Maxwell's Reviews > Don Juan

Byron’s least--or most--Byronic poem, depending on how you understand that term.

So what does Byronism mean? The gothic affectations of Childe Harold, Lara & Manfred? Melancholia split with voluptuous pleasure, the delicate with the desolate; the paradigm for the lothario in exile? Sighing in soliloquy that the annihilation of hedonism always fails to banish the morbid chill of ennui--but doing it again anyway? Half mad aristocrats, those revenants from medievalism, bedeviled by a chthonic ambiguity? And how about the antiheroes of those ghastly Russian novels? The stylized Byron & Byronism of hollywood?

Of course not. At least, not in Don Juan.

Byron’s satires, Beppo, The Vision of Judgment, Don Juan, are sometimes read as a carnivalesque break from the mortifying self seriousness of his early ‘Byronic’ work; of course, ‘English Bards & Scotch Reviewers’ imperils this periodization. And even in the high gothic baroque or in swashbuckling nautical adventures, Byron’s usually pretty funny (although it’s not always intentional). But from his first poems to his last, he’s incautious, never discerning or tasteful, he overwrites everything & spares no one.

There’s just a certain foppishness to Byron. He’s ridiculous. I would suggest that whether he is writing romantic melodrama or puckish satire, he is always writing camp. The worst stuff Byron did, and he produced his fair share of doggerel, was always bleating with sincerity. Earnestness just wasn’t his bag. As he says in Canto VII; ‘but ne’er the less, I hope it is no crime / to laugh at all things --for I wish to know / what, after all, are all things--but a show?’

(this is not to say Byron never wrote an emotionally stirring piece; he did, but his bad poetry all leans into capital-R Romanticism and his best stuff, generally speaking, swerves in the opposite direction)

Don Juan is a scalpel to cut the last scabrous flesh away from clean white bone. Everything is funny here; cannibalism, blasphemy and lost innocence are all punchlines. Who could write such a cynical poem but the rouéish author of Childe Harold & Manfred? Who else but this same man, touched by the first grey hues of senescence, hungover from the adventure & scandal of his youth, could write with such exasperating wryness, write as if to deliberately incense the entire world? Whatever the case, the continuity between Byron’s early and late work is very clear. The item which Byron’s arch seriousness and bathic silliness have in common is extravagance; always flamboyant, whether in reflection or opposition. Always bold & vigorous, even when sneering in disdain. This is true in sickness & health; in his youth and in the final years of his tragically short life.

Byron possessed in spades the qualities which make for a good satirist; he was a flirt, a gossip, a dandyish poseur, playful & ironic--self indulgent, vindictive & subversive. Kinda belligerent. He hated rules but trembled with fury at injustice. He had morals but no ethics. A great capacity for both introspective self knowledge & worldly understanding, but a childish incapacity for application thereof in practical matters. And above all, a smirking sense of humor which was injurious and raunchy. As literary devices, spitefulness and obscenity exist precariously between the twin magnetic poles of the awkward and the entertaining. Whether they’re unsightly or uproarious is entirely down to the confidence of their operator; and despite his oft-overlooked shyness & self consciousness (he’s always miscast in adaptations as macho & domineering--if only to foil Shelley), Byron was a supremely confident writer.

In ‘Don Johnny’ Byron offers a counterweight to his own reputation as an sybaritic libertine; Juan is a naive ingenue, so witless of his own charms as one of Anne Radcliffe’s plucky governesses. But with significantly less gumption and good sense. The array of licentious encounters making up the Don Juan legend are here slapstick accidents, where Juan is preyed on by social climbing vultures. Byron describes his hero as ‘A mischief making monkey from birth’ but he is quickly disabused of his natural disobedience & curiosity by an overly pious education. We are led to believe that Juan might grow up to be the jocular narrator, or at least of a kind with him; and, yeah, Byron encourages that we draw parallels between Juan and himself. This stretches credulity; all we see of Juan is an honorable but airheaded young man. Passionate, but guileless. There is something very quixotic about Juan and it is hard to imagine this quality maturing into the insouciant narrator’s (and by extension Byron’s own) rather dramatic touch.

Juan’s upbringing is a naked refutation of the popular myths of Byron’s marriage; his own marriage to Annabella Milbanke, a spectacularly bad match for them both, is dilated across sing-song posey with his wife (more or less) taking the place of Juan’s mother, Donna Inez. She, like Annabella, is ‘mathematical’, ‘magnanimous’ and incapable of wit. ‘Perfection she was, but as perfection is / insipid in this naughty world of ours’. Byron’s descriptions of her usually swerve into plainly autobiographical territory;
'T’is pity learned virgins ever wed
With persons of no sort of education,
Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred,
Grow tired of scientific conversation:
I don't choose to say much upon this head,
I'm a plain man, and in a single station,
But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?
This is a typical passage in Don Juan. A smug, conversational tone with rhymes that can barely keep pace with his tangential rambling. Of Juan’s father, many ‘whisper’d he had a mistress, some said two / but for domestic quarrels one will do’. His final verdict on marriage comes later, in Canto III; ‘think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife / he would have written sonnets all his life?’

After Juan’s departure from home, the poem loses focus. Byron instead discusses his obsessions--classical antiquity, English hypocrisy, panhellenism, seafaring adventure--only occasionally remembering to tell the story of Juan. By the last Canto, Juan is scarcely mentioned. But his asides are always amusing; at one point in Canto XIII, I laughed out loud for the first time at a poem, ‘Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; / Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.’ In the (nominally) main narrative, I think Juan was being hosted by wearying English prigs. I barely remember. But so many of these sharp epigrams are splintered into my memory; the best character in Don Juan is not Juan himself, but the narrator. It’d probably be uncontroversial to say that the best character in any of Byron’s poems is Byron himself.

After all, Byron’s not an inadept writer. Does he possess the lyrical genius of Wordsworth or Keats? The hallucinatory vision of Coleridge or Blake? I mean, no. Definitely not. But he’s the funniest poet with anything resembling canonicity. What he lacks as a Bard he more than makes up for as a storyteller and wit. I don’t know that there’s any 19th century author who’s so fun to read. At the beginning of Canto IV, he says ‘nothing so difficult as a beginning / in posey, unless perhaps the end’. He never got to muse properly on endings, as the poem remained unfinished at his early death. Bloom called this poem ‘unfinished and unfinishable’ and I wonder if that’s true. That Byron had a few more Cantos in him is beyond question, but how does this poem end? Well, the man himself said, with ‘Juan in either in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest’. That would do.