Footsteps by Richard Holmes
Drying myself and patching my cut hand, I looked back up San Terenzo beach. There, beyond the rowing-boats and fishing nets and instantly recognisable, was the white stuccoed frontage of his house, the Casa Magni, with its characteristic open ground-floor, with seven white arches forming a kind of loggia. It was this big, open ground-floor room like a boathouse that Trelawny found full of driven sand, tarred ropes, broken oars and old nets, many weeks after the drowning. I recognised it too from Mary’s detailed description in her letters, one of which even contained a ground-plan of the front rooms, showing that she and Shelley had separate bedrooms; and also from an old Victorian photograph I had found of the beach-front, taken about 1870.
In the photograph Casa Magni still stood by itself, jutting over a primitive sea-wall; but it looked in bad repair, the walls dark with damp patches, and the metal awning over the first-floor balcony sagging and rusty. An atmosphere of melancholy hung over it, and the trees behind on the hill were dark and forbidding. But now, in the afternoon light, with its fresh stucco and crisp air of seaside simplicity, it looked innocent of all history. I knew I would have to work on it, absorb the atmosphere and take stock. But the thing was, the last house had been found.
As the sun began to set into the sea I sloped up and down the little cafés and beach shelters, unable to concentrate, bemused, worrying about my dwindling supply of lire and starting to feel the night air. San Terenzo has a ruined castle on its northern cliff, and I thought perhaps I could camp there and live rough for a few days, like my old times in the Cévennes. But it was nearly November now, cold and damp at nights, and besides I wanted a table to spread my books—the letters, the journals, the poems—to read and reflect on the problems of Shelley’s exile.
I felt the need to slow everything down, to settle into a kind of alert stillness, to drop down below all the practical demands of daily affairs. I wanted to become quiet in a little room overlooking Shelley’s sea; to concentrate like a fisherman sitting over a pool, waiting for the surface to stir and glint.
I suppose I felt I had him cornered: his back, as it were, against the wall of the western sky. Here was my last chance. Shelley had never stood still, either geographically or imaginatively. The hunting, restless quality of his spirit had been borne in on me, more and more, as I had tracked him across Italy. Nor had his houses usually been so easy to find, so symbolically positioned and distinct. In the first eighteen months after his arrival at Milan, in April 1818, he had rarely stopped more than a few weeks in any one place, always finding some excuse to pack his bags and move on.
From his first crossing of the Alps and his momentary visit to Lake Como his progress describes a rapid, plunging path southwards, in a series of wild meanderings across the map of Italy. From Pisa and Lucca in the west he swept across to Venice and Este on the Adriatic, then dashed south via Ferrara, Bologna and Rimini to Rome; then southwards again to winter in Naples. In the spring of 1819 he moved north to Rome, then spun upwards once more to Florence (but omitting Siena, alas) and west again to Livorno, then back to winter in Florence. Only in January 1820 did he definitely settle in Pisa, remaining there at various addresses (which presented their own puzzles), with summer expeditions to the Bagni of San Giuliano, until 1822.
Of course the household was very young in 1818: Shelley only twenty-six, Mary twenty-one, Claire twenty; and the three children—William, Clara and Allegra (Claire’s child by Byron)—little more than infants. They were free and high-spirited, passionately keen to absorb the art and landscapes of Italy and, though not rich, had an assured income of one thousand pounds a year from the Shelley estates. This was quite enough on which to experiment with living, to rent lodgings as they chose, hire boats and horses, buy innumerable books, commission portraits of themselves, print Shelley’s poems, and write long formal travel-letters and amusing accounts of their adventures for circulation among their friends tied to regular jobs and family commitments back in dull old England. For them, Italy was “the paradise of exiles”—revolutionary exiles perhaps, but something of a dream playground nevertheless.
Yet, especially in the first gypsy-like years of their existence abroad, the tensions within the household were extraordinarily high. Shelley was writing with a creative intensity he had never before achieved. Besides the mass of letters, essays and translations he produced, most of his finest major poems belonged to this Italian period: Julian and Maddalo begun at Venice; Prometheus Unbound at Este and Rome; The Mask of Anarchy at Livorno; the Ode to the West Wind and a mass of shorter lyrics at Florence; and Epipsychidion (his verse autobiography) at Pisa. The one remaining major, visionary work—his unearthly Triumph of Life, a poem much influenced by Dante—was not begun until the last months, when he had come to his final point du départ, the white house at San Terenzo by the sea.
Almost alone among the Romantic writers Shelley sought no refuge in drugs or alcohol, but stoically consulted doctors, took hard physical exercise, kept a vegetarian diet and rose most days at dawn; yet he frequently made himself ill with the strain of producing this immense fountain of poetry, and the household as a whole suffered from profound anxieties and family disruptions. For a start, they had left great unhappiness behind in England. Shelley’s family regarded him as an outcast, and Mary’s family—the Godwins—badgered them endlessly with their debts. Shelley’s two children by his first marriage were wards of the Chancellor’s Court and farmed out to a family; while the ghost of poor Harriet, their mother, drowned in the Serpentine in 1816, still haunted them all. So too did that other tragic suicide, Mary’s half-sister, Fanny Imlay, the saddest part of the Wollstonecraft inheritance.
Nor were they safe from misery and death in Italy. Partly because of the very nature of their nomadic, unsettled existence they lost their two surviving children by Mary—baby Clara who died suddenly, after a strenuous period of coach-travel, at Venice in 1818; and the beloved “Willmouse”, four years old, the darling of them all, who died of fever in Rome in spring 1819. Claire’s child too, Allegra, was unwillingly left behind—much against Shelley’s wishes—with Byron in Venice, to be callously dumped in an expensive Catholic convent by his Lordship, where she too died in 1822.
So the idealist household was childless for many months, and Mary herself suffered a nervous breakdown, as she recounted in her semi-autobiographical novel Mathilda (for there was nothing, at least, that could stop them all writing). Politically too the outlook was gloomy, and they clutched desperately at any signs of a post-Napoleonic liberalisation—radical reform in Britain, a Carbonari uprising in Italy, a revolution in Spain, a war of independence in Greece… none of which then seemed to be forthcoming.
Shelley’s previously optimistic and enthusiastic temperament was scarred by terrible periods of doubts and gloom, especially at Naples, most beautiful of Italian cities, where many private poems—never seen by Mary until after his death—are witness to his deep misery and depression. Of course, he was maturing too, learning to live with his responsibilities and write a more adult, complex, subtle kind of poetry, of greatly increased imaginative power. Yet there was a sense of personal crisis, a crisis of faith and hope in the “great experiment”, which touched on his most intimate relationships. Something of this is expressed in his “Stanzas Written in Dejection” (was he thinking of Coleridge?) composed in the winter of 1818 on a beach near Naples. The second stanza catches the luminous, sparkling beauty of Italy—the dream of their exile together, the great flashing sea of their hopes for the future. Yet Shelley feels isolated and alone:
I see the Deep’s untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone,—
The lightning of the noontide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.
Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned—
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.
Others I see whom these surround—
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;—
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.
Again, that deadly long last line. Of course, everything was not lost; indeed, in creative terms almost everything worthwhile was yet to be done. Yet I was convinced that here was some radical rupture in Shelley’s life, his very identity—the emphatic denial of peace “within”, of “inward” glory, of personal affections, pleasure, love—which presented a profound biographical problem. More and more, as I followed them from house to house, city to village, river to seashore, I felt that the heart of this problem lay in the involved triangle of relations between Shelley and Mary and Claire. It came to puzzle and haunt me, with growing force, until the day I came down to San Terenzo.
What Shelley had hoped to do in Italy was not merely to create a new life—for himself, Mary, and Claire, the three children as they then were and any friends he could persuade to join him. Even as late as October 1821 he was writing to Leigh Hunt, who did eventually come: “Hogg will be inconsolable at your departure. I wish you could bring him with you—he will say that I am like Lucifer who has seduced the third part of the starry flock.”
What he wanted to create was a new form of life, a new kind of community, in which the rules of existence could somehow be rewritten. What his lost mother-in-law, Mary Wollstonecraft, had glimpsed for a moment in the Paris of the French Revolution Shelley tried to project into his “obscure community of speculators” (the phrase is from his unfinished novel, The Assassins), travelling in exile through Italy, waiting, hope against hope, for some new dawn, some new spring which could not be “far behind”.
The sources of his inspiration—the political and moral radicalism, the visionary poetry, the new openness and risk in emotional relationships, the passionate belief in “love” as the law of life—all these things corresponded to what I had myself seen and witnessed, what my whole generation had seen and witnessed (but how quickly they were forgetting!) in Britain and Europe during the Sixties. These parallels, I felt, I could not use explicitly; I could not follow step by step quite as in the old, innocent Stevenson days. But because the parallels existed I had a unique chance to follow and reinterpret Shelley’s life, almost from the inside. I felt I held the password.
Yet this very sense of being an almost privileged witness produced its own difficulties for me. The pursuit became so intense, so demanding of my own emotions that it continuously threatened to get out of hand. When I travelled alone I craved after intimacy with my subject, knowing all the time that I must maintain an objective and judicial stance. I came often to feel excluded, left behind, shut out from the magic circle of his family. I wanted to get in among them, to partake in their daily life, to understand what Shelley called the “deep truth” of their situation. I was often in a peculiar state, like a displaced person, which was obviously touched off by some imbalance, or lack of hardened identity, in my own character. It reminded me of one of my earliest childhood dreams, a recurrent one, in which those I loved were constantly hiding from me or somehow racing away, hurrying on ahead; or, strangest of all, changing their size and scale. One minute they would be like huge trees above my head, sublime and unreachable; and the next like tiny insects, diamond-precious, after whom I blundered with that infinite dream slowness, clumsy and desperate.
A ludicrous image, perhaps. But that is how I sometimes felt in Italy: a laughable figure, ridiculously unsuited to my task, and no longer protected by the adolescent enchantment of Le Brun. Indeed I came to suspect that there is something frequently comic about the trailing figure of the biographer: a sort of tramp permanently knocking at the kitchen window and secretly hoping he might be invited in for supper. How many of Shelley’s houses I stood outside, knocking and knocking!
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Yet sometimes I was let in. I never knew quite what to expect, or even quite what I was looking for. The houses were often odd, inconsequential places in which to start a new life. Many were remote, and none of them was beautiful and luxurious like Byron’s—whose stopping-places I seemed to find everywhere in North Italy, as if Milord advanced like an invading army on a wide front. Shelley infiltrated, moving rapidly and discreetly, and then lying low, in any place where he felt he could write.
In that first summer of 1818, after a brief stay at the Tre Donzelle Inn at Pisa (now an English tea-room, with lawyers’ offices upstairs, shaded by green blinds) he retreated high into the wooded Apennines at Bagni di Lucca. Mary spoke in her letters of a little garden with a laurel grove at the end, where Shelley sat translating Plato’s Symposium until twilight.
The house, known as the Casa Bertini, was rented from a local family called Chiappa. Allegra had by then been sent with their maid Elise to Byron at Venice, and Claire was restless, riding, and watching the dancing with Shelley at the little “casino” below in the village. But the household was cheerful and bustling, Mary happy with Clara and William, helped by Milly Shields, their English maid, an Italian cook and later a manservant, Paolo Foggi, who was to play an important part in their lives.
One of my first expeditions was made in search of this house. I set out from Pisa late one October morning, keeping a running record in my notebook as I went along, full of questions, talking to myself, to Shelley, always feeling my way, keeping alert to the unexpected thing, the revelation perhaps.
I took the local direttissimo, which is the slow train, winding up into the hills beyond Lucca. All along the line was shrouded in vines, big luminous leaves, bean bushes on sticks, coloured marrows nesting in the earth and globe peaches I could almost pick from the carriage window. Shelley’s fragment was a perfect image of this Italy:
Flourishing vine, whose kindling clusters glow
Beneath autumnal sun, none taste of thee;
For thou dost shroud a ruin, and below
The rotting bones of dead antiquity.
The journey from Pisa took one hour ten minutes, about thirty miles. By horse that would be maybe four or five hours’ ride. Why did Claire keep falling off her horse? I asked myself. Did she stay with Shelley in Lucca when they rode there together?
Arriving at the tiny station at the Bagni and finding it deserted, I walked across the lines and then up the hill. All the way they were burning piles of leaves. I passed through the long colonnades of chestnuts and plane trees, the leaves dropping around me, the smoke rising white and blue in the light, the sky full of leaves, beautiful and purgatorial. Shelley wrote at length in his letters about these trees, the water, the sky, the stars at night, entranced by them.
Below me was the River Lima, meandering between shingle banks down the valley to Lucca where it joins the Serchio. There was magic in those names—Lima, Lucca, Serchio—soft words in the mouth, that seemed to affect Shelley’s poetry, opening the vowels and quickening his rhythms. The children learned Italian easiest, William quickly became almost bilingual, but Claire already spoke it well and felt at home.
The road to the Bagni turned through a complete circle, wrapping itself in its cloak of trees, shades of Milton’s Vallombrosa, producing the enclosed landscape that Shelley, surprisingly, often favoured for his houses, nestling in a hillside or under sea-cliffs. There was a small logging industry, with logs stacked neatly in clearings, but little other signs of activity. The modern Bagni has developed down the hillside and across the river—the “Bagni alla Villa”, they called it. But
I drifted back down through the trees, with that familiar lost and invisible feeling. There was an English cemetery, modern Spa buildings closed up, a sense of a forgotten, genteel world of summer exiles and invalids, all departed, a place for a story by Chekhov or Katherine Mansfield. It was borne in on me that Shelley had been really hiding himself away here—how he hated the English abroad, the tea-parties and soirées, the gossip, the evening promenade. Instead he hired horses and rode to II Prato Fioreto; disappeared into the woods with his books; or played in the rivers naked and scrambled up waterfalls like a child. The old question returned to me of Mary’s modesty, compared to Claire’s willingness to slip out of her clothes and bathe, as during the 1814 tour in France.
Shelley’s letters to Peacock described all this—“spray over all my body while I clamber up the river crags with difficulty”—making similes for his poetry. He had a love affair with the waters of Italy: not conquering them like Byron with his swimming feats and races but giving himself up to them, submitting and revelling with a passive pleasure. This was later captured by Trelawny’s story, apocryphal perhaps but interesting, of how the poet jumped into a deep rock pool and seemed to lie on the bottom like a fish until he was hauled out.
My sense of invisibility reached its next stage, a complete lack of self-consciousness and social embarrassment. I began to chat to anyone I saw: an old lady knitting blue wool in a window, a housewife hanging out washing, a woodsman roping up timber, a man in a dark suit strolling to his car. It was a Lancia and I admired it. “Temperamental, like a beautiful woman,” he replied in English to my faltering Italian, and asked me what I was looking for. It was obvious that I was looking for something. Somewhere to stay? No, somewhere where someone else stayed—an English poet.