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sparingly complimenting a stranger's verses (he called what he was
doing "lettering"), or a note of pear-shaped politeness to Lord Hol–
land, are free of flab, purposeful, with every word working. To praise
the letters "as prose" is to praise them for being honest and accurate.
The famous jaunty accounts of his adventures and reflections which
Byron wrote when he felt sociable and amusing are triumphs of the
talk for its own sake which is a celebration of both language and
personality.
In
these accounts he shifts directions, modifies tones, turns
upon himself, partly mocking and partly glorying in the fine style that
reflects his complexity. Byron's delight in a phrase which conveys a
whole attitude, in the syntactical turn which allows him to gloat over
it, is delight in himself, intriguing, contagious, and invigorating.
He wrote letters partly in order to find his life interesting. And, as
life interfered, he relished the drama of letter writing. An account of
Lady Caroline Lamb's pursuit of him is interrupted, he notes, by the
delivery of a letter from Lady Caroline Lamb; as he catches Lady
Melbourne up on the progress of an amour, the husband he is
planning to deceive walks into the room where he sits writing; a
mistress looks over his shoulder, another time, as he writes to someone
else, but also, since she's watching, to her, about her charms. The
immediacy of these little dramas of correspondence is conveyed in a
prose in which words are evidently in action, changing the writer's
mood and meaning as they occur to him. A rueful , ironic, speculative
distance from himself, suddenly intruding, often saves him from self–
pity or worse, flipping up the droopy end of a sentence, a thought, a
paragraph, a letter. Reality, described by words, therefore changes. One
wonders if Lady Byron got it right after all.
Sometimes these meticulously reproduced historical documents
read like an epistolary novel. As Byron ridicules his friend James
Wedderburn Webster for foolishly adoring his wife, then writes to him,
visits him, flirts with the wife, sends Webster a gift of a cheese, almost
succeeds in cuckolding him, and then lends him money, the hero
remains likeable and the plot entertaining. On a more serious level , the
function of letters in Byron's story suggests, as
CLarissa
and
Les Liaisons
Dangereuses
do, how people change by presenting themselves to
others. Byron's letters to Lady Melbourne, notorious for their revealing
hints of his incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, are at
least as revealing for the way they hint.
In
the heat of the affair and
after it, he wrote about it to his confidante as the most difficult and
dangerous of a string of romantic adventures among society ladies,
amusing her by distinguishing between her niece Annabella Milbanke,
