Edge of the Orison (25 page)

He was a river sailor, Thames excursionist, book in one hand, tiller under the elbow, not a deepwater man. Byron commissioned the
Bolivar
, a decked, seaworthy yacht; while Shelley, with help from his friend Williams, designed a cranky and unstable twenty-four-footer. A wooden craft with too much sail and not enough hull. She had to carry two tonnes of pig iron as ballast. Along with a name Shelley didn't want: Byron arranged for Captain Roberts to paint
his
choice on the sail.
So Don Juan
it was. The closest Shelley came to his preferred
Ariel
was the quote from
The Tempest
that Trelawny put on his grave (in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome). ‘Nothing of him that doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea change/ Into something rich and strange.’

The Casa Magni, a former ‘Jesuit convent’, looked, as Holmes says, like a bleached skull. This house, near San Terenzo, taken for the summer, was rife with premonitions. Or so posthumous Shelly cultists would have us believe. Shelly suffered from nightmares, driving his wife from the bed with terrible screams. He said that he had not been asleep but had seen a vision.

Edward Dowden (in his 1886 biography):

He dreamt that lying as he did in bed, Edward and Jane [Williams] came in to him; they were in the most horrible condition – their bodies lacerated, their bones starting through their skin, the faces pale yet stained with blood… Edward said, ‘Get up Shelley; the sea is flooding the house, and it is all coming down.’ Shelley got up, he thought, and went to the window that looked on the terrace and the sea, and thought he saw the sea rushing in.

Worse was to follow: Shelley met himself out on the terrace, a double who said, ‘How long do you mean to be content?’ The fetch established an identity quite independent of the poet, the dreamer. But located firmly in place, the broad terrace of the former convent. The position from which Mary Shelley would watch the sea, when her husband did not return from his voyage to Leghorn.

The last emotional attachment of Shelley's life was for Jane, the (courtesy) wife of his friend Edward Williams. He presented Jane with a guitar which was to become one of the most notable relics of the Shelley cult. This dark, calm woman seems to have had the gift of suggesting much by saying little, keeping clear of literary squabbles, the posturings of poets and pretenders. Mary liked her, as a companion for afternoon walks. ‘Jane and I are off together,’ she wrote to Mrs Leigh Hunt (Marianne Kent), ‘and talk morality and pluck violets by the way… She has a very pretty voice, and a taste and ear for music which is almost miraculous.’

Living communally with this troop of world-class neurotics, anarchist rentiers and bluestocking totty, Jane Williams was taken for a person of sensibility, but no great imagination. They liked to make a picture of her, a plaintive soundtrack for their experiments in auto-destruction: sweet Jane floating on the bay by moonlight, strumming her guitar.

Anna Sinclair, in her youth, knew the syndrome all too well. She weathered maelstroms of performance angst, expelling kitchen-squatters, poets and camp followers, into the street (after three or four days of herbal monologues and ill-tuned guitars). She beat off dazed admirers who turned up at our Hackney house claiming a lifelong fascination with ley lines or multiple-superimposition 8mm film. It dawned on me, very early in the game, that most of the men, husbands, pre-famous sculptors, who arrived late with invitations to very private views, or expressed their eagerness to chauffeur us to a cinema club or Charlotte Street meal, were not
acknowledging my remarkable talent, my brilliant conversation. They wanted the chance to feed, however circumspectly, on Anna's aura: that impenetrable look called unconcern.

Even as a child, an adolescent, she had been the still point, as outsiders saw it, in an outrageous family. Letters of acid denunciation from co-drivers on trips through France – ruined picnics, tragic treats, stinking cheese – would single Anna out as ‘calm, serene and beautiful’. It's an unbeatable act, absence. Detachment. Going deep into your own thoughts. Letting furies exhaust themselves: before you erupt, to everyone's amazement, with a kitchen-pot projectile, a brick aimed at your brother's head. It was always Anna who was sent for, to be with her father when he was in one of his darker moods.

The terrace of Casa Magni, a house in which every occupant dreamt competitively, becomes a platform of psychic manifestations. Jane on the water with her guitar. Jane anticipating Shelley's split self, the flying soul and the drowned soul. Dowden describes the episode:

She was standing one day… at a window that looked on the terrace… she saw, as she thought, Shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket; he passed again. Now, as he passed both times the same way, and as from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back except past the window again… she was struck at seeing him pass twice thus, and looked out and seeing him no more she cried, ‘Good God! can Shelley have leapt from the wall? Where can he be gone?’ ‘Shelley?’ said Trelawny; ‘no Shelley has past. What do you mean?’ Trelawny says that she trembled exceedingly when she heard this; and it proved indeed, that Shelley had never been on the terrace, and was far off at the time she saw him.

Children abandoned in nunneries. Miscarriages. Barbarous natives singing and shouting on the beach. Family bankruptcy back in England (Mary's father, William Godwin). Bills to be settled. Fantasies of living quietly on some Greek island. Visions arrived
more frequently than the post. The Shelley circle were disturbed by the news that Claire Clairmont's young daughter, left by her father (Lord Byron) in a convent in the Romagna, had died of typhus fever. The poet, walking on the terrace at Casa Magni, ‘observing the effect of moonshine on the water’ (as Edward Williams reports), felt uneasy; gripping his friend by the arm, he ‘stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach’.

He recovered after some time, and declared that he saw, as plainly as he then saw me, a naked child (Allegra) rise from the sea, and clap its hands in joy, smiling at him. This was a trance that it required some reasoning and philosophy entirely to awaken him from, so forcibly had the vision operated on his mind. Our conversation, which had been at first rather melancholy, led to this; and my confirming his sensations by confessing that I had felt the same, gave greater activity to his wandering and ever-lively fancy.

In so many texts of the Romantic era, there is a collective delusion: poets exploit images of drowning, naked Blakean babes crying for joy. Time is an unstable medium, devalued by prophetic dreams. Shelley, so Trelawny and other witnesses insist, is childlike, a boy. Hair flopping across his eyes, he is mired in voices; torrents of verse from which he must extract two or three serviceable lines.

‘I often saw him in a state of nudity,’ wrote Trelawny, ‘and he always reminded me of a young Indian, strong-limbed and vigorous, and there were few men who would walk on broken ground at the pace he kept up; he beat us all in walking, and, barring drugs and accidents, he might have lived as long as his father – to ninety.’

As the excesses of Shelley's life began to unravel, the hours of his days ceased to be atomic and became oceanic: he developed a theory of time. None was available to him, his store was used up. He had lived so intensely, spent so recklessly, that he was now an older man than his father, his grandfather. ‘I am ninety years old.’ Poetry plea-bargains with an uncertain future. Always a weak bet: the poem as a machine for achieving immortality. Shelley bought
it. Subtle mnemonics. Secret music that burrows through our defence systems like an intelligent virus. Original clichés laying their syrup over dull tongues. ‘He hath awakened from the dream of life.’

Romantic poets, dying in clusters, killed the poetry franchise: and just at the point when John Clare was launching a public career. Keats, coughing his last in Rome, set the pattern. All his contemporaries were obliged to pen a tribute. (Mick Jagger, in gauzy drag, tried a cover version of Shelley, at the Hyde Park ‘Free’ concert: his immediate response to the face-down swim of Brian Jones. And the launching of a nest of conspiracy theories that would rival those generated by the wreckage of the
Don Juan
. Shelley's first wife, Harriet, carrying his child, also died in the park. By drowning herself in the Serpentine.)

‘Here lieth One whose name was writ on water.’ Shelley, in his ‘Fragment on Keats’, quotes the consumptive poet's chosen epitaph. Keats dies in 1821 and is buried in Rome's Protestant Cemetery. Clare writes a sonnet in his memory and sends it to their shared publisher, Taylor: ‘Just a few beats of the heart – the head has nothing to do with them.’ Shelley composes
Adonais
, while staying at Pisa, in June 1821. He is drowned on a voyage between Leghorn and Lerici on 8 July 1822. Trelawny adds a tag from
The Tempest
to Shelley's memorial stone. He burns his hand, pulling the poet's heart from the improvised funeral pyre on the beach. Byron swims out to his yacht, the
Bolivar
.

Williams was grilled on an iron furnace, slowly, splashed with wine, oil and spices. The author of
Don Juan
decided to ‘try the strength’ of the waters that had robbed him of his friends. He swam until he became sick, a mile out. On his return, there was nothing left of Williams but ‘a quantity of blackish-looking ashes, mingled with white and broken fragments of bone’. Two years later, Byron died of a fever at Missolonghi. His funeral procession in London was witnessed by John Clare.

Coming back to England, after the European tour that gave him the material for
Childe Harold
, Byron learnt that his Cambridge
friend Charles Skinner Matthews (‘Citoyen’) was dead. This ‘brilliant and witty’ young man had drowned in a river, having become tangled in weeds.

Personal tragedies are mythologised, reported by such unreliable witnesses as Trelawny and Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin. Mary Shelley's memoirs of her husband, her edition of the poems, have to be tempered by the requirement of not offending Sir Timothy Shelley; and thereby forfeiting her small allowance. Continental Europe, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, was sticky with officers on half-pay. Disgraced society figures faffing about Florence under assumed names. Minor aristocrats and younger sons borrowing on their expectations. Most, it seems, had pretensions to write. They hunted extant wildlife with guns and dogs. But above all they hunted literary lions.

In summer months, the English exiles liked to play at being sailors. Shelley with his skiff on the river, his paper boats. Marine doodles in the margins of manuscripts. Lord Byron commissioned the
Bolivar
to complement his exotic servants, Italian mistresses, catamites, horses, hounds, apes and cockatoos. Tales of the club-footed poet reached the young Clare in Helpston, at the time when he was considering an apprenticeship with the cobbler Will Farrow. Farrow's brother Tom had been a sailor. A sailor who kept a journal.

Jonathan Bate:

Only one passage stuck in Clare's memory: an account of a traveller who once sailed on a ship on which Farrow served, ‘an odd young man lame of one foot on which he wore a cloth shoe – who was of a resolute temper, fond of bathing in the sea and going ashore to see ruins in a rough sea when it required six hands to manage the boat.’ He was so demanding that ‘his name became a bye word in the ship for unnecessary trouble.’ The name – and this was the first time that Clare heard it – was Byron.

By the time he is taken to High Beach, the asylum in Epping Forest, Clare is possessed by the spirit of Byron. He is recomposing
‘Don Juan’ and ‘Child Harold’ as parallel texts. Romanticism is dead, but the energies it sponsored are still active. The first two cantos of Byron's
Don Juan
, published in 1819, three years before Shelley's fatal voyage, can be interpreted as rehearsing the coming tragedy in the Bay of Spezia.

Juan embark'd – the ship got under way,

The wind was fair, the water passing rough;

A devil of a sea rolls in that bay,

As I, who've crossed it, oft, know well enough;

And standing upon the deck, the dashing spray

Flies in one's face, and makes it weather-tough.

Juan is in flight: ‘steering duly for the port of Leghorn’.

At sunset they began to take in sail,

For the sky show'd it would come on to blow,

And carry away, perhaps, a mast or so.

Poetry, like the neurasthenic dreams of the Casa Magni, precedes human drama. A spectacular death will underwrite a legendary life, sell future volumes. It establishes a necrophile industry, a taste for epitaphs. As Richard Holmes concludes, in his
Guardian
essay, Shelley will have to be ‘undrowned’; recovered, reassembled. His biography, up to this point, has been forged from sanctified relics, provided by dutiful descendants, pious benefactors. A Catholic cult grows up around an avowed atheist. Museums and colleges manufacture shrines.

Lady Shelley, wife of Percy Florence (Shelley's son), made a votive chapel of Boscombe Manor, the family home. She burnt letters, clipped out offensive passages, harried potential biographers. She designed an inner sanctum with domed turquoise ceiling, set with gold stars. Female visitors were advised to remove their hats. A memorial was shaped like a pietà. The boneless poet: a sacrificed corpse in Mary Shelley's arms. Letters, books, fragments of bone,
locks of hair. The barbecued heart was wrapped in a copy of
Adonais
and laid in a silk-lined box.

A pilgrimage to Italy was arranged for Lady Shelley and her son. She slept in the poet's room at Casa Magni, willing the visions that wouldn't come. Elderly fisherfolk were interrogated for their memories of the fatal voyage. Cultists wanted to prove that the
Don Juan
had been rammed by a Leghorn felucca, pirates after Lord Byron's gold. Spars and shattered oars: relics of the true cross. A ninety-three-year-old woman claimed to have witnessed the burning of the bodies on the beach. It was said that the ashes of the two gentlemen had been taken to England so that they could, by witchcraft, be brought back to life.