Quotes: Asimov's notes (1972) to Byron's "Don Juan" (1819-24)

 

Asimov’s annotated Don Juan

 

Text by Lord Byron

Notes by Isaac Asimov

 

Doubleday, Hardback, 1972.

4to. [vi]+1153 pp. Dedication by the author [v]. “Byron: A Short Biography” [1-9]. Index to annotations [1139-53]. Illustrated by Milton Glaser. First Edition.

 

Editor’s Note. In bold, reference to the poem; Roman numbers for cantos, Arabic ones for stanzas and lines, e.g. IV.12.8 stands for Canto IV, stanza 12, line 8; D = Dedication. The annotated line (or part of it) is quoted in italics. If the note refers to several lines, only the last is given; the classic Coleridge edition (1903) may be conveniently consulted in such cases. In round brackets at the end, number of the note in question. The notes are occasionally abridged, and typos fixed (e.g. “frame” in No. 21), silently. Editorial additions to the notes are inserted in square brackets and marked with “Ed.”.

 

D.1.1: Bob Southey! You’re a poet – Poet-laureate (4, 5)

Robert Southey (1774–1843) was an English poet whose success far outstripped his talents. His best-known poems today remain The Battle of Blenheim composed in 1798 and The Inchcape Rock written somewhat later. Neither is very important. Byron hated him with a fervor that seemed but to increase with time (the hate was returned) and Don Juan is dedicated to him with savage irony.

The poet laureate is a court official appointed by the British Prime Minister. The poet laureate (“laureate” means decked with laurel and therefore honored, for in ancient Greece it was the custom to grant the winners at the Olympian games wreaths of laurel leaves) was supposed to write odes in honor of the monarch on his birthday and to celebrate other official occasions in similar fashion.

The poet laureate was by no means assuredly the best poet in the nation, for there were many who would be considered ineligible because their political views were unsuitable or their poetry unedifying. And the best poets often did not want a post which they viewed as that of the government’s tame poetic spaniel.

Nevertheless, the post brought in a little money and a great deal of prestige (with the non-poetic public) and, officially at least, the poet laureate might be considered the chief of British poets (hence “representative of all the race”).

Southey was the twelfth official poet laureate, having accepted the post in 1813, five years before this dedication was written. Byron had only contempt for the man and for the post, but that did not mean that he did not chafe at the fact that the public generally, in awe of the post, were consequently impressed by the man.           

 

D.1.3: Although ‘tis true that you’d turn’d out a Tory at (6)

The Tories were the conservative party of the nation (and modern Conservatives in Britain are still often referred to as Torries). They were the spokesmen of the landed gentry, of the established Church, of the Crown. In short, they represent what we would today call the Establishment.

Southey, in his youth, had been caught up (like many other young Englishmen of the time) in the revolutionary fervor that accompanied the French Revolution of 1789. With age, however, Southey became steadily more conservative and eventually became a pillar of the Tories and one of their most dependable spokesmen. In this respect, he was like a number of other literary figures who had been revolutionaries in their youth but who had hardened and yellowed with age and prosperity, so that Southey’s change had “lately been a common case.” Byron, who remained revolutionary and bitterly anti-Establishment to the end of his days, felt self-righteously superior    to those he considered traitors to their youthful ideals, and his contempt for them knew no bounds.   

 

D.3.8: A fall, for lack of moisture a dry, Bob! (12)

“A dry Bob” seems to have been then-current slang for intercourse without ejaculation (“lack of moisture”). The use of the phrase shocked and (of course) titillated the public and was a particularly effective way indicating that Southey went through the motions of writing poetry without producing anything poetic.

 

D. 4.1: And Wordsworth, in a rather long “Excursion” (14)

Although many of Wordsworth’s youthful poems are first-class, he wrote himself out by the time he was forty, and the last half of his long life shows only occasional flashes of power. His long poem The Excursion, published in 1814, shows none of them and was almost entirely pedestrian. Nevertheless, Wordsworth lived to succeed Southey as a poet laureate in 1843, something that would have stirred Byron’s profoundest disgust, had he lived to see it.

 

D.4.6: And may appear so when the dog-star rages (15)

The “dog-star” is Sirius, the brightest star in the sky (so-called because it is in the constellation Canis Major, or Great Dog). It rises close to dawn during the months of July and August and, in ancient times, was thought to radiate a significant quantity of heat, thus making those months particularly hot. This is not so, of course, but the hottest part of summer is still referred to as the “dog days.” Since great heat can induce sunstroke and can, even short of that, make anyone snappish and unreasonable, men were supposed to be more likely to go mad during the dog days. Hence Byron’s comment implies that only madmen would consider Wordsworth’s Excursion to be poetry.

 

D.5.8: Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for ocean (18)

Byron had traveled all over Europe (and was indeed, at the time he wrote this, living in Venice in permanent exile from his native land). He could not help sneering at the Lake poets for their narrow provincialism as compared with himself.

 

D.7.7: Scott, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe (20-22)

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was a Scottish poet whose success came with The Lay of the Last Minstrel, published in 1805, which contains the great set of patriotic lines that begins “Breathes there a man with soul so dead…” Byron wrote satirically at Scott’s expense in his youth, but the good-natured Scott returned pleasant words for unkind ones, and in the end they were good friends even though Scott was, and remained, a Tory. Scott was lame from an attack of poliomyelitis in babyhood and this may have helped endear him to the self-consciously clubfooted Byron. Scott was offered the laureateship on the death of Pye but he refused it, something which also counted in his favor as far as Byron was concerned.

Samuel Rogers (1763–1855) was quite a second-rate poet, whose only literary fame came with the publication of The Pleasures of Memory in 1792. The phrase “Not dead, but gone before,” seen on many a tombstone now, is his. He was a kindly gentleman who gave good parties, was financially generous to other poets, and was a friend of Byron’s. He lived long enough to be offered the laureateship on Wordsworth’s death but refused it, and no doubt the shade of Byron approved.

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) was a Scottish poet who wrote patriotic verse (Ye Mariners of England, 1800) and ballads (Lord Ullin’s Daughter, 1804). He was, and remained, a liberal, not only supporting the French Revolution, but also denouncing the partition of Poland and inveighing against Negro slavery. He received a pension from the Crown in 1803, but apparently Byron didn’t mind that. He and Rogers (see note 21) were about the only contemporary British writers never to suffer shafts of Byronic satire.       

 

D.7.8: ‘Gainst you the question with posterity (26)

The result of the trial would not have pleased Byron, alas. None of the poets named in this verse, despite Byron’s approval, were destined to compete with Wordsworth and Coleridge in the eyes of posterity, though Scott at least probably transcends Southey.

 

D.8.5-8: Is not the certain path to future praise (28)

It is obvious that Byron emphatically does not follow his own advice, but then few people do.

 

D.11.8: The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh (34)

Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769–1822), was Foreign Secretary from 1812 to 1822. In the years following Waterloo, he kept Great Britain on the side of those Continental monarchies who attempted to crush the forces of liberalism in Europe. This made him anathema to the English liberals, and no one was more vivid in execrations against him than Byron was. He was also identified with repressive policies at home.

Byron’s phrase “intellectual eunuch” is double-barreled. He might well be impugning Castlereagh’s intelligence and it is true that Castlereagh was a bad orator and therefore sounded stupid at times. The phrase might refer more literally to a real or fancied hyposexuality, for through his long marriage of thirty-five years, Castlereagh had no child. This second implication is reinforced by Byron’s deliberate use of “its” for “his” in the succeeding verses.

 

D.15.1-5: Eutropius of its many masters (40)

Here again, the matter of the “intellectual eunuch” is brought up, for Castlereagh’s mind is “emasculated to the marrow.” Eutropius was a eunuch, literally, who served as a minister to the East Roman Emperor Arcadius from 395 to 398. His reputation in history was that of a vile and corrupt intriguer and he came to a bad end, being executed in 399. (Castlereagh also came to a bad end, perhaps even more tragic, four years after these words written. Byron could not know that now – though he might hope.)

 

I.1.6: I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan (48)

Don Juan is an “ancient friend” because he was a well-known figure out of Spanish folklore. He first received recognized literary presentation in a drama El Burlador de Sevilla, written in 1630 by the Spanish dramatist Gabriel Téllez (who wrote under the pseudonym Tirso de Molina).

In the original folk tale, Don Juan was the epitome of the licentious man, who aspired (usually successfully) to make love to every woman he met, and who did so with utter disregard for any law. The climax of his story is his liaison with a noblewoman and its consequences. He kills the woman’s father in a duel. The father is buried and an effigy of him is placed over the tomb. Don Juan, seeing that effigy, mockingly invites it to dinner. The stone figure duly arrives at the meal and drags the rake and blasphemer to Hell.

Various versions of this legend had already appeared in Spain and elsewhere by Byron’s time. Moliere had written a play on the theme and Mozart, an opera. Byron, with no compunction whatever, utterly alters the plot in his own version. In fact, all that Byron leaves of the traditional Don Juan, is his name and birthplace; nothing more! Don Juan’s character is utterly changed. From a heartless blasphemer, seducer, and libertine (as the world viewed Byron), he becomes an innocent, far more sinned against than sinning (as Byron viewed himself).

[Mozart’s opera, using the Italian version of the name, Don Giovanni, also altered the title character a great deal, although nowhere near as much as Byron did. Mozart’s Don Juan is creature of heroic defiance and tragic depth, far removed from the usual lecher and blasphemer. Bernard Shaw later made fun of Byron’s character in the “Epistle Dedicatory” to his Man and Superman (1903), but in the play itself he was content to borrow silently Byron’s innovation of Don Juan, not as the pursuer, but as the pursued. Ed.]

 

I.2.1-2: Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe (50, 51, 56)

Edward Vernon (1684–1757) was an English admiral who wore a grogram cloak (one woven of coarse silk) in bad weather and was consequently called “Old Grog”. He was the first to issue rations of rum and water to the crew. Diluted liquor, and then liquor of any kind, came to be known as “grog” in sailor slang.

William Augustus (1721–1765), a son of George II of Great Britain and an uncle of George III, was created Duke of Cumberland in 1726. In 1745 he headed the British forces fighting off the last Stuart attempt to regain the throne. On April 16, 1746, he defeated the Scottish adherents of “Bonnie Prince Charlie” at Culloden, then pursued and crushed the fleeing rebels with sufficient cruelty to wipe out Stuart hopes forever and to earn for himself the nickname “the butcher”.

John Burgoyne (1722–1792) is best remembered (particularly in the United States) for the defeat of his army and his surrender of Saratoga, New York, in 1777. This was the turning point of the American Revolution.

[Burgoyne is also a witty and memorable character from Bernard Shaw’s play The Devil’s Disciple (1896). He was beautifully portrayed by Laurence Olivier in the 1959 movie. Ed.]  

 

I.7.3-4: Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning (88)

The reader will not be long in discovering that while writing these two lines, Byron has his fingers firmly crossed.

 

I.8.1-4: So says the proverb – and I quite agree (90)

The proverb is Quien no ha visto Sevilla, no ha visto maravilla. A free translation, keeping the internal rhyme, would be “To miss Seville is to miss a thrill.”

 

I.9.2-3: Of Moor or Hebrew blood, he traced his source (94)

The word hidalgo meaning, literally, “son of something” implied that a person was of honorable descent and could therefore use “Don” before his name. Since parts of Spain had been under the domination of the Moors for seven centuries, and since during that time, the Jews had made up a strong and prosperous minority, in the Moorish portions at least, there had been interbreeding between the native Christian Spaniards and the others. It was a point of honor among the Spanish nobility of later times that no Moors or Jews were to be found in their ancestry.

 

I.9.4: Through the most Gothic gentlemen of Spain (95)

Before the invading Moors conquered Spain in 711, Spain had for three centuries been under the rule of a Gothic tribe called the Visigoths. To be able to trace one’s ancestry beyond the Moorish era to the Visigoths themselves would, of course, be the last word in Spanish nobility.

 

I.10.1-2: For every branch of every science known (96)

Byron, who valued women for parts other than their brains, detested female intellectuals. This feeling of his was strengthened, broadened, deepened, and intensified by the fact that Lady Byron (nee Annabella Milbanke) with whom he had contracted a brief and disastrous marriage, followed by an even more disastrous (for Byron) separation that led to his permanent exile, was a “learned lady.” There seems no question but that Byron’s picture of Don Juan’s mother is intended as a satire on Lady Byron.  

[It is true enough that Byron detested female intellectuals. He wrote a whole satirical poem, The Blues (1823), dedicated to them. But he could and did appreciate a few women for non-physical characteristics, if not for their brains, certainly for their personalities and common sense. The most notable example is Lady Melbourne with whom Byron maintained fantastically frank correspondence. “I have no very high opinion of your sex,” he wrote to her on 25 September 1812, “but when I do see a woman superior not only to all of her own but to most of ours, I worship her in proportion as I despise the rest”. Ed.]

 

I.14.8: The English always use to govern d—n (103)

In Byron’s time it was customary to leave “damn” unspelled out to avoid trouble with the censor. Obviously, the inclusion of two letters and the necessity of rhyme makes the word unmistakable, but censorship is characteristically concerned with form rather than with reason.

 

I.25.2: And mischief-making monkey from his birth (114)

In the entire epic there is only one event that can be dated and that is the siege of Izmail in Cantos VII and VIII. This took place in 1790 and in Juan was then eighteen, as he might have been, he would have been born in 1772. However, Byron pays no attention to dates at all, and it is enough to know that the time of the poem is pre-Napoleonic but not much so.

 

I.44.1-8: Which saves, in fact, the trouble of an index (133)

This sounds unbelievable, but there was indeed such an edition published in Amsterdam in 1701, and it offers a particularly fine example of that odd phenomenon, the mind of the censor.

 

I.47.7: As Saint Augustine in his fine Confessions (137)

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430), or St. Augustine, was converted in his early thirties. He led the usual youthful life of a fourth-century pagan of good family (not nearly as bad as the usual youthful life of a nineteenth-century Christian of good family) and described his youth with candor in his later Confessions, perhaps the greatest autobiography of ancient times.

 

I.49.4: As e’er to man’s maturer growth was given (138)

Don Juan now becomes Byron’s idealized version of himself. Byron, who was extremely handsome, went through tortures of dieting to preserve his figure and secretly curled his hair as well. Of course, he had a clubfoot – which Juan does not have.

 

I.51.3: I knew his father well (139)

Here is the “Spanish Gentleman” speaking again. Still, since Don José was so close a picture of Byron as a married man, the poet might be said to have known him well.

 

I.54.5: Him almost man; but she flew in a rage (143)          

Since Don Juan is now Byron’s idealization of himself, Donna Inez takes on some of the characteristics of Byron’s mother; a much ill-used woman who was given to tantrums and rages that were a large factor in making Byron’s childhood hideous.

 

I.56.5: When proud Granada fell (146)

By 1232 the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain had extended their power over almost the whole of the peninsula. Left in Moorish hands was only a small section of southern Spain centered around the city of Granada. This kingdom of Granada maintained itself for two and a half centuries, not capitulating to the combined power of Castile and Aragon till 1492.

 

I.56.6: Boabdil wept (147)

Abu-‘Abdullah (called Boabdil by the Spaniards) was the last King of Granada. When defeated in 1492 and forced to cross over into Africa, he paused on a hill outside Granada to look one last time at the city which had been Moorish for nearly eight centuries. The spot from which he looked back is called “El Último Suspiro del Moro” (The Last Sigh of the Moor), and as he wept, his mother said harshly, “You do well to weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man.”

 

I.56.7: Some went to Africa, some stay’d in Spain (148)

One of the terms of the surrender of Granada was that Moors who remained in Spain would be accorded freedom of worship. The Christian zeal of the Spanish priesthood in succeeding decades made the promise a mockery. By 1525 the Moors were forced either to convert or to leave. Even the converted Moors remained suspect, however, and were constantly hounded under the suspicion of being secretly Mohammedan and in league with the African states south of the Mediterranean.

Finally, in 1609, they were forced out of Spain and the country lost nearly a million of its most industrious and capable citizens, serving thus its own ruin. By then, however, there had been numerous intermarriages and many Spaniards could find traces of Moorish ancestry – if they looked.

 

I.79.5: Platonic, perfect, “just such love as mine” (156)

“Platonic” love is the ideal love described by Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, spiritual rather than physical, inspired by the loved one’s character and virtue, rather than by mere bodily beauty.

 

I.104.4: As e’er held houri in that heathenish heaven (164)

A houri was a nymph who was imagined by Moslems to exist in Heaven for the delectation of the faithful. Houris were ever-beautiful and ever-willing, yet managed to be ever-virginal as well as (if they desired) ever-fruitful. No mentioned is made of intelligence.

 

I.132.8: Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo (190)

The battle of Waterloo, fought on June 18, 1815, was, in Byron’s time, and for a century after, a kind of military watershed. It was the battle at which Napoleon’s power had been broken once and for all, and the battle at which Great Britain’s military prestige reached its all-time high point. Byron view Waterloo as a defeat, however, for by it the reactionary monarchs of Europe were enabled to turn the clock back and erase the advances toward freedom begun by the French Revolution.

 

I.149.1-3: Did not his countryman, Count Corniani (194)

There was indeed a Count Giambattista Corniani (1742–1813) of this period, but he was a harmless historian of Italian literature and is surely not referred to here. Probably the name is used as a play on cornuto, the Italian word for “cuckold.” The name, Cazzani, two lines before may be a play on the Italian vulgarism cazzo, meaning “penis.”

 

I.150.4: I wonder in what quarter now the moon is (195)

The moon was thought to induce madness at certain times. In fact, the word “lunacy” is from luna, the Latin word for the moon.

 

I.194.1: Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart (205)

This is one of the most famous passages in the poem. Few of those who quote it, in season and out, know it is from Don Juan or even that Byron wrote it.

[Presumably the whole stanza is meant. Ed.]

 

I.205.1: Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope (210)

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was an English poet, undersized and deformed (but with giant wit and intelligence), who wrote mock-heroic epics such as The Rape of the Lock in 1712. He wrote almost entirely in couplets and was, of all English poets, the only one who may have been Byron’s superior in the savagery of his wit. Byron admired Pope more than any other poet and Byron’s first satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) was a deliberate, and effective, piece of writing in the style of Pope.

 

I.206.1: Thou shalt not covet Mr. Sotheby’s Muse (211)

William Sotheby was a minor literary figure whom Byron disliked. He believed Sotheby to have been the author of an anonymous and unfavorable review condemning Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon. The surest way to worm one’s self into Byron’s disfavor was to criticize his poetry (something in which Byron closely resembles all other literary figures I have ever heard of).

 

I.206.3: Thou shalt not bear false witness like “the Blues” (212)

The “Blues” (short for “bluestockings”) are the learned ladies whom Byron abhors. The one referred to in the next line in very likely Lady Byron.

 

II.26.7: For the sky show’d it would come on to blow (234)

Much of the second canto is taken up with the gruesome details of shipwreck. Byron got many of those details from a book Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea by Sir G. Dalzell, published in 1812. His borrowing extended to even such small details as the fact that ships’ pumps were manufactured by “Mr. Mann of London” (see three stanzas further on). Byron thought it better in such cases to be accurate by borrowing than to be creative at the cost of absurdity. He takes the same attitude in later cantos to in connection with the siege of Izmail.

 

II.105.8: Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did (257, 258)

Leander, the hero of a romance that appears first in Ovid, was native of Abydos, a city on the Asian side of the Hellespont. He was in love with Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite in Sestos, a town on the European side. Leander swam the Hellespont every night to be with Hero, guided by a light she placed in her window. One stormy night the light was blown out; Leander lost his way and was drowned. When his dead body was washed ashore, the grief-stricken Hero plunged into the waters to her own death. For many centuries readers wept over the sad tale.

Like many a person who suffered a physical handicap, Byron over-compensated. He played cricket well, learned to box, fence, and shoot, and was an excellent swimmer. In 1810, while he was touring the east, the frigate Salsette was carrying him to Constantinople. He decided to try to repeat Leander’s feat. On his second try, on May 3, he managed to swim from Sestos to Abydos in one hour and ten minutes. Allowing for the current, he may have swum four miles. Lieutenant William Ekenhead of the frigate swam the course with him. Byron was proud of this feat and managed to mention it frequently in his writings. (A year before, he had swum across the Tagus River at Lisbon, a more difficult feat, but lacking in classical associations.) Byron suggested that Leander could scarcely have been in the mood for love after an hour or more in the cold current. (The same thought occurred to me, quite independently, years ago.)

[The sentence between the two couples of brackets probably refers to a letter Byron wrote to Henry Drury on the very same day of his swimming stunt. Having boasted of it, he observed that the currents make the stunt dangerous, “so much so that I doubt whether Leander’s conjugal affection must not have been a little chilled in his passage to Paradise.” The letter is reprinted abridged in Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Peter Gunn, Penguin [1972], 1984. pp. 53-4; and complete in a collection with the same title edited by Leslie Marchand, John Murray, 1982, pp. 34-8. Six days later, Byron completed a famous poem about the event.]

 

II.137.8: To those related in my grand-dad’s “Narrative” (267)

Byron’s “grand-dad” was John Byron (1723–1786). He was called “Foul-weather Jack” since he encountered more storms in his nautical career than one had a right to expect. In 1741 he was on board one of the ships under the command of Capitan George Anson (1697–1762), who was on a voyage of circumnavigation of the earth. Anson successfully completed his trip, but the ship on which John Byron sailed, the Wager, was wrecked off the shores of Chile. Byron went through a series of horrors but ended in safety on Chilean soil, only to land in a Spanish prison there. He was finally released and returned to England in 1745.

He eventually wrote up the story of his grisly adventures, publishing it in 1768 under an enormously long title usually abbreviated to its second word Narrative. Don Juan’s hardships were indeed comparative to “grand-dad’s” since Byron borrowed liberally from his grandfather’s book. It was John Byron, for instance, who, like Juan, had to eat the forepaw of his own spaniel (see Stanza LXXI of this canto).

In 1764 John Byron led a fleet of his own in a two-year circumnavigation of the world and in 1779 fought on the British side of the naval battles involved in the American Revolution. In the last-mentioned year he ran into one of the worst Atlantic hurricanes on record, as befitted one called “Foul-weather Jack.”

 

II.201.8: Some play the devil, and then write a novel (292)

This is a clear reference to the half-mad Lady Caroline Lamb, who had carried on a frenzied affair with Byron in 1812, one from which the poet had only with the greatest difficulty extricated himself. She pursued him shamelessly thereafter and on May 9, 1816, after Byron had left England, she vengefully published a perfectly terrible novel, Glenarvon, in which she idealized herself and made Byron look considerably worse than he was. The fact that it openly described the details of their affair (she even included the letter Byron had written her breaking it off, with changes introduced to make him look like a cad) made it a sensation and Byron’s enemies were jubilant.

Lady Caroline, misled by the success of Glenarvon, thought she was a writer and over the next seven years published two other novels which easily attained oblivion.