by Janet Todd
25
Shelley writes to Claire in Este that Mary sank into a kind of despair but is better next day.
Really? Soon he’s complaining she’s cold and distant.
Does he feel guilt? How not? Especially after those (speculative) nights of illicit love in Byron’s villa. Yet, his overwhelming concern is for Claire: his grieving wife must, he writes, do all she can to persuade Byron to let Allegra remain in her care. A demand for a saint: to help with another’s child after yours has been sacrificed.
‘Byron knows the Shelleys’ poor record in child-raising,’ adds Thomas. ‘Allegra would probably “perish of Starvation, and green fruit”, he writes, mocking his friend’s dietary fads.’
Rachel rises from the table, swigs her water bottle, and briefly walks off towards the canal, wishing she were a smoker to hide her reactions. She returns quickly, there’s no stopping this story. Tamsin’s taking her time.
Shelley’s loss and sexual frustration (Mary, we assume, refuses sex) don’t hinder his work. Indeed, they’re good for it, like promiscuity for Byron.
Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Shelley continues working on ‘Julian and Maddalo’ and his great visionary poem Prometheus Unbound.
Mary’s Frankenstein is subtitled ‘the new Prometheus’, so Shelley may be answering his wife’s implied reproach to the visionary, selfish Dr F and his carelessness with the Creature, his only ‘child’.
Thomas adds, ‘He also writes “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” to catch his bleak mood, his “pulsing pain” in the “sea of misery”:
Day and night, and night and day,
Drifting on his dreary way.’
The quotation makes Jane Austen’s high nose twitch. My poets – Cowper, Crabbe, Gray – knew sadness as much or more. They hurt far fewer people.
To each his suff’rings: all are men,
Condemn’d alike to groan,
The tender for another’s pain;
Th’ unfeeling for his own.
Tramp, tramp, thud, thud, mocks Fran. No one reads this stuff now.
Jane Austen shakes her head, her curls remaining fixed.
Fran clears her throat, ‘I know what you’re trying to say, Thomas, that poetry, great art, can come from human suffering. Where the art is great, the suffering, even of another, might be worth it.’
‘You want me to say that,’ says Thomas annoyed. ‘I merely point out that at this time and in this place, Shelley produces great art. I make no moral claim.’
‘Can’t countenance it,’ says Fran feeling reckless. Dishonest too, for she’s aware that bits of this Euganean poem now reside in her skull as vividly as Wordsworth’s bothering daffodils.
Thomas subsides, smiling, ‘Oh well, Shelley anticipated your attitude: “I am one/Whom men love not.”’
‘Right,’ says Annie, ‘so life goes on afterwards, as it has to.’
‘I couldn’t bear to visit Fusina,’ says Rachel.
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has been nothing but suffering, whispers Jane Austen.
It isn’t our suffering, Fran retorts. Less easy to manipulate another’s, and from two centuries back.
‘What Shelley wrote after the death of Clara is undeniably great,’ Annie continues. She seems the least moved and yet, thinks Fran, if anyone can be accused of dumping children for her own work and ease, surely it’s Annie.
Tamsin saunters back with cigarettes and a bag displaying a bearded Mona Lisa with shades. Annie looks coldly at her. Tamsin grins back.
‘I prefer the bag to the painting,’ says Fran. The (much admired) expression reminds her of Jane Austen’s in Cassandra’s portrait.
Mary and Shelley return to the villa in Este.
Men are good at achieving aesthetic distance, perhaps objectifying a suffering separate self. Little mention in letters and diaries of that tiny life so speedily snuffed out.
To give Shelley a more sympathetic response, let’s flit forward nine months to the death of Clara’s brother, William, ‘Wilmouse’ as they called him, of malaria at the age of three and a half. He too died to convenience his father. They were in unhealthy Rome in summer; Shelley insisted on staying because his portrait was being painted.
The babe is at peace within the womb;
The corpse is at rest within the tomb:
We begin in what we end.
The sorrowing mother is numb with grief. Shelley finds her demeanour unappealing (again).
‘Mater dolorosa,’ Rachel ends, eyes lowered.
Fran and Annie exchange glances. They’re like parents wondering whether to adopt: Fran smiles to think of tall, self-assured Rachel succumbing to their care and constraint.
Mary tries to control her grief, at least after Clara’s death – another story after beloved William’s. Then – so Shelley thinks – or rather, you think if you read poetry as autobiography – she hated him and wanted him castrated.
With Claire uppermost in her husband’s mind and perhaps heart, Mary may at this point have noted how precarious her hold is on her poet. Remember Harriet’s short tenure. She may be assessing her marriage realistically, accepting that the old vibrating empathy between the genius and herself is past, their worlds colliding.
Byron suggests she copy out a manuscript for him, by way of distraction.
Annie interrupts the silence. ‘This is the very afternoon to visit San Michele, isle of the dead.’ She waves the cigarette she’s been carefully holding away from the lunch table. ‘Dark tourism. We might find something about burial habits in Venice in 1818. We’ve not seen Clara Shelley’s grave. The Lido, they say, but we don’t know for sure.’
Tamsin laughs, ‘You guys are spending this gorgeous sunny afternoon in a cemetery?’
‘Yup,’ says Fran, cheered by the idea of an outing. ‘The boat goes from the top of Venice.’
‘I could swim it,’ says Thomas, who admires Byron’s wild athleticism.
I am relieved that rigmarole is over, remarks Jane Austen. Allow me to quote a more controlled account of death from my childhood tales: ‘The Vessel was wrecked on the coast of Calshot and every Soul on board perished. The sad Event soon reached Carlisle, and the beautiful Rose was affected by it, beyond the power of Expression.’ Please keep this in mind when you come to dispose of Shelley.
They trudge up misattributed lanes and filled-in canals towards Fondamente Nove, passing Tedeschi, former Austrian post office and surveillance centre, now a consumer emporium. Arriving at the boat stop, they look across at San Michele’s brick walls, symmetrical decorations, and dark yews: they find the place – as Rachel could have told them – un-Romantic.
Fran senses Jane Austen’s amusement, You expected to feel solemn awe I suppose. Like Catherine Morland anticipating Northanger Abbey.
Thomas has done his homework on Protestant corpses.
Venice had a long-established colony of German-speaking merchants. They worshipped discreetly, but had problems disposing of bodies. Churches, scuole and other pious institutions which interred Catholic dead baulked at heretics.
In 1647 Germans were given a special ‘arca’ for their corpses, then in 1717 Swiss Protestants requested the island of San Servolo. The Senate refused but allocated them a (poor) plot on the north of the monastic island, San Cristoforo.
After Napoleon conquered Venice, along with most of Europe, he proposed a modern civic cemetery on San Cristoforo (disliking the stench of Venetian corpses) – with walled areas for ‘culti non cattolici’. The Austrians were more ambitious: in the 1830s, construction of the modern island of San Michele began, taking in San Cristoforo. Walled-off sections accepted unbaptized infants, Greek Orthodox, and some resident Protestants.
As they approach San Michele, Tamsin snaps a photo of the neo-gothic walls (post 1870), then turns her mobile camera towards Thomas, who pulls a lock of hair
over his forehead and grins.
On land, they walk desultorily in different groups, first along church cloisters, then out among graves. Fran savours the quietness. She spies Tamsin and Thomas entwined between tombstones. Perhaps they’ll enjoy a Shelleyan moment in a graveyard less dank than St Pancras.
Rachel likes the stillness within the light: how little is needed in these sunny places to catch patterns. What pattern in a life, how make the real, the whole, from a pattern? A story, a poem?
‘Don’t care for it,’ says Annie, ‘those walls of the dead with little pots of gaudy flowers, looks Hindu.’
‘Catholic,’ says Fran.
‘Not Protestant, you mean?’
‘Not tasteful,’ says Rachel joining them, ‘but, in the sun with only the shadow of trees, they have something.’
In the island’s pokey office, they ask after Protestant graves. The bored official flicks long purple-painted nails to direct them to ‘recinto evangelico’.
‘Sounds like preachy Nonconformists.’
‘Let’s get it over with,’ says Annie turning away. She’s flooded with nostalgia for the wifely, old-fashioned life of the heterosexual couple. She’s fond of Fran, but travelling with women instead of a man – dare she admit it? – disturbs her, people look at you differently. Despite being (probably) the centre of the little group of five, she feels unsettled. Jane Austen may whisper to Fran that friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love, but Annie can’t quite access this comfort. Not yet.
She sets off quickly while Rachel and Fran clamber over hillocks and graves, taking a more circuitous path. All three arrive at a shabby corner of the ‘evangelical’ section. Tamsin and Thomas are already there, staring at tombs of Joseph Brodsky and Ezra Pound, both adorned with humidly wilting flowers. Thomas knows almost nothing of either.
Tamsin grins at him, ‘ “I sat on the Dogana’s steps/For the gondolas cost too much that year.” That’s all I can quote. It’s poetic because Pound was a poet, see.’
She chuckles. Enchanted by her words, they all laugh.
‘Shit,’ she says, ‘I remember another bit: “peacocks in Koré’s house, or there may have been” – that’s got a lilt.’
‘You’re a wonder, Tamsin,’ smiles Fran, looking at Thomas as she speaks. ‘So much lodged in that head – you’d think it’d be too heavy for your long neck.’ She flushes at having made so physical and possibly unseemly a remark.
Four workmen are sweeping up leaves with besom brooms. They chat together in a slow quartet. Not catching the Italian – maybe Venetian? – Fran and Annie recollect the chorus of gardeners in Richard II who comment wisely on the sorry acts of their betters. Perhaps these gardeners have the wisdom of the place, unavailable to visitors.
For pity’s sake, don’t let Fran try to engage them!
Rachel makes a quick swoop round other tombs. She reports that the earliest date from the later nineteenth century, ‘way beyond our period’.
‘Let’s try the Greeks. Perhaps they dumped some Prots in with them,’ suggests Tamsin.
Annie’s dejection has given way to weariness. She wants more alcohol: a large glass of white wine by shimmering water would cheer her. When they arrive at the Greeks, she perks up at the sight of Diaghilev’s tomb, a pile of mouldering ballet shoes on top.
‘Jeez,’ says Tamsin, ‘a bit gross. They’re tiny. Are they from dead infants?’
They look in different directions, seeing nothing but tombs busted by tree roots, stones toppled over, writing defaced by years.
‘I think we’re done,’ says Thomas, feeling the weight of women, even perhaps Tamsin. Elan Valley again – and the London flat with Kiran, the girls and sometimes his mother-in-law. Does he seek female groups – reprising the family he was so keen to leave? He smiles at the notion of Tamsin as a facet of his overwhelming mother. Shelley and his women? You don’t hear a lot of his mother.
They set off back towards the vaporetto stop, finding the cemetery as much a maze as Venetian calli. They trail round in irritated circles.
‘Hey guys, lost in the land of the dead, nice one,’ whoops Tamsin.
They spy a burly man and hurry towards him. The German points to a map in his thick guidebook. To Fran’s weary eyes it seems a board of snakes and ladders. Thomas bends over the page talking the German he prefers to Italian – and indeed to English. The men smile at each other. The exit is behind them.
Before leaving, they make a final stop at the office to see if more can be learnt from Purple Nails. She’s been replaced by a middle-aged woman with black dyed hair and bright orange lips reading a libro giallo. She doesn’t look up. Fran’s turn to ask about graves before 1820 – in halting Italian.
Irritated, the woman glances at her, ‘All here,’ she says in English and returns to her novel.
Tamsin steps forward, ‘I think Protestants were buried on the Lido after 1684 too. Like before San Michele was established?’
‘No Protestants on the Lido, only Catholics,’ says the woman, her eyes fixed on her page.
‘Fuckwit,’ says Tamsin smiling.
‘And Jews,’ adds a young man, entering behind them. Thomas turns to address him, ‘There was a Protestant burial ground where there’s now an airfield.’
The Italians exchange glances and smirk. ‘No,’ says the young man, ‘only Catholics and Jews.’
Returning on the vaporetto, they’re sardined within a party of Chinese tourists clutching glass baubles, vases and trinkets bought in Murano and likely imported from their homeland. Thomas looks behind at Annie and Rachel caught between children playing games on their mobiles. ‘Those officials on San Michele are wrong,’ he says over his shoulder.
‘So why didn’t you argue?’ asks Annie
Thomas shrugs against Tamsin’s head. ‘Not worth it. They knew nothing and were interested in less.’
By the window Fran hears Thomas’s response, liking the idea of less than nothing. Feels positive. The thought makes her light-headed. I need food and a glass of fizz, she thinks.
Rachel pokes Annie, ‘I could murder a beer.’
26
Next morning Fran looks out of her window to find a scruffy barge tied to the single cleat. Two people – father and daughter or a couple? – come out of a small cabin, remains of bread and coffee visible on an upturned crate. They undress without embarrassment, do an all-over wash from a bucket, then stuff night things into the cabin, carefully padlock it, and leave.
Annie joins Fran to watch. ‘I suppose they’re going to find a café to defecate in. At least I hope that’s where they put their shit.’
‘Gypsies,’ says Fran. ‘Or hippies. I like them.’
The couple return, a dog barks from the cabin. They set about cleaning and mending the loose planks of their little house.
Mole in The Wind in the Willows mends and paints his dark, lonely home before feeling the call of spring.
Up we go!
On the quayside the pair deposit leaking bags. They stain the white stone. Then the young woman carries the bags towards the rubbish dump, dripping oil as she marches over the humpback bridge. She returns to continue housekeeping.
Fran’s eager to talk to them, but her language is too poor. She tries grinning through the window, but no substitute for words. She goes outside with Annie to nod encouragement whenever eyes meet. Clothes, tools and pans clutter the narrow quayside.
At a late breakfast, they find the staff outraged. ‘They’re not from the island,’ shouts the waitress over the noise of a coffee-grinding machine. Her English is good: she’s been a barista in Bromley. ‘They must go,’ she says as the grinding subsides, ‘their mooring is illegal. The owner calls the police. They make big mess.’ She sniffs crudely through her arched nose. They sniff better in Italy, Fran thinks.
Annie’s looking at her phrase book. ‘I can’t hold even the simplest conversation in Italian,’ she wails. ‘I despise people who go to other people’s countries and don’t bec
ome fluent in words and ways. But here,’ she throws down the book so it touches the edge of her saucer, wobbling dregs in her cup, ‘the words I memorised slithered off as soon as we landed in Marco Polo.’
‘We suffer from British-educationitis,’ says Fran. ‘Learning the future perfect before mastering how to buy a pound of salami or the polite way to ask youths flirting outside our window past midnight to shut up so their grannies can sleep.’
‘It’s metric here – and in England,’ laughs Annie. ‘It’s something to know grammar. You’re right, though. In our day it was considered enough. Speaking was for foreigners. Besides, we pride ourselves on being monolingual.’
‘What if one gets a heart attack here? What’s the word for it? And what if they’re on strike again or the mist’s so thick vaporetti don’t run?’
They ask the waitress what happens when Giudecca is cut off. She stares into her coffee machine and barks, ‘Always one boat to Zattere. Solo Palanca.’
‘Sounds like Chiron announcing a stop-off at Purgatory.’
Back in Fran’s room, while Annie studies the guidebook for the Lido, Fran continues watching the gypsy boat. Urged by the hotel owner or police or just feeling the coldness of his welcome, the man is trying to start the engine.
Sputtering, then silence.
‘Isn’t it marvellous to see so much going on?’ says Fran.
‘Hmm,’ says Annie taking out a Gauloises and waving it at Fran’s window. Thinking better of it, she replaces it in its box. ‘I once stayed in a bedsit overlooking the Old Kent Road. Not unlike.’
‘I wonder what Agafia watches.’
‘What is it about Agafia?’
‘Envy I guess. The self-reliance.’
‘She had God,’ says Annie, ‘remember that. Have you been noticing Tamsin and Thomas?’
‘You know I once wondered about Rachel. But she’s too old.’
‘Not that again,’ laughs Annie. ‘Thomas and Tamsin don’t hide much. I guess by now they’ve exchanged “the kiss of love when life is young”, the nearest earthly thing to heaven Shelley could imagine. Shelley didn’t stick around long to find what happens next. Maybe a bit tricky for Thomas.’
