The Monsters

by Dorothy Hoobler

  The curse was now to claim another.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE HATEFUL HOUSE

  That time is dead for ever, child!

  Drowned, frozen, dead for ever!

  We look on the past,

  And stare aghast

  At the spectres wailing, pale and ghast,

  Of hopes which thou andI beguiled

  To death on life’s dark river.

  —“Lines,” Percy Shelley, 1817, published 1824

  AFTER THE BIRTHof the Shelleys’ latest child, Percy Florence, in November 1819, his father believed that things would return to normal, and Mary’s depression would disappear. Now she had a baby again to make her happy. But Mary could not so easily forget the deaths of her children Clara and William, nor Shelley’s open affection for other women. Mary’s husband, like her father, had a blind spot for her emotional pain and was unable to deal with it except to complain how it affected him.

  When she was younger, Mary tried to involve herself in the kind of community marriage her husband envisioned. She went through the motions with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, but there is no evidence their relationship was ever consummated, or that it was anything more than playacting on her side. Now she found that she had stronger feelings for order, religion, and domestic happiness.

  Percy, of course, had not changed at all. He succeeded in keeping some of his affairs secret from Mary, who nevertheless suspected what was going on. And after the secret of his mysterious Neapolitan baby, Elena, suddenly emerged—when Byron showed Shelley the letter from the Hoppners at Ravenna—Percy had turned to Mary to bail him out, asking her to write a letter that exculpated him from blame.

  Which she did. Outwardly, she was determined to remain loyal, to give him no cause to complain that she had ever been less than faithful. But the ghosts of their dead children hovered over their relationship, making her depressed and, Percy felt, emotionally cold to him. He himself withdrew into further secrets—furtively writing letters and concealing them from Mary, publishing a love poem to another woman and attributing it to an author Percy claimed was dead. Shelley reflected on his situation, “It seems as if the destruction that is consuming me were as an atmosphere which wrapt & infected everything connected with me.” It was an assessment that proved prophetic.

  The Shelleys had moved to Pisa in late January 1820, just a day after two-month-old Percy Florence had been baptized in the city whose name he bore. Pisa attracted them because of its cheaper housing and the presence of good doctors. As ever, Shelley could not control his restlessness. They had lived in three different Pisan residences by June.

  Claire and Mary remained at odds. Claire pointedly wrote in her journal in February, “A bad wife is like Winter in a house.” Later, she noted, “Heigh-ho, the Clare and the Ma / Find something to fight about every day.” Mary clearly agreed, recording in her own journal that June 8 was “A better day than most days & good reason for it though Shelley is not well. C[laire] away at Pugnano.”

  Shelley was increasingly annoyed by Mary’s jealousy, forgetting that she had justification for it. He wrote a friend in 1820:

  Claire is yet with us, and is reading Latin and Spanish with great resolution. Poor thing! She is an excellent girl. . . . Mary who, you know, is always wise, has been lately very good. I wish she were as wise now as she will be at 45, or as misfortune has made me. She would then live on very good terms with Claire. . . . Of course you will not suppose that Mary has seen . . . this . . . so take no notice of it in any letter intended for her inspection.

  Percy was by now in the habit of asking his correspondents to reply to him through contacts in Pisa, in order to keep their communications secret.

  Percy’s anxiety grew when other problems presented themselves. In June, Paolo Foggi tried to blackmail Shelley with the rumor that Claire was the mother of Elena. Mary may not have known the specifics at this time, but she understood that Percy felt threatened. They consulted a lawyer to force Paolo to abandon his blackmail attempt.

  Godwin, who always made matters worse, was again demanding money. Mary wrote her friends the Gisbornes, then visiting England, to ask them to “lend” Godwin four hundred pounds, which Shelley promised to repay. They did not. All of these threats and worries affected Mary’s milk production, and the baby became ill. The problem appeared to be similar to that which had killed Clara, and Mary became so overwrought that she let Percy censor her mail to avoid any incoming messages that would upset her. Percy began warning Godwin and their friends not to write letters that would “disturb her quiet.”

  Mary got some relief when Claire left for Florence on October 20, 1820. There, she was to stay with a doctor who would introduce her to Florentine society so that she could obtain a job as a governess. Shelley accompanied Claire on the trip, returning with his cousin Tom Medwin, who had been living in Europe after military service in India.

  Percy instructed Claire to send any letters to him at the Pisa post office, directed to the name Joe James. While she was in Florence, he in turn wrote her a letter that throws some light on their relationship: “I should be very glad to receive a confidential letter from you. . . . Do not think that my affection & anxiety for you ever cease, or that I ever love you less although that love has been & still must be a source of disquietude to me. . . .”

  Medwin left an interesting description of Shelley at this time:

  It was nearly seven years since we had parted; but I should immediately have recognized him in a crowd. His figure was emaciated, and somewhat bent; owing to nearsightedness, and his being forced to lean over his books, with his eyes almost touching them, his hair, still profuse, and curling naturally, was partially interspersed with grey . . . but his appearance was youthful, and his countenance, whether grave or animated, strikingly intellectual. There was also a freshness and purity in his complexion that he never lost.

  The Shelleys added new members to their circle of friends in Pisa. Mary began taking Greek lessons from an exile, Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos, who was involved in the Greek independence movement. Shelley dedicated his poem Hellas to Mavrocordatos, though he seems to have resented the attention the freedom fighter got from Mary. When the Greek left Italy to join his compatriots, Shelley wrote to Claire, “He is a great loss to Mary, and therefore to me—but not otherwise.”

  Shelley was more enthusiastic about Professor Francesco Pacchiani, a local “character” who had left the priesthood to write poetry and then had become a professor of chemistry at the University of Pisa. Mary wrote of him, “The poor people of Pisa think him mad and they tell many little stories about him, which make us believe that he is really somewhat odd or, as the English say, ‘eccentric.’ But he says—They believe me to be mad and it pleases me that they make this mistake; but perhaps the time will come when they will see that it is the madness of Brutus.” Pacchiani’s logic mirrored Shelley’s opinion of himself, so it is not difficult to understand why the two got along so well, though Shelley later dropped Pacchiani when the professor showed a fondness for telling crude stories.

  Pacchiani introduced the Shelleys to Countess Teresa Viviani, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the governor of Pisa. Emilia, as the Shelleys called her, was currently living in the convent of Saint Anna, “where she sees no one but the maids and the idiots,” according to Mary. She was compelled to remain there until her parents arranged a suitable marriage for her, and Mary commented, “It is grievous to see this beautiful girl wearing out the best years of her life in an odious convent where both mind and body are sick from want of . . . exercise.”

  Nothing appealed to Percy more than a maiden in distress. He had “rescued” Harriet from her father in 1811, and repeated the performance with Mary in 1814. After he married the rescued maidens, unfortunately, they became less attractive to him. A friend, a poet manqué himself, who knew Percy in his last year of life commented, “He was inconstant in Love as men of vehement temperament are apt to be—his spirit hunting after new fancies; n
othing real can equal the ideal. Poets and men of ardent imagination should not marry—marriage is only suitable to stupid people.”

  Shelley accordingly took Emilia under his wing, writing her what must have been a puzzling letter: “Here are we then, bound by a few days friendship, gathered together by some strange fortune from the ends of the earth to be perhaps a consolation to each other.” A copy of this letter, and four others like it, were found, half-finished, in one of Shelley’s notebooks. It would have been difficult for him to carry on a love affair with someone in as protected a position as Emilia, but of course for Shelley once a deed was imagined, it was as good as done in actuality.

  Emilia became the inspiration for Shelley’s poem Epipsychidion (“on the subject of the soul”), which he told a friend was “an idealized history of my life and feelings.” He portrayed her as the incarnation of Venus, goddess of love:

  I never thought before my death to see

  Youth’s vision thus made perfect. Emily,

  I love thee. . . .

  Claire appeared in the poem as a comet:

  . . . O Comet beautiful and fierce,

  Who drew the heart of this frail Universe

  Towards thine own; till wreckt in that convulsion,

  Alternating attraction and repulsion,

  Thine went astray and that was rent in twain.

  Mary was represented as the Moon, a cold figure who put the poet to sleep:

  And all my being became bright or dim

  As the Moon’s image in a summer sea,

  According as she smiled or frowned on me;

  And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed:

  Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead.

  When Shelley sent Epipsychidion to his publisher, Charles Ollier, he asked that it be published anonymously. “I make its author a secret, to avoid the malignity of those who turn sweet food into poison.” Obviously, he feared Mary’s reaction. Stranger still, Shelley told Ollier that the poem was “a production of a portion of me already dead.” He wrote a preface saying that the anonymous author “died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades [Greek islands] . . . where it was his hope to have realised a scheme of life, suited perhaps to that happier and better world of which he is now an inhabitant, but hardly practicable in this.”

  Mary ultimately did learn of the poem, possibly having it in mind in 1839 when she wrote, “There are other verses I should well like to obliterate for ever.” At the time, she was preparing an edition of Shelley’s poems for publication. Epipsychidion was the only one of his long works that she printed without an introduction.

  Two more people, Jane and Edward Williams, joined the Shelley circle in January 1821. Their relationship was as irregular as the Shelleys’ had been in 1816. Edward Ellerker Williams had joined the English navy at the age of eleven and eventually served in India, where he met Jane, who was in an unhappy marriage. The two ran off together but were never formally married because Jane’s husband refused to give her a divorce. Edward spent his time writing plays that were never produced, something Percy could sympathize with, and the two of them became fast friends. Jane, like Claire, had musical talents, but at the time Percy met the couple, he was still infatuated with Emilia, and described Jane as “an extremely pretty & gentle woman—apparently not very clever.”

  Mary’s first impressions gave no indication that she found Jane a threat. “Jane is certainly very pretty,” she wrote,

  but she wants animation and sense; her conversation is nothing particular, and she speaks in a slow monotonous voice: but she appears good tempered and tolerant. Ned seems the picture of good humour and obligingness, he is lively and possesses great talent in drawing so that with him one is never at a loss for subjects of conversation.

  In March, Mary helped with the birth of the Williamses’ second child and brought the news to Edward that he was now the father of a girl.

  The following month, Percy, Edward Williams, and Henry Reveley, the son of Maria Gisborne, went on a sailing trip. When their boat capsized, Williams easily made his way to the shore, but only Reveley’s quick assistance saved Shelley, who was helpless in the water. The threesome stayed at a local farmhouse for the night before making their way back to Pisa. Shelley’s response seems bizarre. He wrote to Reveley on his return, “Our ducking last night has added fire instead of quenching the nautical ardour which produced it; and I consider it as a good omen in any enterprise that it begins in evil: as being more probable that it will end in good.” Few people would have considered a narrow escape from drowning as “a good omen.”

  Byron joined the group in Pisa in November 1821. The Shelleys were now ensconced on the top floor of a villa on the Arno, with the Williams family living on the floor below. Byron settled on the opposite bank at the Palazzo Lanfranchi. Countess Teresa Guiccioli and her brother Pietro Gamba had a house just up the street, and Byron visited her daily. He loved his palazzo, a sixteenth-century building with dungeons in its cellar. His longtime valet, however, had misgivings. Byron wrote to John Murray that the palazzo “was so full of Ghosts that the learned Fletcher (my Valet) has begged leave to change his room—and then refused to occupy his new room—because there were more Ghosts there than in the other.—It is quite true;—that there are most extraordinary noises (as in all old buildings), which have terrified the servants so—as to incommode me extremely.”

  Shelley enjoyed the company and conversation of women, while Byron claimed to prefer the harem, where “they lock them up, and they are much happier. Give a woman a looking-glass and a few sugar-plums, and she will be satisfied.” As a result, Byron’s circle was always male-dominated. He liked to host stag dinners and take part in outdoor activities like shooting, riding, and boating. Even on Christmas Day the men all dined at the Casa Lanfranchi without the women. On these occasions Mary and Teresa looked to each other for companionship. Mary found Teresa a pretty and amiable woman, without pretensions.

  The reason for Byron’s arrival was ostensibly to begin preparations for the magazine that he, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt were to publish. However, this had to be delayed because Hunt’s wife fell ill before they could leave England. The Hunts would not arrive in Italy until the spring of 1822.

  In January 1822, the Shelley circle welcomed another member. Edward Trelawny was born the same year as Percy but he was a man of action rather than thought. Everyone recognized him as a romantic figure. Mary described Trelawny as “six feet high—raven black hair which curls thickly & shortly, like a Moor’s . . . and a smile which expresses good nature and kindheartedness. . . . His company is delightful.” He had, by his own account, a spectacularly checkered past, in which he left school at twelve after leading a mutiny in which the students flogged a cruel assistant headmaster. Trelawny enlisted in the British navy, from which he said he deserted to join a pirate band that roamed the sea from India to Malaysia. Finally he married an Arab woman whom he had rescued. He sounded exactly like a hero out of one of Byron’s poems, and even Byron was taken in by the man’s stories. After meeting Trelawny for the first time, Byron told Teresa that Trelawny was “the personification of my Corsair.”

  Edward Williams, who had known Trelawny in India, introduced him to the group, and Trelawny won acceptance with his tall tales. Mary liked his rakishness: “He tells strange stories of himself—horrific ones—so that they harrow one up . . . [with] simple yet strong language—he portrays the most frightful situations. . . . I believe them now I see the man. . . . I am glad to meet with one who among other valuable qualities has the rare merit of interesting my imagination.”

  In fact, though Trelawny had spent seven years in the navy, he never rose above the rank of midshipman and had an undistinguished record. He returned to England on a naval ship (not a pirate vessel) and made an unhappy marriage (not with an Arab) that ended in divorce. Most recently he had been living in Switzerland, supported by an allowance from his father. Trelawny had come to Italy specifica
lly to meet Byron and Shelley, for he now fancied embarking on a literary career. Indeed, he made his relatively brief friendship with them his lifelong meal ticket.

  Trelawny left a description of Mary at this time: “She brought us back from the ideal world Shelley had left us in, to the real one, welcomed me to Italy, and asked me the news of London and Paris, the new books, operas, and bonnets, marriages, murders, and other marvels.” Like others, he was struck by “her calm, grey eyes.” He described her as “rather under the English standard of women’s height, very fair and light-haired, witty, social, and animated in the society of friends, though mournful in solitude.”

  Trelawny glimpsed some of the fault lines in the Shelleys’ marriage during a day with the couple in the pine forest of Cascine outside Pisa. Mary became tired and rested beneath a tree while Trelawny found Shelley deep in the forest, daydreaming beside a deep pool. Shelley fantasized about the shapes of the rocks and trees. “We talked and laughed, and shrieked, and shouted, as we emerged from under the shadows of the melancholy pines,” Trelawny wrote. When they rejoined Mary, Shelley’s mood changed. He sighed, “Poor Mary! hers is a sad fate. Come along; she can’t bear solitude, nor I society—the quick coupled with the dead.”

  Trelawny had brought with him the model of a schooner, which immediately captured Shelley’s interest. He and Edward Williams decided to have a full-scale one built, under Trelawny’s supervision. A year later, Mary was to recall, “Thus on that night—one of gaiety and thoughtlessness—Jane’s and my miserable destiny was decided. We then said laughing each to the other, ‘Our husbands decide without asking our consent . . . for, to tell you the truth, I hate this boat, though I say nothing.’ How well I remember that night! How short-sighted we are!”

  From the time she finished Mathilda Mary had been building a life of her own. She realized that Shelley could not be relied on and that his romantic ideas would never meet her need for a stable life. Increasingly, Mary turned to her friends and her mother’s writing to enrich her existence. Her journal entries for February are introspective and searching—very different from the sort of notation previously offered. For example, on February 25, she wrote: “Let me in my fellow creatures love that which is & not fix my affections on a fair form endued with imaginary attributes . . . above all let me fearlessly descend into the remotest caverns of my own mind—carry the torch of self knowledge into its dimmest recesses—but too happy if I dislodge any evil spirit or enshrine a new deity in some hitherto uninhabited nook—Read Wrongs of Women [one of her mother’s books].”