Word: byronism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...BYRON IN ITALY - Peter Quennell -Viking...
...morning in 1816 an Englishman with a godlike face and a deformed foot registered at a Belgian inn, and, '"as soon as he reached his room . . . fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid." It was George Gordon Lord Byron, "for whom foreign travel had a psychological significance which his traveling compan ions could not long ignore." His com panions: Dr. John ("Polly dolly") Polidori; his "querulous" valet, Fletcher; his sparring partner. Next afternoon they all set off for Switzerland via the year-old battlefield of Waterloo where Byron, an insatiable souvenir hunter, bought some scraps of old iron...
Thus Biographer Peter Quennell (Byron: the Years of Fame} starts Byron and his retinue, like latter-day Canterbury pilgrims, on a sentimental journey that was to take the Poet away from England for ever, lead him at last to Greece and death at the age of 36. Byron in Italy is an account of what Byron did while he was waiting for death - his friendship with Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; his affairs with various Venetian slum women and men ; his services as a gigolo-extraordinary to dumpy, dull, married Countess Teresa Guiccioli. It is also an account...
...world's great legends, the Byron story will stand almost any amount of retelling. Retold by Peter Quennell, the result is a minor literary event. Reason: Peter Quennell probably knows more about Byron and the romantic movement than any man alive, tells what he knows in a cadenced Bloomsbury prose that is only now & again too self-consciously elegant. As no one appreciates better than sly Author Quennell, a biography of Byron is ipso facto a novel by Proust...
Eyes for Nipples. When Byron reached Switzerland, he wrote on the hotel blotter after the question Age?: 100. He was 28. But his thick reddish hair was already greying, though "darkened by the lavish use of macassar...