Reflections on Lord Byron’s Childe Harold

I recently finished a novel. In Eileen McHugh, A Life Remade, I created a character named Alice, a retiring art teacher, as the main character’s sculpture teacher during her first year as an art student. The book’s structure called for the story, set in the 1970s, to be told by contemporary survivors from today’s perspective. Alice would not have lived until now, so I passed responsibility for her character to her son, a physics professor at a university in the north of England. She had already decided on the last name of the artistic household in which her son grew up. He was, by chance, Childe. These two artist fathers, one three-dimensional, the other two, would no doubt have chosen a one-dimensional name for their son, so I named him Harold, Harold Childe. That was a joke.

Then a few days later I heard a performance of Harold in Italy, Berlioz’s Viola Concerto in all but name. Somewhere in this drug-fuelled romanticism was an account, or perhaps a mere reflection, of Byron’s Childe Harold’s travels in Italy. It occurred to me that I should reread the poem. I first read it when I was the age my character, Eileen McHugh, was in her art school. Now he could remember almost nothing about it.

It is a heroic poem by Lord Byron, similarly fueled by drugs, written in stanzas of nine lines, eight pentameters followed by the final Alexandrine. It rhymes ABABBCBCB, which means that five lines in each stanza rhyme in the traditional way. In it, our eponymous hero traverses the Mediterranean by sea, if linguistically possible, and visits many places where an art education might recall the classical allusion. Throughout the journey, he calls upon places with millennia of evident history and proceeds to display much of what he knows, all learned within the confines of a private English education. Child Harold remains obsessed with himself, always eager to put his own responses at the forefront of his thoughts, often despite external stimulation. But that’s romanticism, isn’t it? And hadn’t he just written about Eileen McHugh, a 1970s concept artist imagining the meaning of everything she could choose to juxtapose?

Some years ago I wrote a novel that attempted a loose parody of Don Quixote. It was called In Search of Donald Cottee. I’m the person who wrote it, so you won’t be surprised by my estimate of success. I was especially proud of my update on the Cuevas de Montesinos episode. I began to wonder how Byron’s Harold could be parodied some 200 years after his conception.

So instead of revisiting Childe Harold, which probably has been done, what I offer here is a parody plan that may never be written. The first two verses, for me, if experienced today, would be a Mediterranean cruise. Let’s not experience much first hand, but enjoy letting ourselves spend a couple of hours in the protected area of ​​some famous, visited, historical place, as specified in the brochure. One journal, kept by our cruise ship, written in verse, is Childe Harold 2020, with sections copied from brochures handed out on day trips ashore. It is not Childe Harold’s or any other passenger’s reflections on the experience that constitute the gist, but rather quotes from the tourist notes provided to anyone who has paid for the tour.

The last verses travel inland. How we got from A to B is largely unknown, but Byron rarely deviates from the Grand Tour. In contemporary terms. Surely it is a bus trip, a group of 50 people of those who march, chattering, in front of the wonders of Neapolitan art in Capodimonte, to be lectured aloud in front of the Caravaggio, in Milan they ignore the Brera to marvel at the peeling of The Last Supper. Plaster and congregations surround the copy of David in front of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. I think I’m kidding. But Naples is too dirty to walk, isn’t it?

What interests me in 2020 is the fact that the coronavirus pandemic would make cruise and bus travel quite difficult to do. The barriers are obvious and I won’t even try to list them. So how would Childe Harold 2020 manage to suffer his cascading emotional paroxysms?

Online, that’s how. Webcams, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Airb’n’b reviews, restaurant reviews complete with apologetic comments from the owner about service, here’s how our closing 2020 Childe Harold might play the viola of him. Imagine retirees cooped up at home. Where did you go today dear? I took a walk through the Uffizi. He ignored the shit. I just watched the Canalettos. Read about them too. Views of Venice, apparently. The poem will be epic.