RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  Here too is the crouching incubus of Fuseli’s Nightmare – ‘So thy worn form pursues me night and day’ – lying in wait like Tan-yr-allt’s demon; little wonder that Edgar Allan Poe so admired Shelley’s play. Its characters stand shadowed against the sublimity of the physical world; their own creator did not quite comprehend their meaning, as if he were possessed by them, as much as he had made them. They cross time zones and technologies: Asia, the Oceanid beloved by Prometheus, sails in an all-seeing airship ‘over a sea profound’.

  Shelley was writing at a time when much of the planet remained unmapped. The earth still had room for such imaginings, as if there existed, in some sealed library, a metaphysical globe in which reality and poetry could merge. As the synapses snapped inside his head, his pathology zoomed from the universal to the microcosmic; a hugeness collapsing on itself, blood pulsing and flowing like the tides. Out of a world of his own making, he addresses what we mean in relation to Nature; our place within it, and its place within us. He seems suited to neither. Instead, he moves in between.

  Surrounded by real and imaginary terrors, the poet’s fate was foretold by water, written in it, like Keats’s name. Two years after their marriage, Shelley left his first wife, Harriet, with whom he had eloped when she was sixteen, for Mary Godwin, who was also sixteen. Three years later Harriet, who had so regretted the loss of the fine, bold sea at Portmadoc, threw herself into the brown-green Serpentine. She drowned in the goose-shit-stained waters where I swim when exiled to the capital for the day, pushing through the murky lake where Virginia Woolf recorded the drowning of another young woman while imagining herself plunging into its mud. When Harriet’s body was found, a month after she had gone missing, it was discovered that she was ‘far advanced in pregnancy’, the result of an unwise union with another lover.

  Only two months before, Fanny Godwin, Mary’s stepsister, had taken her own life too, with an overdose of opium; their mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had also tried to drown herself in the Thames in 1795, throwing herself off Putney Bridge when she discovered that her lover had left her. All these falling bodies stirred bitter remorse. ‘What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep,’ Shelley wrote, ‘And how my soul was as a lampless sea | And who was then its Tempest.’

  Fleeing England in 1816, Shelley and his circle convened at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, in the shadow of the Alps and their slow-moving rivers of ice rolling down from the mountains where Prometheus might be bound. In a year without a summer – thanks to a volcanic eruption thousands of miles away which darkened the skies by day – they invented their myths for an industrial age already occluding the heavens on its own account. Out of that lakeside another primordial Creature was born, as if brought to life by lightning striking the water; a beautiful man become a Caliban.

  A few days later, Shelley and Byron were out on the lake when their boat was nearly swamped in a storm. Shelley refused to abandon the vessel, despite Byron’s pleas; unlike his fellow poet, who was celebrated for his aquatic prowess, Shelley could not swim at all, and instead held fast to the boat. Naturally, he rationalised the incident in irrational terms: ‘I felt in this near prospect of death a mixture of sensations, among which terror entered, though but subordinately. My feelings would have been less painful had I been alone; but I knew that my companion would have attempted to save me, and I was overcome with humiliation, when I thought that his life might have been risked to preserve mine.’

  As Richard Holmes, his biographer, noted, ‘the most extraordinary thing is that after this incident, Shelley did not ask Byron to teach him to swim’. It was a fatal neglect. ‘If you can’t swim, | Beware of Providence,’ as Shelley himself wrote. But then, his own history did not appear to teach Shelley anything.

  Shelley sat on the banks of the river, watching Trelawny performing a series of aquatic manoeuvres he claimed to have learned from South Sea islanders. The poet was astonished, and envious.

  Edward John Trelawny was a colourful character, even among Shelley’s cast of theatrical personalities. Born of Cornish stock as his name suggested, Trelawny had a fiery temper and a piratical manner. As a young boy he had killed, torturously, his father’s clipped-winged pet raven, beating it until its eye hung out of its socket; when he was sent to boarding school, he was expelled for trying to burn it down in revenge for the floggings he had received. He joined the navy in 1805, serving on the fighting Temeraire – bitterly regretting that he had missed the Battle of Trafalgar – and sailed as far as the East Indies, while remaining dismissive of discipline: on one occasion he assaulted his superior officers. Now at a loose end in Italy, Trelawny had befriended Byron at the height of his infamy, this seducer of whom Lady Caroline Lamb said, ‘this pale handsome face holds my destiny’. They suited each other, these two adventurers: Trelawny became known as Lord Byron’s Jackal, and together the two men boxed, fenced and swam.

  It was through Byron that Trelawny had met Shelley, and fell in love with Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont (who’d already thrown herself at Byron in the most wilful manner). Trelawny was well placed to observe the strange relationship between Shelley and Byron: one willowy and neurotic, the other determinedly physical but equally conflicted; both to be made legendary, not least by Trelawny’s stories.

  Equally, you can see why the poets were drawn to Trelawny. He represented action, rather than introspection. Writers wrote ‘to console themselves for not living’, said André Maurois; Mary Shelley expressed it even more vividly: ‘Trelawny lives with the living, and we live with the dead.’ Swaggering onto their scene, suffused with his own mystique, the former naval officer was powerfully built, six foot tall with dark piercing eyes, a handlebar moustache and a tanned face which reminded Mary of a Moor. She called him ‘a half Arab Englishman’, with an extravagance ‘partly natural … and partly perhaps put on’, forever telling ‘strange stories of himself, horrific ones’. We might find his figure to be almost camp, the stuff of mustachio’d melodrama, a coloured cut-out waved about in a cardboard theatre. But there was also another charge at work among these identity-challenged new romantics. Later critics would claim that Trelawny was in love with Shelley, and perhaps Byron too, and that Mary was a lesbian. Trelawny himself said that Thomas Jefferson Hogg, with whom Shelley had lived in London, was the poet’s ‘one true love’.

  Whoever owned to these desires, southern Europe, its cities, ports and shores, offered licence enough to allow transgression and performance (Byron saw Venice as a ‘sea-Sodom’, filled with ‘marine melancholy’). In that Italian summer of 1822, Trelawny made it his business to get to know Shelley and Byron. His observations of the two men are among the most vivid of all contemporary accounts, although they blur into his own mythomania. Like Shelley, George Gordon, Lord Byron, had the air of a royal exile, a prince driven out of his homeland – not by politics but by rumours of incest and ‘unnatural crime’; Caroline Lamb cited Robert Rushton, the handsome young man who accompanied the lord as his page, as one of those whom Byron had ‘perverted’. With a dog-like loyalty, Rushton slept in a cubbyhole next to his master at Newstead Abbey; a famous image of the pair, poet and page, shows them ready to set out to sea – and hints at something more.

  The poet’s friend John Cam Hobhouse teased him for such recklessness, telling Byron that he might get shot for advertising his criminal relationship so boldly. Before leaving England for Lisbon in 1809, Byron stayed in Falmouth, from where he wrote of his attachment to Rushton – ‘I like him, because, like myself, he seems a friendless animal’ – and boasted of his seduction of another boy in the town, scratching his own name into the window of Wynn’s Hotel as if to mark his conquests. In his private correspondence as in his public image, Byron made it clear that he didn’t care what anyone else thought. An aristocrat operated under privilege – private law – and a poet was further set outside the normal world. He was as entitled to have his affections immortalised as he was to commission a portrait of an animal he loved even more.

/>   Byron’s nautically-named dog, Boatswain (the word comes from the Old Norse, sweyne, a young man in charge of a vessel), was bred to the water – Newfoundlands have webbed feet, like their Labrador cousins – and became Byron’s companion in Newstead’s wide and weedy lake, where he sometimes assumed his master was drowning and tried to pull him out. Boatswain’s loyalty exceeded that of any human bosun; he looked quite as pugnacious and aristocratic as his owner. After his death in 1808 from rabies – ironically known as hydrophobia – during which Byron nursed him, disdaining any fear of infecting himself (Virginia Woolf, ever attuned to animals and their owners, suggested that ‘Byron’s dog went mad in sympathy with Byron’), Boatswain was buried at Newstead and honoured with an elegy from his master to his ‘firmest friend | The first to welcome, foremost to defend’.

  Many, if not most of Byron’s retainers were furred or feathered. He walked with them like a god. When he left England in 1816, lines of onlookers stood either side of the gangway at Dover, watching as his sofa, books, china and glass were decanted onto his ship. Roaming Europe in his enormous coach, copied from one used by Napoleon, the poet was accompanied by a menagerie. In Ravenna, visitors to Byron’s rented villa were greeted by eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a parrot and a falcon, all of whom fought with one another fitfully, ‘and made up as it suited them’. When he moved to Pisa, his procession consisted of five carriages, six manservants, nine horses, and an assortment of dogs, monkeys, peacocks and ibises. It was as if he were lord of all the wilderness.

  No one could ignore the passing of this English aristocrat, as resplendent as any exotic bird or beast and surrounded by his familiars, sweeping all before him and them. Yet in Trelawny’s account Byron, then in his mid-thirties, is a surprisingly vulnerable figure, for all his glamour. At five foot eight and a half, he is not tall, and he shuffles as he walks, because of his club foot. It was his equivalent of Shelley’s high voice, an Achilles heel which made the rest of the show seem more extreme. He dressed majestically in a braided tartan jacket, blue velvet cap with gold braid, and ‘very loose nankeen trousers, strapped down so as to cover his feet’. His vanity was apparent, and included the use of curl papers for his hair and cosmetics for his face, and diets to maintain, in a modern manner, his body image. Declining Shelley’s obsession with ‘mystifying metaphysics’, his aura was one of action and even mayhem (even Shelley admitted that his friend was ‘mad as a hatter’). Turning his bodily self into a paradox, Byron preferred to refer to his disability as ‘cloven footed, diabolic rather than infirm’ – evoking the demon many believed him to be – and when he checked into a hotel, he wrote in the register against his age, ‘One hundred.’

  ‘The Devil,’ Byron declared, as if watching himself limp onto the stage, ‘is a Royal Personage.’ He dallied with the same Satan whom Shelley feared; and where Shelley saw himself as a ‘Lost Angel of a ruin’d Paradise’, Byron assumed the persona of the stalking, or perhaps hobbling, fiend. Most of all, he sought to transcend his terrestrial lameness. ‘In the water a fin is better than a foot,’ Trelawny affirmed, as if the lord were halfway to becoming a porpoise; ‘and in that element he did well; he was built for floating – with a flexible body, open chest, broad beam, and round limbs … If the sea was smooth and warm, he would stay in it for hours.’

  Like his dog, Byron had been bred to the water. His family crest was surmounted by a mermaid, and his grandfather, Vice Admiral John Byron, was known as Foul-weather Jack on account of his reputation for attracting storms. Byron himself was said to have been born with a caul, which doubtless emboldened him in his feats. At college he had swum in the Cam, often with his friend Skinner Matthews, who later drowned there, having become entangled in the weeds. At twenty-one, Byron swam the Thames from Lambeth to Blackfriars. But if the water was his liberation, it might also have been a cover for his true nature, just as his strenuous assertions of masculinity – his boxing, his adventuring, and perhaps even his womanising – were compensations or disguises, another kind of veil.

  Having left England under the cloud of a scandal that could not be named, Byron swam through Europe. In Lisbon he swam the Tagus. In Athens he swam daily at Piraeus and saved a girl, sewn up in a sack as a punishment for adultery, from being thrown into the sea. In Venice he swam the length of the Grand Canal. And in his greatest feat, he swam from one continent to another, across the Hellespont, although the young marine who accompanied him later drowned too. Byron exhorted, ‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean – roll!’ The sea allowed him to challenge his mortal state; it made him alive and free. ‘The great object of life is sensation,’ he said, in words that augured Wilde’s, ‘to feel that we exist, even though in pain.’

  One day Byron dared Trelawny to join him on a swim from the shore back to the poet’s yacht, Bolivar, and to dine in the sea alongside her.

  Trelawny, a better swimmer, reached the boat long before Byron, and ordered the meal to be served on a grating. Treading water all the while, the two men ate their buoyant dinner, washed down with a bottle of ale and followed, for Trelawny, by a cigar, to which Byron objected violently. Then they set off for the shore, but a hundred yards out the food and drink backfired on Byron, who began to retch and to suffer severe cramp.

  Trelawny told his friend to place his hand on his shoulder so that he could help him back to safety.

  ‘Keep off, you villain, don’t touch me,’ Byron replied. ‘I’ll drown ’ere I give in.’

  ‘A fig for drowning,’ Trelawny said; ‘drown cats and blind puppies.’

  ‘Come on,’ Byron shouted. ‘I am always better after vomiting.’

  They returned to the boat, but Byron sat on the ladder, refusing to get on board, demanding that they should swim back to the shore. Trelawny said he’d had enough.

  ‘You may do as you like,’ Byron replied, and jumped in the water. He was ill for two days afterwards, and had to take to his bed.

  In these escapades, Trelawny portrayed himself as a solo audience for the poets’ performances. Back on the banks of Arno, where we left him with Shelley, Trelawny completed his Indonesian exercises, climbed out of the river and began to dress himself on the shore.

  ‘Why can’t I swim, it seems so very easy?’ Shelley asked.

  ‘Because you think you can’t,’ Trelawny replied, patiently. ‘If you determine, you will,’ he continued. ‘Take a header off this bank, and when you rise turn on your back, you will float like a duck; but you must reverse the arch in your spine, for it’s now bent the wrong way.’

  Any onlooker could have predicted that this lesson would not end well. Shelley pulled off his clothes and jumped in the water, but instead of following Trelawny’s instructions, he dropped to the bottom and lay there like a languid eel, making no attempt to struggle or save himself. He had sunk deliberately, as if seeking his amniotic origins, an unplugged foetus. Had he been born with a caul like Byron, he might have been protected; but Shelley wanted to shed his earthly state entirely.

  Trelawny – by now used to these mad antics – dived in to save the poet who, he claimed, would have drowned if he hadn’t been fished out. Recovering back on land, Shelley said, ‘I always find the bottom of the well, and they say Truth lies there. In another minute I should have found it, and you would have found an empty shell. It is an easy way of getting rid of the body.’

  ‘It’s a great temptation,’ he added; ‘in another minute I might have been in another planet.’

  Some thought he might have come from one. Shelley seemed a ‘true alien’, in the words of a modern critic, Karen Swann, a stranger or visitant ‘who speaks with no natural voice and is animated by no natural life’. Nor did any of his near-disasters discourage him. In Italy he nearly drowned in a canal, yet still bathed in ponds ‘as transparent as the air’ and ‘exceedingly cold’, as he boasted to Peacock. He would undress and sit on rocks over the pool, reading Herodotus ‘until the perspiration has subsided’, then leap into the water, climb
ing up the waterfalls and ‘receiving the spray all over my body’.

  On one occasion Trelawny went searching for him in a wood, and was taken by an old man to a trail of books and papers and a hat, and beyond that ‘a deep pool of dark glimmering water’. The old man said, ‘Eccolo!’, which Trelawny took to mean that Shelley was in or under the water.

  A strong light shone through the pines, one of which had collapsed into the pool. The wind rushed through the trees. When Trelawny finally found Shelley, busy writing verses while strumming his guitar, the poet asked him, ‘Don’t you hear the mournful murmurings of the sea?’ It was a scene which could have come from one of Ovid’s Tales or a film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Picking up a fragment of the manuscript which lay scrawled and blotted on the ground, Trelawny could read only the first two lines: ‘Ariel, to Miranda take | This slave of music.’

  Shelley was determined to spend that summer by the sea. He and Mary, and their friends Edward Williams – like Trelawny, a former naval man – and his wife Jane, had come to the Bay of Spezia, the Bay of Hope. No suitable palazzo could be found for Byron and his entourage there, but after some searching the Shelleys and the Williamses discovered a house for themselves at Lerici.

  Casa Magni, a former monastery, could have stood no nearer the shore. It was built over the sea wall, its ground floor left unmade because it flooded at high tide. The house was half sea itself, like the semi-submerged apartment constructed by the renegade nineteen-sixties scientist John C. Lilly to prove how like dolphins we were – or vice versa – by allowing his researchers to live with their subjects twenty-four hours a day. ‘We all feel as if we were on board ship,’ Captain Williams wrote, ‘– and the roaring of the sea brought this idea even into our beds.’