Without compromise, it is the first thing that comes to mind when I finish this biography of Byron from Edna O’Brien, Byron in Love (Cabaret Voltaire, 2024). I started it thinking about how difficult it can be to write something new about the great English poet about whom not only rivers of ink have flowed, but also several films. In fact, she puts it herself in the brief introduction: “So why another book about Byron?”. And his response is this stupendous and intense portrait of the poet.
With austere, rhythmic, ironic, agile and effective prose, O’Brien takes a tour of Byron’s life for which he has immersed himself “in the twelve volumes of his letters and diaries (…) I have read many of his biographies and those that have been written about Lady Byron,” he acknowledges. An elusive and contradictory man who seems to have a mask ready for every situation and for everyone who approaches him, “In him, everything was paradoxical” (p.17), he points out. It takes a certain courage to face a mythologized figure in which legend and reality intermingle in a way that is practically impossible to distill. But the Irish writer is not daunted and sets out, neither more nor less, to discover Byron the Man, the one who “could not exist without the object of his love”the one who got up, rode a horse or played billiards.
“Where everyone stopped, where no one dared to continue, Byron launched himself. He never hid from his many loves, lovers, adventures, idylls and orgies of all kinds.“
What that “object of his love” is is the key that will be revealed little by little. Beginning with his unique childhood, the complex relationship with a fickle mother and an absent father whose supposedly colorful and daring exploits the boy admired. O’Brien points out how before he was eight years old he had read all the books of the Old Testament “compared to which the New did not seem half as interesting” (p.27). That precocious attraction to the dark side and, above all, Byron’s courage and tenacity to continue his path, almost always forbidden, are part of the fascinating character that subjugated his contemporaries and continues to subjugate us now. Byron himself turns his right foot deformity into a metaphor for himself when he speaks of it as “the sign of Cain, a symbol of castration and stigma that ruined his life.” (p.20). Where everyone stopped, where no one dared to continue, Byron launched himself. He never hid from his many loves, lovers, adventures, idylls and orgies of all kinds. Social conventions were there to be broken and to expose the hypocrisy of a society that exhausted the editions of his books and longed to meet him but refused to bury him in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. Byron was always Byron, indomitable and mysterious, and it was the others who tried to fit him into their molds, believing themselves to be the chosen ones.those who were going to be able to calm that tortured soul, redirect it, but who ended up time and again, in better or worse ways, leading to terrible, even tragic, disappointments, as O’Brien vibrantly relates.
“That is the element that fascinated men and women, that inner struggle from which the best and the worst could and did come out: the most faithful friendship, the most resounding dedication, the most sublime poem and the cruelest abuse.“
Byron the Man insatiably seeks the sublime, the situations that allow him to transform into Byron the Poet, as if he had to feed his own Minotaur hidden in the ins and outs of a complex personality, he knows that Promethean force that lives in him and that shapes in his poetry above any other love, above anything else. It is not strange that it is his visit to the battlefield of Waterloo that triggers an earthquake: “Waterloo was for Byron what the madeleine was for Proust (…) It is the most profound Byron, the one who speaks of the horror of war, the mercy of war and, above all, the madness of war” (p. 175). Of course, it is one and the same Byron who, shortly before, had turned his marriage into a hell worthy of an Allan Poe story (p.148), who maintains an incestuous relationship with his stepsister Augusta, who has custody of his daughter with Claire Clairmont, Allegra, to abandon her in a convent where she dies shortly after…, human too human, as Nietzsche would say, by the way, another child terrible.
But: “Beyond all the reproaches, there was his own torment. As he himself said in a letter to Lady Melbourne: ‘All these attacks from outside are nothing compared to what’s happening inside me’ (p. 131). And that is the element that fascinated men and women, that inner struggle from which the best and the worst could and did come out: the most faithful friendship, the most resounding dedication, the most sublime poem and the cruelest abuse.
“Uncompromisingly, just as Byron himself behaved throughout his life with himself and with others, and as his burned memories most likely were.“
Without concessions writes O’Brien, who does not hesitate to reflect with a sense of humor many of the almost vaudevillian situations of the poet’s life, with truly delirious moments, the mud through which he crawled and the mud he threw on others in his desperate search for that love that nourished him, while recognizing its greatness. “Byron didn’t blink an eye at anything. His view of humanity was ruthless; his look, radical” (p.191), he clarifies. If Byron had not existed and a book had been published with the exploits of such a character, it would have been called implausible.
Without concessions, just as Byron himself behaved throughout his life with himself and with others, and as his burned memories most likely were: “The burning of Byron’s memoirs was an act of collective vandalism of which all those who intervened were guilty”, O’Brien denounces and then, also without concessions, names them one by one: “Moore, for the responsibility of selling the manuscript; Hobhouse, for his lack of honesty about Byron’s reputation; and Murray, for his flagrant self-righteousness (…). Also guilty were Augusta and Annabella, for their silent connivance, and the two ‘executors’, Colonel Doyle and Wilmot-Horton, who tore the pages from the copies and threw them into the fire. Murray called his sixteen-year-old son to witness that historic moment” (p.277).
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Author: Edna O’Brien. Qualification: Byron in love. Translation: Beloved Dieguez. Editorial: Cabaret Voltaire. Sale: All your books.
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