The Monsters (16 page)

W
HEN LORD BYRON WROTE
these famous lines, his inspiration was the sight of his lovely female cousin at a party in London, but he might as well
have been describing himself. Byron was a legend in his own time, renowned as much for his physical beauty as for his poetry.
He personified the Romantic movement, turning his own life and obsessions into art, just as his life became a topic of rumor
and gossip throughout Europe and America. Byron became famous just as mass-market publications and mass-produced copperplate
images were starting to appear. Through them, he became the first international celebrity.

At all times and places, beauty has been an asset, and Byron made the most of his striking features. Few who met him escaped
his spell. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet, described him in 1816, when Byron was twenty-eight: “so beautiful a countenance
I scarcely ever saw—his eyes the open portals of the sun.” The French author Stendhal, who saw him in Milan later that same
year, remembered, “I was struck with Lord Byron’s eyes. . . . I never in my life saw any thing more beautiful or more expressive.
Even now, when I think of the expression which a great painter should give to genius, I always have before me that magnificent
head.” Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin met Byron five years later and wrote: “His . . . lips and chin had that curved and definite
outline which distinguishes Grecian beauty. His forehead was high, and his temples broad; and he had a paleness in his complexion,
almost to wanness. . . . [His eyes] were of a greyish brown, but of a peculiar clearness, and when animated possessed a fire
which seemed to look through and penetrate the thoughts of others.” Caroline Lamb, who lost her dignity, reputation, and finally
her sanity over Byron, summed up his allure for women: “That beautiful pale face is my fate.”

Byron worked hard to maintain his looks. He adopted a special way of walking on his toes to increase his height (5'8") and
to conceal the limp that resulted from a congenital birth defect. Careful to preserve his teeth, he used a special powder
to brush them and had it sent to him whenever he left England. He wore gloves, even when indoors, to preserve the white skin
of his notably small and shapely hands; he habitually wrote after midnight and slept through the morning to avoid exposure
to sunlight. He was very proud of his soft chestnut hair. Scrope Davies, a close friend, once entered Byron’s bedroom to catch
him fast asleep wearing hair curl papers. Davies awoke him with the cry: “Sleeping Beauty!” Byron exploded into rage and Davies
explained that he thought his hair curled naturally. “Yes, naturally every night,” replied the poet; “but do not, my dear
Scrope, let the cat out of the bag, for I am as vain of my curls as a girl of sixteen.”

Byron continually exercised and dieted, and may even have been anorexic. He followed a lifelong regimen that alternated between
binge eating and crash diets, for when he let himself go, he gained weight quickly. He measured his waist and wrists each
morning and if he was not satisfied he would immediately take Epsom salts and a variety of patent medicines intended to purge
him—the diet pills of the day. Along with his weight, his energy cycles varied from manic highs to moods of depression and
paranoia. When he was in one of his lethargic periods he became “bloated and sallow,” his knuckles “lost in fat.” Reaching
a manic period, he would become obsessed with his weight, eating nothing but vinegar, water, and a bit of rice. At a dinner
party when he exasperated the hostess by refusing to eat the prepared meal, he was asked what he
did
eat and he replied: “Nothing but hard biscuits and soda water.” Byron’s weight obsession continued throughout his life. Not
long before he died, he explained to a doctor in Greece: “I especially dread, in this world, two things, to which I have reason
to believe I am equally predisposed—growing fat and growing mad; and it would be difficult for me to decide, were I forced
to make a choice, which of these conditions I would choose in preference.”

The one flaw in his physical perfection was his deformed foot. As a child he suffered agonies caused by devices intended to
straighten it. (Some have described it as a club foot, but Byron’s bootmaker claimed that the defect was that one foot was
an inch and a half larger than the other and his ankles were very weak, which caused the foot to turn out too much.) Byron
wore a very close-fitting, thin boot that he laced tightly for support. The calf of one leg was also weaker than the other,
so he always wore long pants even when swimming. Thomas Medwin once mused that it might have been “a
cloven
foot.”

Indeed, the defective foot affected Byron’s gait only slightly, but because so much concern had been shown over it when he
was young, its greatest effect was on Byron’s sense of himself. He regarded it as the mark of Cain, one of his favorite Biblical
characters and the subject of one of his great poems. He felt deeply ashamed of what he considered to be his lameness. Seated
or standing, he always made an effort to conceal the flaw. At parties, he looked for a place to stand where he could hide
the base of his leg behind a curtain or tablecloth. In his full-length portraits, the foot is always in shadows. When his
lifelong friend John Cam Hobhouse was visiting him in Italy, Byron abruptly accused him of looking at his foot. Hobhouse replied:
“My dear Byron, nobody thinks of or looks at anything but your head.”

The “deformity” was one reason Byron saw himself as an outsider, and why he pushed himself so hard. Byron drove himself to
excel in such sports as swimming, boxing, riding, and shooting—and of course lovemaking. He expressed the link between his
lameness and his greatness in a poem:

Deformity is daring.

It is its essence to o’ertake mankind

By heart and soul, and make itself the equal —

Ay, the superior of the rest.

The poet he claimed to admire most was Alexander Pope, a hunchback.

Byron noted that he had developed sexually at a young age: “My passions were developed very early—so early—that few would
believe me—if I were to state the period—and the facts which accompanied it,” he once told a friend. Byron thought that these
early sexual experiences had deprived him of an ordinary childhood, pushing him into premature aging. Later in life, he linked
this precocious sexuality with his tendency to melancholy and depression.

Those childhood sexual experiences were both platonic and physical. When Byron was about seven and living in Aberdeen with
his mother, he felt an intense love for his equally young cousin Mary Duff. “I recollect all we said to each other, all our
caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness. . . . How the deuce did all this occur so early?” he wrote in his
journal in 1813. “I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet my misery, my love for that girl were so violent,
that I sometimes doubt if I have ever really been attached since.” Later when he heard of Mary’s marriage to another, it “was
like a thunder-stroke—it nearly choked me.”

As to physical experience, Byron had been aroused as a young boy by a maid named May Gray. He told a friend she “used to come
to bed with him and play tricks with his person.” This behavior continued for two years until his mother found out and Gray
was sacked. The experience warped Byron’s feelings about women, often causing him to see them as nothing but sex objects.
He later described his attitude: “Now my
beau ideal
would be a woman with talent enough to be able to understand and value mine, but not sufficient to be able to shine herself.
All men with pretensions desire this, though few, if any, have courage to avow it.”

Byron knew that he was a bisexual although there was no such word then (Coleridge coined it in the year of Byron’s death),
and the penalty for homosexual behavior was harsh. Indeed, convictions for sodomy could be punished with a death sentence.
Though youthful experimentation with other boys was acceptable, adult homosexuality was not. Sodomy—defined as anal penetration
and emission—was difficult to prove, but “assault with attempt to commit sodomy” was easier. Those convicted were exposed
in the public pillory, where some were stoned to death by gawking crowds or pelted with mud and excrement. The new level of
intolerance had led some homosexuals to flee England. One such was William Beckford, author of the Gothic novel
Vathek,
a favorite book of Byron’s. The strong homophobia of the times made Byron’s mixed feelings about his attraction to boys understandable.

T
he hero of Byron’s poems was often an aristocrat haunted by sins of the past. That image came not only from his own life but
from the tales of his ancestors on both sides. Their wild background, of which Byron was proud, dated back to the Norman Conquest.
The Byruns, as the family name was spelled then, claimed they had come over with William the Conqueror in 1066 and their name
is listed in the Domesday Book. Newstead Abbey, Byron’s home in Nottinghamshire, came to the family during Tudor times after
Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and distributed their lands among those faithful to him.

The poet’s grandfather John Byron, nicknamed “Foulweather Jack” for his ability to attract storms, was a vice admiral in the
Royal Navy. After being shipwrecked off the coast of Patagonia, he survived by eating his dog, including the skin and paws.
Later he was put in charge of an exploring expedition, but luck was still not with him, for he managed to circumnavigate the
globe without finding a single new island. During the American Revolution, his bad luck caused a storm to blow up during a
naval battle against French ships in the West Indies. His assignment ended in utter failure and he was relieved of his command.

Like his son and grandson, Foulweather Jack was a rake. His escapades with a chambermaid found their way into the scandal
sheets of the time. When he died, the noble title and the estate passed to the poet’s great-uncle William, known as the “Wicked
Lord.” William married an heiress and ran through her fortune; supposedly he was in the habit of throwing her into a lake
on the estate when she displeased him. He murdered his cousin and neighbor William Chaworth; the event was so notorious that
those who wanted to attend his trial had to purchase tickets. William was found guilty of manslaughter but set free. He spent
much of his later years in isolation with his trained crickets, who reportedly left the crannies of the walls of Newstead
Abbey on his command. At his death, the estate showed the signs of long neglect: its once-famous oaks had been cut down and
the manor house was a wreck.

The poet’s father —“Mad Jack,” he was called—was also notorious. As a young Captain of the Guards, he had carried on a love
affair with the married Marchioness of Carmarthen. They ran off together and wed after her husband divorced her. She died
soon after, giving birth to a daughter named Augusta, who would become notorious as Byron’s half sister—and lover. Mad Jack
didn’t have time to grieve for long, for with his wife’s death, her (and his) annual income of four thousand pounds ended
as well. He headed for Bath, the marriage-market of the day, looking for an heiress. Mad Jack’s son would note that he was
“a very handsome man, which goes a great way.” To pay for his gambling debts, Jack was said to have charged wealthy women
for his sexual services.

At Bath, Catherine Gordon, though she was fat, loud, and gawky, attracted his attention—as well she should have, for she was
sole heiress to a large fortune. The Gordons held the estate of Gight in northern Scotland near Aberdeen. This noble family
traced their lineage back to James I, king of Scotland from 1406 to 1437. The Gordons had produced a succession of Scottish
lairds known for their violence and cunning until the last two generations, whose members suffered from melancholia. Catherine’s
father and grandfather had both committed suicide by drowning themselves. Jack had no trouble getting Catherine to fall in
love with him, and they were married a few months later, in 1785. Nor did Jack have much difficulty running through her fortune,
for he led an extravagant life and gambling was one of his many pleasures. With no parents to safeguard her, Catherine soon
lost her castle, her wealth, and then her husband too.

All that Mad Jack left her was a son, born George Gordon Byron on January 22, 1788. He was born with a caul, a membrane over
his head, which is often regarded as a positive omen. As part of the old superstition, the caul was kept for good luck, and
later was sold to John Hanson, the family lawyer, who gave it to his brother, a captain in the Royal Navy. If it held any
luck, Captain Hanson did not benefit, for his ship sank, leaving only one survivor (not Hanson).

Nor did the caul seem to presage good fortune for the infant, for young George’s deformed foot indicated, at least to his
father, that he would never walk. Byron later blamed the deformity on the fact that his mother had kept her corset tightly
laced during her pregnancy. Though that couldn’t have been the source of the problem, it did affect his feelings toward her.
Meanwhile Mad Jack went to France, where he took up with his half-sister Fanny in an incestuous relationship that Jack’s son
would later imitate. Incest seemed truly to be a family affair for the Byrons.

One woman was never enough for Mad Jack (and besides, Fanny was married), and he wrote his sister-lover sexually explicit
letters bragging of his other conquests. “I believe I have had one third of Valenciennes,” he estimated in one missive. He
died, possibly a suicide, when his son George was three. Jack had asked his sister to be his heir, but she shrewdly refused,
knowing he would leave nothing but debts. She was right, and the debts now became, legally, the responsibility of his son.

Though Mad Jack had treated Catherine as badly as would seem possible, she grieved so loudly when she received news of his
death that passers-by in the street heard her agonized cries. Byron himself—though he never really knew his father, having
seen him on only a few occasions—tended to idealize him. Following Jack’s death, his widow and son lived in genteel poverty
in Aberdeen. They formed a close if turbulent bond, but though she sometimes doted on him, at other times she had fits of
rage when she smashed crockery and called him names such as a “lame brat.” Sometimes she accused him of being just like his
father. She hit him when he bit his nails, a lifelong habit he could never break. Byron, embarrassed by his mother’s girth,
would stick pins into her fat arms as they sat in church. Despite everything, his mother was ambitious for him and made great
personal sacrifices to keep up appearances, give him pride in his noble heritage, and encourage his love of reading.