Pilgrim of Doubt
Irving Howe observes in his memoir, Margin of Hope, that as a working-class first-generation Jewish immigrant to the Bronx, his imagination first caught fire when he discovered the works of Marx and Shelley. A sensible pairing, particularly for the founding father of Dissent magazine as well as one of the few New York intellectuals to begin an anti-Stalinist socialist and culminate an anti-Stalinist socialist.
Quite apart from their shared radicalism, Marx and Shelly also shared a fondness for the Promethean as well for employing other classical references to enliven modern plights. Both were moved to physical pains--in Marx's case, carbuncles, in Shelley's, the blows of Eton bullies-- for their art, for which they both have also suffered the enormous condescension of posterity. (Paul Johnson wrote a book about radical hypocrisy: chief on his list of hypocrises for Marx was raging against bourgeois philandering while helping himself to the help. And an old college professor of mine, breaking the strictures of classroom decorum, once did an impersonation of what the maudlin author of "Ode to the West Wind" must have sounded like in bed.) But most of all, they were both poets, after a fashion. Francis Wheen in his excellent "biography" of Das Kapital calls Marx the "poet of commodities," an assessment somewhat prefigured by Edmund Wilson who thought that the Gothic themes depicted in Marx's netherworld of capitalist accumulation were worthy of Dickens or Zola. The greybeard of the British Museum aimed at scientific "laws" to govern history and what he hit was literary paydirt instead. Dark Satanic mills had come before, but it took a rebellious Young Hegelian to peek inside them and canvas the millers about their daily bread.
One needn't be on the left to appreciate this curious hybridizing of roles. Today, the notion of the poet-politician, or the poet-revolutionary, is confined to Brooklyn food co-ops and the V-neck-and-Verlaine quadrants of MFA programs. If the masses prefer their politicians as anything other than lawyers, they prefer them as middling comedians like Al Franken, whose method of delivering a punch line is to kick you in the shin with one. Benjamin Disraeli, with his satirical social novels, may have been the closest we've come to seeing a man of letters earn a sizable reputation as a man of public policy, though when he attempted verse the campaign was usually a failure. And it pays notice that Disraeli took as both his boyhood and adulthood hero a scribbling predecessor in parliament fluent in his own species of Hebrew melodies--Lord Byron.
Harold Bloom has a nice review of Edna O'Brien's Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, in which he notes that the great poet's crest of celebrity began with his maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812, denouncing the Tory government's Framework Bill. It demanded the gallows for the Luddite weavers of Nottingham who, as Bloom aptly phrases it, "had destroyed the machines replacing them." He continues:
"I have just read what appears to be the speech which lacks rhetorical confidence, but it made a considerable impression upon both Whigs and Tories. Like Shelley, Byron was a poet of the left, and revolution kindled his enthusiasm, but his concern for the people is suspect. He grimly exploited the angry workers in the Lancashire coal pits he owned, and expressed no guilt, since his rage for expense invariably exceeded his high revenues. Karl Marx, whose daughter translated Shelley, looked back at the self-destructive careers of both Promethean rebels and shrewdly concluded that Shelley the aristocrat always would have stood with the revolutionary left but that Byron, had he been able to bear survival into middle age (he proclaimed the best of life to be over at twenty-three), would have sided with his hereditary nobility against the lower orders."
That is a shrewd insight indeed, although Shelley, contra his conservative critics who uncover the germ of 20th-century totalitarianism in his woozy visions of utopia, would have been the first victim of any successful revolution to which he leant his bodily fervor (fortunately, there were none). It's impossible, for instance, to imagine Shelley as a functionary of some Committee on Public Safety, much less a purveyor of quest poems in a state where internal passports were necessary. He head never rolled because his heart, desiccated and pyre-scorched, had to be pressed into a book.
But Byron was the bard of ambivalence and confusion: a world-historical teenager. He was an erotic Calvinist, a subversive formalist, and an aspiring revolutionary happy with the luxuries and privileges afforded him by the ancien regime. This made him more a flaky fellow traveler than a committed radical, which was just as well because his genius lay in encompassing multitudes of emotion while not lending the outward impression that he was in any way contradicting himself. This is why Goethe remarked that when Byron thought, he became a child.
Though a very clever one, it must be admitted. He rather neatly fitted what Cyril Connolly once termed the mold of "permanent adolescence," a category Connolly had originally applied to the poets and writers of the 1930's who were just as engage--and sexually conflicted--as Byron. And as with Auden, Isherwood and Spender, there were small but unmistakable hints in Byron of a future reconciliation with the established order. He once wrote from Cambridge to Augusta Leigh, the half-sister with whom an incestuous affair would later be the cause of his exile from England, that he felt "as independent as a German Prince who coins his own Cash, or a Cherokee Chief who coins no Cash at all, but enjoys what is more precious, Liberty." This is the same way of saying that the master-slave dynamic was encoded in his DNA. And while reckless youth may have heightened these inner tensions, given Byron's sense of humor (dark and reactionary, like all good senses of humor), his zero tolerance for mawkishness or Gawd-'elp-us rusticity, and the fact that his first major poem was about the diminishing returns of depravity, it was only a matter of time before the master won out. Marx's daughter spotted Byron's incipient conservatism before Byron did.
Yet unlike Disraeli, the Tory who forestalled a revolution in England by passing legislation more progressive than what any Whig could contrive, Byron deplored the Ottoman Empire and gave his life to the cause of liberating Christian Greece from Islamic dominion. (If he wrote Orientalist poems like The Giaour, Disraeli embodied Orientalist myths about the nobility of the Semitic peoples, myths which led him to some black conclusions such as denying the Turkish slaughter of 12,000 Bulgarians in 1876 for fear of de-stabilizing Ottoman rule.) But even in his final act of self-sacrifice, occasioned as much by a desire for immortality as it was for Hellenic self-determination, Byron cut a figure more silly than heroic. O'Brien seems to imagine Gen. Petraeus fused with Dorian Grey when she notes that his war effort in Missolonghi
signaled escape from the demands and tedium of everyday life and was a metamorphosing from poet to soldier... He ordered scarlet uniforms with buttons, epaulettes and sashes and fearsome helmets with waving plumes, for his corps of three, Count Gamba, Edward Trelawny and himself. The helmets were modeled on those in Book IV of the Iliad.
Anticlimax stalks this passage as it did the life that inspired it. There are no immutable laws of history except the following: If Paris Hilton survives to 40, she'll look and sound like Lynne Cheney. Had malaria and malpractice not claimed the brightest star in the Romantic firmament at 32, he'd like have pitched farther to the right than his nemesis Wordsworth. And his legend would be only half as interesting.
