Shelley: The Pursuit (137 page)

Yet Shelley had been working to create this mythic connection in his own mind between Keats’s consumption and the
Quarterly.
In November 1820 he had drafted, but not sent, a letter to Gifford, Editor of the
Quarterly
, in which he stated as a fact that the first effects on Keats of this review ‘are described to me to have resembled insanity, & it was by assiduous watching that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. The agony of his sufferings at length produced the rupturing of a blood vessel in the lungs, & the usual process of consumption appears to have begun.’
⁹⁸
It is transparent from this unsent letter that Shelley was not thinking in any realistic way about Keats’s reaction to a review of 1818, but rather of his own reaction to the
Quarterly
attack on himself in 1819.

Byron, when he received Shelley’s letter at Ravenna, read the sentence carefully with his head on one side. ‘I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats — is it
actually
true? I did not think criticism had been so killing. . . . I read the review of “Endymion” in the “Quarterly”. It was severe, — but surely not so severe as many reviews in that and other journals upon others.’ Meaning of course, that he had read between the lines into the source of Shelley’s pain.
⁹⁹
He went on to criticize frankly what he had so far read of Keats’s work. Shelley’s odd but sympathetic letter served to remind Byron of other things that he and Shelley had in common besides Claire Clairmont, and he appended a tempting postscript. ‘PS. — Could not you and I contrive to meet this summer. Could not you take a run here
alone
?’ This idea was to bear fruit in August, but for the time being Shelley was left to brood in solitude on the death of his fellow-poet. He returned to reading ‘Hyperion’, but he wrote nothing.

Apart from the boat, and plans for the summer, and Claire’s correspondence, there was a financial crisis which occupied much of Shelley’s mind during April. News had first arrived of this on 13 April through Horace Smith, who wrote to say that Brookes and Co had suddenly refused payment of the spring quarter of the annuity, and that the account was frozen, pending a suit of £120 brought by Dr Thomas Hume — the guardian of Shelley’s children. What particularly amazed and angered Smith was that the suit had been brought without prior warning either to him or Shelley, and yet with the connivance of both Sir Timothy’s solicitor Whitton,
and
Shelley’s solicitor Longdill. Shelley hurried over to consult his stand-by in emergencies, Tatty Tighe, at the Casa Silva, and probably some form of immediate loan was organized to tide him over.
¹⁰⁰
Horace Smith worked hard in London to sort the matter out, sending businesslike copies of all his correspondence with Hume, the solicitors and Sir Timothy to Shelley in Pisa. His mediation as a financial agent for Shelley was invaluable at
this time, and otherwise Shelley’s Italian income might well have dried up altogether. The business, involving dilatory banks and inefficient arrangements to pay Dr Hume by standing order, was eventually sorted out in June.
¹⁰¹
[6]
The one letter that Shelley wrote to Dr Hume at this time showed no trace of warmth or human interest in the children, and makes nothing but a formal inquiry into their ‘present state of health & intellectual improvement’. It was mainly concerned with his own sense of ‘the unexampled oppression’ exercised over him in ‘being forbidden the exercise of . . . parental duties’.
¹⁰²

In Florence, when Claire heard of Shelley’s difficulties, she was alarmed for him, and was suddenly conscious of the precariousness of the life that they were all leading in Italy. On the day after she received the first explanations, she climbed alone to the top of the Boboli gardens overlooking Florence, and sat at the foot of a statue of Ceres, listening to the wind blowing through the fir trees below like the rushing of the sea. It suddenly brought to her mind ‘the many solitary hours of Lynmouth: since that time five years are past, every hour of which has brought its misfortune, each worse than the other’.
¹⁰³
Hearing of her depression, Shelley wrote: ‘I feel, my dear girl, that in case the failure of your expectations at Florence should induce you to think of other plans,
we
, that is you & I, ought to have a conversation together.’
¹⁰⁴
He talked to Mrs Mason about the school plan, and pondered whether he should bring Claire back to Pisa. Meanwhile Claire’s thoughts increasingly turned to Allegra in the convent at Bagnacavallo, and she started to have strange dreams about various people interceding to rescue the child.
¹⁰⁵

Shelley’s thoughts of interceding at the other convent, St Anna, had long since receded when he heard that Emilia was to be married. But he composed a verse narrative, much in the style of Keats, about the death of a young virgin on her wedding night. Themes from sources as far apart as
Frankenstein
and
The Cenci
mingled in Shelley’s mind as he wrote. The piece was entitled ‘Ginevra’, and is written in the same notebook as
Epipsychidion
.
¹⁰⁶
The narrative section is not very successful, but after 200 lines it concludes with an unexpectedly fine dirge, containing imagery so macabre that Hazlitt picked it out for special mention in a preface to Shelley’s poems several years later.
¹⁰⁷
Like Chatterton’s celebrated song, ‘Al under the wyllowe tree’, it stands out vividly from its dramatic context, and there is something similar in the stark and bitter inspiration of the two pieces.

She is still, she is cold

On the bridal couch,

One step to the white deathbed,

And one to the bier,

And one to the charnel — and one, oh where?

The dark arrow fled

In the noon.

Ere the sun through heaven once more has rolled,

The rats in her heart

Will have made their nest,

And the worms be alive in her golden hair,

While the Spirit that guides the sun,

Sits throned in his flaming chair,

She shall sleep.
¹⁰⁸

This, in its own way, was Shelley’s elegy for Emilia; or if not exactly for Emilia, for his conception of her as the beloved, as his epipsyche. There is no way of knowing how bitterly Shelley felt about it, but it does not seem to have been overwhelming. The notebook also contains pages of diagrams in which Shelley was working out the differing effects of head and following winds as they hit a sailing boat steered through various points of the compass.
¹⁰⁹

The little skiff was brought back, in her new rig from Livorno by Reveley on the last day of April, and in the general excitement Mary and Shelley found that at long last the Gisbornes had forgotten themselves so far as to pay a visit to Pisa to watch her arrival. The Shelleys were ‘gentle, but cold’. For the whole of the next week, Shelley and Williams were afloat, exploring the canals around Pisa, and learning to handle the little craft. Reveley sometimes came over to crew, and he and Shelley successfully sailed her right down to Arno to the sea, and then the two or three miles south along the coast to Livorno. Shelley sailed her back single-handed. But there was no talk of swimming lessons, and such things as life-jackets were unheard of.
¹¹⁰
Mary soothed any nagging worries in the company of Prince Mavrocordato, who continued to call almost daily to give his Greek lessons. He told Mary that he was preparing his military equipage and uniform, and promised to show it off before he departed.

The return of the boat seemed to herald the real beginning of summer. The Williamses took up their summer residence in a large house, the Villa Marchese Poschi at Pugnano, some seven miles outside Pisa, while Shelley negotiated for a new residence at San Giuliano. On 8 May, they packed up their belongings at the Casa Aulla and sent them ahead to the Bagni. After a visit to Livorno,
Shelley set sail with Henry Reveley to thread through the narrow waterways to their new residence, while Mary walked over with Prince Mavrocordato to dine with the Williamses at Pugnano, and then made her own way over to the Bagni. It seems to have been a different house this time, but still in the little crescent facing the Monte Pisano, with the canal conveniently running at the bottom of the garden. It was, Shelley told Claire, ‘a very nice house’. The baths were almost entirely deserted at this time in the season, but Shelley looked forward gratefully to the solitude they promised from social diversions, and eagerly stabled his sea horse by the edge of the canal, ready for explorations northwards towards Lucca and the Serchio.
¹¹¹

The month of May, with one or two interruptions, was largely spent in these boating expeditions. Occasionally Mary gingerly allowed herself to be ferried up the canal for a visit to the Casa Silva, or to do shopping in Pisa, but for the most part Shelley was alone or with Edward Williams. The most ambitious of their expeditions took them through the maze of canals and cuts into the Serchio, and winding down through the desolate
maremma
with its thick rush-clumps and wild birds as far as the sea. Shelley made a loose verse-journal of the trip, describing how their course following the Serchio ‘twisting forth / Between the marble barriers which it clove / At Ripafratta’, and into the ‘pestilential deserts wild / Of tangled marsh and woods of stunted pine’ to the bay of Viareggio. It began with them going down to the skiff before dawn —

Our boat is asleep on Serchio’s stream,

Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream . . .

and shows in its simple, prosaic narration how the friendship between Shelley and Williams was gradually ripening into an easy intimacy, based on a common background and a shared love for slightly boyish adventuring:

‘Ay, heave the ballast overboard,

And stow the eatables in the aft locker.’

‘Would not this keg be best a little lowered?’

‘No, now all’s right.’ ‘Those bottles of warm tea —

(Give me some straw) — must be stowed tenderly;

Such as we used, in summer after six,

To cram in greatcoat pockets, and to mix

Hard eggs and radishes and rolls at Eton,

And, couched on stolen hay in those green harbours

Farmers called gaps, and we schoolboys called arbours,

Would feast till eight.’

With a bottle in one hand,

As if his very soul were at a stand,

Lionel stood — when Melchior brought him steady: —

‘Sit at the helm — fasten this sheet — all ready.’ . . .
¹¹²

It was not very good verse, but it caught the flavour of those late spring days very well. The picture of Shelley — Lionel — suspended in sudden remembrance of his days at Eton with a bottle of tea in one hand and the boat rocking perilously underfoot while Williams shouts at him to sit down at the tiller has an authentic flavour.

Shelley wrote to Claire, ‘The Baths, I think do me good, but especially solitude, & not seeing polite human faces, & hearing voices. I go about twice a week to see Emilia . . . . The William’s come sometimes: they have taken Pugnano. W. I like & I have got reconciled to Jane. — Mr Taaffe rides, writes, invites, complains, bows & apologises; he would be a mortal bore if he came often. The Greek Prince comes sometimes, & I reproach my own savage disposition that so agreable accomplished and amiable person is not more agreeable to me.’
¹¹³
Most of the sociable dining took place under the Williams’s roof at Pugnano, where Mavrocordato appeared in full war dress — much to Mary’s admiration — on 16 May. She wrote briskly to the Gisbornes of the Patriarch and Greek bishops decapitated in Constantinople, which was more than outweighed by the success of Ypsilanti’s army of liberation who ‘cut to pieces the forces sent against them’.
¹¹⁴

San Giuliano remained for the most part a retreat from visitors, and when entirely alone, Shelley and Mary seemed to have found a rare peace together. Sometimes Mary could be persuaded to make the trips to Pugnano in the skiff, and she afterwards remembered the slow, rustling journeys through reeds and under the blossoming boughs that hung down into the water, as a magic interlude of serenity. ‘By day, multitudes of ephemera darted to and fro on the surface; at night, the fireflies came out among the shrubs on the banks; the cicale at noon-day kept up their hum; the aziola cooed in the quiet evening.’
¹¹⁵
Sometimes, in the early evening, they would sit at the open windows of the house and Shelley would dream out loud of ‘taking a farm situated on the height of one of the near hills, surrounded by chestnut and pine woods, and overlooking a wide extent of country; or settling still farther in the maritime Apennines, at Massa’.
¹¹⁶
The sounds from the canal and the trees drifted across to them in the twilight, and they sat in silence listening.