Mad Bad and...

One can only imagine the tangle of grief and loss which engulfed Murray when Byron, suddenly, was dead of disease in Missolonghi. His guarding of memorabilia of his lost genius, and the destruction of those parts of his Lordship's legacy which for personal, and commercial reasdons, he did not care to contemplate, must both stem from that complex of feeling...as, perhaps, does the archive itself, the Murray's habit of keeping things, storing things, squirreling away letters and memorabilia, (an thus for the existence and extent of the archive itself) perhaps in some gesture of denial that for always, forever, and whatever else, however distinguished, crossed over the desk of the Murrays at 60 Albemarle Street, time stopped with one of their authors only, they were forever defined by one author only...the one Caroline Lamb called "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"

What I'm saying, trying to say, is that Byron's public self invention is an offered confidence to the reader, a gift of vulnerability...you KNOW me...it is saying. This provokes, clearly, in both unhappy intense Caroline Lamb, and solid, ambitious, business like John Murray, a wish to give of themselves in return...they want Byron to know them...but know him as versions of him...they define their best hope of his love as being mirrors of him in which he sees himself.

Again, a curious observation from yet another Byronic outsider from Pop Culture...Ken Kesey, he of The merry Pranksters and 'One flew over the Cuckoo's nest'...went to a Beatles concert, and listened to the screams and thought he heard what all those little girls, and boys, were screaming. Me.

One does not love the celebrity...one loves the feeling of loving them...one loves the experience of oneself...loving...

Between them, Byron and Murray invented celebrity, and Caroline Lamb fell victim to it. So...in a sense...did they.

Byron's body returned to England in July of 1824...and Caroline watched the parade...pretending to the last it was an accident, perhaps hoping to wring from serendipity a last connection to a meaning beyond that of two people who had a brief and painful affair. She wrote to Murray on the 13th of July
CAROLINE
Will you write and tell me every particular of what has passed since I saw you. Lord Byron's hearse came by our gates Yesterday. You may judge what I felt, Pray write to me
Ever your sincere friend
Caroline Lamb