Byron: Life and Legend - Hardcover

MacCarthy, Fiona

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374186294 ISBN 13: 9780374186296

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

Lord Byron in all his controversial splendor--the long-awaited, authoritative biography

With this brilliant book, Fiona MacCarthy has produced the most important work on Byron in nearly half a century. Granted unprecedented access to many documents and artifacts unexamined by previous scholars, the acclaimed biographer brings a fresh, engaging sensibility to a full appreciation of the poet's life and art.

Byron: Life and Legend explores heretofore unrevealed aspects of Byron's complex creative existence, reassessing his poetry, reinterpreting his incomparable letters, and reconsidering the voluminous record left by the poet's contemporaries: his friends and family, his critics and supporters.

MacCarthy's scope is comprehensive, giving due weight to each aspect of her subject's genius and covering the full range of his life, retracing his journeys through Italy, Turkey, and Greece and culminating in his heroic voyage to Missolonghi, where he died at the tragically early age of thirty-six. After his death, a pervasive Byronism swept Europe; presented here is the fascinating evolution of his posthumous reputation and its influence on literature, architecture, painting, music, manners, sex and psyche.

Full of energy and detail, subtlety and glamour, this vital new study reestablishes Byron as a charismatic figure in the forefront of European art.

About this title

About the Author:

Fiona MacCarthy has written highly acclaimed biographies of William Morris and Eric Gill, and is a frequent contributor to The Observer, The Guardian, and The New York Review of Books. She lives in London and Derbyshire, England.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction 

One of the sights of Europe in 1816 was the lurching progress of the self-exiled Lord Byron as he travelled from Brussels to Geneva and on to Italy in his monumental black Napoleonic carriage. This purpose-built coach, a de luxe version of the Emperor Napoleon's own celebrated carriage captured at Genappe, included not only Byron's lit de repos but his travelling library, his plate-chest and facilities for dining. Drawn by four or six horses, it was nothing less than a small palatial residence on wheels. The hill from Baxter the coach-maker amounted to £500. Poor Baxter was still pressing for payment in 1823, a claim dismissed airily by Byron with the words, 'Baxter must wait -- at least a year.' Presumably the bill was still unsettled when Byron died in Greece in April 1824.   The long shadow of Napoleon loomed over Byron's life, an inspiration and an irritant. Byron, born in 1788, the year before the outbreak of the French Revolution, was conscious of living at an unprecedented period: as he put it, 'we live in gigantic and exaggerated times, which make all under Gog and Magog appear pigwean.' The apparition of Napoleon, almost twenty years his senior, was the spur to Byron's own ambition, his dissidence, the glamour of his arrogance, the sense of sweeping history that permeates his writing. Napoleon's flamboyance, his stamina, his dress, his stance, the assiduity with which he preened his image, nurtured Byron's own creative strain of mockery. As he told his friend Lady Blessington, 'with me there is, as Napoleon said, but one step between the sublime and the ridiculous.'

Byron was bound to Napoleon by ties as strong, or even stronger, than those of any of his sexual liaisons. He found fault with Napoleon, so the sharp-eyed Lady Blessington observed, only 'as a lover does with the trifling faults of his mistress'. His emotional involvement was already strong at Harrow in 1803 when the fierce schoolboy defended his bust of Napoleon, by then the official enemy of England, against the 'rascally time-servers' among his contemporaries. A few years later he had acquired a fine impression of Morghen's engraved portrait of Napoleon, which he sent to be framed resplendently in gilt. 

His personal identification with the Emperor was such that Napoleon's defeats brought on a physical reaction. After Leipzig in 1813 Byron was prostrate with despair and indigestion, groaning in his journal: 'Oh my head! -- how it aches! -- the horrors of digestion! I wonder how Buonaparte's dinner agrees with him? 'In the following year, after Napoleon's abdication and exile to Elba, Byron recorded: 'To-day I have boxed one hour -- written an ode to Napoleon Buonaparte -- copied it -- eaten six biscuits -- drunk four bottles of soda water -- redde away the rest of my time.' That ode was both lament and reproach, for Byron could not approve the abject self-surrender of the hero who should rightly have died on his own sword like a defeated Roman or expired as defianty as Shakespeare's Macbeth or Richard III. But Napoleon still dazzled him, in spite of the anguish of his disillusionment. For Byron, Napoleon was a kind of second nature, part of his thought processes, peculiarly embedded in the detail of his life. 

After Napoleon's final demise Byron accumulated keepsakes: a lock of his hair, snuffboxes with his portrait, gold coins with the depiction of the Emperor that was. There was also the Napoleon cameo pin Byron gave to Lady Blessington in Genoa, removing it with a flourish from his breast, but reclaiming it the next day with the dubious excuse that 'memorials with a point' would bring bad luck. Before he left England in 1816, at the time of the separation scandal, Byron had reserved Napoleon's coronation robes, by then in the hands of a Piccadilly dealer, but never actually claimed them. He did, however, write a fond farewell letter to Mercer Elphinstone, shortly before he sailed, on writing paper pillaged from the imperial bureau at Malmaison and stamped with the Napoleonic eagle: he enclosed a few spare sheets as a parting present. Byron was apparently ecstatic when the death of his mother-in-law Lady Noel allowed him to sign himself NB 'because' (he told Leigh Hunt, admittedly a malicious witness) 'Bonaparte and I are the only public persons whose initials are the same'. 

Byron's wanderings through Italy, from 1816 to 1823, were permeated with memories of Napoleon. He noted, near Milan, the remains of an unfinished triumphal arch, intended for Napoleon, 'so beautiful as to make one regret its non-completion', and on Isola Bella he discovered the large laurel tree on which Napoleon had carved out with his knife the word 'Battaglia' shortly before the battle of Marengo. Byron, himself no mean defacer of trees, had scrutinised the letters closely, by this time 'half worn out and partly erased'.  In the context of Italy, Napoleon seemed to Byron more than ever a Vesuvius, a powerful eruptive force whose final overthrow had let in the political light-weights throughout Europe: 'Since that period, we have been the slaves of fools.' There is no doubt that he saw his own incursions into European politics, first as a partisan of the Italian Risorgimento and then in the Greek War of Independence, with whatever undertones of irony, in quasi-Napoleonic terms. 

Copyright © 2002 Fiona MacCarthy

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0374186294
• ISBN 13: 9780374186296
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 688