At first I felt very confused. Why would it be a good thing to destroy the ‘I’? But the more I thought about it the more I thought back to the graveyard. Wondered if what troubled her in part was that I had, in a sense, by the ugliness of my birth, been destroyed from the outside from the start, and she sensed but couldn’t say this. I’d been born not out of love but coldness, calculation—maybe, even, out of hatred. So how could I go back to an untainted beginning from which I could, of my own will, destroy and thus possess myself? Was that why despite all of Shelley’s efforts, she couldn’t bear to call me “being”? Always I was the creature, the fiend, the evil one, the miserable, the monster. In truth I often shared this revulsion. Was she revealing what she sensed of my beginnings, though she couldn’t quite pin down what they had been (yet she had those notes I’d dropped in the graveyard).
Given who I was and how you made me, why had I even tried to give her comfort? What good could my voice have ever brought to her, and how?
Claire,
Each time I thought my glass skin was finally gone it came back. As if it had been hiding, dormant all along, only to surge forward at the oddest times. So I’d be rolling a ball with William, or tending little Clara, or in the years after their deaths, sitting at my desk trying to make a living writing those short biographies of “eminent men” for Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia, and suddenly I’d feel it—that rigidity, that fierce, glittering refusal—but of what? I hardly expected him to come, so how could I be steeling myself against him? Why did I need to be so armored and hardened, horribly smooth? The armor, in any case, was fragile—glass being so easily shattered. I’d be sitting at my desk, trying to decipher Shelley’s writing, or sometimes just touching the words in his copybooks, or I’d be out tending my garden, or once, having returned to Italy, I was just standing in my rented room looking at a washstand like the ones we’d had when we first traveled, and suddenly I’d start thinking about Charles VI of France, how he believed he was made of glass. At first, when he was young, the people called him Charles the Well Beloved; later he was known as Charles the Mad. (What would people call me if they knew I had glass skin like his? Of course I kept this to myself.) Once he chained himself to his men, made them dance with him in a wild frenzied dance, until one, still chained, was flung too near the torches and caught fire. He burned in his chains while they kept dancing. I’d think of the king and his glass skin and my skin would grow harder, more glittery, reflective, smooth, though it never would have done that in the graveyard when I felt the words come into me like light into water, or the sound of footsteps or the barest wind.
Late in her life she wrote of a girl who exchanged her body with the body of a fiend. Though she shivered like “broken glass” each time she heard his voice, and recoiled from his “unnatural ugliness,” she felt “a certain fascination” so agreed to an exchange of bodies for three days.
Now I lived in that hideous body. I began to walk towards Genoa, growing somewhat accustomed to my distorted limbs
If someone saw me wouldn’t they stone me to death, taking me for a monster?
it became necessary that I should study to conceal myself; and yet I longed to address someone, and to hear another speak
(but I will not blacken these pages with must not blacken)
None knows that once and now I abhor myself in recollection
As she wrote that, was she thinking of me? How she and I were intertwined, and all the silence that came after? I watched her hand slow; it seemed, almost, to soften. I sensed she’d decided to give the girl back her body, would offer her this kindness.
Even so it was long before I recovered. I have never, indeed, wholly recovered my strength. My cheek paler, my spine a little bent
my tongue can’t speak of what befell me
I keep silent to this day and turn my face from the sun—
Such silence in my head as I think of her. Even the jackhammering and sirens outside seem wrapped in gauze and distant, less real than my flawed memory of one single human hand.
I sit at the computer, reading headlines:
Russians have “Derailed” Reforms, Bush says.
Hillary Clinton Opens Up About Faith, Bill’s Infidelity
Transplant Team Crashes, Six Feared Dead
Two Grocery Chains Recall Ground Beef
Judge Awards Woman $184 Million in Divorce
Then:
May 01: Ten bodies found
tortured, shot in Baquba
May 01: One killed by roadside
bomb, al-Bunouk, north
Baghdad
May 01: Head of
kidnapped police officer
found near Beiji
May 01: One shot dead in
Doura, Baghdad
May 01: Three by mortar
rounds, Khalouf, Bani Sa’ad.
April 30: One by roadside
bomb, Talbiya, northeast
Baghdad
April 30: Four by car bomb,
Bayaa, southwest
Baghdad
April 30: 32 by suicide
bomber at funeral in
Khalis
April 30: Five shot dead at
fake checkpoint in Latifiya
April 30: 11 in minibus shot
dead in Iskandariya
April 30: Laborer shot
dead in al-Musayyab
April 30: 27 bodies found
tortured and shot in
Baghdad
Hide not thine ear at my breathing, at my cry
(I remember her copying that down in her notebook). Then:
but so much is strange and bitter
given so much horror how does one not travel only into bitterness?
ashes bewilderment chaos the hauntings of the mind
Claire,
I’d gone to Paris but when I got there I could hardly stand. My legs ached and my skin burned. The Douglases lived on the Rue Neuve de Berry; they took me in, took care of me. I didn’t know what was happening. Didn’t know, even, really where I was. (Did I think I was that girl with skin that burned but would grow soft again and white then turn to glass and she’d be sent away to Scotland?) Six days of fever, headaches, then the spots began— they didn’t want me to look into a mirror but I looked—got up in the middle of the night when they were sleeping. Stared into my ruined face. My mouth hurt, the raw inside of my mouth. Weeks, and it had spread all over me, the smallpox—face, chest, hands, legs, everywhere. How had I caught it? If even just breathing wasn’t safe … if ordinary breathing could bring this to me and into me … Or had I touched some contaminated bedding or clothing, but whose could I have touched? My eyelids swelled, I couldn’t see. Then I heard him near me, “Maybe now you understand why I fell silent. You feel those sores inside your mouth, how it hurts even to speak.” Even in fever, part of me suspected I was the one making up those words, making him speak, that what he said was my conjecture, my stubborn wish for a clear answer. I lay there thinking I’m like him. Always he felt nearer to me than the anxious, efficient ones busying themselves around my bed. Hadn’t I become, like him, a creature, a deformed and monstrous being? A being from whom everyone would flinch? He and I the only ones who understood. Or could it be I was him, and yet I heard him speaking from outside me. Was this how I’d brought him back to me, brought him close again after all? I’d sent him North but he’d come back. Not even my glass skin could sustain itself, keep hard enough and cold, keep him away. In my book he’d set dwellings and trees on fire, torched in malice and longing—now had he somehow set fire to my skin? If he had, should I fear him, should I try to run away? Sometimes I felt frightened, at other times comforted. Would feel him at my bedside, just the two of us in the room with its white curtains billowing in and out of the open window as if the air were innocent. But why should I even expect a benign world, think it possible? Why should I think he should be benign, or the air innocent, untainted? Everyone said my lesions were pustules, but in fact they were fill
ed with the debris of my own tissue, so I was carrying on the surface of my face my hidden taint made manifest. They said I would get better and I did, though my hair never shone like before, and my skin remained more clay-like, tinged a faint, dull gray. Sometimes the inside of my mouth felt raw and burned for no reason though they said I was completely healed.
She lay in her bed with the smallpox covering her face, felt me beside her. I know this—her hand left the evidence, the traces.
Always he felt nearer to me … hadn’t I become like him, a deformed and monstrous creature?
What would she have felt if I died? Who would have watched over her, kept vigil in his mind as she lay in the shadows or looked in the mirror at what she thought of as her ruined face, her young husband long dead, her children in their unmarked graves? Who would have remembered her small hands, how smooth they’d been and waiting, as she lay in that far room fiercely burning?
In her book she hadn’t killed me. Was there some way she wanted to release me? For every stab she gave, she also had a wound. I knew this. I’d left her in a silence she couldn’t understand. I thought of her hurt skin, and her mouth, that place of speech, so blistered and raw no words could come out. Weren’t words what she lived by, words what held her to the earth and made her who she was? No words, not a single one, could come out.
Her hand among messy piles of papers, writing:
it was his frequent habit to read aloud to me lived in utter solitude
was pursued by hatred and calumny was treated with revolting cruelty denounced as vicious
cast forth as a criminal never expressed the anguish he felt
built up a world of his own wandered among the ruins
thought himself defective sheltered himself against memory and reflection in books made various notes
my life a desert since he left
Was she writing of me?
Then I saw she was writing about Shelley, drafting her Preface and Notes to his Complete Poetical Works, 1839. Many years had passed since he’d died.
She dated the bottom corner: Putney, November 6, 1839, and another page: Putney, May 1, 1839. Were those his manuscripts strewn all around her? Her hand shook like blown rain, or a branch against a window.
She called her task inexpressibly painful, and wrote of how difficult it was to extract his lost poems from so confused a mass, interlined and broken into fragments (But wasn’t I trying to do that very thing with her?).
These Notes are not what I intended them to be … my strength has failed under the task … my health has been shaken …
She wrote of having found things
which he hid from fear of wounding me … I never saw them till I had the misery of looking over his writings after the hand that traced them was dust.
She wrote that he’d suffered:
constant pain wound up his nerves … he died and the world showed no outward sign.
I could tell this cruelly pained her. (Thought about how so much of wounding happens in severe and private silence.)
he knew every plant by its name his days were spent chiefly on the water
he possessed a quality of mind which experience has shown me to be of the rarest occurrence among human beings: this was his UNWORLDLINESS
he loved democracy and his fellow-creatures looked on political freedom as the direct agent to effect the happiness of mankind
disappointments tortured but could not tame him
Wasn’t she trying to draw him near, deny the futility of her wish? I think she sensed the desolate nature of her act, her hand trembling, frailer by the hour.
William, What if gravity didn’t exist? What if everything were angles, glimpses, endlessly unfolding questions—No central place to look out from, no one irrefutable law—These rips in me, these—I thought becoming untethered in this way would feel noisy, tumultuous, hard, but I’m not chasing after one thing or another, not worrying about one right place to come back to or another— Everything is so light—My body, your hand where it touches your watch-face, even my memory of my pregnancy, the king walking to his death, even the word subjection— Once I wrote, “and here I throw down my gauntlet, for man and woman truth must be the same, the principles they live by the same.”—But if there’s no gravity I can’t throw anything down can I though I still believe what I said of men, women, truth, and those angles come at me the questions come at me—If there’s no gravity what’s a storm, what’s wind what’s thunder—Marie Antoinette floats free of her aggrandizement, her ridiculous and trivial indulgences, and the king floats free of his gluttony, brutality—There are so many hands in the air—impoverished, dirtied hands—turning this way and that, trying the angles, floating out past the ceiling—Curious—Expectant—Not free—
Claire,
Where does one being end and another begin? Why did I think this could be clear? When Trelawny wanted my help with his book about Shelley—wanted facts about our life together—I refused: “It would destroy me to be brought forward.” My hair was straw, chopped short after the smallpox, my skin sallow, almost gray. I thought of the one in the graveyard, wondered if there was some way he also felt this—that it would destroy him to be brought forward. Large as he was, might he somehow still feel endangered, unprotected in some way? Maybe he’d needed to hide behind those bushes, read from where I couldn’t see him. When he fell silent, was there some way in which that feeling of endangerment had increased? When I had smallpox I walked the streets of Paris bravely. Showed my ruined face. It was a novelty to be so ugly, I’d never in my life been ugly. And as I walked he burned through me— unquiet, fierce, accompanying me everywhere, demanding I take him. So I never felt alone. Who I was had partly turned to ash, what was left was traces of myself mixed in with traces of him. I was walking through the world as both of us, or, rather, as some strange hybrid, though I still couldn’t read his mind, wondered what he wanted. Did he want anything from me at all? If he wanted nothing then was everything I felt only from the needs of my own mind? (Godwin was writing Lives of the Necromancers—his book about famous alchemists, remember?—I thought about all the alchemy inside each one of us, the combinations, burnings, transformations.) If I could walk bravely with my ruined face, walk with my scars and pustules, my straw hair (my legs stiff and hurting from the sores) was there a way I was aiding him by taking him with me, helping him somehow to be brave? Was I speaking to his need? Maybe I was just walking alone. Maybe he never thought of me at all. Or as I’ve said many times, maybe he’d even meant to hurt me. Still, as I walked I felt I was bringing him into the world—the rue Saint-Honoré with its hats and prints and arcades, and the cafés, parks, bakeries, bookstores. Sometimes when I woke I couldn’t tell who I was. Was I myself or the one from the graveyard, was I Shelley? Then I’d recognize my hand against the sheet, see I was myself, though what that meant became increasingly murky, or, if not murky exactly, then more layered, less evident, more complex. So that when I needed money and was finally forced to sell Shelley’s traveling library, as I signed the papers I wasn’t sure if it was Shelley’s hand that signed, or even the hand of the one from the graveyard, or mine—we’d all lived so long together by then—though to all appearances we’d each been only alone for many years and far apart.
Though often desolate, her hand still sometimes came:
In the deepest solitude of thought I
in the fiercest solitude For one tone of your voice what I would give for that one moment of your voice
how painful all change becomes when the internal life is completely
different from the outward and apparent one
I have no friend now myself a faint continuation of
his being
his vanished voice his in the mind’s most desolate solitude
One meaning of bond is “a force that enslaves the mind”
why does the this pen so lag and expression fail when I would
pollas d’odous elthonta phrontidos planois
lake
& craggy height & olive wood & cypress
&r try in vain to bring him back—
At times I’d forget I was myself, would sit there missing my drowned husband, Shelley, or I’d be walking down the street in Paris thinking of my ruined face, or lying in my bed feeling my glass skin. Once I thought, I must create a second life within the outward one (the outward being blighted from the start) then remembered those words were from her journal—they weren’t mine at all.
Laurie Sheck Page 38