Lord Byron is a vampire who gives Bibles to poor children

Prof. Burstein has been teaching a class in the “Nineteenth-Century Gothic” this semester and I have been reading around in the syllabus, just the works I had not read, so no Frankenstein or Jane Eyre or James Hogg right now.  Mostly the, how to say this, lesser Gothic.  Third-tier Charles Dickens ghost stories.  Elizabeth Gaskell magazine fiction.  Enjoyable, but I am not expecting to stumble on the equivalent of A Christmas Carol or Cranford.

Thus John Polidori’s The Vampyre; A Tale (1819) is the worst book I have read in a long time.  It is a milestone in, you know, vampire literature, but more importantly it is built on an outstanding joke, which is that Polidori’s pal Lord Byron, the most famous writer in Europe, is a – is the – vampyre.  Polidori does everything he can to encourage the association.

The punchline comes after the story proper (“Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!” as if anyone cares), in the “Extract of a Letter, Containing an Account of Lord Byron’s Residence in the Island of Mitylene,” which on the surface has nothing at all to do with The Vampyre, and just below the surface acts as a denial that Byron deserves any of his notoriety.   His reading, for example, is not only not especially shocking; he is just a poet, a scholar:

On the tablet of the recess lay Voltaire’s, Shakespeare’s, Boileau’s, and Rousseau’s works complete; Volney’s Ruin of Empires; Zimmerman, in the German language; Klopstock’s Messiah; Kotzebue’s novels; Schiller’s play of the Robbers; Milton’s Paradise Lost, an Italian edition, printed at Parma in 1810; several small pamphlets form the Greek press at Constantinople, much torn, but no English book of any description.  Most of these books were filled with marginal notes, written with a pencil, in Italian and Latin.  The Messiah was literally scribbled all over, and marked with slips of paper, on which also were remarks.

The last line is the culmination of the joke, that Byron’s attention is focused on the era’s great religious poem.  When he is not reading, Byron gives Greek girls money for – their dowries – what did you think I was going to say?  “He also bought a new boat for a fisherman who had lost his own in a gale, and he often gave Greek Testaments to the poor children.”  He bought another “most beautiful” girl a piano.

Lord Byron’s character is worthy of his genius.  To do good in secret, and shun the world’s applause, is the surest testimony of a virtuous heart and self-approving conscience.

I don’t know how much of this is true; that is the third level of the story, the put-on.  Byron wasn’t a vampire, that part I know is untrue.

Prof. Burstein has The Vampyre paired with Byron’s Manfred (1817), an inversion of Goethe’s Faust in which Byron is a wizard who spends his time summoning demons who then refuse to serve him.  Kind of ineffective.  But Byron is doing the same thing Polidori would later do, practically demanding that his readers identify the demented Byronic character with the celebrity author.

The Vampyre is most interesting as a landmark in the literature of celebrity.

He was astonished to find how sweet a thing was poetry - Trollope characters read

Should I write about the books in The Eustace Diamonds.  Whenever I can, I write about the books.  They are so much fun.  Even a shortage of books is fun:

“There isn't anything for you to do.  There are Miss Edgeworth's novels down-stairs, and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in my bed-room.  I don't subscribe to Mudie's, because when I asked for ‘Adam Bede,’ they always sent me the ‘Bandit Chief.”  (Ch. 34)

John Sutherland did the notes in the Penguin edition I read.  He tells me that the lending library would substitute books if it thought your request was unsuitable, so the shocking Adam Bede is replaced by The Bandit Chief; or Lords of Orsino. A Romance (1818).  The poor heroine, Lucy Morris, not the pathological liar but the novel’s more traditional heroine, is being punished for the sins of her fiancée here by being forced to live with a woman who has only four books.  If I thought summaries of novels were of much value I would explain why.

Lucy has her own book, too, Proverbial Philosophy by Martin Tupper, a poem in three volumes with a “theme of self-help.”  What a dreadful thing to be stuck with.  I would have Pride and Prejudice and Castle Rackrent memorized by the time I left that house.  In her previous house, this character had “catalogued the library” (Ch. 3) for fun, so that is who she is.

Most of the reading in the novel is done by the false heroine, the actual protagonist, the “dishonest, lying, evil-minded harpy” (Ch. 11) Lizzie Greystock, Lady Eustace who in a bold break from novelistic tradition is not led to her ruin by over-indulgence in novels but by her love of poetry, especially Romantic poetry, in particular Byron and Shelley.

“Ah,” she would say to herself in her moments of solitude, “if I had a Corsair of my own, how I would sit on watch for my lover's boat by the sea-shore!”  And she believed it of herself, that she could do so.  (Ch. 5)

She means this Corsair, the Byronic Corsair from The Corsair (1814), the one with a “forehead high and pale” and “sable curls in wild profusion.”

The comic high point of the thing is the three page scene in Chapter 21 in which Lady Eustace reads Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813), sacred text of the radical Chartists, en plain air.  “Her darling ‘Queen Mab’ must be read without the coarse, inappropriate, everyday surroundings of a drawing-room…”  But the bench is too uncomfortable and “there were some snails which discomposed her.”  Finally, she makes it through the first stanza, “eight or nine lines,” which are so magnificent that she memorizes them.  She never progresses a line farther with Queen Mab:

As she grew older, however, she quickly became wiser, and was aware that in learning one passage of a poem it is expedient to select one in the middle, or at the end.  The world is so cruelly observant now-a-days, that even men and women who have not themselves read their "Queen Mab" will know from what part of the poem a morsel is extracted, and will not give you credit for a page beyond that from which your passage comes.

Again, we are in Chapter 21 – yes, I read the novel.  Trollope rubs in the joke at the beginning of the next chapter, noting that Lady Eustace had meant to finally read The Faerie Queene at this time, but due to distractions reads even less of it than the Shelley poem, instead wasting her time with novels.

My title is from the first chapter; the theme runs through the entire book.  Trollope always does the same thing, I always think, but I am always in some ways wrong.

His volume heretofore was Man - Byron's Byronic 1814

1814 was an important year for Byronism, a Romantic text-transmitted disease that infected a number of the greatest writers of Europe.  Symptoms included melancholy, handsomeness, and conformity-smashing free-spiritedness.

George Gordon Byron’s immense celebrity began with Child Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812, a travel poem in which a Byronic fellow wanders about the Mediterranean – exotic Spain, exotic Albania.  Understanding the appeal of the character, Byron began to write silly best-selling adventure stories (“Turkish Tales”) starring an Orientalized version of the character, mostly in rhyming couplets, a form of which Byron was one of the few great masters in English.  Meanwhile, Byron increased his celebrity by behaving scandalously.  This formula has been successful for two hundred years now.

With Byron the difference between self-parody and self-mythologizing can be hard to see.  Some examples from The Corsair, canto and line numbers in parentheses:

Sun-burnt his cheek, his forehead high and pale
The sable curls in wild profusion veil  (I.203-4)

There was a laughing Devil in his sneer,
That raised emotions both of rage and fear;
And where his frown of hatred darkly fell,
Hope withering fled – and Mercy sigh’d farewell!  (I.223-6)

Lone, wild and strange, he stood alike exempt
From all affection and from all contempt  (l.272-3)

I would need a specialist in the transmission of Byronism to demonstrate the case, but I think the two cleverly linked verse romances of 1814, The Corsair and Lara, perfect the character.  The first is about a pirate captain who fights a Turkish Pasha for wealth and power.  It features a sea battle, disguises, a beautiful harem girl in distress, a prison escape.  All of what I would now call the usual nonsense.

So this is why in Chapter 17 of Jane Eyre the chic, repellent Miss Ingram wants to hear “’a Corsair-song’” – “’Know that I doat on Corsairs.’”   These stories, and this character, have been copied so often and so thoroughly that it is quite hard to see anything original, but there was a time when everyone thought they were the most daring, innovative, shocking poems anyone had ever seen.

Obviously, the pirate captain is not Byron, but a reader is allowed to imagine Byron as the hero, the image of Byron, the celebrity.  Thus, Byronism.

The preface to The Corsair declares that it will be Byron’s “last production,” but within the same year followed Lara, a meta-adventure.  Not only is the hero much like Byron, but also much like the Corsair. 

The chief of Lara is return’d again:
And why had Lara cross’d the bounding main?  (I.11-12)

But the case cannot be proved.  He has a page who turns out to be a woman, a foreigner, devoted to his life – the woman from The Corsair’s harem?  Maybe!  The home to which the chief has returned – a footnote simultaneously implies that the setting is Spain and not Spain (“the country is not Spain, but the Moon,” Byron wrote in a letter to his publisher).  It is all quite clever, a kind of inside-out parody of the Turkish tales.

Regardless, I would not recommend these adventure poems to anyone who does not savor Byron’s verse, who is not happy to read 1,270 lines of this:

Books, for his volume heretofore was Man,
With eye more curious he appear’d to scan,
And oft, in sudden mood, for many a day,
From all communion he would start away:
And then, his rarely call’d attendants said,
Through night's long hours would sound his hurried tread
O'er the dark gallery, where his fathers frown’d
In rude but antique portraiture around (I.131-8)

And who is not willing to take cheap thrills where he can get them, and laugh along with Byron at the silliness of the whole thing.

The Best Books of the Year: 1812 - The blight of Life - the demon Thought.

The dying light of the autumnal sunset reminds me that it is the season for Best Books of the Year lists, those jolly collections of well-meaning ephemera.

1812 featured two big, lasting literary events.

The most dramatic was the birth of Byronism with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a Romaunt; and Other Poems.  George Gordon had published a couple of earlier books, but it was Childe Harold that made him an international celebrity (“I awoke one morning and found myself famous”):

What exile from himself can flee?
   To zones, though more and more remote,
Still, still pursues, where'er I be,
   The blight of life – the demon Thought.

Perhaps Byron’s fatalistic attitudinizing has become the poem's greatest legacy, but the poem itself is masterful and the book surrounding the poem would have served to undercut the facile Byronism if the facile Byronists had bothered to read it, with its lengthy footnotes and appendices on Albanian linguistics, classical references, and travel writing trivia:

As a specimen of the Albanian or Arnaout dialect of the Illyric, I here insert two of their most popular choral songs, which are generally chaunted in dancing by men or women indiscriminately.

Childe Harold would surprise people who only know Byron by reputation.

The second event was the publication of the first volume of the first edition of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen.  Now it is a truism that the original versions of the Fairy Tales, more violent and weird than later redactions, are worth seeking out.  They are.

Funny how both of these landmarks are partial and mutable texts.  Not only are they both incomplete, with more fairy tales and cantos of “Childe Harold” to follow in a few years, but they would both be published in all sorts of configurations.  Almost no one reads the original books – I haven’t.

What else survives from 1812?  Not much, honestly.  Two hundred years is a long time.  Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson, the second volume of Goethe’s memoir Poetry and Truth, Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee.  I have only read the Goethe.  How is The Absentee?

I am sure I have read George Crabbe’s Tales, a collection of narrative poems along the lines of his 1810 masterpiece “Peter Grimes,” but heck if I remember it.  My fault or Crabbe’s?  Either way, I can hardly pretend that this is a living book in 2012.

I wonder what I have missed?

John Constable’s 1812 “Autumnal Sunset” is owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum.  To see it, just go to the Prints & Drawings Study Room, room WS and paw through case R, shelf 29, box L.

Mikhail Lermontov and A Hero of Our Time

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41) lived and worked in the shadow of Pushkin. His verse forms, his subject matter, and his death in a pointless duel (age 27), suggest his older contemporary at every turn. For the last four years of his life, he was widely acknowledged as Pushkin's heir, Russia's greatest living poet. But Lermontov is very much worth reading for his own sake.

Lermontov's single short novel, A Hero of Our Time (1840), is a series of four adventures of Pechorin, the supposed hero of the title. The adventures are all set on the war-torn Caucasian frontier, and involve smugglers and Chechnyan bandits, kidnapping, Russian roulette, and dueling - exciting stuff. Why, then, is Pechorin always so bored?

That's the central irony of the novel - the adventures are all a result of Pechorin's boredom, his struggle against the meaningless of his life. The result is always some sort of disaster. Pechorin sows chaos, just to have something to do, and leaves a trail of casualties. Here's a sample of how he operates. Pechorin is trying to steal the Princess Mary from his friend Grushnitski, for sport:

"During all these days, I never once departed from my system. The young princess begins to like my conversation. I told her some of the strange occurrences in my life, and she begins to see in me an extraordinary person. I laugh at everything in the world, especially at feelings: this is beginning to frighten her. In my presence she does not dare to launch upon sentimental debates with Grushnitski, and has several times already replied to his sallies with a mocking smile; but every time that Grushnitski comes up to her, I assume a humble air and leave them alone together. The first time she was glad of it or tried to make it seem so; the second time she became cross with me; the third time she became cross with Grushnitski." (p. 121, Ardis edition)

The result, in this case, is one of the greatest, craziest, dueling scenes in Russian literature.

A Hero of Our Time has an indirect, modern structure. A Lermontov-like narrator first hears a long story about Pechorin, then, by chance, actually meets him. Then the last three stories are in Pechorin's own voice, from his journals. So the reader starts at a distance, but draws closer and closer to Pechorin.

Lermontov's hero is a relative of Goethe's Werther and any number of Byronic heroes, and his own descendants will be seen again in certain protagonists of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, and any other character who asks "What's the point of it all?"

This is cross-posted at the Russian Reading Challenge. I'm not sure it's any more useful or well written than Lermontov's wikipedia entry, but such is life.

The long "Princess Mary" chapter is the earliest non-English story I know set in a spa town. In England, I'm thinking of Jane Austen and Tobias Smollett. Who am I forgetting?