Andrew McConnell Stott: Byromania

Literary biography is a strange and problematic genre. The main problem (aside from the usual facile decoding of 'art' into 'life') is that most writers' lives are of the dull, solitary, stuck-at-a-desk-all-day variety. Thankfully, Andrew McConnell Stott, in The Vampyre Family: Passion, Envy & The Curse of Byron, circumvents this problem. The writers on whom he focuses – Byron, the Shelleys, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori – lead the kinds of lives that make Hemingway look like Philip Larkin.

Stott's own life, while not exactly Byronic, is nonetheless pretty unusual. Though an academic – he's currently an English professor at the University at Buffalo in Upstate New York – he was once a stand-up comedian. "Comedy was something I'd wanted to do ever since I was a child," he tells me. "I never had the nerve, but there I was standing in front of a class full of students telling jokes, when it dawned on me that if I took out the educational stuff, I'd have a set. For about three years I taught in the day and hacked my way through the beginner ranks of the comedy circuit at night. It was a fun – shall I say 'vampiric' – double life."

This love of comedy fed into his first book, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, a portrait of one of the most influential clowns in history. Despite sharing The Vampyre Family's exuberance, it's a markedly different work, although there is an interesting cross-over: Grimaldi and Byron were in fact acquaintances. The famous clown's life ended in obscurity and alcohol-fuelled depression, and, after reading The Vampyre Family, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Byron had a part to play: if there's one thing the book makes clear, it's that the philandering poet couldn't help but scatter ruin in his path, so whirlwind-like was his influence.

“I'm interested in what happens at the margins of fame” – Andrew McConnell Stott

But it's precisely this effect on others that attracted Stott to Byron and his cohorts. "I'm interested in what happens at the margins of fame," he says. "Fame and celebrity are so clamorous and distorting that they alter everything around them. I wanted to explore how proximity to fame... affected the lives of those at the periphery." Those at the periphery, in this case, were Claire Clairmont and John Polidori – the former was Byron's occasional lover, the latter his doctor, and both had literary aspirations themselves. "Claire and John were the perfect candidates," says Stott. "Both were brilliant and accomplished, with everything to live for. But celebrity created unrealistic expectations that attacked their self-worth and scarred them forever."

The notion of celebrity lies at the centre of the book, but when asked if Byron was a proto-tabloid-headline-grabber, Stott is ambivalent: "Anyone from Moses onwards has been called 'the first celebrity' at one time or another, so I'm loath to assert to a single point of origin for celebrity culture. Yet there is something about the confluence of events at the beginning of the 19th century that undoubtedly sets the stage for where we are today. For a start, you have a growing middle class with high levels of literacy hungrily consuming print culture in the form of gossipy periodicals and judgmental magazines. Second, you have the first publicity departments that sought to capitalise on what William Wordsworth derided as the public's 'degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.' Add in the Romantic obsession with 'genius,' and you have all the ingredients for a situation in which some people are elevated above the common herd as objects of intense fascination."

The inverted commas around the word genius are there for a reason, however. Stott is certainly an admirer of Byron – reading him, he says, "is like listening to the Beatles – pleasant, accessible, full of stories and characters but with a darker undertow" – but when asked what he'd say to those like me who consider Byron's life more interesting and complex than his poetry, his reply is unambiguous: "I'd say, 'Me too. Read my book!'"