Volume 10, Number 10 · May 23, 1968
Byronorama
By G.M. Matthews
The Missolonghi Manuscript
by Frederic Prokosch
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 338 pp., $5.95
Byron and the Ruins of Paradise
by Robert F. Gleckner
Johns Hopkins, 352 pp., $8.95
Ever since reading in the Thirties a delicately printed poem which mentioned that whales in their gigantic bliss lie trembling two by two, I have had some affection for Prokosch's writing, in which the juicily sensual and scatological are dispensed with literary sugar-tongs; and I found The Missolonghi Manuscript enjoyable in somewhat the same way as Danny Kaye's Hans Andersen. What an entertaining film that would have been, under any other title! If only Prokosch's book had been called Hans Andersen! A Preface validates the manuscript as having been stolen from the dying Byron, though it slyly concedes that the language often seems un-Byronic, the spelling modern, the 'visual precision quite at odds with his earlier manner.' Nonetheless the Manuscript is claimed to be 'in a subtle and secret and self-developing harmony' with the poet's earlier style, and to display 'the iridescent nature of a poet's own past when resuscitated and reinterpreted in the clear sad glow of an autumn solitude.' How very like Prokosch all the actors in this enterprise are! The original (when re-traced) will go to Byron's old college. So Trinity, Cambridge, may eventually get a bull to replace the bear which Byron kept there and hoped to enter for a Fellowship.
Review, 2488 words
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