My mother used to state that she disliked poetry and was bored by Shakespeare, which was shocking in a granddaughter of a Master of an Oxford college, raised in a house full of books. As a girl I was both puzzled and embarrassed by her attitude, although later I realized that it just reflected her nature, which was strictly prosaic. She read a lot about history and travel and was fond of whatever revealed the nature of daily life in the past, for example the letters of Horace Walpole, Mrs Delany and Madame de Sévigné (she almost knew by heart several of de Sévigné’s), but language used for its beauty, not to convey information, meant little to her, and she preferred to look outwards rather than inwards. Indeed I think that writing about emotions appeared to her rather indecent, and certainly unnecessary.
My father, on the other hand, loved poetry and thoroughly enjoyed Shakespeare, which was lucky for me. I am nearly as prosaic as my mother, but I did inherit enough of his disposition to prevent me from going as far in that direction as she did. He saved Shakespeare for me, and a good deal more. However, when someone asks me for my favourite poem and I answer Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’, I am not being facetious. I really do prefer poems which tell a story to those that plumb the depths of experience, and those that depend largely on associations hooked up into a poet’s mind by words and images are lost to me. I read to see something, not to decipher codes.
People sometimes ask writers what book first inspired and helped to shape them. I find that a hard question to answer. I learnt to read early and can’t remember a birthday or Christmas when my presents did not consist of books, so it is impossible for me to imagine how I would have developed without them and can safely say that they did much to shape me. But did any one of them jolt me alive? Not that I can remember. There were many good children’s books – all loved, except those in which I could detect a whiff of do-gooding – followed by generous dollops of romance, before I reached the classics via the Bront
s and Jane Austen, whereupon the world opened up . . . And there is one writer whose words about writing are always with me: Jean Rhys. She hardly ever talked about it, and when she did it was in the simplest way possible: ‘I have to try to get it like it really was’ and ‘You can’t cut too much’. Those words have done a lot to keep me in order, but I can’t say that they inspired me.
The two great writers I think about most often I love for their personalities rather than their artistry – and do so in spite of the fact that I am glad that I never had to meet them: James Boswell, and Byron. Boswell I love for his journals, not for his portrait of Dr Johnson, marvellous though that is, and Byron for his letters, more even than for Don Juan.
What is irresistible about Boswell is his always wanting with passionate intensity to be a good man and making stern resolutions to that end, almost never failing to break those resolutions, and then recording this process with fascinated honesty, as though he were a naturalist recording the behaviour of some strange creature. The one time he managed to maintain goodness for several months was when his father got him to study law in what was, to him, boring, boring, boring Utrecht by promising him a tour of Europe if he kept it up. It was a fearful struggle, but he kept sober, he managed (just) not to fuck whores, he very rarely made a fool of himself by talking too much at parties – and it brought him to the edge of a nervous breakdown; he feared, in anguished passages in his journal, that he was going mad. But it was worth it: the subsequent Grand Tour was bliss. In Naples he likened himself to a lion ‘running after girls without restraint’, and in beautiful Sienna ‘to enjoy was the thing. Intoxicated by that sweet delirium I gave myself up, without self-reproach and in complete serenity, to the charms of irregular love.’
He became a good lawyer and he had the sense to end his series of elaborate campaigns to secure a rich wife, to which a whole volume of the journals is devoted, by marrying his sensible and far from rich cousin Margaret because they loved each other. She, knowing him well, would not have loved him, and neither would Dr Johnson, who did not suffer fools gladly, if Boswell had not had charm and (for all his absurdities) intelligence beyond the ordinary. Of course he did: his writing sparkles with it. And there is also, whatever he is getting up to, an engaging underlying guilelessness about him.
That was not a quality shared by Byron, although the direction taken by his career was largely determined by immaturity. He was, in a sense, ‘self-made’. He never knew his father, had good reason to find his mother impossible, and was afflicted with a club foot, a deformity which he found humiliating, so it is not surprising that he had a tendency to skid into depression. Having a vast amount of imaginative energy and intelligence, he built himself a defiantly brilliant personality, and did it so successfully that to this day the adjective ‘Byronic’ means ‘extremely, even dangerously romantic’. People forget, therefore, how young he was when he became famous overnight at the age of twenty-four with the publication of Childe Harold. Even when he died at the age of thirty-six he had not yet reached his full potential, though he had advanced far enough towards it to suggest a truly impressive future.
His letters show that he first met Augusta, his half-sister, when he was a schoolboy, and that she meant a great deal to him at once, because here at last was someone belonging to him. She knew what he meant when he complained about his mother, something he couldn’t decently do to anyone else. They could giggle together. And later, of course, it became evident that she had the quality he enjoyed most in a woman: cosiness. The women Byron was happiest with were always the cosy ones: Augusta; Lady Oxford, with her brood of children by miscellaneous fathers, with whom he had a delightfully trouble-free affair; the first of his Venetian mistresses; and finally Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli. That Teresa was something of a goose and Augusta very much of one mattered not at all. Byron was able to appreciate intelligent women, but preferred to do it from a distance; for close-up he much preferred a goose to a bluestocking.
He went into his disastrous marriage because he did not yet fully know himself, and accepted the worldly wisdom of Lady Melbourne, his mother substitute. He was terribly short of money, and to her the solution was obvious: he must stop inviting trouble by messing about with his half-sister (which was making him feel guilty anyway) and marry a rich woman. Because he was so clever, Lady Melbourne may have thought that Anne Isabella Milbanke’s celebrated intellect would suit him! So there he was, tied to a woman who was not only a bit of a bluestocking but also smugly determined to save his soul. It was a dreadful mistake which inflamed his tendency to depression and drove him almost at once into uncharacteristic hysteria and cruelty. His own belief was that his romantic poetry was a safety valve which saved him from going mad, which was why he always insisted that he was not proud of it (he said this in his private diary as well as publicly). This crisis, however, was beyond solution by verse. It propelled him into exile, from which he was to send some of the best letters ever written.
They are so good because he (like Boswell) wrote as he spoke, at a time when people usually adopted a formal and supposedly more elegant style when they put pen to paper. You can clearly hear his voice, so the many years between him and you shrivel away. Witty, often flippant, kind and generous, sometimes rather comically showing-off, sometimes shrewd, honest, always acutely alive, there he is, the man who wrote that marvellous poem Don Juan. How extraordinary – how wonderful! – it is that a lot of little black marks on paper can bring a person who died nearly two hundred years ago into your room: bring him so close that you know him much better than you would have known him if you met him in the flesh. It is extraordinary and it is enlarging. When I had to get rid of most of my books in order to fit in the little room that is now my home, there was never any doubt that Boswell and Byron would have to come with me.