300
PARTISAN REVIEW
about his mother, for example, he is angry, proud, and passionate, and
yet aware of the unfairness, and even foolishness, a son's complaints
about a mother inevitably have. One wonders if Byron's self–
consciousness derived from the fact that he turned into "Lord Byron" .at
ten, an age at which the sense of what is real and what is unreal is
acute. Titles, names, words, always seemed to him things, detachable
from life, provisional, magical in their effect and empty in themselves.
Meanwhile, he grew into a genius at using them. Lady Byron put it
acidly: "He is the absolute monarch of words, and uses them, as
Bonaparte did lives, for conquest without more regard for their
intrinsic value." One could not expect
her
to acknowledge that
he
conferred value on
them.
Byron was an extraordinary and energetic correspondent. In the
nineteenth century, when
Don Juan
was widely considered immoral,
the letters were disparaged too; now that most people think his
noncomic poems were the least valuable things Byron wrote, the
author of
Don Juan
is celebrated for his outspoken, lively letters. The
temptation
to
interpret the shift in attitude as progress is to be resisted.
It is true that, if only by example, Byron drives one to extremes, but,
read closely, he also warns against them. Byron's are great letters, but
not because they debunk the poetry or the legend. They contain neither
the essentially witty man behind the saturnine mask nor the facts of life
behind the fictions. Candid and stagey, they present with uncommon
immediacy an engaging and complex person uncomfortably but
indissolubly married
to
his language. Unlike biographies of any length
or tone, they seem the appropriate form for Byron's life. The mosaic–
like portrait produced by a coll ection is telling, like the juxtaposition
of letters and journals. Byron's contradictoriness was not merely social
or epistolary:
"If
I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to
one's self than to anyone else), every page should confute, refute, and
utterly abjure its predecessor," he writes in a journal. He ends another
entry as if it were a letter to someone: "By the by, I am yawning now–
so, good night to
thee,-Mrratpw"Y."
The letters prove that distinctions
between the poet and the correspondent, the private and the public, the
natural and the artificial Byron, must be as false as all the other
dichotomies (classic vs. romantic, comic vs. serious) loved by those
spiritual descendants of his wife who haunt his ghost in the guise of
critics and biographers. By sheer force of self-consciousness h e defies
tidy minds.
Like the best parts of all his poems, Byron's prose moves directly,
confidently, accumulating trength. Even such things as a letter
