Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  She felt bitterly the humiliation of having to apply for money from Imlay, through the American business agent he had left in the city. “I have gone half a dozen times to the house to ask for it, and come away without speaking—you may guess why.” Yet when, at the end of February, Imlay began to insist that she return to London—evidently worried about her health, and that of the child—she expressed horror at the idea of England, adding that she did not believe anyway that he would stay with her, but would embark on another project in Germany or Scandinavia:

  What! is our life then only to be made up of separations? am I only to return to a country that has not merely lost all charms for me, but for which I feel a repugnance that almost amounts to horror, only to be left there a prey to it! Why is it so necessary that I should return?—brought up here, my girl would be freer. Indeed, expecting you to join us, I had formed some plans of usefulness that have now vanished with my hopes of happiness.

  What plans of “usefulness” these were we do not know—did Mary have ideas perhaps for an English-speaking school in Paris, or publication of her paper on female education? Her attitude shows that she was far from disenchanted with France, even now.

  None the less, at the beginning of April, yielding to Imlay’s entreaties, she passed through the barrier for the last time, packed into the coach with Fanny, her new maid Marguerite, her salvaged books and papers and the few bits of clothing and crockery she still owned. The great towers of the Paris barriers, with their bitter, ambiguous memories, dropped behind her on the road and they travelled down to Le Havre where they stopped at Wheatcroft’s house for the final few days. On 7 April Mary wrote to Imlay saying that she was “on the wing” towards him—the same phrase that she had used thirty long months ago before leaving London. She was so full of conflicting emotions—sadness and yet relief at leaving; hope and yet fear for the future—that she sat on the harbour wall, gazing blankly at the choppy spring waters of the Channel:

  I sit, lost in thought, looking at the sea—and tears rush into my eyes when I find that I am cherishing any fond expectations. I have indeed been so unhappy this winter, I find it as difficult to acquire fresh hopes, as to regain tranquillity.—Enough of this—Lie still, foolish heart!—But for the little girl, I could almost wish that it should cease to beat, to be no more alive to the anguish of disappointment.

  Her last act on French soil was characteristically practical. She arranged for a “little store of provisions” to be locked in a closet in a kitchen of the house, so that should Archie Hamilton-Rowan or any other member of the United Irishmen come through Le Havre-Marat (there was talk of Wolfe Tone’s associate Thomas Russell fleeing from Dublin), there would at least be food for them. “Pray take care of yourself,” she scrawled to Rowan, “direct to me at Mr Johnson’s, St Paul’s Churchyard, London, and wherever I may be the letter will not fail to reach me … I neither like to say, or write, adieu.”

  So, on 9 April 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft finally left France. Instead of the tricolour cockade she now carried a small child wearing the bright red sash she had bought for her at one of the republican fêtes in Paris. Here was the only symbol of hope left to her.

  In a way, I think I never really came to a conclusion about Mary’s experiences in the Revolution. In one sense, what happened to her was a personal tragedy, and this aspect is emphasised by much of what she suffered subsequently. Putting it in its barest, harshest form, it was this: in April 1795 she found Imlay was living with another woman in London, and tried to commit suicide by an overdose of laudanum; between June and August she travelled on business for him in Scandinavia; in September she returned to London, and on the night of 10 October 1795 tried to drown herself by jumping off Putney Bridge. The following year she published her Letters Written in Sweden, and began her affair with William Godwin. But on 10 September 1797, eleven days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary, she died from septicaemia. This sequence of catastrophes only reached its end in 1816, when Fanny Imlay, then aged twenty, herself committed suicide by an overdose of opium at a lonely inn in South Wales. It is a tale of such unhappiness it is easy to draw the moral that Mary should never have gone to Paris in the first place.

  But of course biography, as I slowly came to realise, does not draw this kind of moral. It sees a more complicated and subtle pattern. Even out of worldly “failure” and personal suffering (indeed perhaps especially from these) it finds creative force and human nobility—and what are more important values than these? Mary’s story in France astonished me: her courage and tenacity, as well as her marvellous honesty as a witness to her own revolutionary experiences, made her a woman in a million. She was exemplary in a way that completely altered my conception of what “the Revolution” was about. Most important of all, she directed me away from any cynical or over-hasty reaction to 1968 and made me realise that conclusions lie in the long term, in the next generation, in the “seeds of time”.

  For the real impact of the French Revolution, as far as the English were concerned, lay in the thirty years after Mary’s death: in the generation of Byron, Shelley, Hazlitt, Keats, Mary Shelley—one of the most brilliant literary circles that has ever existed—all of whom returned to Europe, regarding it as deeply and truly “their business”. To them, and most especially to the Shelleys, Mary Wollstonecraft was a bright star, permanently on the horizon. When, in the spring of 1814, Shelley and Mary pledged their love on Mary Wollstonecraft’s tombstone in Old St Paneras Churchyard, the flame was consciously carried forward; and I went with it. (I am happy to see that the church is still illuminated by Camden Council every evening until after midnight.)

  Moreover, even in Mary Wollstonecraft’s final years there was a sense in which her tragedy became a triumph. Her love for William Godwin healed many of the wounds that Gilbert Imlay had caused, and it is one of the most intriguing of all biographical footnotes that in her last months Mary decided to write a stage play about her experiences in Paris. It is only a footnote because Godwin subsequently burnt the manuscript; but he tells us one wonderfully provoking fact about the play. It was a comedy. The accusers of Imlay should think hard about that.

  The last of the many portraits of Mary was painted by John Opie (husband of the novelist Amelia) in 1797, probably when she was pregnant with her second child, the future Mary Shelley. Once again she has undergone a transformation. Her face is softer and more open, her thick chestnut hair tucked casually up under a green velvet cap, and her loose white linen dress falling in relaxed folds. She looks more confident in the world than ever before, and if there is something sad and thoughtful in those large eyes of hers it gives her a romantic presence, a contained power and an imaginative force which is new and impressive. It is this portrait that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, properly among her peers, a celebrity.

  I do not think Mary ever solved the conflict between Reason and Imagination. But equally I cannot think that she ever quite gave up her vision of the Golden Age. In her Letters Written in Sweden, the last published and best written of all her books (Godwin said it was the kind of book that made you immediately fall in love with its author), she made many reflections on her time in France, and the hopes and ideals that were still vital to her. In her thirteenth letter, written while crossing one August morning into Norway, she was told of the brave independent life led by the inland farmers of the far north, and finding some secret spring touched off inside her she wrote the following passage:

  The description I received of them carried me back to the fables of the Golden Age: independence and virtue; affluence without vice; cultivation of mind without depravity of heart;—with “ever-smiling liberty” the nymph of the mountain. I want faith! My imagination hurries me forward to seek an asylum in such a retreat from all the disappointments I am threatened with; but reason drags me back, whispering that the world is still the world, and man the same compound of weakness and folly, who must occasionally excite love and disgust, admiration and contempt.


  It was this dilemma that I carried with me, into the next generation of writers, poets and witnesses. My pursuit had begun.

  THREE

  1972 : Exiles

  1

  It was the late autumn of 1972 when I came down to the Gulf of Spézia. By then I had been filling notebooks about Shelley for nearly three years, and was possessed by him, and the voices of his family and friends.

  My pursuit of his restless journeyings had taken me from his birthplace in Sussex through an ever-widening circuit of exile. From the heartlands of Oxfordshire and the Thames Valley I had moved outwards to the West Country, to North Wales, to the Lakes, to Scotland and Ireland, and then to France, Switzerland and finally Italy. Nothing else seemed quite so real. I supported myself with freelance journalism, and I had a contract for a book. But I mark my beginning as a professional biographer from the day when my bank bounced a cheque because it was inadvertently dated 1772.

  Now the inner, growing and imagining part of my life seemed completely bound up with the fate of this small Romantic circle, the post-revolutionary generation, who were trying to turn the principles of the 1790s—republicanism, atheism, free love and the shared commune of “like spirits”—into a form of daily existence, an experiment in living, which would sustain themselves, their children and their writing in a new creative harmony of which the cold, disillusioned world had barely dreamed.

  It would end in disaster, I knew that already. But I suspended belief, knowing that the history of what the world calls failure is often more important, humanly speaking, than any other: for it tells those who come after what remains to be tried. It is, as I later found myself writing, more a haunting than a history: it is peculiarly alive and potent, like all those slumbering winged seeds and disembodied spirits and ambiguous, shadowy monsters that fill the best of Shelley’s poetry.

  The biographer often has to work, not with a tabula rasa, but with a powerfully received image of his subject, already unconsciously formed from the mass of previous work in the same field. I feared this so strongly that I never completely read—and still have not read—the accepted authority on the subject, a detailed American biography by Newman Ivey White, published in two volumes in 1940. With my sense of meeting Shelley afresh, of approaching him from the inside, I felt I could not afford to open myself to the shaping interpretation of a previous generation. My urge was to go directly to the original materials—and most especially to the places— for myself, and risk the numerous details that I might consequently (and did on occasions) get wrong. I journeyed, in every sense, alone.

  In Italy my outward life took on a curious thinness and unreality that I find difficult to describe. It was almost at times as if I was physically transparent, even invisible. I drifted without contact through the tourist crowds of the cities, and among the sleepy inhabitants of remote villages where the Shelleys had stayed a hundred and fifty years before. Except for the two hefty red volumes of Shelley’s letters and the journals of his wife Mary and her stepsister Claire Clairmont (the child of Godwin’s second wife), I was travelling light with the single rucksack of my Cévennes days. I hitch-hiked or took the local buses and little two-carriage branch-line trains that wound slowly through the foothills of the Tuscan Apennines. My tiny radio, a last link with the outside world, had been stolen weeks before when I slept on a sandy beach outside Livorno. I had left a girl I met in Florence in front of a picture in the Casa Dante, a smiling, sensible girl with fine dark hair, because she wanted to go to Siena - and Siena did not lie on Shelley’s itinerary. In little hotel rooms in Venice, in Rome, in Pisa, I read and reread Shelley’s poetry and letters and got quietly drunk in the evenings because I felt so solitary and yet so tense with the voices in my head. I gazed into mirrors above small washbasins with no plugs and did not see myself properly.

  In the endless art galleries I saw nothing but Shelley’s favourite pictures and statues, the Medusa, the grotesque Laocoön, the lovely Venus Anadyomene with her armbands, the strange sprawled erotic shape of the Hermaphrodite, all of which thrilled and disturbed me, so I carried round photographs of them, as another man might carry round intimate pictures of his wife or mistress. I frequented cheap cafes and tavernas, municipal gardens, deserted formal parks, dusty riverside walks and hot back-street piazzas with their dancing washing-lines and pattering fountains. Occasionally I fell in with tramps, odd expatriate couples, or bleached hippies washed up from the shores of Greece and North Africa, the flotsam of the Sixties, an army in retreat talking softly of the great times past, the trips and the highs, the lost islands and the beautiful, broken communes in the sun. I listened, nodded and questioned, and slipped away again with my own demons. On the left-hand pages of my notebooks I put fragments of my own travels, on the right-hand pages I put Shelley’s; the former became scattered and disjointed, the latter ever more intricate and detailed and dark.

  The bus from La Spézia to Lérici was full of Italian schoolchildren, brown knees below blue worsted skirts and shorts, busily eating gelati and chanting Beach Boys songs, down the long rocky road to the sea. I sat with my pack between my plimsolls, sunk in thought. The afternoon sun, already low, glinted across the water, far to the west, through outcrops of umbrella-pines. The road ran down to sea-level and followed the curve of the bay along a thin stone promenade. Round the beach, a mile or so away, the cluster of masts and sails in Lérici harbour flashed and shone, as they appeared and disappeared beyond the promontories and cliffs that indent the bay. So here, at last, it was: the furthest point, the edge of my story.

  “You Americano?” said a voice at my shoulder. She was leaning over from the seat behind, gazing at the picture of Claire Clairmont in the journal on my knee, the same dark long hair.

  “No, Inglese.”

  She was disappointed: “Oh, Beatles, Lordo Byron.” She offered me a stick of violent-green chewing-gum, to make up for it, I think.

  “You don’t like the Beatles, then?”

  “Oh, si, si,” she said with a dismissive shrug, then added more cheerfully, “Lordo Byron, he died here in the water, drowned in his ship like a star.”

  “Like a what?”

  “You know, like a pop star.”

  “Oh really, I thought it was a friend of his—un amico.”

  “No, no, Lordo Byron. Guarda, guarda—” and she tossed her dark head and pointed through the bus window at a little café. Its pink neon sign read: Hotel Byron.

  “I see what you mean.” I rose to clamber down the gangway to the door. For a moment I caught her eye moving from Claire’s picture to my face and back again, and a quizzical smile flashed across her angelic features.

  “Arrivederci,” I said.

  “See you, okay,” she replied with a thoughtful slow nod.

  The bus was stopping at the village of San Terenzo, a small string of sea-front hotels and cafés, with a domed church behind on the hill. I swung my pack on one shoulder and, chewing my gum hard, padded across the pavement and jumped the low wall down on to the beach. I felt curiously hot and shaky, and hurried across to the rocks to bathe. I swam and duck-dived for several minutes, opening my eyes in the clear green-blue water and watching the languorous seaweed swaying on the ocean bed. Climbing back out on to the rocks, I cut my hand. I saw that all the coastal rock was volcanic, twisted and honeycombed, like a fine froth of baroque lace. Its edges were as sharp as blades. It came to me that a drowned body, floating in those beautiful seas, would be soon cut to ribbons.

  The bay of Lérici is about two miles across, a horseshoe shape, steeply wooded behind with pine and ilex and with a number of sandy coves between each descending spur of rock. Lérici itself, a small fishing port and holiday resort, occupies the left or southern tip of the horseshoe. San Terenzo, in those days still not much more than a seaside village, is situated at the right or northern tip. Geographically, the bay is one small loop in the larger sweep of the Tuscan coast, known as the Gulf of Spézia, and commanded by Portovénere on the sea-run
between Genoa and Livorno.

  All these places had by now a special meaning for me. Shelley had his boat, the Don Juan, constructed in the shipyard at Genoa; Portovénere was the point where he would turn back from the open sea and race the Italian feluccas home to Lérici; Livorno was the port where he last saw Lord Byron; and of course San Terenzo (not Lérici) was the place where in 1822 he set up his last house with Mary and Claire, four years after he had first come to Italy.

  Far out to sea westwards, now turning smoky-blue and chrome in the late afternoon light, lay two low humped islands, very black against the skyline. These were Palmária and Tino, where Shelley often used to sail on days of high wind, saying that the humming from the bowsprit was actually the call of a siren from the cliffs. Palmária now has an automatic lighthouse, to guide belated fishermen safely home through these uncertain waters, quickly whipped up by the sudden squalls of tramontana or sirocco.

  While Lérici has had a good stone quay providing sheltered moorings since the eighteenth century, San Terenzo was for a long time little more than a shallow beach partially protected by an artificial reef of piled rocks. Fishermen’s boats had to be anchored temporarily offshore or dragged up on the sand, where Shelley used to keep his coracle built of reeds and canvas as a tender to his yacht.