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The Dean and the Don

Back in 1968, when I was editing Poetry Review, published by the Poetry Society, I started a campaign to have a memorial to Byron placed in Poets’ Corner. I was tentative in my first approach to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey, suspecting they might not be particularly enthusiastic about giving space to a man who boasted of having enjoyed a hundred different women during his first two years in Venice and who thought that ‘all sense and senses’ were against belief in religion.

Fortunately the Dean at the time was Eric Abbott, a highly cultivated and intelligent man who sympathized when I pointed out that at the very least Byron sought to believe, even if he found it as difficult as ‘walking in the dark over a rabbit warren – or a garden with steel traps and spring guns’. But confessing he knew little of the poetry, the Dean asked me what he should read to convince him that Byron was indeed a great poet. I steered him determinedly towards Don Juan. Within a month, he had persuaded the Chapter to give permission, with the support of the Poetry Society the funds were raised, and William Plomer eventually unveiled the stone in the floor of Poets’ Corner.

We don’t read long poems these days, more’s the pity. Yet they are often wonderful achievements, and by restricting ourselves to popular extracts we do ourselves a disservice. But I must not sound like the preacher Byron once heard, who leaned from the pulpit and exclaimed: ‘No hopes for them as laughs.’ The cure for those who
think long poems unreadable and necessarily dull is – as the good Dean found – a dose of Don Juan.

It was that earlier long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that legendarily made Byron famous overnight. He started Juan six years later, in 1818, and I really think originally for his own amusement r

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Back in 1968, when I was editing Poetry Review, published by the Poetry Society, I started a campaign to have a memorial to Byron placed in Poets’ Corner. I was tentative in my first approach to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey, suspecting they might not be particularly enthusiastic about giving space to a man who boasted of having enjoyed a hundred different women during his first two years in Venice and who thought that ‘all sense and senses’ were against belief in religion.

Fortunately the Dean at the time was Eric Abbott, a highly cultivated and intelligent man who sympathized when I pointed out that at the very least Byron sought to believe, even if he found it as difficult as ‘walking in the dark over a rabbit warren – or a garden with steel traps and spring guns’. But confessing he knew little of the poetry, the Dean asked me what he should read to convince him that Byron was indeed a great poet. I steered him determinedly towards Don Juan. Within a month, he had persuaded the Chapter to give permission, with the support of the Poetry Society the funds were raised, and William Plomer eventually unveiled the stone in the floor of Poets’ Corner. We don’t read long poems these days, more’s the pity. Yet they are often wonderful achievements, and by restricting ourselves to popular extracts we do ourselves a disservice. But I must not sound like the preacher Byron once heard, who leaned from the pulpit and exclaimed: ‘No hopes for them as laughs.’ The cure for those who think long poems unreadable and necessarily dull is – as the good Dean found – a dose of Don Juan. It was that earlier long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that legendarily made Byron famous overnight. He started Juan six years later, in 1818, and I really think originally for his own amusement rather than very obviously for publication – even he thought it perhaps ‘too free for these very modest days’; and indeed publication of each of the seventeen cantos was dogged by difficulty: Murray, Byron’s publisher, was horrified by the ‘approximations to indelicacy’ in the poem, and the poet again and again complained of his attempts to censor it by ‘damned cutting & slashing’. Very few readers were offended: most were delighted by the liveliest and most readable, wittiest and most acerbic poem of its time. Byron said that Don Juan was meant to be ‘a little quietly facetious about everything’. He went on writing it, on and off, for the rest of his life, sometimes at breakneck speed, sometimes at odd moments – even after falling into a Venetian canal from the balcony of a lady with whom he had no doubt been discussing the poetry of Wordsworth, he sat down still shivering to add a couple of stanzas. He showed no sign of ever wanting to end it, aiming to send Juan to most of the countries of Europe in order to satirize national traits; he ‘had not quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest’. The poem has nothing to do with the Don Juan of Spanish origin, who appears in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and elsewhere; not even the same pronunciation, being for rhyming purposes pronounced Jew-un. Byron’s Juan isn’t really a womanizer – just a man easily seduced, and it has to be admitted that attempted and often successful seduction does play a large part in the poem: love is treated as satirically as everything else. Don Juan is almost a versified Tom Jones, as lively and vigorous and full of fun as Fielding’s novel. In the first canto Juan is hiding from a suspicious husband in the very bedclothes of the wife; Cantos II–IV provide a halcyon and tender love story with a tragic ending – but in Canto V we find Juan bought by a sultan’s wife for her male harem. And so it goes – Juan as a ‘favourite’ of Catherine II of Russia, cutting a swathe through the fashionable ladies of London . . . If it all sounds pretty flippant, so it is; but it’s a sublime flippancy. Some of the lines will certainly be familiar to those who have never opened the poem:

A little still she strove, and much repented And whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’ – consented.

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’Tis woman’s whole existence.

What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.

There are many, many more acute aphorisms: ‘Ready money is Aladdin’s lamp’ or ‘Wrinkles, the damned democrats, won’t flatter’ – but also occasionally stanzas of real passion, when for instance he writes of Greece and the war with the Turks in which he was to participate and die. But he couldn’t be serious for long, always ready to puncture a posture with a joke:

But I digress: of all appeals, – although I grant the power of pathos, and of gold, Of beauty, flattery, threats, a shilling, – no Method’s more sure at moments to take hold Of the best feelings of mankind, which grow More tender, as we every day behold, Than that all-softening, overpowering knell, The tocsin of the soul – the dinner-bell.

I have to say, the longer I live the more pleased I am to have succeeded in convincing Dean Abbott to place what I suppose was the first Abbey memorial to commemorate a confirmed agnostic (there have been many since); and the more happy I am to adhere to my hero’s advice on life and how to live it – Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda water the day after.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 47 © Derek Parker 2015


About the contributor

Derek Parker’s Byron: The Impossible Hero is available to download from Kindle or Amazon.

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