How many people have to visit a celebrity’s grave every day to be able to consider that their work is still valid? Does the memory of Jim Morrison last longer for the fact that he was always well stocked with bottles of bourbon in his repose at Père-Lachaise than that of other dead people who no one visits?
On a frigid summer morning, we ask ourselves these questions as we enter the crypt where the poet Lord Byron is buried. The place is the beautiful but humble church of Saint Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, half an hour by car from the English city of Nottingham.
–Do you want to know how many people come to visit the grave each day? I couldn’t say… about five, more or less. That crown you see there is from the Greek government. The Greeks do always remember him. He already knows that he died at Missolonghi when he went to support them against the Turks. Once a year we organize a mass for Byron, but don’t think that many people come, no…
The kind parishioner who attends to the visitors points out on the ground the place from which the steps start that lead to the tiny pantheon in which the sarcophagi of Byron, of his daughter Ada Lovelace (mathematician and precursor of computing), his mother, other relatives and a child about whom we do not know and will never know anything.
The writer Thomas Gerrard Barber, author of the interesting book Byron and where he is buried (Hucknall Parish Church, 1939), participated in the last visit to the pantheon, in 1938. There he confirmed that, despite the rumors and finding the seal broken, the dead person buried in Byron’s sarcophagus is none other than Byron.
If anyone finds it striking that Ada Lovelace – whose bicentennial was celebrated with more global repercussion than that of her father – is buried in a burial ground where you cannot even leave flowers, you should know that the woman lives there by her own decision. Although she did not get to know her father and grew up in an environment, that of her mother, hostile to the poet, the truth is that she professed admiration for him.
The fact that they were both sensitive beings, party-goers, drinkers and had a creative love life helped establish that connection with the brilliant skull that was their father.
That is why, because of his unconventional private life, Byron is not buried in Westminster with his peers Browning, Kipling or Spenser, but in a small village lost in Nottinghamshire.
Neither in life nor in posterity was Byron among the best-selling authors, although his books continue to be republished and his Don Juan maintains the well-deserved status of a masterpiece. His validity, although based on his work, is rather due to his status as a celebrity ahead of his time.
Because Byron signed autographs for tourists who traveled expressly to see him on his Grand Tour and because, with the money he earned, he settled in majestic houses – there is his Venetian palazzo – surrounded by groupies and fans. Also because, in the presence of the chroniclers, he always exhibited his supposed complicity with the Evil One to enhance his romantic appearance, as if he had a PR giving him advice on how to give more clickable headlines.
Although it must be clarified that he did not convince everyone equally: a bold journalist, Lady Blessington, unmasked him in 1823 in her monumental Genoese interview Conversation of Lord Byron (Henry Colburn, 1834): “If it were not for the fact that Byron is a great poet, the charlatanry of feigning a satanic character, in this 19th century in which practicality prevails, would even be funny. But, if we take into account his genius, it is too ridiculous,” this chronicler wrote.
The truth is that the myth has survived to this day with its reputation as a sexual icon intact. Just look at the main activity that the Byron Society plans for the bicentenary of his death (it falls on April 19): an international conference titled nothing less than Provative
The symposium will be held in April at the magical Newstead Abbey, in the heart of the Robinhoodian forest of Sherwood, a must-visit place for anyone who wants to delve into Byron’s enigma. The abbey, in fact, is in itself an answer to one of the main mysteries that surround the sixth Lord: where did a poor devil born of a ruined mother and abandoned by a wasteful and quarrelsome father, the Captain John Mad Jack Byron?
To understand how he could suffer such a personality disorder, you have to leisurely tour the splendor of Newstead and put yourself in the place of a humble nine-year-old boy who, suddenly, inherits such a mansion and the title of Lord upon the death of his great-uncle.
Although the house was loaded with debt and he was never able to reform it to his liking, the poet’s apprentice was subjugated. Knowing that he had infinite lakes, caves to explore, paths that were lost in the forest, a labyrinth of majestic rooms, the ruins of the adjoining abbey and a cemetery with centuries-old corpses at his disposal made George Gordon Noel Byron suddenly consider himself a chosen among the chosen, the quintessence of the romantic hero.
Readings and talent made the poet, but the house made the madman with an excessive appreciation of himself.
Let’s not get angry with him. Something similar would have happened to anyone in his situation. A century and a half after Byron, other romantics, the Rolling Stones, experienced a similar metamorphosis. Shortly after starting to play in bars, those middle-class guys who were Jagger, Richards, Jones and company were already filthy rich and lived in decadent mansions that had little to envy of Newstead.
Jagger was more like Shelley than Byron, but no one can deny his emerging status as an egomaniacal, excessive and masterful Byronian.
But there is more. If the poet’s remains rest in Hucknall, Newstead, which is just ten kilometers away, houses an object that symbolized for him death seen as a rebirth, the ultimate romantic and melancholic ideal. The problem is that we don’t know exactly where.
To know what we are talking about, we have to go back to his youth, when the bold Byron dug in the old Newstead cemetery until he discovered a skull that could have belonged to a monk from the abbey. He not only preserved it, but commissioned a Nottingham jeweler to polish it and mount it on a stand like a wine glass.
He drank from it and on it he recorded a wonderful poem of his own: “I lived, I loved, I drank like you: / I died: let the earth claim my bones; / Full you cannot harm me; / The worm has dirtier lips than yours. / It is better to hold the sparkling grape / Than to nourish the slimy brood of the earthworm. / And in the shape of the cup enclose / The drink of the gods, than the food of the reptile.”
This romantic and macabre oddity that he shared with friends was left in the house, along with the furniture, when Byron had to sell it to his childhood friend Thomas Wildman to pay off debts. But it did not survive the next owners, the Webbs, who, horrified, reburied the skull around 1861. But where?
The writer Gerrard Barber maintains that a descendant of the Webbs confessed the exact location to him, but he promised not to reveal it. Did Gerrard take the secret to the grave or did he leave the location written down? It is only Byron’s penultimate enigma, but it certainly deserves investigation. The Byron Foundation suspects that it is not far from the Augustinian cemetery, where the poet would have unearthed it in his day. The original stand with a cast of the skull is now displayed in the abbey. Is not the same.
But perhaps the most consequential mystery of Newstead is where Byron’s study and library were located. It is believed that they occupied a small room overlooking the garden, but it is not known which one. Because, as the housekeeper told Washington Irving, the poet spent most of his stay in Newstead there reading books on a sofa, and not putting on bacchanals, as many believe.
This would be the last great revelation: his talent acquired through reading, so overshadowed by his extravagance.