Lord Byron: the myth that refuses to be tamed

Excessive, passionate, dark, vital, curious, contradictory, tormented and reckless, George Gordon Byron (London, 1788-Mesolongi, 1824) died while a storm was raging. The poet and aristocrat had been living in the Greek city of Mesolongi for more than a year with a troop of soldiers that he paid for to support the independence of Greece from the Ottoman Empire. At his farewell, which today, April 19, marks the 200th anniversary, there was little epic beyond the thunder and lightning that fell outside: the most probable cause of his death was infection from one of the numerous bloodlettings that were performed on him, and for which he lost what is estimated to have been about two and a half liters of blood; There was also dehydration.

The fevers that the doctors tried to control by bleeding him that April 1824 seem to have come from the bite of a tick coming from one of his domestic animals. Pets and guns are among his many eccentric weaknesses, as witnessed by the bear that accompanied him at Trinity College in Cambridge to avoid the prohibition on having dogs, or the fauna that moved freely in the different Italian palaces where he lived and which included at different times a crocodile, an ostrich, monkeys, a falcon, peacocks, guinea fowl, dogs, an eagle and a crow. A festival of talks and readings dedicated to his eminent and wayward student is being held in Cambridge today, Friday and tomorrow, as part of the commemorative events planned for this anniversary.

Fiona MacCarthy compiled a wealth of information on the life, death and posthumous fame of history's most famous Romantic poet in the canonical biography

Byron, Life and Legend

(Debate). Published in the United Kingdom in 2002, this work was commissioned by a descendant of the poet's editor and correspondent John Murray. The detailed reconstruction of Byron's troubled life tells of his childhood in Scotland with a malformed foot and the family's financial hardships, his transformation into

lord

and heir of Newstead Abbey when he was 10, his time at boarding school in Harrow and Cambridge, his travels through Europe and also the most opaque areas of his biography, such as the sexual abuse he suffered from his nanny, his incestuous relationship with Augusta, his sister on his father's side, and his intense homosexual relationships. “Byron's innate orientation toward boys explains many of the persistent enigmas in his biography,” wrote MacCarthy, whose work was the first to openly address this issue. The poet's definitive exile from England in 1816 after a scandalous and vitriolic divorce, this author defends, was due precisely to the fear that her relationships with men would become public, a crime punishable by execution.

Mariana Enriquez, a self-confessed

Byronian

who winked at the legendary

milord

in her first novel

Bajar es lo worst

(Anagrama), defends the most joyous side of the romantic hero. “I think the most common mistake regarding Byron is to think of him as a dark beauty, as Baudelaire would say. He was also a romantic because of the time in which he was living, but he was very enjoyable, very handsome and liked a lot,” explains the author. “He had his troubles: his clubfoot, he was lame, the exile hurt him a lot, he wanted to be thin, he had a thing with his body that was quite contemporary. He was a

predandy

, a personality ahead of his time. He liked to swim, he boxed, he loved Greece because it was hot, he liked to travel, crazy women, eat.” Although Byron's vampiric aura first attracted her—also the assumption that he had been the model for the character of Heathcliff in the novel

Wuthering Heights

—rather than being locked in a castle with a storm, Enriquez claims the poet “as a “man with a bottle of wine on a sunny terrace writing beautiful poems.” Wasn't it dark? “Of course it was, he slept with her sister and mistreated one of her lovers so much that he left her half crazy and left her daughter to die in a boarding school. He was a guy who, beyond the issues of the time, had enormous personal darkness, but that has nothing to do with a Bronte character, sometimes he looks more like Hemingway than anything else,” Enriquez responds.

Who died in 2020, MacCarthy had access to the extensive archive of letters, notes, manuscripts and objects kept at 50 Albemarle Street in London. At that same address, barely a month after the poet's death and before his remains arrived in England, the old editor Murray and a friend of Byron prevailed in a heated argument and burned the memoirs that the poet had given to Tom Moore, who despite having sold them years ago tried to prevent their destruction in 1824. “The burning of Byron's memoirs was an act of collective vandalism,” says Edna O'Brien in the last pages of

Byron in Love

, the brilliant essay that the Irishwoman dedicated to the poet in 2009 and that the Cabaret Voltaire label has rescued with occasion of the bicentennial.

That pyre at editor Murray's house did not stop the overflowing bibliography that the poet has generated, from friends, lovers or admirers who wanted to expose their impressions and contacts with the man whose fame and celebrity anticipated more than a century what would come with the culture of masses. O'Brien writes: “Everything about him was paradoxical: he was introverted and extroverted, handsome and deformed, serious and funny, wasteful and mean, and possessed of dazzling intelligence.” An absolute admirer of his contemporary Napoleon, Byron's life takes place in the Regency, the same period of Jane Austen's novels and in some way represents the culmination of the seducers who ruin some of his heroines.

His enormous binges and conquests, constant games of seduction, desire for adventure, sense of humor and ungovernable determination to assert his freedom above moral norms, creditors or jilted lovers, have proven irresistible and impossible to tame. But under the weight of that intense biography there is a poetry whose validity is defended by Andreu Jaume, translator and editor of a new

Don Juan

(Penguin Classics), Byron's last great composition. “The myth has played against the work, and part of it has aged poorly because it has a stuffy imagery, but both

Childe Harold

and

Don Juan

are great compositions, with which Byron made lyrics of his own experience,” he explains.

Against the backdrop of the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, Jaume claims that Byron perceived that all hope for change was exhausted. “Much of the poem is digressive, containing satirical diatribes and a conception of man, which would later continue with Nietzsche, marked by the defense of a free life that rejects the religious and the sublime,” he points out. With women he goes from misogyny to phylogyny, dedicates the first two songs to women's desire and includes an ode to the “extraordinarily well done” vagina. Irony and sarcasm are two of Byron's fundamental traits: “he laughs at courtly love, at the falsehood of poetic language and vindicates being alive, eating, drinking, sex.”

That indomitable, scandal-proof vitality and his extraordinary ease in writing are two virtues of Byron that Eduardo Mendoza highlights. “He writes in spurts: traveling, drinking, flirting, he manages to make well-rhymed verses,” he comments. His meeting with the

lord

dates back to the translation of the selection of letters that the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma made shortly before his death,

Debil es la carne. Venetian correspondence (1816-1819)

(Tusquets, 1999). “He is a great character, a cursed poet and libertine aristocrat, whose work and life go together. There were very interesting people around him,” he says on the phone. Byron, Mendoza says, knew that his letters would be read aloud on the other side of the English Channel, and in them he shows all his ingenuity and a city of his, Venice, which in the 18th century was considered ugly and unhealthy. Mendoza emphasizes: “Lord Byron has hardly left the literature room, but his life would make for a great television series.”

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