Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
not indulge in cruel invective, yet normally he employs irony with an edge,
expressed in those beautifully balanced antitheses he was to employ even
more effectively in his later writings.
By far the most interesting to the modern reader is his relatively long
self-analysis "Inamorato L'Oiseaux," the essential truthfulness of which is
attested in diaries and letters. After several perceptive observations on his
amorousness or sexuality, his surface look of pride, his sincerity and frugality
and abstinence in food or drink, his perfectionism, and his conviction
that a taste for the company of ladies is necessary to prevent a scholar
being a mere pedant or a philosopher a cynic, he sums up in a serious vein.
Taken out of context these last observations may seem to make Byrd
pompous; in context they point up the whimsical irony of his attitude. All
together he shows a sophisticated introspection as indicative of his meditative
cerebration as any of the self-probings of the theologically centered
saints of New England.
Most of these "characters" seem to be more British than American in
subject and certainly in form, though in one of them Byrd refers to his
"Indian" way of expressing himself. But they were useful preliminary
exercises for the remarkably perceptive, ironic portraits he was to draw in
the prose of his great period, the American.
Over a period of perhaps twenty years, 1700-1719, Byrd composed light
vers de societe on the ladies who thronged to such watering places as Bath
and Tunbridge Wells. The surviving lines are gallant or mocking and
quite conventional. The nve- and eight-line pieces embedded in his letters
to "Facetia" are worth studying to determine their intention. But there can
be no doubt of the bawdy intent of "Upon a Fart," a burlesque of Anne,
Countess of Winchilsea' s "Upon a Sigh," both included in Byrd's letter to
Bellamira."
It was not known until 1939 that Byrd was a diarist at all, when the
discovery of one portion of his shorthand journal was announced. Since
this 1709-1712 section, two others have been decoded and printed, and
other portions may yet be discovered. As literary pieces per se Byrd's
diaries have little merit, for they are but thin segments of life, not the
rounded and relatively complete story represented by an autobiography or
a long and continuous diary, yet they are rich in historical value, and literarily
they offer excellent examples of the raw materials from which his more
finished "Histories" were derived.
Byrd's sense of humor never deserts him, though in the diaries it is
rarely as close to the surface as in most of his other writings. Cheating his
wife at cards and quarreling with her concerning her eyebrow plucking are
inherently comic situations, but Byrd's commentary is deadpan, as "got the
better of her, and maintained my authority." His curious dreams, faithfully