The History of Missed Opportunities by William Galperin

Author:William Galperin [Galperin, William H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

4

LORD BYRON AND LADY BYRON

I

In chapter 15 of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Mr. Bantling, the quintessential Englishman, reflects briefly on Americans and their proclivities.1 Remarking to the writer Henrietta Stackpole, on “that extraordinary American way of yours” where husbands and wives “liv[e] away” from each other, Bantling quickly shifts to the topic of his sister whose acquaintance, he is certain, Miss Stackpole would enjoy making: “She writes herself, you know; but I haven’t read everything she has written. It’s usually poetry, and I don’t go in much for poetry—unless it’s Byron. I suppose you think a great deal of Byron in America.”2

The indices of this innocuous bit of conversation are surprisingly clear in where they point. From the specter of marital separation, to the achievement and renown of Lord Byron, to the interlocutor, whose name temporarily belies her function as a portmanteau character representing American women writers, the not-so-hidden referent is the Byron controversy: the poet’s brief marriage to Anne Isabella Milbanke and their ensuing separation, which an American writer with Stackpole’s initials rekindled and stoked to a near-frenzy more than a half century after the event. The disrepute into which Harriet Beecher Stowe fell in her dogged advocacy of Lady Byron, whom she befriended in the 1850s, and rushed to defend following the publication of Teresa Guiccioli’s well-received memoir of Byron (where Lady Byron figures poorly), is a well-known matter, since it effectively marked the end of Stowe’s remarkable run as a writer of consequence. Indeed, what Bantling is all but declaring outright to Stackpole is that in the same way that you think a great deal of Byron in America, you must think comparatively little now of the woman writer who at one time had made as great a difference as any American writer, living or dead.

The zero-sum logic governing Stowe’s relationship to Lord Byron points to the way Byron and his poetry had become dissociated. Bantling’s calculus has less to do with his implicit claim that Byron is too great and important a writer to be reproached than with his more explicit sense of the ascendance of the “Byronic” on which the poet’s posthumous ability to fend off Stowe’s attack (specifically the charge of incest) depended. James returned to this very subject in “The Aspern Papers,” the germ for which came from Byron, again, and more immediately from his surviving lover, Claire Clairmont, who lived to an old age in Florence, where James had unknowingly passed her door on numerous occasions.3 Like that story’s narrator, whose interest in the poet Jeffrey Aspern is lodged primarily in Aspern’s aura rather than in what he wrote, Mr. Bantling’s blanket admiration of a poet whose appeal to him is largely unpoetical speaks as much again to a Byronic hegemony as to the way Byron’s art had been overtaken by mythology. If Stowe was the manifest loser in her engagement with a poet long-deceased, long-martyred, and long-mythologized, she shares that loss with Byron himself, whose vindication was predicated as much on the poetry he originally produced as on his mystification by popular sentiment.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.