Bernard Beatty. Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022. Pp. xvi +266. $130.00 (hardcover).
Many thanks indeed to Andrew Stauffer of the University of Virginia for his recent review on Project Muse. Link here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/924681
In a recent online conversation, Bernard Beatty offered a reminder of the most rewarding method for encountering the works of Byron: “You just have to listen to him: try to hear his voice, try to follow his processes of his mind.” It’s good advice, and it serves equally well as a directive to scholars approaching Reading Byron, Beatty’s rich gathering of critical insights regarding Byron’s poetry, biography, and political ideas and influence. For at least four decades, Beatty has shaped the international conversation about Byron, not only through his extensive publications (enumerated in a helpful handlist in this volume) but also via his influence on students who themselves have risen to positions of leadership in the field.
Reading Byron comes as a welcome and lasting record of Beatty’s critical mind in action. At once elegant and pugnacious, pragmatic and deeply felt, this collection of essays illuminates central precincts of Byron’s life and work while also casting light on some unexpected corners. It is a model of critical engagement, grounded in extensive, repeated readings and full to bursting with arresting observations.
As its subtitle indicates, Reading Byron is divided into three broad sections. The first, “Reading Byron’s Poems,” contains essays mainly on what he calls the “dark poems”—Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Lara, Manfred, and Cain—with an additional essay on the English cantos of Don Juan. The second section investigates three episodes in Byron’s life: his bachelor residence at Albany in Piccadilly from March to December 1814; his three visits to Seaham centered around his marriage to Annabella Milbanke; and his transition, via his love for Teresa Guiccioli, from the “promiscuous concubinage” of Venice to the “strictest adultery” of Ravenna. The third section offers three shorter essays on Byron’s political beliefs and influence, and it is followed by transcriptions of two lively conversations with Gavin Hopps about Byron and the material covered in the book. As this inventory suggests, Reading Byron—like Don Juan—embraces a miscellaneity held together and propelled forward by the voice of its witty, attentive narrator. It instantiates an episodic critical method particularly appropriate to Byron, proceeding by way of vignettes that reveal some aspect of this changeable figure that Lady Blessington called a “perfect chameleon.” Grand coherent narratives about Byron are difficult to maintain; he is perhaps best read by flashes of lightning such as Beatty conjures here. Surveying the territory behind him, Beatty remarks ruefully, “confidence never seems to be lacking in those who explain Byron to us” (138)—which is not to say that Beatty himself is a shy or retiring critic. In fact, I would say that the Beattific mode in its classic form relies on bold propositions that challenge the reader to think differently. His criticism comes to disrupt orthodoxies and shake readers from certain forms of critical torpor. And yet he is equally sensitive to the power of ambiguity in Byron, of the “perhaps” that echoes through Manfred, Beppo, the “Epistle to Augusta,” and other works at key moments, calling up alternative possibilities. Indeed, what Beatty says of Byron might be said of himself as well: “his sharpest and most specific insights are always formulated through his capacity to hold opposites together” (205).
Sometimes the declarative mode of Reading Byron produces statements that the chapters themselves disprove, as in chapter seven’s claim that, “There is no picture of Byron at Seaham in fact or in our head, because Byron does not make one” (153). This is followed by wonderfully evocative descriptions of Byron—offered by Hobhouse, Annabella, and Byron himself—among the Milbankes in and around Seaham Hall. I left that chapter with a whole album of pictures of Byron at Seaham in my head: Byron nervously greeting Annabella by the chimney-piece, Byron holding Hobhouse’s hand through the carriage window, Byron snatching his mother-in-law’s wig from her head, et al. Activated by Beatty’s initial claim, my attention was riveted.
Similarly, in chapter eight, Beatty makes the extraordinary claim that “Byron is not a lover at a distance,” glossing this in a footnote: “With the arguable exception of his lines ‘To the Po,’ Byron does not write great love poems inspired by the absence of the beloved” (170). To my mind, most if not all of Byron’s love poetry was inspired by absences: of various Marys, of Constance Spencer Smith, of Annabella, of Augusta, and more. Beatty might mean that Byron wrote few great love poems at all: it’s an interesting idea, and one that gets the reader thinking in productive ways: what is a love poem? what constitutes absence? how well, ultimately, did Byron understand and write about love? And so we are spurred onward by Beatty’s provocations. In the chapters on Byron’s poetry, Beatty is most interested in Byron’s “relentless inquiry into the nature and contrariety of human willing, its muffled relation to the intellect, and its inexplicable lurch towards violence and repeated transgression” (15). This interest leads to a foregrounding of “Byron’s religious sensibility,” and the section as a whole suggests “a religious trajectory in his poetic career” (15). Without denying Byron’s skeptical impulses, Beatty shows how deeply the poet’s imagination was structured by the Bible and Christian frameworks of belief. We see Byron engaging with Biblical models of history and allegory in Childe Harold, with the ethics of sin in Lara, with the relinquishment of denial in Manfred, and with the metaphysics of the will in Cain. Each chapter is a tour de force, and they collectively deliver a double shock of resistance and recognition. The effect is something like being told that Black Sabbath is a Christian rock band: you bridle, and then realize that of course they are; how could you have ever doubted it? Not everyone will follow Beatty as far as he takes his argument—in which Aurora Raby becomes the presiding and culminating Christian spirit of Don Juan, “cherub and seraph” leading Byron out of the world of lust, willfulness, and empty sociability (124). But that chapter, “Don Juan: Empty Spaces,” is a small-scale masterpiece. If you are new to Beatty’s vision, I guarantee it will permanently change the way you read the English cantos. The chapters on episodes from Byron’s life prove Beatty a master of biography, and the pieces on Albany and Seaham in particular make me wish he would write “the new version of Moore’s Life for our times” that he calls for here (138). The Albany chapter provides wonderful historical background and on-the-spot descriptive detail, illuminates Byron’s desire for a place “of withdrawal and enclosure in the heart of bustling fashionable London” (152), and sketches with verve the texture and trajectories of Regency bachelor lives, placing Byron alongside fellow Albany residents William Gladstone and Chandos Leigh. The Seaham chapter is packed with vignettes that reveal Byron attempting to fit himself into prescribed roles of suitor, bridegroom, and husband, at a time when he briefly was part of an English family “in this regular way” (168). Irregularity triumphed, as the promiscuity of Venice and adultery of Ravenna demonstrate, yet Beatty reminds us that “fidelity” was really the watchword of the Byron Guiccioli relationship (181). The “Life” section is animated throughout by encyclopedic knowledge and insightful sympathy acquired during a lifetime’s reading of and about Byron.
Beatty’s chapters on Byron and politics show the poet negotiating liberty and license and nationalism and internationalism. Here we see Byron not according to clichés—an unqualified champion of liberty, a jaded relativist, an incoherent political thinker—but rather as a writer invested in freedom and possibility, activating and synthesizing “different registers” and drawn to the “impossibly harmonized contrarieties” of Rome (201). As Beatty says, “He feels with the aristocrat and with the underdog. He mocks authoritarian systems such as the Venetian, yet he admires its long duration and the beauty as well as the horror associated with it. He dislikes mob rule and demagoguery but sympathizes with ‘the People’” (220). At the conclusion of Childe Harold IV, he lauds Roman civilization while simultaneously identifying with the slaughtered Dacian gladiator. That double vision, born from Byron’s wide “pattern of sympathy with myriad forms of human life” coupled with his intense passion over “forms of injustice” (220), may be the most lasting legacy of Byron’s political writings and the most relevant to our present day. Reading Byron is bookended by Jerome McGann’s introduction and the conversations with Gavin Hopps. McGann picks out three aspects of Beatty’s critical work on Byron for particular praise: “his clear grasp of the intellectual power of the verse,” his grasp of “the intimate relation between the life and the work,” and his ability to attend closely to Byron’s language, which McGann calls “treacherously lucid” (1–2). All three of those virtues also characterize McGann’s recent book, Byron and the Poetics of Adversity, which developed out of a series of conversations between McGann and Beatty during the pandemic. Conversation may be the perfect modality for parsing Byron’s many complexities, as the consistently intelligent, collegial, and surprising exchanges between Hopps and Beatty demonstrate. Hopps raises this point exactly, and Beatty agrees: “two people together . . . can get to a place that neither of them could have got to on their own” (239). Reading Byron reflects that sociable energy, a product of the innumerable tutorials, seminars, conferences, bus ride colloquies, and late-night conversations over good claret that so many have had the privilege to share with Bernard Beatty. His book is both a powerful engine and bright souvenir of that busy turning world.
Andrew Stauffer University of Virginia
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