April 13, 1997

'Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know'

By TERRY CASTLE

A biography that sees Lord Byron as a victim of circumstances

BYRON

The Flawed Angel.

By Phyllis Grosskurth.

Illustrated. 510 pp. Boston:

A Peter Davison Book/

Houghton Mifflin Company. $40.





s a small child, Phyllis Grosskurth writes in her new biography of George Gordon, Lord Byron, the budding poet spent hours reading the Old Testament while disdaining the New. The fact does not surprise: one would hardly expect Jesus of Nazareth to hold much interest for the future celebrant of such Lucifer-like souls as Cain, Childe Harold, Manfred and Don Juan. Yet the young Byron's boredom is also telling, a first sign of that devastating force of personality that would ravish, outrage and dumbfound his contemporaries. ''Mad, bad and dangerous to know'' was his lover Lady Caroline Lamb's famous assessment of him, and even today one can scarcely read of his exploits -- his compulsive love affairs with women and boys; his drinking and excess; the scandalous liaison with his half sister, Augusta (who may have borne him a child in 1814); the bizarre athletic feats; his exile in Italy and exotic death in 1824 at the age of 36 while trying to foment a revolution in Greece -- without detecting the faint whiff of brimstone. Jesus lacks charisma in comparison.

Ms. Grosskurth's biography is the first full-length life of Byron since Leslie Marchand's magisterial three-volume study, a work that, although published 40 years ago, looked as if it would never be superseded. Perhaps it hasn't been. Ms. Grosskurth is unfailingly gracious about her various debts to Marchand, but what she has produced is superb nonetheless. ''Byron: The Flawed Angel'' takes its place immediately as the definitive short study of the poet and will be especially valuable for anyone coming to Byron for the first time.

Ms. Grosskurth's work is psychoanalytic biography in the best sense. The author of previous studies of Havelock Ellis, Melanie Klein and Sigmund Freud's ''inner circle,'' she brings a psychoanalytic insight to her mercurial subject, whom she regards as a ''basically decent man . . . destroyed by the expectations and projections of an incomprehensible world into which fate had thrust him.'' ''Destroyed'' is the operative word. Even as she tracks the extraordinary turbulence Byron left in his wake, her book is the poignant record of a soul on the way to an inevitable, much-sought-for oblivion.

The future poet grew up in chaotic circumstances: his father, an odious rake known as Mad Jack, abandoned Byron's mother, Catherine, soon after Byron was born, possibly on account of his new son's severely malformed foot. (All his life, Byron bitterly resented this disability, which he regarded as a cruel stroke of fate against him.) Byron's mother, an obese, self-indulgent, somewhat hysterical woman, seems to have both spoiled and neglected him, while also passing on to him the family tendency toward mental instability. (Ms. Grosskurth, following the lead of the psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison, believes that Byron may have suffered from an inherited manic-depressive illness.) Byron's frantic promiscuity and lifelong predisposition toward ''sudden violent attachments,'' Ms. Grosskurth argues, were a result of this condition -- and this conditioning. With female lovers like Augusta Leigh, Caroline Lamb and the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, the mistress of his Italian years, he sought a kind of ''seductive maternalism,'' a belated (and eroticized) emotional caretaking to make up for his mother's deficiencies. With male lovers -- almost always nubile Mediterranean boys whom he hired as pages or valets -- he sought a juvenile version of himself, a foster son or pupil on whom he could lavish the paternal tenderness he himself had missed yet deeply craved. As he confessed to his confidante Lady Melbourne in 1814, ''I have been all my life trying to make someone love me.''

The discomfort of the soul was marked in the vicissitudes of the body. Byron is one of the most celebrated physical beings of the early 19th century: with the possible exception of Napoleon, we know more about what he looked like than almost any other person of his epoch. Ms. Grosskurth is at her best when tracing, as it were, the fate of the much-admired, much-abused Byronic body. She includes the famous set-pieces: Byron the handsome seducer, stalking majestically through the glittering drawing rooms of Regency London; Byron the swimmer, braving the Hellespont; Byron the brooding ''milord,'' floating in a gondola down the Grand Canal during the years of ponderous exile. And she captures brilliantly the mesmeric, even dizzying effect his body had on others. At a ball in London during the period of the scandal over his divorce from Annabella Milbanke, the militant prude whom he had married in 1815 in a disastrous attempt to cure himself of his own emotional excesses, a woman fainted at the sight of him; another warned her daughter, ''Don't look at him, he is dangerous to look at.'' One-time lovers, like the louche Mrs. Wherry, cherished fetishistic mementos of his person -- including black curling locks of his pubic hair -- like magic talismans.

But the story is also one of the body's self-destruction. Ms. Grosskurth exhaustively records the drinking bouts and obsessive dissipation, the periods of quasi-bulimic physical grossness. After visiting him in Italy in 1818, an English friend wrote that Lord Byron ''could not have been more than 30, but he looked 40. His face had become pale, bloated and sallow. He had grown very fat, his shoulders broad and round, and the knuckles of his hands were lost in fat.'' After putting on weight to the point of self-disgust, Byron would then methodically starve himself by subsisting on a diet of red cabbage washed down with cider or hock.

In the end, his life became black farce. Arriving in Missolonghi in 1824 to assist Greek rebels in a democratic revolt against their Ottoman overlords, Byron was almost immediately overtaken by sickness and a kind of moral despair. Some of the best passages in Ms. Grosskurth's narrative show him -- a 19th-century precursor of one of Joseph Conrad's or Graham Greene's burnt-out cases -- exhausted, drunk, chattering with fever, yet subduing by sheer force of will the hostile factions that appeared at his door to harass him almost every morning of his last few weeks. As death approached, he requested that his body not be disturbed after his demise. No sooner had he taken his last breath, however, than his wish was violated and his corpse hacked open by the attending doctors. Part of his skull and his internal organs having been removed for grisly souvenirs, he was then stitched up again, like Frankenstein's monster, yet so ineptly that friends who saw his body upon its return to England could scarcely believe that it was he.

If Ms. Grosskurth underplays any part of Byron's mercurial existence it is the writing itself, which seems in some ways tangential to this story of self-ruination and collapse. This is not entirely her fault: Byron liked to pass his poetry off as a lordly sideline -- as improvised, informal and unimportant in the larger scheme of things. After he went into exile, he rapidly lost interest in the English literary world and would send poems back to his London publisher in idle moments, asking only that their receipt be acknowledged. Compared with such relentlessly bourgeois contemporaries as Wordsworth, he seems to have cared little about his future reputation.

Still, the literary context for Byron's writing is sketched somewhat vaguely here. Significant works like ''The Corsair,'' ''Manfred,'' ''Beppo,'' ''The Vision of Judgment'' and especially ''Don Juan'' receive relatively short shrift. One wishes occasionally for a slightly less diffident treatment of his verbal genius. Paradoxically, as Byron moved seemingly fecklessly toward his tragic end, he was producing the supreme works of his career. One might not realize, given Ms. Grosskurth's somewhat oblique account of it here, that ''Don Juan'' is possibly the greatest (and funniest) English poem ever written, or that Byron's marvelous letters, collected after his death, match those of Madame de Sevigne, Flaubert and Virginia Woolf in their coruscating sensibility and triumphant joy in life. One wants now and then more sense of the sumptuousness of it all, not just the impinging waste.

Yet for what Ms. Grosskurth has achieved -- an intelligent, balanced, eminently humane portrait of an exorbitantly gifted figure -- one must be grateful. She has avoided the various pitfalls of sensationalism, cliche and self-righteous moral engorgement, yet manages to illuminate, with touching emotional clarity, both the strengths and the flaws of Byron the man. ''How can I thank you?'' wrote W. H. Auden to his poetic mentor in his 1935 ''Letter to Lord Byron.'' Elegantly and empathetically, Phyllis Grosskurth resuscitates the question for a new generation.