Life Lessons from Byron by Matthew Bevis (review)

The title is accurate. There are things that we can learn from Byron and they can be put in a book, even though, as Matthew Bevis points out, Byron had his doubts about this: ‘reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat’. The book is in seven short chapters all of which try to answer a ‘How to?’ question – ‘How to Become Yourself/Think with Your Body/Laugh/Go Astray/Get Wet/Hope/Say Goodbye’. Texts from Byron and others, and reflections by the writer make up the answers. In a coda, Bevis explains how he encountered Don Juan as a student: ‘The first thing that I warmed to was the poet’s assumption that he and I had been on intimate terms for quite some time’. The book is written out of this sense of intimacy with Byron which never seems forced or mannered. I get the impression that Dr Bevis must be an excellent teacher.

Here is an example of some of the ‘Life Lessons’ that we might learn from reading Byron: ‘To become ourselves, then, is to keep some sense of bearings or direction, yet also to make ourselves up as we go along’. We should live, like Byron, by a ‘blending of cerebral and corporeal perspectives’. The style here is both polished and at ease. It seems obvious that Bevis has learned this from his master. For example, his dictum that Byron ‘tends towards provocation, not precept’ could have been coined by Byron himself.

What I liked about this little book, and I liked it a lot, is that it treats Byron as a grown-up – and Byron was very much a grown-up (amongst other things of course). Bevis moves naturally from letters and journals to the poems and to comments by those who knew Byron well. I often read things written about Byron and do not recognise Byron in them, but here, all the time, is the presence of a thinking, feeling, sensitive, witty, modest, very odd, but always vital man who engages his readers with unusual directness and is always, as he claimed, essentially a moral poet.

I knew most of the quotations that Bevis uses (though he provides a very suggestive little bibliography) but not all of them and was constantly delighted by his ability to juxtapose stanzas, or short phrases, from what is clearly a continually thoughtful and extensive reading of the poet. I wish someone would give this book to Melvyn Bragg or Rupert Everett or even Fiona McCarthy. They would learn a thing or two from it about Byron. But any reader, new to Byron, or familiar with him would enjoy this superb little volume. That looks like but is not my last line. I will end instead with one of Bevis’s characteristically incisive phrases: ‘Byron is an inveterate leave-taker, a connoisseur of closure’.