Saturday, June 13, 2009

New York Times Sunday Book review

Oh, Lord - 'Byron in Love'
By KATHRYN HARRISON
Published: June 12, 2009
Thank the gods of literature that George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born in 1788, well out of the reach of psycho­pharmacology. “Byron in Love,” the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien’s compact and mischievously complicit biography of the great Romantic poet and enfant terrible, skates over its subject’s literary career to showcase the dissolute behavior Byron’s critics decried as that of a “second Caligula.”
Arguably, Caligula was the more moderate soul. Even the Byronic hero falls short of his inspiration. Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff and her sister Charlotte’s Mr. Rochester are both pale pretenders to a character no writer could invent.

Illustration from Hulton Archive/Getty Images


BYRON IN LOVE
A Short Daring Life
By Edna O’Brien
228 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95

UK - Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pds.12.99

The rapacious trajectory of the poet’s appetite for sex and celebrity makes him a poster boy for what his contemporary and countryman Dr. J. C. Prichard termed “moral insanity” — a disease of the passions that left the intellect intact while “the individual is . . . incapable . . . of conducting himself with decency and propriety in the business of life.” Today, we’d dismiss Byron as a bipolar sex addict whose unresolved Oedipal conflict held him in thrall to the father he never knew. If lithium wouldn’t have poisoned the mania — and the poetry — out of him, how about Abilify with a chaser of Luvox?

“His beginning,” O’Brien narrates drily, “was not propitious” — a mother who was destitute, “quick-tempered and capricious”; a father in exile to escape debt; and the stigma of a club foot. A ready-made “symbol of castration,” Byron’s deformed right limb would provoke such overcompensation that his verses were eclipsed by his sexual exploits. By the time he embarked, at age 27, on what O’Brien calls “the most public marriage of any poet,” he had fathered a child with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. In what reads like a helpless, hapless, even slapstick collapse in the face of reason, he orchestrated one after another imbroglio in which his bride, Annabella Milbanke, was forced to endure the company of his incestuous lover and their infant daughter (who, he was relieved to report, did not betray her unnatural conception by being “born an ape”).
Read the full review at NYT.
And for a UK review, this at The Telegraph, and this at The Times.

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