As others see us

[sartorias]

. . . both as Americans and as writers . . .

I was rereading Byron's letters and journals over breakfast, and these two entries caught my eye:Whenever an American requests to see me-(which is not unfrequently) I comply-firstly, because I respect a people who acquired their freedom by firmness without excess-and secondly, because these

Comments

[asakiyume]

Wow, fascinating quotes! That second really makes him seem fairly human. Yes, with an ego, but not quite the monumental jerk that he sometimes seems to be.

[sartorias]

Reading his stuff, you get a strong impression of a nerd horribly worried all his life that people found him fat and clumsy, as he was found as a fat, club-footed boy (yet his nanny still molested him at far too young an age), with a predilection for desperate crushes on choir boys, on girls who looked like boys (Caro Lamb), mostly with older women who made him feel good about himself. He respected Mary Shelley because she didn't try to put moves on him, and she had a brilliant mind.

[asakiyume]

I'm liking him more and more.

[houseboatonstyx]

Heh. I thought he was going to end by saying, like Seymour Glass, that he suspected people of conspiring to make him happy.

[sartorias]

Heh!

[anna_wing]

There's a new book out on his last days in Greece, "Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution" by Roderick Beaton, from Cambridge University Press. The Economist gave it a positive review,and it sounds quite interesting. The reviewer said that Byron had rather more empathy for the Greeks than the other Philhellenes, and therefore had lower expectations of them. This sounds plausible, as from his letters and journals one does realise that he was an extremely realistic person in his assessments of other people (and himself). A Romantic, but not a romantic.

[sartorias]

I quite agree. (Except that perhaps he was fooling himself with that last crush on a boy much younger than he was. Or maybe when he saw the truth, he put himself in the way of death. I'd have to reread what his friends allowed us; I strongly suspect that the pages of the journals, and the letters, that were burned were the ones explicitly homosexual. But enough hints were left.)