Swimming with Lord Byron

By William Kuhn

Lord Byron is the greatest writer you've never read.

The biographer of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis tells the story of Britain's most glamorous and most tortured writer.

He was rich and handsome. He was a swimmer and a poet. He loved both sexes. In his work he made a queer love life both thrilling and universal.

He was born with a deformed right foot. An emotional hurt dating back to abuse when he was a boy also affected the man he became. But his hand moved on the page and his body in the water with ease and assurance. His is the story of transcending his disability and his childhood trauma in his verse.

Byron's biography may shine a spotlight on your story too. The disappointments he felt in love, as well as the personal transformation he achieved in his work will strike a chord with anyone who is a reader, a writer, or a lover.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Kuhn
• Release date: Jan 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9798989299737

William Kuhn

READING JACKIE is my biography of Jacqueline Onassis viewed through the lens of the 100 books she edited. JACKIE STORIES is an account of my talks with eight of Jackie's most memorable friends. I've also written a novel about what happened when Queen Elizabeth II went absent without leave from the palace, MRS QUEEN TAKES THE TRAIN.

Book preview

Introduction

To be truthful and honest about why I wrote this book, I need to begin with several harrowing stories. The only encouragement I can provide is that it comes out all right for me in the end. It comes out all right for Byron in the end too.

It begins with the death of my father, just over a decade ago. He was a retired professor of English literature. One whole wall of his study was a collection of his books. In this study on one of the first warm nights of summer, several months after he died, I sat down in one of his leather chairs. I took down one of his books. The skin under my thighs stuck to the leather of the armchair. I opened the book, which was a biography of Lord Byron, and began reading. I knew of Byron but had read little of his work. I was surprised to learn of Byron’s experience of child abuse before the age of ten. This brought back a sense memory of something I’d either consciously ceased to think about or suppressed. My father used to tickle me around that age, sometimes in that study. Sometimes my brother was there, and he was tickled too. Sometimes I was alone with him. I loved the attention that came from a man who could be distant and intimidating. The tickling made me laugh, but it also felt uncomfortable. I hated the loss of control. I hated struggling against someone who was more powerful than me. He did not touch me intimately, but it felt to me as if there was something strange and sexual in his interest. I could not have said that then. I would not have known how to put it into words. I didn’t like it. I felt humiliated by it. I was powerless to stop it.

I have discussed this with my brother, whose memories of the tickling are different. He thinks it was all entirely natural. Nor did he experience it as something unpleasant. I do have a recollection of my mother coming in the room while I was being tickled. Her expression darkened. It was as dark as I’ve ever seen it. She told him, Stop it right now! Perhaps she heard a distress signal in my laughter. Perhaps she saw that his interest in me was more than playful. When she left, he would begin again.

None of this would have come back to me if I hadn’t decided to take down Byron’s biography when my father wasn’t there to object. In fact, he would have been pleased at my taking an interest in his books, though not about the story I’ve just told. That was the moment I had the idea of looking into Byron’s life story. I wanted to explore what his experience as a child might have led to in his adult character. I’ve given Byron’s childhood introduction to sexuality by a nursemaid more attention than the standard biographies. One of the things that is new about this biography is its attempt to set Byron’s development into the context of modern psychoanalytic research about the adult personalities of those who’ve been abused as children. I have also looked at the work of historians who have examined child abuse in historical context. Though it’s only treated explicitly here and at the very end, I’ve been thinking the whole time about how my childhood experience affected me. I am far from having decided what this experience meant to me. I’m not even sure whether it counts as abuse. My father was more often good to me than bad. Byron’s experience may have been similar. The story is complicated, but I try here to explore some of its possible results in adulthood for Byron as a writer and as a lover.

The sexual element in Byron’s biography is prominent in his fame. This was so even in his own lifetime. The scandals surrounding him were less because of his abuse as a child than because of his boyhood romances with other boys, his searching for same-sex sexuality in the Middle East, his adult life of repeated affairs with women who were already married to other men, his marriage that unraveled in public after only a year, and incest with his half-sister. He often wrote of these things explicitly in his letters. He hinted at all these things in his work. His books were probably best sellers because his readers knew that he was handsome, because he was a lord, and because he was known to be confessing his sins in his verse. His lack of specificity about these sins must have driven many of his readers to read more just to try to solve the mystery.

Byron has also been a gay icon for more than two centuries. Historians of homosexuality consider him a canonical figure.[1] His daring openness about his experience of same-sex sexuality has long given other gay men encouragement, especially in times when such love was legally forbidden. This too started while Byron was still alive. A rumor about Byron’s sexuality drove him into exile in 1816. His executors suppressed evidence of his unrequited love for Loukas Chalandritsanos just after Byron died in Greece in 1824. An anonymous poem circulated only a few decades later that openly discussed his male lovers. Benjamin Disraeli, Herman Melville, Henry James, Max Beerbohm, Harold Nicolson, and Tennessee Williams were other writers who were interested in homoerotic themes. All of them drew inspiration from Byron’s work and from his example.

This is another autobiographical dimension of my choosing to write this book. I’m gay and grew up reluctant to admit it. Even though I have learned to experience homosexuality as a pleasure rather than a burden, I’m ready to move on to a new word. This book is different from others in its attempt to evaluate whether queer isn’t a better term to use than gay when thinking about Byron’s sexuality. Queer takes in more people than gay. It includes persons who may not identify with either gender, who consider themselves non-binary, who live outside of social conventions surrounding partnership and marriage. A large part of Byron’s outward personality came from his androgyny and his having the bravery to own up to it. People perceived him as effeminate, and he tried to embrace this in his work. It was also in the unusual clothes he wore and in the portraits he had commissioned. He had an enduring hostility to what he considered excessively restrictive social rules that has its counterpart in queer people’s social defiance today. So, if I feel some personal identification with what Byron went through as a child, I also admire him as someone who dared to be different in how he loved and how he looked in his own day.

Although Byron’s experience of same-sex sexuality has been known about for a long time, there are still distinguished academics in the UK publishing books about him today as if this weren’t true and even if it were, it doesn’t matter.[2] When this is combined with active book banning going on in the USA, often targeted at books for, by, and about queer people, it begins to represent a resurgence of the campaign against queer people that should have long been laid to rest in a modern, civilized society long ago. That is my justification here for quoting the detailed evidence for Byron’s queer sexuality, mostly in his own words, and for connecting it with major themes in his work such as his melancholia, his secretiveness, his rage against social convention. Byron’s greatness lay in his being able to transform the social handicap of his queerness into moving, beautiful language. Sometimes he could be very funny about it too. He experienced a kind of personal transfiguration in his work that helped him rise above the pain he experienced because of attacks on his sexual and moral persona. In one of the best passages of his poetry he claimed that what he wrote would eventually be able to soften hearts all rocky now.[3] He believed that people would come to regret how harshly they’d judged him while he lived. If his reputation was under attack while he was alive, the same judgement threatens to be entered against him today in renewed moral clamor. That’s why a re-evaluation of the connections between his work and his sexual persona, as well as a reminder of the eloquence and written elegance that made him a magnetic force are worth exploring today.

There have been at least two important books of the last several decades that looked at a subject like this one. Louis Crompton in 1985 examined the homophobia of Byron’s era as an important context for understanding his life. Fiona MacCarthy’s excellent biography of 2002 was the first to suggest that Byron was essentially gay, and that his relationships with women were cover-ups for this.[4] My book builds on their foundations. Contemporary women were attracted to him even when they perceived him as effeminate and having had a past that included relationships with other males. That seems as interesting a comment on his era as it is on him. He sometimes sincerely and sexually returned their attention in a way that gay or bisexual doesn’t quite capture adequately. Further, because MacCarthy’s book-length examination of his sexuality is now more than twenty years old, it seems worthwhile to see whether Byron has something new to say to our generation now.

This book is based on my reading of Byron’s letters and his poetry. Though he initially denied that his fictional characters had anything to do with his own life, this was quickly seen through by his readers and by his critics. His best works—including Beppo and Don Juan—are based on recognizable elements of his own life story and his own experience. It was a characteristic of his fellow Romantics to dwell on interior strife and struggles of the self, but Byron’s works are even more taken up with these themes than those of the others.

When it comes to the history of sexuality, however, there is always a degree of speculation involved. Sexual activity usually takes place behind closed doors. Same-sex sexuality was legally forbidden and has always been more difficult to detect. In Byron’s era, what we would call male homosexuality was called sodomy. Men were put to death for it in Britain. Even a conspiracy to commit sodomy, which is what men were charged with if an actual act couldn’t be proved, could lead to personal ruin or suicide. Trials of men accused of sodomy appeared in the newspapers. One of the most famous men accused of sodomy kept a large collection of these newspaper articles.[5] Nevertheless, sodomy could not be mentioned in conversation. The word sodomy referred to a sexual act, anal intercourse, that anyone could commit. It was thus different from a modern notion of sexuality as an inborn trait that orients some minority of people toward their own gender. Ironically, Byron’s was an era when beds were scarce. All sorts of people slept together, and we don’t know what went on. Some high prestige institutions in Britain, for example boarding schools and the navy, were known as places where same-sex sexuality was commonplace, at the very same time as others were being put to death for it. This is the kind of hypocrisy that drove Byron into exile.

There has traditionally been an imbalance between the sorts of evidence required to establish different kinds of sexuality. Whereas any male and female who are married are assumed to have had sex together whether we can establish that or not, the traditional objection in gay history has been There’s no evidence! of a sexual connection between two persons of the same gender. An unnecessarily heavy burden of proof is placed on those trying to figure out the erotic lives of persons who would’ve done their best to keep that part of their lives quiet. All this is to underline that it is necessary to speculate about the sex life even of such a confessional, self-obsessed poet as Byron was. Speculation is a kind of informed guess work. You as the reader are permitted and encouraged to retain your skepticism in specific instances. There is no doubting a vast cover-up and censorship has been involved in telling Byron’s life story. Sometimes Byron himself was the first to provide misleading or false facts to cover his trail. Later it was his friends, his family members, his biographers, or his editors who we know destroyed or hid evidence of his love life to protect his reputation.

Much about Byron can be established from other biographies and from his own writing. This can be done while sitting in a chair in a library. But I have also done some legwork that has opened new dimensions of Byron’s life to me. When I went to look at some of his manuscripts at Harrow School, I visited on a snowy day. I discovered how hard it would be to make it up Harrow’s steep hill if you had a bad foot and leg as Byron did. I’ve also looked at Byron’s letters in the papers of his publisher, now in Edinburgh. The language and penmanship of young men with whom he was involved gave me new ideas of how they stood in their relations with him.

Some of the human scale of Byron’s story comes through things other than texts. I’ve also visited some of the scenes of his parents’ life. His mother and father lived for a time in Gight Castle in Aberdeenshire. It’s now a local park. The ruined castle is overgrown with weeds and thistles. The small, enclosed scale of the place gave me a new idea of how their unhappy marriage might have grown worse in the claustrophobic confines of a cold, stone tower. Aberdeen itself can be a forbidding place with austere, imposing architecture. The gray and self-denying quality of the local variety of Protestantism would have been a backdrop to Byron’s boyhood even if he came to reject it in later life.

The streets in St. James’s where Byron lived most of his London life are still fashionable and still expensive. It would turn anyone’s head to be recognized there. The Casa Saluzzo is a big house in Genoa with palm trees lining the drive. It’s a place few people would choose to leave, as Byron did when he chose to experience the privations of a war zone in Greece. I’ve tried to convey some of what I’ve discovered of the physical geography Byron inhabited as well as what he tells of his life in his letters and poems.

We are more alert to the abuse of women and children than they were in Byron’s era. Historians and biographers are trained to pay attention to the differences between the cultural norms in different eras. We cannot expect people who lived two hundred years ago always to conform to the different priorities of the world we live in today. Back then is conceived as an informal term of disparagement that needs no explanation today. At best it conveys our pity for benighted people living in eras before cellphones and Facebook. However, persons in previous times sometimes lived wiser lives than we do, and people in the past were more self-aware than we sometimes dream of. Byron would certainly in our terms be guilty of abusive and exploitive behavior, both of women and teenaged boys. He sometimes knew this and acknowledged the wrong himself. This should encourage us not to close his books shut, but to raise questions that are worth exploring and may still help us today.

How much of Byron’s adult abuse of others was owing to his own abuse at the hands of an adult when he was a child? What proportion of consenting romantic relationships, in Byron’s era and now, rest on power imbalances? If we look at our own past honestly, how many of us are without guilt ourselves when we consider how we’ve treated our romantic friends and partners? Many of these questions must be partly unanswerable, but they’re still worth keeping in mind when we consider what may seem to us a particularly reckless past life.

What’s also new here will be controversial to some modern Byron purists and lovers of poetry. I have broken down Byron’s poetry into brief excerpts. I have converted his lines into prose and removed the line breaks that distinguish the verses. I have put his writing into bold italics so it is immediately distinguishable on the page. I have done this to make Byron more accessible to our generation, which is less accustomed to reading poetry than his was. My aim has been to make his words immediately comprehensible. I have wanted to make his voice something we can imagine hearing today. I have wanted to let him tell his story in his own words. My guess is that the line breaks mystify and confuse more readers than may be willing to admit. Byron’s name is still well-known but very few people can quote a single line Byron wrote. His lines remain striking and musical even when broken out of their verses. Just as Shakespeare’s plays are often adapted to appeal to modern audiences, my alterations of Byron’s lines nevertheless preserve his original language to appeal to new readers. I hope you will take away from them some quotable lines that will enlarge your sympathies, as mine have been enlarged too. You may go away sensing the parallels between your life and a suffering, intelligent human being, as I have.

When Caroline Lamb made her famous one-line assessment of Byron, that he was mad, bad and dangerous to know, she was doing something like what I’ve done here. She was quoting Byron himself and making up something only partly new. She took Byron’s own last words—mad, bad, and know—from three consecutive lines of his poem Lara and applied them to Byron himself. Her only addition was the word dangerous.[6] Byron’s relationship with Caroline Lamb was one of the most memorable of his whole life. They both loved writing and dressing up. He was proud of knowing her at first and ashamed of having loved her later. She loved him long after he left her, and he never forgot her. He remembered her and resented her. If there’s a similar relationship you can think of in your own past, it may help you identify with a great writer, and maybe help you to see the Byronic in you too.

Swimming is a unique theme in Byron’s life and work. It occurs both in self-revealing passages of his poems and his recollections of himself as a physical body moving through the water. At a key moment toward the end of the last canto of one of his most famous poems, he showed how central swimming was to his conception of himself as a writer and a poet. It repaired his experience of his deformity. His deformed right foot and leg worked better in the water than they did on land. For Byron swimming was also a sort of baptism, where he could commune with a mythical figure of the past, as well as renew himself. In the water he was not a weak man with a limp, nor an effeminate poet, but someone who could perform great feats. In his lifetime there were some remarkable swims. He swam with friends in the Cam in Cambridge. He also swam in the Thames, a more treacherous, tidal river. He crossed the wide Tagus at the mouth of Lisbon’s harbor. He swam from the Lido and up the grand canal in Venice, a swim of at least four hours. He swam across the Dardanelles Strait, at the gateway from the Aegean Sea into the waterway leading to Istanbul, then called the Hellespont and Constantinople.

In 1810, when he was twenty-two, he had just begun Childe Harold the long poem that would make him famous. He took a break to write a much shorter work to celebrate this swim across the Dardanelles. He told his readers that he imitated Leander, who in legend swam across the Hellespont to visit a lover on the other side. Though Byron could sometimes go in for braggadocio, he was also good at exaggeration and making fun of himself. He called himself a degenerate modern wretch to satirize not only his inferiority to Leander, but also the way his sexual and romantic history would be received in Britain if he were ever exposed. Just when you expect him to be crowning himself with a laurel for having completed such a marvelous swim, he observes that Leander eventually drowned on his last crossing of the Hellespont. Then Byron confesses that after his own swim he came down with a shivering fever, or ague.[7] This is to give a preview of what good company Byron can be when he’s talking about himself, as he almost always is in his poems and in his letters. Anyone who’s ever enjoyed the excitement and the fun of being in the water will easily identify with this man who, half naked, half afraid of drowning, thrashed the water for dear life, and lived to downplay it later as a very good