The Book of Lost Books (31 page)

George Gordon, Lord Byron

{1788–1824}

THE FACT THAT Lord Byron's
Memoirs
were burned by his publisher, executor, and biographer has not deprived them of an afterlife. According to the critic William Gifford, they were “fit only for the brothel and would have damned Lord Byron to everlasting infamy.” Nonetheless, a moderately diligent browser could easily obtain Robert Nye's
Memoirs of
Lord Byron
(1989), or Christopher Nicole's
Secret Memoirs of Lord Byron
(1979), or Tom Holland's
Lord of the Dead
(2000), which reveal that the “bad, mad and dangerous to know” poet was a vampire to boot.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, through her friendship with Byron's widow and a hefty slug of inference, shocked the world in 1869 by announcing that the awful secret of the
Memoirs
was Byron's confession to having committed incest with his half-sister Augusta Leigh (a rumor first aired during Lord Byron's life). Most of her evidence was drawn from Byron's drama about an incestuous couple,
Manfred.
By her logic, the author of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
might be suspected of being an elderly black gentleman from the southern states.

Only nine years after Byron's death, an odd poem appeared entitled
Don Leon.
Byron was named as the author, and it seemed to form “Part of the Private Journal of his Lordship, supposed to have been entirely destroyed by Thos. Moore.” Since it refers to events after his death, the ascription is unlikely at best. All the first editions of this rhyming defense of homosexuality are lost; and it is doubtful whether the initial printing kept some clue to the author's identity.

The posthumous fame of Lord Byron was also blighted by a forger who called himself Major George Gordon de Luña Byron, who claimed to be an illegitimate son. After an erratic career in India and America, he eventually wound up in London, where he began blackmailing Mary Shelley with counterfeit correspondence. At this time, Mary was still vainly hoping some of her late husband's lost poetry might be found lining packing cases, and was more than susceptible to any chance to obtain his manuscripts. Having swindled Mary Shelley, the major then produced
The Inedited Works of Lord Byron,
a haphazard collocation of unpublished material, plagiarism, and fakes. He even managed to gull Robert Browning, whose
Essay on Shelley
began with an inadvertent advertisement for some phony epistles.

That John Murray, Thomas Moore, and John Cam Hobhouse destroyed Byron's
Memoirs
is indeed objectionable; even more so, given that Moore's doubts were assuaged by £2,000. None of the men could actually bring themselves to perpetrate the deed, and two friends of Lord Byron's embittered widow did the actual kindling. But are critics wise to wring their hands and wish that “Byron's autobiography might now have its place on the shelves alongside Rousseau's
Confessions
”

The contents of the
Memoirs
are not as intangible as its postulated literary merits. Byron had written to Murray, his publisher, clearly outlining its contents:

The
Life
is
Memoranda
not Confessions. I have left out all my
loves
(except in a general way) and many other of the most important things (because I must not compromise other people) so that it is like the play of Hamlet—“the part of Hamlet omitted by particular desire.” But you will find many opinions, and some fun, with a detailed account of my marriage and its consequences, as true as a party concerned can make such accounts, for I suppose we are all prejudiced.

Lady Byron had, before the
Memoirs
were ever in the hands of potential publishers and editors, scandalized London by hinting at some secret proclivities on the part of her former husband. That Byron wished to provide his version of events in no way justifies suspecting the
Memoirs
to have contained outrageous revelations.

Byron's supposedly explosive
Memoirs
are such a famous example of a book that cannot be read that it blinds us to his real incomplete work. The mammoth
Don Juan,
at the time of his death, had already exceeded the twelve books that Byron had, half-seriously, claimed to be planning at the end of canto I. By the time he was sending the fifth section to Murray in 1821, he knew that “the 5
^th
is so far from being the last of
D. J.
that it is hardly the beginning.” All thoughts of a Virgilian, measured epic, in the standard twelve books and with the prerequisite visits to the Underworld and catalogues of ships, had been shattered.
Don Juan
was a gossipy ragbag, a freewheeling satire that winked at conventional heroics while it lauded the protagonist's unshakeable sense of self, and self-preservation. It was, in Byron's words, “a kind of poetical Tristram Shandy, or Montaigne with a plot for a hinge.”

The sixteen and a bit cantos we have go some way toward fulfilling Byron's claim in that letter that it would have “a proper mixture of siege, battle and adventure.” Juan is sent away in disgrace after an affair with an older woman, is shipwrecked, avoids cannibalism, and conducts an affair with Haidée, the daughter of a pirate. He is sold as a slave in Constantinople, escapes to join the Russian army, and is sent by Catherine the Great on a diplomatic mission to England, where the poem breaks off, leaving him in the middle of country-house shenanigans with three insistent and ardent suitors.

Even this is but a fragment of what Byron felt he could achieve. Juan would tour Europe, becoming “a
Cavalier Servente
in Italy, and a cause for a divorce in England, and a Sentimental ‘Werther-faced man' in Germany, so as to show the different ridicules of the society in each of those countries, and to have displayed him gradually
gâté
and
blasé,
as is natural.” One wonders if Goethe's high opinion of Byron would have altered, had the latter lived to apply his satirical lash to
The Sorrows of Young
Werther.

Byron never mentions Mozart's
Don Giovanni,
nor does he seem too preoccupied with the dramatic version Molière wrote. If we can say anything with a degree of certainty, it is that Byron's
Don Juan
would not have ended with the Commendatore, the Stone Guest. Don Juan might still have ended up in Hell, although Byron characteristically is unresolved on whether to send him there, or to an unhappy marriage: “the Spanish tradition says Hell: but is probably only an Allegory of the other state.”

In the very same letter Byron suggests another closure. Don Juan might end his European tour in France during the Revolution, and be guillotined by Robespierre. Perhaps, he suggested, he would “make him finish as
Anacharsis Cloots
[Clootz],” the Prussian nobleman who asked to be beheaded last that day, in order to complete some pertinent scientific observations.

Had Byron not died in the Greek swamps, who knows how many misadventures and animadversions the Don might have enjoyed?
Don Juan
could only ever be as long as the author's life itself. The
Memoirs
could only ever be a wry and rueful glance over his shoulder; the ongoing, reckless
Don Juan
could have easily ended up anywhere.

Byron's nonchalance about the
Memoirs
is radically at odds with the hysteria caused by their destruction. The very fact that he completed them, whereas
Don Juan
sallies on regardless, implies it was only one facet, a biopsy rather than a body. The
Memoirs
detailed a mere incident, a journalistic rejoinder; whereas
Don Juan
was the epic of his life, in all its comedy, ardor, outspokenness, and opinion.

Thomas Carlyle

{1795–1881}

IF BEING PROLIX, obscure, reactionary, and immoderate were the criteria for becoming lost, there would not be a single page of Thomas Carlyle in existence. Fortunately, he was also a genius—though that is no guarantee of survival either.

In
Sartor Resartus
(1833), Thomas Carlyle created a heady mélange of spiritual autobiography and polemical vituperation, under the guise of a philosophy of clothes written by an eccentric German academic, Professor Herr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. George Eliot thought it marked “an epoch of their minds” for the members of her generation; Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the author possessed “an equal mastery over all the riches of the language,” and a “purity of moral sentiment.”

The work evolved from diametric impulses: philosophical investigation and religious angst, the treatise and the story. Carlyle had been listlessly considering an Essay on Metaphors, which was transformed into the meditations on language as the warp, weft, fabric, and wrapping of thought; he was likewise attempting to find a narrative form in which to express his metaphysical crises and resolutions. An early foray into novel-writing,
Illudo Chartis,
had been abandoned, as had an unwieldy combination of didactic harangue and roman à clef, with the equally ungraceful title
Wotton Reinfred.

Carlyle was never comfortable with the novel as a vehicle for his ideas, considering it slight and superficial; and his biographer Froude dismissed these youthful efforts, saying Carlyle “could no more invent than he could lie.” Although most of
Wotton Reinfred
was burned in 1827, part of the manuscript was stolen by an amanuensis, Frederick Martin, and published after Carlyle's death, when he was, in the words of the
Saturday Review,
“in the opinion of many capable judges, the greatest writer of his time.”

The autobiographical elements of
Sartor Resartus
are polarized between two extreme epiphanies. In a “Baphometic Fire-baptism,” Teufelsdröckh experiences “the EVERLASTING NO,” where “the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference.” This is superseded by “the EVERLASTING YEA,” where Teufelsdröckh realizes “there is in man a HIGHER than Love of Happiness.” He is reconciled to the world through his own sense of creative purpose.

I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even a Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God's name! . . . Up! Up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work.

In, and between, these poles, the glimmerings can be seen not only of Carlyle's mature ideas, but of his inimitable style: the PERPETUAL ACH. In infuriated, frustrated prose, he railed against the mechanistic reduction of “the sole nexus between man and man” to “Cash-payment,” while simultaneously preaching the inherent virtue of work, even to the slaves of the West Indies. His elliptical, apocalyptic sentences raised and exorcised the terror of anarchy, and, as he grew older, the perceptive analysis of the problems of the era was replaced with the conviction that the only solution lay with the “Strong Man” and “the few Wise” who must “by one method or another . . . take command of the innumerable Foolish.”

Carlyle's Gospel of Work faced its own test on March 6, 1835. He and his wife had moved to 5, Cheyne Row in Chelsea, London. Carlyle's literary ambitions and financial security were pinned on his forthcoming work,
The History of the French Revolution.
He had lent the first volume, for comment, to his friend the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who, in turn, and perhaps indiscreetly, had left it with his lady-friend, Harriet Taylor. Writing, as always, had been a strenuous task; on February 7 Carlyle had written, “soul and body both very sick.” Mill appeared at their door on the evening of March 6, ashen-faced and barely comprehensible. Taylor's maid had mistaken the manuscript for scrap paper, and kindled the fire with it. Apart from a few sheets, the first volume was “irrevocably annihilated.”

“The thing was lost,” wrote Carlyle,

and perhaps worse; for I had not only forgotten all the structure of it, but the spirit it was written with was past; only the general impression seemed to remain . . . Mill, whom I had to comfort and speak peace to, remained injudiciously enough till almost midnight, and my poor Dame and I had to sit talking of indifferent matters; and could not till then get our lament freely uttered.

Carlyle's working methods exacerbated the problem. He did not take notes, and selectively incinerated drafts as he progressed. His manuscripts—and we should, perhaps, not judge the maid too harshly in the light of this—were a torrent of crossings-through, excision, revisions, and inkings-out, with scraps of paper glued to the edges to accommodate the emendations. Though he would later praise Dr. Johnson for refusing to “whine over his existence,” at the time Carlyle was utterly distraught. He had “never at any period of my life felt more thoroughly disconsolate, beaten-down . . . simply
impossible
it seems that I should
ever
do that weariest, miserablest of tasks.” “My will is not conquered,” he rallied; “but my
vacuum
of element to swim in seems complete.”

The French Revolution
was published in 1837: Mill had offered £200 compensation, of which Carlyle accepted half. Mill also reviewed it fulsomely in the
London and Westminster Review.
They remained friends until the “Eyre Affair,” in 1866, when Carlyle typically defended the “excessive force” with which the governor of Jamaica had quelled a rebellion, an action deplored by the liberal Mill.

Their parting of the ways mirrors the critical reaction to Carlyle in the twentieth century. The insistence that might is right, that there must be “Order, were it under the Soldier's Sword,” cannot be read without our knowledge of the horrendous culmination of these ideas. Carlyle's political stance cannot be extricated from his literary reputation, any more than that of his idol Goethe. That Hitler was reading Carlyle's
Frederick
the Great
in the bunker as the Allies advanced does little to endear him to contemporary readers.

But even before the rise of totalitarian regimes, Carlyle's posthumous high standing was jeopardized by a book he wanted burned. In 1866, Jane Welsh Carlyle died. It “shattered my whole existence,” and, as he struggled to cope with his grief, Carlyle believed he could find some therapeutic relief in editing her letters. As well as deep respect and actual love, he found resentment, sarcasm, impatience, and unhappiness. He incorporated her letters and his memories into a reminiscence, as an act of penitence and masochistic self-revelation, even including the evidence that he had physically harmed her: his doctrine of brute force applied to the drawing room as well as the imperial palace. “I will write of this no further . . . is not all this appointed by me rigorously to the fire?” This was a different form of suffering from merely rewriting
The French
Revolution.

“I still mainly mean to
burn
this Book before my own departure, but feel that I shall always have a kind of grudge to do it,” he insisted. He always hesitated, as if he could not extinguish the last link to the living Jane. He “solemnly forbid [anyone] to
publish
this Bit of Writing”: it was personal contrition, not public confession. When Carlyle died in 1881, the manuscript remained intact.

The typical Victorian “Life of” was a hagiographic affair: it drew a veil rather than exposed its subject. When Froude prefaced his monumental work with the words: “Mr Carlyle expressed a desire in his will that of him no biography should be written,” he signaled that this was a distinctly different proposition. The correspondence contained in the biography, along with the posthumously published memoirs, had a frankness that perturbed the nineteenth-century readership's penchant for uplifting, adulatory commemoration.

Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,
moped that it would have been “better . . . kept unpublished, for some while at least,” and suggested that Carlyle “must have ‘lost his head' if not when he recorded them, yet when he left them in any one's hands to decide on their publication.” Charles Norton, a later editor, fulminated that “The letters of lovers are sacred confidences, whose sanctity none ought to violate. Mr. Froude's use of these letters seems to me, on general grounds, unjustifiable, and the motives he alleges for it inadequate.” Froude's sin was to show that the Sage of Ecclefechan was also the Bully of Cheyne Row, prompting another biographer, David Wilson, to lament that “the impartial critic is reluctantly driven to use very strong language indeed.”

Personal failings and political naïveté, even political culpability, aside, what keeps Carlyle in the canon? “Strong language,” or what the Scottish poet William Aytoun referred to as “dislocated” language, is Carlyle's legacy. He writes ecstatically, and though the solutions he proffered were unspeakably wrong, the iniquities he sought to redress have rarely been more profoundly unpicked. His psychology, and his society, were complex, and his language reflected that: one does not go to Carlyle for simple answers, or soundbite slogans. Walt Whitman, no lover of Carlyle's authoritarian leanings, captured his importance exactly: “no man else will bequeath to the future more significant hints of our sorry era, its fierce paradoxes, its din, and its struggling parturition periods, than Carlyle.”