“You’ll have time for the alterations. He’s not dead yet.”
“I see.” He stared at me over the top of his halfmoon glasses, trying to figure out if I was a ghoul or, as I thought, merely being practical.
I bought a black tie, a couple of starchy white shirts, and a pair of funereal shoes. Now that the costume was complete, I felt suddenly disburdened. I lunched with a publisher at an Italian restaurant on Curzon Street. We talked death. His father—another Anglican clergyman—had died a few years before, and I had gone to his memorial service. My parents had once gone to a party at Christopher’s house in Islington.
“I need tips and clues,” I said.
“Will you be giving the address?”
“I suppose so.”
“Make it funny, if you can.”
I drove north and took a room, with a telephone, in a pub at Great Oxendon, three miles south of Harborough. With a base in London and another in Leicestershire, I hoped I could be everywhere at once, as required.
With some difficulty, my brothers and I drew up a roster so as to visit in rotation, without either intruding on the time that our mother needed to spend alone with our father or leaving them so alone that she might feel abandoned by her family. A fine line to draw, it was the subject of prickly dispute between us.
My father was surprised to find me at his bedside again.
“I thought you were supposed to be going back to the States.”
“Oh—stuff cropped up. You know, publishing stuff. I’ve just handed in the proofs of my new book.”
My father looked at me. The look said Come off it.
In London, people were anticipating another event. John Major’s Conservative administration was dead on its feet: Major himself had the hangdog, beaten air of a school Captain of Cricket whose team had lost ten matches on the trot. Everyone I knew was certain that a snap election would follow a last, desperate autumn budget, and that—whatever tax-giveaway was in the budget—the Labour Party would romp home. The dominant mood, over the dinner table and at parties, was of high, if slightly tremulous elation. After seventeen years of Tory governments hostile to the arts, to higher education, to people like us, we were going to be back in power at last. Several of my acquaintances were close to members of Tony Blair’s shadow cabinet. A lot of first names were dropped and already there was talk of life-peerages for contemporaries of mine who had served time on the anti-Thatcher barricades.
I felt my exile keenly. I wished the we included me. Watching Major on television, looking grayer and more unconfident with his every appearance, made me think of my father—a comparison that would have annoyed him no end. I looked forward to the moment when Major would finally fall off his perch, but knew that when he did so my father would certainly be gone too.
From my friend’s house in Brixton, I borrowed a pile of books to keep me occupied in the pleasant, airy room I’d rented in the converted coach house of the Great Oxendon pub: John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure, Evelyn Waugh’s Work Suspended, Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit, and a small-print Victorian copy of Shelley’s poems.
Seated by the open window, with bees foraging in the flowers outside, waiting for the telephone to ring, I tried my best to stay in touch with the voyage, and the book, I had left behind at Potts Lagoon. It was hard to read, and hard to think. The word “metastasis” was too much on my mind. Rapid transition from one point to another. The bees metastasized from flower to flower. I metastasized from Waugh to Shelley. The cancer, running wild inside my father, brought with it a new vocabulary for unruliness and disorder …
Come off it, old boy. Day by day, as my father weakened, he fell back more and more on the conversational protocol that had served him well as an experienced parish priest. “Good to see you,” he’d say. “Nice of you to drop in.” He was dealing with his own death patiently, tolerantly; a trained professional at dealing with bad news.
At the vicarage, the bell would ring in the middle of lunch. “Oh, drat! Another parishioner!” my mother would say. But my father would go to the door, assembling his vicar’s face as he went. “Oh, hello there! Not at all! Do come in!” and he would escort the visitor into the drawing room. Just before closing the door behind them, he’d turn and make a face at my mother. His range of faces was as wide as a ship’s wardrobe of signal flags, from the face that said I’ll be rid of this pest in a couple of minutes to the one that said Cancel all my afternoon engagements, and bring us tea and sandwiches in half an hour.
Until the early 1960s, at least, the Anglican vicarage was the officially designated receptacle for any tale of woe. The bereaved, the destitute, the depressed, the crazy made a beeline for our house. Young men in trouble with the law parked their motorbikes against the porch. Young women, then known as “unmarried mothers” in need of “moral welfare,” showed up in droves.
From behind the closed door came the sounds of distraught sobbing, fantastical narratives of hard luck, expostulations of aggrieved innocence, insane cackles, and, sometimes, screams. These were punctuated by my father’s voice, as regular and predictable as a metronome. “Uh—huh. Yup … yup … yup. I see … Uh—huh … I’ve got you … Hmmmm …”
Sitting at his bedside, I was the parishioner now. He was trying to offer all his visitors the solace in the presence of death that it had been his job to dispense as a parson. He must have conducted, on average, three or four funerals a week during his working life. He knew the rigmarole. In the face of his own death, he sought to project an air of calming professional reassurance. He struggled to be jokey, upbeat, nothing to it, and carry on as usual. Sometimes I saw the fear in his eyes, but it would be gone in a flash; he was boxing it away from public view, as a good priest must.
My mother told me that the morphine was giving him bad dreams.
I read Shelley, and for good reason.
Shelley was mad about boats. He loved to write about water; and died at the helm of his own wildly over-canvased miniature schooner, when it foundered in a sudden afternoon storm in the Gulf of Spezia. His description of the landscape—or waterscape, rather—of death itself sounds uncannily like the Pacific Northwest.
In December 1815, six and a half years before his own death by water, Shelley finished his first major poem, Alastor, in which the hero, named the Poet, “… left / His cold fireside and alienated home / To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.” The Poet is the archetype of the Romantic solitary wanderer. He journeys, in an introspective reverie, through Arabia, Persia, and Kashmir (where he enjoys a wet dream involving a veiled oriental muse), until, lonely, lovelorn, and in the throes of a sublime despair, he reaches the ocean, where he spies a “little shallop floating near the shore.” The boat is abandoned and unseaworthy (“its sides / Gaped wide with many a rift”), but its deplorable condition is an added attraction for the Poet, because
A restless impulse urged him to embark
And meet lone Death on the drear ocean’s waste;
For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves
The slimy caverns of the populous deep.
At this point—for me, at least—the narrative of Alastor springs to sudden life, as the Poet gets under way on his deliberate voyage of death. The prolonged storm scene, in which the little boat flies over the night sea, propelled by a hurricane-force wind, is a little too much under the influence of what Richard Holmes calls “Milton’s epic drone,” but it is full of interest and incident.
Along the dark and ruffled waters fled
The straining boat.—A whirlwind swept it on,
With fierce gusts and precipitating force,
Through the wide ridges of the chaféd sea.
The waves rose. Higher and higher still
Their fierce necks writhed beneath the tempest’s scourge
Like serpents struggling in a vulture’s grasp.
Calm and rejoicing in the fearful war
Of wave
ruling on wave, and blast on blast
Descending, and black flood on whirlpool driven
With dark obliterating course, he sate:
As if their genii were the ministers
Appointed to conduct him to the light
Of those beloved eyes, the Poet sate
Holding the steady helm …
. . . . . . .
… At midnight
the moon arose: and lo! the etherial cliffs
Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone
Among the stars like sunlight, and around
Whose cavern’d base the whirlpools and the waves
Bursting and eddying irresistibly
Rage and resound for ever.—Who shall save?—
The boat fled on,—the boiling torrent drove,—
The crags closed round with black and jagged arms,
The shattered mountain overhung the sea,
And faster still, beyond all human speed,
Suspended on the sweep of the smooth wave,
The little boat was driven. A cavern there
Yawned, and amid its slant and winding depths
Ingulfed the rushing sea. The boat fled on
With unrelaxing speed. ‘Vision and Love!’
The Poet cried aloud, ‘I have beheld
The path of thy departure. Sleep and death
Shall not divide us long!’
I knew the icy summits, the whirlpools, the crags with black and jagged arms, the shattered mountain, the slant and winding depths. As the boat fled farther on, I found more scenery to recognize: the “steep cataract”; the “ample chasm … filled with one whirlpool”; the “knarléd roots of mighty trees”; the “battling tides”; the “dizzy swiftness” of “the ascending stream”; the “pyramids / Of the tall cedar, overarching”; the “grey precipices” and “barren pinnacles”; the “pine, rock-rooted”; those “knotty roots and fallen rocks.” As Shelley constructed a suitable imaginary landscape for his hero to die in, he built British Columbia, in iambic pentameters.
That elements of the real Pacific Northwest may have crept into Alastor shouldn’t be surprising. The voyages of Cook, La Pérouse, Vancouver, and the fur-trade captains had brought the wilderness of that coast, with copious illustrations, into the libraries of Shelley’s generation. By the 1810s, when the Alps and the Lake District were beginning to swarm with hikers, there was a hunger for some landscape more unvisited, wild, and sublime than Europe could supply. Extreme experience—the peaks and chasms of love and death, which were at the heart of the Romantic movement in writing and painting—required a corresponding extremity, and loneliness, in nature. The voyage writers brought back tidings of a land impossibly inaccessible to the tourist, replete with alpine heights, unfathomable seas, primitive men in their natural state, cascades, Stygian gloom, watery labyrinths, and impenetrable forests, where a man like Shelley’s Poet could wander forever in uninterrupted solitude.
That was the trouble with Market Harborough. For the first time in my life, I felt in need of a cathedral: a great, dark, vaulted space; somewhere old, musty, and enormous, where I could sit for a while in a carved pew, among pillars and cloisters, in a building constructed on the model of a forest; and if not pray, exactly, then meditate, alone, on what was happening to my father. It was space and solemnity I wanted, not the God-stuff.
Market Harborough, invincibly sunny, was neither spacious nor solemn. People went whizzing past on bikes. They shopped at Tesco’s. They overflowed, babbling, from the pubs. Sneaking out to buy cigarettes at the scruffy Pakistani newsagent’s, I found myself bewildered by the huge, silly headlines in the tabloids. I was too long out of the loop. Everyone in public life had nicknames, nearly all of them new to me. I knew who Paddy Pantsdown was, but beyond that, I was in the dark. The tabloids’ tone—wink-wink, nudge-nudge, ha-ha—seemed to have spread into the streets. At any other time, I might have warmed to the genial mateyness of middle-England, the joshing and the new infusion of high spirits, now that the economy was, at last, on the up-and-up again. In the premature summer heat was an atmosphere of carnival. But I wasn’t here for a carnival.
So I tramped up the High Street, thinking of Desolation Sound.
The boundary between sleep and death appeared to grow narrower by the day. My mother would sometimes say, with nervy brightness, “Just pop in and see how Peter’s doing, would you, dear?” In the bedroom, I’d stare at the yellow, immobile, tufty-bearded face and think he’s dead, then search in my head for the word or gesture I should employ to break the news to my mother. Then I’d see the flutter of life in his so slightly moving chest, and report, “He’s fine. He’s sleeping.”
“Oh, good. He needs a lot of sleep now.”
He was lucky to die as he was doing; at home, in the bed he still shared with my mother. He was feeling little or no pain, thanks to the drugs—a wall of vials and bottles whose labels I didn’t want to read. I studied his face but could see no sign of terrifying dreams.
I stopped by the shop in Jermyn Street, and hung my altered suit in the closet of my room at the pub. It was a perfect fit.
I read eagerly about Shelley’s death at sea, gate-crashing the London Library (my membership long lapsed) to fill in details absent from Richard Holmes’s splendid life of the poet.
Though Shelley had sailed since he was a schoolboy at Eton, his experience was mostly on rivers, from the Thames to the Arno. Amateur sailing, like mountaineering, was itself a product of the Romantic revolution; in overcivilized Europe, the sea and the mountains were the last true wildernesses, and poets in search of wild nature inevitably gravitated to boats. The boy Wordsworth (according to the Prelude) stole a “little boat” on Lake Windermere, and one of his first experiences of the Sublime was to be pursued by “a huge cliff” striding after him as he rowed across the lake at nightfall. Byron owned a big boat, Bolivar (named after the South American liberator), equipped with cannons on whose barrels were engraved the Byron coat-of-arms and the motto Crede Byron. When Shelley moved his large and unconventional family to Lerici, on the Gulf of Spezia, in the spring of 1822, he spent £80 on a scaled-down model of an American-style schooner; sleek, fast, with little sheer and low freeboard, and only 24 feet long, or so the books say. (My own guess is, that was the waterline measurement; overall, at least according to Daniel Roberts’s sketch of the boat, it appears to have been something over thirty feet. Roberts, who supervised its building, was surely in a position to know.)
Whatever its length, Shelley loved the boat he wanted to name Ariel but which ended up, at Byron’s lordly and egotistical insistence, Don Juan. In May it arrived in Lerici from Genoa, and Shelley was delighted. He wrote to Daniel Roberts:
She is a most beautiful boat and so surpasses [our] expectations that it was with some difficulty that we could persuade ourselves that you had not sent us the Bolivar by mistake.
To John Gisborne he wrote:
It is swift and beautiful, and appears quite a vessel. Williams [Edward Williams, Shelley’s friend, retired from the Indian army, and married to the “Jane” of the next sentence] 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 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.’
“It serves me at once as a study and a carriage,” wrote Shelley, who filled the boat with books and began his last important poem, “The Triumph of Life,” while seated aboard, his back resting against Don Juan’s mainmast.
The boat was fast from the start, but Shelley, wanting even greater speed, added topmasts, staysails, and a false stern. To balance the enormous square-footage of canvas that Don Juan now carried, he had to line the bilges with 29 pigs of cast-iron ballast. William St. Clair, in his biography of Trelawny (who had a major hand in Don Juan‘s design and building) de
scribes it as “one of the most unseaworthy vessels ever constructed.”
On 1 July, Shelley sailed for Leghorn, 38 nautical miles south of Lerici, with Williams and a sixteen-year-old “boat boy,” Charles Vivian. He was escaping a household full of sorrow. Late in April, Allegra—Claire Clairmont’s daughter, supposedly by Byron, though Shelley had reason to believe that he might himself be the father—had died of typhus in a convent near Ravenna, aged barely five. Claire was nearly out of her mind with grief. On 16 June, Mary Shelley had suffered a miscarriage, and was in a hardly happier state. Shelley, off to Pisa to consort with Byron and Leigh Hunt, was taking a vacation from this death-ridden summer.
Don Juan reached Leghorn seven hours later, making a steady five-knots-plus. Shelley disembarked, leaving Williams and Vivian to take care of the boat. In Pisa, he stayed at Byron’s palazzo, roistering with his literary friends and making plans for their new magazine, The Liberal. On 7 July he returned to Leghorn, where a south wind was blowing fair for the Gulf of Spezia, and next afternoon Shelley, Williams, and Vivian put to sea. They were twenty miles north of Leghorn, and ten miles offshore, when, about six o’clock, storm clouds showed on the southwestern horizon and all the local fishing boats made for harbor. At 6:30 P.M. the storm broke. The sea off that coast is shallow; the waves inevitably steep.
The Irish poetaster, Count John Taaffe, known as the Laureate of Pisa, is everyone’s source for what happened next. Taaffe talked to the captain of an Italian fishing boat that had passed Don Juan and offered help.
Seeing that they could not long contend with such tremendous waves, [he] bore down upon them and offered to take them on board. A shrill voice, which is supposed to have been Shelley’s, was distinctly heard to say “No” … The waves were running mountains high—a tremendous surf dashed over the boat which to his astonishment was still crowded with sail. “If you will not come on board for God’s sake reef your sails or you are lost,” cried a sailor through the speaking trumpet. One of the gentlemen (Williams it is believed) was seen to make an effort to lower the sails—his companion seized him by the arm as if in anger.
Passage to Juneau Page 30
