Those, and there are many of us, who balk at the Alpine crags and chasms of the numerous big Byron biographies, may happily take a stroll over the level ground of this unassuming yet impressively comprehensive volume. Stauffer, professor of English at the University of Virginia and president of the Byron Society of America, manages, with the aid of a choice handful of the poet’s vivid and hugely entertaining letters, to fashion a rounded portrait, venereal scars and all, of one of the prime movers of the Romantic movement.
Byron was, as Lady Caroline Lamb famously wrote, “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, but he must also have been, at the simplest level, wonderful company. How seriously the Keatses and the Shelleys and the Wordsworths took themselves; not George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron. As he wrote to one of his female intimates: “There is no comedy after all like real life.”
His beginnings were beset with pains and humiliations, though. In 1785, the wastrel John “Mad Jack” Byron married Catherine Gordon, a Scot whom Stauffer describes as “well born and wealthy but unpolished, overweight, and relatively unprotected”. By the time she was pregnant, he had spent her fortune of £30,000 and run off to France. This left Catherine understandably wrought, and she visited her hurt and disappointment on the young Byron, who had been born with a disfigured foot. “My poor mother was generally in a rage every day, and … reproached me with my personal deformity … Those were bitter moments.”
He managed, all the same. In a letter of 3 May 1810, when he was 22, he wrote from the Dardanelles off the coast of Turkey of having swum across “the ‘broad Hellespont’ in an hour and ten minutes”. The distance was less than a mile, but the currents were strong and hazardous, and he joked that “I doubt whether Leander’s conjugal powers must not have been exhausted in his passage to Paradise” – in Greek myth, Leander every night swam that same strait in order to be with his lover Hero.
“You could make a case,” Stauffer writes, “for this being the happiest period, and one of the happiest days, of Byron’s entire life.” Two weeks before setting sail eastwards, he had finished a draft of his poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which, when it was published in the spring of 1812, was an instant success; as Byron was later to recall: “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”
He lost no time in using his newfound celebrity to advance, at a gallop, his endlessly reckless and destructive love life. Caroline Lamb may have recognised his madness and his badness but, as she wrote: “That pale beautiful face is my fate.” However, she, like all his lovers, had to share him, and not just with other women. One of the attractions for him of the lands of the Ottomans was that he found there, as he wrote, a “marble paradise of sherbet and sodomy”, populated, for him, by viziers and brigands but also willing young men.
He gloried in sexual transgression. One of the loves of his life was his half-sister Augusta Leigh, whose third daughter, Elizabeth, he probably fathered. They flaunted their affair in public, shocking a supposedly unshockable Regency London, which in the end closed its drawing room doors against them.
If Greece and Turkey were paradisal playgrounds abounding in boys, Italy was the land of pure heterosexual love. In the longest letter here – indeed, the longest letter Byron ever wrote – dated 1 August 1819 and posted from Ravenna, the poet gives his London publisher, John Murray, a rambunctious account of his amorous adventures over the previous two years. His leading love in that time had been the Venetian Margarita Cogni, whom he had met in 1817. At the time, Byron had been in low spirits. Feeling the burden of what he called his “wretched identity” and the separation from his wife and their infant daughter, “he slipped easily”, in Stauffer’s fine formulation, “into the mysterious, lively decrepitude of Venice”.
Margarita would lead him in a wild dance, and then he was introduced late one evening to the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, a young woman married to a much older man. The two fell at once into a liaison that Byron made light of, but which turned into one of the stormiest and most complex of his many relationships, and one of the most significant – Stauffer suggests that after Teresa, “Byron may never have had sex with anyone else again”. The satyr had been tamed.
Stauffer’s book is a splendid thing, colourful and busy with incident, but always thoughtful and astute in its judgments. The author probably makes too high a claim for the poetry – Byron surely was no more than a first-rate second-rater – but the life outlined here compels our envy and admiration in its energy, even if that energy was soon spent.
The loves are what endure in our imaginations, however raucous, manipulative and destructive they may have been. Stauffer sums it up with a sly grace that his subject would have envied: “Byron gave selfishly to women all his life, often to his own detriment, driven by impulses that sometimes partook of generosity.”
• Byron: A Life in Ten Letters by Andrew Stauffer is published by Cambridge (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
