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‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’ was how Byron’s lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, described him – and with justification, because, even by modern standards, some aspects of his life were shocking – but then there is the poetry. Perhaps in the future of the authoritarian state that Britain is becoming, we will only be allowed to study writers who have led morally exemplary lives. When that happens, Byron will be one of the first to be banned.

My purpose in this short article is to discuss those aspects of Byron’s life that I find interesting and relate them to my own experiences. Some biographical details are given below, but by no means a complete life history. Anyone who would like to find out more should visit the following websites:

http://www.byronmania.com/byron/limnings.html
http://englishhistory.net/byron/moorebyron.html

You also might enjoy Tom Holland’s ‘The Vampyre’, which retells the story of Byron’s life on the premise that he was a vampire. It is a good read, and if you subtract all the vampire references, a reasonably accurate account of his life.

Lord Byron, sixth Baron Byron, was born in 1788 in London. He was initiated into sexual experience by his nursemaid, Mary Duff, at the age of nine. His sexual experiences continued while at school at Harrow, and at Cambridge, and included prostitutes, servants and women of quality. At Cambridge, he explored the ‘other side’ of his sexuality when he fell in love with a choirboy, John Edelston. Byron took his first trip abroad in 1809, and discovered to his delight (as many have done in more recent times) that women in foreign countries were often more beautiful, more highly-sexed, and more readily available.

On August 11th, 1809, Byron wrote the following in a letter to his mother:

"Cadiz, sweet Cadiz! is the most delightful town I ever beheld . . .and full of the finest women in Spain . . . the girl is very pretty in the Spanish style, in my opinion by no means inferior to the English in charms, and certainly superior in fascination. – Long black hair, dark languishing eyes, clear olive complexions, and forms more graceful in motion than can be conceived by an Englishman."

Change Cadiz to Bangkok, and the letter is very similar to the kind of thing that might be written by a present day traveller who has just discovered the charms of Thai girls. Of course, that was a letter to his mother. Soon after, he expressed his feelings more fully in the poem, The Girl of Cadiz, from which this is an extract:

Our English maids are long to woo,
And frigid even in possession;
And if their charms be fair to view,
Their lips are slow at Loves confession:
But, born beneath a brighter sun,
For love ordain'd the Spanish maid is,
And who, - when fondly, fairly won, -
Enchants you like the Girl of Cadiz?

This struck me as so similar to my own feelings when I discovered Thai girls that an adaptation of this poem became my first submission to this website (see: http://www.thailandstories.com/article/poetry/the-girls-of-thailand.html). It was during his trip to Spain that he wrote the first two cantos of Childe Harold – the poem which made him famous. The poem is loosely based on his travels, though he narrates them through the persona of a medieval knight. I tried this myself, imagining what it would be like to visit old Siam in medieval times, but failed to bring it off, partly because of lack of knowledge of the period, and partly because the Spenserian stanza in which it is written was too difficult for me to sustain.

In my introduction, I said that some of the things that Byron did were shocking, even by modern standards. We like to think that the moral values of our age are sophisticated and tolerant, and that ‘anything goes’ as long as others are not harmed. And yet some taboos remain. Ageism is one. If I had a 1000 baht for every ‘disgusted’ look cast upon me because of the over 20-year age gap between me and my teerak, I would be able to take early retirement, yet we are both quite happy in the relationship. Incest is an even stronger taboo (it is, of course, more than a mere taboo, because it is based on the instinct to ensure genetic variety). Notwithstanding, in the summer of 1813 Byron started a love affair with his sister Augusta Leigh, the sinfulness of which was compounded by her being a married woman, as well as a close relative. The incest factor was mitigated by the fact that Augusta was a half-sister, and by the fact that he had not known her as a child, but it was enough to shock English society. True to form, Byron didn’t give a hoot for that, and went on with the relationship anyway, and it is clear from the poetry he wrote about her that she was the one true love of his life:

My Sister! my sweet Sister! if a name
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine.
Mountains and seas divide us, but I claim
No tears, but tenderness to answer mine:
Go where I will, to me thou art the same -
A loved regret which I would not resign.
There yet are two things in my destiny, -
A world to roam through, and a home with thee.

from Epistle to Augusta

Behind many philanderers there is a true love. With me it is an American girl named Mary with whom I had a short but intense relationship when I was 25 (no – she was not my sister). I felt closer to her spiritually than to any woman I’ve met before or since, and perhaps I am looking for her all over again every time I set foot in a gogo bar. I know that a long term relationship with her could never have worked, because Mary, in the true tradition of the American university campus of the mid 70’s, was a feminist. I suppose that what I am looking for is a traditional woman with a sophisticated mind who can discuss the finer points of literature with me before doing the washing up.

Rumours of the affair with Augusta were one of the things which eventually damaged Byron’s reputation, despite his attempt to mend it by marrying the highly moral Anne Isabella Milbanke. No doubt he went through a tremendous inner struggle in which the demands of convention and society conflicted with his desire to be himself. It is a struggle which many of us who found themselves on the high road to Thailand can empathise with. His attempt at self-reform through marriage didn’t last long. He continued to behave in the same immoral way, until in the end, his reputation was so bad that he had no choice but to leave England permanently.

My circumstances are not so extreme, but I no longer feel at home in England. I know that many there would judge my experiences in Thailand harshly. For example, many of my friends, though interested to hear about my exploits, draw the line when I suggest that they come with me. They make comments like: ‘You lucky guy!’ to which I reply, ‘You don’t need luck – just a ticket to Bangkok!’ I even have a friend who is desperately seeking a partner online and at grab-a-granny nights, but who won’t even consider giving Thailand a try. As for the women – well, I wouldn’t dare tell them, because they think that anything greater than a 10 year age gap between a man and a women is simply perverted – and as for ‘paying for it’, well, Harriet Harman and others in the UK government want to make that illegal. If this gets through, the next step will be to make sex tourism illegal. These changes are not driven by morality, or a desire to improve the lot of sex workers, but by feminist ideology. Ironically, the countries I prefer, Thailand and the Philippines, are much more moral in the true sense of the word. The bottom line is that, like Byron, I have to travel to other countries to live the lifestyle I want.
So Byron quit England, where his lifestyle was an anathema, and lived for a while in a villa on the lake near Geneva with Claire Clairmont – a 19-year old girl who had latched onto him just before he left London. Other members of the party were the poet Shelley, and his wife, Mary. It was a highly creative period for all of them, Byron and Shelley writing poetry and Mary writing the first draft of Frankenstein.
Next stop was Venice. Venice was in the early 19th Century what Bangkok is today – that is to say, the seat of all imaginable vice. In the Renaissance it had been the main centre for trade between Europe in the East, but following the plague of 1630, which killed a third of Venice's citizens, and the rise of Portugal as a maritime power, Venice began to lose its position. By the beginning of the 19th Century it was a crumbling shadow of its former self, its only claim to fame being tourism, and a reputation for the easy availability of sex, based on Carnival, and stories about Giacomo Casanova.

Every type of sexual pleasure was available. At the lowest level were street prostitutes who could be hired for an hour in a gondola. The next step was the ‘opera dancer’ who would expect to be set up in small casa and kept as a mistress. It was also possible to have an affair with a woman of quality due to the tradition of the cavaliere servante. This tradition was a kind of ‘safety valve’ for the many young women forced into arranged marriages with older men. It allowed them to take a young lover with the open acknowledgement of their husband.

Byron, of course, was not slow to take advantage of this custom. One evening in 1819 he met a very pretty nineteen-year-old contessa, Teresa Guiccioli. He found that, in addition to their ecstatic love-making, they shared an interest in literature, and as a result, fell in love with her. Sex of the mind as well as of the body is the ultimate aspiration, and not to be found with a prostitute in a gondola, or a bargirl in a gogo bar. I vexed myself for many years trying to achieve this Holy Grail, but am now content to enjoy these pleasures separately. Indeed, some of my happiest times have been sharing a Bangkok visit with a good friend when we begin the day discussing the finer points literature, and end it discussing the finer points of bargirls, before making our choices and going our separate ways for the night.

Byron’s relationship with Teresa inspired his poem Beppo which describes the exploits of a contessa and her cavaliere servante in a semi-autobiographical manner. This is an important poem because Byron used for the first time all the key elements of his later masterpiece, Don Juan. The key elements are: use of ottava rima – but in a freewheeling, conversational style quite unique to Byron, and chatty digressions in which he expresses his opinions to the reader. Only a writer with the confidence to be himself could get away with this. The liberties he takes with the verse form, and the digressions – let alone the subject matter – would be considered unforgivable faults by a more conventionally-minded writer. But Byron had already put two fingers (American readers should translate this as ‘one finger’) up to the establishment with his ‘immoral’ behaviour – why should his poetry be any different? In this stanza (XLI of Beppo) he begins a digression in which he explains why he prefers Italy to England:

With all its sinful doings, I must say,
That Italy’s a pleasant place to me,
Who love to see the sun shine every day,
And vines (not nailed to walls) from tree to tree
Festooned, much like the back scene of a play,
Or melodrame, which people flock to see,
When the first act is ended by a dance
In vineyards copied from the South of France.

The ideas he expresses are so similar to my own feelings about why I prefer Thailand to England that I did a ‘rewrite’ of the poem in which I merely changed Italy to Thailand and updated the politics. This can be found at
http://www.thailandstories.com/article/poetry/thailand-all-the-world-surpasses.html (Note that, due to the continuing attack upon ancient freedoms by the Brown government, the line ‘For 28 days or more without a trial’ should now read ‘For 42 days or more without a trial’).

Casanova claimed to have bedded 120 women, but Byron topped that with a claim to have had 200 women in Venice alone. Even those figures pale into insignificance alongside the claims of many a Thailand monger. As for myself, I deliberately stopped counting after my first year in Thailand because I realised that I was putting quantity before quality. More than once I caught myself thinking that I would like to spend longer with a girl – but if I did, it would prevent me from raising my score. Anyway, I’m no Casanova, or Byron, as I came to this scene late in life – for a true Casanova it’s a life’s work! As for Byron, there was also an element of posturing in his sexual adventures. He chose not to mix with Venetian society, enjoying being a figure of mystery famous for his night-long debaucheries – which also contributed to his reputation as a poet.

One interesting episode – beautifully portrayed in the BBC Documentary, Byron – concerns his affair with a married woman called Marianna, a typical black-haired, black-eyed Italian beauty. Typical of Byron, he took another mistress called Margarita – a carbon copy of Marianna, whom he describes in his letters as ‘very dark, tall, the Venetian face, very fine black eyes - and other qualities which need not be mentioned’ – however, he neglected to get rid of the first before taking on the second – the result was a spectacular cat fight which Marianna won, with the result that the furious Margarita attacked Byron with a knife before jumping out of his window into the canal.

His sexual adventures in Venice also inspired his masterpiece, Don Juan. In this poem, he used the verse form and narrative style that he had developed in Beppo to write a long poem about the legendary Don Juan which is informed by his own adventures in Venice.

This was the inspiration for my own ‘masterpiece’, Bangkok Don Juan, which is also semi-autobiographical. Its hero, Jim, ‘a fat and fifty-something sort of man’ is loosely based on me – though many of the specific episodes are fictional, or happened to somebody else. In that poem, a lifetime of writing and experience suddenly came together. For years I had been writing traditional rhyming verse – an almost useless pursuit in an age when even modern free verse has almost no readership. Suddenly, though, it suited my project – an update of Byron’s Don Juan. Canto I was first posted on this website on November 21st 2006 (see http://www.thailandstories.com/article/poetry/mature/bangkok-don-juan-canto-i.html) and another four cantos followed. Those five cantos were self-contained anecdotes based on Jim’s first visit to Thailand, but I decided to extend it, and Book II, another five Cantos, followed about six months later. It is still unfinished, but will ultimately consist of five books – 25 cantos in total. Of course, its readership is limited – but thanks to the Thailand Stories website, it will not be entirely unappreciated. After all, as Byron himself wrote in his original – what price fame?

What is the end of Fame? 'tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper:
Some liken it to climbing up a hill,
Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour;
For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,
And bards burn what they call their 'midnight taper',
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture and worse bust.

© Rob, 2008