Last night I dreamed of Claire. She was standing at the window in Moscow in the cold, wearing Shelley’s shawl. Then she turned to me and said,
“I’m not in Moscow like you think. Don’t you know where I am? I’m on the island of Gloskar. The cattle are starving, walking on snowdrifts high as roofs. Everyone’s sick here. I’m sick too, don’t you see I can’t close my eyes? And my hands don’t work right, I’m always dropping things. We’re all starving, there’s not enough food. You think about the kindling in your brain, you quote Shelley’s lines, but what about the kindling on this island?—it’s all gone. Why don’t you think of me anymore? When will you ever open your eyes? What did I mean to you? What did your watching mean after all?”
Then she was gone. My hands cold when I woke.
He was writing over a household list she’d made:
gowns— hope as2 is the sick despair of good
sheets— certain4ty of ill
shirts— 11
towels such doubt 5
tableclothspowerless a2nd the spirit with all her brood
napkins— 4
I watched him fold the paper, address it alla Signora Shelley, Casa Galetti, Lung’ Arno, so knew they must be apart. Beyond that I knew nothing.
I glimpsed her hand (somewhere far from him, but where?) leaving a few words—
appears tranquil yet who knows what wind
Where was the monster they’d been writing? Or, rather, her monster?— the monster, the creature, the being, the despised, the mistake, the beautiful, the handsome, the ill-led, the aberration? The monster he’d been commenting on, fine-tuning, critiquing? I missed those echoes of the time we’d spent together (but could I say we had ever really been together?). Echoes that, however ugly and distorted, were more comforting than silence. In truth I found them partly tender.
His syllables lengthened into words:
I fear you are solitary and sad at Villa Magni. I plan to sail back tomorrow with the first good wind—
Poor Clare has borne her loss with great fortitude after the initial shock My boat has arrived and Williams and I are delighted with her. She serves me at once as a study & a carriage.
Then came a swarm much harder to discern:
sustaining hands and many were hurt
The motes of a eye Suffering makes suffering—ill must follow ill
Hard Harsh words beget ill hard thoughts
Stray pen marks, smears, drawings of a face, a bridge, a tree …
As sunlight on a prison which And h ate____
and terror ; and the poisoned rain
Hadn’t I come to think of them as some sort of makeshift family, the only one I’d ever have? Even as I feared she’d leave me. Even as her monster burned and plotted—threatened, murdered, harmed.
Claire,
Sometimes I’d stop building my creature in my copybook, start a letter to him instead. It had been so long since I’d seen him. But what was I after? If I were to blame him didn’t I first need some sense of what had happened? Some version I could live with? Once I started, “You don’t even have a name, yet I want to speak plainly to you. I think often of the word ‘plain,’ that it means frank, clear, unequivocal. It can also mean complete. You read to me so many things. I believe you must like to think about words as much as I do. But I know I should presume nothing, not even that. I want a plain sense of what happened between us. I dream of mountains, huge peaks, crevices, dangerous steep slopes, but Wesley wrote, ‘I recovered some strength, was able to walk again on plain ground.’ And a calm wind is said to be plain. I think you must dislike elaboration as much as I do—you live with the harsh fact of who you are, how you were made, your awkwardness, your hiding. Remember when you read to me from Robinson Crusoe? Defoe wrote, ‘a tradesman’s letters should be plain, concise, and to the purpose.’ I would like mine to be like that. And Anderson asked, ‘Tell me in plain words, do you or do you not have a soul?’ But the problem is I don’t know exactly what I want to ask you. I want to be straightforward like Jacquard’s loom that took the most complicated patterns and wove them with the same ease as the plain. I guess I want to ask you why you stopped speaking, why you went away. But then I need to wonder why you started speaking in the first place, why you read to me like that. We speak of the ‘plain truth.’ I wonder what you think of this expression? What if ambiguity is part of that plain truth? Even if you were to answer, how could I trust what you say is truthful? In my mind I strapped you down, held you prisoner. But in the end my instruments were too blunt, your ambiguities escaped me. Is there a plain truth of you, can I know it? Why should I assume you even knew why you read to me. Maybe it just happened. Why should I assume you understand your silence, or that you’d even tell me. Yet you must understand it better than I do. I remember the graveyard I believe you know my name it’s Mary.”
William, I’m remembering Blake’s etchings, the ones he did for my book of stories—The people look troubled, unhappy—Hatched, wavery lines everywhere over their limbs, spidery, entrapping— He etched such scars on them, the limits and distortions of their thinking. I hadn’t thought I’d written of unhappiness, believed I was writing of improvement, instruction, peace of mind, but I see now—I didn’t know—He knew but I didn’t—I was writing of constriction and imprisonment—I was young, William. All those faces in Blake’s etchings aren’t looking at each other or anything nearby— Nothing real to them but their thoughts so what will they ever see when they’re not really looking?—What if I had written of a pebble, just that? Looked a long time at a pebble—I still think of reaching hands, barricades, the storming—But think of a drop of water, William—Think of a pebble, a branch, a hunk of clay, this wooden desk, a seed, a spider—
Her fingers traced words he’d left behind, touched, sometimes, pages they’d worked on together.
His voice in her margins. Where she’d written
disturb,
he’d crossed it out, replaced it with
destroy.
Where she’d put
diminish
he’d written
extinguish.
For
wretched
he substituted
excluded.
For
cause
he wrote
author. Surprised
became
astonished. Ideas
became
experiences & feelings.
Consider the being.
He stressed this often.
Had she considered that her names for me—the wretch, the creature, the fiend, the monster, the enemy, the daemon, the hideous, the miserable— were softened by him, made by him more subtle, layered? Being so much closer to what I was, and she the one who should have known this.
His words so solid on the page, and yet she couldn’t touch him—
He’d crossed her t’s when she’d forgotten, though often he forgot his own. He’d inserted missing letters, his hand overlaying her hand. He’d written in periods, dashes, commas. His ink stain spread where Carignan’s name was first changed to Clerval.
Reality is of little worth,
he’d written, and in a margin otherwise blank, the single word:
solitude.
On another page:
gradually saw plainly.
She turned to the passage where her monster considers a family:
Yet why were these gentle beings unhappy? They possessed a delightful house for such it was to my eyes and every luxury. they had a fire to warm them when chill and delicious viands when hungry—they were dressed in clothes that kept t in excellent clothes and still more they enjoyed one anothers company &speech —and saw interchanged each day looks of affection & kindness—What did their tears mean? Did they really express pain? I was at first unable to solve these questions
Beneath that he’d written, using her pet name:
o you pretty Pecksie!
Maybe her tenderness had moved him; in that passage her mo
nster was a lonely, striving being.
She came to his:
that I may not be
and
driven from joy for no misdeed
Her hand stopped, touched nothing. It seemed to stay that way for hours, unable to find a right place to come back to—there was no right place—all surfaces alien, comfortless, infected.
Claire,
I was often ill, and like you I wondered was it my body that was weak, too vulnerable, and so suffered, or was it the sufferings of my mind speaking through my body? I wondered this each day I built him. One morning I woke from a dream of prison. I’d been surrounded by turnkeys, bolts, all the miserable apparatus of a dungeon. When I looked up I’d seen barred windows. My bed was a slab of gray stone, the guards had confiscated my copybook and pen. Lying there, Shelley still sleeping, I thought of the prison I’d built in my mind, the ways I’d locked myself in. Considered the harsh words I’d put into my book: my enemy (I used that word often), hatred, anger, revenge, devilish terror, everlasting war. The list went on and on: eternal hatred, everlasting hatred, adversary, rage, maddening rage, fiendish, agony, vengeance, deadly revenge. If I could feel his wound more, trust in it more like I’d wanted to before but couldn’t, maybe I would suffer less. But if he were not just evil, then what was he? I would let him read books, allow his reading voice not to be just a trick of hatred or revenge. But I could go only so far. I still kept him “hideously deformed and loathsome” (since truly I couldn’t trust who he had been). But I let him find in the woods a leather satchel, and inside it some books. So he could read to himself, think about the things that Shelley and I also read and talked of: the rise and decline of empires, the nature of power, sympathy, friendship, the art and poetry of the Greeks and Romans. I even let him feel affection for a family he watched from a distance (though it made me nervous to do this). All those years I never told Shelley what I’d seen. He believed I made it all up, often wondered at my harshness, said there was something cold in me he didn’t understand. Something unforgiving, preoccupied, mistrustful. I couldn’t bring myself to tell, I don’t know why. After he died I’d lie there in the mornings imagining him next to me, thinking I’d finally tell him. And still I couldn’t. Did I believe that the one who once read to me might yet, after all those years, come back, and something be released in me? Or that maybe he’d been watching all along? If he had been watching, would he see that my secret never strayed from my lips (even if I disguised it in a book)? That I hadn’t once in all those years betrayed him—
Time moved forward, back, always in no particular order.
It was clear he’d died:
the watery surface was blank at the age of seven & twenty I find myself alone.
(His hand never grew old.)
Two—or was it three?—of her children had died:
the death of my little Clara has destroyed my children.
Her monster read, though only to himself. She gave him Volney’s Ruins of Empire, Milton’s Paradise Lost. He was trying to teach himself about humans and the world:
… these books … produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection
(Is this what she thought had happened to me?).
I was similar yet at the same time strangely unlike the beings of whom I read … I sympathized with them and partly understood them, yet I was unformed in mind; I was dependent on none and related to none … there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? I was unable to solve these questions …
Shelley had written in the margin:
Whence did I come? What was my destination?
This she had inserted later.
Often his copybooks were back in her hands:
I wish no living thing to suffer pain.
he bends his head as in pain
And thou, & thy self torturing solitude
Grief for awhile is blind
I imagined him coming from the shadows, pressing her hand to his face. But of course he never came.
I sensed a deepening quiet in her hands. Only few words came, white space around them an ice-field or a windless shore:
so destitute of every hope of consolation
the offspring of solitude
my life as it passed …
Again her hand left only a few words. She wrote them slowly:
having nothing, I can lose nothing from this solitary and wind stricken hill
The desk has arrived—with several letters in it from me to mine own S. from when he’d gone, briefly, to Marlow all those years ago—they are full of William—Clara & Allegra—I was in another world while I read them—for I am still alive and they are not. My diamond cross was also in the drawer— the pledge of his safety who is no longer safe.
(I have nothing. I’ve become nothing—)
I feel a strong need to close the shutters. To sit where no one sees me.
Can quietness be visible? It seemed I saw it spreading.
Claire,
Geneva, Chamonix, Portsmouth, Bath. Charles dead, newborn Clara dead, Fanny dead. London, Marlow. I gave birth to Clara Everina. Meanwhile the one in the graveyard still rampaged through my mind, plotted, murdered, taking his revenge. I’d given him a mind that could investigate and wonder. I’d allowed him to read, feel loneliness and hurt (even though I’d never had an explanation). Wasn’t that enough? Now I was a mother of dead children and young children. Had seen them suffer. So how could I keep strapping him down, how could I keep stabbing him? (and still I often stabbed him, strapped him down). Why couldn’t I be like Shelley’s copybooks where the words of the despised and dispossessed would have a voice? Why couldn’t I be kinder? I looked down at Shelley’s pages: “In mine own heartsoul I saw as in a glass/The hearts of others” and “thine atmosphere which penetrates mine.” Saw how he changed “clothes” to “fills,” “buried” to “happy,” “green” to “brown,” “day” to “[truth?”]—How he considered alternatives: “[?swift / dwell], [?truths], [?Indian], “[wide, caverned],” “oversproad,” “unremembered.” Nothing locked in, nothing rigid, cold as my instruments, my table. If he could write upside down and every which way, why couldn’t I turn my thoughts upside down? (I’d seen my own children die, hadn’t that disarranged my mind, set aflame the cold table in my mind?) Maybe I could send him North, as far away as I could manage. Maybe then my thoughts wouldn’t stab him. On the other hand, if I killed him maybe that would be best, I’d be rid of him completely, his voice and inexplicable silence finally dying. Or would he live on inside my mind? Might I even in some odd way miss him? In his notebooks Shelley drew firecracker trees, suns, mountains, huge X’s over the contents of entire pages. I thought of Shelley’s phrase, “the human love that lulls.” Wondered if that was something I could offer my creature—
William, North can be a verb I hadn’t known this—So one can say “gently northing” or “I northed until he couldn’t see me”—Or “northing and flaming, traveling far from where I meant to get to”—I said I wasn’t cold but I’m cold— I remember my trip to Norway, Sweden, Denmark. I sent letters back to Imlay, then turned them into a travel book for Joseph Johnson—It seemed I never knew what my life was without turning it into a book—In those frigid villages the women spinning, the men weaving, anything to keep out the cold—The same cruelty there as here. They had no slaves, but still the man in charge was allowed to beat the others—I northed, William, I flamed— “Cold as charity” Lamb wrote. Isn’t there a cold that drives itself almost out of itself, the way steel crystals bend and disarrange under pressure? That steel changes itself, William—All those days in Sweden a slow fever. In Denmark I looked out on stretches of cold land, imagined in a million or two years all of it covered with people—What will humans do when the earth is used up by our breathing, our construction, and can no lon
ger feed us—In that time of my fever I saw a body burning in the snow—This really happened—There had been an execution. Women and children in pretty dresses walking slowly back, grown tired of watching—Where is my baby is she hungry?—I said I wasn’t cold but I’m cold— This north in me watches I’m northing away, trees flame in my brain, red leaves and yellow, their trunks and branches white ice.
Laurie Sheck Page 36