Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  The Shelleys’ life in Rome was, in a sense, much more real than my own. My life was a figment of my own imagination, whereas theirs was to me an absolute, historic reality—no detail of which could be invented or falsified, not even the weather. When Boris and Alfredo asked about Shelley I was scrupulously exact, except for the fact that I spoke in the present tense. When asked about myself, I was considerably more vague and picaresque. After all, the Shelleys’ lives were simply so much more interesting than my own.

  The game of speaking about them as contemporary visitors to Rome soon became far more than a bit of shared make-believe. It became more like Coleridge’s definition of poetry: a willing suspension of disbelief. But, unlike poetry, it had rigour and absolute rules—everything had to be verifiable. I remember they were always asking me to discover why Shelley was attacked in the post office on the Via del Corso, and by whom. But I could never bring them a satisfactory answer, or even proof that it had occurred.

  “It probably happened,” was all I would say, “but maybe not quite as Shelley remembered it.”

  “I expect it was by Imperialist spies,” said Boris in a hollow voice.

  “CIA,” said Alfredo.

  The last night I ever went to the hostelleria it was somebody’s birthday—I never found out whose, the festivities were too far advanced by the time I slipped in. Monica gave me a free plate of lasagne, and the rest remains hazy. I wanted to tell them about Shelley’s wonderful description of the Arch of Titus in the Forum:

  The keystone of these arches is supported each by two winged figures of Victory, whose fair hair floats on the wind of their own speed, & whose arms are outstretched bearing trophies, as if impatient to meet. They look as if it were borne from the subject extremities of the earth on the breath which is the exhalation of that battle & desolation which it is their mission to commemorate.

  I think I felt that both Russia and South America were, in their own way, “subject extremities of the earth”. But my notebook says only that Boris sang “a Russian drinking-stamping song” and laughed and capered “like a tall grey winter bear”; while Alfredo sang “a lovely soft canzone d’amore” with his eyes shut and a dreamy smile on his face, of which “I could only make out one word—febrile”. Then there was a highly complicated drinking game, involving forfeits and toasts, with an elected Master of Ceremonies who dictated the terms on which the rosso could be drunk. I couldn’t understand most of it, but the laughter was wonderful, warm and somehow sad, full of sentiment and nostalgia—rising to the ceiling like smoke, an exhalation of deepest feelings, quite un-English. It moved and embarrassed me. The toasts were serious and bawdy by turns—family, loved ones, politics, home towns far away. Then they toasted Shelley—as a fellow-exile—and his name rang to the roof. I sat there looking at my plate dangerously close to tears. I came back on wings down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, determined to write my book for people like them too, who would never read it, people who had lost most things except hope. There were stars above the Arch of Titus, a black shape under the sky of the Eternal City.

  5

  Shelley had originally intended to return to Naples from Rome in the summer of 1819. He had completed the first three Acts of Prometheus Unbound in his “upaithric” study in the Baths of Caracalla and by May was working on his verse-play about Beatrice Cenci—the sinister old Cenci palace still exists down by the Tiber near the island. One of the reasons for this planned return southwards must have been his “Neapolitan charge” Elena, and I was surprised to discover that he commemorates her registered birth date, 27 December, in The Cenci:

  I beg those friends who love me, that they mark

  The day a feast upon their calendars.

  It was the twenty-seventh of December:

  Ay, read the letters if you doubt my oath.

  The reference is doubly surprising in that, in the play, Cenci is talking about the day two of his children died; and once again this raised for me the whole problem of Elena’s identity, and Shelley’s depressive crisis at Naples. What complex meaning had Shelley hidden here?

  The circumstantial evidence strongly suggested that Claire Clairmont had conceived a child by Shelley early in 1818, and that the baby Elena Adelaide Shelley, registered as born in Naples and left there with foster-parents until she died two years later, was indeed Claire’s. But as I came gradually to know Claire’s character, and the way she bitterly regretted leaving her child Allegra with Byron, it became less and less likely to me that she would ever leave behind her—to foster-parents, guardians, friends, or least of all to a Foundling Hospital (as Elise Foggi would claim) - a second child, and that by Shelley.

  Moreover, if Claire had some special interest in the child one would have expected her to be the one urging Shelley to go south again; and Mary to be understandably reluctant. But in fact the roles were almost reversed: Claire showed no particular desire to go back, while Mary frequently spoke of Naples as the city where she had been most happy, even in preference to Pisa. As late as April 1822 she was writing to Maria Gisborne: “Pisa certainly agrees with [Shelley] exceedingly well, which is its only merit in my eyes. I wish fate had bound us to Naples instead.”

  In the event, William’s death was to drive them north to Tuscany, on 10 June.

  A further puzzle arose when I examined copies of Elena’s official Italian registration, originally discovered by N. I. White at Naples. If she had really been Claire’s illegitimate child one would have expected Shelley to proceed in the most discreet manner possible. In a city rich with expatriate gossip he would have avoided anything which linked the child to their residence at 250 Riviera di Chiaia. But the birth registration showed that not only had the ceremony been witnessed by a local midwife, Gaetana Musto, but that two local shopkeepers from the Riviera di Chiaia district were also co-opted as witnesses. Shelley himself signed the birth register, formally stating that Elena Adelaide Shelley was the child of Mary Shelley and himself, born to them nearly two months earlier at No 250.

  This presented a further mystery: why had he waited until 17 February, the day before their final departure from Naples, to formalise the registration? It all suggested a decision taken at the last possible moment, almost on impulse, and with no particular attempt at discretion. Moreover it would not have provided convincing cover for Claire, even if the child had been hers. For who would ever believe that Shelley and Mary would leave their own child behind in Naples, with Italian foster-parents? The document was self-evidently false, and this must have been known by all the local signatories. There would have been many ways of hushing up an illegitimate birth in such a city as Naples—the child need never have been registered there at all—and I could not believe that this was one of them. Shelley must have had a different purpose in making this legal declaration.

  Nevertheless it seemed inescapable that Claire had been compromised in Naples in some way; and that Shelley (but not Mary) had been close to despair about it. The blackmail that Paolo Foggi and Elise began—“Paolo’s infernal business”—in June 1820, immediately after Elena’s death in Naples, eventually required the services of an Italian lawyer, Del Rosso, to silence it. So there must have been some basis in fact, though not necessarily what the blackmailers alleged. Elise seemed genuinely sure that Shelley and Claire had been lovers at Este; and her wild tale of the illegitimate child born at No 250 was obviously based on local gossip, or something of which she had personal knowledge. Then there was that crucial date, 27 December 1818. How could one avoid it?

  The date appears quite separately in three significant documents. It is the day recorded for Elena’s birth on the official register. It is the date recorded in Mary’s own journal for Claire being “ill”. And it is the date carefully chosen by Shelley in The Cenci, as a kind of bleak memorial of some tragic occurrence in the family.

  I worried at this problem ceaselessly. The details are far more convoluted than I have sketched here, and in the end I wrote a separate appendix on the subject for my
biography. There is for example Elise’s recantation, written in Florence in 1822, stating that she had seen “rien de pervers” in Claire’s conduct at Este after all; and also Claire’s letter to Mary saying that Elise would sign whatever she dictated, but—significantly—that she did not know how to phrase it.

  Nevertheless I came to feel that there were three likely truths underlying the Hoppner scandal, and somehow they had to be reconciled. The first was that Shelley and Claire had very probably been lovers at Este, that some of what Elise said was indeed true, and that there were sufficient grounds for Paolo Foggi’s blackmail, for Shelley’s acute depression at Naples and for Mary’s growing desire for Claire to leave their household. The second was that though the baby Elena, the “Neapolitan charge”, undoubtedly existed as a source of grief and embarrassment to Shelley, something that he always tried to keep secret, she was not in fact Claire’s illegitimate child. The third was that, none the less, the date of 27 December was especially significant in the whole affair. Somehow it linked the baby Elena with Claire’s compromised position.

  The light that these conjectures threw on Shelley’s marriage was considered radical and even somewhat outrageous at the time that I wrote. But they are now widely accepted by Shelley scholars and readers, because the unconventional nature of Shelley’s relationships is regarded with much more sympathy and understanding. But they do not of course provide a biographical solution to what actually happened; nor is there really sufficient evidence to do so still. Nevertheless I felt insistently, and perhaps misguidedly, that a solution had to be provided.

  My own solution in the published book was stark. It had two parts: that Elena was Shelley’s illegitimate child by the maid Elise; and that Claire had also been pregnant by Shelley, but had had a miscarriage at four months on 27 December. In retrospect, I now think that the first part of this hypothesis is both unnecessary and extremely unlikely. But I am more than ever convinced that the second part—Claire’s miscarriage—alone represents the true solution to the mystery.

  The baby Elena was, I now believe, a Neapolitan foundling child, which Shelley impulsively adopted from the Naples Foundling Hospital as an act of atonement for Claire’s suffering. He chose a child born on the date of Claire’s miscarriage (her “illness”)—hence the crucial coincidence of 27 December—and intended to bring it up with foster-parents at his own expense. Hence Elise’s notorious accusation was partly based on a misunderstanding, or misinterpretation of what she genuinely thought had occurred.

  Even as I write this I am seized with my old doubts. So much evidence really does point to Elena being Claire’s illegitimate child. It is only my interpretation of Claire’s and Shelley’s characters that stands against it. And how can one really interpret Claire’s behaviour, with her diary entries missing for those eight crucial months between the end of June 1818 and the beginning of March 1819? And why was the diary missing—or destroyed—anyway?

  Yet a biographer does become slowly convinced about his subjects’ characters. After studying them and living with them for several years he finds they become one of the most important of all human truths; and I think perhaps the most reliable. This sense of character eventually grows very strong, and in an extraordinary way a relationship of trust seems to be established between you. There are several things that I concluded about the quality of this trust, while I was in Italy.

  First there is the whole question of people acting “true to character”, or “true to themselves”. In daily human affairs notoriously, we all do sometimes act apparently out of character—especially in situations of great stress or temptation or depression. In such situations one could say that a person’s sense of their own identity is diminished, and that they act almost in spite of themselves. Yet the biographer views and witnesses these daily human affairs in a special and privileged perspective. He gains a special kind of intimacy, but quite different from the subjective intimacy that I had first so passionately sought. He sees no act in isolation; nor does he see it from a single viewpoint. Even the familiarity of a close friend or spouse of many years suffers from this limitation. The biographer sees every act as part of a constantly unfolding pattern: he sees the before and the afterwards, both cause and consequence. Above all he sees repetition and the emergence of significant behaviour over an entire lifetime. As a result I have become convinced of the integrity of human character. Even a man’s failings, sudden lapses, contradictory reactions, sudden caprices, seem in the long run to fall within a pattern of character. One could say, paradoxically, that people even act out of character in a certain way: there is always, so to speak, meaning in their madness, provided one has full knowledge of the circumstances. (Though that is the great proviso, together with Henry James’s, “never say you know the last word about any human heart”.)

  The real error in my first hypothesis, that Elena was the child of Shelley and Elise, lies in the fact that, had she been so, it would have been utterly out of character for Shelley to leave the child in Naples. In character for Byron, but never for Shelley. Shelley’s attitude to children, legitimate or illegitimate, had been amply demonstrated by the long chancery case bitterly fought in England for custody of the children by his first marriage; and by his support of Claire when she gave birth to Allegra. Shelley was simply not the sort of man to abandon children whatever the social pressures. And this objection, as I have already said, applies with even greater force to any child of his and Claire’s. In trying to solve a domestic mystery by mechanical, almost forensic explanation, I violated what I had learned much more deeply of the laws of character. I had in effect broken the terms of the biographer’s trust. It was a cardinal mistake.

  By the same token, I had maintained that trust, almost in the teeth of the evidence, as far as Shelley and Claire were concerned. The whole pattern of their relationship pointed to a sexual affair, a compromising situation and a probable pregnancy. Yet nothing in the character of their intimacy either before or, even more important, afterwards at Florence and Pisa allowed me to concede that they had abandoned a love-child to the Naples Foundling Hospital, or callously farmed it out to foster-parents. The tragic miscarriage became the logical solution to the mystery.

  The second thing about this trust is, of course, that one may be wrong about it. As in all human affairs, trust may be misplaced or betrayed; or one’s judgment of character may be simply incorrect. This possibility of error is constant in all biography, and I suspect that it is one of the elements which gives the genre its peculiar psychological tension. I do not here speak of simple errors in documentation; or even less of the deliberate slanting of an account. I mean that the reader can see, from the outside, an honest relationship developing between biographer and subject, and the deeper this becomes the more critical are those moments—or areas—in which misunderstanding or misinterpretation become evident.

  At the point where the reader believes he can see more truly or fairly into the state of the case than the biographer himself then the very nature of the book he is reading seems to change. Essentially, the dramatic nature of the biography—its powers of re-creation—are fatally undermined. The literary illusion of life, the illusion that makes it so close to the novel, is temporarily or permanently weakened. In short, where the biographical narrative is least convincing its fictional powers are most reduced. Where trust is broken between biographer and subject it is also broken between reader and biographer.

  The great appeal of biography seems to lie, in part, in its claim to a coherent and integral view of human affairs. It is based on the profoundly hopeful assumption that people really are responsible for their actions, and that there is a moral continuity between the inner and the outer man. The public and the private life do, in the end, make sense of each other; and the one is meaningless without the other. Its view of life is Greek: character expresses itself in action: and can be understood, if not necessarily justified.

  Inevitably I took the mystery of Elena north with me again, to Flo
rence and then Livorno, where the Shelleys settled in late summer 1819. It was here, almost exactly a year later, that the story—as opposed to the scandal—had its sequel. At the end of June 1820 Shelley heard of the baby’s illness; and on 7 July her death. Both Claire’s and Mary’s journals exist in full for this period, without significant deletions; as do several letters from Shelley to his close friends the Gisbornes, then in London. So in many ways it is the most revealing time of all in the whole sad affair: what did they each say?

  Mary, as so often, says nothing at all on the matter; though there is a letter showing that she knew of Paolo Foggi’s blackmail attempts. Claire’s diary shows no evidence of grief or upset, though an ironic reference of 13 July to “those who threaten to take to the law” indicates that she too knew of Shelley’s efforts to silence Paolo. On 4 July there is also a stinging aside about her quarrels with Mary, in two lines of doggerel:

  Heigh-ho, the Clare & the Ma

  Find something to fight about every day

  —but this hardly indicates any shattering revelation or dispute. In fact there is a lot about Naples in Claire’s diary throughout this summer, but it all concerns her enthusiastic reception of the revolution there against the King, an enthusiasm which she shared with Shelley, and which helped to inspire his “Ode to Liberty” of that year. There is nothing that could be remotely connected with grief or remorse over Elena’s death.

  By contrast, Shelley has a lot to say. He had taken the Gisbornes into his confidence over Paolo, and it was they who had originally helped him employ the lawyer Del Rosso. Clearly they also knew about Elena, and it is to them that Shelley unburdens himself. On 30 June he writes: “My poor Neapolitan, I hear, has a severe fever of dentition. I suppose she will die, and leave another memory to those which already torture me. I am awaiting the next post with anxiety, but without much hope. What remains to me? Domestic peace and fame? You will laugh when you hear me talk of the latter…”