Don Juan

BYRON -- Andre Maurois -- Appleton ($5).

Author Maurois' Ariel, the life of Shelley, suave, brief, delicately ironic, set a new style in biography. So great was Ariel's success and that of the similar Disraeli that readers might have expected Maurois to treat Shelley's friend and fellow-poet in the same style. But no miniature in enamel is this orthodoxly lengthy, appendixed, annotated biography of Byron. Says Author Maurois: "This is the first life of Byron written since a large amount of new material has become available . . . all the family papers ... the copy of Moore's Life of Byron annotated by Hobhouse. . . ." Maurois' new material goes chiefly to show that the half-hushed scandal of Byron's life was true: though scholars quarrel still about whether or not the poet committed incest with his half-sister, Maurois believes he did, thinks the evidence incontrovertible, regards it as no great crime.

On March 10, 1812, George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron, awoke in London to find himself famous, not because he was young (24), handsome, aristocratic, but because he had written the first two Cantos of Childe Harold. London's drawing rooms and boudoirs were invitingly opened to him; all the ladies wanted to meet the new poet; some to love him. Byron declared he never seduced a woman: "the easiness of female virtue remained something truly astonishing for him." When he married Annabella Milbanke, friends hoped he would settle down; instead, on his honeymoon he took his wife to visit Mrs. Augusta Leigh, his half-sister, and when they went to London Augusta came to stay with them. Byron was "Duck" to his wife; to his half-sister, "Baby." His marriage lasted only a year: reports of the separation together with his publication of some violently pro-Bonaparte verses, so changed public opinion against him that he decided to leave England forever.

The exiled Byron spent the last seven years of his life in Italy; made Venice notorious by his presence. After his final affair, with Italian Countess Guiccioli, he went to Greece to help in the war for independence against the Turks. In swampy, feverish Missolonghi, before he had fired a shot for Greece, he died. It was no surprise to him, for a fortune-teller had long since prophesied he would die in his 37th year: superstitious, he believed her. Fishermen at Missolonghi still talk about him.. Ignorant that he was a poet, they say: "He was a very brave man--he came to die for Greece because he loved freedom."

Of only medium height, tending to fat, with one foot lame from birth, thick red-dish-brown hair, blue-grey eyes, classic features, Poet Byron looked the part only when he dieted, which he did sporadically. Fond of boxing, fencing, he played for Harrow against Eton in the 1805 cricket match, was a famed swimmer. He swam the Hellespont (three miles) on the second attempt.

Author Maurois' other books: Colonel Bramble, Mape: the World of Illusion, Captains and Kings, Bernard Qnesnay, Disraeli, A Voyage to the Island of the Articoles, Aspects of Biography, Atmosphere of Love.

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