Shelley: The Pursuit (141 page)

Claire also seemed predisposed towards peaceful behaviour. She left Florence for her summer break, and Shelley and Williams took three days off to move her from Pisa to Livorno. Mary was not having her at San Giuliano. She wrote letters, studied German, tried going to church and also swimming. She found herself more adept at the latter, though when the waves were high the water always tended to jump down her throat.
²⁶
Towards the end of the month, she was allowed to visit Pisa for a few days, and shuttled between the Casa Silva and the Williams’s villa at Pugnano. She occasionally visited San Giuliano, but she does not seem to have managed to stay overnight there, though Shelley would walk over to Pisa to have breakfast with her.
²⁷
When she visited the convent of St Anna, she was told coyly that Emilia had adopted the habit of praying to a saint, ‘but every time she changes her lover, she changes her Saint’. Both Claire and Shelley considered this a fine flower of convent education.
²⁸

At the end of July Claire went back to the ozone of Livorno, and Shelley departed for Florence. He was accompanying the Gisbornes to bid them a final farewell on their journey to England. Shelley and the Gisbornes parted in mutual accord, or at least Shelley and John Gisborne did; the understanding was to serve as the basis for him to act as Shelley’s literary agent in London. Shelley was also carrying out a commission for Horace Smith. Smith had decided to leave England and move south with his wife, partly for reasons of health, and partly because he was bored with his legal career. Shelley was anxious to find a house in Florence in return for Smith’s dedicated work in his financial affairs. Shelley was delighted that after three long years of prevarication by Hunt and Hogg, he had at last seduced one member of his old circle in London to join him in Italy. He suspected, with good reason, that once one moved, the rest might follow. This, combined with the new friendliness of Byron, began to make Shelley think that the end of the year might see Tuscany — Pisa or Florence — become a permanent home for him.

The prospect of drawing together some kind of English literary colony at Pisa began to balance in his mind against the old dreams of cutting free from his commitments and going east. Thus, on the eve of his twenty-ninth birthday, his oldest scheme of all, the ideal of a radical commune of like spirits, was after many vicissitudes and transformations beginning to re-emerge in Italian colours. Throughout the alarms and excursions of the next few months, which saw almost no time for serious or sustained writing, the strenuous effort to hold together the volatile and conflicting interests of his various friends became Shelley’s paramount consideration. He wanted a nucleus for the new community and he regarded himself, rightly, as the only person who could reconcile the potential factions. He worked hard at it. For the first time since he had been overwhelmed by the confusion and misery and conflicting loyalties which beset him
in the winter of 1818–19 at Naples, he felt that his life had some real social purpose. The task of reconciling his friendships with three people — with Mary, with Claire and with Byron — became the first objective; as it remained the last. Yet throughout Shelley again revealed his toughness, his resource and his not inconsiderable cunning, in the depth of these human complications.

When Shelley returned from Florence to San Giuliano on 2 August, the wheels of life which had turned slowly and remotely among the green waterways of Pisa, suddenly seemed to speed up. A summons awaited him from Byron: why didn’t he
run
to Ravenna at once? Shelley kissed Mary and left the following morning.
²⁹
Mary did not like to see him go: it was, after all, his birthday the next day, and she would have preferred them to celebrate it quietly together. Instead she wrote in her journal for the 4th: ‘Shelley’s birthday. Seven years are now gone; what changes! what a life! We now appear tranquil; yet who knows what wind — but I will not prognosticate evil; we have had enough of it. When Shelley came to Italy, I said all is well if it were permanent; it was more passing than an Italian twilight. . . .’
³⁰
She consoled herself by working hard at the clean copy of
Valperga
, and spending more and more time with the Williamses. For the first time they became ‘Edward ’and ‘Jane’ in the journal, and on the 6th Mary read Edward the fictionalized history of her breakdown,
Mathilda.
She awaited the post from Ravenna.

But Shelley, for all his haste, had not gone directly on his journey. The evening of the 3rd found him not at Florence but at Livorno, where he appeared unexpectedly at Claire’s. He spent the night there, and at 5 the next morning they were up and rowing in the harbour. They visited friends, and then after breakfast took a sailing boat, and celebrated Shelley’s birthday on the water. Claire noted: ‘Then we sail out into the sea. A very fine warm day. The white sails of ships upon the horizon looked like doves stooping over the water. Dine at the Giardinetto. Shelley goes at two.’
³¹
It was the last birthday that Shelley celebrated. Claire had a pain in her stomach.

From Livorno, Shelley took the diligence and spent the night at Empoli, on the way to Florence. At dawn on Sunday the 5th he travelled into Florence, hired an open
calèsse
and drove flat out for Bologna. On the way they had a crash, an event which Shelley recounted with glee. ‘. . . The old horse stumbled & threw me & the fat vetturino into a slope of meadow over the hedge. — My angular figure stuck where it was pitched, but my vetturino’s spherical form rolled fairly to the bottom of the hill, & that with so few symptoms of reluctance in the life that animated it, that my ridicule (for it was the drollest sight in the world) was suppressed by the fear that the poor devil had been hurt.’
³²
But driver, horse and
calèsse
all survived the effects of Shelley’s high spirits, and he covered the road from Florence to Bologna, a distance of some seventy-five miles, in
about twenty hours of non-stop driving, having departed from Florence late on Sunday morning, and arrived soon after dawn on Monday the 6th. Part of the reason for the haste was a need to cover his tracks from both Claire and Mary.

From Florence he had dispatched a note to Claire that makes it clear that he had not told her of his trip to see Byron. He recounted that he had slept at Empoli ‘as one might naturally sleep after taking a double dose of opium’ — a phrase that does not quite explain itself — but that he was ‘in doubt about his hours’ and would probably not be able to see her ‘so soon as Thursday’. He signed ‘Yours ever most affectionately, S.’ and advised her to keep off green fruit. In other words she knew nothing of Ravenna.
³³
But another note, to Mary from Bologna, also shows that she in her turn had not been told of his birthday visit to Claire at Livorno. He breathlessly explained failure to arrive in Bologna the previous evening, by ‘having made an embarrasing & inexplicable arrangement for more than twelve hours’ and having travelled ‘all night at the rate of 2 miles an hour’. In this way, the day spent with Claire was concealed from Mary. Shelley’s only mention of Claire was to suggest tactfully that now, in his absence, Mary might invite her to spend a few days at San Giuliano: but she should not be told of the visit to Albe. ‘My love to the Williams’s — Kiss my pretty one, & accept an affectionate one from me in return for the cold. . . .’ But he deleted the last five words. Anyway his chaise for Ravenna was waiting. ‘Yours ever, S.’
³⁴
He arrived at Ravenna, a further fifty miles, at 10 that night, and was greeted by a delighted Byron who looked sleek and healthy, with a rather receding hairline. They talked, as was their custom on such occasions, till 5 in the morning.
³⁵

Shelley was Byron’s honoured guest for the next ten days, and the reunion, despite one dramatic eruption, was a great success. At the time of Shelley’s visit, Byron was still established in a splendid and extensive set of apartments within the palace of Countess Guiccioli’s erstwhile husband. The count had recently divorced La Guiccioli, who had been living with Byron as her
cavaliere servente
in the palace, and she was now banished to Florence for fear of incarceration within a convent.
[2]
She was on an allowance of 1,200 crowns a year, and Byron on an income of £4,000. For once Byron was living within his means, and even — he told Shelley — giving a quarter of it to charity.

He had at Ravenna substituted for his variegated and irregular assortment of Venetian street-walkers, bakers’ wives and other youthful functionaries, an equally imaginative animal menagerie, who were allowed the freedom of the corridors and rooms, and whose number only gradually revealed themselves to Shelley. After his first three days’ stay, he made it ‘two monkeys, five cats, eight
dogs, and ten horses’; but by the end of the week this tally had been filled out by ‘three monkies, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon’. Shelley explained gravely to Peacock that ‘all these except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it’. However, even this was not quite the true tally. ‘[P.S.] After I have scaled my letter, I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective, and that in a material point. I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes.’
³⁶

Byron established Shelley in a magnificent chamber, and gave him his personal servant Tita as his valet. ‘Tita the Venetian is here, & operates as my valet: a fine fellow with a prodigious black beard, who has stabbed two or three people, & is the most goodnatured looking fellow I ever saw.’
³⁷
Shelley was also made much of by the faithful Fletcher: ‘Fletcher is here, & as if like a shadow he waxed & waned with the substance of his master, Fletcher has also recovered his good looks & from amidst the unseasonable grey hairs a fresh harvest of flaxen locks put forth.’
³⁸
Altogether the magic palace filled Shelley with delight and good humour.

Shelley rapidly adapted himself to his Lordship’s hours, which were still sublunary. He rose at midday, and walked abroad in the city before breakfasting with Byron who rose usually at 2. They then talked and read and lounged until 6, when they rode out together to an area of pine forest which stood between the city and the sea, recalling the bleak and beautiful Venetian Lido of 1818. Sometimes they rode out a little earlier to shoot off pistols before the light softened. The usual targets were pumpkins, and Shelley found his eye and hand were still good, and sometimes as good as Byron’s, which was excellent.
³⁹
Afterwards, they dined lightly but choicely at 8 o’clock, and settled down to talk until 4 or 5 in the morning. The talk was ranging but demanding: Byron’s women, diseases and emotional life
in extenso
— for he had been writing his memoirs;
⁴⁰
politics, especially Byron’s involvement in the local
Carbonari
movement which very much surprised and pleased Shelley; and of course poetry — especially Byron’s fifth canto of
Don Juan
which was still in manuscript. This last filled Shelley with conflicting waves of admiration and bitter, jealous despair, the most genuine form of tribute one great poet may spontaneously pay to another. He recognized it instantly as a masterpiece, and knew that the magic palace was not merely a stage set for a pantomime, but the theatre of something genuinely wayward and great. ‘He has read to me one of the unpublished Cantos of Don Juan, which is astonishingly fine. — It sets him not above but far above all the poets of the day: every word has the stamp of immortality. — I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may: and there is no other with whom it is worth contending.’ Now
that Keats was dead, this was an impeccable judgement. The only exception it admitted, was that of the man who made it.

However, Byron’s magic palace contained at least one demon for Shelley. It rose up during the discussions of the very first night. This was the story that Elise Foggi had related to the Hoppners the previous summer, and of which Hoppner himself had written so fully to Byron. If Byron was suspected of malice or lack of frankness in the affair, it has to be admitted that he hardly lacked forthrightness once faced with Shelley. The whole story had been related within seven hours of his arrival at Ravenna.

Nor did Shelley hesitate to write instantly to Mary the following morning. He rose at 11, and dashed off six pages of quarto in time to catch the midday post. Only about half this missive concerned the Hoppner scandal; the rest good-naturedly talked of Byron, La Guiccioli and Ravenna. For all Shelley’s shock and anger, he cannot really have been very much surprised, having been struggling on and off with del Rosso against Paolo’s blackmail attempts since June 1820. He had mentioned del Rosso in a letter to Claire as recently as 18 February.
⁴¹

In Shelley’s letter to Mary of 7 August, and in the passionate reply of Mary written specifically for Mrs Hoppner and dated Pisa 10 August,
[3]
one fact is outstanding in its absence. In discussing the scandal, the basis of which was the production of an illegitimate baby in Naples in the winter of 1818, neither letter makes the least reference to Elena Adelaide Shelley. This means, quite simply, that neither Mary nor Shelley intended to recount the full story. Their answer, as far as Byron or the Hoppners were concerned, was to be oblique.