Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  It was clear that he could not do so to his friends, or in a normal way to Mary herself. Another man would have packed up the household and moved back to Pisa or Livorno, to some sort of civilisation. But that was not the Shelley I had watched driving himself to this edge of existence. Shelley would act, would express himself through his imagination. Casa Magni in this sense became a dream place, a theatre of his mind: and this was one of the reasons that I myself entered it with such mixed feelings, even misgivings.

  The story of Shelley’s visions and nightmares during those last weeks is well known. They are the last part of the received myth of his life that any biographer has to confront in an attempt to explain without trying to reduce or deny. In my room at the pensione, full of those strangely empty cradles and the sound of the sea coming through the windows beyond my own balcony, I tried to consider them calmly, though not at first very objectively. I wrote my daily notes, I kept my own dream diary, I wandered about the little beach long after dark and sat late into the night on my cane chair drinking Chianti from a straw-cased flask. Several mornings, before dawn, I walked to Lérici along the cliff road and stood on the harbour quay looking back across the bay through borrowed binoculars, watching the sunlight spill down through the olive trees and light upon the empty terrace of Casa Magni. Often, as I raised those lenses, I wondered what figures I might glimpse.

  Shelley’s imagination erupted six days after Mary’s miscarriage. In Edward Williams’s characteristically laconic diary entry for 23 June: “Shelley sees spirits and alarms the whole house.” Mary’s sketchy journal makes no mention of this, nor do Shelley’s own letters say a word. But for the fact that Shelley died just over a fortnight later and Mary went over those last days in great detail in her long letter of 15 August to Maria Gisborne—perhaps the most remarkable and moving letter she ever wrote—there would be no way of knowing just what those “spirits” were. However, Mary explains in great detail, and almost for the first time I felt I was looking into the secret, hidden life of Casa Magni; as if the glittering shapes had risen, momentarily, from the deep towards the surface.

  This is what Mary wrote: “As I said Shelley was at first in perfect health but having over fatigued himself one day, and then the fright that my illness gave him caused a return of nervous sensations and visions as bad as in his worst times.”

  This itself immediately alerted me, for Mary had never previously written about Shelley’s “visions”—yet she now implied that they had occurred often: perhaps throughout their time in Italy.

  Her account continues:

  I think it was the Saturday after my illness [in fact Sunday 23], while yet unable to walk I was confined to my bed—in the middle of the night I was awoken by hearing him scream and come rushing into my room; I was sure that he was asleep and tried to waken him by calling on him, but he continued to scream which inspired me with such a panic that I jumped out of bed and ran across the hall to Mrs Williams’ room where I fell through weakness, though I was so frightened that I got up again immediately—she let me in and Williams went to S. who had been wakened by my getting out of bed—he said that he had not been asleep and that it was a vision that he saw that had frightened him.

  Mary may have been terrified indeed; but typically she remained perfectly rational, for she observed logically: “as he declared that he had not screamed”—and Shelley had screamed enough to wake the whole house—”it was certainly a dream and no waking vision.” The following morning she calmly questioned him about what he had seen, and gradually two “visions” emerged: the first concerning the Williamses (who were sleeping together in the room next to Shelley’s), and the second concerning herself. Both visions reveal clearly enough Shelley’s deep underlying anxiety, and his sense of guilt at the way he was treating Mary.

  She records what he “saw” unflinchingly:

  What frightened him was this—He dreamt that lying as he did in bed, Edward and Jane came into him, they were in the most horrible condition, their bodies lacerated—their bones starting through their skin, their faces pale yet stained with blood, they could hardly walk, but Edward was the weakest and Jane was supporting him—Edward said, Get up Shelley, the sea is flooding the house and it is all coming down. S. got up, he thought, and went to his window that looked on the terrace and the sea and thought he saw the sea rushing in.

  The laceration of those bodies puzzled me for a moment, until I remembered the volcanic rock around the bay. Both Edward and Jane were, in Shelley’s eyes, drowned people—and the house itself had become the boat, foundering beneath stormy seas. To a literal interpretation this might seem like a direct presentiment of their shipwreck. But I came to think of it much more as symbolic: Shelley’s unconscious realisation that his dream of the “island house” at Casa Magni was doomed, that they would all be swept away by outside forces, that ordinary life would break in upon them, and that he must rouse himself and face reality before it was too late.

  The second part of the vision moved to Mary’s room: the room in which she had so nearly bled to death. To get there, Shelley would have to have opened his bedroom door, crossed the dining-room in front of the big terrace windows, and burst through the door opposite, altogether a distance of some thirty feet. So this was no ordinary nightmare; at the least it was sleep-walking—common in childhood (Shelley had sleep-walked regularly at Syon House, his prep school, where he was desperately unhappy) but rare in a normal adult. Mary’s account continues, now breathless, the manuscript showing that she wrote with increasing speed, hardly bothering to punctuate:

  Suddenly his vision changed & he saw the figure of himself strangling me, that had made him rush into my room, yet fearful of frightening me he dared not approach the bed, when my jumping up awoke him, or as he phrased it caused his vision to vanish. All this was frightful enough, & talking it over the next morning he told me that he had had many visions lately—he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace & said to him—“How long do you mean to be content”—Not very terrific words & certainly not prophetic of what occurred. But Shelley had often seen these figures when ill …

  It is interesting that Mary, still amazingly logical and objective, specifically denies that Shelley was somehow prophesying his own death. It would have been so easy, in her distraught state, to make an “anecdote” of it, to show her beloved poet foreseeing his last days on earth. (Trelawny hints at this continuously in the Records.) Again she says that Shelley often saw such visions “when ill”. But what she leaves unsaid is how the murderous “strangling” image must have come to Shelley. For surely it is evident that Shelley’s mind was running obsessively over those awful hours after her miscarriage. He would have remembered those unstaunchable flows of blood on the sheets; the tin hip-bath full of water and lumps of ice; lifting Mary into it, fainting, her head back in his arms; holding her down in the freezing water; the appalled faces of Jane and Claire—especially Claire—wondering if the shock would kill her … So he woke the house with his screams.

  But Mary says nothing of all this. What could a biographer say? “He would have remembered …”; the fatal past subjunctive, which marks the passage from fact and evidence, to fiction and self-projection. I walked beside the little modern marina at Lérici and watched the Italians in their crisp white trousers and blue espadrilles, rolling sail canvas, emptying plastic buckets, calling to each other, preparing for the end of the season. Stacked on the quay were wooden boxes of silvery sprats. I returned the borrowed binoculars.

  “You could see well? You found what you were looking for?”

  “Not really. But they are beautiful glasses.”

  “Sometimes the weather is too hazy. It is a sort of sea-mist. But it is wonderful for sailing here in the bay. Outside it is rougher. Outside it can be dangerous.”

  “I have heard.”

  I thought for a long time about Shelley seeing the figure of himself. “How long do you mean to be content?” Did Mary know that thes
e words came from Goethe’s Faust? Claire must have known, for she was slowly translating the poem into English. Shelley had arranged this translation for Byron—who could not read it in the original—telling his Lordship that he had commissioned the work from a friend in Paris, and extracting a fee of sixty crowns. It was typical of the way Shelley quietly continued to look after Claire, and brought her—often secretly—into all his schemes up to the very end. But the “double”, the fatal doppelgänger, also figured in his own poetry, and here I could begin to make a tentative connection between these disturbed dreams and involuntary visions and the deliberate, often learned, process of his creative work.

  In Act One of Prometheus Unbound there is a haunting passage in which Shelley describes the “two worlds of life and death”. Combining classical ideas of Hades, Platonic notions of the intermediary sphere of daemons and the Dantean vision of the Christian Inferno, he suggests the existence of a world of “doubles”, of “shadows” which repeat or mirror everything on earth, “all forms that think and live”. These are not so much ghosts of the dead as ghosts of the living. We all have our doubles in this second world (the idea is most familiar nowadays in science fiction rather than poetry). Only at the moment of death or destruction are the real and the double united, “and they part no more”. Thus to meet your double, or to see it attacking someone, signified imminent peril: death perhaps, or the invasion of the real, normal world by the world of shadows. It was precisely this problem that Shelley seems to have been facing at Casa Magni. In modern psychological terms, he was refusing to acknowledge the realities of his situation, so fraught with suffering, and his unconscious mind was rebelling. Of course, that was crudely put: but it gave me a frame in which to consider the “deep truth” at the end of his life.

  In the poem it is beautifully put. The person who sees his double is a magician, the part legendary and part historical Zoroaster. A Persian wise man, supposed to have lived about 1000 BC (but also identified with one of the Magi who visited the infant Christ), he founded the Parsee religion with its dualistic theology of Good and Evil (hence Nietzsche’s and Richard Strauss’s Zarathustra). Zoroastrianism had always fascinated Shelley and appears throughout his poetry from Mont Blanc (1816) onwards.

  In Prometheus Unbound the figure of the Earth describes how Zoroaster met his own double and came to a knowledge of the shadow world:

  … Ere Babylon was dust,

  The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

  Met his own image walking in the garden.

  That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

  For know there are two worlds of life and death:

  One that which thou beholdest; but the other

  Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit

  The shadow of all forms that think and live

  Till death unite them and they part no more;

  Dreams and the light imaginings of men,

  And all that faith creates or love desires,

  Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes.

  Several points now gave a new meaning to this passage. The Earth describes Zoroaster as her “dead child”, a phrase which surely had personal meaning for Shelley. The description of the shadow world containing “terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes” was exactly how everyone talked about San Terenzo. And I began to wonder if, at some level, during these last days Shelley was almost identifying with Zoroaster, seeing himself as a poet-magician, like Prospero in The Tempest, somehow attempting to exorcise all their pain and suffering—Mary’s, Claire’s, his own—by natural magic and his own poetry, at Casa Magni. Or was this a fantastic suggestion, more appropriate to fiction than to biography?

  I never quite resolved that tension between a mythical and a strictly historical view of Shelley’s last days; and I am still not sure if it can—or should—be done. The mystery of his inner nature remains until the end. Yet all this summed up for me the final act of his search for the new life, the final revolutionary attempt: it was not self-destruction in the mundane sense, but a magic self-transcendence at the level of the imagination. Shelley never gave up the Romantic struggle he had inherited, never finally gave up hope that the great forces of regeneration were on his side. As he wrote in bold black ink on the front inside cover of his last working notebook, bleached with sun and sea-salt: “The Spring rebels not against winter but it succeeds it—the dawn rebels not against night but disperses it.”

  For Mary, the survivor, Shelley’s drowning on 8 July 1822 was also a transformation of their lives into the world of the imagination, but of a very different kind. Within two months she was writing of the extraordinary sea-change that had overtaken the memory of her husband. To Jane Williams—now her “best, dearest, only friend”—she wrote from Genoa on 22 September of the summer that they had shared together, lamenting her departure for London and looking back with bitter regret to the “paradise” she and Shelley had known at San Terenzo:

  Ever since you quitted me I am overpowered by a melancholy and misery no human words can describe and no human mind can long support… You are gone, the last link of a golden chain leaving me bound by a leaden one alone. You the Eve of a fair Paradise—Now through Eden take your solitary way. I was never the Eve of any Paradise, but a human creature blessed by an elemental spirit’s company & love—an angel who imprisoned in flesh could not adapt himself to his clay shrine & so has flown & left it—& I feel as poets have described those loved by superhuman creatures & then deserted by them—Impatient, despairing—& resting only on the moment when he will return to me.

  It was impossible not to sympathise with Mary’s overwhelming grief. That remorseless, gnawing grief, moreover, of the widow who feels that she has somehow failed to do justice to her spouse in life and must therefore make a cult of him in death. At the Keats-Shelley Museum in Rome I had noted the disturbing fact that even the handwriting of Mary’s letters changed sharply after Shelley’s death and became virtually identical with his own, as if it were the “automatic writing” of the spiritualists, guided by his disembodied spirit. But in biographical terms Mary’s profound mourning and her transfigured memory of “the angel imprisoned in human flesh” was to prove a disaster. Within two generations it was to produce that apotheosis of the Victorian Shelley in Matthew Arnold’s essay, describing the “beautiful ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings in vain”. So the great aim of my biography finally came clear to me.

  I left my balcony at San Terenzo early one crisp November morning, determined to bring that angel to earth, and to do justice to Shelley’s lifelong dream of a better world here below. The bay was empty of boats, and a light pearly mist rose off the glittering water. The bus to La Spézia was almost empty.

  FOUR

  1976 : Dreams

  1

  Shelley’s drowning was like a death in the family. I went back to London and wrote his Life, some eight hundred pages of it, virtually non-stop every day for fourteen months. I was possessed by it, and in the end it became something like an act of exorcism, and his death was a release. I can remember very little of that period, except that I slept on an ex-army camp-bed most of the day, and began writing at dusk, usually in deep depression. Once some friends took me to Torbay for the weekend at the beginning of February, and one midnight I took to the cold sea and swam out towards the end of the pier. I remember the sound of the waves running in from the dark and slapping the pier stanchions, a sound like death, and thinking if I could get round the end of the pier I could come back and finish the book. It was a long pull. My friends drove their car on to the edge of the promenade and switched on the headlights facing straight out to sea so as I finally rounded the black point I found a long glittering tunnel of yellow light, and swam back dazed and stupid, and stumbled up the beach. Six weeks later the book was done.

  At the end of 1974 I went back to Paris, supposedly to write a novel. I had had enough of facts; I wanted some fiction, and some daylight. I bought my set of coloured notebooks at Gib
ert Jeune on the place Saint-Michel, found my hotel room and my morning cafe, enrolled at an Institute to teach English to French schoolchildren two evenings a week, and settled down to await inspiration. This time I would follow no one else’s footsteps but my own. My bible was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, with its wonderful clear wintry opening: “And then there was the bad weather.” Only the weather was beautiful.

  The Paris I now rediscovered was a calm, picturesque city; that is to say, a city of pictures. It celebrated the idea of the flâneur, the man who drifts round the streets, gazing at everything that meets his eye. From the mirror-life and postcards of the big cafes, and the huge displays of prints and posters along the quais and through the Latin Quarter, I moved effortlessly into the great galleries of the Grand Palais, the Jeu de Paume, the Beaubourg and ever-changing exhibitions in the rue de Seine. After that it was the cinemas, thicker on the ground than in any other city in Europe, and not only in the tourist quarters. At the place Clichy, where the eighth arrondissement joins the eighteenth, you could stand at the top of the Metro steps and, turning through a circle, see the posters and horaires for no less than twelve different feature films at a single glance.

  I became absorbed in this city of images. I learned my colloquial French in the films noirs; and in the evenings made up gangster plots, trials and detective stories for my schoolchildren to act out in colloquial English. The rumour ran among the ten-year-olds that Monsieur Holmes was directly descended from Le Grand Sherlock.

  But, despite myself, the pictures led me inexorably back into the past again. An exhibition at the Kodak Gallery in the rue Jacob, and a grand retrospective at the Bibliothèque Nationale, just across the rue Vivienne from White’s Hotel, taught me that Paris was the birthplace of the portrait photograph. At the very time that the Impressionist painters were starting on the long march to modern Abstraction, the early photographers were beginning to produce a wholly new kind of Realism. Men such as Adam-Salomon, Carjat, Nadar and Disderi—many of them originally minor painters and cartoonists—produced a visual revolution in the twenty or thirty years following the invention of the wet-collodion photographic plate in 1850.