Last week marked the bicentenary of the death of Lord Byron, bad-boy hero of every literary wannabe who ever let his hair flop over burningly romantic eyes and hung around his idol’s birthplace (now a John Lewis). In 1938 the power of the Byron legend even caused an enthusiast to dig his vault up and thrillingly describe the exceptional “manhood” of the poet’s naked corpse.
But the reverent gilding of the anniversary suddenly got chipped by news from a Cambridge library. After many affairs, rumoured incest and a very brief marriage to Annabella Milbanke, Byron fled abroad to further mistresses and adventures and died at 36 in the Greek war of independence. But alongside his poetry he left a memoir, boasting of his “true dissipation… I can assure you my life is very entertaining and very instructive”.
He wanted it published when he was safely dead, but his friends burnt it to avoid tarnishing his reputation. It is considered a literary crime by those for whom no author’s actual writings are ever enough. But now emerges a letter by Lady Elizabeth Palgrave: she read it at the publisher’s and expresses a very female revulsion. It was, she writes, cold-blooded and heartless, “exposing and degrading” his one-year wife with “opprobrious epithets”, and mocking that he only married her because they got stuck in a snowstorm and he was “without another creature to whom he could make love”. He sneered at his well-intentioned in-laws too. In other words, for all his talent Lord Byron was no gentleman. He was a cad.
There is no point today in shuddering disapproval of libertines, male or female, gay or straight. That ship sailed long ago, and the West now holds sexual self-expression as sacred. Monogamy and fidelity are just another choice; every complicated nuance of gender exploration, polyamory and serial philandering is respected and televised; private fetishes are praised as long as they’re consensual, over-age and stop short of bestiality and necrophilia. We may laugh a bit or roll our eyes and know who to avoid, but private lives are excused in a general version of the old adulterer’s wail “this thing is bigger than both of us”. Feelings rule supreme.
Fair enough. The old sexual taboos were often cruel and irrational, deeply rooted in misogynies, homophobias, controlling religions and preoccupation with inheritance. Few can cast the first stone, and provided any resulting children get proper consideration, there are worse harms. Many adult lives begin in libertinism and come gradually to realising that dull old pair-bonding has advantages. But strolling around the human zoo and thinking about Byron’s sly posthumous nastiness about the mother and grandmother of his child, there is an interesting line to draw.
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Libertinism is one thing, caddishness quite another: it turns hot-blooded human failing into something more deserving of the whip-sting of disapproval. We have all known and liked people with wildly disgraceful sexual lives who nonetheless remain essentially civil, generous and considerate, unwilling to trash or embarrass anyone else. It is weasel-spirited caddishness that makes us shudder.
Several lately display that. There was William Wragg MP who in self-preservation dragged colleagues into the same smartphone gutter as himself, but worse was his colleague Mark Menzies. Bad enough to ring a former lady mayoress in the small hours demanding money to which he had no right; but the following morning he got it from another party official who was forced to take it out of her own Isa, thus losing forever the precious tax-free interest laid aside some previous April. Definitely no gentleman, Mr M.
More cads? Celebrity split-ups and trolling interviews about exes produce plenty: Johnny Depp is no gent, nor I fear is John Cleese. And never forget the ultimate breach of decency when Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross giggled repeatedly on air about the former having “had” a named, identified young woman. Schoolboys in the age of porn-texting do it, but Ross was 48 and Brand in his thirties.
Or take a fresher horror: in last week’s Spectator their theatre critic and free-floating flâneur Lloyd Evans mused on how, after attending a lecture in Cambridge on Kant delivered by a good-looking historian, he went — fancying himself one of the “misfits and outcasts” of the city — to a seedy massage parlour to engage with a Chinese sex worker of whose antecedents and liberties he knew nothing, but whose first name and apparent age he gaily reveals. He haggles over the price of her body for a “brisk workout” and gets one.
Well, you might tolerantly say, whorehounding is an old, old story, some lonely chaps can’t help it, some sex workers defend it. But caddishness surfaces: Lloyd hadn’t got his ATM card or the courtesy to bring cash, so made the woman wait while he wandered back to his hotel for a laptop. Then he patronised her by “gallantly” handing over an extra £20 while sniggering to himself over HSBC being the Shanghai immigrant’s “local bank”. And then proceeded to write about it all in the public prints. No manners, no honour, no basic human respect.
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Does this matter in a wider sense? I think it does. Sexual self-indulgence is immemorial and finally often forgivable, but the vanity of putting no value at all on another person’s dignity, reputation and feelings barely is. It’s a mean, needless theft for little gain. Byron’s friends burnt his petulant memoir because in those days, before incontinent publishing and broadcasting, they understood that some things really do dishonour a man.
