Shelley: The Pursuit (50 page)

For the next four months, that is to say until mid-March of 1814, Shelley’s life is very largely a mystery. We do not know in any detail or with any certainty where he was living, who his companions were, or what he was thinking and writing. What evidence we do have suggests that this was one of the most desperately unhappy periods of his whole adult life, when he was constantly racked by worries about money and his inheritance, when his relationship with Harriet was inexorably breaking down in mutual dissatisfaction and bitterness, and when he could find no steady place of residence, but moved restlessly between addresses in Berkshire and London, alternatively leaning on his friends’ shoulders and quarrelling violently with them. Godwin alone remained beyond reproach.

On 13 December, Shelley had the first of many financial conferences with his new solicitor, Amory, of 59 Old Bond Street. Godwin’s diary records that this was held at Took’s Court with himself, Dr Newton, the publisher Hookham, and a gentleman called Sorrel in attendance.
⁶⁵
Both Godwin and Hookham certainly had their own interests as well as Shelley’s at heart: Hookham was owed money on the printing of
Queen Mab
, and Godwin was already taking up Shelley’s repeated offers of support, since, despite the success of Mrs Godwin’s library his position was very precarious. Shelley had first promised to help him in the summer, when he had still thought that his majority would automatically bring extensive funds. At this meeting, only tentative plans and immediate needs were met. Before returning to the country, Shelley had a long talk with Hookham and arranged to keep a private room for himself in Hookham’s house at 15 Old Bond Street. He was already thinking in terms of a retreat.

On 19 December, just in time to make arrangements for a family Christmas, Shelley
took a house at Windsor, some eight miles and an easy ride from the Boinvilles’ at Bracknell. We have no record of this Christmas, the last one he spent with Harriet and his child. Likewise, January and February 1814 are largely a blank. Godwin’s diary shows that he was writing to Shelley about once a week, except at the end of February when letters stopped for a while.
⁶⁶
On short trips to London, when Shelley was beginning to think in terms of procuring a really large
post obit
loan in the region of £3,000 (about seven times his annual income), he saw Godwin several times, and dined with him thrice. At the Newtons’ there was a quarrel, and relations were broken off.
⁶⁷
In Berkshire, domestic relations became more and more difficult, and increasingly Shelley took to riding over to Bracknell, and sometimes he stayed the night. As the spring approached, Cornelia Boinville suggested that she give him regular lessons in Italian to help pass the time.

At the beginning of March, things seemed to be approaching a crisis, and Mrs Boinville and Shelley decided that for a temporary period at least Shelley should leave Harriet and Eliza at Windsor. Shelley packed a few things and moved over to Bracknell, while Mrs Boinville wrote to apprise his friend Hogg of the situation in a lightly handled letter: ‘I will not have you despite homespun pleasures. Shelley is making a trial of them with us, and likes them so well, that he is resolved to leave off rambling, and to begin a course of them himself. Seriously, I think his mind and body want rest. His journeys after what he has never found have racked his purse and his tranquillity. He is resolved to take a little care of the former in pity to the latter, which I applaud, and shall second with all my might. He has deeply interested us. In the course of your intimacy he must have made you feel what we feel for him now.’
⁶⁸
To give Shelley’s visit a certain propriety, Mrs Boinville explained that he was seeking a house in the district. ‘Excuse a thousand blunders and much confusion of expression,’ she wrote in an expressive P.S., ‘. . . for I write, talking occasionally to Shelley of twenty different subjects.’

Hogg seems to have visited Bracknell during this month, but happened to miss Shelley, who was visiting London. In one of his most elusive passages Hogg describes Shelley’s bedroom scattered over with clothes and books — mostly French — turned face downwards at the point where he had broken off reading; and he relates some strange history of Shelley using the wooden wash-tubs to go boating on the stream at the bottom of the garden. Apparently, he managed to knock out the bottoms of all the washtubs in the house. There is also a description of Shelley being given endless cups of tea in the drawing-room by ‘a lovely young creature’, presumably Cornelia. The intention is, as ever with Hogg, comic; but the physical facts described suggest Shelley was on the verge of breakdown: ‘He was greedily swallowing the nectar, discussing and disputing
the while, and trembling with emotion; and pouring the precious liquor into his bosom, upon his knees, and into his shoes, and spilling it on the carpet.’ Meanwhile, Cornelia stood by him listening, refilling his cup, and mopping him gently with a white cambric handkerchief.
⁶⁹

From Bracknell, Shelley wrote to his father, after Amory had gone to negotiate with him at Field Place. Timothy had politely turned Amory off with the explanation that the settlement now lay in Chancery and only Shelley’s grandfather, old Sir Bysshe, had it in his power to remove the impediments. Shelley coldly deployed his most pointed argument: ‘I lament to inform you that the posture of my affairs is so critical that I can no longer delay to raise money by the sale of Post Obit bonds to a considerable amount . . . surely my Grandfather must perceive that his hopes of preserving and perpetuating the integrity of the estate will be frustrated by neglecting to relieve my necessities; he knows that I have the power, which however reluctantly I shall be driven to exert of dismembering the property should I survive himself & you.’
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The letter was received in silence, and despite Amory’s own remonstrations,
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Shelley now decided he would clinch the biggest loan he could conveniently get his hands on in London. A large part of this was destined for Godwin.

Shelley’s state of mind in March and April was enough to cause those who were still in touch with him increasing uneasiness. A rare letter to Hogg of 16 March reveals febrile and conflicting emotions, and fluctuates between apathy and something like hysteria. Referring to Bracknell Shelley wrote, ‘I have escaped, in the society of all that philosophy and friendship combine, from the dismaying solitude of myself. They have revived in my heart the expiring flame of life. I have felt myself translated to a paradise, which has nothing of mortality but its transitoriness . . . .’ But only a few lines later he is writing: ‘I have sunk into a premature old age of exhaustion, which renders me dead to everything, but the unenviable capacity of indulging the vanity of hope, and a terrible susceptibility to objects of disgust and hatred.’ Looking back over his life to the Oxford days, he glanced ‘with wonder at the hopes which in the excess of my madness I there encouraged’. Harriet is simply not mentioned, but Shelley is bitterly explicit about his feelings for Eliza Westbrook, which had been building up for months: ‘I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul. It is a sight which wakens an inexpressible sensation of disgust and horror, to see her caress my poor little Ianthe, in whom I may hereafter find the consolation of sympathy. I sometimes feel faint with the fatigue of checking the overflowings of my unbounded abhorrence for this miserable wretch. But she is no more than a blind & loathsome worm, that cannot see to sting.’ All barriers of pretence and politeness were now down.

Yet not all, for astonishingly, a mere week after this letter was written,
Shelley agreed to go through the form of a second marriage with Harriet to remove possible legal irregularities resulting from the Scottish marriage of 1811. This may have been the result of a request from John Westbrook, who attended the ceremony and was determined to have his daughter’s legal position in relation to Shelley’s inheritance made absolutely certain, especially since the emotional position was steadily deteriorating for all to see. But Shelley himself may also have needed the clarification of the legal position for tying up his
post obit
arrangements. Shelley called with Godwin at Doctors Commons for the licence on 22 March, and two days later he was remarried to Harriet at St George’s Church, Hanover Square — where little Ianthe had been christened — with Westbrook and others as witnesses. Whether this hollow rite, which Shelley still abominated on principle, served to increase or reduce the tension between them is not known.
[10]
The only writing we have from him at this period is a note to his father imperiously requesting that a certain Mr Shourbridge should be granted shooting rights on the Field Place estate. Possibly this was in exchange for an introduction to useful financiers. Timothy’s note scrawled angrily on the back of the letter when he received it reads: ‘Hatter in Bond Street, Dashing Man, the latter goes to Brighthelmstone in his Barouche & fine Blood Horses in Summer. No sort of acquaintance with them [the Shourbridge brothers] whatever.’ The letter was written from 16 Charing Cross, which was Francis Place’s address, and suggests that Godwin was busy introducing Shelley into the radical London set. At around this time Shelley found two money-lenders, the brothers Andrew and George Nash, and negotiations for a sum in the region of £3,000 were commenced. Godwin hoped to collect about half of this figure.

By the end of the month Shelley was again back in Bracknell, sheltering with the Boinvilles. It is not certain at what date he returned, but he was not long enough in London to witness the arrival of Godwin’s daughter Mary at Skinner Street. She had returned from one of her stays with the Baxter family in Scotland on 30 March, and dined that evening with her beloved father.
⁷²

At Bracknell during April, Shelley continued his conversations with Mrs Boinville, and his Italian lessons with Cornelia. Relations with Harriet showed little signs of improvement, and Harriet herself decided to leave Windsor and take a spring holiday. Accompanied by Ianthe and Eliza, she travelled down to the West Country, staying first at Southampton, and later at Bath, according to Mrs Boinville’s letter of 18 April to Hogg. Thus the separation which had tacitly existed between Shelley and Harriet since the beginning of March was now openly recognized. There is no evidence that Harriet was in London again before
July. Mrs Boinville’s attitude to these developments may be gathered from what Shelley later wrote to Harriet: ‘Mrs Boinville deeply knows the human heart; she predicted that these struggles would one day arrive; she saw that friendship & not passion was the bond of our attachment.’
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Taking tea with Godwin and Shelley and several others at about this time, Hogg heard a voice inquire of the author of
Political Justice
what he considered the nature of love to be? Godwin remained silent, but Shelley with a half mocking, half defiant glance interrupted the master’s cogitations: ‘My opinion of love is that it acts upon the human heart precisely as a nutmeg grater acts upon a nutmeg.’ The company waited solemnly for this piece of levity to be rebuked, but Godwin merely looked across the room and nodded silently.
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At Bracknell Shelley moved in a dream world, totally disillusioned with Harriet’s love, but desperately seeking some alternative relationship. He half thought he had fallen in love with Cornelia Boinville, and to Hogg he sent a poem addressed in secret to her, ‘I have written nothing but one stanza’:

Thy dewy looks sink in my breast;

Thy gentle words stir poison there;

Thou hast disturbed the only rest

That was the portion of despair!

But then, with a moan, he dismissed it: ‘This is the vision of a delirious and distempered dream, which passes away at the cold clear light of morning. Its surpassing excellence and exquisite perfections have no more reality than the colour of an autumnal sunset.’
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But there was more reality in this transient passion for Cornelia than he admitted to Hogg. In the first few pages of a notebook dating from this period, and subsequently given to Jane Clairmont for her journal in August,
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there are several fragmentary entries, in Latin, in Italian and in English which were the product of this half-suppressed passion. He copied out the section of Dante’s
Inferno
, Canto V, in which Paulo and Francesca fall violently in love while innocently studying a book together; and from Augustine’s
Confessions
he drew one of his favourite tags which he afterwards used as the epigraph to
Alastor
: ‘I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love itself; and I sought for something to love, since I loved loving.’
[11]
Then in a piece of rather stumbling Latin dog prose, he constructed a vague erotic fantasy of desire and fulfilment. Part of this may be rendered: ‘She (he) pressed kisses upon my lips! Suddenly the whole world was clothed with the everlasting colours of heaven. . . . Out of a terrible solitude I contemplated love, as if I were a prisoner, both wretched and
contented. . . . I rose up from sleep, denied all delicious desires. . . . She (he) held me in her (his) arms in bed, and I nearly died from delirium and delight. Sweet lips called back the mutual kisses of life! She (he) calmed my fears.’ The gender of the narrator is not clear from the Latin. The manuscript has been burnt in several places. There are also several lines of blank verse in this section of the notebook, most of which are loose and undistinguished; but the opening three lines present with simple force a familiar image: