Byron
At the Atlantic, Elizabeth Wasserman writes a concise cultural history of attitudes toward Byron, not his poetry but his scandalous personal life. His partisans have portrayed him as a heroic free-thinker and libertine, his detractors (notably Harriet Beecher Stowe) as a "vicious, alcoholic madman who tried in every way possible to break his wife's spirit." In 1922, the critic Katharine Fullerton Gerould wrote, "The simple fact is this: no woman has ever been able to keep her head about Byron; and now that he is dead, the men seem to be as bad as the women. . . . In the nonacademic world of letters no one, apparently, either knows or cares whether Byron was a great poet. After a hundred years, the sole question that impassions people is: 'Just how much of a cad was he?'" (Nov 2002)
In the new book Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex since the Grand Tour, Ian Littlewood explores the history of British tourism in search of sensual pleasures. Reviewer Jad Adams writes, "Littlewood attempts to categorise the sex traveller as the connoisseur of foreign culture, the pilgrim who wants a deeper understanding of self, and the rebel who finds in other countries a freedom denied at home." Russell Davies's review passes along several choice anecdotes and quotations involving British writers James Boswell, Lord Byron, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess and Joe Orton. "Foremost among the touring rebels was of course Byron, who always kept a condom in his waistcoat pocket and, according to his travelling companion Dr Polidori, 'fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid' the moment he reached his Ostend hotel. Embracing the notoriety which his sanctimonious countrymen seemed determined to foist upon him, the ruthless womaniser Byron developed a parallel career as a continental pederast, installing one 15-year-old favourite, Nicolo Giraud, in a Franciscan monastery in Athens, which doubled as a hotel and a boys' boarding school ('nothing but riot from noon till night')."
The Guardian | Books Online (Jun 2001)
I'm reading Byron's Don Juan (well, excerpts from an old Norton Anthology of English Literature found at a garage sale). This passage from Canto I, which deals with Juan's childhood, brilliantly lampoons the impulse to "protect the children" by sanitizing their educations. Juan's mother, Donna Inez, wants her boy to receive a well-rounded yet "strictly moral" education, which raises some difficulties when his tutors get to the Greek and Roman classics.
His classic studies made a little puzzle,
Because of filthy loves of gods and goddesses,
Who in the earlier ages raised a bustle,
But never put on pantaloons or bodices;
His reverend tutors had at times a tussle,
And for their Aeneids, Iliads, and Odysseys,
Were forced to make an odd sort of apology,
For Donna Inez dreaded the mythology.
Ovid's a rake, as half his verses show him,
Anacreon's morals are a still worse sample,
Catullus scarcely has a decent poem,
I don't think Sappho's Ode a good example,
Although Longinus tells us there is no hymn
Where the sublime soars forth on wings more ample:
But Virgil's songs are pure, except that horrid one
Beginning with "Formosum Pastor Corydon."
Lucretius' irreligion is too strong,
For early stomachs, to prove wholesome food;
I can't help thinking Juvenal was wrong,
Although no doubt his real intent was good,
For speaking out so plainly in his song,
So much indeed as to be downright rude;
And then what proper person can be partial
To all those nauseous epigrams of Martial?
Juan was taught from out the best edition,
Expurgated by learnéd men, who place
Judiciously, from out the schoolboy's vision,
The grosser parts; but, fearful to deface
Too much their modest bard by this omission,
And pitying sore his mutilated case,
They only add them all in an appendix,
Which saves, in fact, the trouble of an index;
For there we have them all "at one fell swoop,"
Instead of being scatter'd through the pages;
They stand forth marshall'd in a handsome troop,
To meet the ingenuous youth of future ages,
Till some less rigid editor shall stoop
To call them back into their separate cages,
Instead of standing staring all together,
Like garden gods — and not so decent either.
My edition includes this footnote from Byron himself: "Fact! There is, or was, such an edition, with all the obnoxious epigrams of Martial placed by themselves at the end."
Don Juan Project
