The lines are immaterial

I once met a thoroughly heterosexual old naval officer who had been a midshipman on the ship that sailed to Gallipoli with Rupert Brooke on board, the voyage during which Brooke died. I asked him what Brooke had been like. He said at once, ‘He was a god. Extraordinary beauty, law to himself. Like Lord Byron, I expect. There are these people.’

Fiona MacCarthy says towards the end of her thoroughly researched and very readable 600-page biography of Byron, the first to come from John Murray, keeper of the Byron flame, for nearly half a century, that ‘there are always private reasons behind the choice of a biographical subject’. She does not tell us hers, but examination of the godlike image is bound to have been one of them, for she gives us Byron in all his sound and fury, his ‘madness’, drunkenness, arrogance, melancholy, irreverence and of course his Olympian excesses in love. For six years she has had the freedom of the Byron archive at John Murray, still in the same panelled room at 50 Albemarle Street which Byron knew well. The splendid Phillips portrait of Byron at the height of his fame hangs over the fireplace – tender and most gloriously handsome except for the incipient double chin that worried him (Brooke was never to be old enough!) and for which he sometimes went on a diet of boiled potatoes and water, which he found effective.

There are very many icons and votive offerings at Albemarle Street. The different-coloured tresses of several mistresses’ hair. The cornelian ring that passed between Byron and his ‘purest’ love, the Cambridge choirboy Edelestone (‘Edelestone, Edelestone, Edelestone’, Byron has scribbled above a poem on one scrap of paper). MacCarthy says the ring is ‘poignantly small’. Even more poignantly small is the slipper of Byron’s illegitimate daughter by Claire Clairmont, the pillar-to-post little girl, Allegra, whom Byron dumped in an Italian convent before she was four and never visited though she wrote yearning letters.