Image - Lord Byron’s ‘Don Juan’

Don Juan Cantos Annotated

TL;DR An up-dated draft of my “Annotated Don Juan” is available. It now provides notes and illustrations for Cantos I, III and IX. Get it here and read along with the narration.

At the end of the previous article I said “My second reason for liking Don Juan is the misdirection and sub-texts…”.

Byron wants us to be complicit in the comedy of Don Juan. The fun comes from understanding what is really going on. The poem is only superficially about Juan and his slightly ridiculous adventures around pre-Napoleonic Europe. From the outset — from the selection of Juan as the nominal hero in the first stanzas of Canto I — and especially from Canto IV onward, the poem is about Byron’s view of the world and of himself; in so far as he can see himself.

The difference between the story and the point is the first, and most obvious, level of misdirection in Don Juan. There are deeper levels, too, that concern the things Byron might wish to hide, or should hide but won’t or can’t because they affect the way he sees the world and himself. Here, the misdirection concerns his relationship with his half-sister; his misbehavior toward his wife; his bisexuality; his fear that he will die without being the hero he imagined; his belief that he “burned his candle” too early and, perhaps; his suspicion that the “full account” for his early promiscuity is still to be paid. He alludes to each of these things in the poem — some, several times — but not always directly. He never lingers on them. The discursive verse that leads him to introspection can just as easily whisk him away from it. It seems he has only to look up from his pen for a moment to find a diverting opportunity for irony or to spot an enemy of public virtues — liberty above all — that needs skewering.

I have no doubt there are also sub-texts in the poem than no reader now appreciates. Hints and allusions that, on the surface seem unremarkable but, to a sufficiently informed reader such as Cam Hobhouse, the friend of his late teens and twenties, would recall much more resonant ideas and events: in Spain, Greece and Turkey at the start of the 1810s, in London in the mid-decade and in Geneva or Venice at the end of that decade. If we are searching for reasons that Hobhouse tried, unsuccessfully, to tone-down the first four Cantos (in Murray’s hands), or successfully to destroy the early sketch of a novel and then to burn the memoir bequeathed to Moore after Byron’s death, they probably lie there. Hobhouse may have argued his vandalism was to protect his friend’s reputation. But it was very likely intended to protect his own as he climbed the greasy pole of political prominence. His censorship ensured that the sub-texts we can no longer read in Don Juan would have no key to unlock them.

Still, the pleasure of the poem is not the less for these unguessed mysteries. Don Juan still contains a remarkable depth of allusion in almost every stanza. They give the poem a substance of ideas that few extended comedies can match — Shakespeare (perhaps), Ben Johnson, Pope — and sinews that bind it to its literary forebears, while keeping up an extraordinary pace.

Then, Byron did not set out to write a poem of riddles. On the contrary, he meant the poem to have a political impact. For that, it had to be accessible and popular, as it was. The most frequent form of allusion in Don Juan is to classical authors and mythology. These references would have been more or less familiar to his contemporary readers of every class who had at least some formal education. Direct quotes from Latin or Greek authors (Horace, Homer) might not have been so familiar but in most cases — with one notable exception in Canto IX — Byron glosses the quote in the verse, making it less a mystery.

His quotes from English authors — Shakespeare especially, but also the Bible in the KJV, some 17^th century dramatists, popular authors such Alexander Pope and Walter Scott (and even to Wordsworth and Southey) — are not usually acknowledged but the references are often to well-known passages. Canto IX alone contains perhaps a dozen quotes from Hamlet and Othello that might be at least half-remembered by those who have seen or read the plays.

Then there are many half-borrowings, unacknowledged and usually paraphrased or transformed, from his more obscure sources. Byron read very widely and was regularly supplied — often by his first publisher, John Murray — with packages of books from England. He must also have had an encyclopedic memory. In every Canto there are authors in Latin, Italian, French or English whose ideas and images he borrows. Occasionally he mentions them or their works: Horace, Virgil, Pope, Luigi Pulci. But as Peter Cochran — who dug up most of them — notes at some point in his scholarly notes, those that were most influential on Byron he mentions least or not at all, such as Thomas Hope’s eccentric comic novel Anastasius that Byron read while composing the early Cantos and that had a great influence on the narrative and some of the comedy of Don Juan.

Aside from literary references, the narrative and digressions in Don Juan are peppered, too, with references to public events, prominent people, political and religious ideas, histories, technologies and (to use a modern phrase) memes of the late 18^th and early 19^th century in Europe. That was the period when what we would call the “modern world” began. Echoes of the social, political and technological upheaval of those decades are still found in the constitutions of modern States, in the forms and conventions of contemporary art and literature and in the technologies that still surround us.

Still, a lot of the context for the verse in Don Juan that would have been readily available to a 19^th reader, or listener, is not so readily available to readers and listeners in the 21^st century. For the reader, today, there are new ways to compensate for that. Dispersed around the public Internet is all the information a reader would ever need to grasp the context of even the obscure references in the poem. If the reader has the time and patience.

For the listener, the pace of the verse makes it hard to follow-up any of the references without losing track of the listening experience.

Hence these annotations. In compiling them, I’ve taken advantage of three valuable annotators before me. First, and foremost, Peter Cochran whose extensive notes on all of Don Juan and whose editions of ancillary material such as the Hobhouse diaries — still available for download from his website — are invaluable for any student of Byron. Second, the notes in the Stefan edition of Don Juan (also used by Peter Cochran). Third, the notes by Isaac Asimov in his beautiful edition of Don Juan from the mid-1970s that better indicate than either Stefan or Cochran where a contemporary reader might need some background (although Asimov offers no comments on some of the naughtier bits of the poem).

Somewhat following the Asimov edition, I’ve included some illustrations that I hope will make the annotations seem less of an exercise in dry scholarship and perhaps help to show what it is often hard to say in a short note.

Why I like Don Juan

Just now there’s a lot of interest in theories of behaviour as ‘signalling’. For example, education choices and curricula are said to be “about” signalling wealth or conformity with corporate ethics rather than about getting knowledge. Conversation is said to be a about showing-off, displaying intellectual assets, grooming allies etc.

OK. It seems just yesterday (in fact decades ago) it was “all about” nudges and hidden motivators and… well. Theories of incentives, values and behaviour are probably useful given the “hall-of-mirrors” that is introspection. But they are not a substitute, especially on matters of taste or preference.

I like to perform Don Juan (my recordings). Does that mean that I like Byron’s poem because it’s an opportunity to “show off”? The idea can’t be discounted. It must be part of the (unacknowledged) calculus. After all, it would just be too damned hard to make the effort and to put up with the frustrations of recording were it not for some selfish return. The satisfaction of capturing or inventing a ‘voice’ for Byron’s poem in a way that other recordings do not is an important reward for me that I need not share with any one else.

But I can give other, less embarrassing reasons, too, for liking this poem more than many other literary works and more than most of Byron’s other poetry.

First; I like its clever discursive verse. Byron’s management of rhyme and argument — sound and sense — is remarkable. The conversational tone and the structured sentences that weave through the rhythm and rhyme of his stanzas —- often to a clever joke in the final couplet — makes it great fun to recite Don Juan.

Despite its boundless variety, meter and rhyme are hard-won in the english language; more than in a romance language like italian, for example where, notoriously, “every word rhymes with every other”. This difficulty makes metrical verse in english especially prone to “accidents” or particular qualities. These are quirks and inflections: like the ways a pigment flows from the brush in different paint media or the ways in which the softness of a pencil’s lead and the angle of the point shapes a pencil line. Mastery of plastic arts means, at the lowest level, mastery of — and concession to — the accidents of the medium. This is true, too, of verse, I think. The ineluctible character of the language as a medium constrains the poet both in the shape of the sound and also the shape of the argument: what you can say is, in the micro-environment of a phrase, determined, in part, by how you must say it.

So when Byron boasts that he has no plan for Don Juan but follows where his ‘nose’ takes him, he is doubtless telling (part of) the truth about the grand scheme. But he seems also to be telling us about the craft of verse (anyone’s verse) at the ‘micro’ level. That craft is to find — or be found by — the inevitable word whose sound and sense lead from the first hint of an idea to its development and final form.

Of course, Byron tells us as much in Don Juan: in Canto IX, for example, when he laments in an aside that he “needs must” (and does) rhyme “love” with “dove” even if it means allowing sound to overrule sense.

Besides Platonic love, besides the love
Of God, the love of sentiment, the loving
Of faithful pairs (I needs must rhyme with dove,
That good old steam-boat which keeps verses moving
‘Gainst reason — Reason né’er was hand-and-glove
With rhyme, but always leant less to improving
The sound than sense)
Canto IX, 403–7

Still, Byron’s ‘lament’ is disingenuous (surprise!): his ‘formulaic’ rhyme serves the purpose of his jokey admission perfectly well.

Now, even his early lyrics showed Bryon was a superior craftsman of verse. Sustaining the energy of the verse in long poems, like Childe Harold, confirmed it. But I think what we see on the surface of the verse in Don Juan is still more remarkable. Childe Harold (like most of his other verse before 1818) for all its original shock-value has a formal, rhetorical quality: poetic diction and Spenserian stanzas that, in english, sound monumental or maybe marmoreal. Like ranks of fluted columns.

But Don Juan is conversational in tone. Although somewhat strictly rhymed (Byron stretches a point, wittily, here and there) in ottava rima, the rhyme sometimes delivers the punch (especially in the last couplet) but often acts merely to propel the sense across a series of parenthetical or otherwise subordinate clauses; to knit together the jostling notions and ironic (or pathetic) contrasts that comprise the apparently intimate, frequently manipulative conversation of a very clever companion.

Even when embarked on pure narrative in Don Juan, Byron’s genius for tuning his verse to a necessary effect is impressive. Consider this extract from Canto VIII, where Juan, who has lost contact with his own troop in the assault on the fortress of Ismail, is about, accidentally, to lead an heroic infantry-charge.

Constructed from a masterly concatenation of enjambed lines (asterisks) and concurrent clauses, the verse mimics Juan’s stumbling advance across the battle-field while the poet piles-on the images of death and confusion. Without affording end-of-line pauses, the verse propels us forward without us knowing, at first, where we are headed. Notice that the second and third of these verses is one long, 16-line, sentence with the subject (“Juan”) and the principal verb (‘Rush’d) found only in the last two lines. By the time the reader reaches the first line of the fourth verse — “He knew not where he was, nor greatly cared” — he/she, too, feels a bit lost. Then Juan dashes ahead into the fray, just as Byron lobs his own satiric bomb into the last couplet.

Then, like an ass, he went upon his way,
And, what was stranger, never look’d behind;
But seeing, flashing forward, like the day *
Over the hills, a fire enough to blind *
Those who dislike to look upon a fray,
He stumbled on, to try if he could find *
A path, to add his own slight arm and forces *
To corps, the greater part of which were corses.

Perceiving then no more the commandant *
Of his own corps, nor even the corps, which had *
Quite disappear’d — the gods know how! (I can’t *
Account for every thing which may look bad *
In history; but we at least may grant *
It was not marvellous that a mere lad,
In search of glory, should look on before,
Nor care a pinch of snuff about his corps): —

Perceiving nor commander nor commanded,
And left at large, like a young heir, to make *
His way to — where he knew not — single handed;
As travellers follow over bog and brake *
An “ignis fatuus;” or as sailors stranded *
Unto the nearest hut themselves betake;
So Juan, following honour and his nose,
Rush’d where the thickest fire announced most foes.

He knew not where he was, nor greatly cared,
For he was dizzy, busy, and his veins *
Fill’d as with lightning — for his spirit shared *
The hour, as is the case with lively brains;
And where the hottest fire was seen and heard,
And the loud cannon peal’d his hoarsest strains,
He rush’d, while earth and air were sadly shaken
By thy humane discovery, Friar Bacon!
Canto VIII, 233–264

If that analysis sounds too complicated, it’s my fault. Byron’s verse is great fun when he’s being clever or naughty, and affecting when he’s being serious. The ironies are a delight; the contrasts witty and often unexpected. His ideas cascade, sometimes, in torrents.

Following the twists and turns of Byron’s sentences in Don juan is like watching an expert surfer flick across the waves or some graceful kid on a roller-board do stuff that almost terrifies you to watch. When, at last, he lands the pleasure is part wonder and part relief. The pleasure of his satire is tension released.

Brave! It’s the only word for what Byron essays, against the opposition of his publisher (Murray), the literary magazines (the Review) the “serious” Press, and even his erstwhile friends (Hobhouse). At every point in the extempore performance of Don Juan — stand up poetry — Byron insists on taking a risk. Saying what he can or must and trusting to the judgement of his “common” readers or of history to comprehend what his critics and censors could not.

How fully his determination has been justified!

My second reason for liking Don Juan is the misdirection and sub-texts… No. This post is long enough already. I may come back to that idea in a future post.

Catching up… and an announcement

Visitors to this site who know some of Lord Byron’s early lyric and love poetry — perhaps encountered at school — are sometimes puzzled by his longest work, Don Juan. Even repelled.

They’re struck by the radical difference in the verse and the tone of the poem. It’s certainly not lyric. It’s sort-of-philosophical, but more jokey than serious, and sarcastic and salacious and slanderous. They wonder, perhaps, whether they should bother to find out what this rambling, snarky novel-in-verse is all about.

If you’ve come to listen to the recording of Canto IX, you may be puzzled, too, to find this young solider with a famous Spanish name and a reputation for being a rake transposed to Russia. Did the Empress Catherine really seduce him? Isn’t Don Juan supposed to be the pants-man in his own legend?

Good questions! But hard to answer in brief. It’s a bit like someone who watches an episode of Twin Peaks or Game of Thrones for the first time. If they ask you to explain what’s going on, your first thought might be: “this could take all night”! Let’s just say: if you like this episode of Don Juan it will really repay you to start with earlier stuff such as the free, illustrated, narrated Apple IBook of the Dedication and Canto I (from which the Map at the top of this post is taken).

If you don’t have an Apple device (Mac, iPhone or iPad) the iBook won’t play. But I’ll be releasing the combined audio of Cantos I and Canto II later this year (Sept-Dec 2018) on the 200^th Anniversary of their composition. Please stay tuned for details.

Meanwhile, for new listeners to Canto IX, here is an “even-shorter-than-Cliff-Notes” summary of Don Juan and it’s context.

Lord Byron (later Lord Noël-Byron, christened George Gordon) published this long poem (16 Cantos or ‘books’; never finished) in episodes, as it was being written, in the early 1820s. He was in his early 30s and still — five or six years after fleeing England for Italy — possibly the most popular, scandalous, admired and reviled literary figure of Britain. He had hurried out of London just ahead of the debt-collectors and to avoid censure for multiple rumoured (but then obscure) offences including incest with his half-sister, ‘sodomy’, a public scrap with the mad-infatuated Caroline Lamb (she had a knife), his wife’s “escape” with his infant daughter from his (verbal, mental) abuse etc etc.
The real subject of Don Juan is Byron himself whom both Goethe, for example, and Matthew Arnold agreed was one of the most fascinating studies of 19^th century European literature. The story is nominally the adventures the Spanish nobleman whose reputation as a bounder and a rake everyone knows “from the pantomime”. Byron’s version of the tale is, however, entirely original, as is the telling: full of diversions, interruptions, jokes, philosophical rumination, nearly-frank confessions and, above all, clever and frequently savage satires of contemporary autocrats in Europe, their repressive governments and the hypocrisy of their allies in the press, parliaments and in the church. He is also a merciless, and very funny, critic of contemporary poets such as Wordsworth and the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey.
Byron’s Juan — he rhymes the name with “ruin” on purpose — is not the evil seducer of Mozart’s opera. Instead, the first (and sustained) joke of the poem is that readers looking for a model of Byron-as-rake find in Juan an upright, modest, dashing and earnest young hero who far from being a cynical lothario is, rather, the passive victim of his own manly virtues.
The story starts as a bedroom-farce. Juan as a pretty, smooth, inexperienced, teenager, is discovered hidden in the boudoir — OK, in the bed — of the young wife of one of his prudish mother’s former suitors. Sent abroad by his mother to a “moral” education in Italy, he is the sole survivor of a terrible shipwreck followed by cannibalism among the crew. Cast on the beach of a remote Ionian island, he is rescued and ‘bethrothed’, after some steamy but-off-stage sex-on-the-beach, by the nubile, innocent daughter of a ferocious pirate. Dad returns from sea in disguise and discovers the young pair living it up at his expense. After a brief struggle he captures Juan and sells him into slavery in the Turkish galleys. His daughter dies of grief.
The powerful Sultana of Istanbul spots the handsome lad when he is put on display in the slave market. She has her chief eunuch buy Juan and deliver him to her disguised as a female concubine, in the harem of the Ottoman Sultan. After some hair-raising, cross-dressing hilarity, the sensual, powerful Gulbayez and Juan are about to hit it off when the Sultan unexpectedly turns up. So Juan, still in disguise, has to spend the night hiding in the Sultan’s harem where the ladies fight over the opportunity to share a bed with this lovely new concubine.
Juan escapes Istanbul in the company of an English mercenary and together they join the army of Russia, under the legendary general Alexander Suvorov, in the siege of Ismail, the european-frontier fortress of the Ottoman empire at the mouth of the Danube. Juan — somewhat by lucky accident — distinguishes himself in battle. Suvorov promotes him Lieutenant and sends him back to the Empress of Russia with a Dispatch announcing the bloody victory. As Canto IX explains, the satisfaction of slaughter at Ismail was not the only joy Catherine had in this news.
In the following Cantos, Juan is sent by Catherine on a secret diplomatic mission to London where he navigates the “marriage market” of the London Season under the close watch of a myriad matchmakers but without coming to harm. The Season over, Juan joins the Country house-party of some noble friends for the hunting (‘abominable’) and the social-sexual intrigue. He witnesses the banqueting-tents of a corrupt English electoral campaign and — when we see him last — is solving the mystery of a haunted Abbey, where he encounters the generous bosom of a “ghostly” Duchess.

The First Line of Don Juan

Byron cheekily begins his greatest poem in precisely the wrong way for an “epic”:

”I want a hero!…”

Nothing could be more absurd than an Epic without a hero. The essence of an Epic is the struggle of the hero against his own nature and the enmity of gods! No hero, in an Epic, means no story and no plot.

Homer’s Illiad (via Alexander Pope) announces the hero in the first word!

”Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!”

Homer’s Oddessy (via Robert Fitzgerald) begins with the character of Odesseus:

“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story Of that man, skilled in all ways of contending, The wanderer…”

Virgil’s Aneid (via John Dryden) is about the role of one man in founding Latium:

“Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate, And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate, Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore. “

The beginning of Don Juan is misdirection and farce, like much of the rest. Byron has, of course, already chosen his hero whom he finally introduces some forty lines later. But he makes this admission only after allowing himself hautily to dismiss contemporary heroes of revolution and counter-revolution in Europe and even the most romantic of British heroes (after Francis Drake): Horatio Nelson. Byron prefers to all of these a parody of a pantomime villain, Don Juan.

The satire is — or would have been in 1819, when classic literature was at the heart of grammar school education — evident to his readers. Still, since the mild young hero Byron offers cannot be taken too seriously either at the start or at any later point in the poem. So it’s not amiss of us to ask: Did Byron ever find the hero he was looking for?

It was evident to his contemporaries as to us that Byron chose his Juan — a victim not of divine malice and malign circumstance but only of the admiration of his acquaintance (especially female) and of good luck — as an autobiographical joke. A satyrical counterpoint to his own rakish reputation as a wicked exile. The passive Juan is hardly more than a device.

But something similar could be said of Achilles or Ulysses or Aneas. None could be described as fully-developed dramatic actors: they have fixed, rather superficial characters that see no psychological development in the course of the narrative. As befits oral poetry, they are creatures of their own epithets. Juan is slightly more rounded than Achilles or Odysseus or Aeneas. He does develop some moral and even poltiical sophistication, especially after he arrives in England. But he is more often out of focus in “Don Juan” than is typical for an epic hero. He is ‘forgotten’ during long diversions from his, or any other, narrative — more than any of the classic epic heroes.

Then, when Juan is offstage — and often when he is onstage — Byron makes himself the center of attention. But “Byron” cannot be the hero he seeks in the poem’s first line. He claims centerstage only in a discursive way, as the voice of commentary and diversion; never part of the “epic” action. “Byron” has no fixed character or epithets. Nor is “Byron” a victim of fate and divine meddling any more than Juan. He holds himself — so he pleads — accountable for his own actions, however much he may regret some and believe others misconstrued.

Byron hints at dark memories and ‘sin’. But he does not dwell on these and does not confess. He offers sentimental regrets and then jokes about them (women, drunkenness, over-indulgence of other kinds); he seems to accept some blame; repents wasted opportunities and the loss of attachments. He hopes for the vindication of literary fame: securely, he contends, though not forever. Salvation never enters into it.

Nor is “Byron’s” end heroic in the epic sense, although Byron’s was romantic and in some ways even heroic. Wherever Juan might be headed — or “beheaded”: Byron once joked he might send Juan, at last, to the guillotine with the other Aristos in France — Byron’s own fate was, and will forever be, the end of the poem’s epic. As narrative, his journey breaks-off rather than concludes. Byron’s failure ever to return to home to England or to vindication, like Odysseus, or to found a race like Aeneas (his legitimate daughter, Ada, died childless), or even to transcend by a fateful death in battle like Achilles sadly disqualifies the ‘epic’ in his personal narrative.

Then, if we could interrogate his ghost, it would likely scorn the idea that Byron found the ‘hero’ he sought in himself as a sort of pathetic fallacy. He might answer that the mild Juan was his answer to precisely this question.

But, suppose we ask not whether he found his ‘hero’, but whether in the course of five years and sixteen finished Cantos he had found, at least, his protagonist? Lady Constance Blessington in her “Conversations of Lord Byron” argues that Byron could not find himself:

“Byron has remarkable penetration in discovering the characters of those around him, and he piques himself extremely on it: he also thinks he has fathomed the recesses of his own mind ; but he is mistaken : with much that is little (which he suspects) in his character, there is much that is great, that he does not give himself credit for : his first impulses are always good, but his temper, which is impatient, prevents his acting on the cool dictates of reason ; and it appears to me, that in judging himself, Byron mistakes temper for character, and takes the ebullitions of the first for the indications of the nature of the second.”

“Connie” is clever and insightful. This is entirely plausible. But I suspect it is a characterization of Byron. I suspect he had, by the time he left Genoa, arrived as some sort of pact with himself. Greece was the quietus he sought.

Stand-up poetry

The more time I spend with “Don Juan” the more I am convinced that it is crucial, for an understanding of the poem, to remember that it is a performance, not a conventional text.

I’ve been looking closely at Canto III again in the past couple of weeks, because — alas! — I have to re-record it. The reading I made nearly a year ago has some tiny, impossible-to-remove ‘clicks’ introduced somehow in the signal chain from microphone to audio file (damn!).

What stands out as I revise, is the evidence that Cantos III and IV mark a change in Byron’s ambitions for his poem. As if the contrasting reception of Cantos I and II — from his publishers and critics, on one hand, and his readers on the other — decided him to follow his inclination, and be damned.

Byron poured into Don Juan, more than in any other of his works, his extraordinary talent for verse, his reflexive obsessions and ticks, his doubts and guilt (public and private), a distinguished classical education, his spite for reaction and repression, his jokey-blokey-post-Enlightenment political incorrectness, his generosity to friends, and his restless conviction he had ‘lived’ too much (by his early 30s).

Still, it was a sort of extempore performance for the English public that had loved him before his exile and that remained fascinated by him — or by his legend — as he was by himself. He revised each Canto in making the fair copy before it went to the publisher and saw and corrected proofs of Cantos I and II. But he had no overview of the whole poem. It was never ‘whole’ in the sense of ‘complete’, since he left it unfinished at his death. Once the fair copy left Italy for London, it was more or less out of his hands.

Other great works of literature have appeared ‘serially’; Dickens’ novels for example. But they were planned in great detail; the plot ramified, the characters sketched before the first parts appeared. Byron boasted that he had no plan in writing “Don Juan”; he had only ‘materials’. He had no opportunity to rebalance the whole, to revise what he had written (once printed) or to adjust the pace or focus of anything he had written. He never saw the sixteen Cantos that he completed, in one published edition.

The extempore composition of a long work would have been risky even for a form heavily bound by convention, such as the epic poems of Classical Greece. But Don Juan was (is) far from conventional. On the contrary, today as two-hundred years ago it is remarkable for its innovation. Byron mocks poetic conventions claiming to respect epic precedent and ‘Aristotle’s rules’ of dramatic unity while paying them little heed.

Then the content is a riotous “mash-up”. It is part farce — lightweight, risky and fun — and part a bitter satire with sharp barbs for the pretensions of his own class, the institutions of Regency England and the triviality of the then-growing fashion for “polite” taste (in literature especially). Interspersed with these are meditations, jokes, teasing and misreporting of his own experience, beliefs, and tastes in tones that are sometimes ironic, sometimes pathetic and even maudlin (‘pathetic’ in another sense)..

Still, the greatest innovation of Don Juan is Byron’s willingness to leverage his own celebrity and the clever way in which he does so. No author had attempted this before him; few public figures have done it so well since. His notorious (although exaggerated) public image gave him a highly visible performance platform that he was more than willing to exploit from exile.

It is stand-up poetry. Byron is as provocative as Juan is mild; always witty, sometimes brittle, occasionally sentimental and even self-indulgent. He is the subject of his own performance. Or rather, “Byron” is the subject: for where the performer and the performance truly coincide is sometime anyone’s guess.

Everything about this complex layering of public satire and quasi-confession feels modern and without precedent. The greatest English satyrists (Dryden, Pope) were conventional in their use of the poet’s voice. Although both were famous in their own times they do not overtly draw attention to themselves as characters in their poetry except in the same mild, meditative way as e.g. Horace does in his epistles which, however, are cast as private communications. Lawrence Sterne mixed fictional forms and narrative voices in a tumult of styles in “Tristram Shandy” but never inhabited Tristram in the way that Byron inhabits “Don Juan”. Pulci and John Hookham Frere, two of Byron’s models for the ottava rima style, used an off-hand, conversational tone to deflate their grand subjects (the epics of Roland and of King Arthur: the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain) but neither steps out of the narrative frame to offer reflections on themselves.

His risky method of compostion meant Byron had to discover what he wanted the poem to be and how to do it while publishing the poem. He had a sort of “trial run” in Beppo, his imitation of Pulci that he offered to Murray in late 1817 along with the Fourth (and last) Canto of Childe Harold. But it is evident that he is experimenting with the tone and the framing of DonJuan as he worked on it.

Canto I begins as a narrative with an overt ‘framing’ device: a narrator. In the un-finished (draft, never published) prose preface to Canto I, Byron even invites the reader to imagine a scene outside a Cantina in Spain where the narrator is telling the tale. But the older, stuffy, friend-of-the-family who begins the tale disappears after few dozen verses, to be replaced by Byron himself. Or, at least, by the avatar of “Byron” that Byron proposes for the purpose of his performance.

Canto II is less farcical than Canto I and has a broader narrative canvas with a shipwreck, a survival tale and the romance with Haidée. Still, its episodes of cannibalism and ‘illicit’ love on the beach were just as provocative to Byron’s readers as the adultery and ‘blasphemy’ of the first part. Also, Byron’s diversions from the narrative are, like those in Canto I, somewhat related to the action and events, like a loose commentary.

But Canto III, begun nine month after he had finished Canto II breaks the narrative momentum. I have posted here before on the “Peculiar trajectory of Canto III” (http://madbaddangerous.com/2015/04/the-peculiar-trajectory-of-canto-iii-don-juan/). It is remarkable for having almost no action and for wandering off, first, into descriptions of Turkish luxury, then into a lyric intrusion condemning Greek complacency. A meditation on literary fame leads to a blistering attack on Wordsworth and the “Lakers” and, immediately after, a curious meditation on the evening sky that develops into Mariolatry, memories of evening liturgy and forest scenes and finally into a claimed pantheist devotion.

Still, the ever-watchful performer in Byron catches the poet before he becomes maudlin, threatens to award him the ‘wooden spoon’ of poetry for lacking imagination and calls an end to the Canto in order to get the narrative back on the rails. This ‘lapse’ has been, perhaps, a dramatic ruse to lull the reader before the “coiled up” Lambro, lurking off-stage, bursts in upon the lovers dozing on their divan. But it is also, no doubt, an experiment in tone that Byron refines in subsequent Cantos.

Canto VI and the tumult of 1822

Canto VI begins, in full naughty-Don Juan-style, with a politically incorrect (then as now, for diffferent reasons) defence of passion. Byron sidles into the story-line briefly to recall the last scenes of Canto V, then wanders away into a discussion of “boring” polygamy — as if it were a serious option for his Regency readers — leading thence to a debate on the relative merits of warmth and coolness in love.

But he fails to trace the threads of his argument when he decides to quote Horace’s recommendation of moderation in love as in all things. Problem is, he mixes up the quote, selects a line from Ovid instead¹, and then in mid-flight, pauses to remark he’s not quite happy with the way the Latin scans in the English verse. It’s Byron showing-off and toying with the readers’ curiosity (and his own) about his thought processes.

Cantos VI, VII and VIII of Don Juan, all composed in the first half of 1822, mark a new turn in the six-year journey of composition for Byron. It was a stressful year: he abandoned his first and greatest publisher; his companion in exile, Shelley, drowns; relations with Teresa Guiccioli are cooling into a kind of domesticity, and; Byron’s entourage drew him into a serious conflict with local authorities. Still, what stands out from all of this is his devotion to Juan; he works at it steadily, convinced it is his best work.

The first drafts of Canto VI date to February 1822. Byron’s plans for the poem – that is, his narrative notions that he declined to fill-in – remained the same. But after years of cross-purposes and cross letters he decided to abandon John Murray’s conservative publishing house for the “radical” (i.e. popular) journal proposed by John Hunt. He was also, apparently, working under a ban at home. He had promised his mistress, the Countess Guiciolli, who considered the poem unsuitable to his genius and reputation to write no more of Don Juan. But he resumed in secret. No matter what others thought or how many other projects he began, Juan was essential to him.

The narrative of Canto VI picks up immediately after the torrid-comic cross-dressing scene with Gulbayez, the Sultan’s most beautiful bride, in Canto V. It is an anti-climax (what else could it be?). Juan spends a night-in-disguise in the harem as “Juanna”. There are not enough beds to go around (darn!) so he has to share. His bed-partner, Dudú, wakes in alarm during the night to recount a sexually-charged dream, then returns to bed with her new friend. Gulbayez herself spend a sleepless night of longing and fear in the Sultans’ chamber and next morning sends to know what happened in the harem overnight. She guesses the worst — rightly or wrongly we don’t know — from the evasive replies she receives and orders Juan and his “paramour” be secretly expelled from the Palace by boat along the Tigris.

The next we see of Juan at the start of Canto VII he, and his companions (including Dudú?), are in what is now Ukraine, headed along the Danube for the city of Ismail, then an outpost of the Ottoman Turkish empire under seige by the Russian army.

1822 was a tumultous year for Byron. In late January, Lady Noël, his mother-in-law — Byron and Anabella are separated, not divorced – died. As part of the marriage settlement and separation arrangements, Byron will inherit both the Noël name and some of the Noël money, enabling him to live more comfortably in Italy. He immediately takes the name of “George Gordon, Baron Noël Byron” and begins to sign his drafts and correspondence “NB”: the same initials as Napoleon Bonaparte.

He is living in Pisa, having moved there at the urging of the Shelleys, who also live there, after the Guicciollis were exiled from Ravenna because of the family’s revolutionary sympathies. Then, in March, as Byron and a party of friends returned from a ride outside the city, there is a scuffle at a city gate in which an obstreporous police Sergeant-Major is pitchforked, but not seriously wounded, by one of Byron’s servants. The affray and the subsequent court action causes friction with the city and state officials who strongly suspect Byron, too, of being a republican sympathiser (he is at least that). On April 20^th, he is deeply affected by the death of his daughter Allegra (by Claire Clairmont). She died of a childhood illness in the convent at Bagnacavallo where Byron had placed her to start her education. On July 1^st, Leigh Hunt — poet and brother of John Hunt, Byron’s new publisher — and his numerous family arrive in Pisa; they become somewhat ungrateful dependents of Byron. Then, on July 8^th, Percy Shelley, Edward Williams and Charles Vivian drown in a boating accident. Shelley’s decomposing corpse is found days later in the sea; Byron has a a pyre built on the beach to burn the body because the authorities will not permit its burial.

None of this slows, however, the extraordinary pace of Byron’s literary production. He finishes Cantos VI-VII by August of 1822. Mary Shelley, now widowed and also, in effect, a dependent makes the fair copies. In October, his outstanding satire, The Vision of Judgement is published, in the first number of John Hunt’s journal, The Liberal. Then Werner, the last of Byron’s works to be published by Murray, appears on November 23^rd. Still at Pisa, Byron begins The Age of Bronze and The Island, two forgettable political satires that will be published by Hunt who also publishes. Cantos VI-XVI of Don Juan in July of the following year.

In September 1822, Byron puts the turmoil of Pisa behind him, moving to the sun-filled bayside of Genoa, his last home in Italy.

A sample recording Canto VI

This project is gathering steam… or, something possibly more energetic than steam.

Here is a sample from my never previously released recording of Canto VI of Byron’s Don Juan. It’s the first 61 verses that may give you some idea of what the whole recording will be like when, real soon now^TM, I release it.

Listen to a sample of Canto VI

This .mp3 file is about 40Mb. If you prefer to DOWNLOAD the file (e.g. for your phone) just click on the download (down-arrow) button or here if on a mobile device.

PLEASE USE YOUR HEAPHONES TO LISTEN (or high quality external speakers). The excerpt is about 25 minutes long… good for the commute, or doing the ironing. I’d really appreciate your feedback in the Comments!

Here’s a bit of context…

The Story So Far

Juan’s mother — the prudish, controlling, Donna Inez — dispatches her 16-year-old son by ship to Italy at the end of Canto I (in which the virginal Juan has an affair with the gorgeous young wife of one of her former lovers). The ship is blown off-course and destroyed in a terrible storm. The survivors, including Juan, take to a whale-boat only to drift for many days. Their supplies are exhausted and, in desperation, they turn to cannibalism. All perish, in the end, save Juan who swims ashore on an isolated Ionian island where, exhausted and unconscious on the beach, he is found and revived by Haidée, the lovely daughter of the ferocious pirate who owns the island.

Haidée and Juan become lovers. She “betrothes” Juan, falls pregnant, and proposes to marry him, believing her father dead. But Lambro, the pirate, returns unexpectedly in the midst of the marriage-feast. After a scuffle, his crew capture Juan and sell him into slavery in the slave-market at Constantinople. Juan is, without question, a hunk. He is hardly put on the auction-block before he is snapped-up by — it turns out — an agent for the fourth and most beautiful wife of the Sultan. Forced to wear women’s garments, dressed as a concubine, Juan is brought secretly in the night to the fabulous Gulbayez who wants him for her toy-boy. Her murmured invitation, “Christian, do you love?”.

The upright, sentimental Juan answers with tears! No, he cannot betray the vows he made to Haidée (who, he does not know, has died of love and loss). Then, just as this steamy, cross, potentially climactic scene is reaching a crisis, the Sultan followed by a procession of some of his 1500 other concubines arrives. What a pretty new slave, he remarks before dismissing Juan and the rest of the female chorus to their Harem for the night.

Now, read on…

A talk on Byron & Don Juan

A few weeks ago, the chair of a poetry group in one of the city Clubs in Melbourne (where such things still exist) invited me to give a talk on Don Juan.

What I did, instead, was to provide a short paper in advance and to devote my 20 minutes to a reading (from Canto I, leading up to the ‘seduction scene’).

Here is the text of the paper:

Byron & Don Juan

About Lord Byron?

A parvenu; a Baron at 5 by a residual heritage ¹. Very bright; a talented linguist; well-educated (Harrow, Cambridge) although indolent at school and the University. He had a rakish father who abandoned him as an infant; an hysterical, silly mother; an abusive nanny. He was slightly disabled from birth: when he walked, he half-dragged his right foot because the lower leg was dysplasic. He was not tall but neatly proportioned; obsessive, in bursts, about his weight and about sports such as swimming and boxing. He had an almost girlishly handsome face, evident ‘charisma’ and much personal charm. Bisexual, his deepest loves were his half-sister — whom he first met in his late teens — and one or two boyfriends early and late in life. Still, he was promiscuous even by the loose standards of the cot-hopping Regency upper-class.

Byron enjoyed spectacular early fame — due both to talent and to hard work — as an author of edgy but sentimental verse followed by a swinging satyrical reply to his critics. Politically a Whig; too sceptical of the Church to take formal religion seriously. An upper-class anti-reactionary rather than a liberal, although he later supported revolutionary causes in both Italy and Greece. He was scornful of the ‘cant’ of Tory governments and the odious Hanoverians whom they served. Not interested in English politics, except to satirise it. A ‘good hater’ of those whom he believed had traduced him or who profited from power; he was generous and kind to the unfortunate and to those of lower status. Jealous of his claim to nobility; he was no democrat but he was unpretentious. Without a patron or a steady guide when young but supported — and kindly, if ineffectually, advised —- by a leading Tory publisher (John Murray).

Against advice he married unsuitably, affectionately – at first – but lovelessly. It seems he did so to divert himself from an incestuous affair with his half-sister, who bore a child that may have been his, and possibly to avoid more serious rumors of ‘unnatural’ relations. He was irresponsible with money when young, beset by debt, unable to sell his considerable estate (Newstead Abbey) and foolishly cruel to his wife in the year or so they spent together. When she left him, taking their infant child, rumours of Byron’s supposed infidelities, and worse, were spread in London society by his half-crazed former lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, the wife of Lord Melbourne. He fled — as many others, including his father, had done — to the Continent to avoid the bailiffs, social censure and, perhaps, denunciation. He never returned to England. After seven years of astonishing poetic output in Italy, he died of illness at the age of 36 (1824) while leading an expedition to support the Greek revolt against the Turks.

About Don Juan?

One hundred eighty years after his death, Byron’s fame has dwindled. His poetry remained hugely popular until the 1830s when the Victorians’ prissy literary taste deprecated his “scandalous” verse. His reputation was restored but re-shaped by Matthew Arnold — the scourge of Victorian bourgeois dullness — who published (1865) his own selection from Byron that, however, paid little attention to Byron’s greatest poem. For the next hundred years, under Arnold’s influence, earnest Byronian ‘societies’ imbibed the wild declamations of Childe Harold and committed Byron’s lyrical poems to memory. But not Don Juan. It was too freewheeling, even brutal, for Arnoldian High-Church tastes. And too difficult to excerpt in anthologies.

These days, the ghost of Lord Byron — even less substantial (but, hey, who ever invokes the shades of Wordsworth or Southey?) — lurks on Twitter and Facebook and in the occasional TV or film cameo. There, it feeds on the celebrity of an imagined dandiness and rakishness² and on snippets of some misread romantic verse.

Although his many lyrics are fine and highly quotable, Byron’s more secure claim on posterity is that he may be the greatest satirist in English poetry — he and his model, Alexander Pope, vie for that crown — especially for “The Vision of Judgement”. But that tremendous fake apotheosis of George III and his poet Laureate, Robert Southey, now is scarcely read outside academic circles. Also, he composed, in Don Juan, the funniest, boldest and most readable verse ‘novel’ in English literature. It is a satirical epic in ottava rima verses, comparable in scale to Cervantes’ Don Quixote but very modern in scope.

The poem comprises Sixteen (finished) Cantos, each of 100-or-so tightly-rhymed eight-line stanzas in an ‘Italian’ form: ottava rima ³ whose ostensible narrative concerns the adventures of its hero, Don Juan. Byron’s Juan – he rhymes the name with “ruin” on purpose – is not da Ponte’s “Don Giovanni”, the evil seducer of Mozart’s opera and pantomime. Instead, the first (and sustained) joke of the poem is that readers looking for a model of Byron-as-rake find in Juan an upright, modest, dashing and earnest young hero who is, rather, the passive victim of his own manly virtues. A gallant young lover secreted in the boudoir of another man’s wife; the sole survivor of a terrible shipwreck; cast on the beach of a remote Ionian island; rescued (and ‘bethrothed’) by the daughter of a ferocious pirate; enslaved in the galleys and disguised in the harems of an Ottoman Sultan; thrown by the fortunes of war into the arms of the Russian Empress; sent on a secret mission to the banqueting-tents of an English electoral campaign and to the bosom of a “ghostly” Duchess haunting a stately English manor home.

But Juan’s odyssey is only the canvas for Byron’s satire. Byron’s targets are famous and infamous personalities; money, religion, newspapers, warfare and fashionable science, and; the tempus & mores of England in the late Regency and Europe after Waterloo, simmering with political reaction and revolt. The narrative deploys familiar tropes: the deceptions of youthful hope, the cynicism of power, loves’ demands, the misalliance of men and women, the frailty of (non-literary, especially military) fame, the poverty of great riches, the hypocrisy of office and position and, above all, the clarion call of liberty. The satire is clever; the verse is often brilliant, if a little uneven.

Still, Don Juan is compelling mostly because Byron is too adventurous (or maybe ‘incautious’) a writer to be content with the familiar targets. He takes risks, and boasts about it.⁴ He sets out, in Canto I, to tell a story in comic verse; a sort of bedroom-farce that mocks but also begs the impression of him in London as a self-exiled rake and bounder. The first Canto even has a fictional ‘narrator’ to set the stage for the action and comment on the characters. But, by the time he comes to the end of Canto II — after indulging, for fun, in repeated “blasphemies” (not really), libels, attacks on national heroes, scandalous sex and even cannibalism — it has become clear to Byron that his ‘unplanned’ epic is also more than an entertainment. The epic; has developed into a more personal and more demanding poem.

Up to 1819 when the first two Cantos of Don Juan appeared, Byron’s oeuvre had been crowned by his long poem Childe Harold, a bildungsroman that established the model of the “Byronic” hero: world-weary (although a twenty-something); driven by a melancholic imagination; bearing a sense of deep, but obscure, guilt and; surrounded by dramatic landscapes. As he began to work on Don Juan, the earlier poem was still extremely popular with readers and writers all over Europe who identified The Childe with Byron himself. But Byron had evidently grown tired of the high-romantic posture and the stilted Spenserian verse. The ottava rima style offered him a more vernacular, ironic form in which to puncture reactionary dullness and while engaging in a half-sarcastic, half-serious examination of his own opinions, tastes, expectations, disappointments and errors. Or, at least, those opinions etc. that Byron claimed were really his. He would hold back nothing.⁵

Although Byron, disingenuous, continues to insist in later Cantos that his poem has the structure of a conventional epic with wars, feasts, sea-battles, goddesses, “loves” etc. his epic is, in reality, an interior adventure: Byron examining the travails of being Byron. His many diversions from Juan’s tale to remark on an interest, skewer a phoney, discuss a curiosity or muse over own history turns his epic into a “stand-up”, first-person performance that deliberately employs his “celebrity” as a platform. It is a style that rather shocked John Murray, his first publisher, but now seems familiar. Byron was the first to do it and few have ever done it so well. Even so, the degree to which the “Byron” who writes Don Juan is truly Byron is occasionally open to doubt. The cleverness of his verse, his allusions, his willingness to strike a rhetorical pose for effect and his ironical humour makes it apparent that, sometimes, we are seeing a mask adopted for the performance. And, sometimes, the mask seems to slip.

One of his keenest contemporary critics — an acquaintance made in Pisa shortly before he sailed for the Greek revolution and his death — was the ‘adorable’ Lady Constance Blessington; a clever, beautiful, Irish social climber and journalist who published, for profit, a serialized book of their conversations shortly after Byron’s death. She records that Byron asked her, at one point, for her assessment of his character:

“I replied, ‘I look on you as a spoilt child of genius, an epicycle in your own circle.’ At which he laughed, though half disposed to be angry.”

Blessington also, rather sniffily, accuses Byron of “flippancy and a total want of self-possession.” Clearly, his willingness to shock did not quite meet her standards of seriousness or decorum for an English poet or Peer. But, however ungenerous — however much she had her eye on her own reputation and the market for her book — she’s not entirely wrong. Just as in life Byron sometimes seemed to be not quite ‘in control’ of himself (or his reputation), so in Don Juan Byron arguably fails to quite grasp his own mercurial character. Still, his attempt reaches depths that, for example, Wordsworth’s endless, wordy psychologising in The Excursion never reaches.

The poem is, at heart, an entertaining story with a lot of well-deserved jabs at hypocrisy and abuse of power, with gorgeous set-dressing, bright ideas and lots of clever verse that make it much better reading than almost anything from his contemporaries. And Byron is, in every way, a fascinating subject for dissection.

Peter Gallagher
madbaddangerous.com
October, 2016

His great uncle the “Wicked” 5^th Lord Byron outlived his offspring . ↩
Byron has only himself to blame for this image spread by, for example, his decision to have himself portrayed in Turkish costume. In reality he was not serious enough about costume to be a dandy and worked too hard to be a rake. ↩
It has often been noted that every word in Italian rhymes with almost every other word in Italian. It takes uncommon genius to manage the trick over such an extended length in English. ↩
Each Canto went to his publisher as he completed it over the years 1819 to 1824. He resisted all pleas for an outline or plan and dismissed most proposed revisions. So the epic became a lengthy, extempore performance whose targets and tone evolves as the poem continues. ↩
Accordingly, after finishing the second Canto he composed an astonishing “Dedication” to Robert Southey designed to eviscerate the ‘turncoat’ Laureate and his companion in dullness, William Wordsworth. Since the Dedication also slandered Lord Castlereagh as an intellectual nullity and enemy of liberty, Murray refused to publish it and it did not appear until after Byron’s death. ↩

Progress in the recording of Don Juan

The image shows Catherine the Great in a walking cloak; painted by V.Borovikovskiy about 1794

It’s nine months at least since I last posted here: not what readers expect, of course, so I assume I have no readers any more. Alas! My own fault.

But I have not been quite so idle on the recording front. One way or another, in fits and starts (mostly ‘fits’), I’m getting through the Cantos. The last I reported on here was Canto III. But I’ve also recorded Canto IV and Cantos VI through IX. I recorded Canto I, Canto V and Cantos XIII-XVI for Librivox several years ago. I’ve left until last a second visit to those cantos. I also have (re-)recordings of I and II that I made a couple of years back in my planned series of iBooks (a project dropped after the illustrated, read-aloud Canto I failed to sell: it is now available for free download).

Canto IX, set around 1790, sees Juan, the ‘hero’ of the battle of Ismail (Russia vs Ottoman Turks), as the toy-boy of an ageing — but amorous — Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. The Canto is an hilarious, clever, scandalous satire on sex and imperial power with a few Byronic rockets for the reactionary government of 1820’s England. Juan is flattered by the Empress’ attention and, naturally, fully capable of fulfilling the duties of his ‘post’ (… yes, there are plenty of double entendres and paraphrases of bawdy Roman verse that educated English men and women of the Regency no doubt recognized). But he falls ill in the Russian snows and is given an embassy to England as a reward for his ‘services’ to Catherine.

I am now recording Canto X, composed in 1822. It brings Juan, as a Russian speaking Spaniard, to London; the city Byron had fled seven years before. Some of his finest satire is just ahead.

The British Library’s “Don Juan” collection

The BL has a number of Byron’s manuscripts and some early editions of the published Don Juan from the 1820s. Pages from some of them are on-line as image files: well worth exploring.

I have taken the illustration at the head of this post from an 1826 pirated edition (Smeeton) of Canto I that featured plates by Isaac Cruickshank (brother of the better-known George). The image depicts Juan and Julia her maid — the ‘adept’ Antonia — shooing Juan from Julia’s bedroom (he had been hidden in the closet) while her husband, Don Alfonso, searches the rest of the house for her lover.

The verse (No. 182) is Byron at his most suggestive… Julia pleads with Juan who, still love struck, tarries:

“Fly, Juan, fly! for heaven’s sake — not a word —

The door is open — you may yet slip through

The passage you so often have explored —
…”

For comparison, Lynette Yencho’s illustration of the same verse for my audio-iBook of Canto I of Don Juan:

It’s amusing that the British Library notes that the Cruickshank images are “Free from any copyright retrictions”. It was the refusal of the Crown to grant copyright to Cantos 1 & 2 that lead to their widespread piracy by the publisher of this edition (among others).