Recently in Gordon, George, Lord Byron Category

Publisher's Weekly recently hosted a panel as part of its "Think Future: What's Next in Publishing" discussion series on the question of "Will Book Reviews Still Matter?"    

I didn't attend the event, and I don't know what was said, but a fair guess is that the discussion, like the animating question, was of a piece with other expressions of the massive insecurity in the industry right now: will people read books in the future?  Will book stores continue to exist?

Not being one who views change as synonymous with annihilation, I am comfortable projecting the continued existence both of books and book stores.  My relaxed optimism extends with even more confidence to book reviews - though I might wish it to be otherwise.  Here's why:

Short of folks stuck in ski chalets during blizzards who are driven by boredom to peruse the only book on hand, people's choices in reading materials are rarely random.  They're usually guided by some previous knowledge about the book.  Their friend recommended it.  They've heard good things about the author.  The book got good reviews.

Although a friend's recommendation, or a prior positive experience with the author's work, will likely remain more influential than reviews are to an individual's purchasing decision, reviews are nonetheless likely to continue to be important for sales.  Reviews start a public conversation about a book, as well as setting the agenda for that conversation, and such conversations prime an audience's appetite for the book.    

Conversation, whether in meat-space, virtual space or mental space, is vital for any book marketing effort because conversation is the social corollary to the private act of reading.  Most of us are social animals and most of us, therefore, want to talk about what we read.  In communities with a relatively high level of literary output, but without apparatus for sparking public conversation about books - for example, in Nairobi, where I've never seen a single book review, bookstores lack the space to accommodate book readings and the Internet hasn't picked up the slack - books don't sell.

So conversation is necessary.  And, though any glance at the line-up of television pundits might lead one to another conclusion, conversation (even in America, even today) is a skill.  Good conversationalists have thought-provoking, witty and passionate things to say.  Poor conversationalists - which includes most of us at some moment or another - can nonetheless function tolerably if they have the decency to quote (with or without attribution) that which they've heard good conversationalists articulate.

Reviewers, if they excel at their jobs, are good conversationalists who provide book-meat to the public for roasting, mastication and regurgitation.  Reviewers thus serve a critical social function that will in some form transcend the rapid (and foolish, in my opinion) disappearance of book review sections in newspapers.

The question to my mind, therefore, is not, "Will Book Reviews Still Matter?" but "What are the media platforms from which book reviews will be disseminated?"  

If the answer is (as it likely will be), "the Internet," then we will probably see a similar pattern to that which has emerged elsewhere online: faced with overwhelming choice and no editorial filter, netizens will default to trusted familiar voices.  We will see, not a diminution in the importance of book reviews for book sales, but an increase in the importance of certain online reviewers' opinions about books.

And as anyone with even passing familiarity with Lord Byron's poem "Who Kill'd John Keats?" knows, concentration of the critics' power is never a positive development.   

(Image of Dr. Samuel Johnson, in Harold Bloom's words, "the most eminent of all literary critics," from The New York Times)  

In Beppo, Lord Byron's verse play, the poet raises an intractable question: were 99 stanzas necessary?

A comic, bawdy Venetian adventure, Beppo ostensibly tells the tale of a woman, Laura, whose husband, Beppo, goes to sea and disappears without a word.  "And really if a man won't let us know/That he's alive, he's dead, or should be so," explains Byron.  So Laura takes a cavalier servente, an openly-accepted second husband.  Six years go by, and Laura and her cavalier servente are enjoying their life together, when - at a masked ball during Carnival - Laura catches the attention of a Turk . . . who turns out to be her husband.

Despite the drama of this situation, the plot is secondary to scene-setting and musings of tangential relevance.  In Beppo, Byron's digressions, quite self-consciously, rule the poem:  

. . . [F]or I find
Digression is a sin, that by degrees
Becomes exceeding tedious to my mind,

Byron complains in stanza 50.  Just thirteen stanzas later, he's moaning again:

To turn, -and to return; the devil take it!
This story slips for ever through my fingers.  

But however much Byron protests his poetic ADD, he devotes extensive energy to it.  As Jeffrey, writing in Edinburgh Review in 1818 observed, "This story, such as it is, occupies about twenty stanzas."  (My own count is not so condemnatory.  I allow the first 20 verses as appropriate background scene-setting, and I only count 27 or so verses of proper digression.  Nonetheless, even by my generous assessment, 47 verses of 99 do not advance the plot.)  

Explanations of Byron's digressions abound.  Jeffrey calls them "unquestionably by far the most lively and interesting parts of the work."  Harsh condemnation of the story then.

Jeffrey is not the only critic to slight Beppo's story.  Writing in The Guardian, Benjamin Markovits calls the story "scant" and explains the digressions in Beppo as follows:

The real hero of the piece is the poet himself . . . . [engaging in] a series of digressions on worldliness: on how to take pleasure from the world, on how to live.

While I agree with both these comments, I think in some sense they miss the larger picture of how the digressions deepen the reader's experience of the story and how the poem's constituent parts relate to the whole.  

If, as Jeffrey and Markovits suggests, the digressions don't relate to the story, but instead supplant the story, then my inquiry is irrelevant.  The constituent parts don't relate beyond allowing the story to serve as a frame for Byron's digressions.

But to explain the story in Beppo as a thin branch on which to hang the poet's "lively and interesting" observations "on how to live" seems (to my mind) to disserve Byron's skills as a storyteller.  Such an interpretation also fails to give meaning to the stanzas in which Byron calls attention to his own digressions.

My reading is that the digressions are integral to the story.  By calling attention to his digressions, Byron is signaling to the reader that they are not the sloppy tangents of a debauched mind, but deliberate and purposeful additions to the story.  Byron is telling the tale of a woman whose relationship with her cavalier servente is a digression in her marriage.  The digression is entertaining, worldly and broad-minded - just like Byron's digressions in the poem.  In Beppo, Byron is offering himself as cavalier servente to the reader; he is inviting his adoring fans to allow him to be a digression in their day, life, relationship.  (The poet isn't the hero of the poem; the reader is.) 

And, in the reader's acceptance of Byron's service, the reader is implicated in Laura's "sin."  Writing of immoral relations for a conservative British audience, Byron stealthily builds the reader's sympathy for Laura - as well as support for the poem's happy ending that allows Laura to escape without punishment - by inviting the reader to partake via literary effigy in Laura's naughtiness.  

Given such playfulness, 99 stanzas are not only necessary, but possibly insufficient.

(Cover of Beppo from Byronetc.com.)

The New York Times magazine recently ran a profile of James Patterson, the world's best-selling author, in which his former publisher at Little, Brown, Sarah Crichton, "says she was continually surprised by the success of Patterson's books. To her, they lacked the nuance and originality of other blockbuster genre writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz."

Lacked the nuance and originality of Dean Koontz?  That's like saying he lacks the grammatical competence of Sarah Palin. 

Whatever the legitimacy of the criticism (and I don't know because I haven't read Patterson), I have to wish - however naively - that publishers were more publicly supportive of their authors.  

Of course, authors can generate terrific material insulting their publishers (for example, Lord Byron's "Dear Doctor, I have read your play").  But such artistic impishness doesn't strike me as being as shockingly discourteous as Critchton's remark.  John Murray, after all, made money off Byron's poem mocking him.

(Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Iago from the Victoria & Albert museum)

I love George Gordon, Lord Byron's poem, "Dear Doctor, I Have Read Your Play."  It's funny, fun to read out loud, fun to imagine a play that "purges the eyes and moves the bowels" - moves the bowels?!  Apparently, the good doctor of the title (Byron's friend, John William Polidori) invented an entirely new (and not-to-be-seen-again) genre: the laxative drama.

But, much as I believe the English literary canon would be diminished for its absence, I have to wonder why Lord Byron wrote the poem.  The man, after all, was a super star by 1817 when he wrote "Dear Doctor," by which time he'd long been famous for accomplishments like Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the unpublished (but no lesser known) I Had An Incestuous Affair With My Half Sister.  

"Dear Doctor" allows the reader to infer that recent criticism of Byron's writing might have been a reason for the poem's composition:  

There's Byron, too, who once did better,
Has sent me, folded in a letter,
A sort of - it's no more a drama
Than Darnely, Ivan, or Kehama;
So alter'd since last year is pen is,
I think he's lost his wits at Venice.

Nonetheless, such cause seems a tad inadequate.  Byron was not a man unfamiliar with rejection.  His clubfoot, for instance, did not provoke an outpouring of acceptance and tolerance from his peers.  And his personal life - incest, anal sex, divorce - seems to have generated sufficient expression of social condemnation to convince him to go into self-imposed exile.

Moreover, whatever the critics opined about his work, Byron was never at a loss for either publishers, fans or sales.  

So why should Byron care about a rejection from John Murray, much less care enough to write a rhyming verse poem about it - a poem that, even for as skilled a hand as Byron, surely required more effort than the dismissive sigh of, "Well, that happened, moving on," that characterizes (for example) my reaction to rejection from publishers?

Plainly, something needled Byron into diverting poetic energies from the Romantic imperative of composing verses as aids to seduction and devoting those energies, instead, to a Philip Roth-like anxiety orgy of venting/moping/carping.  I can think of at least three motivations for this trek off Byron's beaten path:

1.    Byron was outraged, not by rejection of him, but by rejection of his friend, John William Polidari.  The poem, in this interpretation, was an expression of loyalty and friendship.
2.    Despite his experiences, Byron was unusually sensitive to criticism, to the point that he'd stoop to bashing easy targets.  According to this theory, the poem is an expression of insecurity (and possibly immaturity).
3.    Byron felt a heroic passion to expose the brutality of the publishing industry, which was inhumane in its treatment of authors and destructive to the cause of literature.  In this scenario, the poem is an expression of reality.

In proffering this critique of the publishing industry, my own motivations are, of course, transparently obvious: to bring healing to the ill.  Out of concern for what appears to be a plague of industry-wide, chronic constipation (of which reflexive rejection is a symptom), I am pioneering the laxative blog post.

(Image of Lord Byron from The Independent)