The Consolation of Byron

Snowed in during a storm in January 2024, I found myself reading Byron. I was idle and concerned about early signs of dementia in my dad, and needed something to “withdraw myself from myself,” as Byron once proclaimed was his motive for writing. I knew and liked some of Byron’s shorter poems, and was familiar with his “mad, bad, and dangerous” persona that brought a naughty mock heroism to Romanticism. (Drinking from a skull! Nose-thumbing Cambridge’s ban on pet dogs by keeping a live bear in his dorm!) But I’d never read his masterpiece Don Juan—had never actually met anyone who had—and knew little about it other than that it was long, and a satire. One morning, on what turned out to be the very week of his birth on the bicentenary of his death, I opened Don Juan for the first time, expecting simply to lose myself in its ridiculousness. And while the book is certainly ridiculous and very funny, I was amazed to find within Byron’s lampoonery actual insight into the serious inquiries and “villainous chaos” of life.

Over the following weeks, I cracked the book open for a balancing B-side to the A-side of the situation with my dad. Amid my dad’s confused texts, my mom’s anxious reports of his forgetting her name or standing at the edge of the pool he used to swim daily laps in, I devoured not only all of Byron’s Don Juan, but his lyrics, letters, satires, tragedies, and his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which introduced the Byronic hero so forcefully to the world that Byron “awoke one morning and found [himself] famous.” I binge-watched Cambridge’s live Byronthon and an embarrassing amount of Heathcliffs, Rochesters, and Dimmesdales for a quick hit of abundant-haired brooders.

Byron reminded me that it’s okay to acknowledge how life can simultaneously thrill and appall, and to meet this fact by living robustly within, and yet beyond, oneself. Born into privilege and raised by an erratic mother, he suffered sexual abuse and struggled with disordered eating. His good nature was ribboned with melancholy. He rode and swam expertly to compensate for his deformed right foot, which had plagued him his whole life (Mary Shelley once wrote that he scarcely composed a line that wasn’t influenced by it). Married young then separated, in and out of love, and sexually fluid, he experienced almost every iteration of complicated human connection and was often agonized by grief, worry, prejudice, lawsuits, debt, rumors, and alienation. At twenty-eight, he left England forever. An itinerant outsider, he hated and fought against exclusion and injustice. From his first House of Lords speech defending weavers, to his support of the war for independence in Greece, where he died at thirty-six, he concerned himself with the world’s prodigals, captives, contrarians and yearners—a Virgil leading through the forest dark, but with a snicker and two middle fingers up.

Against a Hegelian tendency to resolve contradictions through the tidy dialectic process of synthesis, Byron writes into Don Juan the bold admission of life’s complexity. For this mock epic, which reimagines the folk-legend Spanish seducer as the seduced, Byron rolls out seventeen cantos in Italianate ottava rima with its ABABABCC scheme (we can thank Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso for its structural and tonal influence). The slight offness of using the un-English form in colloquial English is exactly what creates comic potential. To make it all work, Byron perverts language with explosive unconventionality (Juan becomes /joo-wuhn/). At several points the poem gives the effect of a translation of the not-quite-translatable. And because the cantos can have as many stanzas as he chooses, Byron advances Don Juan while subsuming like a black hole his experiences and observations on anything from marriage to death, the sublime, the foreign secretary, Milton, aristocratic shallowness, his estranged wife, Congreve, Fielding, Newstead Abbey, weather, the state of England, and his hatred of pietism and Poet Laureate Robert Southey and the cult-worship of Wordsworth (“Turdsworth”).

Byron “can impinge upon any subject he likes,” Virginia Woolf writes in her journal in 1918, a few years before writing Mrs. Dalloway. She had been exploring the “superb force” of his “evil genius” in Don Juan, which she considers the most readable epic poem ever written, largely because of “the springy random haphazard galloping nature of its method. This method is a discovery by itself. It’s what one has looked for in vain—an elastic shape which will hold whatever you choose to put into it.”

Some critics saw in Byron’s comic agility an inability to reflect on serious things or offer a moral guide. This brings to mind something British playwright Joe Orton once explained in Radio Times about his own subversive humor: “In a world run by fools, the writer can only chronicle the doings of fools or their victims. And because the world is a cruel and heartless place, he will be accused of not taking his subject seriously . . . But laughter is a serious business, and comedy a weapon more dangerous than tragedy.” Of the rollicking chaos of Don Juan, Byron writes in Canto VII how his poem isn’t meant to offer profundity or even only comedy, but

a collision of these charged particles,
A nondescript and ever varying rhyme,
A versified aurora borealis,
Which flashes o’er a waste and icy clime.
When we know what all are, we must bewail us,
But ne’ertheless I hope it is no crime
To laugh at all things, for I wish to know
What after all are all things—but a show?

which of course echoes Shakespeare’s exiled, melancholic nobleman Jaques, who claims that “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.” Don Juan himself almost seems like a mere expression of his environment. While “not as great of a bore as Childe Harold,” W. H. Auden writes in his essay on Byron, Juan is not singularly tragic or funny or valorous, which is part of Byron’s point. Thrown into various wild circumstances—a pirate’s island lair, a Constantinople harem, court life in Greek Orthodox Russia, a country estate in Protestant England—Juan’s heroism is simply that he repeatedly adapts and survives.

I’m realizing now that it’s not only Don Juan that struck me, but Woolf’s experience of it: the way it challenged her mind to “sharpen its perceptions” and grasp another writer’s work as a concentrated whole, a pleasurable redirection for when she was, as I was that snowy weekend, “left alone in a tumultuous frame of mind.” Interspersed with her private concessions—“What a born melancholic I am! The only way I keep afloat is by working” and “Why is life so tragic” (statement, not question)—Woolf’s diaries show she repeatedly considered Byron. As did Scott, Balzac, Baudelaire, Sand, Stendhal, Pushkin, Heine, Tennyson, Ruskin, the Brontës, and Nietzsche. Kierkegaard loved Byron for his mastered irony, Flaubert for his agility. Delacroix found Byron “an unfailing spur” to his imagination, and was often only able to paint after reading him. Oscar Wilde openly revered Byron’s aesthetics (Edgar Degas once said that Wilde looked like someone playing Byron in a suburban theater). Goethe thought Byron’s poetic power and insight “as great as Shakespeare” (Shakespeare!) and that “everything that came from the man, especially from his heart, was excellent.” Comparing the two Romantic poets, nineteenth-century journalist Giuseppe Mazzini wrote that Goethe better expresses lives—but Byron, life.

It’s probably this last attribute that best articulates what Byron can do for us modern readers. He conjures what, in my mind, is not only his but all of Romanticism’s most valuable sentiment: that life can only be tangibly experienced through its series of untamed, immediate moments. As if to inadvertently corroborate this idea, there is now with my dad only the present. But while within the pages of Byron, I feel up for any kind of switchback/absurdity/beauty/hilarity/incongruity that may come from my father’s condition. Or, as Byron himself wrote in a moment of seriousness: “And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.”