I found my daughter at the table, cutting square clouds from a shirt box, gluing them in a neat white grid to scribbled-blue paper. A day had never looked so orderly. She colored the sun a quarter each yellow, orange, red, black. Later I caught her inspecting the scene for flaws, using a dollar-bin kaleidoscope as a jeweler’s eye. When she finished, she handed me the paper, called it her sky contraption. My daughter invented it herself, or as she says, guessed it up. And I—or my body in its genius—guessed her up, the girl whose sun is a quarter black, whose sky is a kind of spreadsheet, a cloud in each field, value undetermined. She autosums the clouds until the formula should fall apart, but it doesn’t.
Byron: A Life in Ten Letters review – dispatches from a lusty life
This article is more than 1 year old
Andrew Stauffer conveys the vigour and pace of the poet’s escapades with brio, but stumbles when he suggests Byron anticipated modern celebrity
Peter Conrad
Tue 26 Mar 2024
Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, but in Byron’s case the unstoppable overflow consisted of a more vital and potent bodily fluid. “Is it not life?” he asked about his comic epic Don Juan, the annals of a globe-trotting seducer; he added that his qualification for writing it was that he had “tooled” in a post chaise, a hackney coach, a gondola, against a wall, and both on and under a table. He claimed to do his rhyming, as he nonchalantly called it, “at night / When a Cunt is tied close to my inkstand”, and on receiving royalty cheques from his publisher he vowed that “what I get by my brains I will spend on my bollocks”.
When not drinking, gambling and having sex, Byron also tossed off 3,000 letters, which race to keep up with the flux of his sensations as he reels through adulterous intrigues, literary squabbles and political conspiracies. Here, even more than in Don Juan, he writes while living in an unfinished present tense. Postscripts and interruptions, as Andrew Stauffer says, give his correspondence a “risky immediacy”, with “rapid-fire, time-stamped updates”; punctuation increases the tempo in a blitz of breathless dashes.
Stauffer’s brisk new biography develops as a commentary on 10 of these letters, chosen to mark the stages of Byron’s hurtling progress to an early death. After drinking, gambling and whoring at Cambridge – where, as an aristocrat, he obtained a degree without needing to sit for exams – he graduates to the dizzy social carousel of London. Harassed by creditors and in retreat from sexual scandals, he soon flees abroad. In Greece, he romps in a monastery dorm with some uncelibate male novices whom he calls “sylphs”. In Italy, he enters into a dangerous liaison with a countess whose husband, he fears, intends to slice his gizzard open with a stiletto. At last, joining the Greek campaign for independence from the Ottoman empire, the libertine reinvents himself as a man of action, only to be found unfit for battle; he dies of a fever in swampy Messolonghi at the age of 36.
As Stauffer writes, Byron’s private letters were “semi-public productions”, meant to be shared around. They also functioned as a substitute for genuine intimacy: courting his future wife, Annabella Milbanke, he seems happier sending her extravagant love notes than when they’re actually together. He is always performing for an invisible audience, experimenting with alternative versions of himself that he often borrows from characters in Shakespearean drama. A complaint about his strained nerves splices together a gruff, stoical shrug by Macbeth and one of Lear’s doddering laments; in a Greek crypt, he climbs into an open sarcophagus and declaims Hamlet’s meditation on the skull of Yorick. He arranges appropriate costumes for each of his impersonations. On his travels through the eastern Mediterranean, he acquires Albanian robes and brandishes a sabre, and in Italy he festoons himself with showy bling that startles English visitors. To go soldiering in Greece, he designs a scarlet and gold uniform and a cavalry helmet, which he never wears.
Byron’s role-playing persuades Stauffer that he anticipated “the theatrically confessional style of modern celebrity”, offering glimpses of a private self that may be just another Instagram pose. This notion prompts some crass anachronisms. Stauffer wonders if Byron’s Venetian orgies made him “a sex tourist”, although what truly fascinated him was the city’s illusory enchantments and its elegiac decline. Then as Byron rallies support for Greek liberation, Stauffer calls him an “influencer”, which is even more unjust. Influencers profit from commercial endorsements; Byron used his personal fortune to subsidise the insurgent patriots and had to watch as his funds were misappropriated or squandered.
Stauffer more justifiably deplores Byron’s sadistic treatment of women, whom he classified as “She-things”. When Annabella announced her pregnancy, he said he wished that their child would be stillborn; during the delivery he “sat in the drawing room below throwing empty soda bottles loudly against the ceiling”. Despite such deranged conduct, Stauffer believes that Byron longed to be saved from his “schizoid multiplicity”. But none of his lovers managed to calm his frenzy, and far from redeeming himself by enlisting in the Greek war, his involvement there ended in a gruesome fiasco.
Revising Wordsworth’s maxim about powerful feelings, Byron defined poetry as the lava of imagination, whose overflow prevented an eruption. When he fell ill at Messolonghi, another liquid spurted from him, this time fatally. His doctors, after administering a battery of emetics and purgatives, used leeches and lancets to siphon off two litres of blood, effectively killing him. For Byron this agony counted as a consummation: “Come, you damned set of butchers,” he said to the quacks, angrily challenging them to do their worst. So much for Stauffer’s theory that the laughter in his letters served as therapy, preserving a “comic worldview that is crucial for our sanity”. The rest of us may benefit from the medicine of self-mockery, but Byron was a tragic comedian, incorrigibly intent on self-destruction.
Byron: A Life in Ten Letters by Andrew Stauffer is published by Cambridge University Press (£25).
A drunk old man’s report of sighting an angel opens on to much broader mysteries
Nest Box
When the drunken old fool saw the barn owl,
he swore blind it was an angel. ‘Half-human, half-eagle,’
he told someone in the town square. ‘White flames in mid-
a ghost with wings,’ he crowed to the gathering crowd.
‘A weird presence that materialised out of the heavens,’
he said to the scrum of reporters before he keeled over.
They searched the meadow and heath but found only pellets of small bones and teeth
and skulls and part-digested fur and knotted hair.
Which was strange, because when the young girl saw the angel she swore blind it was a barn owl,
but when birdwatchers went to the copse and looked in the nest box
they found tinselly silver threads and luminous turds
and a warm meteorite and a few feathers made only of light.
***
Nest Box is from Simon Armitage’s Dwell, a slim hardback collection illustrated by the talented Cornish artist and printmaker, Beth Munro.
The briefly titled poems, such as Drey, Den, Hibernaculum and Insect Hotel, focus on the safe places, natural or devised, inhabited by the wildlife of the restored Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall. Eventually, we’re told, the poems will be “manifested physically at site-specific locations and in different guises” – as installations, treasure-trails, sculptures and so on. Dwell, therefore, is an illustrated print preview, an informal, engaging, often humorous short collection that will appeal to younger readers, and occasional readers, and sharpen every reader’s ecological conscience.
The Lost Gardens project, today and in its future planned restorations, has supreme ecological significance, as Dwell makes clear. It’s a story with major historical-political dimensions, too, concerning class, regionalism, and the first world war. I’m already speculating, and hoping, that a full-length collection might emerge later from the poet laureate’s heartfelt engagement with the “Willow Garden” (as its Cornish name translates). It is rich material.
While the poems in Dwell are simultaneously grounded and freely imaginative, Nest Box addresses more fundamental questions about what we define as real. It reminded me, on a first reading, of similar questions raised by one of my favourite children’s books, Skellig, by David Almond. There, the eponymous protagonist might almost be any homeless man, but, as he eventually admits to the children who have helped rescue him, he’s really “something combining aspects of human, owl and angel”. Almond acknowledges the influence of a short story by Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, usually classified as magic realism.
Armitage’s poem is more oblique: not contained easily in any genre box, it’s essentially concerned with questioning the human response to natural phenomena, and asking how we can provide “evidence” to challenge our possible illusions. There is an ecological force to the inquiry: humans need some enchantment to draw them into a less than self-centred concern with the environment, but we need to know what we see when we see “nature”, to best be able to preserve it. It’s a big question for ecopoets, too.
Nest Box begins when the “drunken old fool” (or supposed one) swears “blind” that he saw an angel in the sky. He burbles a riff of conflicting images: “half-human, half eagle”, “white flames in mid-air // a ghost with wings”. The reporters investigating the story, after the man has “keeled over”, search for evidence, but find only the remains of an owl’s last meal.
Armitage’s narrative, casual but determinedly objective, pursues the qualifications of rhetorical argument, the “strange” and the “but then”… A second observer, a young girl, swears her own sighting to have been a barn owl. But are the two visions incompatible? The evidence for the sighting of the angel consists of the remains of small mammals (“pellets of small bones and teeth, // and skulls, and part-digested fur / and knotted hair”). The evidence for the barn owl is pursued by birdwatchers, a breed of narrator we’d expect to be less unreliable than reporters. They check the nest box and find a mysterious, mixed assemblage: “tinselly silver threads / and luminous turds // and a warm meteorite / and a few feathers made only of light.” Are the angel and the owl sharing the nest box by any chance?
There are lively if not unpredictable “turns” as Armitage’s fast-moving, rhymed and half-rhymed couplets unroll, blending journalese and lyric tones. No adjudication is imposed: ultimately, the evidence for the nest box angel may be as unreliable as the old drunk’s sighting of the creature itself. The young and not-so-young reader’s imaginative intelligence is well-nourished. What evidence, we wonder, would show that an angel had used a nest-box meant for an owl? What is an angel? What is this one like? It’s clearly not a grumpy old man with wings, and not as grand and strange as what was seen by the “drunken old fool”, either. It’s an angel the size of a barn-owl, or smaller. Should we think of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica? Perhaps it’s not any traditional kind of angel, but, in view of the “warm meteorite”, not essentially supernatural. The muscles of ratiocination and imagination need to be continually exercised by us earth-dwellers, not least because life-forms on planets other than ours are almost certain to be discovered one day soon.
Armitage’s “Welcome Note” to Dwell is relevant to Nest Box. He describes how his grandparents fought to guard the eaves of their proudly well-maintained council house against messy nesting house martins. “This kind of inhospitality,” Armitage writes, “has increased in direct proportion to soaring human populations, and the consequence of homelessness for most living things is extinction. House martins are now a red-listed bird.” It’s something to bear in mind as we enjoy the magic and humour of the angel-owl but ponder the last traces of its residency in the well-meant nest box.
