Don Juan Read online

  Hunt was cheered by the battle and by the bounty. Knowing his commodity and out to forestall piracies, he did a print run of around 21, 000 for each instalment, and set several formats at different prices: the most lavish was on quality paper, priced at nine shillings sixpence; the cheapest was set at a mere shilling. 8 Then, as fast as Byron could write, Cantos XV–XVI were prepared for publication in March 1824 – all in all, eleven cantos in nine months. The reception was everything that Murray could have anticipated, and probably helped manage: the new cantos were heaped with abuse by the reviews, or just ignored by the ‘polite’ London quarterlies. And sales were as brisk as ever.

  A NEW HERO, A NEW POETRY

  This new ‘species’ (to recall Shelley) was imprinted by a name some centuries old in legend, literature and popular culture: ‘Don Juan’, infamous rogue, libertine, charmer, lady-killer. From the opening stanza of Byron’s epic, however, it is clear that the hero is not this continental lover. That famed name is an iamb of two rhyming syllables sounding like con, but Byron’s rhyme uses the anglicized form, a trochee chiming to the sound of new one and true one:

  I want a hero, an uncommon want,

  When every year and month sends forth a new one,

  Till after cloying the gazettes with cant,

  The age discovers he is not the true one.

  Of such as these I should not care to vaunt;

  I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan.

  We all have seen him in the pantomime

  Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.

  Old-sounding Juan is only a faint echo in the sound of the repeated ‘want’ With a fall into feminine rhyme, Byron’s Juan is announced – and pronounced – as a new one. The renaming is a keynote for the whole. In contrast to his legendary namesake, Byron’s Juan is no rakish pursuer of women, but will have his life run by women: his mother, his lovers, a Sultana and a Czarina, a Lady, and then a designing Duchess of the English ‘Gynocrasy’ (so Byron spells it), and always by Fate (the metaphysical woman). New-one Juan is genial, good-hearted, perpetually innocent, for ever young. He has almost no memory, no interiority, no soliloquies – except as an effect of situations, and usually in terms so clichéd as to summon the narrator’s satire. Even as his world changes around him, sometimes with chaotic speed, he never really changes or develops.

  While the first stanza keys in Juan, it features the narrator, a stand-up monologist. From the start, and never otherwise, Don Juan proceeds on this double track. When Murray, with an eye to marketing the ‘new’ Byron, asked him (just after Cantos I–II had been published) for the big plan, Byron replied, ‘I have no plan – I had no plan – but I had or have materials’ (12 August 1819; BLJ VI 207). ‘Donny Johnny’ (Byron called his hero) was a pretext on which to fashion everything and anything else. Juan-hero plays in a kind of ‘situation epic’ (each episode a new plight for the lad), while the ‘materials’ take shape through the narrator’s ceaseless inventions across a wide range of moods and stylistic levels. He is raconteur, satirist, autobiographer, self-reflector, muser, literary historian and theorist, sociologist, culture critic – always performing with a ‘Byronic’ flair, and always speaking Byron’s poetry. It is by this poetry, after all, that we first know that Juan will not be the legendary rake. The anglicized form of his name modernizes, ironizes. We get similar instruction on other continental names: no memory is ‘so fine as / That which adorned the brain of Donna Inez’ (I 11), Juan’s mother; his father is scripted Don ‘Jóse’ (the name yet another trochee); Juan’s birthplace, Seville, rhymes propitiously with revel, and the port of departure for Childe Juan’s Pilgrimage is Cadiz, rhymed with the ladies of its streets.

  Byron often hones his new pronunciations to puncture cant, unsettling its habits of esteem. At the end of Canto I, Southey is set to rhyme with mouthey (205), the proud Laureate reduced to bombastic mouthpiece. In Canto IX’s first stanza, the English national hero, the Duke of Wellington, vanquisher of Napoleon at Waterloo, gets a French twist, rung and wrung on Byron’s disgust of war glory:

  Oh Wellington! (Or ‘Vilainton’, for Fame

  Sounds the heroic syllables both ways.

  France could not even conquer your great name,

  But punned it down to this facetious phrase –

  Beating or beaten she will laugh the same.)

  You have obtained great pensions and much praise;

  Glory like yours should any dare gainsay,

  Humanity would rise and thunder ‘Nay!’

  Byron wrote this stanza in 1819, intending it for Canto III (1821). Then, deciding not to test Murray on the point, he asked Tom Moore to retrieve ‘the stanzas to Wellington… If they have fallen into Murray’s hands’, he worried, ‘he and the Tories will suppress them, as those lines rate that hero at his real value’ (12 July 1822; BLJ IX 182–3). With Hunt publishing Canto IX, Byron was free to sound the heroic syllables another way. On a French tongue and in a French view, Wellington puns down to Vilainton (villainous manners), and the countermanding Nay, without even sounding the syllables another way, says Ney: the name of Napoleon’s field marshal at Waterloo (executed for treason in December 1815 by the restored, reactionary French monarchy). Byron’s manuscript reveals that he wrote Vilain ton as two words, to sharpen the punning, and was equivocating about whether to write Ney or leave it Nay. He put the question in the published text in a devilish note for his reader to ponder: ‘Query, – Ney? – PRINTER’S DEVIL.’ 9

  The couplet that sounds the syllable both to gainsay and say, to give Nay and Ney, is an intricate poetic climax. This is one of the resources of ottava rima that Byron loved to play with – and in this instance, it shows the power of poetry itself in the way it links what the reflexes of cant would oppose. The stanza’s rhyme pattern abababcc can be worked like a compressed Shakespearean sonnet: like the sonnet’s three progressive quatrains, the triplet of ababab builds a case; and then a couplet, cc, hits a pithy climax, a sudden reversal, a piece of epigrammatic wit. And because ottava rima has no couplet until this cc climax, its ababab can also be enjambed, the syntax ‘striding over’ the line break with the fluidity of blank-verse conversation, faintly punctuated by rhyme. In the first stanza of that delayed Dedication, Byron rings this double formal value:

  Bob Southey! You’re a poet, poet laureate,

  And representative of all the race.

  Although ‘tis true that you turned out a Tory at

  Last, yours has lately been a common case.

  And now my epic renegade, what are ye at

  With all the lakers, in and out of place?

  A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye

  Like ‘four and twenty blackbirds in a pye,…’

  Laureate / Tory at, like Juan true one new one, is a rhyme module of meaning in itself. So is all the race / common case – a Byronic poetic linking that diminishes the poet laureate’s pretension to the voice of general representation. Noting that the ‘common case’ is Lake Poets fallen away from the liberal politics of their youth, Byron gives a stress to common worthy of Hamlet’s rebuke to his mother’s quick recovery from the death of his father (‘ay, Madam, it is common’; I ii 74). The former liberals are now common Tory ‘place’ men. (Southey was preceded by Henry James Pye as Poet Laureate, and would, after Byron’s death, be succeeded by Wordsworth, now enjoying a patronage post in the Lakes.)

  Byron spices his abuse with a rhyme-slanged ridicule of Southey’s pride as Laureate:

  You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know,

  At being disappointed in your wish

  To supersede all warblers here below,

  And be the only blackbird in the dish.

  And then you overstrain yourself, or so,

  And tumble downward like the flying fish

  Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob,

  And fall for lack of moisture quite a dry Bob. (Dedication 3)

  When Murray worried about these ‘two “Bobs”’, Byron
reluctantly, while it still seemed that this Dedication was to be set at the front of Cantos I–II, agreed to a modest ‘curtailment’ (BLJ VI 105). He was punning on the problem. Shortened to Bob, Southey’s name is a luckless boon: in poetic terminology, a ‘bob’ is a refrain, sometimes just a short line (even a syllable) at the stanza’s end. In Byron’s cartoon, the overstrained little ‘bob’ rhymes, limply, only with itself, a sterile coupling, playing on the slang of ‘dry bob’ as ejaculation without juice. Another shaft in the quiver of ‘dry Bob’ is the meaning of an Eton schoolboy who plays land sports rather than water sports – reducing the Laureate not just to boy, but no match for Byron’s oceanic cosmopolitanism. In the measure of Byron’s anti-establishment poetics, Southey’s bad politics and bad poetry are the same.

  In the stanzas that did reach publication in 1819, Byron’s casual skill with rhyme-rippled enjambment and couplet compression mocks the cant of national honour. When Byron began his epic, ‘I want a hero’, he meant both ‘I desire’ and ‘I lack’, and the next two stanzas list a legion of candidates from the war-glutted age, none lasting longer than newsprint:

  Vernon, the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke,

  Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe,

  Evil and good, have had their tithe of talk

  And filled their signposts then, like Wellesley now.

  Each in their turn like Banquo’s monarchs stalk,

  Followers of fame, ‘nine farrow’ of that sow.

  France too had Buonaparté and Dumourier

  Recorded in the Moniteur and Courier.

  Arthur Wellesley would become the Duke of Wellington. Charles Dumourie(z) may have been an important force in the French Republic, but in Byron’s verse he survives merely by the convenience of coupling with Courier – and this, not even the British paper but the French Courier Républicain founded in 1796 and no longer in business. The mock-epic catalogue makes no apologies for the poet’s measures of fame:

  Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, Mirabeau,

  Petion, Clootz, Danton, Marat, La Fayette

  Were French, and famous people as we know;

  And there were others scarce forgotten yet,

  Joubert, Hoche, Marceau, Lannes, Dessaix, Moreau,

  With many of the military set,

  Exceedingly remarkable at times,

  But not at all adapted to my rhymes.

  Some names survive to be conjured with – Danton, Marat, La Fayette – and others only because they scan into the patter and patterns of ottava rima.

  One of these names, at least, survives in Byron’s correspondence with Murray about Don Juan early in 1821, in his thought of concluding the hero’s career in the Reign of Terror, ‘to make him finish as Anacharsis Cloots – in the French revolution’ (BLJ VIII 78). Condemned to the guillotine in 1794, Jean-Baptiste, Baron de Clootz (aka ‘Anacharsis Cloots’), met his doom with a contribution to that famous Terror genre, the gallows speech, using his turn to affirm his principles and arraign the present disasters. 10 Standing before Murray’s repeated censures or requests to ‘alter’ the most provocative elements, Byron plays Cloots to Murray’s Committee on Public Safety, the terror tribunal of censorship; and for his speech he gives an epic autobiography that is also a tour de force in satiric cultural commentary, including his side in the scandal concerning the separation from his wife. Notwithstanding his former protests, Byron now seems to have ‘plans’ after all, some ‘notions on the subject’ of Juan:

  I meant to take him the tour of Europe – with a proper mixture of siege – battle – and adventure – and to make him finish as Anacharsis Cloots – in the French revolution. – To how many cantos this may extend – I know not – nor whether (even if I live) I shall complete it – but this was my notion. – I meant to have made him a Cavalier Servente in Italy and a cause for a divorce in England – and a Sentimental ‘Werther-faced man’ in Germany – so as to show the different ridicules of the society in each of those countries – – and to have displayed him gradually gate and blasé as he grew older – as is natural. – But I had not quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell – or in an unhappy marriage, – not knowing which would be the severest. – The Spanish tradition says Hell – but it is probably only an Allegory of the other state – – (BLJ VIII 78)

  It’s all flagrantly Byronic, in both the heroic and the satiric mode. Byron took a famous tour of Europe; he is ‘Cavalier Servente’ (the socially acknowledged ‘escort’ of a married woman, in Italian custom) to Teresa Guiccioli; the Byronic Heroes were kin to Goethe’s lovelorn suicidal hero, Werther; Byron was infamous for his failed marriage; and the narrator of Don Juan is a middle-ageing, gâté and blasé (spoiled and jaded) raconteur. Byron’s tone is not Cloots’s political gothic, but social conversation, or rather epic cultural critique, weaving its elements in and out of Byron’s own life and mapped on to the hero’s errant adventures.

  In April 1822 he assured Murray that he had no interest in the assignment that was conventionally, ever since Homer and Virgil, the summa of a poet’s career. To the urgings of Murray and others that he ‘undertake what you call a “great work” an Epic poem I suppose or some such pyramid’, Byron retorted, ‘I’ll try no such thing – I hate tasks’ (BLJ VI 105). Just a half-dozen stanzas into his first canto, he had set his principles, like his hero, against the established line:

  Most epic poets plunge in medias res

  (Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road),

  And then your hero tells whene’er you please

  What went before by way of episode,

  While seated after dinner at his ease

  Beside his mistress in some soft abode,

  Palace or garden, paradise or cavern,

  Which serves the happy couple for a tavern.

  That is the usual method, but not mine;

  My way is to begin with the beginning.

  The regularity of my design

  Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning,

  And therefore I shall open with a line

  (Although it cost me half an hour in spinning)

  Narrating somewhat of Don Juan’s father

  And also of his mother, if you’d rather. (I 6–7)

  The ‘beginning’, of course, had been launched several stanzas earlier, and the poet’s design is nothing if not a wandering by whims of inspiration, putting his digressions into the work of an epic’s ‘sinning’ transgressions. Even the poetic business of ‘beginning’ is arbitrary for Byron: it might as well be patrilineal, or biological. What Byron refuses is the convention of beginning by keynoting of character, of moral themes and of promised epic strife: the wrath of Achilles; the wisdom, wit and woe of Ulysses; arms and the man; the journey of life; man’s first disobedience; whatever. To Murray he sighed, ‘you have so many “divine” poems, is it nothing to have written a Human one? without any of your worn out machinery’

  (BLJ VI 105).

  Byron’s human epic not only refuses the artifices of divine machinery, it also refuses generic consistency, an artifice (Byron contended) false to the contrarieties and contradictions of lived experience. By Canto XV (1824) he has become the theorist of the anti-mode: ‘if a writer should be quite consistent, / How could he possibly show things existent?’ (87). The next stanza answers by folding the question itself into an ironic reversal:

  If people contradict themselves, can I

  Help contradicting them and everybody,

  Even my veracious self? But that’s a lie;

  I never did so, never will. How should I?

  He who doubts all things nothing can deny.

  Truth’s fountains may be clear, her streams are muddy

  And cut through such canals of contradiction

  That she must often navigate o’er fiction. (88)

  There are two rhymes for the poet’s I: the refusal of his truth-telling self to lie, and the refusal of his doubting self to deny anything. The paradoxical logic is summed in the c
ouplet: an openness to contradiction within the poetics of fiction.

  While such navigation of the borders between fiction and factual reference would intrigue wider and wider communities of Byron’s readers, the initial reception was no predictor of this success. Murray and his Tory circle might have been counted on to be upset, but so were many otherwise progressive, self-consciously ‘modern’ readers. Poet John Keats, who was enchanted by Childe-Harold Byron, was not alone in hating the swings between satire and sentiment in Don Juan, especially in Canto IPs shipwreck episode. The reverberations of dismay included even Byron’s friends. Within a week of publication, on 23 July 1819, Murray relayed a report to Byron, hoping to seed the ground for reform. No such luck. On 12 August Byron replied with such energetic defiance that he seems to have been newly inspired by the adversity. He was, as he would say in Canto XV, born for opposition:

  You are right – Gifford is right – Crabbe is right – Hobhouse is right – you are all right – and I am all wrong – but do pray let me have that pleasure. – Cut me up root and branch – quarter me in the Quarterly… but don’t ask me to alter for I can’t – I am obstinate and lazy – and there’s the truth. – But nevertheless – I will answer your friend C.V. 11 who objects to the quick succession of fun and gravity – as if in that case the gravity did not (in intention at least) heighten the fun. – His metaphor is that ‘we are never scorched and drenched at the same time!’ – Blessings on his experience! – Ask him these questions about ‘scorching and drenching.’ – Did he never play at Cricket or walk a mile in hot weather? – did he never spill a dish of tea over his testicles in handing the cup to his charmer to the great shame of his nankeen breeches? – did he never swim in the sea at Noonday with the Sun in his eyes and on his head – which all the foam of ocean could not cool? did he never draw his foot out of a tub of too hot water damning his eyes & his valet’s? did he never inject for a Gonorrhea? – or make water through an ulcerated Urethra? – was he ever in a Turkish bath – that marble paradise of sherbet and sodomy? – was he ever in a cauldron of boiling oil like St John? – or in the sulphureous waves of hell? (where he ought to be for his ‘scorching and drenching at the same time’) did he never tumble into a river or lake fishing – and sit in his wet cloathes in the boat – or on the bank afterwards ‘scorched and drenched’ like a true sportsman? – – ‘Oh for breath to utter’ (BLJ VI 206–7)