Lord Byron Just Keeps Getting Gayer

FIONA MacCarthy has written the most important [Byron] biography in half a century, published by [John Murray], Byron's own publisher. Critics are not sure how to respond. Anne Barton in The New York Review of Books praises MacCarthy's "empathy with Byron" but deplores her "seeming lack of interest in poetry generally, and of Byron's in particular," finally admitting that the biography is "balanced, fair, thoroughly researched, and beautifully written." I think that Byron did like post-adolescent men, including big butch types. From 1816 onwards his immediate circle always included good-looking young men, who ranged from the servant to the upper class. Most important among the former was William Fletcher, who "was at Byron's side from 1804, when Byron was sixteen, almost without interval until his master died." According to a local woman, the young Byron had observed Fletcher plowing the fields on his estate, taken a fancy to him, and hired him for his household--first as a groom, and then as his valet. In 1809 Byron and Fletcher were travelling in Portugal, where they visited a monastery: "Fletcher complained that the `benevolent faced clergyman' had been teaching him Greek and kissing him." Byron and Fletcher may have been master and servant, but there was good-natured kidding back and forth between them, and friends regarded them as a couple. In his Recollections of the Last Days of [Percy Bysshe Shelley] and Byron (1848), Edward John Trelawny playfully refers to Fletcher as "Byron's yeoman bold"--a marvelously evocative phrase. (From the OED: "Yeoman: a youngman, a man in the service of, or in attendance upon, a person of high rank ... a lover, a male sweetheart.") At Byron's funeral, "Fletcher, who had been with Byron for so long, had to withdraw from the front ranks of the chief mourners, with whom in the commotion the servants were intermingled, to support himself against a pew in a paralysis of grief."