Even years later, Browning’s sister and son could still be counted upon to spend a full evening discussing what he might have done that day. The possibilities were endless. He might have gone off hunting for a suitable setting for a new poem, or for the physical characteristics of a duke by examining handsome northern Italian workmen. He might have gone, again, to visit his beloved Palazzo Manzoni, to gaze wistfully at its marble medallions. He might have gone to visit a Venetian builder, to discuss plans for the beautiful tower he had talked about building at Asolo, or out to Murano to watch men mould their delicate bubbles of glass. His sister was convinced that he had gone to the Church of S.S. Giovanni e Paolo to gaze at his favourite equestrian statue. His pious son, on the other hand, liked to believe that his father had spent the day in one of the few English churches in Venice, praying for the redemption of his soul. But all of their speculations assumed a sense of purpose on the poet’s part, that he had left the house with a definite destination in mind, because as long as they could remember, he had never acted without a predetermined plan.
Without a plan, Robert Browning faced the Grand Canal with very little knowledge of what, in fact, he was going to do. He looked to the left, and then to the right, and then, waving aside an expectant gondolier, he turned abruptly and entered the thick of the city behind him. There he wandered aimlessly through a labyrinth of narrow streets, noting details; putti wafting stone garlands over windows, door knockers in the shape of gargoyles’ heads, painted windows that fooled the eye, items that two weeks earlier would have delighted him but now seemed used and lifeless. Statues appeared to leak and ooze damp soot, window-glass was fogged with moisture, steps that led him over canals were slippery, covered with an unhealthy slime. He became peculiarly aware of smells he had previously ignored in favour of the more pleasant sensations the city had to offer. But now even the small roof gardens seemed to grow as if in stagnant water, winter chrysanthemums emitting a putrid odour, which spoke less of blossom than decay. With a kind of slow horror, Browning realized that he was seeing his beloved city through Shelley’s eyes and immediately his inner voice began again: Sepulchres where human forms / Like pollution nourished worms / To the corpse of greatness cling / Murdered and now mouldering.
He quickened his steps, hoping that if he concentrated on physical activity his mind would not subject him to the complete version of Shelley’s “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills.” But he was not to be spared. The poem had been one of his favourites in his youth and, as a result, his mind was now capable of reciting it to him, word by word, with appropriate emotional inflections, followed by a particularly moving rendition of “Julian and Maddalo” accompanied by mental pictures of Shelley and Byron galloping along the beach at the Lido.
When at last the recitation ceased, Browning had walked as far as possible and now found himself at the edge of the Fondamente Nuove with only the wide flat expanse of the Laguna Morta in front of him.
He surveyed his surroundings and began, almost unconsciously, and certainly against his will, to search for the islanded madhouse that Shelley had described in “Julian and Maddalo”: A building on an island; such a one / As age to age might add, for uses vile / A windowless, deformed and dreary pile. Then he remembered, again against his will, that it was on the other side, near the Lido. Instead, his eyes came to rest on the cemetery island of San Michele whose neat white mausoleums and tidy cypresses looked fresher, less sepulchral than any portion of the city he had passed through. Although he had never been there, he could tell, even from this distance, that its paths would be raked and its marble scrubbed in a way that the rest of Venice never was. Like a disease that cannot cross the water, the rot and mould of the city had never reached the cemetery’s shore.
It pleased Browning, now, to think of the island’s clean-boned inhabitants sleeping in their white-washed houses. Then, his mood abruptly changing, he thought with disgust of Shelley, of his bloated corpse upon the sands, how his flesh had been saturated by water, then burned away by fire, and how his heart had refused to burn, as if it had not been made of flesh at all.
Browning felt the congestion in his chest take hold, making his breathing shallow and laboured, and he turned back into the city, attempting to determine the direction of his son’s palazzo. Pausing now and then to catch his breath, he made his way slowly through the streets that make up the Fondamente Nuove, an area with which he was completely unfamiliar. This was Venice at its most squalid. What little elegance had originally existed in this section had now faded so dramatically that it had all but disappeared. Scrawny children screamed and giggled on every narrow walkway and tattered washing hung from most windows. In doorways, sullen elderly widows stared insolently and with increasing hostility at this obvious foreigner who had invaded their territory. A dull panic began to overcome him as he realized he was lost. The disease meanwhile had weakened his legs, and he stumbled awkwardly under the communal gaze of these women who were like black angels marking his path. Eager to be rid of their judgemental stares, he turned into an alley, smaller than the last, and found to his relief that it was deserted and graced with a small fountain and a stone bench.
The alley, of course, was blind, went nowhere, but it was peaceful and Browning was in need of rest. He leaned back against the stone wall and closed his eyes. The fountain murmured Bysshe, Bysshe, Bysshe until the sound finally became soothing to Browning and he dozed, on and off, while fragments of Shelley’s poetry moved in and out of his consciousness.
Then, waking suddenly from one of these moments of semi-slumber, he began to feel again that he was being watched. He searched the upper windows and the doorways around him for old women and found none. Instinctively, he looked at an archway which was just a fraction to the left of his line of vision. There, staring directly into his own, was the face of Percy Bysshe Shelley, as young and sad and powerful as Browning had ever known it would be. The visage gained flesh and expression for a glorious thirty seconds before returning to the marble that it really was. With a sickening and familiar sense of loss, Browning recognized the carving of Dionysus, or Pan, or Adonis, that often graced the tops of Venetian doorways. The sick old man walked toward it and, reaching up, placed his fingers on the soiled cheek. “Suntreader,” he mumbled, then he moved out of the alley, past the black, disapproving women, into the streets towards a sizeable canal. There, bent over his walking stick, coughing spasmodically, he was able to hail a gondola.
All the way back across the city he murmured, “Where have you been, where have you been, where did you go?”
Robert Browning lay dying in his sons Venetian palazzo. Half of his face was shaded by a large velvet curtain which was gathered by his shoulder, the other half lay exposed to the weak winter light. His sister, son, and daughter-in-law stood at the foot of the bed nervously awaiting words or signs from the old man. They spoke to each other silently by means of glances or gestures, hoping they would not miss any kind of signal from his body, mountain-like under the white bedclothes. But for hours now nothing had happened. Browning’s large chest moved up and down in a slow and rhythmic fashion, not unlike an artificially manipulated bellows. He appeared to be unconscious.
But Browning was not unconscious. Rather, he had used the last remnants of his free will to make a final decision. There were to be no last words. How inadequate his words seemed now compared to Shelley’s experience, how silly this monotonous bedridden death. He did not intend to further add to the absurdity by pontificating. He now knew that he had said too much. At this very moment, in London, a volume of superfluous words was coming off the press. All this chatter filling up the space of Shelley’s more important silence. He now knew that when Shelley had spoken it was by choice and not by habit, that the young man’s words had been a response and not a fabrication.
He opened his eyes a crack and found himself staring at the ceiling. The fresco there moved and changed and finally evolved into Shelley’s iconography—an eagle struggling with a ser
pent. Suntreader. The clouds, the white foam of the clouds, like water, the feathers of the great wings becoming lost in this. Half angel, half bird. And the blue of the sky, opening now, erasing the ceiling, limitless so that the bird’s wing seemed to vaporize. A moulted feather, an eagle feather. Such untravelled distance in which light arrived and disappeared leaving behind something that was not darkness. His radiant form becoming less radiant. Leaving its own natural absence with the strength and the suck of a vacuum. No alternate atmosphere to fill the place abandoned. Suntreader.
And now Browning understood. It was Shelley’s absence he had carried with him all these years until it had passed beyond his understanding. Soft star. Shelley’s emotions so absent from the old poet’s life, his work, leaving him unanswered, speaking through the mouths of others, until he had to turn away from Shelley altogether in anger and disgust. The drowned spirit had outdistanced him wherever he sought it. Lone and sunny idleness of heaven. The anger, the disgust, the evaporation. Suntreader, soft star. The formless form he never possessed and was never possessed by.
Too weak for anger now, Robert Browning closed his eyes and relaxed his fists, allowing Shelley’s corpse to enter the place in his imagination where once there had been only absence. It floated through the sea of Browning’s mind, its muscles soft under the constant pressure of the ocean. Limp and drifting, the drowned man looked as supple as a mermaid, arms swaying in the current, hair and clothing tossed as if in a slow, slow wind. His body was losing colour, turning from pastel to opaque, the open eyes staring, pale, as if frozen by an image of the moon. Joints unlocked by moisture, limbs swung easy on their threads of tendon, the spine undulating and relaxed. The absolute grace of this death, that life caught there moving in the arms of the sea. Responding, always responding to the elements.
Now the drowned poet began to move into a kind of Atlantis consisting of Browning’s dream architecture; the unobtainable and the unconstructed. In complete silence the young man swam through the rooms of the Palazzo Manzoni, slipping up and down the staircase, gliding down halls, in and out of fireplaces. He appeared briefly in mirrors. He drifted past balconies to the tower Browning had thought of building at Asolo. He wavered for a few minutes near its crenellated peak before moving in a slow spiral down along its edges to its base.
Browning had just enough time to wish for the drama and the luxury of a death by water. Then his fading attention was caught by the rhythmic bump of a moored gondola against the terrace below. The boat was waiting, he knew, to take his body to the cemetery at San Michele when the afternoon had passed. Shelley had said somewhere that a gondola was a butterfly of which the coffin was a chrysalis.
Suntreader. Still beyond his grasp. The eagle on the ceiling lost in unfocused fog. A moulted feather, an eagle feather, well I forget the rest. The drowned man’s body separated into parts and moved slowly out of Browning’s mind. The old poet contented himself with the thought of one last journey by water. The coffin boat, the chrysalis. Across the Laguna Morta to San Michele. All that cool white marble in exchange for the shifting sands of Lerici.
JOHN’S COTTAGE
Sometimes what you are running away from and what you find when you stop running and arrive somewhere else are almost the same thing—variations on a ghostly theme. Then, a subsequent experience can become a positive print of a shadowy negative in the mind. Understand. There were originally two Johns; a dark silhouette followed by an idea. The latter added detail, colour to the outline of the former. And then there was only one.
In the not too distant past each time I thought of the first John the flat human shape of Peter Pan’s shadow leapt over the window sill of my imagination. Something about the way that shadow was folded up and placed inside a square object that may very well have been a drawer or toy box but that sticks in my mind as a suitcase. Folded up and placed inside some kind of luggage. You see, John’s shadow was always in my luggage, and no matter how far I ran or where I ended up, that shadow ended up there too. Even if I was certain that I had left it at home.
Home. That place where John’s shadow sometimes rang the phone but more often did not—the real John being busy in some office somewhere in another city. One stupid wire connecting our breathing, our tense silences; our bodies occupying rooms that were foreign to the other. Let me put it this way. I knew every detail of the rooms I lived in; the cracked paint around the windows, the stains on the carpets, that bit in the corner where the wallpaper was beginning to peel. I assume that John knew the peculiarities of his rooms as well. But neither of us knew anything about the other’s house—about the place where the other really lived. That was the nature of our relationship.
I always liked the idea that Peter Pan slid across the window ledge and took over the air of Wendy’s room. I liked his curiosity; the way he examined object after object so that, by the time he reached the very surprised Wendy, who was sitting bolt upright in her bed, he really knew her quite well; all about her window sashes and bedside tables, all about her music box and stuffed toys and sleeping brothers. He knew her well enough to demand that she sew his shadow back on immediately. Which she did, making everything more or less as it should be. John knew nothing of the interior of my rooms and didn’t care to know as far as I could tell. So, as a result, I gained full possession of his shadow. He just never knew me well enough to ask for it back. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware that I had it.
Once the shadow was back in place, back where it should be, Wendy and Peter began to have adventures. John and I shared no adventures. We met in neutral rooms in the neutral suburbs of what could have been any city in the world. It was all poured concrete and mirrors and plate-glass windows that looked out on more poured concrete. You couldn’t take much home with you from spaces such as these. It would be unlikely that you would even remember the pattern on the spread or the pictures on the walls. Nobody stayed for long in these rooms and we knew it. They passed right through them on their way back to the unique furniture of their real lives. This was just the way John wanted it. The memory of me or anything to do with me was something he could do without. Because I was in love with him this angered and hurt me even though I knew that things could be no other way. Perhaps it was this hurt, this anger that made me unconsciously steal his shadow.
I was always running away from John one way or another: planes to here, planes to there, trains to places where there were no phones. Phones that ring, phones that remain silent, phones that are full of awkward sentences and tense silences. I was always running away to anonymous addresses in foreign countries. Sometimes I was annoyed to find John’s shadow in my suitcase when I arrived; sometimes, however, I was relieved. A bit of familiarity in a strange place. And without the possibility of having to deal with the neutrality of the real John this could be comforting. The shadow, I felt, had the ability to care.
And it was portable—unlike John who stayed, stayed, stayed where he was. Stayed with his wife, stayed with his kids, stayed in the city. He wouldn’t have followed me anywhere, not that John, not that real John. He made me come to him in those grey neutral rooms he rented. He locked me into them and pushed me out of them. He covered himself with me and then he showered me off. But I had his shadow with me later for some company.
More than anything, though, I missed knowing some other kinds of rooms; rooms where something, anything, belonged to him, belonged to me, belonged to us.
This time when I arrived at the airport in northern England I was full of John, full of him. On the plane I had read books that I knew he liked, expressed to the stranger beside me opinions that I knew were his. I was even wearing a pair of jeans that were similar to his. Oh, I was full of him all right, more than I usually was when I was running away, and why? Because he had utterly rejected me before I had left. It was always like that: the greater the hurt, the more the compulsion to run away, the more he pumped through my blood stream and nervous system like some kind of bad drug leaving me weak with longing and self-loathing. His
indifference was a stimulus to my obsession, it was as simple as that. And so, by the time I stepped off the plane in northern England I was so stunned, so absorbed that I wasn’t sure that his shadow wasn’t my own, that I hadn’t sewn it onto the toes of the wrong body by mistake.
John in my bloodstream, John in my nervous system and John’s shadow attached to every other part of my body as I walked up the flagstone path towards the stone cottage I had rented. Beside me, oblivious to all but my material luggage, my new landlady, Mrs. Southam, who was discussing, at some length, the hardships of the present winter, hardships which had continued well into this month of March. Snow was still present on the tops of the distant hills and the windows of the house were fogged in a way that suggested to me that, although it might be warmer in than out, one would still be able to see one’s breath in the parlour. (John’s breath or mine?)
“You’ll be wanting,” she was saying, “coal, … maybe smokeless like we’re supposed to burn. But it’s very dear and we burn the old stuff and never get caught. Stanley will make delivery down chute,” she added, thoughtfully.
“Stanley …?”
“Me husband.”
Shades of John’s wife slid into my imagination. I had never met her and had no idea what she was like. But I had invented her, over and over. A practical, attractive woman of the skirt and sweater variety—one who cooked wholesome meals or, if I was feeling tired, a snivelling neurotic with perpetual psychosomatic pains and the ability to manipulate through guilt.
When John travelled to other places, which wasn’t very often, it was she who accompanied him and so, later, when he spoke about those rare times it would be she who shared his memories.
He shared nothing but poured concrete with me. Nothing but walls and windows with curtains obscuring views and doors which either locked you in or out.
Storm Glass Page 2
