RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  At first Shelley loved it; Trelawny saw him as a South Sea islander, delighting to sport in the water. The poet said, ‘I wish I was far away on some lone island, with no other inhabitant than seals, sea-birds, and water-rats,’ and told Trelawny that instead of wasting his life reading Greek and Latin, he ought to have learned swimming and sailoring instead. To that end, he resolved to acquire his own boat. But when Captain Roberts, who was to build it, came to lunch, he was entertained by the three women of the house; Shelley was nowhere to be seen.

  Suddenly, the poet appeared in the shadows at the back of the room, trying to creep upstairs. Challenged by his wife on his behaviour, Shelley approached the table to explain. He didn’t have to: he was naked and fresh from the sea, a selkie who’d shed his sealish skin. The women affected to avert their eyes. ‘Yet he was good to look at,’ André Maurois imagined, ‘his hair full of seaweed, his slender body wet and scented with the salt of the sea.’ But Shelley’s dreams were increasingly filled with images of disaster. They came in like the tide. Edward Williams was standing on the terrace with Shelley when the poet grabbed him by the arm and stared down at the waves, saying, ‘There it is again! – there!’ He’d seen a naked child rising out of the sea, clapping its hands and smiling at him.

  ‘Shelley sees spirits and alarms the whole house,’ said Mary. Like Tan-yr-allt and the Villa Diodati, Casa Magni seemed to raise ghosts from the water; the former monastery had become Nightmare Abbey. In another terror, Shelley saw Edward and Jane ‘in the most horrible condition, their bodies lacerated – their bones starting through their skin, the faces pale yet stained with blood’. In his dream, Edward told him, ‘Get up, Shelley, the sea is flooding the house and it is all coming down,’ and as the poet rose and went to his window, he saw the sea rushing in and himself strangling his own wife. The water he had tried to control in Wales was now lapping at his door, and Shelley bore witness to the most awful apparition yet: a cloaked figure that came to his bedside and which he followed to the hall, where it lifted its hood to reveal his own face, asking, ‘Siete satisfatto?’ – Are you content?

  The fear was infectious. Jane Williams claimed that while Shelley was out sailing she had seen him walking on the terrace, twice. This hyped-up atmosphere of signs and wonders was stirred by a sequence of real tragedy: Shelley’s young daughter Allegra had just died of typhus; Mary was about to miscarry; Byron’s illegitimate daughter by Claire died. These Shelleyan orphans seemed to announce their fatherlessness even before they were born. There was no consolation for any of them in this world, least of all in the sea. It did not care. Nothing could help them. Everything was speeding up; life and death were collapsing in on each other.

  On the afternoon of 8 July, Shelley set sail across the bay on a twenty-four-foot, twin-sailed yacht, one of a pair designed by Trelawny and built by Roberts for him and Byron. Shelley had intended to call his boat Ariel, but when it arrived, Byron had already christened it Don Juan, and the name was painted in garish letters on the forward mainsail. Shelley insisted it should be removed; he didn’t want to sail under his friend’s most infamous creation. The fact that Byron’s poem included the sinking of the ship which carried his immoral hero was hardly a good omen, either.

  Shelley, three weeks from his thirtieth birthday, was dressed in maritime fashion, in a short double-breasted reefer jacket, white nankeen trousers and black leather boots. He was accompanied by Edward Williams and an eighteen-year-old English boy, Charles Vivian, ‘a smart sailor lad’ who’d come with the yacht when it arrived from the shipyard; he was ‘quick and handy, and used to boats’. That afternoon, they were heading back home from Leghorn harbour. Trelawny had set sail alongside them on Byron’s Bolivar, but soon lost sight of Don Juan in a thick sea fog. One of his crew looked at the gathering clouds and said, ‘The devil is brewing mischief.’

  By six o’clock the storm had struck. A passing ship told them to reef in their sails or they would be lost; Shelley was heard to shout in his shrill voice, ‘No,’ and prevented Williams from doing so. The boat sank under full sail. Later, there would be claims that it had been rammed by raiders who thought it was laden with Byron’s gold. It was five days before the wreck was discovered, and ten before the bodies were found, three miles apart. ‘The sea, by its restless moaning,’ Mary recalled of those suspended days in which Shelley neither existed nor did not exist, ‘seemed to desire to inform us of what we would not learn.’ She waited like her biblical namesake at the tomb. The atheist poet had wanted to sleep at the bottom of the sea. The sea would not let him.

  Williams was discovered undressed, apparently in the act of attempting to swim, although the sea habitually strips its victims. Since he could not swim, it was assumed that Shelley had drowned at once; he’d told Trelawny that if their ship did wreck he would sink immediately, to save others the danger of trying to rescue him. Almost unrecognisable now, he was identified by his nankeen trousers and white silk stockings, and a volume of Keats’s poems – the book was found stuffed, as if hurriedly, in his pocket. The third of the party, young Charles Vivian, was found on a far beach. The official report stated that his body was clad in a cambric shirt, cotton waistcoat, blue-and-white-striped trousers; the image of a neat sailor boy made horrific by the fact that the head had been eaten by fishes. Not for Vivian the rites which would honour his renowned, drowned shipmates. His loss was barely noticed, in the corner of the picture. He was buried in the sand, like a clam.

  Williams’s and Shelley’s remains were also temporarily interred on the beach, ready to be cremated there; partly because Italian law demanded it in order to guard against plague, and partly because the bodies were so badly mangled. Trelawny, with a mixture of the practical and the piratical, devised the pagan ritual by which they were to be disposed. He had a furnace made of iron bars and sheet iron, a kind of human oven. Trelawny, Byron and Leigh Hunt assembled on the strand. The spectacle had drawn a crowd, including a number of richly dressed ladies. Soldiers gathered the fuel: brushwood and driftwood, flotsam from former wrecks. Frankincense, salt, wine and oil were thrown on the pyre, as if some classical hero were being sent off to the underworld at the outer bounds of the ocean.

  As the flames consumed Williams’s body – its meat more like the carcase of an animal than that of a man – Byron announced, ‘Let us try the strength of these waters that drowned our friends. How far out do you think they were when their boat sank?’ At that, he stripped off and waded into the sea, followed by Trelawny. They swam nearly a mile out before Byron, as usual, got sick, and they had to return to shore.

  Shelley’s assumption at Viareggio the following day was even more dramatic. Trelawny claimed that ‘The lonely and grand scenery that surrounded us so exactly harmonized with Shelley’s genius that I could imagine his spirit soaring over us,’ while Leigh Hunt was reminded of an airy spirit, ‘found dead in a solitary corner of the earth, its wings stiffened, its warm heart cold’.

  They were about to burn Icarus. In attendance were the same group of grieving friends commemorated years later in Louis Édouard Fournier’s famous painting – a fanciful, preternatural scene, since it included Mary Shelley kneeling on the shore despite the fact that she was miles away that day.

  As the poet’s remains were dug up, Trelawny felt they were no more than wolves or wild dogs scavenging Shelley’s corpse, ‘tearing out his battered and naked body from the pure yellow sand that lay so lightly over it, to drag him back to the light of day’. At one point the shovel struck Shelley’s skull with a dull hollow sound. His corpse was now ‘of a dark and ghastly indigo colour’. Trelawny had brought his ‘iron machine’, and the same rites were observed; he noted that more wine was poured over the poet’s dead body than his living body had ever consumed. This, and the oil and salt, turned the flames yellow as the air was made wavy and tremulous by the Promethean fire. Shelley was a fallen comet, still smouldering on the beach. Then the corpse fell apart, and the brains bubbled in their cranial cauldron.

/>   Byron, unable to bear the sight, had already taken off all his clothes again to swim back to his yacht. Meanwhile, back on the gothic barbecue, Shelley’s heart resisted the flames. Trelawny snatched it from the fire, and when the embers had died down, swept the poet’s ashes into a box and returned to Bolivar himself.

  Were these real people at all? Once Shelley had drowned, the dramatis personae were dispersed, as if they had only been held together by his magic. Trelawny proposed marriage to Mary Shelley, but she declined, saying that her name would look pretty on her tombstone. Hogg proposed to Jane Williams – who had to reveal that she had never been married to Edward Williams, and still had a husband somewhere in India.

  Byron became ever more Byronic, pursuing his championship of the Greeks and funding his own private army to free them from the Ottoman Empire. Trelawny accompanied him partway on the journey, giving up Benjamin, his African-American groom, to Byron – his blackness ‘a mark of dignity’ – as well as donating his green embroidered military jacket to the lord. Also at Byron’s side was his other loyal accomplice – Lyon the Newfoundland, who had replaced Boatswain. Throughout the voyage, Byron and Trelawny swam every day, diving off Bolivar at noon, ‘in defiance of sharks or weather’, accompanied by Lyon, who like his predecessor was ever ready to leap into the water to join his master. It was the only exercise Byron got, since his disability made it difficult to walk on deck, stumping about like Ahab.

  Sailing into battle in a new heroic outfit – crowned with a shiny Greek helmet with a great feathery crest like a bizarre bird – Byron would meet his end, which he had long predicted, not drowned as his friends had been – since he had been born veiled – but expiring in a dreary villa next to a shallow, slimy salt marsh, where he wrote his final poem, an appeal to the last of his boy loves, fifteen-year-old Loukas Chalandritsanos: ‘Such is this maddening fascination grown, | So strong thy magic or so weak am I.’ The pain of this unrequited affection fatally lowered the lord’s spirits. Less than two years after Shelley’s drowning, Byron, who insisted on riding in the rain, caught a chill. He died of a fever on 19 April 1824, during a violent electrical storm, as if Ariel had come for him. He was thirty-six years old.

  To close the circle, Trelawny composed another macabre scenario which, like almost everything he ever said, may or may not have been true. Wading through the water, he arrived at Byron’s pathetic lying in state five days after his death. His friend looked more beautiful than he had in life: the lines on his face had fallen away, the skin drawn back; no marble bust could match its pallor, his fate. And yet Trelawny remembered how dissatisfied Byron had been with his physical self, and how he had longed to cast it off, too. Sending the lord’s faithful servant, William Fletcher, for a glass of water, Trelawny, left alone in the room, pulled back the sheet that covered the corpse, and discovered the true extent of Byron’s deformity.

  Even though, by his own account, Trelawny must have seen his friend naked many times – once, after swimming, Byron held out his right leg and said, ‘I hope this accursed limb will be knocked off in the war,’ to which Trelawny replied, ‘It won’t improve your swimming’ – the poet’s body was shockingly revealed in this last scene. Not only was his right foot clubbed, but both legs were misshapen and withered to the knees. The dead Byron had the ‘form and features of Apollo’, but ‘the feet and legs of a sylvan satyr’, half hero, half animal.

  Trelawny reeled back, retrospectively working out this conjuring trick, this last transformation. He’d always thought Byron exaggerated his disability for effect, boasting of a body ‘scarce half made up’. Now he recalled, as if in a flashback, the wiles Byron employed to disguise his true self: high-heeled boots with uneven soles, their toes stuffed with cotton wool; trousers tailored wide below the knee and strapped under his instep to cover his twisted legs and feet; the way Byron would half-run, half-totter into a room. His incompleteness was somehow shameful; it seemed to unman him. His constant battle with his weight was part of the same process; Trelawny noted that much of the time that he knew him, Byron existed in a state of semi-starvation. If he grew too heavy, the pressure on his deformed legs meant he could barely walk. What a fragile artifice he seemed, this bone-weakened body, this bastard self-construction, this charming man who seduced women but loved boys. Little wonder he’d left England to seek the solace of the sea. For Byron, so ill-suited to the land, the water was the only place where he could be himself.

  After many more adventures, violent and amorous, surviving an assassination attempt and siring a daughter by a child bride, Trelawny retired to Putney, espousing vegetarianism and temperance and cold water, eschewing underwear and overcoats and hot food. Yet his wanderlust drew him to new exploits: a vague attempt to found a utopian commune in Virginia, and a stupendous, if not stupid, swim across the Hudson above Niagara Falls, nearly dying in the process. ‘Seeing the land on each side I thought it absurd to be drowned in a river. I heard the voices of the dead calling to me. I actually thought, as my mind grew darker, that they were tugging at my feet.’ It would have been, he thought, ‘a fitting end to my wild meteor-like life’.

  Even in his final retreat, to the genteel south-coast village of Sompting in Sussex – where he swam a mile in the English Channel every day, whatever the weather – Trelawny played out his role. He padded about barefoot, chopped his own wood, drew water from his well. He also received young admirers such as the sandal-wearing Edward Carpenter, who shared his vegetarianism and disdain for ‘bathing-drawers’ (and had recently returned from Massachusetts, where he’d paid tribute to Thoreau by swimming in Walden Pond). Trelawny remained a republican and an atheist, yet like Byron and Shelley he was assumed into Victorian legend, partly through his own mythomania, partly through art. In The North-West Passage, painted in 1874 by John Everett Millais and subtitled ‘It might be done and England should do it’, the grizzled and bearded sea-king is seen seated beneath a portrait of Nelson, hero of a battle Trelawny had never seen. There are draped ensigns and marine charts, and a glass of grog to hand (the abstemious subject protested at this detail, and threatened to challenge Millais to a duel). A young girl, supposed to be Trelawny’s daughter, reads at his feet. The reference to The Tempest seems clear. And as we look over his shoulder, through a window and out to sea, we see a single yacht, passing by in the distance, with somewhere to go.

  In the fast-running waters of the Tavy which rush off Dartmoor, accelerated by its granite and turned brown by its peat, I swim with Tangle the retriever, both our heads held high. He paddles with webbed feet, and occasionally dips his greying muzzle down into the water like a bear, nosing about the riverbed. Someone leans over the bridge and shouts, ‘Very Lord Byron.’ Tangle climbs out and shakes his coat, from sleek head to shaggy tail.

  Tangle is my Boatswain. He puts me in mind of a story told by Caitlin Davies, of a race in 1880 in the Thames between one R. Smith, ‘a known aquatic performer’, and a six-year-old black retriever named Now Then, who had previously rescued seven people from drowning. The dog won easily, still swimming towards London Bridge after two hours, long after his human rival had fallen far behind. An etching shows the dog’s profile held above the waves, just as Byron’s dogs swam heroically with him.

  Tangle is my braveheart, running up to the tor, his black coat flying like a Renaissance prince, with a twisted green silken rope for his leash. He is often approached by other dogs, yet is quite unassuming in his handsomeness, barely acknowledging, with a sideways glance, the admiring stares of passersby as he walks on. They are envious of my elegant escort, my charismatic canine companion. He cannot be far from water for long. He runs back to the river, pausing to ensure that he knows where I am, and vice versa. This is his domain. Most noble of his breed, he dashes over moors where his wolfish ancestors prowled. Down in the valley of the Dart, where maple leaves drift past us like yellow stars in the dark river, Tangle dips his snout, seeing what I do not, raising his head to shake and snort, clearing his nostrils for a second
try. He sits beside me in the autumn sun, sniffing the air, scenting worlds beyond my senses, tolerant of my ineptitude, ignorant as I am of the reality around me. He knows the hour of my coming and my going.

  Dogs of course live faster, more intense lives than ours, cramming in every experience, rendering ours dull and sluggish in comparison. They experience ecstasy and despair every minute while we waste time, suffering over tediously elongated spans, hanging around long after our expiry dates. We may think them bound to our will, but dogs know we are bound to theirs. ‘For the dumb creatures,’ as Orlando, keeper of her own elk-hounds, was aware, ‘are far better judges both of identity and character than we are.’ I wonder what Tangle remembers; or if he is shackled by memory at all, in the way we humans are cursed with the knowledge of our mortality.

  Mary Shelley ‘remained trapped by memories both idealized and remorseful’, as Richard Holmes would write, although her life after Shelley ‘attained a curious stillness, interrupted only by sea-bathing at Sandgate’, in Kent. Her husband’s ashes had long since been interred in Italian earth, in the same churchyard in Rome where John Keats lay. Keats had asked for one line on his stone, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ On Shelley’s, Trelawny had Ariel’s song inscribed.

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  Years later, Trelawny’s own ashes would be laid loyally by Shelley’s side.

  All that clamour has long since fallen quiet, like the lull of a tide, leaving only memorials standing proud. In Oxford, Shelley’s half life was commemorated – by the college that expelled him – with a weighty sculpture by Edward Onslow Ford.

  The naked poet – for whom Ford’s own fourteen-year-old son Wolfram had modelled – lies splayed over a sea-green slab, supported by bronze-winged lions and mourned by a female muse. Shelley is rendered in marmoreal white, languidly draped as much in an opium daze as in drowned demise, his frail body carved out of ten tons of crystalline limestone, itself formed from crushed sea creatures.