BOOKS:Byron in Love

Byron

Byron was a paradox__ beautiful, but deformed, spend thrift, but miser, lover of women but also of men, brilliant, but also childish, creative, but self destructive__in other word interesting. Today Byron is known more for his profligate lifestyle than his poetry. Edna O'Brien takes advantage of this voyeuristic fascination with Byron's life in her book, "Byron in Love A Short Daring Life." Byron's passion for both men and women developed early in his life and O'Brien chronicles a string of romantic encounters, punctuated by bouts of gonorrhea and poetic mania. She plays psychiatrist here concluding that Byron compensated for his deformed club foot with a string of homosexual relationships and heterosexual trysts__hmm, perhaps, the details are in book, the reader can be the judge. In the end Byron's life comes to one big profligate train wreck, dying of a fever while on a military adventure he had no business being on and leaving a string of broken relationships. The premise here is that all this randy behavior was the fuel for his poetic genius and inspiration for poems such as: "Manfred," "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" and "Don Juan." There are better biographies (see Byron), but this book is well written, interesting and fast paced__ in the end though it risks being a literary version of an "E-True Hollywood Story."