Footsteps by Richard Holmes
To this he adds a PS dated 1 July: “I have later news of my Neapolitan. I have taken every possible precaution for her, and hope they will succeed. She is to come as soon as she recovers.”
Of course it is this last sentence that strikes one: if Elena really had been his illegitimate child, so carefully secreted away in Naples, why should he now risk everything by proposing to bring her to his household at Livorno? And if she had been Claire’s would not Claire be in a fever of anxiety to know the outcome of this radical change in plan? Then, on further reflection, there are the omissions: why does Shelley write so impersonally of the baby—never using her name, Elena, never making the slightest hint about her mother, never suggesting an impending domestic crisis? On the contrary, he seems to suggest that the baby’s death will simplify things, leaving him “domestic peace”. His grief is real enough—a memory to “torture” him—but it is impersonal, and above all it shows no guilt. Could he have written that way about Claire’s child? I find it difficult to believe.
Then, about a week later, around 7 July, Shelley wrote again to the Gisbornes in a mood of great bitterness and disillusion. It is this letter that shows something more than grief, a sense of being hounded and oppressed, so that even his good actions seem to be turned to evil. If Shelley did adopt Elena as an act of atonement for causing Claire such misery, then I now feel I can interpret and understand a voice that ends in despair and fury:
My Neapolitan charge is dead. It seems as if the destruction that is consuming me were as an atmosphere which wrapt & infected everything connected with me. The rascal Paolo has been taking advantage of my situation at Naples in December 1818 to attempt to extort money by threatening to charge me with the most horrible crimes. He is connected with some English here, who hate me with a fervour that almost does credit to their phlegmatic brains, & listen & vent the most prodigious falsehoods. An ounce of good civet apothecary to sweeten this dunghill of the world.
The exclamation from King Lear comes from the old king’s famous speech of disgust, “Let copulation thrive…” Paolo, at least, was forced to leave Livorno within twenty-four hours. I meanwhile continued on my way to Pisa.
6
I found the calm of the old riverside city, with its dreamy hints of Moorish architecture and the ancient sea-trade of the southern Mediterranean, curiously deceptive. From 1820 onwards Shelley was to rent various apartments here along the crumbling banks of the Arno, and Pisa became his most settled home in Italy (“our roots were never struck so deeply as at Pisa”), with an outwardly contented Mary and their third and only surviving child, Percy, born the previous November. Gradually the last expatriate circle of his friends formed around him: the bearded, piratical Edward John Trelawny; the charming Old Etonian Edward Williams, an ex-Indian army officer, with his voluptuous wife Jane Williams (actually the separated wife of a brother officer); and, in late 1821, Byron and Teresa Guiccioli. Life took on an almost domestic surface, and Shelley for the first time unpacked fully his cases of books, while Mary grew plants in pots on the window-shelf.
I wandered about Pisa for many days, feeling my way into the place, talking to the university medical students (term had begun and the tourists gone home), reading of Galileo and the Pisanos, hanging over the parapets of the bridges and gazing up at the mace-headed tower where Dante says Count Ugolino was imprisoned and starved until he ate his own children. But all the time I was thinking of the absent Claire.
Two or three hundred yards down the Lung’arno, Byron’s establishment, the Palazzo Lanfranchi, which Shelley found and hired for him in autumn 1821, still dominated the street. Its mullioned windows and sculpted door-lintel looked directly on to the sleepy, curving river. It was in fact a town house, dating from the seventeenth century, rather than a “palace” in the English sense, but it maintains its superiority by being the only building which has its own stone landing-steps still cut into the river wall.
To reach Shelley’s modest apartment a skiff would have taken you from these steps diagonally downriver almost to the old city wall on the far bank; or else a brisk four-minute horse trot would have led you round by the bridge. But I arrived a little too late, as American bombers had destroyed the last two old buildings in the row, including Shelley’s, in 1944.
It occurred to me that though the house was gone I could still photograph the view from the house that Shelley would have seen every morning, as he stepped out with his books to go walking in the woods—“the Cascine, near Pisa”—or to take the skiff with Williams. This reversal of perspective, looking outwards from within Shelley’s life rather than the more usual attempt to look inwards from the outside—the view from the window, rather than the view of the window in the façade—became for me one of the important techniques of biography. In a sense it was merely a device, a trick of perspective using the same materials. But it also expressed a principle, a definite method of recapturing time, by turning the viewpoint inside out, if only for a moment.
The photograph that resulted from this discovery largely made up for the disappointment of finding Shelley’s house gone. For me it expressed so much of the feel of Shelley’s Pisa—not the tourists’ Pisa of Leaning Tower and Baptistery, but the residential Pisa, standing quietly along the Arno, elegantly crumbling, its buildings reflected in water, as described in Shelley’s tone-poem, “Evening: Ponte al Mare, Pisa”. A painted skiff with its long bird-like prow rested on the nearside bank, and, beyond the white facade of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, were the jutting irregular lines of the tiled roofs against the Tuscan sky, the stone walls tufted with grass, the shimmering ripples breaking and re-forming the old city like a mirage:
Within the surface of the fleeting river
The wrinkled image of the city lay,
Immovably unquiet, and forever
It trembles, but it never fades away;
Go to the East…
You, being changed, will find it then as now.
“Immovably unquiet”—a typical Shelleyan paradox about the passage of time, so subtly put that it was easy to overlook it.
By capturing it in my lucky photograph I was drawn again to reflect on the paradoxes of time as they affect the biographer. In a photograph, it is conventionally said, an “instant of time is frozen”, like a bucket of water taken from a flowing river or a tableau held in a theatrical production. But in my photograph of Pisa from Shelley’s lost house I felt that I had established a continuity of time, a linking of one “instant” to the next across many years, with a dissolving (rather than a freezing) of much that was temporary and ephemeral. “You, being changed, will find it then as now.” Without people, without vehicles, with only the boat and the roofs and the river, Pisa could be seen very much as Shelley would have seen it. Biography too had to achieve something like that.
From the moment of Claire’s departure from Pisa, Shelley’s shaking of his domestic chains becomes, as it were, audible. To his cousin, Tom Medwin, who was travelling through the Alps with Edward Williams, he wrote in July 1820:
How much I envy you, or rather how much I sympathise in the delights of your wandering. I have a passion for such expeditions, although partly the capriciousness of my health, and partly the want of the incitement of a companion, keep me at home. I see the mountains, the sky, and the trees from my windows, and recollect as an old man does the mistress of his youth, the raptures of a more familiar intercourse…
It seemed to me that this was written partly with Claire in mind; and that Mary had long since ceased to be Shelley’s “companion” in the delights of such wandering.
Shelley continued to associate Claire with his wilder schemes, as a letter to her three months later, at the end of October 1820, makes explicit. The somewhat mysterious dream of a great sailing expedition to the East which it describes became one of Shelley’s deepest escape-fantasies in the last months of his life. It appears again and again disguised in such poems as “Evening: Pisa” and Epipsychidion, and it is secretly present in the entire pl
I have read or written nothing lately, having been much occupied by my sufferings, and by Medwin, who relates wonderful and interesting things of the interior of India. We have also been talking of a plan to be accomplished with a friend of his, a man of large fortune, who will be at Leghorn next spring, and who designs to visit Greece, Syria, and Egypt in his own ship. This man has conceived a great admiration for my verses, and wishes above all things that I could be induced to join his expedition. How far all this is practicable, considering the state of my finances, I know not yet. I know that if it were it would give me the greatest pleasure, and the pleasure might be either doubled or divided by your presence or absence. All this will be explained and determined in time; meanwhile lay to your heart what I say, and do not mention it in your letter to Mary.
Shelley in Egypt, Shelley in Greece: it is an intriguing possibility, a whole new perspective on his dreams. Was it a realistic scheme?—I never managed to discover who that “man of large fortune” was, or even if he ever existed. Certainly Mary never got to know of this plan—and she had become the touchstone of reality in Shelley’s household. The letter seems to imply that Shelley wanted Claire to come with him, but not Mary—the phrasing of his invitation is curiously echoed in the “free love” passage of Epipsychidion in the following year:
True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
But the destruction of his marriage was not, I am now convinced, what Shelley intended—consciously at least; nor do I think that Mary, so difficult yet so long-suffering and so absolutely loyal to Shelley would ever have allowed herself to be left behind. But it does show how Mary, by this date, was being excluded from one whole part of Shelley’s mind; and how Claire was still a warm and secret sharer.
Claire, in this sense, gradually became a key witness in my biography, even a kind of collaborator. I felt her presence urging me on whenever I found myself attacking or contradicting the conventional view of Shelley, especially in matters political or amorous. “Claire and I,” I found myself thinking, “we know the truth about this.” Indeed, I now think Claire was the source of much mischief at certain points, and frequently led me to be unfair to Mary. The light did not dawn until long afterwards, when a friend remarked with a flash of mockery, “Of course, trust you to fall in love with Claire Clairmont!”
I was not the only one, it seems. Several of Shelley’s friends saw her as the dark, unstable, poetic element in his life, as against the blonde, domestic, pacifying one. Thomas Love Peacock had already guessed and celebrated the importance of this dynamic when, years before, he gave Mr Scythrop, with his “passion for reforming the world”, a divided love-life in Nightmare Abbey (1818). Peacock tactfully mixed up Claire and Mary’s qualities (with a dash of Harriet Shelley), and presented Scythrop as perpetually and comically incapable of choosing between the raven-haired intellectual, Stella, and the fair-haired, musical, adoring Marionetta.
Trelawny too never quite recovered from his infatuation with Claire, and his fascination with the emotional drama she generated around Shelley’s attempts to live out his radical ideas. In January 1870, nearly fifty years after the events that had first drawn them together in Italy, he wrote an unpublished letter to Claire, which still shows him teasing the old lady, and playing nostalgically with the wild possibilities that their lives had touched on:
The present and the future are nothing—so I look back, and the Shelleyan episode in my life is the most interesting. Bye the bye, why did he not project a sect on the Mormon plan? I would gladly have joined him and founded a settlement. As Man is everywhere, and at all periods has been, ingrained with superstition, we must have had ours—the heathen mythology would have done, with adaption to our present state. The poet should have had his fifty wives—five would have done for me… You say he was womanly in some things. So he was, and we men would all be much better if we had a touch of their feeling, sentiment, earnestness, and constancy. But in all the best qualities of man he excelled. The best qualities of the sexes he had—not exactly all—he was inconstant in Love as men of vehement temperament are apt to be—his spirit hunting after new fancies. Nothing real can equal the ideal. Poets and men of ardent imagination should not marry; marriage is only suitable to stupid people.
Why was Claire’s role in Shelley’s life so important to me? Why did I question it more closely than almost anything else, except Shelley’s political radicalism? Why did I give up so much time and thought to Claire in Italy that I was almost certainly unfair—or at least unsympathetic—to Mary: his wife, his biographer and his literary executor? These are questions that I find it hard, and even quite disturbing, to answer fully. But they reveal something of the biographer’s hidden or secret impulses.
In terms of research, the explanation may seem obvious. Shelley’s relations with Claire were simply that part of his private life that had been least freely explored by previous writers. Claire’s diary was the last major document from Shelley’s inner circle to be published—not until 1968—and many of her letters still had to be consulted in manuscript. I felt that she had never been given her proper place in Shelley’s story.
It was the same with Shelley’s radical politics. It was the political, visionary poems like The Revolt of Islam (1818) or the political, visionary prose like A Philosophical View of Reform (1820, but not published for a hundred years after) which had previously received the least attention. Indeed, the subject of Claire and the subject of radicalism were in a sense complementary. One represented the most extreme edge of Shelley’s private life while the other showed the most extreme element in his public concerns. Both had, I felt, been bowdlerised by my predecessors. The safe Shelley, the known Shelley, the acceptable Shelley was the figure in the middle-ground—Mary’s unworldly husband, the lyric poet, the romantic exile, the gentle idealist: “our ideal Shelley”, as Matthew Arnold called him. But this was a Victorian figure. I wanted to show what I met for myself: a modern Shelley still speaking to us, a Shelley who had penetrated the darkness at the edges of existence; a bright flame, certainly, but a flame flickering in shadows.
Claire, more than anyone else in the whole story perhaps, saw and understood this restless, reckless side of Shelley—being temperamentally, if not intellectually very much inclined that way herself. She never allowed me to forget this vital, fiery, darting element in Shelley’s character.
Their passionate friendship—for that is what finally I think it was—had a symbolic importance to me, as an emblem of the Romantic revolt, a refusal to conform to the conventional patterns and expectations of society. I did not want it to die out, either smothered by the familiarities of domesticity or blasted by the failure to live up to the responsibilities of an illegitimate child. I am still convinced that neither of these things happened, and that as part of Shelley’s “experiment in living” the relationship contained much that was best and most revolutionary in Shelley’s attitude to love.
None the less, it cannot be said to have brought much happiness to those concerned. Nor can it be said to have been a conventional “success”. As I stood back and tried to consider Shelley’s overall situation at the time he finally left Pisa for the Gulf of Spézia I was aware of almost nothing but the contradictions in his life, the suffering and the sense of sublime refusal to face any reality he had created, outside that of his own poetry. In one sense he was a formidably brave, kind and creative man; in another he was self-deceiving to the point of cruelty to those most dear to him.
Certainly the underlying domestic problem between Claire and Mary was never finally resolved. The last letter Mary was to write to Shelley is from the Casa Magni and dated 3 July 1822. It has survived only in a fragment, because it went down
7
The move to the Casa Magni in April 1822 was thus for me the final act in a biographical drama of immense complexity. As I drifted through San Terenzo that late autumn afternoon my gaze turned constantly to the sea. I remembered how Shelley had sailed out into the bay in his slim twenty-four-foot schooner, fitted out by the handy Edward Williams with bookshelves and lounging cushions, and felt that his life had never achieved such a level of magic transcendence.
“My boat is swift and beautiful,” he wrote, “and appears quite a vessel. Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well, that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, ‘Remain, thou art so beautiful.’”
The reasons for the removal to San Terenzo, after his two comparatively peaceful and settled years at Pisa, confronted me with this final sense of mystery, and the enigma of Shelley’s deepest emotions. Outwardly there were practical explanations that were easy enough to understand. The boating scheme (largely Trelawny’s invention); the increasingly awkward relations with Byron in Pisa; and the immediate need to soothe and distract Claire, because of the news of her child Allegra’s death—all these provided pretexts for such a move.