Shelley: The Pursuit (151 page)

But for once Claire was not so easily mollified. She wrote back to Shelley under the unlikely pseudonym of ‘Mr Joe James’ at the Pisa post office, pressing the plan further, or threatening instead to leave Italy immediately for Vienna. On hearing his part in the dragoon affair she criticized in turn his own ‘rashness’ and ‘want of temper’, and he was forced to defend himself. ‘My part in the affair, if not cautious or prudent, was justifiable. . . . The fault of the affair, if there be any, began with Taaffe. . . . The man was probably drunk. — Don’t be so ready to blame. Imagine that there may be more temper and prudence in the world, besides what that little person of yours contains.’
⁷⁷
He did not often write like that, but Claire had wittingly or unwittingly touched on the delicate subject of his conduct in Byron’s company. He told her that as far as Vienna was concerned, ‘the change might have a favourable effect on your mind. . . . I must try to manage the money for your journey, if you have so decided.’
⁷⁸

But he did not really want her to go. After his show of benevolent indifference,
he suddenly addressed her an urgent and deeply personal appeal to take a firmer and calmer control on her life. ‘Some of yours & of my evils are in common, & I am therefore in a certain degree a judge. If you would take my advice you would give up this idle pursuit after shadows, & temper yourself to the season; seek in the daily and affectionate intercourse of friends a respite from these perpetual and irritating projects. Live from day to day, attend to your health, cultivate literature & liberal ideas to a certain extent, & expect that from time & change which no exertions of your own can give you . . . .’ It was the philosophy he had been trying to practise himself for several months.
⁷⁹

By the second week of April, the Pisan circle was breaking up. Byron was to take a summer residence near Livorno, while Shelley and the Williamses agreed that they would go further up the coast north of Viareggio. They were not quite sure where they would settle, for they had been refused leases on their original houses at Spezia. But a report from Roberts via Trelawny said their boat would be ready in ten days’ time. On the 10th, Shelley wrote to Claire: ‘I am not well. My side torments me; my mind agitates the frame which it inhabits, and things go ill with me — that is within — for all external circumstances are auspicious. Resolve to stay with us this summer, and remain where you are till we are ready to set off — no one need know of where you are; the Williams’s are secure people, and [we] are alone.’
⁸⁰
Two days later Mary, who had been writing sheets and sheets narrating the dragoon affair to the Gisbornes, wrote to Leigh Hunt to know when he might be expected. ‘You will find Shelley in infinitely better health; indeed he has got over this winter delightfully . . . .’

A few last desultory billiard games were played at the Lanfranchi,
⁸¹
but there was no more shooting, or dining, and the weather was wet and windy. Shelley and Williams stayed indoors talking about play-writing: ‘[Shelley] gave me a long lecture on the drama — put me in bad spirits with myself.’ Claire arrived secretly on the 15th, and lodged quietly with the Williams. They were all now anxious to leave, but the Pisan courts had summoned each of them to appear for cross-examination in the dragoon affair. Byron’s courier was asked if he struck the dragoon: ‘No! [he answered] but if I had had a pistol I should have shot him.’ Mary and Theresa Guiccioli themselves were examined for five hours, during the course of which the Countess offered that ‘she could not swear but she thought Mr Taaffe was the person who stabbed the dragoon’. So it muddled on.
⁸²

The imminent dissolution of the colony at Pisa had the effect of turning Shelley’s eyes for a moment to more distant personal changes. He was anxious to know what real independence he could eventually secure in Italy from his own resources. He wrote at length to John Gisborne about the Shelley estates in England, discussing his debts — which he now reckoned at £20,000 to £25,000
‘principally post obits’ — and his wish to escape from the hand of his old solicitor Longdill. He talked of inheriting, but ‘I have altered my determination about coming to England at my father’s death — I
will not
come at any rate’. Although he did not ask Gisborne directly, he obviously hoped that having started as his literary agent he might also cope with the financial side. ‘What ought I to do? Is there any possibility of engaging some active & intelligent man of business, who would zealously enter into my affairs, and make himself master of my papers &c., so that on the event of the succession falling to me, he might be prepared to act with the promptitude & the spirit which my concerns demand. . . . These are questions to which I should be obliged if you would give your serious consideration, & indeed you might consult with Hogg upon them.’ The list of Shelley’s enemies in England seemed full: his many creditors, his solicitor Longdill, ‘this thief Ollier’, and of course the Godwins — who were ‘forever plotting & devising pretexts for money, none of which however they get: 1st because I
can’t
, & 2nd because I
won’t
’.
⁸³

There was little news from Pisa:
Hellas
had arrived in Ollier’s edition, ‘prettily printed’ and Shelley was continuing to read
Faust
and also Calderón’s
Magico Prodigioso
which he found ‘strikingly similar’ to the Goethe in many respects. He had now decided to translate both for the first issue of the
Liberal.
To Ollier he sent a curt note by the same post asking him to deliver his accounts to Gisborne and authorizing Gisborne as his sole agent in London. There were also half a dozen printing errors in
Hellas
, though only one serious one: line 466 had been printed ‘Death is awake! Repulsed on the waters!’
Repulsed
was wrong.
⁸⁴

To Horace Smith in Paris Shelley wrote somewhat guardedly of Byron. There had been a report circulated by Moore that the atheistical tendencies in
Cain
were the result of Shelley’s influence. Shelley remarked that he would have been happy to have any influence on that ‘immortal work’, but ‘pray assure [Moore] that I have not the smallest influence over Lord Byron in that particular; if I had I certainly should employ it to eradicate from his great mind the delusions of Christianity, which in spite of his reason, seem perpetually to recur, & to lay in ambush for the hours of sickness & distress’.
⁸⁵

To Leigh Hunt Shelley wrote more confidentially . Though the Pisan plan for the
Liberal
was still alive, and Byron still ‘anxiously’ awaited Hunt’s arrival, Shelley’s personal feelings were bitter. ‘Perhaps time has corrected me, and I am become, like those whom I formerly condemned, misanthropical and suspicious . . . . Certain it is, that Lord Byron has made me bitterly feel the inferiority which the world has presumed to place between us and which subsists nowhere in reality but in our talents, which are not our own but Nature’s — or in our rank, which is not our own but Fortune’s. I will tell you more when we meet . . . .’ In the meantime, ‘sea air is necessary’.
⁸⁶
The circle was broken.

29. The Gulf of Spezia

On 23 April 1822, Edward and Jane Williams took Claire off to go househunting in the bay of Spezia. Williams and Shelley had already decided on the little fishing village of Lerici as their summer residence. It stood on the southern tip of the bay opposite Portovenere, and for all its diminutive size and remoteness it had a proper stone quay and was a regular calling-point for mail boats. Williams had an introduction to the harbour-master, Signor Maglian, and when they arrived on the 24th, they were greeted with great politeness and shown round at least a dozen unsuitable houses. After a full day’s search round the bay, there was still ‘nothing that could possibly suit’, and leaving the harbourmaster to make further inquiries, they set out back to Pietra Santa and Pisa. But returning homeward ‘we were struck with the beauty of some unfinished grounds, and on inquiry learnt that it was probable they would sell them & the dilapidated house that stood in ruins there’.
¹
This was their first sight of the Casa Magni.

Back at Pisa on the 25th, Williams found Shelley standing white-faced at the door of his apartment, and hastily took him aside.
²
He had just received news from Byron that little Allegra had died of typhus fever at the convent of Bagnacavallo.

Shelley decided that the first thing to do was to leave Pisa and get settled at Lerici without a moment’s pause. The whole of the next day was spent packing and boxing furniture, for he did not intend to keep the apartment at the Tre Palazzi any longer. At midday on the 27th the baggage was loaded on to two boats at the landing-stage. Shelley kept Claire’s box with his personal luggage.
³
He took a tight-lipped leave of Lord Byron who was at the Lanfranchi morosely considering his own emigration to Livorno. Mary, Claire and little Percy were dispatched by coach to La Spezia in Trelawny’s care, with instructions to conclude the negotiations for a house immediately. At 4 o’clock, the two luggage boats cast off and disappeared under the Ponte Al Mare and round the curve of
the Arno in the fast seaward current.
⁴
The Williamses and Shelley followed on a separate boat ninety minutes later. Shelley, said Mary, was like a torrent hurrying everything in its course.
⁵
And still Claire knew nothing of Allegra.

The last three days of April were spent with Mary at La Spezia negotiating for the Casa Magni, and Shelley at Lerici with two boat-loads of luggage trying to avoid paying £300-worth of customs duties. Notes sped across from one side of the Gulf of Spezia to the other. ‘I, of course, cannot leave Lerici…but if the Magni House is taken there is no possible reason why you should not take a row over in the boat which will bring this — but don’t keep the men long. — I am anxious to hear from you on every account . . . .’
⁶
Finally, on the 30th, the Casa Magni was taken, and the boats were unloaded on the tiny piece of sandy beach in front of it, with everyone helping to carry the boxes up through the lapping Mediterranean surf. It only took an hour.
⁷
The Williamses, unable to find a house for themselves, were also quartered on the single habitable floor of the Casa Magni, together with their two babies and the servants. The customs said they would count the house as a luggage depot since it was so near the sea, and there would be no duty to pay.

Williams and Shelley spent the next afternoon fishing off the rocks; they caught nothing and found the stone was volcanic and viciously sharp, twisted into grotesque lacework and tracery. In the evening, Claire walked into the room where they were all talking about Byron and Bagnacavallo. She asked them if Allegra was dead; Shelley stood up and said yes.
⁸
He told Byron afterwards that what he really feared was that she would go mad.

For the first week of May, all their time was taken up in coping with Claire. Shelley wrote to Byron asking for a miniature and a lock of the child’s hair, which duly appeared by the return boat. A murderous note from Claire slipped past Shelley’s observation — or so he said — and also reached Byron at Livorno; but to this second letter there would be no answer.
⁹
Claire’s only coherent request was that she should be allowed to see Allegra’s coffin before it was shipped from Livorno to England. When Byron offered to give her complete charge of Allegra’s funeral and burial, Shelley wrote back: ‘She now seems bewildered; & whether she designs to avail herself further of your permission to regulate the funeral, I know not. In fact, I am so exhausted with the scenes through which I have passed, that I do not dare to ask.’
¹⁰

The only relief was the extraordinary beauty of their situation in the bay of Lerici. Even in his first letter to Byron, Shelley could not avoid mentioning it: ‘Nature is here as vivid and joyous as we are dismal, and we have built, as Faust says, “our little world in the great world of all”.’

The Casa Magni had been built originally as a boat-house, and it was right on the seashore. Its ground floor consisted of an open stone portico with seven
arches roughly whitewashed, and a stone-flagged floor running back into the building. The edge of the flagging had a low wall which formed a little jetty, with a fringe of small rocks up against it. The sea frequently splashed to the very foot of the portico. The flag-stones were always carpeted with the blown sand, and the ground floor could only be used for storing rope and tackle and oars. Above the portico was the first-floor terrace, which ran the whole length of the building and looked out westwards clear over the bay. Inside was a single large main room, reached by a staircase from the back. Off this central chamber, which the Shelleys and the Williamses shared as their dining hall, were three smaller rooms. The ones to the left and right, facing over the terrace and the sea, were Mary’s and Shelley’s respectively, while the Williamses were given the third room, immediately next to Shelley’s, on the north side of the building. The servants and the children slept in the back of the house.