Footsteps by Richard Holmes
Yet the moment I arrived at San Terenzo I was overwhelmed by the improbability of it all, the wildness of the place, the deliberate extremity of the whole position. There was something desperate and irrational here. More than ever before, Shelley seemed to be moving into a world of fantasy. The Casa Magni, with its seven white open arches standing only a few feet from the sea, seemed more a vision than a house of stone and stucco and pebble dash. And Shelley had foreseen just such a house a year before, in Epipsychidion:
This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed
Thee to be lady of the solitude.—
And I have fitted up some chambers there
Looking towards the golden Eastern air,
And level with the living winds, which flow
Like waves above the living waves below …
Of course, Casa Magni faced west, not east; but the rejected prefaces to Epipsychidion—which speak of “fitting up the ruins of an old building” on one of the “wildest of the Sporades”—and a remarkable letter to Mary of August 1821, where he also speaks of retiring to “a solitary island in the sea”, where he would build a boat and “shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world” all convinced me that the idea had been long in his mind, and that San Terenzo was the nearest thing to his magic island, his last retreat.
Yet in ordinary, mundane terms, Shelley’s move here still made little sense. He had no ostensible reason to think his life was over. He was not yet thirty, his career had barely begun, and he stood to inherit a large estate on the death of his father back in England (Sir Timothy Shelley was already seventy-one). His own son, Percy, was a robust little boy of two and a half; and Mary was again pregnant.
His scheme to launch a new magazine, The Liberal, with Byron and Leigh Hunt showed that his literary ambitions were far from extinguished. Events in Greece—about which he had dashed off his choric drama, Hellas—now fed his political hopes once more, so central to his inspiration as a poet. Even in England the tide was slowly turning in favour of a more liberal outlook: the first time, really, for two decades. Within the next five years the agitation for Parliamentary Reform would turn into a gathering storm. In all outward circumstances, Shelley had everything to live for. Yet by coming to San Terenzo he seemed to be courting obscurity, self-abandonment and imminent disaster for himself and his family.
Dumping my pack in the corner of a little taverna, decorated with faded blue seascapes, I got talking to a fisherman who said he had a brother, who had a wife, who had an ancient aunt who could help me … I had long got into the habit of drifting with unlikely currents of this kind. Passed from hand to hand through the village, with much laughter and some singing in a back kitchen, I was finally taken up to the top of a crumbling block of flats behind the little church. Here I was introduced to Signora T—, an old lady dressed in black, who sat very upright in a cane chair with a cluster of diamonds on her left hand.
Her apartment was almost dark, except for a beautiful marine lamp, and she seemed nearly blind. I was told to sit down next to her and tell her about my life. She listened intently, occasionally smiling and shaking her head. In turn she told me she had been a cook in Kensington during the War, and had been very lonely and read the English poets. Then she had met Mario, and come home, and life had been good to her. Mario was dead now, but she had inherited an old house on the seafront, and she had let out the rooms as a pensione for old people and widows like herself, so they could take a holiday from the big cities, from Genoa, from Florence.
“Old people like looking at the sea. It brings back their memories, their lives. It is like looking at a fire. It is a sort of dream.”
Here she made a smoothing gesture with her hand, and I was sure that she was blind. She smiled again.
“But old people cannot afford very much money. And nor can young people. That is all right. Life has been good to me. You must have a room in my pensione, if you wish, and dream about your poeta inglese.”
I was ushered out, and left her sitting, dark and upright against the steady glow of the glass lamp.
Her pensione was next door but one to the Casa Magni. The room was on the first floor, looking directly over the sea, with a big stone balcony carved with fleur-de-lys. It was the best room I ever had in Italy, and also the strangest.
The windows were hung with old brocade curtains, the floor was tiled with patterned marble, smooth and warm to my naked feet. In one corner was a huge old mahogany armoire, with pier-glass mirrors; in the other an enormous double-bed with spiral-carved bedposts and the tattered remnants of a canopy. In the middle of the floor was a white tin table, and a beautiful high-backed cane chair with curving arms. Strangest of all, against the far wall, were not one but two cradles, also made of cane, on wooden rockers with small, embroidered tent-like lace veils over each head. Their design was certainly nineteenth century. I felt I was moving in with a whole family.
For this enchanted room I was asked to pay the equivalent of one pound ten shillings a week, in advance. I moved the table out on to the balcony and unpacked my books. Overhead was a canvas awning with a loop of washing-line clipped with wooden pegs. Out in the bay the lighthouse on Palmaria had begun to wink. I craned over the balustrade and looked across to the balcony of Casa Magni. Then I sat down and began to write my daily notes, the long continuous imaginary conversation I had with my subject.
I was full of questions. The first thing I did not understand about San Terenzo was its remoteness. It wasn’t just a summer holiday; Mary hated it from the start. It was nothing like the Bagni di Lucca, with its little baths and stables and casino. There was no civilisation near it. Food supplies came from Salzano, four miles inland across the river. Even the mail came by boat, once or twice a week through the Harbour Master of Lérici, Signor Maglian. The buildings that make it this small modern resort are all recent, that is to say late nineteenth century, except the church. Early biographers wrote indiscriminately of Casa Magni being actually at Lérici, or “Santa Renzo”, so obscure was it. Mary says Casa Magni was originally built as a boathouse, and the proprietor of the estate on which it was situated was insane: “He had begun to erect a large house at the summit of the hill behind, but his malady prevented its being finished, and it was falling into ruin.”
That must have amused Shelley, and given the place its demonic touch. Whenever he describes it in his letters of May and June he mentions Faust, and implies he too has made some sort of pact with the devil. The sea, the boat, the storms, the moonlight immediately enter his poetry with unearthly force; and Dante’s underworld—the Inferno—shapes The Triumph of Life. None of the last short lyrics are addressed to Mary; all are to Jane Williams—except perhaps the lines, “We meet not as we parted, We feel more than all may see,” which may have been to Claire. Shelley was tortured by Allegra’s death. At Casa Magni he had to think of all that trail of dead children marking his course through Italy during the last five years—Clara at Venice, Willmouse at Rome, Elena at Naples, and now Allegra at Bagnacavallo, a stepping-stone path of little tombs.
Was he running away from all that at Casa Magni—or trying to isolate himself and face it in his poetry? Was he turning, at bay, in his magic fortress? There are references to The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play, and the idea of reincarnation in the “Ariel to Miranda” poem, written like a guitar tune for Jane:
Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who,
From life to life, must still pursue
Your happiness;—for thus alone
Can Ariel ever find his own.
From Prospero’s enchanted cell,
As the mighty verses tell,
To the throne of Naples, he
Lit you o’er the trackless sea,
Flitting on, your prow before,
Like a living meteor.
Shelley’s image of himself is now that of a meteor, burning itself up; a preoccupation which persists through May and June. The self-destructive idea had begun in Adonais, where he seems to foresee his
… my spirit’s bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given …
As I put down these scattered last notes, there on my balcony, and thought about them during the final days of swimming and walking about the bay it was borne in on me how far Mary Shelley had been struggling with the same questions. Because she was ill with her pregnancy and frequently confined to bed, or to a sofa dragged out on to the terrace of Casa Magni, she must have felt like a spectator—helpless amidst events she could not properly control or understand. There may have been some degree of wisdom after the event in the Notes on the Poems of 1822 which she wrote seventeen years after, in 1839. She only kept the sketchiest daily journal between May and June 1822, and there are only three known letters written from Casa Magni: one to Maria Gisborne of 2 June; another—a brief line to Hunt—on 30 June; the last—the scrap to Shelley—in July.
Yet her recollections of 1839 carry great conviction:
During the whole of our stay at Lérici, an intense presentiment of coming evil brooded over my mind, and covered this beautiful place and genial summer with the shadow of coming misery … The beauty of the place seemed unearthly in its excess: the distance we were at from all signs of civilisation, the sea at our feet, its murmur or its roaring forever in our cars,—all these things led the mind to brood over strange thought, and, lifting it from everyday life, caused it to be familiar with the unreal.
The note to Hunt, sent with Shelley on their last expedition down to Livorno in the Don Juan on 1 July, when Mary was left behind on her terrace, confirms this sense of doom and helplessness most vividly. I read it again as the last light drained away behind the castle and faded beyond Portovénere:
My dear Friend—I know that S. has some idea of persuading you to come here. I am too ill to write the reasonings only let me entreat you let no persuasions induce you to come, selfish feelings you may be sure do not dictate me—but it would be complete madness to come. I wish I could write more—I wish I were with you to assist you—I wish I could break my chains and leave this dungeon.
Mary had not seen Hunt for four years, since they left England. Yet she speaks directly and urgently to him—of “madness”, of her “dungeon”. It is clear that she was desperately unhappy at Casa Magni, and felt cut off from the normal world.
The house was primitive, uncomfortable, overcrowded: five adults—including Claire—and three children (two belonging to Jane Williams), sharing three main rooms and the servants’ quarters. Yet Shelley had surrendered their apartment in Pisa, put all their furniture in store at Lérici and given himself up to boating and writing. He seemed no longer interested in building a proper private life together with Mary, but had gone back instead to his old dreams of a communal existence, lived from day to day and hand to mouth. He might even invite the Hunts—with their four children—to join them.
After four long years of trying to establish a real home, with real roots, in Italy, Shelley’s improvident flight to Casa Magni must have nearly broken Mary’s heart. With Pisa gone, what did their future hold? Would Shelley even remain with her, Mary must have wondered in those summer nights, gazing up at the rough Whitewashed ceiling of her room, hearing the sound of the waves beating and sighing on the beach: “The gales and squalls that hailed our first arrival surrounded the bay with foam; the howling wind swept round our exposed house, and the sea roared unremittingly, so that we even fancied ourselves on board ship.”
Did Shelley intend to leave Mary and Percy with the Hunts and their children at Livorno? Did he plan some extended sailing expedition?—there was already talk with Williams of sailing across to Corsica. Maybe he would go further—to the Balearic islands, the coast of North Africa, Greece, the Levant? Or was his restlessness, his increasing elusiveness, evidence of some irrevocable shift of emotion—towards the attractive, guitar-playing Jane Williams? Or towards Claire once more, so tragically bereft of her child but also free now of Byron, dark and restless—“la fille aux milles projets”—and still only twenty-four? Or, worst of all possibilities perhaps, because least preventable and most absolute, was Shelley unconsciously tempting fate, challenging his destiny on the water, and deliberately flirting with death, with suicide?
I knew that within weeks of Shelley’s drowning Mary would be bitterly reproaching herself for her doubts about Shelley, for her coldness at Casa Magni, for the way that she had held herself back from him In her poem “The Choice”, not published until fifty years after it was written (probably at Monte Negro in 1823), she says that her heart accused her of not having requited Shelley’s love:
It speaks of cold neglect, averted eyes,
That blindly crushed thy soul’s fond sacrifice:
My heart was all thine own,—but yet a shell
Closed in its core, which seemed impenetrable,
Till sharp-toothed misery tore the husk in twain,
Which gaping lies, nor may unite again.
Forgive me! …
A “shell closed in its core, which seemed impenetrable”: a bitter self-accusation, full of uncomfortable sexual undertones, and bleakly miserable. Yet how much more so, had Mary known the contents of Shelley’s last letter to the Gisbornes, written just three weeks before he died. Italy he finds “more and more delightful”. Yet he misses old friends, and feels cut off from Mary:
I only feel the want of those who can feel and understand me. Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not. The necessity of concealing from her thoughts that would pain her, necessitates this perhaps. It is the curse of Tantalus, that a person possessing such excellent powers and so pure a mind as hers, should not excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life.
He adds that he finds Jane and Edward Williams “very pleasing” by contrast, “but words are not the instrument of our discourse”.
Many of Shelley’s friends in Italy—Leigh Hunt, Jane Williams, Trelawny to some degree—were later to accuse Mary of coldness towards Shelley, especially in those last months. No doubt there was much truth in this. Yet something else struck me as I read over that letter. It was written on 18 June. This was a there two days after a near fatal miscarriage which Mary suffered at Casa Magni, in circumstances of pain and terror and humiliation. How could Shelley have been so utterly unfeeling to write such things at such a time?
Here was the final, sad example of how differently their lives together could be perceived by two people, even two as close as Shelley and Mary. Shelley seems to have regarded the miscarriage—consciously, at least—as a domestic mishap of no great importance. Indeed, in describing it he almost seems to put himself and his own reactions to the fore. Mary’s situation, he writes:
for some hours was alarming, and as she was totally destitute of medical assistance, I took the most decisive resolutions, by dint of making her sit in ice, I succeeded in checking the haemorrhage and the fainting fits, so that when the physician arrived all danger was over, and he had nothing to do but to applaud me for my boldness. She is now doing well, and the sea-baths will soon restore her.
But Mary was not soon restored. On the contrary, for her the whole episode was traumatic: she was in great pain for many days, and convinced that she was going to die. The lost child was one more link in the “leaden chain” of fatalities, and to her it proved just how hopeless, how crazily unrealistic, was the household at Casa Magni. As she later exclaimed: “No words can tell you how I hated our house and the country around it… the beauty of the woods made me weep and shudder.”
Her own description of the miscarriage (also written to the Gisbornes) is much more factual than Shelley’s, and far more devastating:
On the 8th of June (I think it was) I was threatened with a miscarriage, and after a week of ill-health on Sunday 16th this took place at eight in the morning. I was so ill that for seven hours I lay nearly lifeless—kept from
In fact Mary did not leave her bedroom, or the terrace beyond her door, for the next three weeks—indeed not until after Shelley had departed on his last trip to Livorno. It was only the sinister rumours of the sinking of the Don Juan that finally got her on her feet again, for a terrible all-night carriage ride to Pisa and then on to Livorno to find Trelawny. As much as seventeen years later she recalled that day of her miscarriage in her journal as the first time she had “had the opportunity to look at Death in the face”.
Yet Shelley, of all men, could not be described as unfeeling. This was the contradiction. Having followed his life through Italy, nothing so convinced me as the extreme sensitivity of his feelings for those around him. Above all, it was the emotional intensity of his relations with Mary and Claire which had formed the centre of his life. Moreover his poetry, and writing generally, drew directly on this passionate intensity of feeling. Without it he could never have been the extraordinarily productive poet that he was. It was inconceivable to me that he should not have reacted most violently to Mary’s sufferings and blamed himself only too acutely for her misery at Casa Magni. It was only a question of how he would manage to express it.