It was the late autumn of 1972 when I came down to the Gulf of Spézia. By then I had been filling notebooks about Shelley for nearly three years, and was possessed by him, and the voices of his family and friends.
My pursuit of his restless journeyings had taken me from his birthplace in Sussex through an ever-widening circuit of exile. From the heartlands of Oxfordshire and the Thames Valley I had moved outwards to the West Country, to North Wales, to the Lakes, to Scotland and Ireland, and then to France, Switzerland and finally Italy. Nothing else seemed quite so real. I supported myself with freelance journalism, and I had a contract for a book. But I mark my beginning as a professional biographer from the day when my bank bounced a cheque because it was inadvertently dated 1772.
Now the inner, growing and imagining part of my life seemed completely bound up with the fate of this small Romantic circle, the post-revolutionary generation, who were trying to turn the principles of the 1790s—republicanism, atheism, free love and the shared commune of “like spirits”—into a form of daily existence, an experiment in living, which would sustain themselves, their children and their writing in a new creative harmony of which the cold, disillusioned world had barely dreamed.
It would end in disaster, I knew that already. But I suspended belief, knowing that the history of what the world calls failure is often more important, humanly speaking, than any other: for it tells those who come after what remains to be tried. It is, as I later found myself writing, more a haunting than a history: it is peculiarly alive and potent, like all those slumbering winged seeds and disembodied spirits and ambiguous, shadowy monsters that fill the best of Shelley’s poetry.
The biographer often has to work, not with a tabula rasa, but with a powerfully received image of his subject, already unconsciously formed from the mass of previous work in the same field. I feared this so strongly that I never completely read—and still have not read—the accepted authority on the subject, a detailed American biography by Newman Ivey White, published in two volumes in 1940. With my sense of meeting Shelley afresh, of approaching him from the inside, I felt I could not afford to open myself to the shaping interpretation of a previous generation. My urge was to go directly to the original materials—and most especially to the places— for myself, and risk the numerous details that I might consequently (and did on occasions) get wrong. I journeyed, in every sense, alone.
In Italy my outward life took on a curious thinness and unreality that I find difficult to describe. It was almost at times as if I was physically transparent, even invisible. I drifted without contact through the tourist crowds of the cities, and among the sleepy inhabitants of remote villages where the Shelleys had stayed a hundred and fifty years before. Except for the two hefty red volumes of Shelley’s letters and the journals of his wife Mary and her stepsister Claire Clairmont (the child of Godwin’s second wife), I was travelling light with the single rucksack of my Cévennes days. I hitch-hiked or took the local buses and little two-carriage branch-line trains that wound slowly through the foothills of the Tuscan Apennines. My tiny radio, a last link with the outside world, had been stolen weeks before when I slept on a sandy beach outside Livorno. I had left a girl I met in Florence in front of a picture in the Casa Dante, a smiling, sensible girl with fine dark hair, because she wanted to go to Siena - and Siena did not lie on Shelley’s itinerary. In little hotel rooms in Venice, in Rome, in Pisa, I read and reread Shelley’s poetry and letters and got quietly drunk in the evenings because I felt so solitary and yet so tense with the voices in my head. I gazed into mirrors above small washbasins with no plugs and did not see myself properly.
In the endless art galleries I saw nothing but Shelley’s favourite pictures and statues, the Medusa, the grotesque Laocoön, the lovely Venus Anadyomene with her armbands, the strange sprawled erotic shape of the Hermaphrodite, all of which thrilled and disturbed me, so I carried round photographs of them, as another man might carry round intimate pictures of his wife or mistress. I frequented cheap cafes and tavernas, municipal gardens, deserted formal parks, dusty riverside walks and hot back-street piazzas with their dancing washing-lines and pattering fountains. Occasionally I fell in with tramps, odd expatriate couples, or bleached hippies washed up from the shores of Greece and North Africa, the flotsam of the Sixties, an army in retreat talking softly of the great times past, the trips and the highs, the lost islands and the beautiful, broken communes in the sun. I listened, nodded and questioned, and slipped away again with my own demons. On the left-hand pages of my notebooks I put fragments of my own travels, on the right-hand pages I put Shelley’s; the former became scattered and disjointed, the latter ever more intricate and detailed and dark.
The bus from La Spézia to Lérici was full of Italian schoolchildren, brown knees below blue worsted skirts and shorts, busily eating gelati and chanting Beach Boys songs, down the long rocky road to the sea. I sat with my pack between my plimsolls, sunk in thought. The afternoon sun, already low, glinted across the water, far to the west, through outcrops of umbrella-pines. The road ran down to sea-level and followed the curve of the bay along a thin stone promenade. Round the beach, a mile or so away, the cluster of masts and sails in Lérici harbour flashed and shone, as they appeared and disappeared beyond the promontories and cliffs that indent the bay. So here, at last, it was: the furthest point, the edge of my story.
“You Americano?” said a voice at my shoulder. She was leaning over from the seat behind, gazing at the picture of Claire Clairmont in the journal on my knee, the same dark long hair.
“No, Inglese.”
She was disappointed: “Oh, Beatles, Lordo Byron.” She offered me a stick of violent-green chewing-gum, to make up for it, I think.
“You don’t like the Beatles, then?”
“Oh, si, si,” she said with a dismissive shrug, then added more cheerfully, “Lordo Byron, he died here in the water, drowned in his ship like a star.”
“Like a what?”
“You know, like a pop star.”
“Oh really, I thought it was a friend of his—un amico.”
“No, no, Lordo Byron. Guarda, guarda—” and she tossed her dark head and pointed through the bus window at a little café. Its pink neon sign read: Hotel Byron.
“I see what you mean.” I rose to clamber down the gangway to the door. For a moment I caught her eye moving from Claire’s picture to my face and back again, and a quizzical smile flashed across her angelic features.
“Arrivederci,” I said.
“See you, okay,” she replied with a thoughtful slow nod.
The bus was stopping at the village of San Terenzo, a small string of sea-front hotels and cafés, with a domed church behind on the hill. I swung my pack on one shoulder and, chewing my gum hard, padded across the pavement and jumped the low wall down on to the beach. I felt curiously hot and shaky, and hurried across to the rocks to bathe. I swam and duck-dived for several minutes, opening my eyes in the clear green-blue water and watching the languorous seaweed swaying on the ocean bed. Climbing back out on to the rocks, I cut my hand. I saw that all the coastal rock was volcanic, twisted and honeycombed, like a fine froth of baroque lace. Its edges were as sharp as blades. It came to me that a drowned body, floating in those beautiful seas, would be soon cut to ribbons.
The bay of Lérici is about two miles across, a horseshoe shape, steeply wooded behind with pine and ilex and with a number of sandy coves between each descending spur of rock. Lérici itself, a small fishing port and holiday resort, occupies the left or southern tip of the horseshoe. San Terenzo, in those days still not much more than a seaside village, is situated at the right or northern tip. Geographically, the bay is one small loop in the larger sweep of the Tuscan coast, known as the Gulf of Spézia, and commanded by Portovénere on the sea-run between Genoa and Livorno.
All these places had by now a special meaning for me. Shelley had his boat, the Don Juan, constructed in the shipyard at Genoa; Portovénere was the point where he would turn back from the open sea and race the Italian feluccas home to Lérici; Livorno was the port where he last saw Lord Byron; and of course San Terenzo (not Lérici) was the place where in 1822 he set up his last house with Mary and Claire, four years after he had first come to Italy.
Far out to sea westwards, now turning smoky-blue and chrome in the late afternoon light, lay two low humped islands, very black against the skyline. These were Palmária and Tino, where Shelley often used to sail on days of high wind, saying that the humming from the bowsprit was actually the call of a siren from the cliffs. Palmária now has an automatic lighthouse, to guide belated fishermen safely home through these uncertain waters, quickly whipped up by the sudden squalls of tramontana or sirocco.
While Lérici has had a good stone quay providing sheltered moorings since the eighteenth century, San Terenzo was for a long time little more than a shallow beach partially protected by an artificial reef of piled rocks. Fishermen’s boats had to be anchored temporarily offshore or dragged up on the sand, where Shelley used to keep his coracle built of reeds and canvas as a tender to his yacht.
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.
The sudden, broken and stumbling rhythm of that last, long line shatters the radiant dream and prepares for the solitary, confessional cry of the next stanza, with its bleak, disillusioned list of negations and failures, almost as if everything were lost:
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!
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 the old road twisted up and up into the woods, the tarred surface eventually giving way to a broken stone track on yellow sandy earth. There were no indications of a Casa Bertini, but old moss-covered plaques marked other more famous names—a Villa Byron (when was he here?) and one lived in by Montaigne. Then the track ran out.
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.
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 me think thy spirit feeds,
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.
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, and knew that they existed.
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.”
I never found the Villa Valsovano where Mary wrote this—it was allowed to fall into ruins at the turn of the century. But I found an old photograph of it, a large four-square Tuscan farm, with thick stone walls, plain square windows and a shallow tiled roof. It was set on sloping ground, within sight of the sea just south of Livorno, with its own garden and a little olive plantation. Mary recalled sitting on a garden seat in one of the stone arbours of the podere wall, listening to the peasants singing popular tunes from Rossini. She may well have written this journal entry there.
Above her, on the roof of the farmhouse, was the tower that Shelley had adopted as his study, and where he retreated to bask in the sun with his papers and books, trying to forget the misery below. In the photograph the tower shows up as a kind of greenhouse, mounted in the centre of the roof, with large hemispherical windows on each side, and what looks like the palisade of a little balcony. Here Shelley wrote his play about incest and patricide, The Cenci; and The Mask of Anarchy. At midday the tower grew so hot with the sun that Shelley alone could stand it, sitting half-naked at his desk. As I wandered about the little lanes of Monte Nero—I found Byron’s villa, of course: very grand, with statues on either side of the entrance steps—I realised that their “Scythrop’s tower” had become a local architectural fashion. All along the beach road were holiday villas, each with their Tuscan tower—Gothic turrets in pink or orange stucco, modernist blockhouses in white concrete, fairy-tale campanili with dark Tuscan tiles and arched windows and barley-sugar pillars.
Claire’s journal entry was made three years later, in 1822, shortly after Shelley’s death. She had finally decided to leave Italy for good—the first person of Shelley’s circle to act so decisively—and had set out by coach to stay with her brother Charles in Vienna. She may have had a brief affair with Trelawny—but her mind went back to other things. This is what she wrote on 20 September 1822 after leaving Florence for the last time:
We set out for Bologna. During the first part of the road I was too occupied with my own thoughts to attend to the scenery. I remembered how hopelessly I had lingered on Italian soil for five years, waiting ever for a favourable change, instead of which I was now leaving it having [lost every object—deleted] buried there every thing that I loved… Not withstanding the rain which came by fits very heavy, I walked up the steep hills, hoping by fatigue of body to dull the painful activity of mind…
So Claire’s last entry in her Italian journal—the fourteen remaining pages are blank—ends in streaming rain, clambering up the hills above Tagliaferro. She says she has buried “everything” that she loved: so not her child Allegra only, but also Shelley, and perhaps others too! Did she mean little Willmouse, of whom she was so fond? Did she mean Shelley’s mysterious “Neapolitan charge”? Who else did she mean? “Having buried everything that I loved “—not lost, but specifically “buried”. I puzzled over this internment of loved ones. And the “favourable change” she waited for during five long years: presumably that was a change in Byron’s attitude towards her and Allegra. But was this all? Was there also a change in Shelley’s attitude that she waited for?
To begin with, what I wanted to know about Claire was very simple. Had she ever slept with Shelley? There were at least three periods of their life together when this might have happened. During the ménage at Kentish Town in the spring and winter of 1814–15, after they had returned from the elopement, was the first. They were all very young—Claire only sixteen—Mary pregnant with her first child, and Hogg apparently in love with Mary. The extraordinary scenes of those months—rows, walk-outs, midnight terror sessions, hide-and-seek with the bailiffs—suggested intrigues and emotional cross-currents. But, as I learnt to expect at later moments of private drama, the relevant pages of journals and diaries were missing—either torn out, or lost, or subsequently destroyed. The whole six months can be summed up in a phrase from one of Claire’s own letters to her stepsister Fanny Imlay, written from Lynmouth on 28 May 1815, after she had been temporarily driven out by Mary: “so much discontent, such violent scenes, such a turmoil of passion and hatred.”
It can be added that when, a year later, Claire became Byron’s mistress in London, she made a point of saying that she did not believe in marriage and that Shelley would vouch for her character. Byron always accepted that Allegra was his child by Claire, but he also implied that he thought Shelley might previously have been Claire’s lover—and this was to prove, at the least, a source of jealousy and suspicion between the two poets. Nor did Claire, in her many subsequent and heart-breaking appeals to Byron, ever say that she had been a virgin when they met. None the less, Claire always declared that Byron had been the great love of her life—and she claimed it with a lasting bitterness that is utterly convincing.
Many years later, in 1827, she wrote to Jane Williams of her relationship with Byron:
I am unhappily the victim of a happy passion. I had one; like all things perfect in its kind, it was fleeting, and mine only lasted ten minutes, but those ten minutes have discomposed the rest of my life. The passion, God knows from what cause, from no fault of mine, however, disappeared; leaving no trace whatever behind it except my heart wasted and ruined as if it has been scorched by a thousand lightnings. You will, therefore, I hope, excuse my not following the advice you give me in your last letter, of falling in love…
It is sobering to find Claire still writing in this way of events that had taken place during one spring and summer, eleven years previously. But it also suggested to me that, whatever else, her relationship with Shelley was not of the same order of intensity. Nor was it likely to have involved a child—or, at least, not a child like Allegra, separated from her mother, and an endless source of Claire’s bitterness and recriminations. The relationship would have been of a different kind; and inevitably so, for while Claire had never lived with Byron for more than one night at a time she had lived more or less continuously under Shelley’s roof—despite everything that Mary had felt—from 1814 to 1820. At the very least they were old friends.
The second period when they might have been lovers was in that first summer in Italy, between August and October 1818. But it could not have been at the Bagni di Lucca in Mary’s presence, but rather two hundred miles away, on the other side of Italy, in the Euganean hills south-west of Venice.
Letters from Allegra’s nurse in Venice, Elise, had persuaded Claire that she must visit her child without Byron’s knowledge. Shelley decided to accompany her, leaving Mary and his own two children at Casa Bertini. The details of their journeyings and their scheme to deceive Byron, with the help of the British Consul at Venice, Richard Belgrave Hoppner, are characteristically involved, for Claire always had a genius for complicating life. But the upshot was that Shelley and Claire were alone together from the day they left Florence by vettura on 18 August to the day an exhausted Mary and two rather sick children arrived to rejoin them at the Villa Capuccini, at Este, in the Euganean hills, on 5 September. This was a total of nineteen days, or just under three weeks.
Shelley and Claire were again alone together at inns in Padua for several odd days during late September and early October, when Claire was “attending the medico” for some mysterious illness. And finally they were again alone at the Villa Capuccini, except for Elise and Allegra, for four days over the last weekend in October, while Mary remained in Venice.
The only adult witness to these unusually extended periods together was Elise, the nurse, at Este. And Elise was reliably reported to have said, some two years later, that Shelley and Claire had indeed been lovers, and that Claire had in fact conceived a child by Shelley. Her evidence has of course been bitterly disputed by everyone—most of all by Mary—and came to be known as “the Hoppner scandal”.
Once again, Claire’s journal covering the time at Este is missing. Both Shelley and Mary lovingly describe the villa, with its pergola and garden on the brow of a hill, and the summer-house where Shelley began both Julian and Maddalo and Prometheus Unbound. To the north, just across a sunken lane, was “an extensive Gothic castle, now the habitation of owls and bats, where the Medici family resided before they came to Florence”. To the south was a wide view of the plains of Lombardy. In the evenings Shelley would do owl-calls for Allegra and Willmouse, and the owls would answer back with quivering echoes from the dark battlements of the castle—like young Wordsworth’s owls calling back across the lakes in Cumberland.
The Hoppner scandal did not break until 1821, and then in a mass of conflicting evidence and testimony, a great deal of it concerned with what may have been a quite different problem: who were the father and mother of Shelley’s “Neapolitan charge”, a child registered in his and Mary’s name on 17 February 1819 at Naples? But what puzzled me at Venice, as I stifled in little rooms filled with the pungent odour of ancient backwaters, was the lack of evidence concerning their behaviour, which actually dated from the autumn of 1818. No letters or notes from Claire to Shelley are known. There are a number of agonised references in Shelley’s poems of the time which could be interpreted as alluding to Claire; but poetic evidence is, generally speaking, the least reliable, simply because it assumes the poet is speaking autobiographically—a perilous assumption at the best of times.
There is indeed one letter of Shelley’s to Claire, written from Venice on 25 September. But this appeared to be exclusively concerned with quite another, and very tragic event, the sudden death of baby Clara. I read this letter over and over in the published text.
“My dear Claire,” it begins, and proceeds to narrate the story of Clara’s convulsions on the journey with Mary to Venice; how they called first one, then a second doctor to the inn; how “in about an hour—how shall I tell you—she died—silently, without pain”. And how “this unexpected stroke reduced Mary to a kind of despair”. Well, that fact alone might lead Shelley to draw a veil over anything else. Yet it remained puzzling. Surely Shelley would have made some remark, some slight gesture, towards Claire? Unless of course there had been nothing special between them at this time after all. The letter ended simply, sadly and directly: “All this is miserable enough—is it not? But must be borne… And above all, my dear girl, take care of yourself. Your affectionate friend, PBS.”
Nothing more to be said, it would seem.
Venice disappointed me. The most religiously preserved of the North Italian cities, despite all the depredations of the sea, it seemed encrusted under so many other associations, so many waves of visitors and pilgrims, that my Romantics were quite lost. The Palazzo Mocenigo was like any other on the Grand Canal, and it was easier to imagine Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach dying here than Byron swimming races and climbing balconies. The Lido had been Shelley’s lovely, desolate
… bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds…
But this abandoned beach had become one of the great hotel fronts and rich playgrounds of the northern Adriatic. I returned like everyone else to San Marco and watched the pigeons swoop, and black battered gondolas ride uneasily at their posts. One post was empty; it stood bare out of the waters, worn by invisible ropes, as if something were missing.
Yes, something was missing all right. Something so small that I did not realise it until I was in Rome, sitting one day in the long grass of the Forum. The text of Shelley’s letter to Claire was not quite complete, as published. The three dots in the penultimate sentence had an editorial note attached: “one line is here erased.” This is common in Shelley’s letters, and is usually of little significance; when checked against the manuscript the erasure or deletion is minor. But here the manuscript was in America, and could not immediately be checked. It was only some time later that I recovered the full text, held by the Pforzheimer Library of New York. The end of Shelley’s letter from Venice, to Claire at the Villa Capuccini, now read very differently. This is what it said: “All this is miserable enough—is it not? But must be borne. Meanwhile forget me & relive not the other thing—And above all, my dear girl, take care of yourself. Your affectionate friend, PBS.”
So there, after all, was exactly that gentle but secret message between them that I had expected. The additional sentence crossed through in contemporary ink—either by Shelley, therefore, or most likely by Claire herself. The very deletion carries its own implication. It does not prove of course that they were lovers at Este; but it does show that Shelley shared something secret and special with Claire, and that now—with little Clara’s death and Mary’s despair—the situation had changed, and he wished to damp it down. “Forget me & relive [or revive] not the other thing”: but if Claire were pregnant (as Elise was to say) it might not have been so easy.
There was a third period when Shelley and Claire might have been lovers: the time between October 1820 and March 1822 when she left Shelley’s household (partly as a result of the Hoppner scandal) and went to stay as a lodger and governess with the Italian family of Dr Bojti in Florence. In the week this parting occurred Claire wrote in her journal: “Think of thyself as a stranger & traveller on the earth, to whom none of the many affairs of this world belong, and who has no permanent township on the globe.”
She was desolate and lonely, and it is clear that life had little meaning without Shelley—except for the endless, nagging possibility that she might still do something to get Allegra back from Byron.
During these next eighteen months Shelley and Claire met frequently—often in secret at Livorno, or at Pugnano outside Pisa. They also corresponded, with Claire using the poste restante at Pisa, and a false name—the wonderfully banal “Mr Joe James”—on Shelley’s instructions, so that Mary should not know of it. Once again, most of these letters have disappeared, but a revealing set of five from Shelley to Claire remain for the final months of their separation between December 1821 and March 1822. It is evident from these that Shelley was missing Claire greatly, and the tone of affection and regret is set by the opening paragraph of a letter of 11 December:
My dearest friend, I should be very glad to receive a confidential letter from you—one totally the reverse of those I write you; detailing all your present occupation & intimacies, & giving me some insight into your future plans. Do not think that my affection or anxiety for you ever cease, or that I ever love you less although that love has been & still must be a source of disquietude to me… Tell me dearest [deleted] what you mean to do, and if it should give you pleasure come & live with us.
Claire of course did finally come to live with them again, four months later in April 1822, at Casa Magni. Yet it is clear that, but for Allegra’s death, Mary would never have assented to it: she was finished for ever with any radical ménage. To those outside Shelley’s immediate circle it was obvious how strange and difficult the triangle of relations between the three had become. Claire’s protectress at Pisa, Mrs Mason—the erstwhile Lady Mountcashell, once a pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft in Ireland—could see the situation in a calm and commonsense light. She could see that Claire would never marry or make an independent life of her own, and that Mary would never be able to enjoy a normal marriage, until Shelley and Claire were permanently separated. She wrote as tactfully as she could to Shelley in May 1822:
I wish Claire had some determined project, but her plans seem unsettled as ever, and she does not see half the reasons for separating herself from your society that really exist… I regret Mary’s loss of good health and spirits, but hope it is only the consequence of her present situation [ie her pregnancy], and therefore merely temporary, but I dread Claire’s being in the same house for a month or two…
“I dread Claire’s being in the same house”—strong words. And words which brought me back once more to Casa Magni. For it was here that I began to realise that the question of Shelley and Claire as lovers, in a simple sexual sense, was a very superficial one. The relationship required much deeper understanding. It was the human quality of their long, passionate and restless friendship which was important. For Claire brought out in Shelley something that Mary never did: a dark side, tortured and dissatisfied, full of wild schemes and desperate hopes, which in fact gave much of his writing its most characteristic—and least lyrical—edge. It was too, I think, the side of his dreams and nightmares, and his ultimate realisation of the need to transcend his situation in Italy.
What did Shelley himself say about this relationship? He too was inclined to treat the sexual side—and all the speculation it aroused—with a certain nonchalance, even with flippancy. On the occasion of the Hoppner scandal he admits that “the living with Claire as my mistress” would have been a “great error & imprudence” but not a “crime”. In no sense would it have been a moral evil, such as “abandoning a child”—explicitly Claire’s supposed baby—an act which he always most vehemently and convincingly denied. Yet even when writing to Mary at such a tense moment he most carefully avoids actually denying that he and Claire had ever been lovers. Indeed, he is almost teasing on the subject, with a flash of the old rebellious, coat-trailing Shelley of much earlier days. He tells the appalled Mary: “Elise says that Claire was my mistress—that is all very well & so far there is nothing new: all the world has heard so much and people may believe or not believe as they think good.”
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.
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 Shelley—and see it under the grey eye of twilight.”
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 whom the borders between remote possibility and the immediate practicalities of life had become permanently blurred. Yet their shared notion of Liberty was not unreal, and not laughable. They were waiting upon events, upon some sudden turn in luck, some unexpected current that would draw them back into life and action. For the time being they were washed up, comic in their dignity, but resilient and self-mocking: the tide might turn again, might float them off. I remembered the ring that Shelley had had made for himself in Italy, with the inscription: “il buon tempo arriva.” The good time will come.
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.
The Shelleys’ life in Rome was, in a sense, much more real than my own. My life was a figment of my own imagination, whereas theirs was to me an absolute, historic reality—no detail of which could be invented or falsified, not even the weather. When Boris and Alfredo asked about Shelley I was scrupulously exact, except for the fact that I spoke in the present tense. When asked about myself, I was considerably more vague and picaresque. After all, the Shelleys’ lives were simply so much more interesting than my own.
The game of speaking about them as contemporary visitors to Rome soon became far more than a bit of shared make-believe. It became more like Coleridge’s definition of poetry: a willing suspension of disbelief. But, unlike poetry, it had rigour and absolute rules—everything had to be verifiable. I remember they were always asking me to discover why Shelley was attacked in the post office on the Via del Corso, and by whom. But I could never bring them a satisfactory answer, or even proof that it had occurred.
“It probably happened,” was all I would say, “but maybe not quite as Shelley remembered it.”
“I expect it was by Imperialist spies,” said Boris in a hollow voice.
“CIA,” said Alfredo.
The last night I ever went to the hostelleria it was somebody’s birthday—I never found out whose, the festivities were too far advanced by the time I slipped in. Monica gave me a free plate of lasagne, and the rest remains hazy. I wanted to tell them about Shelley’s wonderful description of the Arch of Titus in the Forum:
The keystone of these arches is supported each by two winged figures of Victory, whose fair hair floats on the wind of their own speed, & whose arms are outstretched bearing trophies, as if impatient to meet. They look as if it were borne from the subject extremities of the earth on the breath which is the exhalation of that battle & desolation which it is their mission to commemorate.
I think I felt that both Russia and South America were, in their own way, “subject extremities of the earth”. But my notebook says only that Boris sang “a Russian drinking-stamping song” and laughed and capered “like a tall grey winter bear”; while Alfredo sang “a lovely soft canzone d’amore” with his eyes shut and a dreamy smile on his face, of which “I could only make out one word—febrile”. Then there was a highly complicated drinking game, involving forfeits and toasts, with an elected Master of Ceremonies who dictated the terms on which the rosso could be drunk. I couldn’t understand most of it, but the laughter was wonderful, warm and somehow sad, full of sentiment and nostalgia—rising to the ceiling like smoke, an exhalation of deepest feelings, quite un-English. It moved and embarrassed me. The toasts were serious and bawdy by turns—family, loved ones, politics, home towns far away. Then they toasted Shelley—as a fellow-exile—and his name rang to the roof. I sat there looking at my plate dangerously close to tears. I came back on wings down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, determined to write my book for people like them too, who would never read it, people who had lost most things except hope. There were stars above the Arch of Titus, a black shape under the sky of the Eternal City.
Shelley had originally intended to return to Naples from Rome in the summer of 1819. He had completed the first three Acts of Prometheus Unbound in his “upaithric” study in the Baths of Caracalla and by May was working on his verse-play about Beatrice Cenci—the sinister old Cenci palace still exists down by the Tiber near the island. One of the reasons for this planned return southwards must have been his “Neapolitan charge” Elena, and I was surprised to discover that he commemorates her registered birth date, 27 December, in The Cenci:
I beg those friends who love me, that they mark
The day a feast upon their calendars.
It was the twenty-seventh of December:
Ay, read the letters if you doubt my oath.
The reference is doubly surprising in that, in the play, Cenci is talking about the day two of his children died; and once again this raised for me the whole problem of Elena’s identity, and Shelley’s depressive crisis at Naples. What complex meaning had Shelley hidden here?
The circumstantial evidence strongly suggested that Claire Clairmont had conceived a child by Shelley early in 1818, and that the baby Elena Adelaide Shelley, registered as born in Naples and left there with foster-parents until she died two years later, was indeed Claire’s. But as I came gradually to know Claire’s character, and the way she bitterly regretted leaving her child Allegra with Byron, it became less and less likely to me that she would ever leave behind her—to foster-parents, guardians, friends, or least of all to a Foundling Hospital (as Elise Foggi would claim) - a second child, and that by Shelley.
Moreover, if Claire had some special interest in the child one would have expected her to be the one urging Shelley to go south again; and Mary to be understandably reluctant. But in fact the roles were almost reversed: Claire showed no particular desire to go back, while Mary frequently spoke of Naples as the city where she had been most happy, even in preference to Pisa. As late as April 1822 she was writing to Maria Gisborne: “Pisa certainly agrees with [Shelley] exceedingly well, which is its only merit in my eyes. I wish fate had bound us to Naples instead.”
In the event, William’s death was to drive them north to Tuscany, on 10 June.
A further puzzle arose when I examined copies of Elena’s official Italian registration, originally discovered by N. I. White at Naples. If she had really been Claire’s illegitimate child one would have expected Shelley to proceed in the most discreet manner possible. In a city rich with expatriate gossip he would have avoided anything which linked the child to their residence at 250 Riviera di Chiaia. But the birth registration showed that not only had the ceremony been witnessed by a local midwife, Gaetana Musto, but that two local shopkeepers from the Riviera di Chiaia district were also co-opted as witnesses. Shelley himself signed the birth register, formally stating that Elena Adelaide Shelley was the child of Mary Shelley and himself, born to them nearly two months earlier at No 250.
This presented a further mystery: why had he waited until 17 February, the day before their final departure from Naples, to formalise the registration? It all suggested a decision taken at the last possible moment, almost on impulse, and with no particular attempt at discretion. Moreover it would not have provided convincing cover for Claire, even if the child had been hers. For who would ever believe that Shelley and Mary would leave their own child behind in Naples, with Italian foster-parents? The document was self-evidently false, and this must have been known by all the local signatories. There would have been many ways of hushing up an illegitimate birth in such a city as Naples—the child need never have been registered there at all—and I could not believe that this was one of them. Shelley must have had a different purpose in making this legal declaration.
Nevertheless it seemed inescapable that Claire had been compromised in Naples in some way; and that Shelley (but not Mary) had been close to despair about it. The blackmail that Paolo Foggi and Elise began—“Paolo’s infernal business”—in June 1820, immediately after Elena’s death in Naples, eventually required the services of an Italian lawyer, Del Rosso, to silence it. So there must have been some basis in fact, though not necessarily what the blackmailers alleged. Elise seemed genuinely sure that Shelley and Claire had been lovers at Este; and her wild tale of the illegitimate child born at No 250 was obviously based on local gossip, or something of which she had personal knowledge. Then there was that crucial date, 27 December 1818. How could one avoid it?
The date appears quite separately in three significant documents. It is the day recorded for Elena’s birth on the official register. It is the date recorded in Mary’s own journal for Claire being “ill”. And it is the date carefully chosen by Shelley in The Cenci, as a kind of bleak memorial of some tragic occurrence in the family.
I worried at this problem ceaselessly. The details are far more convoluted than I have sketched here, and in the end I wrote a separate appendix on the subject for my biography. There is for example Elise’s recantation, written in Florence in 1822, stating that she had seen “rien de pervers” in Claire’s conduct at Este after all; and also Claire’s letter to Mary saying that Elise would sign whatever she dictated, but—significantly—that she did not know how to phrase it.
Nevertheless I came to feel that there were three likely truths underlying the Hoppner scandal, and somehow they had to be reconciled. The first was that Shelley and Claire had very probably been lovers at Este, that some of what Elise said was indeed true, and that there were sufficient grounds for Paolo Foggi’s blackmail, for Shelley’s acute depression at Naples and for Mary’s growing desire for Claire to leave their household. The second was that though the baby Elena, the “Neapolitan charge”, undoubtedly existed as a source of grief and embarrassment to Shelley, something that he always tried to keep secret, she was not in fact Claire’s illegitimate child. The third was that, none the less, the date of 27 December was especially significant in the whole affair. Somehow it linked the baby Elena with Claire’s compromised position.
The light that these conjectures threw on Shelley’s marriage was considered radical and even somewhat outrageous at the time that I wrote. But they are now widely accepted by Shelley scholars and readers, because the unconventional nature of Shelley’s relationships is regarded with much more sympathy and understanding. But they do not of course provide a biographical solution to what actually happened; nor is there really sufficient evidence to do so still. Nevertheless I felt insistently, and perhaps misguidedly, that a solution had to be provided.
My own solution in the published book was stark. It had two parts: that Elena was Shelley’s illegitimate child by the maid Elise; and that Claire had also been pregnant by Shelley, but had had a miscarriage at four months on 27 December. In retrospect, I now think that the first part of this hypothesis is both unnecessary and extremely unlikely. But I am more than ever convinced that the second part—Claire’s miscarriage—alone represents the true solution to the mystery.
The baby Elena was, I now believe, a Neapolitan foundling child, which Shelley impulsively adopted from the Naples Foundling Hospital as an act of atonement for Claire’s suffering. He chose a child born on the date of Claire’s miscarriage (her “illness”)—hence the crucial coincidence of 27 December—and intended to bring it up with foster-parents at his own expense. Hence Elise’s notorious accusation was partly based on a misunderstanding, or misinterpretation of what she genuinely thought had occurred.
Even as I write this I am seized with my old doubts. So much evidence really does point to Elena being Claire’s illegitimate child. It is only my interpretation of Claire’s and Shelley’s characters that stands against it. And how can one really interpret Claire’s behaviour, with her diary entries missing for those eight crucial months between the end of June 1818 and the beginning of March 1819? And why was the diary missing—or destroyed—anyway?
Yet a biographer does become slowly convinced about his subjects’ characters. After studying them and living with them for several years he finds they become one of the most important of all human truths; and I think perhaps the most reliable. This sense of character eventually grows very strong, and in an extraordinary way a relationship of trust seems to be established between you. There are several things that I concluded about the quality of this trust, while I was in Italy.
First there is the whole question of people acting “true to character”, or “true to themselves”. In daily human affairs notoriously, we all do sometimes act apparently out of character—especially in situations of great stress or temptation or depression. In such situations one could say that a person’s sense of their own identity is diminished, and that they act almost in spite of themselves. Yet the biographer views and witnesses these daily human affairs in a special and privileged perspective. He gains a special kind of intimacy, but quite different from the subjective intimacy that I had first so passionately sought. He sees no act in isolation; nor does he see it from a single viewpoint. Even the familiarity of a close friend or spouse of many years suffers from this limitation. The biographer sees every act as part of a constantly unfolding pattern: he sees the before and the afterwards, both cause and consequence. Above all he sees repetition and the emergence of significant behaviour over an entire lifetime. As a result I have become convinced of the integrity of human character. Even a man’s failings, sudden lapses, contradictory reactions, sudden caprices, seem in the long run to fall within a pattern of character. One could say, paradoxically, that people even act out of character in a certain way: there is always, so to speak, meaning in their madness, provided one has full knowledge of the circumstances. (Though that is the great proviso, together with Henry James’s, “never say you know the last word about any human heart”.)
The real error in my first hypothesis, that Elena was the child of Shelley and Elise, lies in the fact that, had she been so, it would have been utterly out of character for Shelley to leave the child in Naples. In character for Byron, but never for Shelley. Shelley’s attitude to children, legitimate or illegitimate, had been amply demonstrated by the long chancery case bitterly fought in England for custody of the children by his first marriage; and by his support of Claire when she gave birth to Allegra. Shelley was simply not the sort of man to abandon children whatever the social pressures. And this objection, as I have already said, applies with even greater force to any child of his and Claire’s. In trying to solve a domestic mystery by mechanical, almost forensic explanation, I violated what I had learned much more deeply of the laws of character. I had in effect broken the terms of the biographer’s trust. It was a cardinal mistake.
By the same token, I had maintained that trust, almost in the teeth of the evidence, as far as Shelley and Claire were concerned. The whole pattern of their relationship pointed to a sexual affair, a compromising situation and a probable pregnancy. Yet nothing in the character of their intimacy either before or, even more important, afterwards at Florence and Pisa allowed me to concede that they had abandoned a love-child to the Naples Foundling Hospital, or callously farmed it out to foster-parents. The tragic miscarriage became the logical solution to the mystery.
The second thing about this trust is, of course, that one may be wrong about it. As in all human affairs, trust may be misplaced or betrayed; or one’s judgment of character may be simply incorrect. This possibility of error is constant in all biography, and I suspect that it is one of the elements which gives the genre its peculiar psychological tension. I do not here speak of simple errors in documentation; or even less of the deliberate slanting of an account. I mean that the reader can see, from the outside, an honest relationship developing between biographer and subject, and the deeper this becomes the more critical are those moments—or areas—in which misunderstanding or misinterpretation become evident.
At the point where the reader believes he can see more truly or fairly into the state of the case than the biographer himself then the very nature of the book he is reading seems to change. Essentially, the dramatic nature of the biography—its powers of re-creation—are fatally undermined. The literary illusion of life, the illusion that makes it so close to the novel, is temporarily or permanently weakened. In short, where the biographical narrative is least convincing its fictional powers are most reduced. Where trust is broken between biographer and subject it is also broken between reader and biographer.
The great appeal of biography seems to lie, in part, in its claim to a coherent and integral view of human affairs. It is based on the profoundly hopeful assumption that people really are responsible for their actions, and that there is a moral continuity between the inner and the outer man. The public and the private life do, in the end, make sense of each other; and the one is meaningless without the other. Its view of life is Greek: character expresses itself in action: and can be understood, if not necessarily justified.
Inevitably I took the mystery of Elena north with me again, to Florence and then Livorno, where the Shelleys settled in late summer 1819. It was here, almost exactly a year later, that the story—as opposed to the scandal—had its sequel. At the end of June 1820 Shelley heard of the baby’s illness; and on 7 July her death. Both Claire’s and Mary’s journals exist in full for this period, without significant deletions; as do several letters from Shelley to his close friends the Gisbornes, then in London. So in many ways it is the most revealing time of all in the whole sad affair: what did they each say?
Mary, as so often, says nothing at all on the matter; though there is a letter showing that she knew of Paolo Foggi’s blackmail attempts. Claire’s diary shows no evidence of grief or upset, though an ironic reference of 13 July to “those who threaten to take to the law” indicates that she too knew of Shelley’s efforts to silence Paolo. On 4 July there is also a stinging aside about her quarrels with Mary, in two lines of doggerel:
Heigh-ho, the Clare & the Ma
Find something to fight about every day
—but this hardly indicates any shattering revelation or dispute. In fact there is a lot about Naples in Claire’s diary throughout this summer, but it all concerns her enthusiastic reception of the revolution there against the King, an enthusiasm which she shared with Shelley, and which helped to inspire his “Ode to Liberty” of that year. There is nothing that could be remotely connected with grief or remorse over Elena’s death.
By contrast, Shelley has a lot to say. He had taken the Gisbornes into his confidence over Paolo, and it was they who had originally helped him employ the lawyer Del Rosso. Clearly they also knew about Elena, and it is to them that Shelley unburdens himself. On 30 June he writes: “My poor Neapolitan, I hear, has a severe fever of dentition. I suppose she will die, and leave another memory to those which already torture me. I am awaiting the next post with anxiety, but without much hope. What remains to me? Domestic peace and fame? You will laugh when you hear me talk of the latter…”
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.
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 plan to settle on the seashore at Casa Magni, which Shelley understood—more or less unconsciously—as a jumping-off point, a point of departure, rather than—as Mary thought—a temporary and highly impractical holiday home. Shelley wrote to Claire in Florence:
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 with him, probably folded in one of his pocket-books, in the wreck of 8 July. The damaged paper, torn and disfigured with sea-water, carries only a few phrases, none of them complete. But it refers specifically to Claire. Mary mentions her wish for a house “all our own”, the lack of “order and cleanliness” at Casa Magni, and begs Shelley to seek Mrs Mason’s help at Pisa—and “talk to her also about Claire”. It had been Mary’s refrain for seven long years.
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.
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 fate with startling clarity:
… 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 fainting by brandy, vinegar, eau de Cologne etc—at length ice was brought to our solitude—it came before the doctor so Claire and Jane were afraid of using it, but Shelley overruled them and by an unsparing application of it I was restored. They all thought and so did I at one time that I was about to die … My convalescence was slow …
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.
It was clear that he could not do so to his friends, or in a normal way to Mary herself. Another man would have packed up the household and moved back to Pisa or Livorno, to some sort of civilisation. But that was not the Shelley I had watched driving himself to this edge of existence. Shelley would act, would express himself through his imagination. Casa Magni in this sense became a dream place, a theatre of his mind: and this was one of the reasons that I myself entered it with such mixed feelings, even misgivings.
The story of Shelley’s visions and nightmares during those last weeks is well known. They are the last part of the received myth of his life that any biographer has to confront in an attempt to explain without trying to reduce or deny. In my room at the pensione, full of those strangely empty cradles and the sound of the sea coming through the windows beyond my own balcony, I tried to consider them calmly, though not at first very objectively. I wrote my daily notes, I kept my own dream diary, I wandered about the little beach long after dark and sat late into the night on my cane chair drinking Chianti from a straw-cased flask. Several mornings, before dawn, I walked to Lérici along the cliff road and stood on the harbour quay looking back across the bay through borrowed binoculars, watching the sunlight spill down through the olive trees and light upon the empty terrace of Casa Magni. Often, as I raised those lenses, I wondered what figures I might glimpse.
Shelley’s imagination erupted six days after Mary’s miscarriage. In Edward Williams’s characteristically laconic diary entry for 23 June: “Shelley sees spirits and alarms the whole house.” Mary’s sketchy journal makes no mention of this, nor do Shelley’s own letters say a word. But for the fact that Shelley died just over a fortnight later and Mary went over those last days in great detail in her long letter of 15 August to Maria Gisborne—perhaps the most remarkable and moving letter she ever wrote—there would be no way of knowing just what those “spirits” were. However, Mary explains in great detail, and almost for the first time I felt I was looking into the secret, hidden life of Casa Magni; as if the glittering shapes had risen, momentarily, from the deep towards the surface.
This is what Mary wrote: “As I said Shelley was at first in perfect health but having over fatigued himself one day, and then the fright that my illness gave him caused a return of nervous sensations and visions as bad as in his worst times.”
This itself immediately alerted me, for Mary had never previously written about Shelley’s “visions”—yet she now implied that they had occurred often: perhaps throughout their time in Italy.
Her account continues:
I think it was the Saturday after my illness [in fact Sunday 23], while yet unable to walk I was confined to my bed—in the middle of the night I was awoken by hearing him scream and come rushing into my room; I was sure that he was asleep and tried to waken him by calling on him, but he continued to scream which inspired me with such a panic that I jumped out of bed and ran across the hall to Mrs Williams’ room where I fell through weakness, though I was so frightened that I got up again immediately—she let me in and Williams went to S. who had been wakened by my getting out of bed—he said that he had not been asleep and that it was a vision that he saw that had frightened him.
Mary may have been terrified indeed; but typically she remained perfectly rational, for she observed logically: “as he declared that he had not screamed”—and Shelley had screamed enough to wake the whole house—”it was certainly a dream and no waking vision.” The following morning she calmly questioned him about what he had seen, and gradually two “visions” emerged: the first concerning the Williamses (who were sleeping together in the room next to Shelley’s), and the second concerning herself. Both visions reveal clearly enough Shelley’s deep underlying anxiety, and his sense of guilt at the way he was treating Mary.
She records what he “saw” unflinchingly:
What frightened him was this—He dreamt that lying as he did in bed, Edward and Jane came into him, they were in the most horrible condition, their bodies lacerated—their bones starting through their skin, their faces pale yet stained with blood, they could hardly walk, but Edward was the weakest and Jane was supporting him—Edward said, Get up Shelley, the sea is flooding the house and it is all coming down. S. got up, he thought, and went to his window that looked on the terrace and the sea and thought he saw the sea rushing in.
The laceration of those bodies puzzled me for a moment, until I remembered the volcanic rock around the bay. Both Edward and Jane were, in Shelley’s eyes, drowned people—and the house itself had become the boat, foundering beneath stormy seas. To a literal interpretation this might seem like a direct presentiment of their shipwreck. But I came to think of it much more as symbolic: Shelley’s unconscious realisation that his dream of the “island house” at Casa Magni was doomed, that they would all be swept away by outside forces, that ordinary life would break in upon them, and that he must rouse himself and face reality before it was too late.
The second part of the vision moved to Mary’s room: the room in which she had so nearly bled to death. To get there, Shelley would have to have opened his bedroom door, crossed the dining-room in front of the big terrace windows, and burst through the door opposite, altogether a distance of some thirty feet. So this was no ordinary nightmare; at the least it was sleep-walking—common in childhood (Shelley had sleep-walked regularly at Syon House, his prep school, where he was desperately unhappy) but rare in a normal adult. Mary’s account continues, now breathless, the manuscript showing that she wrote with increasing speed, hardly bothering to punctuate:
Suddenly his vision changed & he saw the figure of himself strangling me, that had made him rush into my room, yet fearful of frightening me he dared not approach the bed, when my jumping up awoke him, or as he phrased it caused his vision to vanish. All this was frightful enough, & talking it over the next morning he told me that he had had many visions lately—he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace & said to him—“How long do you mean to be content”—Not very terrific words & certainly not prophetic of what occurred. But Shelley had often seen these figures when ill …
It is interesting that Mary, still amazingly logical and objective, specifically denies that Shelley was somehow prophesying his own death. It would have been so easy, in her distraught state, to make an “anecdote” of it, to show her beloved poet foreseeing his last days on earth. (Trelawny hints at this continuously in the Records.) Again she says that Shelley often saw such visions “when ill”. But what she leaves unsaid is how the murderous “strangling” image must have come to Shelley. For surely it is evident that Shelley’s mind was running obsessively over those awful hours after her miscarriage. He would have remembered those unstaunchable flows of blood on the sheets; the tin hip-bath full of water and lumps of ice; lifting Mary into it, fainting, her head back in his arms; holding her down in the freezing water; the appalled faces of Jane and Claire—especially Claire—wondering if the shock would kill her … So he woke the house with his screams.
But Mary says nothing of all this. What could a biographer say? “He would have remembered …”; the fatal past subjunctive, which marks the passage from fact and evidence, to fiction and self-projection. I walked beside the little modern marina at Lérici and watched the Italians in their crisp white trousers and blue espadrilles, rolling sail canvas, emptying plastic buckets, calling to each other, preparing for the end of the season. Stacked on the quay were wooden boxes of silvery sprats. I returned the borrowed binoculars.
“You could see well? You found what you were looking for?”
“Not really. But they are beautiful glasses.”
“Sometimes the weather is too hazy. It is a sort of sea-mist. But it is wonderful for sailing here in the bay. Outside it is rougher. Outside it can be dangerous.”
“I have heard.”
I thought for a long time about Shelley seeing the figure of himself. “How long do you mean to be content?” Did Mary know that these words came from Goethe’s Faust? Claire must have known, for she was slowly translating the poem into English. Shelley had arranged this translation for Byron—who could not read it in the original—telling his Lordship that he had commissioned the work from a friend in Paris, and extracting a fee of sixty crowns. It was typical of the way Shelley quietly continued to look after Claire, and brought her—often secretly—into all his schemes up to the very end. But the “double”, the fatal doppelgänger, also figured in his own poetry, and here I could begin to make a tentative connection between these disturbed dreams and involuntary visions and the deliberate, often learned, process of his creative work.
In Act One of Prometheus Unbound there is a haunting passage in which Shelley describes the “two worlds of life and death”. Combining classical ideas of Hades, Platonic notions of the intermediary sphere of daemons and the Dantean vision of the Christian Inferno, he suggests the existence of a world of “doubles”, of “shadows” which repeat or mirror everything on earth, “all forms that think and live”. These are not so much ghosts of the dead as ghosts of the living. We all have our doubles in this second world (the idea is most familiar nowadays in science fiction rather than poetry). Only at the moment of death or destruction are the real and the double united, “and they part no more”. Thus to meet your double, or to see it attacking someone, signified imminent peril: death perhaps, or the invasion of the real, normal world by the world of shadows. It was precisely this problem that Shelley seems to have been facing at Casa Magni. In modern psychological terms, he was refusing to acknowledge the realities of his situation, so fraught with suffering, and his unconscious mind was rebelling. Of course, that was crudely put: but it gave me a frame in which to consider the “deep truth” at the end of his life.
In the poem it is beautifully put. The person who sees his double is a magician, the part legendary and part historical Zoroaster. A Persian wise man, supposed to have lived about 1000 BC (but also identified with one of the Magi who visited the infant Christ), he founded the Parsee religion with its dualistic theology of Good and Evil (hence Nietzsche’s and Richard Strauss’s Zarathustra). Zoroastrianism had always fascinated Shelley and appears throughout his poetry from Mont Blanc (1816) onwards.
In Prometheus Unbound the figure of the Earth describes how Zoroaster met his own double and came to a knowledge of the shadow world:
… Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One that which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadow of all forms that think and live
Till death unite them and they part no more;
Dreams and the light imaginings of men,
And all that faith creates or love desires,
Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes.
Several points now gave a new meaning to this passage. The Earth describes Zoroaster as her “dead child”, a phrase which surely had personal meaning for Shelley. The description of the shadow world containing “terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes” was exactly how everyone talked about San Terenzo. And I began to wonder if, at some level, during these last days Shelley was almost identifying with Zoroaster, seeing himself as a poet-magician, like Prospero in The Tempest, somehow attempting to exorcise all their pain and suffering—Mary’s, Claire’s, his own—by natural magic and his own poetry, at Casa Magni. Or was this a fantastic suggestion, more appropriate to fiction than to biography?
I never quite resolved that tension between a mythical and a strictly historical view of Shelley’s last days; and I am still not sure if it can—or should—be done. The mystery of his inner nature remains until the end. Yet all this summed up for me the final act of his search for the new life, the final revolutionary attempt: it was not self-destruction in the mundane sense, but a magic self-transcendence at the level of the imagination. Shelley never gave up the Romantic struggle he had inherited, never finally gave up hope that the great forces of regeneration were on his side. As he wrote in bold black ink on the front inside cover of his last working notebook, bleached with sun and sea-salt: “The Spring rebels not against winter but it succeeds it—the dawn rebels not against night but disperses it.”
For Mary, the survivor, Shelley’s drowning on 8 July 1822 was also a transformation of their lives into the world of the imagination, but of a very different kind. Within two months she was writing of the extraordinary sea-change that had overtaken the memory of her husband. To Jane Williams—now her “best, dearest, only friend”—she wrote from Genoa on 22 September of the summer that they had shared together, lamenting her departure for London and looking back with bitter regret to the “paradise” she and Shelley had known at San Terenzo:
Ever since you quitted me I am overpowered by a melancholy and misery no human words can describe and no human mind can long support… You are gone, the last link of a golden chain leaving me bound by a leaden one alone. You the Eve of a fair Paradise—Now through Eden take your solitary way. I was never the Eve of any Paradise, but a human creature blessed by an elemental spirit’s company & love—an angel who imprisoned in flesh could not adapt himself to his clay shrine & so has flown & left it—& I feel as poets have described those loved by superhuman creatures & then deserted by them—Impatient, despairing—& resting only on the moment when he will return to me.
It was impossible not to sympathise with Mary’s overwhelming grief. That remorseless, gnawing grief, moreover, of the widow who feels that she has somehow failed to do justice to her spouse in life and must therefore make a cult of him in death. At the Keats-Shelley Museum in Rome I had noted the disturbing fact that even the handwriting of Mary’s letters changed sharply after Shelley’s death and became virtually identical with his own, as if it were the “automatic writing” of the spiritualists, guided by his disembodied spirit. But in biographical terms Mary’s profound mourning and her transfigured memory of “the angel imprisoned in human flesh” was to prove a disaster. Within two generations it was to produce that apotheosis of the Victorian Shelley in Matthew Arnold’s essay, describing the “beautiful ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings in vain”. So the great aim of my biography finally came clear to me.
I left my balcony at San Terenzo early one crisp November morning, determined to bring that angel to earth, and to do justice to Shelley’s lifelong dream of a better world here below. The bay was empty of boats, and a light pearly mist rose off the glittering water. The bus to La Spézia was almost empty.