Claire,
Remember when we kept our journals?—
“Tuesday 8th Letter from Fanny—drawing lesson—walk out with Shelley to the south parade. Read Clarendon and draw—in the evening work & S reads Don Quixote aloud.”
That was October, 1816. Fanny died the next day. What was I doing when she died?—reading the memoirs of Princesse de Barreith? Drawing? Walking alone or with Shelley? Such ordinary things—
“Wednesday 23rd Write Walk before breakfast. Afterwards write and read Clarendon. Shelley writes & reads Montaigne—In the evening read Curt. & work—Shelley reads Don Quixote aloud.” Days like that. Remember? But not a scrap of writing survives from the years I was a child. So much I didn’t tell you. Yet I criticized you for being melodramatic, for your “Clairmont Style”— your conviction that some unworldly being was moving through your room disarranging things. And all the time I kept from you what I’d seen when I was 8 …
He stepped out of the bushes, partly shielding his face with his hand. He seemed a hurt presence. A presence somehow ashamed.
It’s the ordinary that frightens: a plain white envelope, a sunny day in the mountains, reading, thinking, looking at a newborn’s skin. The words: “infant,” “Monday,” “Leghorn,” “July,” frighten me.
When I was 8: stillness, trust, my own bed, thinking, frightened me.
I felt no need to turn from him.
I asked his name. “I don’t have one,” he said.
That seemed to me an extraordinary thing. I couldn’t decide if it was wonderful or horrible, to have no name like that, yet to be a creature of language, a creature using words.
Why had no one named him? And un-named like that, did he know an aloneness much worse than my own?
He held a book in his hands. I could tell he didn’t want me to look into his face. How does one calm another’s shame? Then he stepped back into the bushes, head still deeply bowed, and started in a gravelly, hushed voice to read.
I thought she must have run away. When I stepped from the bushes she’d seemed calm, unfrightened, even curious, but wouldn’t she have quickly reconsidered and then fled?
Back within the bushes’ cover, I read out loud as I often did to calm myself. I kept many books with me by then:
“In France they have a dreadful jail, the Bastille. The poor wretches who are confined in it live entirely alone; have not the pleasure of seeing men or animals; nor are they allowed any books.—They live in comfortless solitude. Some have amused themselves by making figures on the wall; others have laid straws in rows. One miserable captive found a spider; he nourished it for two years; it grew tame, it partook of his lonely meal. But when the warden learned of this he crushed the spider. The prisoner looked round his dreary apartment, and the small portion of light which the grated bars admitted only served to show him that he breathed where nothing else drew breath.”
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“Loveliest of what I leave behind is sunlight,
and loveliest after that the shining stars, and the moon’s face,
but also cucumbers that are ripe, and pears, and apples.”
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“We are not as hardy, free or accomplished as animals.”
“Before begging it is useful to practice on statues.”
“I threw my cup away when I saw a child drinking from his hands at the trough.”
“The greatest beauty of humankind is frankness.”
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“I have just completed a forty-two-day voyage around my room. The fascinating observations I made and the endless pleasures I experienced along the way made me wish to share my travels with the public …”
After sunset, after the girl had gone home, her dead mother’s voice would often visit, speaking to William or sometimes to her friend Fanny Blood, but never to her child.
William—I keep seeing those early years, all those letters now lost or destroyed— How as punishment my parents made me sit in a straight-backed chair not speaking for hours—Then the years in London when we lived among silk-weavers and offices—Years of failed farms—My father beating my mother—me sleeping like a dog on the landing outside their bedroom door—As if that could help her—At sixteen I met the Reverend Clare. His spine contorted, legs bent, he could barely walk—wore out only one pair of shoes in fourteen years—Was often sick—Was kind—Gave me books, taught me things. Brought me to meet Fanny Blood—So much hurts the mind but I only ever wanted to be an experiment, it was all an experiment, wasn’t it? I never wanted a genteel life—
Later I’d see her hand in air clearly writing; brown letters quickly drying on the page.
William I must teach myself things—If I could lay aside all restraint, if I—What are girls allowed to learn in school?—needlework, music, dancing-Trivial things—I don’t want to be anyone’s wife—Jane Arden’s father gave us a private lesson on globes. Taught us about optics and the expansion of metals—
Claire,
He read and I listened. The river rough and muffled in the background. Dull leaf sounds rustling underneath his voice. My fingers picking at pebbles in the dirt. This was before “must go into town for pins/sealing wax/spy glass,” before “buy mourning and work in the evenings,” before “I am ill most of the time,” and “the watery surface was blank.” Before “at half past three nothing remained but a quantity of blackish looking ashes mingled with pieces of white and broken fragments of bone …” I don’t even remember why I crossed that out. This was before “my Book dedicated to Silence—”
I came to realize that some of what he read had been written by my mother. In the extreme … in the mind’s farthest corners … I don’t know how to explain this. Sometimes I glimpsed his face, but mostly not. A few times I found some scraps of paper he’d dropped in the bushes: “Clerval who’s left for the east,” one read. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
So many years since I’ve seen you.
Your sister,
Mary
I walk where Melville walked, try to forget her. But her small worried face keeps coming back, and her hands as if waiting.
Before she ever saw me, I watched her for days without speaking. Tried not to move, didn’t want her to know I was there. Feared even a glimpse of me might harm her. But how would it harm her?
So why had I stepped from the bushes? Why had I begun to read?
William, Are you there can you hear me?—I’m visiting Reverend Price—It’s years before I knew you—He’s very excited for the Americans and their revolution but questions how they can truly succeed given their evil practice of slave trade. He tells me to question, always question, never stop—his voice halting and weak, he’s not well—I must teach myself things—I have a fever I know I have a fever—How can the Americans contend for liberty when they themselves enslave others?—So much hurts the mind— Scars on a whipped back—Namelessness—Silence—Eyes forced to the ground, eyes not allowed to look where they want to, eyes that don’t know how to read—
Then I’m in Bath’s warm springs where the sick pass infections unknowingly to each other—this happens all the time—What if I’ve passed my infection to our daughter?—Isn’t the mind like this too?—every idea infected by the unfoughtfor, the accepted—There’s little freedom and solitude after all. Reverend Price writes to John Jay—I can see his hand moving— “It will appear that the American people who have struggled so bravely against being enslaved themselves are ready enough to enslave others.” So many cages of action and mind. I haven’t met you yet, don’t know if I want to. I have a fever can you even see me—I want never to marry.
Claire,
One day he read to me from my mother’s letters. But how could he have seen her letters? They were to the American, Imlay, Fanny’s father. From before we were born.
She wrote of his “barrier-face,” and called the child “our barrier-child.” “You are mistaken if you think me cold,” she said. “I am determined to earn money for myself—the
little girl and I will live without your assistance—.” Wrote, “I cannot sleep—” and, “Our little Hercules loves three things—to ride in a coach, to look at a scarlet waistcoat, to hear loud music—The child can’t rest with anyone but me, yet I look out over the sea and everything is cold. To deaden the mind is not to calm it—You don’t love me, I know.”
I turned the pebbles over in my hands as he read. Years later, at Lerici, I’d hear in the sound of the sea his gravelly voice, though I tried not to hear it. How many years since Fanny died? No one ever claimed the body. That day I bought mourning clothes, standing in that awful shop I felt her beside me one last time.
Then a pained silence came into me.
But William I want to understand what Liberty is. I don’t know you yet—I’m in the North—a place called Rusoer, houses crowded under cliffs, only wooden planks for walkways. What am I wanting? Sometimes I imagine Fanny Blood’s still alive rendering her botanical drawings for Curtis’s Flora Londinensis, making her living that way. That she and I could live together—be happy—the Child and I sail back to England in the morning—
Then I’m in France, it’s winter. I’m watching the King escorted to his trial— The entourage goes silently through the streets, every now and then a drum rendering the stillness more awful. When night comes I can’t bring myself to put out the candle—Eyes everywhere glaring, bloody hands—Yet I’m filled with admiration for the people and their revolution. There must be equality, no part of mankind left chained as to a rock—Milton called women “this fair defect/ Of nature.” As long as we’re called a defect, William … Our new daughter, will they call her this also? And what of the poor who are accustomed to being punished, often for merely just getting in the way of the rich?—This refined villain that is our artificial life—It’s justice, not charity, that’s wanting in the world. I don’t know where you are I don’t know if you can hear me—
Those days in the graveyard I read from whatever I could find—food-stained books lifted from trash cans, newspapers, stray pages left on benches:
“The Emperor Ling Ti, who reigned circa 170 A.D. felt that nothing was too good for his favorite dog. The animal, undoubtedly born under a lucky dog star, was given the official hat of the Chin Hsien grade, the highest rank of the time. The hat was eight and three-quarter inches high and ten inches in circumference.”
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“Yao, the famous legendary emperor of China’s Golden Age, is said to have been born with eyebrows of eight different colors.”
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“Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a Hell beyond the grave?—that Hell is here in the lash that strikes the slave’s naked sides, in the poor too sick to eat their sour bread.”
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“… although I hear people say ‘Moses meant this’ or ‘Moses meant that,’ I think it more truly religious to say ‘Why should he not have had both meanings in mind, if both are true? And if others see in the same words a third, or a fourth, or any number of true meanings, why should we not believe that Moses saw them all?”
Claire,
Lord Dillon once said to me, “I’m puzzled because you seem in no way like your writings.” But the outward is so little of anything. Those days in the graveyard why should I have been afraid? What did it matter what he looked like? And anyway his manner wasn’t threatening, though sometimes his voice grew taut and I felt a kind of pestilence spread inside my brain, an acrid warning. As if he and I were all that was left in a world that had destroyed itself. Everything in ruins. The air a barren plain between us, and I felt a chill, a barrier, a recoil. Not wanting to be left only with him. But then he’d start to read again and the sense of plague would quiet-back inside me.
Do you remember that locked box I carried to France when Shelley and you and I ran away? Inside were the few scraps of paper from the graveyard, the ones he’d dropped in the bushes or the grass. I never knew if he’d left them on purpose. “Clerval who’s left for the east” one said, and then there were these: “unable to endure the aspect of the being he’d created” / “inside his laboratory” / “oppressed by a slow fever” / “dejection never leaves him” / “that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing at my feet” / “this trait of kindness moved me.”
And a few more:
“my life was indeed hateful to me” / “to seek one who fled from me” / “vast and irregular planes of ice which had no end”
The handwriting was large, dark, crude, as if written with a branch or twig.
Some nights I’d lie awake imagining a plague covering the earth, and I’d wonder why I couldn’t stand the thought that he and I might be the last ones alive—why didn’t I want to be left with him?—even though when I listened to him read, a comfort fierce as burning sand came into me.
Was I reading to myself or her? After a while I couldn’t tell the difference, though I recoiled when I thought of the human world she was part of that world that had recoiled from me.
If human contact had come to seem a form of contamination, and it had, and myself ugly in my own eyes when I considered what I’d glimpsed in yours, then the contamination I felt from books was less a disease than a blending of minds, conversations unfolding across centuries, weird impersonal probings, wonderings passed from one being to another, facts and syntactical combinations taking root in one being then another.
Over time I thought of you less, though I still feared I might hurt the child who, though motherless, must certainly have been beloved. She sat there sorting pebbles as I read:
“Man has been changed into an artificial monster, his faculties benumbed.”
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“There are authors whose object is to narrate real events. Mine, if I should be able to attain it, would be to tell of what is possible to happen.”
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“A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear.
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
The Beggar’s Rags, fluttering in Air,
Does to Rags the Heavens tear.
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn & every Night
Some are Born to sweet Delight.
Some are born to sweet Delight,
Some are born to endless Night.”
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“Ivy grows best when wild; birds wing most sweetly without teaching.”
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“Be very careful, in painting, to observe that among the shadows there are other shadows that are almost imperceptible as to darkness and shape.”
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“Now I will tell you about the city of Kinsay. It has some thirty thousand baths, the water of which is supplied by fresh springs. They are the finest and largest hot baths in the world; large enough for one hundred persons to bathe together. The people delight in them. In that city there are also ten principal markets. Some contain pears weighing as much as ten pounds apiece, their pulp white and fragrant as a confection. And there are peaches in their season both yellow and white, of very delicate flavors. The natives are peaceful in character. They know nothing of handling arms and keep none in their houses. Every year they produce enormous quantities of salt which bring in a great revenue; also great quantities of sugar and silk. The trading of these keeps them in comfort. But now we will quit this place and speak of other cities …”
Claire,
I kept imagining that he and I were the only ones left alive. His gravelly voice a spider’s web which instead of viciously entrapping created against the air a refuge of intersecting lines, a kind of dwelling. I lived within that voice, its stories. And still I couldn’t stand the thought of being left with him. Sometimes I imagined hurting him, seeing him cry. Why does the mind disfigure itself why does it… Imagin
ed telling him I hated his voice, his yellow eyes, that he was a disgusting aberration of nature, nothing anyone could ever love. I’d picture his shoulders heaving as he sobbed. Imagined throwing a stick at him or stones. For a while this comforted me. But why would the thought of hurting him comfort me? I waited each day for him to come-
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