Don Juan foundered ten miles west of Viareggio. Days later, the bodies of Shelley, Williams, and Vivian were washed ashore. The fish had eaten their faces away. Shelley was identified by his reefer jacket, white nankeen trousers, and black leather boots. A copy of Keats’s Poems was in the pocket of the jacket.
With the assistance of an Italian fishing boat, Daniel Roberts salvaged Don Juan with its tangle of broken spars (the water in which it sank must have been very shallow indeed). The boat was full of bluish mud. Roberts got out of her the 29 pigs of ballast; two trunks full of books and clothes; a case of Marsala wine, the corks forced halfway out the bottles by the pressure of submersion and the wine impregnated with saltwater; and seven teaspoons.
Was Shelley determined to re-create the suicidal voyage of the Poet in Alastor? I phoned Richard Holmes to quiz him about the sinking of Don Juan.
“Was it just foolhardiness, or a Romantic death wish?”
“I don’t think there was any death-wish at all. It was a very difficult summer for Shelley, and he had to battle on through long depressive episodes—like most writers do. But sailing was a wonderful release for him. It was a death trap of a boat, but it was the place where he was happiest. I think, when they were off Viareggio, it was reckless, and enjoyable, and he was giving the boat a go—”
“Let’s see what this baby will do?”
“Yes. That sort of thing. Fast! Speed! Racing! Hot! He was enjoying himself. He’d sailed a lot, but had very little experience at sea, and he didn’t realize how dangerous the boat was.”
The person to feel sorry for was the boy, Charles Vivian. Shelley and Williams were responsible for their own bad seamanship, of which Vivian was the powerless victim. I wondered who he was. Holmes had been able to find out little about him.
“I think they probably picked him up on the dock at Lerici. By the time Shelley took his house there, the place was already a sailing center for English expats. It was the beginnings of marina culture …”
Suddenly, I knew exactly who Charles Vivian was. The sun-bleached teenager, head full of boats, wandering the pontoons in search of a berth on anything with furled sails. Falling in with Shelley and Williams must have seemed to him a brilliant stroke of luck.
Writing to Mary Shelley, after the salvage of Don Juan, Daniel Roberts reported: “all the boys things safe in the forepeak.”
Poor Charles Vivian. Prior to sailing with Shelley, anyone should have studied the seagoing passages in Alastor in close detail, and worried about whether their author was likely to be a safe captain of a real boat in a real sea.
On 14 June (my birthday, as it happened) I was reading The Debt to Pleasure in my room at the pub when, just before eleven o’clock at night, the telephone rang. It was my brother Dominic, asking if I could lend a hand at the bungalow: my father’s sheet needed to be changed, a three-person job.
I drove fast through the dark, the chimerical firs and cypresses crowding in around the narrow road. Every night now, I found England dissolving into the landscape I had left behind; its fields and meadows reverting to thick forest. On the long-haul drives between Leicestershire and London, it was a pleasant illusion; I enjoyed depopulating the countryside and restoring it to wilderness.
At the bungalow, both my mother and my brother looked like haggard sleepwalkers, their faces chalky with exhaustion and anxiety. We muttered at one another and trudged, single file, into the bedroom where my father lay. He was close to coma now. My mother lifted the bedclothes. He was wearing only a diaper. The loincloth, the beard, the wasted body: he had become a deposition scene, a pietà, fresh from the cross.
Ravaged though he was, he was astonishingly hard to shift. We tried to tug the soiled sheet from underneath him; it wouldn’t budge. My brother and I held on to a leg apiece and hauled him sideways across the bed while my mother cradled his head in her lap, saying, “It’s all right, darling, it’s all right! We’re just giving you a clean sheet—” To me it seemed that moving him limb by limb with such inexpert roughness, we were in danger of breaking him apart. My brother and I were a pair of amateur removal men, gasping for breath as we lugged my father about. Just as our job was almost done, my father rolled suddenly, face forward, and said, “I’m going!”
“No, you’re not, my darling! You are not!”
I had never before heard my mother speak with such fierce authority.
Five minutes later, as I was leaving the bungalow to go back to my pub, my brother came with me to the door. “That was terrible,” he said in a dry, creaky whisper.
“We did okay,” I said.
In bed in my room, I found my place in The Debt to Pleasure, but the words skedaddled all over the page like a flock of impish bats. The book fell out of my hand. Seconds later, I was roused by the imperious British double-jangle of the phone. The red numbers on the clock-radio said 7:01 A.M.
My mother’s voice. “Peter’s—gone.”
Of course he’d known. He always had been a realist—and never more so than in his last spoken words. No more indignities now. I was glad for him. Driving to Harborough in the rising sunshine, I wound the windows down and heard the blackbirds singing.
In the bedroom at the bungalow, he looked strangely less dead than when he’d been alive—his face relaxed in sleep so deep that I might almost have envied it, as I envied Julia’s total surrender to unconsciousness. My mother sat beside him. For her sake, I bent down and brushed his cheek with my lips. It was less than a kiss. We’d never kissed. The cheek was only a little cooler than it should have been.
My mother said, in a small voice, “We’ve been so happy together. I love him so much.”
Now began the surreal administrative business of death, “the arrangements.” I put a kettle on to boil for coffee, left a message on the undertaker’s answering machine (whose greeting sounded as if recorded by Vincent Price), asking him to call me as soon as he got in. A nurse came, and quickly went away. The doctor arrived—a kindly, soft-spoken man, whose first gesture was to take my mother in his arms. The two absent brothers were on the road; Colin coming down the M1 from Sheffield, William coming up it from London.
I found the doctor on his knees in front of the toilet, and thought for a moment that he was throwing up. But he was flushing my father’s drugs down the sewer-line one by one.
“Coffee?”
“That would be very nice,” he said over the rumbling cataract in the lavatory bowl.
My father, in full control of the morning, was in an amiable, even facetious mood. He had left behind a closely typed, ten-page document, headed IN THE EVENT OF A DEATH. He’d thought of everything, and clearly had enjoyed himself at the typewriter as he disposed of his own forthcoming remains.
The immediate information required by the funeral director from the Will is the manner of disposal of the body … burial or cremation. We both wish to be cremated,—simple, no grave to keep up and visit and a decent way of disposal … NO Ilkley Moor processes for us! Disposal of ashes: uncertain but NOT for keeping on a mantelpiece! ??Scatter—tho’ frowned on by church authorities—on e.g. British Camp, Malvern Hills or somewhere in Worcs … Oddingley [his father’s parish] in or near the churchyard … or in the New Forest?… or?? (Have a weekend of it, expenses paid for hotel rooms etc) More formally, St Nicholas’ churchyard has a garden or rest. See the Vicar, of course.
“Funerals do not come cheaply!” he warned, advising us to instruct the undertaker that “Simplicity is the order of the day.” He discussed car-parking arrangements for the reception at the bungalow after his funeral and cremation were finished:
The Police should be informed so that overflow parking on the cycle track, and preferably between that track and the roadway, is agreed. With the added parking space in front of the bungalow, it may be possible to let a few cars park further onto the grass if necessary, and if the ground is not too wet …
For the church service its
elf, he recommended that “the general tone should be positive joy/thanksgiving/humorous etc etc rather than glum speculations or insurance policies!”
With my father affably chatting away in my ear, I uncorked a bottle of cognac and brought it out on a tray, with glasses, to the lawn, where the family was now building to full strength. The oddity of drinking brandy at nine in the morning seemed proper, and might easily have been specified by my father. My brothers and I, all pale and pouchy-eyed, clinked glasses. The undertaker arrived at a scene of genteel debauchery, like the hungover remnants of a party from the night before.
He said, sotto voce, “My men are outside. For whenever you’re ready.”
His round, rubicund face, full of laughter lines, was at odds with the death-suit that was the obligatory uniform of his trade. He looked as if he’d been a bad boy at school. In his Harborough retirement, my father had been a freelance taker of funerals and often had worked with Mr. Stamp, who seemed unaffectedly sorry about my father’s death. “He had a sense of humor,” he said. “He used to make me laugh, sometimes. I tell you, I’m going to miss him.”
He declined a glass of brandy, though I sensed a pang of regret. “A bit on the early side for me,” he said, excusing himself to go and “have a quick word” with his men.
My mother sat in a garden chair, facing away from the house. Mr. Stamp sat on her right, Dominic on her left. The rest of us completed an untidy circle. We passed our father’s instructions from hand to hand, then settled into discussing coffins and their prices.
In the gloom of the house, behind my mother’s cast-down head, I saw Mr. Stamp’s men, half a dozen of them, going silently about their morning’s work. Six black cormorants, shuffling through the hall. I didn’t want to see exactly what it was they were doing.
I said, “Let’s go for the plain deal—”
“With brass fitments?” suggested Mr. Stamp hopefully.
That afternoon, having moved on from cognac to hock, my brother Colin and I sat on the little rockery at the far end of the lawn, mingling the scent of flowering lavender with the smell of red-pack Marlboros. Colin—sensitive to giving my mother further, wanton reminders of cancer—was carefully hiding his butts deep in the crevices between the stones. I was grinding mine into the gravel path with my heel.
Colin had always looked the most like my father. There were streaks of silver now in his neatly trimmed black beard. We talked about the ritual of changing my father’s sheets, which had been his duty a couple of evenings before.
“The weird thing was,” he said, “that even though his body was so wasted, I saw it was my body—you know? My arms, my legs, my torso …”
I realized that I’d felt that, too, but mine was a shadowy, inarticulate sensation. I was grateful to Colin for putting it into words.
“I’m worried about our carrying the coffin,” I said.
During the morning, perhaps elevated by brandy, we had agreed that the four brothers should carry the coffin from the hearse into the Kettering crematorium, after the funeral service in a Market Harborough church. Mr. Stamp had nixed our plan to carry the coffin into the church; that was a job for pros. “There are steps at St. Nicholas’s,” he said darkly, “and a bit of tricky turn to make as you go in.”
“When you see them doing it on television,” I said, “it’s always six hulking marines, and they’re always marching in step. If you fall out of step, what do you think happens to the coffin?”
“Oh, God.”
“Do you think William and Dominic know how to march in step?”
Colin and I had both been compulsorily enlisted into the “Corps” at our respective schools; our younger brothers had attended schools that didn’t go in for Saturday mornings of khaki, blanco, Bren-gun-stripping, and parade-ground drill.
“Perhaps we could arrange for a practice—”
“With an empty coffin? Left, left, left, right, left?”
“Have you got another cigarette?”
“Hey …” I reached for my wallet and fished out a snapshot of Potts Lagoon, taken from the floatplane six weeks before. As if I were telling a bedtime story to Julia, I described to my brother the world inside the picture: the bears in the woods, the still-water pool, the neighbors paying visits in their boats, the irrelevance of the telephone, the fish and the game, the lilting house on its raft. I pointed out my own boat, tied to the Walderses’ cabin with a cat’s cradle of ropes. As a graduate student, Colin had read the standard texts on the Kwakiutl. I rattled on about how their art was a brilliant, stylized exploration of flux and chaos.
Colin sucked on his Marlboro. “I wish I had a Potts Lagoon.”
Shelley’s body, hastily buried in the sand and sprinkled with quicklime, had turned indigo when Trelawny dug it up a month later in order to cremate it in a formal ceremony on the beach near Viareggio. Driftwood logs were burning in an iron furnace, specially constructed to Trelawny’s specifications; and when “the fire was well kindled,” Shelley’s corpse, disfigured and partially decomposed, was heaped into it. Byron stood by, with Bolivar anchored just offshore. Leigh Hunt sat in his carriage nearby, while Trelawny, a couple of local fishermen, and some members of the Tuscan militia got on with the business of the cremation.
In Trelawny’s account:
More wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and the fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the bottom of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.
Byron could not face this scene, he withdrew to the beach and swam off to the “Bolivar.” Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage. The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burned.…
Byron wanted Shelley’s skull, “but remembering that he has formerly used one as a drinking cup, I was determined that Shelley’s should not be so profaned.” Trelawny handed the heart to Leigh Hunt, who later presented it to Mary Shelley.
William St. Clair writes:
Shelley the great pagan had a great pagan funeral. No priest was near. No prayers were said. Trelawny turned what might have been a tiresome and perhaps sordid administrative ordeal into an unforgettable drama.
Shelley’s young death by drowning, and his beach-funeral, ensured his apotheosis as a Romantic hero.
I could not now hear the word “cremation” without thinking of the scene at Viareggio.
Two days after my father’s death, his body was ready to be viewed in Mr. Stamp’s chapel of rest. I drove my mother there.
The room was lightly refrigerated, decorated with urns of white lilies. Muzak, of the kind probably known as “light classical,” and probably circulated exclusively within the undertaking trade, was playing at a volume so subdued that all one could hear was a faint mournful susurrus of woodwind and strings. The open coffin was placed on a trestle, on which had been spread a starched white tablecloth.
I stood back. My mother walked shakily forward, and I heard her racking intake of breath as she saw the waxwork figure in its wooden box.
He’d been dressed in clothes selected by my mother from his wardrobe: polished brown shoes (“must have leather soles, can’t be rubber; the crematorium won’t allow it,” Mr. Stamp had said); gray flannels; a salmon-pink shirt, open at the neck; a greenish-gray tweed sports jacket. His outfit suggested a picnic, or a round of golf. His unruly beard had been trimmed as neatly as Colin�
��s, his swept-back hair combed into place with brilliantine. They had put color in his cheeks and rouged his lips, which had been molded into a strange smile. They’d robbed him of his character: it was as though he’d never lived.
My mother leaned over and kissed him—kissed it—on the mouth.
With my arm around her shoulder, we stood gazing at the unlikely piece of art that once had been my father. A minute passed—or was it ten, or just ten seconds? It wasn’t a measurable time.
“I think I’m ready to go now,” my mother said.
I helped her back to the car. Inside, she said, “It was quite like Peter, but it wasn’t really Peter …” and began to cry, helplessly, inconsolably, as if the concrete dam of grief had burst inside her.
St. Nicholas’s was a tawny stone parish church, as old as England. My brother William, a filmmaker, was crouched among the ancient tombstones, videoing the event, as the cormorant-crew carried the coffin into the church, followed by the family, then by a full-house congregation of relatives, friends, clerical colleagues, and ex-parishioners. The distended violet pupil of the camera lens tracked us as we came through the lych-gate, and I wouldn’t have been much surprised to hear my brother call “Lights!… Rolling!… Cut!… Wrap!” while we went through our parts in this classic piece of costume drama.
I took my place on the outside of the pew reserved for family, and nestled in the somber comforts offered by the church: old stained glass, sturdy pillars, brass memorials, marble entablatures, flagstones worn smooth and engraved, faintly, with names of the people buried beneath them. Though the church was full, the dead far outnumbered the living. One could smell them in the ripe churchy odor of hassocks, hymnals, polish, and bone-dust. The latest addition to their company lay just beyond my feet, at the head of the aisle, beside the corkscrew steps leading to the pulpit. My father was a freshman here, on his first day at a college whose traditions reached back into the Middle Ages.
Passage to Juneau Page 31
