Matched Wit

THE REMINISCENCES AND RECOLLECTIONS OF CAPTAIN GRONOW. 384 pages. Viking. $7.95.

Captain Rees Howell Gronow was a dapper, wicked little Welshman. He fought with distinction beside Wellington in the Peninsula and at Waterloo; he gossiped and gamed at the best clubs of Regency London. He matched wit and waistcoats with Beau Brummell, shot pistols with Lord Byron. And in his later years, he sat sucking the handle of his cane in the window of his Paris club while the Revolution of 1848 raged in the streets below. Then he wrote his reminiscences.

Byron in Curlers. His book is a kind of protracted gossip column of the romantic period. Byron, he reveals, slept with his hair in curlers; Sir Walter Scott was as stout a trencherman as any character in his historical novels. Gronow was a friend of Shelley's at Eton, and recalls how the fledgling poet, inspired by Homer's account of heroic single combats before Troy, took on a young baronet named Sir Thomas Styles in a fist fight. "Shelley stalked round the ring and spouted one of the defiant addresses usual with Homer's heroes: the young poet, being a first-rate classical scholar, actually delivered the speech in the original Greek." But stubby young Sir Thomas delivered "a heavy slogger" to Shelley's middle, and the poet turned tail and ran. Not many years later, Gronow reports with disinterest, young Styles was driven mad by fleas and heat during the Peninsular War and cut his throat from ear to ear with a razor.

Wasps in Amber. With casual vividness, the old dandy sketches Hoby the Bootmaker, an insolent St. James Street shopkeeper who sneered at every customer up to and including the Iron Duke himself; Colonel Kelly of the First Foot Guards, a grand dandy so proud of his precious, gleaming boots that he burned to death trying to save them from a fire; and muscular Dan Mackinnon, who "used to amuse his friends by creeping over the furniture like a monkey." In Lisbon with Lord Byron, Mackinnon spied two nude Portuguese beauties at their morning ablutions across from his hotel, but he was horrified to see that they used no toothbrushes. He sent them some, and was even more horrified when the girls used them to brush their hair.

Not much of a literary stylist, Gronow employs a direct but flat prose that captures his subjects like wasps in amber. Yet between the lines, his frigid, faultlessly attired figure dominates the book. He emerges haughty, violently prejudiced, yet worldlywise. As one contemporary wrote: "He committed the greatest of follies without in the slightest disturbing the points of his shirt collar." Can any modern memoirist make the same claim?

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