Shelley: The Pursuit (131 page)

But the request for Arabic grammars was now repeated to Claire, ‘for a purpose and a motive as you may conceive’. He dilated on his scheme: ‘[Medwin and I] have also been talking of a plan to be accomplished with a friend of his, a man of large fortune, who will be at Leghorn next spring, and who designs to visit Greece, Syria, and Egypt in his own ship. This man has conceived a great admiration for my verses, and wishes above all things that I could be induced to join his expedition. How far all this is practicable, considering the state of my finances I know not yet. I know that if it were it would give me the greatest pleasure, and the pleasure might be either doubled or divided by your presence or absence. All this will be explained and determined in time; meanwhile lay to your heart what I say, and do not mention it in your letter to Mary.’
⁸

The idea of sailing away, of going to the East, or to distant isles, moved uneasily in Shelley’s mind between poetry and reality. Did Medwin’s friend ‘of large fortune’ really exist? Certainly he never materialized. But the journey was a plan or a vision that embraced Claire — and not much later, another girl. During this winter it was essentially the plan of a sick man, and a trapped one; it was a vision of open sea viewed from a closed harbour, but it was none the less powerful for that.

November passed painfully by. To Peacock Shelley explained that he had no taste for original composition, ‘the reception the public have given me might go far enough to damp any man’s enthusiasm’. He had been reading nothing but Greek and Spanish: ‘Plato and Calderón have been my gods.’
⁹
Mary was working downstairs on her new novel
Valperga
, set in the medieval period, which, as Shelley observed evenly, ‘she has raked out of fifty old books’.

At least there was Medwin’s company at the Casa Galetti, and on expeditions
to the Campo Santo. Once Shelley discussed Foundling Hospitals: there was one at Pisa which he took Medwin to see.
¹⁰
Shelley talked with Medwin a good deal about translation, and read Spanish and Italian with him. He discussed an idea he had had of translating the whole of the
Divina Commedia
, and showed Medwin the fragment of his version from the
Purgatorio
, ‘Mathilda Gathering Flowers’. Medwin recalled: ‘Shelley was well conscious of his talent for translation, and told me that disheartened as he was with the success of his Original composition, he thought of dedicating his time to throwing the grey veil of his own words over the perfect and glowing forms of other writers.’
¹¹

Medwin encouraged Shelley after his own fashion, and one morning brought down a rough version of
Inferno
, Canto XXXIII — the incarceration of Count Ugolino in a tower at Pisa with his two sons. All three were starved, and the grim poem implies, without explicitly stating, that Ugolino committed the act of cannibalism before he died, which he constantly and obsessively repeats, with a vulpine-like snapping of his jaws, in his infernal incarnation. Shelley gingerly corrected parts of Medwin’s rough, and supplied the rewriting of several stanzas. The Ugolino Canto dwelt in Shelley’s mind, especially as Ugolino’s tower — La Torre della Fame — still stood in the city by the Ponte al Mare on the Arno.
[1]
The result of his brooding was ‘The Tower of Famine’, one of the last poems of the year, and one of the first of those admirable, short, meditative pieces which can be loosely grouped as his ‘Pisan poems’. In ‘The Tower of Famine’ he substituted the cannibal image for one more familiar, and haunting; but the strange, displaced, faintly infernal aspect which Pisa sometimes revealed to him is clearly shown, that ‘desolation of a city, which was the cradle, and is now the grave of an extinguished people’. The stanza form is the English terza rima, and it ends:

There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers

And sacred domes; each marble-ribbèd roof,

The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers

Of solitary wealth, — the tempest-proof

Pavilions of the dark Italian air, —

Are by its presence dimmed — they stand aloof,

And are withdrawn — so that the world is bare;

As if a spectre wrapped in shapeless terror

Amid a company of ladies fair

Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror

Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue,

The life of their sweet eyes, with all its error,

Should be absorbed, till they to marble grew.
¹²

Medwin found there was something faintly disquieting about Shelley’s reading of poetry. He was confined to bed for some time by a travel illness, and Shelley frequently came up to read to him at the top of the Casa Galetti. He remembered how Shelley could produce an effect ‘almost electric’ with his recitation of ‘The Witch of Atlas’, and how he took a peculiar pleasure in Wordsworth’s ‘Peter Bell’, and the various associations it had for him. ‘Shelley used to chuckle, with his peculiar hysterical cachination, over this Nursery Tale of Wordsworth’s and to repeat the stanza which forms the motto of his own “Peter Bell”, with tears running down his laughing eyes, as he gave utterance to, —

This is Hell, and in this smother,

All are damnable and damned,

Each one damning, damns the other,

They are damned by one another,

By no other are they damned.’
¹³

But it was probably not until January 1821 that Shelley began his essay ‘On Devils and the Devil’.

Five days before Claire was due to return to Pisa from the Bojtis for the last week of November, Shelley wrote to her in Florence. He explained, several times over, that he wanted her to return to Pisa at the expiry of her first month’s ‘probationary’ period, without definitely cancelling the arrangement with the Bojtis for the rest of the winter. ‘How I long to see you again, and take what care I can of you — but do not imagine that if I did not most seriously think it best for you that I would advise you to return. I have suffered horribly from my side, but my general health decidedly improves, and there is now no doubt that it is a disease of the kidneys which, however it sometimes makes life intolerable has, Vaccà assures me, no tendency to endanger it. May it be prolonged that I may be the source of whatever consolation or happiness you are capable of receiving!’
¹⁴

Claire did not make a practice of commenting in her diary on her letters either from Shelley or Mary, or on the news from Ravenna. But she amused herself by composing captions for imaginary cartoons of Byron, some of which were fairly savage. There is also one such caption-piece for Shelley during November.

‘Caricature for poor [dear —
deleted
] S. He looking very sweet & smiling. A little [child —
deleted
] Jesus Christ playing about the room. He says: Then grasping a small knife & looking mild I will quietly murder that little child.
Another. Himself & God Almighty. He says If you please God Almighty, I had rather be damned with Plato & Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley & Malthus. God Almighty: It shall be quite as you please, pray don’t stand upon ceremony. Shelley’s three aversions. God Almighty, Lord Chancellor & didactic Poetry.’
¹⁵

Claire came back to Pisa on 21 November, and resumed her regular attendance on Mrs Mason at the Casa Silva. Four days later she spent the day in Livorno with Shelley, and came back late, at 9 in the evening, ‘very tired’. It was during this excursion together that Shelley and Claire together convinced each other that she would have to go back to Florence in December. Medwin, who now met her for the first time, was very much struck by Claire, though he believed her to be four or five years older than she actually was. ‘I remember her in 1820, living
en pension
at Florence, then twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age. She might have been mistaken for an Italian, for she was a
brunette
with very dark hair and eyes. . . . She possessed considerable accomplishments — spoke French and Italian, particularly the latter, with all its
nuances
and niceties . . . and possessed an
esprit de société
rare among our country women.’
¹⁶

The acceptance of the dissolution of the old triangular
ménage
between Shelley, Mary and Claire did not have immediate or drastic repercussions. For at Pisa the
esprit de société
now suddenly and quite unexpectedly became general in the weeks before Christmas. For the first time since their arrival in Italy in 1818, the Shelley household at Casa Galetti became a genuinely open and hospitable one, and a routine of evening dinners and concert visits and
conversazione
began which had not occurred since the London spring of Madame Millanie and Mozart and the Hampstead literary tea-parties. In this sudden flurry of social activity, the departure of Claire to lead her own life in Florence somehow seemed more in the order of things. Although it was not to be without emotional consequences for Shelley.

The winter of 1820–1 at Pisa had at first promised to be a depressing one — quite apart from Shelley’s nephritic attacks. Mary entered irritably in her journal on a wet afternoon in mid-November: ‘It would be pleasant enough living in Pisa if one had a carriage, and could escape from one’s house to the country without mingling with the inhabitants; but the Pisans and the Scolari, in short, the whole population, are such that it would sound strange to an English person if I attempted to express what I feel concerning them — crawling and crab-like through their sapping streets.’
¹⁷
In other words, that Pisa would be pleasant enough except for the Pisans. But these feelings dramatically changed through the rapid blossoming of a friendship with one of the professors of the science faculty at Pisa University at the end of the month.

Francesco Pacchiani first made his appearance on 24 November, exactly one
of those wet Fridays when they all stayed indoors and read the papers. It would seem that it was Claire who met Pacchiani at Mrs Mason’s, rather than at the Casa Galetti.
¹⁸
On the following Sunday he spent the evening, and on Tuesday he supped. It was Pacchiani who introduced Shelley to a wider circle of Pisan acquaintances; he was just the man to do it. An Italian of Prato by birth, he had made a brilliant academic career, holding both the Chairs of Logic and Metaphysics at Pisa by the age of 32, while lecturing on mathematic and theoretical physics with the personal recommendations of Humboldt, Gay-Lussac and Cuvier. In 1817, Colonel Calicot Finch reported that he was still one of the two most popular lecturers among the students, with a fashionable following in Pisan society. In fact his career was on the decline, and when Shelley met him in 1820, he had, at the age of 49, just been dismissed by the university authorities, and was living among the
salons
and cafés of Pisa on his reputation as a conversationalist. He was a formidable social enemy with a lethal gift for concocting sobriquets which stuck, and was one of the best-known public eccentrics in Pisa. Medwin remembered how tall he was, with dark eyes and bony features, and a generally Moorish expression which blended well with his surroundings. Professor Pacchiani’s own sobriquet was
Il Diavolo di Pisa
, an appointment which Medwin says Shelley greatly appreciated, remarking that every city should have its own. He was in fact reputed to be, as he quickly told Mary, more than a little mad.
¹⁹

Although the friendship with Pacchiani did not remain intimate for very long, it lasted sufficiently for other introductions to follow. They were a colourful collection of human oddities, with a distinct air of the raffish. First among them was the celebrated Tommaso Sgricci, a native law student of Pisa, who had abandoned his profession to pursue his self-created career of
Improvvisatore
— a mixture of poet, stage medium and theatrical impresario. He was a highly strung personality — in fact something of a hysteric — with a natural sensibility for Greek drama and one of those rare automatic memories which could absorb dates, names, plot, quotations and whole texts with little apparent effort. In 1820, at the age of 32, he was at the height of an international career, which had triumphantly carried audiences both at Rome and Paris. At one of his evening
accademie
he could reportedly produce a three-part programme of spontaneously improvised poems: one in blank verse, one in terza rime and a complete two-and-a-half-hour tragedy on a classical theme. The inexhaustible creative faculties which this performance seemed to suggest, deeply fascinated Shelley, though he sensed the staginess of Sgricci.
²⁰
Byron had seen him perform in Ravenna earlier in the year and wrote extenuatingly to Hobhouse: ‘he is also a celebrated Sodomite, a character by no means so much respected in Italy as it should be; but they laugh instead of burning, and the women talk of it as a pity in a man of
talent, but with greater tolerance than could be expected, and only express their hopes that he may yet be converted to adultery’.
²¹
He first spent the evening at the Casa Galetti on 1 December, and Mary said that he
improvised
with ‘admirable fervour and justice’, though he was too fond of female applause.
²²