Romantics, Goths, Hippies and Monsters, Part II

"Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame," by Benita Eisler

"The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer," by Sydney Padua

"Mary Shelley" -- 2017 film

"Byron" -- 2003 TV drama

Earlier this year, when I published Part I of this post, I said I would address Benita Eisler's biography of Lord Byron in a later post. It ended up being much later. This giant doorstop of a book was often too heavy to carry on the bus and too big to page through as I lay in bed.

That said, it's a hell of a book. Nearly every page has something juicy on it. If you think outrageously irresponsible debts are juicy, then you will think the juiciness lies on every page.

Elle Fanning in "Mary Shelley." 

But before I talk about that, let's talk about some biopics. 

Many months after its limited release in theaters, the 2017 film "Mary Shelley" came out on DVD, and I borrowed it from Netflix. (Yes, you can still get DVDs from Netflix. The selection is much better for its DVDs than for its streaming content, too, especially for older movies and TV shows.) The movie was not well-received by critics or audiences, but I thought the first half of it was pretty good. Elle Fanning is appealing as Mary, and Douglas Booth, as Percy, does a good job of conveying the poet's charms. Neither of them comes across as the intelligent, serious writers they were in real life, but I blamed that on the writing and direction more than on the actors.

The movie portrays Percy as using his Romantic, care-free, free-love philosophy as a way to rationalize his habit of following his desires wherever he wanted, and it shows how the burden of this way of living fell hardest on the women in his life. I took a similar view when I wrote about the Shelleys earlier this year, when I was discussing Daisy Hay's "Young Romantics." From the vantage point of 2019, it's hard to not see the story that way. Still, I wasn't crazy about the way the movie hammered that point home, giving us a happy ending where Mary stands up for herself and Percy tries to win her back, telling the world that she is the true author of "Frankenstein." That whole last act -- the conflict, the happy reunion. the feminist empowerment -- struck me as forced. We learn about Percy's drowning and Mary's long widowhood only in an epilogue.

OK, I'm being pretty negative here about a movie I thought was mostly good, but one more thing: "Mary Shelley" portrays Lord Byron as a sleazy creep. As we will see in a minute, the real Lord Byron probably was a sleazy creep, but it's important to remember that many of his contemporaries found him charming, even when they were scandalized by him. He was a bit like a rock star. I get more of that sense of rakish charm from Jonny Lee Miller, who plays the title role in the BBC's "Byron" (2003).

The television drama is centered mostly on Byron's love life, and, well, you can't really tell the story of the author of "Don Juan" without talking about that. Byron had affairs with both men and women, and became famous for writing sexually suggestive poems. Oh, and he fled Britain after it was revealed he had an affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. (He may have even been the father of one of her children.) What can you do with that if you're a filmmaker, except camp it up and go Goth?

Still, the BBC play feels like a story of romantic intrigue more than anything, which is a weird choice. Byron and Augusta seem to genuinely love each other. With other women, Byron is always pretending to be someone he's not, but with Augusta, he feels completely at ease. In a romance story, aren't we supposed to root for the lovers to stay together? It's disturbing to have that dynamic in a story about incest.

One thing I really liked in "Byron" was the way it treated Byron's manservant, Fletcher, and his own love affair with a maid who works for Annabella Milbanke, Byron's unfortunate wife. Their story is told in bits and pieces, but it shows us two people in a healthy, loving relationship, and who are separated only through the selfishness of their employers -- well, employer, singular. It's Byron's fault. It wasn't bad enough he destroyed his own marriage; he had to destroy Fletcher's too.

Oh, and Mary Shelley shows up in a couple of scenes, where she is played by a pre-fame Sally Hawkins.

The Rake's Progress

Byron is a somewhat peripheral figure in Hay's "Young Romantics," but he plays some very important parts. He famously hosted the Shelleys during the time Mary began to write "Frankenstein." For another, Mary's half-sister Claire Clairmont bore Byron a daughter, Allegra.

This is a really sad story. Clairmont, having no job and no husband, sends Allegra off to live with her relatively wealthy father. Byron, having no interest in children, sends Allegra off to a convent, where she dies a few years later. 

Not a great dad.

Incidentally, the "Mary Shelley" movie depicts Claire as the third wheel in the Shelley household. There is a very strong suggestion that she and Percy are sleeping together when Mary is not available.  But soon enough, Mary and Percy reconcile and, feeling left out, Claire pursues Byron in order to land a poet of her own. The results are disastrous. I don't know if this is how it really happened. Hay doesn't conclusively say whether Percy and Claire were sleeping together. I have seen other writers suggest that Allegra was actually Shelley's daughter. Perhaps we will never know. Later in life, an embittered Claire started to write her memoirs, but died before she was finished.

At any rate, in the "Byron" TV drama, Claire is portrayed as a libertine who excites the aristocratic Byron the way all those bohemian New York women excited Don Draper on "Mad Men." There are a fair number of somewhat explicit sex scenes in the TV drama, and one of the funniest has Claire intensifying Byron's pleasure by reciting radical platitudes about free love and the rights of women as he pumps away between her legs.

Ironic Byronic Comics

From the comic "The Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage,"
by Sydney Padua: A little bit about Lord Byron,
his estranged wife and their brilliant daughter,
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace,
better known as Ada Lovelace. For her work with
Charles Babbage's proto-computer, the Difference Engine,
Lovelace is now recognized
as the first software programmer in history.

Oh, and speaking of his fatherhood, Byron had another acknowledged daughter, from his unhappy marriage to Annabella Milbanke. This daughter is known today as Ada Lovelace, who is sometimes called the first computer programmer.

Sydney Padua elaborates on the story of Ada Lovelace in "The Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage," a fun comic in which she briefly tells the true story of how Lovelace -- who became a mathematical genius after her mother forbade her from following her father's passion for the arts -- ended up working with Charles Babbage, an inventor who proposed a steam-driven computer he called the Difference Engine. From there, Padua goes off into some wild steampunk fantasies about the duo using their Difference Engine to fight crime. It is more a collection of short comics than a graphic novel, but it's fun.

The real story of Ada Lovelace was, no doubt, not so fun. Her real name was Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. She was named after Augusta Leigh. Byron apparently confessed the truth of his incestuous affair to Annabella sometime after their daughter was born. Before long, Byron fled England to escape scandal.

Comparing Byron's self-imposed exile to the Shelleys' is instructive. The Shelleys left England to get away from their own scandals, but spent the rest of their days scrounging for loans and handouts from friends. Byron, who had a noble title, some wealth and fame, was able to live relatively comfortably in Switzerland, and maintained his friendships, business interests and literary influence even as his personal life made him too radioactive for English social life. Money can get you out of a lot of scrapes.

Mad, Bad And Dangerous To Know

So, back to the Byron biography in book form ...

When I'm reading a biography of a famous figure, I tend to get bored in the early chapters, where the author explores the history of the subject's ancestors and then goes into detail about the subject's childhood. Reading Benita Eisler's "Child of Passion, Fool of Fame," I had a very different reaction.

His jilted lover Caroline Lamb (known as Caro) famously described Byron as "mad, bad and dangerous to know," but when you place him in the context of his ancestry, the most infamous Byron probably ranked third or fourth in madness, badness and dangerousness. He came from a long line of gamblers, drunks, womanizers and violent reprobates. His father, known as "Mad Jack" Byron, married his mother for her fortune, and promptly disappeared from the narrative of his son's life.

As for his childhood, Eisler doesn't get far into his education before we have the young Lord Byron's

Good grief this book is big. The man died
 at 36. How much can there be to say?

governess instructing him in the Bible during the day (beating him to make sure he memorized passages) and then drunkenly taking various tradesmen to bed with her at night, in the next room over from her student. Soon enough, she starts taking young Byron himself to her bed. He was younger than 12.

Soon enough, the young lord is sent off to a boarding school that, Eisler informs us, just happened to have a well-publicized history of rampant homosexual experimentation among the student body.

It might seem prurient for Eisler to include some of these details for any other biographical subject, but for Byron they give insight into his later life and work. As I said earlier, it's pointless to try to separate his sex life from his writing.

As for his poetry, I don't feel especially qualified to critique it. It is 200 years old, and it strikes me as old-fashioned in many ways, but also strikingly modern in ways that a lot of 19th century poetry is not. Compared to Percy Shelley's, Byron's writing style seems much less flowery. Take this bit from the aforementioned "Don Juan":

     Her glossy hair was cluster'd o'er a brow
       Bright with intelligence, and fair, and smooth;
     Her eyebrow's shape was like th' aerial bow,
       Her cheek all purple with the beam of youth,
     Mounting at times to a transparent glow,
       As if her veins ran lightning; she, in sooth,
     Possess'd an air and grace by no means common:
     Her stature tall—I hate a dumpy woman.

Those apostrophes, contracting vowels to get the words to fit the meter -- that's some old school stuff right there, friends. But ignore that and you have a nice description of a beautiful woman ... until you get to that last line. "I hate a dumpy woman." Was that really necessary? No, but it does tell you something about the narrator. He's a jerk. He loves women in an aesthetic way, and for what they can do for him. If he's not attracted to a woman, he has nothing but contempt for her. He's like those guys today who go on comments threads to give detailed critiques of a woman's looks.

Was Don Juan meant to be Byron himself? I don't know. It's interesting to note that Byron himself was chubby when he was young. You might even have called him dumpy. And of course, he had a deformity in his foot that caused him to limp. (Eisler writes that it was a common type of problem that could have been corrected, even in his day, had he received better quality medical care as a child.) In Ken Russell's "Gothic" Byron's limp is portrayed with the suggestion that he has a satanic cloven hoof.

But of course, Byron wasn't Satan. He died in a stupidly human way, at age 36. Inspired by the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire, he went off to join the fight. Eventually, he caught a bad cold, for which his doctors prescribed bloodletting. He either bled to death or died from sepsis after being sliced open with unsterilized instruments. Romanticism and the Gothic arose partly in reaction against the growth of scientific thought, as you can see most clearly in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus," but a lot of the Romantic writers could have lived much longer, happier lives had they enjoyed the benefits that science would bring to modern medicine.