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THE MISSOLONGHI MANUSCRIPT by Frederic Prokosch

THE MISSOLONGHI MANUSCRIPT

By

Pub Date: Jan. 15th, 1967
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

This reprise of the life of Byron, more roue than romantic, is based on some presumptive diaries that he kept during the terminal period of his overindulgent life in swampy, malodorous Missolonghi. Here he had gone to find ""self-renewal and self-forgetfulness""; the former he does not find on either spiritual or physical terms(the melancholy young man on the medallion of the cover is only a ""parched, pitted, pendulous"" debauche--the victim of his natural functions); as for the latter, he is wholly narcissistic. His repertory of women appear in occasional scenes--Caroline (Lamb); Augusta; his abused wife; Claire; and the paisano Teresa; none of them appease him and he finds himself remembering only the more distastefully bizarre. Always a verbalist, always a sensualist, it is hard to think that Prokosch' Byron is a satisfactory superimposition or substitution for the legendary image.