Shelley: The Pursuit (9 page)

In London, they all went to see Hellen and Margaret Shelley at their school in Clapham, and Hellen was much impressed by Harriet’s prettiness as Tom Medwin had been at Field Place — ‘like some Madonna of Raphael’. She remembered that Shelley was very full of himself and showing off, and much to everyone’s embarrassment spilt a glass of port wine on the headmistress’s tablecloth. Then they all went into the garden and ‘there was much ado to calm the spirits of the wild boy’.
⁷²
The curious thing was that the two cousins looked very much alike, and Shelley seemed to revel in this sense of twinship. In May, the Groves returned to Wiltshire and Shelley went back to Eton for his last year. Charles Grove remembered that ‘Bysshe was full of life and spirits, and very well pleased with his successful devotion to my sister.’
⁷³
Harriet tacitly agreed to act as his Muse, and the friendship brought him both kudos and self-confidence. He continued to write to her regularly in Wiltshire, but his letters instead of being full of romantic declarations, were packed out with Shelley’s strange mixture of grim, gothic fantasies and poems, and lumps of ill-digested Condorcet and Lucretius. By September, Harriet had grown both alarmed and slightly bored with the correspondence, and she showed some of it to her parents who advised her to break it off. Shelley was piqued rather than upset by this development, but he continued to address her as a convenient Muse in the poems which he was writing with Elizabeth, and in the following spring he met her again at Field Place. Neither Shelley’s nor Harriet’s parents regarded this in any way as ill-advised. Harriet had some arguments with her brother Charles about a gothic novel Shelley had written, which she was prepared to patronize: ‘I think it makes him [Charles] appear very illnatured to criticise so
very
much.’
⁷⁴
Shelley himself was sulking, and she found his behaviour strange and odd, but they walked again at St Irving’s and Strood, and had ‘a long conversation’, in which nothing very constructive seemed to emerge. They had little in common, and it was only in her absence that Shelley could feel very strongly about her.

For her part Harriet certainly did not take the matter very seriously, and by the end of the year she had announced her formal engagement to a local gentleman farmer, William Helyer. Shelley by this time was at Oxford, and it was only
during the winter vacation of 1810, when he first heard the news, that he reacted with melodramatic despair, and Elizabeth spoke of watching him very carefully when he went out for walks with his gun. But by this time, quite other forces were at work, and Harriet’s ‘betrayal’ provided a natural
mise en scène
. It was an affair, like the other myths of his childhood, that flourished in retrospect and in his angry memories of persecution and love withdrawn.

Shelley was 18 in 1810, and in his last term at Eton he finally established himself as a notable classical scholar, a tolerated eccentric with strange philosophical views and, something rather smarter, a popular author. In April, the gothic novel upon which he had been working both at Eton and Field Place for some eighteen months, appeared under the announcement in
The British Critic
: ‘Zastrozzi; a Romance. By P.B.S. 5s.’ Shelley earned the remarkable sum of £40 for this work, printed by J. Robinson, and circulated in time to bring him considerable admiration and notoriety in his leaving term at Eton. The £40 was spent on a farewell dinner, which suggests that he had established not merely a niche but an active following by the time he left. Hogg records that he was dignified by the title ‘the Eton Atheist’, a title reserved for those who had successfully opposed the school authorities. The implication was sociological rather than theological; but it implied recognition.

On Election Day, 30 July 1810, Shelley delivered one of Cicero’s speeches against Catiline as his contribution to the leaving ceremony, and it was generally understood that the tall, thin, strangely animated figure who would be going up to Oxford in the autumn had recently completed a translation of the first fifteen books of Pliny’s
Historia Naturalis
. Tom Medwin added that at this time Shelley’s favourite among contemporary poets was Robert Southey, and that he knew Southey’s massive oriental verse narrative
Thalaba
almost by heart. Shelley liked to chant the demonic formula from Southey’s
Curse of Kehama
while fixing his eye on his companion —

And water shall see thee

And fear thee, and fly thee

The waves shall not touch thee

As they pass by thee!

He had also developed the eccentricity of muttering bits of
Macbeth
and Coleridge’s
Ancient Mariner
under his breath, which he added to the natural peculiarity of his high, sharp laughter at unexpected moments. The ‘eccentric’ style, perhaps partly imitated from Dr Lind, was a deliberate piece of character creation, and revealed that the slightly spoilt arrogance of the eldest child had survived the long infernal trial of his schooldays. At this time he wrote to
Edward Graham, the young music master who taught Shelley’s sisters at Clapham and lived at the fashionable address of 29 Vine Street, Piccadilly: ‘It is never my custom to make new friends whom I cannot own to my old ones. . . . I act unlike every mortal enough in all conscience, without seeking for more Quixotish adventures.’
⁷⁵
Graham actually became a close friend during this summer of 1810, and helped Shelley with his literary schemes, while sharing with him and Elizabeth in the wilder weavings of their horror fantasies.

The months before Oxford saw a burst of literary publications, which suggests that Timothy had granted Shelley an allowance to indulge in this more adult form of ‘pranking’. There were four completed works, apart from a lost horror tale called
The Nightmare
, which it appears Shelley wanted Henry Fuseli to illustrate.
⁷⁶
Besides
Zastrozzi
, which came out in the spring, Shelley completed a book of poems with Elizabeth; a verse melodrama
The Wandering Jew
, which was partly written by Tom Medwin; and
St Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian
, a second romance in the style of
Zastrozzi
, concerning alchemy and free love and unspeakable crimes of passion.
St Irvyne
was duly published during Shelley’s first term at Oxford, but the verses of
The Wandering Jew
stuck at Ballantyne’s office and did not appear in book form until the Shelley Society solemnly brought it forth in 1887. The book of poems appeared in September. All the works were lurid in the extreme, a grand vindication of the educational powers of the Minerva Press.

The most interesting,
Zastrozzi
, is a work of pure pastiche, and draws continually — even down to names — on the novels and stories of Lewis, Mrs Radcliffe and the
Zofloya
of Charlotte Dacre. The protagonists are the standard cardboard figures of the genre: Verezzi the suffering hero and Zastrozzi the persecuting villain: Julia the blonde virginal heroine (Verezzi’s true love) and Mathilda the hot-blooded scarlet woman (raven-haired and Zastrozzi’s accomplice in crime). It has however provided perfect raw material for a modern psychoanalytic study which yields the succinct interpretation that Shelley was ‘an introspective schizoid type with arrested sexual development at an undifferentiated stage, showing itself in elements of narcissism, homosexuality, and immature heterosexuality’.
⁷⁷
Certain unusual qualities in Shelley’s juvenile work
do
show up through the psychoanalytic screen; and certain significant repetitions of structure and theme do relate to later developments — not so much directly in Shelley’s life, but rather more in his work.

Throughout the tale, Verezzi, like the best heroes of the type, is pursued or tortured or seduced, or all three simultaneously. But the way this occurs is on at least one occasion less typical. At the beginning of the tale he is immured in a cave, chained to a rock, starved and driven mad. This is clearly an early rendition
of the ‘asylum’ incident at Field Place: it recurs in
The Revolt of Islam
(1817) and
Prometheus Unbound
(1820).

Mathilda and Julia are standard types again, but Verezzi’s agonized inability to choose between them, for he falls in love with both, one sexually and the other platonically, is more original. At the height of the imaginative and sexual excitement he is confronted by both at once in the same room: his reaction is traumatic — first he swoons and loses consciousness, then he awakes and stabs himself to death in a kind of ecstasy. The two contrasting women, and the suicidal or self-immolating third alternative are recurrent in Shelley’s work; they are to be found in
Alastor
(1815),
Prometheus Unbound
(1819) and in
Epipsychidion
(1821). They are also in Peacock’s brilliant comic variation on the Shelleyan theme,
Nightmare Abbey
(1818).

Finally, in the character of Zastrozzi, the towering irrepressible villain, we have an early draft of the Satanic outcast, the damned atheist, who confronts his judges and remains unmoved in the final scenario, gaining, at the last, a heroic stature by default.
⁷⁸
This figure became enormously important to Shelley, and sophisticated variations on him appear in nearly all the longer poems:
Queen Mab
(1813),
The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound
and
The Cenci
(1819) — as well as in many of the shorter ones.

The question of violence, first encountered in Shelley’s reaction to school, now occurred for the first time as a literary peculiarity. The violence in
Zastrozzi
is striking; it is physical violence and often presented with blatant satisfaction. Here, for example, the scarlet woman ends the career of the virginal blonde:

‘Die, detested wretch,’ exclaimed Mathilda, in a paroxysm of rage, as she violently attempted to bathe the stiletto in the life-blood of her rival; but Julia starting aside, the weapon slightly wounded her neck, and the ensanguined stream stained her alabaster bosom. She fell on the floor, but suddenly starting up, attempted to escape her bloodthirsty persecutor. Nerved anew by this futile attempt to escape her vengeance, the ferocious Mathilda seized Julia’s floating hair, and holding her back with fiend-like strength, stabbed her in a thousand places; and, with exulting pleasure, again and again buried the dagger to the hilt in her body, even after all remains of life were annihilated. At last the passions of Mathilda, exhausted by their own violence, sank into a deadly calm; she threw the dagger violently from her, and contemplated the terrific scene before her with a sullen gaze.
⁷⁹

There is a sense in which all this, too, can be dismissed — and perhaps should be — as cheerful plagiarism. Nevertheless the skill and relish with which the action is drawn out is remarkable; and more so is the fact that the basic rhythm of the
action, its frantic climax and torpid decline, reflects not so much an act of ordinary assault, as the specific act of rape.
[5]

The intoxicating sense of freedom which Shelley felt in his departure from Eton allowed many of his darker and solitary preoccupations (witnessed in
Zastrozzi
) to bubble up again more lightly in the camaraderie between himself, Elizabeth and Edward Graham. A letter informing Graham that the Shelley family were coming to Town, and would meet him in Clapham, contained the following macabre instructions:

Stalk along the road towards them — & mind & keep concealed as my mother brings a blood stained stiletto which she purposes to make you bathe in the lifeblood of her enemy. Never mind the Death-demons, & skeletons dripping with the putrefaction of the grave, that occasionally may blast your straining eyeball — Persevere even though Hell & destruction should yawn beneath your feet — ‘Think of all this at the frightful hour of midnight, when the Hell Demon leans over your sleeping form, & inspires those thoughts which eventually will lead you to the gates of destruction’. . . .
⁸⁰

A note by Elizabeth added, with suitable Rosicrucian cyphers, that the Hell Demon was to be honoured with the title of ‘HD’. This demon proved to be a useful all-purpose persona, for it featured prominently in more serious, melodramatic form in the collection of poetry by Shelley and Elizabeth, published anonymously and entitled
Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire
. The book appeared in September 1810, the month before Shelley went to Oxford.

This was Shelley’s first poetical production: an entirely third-rate collection of bad gothic verses, sixteen pieces and a fragment in all. Among these were two verse epistles by Elizabeth; some half a dozen sentimental ‘Songs’ addressed by Shelley to Harriet Grove; translations from German and Italian material; a revolutionary declamation about Ireland; and Shelley’s imitation of Chatterton, ‘Ghasta; or the Avenging Demon!!!’ There was also a straight plagiarism from a horror-poem by Monk Lewis which led to the whole edition being pulped before the end of the year. No less than 1,500 copies of the book were printed in Worthing, and published in Pall Mall by John James Stockdale. It was again financed, according to Hogg, by Shelley’s grandfather, old Bysshe. The contents and style give a fair indication of Shelley’s imaginative development at the age of 18: he could not be called precocious. But the collection gave him a new
sense of achieved identity, and he filled his letters to Graham with hard-headed professional remarks about ‘pouching’ the reviewers. Amazingly, two periodicals did actually notice it.
[6]