Restoring Coherency to Byron

Kenneth L. Brewer

Clinical Associate Professor of Arts and Humanities The University of Texas at Dallas

Anthony Peattie, The Private Life of Lord by Douglass as an “exhaustive recounting of Byron. Unbound, xxi + 586 pp., £35 cloth. the poet’s day-to-day existence,” is three volumes, while Benita Eisler’s outstanding 2000 biography, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, consists of 880 pages of small font. n his survey of “Byron’s Life Some recent biographers, perhaps taking and His Biographers,” Paul Douglass their cue from Marchand’s 1970 Byron: observes that the “irresistible material A Portrait, an updated and condensed I[of Byron’s life] has made a mountain of version of his earlier biography (but still biographical writing, including over 200 weighing in at 518 pages), have even substantial biographies, dozens of memoirs, engaged in product differentiation in their countless pamphlets and biographical titles: thus Edna O’Brien’s 2010 Byron in essays, and innumerable fictional Love: A Short, Daring Life, referring both to treatments in novels, poems, plays, and Byron’s thirty-six year life and the relatively operas.” Douglass’s essay was published in modest 228 pages of the book itself. 2004, and that mountain has only grown Anthony Peattie is emphatically of the higher since. Perhaps contributing to the maximalist school of Byron biography—the mountain metaphor is not just the sheer book is massive, and so is the research that number of biographies of Byron, but that went into it—even though his study is each one tends to be a mountain in itself— specialized, as the title suggests, and not a perhaps a “mountain range” is a better comprehensive biography. It would be metaphor. The first full-length biography, intellectually tidy if the history of Byron Thomas Moore’s Life of Lord Byron, was biography were an upside-down pyramid, published in two volumes, one in 1830 (six in which generalized biographies in time years after Byron’s death), with the second gave way to more specialized ones, but this volume arriving in 1832. Leslie Marchand’s in fact is not the case. Even before Moore’s 1957 Byron: A Biography, aptly characterized biography was published, there were

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 27 5/28/20 3:16 PM already narrowly focused memoirs of Byron illustrations of two boxing matches published by friends and colleagues, some involving pugilist Tom Johnson. Nearly of them highly specific, such as Pietro every page contains a visual image that is Gamba’s 1824 A Narrative of Lord Byron’s illuminating or unusual (often from private Last Journey to Greece. And while much of collections), from portraits of Byron’s the interesting work on Byron’s life in mother to bits of Byron’s clothing, to recent years has focused on particular issues illustrations that accompanied editions of such as his sexuality, there continue to be his poems. The effect of this is to remind us compelling generalized biographies as well, that Byron lived, intensely, in a world of as the example of Eisler’s biography objects. Douglass describes recent Byron indicates. It is tempting to claim that we biographies as “pay[ing] more attention to live in a golden age of Byron biography, but Byron’s overt behavior than his genius.” it has pretty much always been a golden age Moore used the word “genius” ninety-nine of Byron biography since his death. times in the first half alone of his biography; As Peattie cheerfully admits in his Peattie uses it precisely one time in 586 introduction, his study does not cover the pages. Peattie clearly fits the category of entirety of Lord Byron’s private life, but biographers who focus on Byron’s “overt rather “his intermittent eating disorder and behavior,” with an emphasis on material his obsession with fatherhood,” noting that phenomena that affected Byron’s behavior. these “may be related to one another.” This begins with Byron’s club-foot, about Peattie eschews a straightforward which he was always intensely self- chronological account in the first half of the conscious. Peattie quotes Mary Shelley to book, beginning in medias res with “Byron’s persuasive effect: “No action of Lord Byron’s First Diet” in 1807, when he was nearly life—scarce a line he has written—but was nineteen. In the second half, which focuses influenced by his personal defect.” on Byron and fatherhood, he follows a more Following Mary Shelley, Peattie grounds chronological structure. While Peattie’s book Byron’s creative work in the physical realities can certainly be read straight through with he endured, and he views his study as cutting great pleasure, some repetition suggests that through the thicket of “Byron Studies” in Peattie assumes that readers will prefer to order to restore hard-headed common sense dip in and out, sometimes reading only to discussions of the life of Byron (as a specific sections in encyclopedia style. freelance writer, “I am not looking for tenure,” Without a doubt the most impressive he notes). For example, Peattie includes a aspect of Peattie’s study is the illustrations, striking image of the boots Byron wore as a beginning with a gorgeous dust-jacket cover young man, noting that the one for the and endpapers by Howard Hodgkin. Peattie defective foot included a metal plate that notes that Moore’s biography included only weighed over a pound. He observes that one visual image, though this scarcity made there has been considerable debate about this image an extremely important one in what precisely was wrong with Byron’s foot: codifying the “look” of Romanticism. It is not “Recent diagnoses include Little’s disease an exaggeration, however, to state all of the (spastic paraplegia), infantile paralysis, beautifully reproduced illustrations in injury associated with post-natal trauma, Peattie’s book are important. These begin congenital dysplasia and the neurogenic with a funerary urn Byron had commissioned foot deformities associated with spinal as a gift to fellow writer Walter Scott, and end dysraphism.” Peattie then drily concludes, with Byron’s boxing screen, which contained “In any case, it often hurt.”

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 28 5/28/20 3:16 PM As Peattie compellingly demonstrates, Dieting for Byron Byron himself struggled mightily against the presence of gross material reality in his life. represented a heroic Byron was a thoroughgoing metaphysical dualist, and Peattie offers a list of opposed endeavour, to free the terms that structured Byron’s thinking, such spirit from the body. as “body/embodied” versus “soul,” “flesh and blood” versus “phantom,” and so on. Peattie grants that this list may seem “facile, Moore, “[N]one of us had been apprised of reductive” but “it corresponds to the way his peculiarities with respect to food . . . Byron thought and felt about the world.” there was nothing upon the table which Like many recent biographers, Peattie [Rogers’s] noble guest could eat or drink. emphasizes the role that Byron’s Scottish Neither meat, fish, nor wine, would Lord Calvinist background played in his loathing Byron touch. . . .” Byron ultimately dined of the material realm, though he applies this happily on potatoes and vinegar. Peattie framework with a light touch (twelve mentions points out that during the Napoleonic of Calvinism, compared to around twice that Wars, beef-eating was associated with many for “foot”), not regarding Calvinism as a British patriotism, and that while Byron did means to explain everything about Byron. An avoid beef, in his own view, primarily to interesting manifestation of Byron’s attempt lose weight, he also believed that beef had to transcend the material was his dislike of negative effects on a person’s character, the poetry of John Keats: “Byron reacted with asking Moore, “[D]on’t you find that … intense hostility to Keats’s indulgently beef-eating makes you ferocious?” sensual poetry: he assumed that Keats suffered Byron’s compulsive dieting, Peattie from ‘inordinate self-love’ and identified his argues, has often been misunderstood. poetry with masturbation.” Byron was far The Victorians tended to dismiss it as more at home with Percy Shelley’s more further evidence of Byron’s (considerable) philosophical poetry, though Peattie also personal vanity, and this view continued re-establishes the importance of Samuel well into the twentieth century. Peattie Taylor Coleridge as a kindred soul to Byron provides ample evidence that biographers through their shared interest in anti-heroic have neglected Byron’s obsession with food, protagonists such as Milton’s Satan. though in the twentieth century, accounts “Anorexia Byronica,” the most have tended to react against Victorian enthralling section of Peattie’s study, earnestness by “adopting a tone of jaunty focuses on Byron’s eating. Byron once told a casualness” towards Byron’s determination friend that “he would rather not exist than to be slim; Marchand, for example, be large.” Byron blamed his mother for his suggested that Byron dieted in order to be large size, and his incessant dieting was more successful as a seducer of women. notorious among his contemporaries. While Peattie, as we have seen, is not Peattie includes a detailed description of a much interested in debates about the dinner Byron attended on November 4, 1811, nature of Byron’s foot problem, he devotes at the home of the poet Samuel Rogers in a chapter to “Interpretations and London. Two other poets, Thomas Moore Diagnoses” of Byron’s eating issues. Peattie (his future biographer) and Thomas argues that Byron was in fact anorexic, a Campbell also were invited. Byron’s behavior diagnosis, he notes, that was first argued astonished the other poets. According to for in 1982. The reader might worry that

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 29 5/28/20 3:16 PM this approach is a trendy, perhaps “A man of genius makes no mistakes,” anachronistic medicalizing of Byron’s Stephen Dedalus observes in James Joyce’s behavior (in a similar way to how 19th century Ulysses: “His errors are volitional and are literary characters from Bartleby the Scrivener the portals of discovery.” Byron’s early to Sherlock Holmes are now regarded as biographers tended to view him, in being on the spectrum of autism). Peattie is moralistic terms, as a man of genius who well aware of this danger, arguing that we had in fact made many mistakes. They must look deeper than “the most banal separated, in this sense, his life from his interpretation of Byron’s disorder,” which is art. Peattie has restored coherency to that he starved himself “in order to assert Byron, and even if he avoids the term control—where that was possible—over his “genius,” he gives us a Byron whose private own body. Peattie suggests that “[d]ieting life influenced his art in deeper ways than for Byron represented a heroic endeavour, we have seen before, evidenced particularly to free the spirit from the body, a battle for in his careful reading of Don Juan in the independence that paralleled (if it did not latter half of the book. Peattie’s beautifully also reflect) his enthusiasm for other written, beautifully illustrated study will struggles for independence: his own from no doubt become required reading on his mother; Italy’s from Austria; and Byron for the general public, and yes, for Greece’s from Turkey.” those in Byron Studies, for a long time.

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