I recently read Irish novelist Edna O'Brien's short (and itself quasi-novelistic) 2010 biography of the great Romantic poet Byron in Love. While not adding wholly new dimensions to the classic Byron legend, nor demolishing any aspects of it, it nonetheless makes some of the features of that legend live again for a new generation of readers.
Two familiar features of Byron's life come through strongly in O'Brien's treatment. First: he was utterly abominable to many of the people around him, particularly those who most looked to him for care and support. And second: he surrounded himself, throughout his life, with wild, fierce animals.
Was he really all that bad to people? I'll be the first to look for extenuating circumstances and to cast doubt on the motives of his detractors. I admire Byron and want to believe that he was redeemed in the end by his art—or, failing that, his politics. But yes, he was in fact dreadful, particularly in the role of husband and father, no matter how much it has become a biographic cliché to say so.
The point at which one's willingness to tolerate or excuse Byron's behavior breaks down may vary by reader. In O'Brien's telling, perhaps the most heinous episode is his treatment of his second, illegitimate daughter Allegra, by Claire Clairmont (step-daughter to William Godwin and thereby step-sister to Mary Shelley née Godwin, O unhappy ménage!)
Not only was his Lordship a repulsively neglectful and self-involved parent to Allegra, he also—even more perversely—insisted on denying her the presence in her life of anyone who might have treated her with more care. Claiming exclusive rights of custody, Byron ignored letters from her mother Clairmont and refused the latter to see her daughter.
Yet, wholly uninterested in the child's wellbeing himself, he eventually pawned her off to a convent of nuns where she perished in 1822. In O'Brien's telling, his treatment of Allegra was enough to arouse the indignation of the more soft-hearted P.B. Shelley, who contemplated striking the other poet down but was unable to persuade him in the end to allow the child a visit from her mother.
Uninterested in the emotional compromises involved in dealing with other people, Byron was also, no less famously, a lover of animals—particularly those of the large and fierce variety. Throughout his life, he surrounded himself with beasts.
There were the multiple Newfoundland dogs he owned (and whose features and behavior, the more one learns about them, do not quite seem to resemble the large lovable family-friendly versions of the breed today). There was also a bear, which he had at Cambridge. Later, there was a monkey. Indeed, O'Brien observes, he seldom traveled without a menagerie in tow.
It may seem incongruous that someone who could be so blackhearted toward his human contemporaries would nonetheless maintain throughout his life a tender affection for animal kind. Yet, watching a now world-famous documentary Netflix series with my sister and brother-in-law this weekend has reminded me that this is perhaps not such an uncommon coupling of traits.
Like all the rest of the internet, it would seem, we have spent the past few days discovering the 7-part serial The Tiger King—from the team that brought you the Fyre Festival documentary, most famously. I don't know why exactly, but for some reason this was the show America needed in the age of social distancing. As my sister and I hypothesized: "It's something to care passionately about that isn't coronavirus."
The series delves into the astonishingly sordid details of the lives of America's dealers and exhibitors of big cats—as well as the curiously similar existences of the activists committed to bringing them down. Whether the show is simply manipulating us to see things a certain way is, as with all documentaries, certainly open to question. In any case, however, the series makes an intriguing implicit argument.
Four episodes in, the show's central theme appears to be that the big cat dealers and the big cat "rescuers" are locked in a perpetual dialectic with one another, in which each needs the other to give direction to their lives, and in which both come to mirror one another in their actions—even in their treatment of the cats.
Both sides ultimately hold animals in enclosures and exhibit them for money; both have vast teams of under-compensated and over-worked quasi-employees taking care of the beasts; both have messianic and narcissistic complexes and inspire a cult-like devotion, and both are vicious litigators with a barely-concealed potential for violence.
Put more simply, the show's theme is this: animal people are weird.
I recall hearing somewhere—I think on NPR—that sociopaths tend to have a love of animals, because animals give them the unconditional love they feel they are owned by all other humans. And while the subjects of the Tiger King series may not quite be sociopaths, they certainly suffer from some form of clinical narcissism or related disorder of the personality. I suspect much the same could be said of Byron.
Byron certainly concluded that he preferred animals to people, citing their higher degree of loyalty, in one of the greatest poems ever written. He makes a fair and accurate point.
But seen from another perspective—and viewed in light of his own highly disloyal treatment of the people around him—perhaps what Bryon is saying is this: that humans, unlike animals, cannot be trusted to obey one's commands. Humans, unlike animals, are not wholly in the power of oneself as a keeper and master. Humans, unlike animals, do not lavish unconditional affection on one; they do not celebrate one's arrival and the bare fact of one's existence, under all circumstances.
Relationships with humans, in short, require emotional compromise. They involve reciprocity. And while for many people this is simply an obvious fact of life, for the narcissist it is a constant source of frustration and outrage—a violation of the true and proper ordering of the social universe.
In our society presently, being an "animal lover" is almost universally regarded as a positive trait. Yet, while I do like dogs and other animals, I hope that I do not become the sort of person who prefers their company to members of my own species.
Human relationships are harder and more complex than those with the animals. But they make us better people, confronting us daily with the fact that the world was not built to serve our wishes and needs without question, that the Other exists and has the same rights and the same claims.
Perhaps we should put a higher premium, therefore, on those among us who consider themselves lovers of the human species as well as lovers of animals, and beware those who do not. "Let not the man who is beast come near me," as Louis MacNeice wrote, and perhaps we should add—same goes for the man who loves beast more than man.
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