Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  MARY We were in wretched discomfort at first, but now we are in a kind of disorderly order, living from day to day as we can … The Williams have taken up their abode with us, you may imagine how ill a large household agrees with my laziness, when accounts and domestic concerns come to be talked of … baby Percy is well, and Shelley singularly so, his incessant boating does him a great deal of good. I have been very unwell for some time past, but am better now, I suppose. I have not even heard of the arrival of my new novel …

  SHELLEY The Williams are now on a visit to us, and they are people who are very pleasing to me. But words are not the instrument of our intercourse. I like Jane more and more, and I find Williams the most amiable of companions. Jane has a taste for music, and an elegance of form and motions that compensates in some degree for the lack of literary refinement … I listen the whole evening on our terrace to her simple melodies with excessive delight.

  HOLMES In fact it seems clear that Shelley had embarked on one more of his lifelong series of Platonic flirtations, this time with Jane Williams. He had set out to captivate her, to enchant her. She was beautiful, musical, liked bathing and boating, and emerged cheerfully from her duckings in the surf in a clinging cotton bathing-dress which revealed her ‘elegance of form and motions’ to Shelley’s dreamy eye. Mary also had to suffer this form of magic. Shelley wrote many poems for Jane to set to music. In the manuscript of one you can read in tiny writing the words, ‘Alas, I kiss you Jane.’ In another Shelley cast them all as characters from Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest: with Jane as the wide-eyed Miranda, Williams as the noble Prince Ferdinand, and himself as Ariel – the airborne restless spirit. (Mary is not given a part.) This poem accompanied the gift of an expensive Italian guitar, especially ordered from Florence, for Jane.

  guitar, waves

  SHELLEY Ariel to Miranda: – Take This slave of Music, for the sake Of him who is the slave of thee, And teach it all the harmony In which thou canst, and only thou, Make the delighted Spirit glow, Till joy denies itself again, And, too intense, is turned to pain. For by permission and command Of thine own Prince Ferdinand, Poor Ariel sends this silent token Of more than ever can be spoken; Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who From life to life, must still pursue Your happiness; – for thus alone Can Ariel ever find his own …

  HOLMES The charming, flirtatious tone of this, which promises in music ‘more than ever can be spoken’ in words about his love for Jane, suggested to many Victorian scholars that the awful truth about the Casa Magni was simply an adulterous affair.

  This is not impossible, though Jane had her own small children at Casa Magni, and was evidently very attached to Williams, for whom she had already abandoned her first marriage in India. But the truth is probably more subtle. Shelley was trying to ‘enchant’ both Jane and Williams in some more primitive, magical sense. He was trying to cast a spell over them, by transforming their normal world into a play, the magical island drama of The Tempest. He himself was pretending to be ‘poor Ariel’, but in fact he was acting the part of Prospero, the poet-magician who commands the revels. The idea of turning the Casa Magni setting into a magic island, where everything is idealized and dramatized, emerges more and more strongly in his letters and poems as the summer progresses. Other dramas are also brought to bear on the situation, so that all his actions take on symbolic meaning. One other play is Calderon’s El Magico Prodigioso, which he had been translating from the Spanish, wherein the magician finally summons a terrifying demon out of the sea.

  A third drama is Goethe’s Faust, in which the learned doctor makes a pact with the Devil in which his soul is forfeit if he ever finds a moment and a place so beautiful that he wishes to suspend time itself. In all these dramas there is a sense of imminent crisis, in which a magic world of love and beauty will suddenly be dissolved or overwhelmed by death, by tempest, or by a demon, which has been unconsciously courted or desired.

  SHELLEY My boat is swift and beautiful, 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, thou art so beautiful.’

  HOLMES This is how Shelley was writing by June. It takes us a little further into the truth of those last weeks. The open invitation to death, disguised in Faust’s words, was a literary allusion that only Mary might have understood.

  But others at the Casa Magni sensed it in their own way. When in mid-June Trelawny arrived in the bay, sailing on Byron’s much larger and more seaworthy boat the Bolivar, he quickly registered something peculiar in the dreamlike atmosphere of the spell-bound group of friends round Shelley. Trelawny was a runaway Cornish sailor, an adventurer with a pirate beard, a mischief-maker, a womanizer, a teller of tall stories. But even Mary liked him.

  MARY Trelawny is extravagant – un giovane stravagante – partly natural and partly perhaps put on, but it suits him well … with his Moorish face, his dark hair, his Herculean form. An air of extreme good nature pervades his whole countenance, especially when he smiles, which assures me that his heart is good, though he tells strange stories, horrific ones, so that they harrow one up …

  HOLMES Trelawny is always a myth-maker, and the biographer has to be aware of this when he is trying to understand the extraordinary situation developing at Casa Magni. Nothing Trelawny says is ever quite reliable, ever quite serious.

  But he also has a genius for capturing the feel of a situation, the undercurrents of emotion, which he will colour-up and dramatize to bring out the human truth as he sees it. He invents dialogue, he shapes anecdotes, he exaggerates and choreographs events with raffish humour. He himself recounts the world like a series of playlets. But he is interested in the truth. From Trelawny we can learn more, if we take him with a pinch of sea-salt.

  waves, wind, shouting, laughter

  WILLIAMS Luff up! Luff up to the wind! … Shelley, you can’t steer, you have got her in the wind’s eye now … Give me the tiller, you attend to the main sheet … to the main sheet, Shelley … Now ready about! helm over! let go the fore sheet … the fore sheet, Shelley … what a beauty, she’ll spin on her heel now … damn it Shelley, the other one …

  TRELAWNY (recalling)

  The main sheet was jammed, and the boat unmanageable, or as the sailors express it, in irons. When the two had cleared it, Shelley’s hat was knocked overboard, and he would probably have followed it, if I had not held him. He was so uncommonly awkward that, when they had things ship-shape, Williams, somewhat scandalized by the lubberly manoeuvre, blew up the Poet for his neglect and inattention to orders …

  SHELLEY (against background of shouts)

  Sorry, captain … (laughing wildly) main sheet, fore sheet, bed sheet … Sword and helm, stern and helm, stern and prow …! ‘Flitting on your prow before, / Like a living meteor’ …

  TRELAWNY (recalling)

  Shelley was, however, so happy and in such high glee, and the nautical terms so tickled his fancy, that he even put his beloved copy of Plato in his pocket, and gave his mind to the fun and frolic …

  WILLIAMS Luff up again … no, starboard, starboard …

  SHELLEY ‘The keen stars were twinkling … the guitar was tinkling.’

  TRELAWNY (speaking to Williams)

  You will do no good with Shelley, until you heave his books and papers overboard; shear the wisps of hair that hang over his eyes in the wind; and plunge his arms up to the elbows in tar …

  SHELLEY My dear Tre … I am sure you are perfectly right … I am a nautical peasant … Neptune’s farm-labourer … ‘I see the unpastured Ocean hungering for Calm …’

  TRELAWNY (recalling)

  Shelley was intent on catching images from the ever-changing sea and sky, he heeded not the boat … (aloud)

  If we had been in a squall today, with the main sheet jamme
d, and the tiller put starboard instead of port, we should have had to swim for it.

  SHELLEY Not I. I should have gone down with the rest of the pigs in the bottom of the boat.

  HOLMES He meant the pig-iron ballast, according to Trelawny. But was Shelley really as incompetent as Trelawny likes to make out? He had after all been sailing all his life, and navigated most of the river Arno and river Serchio in a single-handed dinghy only the previous year. Perhaps he took risks on the water, as he took risks in his poetry; perhaps he frightened Trelawny. Then again there was the time Shelley arrived late for dinner at the Casa Magni, having fallen out of the rowing boat into the surf.

  a dinner party, talk and laughter, background of sea

  TRELAWNY (recalling)

  Dinner was served in the central room of the Casa Magni, and they never waited for the Poet, knowing how uncertain he was … One of the party was saying that genius purifies; the naked statues of the Greeks are modest, the draped ones of the moderns are not. Then the talk was unexpectedly interrupted …

  a shriek, a crash of glass, a chair falling, laughter

  WILLIAMS Good God, Shelley – (amused)

  MARY Oh, my gracious! How dare you, Shelley … (outraged)

  TRELAWNY (recalling)

  The company were confronted by an apparition not tolerated in our chaste and refined age even in marble, even in candlelight. Shelley was just out of the sea, not in evening costume, but as naked as Adam before the fall. The brine trickled down his innocent nose, and small fragments of seaweed clung to his hair. He had been gliding noiselessly round two sides of the saloon to his room, and might possibly have succeeded un- noticed. But now he came up to the table in the full candlelight, stopping in front of his wife, to explain the case …

  SHELLEY (all innocence) How can I help it, dear Mary? I must go to my room to get my dry clothes … I have not altered my hour of bathing, but you have changed yours for dining …

  JANE Stop dripping on me, Shelley – (delighted)

  SHELLEY The rowing boat has played me one of her usual tricks … But I have rescued my priceless Aeschylus from the wreck.

  MARY Shelley, I cannot bandy words with – (seeing the joke) – with a sea monster!

  TRELAWNY (recalling)

  Having swiftly dressed, the Poet reappeared and took his place at the table, unconscious of having done anything that could offend anyone.

  HOLMES If we can believe Trelawny, then it is unlikely that Shelley was innocent in creating this little scene, walking naked out of the shadows like a ghost, to amuse Williams, to tease Jane, and undoubtedly to provoke his wife Mary. It was all part of the game or drama he was playing at the Casa Magni, creating his own world of magic events, his own Magico Prodigioso. Perhaps he was even enacting his own drowning, and coming back to haunt them, not with horror but with laughter.

  Yet some of the games, as Trelawny saw, became perilous and even not quite sane. There was the time he took Jane and her two children far out into the bay in the little rowing boat.

  oars in water

  SHELLEY Now Jane, let us together solve the great mystery.

  JANE No thank you, Bysshe, not now. I should like my dinner first, and so would the children.

  SHELLEY Ah, Jane.

  When the lamp is shattered

  The light in the dust lies dead –

  When the cloud is scattered

  The rainbow’s glory is shed.

  When the lute is broken,

  Sweet tones are remembered not;

  When the lips have spoken,

  Loved accents are soon forgot..

  JANE Oh look, the mist is clearing away, and there’s Edward coming on shore with Trelawny, they must be famished …

  lapping of water, the children begin to cry

  SHELLEY As music and splendour

  Survive not the lamp and the lute,

  The heart’s echoes render

  No song when the spirit is mute:

  No song but sad dirges,

  Like the wind through a ruined cell,

  Or the mournful surges

  That ring the dead seaman’s knell.

  JANE Oh, Bysshe, that’s so beautiful, so sad …

  SHELLEY Ah, Jane.

  JANE … It reminds me you haven’t written out the words for the Indian Air for my guitar.

  SHELLEY Yes, I have, long ago …

  sound of oars as he begins rowing again I must write them out for you. (laughs) I can never read what I write down out of doors, or on the boat. I fly along too fast. You must play that Indian Air again, and I’ll try to make the thing better.

  waves on the shore, the rowing boat beaches, voices of Edward Williams and Trelawny

  JANE Oh, Edward, you won’t catch me in a boat again with Shelley alone!

  WILLIAMS Whyever not, my dear, he rows rather well.

  HOLMES Well that is how Trelawny recalls it. Shelley had threatened to drown them. Was it just another of his tall stories? Perhaps. But the suggestion that Shelley was far from happy at the Casa Magni, and that his games and flirtations hid suicidal thoughts, is not so farfetched as it might appear. When Trelawny sailed the following day for Livorno in the Bolivar, he found the following letter awaiting him at the port, from Shelley.

  Far from exaggerating, Trelawny may really have been very discreet in what he afterwards wrote, partly to protect Mary. Because he chose never to mention subsequently what Shelley asked him now.

  SHELLEY Lerici, 18 June. My dear Trelawny … You of course enter into society at Livorno; should you meet with any scientific person capable of preparing the Prussic Acid, or essential oil of bitter almonds, I should regard it as a great kindness if you could procure me a small quantity … I would give any price for this medicine. You remember we talked of it the other night, and we both expressed a wish to possess it. My wish was serious, and sprung from the desire of avoiding needless suffering. I need not tell you I have no intention of suicide at present, – but I confess it would be a comfort to me to hold in my possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest … A single drop, even less, is a dose and it acts by paralysis.

  HOLMES Paralysis, suspension of time, suicide, death: again the same underlying preoccupation at the Casa Magni, running like a dark tide beneath the sunlit waters of the bay. Why should this be? The marital discord with Mary, a sense of guilt and hopelessness about his lost children, must have been a part of it. But then also he was a writer, a poet, who had not found his audience – unlike his friend Byron. His works were unread, many of his poems not even printed, and he would be thirty years old in the coming August. The causes he believed in – democratic reform in England, and if necessary revolution; wars of Independence in Spain, in Greece, in South America; all seemed to be disappearing under a great wave of political reaction across the world. The hope that had animated the writing of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, and the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ back in 1819, seemed to have been dissipated …

  SHELLEY

  … Be thou, Spirit fierce,

  My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

  Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

  Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

  And, by the incantation of this verse,

  Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

  Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! …

  HOLMES But now that fierce spirit had become the charming, melancholy, flirtatious Ariel, playing boats, playing romance, playing life itself – or death. At times Shelley must have felt very bitter, very close to despair, on the beautiful Italian seashore.

  waves breaking, distant voices calling and laughing

  SHELLEY

  I see the Deep’s untrampled floor

  With green and purple seaweed 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 noontime ocean


  Is flashing round me, and a tone

  Arises from its measured motion,

  How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

  Alas! I have not 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.

  Yet now despair itself is mild,

  Even as the winds and waters are;

  I could lie down like a tired child,

  And weep away the life of care

  Which I have borne and yet must bear,

  Till death like sleep might steal on me,

  And I might feel in the warm air

  My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea

  Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.

  HOLMES One can easily imagine Shelley reciting those haunting verses on the beach at Casa Magni. But in fact they were written four years earlier at Naples, shortly before he embarked on some of his greatest poetry, such as Prometheus Unbound. Such depression, such desperation, was familiar to Shelley in periods of unhappiness and unproductivity; as it is familiar to most writers. It did not necessarily mean that everything was lost, that everything was hopeless. On the contrary, it could mean that something important, something magnificent, was about to burst forth. It could mean the calm before the creative storm. As the heat of June settled sweltering over the bay, there is that sense of crisis, of almost angry impatience in Shelley. He wants to suspend time, but also transcend it. He wants to keep perfectly still, but also to sail out – fly out – beyond the horizon. He stands on the terrace of the Casa Magni looking out over the sea, as if he stood on a cliff’s edge.

  SHELLEY I write little now. It is impossible to compose poetry except under the strong excitement of an assurance of finding sympathy in what you write. Imagine Demosthenes reciting a Philippic to the waves of the Atlantic! Lord Byron is in this respect fortunate. He touched a chord to which a million hearts responded, and the coarse music which he produced to please them disciplined him to the perfection to which he now approaches … I feel too little certainty of the future, and too little satisfaction with regard to the past, to undertake any subject seriously and deeply. I stand, as it were, upon a precipice, which I have ascended with great, and cannot descend without greater peril; and I am content if the heaven above me is calm for the passing moment.