This review appeared in the
March-April 2003 issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review. It has been
slightly revised.
Fiona MacCarthy.
Byron: Life and
Legend.
John Murray in Great Britain.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the U.S.
London & New York 2002.
674 pages, $35.00.
Reviewed by John Lauritsen.
Fiona MacCarthy has written the most important Byron
biography for half a century, published by John Murray, Byron's own
publisher. Critics are not sure how to respond. Anne Barton in The New York Review of
Books
praises MacCarthy's “empathy with Byron”, but deplores her
“seeming lack of interest in poetry generally, and of Byron's in
particular” — though Barton admits that the biography is
“balanced, fair, thoroughly researched, and beautifully
written.”
The opposite tack is taken by Anne Fleming in the Times Literary
Supplement.
According to her, MacCarthy is admirably responsive to Byron's poetry,
but thoroughly dislikes him as a man. Fleming is unhappy that MacCarthy
portrays Byron's love interests as fundamentally male. Other reviewers
followed suit, complaining that Fiona MacCarthy overemphasized Byron's
homoerotic inclinations or slighted his poetry.
Neither criticism is justified. Without
overemphasis, MacCarthy was simply more forthright than her
predecessors in discussing Byron's sexuality — a forthrightness
made possible by changes in public opinion and the legalization of sex
between males in England. She writes:
Our understanding of Byron's
bisexuality, an open secret within his own close circle, throws
important light on the pattern of his life. In an essay in her book
Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered Doris Langley Moore has argued that
Byron's love affairs with women were his main emotional focus, his
relations with boys being no more than diversions. I believe the
opposite is true. Byron liked the chase, the reassurance of
heterosexual conquest. But in general, Byron's female attachments
dwindled quickly in intensity.
MacCarthy does not neglect Byron's poetry,
and sometimes brings considerable insight to it, but her main concern
is Byron as a man and as a phenomenon. In her words:
This book is about the nature
of his fame: the ambition Byron felt as 'the most powerful of all
excitements'; the degree to which he created and then manipulated his
visual image, attempting to control the reproduction of his portraits;
the complex and fascinating intertwining of his personal celebrity and
literary reputation; his bitterness when fame turned to notoriety, and
its consequences for the future generations of his family and entourage.
Byron was a bundle of contradictions. Shy, pale and
effeminate, short and with a strong tendency to become fat, crippled
with foot deformities, he nevertheless became the reigning male sex
symbol of the 19th century. To this day the Byronic hero is the
archetype of the swaggering male adventurer, with his sardonic and
defiant virility. Byron had an abundance of character defects —
he could be mean and petty to even his best friends — but he also
had charm and a gift for empathy, which gained lasting devotion from
those close to him.
At the age of 18 Byron was chubby: 5 feet 8 inches
tall and weighing 194 pounds. But by 24 he had slimmed down to 140
pounds: he was then at the height of his beauty and on the threshold of
fame, which would come from the publication of Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage.
Soon females of all ages and descriptions would be throwing themselves
at him, exhibiting the sexual frenzy that would later greet such
celebrities as Franz Liszt, Rudolf Valentino and Elvis Presley.
Fiona MacCarthy has written a full-scale biography,
which covers in vivid detail his affairs and friendships; his
unfortunate marriage; his residences, costumes, animals, carriages,
etc.; his travels; his political involvements; his writings; his grisly
death in Greece from malnutrition, alcoholism, laxatives and bleedings;
and the aftermath.
MacCarthy has a sense of irony and can appreciate
camp, the unique humor of gay men. From her Introduction:
In the cacophony of
sophisticated voices, the female as self-assured and brittle as the
male, Byron's own laconic tones stand out as irresistibly self-mocking.
Accused of carrying off a girl from a convent: 'I should like to know who has been
carried off — except poor dear me
— I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan
war.' Here is Byron as progenitor of a high camp English manner
of expression that extends to Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank, Noël
Coward.
My main disagreement with Fiona MacCarthy comes from
her uncritical acceptance of the received verdict that Byron's male
love interests were confined to adolescent boys. The fallacy here is
two-fold: first, arguing that a paucity or lack of evidence proves a
negative, and second, a failure to look closely at the evidence that
does exist. A double standard has been in operation here: we are
supposed to believe that Byron had sex with middle-aged and even
elderly women, but that he had no interest in males who were out of
their teens.
I think that Byron did like post-adolescent men,
including big butch types. From 1816 onwards his immediate circle
always included good-looking young men, who ranged from the servant to
the upper class. Most important among the former was William Fletcher,
who “was at Byron's side from 1804, when Byron was sixteen,
almost without interval until his master died.” According
to a local woman, the young Byron had observed Fletcher ploughing the
fields on his estate, taken a fancy to him, and hired him for his
household — first as groom, and then as his valet or personal
servant.
In 1809 Byron and Fletcher were travelling in
Portugal, where they visited a monastery: “Fletcher complained
that the ‘benevolent faced clergyman’ had been teaching him
Greek and kissing him.” In 1814 Byron and Fletcher were
living in a Piccadilly apartment, where after exercise Byron would
“get Fletcher to rub him down.” The crucial question
of whether Fletcher was good-looking is answered in the affirmative by
Percy Bysshe Shelley, who in an 1821 letter observes that William
Fletcher, away from the dissolute atmosphere of Venice, had
“recovered his good looks” and was sprouting “a fresh
harvest of flaxen locks”. If Fletcher was still good-looking in
1821, he must have been strikingly handsome when Byron first spotted
him seventeen years earlier.
Byron and Fletcher may have been master and servant,
but there was good-natured kidding back and forth between them, and
friends regarded them as a couple. In his Recollections of the Last
Days of Shelley & Byron, Edward John Trelawny playfully refers to
Fletcher as “Byron's yeoman bold” — a marvelously
evocative phrase. (From the OED: Yeoman = youngman, a man in the
service of, or in attendance upon, a person of high rank ... a lover, a
male sweetheart.) At Byron's funeral, “Fletcher, who had
been with Byron for so long, had to withdraw from the front ranks of
the chief mourners, with whom in the commotion the servants were
intermingled, to support himself against a pew in a paralysis of
grief.”
Another servant was Giovanni Battista Falcieri,
known as "Tita", a gondolier acquired in Venice. Tita was assigned to
be Shelley's valet, when he visited Byron in Ravenna in 1821. Shelley
found Tita simpatico, describing him as “a fine fellow with a
prodigious black beard, who has stabbed two or three people, & is
the most goodnatured looking fellow I ever saw.” Perhaps Tita
learned from Fletcher how to give a good rubdown.
In 1820 Byron wrote to William Bankes (a fellow
exile, who as a young man had indoctrinated Byron into the
“already thriving subculture of sodomy” at Cambridge),
urging him to visit Ravenna for Carnival: “Tita's heart yearns
for you, and mayhap for your broad silver pieces.” This
passage suggests that Tita's sexual services, in the gondolier
tradition, were for sale; that Byron had sex with the good-looking
young men in his service; and that he shared them with his friends.
Tita, described by contemporaries as muscular and
herculean, was a popular young man. He went to England to attend
Byron's funeral; then he was taken on for a year by John Hobhouse
(Byron's overly possessive friend, an egregious closet quean); and then
he joined the young and handsome Count Pietro Gamba, who had been
Byron's constant companion for his last four years. After Gamba
died fighting for Greek independence, Tita entered the service of the
young Benjamin Disraeli, future Prime Minister of England.
For many reasons this is the finest Byron biography
ever written. Fiona MacCarthy was given full access to the Byron
archives of the John Murray publishing house, largest in the world,
which had previously been opened only to Leslie Marchand in the fifties
(on condition that he not allude to Byron's homoerotic proclivities).
She could and did tell the truth about his sexuality. And she could
utilize the scholarship of her predecessors. MacCarthy writes with
intelligence and style, maintaining objectivity and good humor
throughout. The book is handsomely produced, with 76 beautiful
illustrations on heavy coated stock. I enthusiastically recommend it.
