twenty people before--again with Byron's permission--selling them to John Murray for £2,000 (which Murray paid back following the burning). As for the contents:

A minority of readers found themselves outraged. William Gifford, who had read the memoirs at Murray’s request, reported that “the whole Memoirs were fit only for a brothel and would damn Lord B to certain infamy if published.” Lord John Russell found three or four pages “too gross and indelicate for publication.” But the consensus of opinion was that Byron’s memoirs were a bit of a damp squib. Two weeks after the destruction Mary Shelley wrote to Trelawny: “There was not much in them I know, for I read them some years ago at Venice, but the world fancied that it was to have a confession of the hidden feelings of one, concerning whom they are always passionately anxious.”

Is it possible that the memoirs consisted less of a catalogue of amorous adventures and more of an attempt to justify Byron’s indefensible behavior in his marriage, which Karen Joy Fowler has described well as “improbably gothic in its awfulness”? Byron did mention the marriage in his letter to Murray. MacCarthy also quotes a letter from Lord to Lady Byron in 1819, three years after she’d left him, in which Lord Byron expresses a wish that his ex-wife would read the memoirs for accuracy, noting however that

You will find nothing to flatter you—nothing to lead you to the most remote supposition that we could ever have been—or be happy together.

Could it all have been an unconvincing attempt to clear his name, if not completely, then at least a tiny bit?

In any case, it’s understandable that Lady Byron’s friends wouldn’t want to take the chance of an account of the marriage from Byron’s perspective coming to light; add in the concern of relatively respectable friends such as Hobhouse--who might have been worried in part about the possibility of Byron recounting homosexual adventures--and the fate of the memoirs begins to seem inevitable. As Vic Gatrell puts it in City of Laughter,

Byron and his ilk were laid low by somethign deeper than a passing spasm of moralizing. A cultural revolution was more like it, and Byron's lament for the shift from cunt to cant was no bad way of describing what had happened.

The prudes won out, and the match was struck.

I’ll let Byron himself have the last word, reminding us that whatever we may lose to the flames, we lose far more every day to the inevitable wear of time. In his “Detached Thoughts,” he wrote,

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us.—a year impairs, a luster obliteratres.—There is little distinct left without an effort of memory,--then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment—but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?

Some laughs, or, "A dark, even-handed misanthropy"

To leaven yesterday's tales of robbery, killing, and general amorality, today let's have some humor!

I've really just got a few funny items for you, but I think that can be excused when this first one is, I venture, the funniest thing I've ever read. It is, not unexpectedly, by P. G. Wodehouse, and it opens the story "Buried Treasure," a tale of the Angler's Rest club that is collected in Lord Emsworth and Others (1937). The only additional introduction you need is the knowledge that in Angler's Rest stories Wodehouse identifies each speaker by the name of his drink. And now, to the joke:

The situation in Germany had come up for discussion in the bar parlour of the Angler's Rest, and it was generally agreed that Hitler was standing at the crossroads and would soon be compelled to do something definite. His present policy, said a Whisky and Splash, was mere shilly-shallying.

"He'll have to let it grow or shave it off," said the Whisky and Splash. "He can't go on sitting on the fence like this. Either a man has a moustache or he has not. There can be no middle course."

Wodehouse's most impressive achievement in those paragraphs is to maintain complete surprise: even though you know a joke's coming, his opening lines get your thoughts running so completely in one particular track that the sudden jump to another, previously unconsidered track is hilarious.

Now let's shift from the verbal to the visual, and from the twentieth century to the eighteenth, where I've been spending so much of my reading time lately. One of the books that's been holding me in that period is Tom Jones (1749), and the designer of the Penguin Classics edition deserves plaudits for choosing the perfect cover image, James Gillray's print Fashionable Contrasts;--or--The Duchess's Little Shoe Yielding to the Magnitude of the Duke's Feet (1792).



Created to celebrate and satirize the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of York, the print's simplicity is stunning, especially when contrasted with the other works of Gillray and his contemporaries, which tended to be overloaded with characters and symbols. And what a title!

Gillray, whose work I've noted before, was a contemporary of Blake, Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank, an artistic descendant of Hogarth, and an influence on Goya. As Vic Gatrell tells us in his spectacularly entertaining City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2006),

Gillray was an enigmatic fellow, and we're not going to like him. In appearance he seems to have been rather daunting, so it comes as no surprise to learn that, with his "slouching gait and careless habits," he was too taciturn to have intimate friends. As the artist-journalist W. H. Pyne remembered, he was "meanly mischievous" to other people and as lazy in his personal relationships as in his art, and "a stranger to the feelings of friendship." But although he was "a careless sort of cynic, one who neither loved, nor hated society," "his aberrations were more the results of low habits and the want of self-esteem, than from malignity, envy, or meanness."

And though, as Gatrell points out,

Artistic London was a small world, and he grew into his trade alongside significant others. . . . [and in] their tavern lives, these men mingled with literary and theatrical hacks as well as each other, acting out the fashionable cult of dissolute genius with growing conviction,

Gillray seems never quite to have been fully a member of that fraternity of artists, standing decidedly aloof.

Except for a few depictions of St James's characters from life, his works lack warmth or affection. . . . Many are moved by a dark, even-handed misanthropy--by something approaching hatred, mixed with sadism.

That certainly seems the case when you look at some of Gillray's other works, such as this celebration of Nelson's victory on the Nile, Destruction of the French Collossus, which could with some adjustments have been slipped into the pages of an EC comic of the 1950s:



Given the horrors clearly available to Gillray's imagination, it may not surprise you to learn that he went insane in his later years. In his last days he thought George Cruikshank (later to be celebrated for his illustrations of Dickens) was Sir Joshua Reynolds and he himself was Rubens, while a suicide attempt in 1811 inadvertently recreated some of the grotesquely comic air of his prints:

He once tried to throw himself out of [his patron] Hannah Humphrey's upper window, and was saved because he jammed his head and was spotted from White's club across the street.

But now I've allowed my interest in Gillray to derail me from my initial intention to leaven your day with humor--can anything be further from the comedic than suicidal insanity? I'll try to make up for it with, first, another Gillray, this one with none of the elegance of Fashionable Contrasts--for as any Swift fan could tell you, when all else fails, one can always opt for scatology, which Gillray did in his 1793 take on the possibility of a French invasion, The French Invasion;--or--John Bull, Bombarding the Bum-Boats:



Gross, yes, but hard not to smile at, and presumably effective politically. The French, it seems, may find themselves needing the services of the Poopsmith.

Having descended into the gutter, I'll stay there and close with this pleasantly scurillous anecdote that Henry Fielding tosses off in Tom Jones regarding actress Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II and good friend of I've Been Reading Lately favorite Lord Rochester:

On this subject, reader, I must stop a moment, to tell thee a story. "The famous Nell Gwynn, stepping one day, from a house where she had made a short visit, into her coach, saw a great mob assembled, and her footman all bloody and dirty; the fellow, being asked by his mistress the reason of his being in that condition, answered, `I have been fighting, madam, with an impudent rascal who called your ladyship a wh--re.' `You blockhead,' replied Mrs Gwynn, `at this rate you must fight every day of your life; why, you fool, all the world knows it.'

`Do they?' cries the fellow, in a muttering voice, after he had shut the coach-door, `they shan't call me a whore's footman for all that.'"

Finally, since it's a day of visuals, and I've already violated all bounds of good taste, I may as well add some nudity. Here's a 1672 engraving by Richard Thomson of a painting by Peter Cross depicting Nell Gwyn as Cupid:



Gwyn's sly smile and, um . . . perkiness . . . may be NSFW these days, but they must have been just fine in Samuel Pepys's day, for he reportedly kept a copy hanging over his desk at the Admiralty.

From the Department of Almost But Not Quite

1 In recent weeks, Ed and his readers at the Dizzies have been discussing the persistence in literature of the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of the snake that eats its own tail, a metaphor for circularity and infinity. I remembered that discussion late Wednesday night as I was reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and came across the following scene, which finds Luna Lovegood leading Harry into Ravenclaw's common room:

[Luna] knocked once [on the eagle-shaped door knocker], and in the silence it sounded to Harry like a cannon blast. At once the beak of the eagle opened, but instead of a bird's call, a soft, musical voice said, "Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?"

"Hmm . . . What do you think, Harry?" said Luna, looking thoughtful.

"What? Isn't there just a password?"

"Oh no, you've got to answer a question," said Luna.

"What if you get it wrong?"

"Well, you have to wait for somebody who gets it right," said Luna. "That way you learn, you see?"

"Yeah . . .Trouble is, we can't really afford to wait for anyone else, Luna."

"No, I see what you mean," said Luna seriously. "Well then, I think the answer is that a circle has no beginning."

"Well reasoned," said the voice, and the door swung open.

The phoenix or the flame? The head or the tail of the snake? An ouroboros in Harry Potter, almost . . . but not quite.

2 On the train and around the city the past week, I've seen dozens and dozen of people reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But I've also seen, just today, people reading Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Colleen McCullough's Fortune's Favorites, Anna Karenina, Walden, Michael Connelly's The Lincoln Lawyer, Gregory Maguire's Wicked, The Turn of the Screw, and, as seems to be the case any time I get on the train, The Kite Runner.

So almost everyone's reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows . . . but not quite.

3 In the introduction to his fascinating City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2006), Vic Gatrell writes about a gentlewoman named Lady Worsley:

In 1782, nearly a dozen prints circulated in fashionable London that were not at all designed to trump her high standing and connections. Costing a shilling plain or two shillings coloured and exhibited in printshop windows, they were bought by the great if not the good in malice and delight.

In one, by the up-and-coming caricaturist, James Gillray, entitled Sir Richard Worse-than-sly, Exposing his Wifes Bottom--O Fye!, a man hoists another man on to his shoulders to allow the latter to peep through a bathhouse window at the naked Lady Worsley as she washes herself demurely. In bluff military fashion, the peeping man remarks to the other below: 'Charming view of the back settlements, Sr Richard.' 'Good lack! my lady,' her attending maid exclaims in alarm, 'the captn will see all for nothing.'

The print illustrated a scene that had been revealed during a suit Sir Richard Worsley filed against the captain referred to in the print, Captain Bissett, for "criminal conversation" with Lady Worsley. According to Gatrell:

The court heard that while Worsley was quartered in the military camp at Cox's Heath, Lady Worsley had often used the nearby bathhouse at Maidstone. On one occasion her husband had tapped on the bathhouse door, saying 'Bissett is going to get up to look at you.' Hoist Bissett up to the window Worsley duly did, for him to gaze on her nakedness.

Perhaps needless to say, given this revelation the court found Worsley's suit less than convincing and awarded him only a single shilling in damages for the adultery.

The story is similar to the famous tale told by Herodotus about Candaules, King of Lydia, and his friend Gyges:

Now this Candaules became enamoured of his own wife and therefore thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. One of the members of his personal guard, Gyges the son of Dascylus, was an especial favourite of his, and Candaules use to discuss his most important concerns with him; in particular, he used to keep praising his wife's appearance, because he thought she was so beautiful. Candaules was destined to come to a bad end, and so after a while he said to Gyges, 'Gyges, I don't think you believe what I tell you about my wife's looks--and it's true that people trust their ears less than their eyes--so I want you to find a way to see her naked.'

The proposal made Gyges extremely uncomfortable, but Candaules was his king, so he allowed Candaules to hide him in the queen's bedroom. A painting of the scene, below, features in Anthony Powell's Temporary Kings; his characters encounter the painting in Venice, which allows Powell to use the tale to highlight a pair of his favorite topics, sex and power.


{"Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, As She Goes to Bed" by William Etty}

The queen discovered Gyges in her chambers and, ashamed, told him,

Gyges, there are now two paths before you: I can leave it up to you which one you choose to take. Either you can kill Candaules and have me and the kingdom of Lydia for your own, or you must die yourself right now, so that you will never again do exactly what Candaules wants you to do and see what you should not see. Yes, either her or you must die--either the one whose idea this was or the one who saw me naked when he had no right to do so.

Gyges was horrified, but he realized he was trapped. He opted for killing Candaules (for which the queen already had a suspiciously well-developed plan), took the throne, and reigned as King of Lydia for thirty-eight years.

The result of the revelation of Sir Richard and Lady Worsley's immodesty, on the other hand, was of much less consequence: public embarrassment, the creation and sale of a variety of satirical prints that they surely knew were hidden in the sideboards and bedsteads of their supposed friends, and the revelation, according to Horace Walpole, that Lady Worsley had "enjoyed the favours of thirty-four young men of the first quality."

The story of the Worsleys is almost an analogue for the story of Candaules and Gyges . . . but not quite.

4 I'll end with a passage I read on the train on the way home today, from Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, in which Tolstoy is writing about Tsar Nikolai I.


{Portrait by Franz Kruger of Emperor Nicholas I of Russia, 1852}

The constant, clear, vile blatancy of the flattery of those around him had brought him to the point where he no longer saw his contradictions, no longer adapted his actions and words to reality, logic, or even to simple good sense, but was absolutely certain that all his instructions, no matter how senseless, unjust and mutually incompatible, became entirely sensible, just and mutually compatible simply because it was he that gave them.

I have to confess that it's only wishful thinking that lands this passage in the Department of Almost But Not Quite.


Sadly, there's no not quite about it: put that passage in one of Ron Suskind's books about the Bush administration and you'd never think it the slightest bit out of place.