Byron: Life and Legend by Fiona MacCarthy

A thorough inspection of Byron's closet does scant justice to great poetry, says Duncan Wu

Scandal and intrigue made Byron a star in his own lifetime – and in ours. Fiona MacCarthy's is the sixth biography to appear in as many years. And who can begrudge such an extraordinary life its enduring fascination? Born with a club foot, Byron was the victim of what we would now call childhood sexual abuse at the hands of his nurse. He kept a tame bear in his rooms at Cambridge (there were rules against dogs); had an affair with his half-sister Augusta and countless other liaisons with members of both sexes; swam the Hellespont and the Tagus; exiled himself from England when stories of his homosexual past leaked out; and led his own army to the Greek War of Independence, where he died at 36. Oh yes, and he wrote some of the greatest poetry in the language.

Fiona MacCarthy's biography is published by John Murray, a firm whose fortunes were built on Byron's early success. It was in the grate of the fire in Murray's drawing-room that the manuscript of one of the biggest potential money-spinners in literary history was burnt shortly after Byron's death: his memoirs. However misguided, that act guaranteed the success of the countless biographies that have followed, which continue to speculate on their likely contents.

MacCarthy doubtless tells us much that Byron would have omitted. As she points out, the advantage of writing in an age comparatively relaxed about homosexuality is that she can, unlike many predecessors, discuss Byron's sex life frankly. She has enjoyed the run of the Murray archive, which contains hair mailed to him by admiring women, Byron's bust, many manuscripts and other relics. She describes the "patchwork" of scraps comprising the manuscript of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: evidence of its piecemeal composition as Byron travelled across Europe in 1816.

As a research document, this is a thorough and accurate account of the life. MacCarthy deals best with Byron's childhood and early manhood, and is a good sceptic when confronted by hearsay, especially his alleged boyhood passion for his cousin, Mary Chaworth (a cover for his burgeoning homosexuality), and his paternity of Medora, Augusta's daughter. Some set-pieces are memorable: she is good on the incompetence of the doctors at Byron's death-bed, and produces comic moments describing his wedding-day in a doom-laden tone more suitable for a public flogging. And she is shrewd when dealing with Byron's mother and Lady Caroline Lamb, both of whom were clearly monsters.

What lets this book down is MacCarthy's tendency to be summary: lining up the main players, putting them through their paces, and then returning them to their box without comment. The most glaring example is the chapter dealing with Byron's brief but intense friendship with the Shelleys on the shores of Lake Geneva in summer 1816. From this came some of the greatest poetry (and fiction) any of them would compose; it was a crucial moment in their lives, informed by a considerable body of evidence on what happened.

For instance, Byron and Shelley's first meeting, when they shook hands on the shores of Lake Geneva, is one of those mythical events that actually took place. MacCarthy does not mention it, nor Shelley's famously well-intentioned attempts to "dose" Byron with "Wordsworth physic" (by reading Wordsworth's poetry to him). And the ghost-story competition at the Villa Diodati is described less as it must have been experienced by those present than as a historical event that gave rise to several works of literature.

The failure to exploit the drama inherent in this story is evident in flat descriptions of the supporting cast. Byron's acquaintance George Ticknor is "a young American in London" (rather than the future publisher of many Romantic and Victorian writers); Henry Crabb Robinson a "lawyer and literary hanger-on" (rather than Germanist, diarist, and intellectual); while even the likes of Claire Clairmont, and Mary and Percy Shelley remain shadowy figures, fuzzily drawn, rather than the remarkable men and women they were. Likewise, Ravenna, Pisa and Rome (to say nothing of Cheltenham) are seldom more than sketches, hardly the exotic locations they must have seemed to the expatriate literati.

Because her characters and their environment lack clarity and depth, MacCarthy is often not in a position to make judgements about them. She is alarmingly reticent when it comes to Byron's conduct towards the child he fathered with Claire Clairmont. Allegra died in the convent to which he confined her, where, despite her pleas, she was prevented from seeing her mother. If MacCarthy doesn't regard that as an insane act of cruelty, her first duty as biographer is to say why. Byron's treatment of his wife, unprovoked rage towards monks at Theotokos Agrilion, and avowed fear of "growing fat and going mad" attest to a long-term psychological instability that requires discussion by any serious biographer.

The impression that she handles her subject with sugar tongs extends to his poetry. "Scott – Southey – Wordsworth – Moore – Campbell – I – are all in the wrong", he is quoted as saying, but without any explanation that this takes us to the heart of his poetic theory. Don Juan is now regarded as a literary masterpiece, but you wouldn't know it from this book. There is nothing here about the formal triumph of ottava rima, Byron's use of metre and rhyme for comic purposes, or any detailed account of the poem's reception. MacCarthy's endorsement of it as "a rollicking amatory narrative" does it scant justice, and doesn't suggest much feeling for its true quality.

Her grounds are surer when she says that "Darkness" "projects domestic grief into the cosmic", but the statement is too cryptic not to require commentary. The suggestion that "Sardanapalus" contains "no love interest" is simply wrong. In fairness, hers is not meant to be a critical biography, but neither does it seem to have the foggiest idea why Byron is now held to be one of our greatest poets.

MacCarthy's forte is her deployment of the facts, assembled skilfully, accurately, and usually in the right order. This book will tell you that Byron helped write an Armenian-English grammar, used "cundums", and bit his nails. And MacCarthy's conjectures about Byron's sex life are probably right. But it is a sad comment on our culture that a fully researched biography such as this has little to say about what made Byron a great poet, while devoting several hundred pages to proving that he was a closet homosexual whose cover was the exaggerated number of female conquests which were his chief boast.

Duncan Wu is professor of English language and literature at Oxford University; his critical biography 'Wordsworth' is published by Blackwell