RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  The suffering of animals echoed humankind’s. Evoking Rousseau’s noble savage, Newton claimed that the South Sea islanders were perfectly happy ‘until Captain Cook conceived that they must be miserable without beef and mutton. He took compassion upon them, and they have since lost their former health.’ He also observed that the whalers of Nantucket ate raw potatoes to ward off scurvy. His book took in new notions of the past, too, noting the discovery of a preserved mammoth in Siberia ‘within a few paces of the shore of the frozen ocean’, and citing George Cuvier’s theories of extinction as proof that ancient myths were based on real events: the promised apocalypse had happened already. ‘The burning of the world, which Platonic philosophers contemplated as being still in the womb of futurity, seems to have taken place long ago.’

  Newton saw humanity in a state of perpetual dysfunction – ‘It is not man we have before us, but the wreck of man’ – and consumption and exploitation were the cause. It was a sentiment with which Shelley agreed, as would the Apostles of the Newness. But the poet’s Welsh experiment, inspired by Newton and his family – they called Shelley ‘Ariel’ when he visited them, since he resembled ‘the image of some heavenly spirit come down to earth by mistake’ – was even more short-lived than Fruitlands or Thoreau’s sojourn by Walden Pond.

  Driven out of Wales, Shelley and his communists decamped to Devon. Occupying a cottage overlooking the sea at Lynmouth, the group aroused suspicion among the locals, with their unescorted females and a young man who was clearly ‘someone’ but they weren’t sure who, and who exhibited distinctly strange behaviour. Shelley had overcome the problems of promoting his insurrection in a characteristically ingenious manner: he sealed copies of his Declaration of Rights in bottles which he called ‘vessels of heavenly medicine’ and set them adrift in the sea. They were talismanic, folkloric objects, like the gods-in-bottles assembled in the West Country and elsewhere, often by Irish workers: recycled glass bottles into which cryptic wooden items – ladders, tools and nails, apparently emblematic of the Crucifixion – were inserted, and which were then filled with water. In his ingenuity, Shelley also devised miniature boats composed of little boxes covered with bladders (clearly he did not object to this use of animals), with lead weights and sails to keep them on course; at least one was found by a fisherman, mystified by this suspect device.

  Most ambitious of all was Shelley’s sky-fleet of hot-air balloons, made of silk and cow gum and powered by spirit-soaked wicks; potent extensions of his prophetic visions of luminous airships and fleeting comets. Laden with his Declaration of Rights, they were launched like Chinese lanterns across the countryside, sailing over a landscape that was no longer a rural idyll but a battleground of fire, air and water. He hoped his missives would drift up the Bristol Channel, a conduit of slavers, offering ‘a ray of courage to the oppressed and poor’. Had he but known it, his techniques would be taken up in the Cold War when West Berliners sent message-laden balloons over the Wall; they called them Mauersegler, ‘wall sailors’, another name for swifts.

  Shelley’s airships and boats might seem like toys to us, but Britain in 1812 was in uproar. It was caught in a war with revolutionary France that had caused the coast of southern England to be fortified, and fighting a new war with its former colony of America; its sovereign had been declared insane and replaced by a dilettante regent, the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, had been assassinated, and the country was threatened by Luddites determined to destroy the machines that were taking over their lives and livelihoods. In such an overheated atmosphere, Shelley’s actions were an open challenge to an oppressive state. People were watching. ‘Mr Shelley has been regarded with a suspicious Eye since he has been in Lynmouth,’ wrote the town clerk, and when the poet’s young and illiterate Irish servant Dan Healy was found guilty of ‘dispersing papers printed without the printer’s name being on them’ and, rather than betray his master, spent six months in Barnstaple’s grim stone gaol on Dartmoor, it was clear that Shelley and his revolutionists would have to move again. They left Devon at dead of night, on their own surreptitious flight.

  Having reached the outer limits of the mainland in North Wales, Shelley believed he had found the resolution of his ideals: nothing less than a reformation of human and land. To the poet, Madocks’s plan represented ‘one of the noblest works of human power – it is an exhibition of human nature as it appears in its noblest state – benevolence – it saves, it does not destroy’. Like Ariel, Shelley was taking on the sea itself, subscribing to its circumscription.

  In an echo of the Stevensons’ attempts to conquer the waves, Madocks’s Grand Scheme sought to embank the waters, reclaiming five thousand acres of land from the sea. Shelley did not see this as an act of theft. Rather, it was as if his own poetry might build the dyke; as if words would be used to tame nature and bend its fearful force, while reaching out to new lands. ‘Yes! the unfruitful sea once rolled round these islands, through the perspective of these times, – behold famine driving millions even to madness.’ Shelley had seen desperate hunger in Ireland and tyranny at work in England. Here in Wales he saw salvation in the sea. He pledged to spend his last shilling on ‘this great, this glorious cause’. He even claimed that Madocks was the true Prince of Wales, ready to rule in revolutionary stead of the decadent regent.

  Shelley’s family and followers – Harriet, her sister Eliza, and later, when released from Barnstaple gaol, young Dan Healy (possibly tailed by the authorities, keen to discover where his seditious master had fled) – made camp in a sea-facing house, Tan-yr-allt, Under the Precipice – built by Madocks. Shelley called it ‘a cottage extensive and tasty enough for the villa of an Italian prince’.

  It was, and is, a sublime vista. At dawn, the sun rises over Snowdon, turning its crags pink. Below, the widening, fast-flowing estuary carries debris like meltwater from a glacier, eddying brown and swirling with silt. As I swim, unsure of what is deep or what is shallow, I feel the current is strong enough to carry me out to the Irish Sea. This place conspires: the entire inlet is unstable, shifting, defying – the very forces of Shelley’s poetic imagination, his utopian intent.

  But Madocks’s efforts were not to everyone’s liking; Harriet Shelley felt his actions to be against nature itself. ‘The sea, which used to dash against the most beautiful grand rocks,’ she wrote scathingly, ‘was, to please his stupid vanity and to celebrate his name, turned from its course, and now we have for a fine bold sea, which there used to be, nothing but a sandy marsh uncultivated and ugly to the view.’ Her husband, too, had ignored what lay below the ocean’s skin, mistaking its open surface for emptiness; perhaps it was this disavowal that had stirred the demon which now stalked him in the Welsh hills.

  That winter was intensely cold. ‘The thermometer is twelve degrees below freezing,’ Shelley told his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg; ‘this is Russian cold.’ He felt frozen out by the people, too. ‘The society in Wales is very stupid. They are all aristocrats and saints.’ The poet retained his apartness. ‘I continue vegetable; Harriet means to be slightly animal, until the arrival of spring. My health is much improved by it.’

  But in February 1813, as the spring tides threatened the construction of the embankment and raised the tension between its champions, new storms blew in, fit to breach the barrier. Shelley felt under siege. A local landowner, the Honourable Robert Leeson – one of those aristocrats – had sent Shelley’s seized pamphlets to the government; he may have been behind what happened next.

  At the height of the storm, the pacifist poet took a pair of loaded pistols to bed. That night, shots were fired about the house. Windows were smashed, shouts heard and shadowy figures seen. In the confusion, Shelley found himself outside in the mud, with musketball holes in his nightgown. According to Harriet, who remained upstairs, terrified, the ghostly assailant shouted, ‘By God, I will be revenged. I will murder your wife, and will ravish your sister! By God, I will be revenged!’

  In these split perspectives, it is diff
icult to discern what happened, if anything happened at all. Thomas Love Peacock called it an hallucination conjured up by Shelley’s overactive imagination and sense of persecution; but William Madocks declared it to be ‘a transportable Offence, if discovered’. Others thought that the strange figure, a wild man of the woods which Shelley sketched on a firescreen like a gothic identikit, showed a man dressed up to look demonic, as though the poet were ‘taunted and terrified by some deliberately contrived theatrical “apparition”’.

  Years later, in an article in The Century magazine published in 1905, Margaret L. Croft investigated the incident, a detective coming upon the crime scene long after the event. She quoted a witness who said that Shelley had ‘fancied he saw a man’s face in the drawing-room window; he took his pistol and shot the glass to shivers and then bounced out on the grass, and there he saw leaning against a tree a ghost, or, as he said, the devil … When I add that Mr Shelley set fire to the wood to burn the apparition (with some trouble they were saved) you may suppose that all was not right with him.’ That vision, of a burning beech on a remote Welsh hillside, a raging fire to expel the devil, conflates with Shelley’s retinal memory of a three-fingered and horned form, part stag, part demon, part tree, a kind of Caliban.

  Ever since his boyhood, when he had sought ghosts in starlit woods, Shelley had feared a ‘following figure’; a fear all the more powerful for the fact that he did not believe in spirits, gods or demons. Nonetheless, they haunted him relentlessly. The opposite was always true, in his contrary life. Whatever the truth of the feverish incident at Tan-yr-allt – whether it was a government-sponsored scare tactic, an assassination attempt, or a localised eruption of violent prejudice – Shelley would ever feel pursued by evil, even and until he succumbed to the waves.

  He was, by all accounts, even those which stretch our credulity in the time and space between our selves and his, an extraordinary figure. ‘Was it possible that this mild-looking, beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with the world?’ his friend Edward John Trelawny would write, recalling his first meeting with the poet. Tall but stooped, Shelley looked deceptively fragile. He wore expensive clothes, ‘according to the most approved mode of the day’, but they were unbrushed and rumpled. To Trelawny, he resembled a schoolboy who’d outgrown his uniform – albeit one who’d tried to raise the devil at Eton, drawing pentacles on the ground just as the starman drew cabbalistic signs on his carpet and saw demons in his pool.

  The poet’s face was pale and delicate and feminine and elusive – no one seems to agree which of the portraits are at all like – but his cheeks became freckled and tanned in the summer. His features were asymmetrical and powerful in animation. His eyes were blue and his hair was long and dark – or was it short and fair? – and he had a habit of running his fingers through its tangles. He was acutely aware of his body. At one point he believed he had contracted elephantiasis from an obese woman in a coach and kept pinching the skin on his hands, arms and neck, thinking his legs were about to swell to the size of a pachyderm’s and his flesh crumple. He had no interest in food or drink: he appeared to subsist on tea, bread and butter, lemonade prepared from a powder in a box, and tincture of opium. He was prone to nervy gestures, as if he could not sit or stand still in the world, as if he were quivering in another dimension. Perhaps that was why he was drawn to streams and pools and seas; they stilled his querulous soul. ‘Shelley never flourished far from water,’ Trelawny wrote. ‘When compelled to take up his quarters in a town, he every morning with the instinct that guides the water-birds, fled to the nearest lake, river, or seashore, and only returned to roost at night.’ For someone whose life was predicated on extremes, the sea represented the ultimate, ‘the Deep’s untrammelled floor’, where the Oceanids cast human fates, and where sharks gnawed at the bones of jettisoned slaves.

  Shelley was destined for discontent. He had been expelled from Oxford as a REVOLUTIONIST after publishing a tract on The Necessity of Atheism. His ‘strange and fantastic pranks’ at college had included taking an infant from its mother on Magdalen Bridge, asking, ‘Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?’ Thomas Jefferson Hogg, his college intimate, said he was once forced to stop Shelley inflicting violence on a boy who was maltreating a donkey; on the other hand, when he had gone out in a new blue coat with glittering buttons which were then torn off its skirts by a mastiff, Shelley went to fetch his pistols to shoot the animal. Hogg wrote of Shelley’s sudden, pantomimic appearances, ‘as he always looked, wild, intellectual, unearthly; like a spirit that had just descended from the sky; like a demon risen at that moment out of the ground’. He surrounded himself with ‘queer people’, as if to make his behaviour seem more sane; and as his imagination spilled into reality, his habit of scrawling and doodling on books extended to walls and wainscots and rocks, making his mark like a dog cocking its leg.

  It is difficult to think of a more extreme existence for a poet. Around Shelley swirled storms and elopements, anarchy and abandonments, monsters and demons, suicides and premature deaths; events which could not but taint the tenor of his work and turn his life into gothic drama. Lives were lived in epistolic energy. The telegram had yet to be invented, but hurried notes might be delivered two or three or more times a day – between Shelley and Harriet and Mary; between Shelley and William Godwin, his father-in-law; between Mary and her father and her half-sisters Claire and Fanny; long declarations of passionate love or urgent demands for money – a sense of communication more fast-moving than ours because their thoughts seemed to precede the paper on which they were written.

  Words were loosened, unbound, uttered on a semi-public stage in an age when philosophers and aristocrats kept open houses for ideas and conversations and gossip. Far from enlightening, real life for Shelley became so awful, with such evil returns for his attempts to do good, that he retreated into his poetry, which was more real than anything, and where he could achieve utopia, an equality of love and justice – for all that a poet of another age, Matthew Arnold, would see him as a ‘beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’. He was trapped by his times, like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, blown about by the storm of progress, his wings caught in the wind, no longer able to close them.

  Shelley’s story was so powerful and mad that it resonated beyond his work. In 1924, André Maurois’s biography, entitled Ariel, would recast Shelley’s life as a series of scenes from Maurois’s own neurotic era. In the same spirit as Woolf’s Orlando, Maurois equated the Regency with the Jazz Age, seeing Shelley as ‘half man and half meteorite’, his female followers as flappers or bluestockings, and his male friends as dandies and wits; all vile bodies in decline and fall. At one point, Maurois describes the effect of Shelley’s Irish insurrection as a ‘screaming joke’.

  Bysshe sometimes sighed deeply.

  ‘Is it necessary to read all that, Harriet dear?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely.’

  ‘Cannot you skip some part?’

  ‘No, it is impossible.’

  But then, Shelley was defined by his own histrionics. When the nineteen-year-old poet had gone to Ireland, determined to stir radical opinion, his father-in-law-to-be, William Godwin, warned him, ‘Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!’ And when Robert Southey accused him of having driven his first wife to suicide, the poet, in provocation as much as defence, retorted, ‘I could tell you a history that would open your eyes.’ As Stephen Hebron, a contemporary Shelleyan, tells me, the modern world would surely have diagnosed mental illness in his intense mood swings, heightened by opium. Shelley was now taking laudanum regularly, showing the bottle to Thomas Love Peacock and saying, ‘I never part from this.’ Peacock in turn parodied him as Scythrop Glowry, ‘troubled with the passion for reforming the world’, and living in Nightmare Abbey, over a shore dashed by monotonous waves; a site ‘ruinous and full of owls’ and staffed by a butler named Raven and a steward called Crow. And if Shelley’s psychod
rama read like opiated Shakespeare, then he identified deeply with The Tempest, his favourite play. Its influence runs powerfully through his most ambitious work, Prometheus Unbound.

  Shelley’s sprawling epic, completed in 1816, opens with Prometheus, punished by the gods for having given fire to humanity, chained to ‘a Ravine of Icy Rocks in the Indian Caucasus’, a setting that echoes the Arctic scenes of Frankenstein (itself ‘A Modern Prometheus’). Bound to ‘this wall of eagle-baffling mountain’, he faces a world locked in a thousand-year winter – ‘The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears | Of their moon-freezing crystals’ – while ‘Heaven’s winged hound’, a hawk, pecks his innards with a poisonous beak. This is a nightmare Narnia, a very bad trip indeed.

  The play swells with spirits, phantasms, furies and fauns who speak ritually, like Prospero and his familiars. Both Prospero and Prometheus are captives; Shelley describes a kind of natural Promethean fire in marsh gas or will o’ the wisp: fire out of water. The Earth and Ocean are listed as dramatis personae; the elemental setting is apocalyptic, closer to Turner’s mythic miasmas or John Martin’s lurid panoramas, a science-fiction scenario of ‘those million worlds which burn and roll | Around us’, of dark seas ‘lifted by strange tempest’ and places peopled by ‘Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes’ whose ‘bright locks | Stream like a comet’s flashing hair’ as they sweep onward. Such cosmology could prophesy the beginning of all matter, or the ending to 2001. The magus Zoroaster meets ‘his own image walking in the garden’, and instead of devils, ‘all the gods | Are there, and the powers of nameless worlds’. Veering between east and west, past and future, particles and universes, a future magician, J.Robert Oppenheimer, might step in to declare, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’