Word: missolonghi
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...MISSOLONGHI MANUSCRIPT by Frederic Prokosch. 338 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...much. He was a good if not great poet; he was handsome; he could swim the Hellespont, even with a game leg; he had affairs with men as well as women including, some believe, his half sister. He was also a political rebel. When he died at 34 in Missolonghi, Greece, he was planning and financing a revolt against the Turkish oppressors...
This is the man whom Novelist Frederic Prokosch (The Seven Who Fled) tries to catch in undress. Normally an imaginative writer with considerable flair, Prokosch here employs the tired conceit that Byron left three notebooks at Missolonghi in which he reconstructed his life. As fiction, the book may appeal to those who want to see a flamboyant figure oscillate between homosexuality and heterosexuality with the nice indifference of a metronome. Prokosch uses all the four-letter words that his earlier elegance would have found quite supererogatory. Even more drearily, there is nothing new here about Byron. The hero...
...Speedey Deselution." Byron made Italy his home for seven years before proceeding to Greece with the little army of men whom he paid out of his own pocket to fight against the Turks for Greek independence. There, at swampy Missolonghi, he died of fever at the age of 36, attended to the last by his devoted valet, William Fletcher. All others when they wrote of Byron rose to the occasion with polished words and well-turned phrases, but it was the blunt, semiliterate Fletcher who had the privilege of recording what he called that "fatal day which deprived England...
Three weeks later at Missolonghi, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, Byron died of a fever. It was the sort of death he had invited years before in one of his most passionate and characteristic couplets...