Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (53 page)

Claire did not take Trelawny’s advice, but she did leave behind strands of the memoir she never wrote. In sections of letters drafted and redrafted for Trelawny she presented herself as a victim, as a gentle creature who succumbed to Shelley’s dominant personality, and as the innocent dupe of an unscrupulous Byron.  And in conversations which took place when she was in her seventies she was markedly less coy about her past. We know this because one of her interlocutors, a retired Massachusetts sea captain named Edward Silsbee, wrote down her stories in a series of notebooks, which were discovered by the Romantic scholar Marion Kingston Stocking in 1991. Silsbee, an ardent Shelley devotee, was fascinated by Claire and made repeated efforts to buy her papers. When he failed to do so it was rumoured in Florence that the price demanded – marriage to Claire’s niece Pauline – entailed too much of a sacrifice. Henry James heard this story a decade after Claire’s death and used it as the basis for
The Aspern Papers
. Silsbee’s notebooks capture Claire’s voice in a remarkably vivid way, and they also give us an insight into her feelings. ‘Shelley was
devoted in manner
to women like myself when young’, she told him in one of her more confessional moments. ‘He was moreover so handsome and attentive and attractive and very dangerous’. ‘She loved him’, Silsbee’s note continued, ‘and thus she has often described him.’
¹⁴

If the Silsbee notebooks show something of the emotional reality of living one’s life in accordance with Shelley’s philosophy of free love, then a recently discovered additional strand of Claire’s unwritten memoir reveals her anger about the experiments in living in which she participated. In a manuscript fragment buried amongst other papers, Claire did make one attempt at autobiography. This fragment lay undisturbed for many years, hidden in a cache of privately owned letters. In 1998 it was purchased by the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, alongside the collection of manuscript letters in which it was filed. It is now held at the New York Public Library, and is published here for the first time. ‘Reader of these pages’, the fragment began, ‘before you pursue them it is well that you should know they are written by a person, who knows nothing of composition much less of the art of Authorship.’ ‘I have to relate’, Claire continued, ‘my recollections of two great Poets, and . . . on their account I hope this recital will awaken many profound reflections.’

The text which followed this modest beginning was extremely surprising. It presented a viscerally angry perspective on the philosophy of Claire’s contemporaries, and contradicted much of the surviving historical record. Nothing else quite like it survives, although it is reminiscent of the sixteen year old Claire sitting on a beach in Lynmouth, burning with resentment at the way she had been treated. In the fragment Claire demolished the reputations of both Shelley and Byron, and attacked both their behaviour and their principles:

If I commit this sad tale to paper and finally to the public, it is with the intention of demonstrating from actual facts, what evil passion free love assured, what tenderness it dissolves; how it abused affections that should be the solace and balm of life, into a destroying scourge what . . . bitter tears [it] caused to flow, and what victims it immolated [the reader] will behold how the worshippers of free love not only preyed upon one another, but preyed equally upon their own individual selves turning their existence into a perfect hell.

Having set out the parameters of her attack, Claire turned her attention to the effect of free love on the characters of Shelley and Byron:

Such will be the picture my recollections of two great poets S & B – will present; they were the fondest and most obstinate advocates and partisans and followers of free love . . . it appears to me that in the eternal interest of religion and morality of truth and right require a plain straightforward description of their opinions and conduct.

Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love I saw the two first poets of England . . . become monsters of lying, meanness cruelty and treachery – under the influence of free love Lord B became a human tyger slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women who under the influence of free love . . . loved him.

The savagery of Claire’s language in these passages was not replicated anywhere else in her papers. Free love, in her account, prompts ‘evil passion’, ‘abuses’ affections and is a ‘destroying scourge’ which ‘immolates’ its victims and causes ‘bitter tears’ to flow. It transforms Shelley and Byron into ‘monsters of lying, meanness cruelty and treachery’. One might expect Claire to write about Byron in this manner, but despite her late conversion to Catholicism, her attack on Shelley is more unexpected. And it was in fact Shelley – according to Silsbee, the love of Claire’s life – who was the main target of her offensive. In the second part of the fragment, Claire parodied the marriage note in
Queen Mab
in order to demonstrate the hollow falsity of Shelley’s philosophy:

The opponents of the institution of Marriage assert that it is a practical code of misery and servitude – that it is a despotism which inculcates falsehood and meanness and turns the body and mind of its followers into hideous wrecks of humanity . . . These pages are a record of the effects and workings of the free love system such as the writer of these pages beheld with her own eyes – this is no hearsay record – it is derived from the life of persons who had devoted themselves to the worship of free love and from their own account the reader must inevitably draw the following conclusions that the selfishness, the treachery & meanness, & the cruelty practised by the opponents of marriage and the misery these same opponents induced . . . exceeded any amount of the same results produced by marriage.
¹⁵

Here, Claire turned Shelley’s own words against him, lifting phrases such as ‘practical code of misery and servitude’ directly from
Queen Mab
, along with a linguistic register that described marriage in terms of bigotry, disease and selfishness. Nowhere else did Claire explicitly accuse Shelley of cruelty, or reveal so minutely the dark underside of Romantic living.

When the disparate strands of Claire’s unwritten memoir are assembled, a complicated picture of the group’s communal history emerges. Finally it was Claire, rather than Mary or Hunt, who stood back to explore the practical, emotional and intellectual consequences of living as part of a politically and philosophically radical network. It was also Claire who produced a version of history that celebrated neither a particular individual nor a particular coterie. Instead, she presented posterity with an account of lived experience. This account was incomplete and, at times, contradictory, but it attempted to describe the reality underlying the idealism of her youth. And it presented a bleak indictment of that idealism. Claire’s case appears to show that the visions of her Romantic contemporaries were illusory, naïve and damaging.

There is, however, a more nuanced way to read Claire’s memoirs. Her papers suggest that, although her relationships with Shelley and Byron caused her much suffering, her character was shaped and strengthened by the relationships of her youth.  The Claire who has fascinated generations of writers and biographers  – from Peacock’s celebration of her in
Nightmare Abbey
, or
The Aspern Papers
,  to Richard Holmes’s admission that he fell ‘in love with Claire Clairmont’
¹⁶
– developed her extraordinary resilience and independence of spirit during her years with Shelley, Mary, Hunt and Byron. She was the great Romantic survivor, who continued to re-examine and reinterpret her story until the end of her life.

Claire died in 1879, almost sixty years after Shelley drowned in the sea off Viareggio. With her passing, only one other contemporary chronicler of the group remained.  This was Trelawny. Trelawny only ever played a peripheral part in the stories of his famous friends, but this was not how he wished to be remembered. In 1881, at the age of eighty-eight, he accordingly orchestrated one final dramatic tableau, in which he would figure for ever as Shelley’s chief companion. He left a complicated series of instructions about his burial wishes which, after his death on 13 August, were carried out to the letter. His body was shipped to Germany for cremation, and his ashes were taken on to Rome by Emma Taylor, the last in his long line of mistresses. Emma arranged for his ashes to be buried next to Shelley’s in the Protestant Cemetery, in the plot he had purchased in 1823.

There the remains of Trelawny still lie, along with those of Shelley, Keats, and Joseph Severn. Keats’s gravestone, designed by Severn and Charles Brown, is defiant both in its castigation of his enemies and in its claim, dictated by him, for the transience and the permanence of his reputation. ‘This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone.  Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water’. Shelley’s epitaph, chosen by Trelawny, is more enigmatic, but it makes an equally bold claim for immortality, in the form of a quotation from
The Tempest
: ‘Nothing of him that doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange’.

The graves of Severn and Trelawny themselves could not hold more of a contrast, either with their poet-companions or with each other. Severn’s headstone acknowledges his talent with a short inscription and an engraving of an artist’s palette, but celebrates him primarily as the ‘Devoted friend and death-bed companion of John Keats’. Trelawny’s – in accordance with his own instructions – is inscribed with four lines of Shelley’s poetry:

These are two friends whose lives were undivided.

So let their memory be now they have glided

Under the grave: let not their bones be parted

For their two hearts in life were single-hearted.
¹⁷

If Severn’s epitaph symbolises loyalty and self-effacement, then Trelawny’s represents the complicated undertow of friendship with the famous. No one, not even Trelawny himself, could claim that Shelley’s lines were an accurate description of their relationship, which lasted for less than a year. But by 1881, to be a friend of Shelley was a significant claim to fame, and Trelawny died entirely convinced by his own fantasy of friendship.

Although Trelawny’s gravestone celebrates a friendship which was always, at one level, inauthentic and mythical, the qualities embedded in the Protestant Cemetery remain the qualities which make the stories of the Shelleys, the Hunts and their friends important. The graves represent an ideal of intertwined lives and testify to the significance of a shared history. That history shaped all the figures who coalesced around Shelley and Hunt, and had an inestimable impact on their writing. Some of the greatest works in the English canon –
Frankenstein
,
Alastor
, ‘Julian and Maddalo’,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
– owed their genesis and their development to conversation and sociability. The lives of Shelley, Mary, Claire, Hunt, Bess, Keats, Byron and many others were transformed as their worlds intersected, and as, in complex and ever-shifting configurations, they talked to each other, fought with each other, hated each other, and fell in love. Their stories demonstrate that friendship is not always easy: that relationships with other people can simultaneously be a source of great strength and unknowable pain. But they also show that friendship can be the making of the man. This is an idea which lies at the heart of a story about a web of exceptional men and women, who were made by their relationships with one another.

Footnotes

*
 The paternity of Augusta’s daughter Medora, born on 15 April 1814, has been the source of much speculation, and Medora herself would come to believe that Byron was her father. Byron, however, never demonstrated much concern for Medora, despite the closeness of his relationship with Augusta and the interest he would take in his other children – both legitimate and illegitimate. For a fuller discussion of Medora’s paternity see Fiona MacCarthy,
Byron: Life and Legend
, pp. 214–15 and Michael and Melissa Bakewell,
Augusta Leigh
, p.115.