Thursday, Jan. 8, 1998 | 8:48 a.m.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, as anybody fascinated by the poet's eventful life will know, died in 1824 in the Greek town of Missolonghi during the Greeks' war for independence from Turkey. That fact has made Missolonghi a kind of geographical icon of the romantic imagination, immortalized, for example, in a painting by Delacroix.
But, as Stephen Minta writes in "On a Voiceless Shore," his meditation on the role that Greece played in Byron's life, Missolonghi is "the kind of town no famous man would ever die in, except through rotten luck or gross misjudgment."
Minta's vision of the town (which he spells Mesolongi) is typical of his approach to his subject. "On a Voiceless Shore" (the line comes from Byron's "Don Juan": "On thy voiceless shore/ The heroic lay is tuneless now") is part biography and part modern travelogue.
Most of all it is a rumination on the meaning of Byron's life, on the reasons for his self-exile, his loathing of Britain, the intensity of his erotic quests and the conflicting attractions of private sensuality and political engagement.
The plain fact is that so much has been written about Byron - most recently Phyllis Grosskurth's admirable biography, published last year - that it would be almost impossible for Minta to add much in the way of new information. But in his somewhat languid and elliptical fashion, he has drawn an evocative, impressionistic and sometimes puzzling portrait of the man and his times, reflecting as he does so on the various meanings of Byron's experience and its connection to his poetry.
Minta, whose last book, "Aguirre," was a reconstruction of a 16th-century journey across South America, takes a personal approach to his new subject. Fascinated, like Byron, by Greece and well traveled to other parts of the globe, he retraces Byron's steps, even crossing over into Albania, which Byron visited in 1809. He provides a fascinating historical account of Ali Pasha, the Albanian warlord who was host to the poet and his traveling companion, John Cam Hobhouse.
Minta clearly feels a powerful attachment to a Byron, a man he sees as a fellow wanderer. His essay is an effort to reach out and touch a spiritual brother.
"The fascination with life beyond the boundary is general in Byron. His sexuality was just one of a number of ways in which it was expressed," Minta writes at one point, giving expression to his central theme.
"The other side of this creative ambition was a deep self-destructiveness, one that often yielded to simple nihilism, but which drove him on in the end toward a kind of tragic crisis. Byron's life is constantly poised between these two alternatives: the indolence of despair, or the wild flight into action."
Minta, as he reinterprets Byron's life, always writes evocatively, suggestively, but he does not always provide a model of thematic clarity. He expresses a general dissatisfaction with others' views of Byron, but in the end his own interpretations, folded into the draperies of his episodic narrative, do not provide a clear alternative view.
This is the case, for example, as Minta treats the basic question: Why did Byron go to Greece in the first place? The conventional explanation is that Byron was rejecting cold and sexually repressive Britain for the heat of a place where he could indulge his avid sensuality, especially his taste for barely adolescent boys.
"The neatness is attractive," Minta says of this explanation, "but in the end looks unsustainable." Minta's own explanation for the pattern of Byron's life has to do with a deeper urge to transgress the accepted boundaries of pre-Victorian society, but, despite some interesting if cursory reflections on Byron's sexuality, Minta is less distant from convention on this matter than he seems to believe.
He establishes convincingly that it was in Greece that Byron first fulfilled his homoerotic yearnings, even though he was well aware of them before his departure from cold England.
But Minta stresses lines of poetry indicating that Byron tired of the "homosexual orgy of Athens" just as he tired of "heterosexual orgies" later. His conclusion is that sex alone was not what drove Byron but something else, "a desire to go beyond the accepted limits of his own culture."
"And the heart must pause to breathe/ And love itself have rest," was Byron expressing what Minta calls "the sadness of that labor-intensive existence."
After two years, Byron returned to England, gaining instant fame with the publication of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" in 1812. He married briefly, had a scandalous incestuous relationship with his half-sister and struggled with the financial problems that forced him to sell his estate. In 1816, he left England, never to return.
Byron had "exhausted all the conventional possibilities of belonging: family, marriage, country and reputation," Minta writes. "This time, there was no release, and the rest of his life was a drifting search for a home elsewhere, first through love, then, finally, through political action."
The political action, of course, came in Greece, where Byron lent his immense prestige to the cause of independence. Minta examines this episode with shrewdness and awareness, admiring Byron to the end but resisting the temptation to drape him in the robes of the romantic hero.
Minta's attempt to link the two Greek episodes - seeing the first one as a search for sensual liberty, the second as "that strange, obscure pursuit of freedom through others" - may violate this author's own warnings against "neat separations."
Still, his effort to see Byron whole is a valuable, often absorbing exercise in historical awareness, one that deepens our understanding of the poet himself and the more universal choices that he faced.
Publication notes:
ON A VOICELESS SHORE
Byron in Greece
By Stephen Minta
Illustrated. 292 pages. Henry Holt. $25.
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