Footsteps by Richard Holmes
Once again it was like a password, and my luck had changed. For this was Signor M—, the director of the local Assurance Agency, a delightful man who knew all the property at the Bagni, knew the Mayor, knew the station master, knew everyone. The idea of Shelley’s lost house intrigued him, a professional challenge, and instantly he joined in my search. We drove up and down for an hour, calling at cottages and villas, even interviewing the Mayor who was playing billiards in the back room of the social club. Everyone knew the Villa Byron but no one had heard of the Casa Shelley, until I suddenly mentioned the Chiappa family; and it was as if nothing had changed in five generations.
Of course, there was a Villa dei Chiappa, right back where I began, at the point in the hills where the tarred road became a track. We drove back up, and there in the old wall was the original stone sign, worn smooth with age, which Signor M—scraped delicately with the tip of a silver penknife. Ecco! It was two stone cottages run together, set back above the road, three storeys with weathered walls like a farmhouse, old Tuscan tiled roof and yellow flaking shutters. Signor M—tapped at the door, made introductions and explanations, laughed at the unlikelihood of it all, and went off assuring me I now had the run of the place, “to speak to my poet in peace”.
I shall never forget this man’s kindness, one further link in my long mysterious chain of providential guides, whose sense of the past as a living presence made him understand my pursuit instinctively. At the last moment he gave me the fragment of another life story, which deepened that sympathy to something more.
“Oh yes,” he said, smoothing the wing of his gleaming car. “We are all lost sometimes in our lives. An Englishman lost in Italy, or an Italian lost in England. I was a prisoner there, you know, a prisoner of war for three years. It makes you think of Liberty. Your English poets understand Liberty. Liberty!—Ah, temperamental, like a woman!”
He patted the car, shook my hand and shot off down the track in a fine spray of damp earth, an operatic exit perfectly timed.
It was the top storey of the Villa dei Chiappa which fascinated me at first. Unlike the rest it had not been converted: the beams were bare, the lathes of the roof exposed, a fire of logs and twigs burning in a nineteenth-century iron grate. The view from the front overlooked the little corkscrew road, and then across the valley of the Lima to the wooded hillside opposite, beautiful but slightly claustrophobic. I recalled with what relief Mary later greeted the open panorama of the Lombardy plain from Este. But then, from the back window, there was the little garden, shrouded in foliage. I hurried down, out through a small door with an old brass handle lovingly polished, and up four steps to a narrow sanded walk.
The garden was long and narrow, hedged round by shrubberies and wild vines. It was about twenty foot wide by forty foot long, with a small aisle of surprisingly large plane trees running on either side of the walk, like the pillars of a church. Shelley later invented the term “upaithric” to describe such an open-air temple, like the roofless colonnades of the Roman ruins in the south, which he said were like ideal forests in stone. The trunks of the plane trees were peeling, giving them a stippled look, grey-green bark falling away from pale wood, like flakes of used-up sunlight. There at the end of the garden was still a grove of laurel, and far below to the right the glittering curve of the Lima, exactly as Mary had described.
I walked into the grove and turned back, seeing in one flash what Shelley saw as he looked up from his table, with his Greek lexicon and his Marcello Ficino and his scattered paragraphs of Plato. The light was fading and there was a smell of damp leaves that reminded me of England. The wind stirred and dropped, and everything was still.
I sat on a piece of wood in the laurel grove making notes, then pulled out my camera. It was a thirty-year-old Ensign, with a bellows lens, taking big two-and-a-half-inch negatives of great sensitivity, though all the settings had to be calculated and done by hand. I set the aperture and field of focus to cover ten foot to infinity, the timing at one-fiftieth of a second—the longest I thought I could hand-hold—and breathed deeply like a swimmer about to dive to the bottom of the sea. Then gently I squeezed off a couple of shots, taking one-fiftieth of a second somewhere out of time. Ten foot to infinity, I think, is exactly the range of focus required by a biographer—from the close-up portrait to the full historical perspective.
There was a little scurry of leaves, an odd impression of movement, then voices sounded in the house, the garden door clicked open, a towel was drawn in from the iron balustrade, and I was being called in for a grappa.
At the big mahogany table in the kitchen we had our thimbles of clear fire, children appeared round doorways and pattered across the tiles in bare feet, and Signora wrote her name in my notebook. She did it gingerly, like someone signing an open cheque. Maria Pellegrini, Casa dei Chiappa gia Bertini, Bagni alla Villa, Bagni di Lucca. Then she smiled a little wearily, brushed back a lock of hair, shushed the children.
“Soon they will go to school,” she said. “You have children?”
“No—Shelley had children. Two of them lived here.”
“Ah, so maybe you have children after your book is finished.”
“Maybe after my book, yes.”
“Writers should have children, I think, or they get lonely.”
“Yes. Shelley wasn’t lonely here. He was very happy.”
“Good. We are happy too. You will be happy when you have children, I think.”
I made the long walk back, unwinding down through the trees in the gathering dark to the station. All the time leaves were falling through the sky, and bonfires showed little mouths of fire. Ever after the name Lucca has meant “leaves” to me: the Bath of Leaves. Waiting for the last direttissimo, I watched the green signal light gleam along the rail, and reread Shelley’s letter on Jupiter, the evening star that guided him home on his rides through the hills. I felt I had come very close.
This particular day, which set the pattern for much of my subsequent wanderings through Italy, also had a curious footnote—or rather, footstep. It was a little one, but showed how much can happen without one realising it at the time.
Weeks later I had my sheet of contact-prints for the Lucca area and found only one very dark shot of the garden at Casa Bertini had come out. It was a vague vertical of trees framing a grey façade with a little balcony. It seemed hardly worth having the photograph printed up to full size, but on an impulse I marked it “print for maximum light”, and filed the resulting half-plate photograph in its chronological sequence, June—August 1818, cross-referenced “Symposium”.
Much later still, when writing this section of my biography, I was going through the photograph file for possible illustrations when I came across the picture again. It seemed rather clearer than I had first thought, and I held it under my desk lamp for closer inspection. I frowned and took a second look. Between the first and second plane tree, in the shadows on the right, stood a small child. It was a boy, aged between three and four, almost dwarfed by the trees, up to his ankles in leaves, and with a pair of dark eyes fixed on the camera. A faint tingling sensation passed over the top of my scalp. I felt I was looking at a photograph of little William, Shelley’s dead son.
Shelley was more fond of this child than any other. He was Mary’s first surviving child; he had been with them on their previous trip abroad to Switzerland in 1816; he was adored by Claire, who talked to him in Italian. He was of a sunny, bubbling disposition, and in many ways held the household together—a focus of warmth and love and their hopes for the future. When he tragically died, in Rome in April 1819, they were more than heartbroken: some mainspring within the circle was permanently damaged. Mary broke off writing her journal for many months; Claire began to worry obsessively about Allegra. Shelley, turning for solace to his poetry, tried and signally failed to write a poem about his son. For once the poet was overwhelmed by the father, and the elegy broke off after a few lines:
Where art thou, my gentle child?
Let
With its life intense and mild,
The love of living leaves and weeds
Among these tombs and ruins wild;—
Let me think that through low seeds
Of sweet flowers and sunny grass
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion…
This deep grief only found its full expression after another two years, when Shelley was writing his lament for another death, that of John Keats, in Adonais. The faltering hope for some pantheistic transformation into the “living leaves and weeds”, some seed-like resurrection into a redeemed “portion” of Nature, at last became articulate in one of Shelley’s most triumphant and memorable passages:
He is made one with Nature…
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there,
All new successions to the forms they wear…
All that seemed to be implicit in the leafy garden at Casa Bertini, and the little figure staring at me. Besides, I too was very fond of “Willmouse”. Who could forget how he had pointed at the beautiful stippled trout lying on the slabs of the Roman fish market, and made Shelley laugh by his solemn exclamation: “O Dio—eke bella cosa?” Many such things flashed through my mind as I sat at my desk unmoving, astonished by the presence I had conjured up.
Then the moment passed and my critical faculties returned. I bent again to look at the half-plate photograph, smelling the damp leaves, and concentrated more carefully. No illusion, certainly—it was a child indeed, a little boy peeping mischievously round the tree-trunk. But one hand was in the pocket of a pair of modern flannel shorts and the jersey was a fashionable polka-dot. It was none other than little Master Pellegrini, come to spy out the funny foreign fellow scribbling in his exercise book. The Inglese didn’t see anything at all—he was quite lost in another world, like Papa doing the lotto.
So Willmouse escaped me again. But I included the photograph in my book, wondering if someone else, someday, might experience for a moment the same tingling surprise. And besides, I thought, this was almost a symbol of what my biography should try to achieve. It should summon up figures like a magic photograph plate, and hold them through time, at ten foot to infinity, with the soft shock of recognition, perfectly alive.
But that was not quite all. For what I had photographed, most strangely, was also my own recurrent dream in childhood. Here was the small boy lost in a timeless world, among huge trees—trees that were perhaps other people, the people he loved, transformed into a world of nature, enduring and monumental, “new successions to the forms they wear”. That dream I cannot now explain at all; or quite guess what it might mean as a symbol of some larger imagination at work.
3
My early investigation of the Casa Bertini set the pattern of my researches in one specific way. Many of the questions in my Bagni di Lucca notebook already concerned Shelley’s relations with Claire Clairmont. This relationship became a vital element in the main biographical problem of Shelley’s inner nature, his mature identity, that I tried to solve, or at least to clarify (the pun ran in my head), in Italy. What was the true character of their friendship? How did it affect Shelley’s attempt at the “new life”, and his fluctuations between hope and despair? And above all what impact did it have on his imaginative writing.
The received biographical image of Shelley’s adult character had three powerful components, or filters. The first was the “angelic” personality of popular myth, the “Ariel” syndrome, with its strong implication that Shelley was insubstantial, ineffectual, physically incompetent. This I intended to explode (I felt quite violently about it) by re-creating a daily detailed texture of Shelley’s life, showing a man who loved travel and hard intellectual work; who rode, sailed, shot a pistol as well as Lord Byron; who argued elegantly but occasionally got into brawls; who laughed, teased and made jokes; who addressed public meetings and lost his temper with officials; who put up with much ill-health and much scandal-mongering; who fathered six (or so) children and published some twelve books of poetry in less than twelve years. In short, to show a man whose physical impact on life, and on those around him, was intense and unforgettable.
The second component concerned his radical politics. The tendency had always been to treat these as essentially juvenile, and incompatible with his mature lyric gift as a writer. It was said that Shelley progressed from the schoolboy anarchism of Godwin to the sophisticated idealism of his Italian Platonics. There was no connection, for example, between his Irish revolutionism and Prometheus Unbound. This apolitical, conservative, aesthetic interpretation of Shelley had to be more subtly altered. Writing from the perspective of the Sixties I wished to show that Shelley’s poetic and political inspirations were closely identified; that there was a continuity of revolutionary and reformist thought throughout his work; and that his lyric gift was only one element in his main creative effort towards the writing of large, carefully structured poems. Moreover, I believed it was impossible to understand his private life—his journeying, his unstable households—without appreciating his political enthusiasms.
The third component concerned the inner nature of those households, and Shelley’s emotional and sexual make-up. It was here that I felt it vital to give Claire her full and proper place in Shelley’s life, from 1814 to 1822. I did not think this had ever been done before, and I knew perfectly well that it would be provocative. The prevailing attitude to this subject had been set eighty years before by Matthew Arnold, in an essay based on a review of Shelley’s first biography by the Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin, Edward Dowden. Arnold perfectly expressed the Victorian position—knowing, yet fearful and distasteful of what it knew—or thought it knew:
In one important point Shelley was like neither a Pythagorean nor an angel: he was extremely inflammable. Professor Dowden leaves no doubt on the matter. After reading his book, one feels sickened for ever on the subject of irregular relations; God forbid that I should go into the scandals about Shelley’s “Neapolitan charge”, about Shelley and Emilia Viviani, about Shelley and Miss Clairmont, and the rest of it! I will only say that it is visible enough that when the passion of love was roused in Shelley (and it was aroused easily) one could not be sure of him, his friends could not trust him. We have seen him with the Boinville family. With Emilia Viviani he is the same. If he is left much alone with Miss Clairmont, he evidently makes Mary uneasy; nay, he makes Professor Dowden himself uneasy.
He did not make me uneasy. Anyone who had grown up in the Sixties could understand Shelley’s attitude to marriage and divorce; his principle that love was “free”; his ideal of the equal partnership and mocking attitude to conventional monogamy; his belief in the liberating force of love. How else could one make any sense of poems like Epipsychidion, written at Pisa in 1821? Besides, Arnold seems to have thought that Shelley was some Byronic seducer—“inflammable”—going off like gunpowder whenever a pretty woman came into his orbit. That was hardly the case. Shelley was a much rarer and more interesting species—the man who acted on principle, who acted out of sympathy and truth of feeling, who deliberately defied convention—and, to his utter dismay, caused chaos as a result. And it was this that made me uneasy, and fascinated me.
Many of my friends, married, living together or living in various forms of communities and groups seemed to be going through the experiences and crises that Shelley’s various households went through. This was enormously important to me. When I wrote about Shelley I seemed to be writing about my own friends, practically at first-hand. Most unsettling of all—when I wrote about Shelley’s women friends and lovers—I seemed to see faces, hear voices that I already knew. I do not say I knew them in the same way as Shelley—that would be absurd—but I had met people very like them, and seen them in situations very similar, an
Moreover, I slowly realised that part of the fascination of the Shelley story was that it would be the same for every reader of my generation. For us, and maybe for others, the story was a, continuing one. It was, in Shelley’s own phrase—so often used mockingly—“a pure anticipated cognition”. It was, as he wrote of the Maniac in Julian and Maddalo, a story which, “told at length, might be like many other stories of the same kind: the unconnected exclamations of his agony will perhaps be found a sufficient comment for the text of every heart.”
The role of Claire within this life was crucial. What had happened in Shelley’s first marriage to Harriet Westbrook was sufficiently well known and understood. The causes of their unhappiness—their differences of background, their intellectual incompatibility, their extreme youth—were clear and indeed almost commonplace, though no less sad for that. But the second marriage to Mary Godwin—beginning with the elopement to France and Switzerland, together with Claire—was something altogether different. It was a deep relationship, and not a simple one. It could be interpreted in one of two ways. Either it was a conventional marriage that survived, under great stress—often a creative stress—various outside entanglements and internal explosions, and brought Shelley and Mary side by side as far as the Casa Magni. Or else it was from the start a radically unconventional marriage, a dynamic and unstable relationship which required a second woman (and possibly a second man) to keep it in working equilibrium. On this interpretation the second woman was Claire Clairmont.
In a life so varied and free, as they lived in Italy, it would be easy to underestimate the tension within the marriage. Following them from one house to the next, I could never forget it. Two private journal entries—one by Mary, one by Claire—came to represent this for me, and to serve as constant and bitter reminders. On 4 August 1819—Shelley’s twenty-seventh birthday—at their turreted seaside house near Livorno, Mary wrote in her journal for the first time since William’s death: “Leghorn—I begin my Journal on Shelley’s birthday. We have now lived five years together; and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I might be happy; but to have won, and then cruelly to have lost, the associations of four years, is not an accident to which the human mind can bend without much suffering.”