Poet on a Chain

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF LORD BYRON (276 pp.)--Edited by Jacques Borzun--Farrar, Straus & Young ($3.75).

The character of Lord Byron

Was of low degree,

Caused by his reckless conduct

And bad company.

So much even the backwoods balladists of North America knew, and any English major can recite the rest of the awful truth: the great Romantic poet was a no-proof lush and a sexsmith who took all womanhood for his forge. For love of him, a titled lady stabbed herself with a pair of scissors, and for hate, a cast-off mistress had him burned in effigy. Even his half-sister succumbed to his wiles.

The world, in fact, has been so fascinated with the erotic side of George Gordon, Lord Byron, that it has almost forgotten that he was, after all, a rock of strength as well--allowing for a few streaks of soft shale in the composition. The Selected Letters of Lord Byron, published this week with an introduction by Jacques Barzun, shows almost more intimately than the poems the vigorous male grain of the most varied and masterful English spirit of the Romantic Age.

Bravery & Bravado. Right from boyhood, Byron greedily determined to have an outward career as exciting as his inner life, and to get, if possible, the best of both worlds. A deformed foot and excess weight stood in his way, so at 19 he grimly started training. "I have lost 18 LB in my weight ... by violent exercise and Fasting ... I wear seven Waistcoats and a greatcoat, run, and play at cricket in this Dress, till quite exhausted by excessive perspiration, and the Hip Bath daily; eat only a quarter of a pound of Butcher's Meat in 24 hours, no Suppers or Breakfast, only one Meal a day; drink no malt liquor, but a little Wine, and take Physic occasionally. By these means my Ribs display Skin of no great Thickness & my Clothes have been taken in nearly half a yard."

At about the same time, he rushed out his first volume of verse, and noted merrily: "In every bookseller's window I see my own name, and say nothing, but enjoy my fame in secret." Two years later, taking the staff of relativism firmly in his aristocratic hand, the handsome young lordling set off to the Continent on a pilgrimage of pleasure and selfdiscovery.

In Albania he visited the Turkish vizier, Ali Pasha, who "treated me like a child, sending me almonds and sugared sherbet, fruit and sweetmeats twenty times a day." Off the isle of Corfu he found he could take the lash of fortune as well as her caress. When the ship seemed certain to go down in a storm, and even the captain "burst into tears and ran below deck," young Byron, with as much bravery as bravado, "wrapped myself up in my Albanian capote (an immense cloak) and lay down on deck to wait the worst." On shore, his valor was heartily rewarded by the female population of Greece.

At the farthest extreme of Europe, he committed the master symbol of the Romantic movement. "This morning," he exulted, "I swam from Sestos to Abydos." And then, being Byron, he saw the funny side of it: "The immediate distance [across the Hellespont] is not above a mile, but the current renders it hazardous, so much so that I doubt whether Leander's conjugal affection must not have been a little chilled in his passage."

In at the Windows. Back home, Byron plunged into a round of affairs with the most famous beauties in England. After four years of it, he married Annabella Milbanke, the cousin of Lord Melbourne, "the most silent woman I ever encountered," he wrote with some concern. "I like them to talk, because then they think less." His wedding, however, "went off very pleasantly, all but the [kneeling] cushions, which were stuffed with peach-stones, I believe, and made me make a face which passed for piety." In the next year Byron lived in a peace of spirit that is most purely appreciable in the book of Hebrew Melodies, which contains the sweetest lyrics he ever wrote.

Then the marriage exploded in one of the worst scandals of the age. Annabella left Byron, and the word went around that she had discovered a love affair between her husband and his half-sister. A storm of public opinion drove Byron out of England, never to return. In Italy, he settled down as the lover of a draper's wife, Marianna Segati, wrote much verse (including most of his masterpiece, Don Juan) and many disgusted letters back to England about "the destruction with which my moral Clytemnestra hewed me down." But women he could not escape. They choked his mornings with billets-doux and crawled in his windows at night. He sighed and took what came.

Letter from Missolonghi. "I feel," wrote Byron's better self, "and I feel it bitterly, that a man should not consume his life at the side and on the bosom of a woman, and a stranger . . . But I have neither the strength of mind to break my chain, nor the insensibility which would deaden its weight."

In 1823, when Byron was 35, he found the strength, in his passionate belief in human liberty, to break his chain. He went to fight for the Greeks in their war of liberation from the Turks. In the midst of it all, he still found time to turn out verse and to twit an erring friend back home: "Pray who is the lady? The papers merely inform by dint of asterisks that she is somebody's wife and has children ... It is to be hoped that the jury will be bachelors."

Three weeks later at Missolonghi, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, Byron died of a fever. It was the sort of death he had invited years before in one of his most passionate and characteristic couplets:

Better to sink beneath the shock Than moulder piecemeal on the rock.

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