‘Collecting Byron: A Conference in Celebration of the Byron Society Collection’ Drew University, Madison, New Jersey 11-13 April 2014

Abstract

The mandate of the 'Collecting Byron' conference was double: to assemble Byron scholar-collectors and to celebrate the Byron Society of America's collection of Byroniana, books and ephemera now housed at the Drew University Library. In her accomplished introduction to the conference pamphlet, Marsha Manns, Co-Founder and Chair of the Byron Society of America, gives the history of the Byron collection at Drew and anecdotes regarding several of the donors, including Jackie Palmer and Michael Rees, now Brother Teilo. The conference was also the occasion of the ninth Leslie A. Marchand Memorial Lecture, given by Alice Levine (Hofstra). Twenty-two Byron scholars attended the conference, including the redoubtable Jack Gumpert Wasserman, who described his Byron Collection and his international adventures as a collector, as well as David McClay, Senior Curator of the John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, who offered many valuable insights into the history of this, the most important collection of Byron documents and MSS.Alice Levine's lecture suited the conference and invoked the legacy of Leslie A. Marchand most admirably. Since the publication of her critical edition of Byron's Poetry and Prose (Norton, 2010), Professor Levine has had to answer many times the question, 'Why didn't you include [insert your missing favourite here]?' Levine's lecture was a thoughtful answer to this question which she supplemented with a spreadsheet outlining which 'favourites' did make it into eight of the most recognised editions beginning with Swinburne's Moxon edition (1866) and including Auden's (NAL, 1966), McGann's (OUP, 2000) and her own. To the surprise of many in the audience, the most anthologised poem by Byron is not 'She Walks in Beauty' but rather 'On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year'. Levine gave many insights into the 'saga' of selecting the poems for her edition, a process which consumed two years of the nine-year project; and the second-guessing of her selections continues to haunt her. She admires Auden's edition because of his relish for Byron's satire and because he includes many of the letters. Following Auden's example, Levine reprinted 82 letters and several journal entries, many of which include shorter poems. An anecdote that Levine recounted is especially telling. She recalled seeing a framed version of Byron's 'Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull' in a friend's apartment. The fact that she and her friend shared an affection for the poem, albeit unknowingly, brought a fresh appreciation for the lines. One can't help but wonder how strongly and thoroughly the sharing of Byron's work informs this fine edition. The hardest choice of all was cutting Don Juan because digression is all; and without the narrative context for a 'hinge', the artifice of Byron's digressive art loses its copiousness and power.I was most struck by the strong representation of young Byron scholars from the USA and Canada. In his paper 'Let us look at them as they are: Lord Byron and Modern Greek Print Culture', Alexander Grammatikos (Carleton) gave a splendid analysis of Byron's changing attitudes to the Greece of the first Mediterranean Tour as exemplified in the notes appended to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II. Grammatikos is uniquely qualified to shed light on Byron's understanding of the Romaic language and print culture that Byron discovered at the end of 1809. He made the point that Byron wanted to look at the contemporary Greek writers 'as they are ' rather than as automatically subordinated to Classical Greek culture. Isaac Cowell (Rutgers) in his 'Byron as Collector of Failures and Improbabilities: Don Juan and the Problem of Hope', focused on Byron's use of'oppositional irony' whereby an apparent moment of frustration or 'deadweight' can produce a flicker of hope. Cowell used Don Juan, VIII, 96 and the dynamism of the shared 'dilated glance' between Juan and Leila to make his point. Byron often confronts the reader with an apparent paradox and then dares the reader to consider it. …