Literary Rogues (5 page)

An anonymous book was quickly published to provide a counterpoint to De Quincey's, titled
Advice to Opium Eaters
. Its purpose was to warn others from copying De Quincey, though a more cynical reader might think that the anonymous author's true aim was to capitalize on the popularity of
Confessions
. Because of his high profile, De Quincey was widely blamed by doctors, politicians, and priests for a rise in recreational drug use in the nineteenth century.

De Quincey, for his part, was explicit in stating that the fantastic dreams a literary man like himself experienced as a result of opium use were not representative of the layman's experience. “If a man ‘whose
talk is of oxen
' should become an opium-eater, the probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all)—he will dream about oxen.” Of course, plenty of authors imitated him in search of the fantastic dreams he wrote about. Louisa May Alcott, Branwell Brontë, and Wilkie Collins were among a long list of writers who followed De Quincey down the path of opium addiction.

In the original edition of
Confessions
, De Quincey called the book “the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium: of which church I acknowledge myself
to be the only member
.” In a revised edition of the book, thirty-five years after the first edition was published, De Quincey updated this line to read, “This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium; of which church I acknowledge myself
to be the Pope
.”

“Those who have read the
Confessions
will have closed them with the impression that I had wholly
renounced the use
of opium,” he wrote in the revised edition's epilogue. In truth, he had never quit. Opium was perhaps the only way he could have weathered the final four decades of his life, a roller-coaster ride of fame, financial difficulties, the loss of five of his eight children, and the death of his beloved wife. He had little choice but to keep using. “Without opium I can't get on with my work, which the publishers are urging me to complete,” he told a friend in 1854. De Quincey was laid up with a swollen foot and leg, and his doctor had advised him to quit opium to speed his recovery, which he couldn't do. “
The work must be done
; the opium can't be left off,” he said. “The leg must take its chance.”

De Quincey died five years later of natural causes unrelated to his drug abuse.

“
Problem
:
bored
. Solution: sex, alcohol, firearms.”

—
DANIEL FRIEDMAN ON THE LIFE OF LORD BYRON

N
early two hundred years after his death,
Lord Byron
(1788–1824) continues to make headlines: in 2008, the
Sun
, a British tabloid, ran
a sensational story
about the poet under the headline, “Lord Byron's Life of Bling, Booze and Groupie Sex.” As a young boy, however, George Gordon Byron was an unlikely candidate to leave such a lasting impression upon the nineteenth-century literary landscape. He later recalled that as a child he was “
neither tall nor short
, dull nor witty,” before adding that he was “lively—except in my sullen moods, and then I was always a devil.”

When his grandfather passed away, George Gordon became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, Lord Byron. You can tell everything you need to know about Byron's family history by looking at the nicknames of his relatives: his grand-uncle was known as “the Wicked Lord,” and his father went by the moniker “Mad Jack” Byron. Mad Jack was deceased when young George Gordon inherited his title, and management of the family estate fell to the new Lord Byron—who was only ten years old.

Despite his mother's caution, Byron quickly found himself borrowing money against the lands he stood to inherit, to support his lavish appetites. Although he was born into money, he never seemed to have enough. What exactly did Byron spend his money on? Aside from upkeep on his family's rapidly deteriorating estate, Byron collected exotic animals. Over his life he would amass a veritable zoo of animals, including a bear, several monkeys, a goat with a broken leg, a wolf, horses, dogs, cats, an eagle, a crow, a falcon, peacocks, guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane.

Despite his affluence, the young Lord Byron was constantly plagued by “black moods.” He was apt to break down over the slightest thing. “
I cry for nothing
,” he once wrote. “Today I burst into tears all alone by myself over a cistern of goldfishes—which are not pathetic animals.” His macabre habits, such as firing pistols indoors and drinking wine from his ancestors' skulls, did little to alleviate his depression.

Social interactions only worsened his mood: “
An animated conversation
has much the same effect on me as champagne,” he said. “It elevates me and makes me giddy, and I say a thousand foolish things while under its intoxicating influence. It takes a long time to sober me after; and I sink, under reaction, into a state of depression, out of humor with myself and the world. I find an interesting book the only sedative to restore me.”

When he wasn't reading, spending money, or brooding, Lord Byron wrote poetry. He felt that he had some catching up to do with his literary elders. Shakespeare, for instance, “had
a million advantages over me
—besides the incalculable one of having been dead for one or two centuries,” which he termed an attractive quality “to the gentle living reader.” He published several volumes of poetry in his late teens, including
Fugitive Pieces
and
Hours of Idleness
, to little acclaim.

Since proper gentlemen simply did not dirty their hands with an industrious task like writing, Byron gave his copyrights away to friends and family to avoid being mistaken for a lowly author. Poetry? 'Tis no more than a hobby, like shooting pistols indoors! It's unclear if any of his peers in the House of Lords bought into this logic. Even when his books later became bestsellers and his debt was mounting to burdensome levels, Byron refused to accept payment for his work.

When he turned twenty, Byron picked up his pen and paper and left England. He traversed the European and Asian continents, plugging any hole he could find. He is reported to have slept with two hundred women while in Venice—in the course of just one year. And that doesn't include the dozens of teenage boys biographers have linked him to during the same period. “He has
no indisposition that I know of
but love, desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion,” his mother lamented.

In 1811, Byron returned to England. Despite his adventures, he was completely bored with life. “At twenty-three
the best of life is over
. I have seen mankind in various countries and find them equally despicable. I grow selfish and misanthropical.” In his private journal, he continued his rant: “
I am tolerably sick of vice
which I have tried in its agreeable varieties, including wine and ‘carnal company.' ” Even seeing his poems in print had failed to uplift his spirits. “I have
outlived all my appetites
and most of my vanities—even the vanity of authorship.”

Ironically, it was only after this point that his career really took off, with the publication of the first canto of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
. Byron awoke one morning and found himself famous, he joked. He was only half kidding.

When Byron came of age, Europe was in the final days of the Enlightenment, a massive period of upheaval that pulled the continent solidly out of the ignorance and error of the Middle Ages and into the intellectual light of the eighteenth century. While academics welcomed the Enlightenment with open arms, the common man was highly skeptical of the new world order. The Seven Years' War (1756–1763), the American Revolution (1775–1783), and the French Revolution (1789–1799) all contributed to the sense that the world was quickly spinning out of control. The young, sensitive writers who came to be known as the Romantics were attuned to the growing sense among the populace that the eighteenth century was too fast-paced for its own good. With the publication of the first canto of
Childe Harold
in 1812, Byron became the poster child for the Romantic era overnight.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
was vaguely based on Byron's travels through Portugal and the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. Childe Harold, the disaffected young hero, sets out on his own in an uncaring, cruel world to recapture a sense of wonder that the Enlightenment had bleached from nature and industry had run roughshod over.

English readers of all classes snapped the narrative up as Byron's publisher serialized it from 1812 to 1818. The Duchess of Devonshire wrote that
Childe Harold
“is on
every table, and Byron courted
, visited, flattered and praised whenever he appears. He is really the only topic of conversation—the men jealous of him, the women of each other.” Melancholy and disillusionment were in vogue, and Byron was as melancholic and disillusioned as they came.

But as Byron's fame blossomed, he couldn't shake the feeling that his glory days were behind him. “
Fame is but like all other pursuits
, ending in disappointment—its worthlessness only discovered when attained,” he later said. “People complain of the brevity of life. Should they not rather complain of its length, as its enjoyments cease long before the halfway-house of life is passed, unless one has the luck to die young?”

Lord Byron's life did not end at twenty-three, forcing him to put up with the pains of life as an eighteenth-century celebrity. “
How very disagreeable it is
to be so stared at!” he once complained. “I pay the price of passing through the town, and exposing myself to the gazing multitudes.”

Novelist Lady Blessington, who spoke at length with Byron, wrote, “
There were days when he seemed more pleased
than displeased at being followed and stared at. When gay, he attributed the attention he excited to the true case—admiration of his genius. But when in a less good-natured humor, he looked on the spotlight as an impertinent curiosity, caused by the scandalous histories circulated against him.” He also “suffered from” an unending deluge of fan letters, the “
anonymous amatory letters
and portraits” that he received from his adoring fans. Byron nonchalantly dismissed them, confessing to Blessington that he “has never noticed any of them”—the women or the letters, one cannot be sure.

Byron did, however, have a thing for his admirers' hair. Like a child tossing aside the birthday card and ripping open the wrapped present, Byron plundered his fan letters for the locks of hair that women routinely sent him. He catalogued more than one hundred locks of hair in envelopes meticulously labeled with the women's names.

One of the most notorious additions to his hair collection was Lady Caroline Lamb, a married aristocrat with whom he had a brief and fiery affair. Rumors spread that the fair Lady Lamb had herself delivered naked on a serving tray to Byron's dining room. Pleased with what he saw, Byron indulged himself with Lamb—repeatedly, and with great passion. Lamb was a writer as well, and they seemed like the perfect intellectual and physical match. (Her husband apparently didn't give either of them pause.) Their affair was cut short, however, when Lamb let on that she was in love with the notoriously commitment-phobic lord. “
I will kneel and be torn from
your feet before I will give you up,” Lamb wrote to him. Byron immediately dumped her.

Lady Caroline Lamb refused to give up on her quarry. She would “make” him love her, she said, and sent Byron a lock of her pubic hair as a ploy to get him back. “
I cut the hair too close
and bled,” she wrote in an accompanying letter.

Byron was amused at Lamb's attempts to rekindle their romance. He responded with the taunt “
Any woman can make a man
in love with her, but show me her who can keep him so!” Byron sent her a lock of hair—not from his own head, but from the head of Lady Oxford, another of his many lovers. Then Byron promptly married Lamb's cousin, Anne Isabella Milbanke. He was in desperate need of the property and influx of cash his new bride would bring, but he was none too eager to wed. “
I am about to be married
, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness,” he wrote. Although Lamb pledged to buy a pistol and kill herself in front of Byron and his new bride, she instead sent them a letter of congratulations. Lamb was nothing if not polite.

Unsurprisingly, Byron's lifestyle of “bling, booze, and groupie sex” proved to be incompatible with married life. His unhappiness reached its apex when his wife gave birth to their first and only child, and he proclaimed that he was in hell. He had predicted as much years earlier when, plotting his poem
Don Juan
, he contemplated whether his hero should “
end in hell, or in an unhappy
marriage, not knowing which would be the severest.”