Summarizing two recent books on Lord Byron, you write: “All things considered, both biographers imply that it was better to be Byron’s boyfriend than Byron’s mistress” (This Week, April 12).
Was it? According to Corin Throsby’s review in the same issue, the poet “wrote of his love for several men” – they were all boys in their mid-teens. They included Nicolo Giraud, “a young Greek-born French man”, which is a coy way to describe someone whom all biographers assume to have been about fifteen during his relationship with the poet. Byron writes unambiguously in a letter to John Cam Hobhouse on August 23, 1810, of his desire to have intercourse with this boy; by October 4 he boasts of doing so “above two hundred” times. (Presumably other partners were by this point involved.) Even Hobhouse, that paladin of Byron’s posthumous reputation, summarizes in a diary entry of July 19, 1811, the poet’s private account of his conquests on this solo leg of the tour: “none female nor under ten nor Turk”. Soon after they parted in Malta Byron stopped answering Nicolo’s plaintive letters, and later cancelled the enormous sum of £7,000 he had thought to leave him in a will. After being cut off Nicolo disappears from the record. I am not sure, in the end, that he can be said to have fared better than the mistresses, some of whom at least got to tell their own side of the story.
If the poet “railed against dishonest, hypocritical uses of language”, as Andrew Stauffer states in his introduction to Byron: A life in ten letters, then he would surely have had something to say about being recast by William Kuhn and others as a “queer” forerunner in a distant “homophobic” era on the basis of acts and feelings that are viewed as harshly in the Britain of today as they were in his own time.
Laurence Sterne
Craig Raine’s exposition of the influence of Laurence Sterne on Jane Austen and Lord Byron (Afterthoughts, April 19) was very interesting. Given his deep and wide knowledge of Russian literature, I was surprised he made no mention of the influence of the English novelist on Leo Tolstoy, who wrote in his early diaries that Sterne was his favourite writer and in 1851–2 translated A Sentimental Journey into Russian.
In “Who, What Am I?”: Tolstoy struggles to narrate the self (Cornell University Press, 2014), Irina Paperno writes that “Tolstoy’s narrative strategies were borrowed largely from Laurence Sterne”, making “the protagonist/narrator into a locus of action”. In War and Peace, just before Prince Andrei sets off to war, his sister, Princess Maria, quotes Sterne: “As Sterne says: ‘We love people not so much for the good they’ve done us, as for the good we’ve done them’”.
In some ways I think the influence comes as something of a surprise.
Collage in fiction
Further to the review of Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound
