Byron may have lived most of his life with serious depression – and with a mother like his who can blame him? – but despite this affliction, or more likely because of it, he was capable of punching through pretension. Not only was he capable of it, one suspects that he couldn't turn the ability off. And of course it got him into a lot of trouble. Toby Young's "loser lit" classic, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, could have been dedicated to George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale, who once memorably referred to one of the symptoms of his depression as "boiling brains".
Wordsworth, Coleridge and their set he referred to dismissively as "Lakers", while Leigh Hunt and other poets he considered inverted snobs he dubbed "Cockneys". He got particularly riled with the latter group because they had the temerity to attack Alexander Pope, his literary hero. The strength of Byron's feeling can be seen in the fact that he resorts to two of his bête noirs,cant and cunt , to excoriate Hunt:
"When he was writing his Rimini, I was not the last to discover its beauties, long before it was published. Even then I remonstrated against its vulgarisms; which are the more extraordinary, because the author is anything but a vulgar man. Mr. Hunt's answer was that he wrote them upon principle; they made part of his 'system'!! I then said no more. When a man talks of his system, it is like a woman's talking of her virtue. I let them talk on."
One classic put-down out of so many from a man who described writing as torture ...
Wordsworth, Coleridge and their set he referred to dismissively as "Lakers", while Leigh Hunt and other poets he considered inverted snobs he dubbed "Cockneys". He got particularly riled with the latter group because they had the temerity to attack Alexander Pope, his literary hero. The strength of Byron's feeling can be seen in the fact that he resorts to two of his bête noirs,
"When he was writing his Rimini, I was not the last to discover its beauties, long before it was published. Even then I remonstrated against its vulgarisms; which are the more extraordinary, because the author is anything but a vulgar man. Mr. Hunt's answer was that he wrote them upon principle; they made part of his 'system'!! I then said no more. When a man talks of his system, it is like a woman's talking of her virtue. I let them talk on."
One classic put-down out of so many from a man who described writing as torture ...
2 comments:
You do realize he suffered from bipolar disorder?
That's the label people put on it now, looking back 200 years. His long-suffering wife (she could live with him for only a year before kicking him out), Annabella Milbanke, was very perceptive about what was at the heart of Byron's problems. This is from a letter written to a friend during that traumatic year (1815):
"It is the Ennui of a monotonous existence that drives the best-hearted people of this description to the most dangerous paths, and makes them often seem to act from bad motives, when in fact they are only flying from internal suffering by any external stimulus."
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