No biographer of Byron is short of materials. There is his copious correspondence, alive with irony and mischief. There are the memoirs that poured from the press after his death in 1824, many offering preserved fragments of his conversation or recollections of his character. And there is his self-dramatising poetry, packed with apparent confessions and teasing autobiographical allusions. Tellingly, the very subtitle of Benita Eisler's biography is a self-description of one of Byron's poems.
The problem for the biographer is exactly that Byron styled himself so brilliantly for posterity. In one of his letters to Lady Melbourne, the correspondent to whom he wrote most freely and knowingly, an aside in the midst of gossip catches this self-consciousness. 'I never laughed at P- (by the bye, this is an initial which might puzzle posterity when our correspondence bursts forth in the 20th century).' Burst forth it has, and puzzled the annotators have duly been.
Biographical sympathy for those variously seduced by what a contemporary reluctantly admitted was an 'irresistible attraction in his manner' does not mean vindication. Byron's half-sister Augusta, 'amoral as a rabbit' in Leslie Marchand's authoritative life of Byron, is made fully responsible for her incestuous and mutually destructive affair with the poet. Byron's wife, Annabella, is not absolved from vengefulness and stupidity, but she is shown as rational in her determination to blacken her husband's character.
Annabella's letters and 'narratives', not available to Marchand, but now deposited by her descendants in the Bodleian Library, have persuaded Eisler that she was understandably labouring to ensure her custody of her child, Ada. (After all, as Eisler points out, Byron was later to separate another daughter, Allegra, from her mother, Claire Clairmont, and to allow her to die neglected.) So Annabella collected the testimonies of servants to Byron's 'deranged' behaviour in their last weeks together - threats, drunkenness, violent sexual advances only a few days after she had given birth. Eisler makes the accounts seem like plausible glimpses of a hellish marriage.
She allows others to emerge from the gloom of Byron's glamour: his closest friend, John Cam Hobhouse, comic and admirable in his loyalty; his publisher, John Murray, endlessly lambasted in Byron's letters but a man of surprisingly liberal tastes; his confidante, Lady Melbourne, whom Eisler calls Byron's 'satanic Other'. She was mother-in-law to Byron's most notorious lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, and aunt to Annabella Milbanke, who, partly through her machinations, would become Byron's wife. Clever and infinitely worldly, she becomes in this book a representative of the liberal and libertine Whig aristocracy to which Byron belonged. From this class Byron learned his elegant ennui, turned to exotic melancholy in Childe Harold, the bestseller that made him famous overnight. His resentment at its influence seems one of his most genuine passions.
His sense of being wounded and tormented was poetically useful, but in his own eyes he was indeed a disabled debauche, ever aware of his club foot. According to his friend Tom Moore, he blamed his mother, whose insistence on corsets or dislike of obstetrical examinations had somehow made him, as he called himself, le diable boiteux: the lame devil. No one can doubt the bitterness who reads his sour satire 'The Waltz', where the fleetness of foot required for this exciting new dance becomes a metaphor for the licentiousness of the entire beau monde. The disability made for Byron's obsession with swimming, water being the element that freed him and made him strong; along the Thames from one side of London to the other, over the Tagus at Lisbon, across the lagoon and down the grand canal at Venice, and, most famously, across the Hellespont.
Eisler's digressions into the details of Byron's obsessions make this a readable book as well as a long one. She has room for what is odd and characteristic, from his peculiar starve-binge eating habits, to his anxious earnestness about matters of dress, to his failures of taste in interior decor. Occasionally she leads herself into suspect psychologising in order to explain his behaviour. His mother's tempestuous changes of mood 'convinced him of the unreliability of women'. He enjoyed the rigours of his travels in Albania because, 'troubled by evidence of the feminine in his character', he sought 'to confirm his manhood'. He hated Lord Elgin because he was Scottish, like his mother, and had a facial deformity which was the counterpart of Byron's lameness. Even Byron's dogs are not immune from psychological insight, their scraps with his mother's pug being confidently diagnosed as 'a projection of their owner's hostility'.
More convincingly, Eisler emphasises his intermittent homosexuality. This too was a matter of self-fashioning. Byron belonged to a gay subculture while in Cambridge, communicating with fellow 'Methodists' (as they liked to call themselves) in high-camp code. His half-sister apart, his expressions of deepest feeling were reserved for boys. It was the Trinity College chorister John Edleston ('Thyrza') who inspired his most agonised love poetry. The travels that he turned into Childe Harold and a series of poetic Eastern tales became a pursuit of 'Greek love'. A famous portrait of Byron as Romantic Wanderer shows him with his 'page', Robert Rushton, in attendance; Eisler confirms Lady Caroline Lamb's report that Rushton was another whom Byron had seduced. In all things he styled himself a crosser of boundaries.
All this might become mere tittle-tattle, as it was during Byron's own life, but Eisler recognises that the narcissism and libertinism are interesting because they were transmuted into the 'sad merriment' of his best writing. This is truest in his greatest poem, Don Juan, where, both comically and poignantly, 'The flesh is frail, and so the soul undone'. Byron's life gave him the stuff of his poetry, but the poetry - in its ruefulness and self-mockery - escaped the life.
