Flesh in the Age of Reason (68 page)

In such moods Byron could find the world too wicked, too absurd, to countenance even the idea of some presiding intelligence. ‘I wonder how the deuce any body could make such a world,’ he asked himself, rhetorically: ‘for what purpose dandies, for instance, were ordained – and kings – and fellows of colleges – and women of “a certain age” – and many men of any age – and myself, most of all… Is there any thing beyond? –
who
knows?’ Materialism was thus the bottom line, the acid-test dividing illusion, delusion and hypocrisy from reality. And the passionate Byron who prided himself upon being an honest sinner in an age of cant subscribed to a sardonic no-illusions materialism, the Mandevillian sexual egoist, as a frank take on the human condition.

He did of course rejoice in a certain macho materialism, that of firm and fit flesh. No mere literary lion, Byron sought admiration for his looks and animal magnetism; the ‘action man’ persona was meticulously groomed. In a dandyish era when youth and fitness counted (see
Chapter 13
), much attention was devoted to cultivating
a manly, handsome body. He was proud of having swum the Helles-pont, an act self-consciously echoing ancient Leander. He dedicated himself to the martial arts, in particular fencing and boxing. ‘I have been sparring with Jackson for exercise this morning,’ he wrote in March 1814 (he was then 25), ‘and mean to continue and renew my acquaintance with the muffles. My chest, and arms, and wind are in very good plight, and I am not in flesh.… At any rate, exercise is good and this the severest of all; fencing and the broadsword never fatigued me half so much.’ In physical exertion lay the antidote against his tendency to be ‘
ennuyé
’, his leanings towards ‘spleen and all uncharitableness, [being] a complete misanthrope’: ‘Today I have been very sulky – but an hour’s exercise with Mr. Jackson of pugilistic memory – has given me spirits & fatigued me into that state of languid laziness which I prefer to all other.’ Animal spirits kept his doomed and cursed sense of despondency at bay. An aristocrat born lame with the handicap of a club foot, he was delighted to slum and spar with the professional pugilists of the day.

Keeping trim, keeping his figure, was crucial. Slimming had become a preoccupation while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge Cambridge. ‘You will be surprized to hear I am grown
very thin
,’ he told his friend John Hanson in April 1807:

I have lost 18 LB in my weight, that is one Stone & 4 pounds since January… However dont be alarmed, I have taken every means to accomplish the end, by violent exercise, & Fasting, as I found myself too plump. – I shall continue my Exertions, having no other amusement.

How had he done it? ‘I wear
seven
Waistcoats, & a great Coat,’ he told his friend:

run, & play at cricket in this Dress, till quite exhausted by excessive perspiration, use the hot Bath daily, eat only a quarter of [a] pound, [of ] Butcher’s meat in 24 hours, no Suppers, or Breakfast, only one meal a Day, drink no malt Liquor, [only?] a little Wine, & take Physic occasionally, by these means my
Ribs
display a Skin of no great Thickness, & my Clothes, have been taken in nearly
half a yard
.

By July of that year it was his boast he could ‘vie with the
slim
beaux of modern times’, and three months later, he declared to another friend: ‘I weigh less by
three Stone
, & 9
pounds
, than I did 6 months ago. – My weight was then
14
stone & 6 LB. It is now
10 Stone 11
LB!!!’ There was not an ounce of flab upon him, he had learnt to master his flesh.

The profound ambiguities of the Romantic body shine through Byron’s writings, to say nothing of his doings. He gloried in a firm, youthful physique, which meant that the frailties of the flesh needed to be endlessly disciplined. But he also went in for hedonistic dissipation, a self-indulgent, carefree wallowing in alcohol, that state of ‘hiccup and happiness’. The tipsy rake formed no small part of Byron’s image, and yet he hated the hangover, the bloated morning after, the unbearable heaviness of being. And over-indulgence at the dinner table disgusted him. ‘I have dined regularly to-day, for the first time since Sunday last – this being Sabbath, too,’ he wrote in his journal in 1813: ‘I wish to God I had not dined now! – It kills me with heaviness, stupor, and horrible dreams; – and yet it was but a pint of bucellas, and fish.… The horrors of digestion!’ For long spells Byron lived off dry biscuits and soda water. ‘I wish I could leave off eating altogether,’ he declared.

The irresolvability of the flesh – the desire to be fit, sexy, handsome and youthful, and yet the paradoxical temptation to wreck it all in bored self-indulgence – was central to the Byronic dilemma. It surfaced, perhaps, in such seemingly petty concerns as the state of his teeth: ‘Went to Waite’s [the dentist]. Teeth are all right and white.’ But how could man respect himself when he was always being brought down to earth by the most banausic things? Suffering from a bout of food poisoning brought on by bad cockles, ‘I remarked in my illness the complete inertion, inaction, and destruction of my chief mental faculties. I tried to rouse them, and yet could not – and this is the
Soul
!!! I should believe that it was married to the body, if they did not sympathise so much with each other.’

For Byron the romantic hero the conventional life of fashionable London or Venice spelt exhaustion.
Ennui
was to be resisted with
rebellious energy – that it was which gave the spice of life – ‘I like energy – even animal energy – of all kinds; and I have need of both mental and corporeal,’ he declared in 1813. ‘The great object of life’, he insisted, ‘is Sensation – to feel that we exist, even though in pain.’ The energy of youth, however, was also doomed to succumb to age and decrepitude:

We wither from our youth, we gasp away –
Sick – sick; unfound the boon, unslaked the thirst.

From his mid-twenties, Byron grew quite obsessed with ageing: ‘I shall soon be six-and-twenty,’ he recorded on 22 January 1814:

Is there any thing in the future that can possibly console us for not being always
twenty-five
?

          ‘Oh Gioventu!
Oh Primavera! gioventu dell’ anno.
Oh Gioventu! primavera della vita.’

‘My health is good,’ now 28, he informed his half-sister Augusta Leigh,

but I have now & then fits of giddiness, & deafness, which make me think like Swift – that I shall be like him & the
withered
tree he saw – which occasioned the reflection and ‘die at top’ first. My hair is growing grey, &
not
thicker; & my teeth are sometimes
looseish
though still white & sound. Would not one think I was sixty instead of not quite nine and twenty?

By his thirties, he felt quite elderly:

It is three minutes past twelve. – ‘’Tis the middle of the night by the castle clock,’ and I am now thirty-three!

‘Eheu, fugaces, Posthume, Posthume,
Labuntur anni’…

And at 35? ‘Do not believe all the lies you may hear’, he chafed Augusta: ‘Hobhouse can tell you that I have
not
lost
any
of my
teeth hitherto
, – since I was 12 years old… and so far from being fatter –
at
present
I [am] much thinner than when I left England.’ His fear was not of not having many years left; it was rather a despondency at having done so little with the good years.

On top of all this, compounding the complexities and confusions was, of course, Byron the poet. There was the autobiographical versifier who brilliantly recorded his exploits as a bundle of tormented desires and an object of freakish fascination. But there was also the poet-persona. The macho man, swimmer, boxer and warrior who died that Greece might still be free, was also a bard, a man of imagination and wit. It is qua poet that Byron resurrected the exploded and discarded immortal Christian soul by bodying it forth through the notion of soul conceived as poetic imagination.

Verse itself could assume immortality, could be a proof of the ‘soul’ in the sense of the transcendence of the gross and tawdry. Byron held out for a heroic immortality, the autonomy of the lone and courageous individual freed from hidebound convention and all that was detestable. It was an imperishability that was essentially subjective and personal. ‘Matter is eternal – always changing – but reproduced and, as far as we can comprehend Eternity Eternal,’ he mused, ‘and why not Mind? Why should not the Mind act with and upon the Universe? – as portions of it act upon and with the congregated dust – called Mankind?’ Mind, after all, was ceaselessly active:

Of the Immortality of the Soul – it appears to me that there can be little doubt – if we attend for a moment to the action of Mind. – It is in perpetual activity; – I used to doubt of it – but reflection has taught me better. – It acts also so very independent of body – in dreams for instance incoherently and madly – I grant you; – but still it is
Mind
, & much more
Mind
– than when we are awake.

The Byronic soul, however, was not Christian and orthodox but personal and idiosyncratic:

How far our future life will be
individual
– or rather – how far it will at all resemble our
present
existence, is another question but that the
Mind
is
eternal
– seems as possible as that the body is not so. – Of course – I have venture[d] upon the question without recurring to Revelation.

Such belief, Byron admitted, was, more than anything else, a personal, psychological necessity: ‘Every body clings to it – the stupidest, and dullest, and wickedest of human bipeds is still persuaded that he is immortal.’

Immortality might be achieved by fame, by the enduring life of his verse. Some semblance of it might also be gained through a triumph of the will, the conviction (perhaps similar to that expressed by the
Spectator
, but far more forcibly) that there
must
be something beyond, transcending the wretched failing frailties of the flesh. In an almost Nietzschean way, struggle would be the proof:

’Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now,
What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought!

And, through struggle, some kind of ultimate identification with nature, with the cosmos, could be achieved:

     But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:
     My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
     And my frame perish even in conquering pain;
     But there is that within me which shall tire
     Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire;
     Something unearthly, which they deem not of,
     Like the remember’d tone of a mute lyre,
     Shall on their soften’d spirits sink, and move
In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.

Soul was thus the condition of being in sympathy with, at one with, the great, vast, impersonal forces of nature – those avalanches, earthquakes, volcanoes, snowstorms and blizzards Byron loved to describe:

Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
Is not the love of these deep in my heart
With a pure passion?

In losing himself in these lay Byron’s hope that the tawdry, paltry limitations of the human condition could be transcended.

Of course, Byron knew full well that poetry in itself was no proof of soul or immortality. Like Swift, he could deflate the poet’s pretensions, reducing them to bodily tics and psycho-pathology. What did he make of Keats’s poetry, he was asked: ‘such writing is a sort of mental masturbation – he is always f—gg—g his
Imagination
. – I don’t mean that he is
indecent
, but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.’ Thus did Byron reduce bad verse to bodily dysfunctions. In another satirical poem penned to his publisher John Murray, he suggested that a play written by his former friend Dr Polidori should be treated not as literature but rather, at best, as a work of medicine or, at worst, a manifestion of disease; while lacking artistic quality, the drama might serve as a purgative. Murray should turn it down in the following terms:

Dear Doctor – I have read your play
Which is a good one in it’s way,
Purges the eyes & moves the bowels
And drenches handkerchiefs like towels
With tears that in a flux of Grief
Afford hysterical relief
To shatter’d nerves & quicken’d pulses
Which your catastrophe convulses.…
My hands are full – my head so busy –
I’m almost dead – & always dizzy –
And so with endless truth & hurry –
Dear Doctor – I am yours,

John Murray.

Precisely as for Swift and Pope, bad art is inseparable from the disorders of the body. But great art, for Byron, may be the emancipation of the soul.

The sceptic or cynical deflater should have the last word. After the golden and silver ages, Byron commented, his was an ‘age of rags’, avalanched by paper. And in such a time, was there any vanity like the author’s?

I was out of spirits – read the papers – thought what
fame
was, on reading, in a case of murder, that ‘Mr. Wych, grocer, at Tunbridge, sold some bacon, flour, cheese, and, it is believed, some plums, to some gipsy woman accused. He had on his counter (I quote faithfully) a
book
, the Life of
Pamela
, which he was
tearing
for
waste
paper, &c., &c. In the cheese was found, &c., and a
leaf
of
Pamela wrapt round the bacon
.’ What would Richardson, the vainest and luckiest of
living
authors (
i.e.
while alive) – he who, with Aaron Hill, used to prophesy and chuckle over the presumed fall of Fielding (the
prose
Homer of human nature) and of Pope (the most beautiful of poets) – what would he have said, could he have traced his pages from their place on the French prince’s toilets (see Boswell’s Johnson) to the grocer’s counter and the gipsy-murderess’s bacon!!!