Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  HOLMES But the fact is, whatever he said to his friends, Shelley was now writing hard on an entirely new poem, perhaps the greatest of his life. In these few last days he drafted over five hundred lines. Mary saw him slipping away with his papers to write, sometimes before dawn on the rocks round the bay; sometimes during the sweltering noon siesta sitting alone in the anchored boat out on the bay.

  It was called, ironically, ‘The Triumph of Life’. The poem is a vision, told in the terza rima of Dante’s Inferno. It tells, not of the beauty of Life, but of its terror: the destruction which Life inevitably brings to every human being – the destruction of hope, of physical beauty, of love, of ambition, of spiritual identity itself. It is, philosophically, certainly the darkest thing that Shelley ever wrote. Even the great historical figures of the past – Plato, Rousseau, Napoleon – are included in its vision of doom. But it is not a poem of despair. On the contrary, it is a poem of confrontation, of courageous questioning, of demanding to know the truth of the human condition, whatever it should be. It is the poem of a Fierce Spirit looking into the eye of a storm. This is the new Shelley, the other Shelley, that seemed to be emerging from the suspended dream world of the Casa Magni.

  SHELLEY

  But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold

  Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem

  The cone of night, now they were laid asleep,

  Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem

  Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep

  Of a green Apennine; before me fled

  The night; behind me rose the day; the deep

  Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head –

  When a strange trance over my fancy grew

  Which was not slumber …

  out of the waves gradually grows the noise of a crowd

  SHELLEY

  As in that trance of wonderous thought I lay,

  This was the tenour of my waking dream:-

  Methought I sat beside a public way

  Thickstrewn with summer dust, and a great stream

  Of People there was hurrying to and fro,

  Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,

  All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know

  Whither he went, or whence he came, or why

  He made one of the multitude, and so

  Was borne amid the crowd, as through the sky

  One of the million leaves of summer’s bier.

  Old age and youth, manhood and infancy,

  Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear,

  Some flying from the thing they feared, and some

  Seeking the object of another’s fear …

  And others mournfully within the gloom

  Of their own shadow walked, and called it death …

  now added to the crowd, comes the noise of thunder-ous approaching waves, and storm

  SHELLEY

  … And as I gazed, methought that in the way

  The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June

  When the south wind shakes the extinguished day,

  And a cold glare, intenser than the noon,

  But icy cold, obscured with blinding light

  The sun, as he the stars. Like the young moon

  When on the sunlit limits of the night

  Her white shell trembles amid crimson air,

  And whilst the sleeping Tempest gathers might …

  So came a Chariot on the silent storm

  Of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape

  So sat within, as one whom years deform,

  Beneath a dusky hood and double cape,

  Crouching within the shadow of a tomb …

  The crowd gave way, and I arose aghast,

  Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,

  And saw, like clouds upon the thunder-blast,

  The million with fierce song and maniac dance

  Raging around …

  at this point the poem is cut short by an agonizing scream, the voice of a woman in overwhelming pain

  MARY On Sunday at eight in the morning I suffered a miscarriage. I was so ill that for seven hours I lay nearly lifeless – kept from fainting by brandy, vinegar, eau de Cologne etc. – at length ice was brought to our solitude – it came before the doctor, so Claire and Jane were afraid of using it, but Shelley overruled them and by unsparing application of it I was restored. They all thought, and so did I, at one time that I was about to die … My convalescence was slow, and during it strange occurrences happened to retard it …

  SHELLEY Mary’s situation for some hours was alarming, and as she was totally destitute of medical assistance, I took the most decisive resolution, by dint of making her sit in ice, I succeeded in checking the haemorrhage and the fainting fits, so that when the physician arrived all danger was over, and he had nothing to do but applaud me for my boldness. She is now doing well, and the sea-baths will soon restore her.

  HOLMES Shelley had lost another child, and nearly succeeded in killing his wife. No medical assistance was available nearer than La Spezia, several hours by road or by sea across the bay, and Mary remained dangerously weak, lying on a couch on the terrace of Casa Magni, helplessly watching her husband sail and write on the sea below.

  From this time on, in late June, life at the Casa Magni took on a surreal quality, that none of the survivors ever forgot. Shelley refused to take his family back to Pisa, but continued to mount ever more risky sailing-expeditions with Williams, and to stay up most of the night writing his visionary poem with rapt intensity, as if indeed he had become Prospero in magic control of all their destinies. When he did sleep he began to suffer from appalling nightmares, and these somehow seemed to overflow into the waking lives of the others.

  The ‘strange occurrences’ which Mary mentions rose out of these, as if Shelley’s poetic faculty was indeed beginning to swamp their real lives, or hold them within a nightmare enchantment.

  WILLIAMS 21st June, Friday. Calm – the sun having excessive power. Fitted the topmasts ataunt, with these up she looks like a vessel of 50 tons.

  Saturday 22nd June. Calm. Heat overpowering … at 7 launched our boat – with all her ballast in she floats 3 inches lighter than before. Sailmaker at work on a flying jib.

  Sunday 23rd June. Calm – fit new rigging. During the night Shelley sees spirits and alarms the whole house. Heavy sea running in …

  MARY I think it was the Saturday after my illness while yet unable to walk I was confined to my bed. In the middle of the night I was awoke by hearing him scream and come running into my room. I was sure that he was asleep and tried to waken him by calling on him, but he continued to scream which inspired me with such a panic that I jumped out of bed and ran across the hall to Mr Williams’s room where I fell through weakness, though I was so frightened that I got up immediately. Jane let me in and Williams went to Shelley and shook him awake … What had frightened him was this …

  sea gathering, heavy breathing, nightmare moaning

  SHELLEY (nightmare)

  … I dreamt that lying as I did in bed alone, Edward and Jane came into me, they were in the most horrible condition, their bodies lacerated, their bones starting through their skin, their faces stained with blood. They could hardly walk, but Edward was the weakest and Jane supporting him …

  WILLIAMS (nightmare)

  … Get up, Shelley, the sea is flooding the house and it is all coming down.

  JANE (nightmare)

  … Oh, God, Shelley. Oh, God Shelley, it’s all flooding.

  SHELLEY (nightmare)

  … I got up, and went to my window that looks on to the terrace and the sea. And I saw the sea rushing in … Suddenly my vision changed, and I saw the figure of myself strangling Mary, so I rushed into her room, but I did not dare approach the bed …

  MARY All this was frightful enough, and talking it over the next morning he told me he had seen many visions lately. He had seen the figure of himself, which met him as he walked on
the terrace, and said to him – ‘How long do you mean to be content?’

  HOLMES ‘How long do you mean to be content?’ Shelley had now seen his own double, his doppelgänger, challenging him about what he would do at Casa Magni. Shelley knew that in many magical and occult traditions, the meeting with one’s double was an omen of imminent death. No one else at Casa Magni probably knew this, but Shelley had already written about it in Prometheus Unbound, three years before, using the tradition of the Parsee wise man and magician Zoroaster.

  SHELLEY

  … Ere Babylon was dust,

  The magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

  Met his own image walking in the garden.

  That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

  For know there are two worlds of life and death:

  One that which thou beholdest; but the other

  Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit

  The shadows of all forms that think and live

  Till death unite them, and they part no more.

  HOLMES If Shelley thought of himself as Zoroaster, or Prospero, at Casa Magni, then his magical powers were getting perilously out of hand. His poetic visions were taking on a life – or death – of their own. It would be easy to explain this away, as the sensible Edward Williams did, as his ‘wandering imagination’ getting out of control as he worked with passionate intensity on ‘The Triumph of Life’. Psychologically he may have been close to a state of nervous breakdown. But Shelley was not the only person who saw his double.

  MARY Shelley had often seen these figures when ill; but the strangest thing is that Mrs Williams also saw them. Now Jane though a woman of sensibility, has not much imagination and is not in the slightest degree nervous – neither in dream or otherwise. She was standing one day at a window that looked on to the terrace with Edward …

  JANE It was day, and the sea was sparkling in the sunlight. I saw, as I thought, Shelley hurry by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket, in his sailing clothes. Then he passed again in the same direction. Now as he passed both times the same way – and as from the side of the terrace towards which he went each time there was no way to get back, except past the window again – the wall was twenty feet from the ground – I was struck at seeing him pass twice. I was terrified. ‘Good God, Edward, can Shelley have leapt from the wall?’

  WILLIAMS What do you mean, Jane? Shelley’s not up here.

  (hurries out on to the terrace) the sea

  WILLIAMS Look, there he is out on the bay, writing. Look, my dear. But Jane, my darling, you’re trembling all over. What is it, what is it, my darling?

  JANE Oh, Shelley. Oh, my God.

  HOLMES Shelley and Williams were now planning their most ambitious sail: a journey to see Byron and Leigh Hunt eight hours southwards down the coast to Livorno. Mary hated the idea of this voyage, but Shelley would only put it off for a few days, while new topsails were fitted to the boat, and he struggled to finish his poem before departing. The weird, dream-like atmosphere was increased by a glassy heatwave that set in over the gulf of Spezia, and the festivities of the Feast of Saint John, that the villagers of San Terenzo began to celebrate each night upon the beach.

  WILLIAMS Thursday 27 June. Employed all day about the boat. The heat increases and prayers are offered for rain. Heat so excessive that the labourers are forbidden to work in the field after 10. Strange Fiesta of St John.

  MARY Our near neighbours of San Terenzo are more like savages than any people I ever before lived among. The night they pass on the beach, singing or rather howling; the women dancing about among the waves that break at their feet, the men leaning against the rocks and joining in their loud wild chorus …

  sea, dancing, singing, howling, and laughter

  MARY … men and women and children in different bands – the sexes always separate – they pass the whole night in dancing on the sands close to our door, running into the sea then back again, and screaming all the time one perpetual air – the most detestable in the world.

  WILLIAMS It’s a damn funny business. Look at those girls, practically naked …

  JANE Oh, listen to the music, how strange it is.

  SHELLEY … The million with fierce song and maniac dance raging around …

  HOLMES Sitting out on the terrace under the moonlight, looking down on to this unearthly almost pagan ritual of dance and song, the little group of English exiles were carried further and further into Shelley’s dream.

  For him it was a Dance of Death, a sort of storm of sexuality and destruction, and it entered directly into his poem ‘The Triumph of Life’, with extraordinary prophetic metaphors of tempest and overwhelming seas. He wrote this passage perhaps in the very last days before setting sail for Livorno.

  sea, singing, dancing and approaching storm, panting breath

  SHELLEY

  … Now swift, fierce and obscene,

  The wild dance maddens in the van, and those

  Who lead it – fleet as shadows on the green,

  Outspeed the Chariot, and without repose

  Mix with each other in tempestuous measure

  To savage music, wilder as it grows.

  They, tortured by the agonizing pleasure,

  Convulsed and on the rapid whirlwinds spun

  Of that fierce Spirit, whose unholy leisure

  Was soothed by mischief since the world begun,

  Throw back their heads and loose their streaming hair

  And in their dance round her who dims the sun,

  Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air

  As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now

  Bending within each other’s atmosphere,

  Kindle invisibly – and as they glow,

  Like moths attracted and repelled,

  Oft to their bright destructions come and go.

  Till like two clouds into one vale impelled,

  That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle

  And die in rain – the fierce band which held

  Their nature snaps. – While the shock still may tingle,

  One falls and then another in the path

  Senseless – nor is the desolation single,

  Yet ere I can say where, the Chariot hath

  Passed over them – nor other trace I find

  But as of foam after the Ocean’s wrath

  Is spent upon the desert shore – behind,

  Old men and women foully disarrayed,

  Shake their grey hairs in the insulting wind,

  And follow in the dance, with limbs decayed,

  Seeking to reach the light which leaves them still

  Farther behind and deeper in the shade.

  HOLMES By capturing this terrible vision in poetry, Shelley felt he had subdued it, and the inner tempest was coming under his control. Like Prospero, he believed that he commanded the island and the sea with his magic wand of art, and that he could look every terror in the face, including his own double which meant death. Now he was neither depressed nor suicidal, but believed with manic confidence that he only had to finish his poem and undergo a symbolic death. Forty-eight hours before setting sail he wrote with great confidence about the need for courage and truth in the affairs of men.

  SHELLEY It seems to me that things have now arrived at such a crisis as requires every man plainly to utter his sentiments on the inefficacy of the existing religions no less than political systems for restraining and guiding mankind.

  Let us see the truth whatever that may be. – The destiny of man can scarcely be so degraded that he was born only to die: and if such should be the case, delusions, especially the gross and preposterous ones of the existing religion, can scarcely be supposed to exalt it. If every man said what he thought, it could not exist a day … I still inhabit this divine bay, reading Spanish dramas and sailing and listening to the most enchanting music. We have some friends on a visit to us, and my only regret is that the summer must ever pass, or that Mary has not the same
predilection for this place that I have, which would induce me never to shift my quarters.

  HOLMES On the 1st of July 1822, Shelley, Edward Williams and their boatboy Charles Vivian rose at 4 a.m. to prepare the topsails of the boat. They left in calm, clear weather, tacking out of the bay and then turning south to run on a broad-reach down to Livorno. People said afterwards that Shelley had never looked so happy, a tanned laughing figure with his arm held up towards the sails as they filled with wind. Mary, left on the terrace of Casa Magni with Jane and Claire, was in tears and despair.

  MARY This departure of Shelley’s seemed to add insufferably to my misery. I had just begun to crawl from my bedroom to the terrace. I could not endure that he should go. I called him back two or three times and 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. They went, and Jane, Claire and I remained alone on the terrace with the children.

  HOLMES A week later, Shelley, Williams and the boatboy were drowned some ten miles out to sea while returning from Livorno. Trelawny, who had been following their course with a telescope, said that they disappeared into the black clouds of a sudden summer storm, with their sails up. Shelley had not finished his poem, ‘The Triumph of Life’; but Edward Williams had made one last entry in his Journal.