Imposture, page 22
How often in the course of his life had Lord Byron threatened to end it! There was the misery of his foot – he used to hope that, in case of a general resurrection, he would rise up with a better pair of legs or be sadly left behind in the squeeze into Paradise. The misery of his ‘fathering, or rather, mothering’ as he put it – Mrs B was a vain, ugly, sagacious, adoring mockery of her son. Then the ordinary misery of his youth; it was a kind of game, among his college set, to boast of their intended suicides. The misery of his first literary reception: ‘Hours of Idleness’ had been fiercely greeted by the Edinburgh Review, a lashing to which Lord Byron often referred when consoling Polidori for the abuse heaped upon his own poetical specimens. The restless misery of a young man as he set off for the first time to explore the world, which was followed, on his return, by the settled misery of his marriage. And then the misery of that dark sin which was both the burden of all his verse and the unforgivable hope at the heart of it: the dream of selfless love, pure, free and equal, fraternal and generative at once – which he had found finally in his sister’s arms, which had been taken from him, which he had learned to do without. For though he talked of death, and played with pistols, and drank from skulls, something cowardly in Byron persisted in living; he hadn’t the courage that Polidori had. Polidori had discovered at last the one thing he would taste first-hand that the poet didn’t dare to, though he was sobbing childishly as he raised the glass to his lips. Esmé was banging on the door, and he imagined as he drank Lord Byron himself – as he had three years before at Diodati, after their row over the ghost-story – entering at the fatal minute, his arm stretched forth, his gesture expanding into an embrace.
Copyright © 2007 by Benjamin Markovits
First American edition 2007
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Markovits, Benjamin.
Imposture / Benjamin Markovits. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-393-32973-5 (pbk.)
1. Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788–1824—Fiction. 2. Impostors and imposture—Fiction. 3. Young women—England—London—Fiction. 4. London (England)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.A7543I47 2007
813’.6—dc22 2007004948
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Benjamin Markovits, Imposture
