Mad, Bad, Impossible to Know - Page 3

The charm hasn't died. In the last decade alone, there have by my count been at least twelve full or partial biographies of Byron, and the last few months have delivered two new examples of both. Both have a bit of a "truth problem." Biographers of the famous dead toil under a burden of delivering fresh revelations, and long-dead subjects can make it temptingly easy to come up with unprovable theories. This is the downfall of Fiona MacCarthy's big comprehensive life. David Crane sets his sights a little lower, and acquits himself reasonably well.

MacCarthy's Byron: Life and Legend arrives with a handicap, as the last full-scale work, Benita Eisler's 1999 Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, set a standard that is hard to beat: zesty, intelligent, unstinting on both the art and the life. MacCarthy does, however, have a slight scholarly edge: access to a horde of previously unknown Byron letters, still under the keep of the heirs of Byron's publisher, John Murray. On the plus side, she considerably firms up the incest matter, if it needed firming up, with a letter from Byron to Augusta where he considers what place the two of them will share in hell. MacCarthy also brings some welcome skepticism to the idea that Byron fathered Augusta's daughter Medora, an idea he himself often flirted with. She also does a nice bit of detective work in determining the cause of Byron's death; not malaria, as had long been thought, but Mediterranean tick fever, possibly contracted from one of his dogs.

That, alas, is about it. With her excellent 1996 biography of William Morris, MacCarthy had a relatively fresh field of inquiry and was able to get to the soul of an artistic community — the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — through one quiet, unassuming man. Byron defeats her; too large to be boring, but larger than her ability. She doesn't have Eisler's narrative flair, and the book is fatally flawed by a dull "surprise" of her own invention: Byron was gay.

Byron's sexual relationships with men are no longer news; he was outed as bisexual years ago. MacCarthy tries to up the ante by saying that Byron actually preferred men, that he was gay by nature. To prove her point she channels the ghost of Dr. Freud, relies on guesswork, and trusts the reader not to follow her argument too closely.

To start with, MacCarthy says Byron's "female attachments dwindled quickly in interest." Oh really? Like the year he spent absorbed in Lady Caroline Lamb? Like the eight months he spent with Lady Oxford? Like the year he spent married to Annabella? Like the never-ending love he had for Augusta? How about the relationship with Teresa, which continued off and on from 1819 until he left for Greece in 1823? Every one of these relationships had a thick, novelistic density to it; there's nothing "quick" about them, and only the Oxford one can be said to have dwindled. The others were terminated by violent dismissal, exhaustion, or Byron's own death. MacCarthy writes that Byron's "male loves seem to have deepened and flourished with the years." So far as I could tell, only Edleston and Rushton came close to filling this bill; were the majority of his gay liaisons anything more than predatory quickies with boys at school or in Turkey or Greece — boys whom he treated as casually as he did actresses and chambermaids? The picture that continually emerges from MacCarthy's research, as well as from Eisler's and David Crane's, isn't of a man who saw men or women as a substitute for either. It's of a self-absorbed baby who just couldn't stop playing tricks with his person — the trickier, the better.

Article Author: Rodney Welch

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