Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (42 page)

Claire’s letter did have certain positive effects. Byron had ignored her pleas regarding Allegra for years, but her indictment of him – as well as the guilt he felt for disregarding her concerns about Allegra’s health – caused him to accede to her final requests. He sent her a miniature of Allegra and a lock of her hair, and offered to implement her instructions about the funeral. At first, Claire wanted to go to Livorno to view Allegra’s coffin, but to Shelley’s relief, she later decided against it. Eventually, exhausted by her suffering, she permitted Byron to organise matters as he desired. Allegra’s small form was transported to England, where John Murray organised a burial in Harrow Church. The parishioners there refused to allow any memorial to the illegitimate daughter of a notorious peer, so Allegra was buried in an unmarked tomb.

After Claire’s first, desperate grief, Mary and Shelley were relieved and surprised to find her calmer than she had been for a long time. The certainty that she would never see Allegra again was easier to deal with than the limbo she had been in for four years. Forthright Mrs Mason shared the Shelleys’ relief at Claire’s reaction, which she saw for herself when Claire arrived unannounced in Pisa on 21 May. Now that nothing bound Claire to Italy, Mrs Mason hoped she would be able to live an independent life, which would separate her permanently from the Shelleys. She was therefore disappointed to learn that Claire planned to go back to Lerici. Allegra’s death released Claire from her connection with Byron, but it did not resolve the uncertainty over her future. She returned to Casa Magni on 7 June, apparently a member of Shelley’s community of exiles once more.

Claire’s assistance was in fact much needed at Lerici. Mary’s fifth pregnancy, still in its early stages, was progressing badly, and, possibly as a result of this, she was slipping once more into a terrible, disabling depression. ‘I was not well in body or mind’, she later told Maria Gisborne. ‘No words can tell you how I hated our house & the country about it. Shelley reproached me for this – his health was good & the place was quite after his own heart.’
⁴⁴
She found peace only on Shelley’s new boat, ‘when lying down with my head on his knee I shut my eyes & felt the wind & our swift motion alone.’ There are many images of Mary and Shelley on boats together: buffeted across the English Channel in an open boat in 1814; reading Wollstonecraft and winding up monarchists on ponderous Rhine barges; skimming across Lake Geneva with Byron. But this image – of Mary, ill and depressed, taking comfort from Shelley’s physical presence but unable to explain her emotional torments to him – is unique in its desolation.

Shelley was entranced by the Bay of Lerici. He pitied Mary (who, he told Claire, suffered ‘terribly from languor and hysterical affections’)
⁴⁵
but he could not understand her antipathy to the area. His boat arrived in mid-May, and both he and Edward were delighted with it, although they insisted on adding additional topmasts, a false stern, and on refitting a sail which had been marked with the words ‘Don Juan’. Shelley planned to call his craft
Ariel
, and he was put out to find that Daniel Roberts, acting on instructions from Byron, had named the boat on his behalf. But once the necessary alterations had been made, the
Don Juan
(the name stuck, even if the sail was changed) provided him with matchless joy. ‘It is swift and beautiful’, he told John Gisborne. ‘Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, “Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful.”’
⁴⁶

Despite Shelley’s delight at his surroundings, it was a strange, unsettling period for all the inhabitants of Casa Magni. Shelley experienced visions and hallucinations – of a child rising from the sea; of Edward and Jane – bloodstained and lacerated – telling him the sea was flooding the house; of strangling Mary. Jane had visions, too, of Shelley appearing on the terrace when he was known to be miles away.  Edward immersed himself in
Queen Mab
(‘an astonishing work’),
⁴⁷
while Shelley wrote his haunting ‘Triumph of Life’ in which a ghostly Rousseau guides the poet through a pageant of human history. He also wrote more poems in praise of Jane – ‘To Jane’ (‘Sing again, with your dear voice revealing/ A tone/ Of some world far from ours’) and ‘Lines written in the Bay of Lerici’, in which Jane is as fair as the moon (the symbol used for Mary in
Epipyschidion
) but ‘far more true’. Jane was by this point firmly established as Shelley’s muse, but he had not simply transferred his affections from Mary and Claire to her. At the end of May he told Claire that ‘Jane . . . pines after her own house and saucepans to which no one can have a claim except herself. – It is a pity that any one so pretty and amicable should be so selfish.’
⁴⁸
And although Jane was flattered by Shelley’s attention she showed no sign of wavering in her affection for Edward. Indeed, she found Shelley’s behaviour rather alarming, particularly when he discussed the delights of drowning while taking her and her children out for a sail in his boat.

On 16 June Mary suffered a miscarriage which nearly killed her. She haemorrhaged blood and slipped in and out of consciousness while Claire and Jane, frantic with worry, sent for a doctor and ice to stop her from bleeding to death. The ice arrived before the doctor and Shelley (who later congratulated himself on his ‘decisive resolutions’) forced Mary into an ice-filled bath, which at length stemmed the frightening flow of blood. By the time the doctor arrived, Shelley reported, ‘all danger was over, and he had nothing to do but to applaud me for my boldness.  [Mary] is now doing well, and the sea-baths will soon restore her.’
⁴⁹

Mary was, however, far from well. She had lost a great deal of blood, had been convinced she was going to die, and for days afterwards was too weak to do more than crawl from her bed to the balcony overlooking the sea. She had also lost another baby, and with it the prospect of a repaired family, still diminished by the deaths of her unnamed daughter, Clara and William. The episode added to the depression which overcame her after her arrival in Lerici, and it exposed further the gulf which now separated her from Shelley.

In the same letter in which he told John Gisborne of Mary’s dangerous miscarriage, Shelley made the following complaint:

I only feel the want of those who can feel, and understand me. Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not. The necessity of concealing from her thoughts that would pain her, necessitates this, perhaps. It is the curse of Tantalus, that a person possessing such excellent powers and so pure a mind as hers, should not excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life.
⁵⁰

It is difficult to read this letter now and not to find Shelley’s failure to understand the extent of Mary’s suffering – or the effect of a near-fatal miscarriage on her mood and her ability to be affectionate – extraordinarily heartless. It is also strikingly unselfconscious, in its placing of the blame for the breakdown of ‘sympathy indispensable . . . to domestic life’ entirely on Mary’s shoulders. As his 1814 letters to Harriet illustrate, throughout his life Shelley remained unaware of his ability to hurt and damage the women with whom he came into contact. But, in some respects, this interpretation of Shelley’s conduct is anachronistic, and it does not pay sufficient attention to the subtlety of his lament to John Gisborne. This was no ordinary complaint of a husband against a withdrawn wife, but a plea for the kind of understanding Shelley believed to be central to his emotional and intellectual experience. Moreover, even in a paragraph which now appears supremely self-centred, Shelley reiterated his determination to protect Mary and to shelter her from distress and harm. The tragedy of Shelley and Mary’s marriage lay in her inability to convey to him the depths of her emotional attachments, and in his failure to understand how much pain his actions caused her.

As the residents of Casa Magni lived out their strange existence on the Bay of Lerici, the Hunts finally arrived in port at Genoa. From Genoa they travelled by sea to Livorno, and it was to Livorno that Shelley and Edward sailed to meet them. Mary was acutely unhappy at Shelley’s departure, which, she told Maria Gisborne, added ‘insufferably to my misery. I could not endure that he should go – I called him back two or three times, & told him that if I did not see him soon I would go to Pisa with the child – I cried bitterly when he went away.’
⁵¹
In her despair, she sent a heart-rending note to Hunt, begging him not to agree to Shelley’s suggestion that he should bring his family to Casa Magni. ‘I am too ill to write the reasonings only let me entreat you let no persuasions induce you to come, selfish feelings you may be sure do not dictate me – but it would be complete madness to come – I wish I could write more – I wish I were there to assist you – I wish I could break my chains & leave this dungeon.’
⁵²
By this point Mary was desperately asking Shelley to find them somewhere else to live for the rest of the summer, and she knew that the Hunts’ presence in Lerici would make moving impossible.

While his family waited for Shelley in Livorno and the
David Walter
was disembarked, Hunt took a carriage to Byron’s country villa outside Pisa. He was much surprised at the changes wrought by the passage of years in Byron, who had grown fat and lethargic – ‘altogether presenting a very different aspect from the compact, energetic and curly-headed person, whom I had known in England’.
⁵³
Hunt was introduced to Teresa Guiccioli, and was immediately plunged into a Byronic drama when Pietro Gamba interfered in a quarrel between Byron’s servants and was stabbed. The offending servant was dismissed, but not before the entire household worked themselves up into a state of hysteria at the thought of him pacing outside the house, waiting to fight the first person who emerged. (In fact, when they did venture forth, the servant threw himself at Byron’s feet, weeping and wailing and asking for forgiveness.) The whole episode, Hunt later recalled, was reminiscent of
The Mysteries of Udolpho
.

Hunt returned to Livorno, and there he and Shelley had a joyous reunion.  They had not seen each other for four years, and their meeting was recalled many years later by Thornton Hunt. He remembered the ‘shrill sound’ of Shelley’s voice, ‘as he rushed into my father’s arms, which he did with an impetuousness and a fervour scarcely to be imagined by any who did not know the intensity of his feelings and the deep nature of his affection for that friend. I remember his crying out that he was “so
inexpressibly
delighted! – you cannot think how
inexpressibly
happy it makes me!”’
⁵⁴
But the euphoria of Hunt and Shelley’s meeting was short-lived. After a night in a hotel in Livorno they travelled to Pisa, and the Hunts were installed in the apartments prepared for them on the ground floor of the Palazzo Lanfranchi. On their arrival, Marianne was seen by Vaccà, the doctor who had offered Shelley much sensible advice. He announced that she was in a decline and was unlikely to live out the year, a piece of news which devastated Hunt.  Moreover, the Hunts had no money. Both Shelley and Byron were taken aback to find they had a destitute family on their hands. This was particularly problematic since Byron was now bored with the journal plan and, after the various affrays in which he and the Gambas had been involved, was contemplating leaving Tuscany for good.

Shelley threw himself into rescuing the journal, and, with it, Hunt’s means of survival in Italy. He convinced Byron to stay in Pisa for the time being, and Byron agreed to give Hunt the copyright of ‘The Vision of Judgment’: a brilliant, witty satire (written shortly before Byron’s arrival in Pisa) which had both Southey and George III as its targets. A title for the journal –
The Liberal
– was agreed. It looked as if Shelley had managed to yoke Hunt and Byron together. But he was dubious about the strength of their bond. ‘Between ourselves’, he told Horace Smith, who was marooned in Paris with his ill wife and family, ‘I greatly fear that this alliance will not succeed . . . and how long the alliance between the wren and the eagle may continue I will not prophesy.’
⁵⁵