Vindication (40 page)

On the same day as Mary laughed off the poem, Godwin arrived to say goodbye before leaving for three weeks to visit his mother and his friend Dr Alderson in Norwich. From there, he affects to have a go at heartfelt words: ‘Now, I take all my Gods to witness…–but I obtest & obsecrate them all–that your company infinitely delights me, that I love your imagination,
your delicate epicurism, the malicious leer of your eye [with slight paralysis of the lid], in short every thing that constitutes the bewitching tout ensemble of the celebrated Mary.' Her spontaneity seems to draw out a playfulness, untapped till now by Godwin's ministerial
gravitas
. He continues to send up romance: ‘Shall I write a love letter? May Lucifer fly away with me if I do! No, when I make love, it shall be with the eloquent tones of my voice, with dying accents, with speaking glances (through the glass of my spectacles)…'

He also challenged her attachment to an increasingly militarised France. ‘Shall I write to citizenness Wolstencraft a congratulatory epistle upon the victories of Buonaparti?' If it would rejoice the cockles of her heart he was prepared to pass in review before her the art treasures, like Raphael's
St Cecilia
, which ‘that ferocious freebooter' had recently stolen from Italy.

By now, Mary had given up all thought of returning to the Continent. She took her furniture out of storage and moved to 16 Judd Place West (situated at what is now the front gate to the British Library, and around the corner from Godwin's lodgings). No mean inducement was his offer to look at her work. Since Mary chose to write ‘for independence', and since she had to support Fanny when maintenance from Imlay failed to appear, she did have bits and pieces of work in progress. In January she had put together a stage play based on her experiences in Paris–a comedy, of all things–which she had offered to managers without success. Godwin had read it on 2 June–without encouragement. As summer came on, she was making stabs at a second novel, on the wrongs of women. During July, she reworked her manuscript and began to seek out friendships in Godwin's circle, a rather belated encounter with sophisticated women of the capital. She dined with Godwin's recent acquaintance Mary (‘Perdita') Robinson, once an actress and mistress of the Prince of Wales, now a writer whom Mary had reviewed. She dined also with Sarah Siddons, the foremost actress of the day (famous for her performance as Lady Macbeth), who declared that no one could have read Wollstonecraft's
Travels
with ‘more reciprocity of feeling, or more deeply impressed with admiration of the writer's extraordinary powers'. Mary, in turn, admired the ‘dignified delicacy' of Mrs
Siddons in Nicholas Rowe's tragedy,
The Fair Penitent
. Calista's line about hearts that were ‘joined not matched' spoke to her own sufferings with Imlay.
*

Then there was Dr Alderson's daughter, Amelia. Before they met, Amelia had let her know that ‘as soon as I read your letters from Norway, the cold awe which the philosopher has excited, was lost in the tender sympathy called forth by the woman. I saw nothing but the interesting creature of feeling and imagination.' After they met, Amelia declared that whatever she had seen had always disappointed her ‘except Mrs Imlay and the Cumberland lakes'. Mrs Imlay appeared to her another Cleopatra, reminiscent of her ‘Princess' character with George Blood. Until this time, Mary's ties with intelligent women had been intense but few: her sisters; Jane Arden in Yorkshire; Fanny Blood; her pupil Margaret King; and more recently Ruth Barlow.

 

Though Mary's friendship with the Barlows had appeared to end during their period in Hamburg, they, at least, did not forget her. In the summer of 1796 Joel Barlow was acting as American agent in Algiers–in his words, an ‘abominable sink of wickedness, pestilence and folly'–when the plague broke out. With victims dropping on every side, on 8 July he warned Ruth, far away in rue du Bac in Paris, that he had to expose himself to the disease if he was to rescue American citizens and board as many as possible on ships leaving the country. In case of his death, she was to know that he was leaving her what he considered their joint property of about 120,000 dollars (equivalent to about three and a half million today), with bequests to be made at her discretion. The most interesting part of this letter is his concern for Mary Wollstonecraft, who was the only non-American and the only non-member of the Barlow family (apart from the loyal Blackdens) whom Barlow thought of when death came close:

We have seen a Barlow whom Mary had sized up in London as one ‘devoured by ambition'; and we have seen the confidence man of the Scioto scam; and possibly Mary's unidentified ‘knave' in the business of the silver ship. Yet Joel Barlow can rise to a hero's action, and risk his life when rescue is needed. His duality mirrors Imlay who can save Mary Wollstonecraft from the Terror and yet be the same person to dodge inconvenient obligations. Barlow, though, remains visible, while Imlay manages to vanish, leaving no trail–only creditors. Frustration and rage are left to fill up the place where he has been. His voice leaves no sound; his name is rarely on paper. His associates–including Barlow and Mary Wollstonecraft–sustain his secrecy, as when Barlow tells Ruth that Mary has a sweetheart. Both times when Barlow puts this on paper, he gives no name: the man is ‘of Kentucky'. The frontier cover must suffice. Despite their business partnership and network of the same contacts, there is no mention of Imlay in Barlow's papers–no more than a note at the end of 1795 to the effect that Imlay had marked out seven Parisian cafés. For what purpose? This still remains unknown, but much about Imlay, especially his unshakable sense of himself as a man of ‘principle', could fall into place were he part of a new secret service, run by the President himself.

Barlow, too, may have played a part for the man who sent him to Algiers and his immediate boss during his tour of duty there was Colonel David Humphreys, a Yale buddy, once a fellow-member of the Connecticut Wits, then appointed as special secret agent to Europe in 1790. Outwardly he served as a US representative in Portugal, then as American Minister in Spain. Can it be relevant that September 1795 sees him operating in Le Havre? While Wollstonecraft was advancing into the heart of the ‘fraud' she
uncovered in Hamburg and refusing Imlay's further instructions, Barlow, in Paris, was conducting a cryptic correspondence with Humphreys. They dwell on an ‘object' that, throughout, remains unnamed, and Humphreys is reminded to ‘instruct' Barlow before leaving Le Havre. Barlow jots down a memo about Imlay's seven cafés in Paris–a rare mention of Imlay by name. A sea captain called O'Brien roves between Algiers, Lisbon, London and the seat of government in Philadelphia. There, O'Brien conveys the situation in Algiers to no less a person than the President.

Washington was prepared to draw on his massive Intelligence fund in order to ransom American captives in Algiers, while Barlow negotiated with the capricious Dey, Hassan Bashaw, who maintained Turkish rule over Moors and Jews and harboured pirates to whom nations paid annual tribute–bar Britain with its formidable navy. So long as the American states had been colonies, they had come under the protection of the British navy, but in the 1790s US trade in the Mediterranean was disrupted, and numbers of American sailors enslaved. Barlow had the help of a Jew called Baccri who understood how to proceed–the tactic was to avert the Dey's threats, before they were made, by tickling his greed with gifts and promises. Barlow promised an American frigate, and then had to cope with a gathering storm when delivery was–deliberately–delayed. Master-spy Humphreys let Barlow know that Washington wished him to extend his stay in North Africa. Barlow, who had left Paris and Ruth at the end of December 1795, would not return until October 1797.

He saw this as a ‘disinterested' sacrifice for his country. Once he had a fortune on the go, he followed a wish to rise into public office out of the murk of commerce. This he did by way of Algiers, writing grandly of ‘the interest of the United States'. All the same, he was shifting cargoes of his own in the Mediterranean, and it was convenient to have his country pay eighty-three thousand dollars a year to the Pasha of Tripoli for US merchant ships to be protected from the pirates of Algiers. This treaty Barlow secured in 1796. A darker deed was to deliver arms–two thousand bombshells and a thousand quintals of gunpowder–to the unprincipled bully of a Dey. Thanks to Barlow, US trade was to flourish on the backs
of subject peoples. In one letter to the Secretary of State, he was shameless enough to quote a common saying in the Levant that ‘no honest man goes to Algiers'. He can quote this with humorous ease because, at this moment, Barlow moves from dark tricks to the good deeds on his mind in his will-letter to Ruth. If he does not die in the epidemic, he will put his fortune to the service of his country and others in need. It's the standard sequel to sordid gains to purify them with charity, and I suspect that Barlow's recollection of Mary Wollstonecraft at this time in his life–when he draws close to mortality–has to do with his own need for moral gesture.

Barlow did not die in the foetid summer of 1796. But it was an occasion for trying out a farewell aria to Ruth. ‘I have the wife that my youth has chosen and my advancing age has cherished…from whom all my joys have risen, in whom all my hopes are centred…If you should see me no more, my dearest friend, you will not forget I loved you.' Even more gracefully, he accepts that another man could take his place.

Barlow always projects this image of married love, but as we know, his wife, unlike Mary Wollstonecraft, forced herself to condone infidelities. She wondered on one occasion if he had a ‘
black
sweetheart'. Ruth declined into invalidism, retreating for long spells to spas, while Barlow sent regular, ardent letters–being (like Imlay) too busy to visit the dear sufferer. Once Barlow had a nightmare where he stands at Ruth's bedside gazing at her wasted form–yet still he does not come. Instead, he offers her his dream. His concern steams off the page. It's not surprising that Ruth stayed wilting in those heated epistolary arms. Imlay too was a master of assurance: his affirmations left Mary Wollstonecraft sick in mind for a year and a half. Only Godwin helped her.

 

What pleased Mary most in Godwin's letter from Norwich was an announcement that he was coming home, ‘to depart no more'. He was expected on 20 July, and when he did not appear, Mary found herself ‘out of humour'. The following day she left her manuscript (‘as requested') at his lodgings, together with a note, signed familiarly with her first name. ‘I mean to bottle up my kindness, unless something in your countenance, when I do see you, should make the cork fly out–whether I will or not.'

As it happened, he wasn't back. When he did return, on the 24th, he came ready to renew what was turning into something he had not known before. For his placid face and coldness of manner didn't exclude a lurking responsiveness, keen of eye behind his spectacles. Hazlitt said that Godwin had ‘less of the appearance of a man of genius, than any one who has given such decided and ample proofs of it'. Though he was angular and nearsighted, discerning women were drawn to him. A cosmopolitan beauty, Mrs Reveley, daughter of an architect, an unconventional wanderer who had brought her up on his own in Constantinople, fell in love with Godwin and let him know it. One day at Greenwich in 1795 she and Godwin overstepped the mark. It was Godwin who stopped. He was too responsible to deviate from the laws of society in a way that might injure a wife. Mary, unaware of this particular attraction, could not hide her antagonism to the hovering Mrs Inchbald–‘Mrs Perfection', as Godwin
called her after she suggested amendments to his novel, saying, ‘I have not patience that anything so near perfection should not be perfection.' Godwin enjoyed his role as her favoured escort.