Literary Faker

MAJOR BYRON: THE INCREDIBLE CAREER OF A LITERARY FORGER (217 pp.)--Theodore G. Ehrsam--Boesen ($6).

In the light of his reputation, nothing seemed more natural than that Lord Byron should have fathered and deserted a son. According to "Major George Gordon de Luna Byron," it happened in Spain in 1809, when the fiery poet swept the Countess de Luna off her feet, secretly married her in a Roman Catholic ceremony, then blandly deserted her.

The major was determined to live as a Byron. He used the arms and motto of the family, impressed the Byron crest on his stationery and silverware. He even made his living by forging Byron letters, and did so well at it that he branched out to include letters guaranteed (by the major) to be from the pens of Keats and Shelley.*

In Major Byron, N.Y.U.'s Professor Ehrsam has done the best job of literary detective work on the forger in print. He is himself sadly handicapped because: 1) the slippery major left few biographical traces, 2) Major Byron was first written as a Ph.D. thesis, and after two rewritings is still more awkward and pedestrian than even most doctoral dissertations. Yet Dr. Ehrsam sometimes proves himself a shrewder hand than his literary betters in the treacherous field of literary hokum.

Even during his lifetime Major Byron couldn't fool everybody every time. When England got too hot, the major lit out for Paris or the U.S. The editor of New York's Evening Mirror sized him up at first glance in 1849: "We turned from him with the natural disgust we feel for humbugs in general, and literary humbugs in particular." When the major sued for libel and lost, he went back to London, but in 1861 he popped up again in St. Louis in the uniform of a major in the Federal army. Though Major Byron does not show up in War Department records, he was remembered by St. Louis citizens of the time as "modest, unassuming, and highly cultivated, but rather bizarre in manner."

Major Byron died in New York in 1882, leaving literary experts on two continents with ruffled vanities. Some of his Keats and Shelley forgeries are crude, but the Byron ones are sound. Said a famous London auctioneer to Lord Byron's publisher: "Here are some genuine letters of Byron's, and here are forgeries of them. We must not mix them, for if we do, we shall never be able to separate them."

* Author Ehrsam contributed proof of Major Byron's Shelleyana fakes in Robert Metcalf Smith's The Shelley Legend (TIME, Nov. 19, 1945).

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