Footsteps by Richard Holmes
That was all he was prepared to say; and all the comfort Mary was to get on the subject in writing.
On the general question of his friendship with Claire, Shelley adopted a different tone. It was already obvious to me from his letters that he bitterly regretted the fact that after 1820 Claire had to live apart from them in Florence. But he reveals this most clearly in his autobiographical poem of January and February 1821, Epipsychidion. In this poem, adopting the Petrarchan courtly-love convention, he assigns a cosmological symbol to each of the women in his life: Mary is the Moon, Emilia Viviani the Sun and Claire the Comet. The poem thus has unusually reliable biographical significance. Using this symbolism (like a modern roman à clef) he begs Claire to return from Florence, and looks back with extraordinary anguish at their difficult, passionate, involvement:
Thou too, O Comet beautiful and fierce,
Who drew the heart of this frail Universe
Towards thine own; till, wrecked in that convulsion,
Alternating attraction and repulsion,
Thine went astray and that was rent in twain;
Oh, float into our azure heaven again!
This, in its way, is remarkably explicit. The nature of their relationship, says Shelley, was fiery and violent, dynamic and unstable, “alternating attraction and repulsion”. Claire’s heart was finally driven “astray” by the “convulsion” of emotions; while Shelley’s was “rent” in two—he seems to mean permanently divided between Claire and Mary. He even goes on to make a mournful little joke about Mary’s attitude: if Claire will come back to them, Mary will relent: “the Moon will veil her horn/In thy last smiles.”
A relationship of such power and intensity, lasting over eight years, was unlikely to be based solely on sexual infatuation, or indeed frustration. Claire appealed and responded to what was most imaginative in Shelley as a writer—both his poetry and his radicalism. In a way this is surprising, for it was surely Mary—the enormously gifted daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the well-read author of Frankenstein—whom one would expect to fulfil this role. I knew for example from her journal how she and Shelley read together every day; how Mary copied and criticised much of what Shelley wrote; how she took part most fully in the professional side of his life. Yet the fact remains that Claire had a spontaneity, a vividness and almost violence of response to life that Mary lacked—and for which Shelley always hungered.
I first became fully aware of this when I left Venice for Rome.
4
I arrived in the capital late one night, after hitching down the Autostrade del Sole. From a boxroom above the Via Cavour I gradually worked my way into the labyrinth of tiny streets immediately north of the Foro Romano, until by the third day I had a small annex room off the Via Leonina, with a view of pink and white washing strung above a stone fountain—or rather a stone obelisk with an iron pipe—gently splashing on to the cobbles.
This miniature piazza, itself not much larger than a room, came to symbolise modern Rome for me—it had a baker’s shop, a motorcycle repair shop and a sort of bottling plant smelling darkly of old red wine. It was never quiet at any hour of the day or night, except for the two hours of siesta, when even the radios were muted. Outside each doorway stood a wooden chair with a wicker bottom, occupied either by a cat or a grannie, depending on the position of the sun. Above rose a cliff of geraniums, alternating with underwear and birdcages, until a hot blue square of Roman sky was reached.
My room had a folding bed and a window-ledge, on which I spread my books. I read and made notes during the night, using the white ecclesiastical candles I could purchase in the churches. At dawn, when the bottling plant started up, I closed the shutters and went to bed. At siesta I got up and went out on my tours—again and again to Shelley’s three favourite places, the Pantheon, the Forum and the huge ruined Baths of Caracalla. Occasionally I would work on the manuscripts in the Keats-Shelley Museum above the Spanish Steps, or drift through the Capitoline Museum, or sit in the room containing the Hermaphrodite statue in the Palazzo Borghese.
Shelley left many fragmentary notes on the statues of Rome, and his appreciation shows—besides his instinctive understanding of classical legends—his unabashed pleasure in erotic imagery. Of one unidentified “Athlete” he wrote: “Curse these fig leaves; why is a round tin thing more decent than a cylindrical marble one?” And of a “Venus Genetrix”: “Remarkable for the voluptuous effects of her finely proportioned form being seen through the folds of a drapery…” While of a disappointing statue of “Leda” he exclaimed frankly: “Leda with a very ugly face. I should be a long time before I should make love with her.”
Shelley did not come to Rome like an ordinary English tourist, content to gaze. He came to find active inspiration, a new sense of history and the works of art and mythology that he could incorporate into his own poetry. He rejected much that he saw—the hateful imagery of Imperial Rome, the contemporary Rome of the Pope and the slaves working in chain-gangs in St Peter’s Square. Yet his favourite sites became sacred places for him, not monuments but living sources of power, symbols of Liberty. Ignoring as far as I could the modern tourist round, dislocating my hours, I tried to immerse myself in these places, living a double life as monkish tramp and nineteenth-century ghost.
It was just here that I began to appreciate the quality of Claire’s companionship. Shelley was in Rome from 5 March to 10 June 1819, and for once Claire’s journal exists almost in full for this whole period: from 7 March till 3 June—the day Willmouse first became seriously ill. While Mary’s journal remains its usual, brief laconic self—a list of sites visited and books read—Claire’s is characteristically full and vivacious. But more than that: she succeeds in showing Rome as Shelley saw it, through his eyes. In many of her entries I could catch Shelley’s own words and reflections on what they were seeing: his speaking voice, puzzling, meditating and enthusing. I could begin to understand how close they really were.
On Sunday 14 March, for example, Mary enters the following in her journal: “Read Montaigne, the Bible, and Livy. Walk to the Coliseum. Shelley reads Winckelmann.”
It is of course a help to know that Shelley was reading the great German art historian Johann Winckelmann’s epoch-making study The History of Ancient Art among the Greeks (1762). It indicates how Shelley was already interpreting Rome as a philhellene, and how European his thinking had become (the book was not translated into English for another forty years). Yet what were his personal reactions to the great ruins of the Coliseum? Was he impressed by them? Did he go inside? Did he stay long? Mary tells us nothing of this.
Here is Claire’s entry for the same day:
Go to the Capitol and the Coliseum—We range over every part—along the narrow grassy walks on the tops of the arches-above us on the nodding ruins grew the wall-flowers in abundance. The Coliseum resembles a mountain, its arches and recesses appear as so many caves, and here and there are spread as in the most favoured of Nature’s spots, grassy platforms with a scattered fruit or thorn tree in blossom.
Immediately I could see them bounding along those precipitous paths above the arches (now frequently fenced off for safety), spying the wild flowers and choosing the little hidden lawns terraced into the ruins—“grassy platforms”—for sitting under a blossoming tree. Already Claire has seized on the idea that enchanted Shelley about the ruins both of the Coliseum and the Baths of Caracalla: that they had reverted to kinds of natural landscape—magic mountains with their caves and alpine lawns. It was exactly these dream-landscapes that he was to build into the great visionary settings and backdrops of Prometheus Unbound, and to describe at length in his long letter to Peacock of 23 March.
Claire completes her entry: “I think there can be nothing more delightful than a daily walk over the Capitol to visit the ruins of the Forum. In ancient times the Forum was to the city what the soul is to the body—the place in which is concentred all the most powerful and the best.—In the evening I go there again with
This walk became their evening ritual while they were living in that quarter of Rome: to visit the “soul” of the ancient city—as defined in Shelley’s own words, after Plato, as a “concentring of the powerful and the good”.
Shelley also wrote a little-known fragment about the Coliseum: an unfinished story describing an old man visiting the ruins during the “Feast of the Resurrection”. The old man is blind, but accompanied by a young woman—Helen—“apparently his daughter”. He questions her as to the appearance of the Coliseum and, listening to her replies, he weaves his own imaginative interpretation on what he hears from her. In a sense this “rebirth of the imagination”—an Easter theme—is partly the meaning of the piece; but also it seemed to me to reflect something of the continual imaginative interchange between Shelley and Claire.
The young woman describes the towering ruins, the “dark arcades”, the mossy lawns covered with clover and wild flowers, the “shattered arches and the isolated pinnacles”. Then the blind poet remarks that the ruins sound more like “chasms rent by an earthquake among the mountains than like the vestige of what was human workmanship”. He goes on, with a wild, almost surreal flight of the imagination: “Are they not caverns such as the untamed elephant might choose, amid the Indian wilderness, wherein to hide her cubs; such as, were the sea to overflow the earth, the mightiest monsters of the deep would change into their spacious chambers?”
This is already close to the descriptive language of Prometheus, but recognisably spiced by Shelley’s sense of fun, his love of the mysterious and strange, his passion for teasing Claire. It was as if the Coliseum lay deep beneath the sea, and they swam about it like pearl-divers, half-expecting some sea-monster, some slumbering Kraken, to surge out of its dark caverns and devour them both.
Claire, unlike Mary, also shared Shelley’s impatience with the expatriate socialising that English visitors were expected to take part in—the dreaded Conversazione in the smart salons of the Via del Corso. She left one amusing glimpse of such a Sunday soirée: “In the evening go to the Conversazione of the Signora Marianna Dionigi where there is a Cardinal and many unfortunate Englishmen who, after having crossed their legs & said nothing the whole evening, rose up all at once, made their bows, & filed off.”
It was Claire, too, who made contact with the woman who was to become the trio’s closest friend in Rome, the painter Aemilia Curran, an old friend of William Godwin and one of the original circle of feminists who knew Mary Wollstonecraft in London in the 1790s. They soon moved from their lodgings in the Corso to take rooms next to Miss Curran in the Via Sistina, above the Spanish Steps, where the three portraits of Shelley and Claire and Willmouse were done in May. The third was lost for many years; the first—partially repainted after Shelley’s death—now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
My own social life was very odd in Rome. Reading Shelley’s letters and poems on the sites where he wrote them, especially in remote corners of the Forum, I perched illegally in the crumbling brickwork of the Caracalla while whole afternoons seemed to drift by in absolute, autumnal solitude. I was once shut in by the guards, having missed their whistles, and had to climb out through a vegetable garden next door, becoming inextricably involved with bean-netting and finally escaping over the lattice-work of a pear tree tied to a wall, terrified that I should damage its beautiful old branches and earn the undying enmity of the genius loci. I climbed with shoes tied round my neck.
My favourite point on the Palatine Hill, high above the Temple of Jupiter, was also temporarily out of bounds to the public, owing to subsidence, although it commanded by far the finest vista of the entire Forum. I used to arrive there during the siesta when no one was about and work undisturbed for an hour or two, until a particular guard—who got to know my routine—came and shouted at me from the far side of the wire.
One afternoon I showed him the picture of Shelley by Joseph Severn, working with his books in the ruins (actually in the Bagni di Caracalla, but I glossed over that), and this subtly changed the atmosphere of our daily encounters. Thereafter this long-suffering man used to arrive from his luncheons, buttoning up his dark-blue tunic, and calling genially—“Okay, crazy Shelley, you leave now, crazy man.”
But my only real friends were at the rakish little worker’s hostelleria in the Via di Tre Conti behind Trajan’s Market. More than three tales were told there. In the daytime it was a bustling café-restaurant with six long wooden tables, a steel serving-counter and a huge old fridge—looking more like a gangster’s safe stuck over with pictures of the Pope and Sophia Loren and Michelangelo’s Adam and Eve cast out of Paradise. At night, after nine, it became a cabaret, in the old sense, a place where people drank and told long involved jokes and sang sentimental songs.
It was here that I fell in with two gentleman drifters, expatriates and dreamers of the old school, who welcomed me into their circle at the end of the fourth table where they were perpetually to be found in front of large tumblers of rosso. They were a fantastic pair, melancholy and humorous by turns, who vied in a courtly way for the favours of the waitress, Monica, a thin lady in her forties who wore a red ribbon in her long black hair. Each night they told me their life stories, which I would write down in the left-hand side of my notebook on my return to the annex room.
Why I liked them was that the details changed slightly every night, depending on their mood and the poetic demands of the occasion. In effect they had had at least half a dozen lives each, and they encouraged me to show an equal largesse. “Tell us,” they would begin, “when you were at Oxford, when you were at Cambridge, when you were at the Sorbonne, when you were at Princeton…”
Best of all, they would always ask me the latest news of Shelley, and Claire, and Mary. How was Shelley’s poem progressing? How were Claire’s singing lessons getting on? How were Mary’s moods? What galleries had they visited today? And, with great tenderness, how was little William’s health? They listened to my replies with care, nodding gravely, shaking their heads, smiling, sometimes sighing deeply, agreeing that more rosso was called for, perhaps. “You must find out…” they would reflect; “you must ask them…”; and finally, “that reminds me…” and so their own lives would begin again, with some new adventure.
The tall one, Boris, had distinguished grey hair, a signet ring, and always wore a long black tweed coat. He was, he said, a White Russian who had been born in Cairo, divorced in Rome and longed to go to Scandinavia. He could quote the poetry of Cavafy in French. His two passions were Soviet Imperialism, which he hated, and cold blonde Scandinavian women, whom he loved. Sometimes even these leading details would alter, and on one memorable night he described vividly how he had been brought up in Helsinki and fallen in love with a gypsy girl in Cairo.
His friend, Alfredo, was a short swarthy man who wore a black leather jacket and a series of brightly coloured scarves. He came, he said, from Chile and had once worked on the newspaper L’Amicità. He had big mournful eyes and could sing in a fine tenor voice. His love-life had been so tragic that he had renounced women for ever; and perhaps for this reason it was to him that Monica’s smiles were most often directed. His political hatred was reserved, despite everything Boris could contend, for American Imperialism, and there were many lurid accounts of a journalistic assignment in Saigon.
Both agreed however that “imperialism was the number one evil of our time”, and when I described Shelley’s radical views they nodded gloomily: “You see, nothing has changed, it is Liberty that the people want.”
“Liberty or death,” said Alfredo.
“Life, Liberty and the pursuing of happiness,” said Boris.
The rosso went round.
Why do I record these two unlikely figures? Partly because their romantic expatriatism did teach me, by a strange analogy, something of the dreamy timeless world of European exiles. For they were, essentially, men in exile—full of mad hopes and slumbering regrets—for wh
But more important to me than this was their sense of fantasy, of the malleable properties of their own lives. You could dismiss them as bar-flies, tellers of tall stories. But that is not what I saw. They were people not wholly different from a man like Trelawny, for whom the truth about themselves and others had to be given a mythic shape. Much of what they said was to do with what might have happened to them, what they wanted to happen rather than what actually happened. They lived in a kind of subjunctive mode, especially the past subjunctive; but this world of possibilities was no less part of them, part of their truth as personalities, than the more normal grammar of reality and the everyday recorded fact. We are what we dream, in the same way that we are what we eat. I began to realise that a biographer had to become fluent in this subjunctive language; to manipulate and interpret it with the same confidence as all the other tenses of the past. He should be neither drowned by it nor frightened of it. It was simply one more dialect of the past—dialect of the memory—that he would have to master.
Besides, I liked Boris and Alfredo. Their warmth, their eagerness to share their fantastic existence, appealed to me. I felt at home with them; a marginal, as the French say, no less than they. They made clearer to me something in the contradictory nature of my own vocation. For here I was, living a largely fantasy existence precisely in order to establish the most exact, daily and domestic truth about other people’s lives.