For Thee the Best

THE dust jacket of this novel announces that Lord Byron “occupies the center of the stage, and it even carries a reproduction of Count d’Orsav’s sketch to prove it, but the reader who looks for another contribution to the literature of Byronism here will find himself in strange company. Mr. Aldanov has written a study of post-Napoleonic Europe, where the hopes ol liberalism and the ambitions of conservatism were dying out in a welter of suspicion, ineptitude, and disillusionment. It was a disorganized period, and For Thee the Best is a disorganized book.

The novel begins when Byron attends a meeting of the Venetian Carbonari and listens to a report on Turkish atrocities in Greece. It ends five years later at Missolonghi. During those five years, we know that Byron wrote a great deal, had trouble with his publisher, was hounded by the Italian police, founded an unsuccessful magazine and quarreled about it with Leigh Hunt. His daughter Allegra and his friend Shelley died.

Mr. Aldanov ignores these matters. Instead, he introduces the heads of half the governments of Europe, skipping all over the map to do it. The presentation of the weary, worried statesmen in London and Vienna, men personally well-meaning but frequently vicious in their policies, is uncommonly persuasive. The small-time professional spy who lumbers through the book, working for whatever foreign office will pay him best, is a fine illustration of the seamier side of world politics, and the most human character in the novel.

But these people have no relation to the story of Byron, and Byron’s connection with the didos of high diplomacy remains vague. The Master-of-the-Moon, for such is the title of the incompetent sleuth, is evidently designed to serve as a link between the great world of kings and statesmen and the underground stirrings of republicanism which culminate in Byron’s expedition to liberate Greece. The link is weak, however, and the book falls apart into disparate episodes.

If the picture of Byron were convincing, his character would probably hold the story together in spite of its sprawling construction. It does not do this, because Mr. Aldanov treats his Lordship with too much respect. He presents an intelligent, cynical gentleman, bored with his mistress and the literary life, who undertakes a military role without any real belief that good will ensue.

There is not a trace in this amiable creature of the irritability, the wit, the teasing humor, the uncertain arrogance, the exasperating inconsistency, to which a host of Byron’s enemies, and most of his friends, have testified. Only at the end, when he is seen, through the eyes of the flustered little spy, less as an individual than as a symbol of all the courageous, inexperienced amateurs who make revolutions, does Byron become a living figure.

Although it is impossible to see any pattern in the incidents strung together by Mr. Aldanov, all of them are written with great skill and several are brilliant fusions of history, imagination, and ironic wit. The Duke of Wellington’s dinner party, for instance, where the host struggles simultaneously with the King’s boredom and the increasingly obvious madness of his friend Castlereagh, is a small masterpiece.

Mr. Aldanov writes of these people as if he had met them once and judged them shrewdly, but not as if he understood them deeply or eared for them at all. He can make the tangle of misunderstanding and absurdity among the minor officers at Missolonghi ring true, or the relatively uncomplicated Wellington, but Lord Byron eludes him.

PHOEBE LOU ADAMS