298
PARTISAN REVIEW
THE PERFORMING SELF
BYRON'S LETTERS AND JOURNALS
ed. Leslie
A.
Marchand. Vol–
ume I, ' In My Hot Youth'; Volume II , ' Famous in My Time'; Volume III ,
'A/as! the Love of Women!' . Harvard University Press.
Like a hero of romance he had a single name. " Byron " is the
aesthetic opposite of the grim monosyllable that made Ma tthew Arnold
lament the ug liness of Eng lish names, "Wragg." Lean and clear,
phoneticall y spelt, elegant to look a t, it has the virtues Byron liked in a
name, being short, vocalic, and ancienl. He played with spelling it
"Burun," and , more often, "Biron," in French . Of course he had a
dashing handwriting, and he enjoyed varying his signa ture. Sometimes
h e signed a lordl y "B"; mo re idiosyncra ti ca ll y and boyishly, he
translitera ted hi s name into Greek letters, or scrawled the first two as a
monogram. Although, or because, h e ha ted hi s mother-in -law, from
whom he la ter inherited the title " Noel," the evidence of orthography
is tha t he enjoyed adding il. He had a passion for paradoxes, and his
favorite had to do with the self (his) as sing le but multipl e, changing
and constant, false while sincere. Bo th as a poet and an invetera te
"scribbl er" of letters and journals, he tri ed to find and to escape the
ri ght name for it.
Byron was one of those peop le who seem quintessentiall y human
a lthough they a re obviously not like most of us at all . He wa s a star.
One is curious about how such people exist, and the trivi al, ordina ry
bits o f their actual lives are interesting in proportion to the extent to
which they themselves are artifacts or embl ems, rather than women or
men. Byron 's laundry lists and his correspondence with hi s banker
have the po ignan cy o f Napo leon 's cold in
War and Peace.
Everything
he wrote, especially wha t was mos t private and unstudied, is relevant,
since wha t we want to know is how real life goes fo r someone who
seems the embodiment o f an idea. Writing va riously to express and " to
withdraw myself from myself," Byron also con sciou sly anti cipa ted our
in terest. Thomas Moore, who burned the
Memoirs,
is the vi ll ain of the
piece starring Byron . Leslie A. Marchand, the edi tor of a new compen–
diou s edition of
Byron's L etters and Journals,
is one o f the most
h elpful members of the Chorus.
It
is fittin g that Professor Marchand is
