Letters to the Editor

Dear Sir,

I’d like to pay a tribute to Peter Cochran, who left us a few months ago. Peter and I never really met; we just exchanged emails and letters. Still he played a strong part in my passion for Byron.

I first got in touch with him after I pointed out a small error in the IBS website in 2007. He welcomed my remark and cheerfully asked me questions about my interest for Byron. I sent him my first translations and we kept in touch. Though we happened to talk of almost everything (literature in general, cinema, even politics), Byron was our main link. I sent him everything I wrote on the poet: books, papers, and all issues of the review I created, Dossiers lord Byron. It was a great honour to me to have him as my first reader: he generally said very few words, but it was enough to encourage me. I never was so thankful to rely on him than last year, when I worked on ‘The Publication of Don Juan’ for Dossier 10: he redressed two or three factual errors concerning some tiny details (there was no one like him for that), and helped me translating some very difficult passages in the rejected stanzas. This issue couldn’t have existed without him.

In return, Peter sent me a lot of files, including papers and sometimes whole chapters of his own books. That kind of generosity I never saw elsewhere, especially here in France where scholars are more prone to keep than to share. I just had to allude to a subject, and he spontaneously told me what he knew. Peter and I progressively learned to trust each other. In 2010 he published my first paper in the Newstead Abbey Review. He began to use my works for some of his books and even asked my help for some translation. Our only disagreement in eight years concerned the discussion opening his ‘Romanticism’ and Byron, which he sent me long before its publication: he considered Romanticism never existed as a structured movement in England (which is probably true), but stubbornly extended his opposition to other countries, denying such a movement occurred in France, which is indisputably false. I tried to prove to him that Stendhal was a wrong guide in this matter, but I failed.

I didn’t catch at once how much Peter was a great Byronist. But after a few readings, I saw the seriousness behind the amusing tone: new documents, statements based on solid facts, judicious choice of quotations, etc. One of his characteristics concerned the use of quotations: he preferred primary sources (poems and letters of Byron, Hobhouse, etc.) to secondary ones (scholars’ analysis). But his highest difference consisted in saying things straightforwardly, crudely (see his paper on Byron and Ali Pacha in issue 23 of this journal), a quality I particularly appreciate. He was also incorrigible: I won’t repeat here the judgements he occasionally delivered about people, but it wasn’t far from Byron’s. In 2014 he asked me to review some books for the Newstead Abbey Review. Considering how these books were disastrous, I told him I feared the review would turn to an execution; his answer was: ‘Be economical! Be an executioner! I love executing in my reviews—see my website!’

This unusual sense of humour and his breaking with scholarly moderation (by calling The Corsair ‘Byron’s silliest poem’, for example) led him to be considered a kind of clown in the Byronic community. This is probably why his writings aren’t as widely quoted or listed in bibliographies as some, a thing I never understood. Perhaps the fact that we never physically met played in my favour: I judged him by his work and nothing else. I admit he was quite amazing: he had something of the Pythons about him (once he quoted Schwarzenegger as The Terminator!), but no one can doubt he was a fervent admirer of Byron and an incomparable connoisseur of his works. I’m glad I had the chance to engage in a dialogue with such an extraordinary man.

Farewell Peter. I’ll never...