Mad, Bad, Impossible to Know - Page 4

MacCarthy, however, thinks that no evidence only proves her point. Byron's male friendships between the years 1811 and 1816 were "muted," she writes, and his attentions to women were all the more cruel because "he was being false to his own heart." Got that? The more women he loved and ditched, the more it only proves he's gay. Women, she says, seemed to distract him "from the homosexual instincts he was straining to repress." Some repression. Of Byron's torrid affair with Lady Oxford, MacCarthy herself writes: "He would claim he never felt a stronger passion, which she returned with equal ardor."

Still, she plugs away, rejecting common sense at every turn. When Claire Clairmont tells Byron "I had ten times rather be your male friend than your mistress," MacCarthy is quick on the draw: "Had she sensed, or heard rumors, of his homosexuality?" My guess is she simply knew that Byron's closest and most enduring male friendships — with Shelley, John Cam Hobhouse, John Murray, numerous others — lasted because no sex was involved (that we know of, anyway). Later, when Byron calls Venice a "sea-Sodom," MacCarthy says "It seems likely that his Venetian sexual exploits were a good deal more varied than he claimed." Her writing is full of these nagging suppositional hang-nails: lots of likelys, perhapses and surely-he-must-haves. If Byron makes homoerotic overtures, MacCarthy leaps all over it; if he doesn't, she decides he's in denial. The more women Byron scores, the more marriages he wrecks, the more children out of wedlock, the more MacCarthy simply insists he's compensating for what he really wants.

Actually, I think there's something else going on here, something MacCarthy doesn't acknowledge. Fulfilling as the Edleston and Rushton affairs may have been, both lack the one element Byron always needed from lovers: drama, preferably with a strong dose of exhibitionism. Case in point: his marriage to Annabella Milbanke.

This ill-advised pairing first came about in the hope of effectively killing off another obsessive relationship: Byron's open affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, married at the time to William Lamb, a member of Parliament. "Caro" was an all-consuming, somewhat psychotic thing, and in Byron she had met her match, famously describing him as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." They knew just how to push each other's buttons, with Caro designing costumes for their erotic games and sending Byron clippings of her pubic hair. The affair, often played out in full view of the London bourgeoisie, had a strong sense of shock theater to it, and wasn't doing the families involved any favors. With the aid of Caro's mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne, Byron tried breaking it off with Caro and safely landing into marriage with Annabella, a strait-laced, intellectual, and thoroughly pious cousin of William's. Nothing, alas, went quite as hoped: Caro attempted suicide and Annabella turned him down. Byron moved in with the much older Lady Oxford; as that affair ran it's course, he came in contact with his older half-sister Augusta, sorely in need of his financial help. Although the two shared the same father, they knew each other only slightly. As contact increased, so did the spark between them.

Article Author: Rodney Welch

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