Andrew Stauffer conveys the vigour and pace of the poet’s escapades with brio, but stumbles when he suggests Byron anticipated modern celebrity
Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, but in Byron’s case the unstoppable overflow consisted of a more vital and potent bodily fluid. “Is it not life?” he asked about his comic epic Don Juan, the annals of a globe-trotting seducer; he added that his qualification for writing it was that he had “tooled” in a post chaise, a hackney coach, a gondola, against a wall, and both on and under a table. He claimed to do his rhyming, as he nonchalantly called it, “at night / When a Cunt is tied close to my inkstand”, and on receiving royalty cheques from his publisher he vowed that “what I get by my brains I will spend on my bollocks”.
When not drinking, gambling and having sex, Byron also tossed off 3,000 letters, which race to keep up with the flux of his sensations as he reels through adulterous intrigues, literary squabbles and political conspiracies. Here, even more than in Don Juan, he writes while living in an unfinished present tense. Postscripts and interruptions, as Andrew Stauffer says, give his correspondence a “risky immediacy”, with “rapid-fire, time-stamped updates”; punctuation increases the tempo in a blitz of breathless dashes.
