PART IV
A Woman of Ill Repute
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BITTER WATERS
1822–1823
‘I bear at the bottom of my heart a fathomless well of bitter waters, the workings of which my philosophy is ever at work to repress …’
Mary Shelley, Journal, 5 October 1822
AND THOU, STRANGE STAR! ASCENDANT AT MY BIRTH
Which rained, they said, kind influence on the earth,
So from great parents sprung I dared to boast
Fortune my friend, till set, thy beams were lost!
And thou – Inscrutable! By whose decree
Has burst this hideous storm of misery!
Here let me cling, here to these solitudes,
These myrtle shaded streams and chesnut woods;
Tear me not hence here let me live & die,
In my adopted land, my country, Italy!1
Mary’s unhappiness is apparent on almost every page of the new journal which she began to keep in October 1822, when she and the Hunts were uneasily sharing a home near Byron’s on the outskirts of Genoa. It is not clear whether she ever intended to publish ‘The Choice’, the long self-lacerating poem which she wrote out in its pages, but it leaves no room to doubt her feelings. Her anguish, profound and unappeasable, was made more bitter by the recognition of her own faults, her coldness, her egotism, her quick temper. Was it her own complaining letter which had driven Shelley to risk his life trying to return as quickly as possible to the Villa Magni on a stormy day? She would never know; she would always wonder.
Mary was still only twenty-four when Shelley drowned. Unhappiness drew her thoughts back to Mary Wollstonecraft, whose wretchedness she knew so well from A Short Residence and from Godwin’s Memoirs with their account of the last stages of her relationship with Gilbert Imlay. Her mother had died at thirty-seven; it was no punishment to imagine herself following the same route. Thirteen more years; she reckoned them up and found them long enough. In thirteen years she could see Percy through school, publish all the manuscripts of Shelley which she could collect and, most important of all, write the life of ‘a Celestial Spirit’, his integrity and ‘sweetness of disposition … unequalled by any human being that ever existed’.2 This was another thrust at herself; she knew very well that sweetness of disposition was not an attribute anybody had praised her for in the past few years.
Shelley appeared to her in dreams; in her letters, she spoke, as if to reclaim him, of ‘mine own’; allusions to ‘Him’, ‘He’ and ‘His’ suggest that the dead man had achieved the status of a deity in her thoughts. He had, she liked to fancy, become the presiding spirit of the woods and lakes and mountains he had loved. This was the promise he had held out to her in Adonais: ‘He is a presence to be felt and known / In darkness and in light, from herb and stone.’
Her grief, after the first terrible night of searching for news of the boat, was private. She spent August with Claire and Jane Williams at their old lodgings in the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa at Pisa. Trelawny visited, flirted with Claire and helped with the arrangements for transporting Shelley’s remains to Rome. ‘He is generous to a distressing degree,’ Mary told Mrs Gisborne on 27 August. His behaviour was painfully contrasted to that of Mrs Mason whose coldness bewildered her.
Mary, meanwhile, made herself useful to Hunt’s invalid wife and tried to smooth ruffled feelings between Byron and the noisy, unwelcome tribe of Hunt children who romped and yelled under the little back room on the first floor of the Palazzo Lanfranchi where, stoked with gin-punch, he was writing Don Juan. She did her best to comfort Jane Williams who, haggard and distraught – ‘no woman had ever more need of a protector,’ Mary sympathetically wrote3 – seemed all that a widow conventionally should – and that she herself did not. Her calm exterior was perceived as lack of feeling. ‘No one seems to understand or to sympathize with me. They all seem to look on me as one without affections,’ she wrote with astonishment in her journal on 21 October. And again, on 17 November, after an unhappy conversation with Hunt: ‘a cold heart! have I [a] cold heart? God knows! but none need envy the icy region this heart encircles.’
This apparent indifference, the stoicism which Godwin had taught his daughter to see as the noblest of virtues, added weight to the unkind gossip about Mary’s failings which Jane Williams spread before she went back to England in the autumn of 1822. Leigh Hunt was a ready listener, having had first-hand experience of Mary’s anger when he tried to justify his right to – of all painfully symbolic objects – her husband’s heart. Writing to his sister-in-law Bessy Kent in September, he commented on Mary’s ‘extreme and apparently unmitigated bad temper’ and wondered that it had not been cured by the love she evidently felt for Shelley. ‘She certainly must have terrible reflections at times,’ he added.4
This was after he had talked with Jane. Initially, Hunt was awestruck by Mary’s restraint. Writing to Bessy shortly after the bodies had been discovered, he told her that Mrs Shelley was coping remarkably well, ‘better than could have been imagined’. It was from being shown this letter by Miss Kent that William Godwin first learnt of Shelley’s death; he knew his daughter well enough to guess at the pain she was hiding. Mary’s own letter, when it reached him, pathetically assured him that Shelley was still with her, inspiring her to emulate his wisdom and goodness, ‘that I may be worthy to join him’.5 Godwin let the religious sentiments pass without comment on this occasion. ‘She has great courage,’ he told her aunt Everina Wollstonecraft, ‘though it is easy to see she is dreadfully overwhelmed by this disastrous event.’ The couple had, he added, been ‘doatingly fond of each other …’6
It was sad that Godwin could not bring himself to say as much to his daughter; the best he could manage was to rejoice that Shelley would no longer be able to keep back his letters. Mary could look forward to sharing the family’s troubles to the full. ‘You are now fallen to my own level …’ Godwin told her; ‘whatever misfortune or ruin falls upon me, I shall not now scruple to lay it fully before you.’ It sounds heartless; it was not meant to be so. At a time when he was still – when was this not the case? – desperately short of money, he urged Mary to request whatever small sum she might need; for the present, he wanted her to come home and be comforted by ‘your earliest friend’.7
Godwin’s letter arrived in August, when Mary was still undecided as to whether she should go or stay. She did not want to be a burden on her hard-pressed father; she did not, on the other hand, see how she was going to support herself in the immediate future if she stayed on in Italy. Shelley had not insured his life; she had to wait until the end of October to learn from Peacock, one of the two executors, that she could expect the £220 allowance due for the quarter year during which he died.8 In October, she also received ninety-seven crowns (a little over £50), divided with Jane Williams, as their share of the money raised from selling off the contents of the salvaged boat.* Payments by the Liberal for contributions from Shelley and herself brought in a further £36 towards the end of the year. By November, Mary felt sufficiently secure to send a gift: of £12 to Claire, who had left Italy at the end of the summer to seek employment as a companion or governess in Vienna, near her brother. Mary’s generous impulse was applauded by Mrs Mason, for whom it made ‘a striking contrast’ to the behaviour of Byron who had disgusted her by refusing to send Claire a penny.10† Mrs Mason may not have known, and Byron probably did, that Claire, during her last weeks in Pisa, had become closely involved with Edward Trelawny; since Trelawny’s pockets were always generously opened to his friends, Byron might have assumed that he was taking care of a woman to whom he had become attached.
Byron never showed a trace of guilt about his callousness towards Claire; he did, in the summer of 1822, feel a little conscience–stricken about his past treatment of the Shelleys. The Hoppners’ gossip had been welcome at a time when he wanted to keep Allegra away from Shelley and Mary; he had been free with his view of them as careless parents. Anxious
to redress the harm already done, Byron now assured his friends in England that Shelley had been ‘the best and least selfish man I ever knew – I never knew a man who was not a beast in comparison.’11 As one of Shelley’s two executors he now felt a degree of responsibility for Mary’s welfare.
The solution he found was to invite Mary to be his fair copyist, a task she had readily accepted at Geneva and in Venice during the bleak days after her baby daughter’s death. More recently, she had copied statements taken after the incident with Sergeant-Major Masi at Pisa. Byron had made his own fair copies of the first five cantos of Don Juan; the work he offered now was charity disguised as necessity. There is no proof of financial dealings in either Mary’s or Byron’s correspondence, but a letter of 1830 in which she warmly confirmed her father’s view of Byron as ‘generous, openhanded and kind’,12 together with frequent allusions in her letters to Byron’s offers of money, suggests that payment was certainly intended. ‘I am quite of the old school with regard to gratitude,’ she told him on 27 November, drawing the line between herself and William Godwin’s belief in unthankful acceptance.
Grateful though Mary was, she cannot much have relished the task of transcribing canto VI, in which Juan, disguised as Juanna, engages with the delectable Dudù in a harem of luscious odalisques. This was less a distraction than an affront to the sensibilities of a young woman whose October journal shows her reshaping her dead husband into a sexless angel, ‘a spirit caged, an elementary being …’ But she had never lacked perseverance; lips pursed, she carried on. When a phrase disgusted her, she simply drew a line or left; a blank. Occasionally, she misread or omitted a word. Noting that Shelley had been left out of Byron’s list of the poets of the age in canto XI, she drew his attention to it with an endearingly unsubtle hint. He had made a reference in his list to a period of eight years, she told him; how remarkable that he should have mentioned the exact time of Shelley’s relationship with her!13 But Byron, oddly enough, for he had included Coleridge and Keats, declined to oblige her. Copying canto XV she believed she had found a portrait of herself, a rather pleasing one, in Aurora Raby who, ‘radiant and grave
… look’d as if she sat by Eden’s door,
And griev’d for those who could return no more.14
Did Mary fall in love with Byron in the months after Shelley’s death? She seems hardly to have known the answer herself. Bewildered by her feelings after talking alone with him for two hours in October, she tried to rationalize her excitement. His voice was like nobody else’s; perhaps it affected her because she always expected to hear Shelley’s giving the response? This, so she told herself, was the answer to the enigma, to why Byron ‘has the power by his mere presence & voice of exciting such deep & shifting emotions within me’.15
Was that all there was to it? Was Byron no more than a voice, triggering her memories of Shelley? She asked for, and faithfully kept in her dressing case until her death, a lock of his hair.‡ She took note of the fact that Teresa was jealous of her, although with wonder that anybody could be jealous ‘of a living corpse such as I’.16 She took care to disguise the level of their intimacy. ‘I see very little of L.B. he does not come here,’ she wrote to Jane Williams from Genoa on 7 March 1823; just two days earlier, she had asked Byron to come and visit her ‘this evening at your usual hour’.17 ‘Can I forget his attentions & consolations to me during my deepest misery?’ she asked herself the following year when she heard of Byron’s death. ‘Never.’18 As a widow, she had committed herself to Shelley’s memory. ‘After loving him I could only love an angel like him,’ she told Jane Williams on 18 September. Byron was no angel – he even coolly read the letters Mary had sent in 1817 ‘from me to mine own Shelley’ when her old writing-desk from Marlow was mistakenly delivered to his door in September. Mary’s only worry was whether these letters might have said anything to upset him. ‘There were some things a little against him,’ she remembered, and then brightened: ‘– and others in praise of his writings.’
To Mary, assiduously though she had begged for it to be sent out to her, the desk’s contents gave as much pain as pleasure.§ ‘What a scene to recur to!’ she wrote in her journal on 7 October. ‘My William, Clara, Allegra are all talked of – They lived then … their hands were warm with blood & life when clasped in mine. Where are they all? This is too great an agony to be written about.’20 Percy, happily, was in excellent health. Sometimes, in her blackest moments, she wished he was not: ‘you are the only chain that links me to time,’ she had noted two days earlier: ‘but for you I should be free.’ But this was a mood which passed.
Byron’s kindness helped to influence Mary’s decision, at the end of the summer, to join the Hunts, who were now entirely dependent on his financial support of the Liberal for their own survival as well as that of the magazine, and to follow their patron to Genoa. Teresa’s young brother Pietro Gamba had found Byron a house there, the Casa Saluzzo, in the pleasant suburb of Albaro. Jane Williams, armed with a purseful of London introductions from her friend, returned to England from Genoa on 17 September. At least one letter had been sent ahead of her. Unaware of Jane’s propensity to gossip, Mary urged Jefferson Hogg to be kind to her and to listen to the woman ‘who more than any other person can describe to you the last actions & thoughts of your incomparable friend’.21 Hogg did as she asked; he soaked up every word.
Jane left their Genoa inn at four in the morning. Waking from a dream of Pugnano and the beautiful Villa Poschi – ‘its halls, its cypresses – the perfume of its mountains and the gaiety of our life beneath their shadow’ – Mary went grimly out to find lodgings for herself and the Hunts. As she walked along, listening to the roar of the sea, she felt misery of a kind worse than she had yet experienced. ‘I am not given to tears,’ she told Mrs Gisborne that day. This was worse, a ‘stringemento which is quite convulsive & did I not struggle greatly would cause violent hysterics’. She suppressed it. She found the Casa Negroto at the bottom of Albaro’s steep hill; forty rooms, two marble staircases and a garden, all for £40 a year. She knew the Hunts were woefully short of money. Generously, she decided to cover more than half the rental cost herself although she and Percy were two to the Hunts’ party of eight.
*
Charles Dickens, visiting Genoa in 1853, spent three months in the suburb of Albaro over which the expanded city now sprawls. His presentation of the view from the hilltop village tells us how the area looked when Mary was at Casa Negroto.
The noble bay of Genoa, with the deep blue Mediterranean, lies stretched out near at hand; monstrous desolate old houses and palaces are dotted all about; lofty hills, with their tops often hidden in the clouds, and with strong forts perched high up on their craggy sides, are close upon the left; and in front, stretching from the walls of the house, down to a ruined chapel which stands upon the bold and picturesque rocks on the sea-shore, are green vineyards, where you may wander all day long in partial shade, through interminable vistas of grapes, trained on a rough trellis-work across the narrow paths.22
The views were beautiful, but the Hunts, assured by Mary that they would be delighted with the Casa Negroto, were unimpressed. ‘[T]he number and size of the doors and windows make it look anything but snug,’ grumbled Marianne, longing for her cosy London parlour.23 Mary took comfort from the fact that they had enough space to lead separate lives. She did not know the spiteful tales Jane Williams had been telling of her marriage; she did know that Hunt had become strangely unfriendly. She supposed it was because she had made such a fuss about his attempt to keep Shelley’s heart; the quarrel had been very unpleasant.
The autumn proved bitterly cold; a small and inefficient stove failed to lift the temperature of Mary’s rooms on the upper floor and she was forced to take refuge downstairs. A fire was small compensation for the continued rudeness of Hunt’s manner; Marianne, who had discovered that she was expecting a seventh child, was cross, unwell and miserable. There were many occasions when Mary wished Trelawny had not bullied her
into sharing a house with these supposed friends; she was less aware than he of the gossip which had gone before her. In the eyes of the expatriate colony in Genoa, she was still the girl from a radical background who had run off with a married man, borne his children out of wedlock and then let Lord Byron have his way with her and her sister, all with her lover’s consent. Stories of suicides, of children put in foundling hospitals, of households of free love, were probably also doing the rounds. Claire had been wise to leave. As for Mary: ‘[T]he English at Genoa will not receive her …’24 She seemed blind to her situation. ‘T[relawny] says that I am the person in the world most ignorant of it & its character,’ she noted after talking to him on 5 October. ‘It is true I seldom see, I only feel evil.’ Had he, one wonders, been trying to open her eyes to Jane Williams’s scandalmongering?
Mary saw no future in the love-affair which had briefly flared up between Trelawny and Claire in the aftermath of Shelley’s death. In Genoa, as she was well aware, he was sleeping with Gabrielle Wright, the wife of one of his friends; at the same time, he shamelessly asked Mary, who had a good command of French, to write on his behalf to a former mistress in Paris. ‘Say everything,’ he instructed her; ‘tell her what I have been doing, where I am, how unshaken in my attachment, how delighted with her constancy …’25 Warning him that his affair with Mrs Wright might get him into trouble, Mary had the poor reward of losing his company herself. ‘I have only seen him three times since his return here,’ she lamented to Jane on 15 October; a month later, however, Trelawny had become a regular visitor, easing the tense atmosphere around the Hunts’ fireside. Writing to Claire on 22 November, Trelawny praised Mary’s new-found meekness: ‘as both of us are overbearingly self-willed and bad-tempered, such forbearance and toleration on her part argues great and real friendship … I am very loth to leave her!’
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