by Philip Hoare
Despite its intersexual air and echoes of the poet’s preoccupation with the classical hermaphrodite, nothing could be less Shelleyan than this unwieldy Victorian lump, donated by his daughter-in-law, Jane, Lady Shelley, to University College in 1893. It is enclosed under a blue dome scattered with gold stars – just as the somewhat exuberant Lady Shelley maintained a violet-scented Shelley Sanctum in her Bournemouth house in which, lit by a red sanctuary lamp, were preserved locks of his hair and blue pots filled with slivers of his bone. Another jar was said to contain part of his heart, wrapped in a page torn by Mary from her copy of his Adonaïs. In her devotion, Jane had made the pilgrimage to Casa Magni hoping to experience a vision, and claimed an Italian peasant told her of Shelley, ‘he was like Jesus Christ. I carried him in my arms through the water – yes, he was like Jesus Christ.’ She was clearly thinking of the memorial to Shelley in Christchurch Priory, where he lay in Mary’s arms as another pietà, a trail of seaweed wrapped around his arm.
Oxford’s version lies locked behind an iron grille, to which Lady Shelley was given a golden key. On its unveiling, the memorial was enthusiastically received by one commentator: ‘It is as if the restless sea, in whose breast he had been tossed all those years, had laid him at last upon the threshold from which he had been first cast forth.’ A more sceptical critic was less impressed – he described the sculpture as ‘a slice of turbot laid out on a fisherman’s scale’.
Having made my way through the city’s intimidating stone lanes to this cloistered shrine, I’m surprised at its scale. It’s much larger than I’d expected: the size of a hall in a stately home, its gates and bars imprisoning the poet who was gated and barred from this place. The memorial is set a few steps down, below ground level, forcing the visitor to descend as to a saint’s effigy in a crypt. Once the chamber was flooded by undergraduates as a prank, turned into a pond, complete with goldfish. I’d like to have seen this space glinting with fish like a grotto, the light of the waves rippling on its sky-dome; a miniature Casa Magni, lacking only a few sporting dolphins from the Tethys Sea. But this is a wrecked casualty, wheeled in on a trolley. In a corner of the chamber there’s a radiator fixed to the wall, as if to warm up the corpse.
This is no place for Shelley, drowned or dry. ‘The dead were no longer able to object or to disgrace themselves,’ as Denton Welch wrote. ‘Once the power to ridicule or to degrade them had been taken away from them they could be manipulated; they were ready then for honour and remembrance.’ As I peer through the cage, the sprawled Shelley becomes a broken bird, tossed in the stormy surf and thrown onto the shore.
I cross the busy street and descend into the gloomy basement of a nearby building while the city’s cyclists and pedestrians weave above me. The bunker contains a conference table, an overhead projector, and a whiteboard on which some explanatory notes have been lately wiped away. Anything from health and safety to philosophy to procedures for the evacuation of priceless treasures might be discussed down here.
I wait for Stephen Hebron to return from a distant store. He arrives carrying a small grey cardboard box. Its catalogue-cum-convict’s number – MS Shelley adds. e.20, fol.721 – gives few clues to its contents. The package contains a package within a package within a package; Stephen unwinds the cord that ties the first, unfolds the flaps that envelop the second, then unsheathes the sea-green leather and gilt-blocked slipcase which reverentially protects the last. The ceremony is somewhat undermined by the final object: a block of what looks like blotting paper, loosely stitched – or rather, coming apart – at its exposed spine.
Laid on a pair of anodyne grey foam pads, this precious artefact might as well be sopping wet, since it is all that remains of the notebook which Shelley took with him on his last voyage. Fished from the wreck when the boat was raised, it comprises fewer than fifty pages of Shelley’s workings, doodles, sums and summations in pencil and ink. Amazingly, and for all the control extended around this object, I am permitted to handle it without gloves. It is like having unprotected sex with a book.
Soaked, splattered, stuck together; washed-out, faded, mildewed and bleached by its improbable survival since leaving the poet’s hand and being subjected to history’s spin-cycle, these pages are more pattern than writing, more kelp than literature. Like the sodden sheets Trelawny found around the poet by his Italian pool, they turn as rags in my hands, their fine laid paper made of pulp and cloth, layered with meaning and unmeaning. The brown ink bleeds into itself or disappears entirely mid-word, erased by some censoring agent, as if the authorities had finally redacted the rebel’s mad treason.
Now in climate-controlled captivity, it will never see another storm. Its crumpled, frayed, salted and sanded leaves have been flattened out and conserved, catalogued and boxed up – for our safety, as much as its own, like nuclear waste. Pages which endured the mighty tempest are too fragile to see the twenty-first-century light of day. Too late, too soon, too powerful, this collection of incantations. ‘And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,’ Prospero says, ‘I’ll drown my book.’
Shelley’s italic hand slopes into itself, colliding one letter with another, trying to catch up with his ideas. The book – but it is no mere book, one of those bound prisons of words – is filled with his elegy to Keats, his Adonaïs, whom he considered to have been murdered by the critics, yet who was now ‘made one with Nature’, free from ‘the contagion of the world’s slow stain’. Shelley’s thoughts sweep across these pages, the way a crosswind sweeps over a calm sea. Animated with cosmic signs and wonder-animals, from swallows to ‘obscene ravens’, careering to its un-ending, the book bursts, images pulling at their binding, unstitched with violent imagining.
On the cover of another journal, Shelley had used a knife to carve out the words SINCERITY AND ZEAL. Here, almost every word or line is crossed out in favour of a superior idea or arrangement; and that in turn revised, revision upon revision, cut up and sliced. The poet’s thought processes visibly arrange themselves across the pages, even as they fade away and trail into nothingness. He was racing his own fate, this starman. Sometimes the words seem to gather in an unfilterable cluster, heading down a dead end. Momentarily defeated, or perhaps rocked by a wave on Don Juan, Shelley stops, overwhelmed, and starts to doodle a tree or a boat, his quill quivering over the page. With the words ‘eternal living stars, which smile on its despair’, he pauses to add a stellar mass, an exploding future vision of a black hole.
Now other images hove into view, scratched into the thick Italian paper: a prancing nude cartoon man; a huge phallus. And strangest of all, a spiky demon, a cousin of that Tan-yr-allt imp, morphing out of an inkblot into an angular semi-human figure with talons and a bird’s beak, breaking free from a tree or out of a painting by Bosch. Even unto the last, as the waves rose up and he was sucked under, Shelley remained a haunted man.
The breath whose might I have invok’d in song
Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!
I am born darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonaïs, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
ZEROANDEVERYTHINGTOGETHER
I lie in the ward through the night, watching wild people in their beds, caught in their uncurtained dramas. A ninety-two-year-old man cries out for someone to come and relieve the pain in his neuropathic legs, when he has already been told there’s nothing they can do for him. His reiterated groans are awful to hear, but you get used to them after a while, you even switch off, like the nurses do as they get on with their jobs, logging our data onto the computer, waking us up at regular intervals to shine torches in our eyes and ask if we know where we are. I don’t even know what floor of the building I’m on. Am I on the top or down in the
basement? It could be day or night or neither in here. There are no windows to betray the natural world; only the hermetic world of medicine, a sealed culture unto itself, responsible to unspoken codes designed to perpetuate as much as to minister.
When it first happened, time stood still. Or perhaps it went into reverse, rewinding to wipe the precise moment of impact from my memory, even before I’d experienced it. The progress of my life stopped; and restarted. Whatever occurred in between was lost, dissolved by the adrenaline speeding up my heart to hasten me out of the trauma. Entire spaces fell out of my brain. I knew I had a good friend in the same city, but I couldn’t remember her name or even her face. My eyes swam. Yet I felt no pain, standing there over the dark pool that my head had left behind in the gutter as a Polish woman, the first on the scene, said, ‘Oh no oh no oh no.’ I asked urgently for water, and when it came I used it to try and wash the blood out of my favourite stripy shirt.
Later, an investigator would examine the CCTV footage of the accident, a playback in grainy slow-motion. Hurtling through a kind of tunnel created by a pair of tall buildings, I do not notice the low barrier slung across the road. My new brakes are all too efficient. I see the obstruction too late, but not too late to brake. And as I do, my bike is left behind and I carry on, tumbling like an acrobat over the unlit barrier and landing on my head, hitting the tarmac with my brow.
The fact that all this takes place in twilight only makes it more cinematic – and not just in retrospect or in the film I’ll never see, but in the unscheduled performance outside which I stand, stranded, pulling myself to my feet and feeling only annoyance that I’ve missed my train home and worrying about my bike lying abandoned on the kerb. I want to see it all rewound, from another angle, in the way that I witnessed my first accident, standing at the bus stop under the butcher’s clock on the way to school one morning, when a boy and his bike collided with a car at the busy junction, his body flying through the air, tumbling over the bonnet with a bounce as he shouted out ‘Mummy,’ much as deserters called for their mothers when they were shot at dawn.
The darkness of the night seemed to swallow up what followed. I don’t remember how I got to the hospital, although I do remember a security guard by my side in the car and wanting to be held, to stop the momentum of the crash still reverberating through my body. I felt utterly abandoned and alone. As I waited to be seen in A&E, the geriatric woman opposite me sat up in bed, having taken off her blouse – it was one of the hottest nights of the year, in a heatwave that had lasted for weeks – exposing her yellowy breasts. She too was calling. ‘Why won’t someone come and help me?’ And I thought of my mother in intensive care in the last week of her life, wired-up in a darkened airless ward, the instruments around her beeping out the fathoms of her descent as she sank into some unknown abyss. A young nurse stitched up my eyebrow, sewing it back together. I wished she wasn’t chatting as she remade my face.
Wheeled into the ward for overnight observation, everything is twilit, warm and womb-like. It is comforting to be among strangers. During the night I get up to piss, but almost faint as I do, a result of my low blood pressure, compressed in this bathysphere. The doctor orders that I should be hydrated. A handsome nurse tries to stick a needle in my thin arms. Unable to find a vein, he repeats the procedure again and again, digging around in my skin. I apologise. Then I feel the cold flow of the saline, the sea inside of me.
‘There’s not much of you, is there?’ says Sue the ward nurse, altogether too breezy for 3 a.m.; she talks and laughs out loud with little concession to the hour or her sleeping patients. Lying in pain I can’t quite discern, I do not hold it against her. Three hours later the light levels shift, as they do at the end of an overnight flight, and I receive two slices of toast, my reward for having survived.
All the rhythms of this place are removed from the world. It is a surrogate society to which anyone might belong yet where no one really does. It offers a kind of physical transcendence, a halfway house; a state suspended between bleeping machines and human bureaucracy, where bodies are more important than people. As a boy in the nineteen-sixties I feared hospitalisation almost as much as I feared conscription, sucked into soulless organisations bent on my suppression. I remember visiting my father in an old brick hospital on the other side of the city and seeing him lying in the men’s ward. The room was gloomy and oppressive. He was suffering from a suspected heart condition; he told us how one of his fellow patients had blister burns the size of tomatoes. The redness and roundness and the ripeness lodged in an interior from which one might never escape; although now I wonder if I ever saw that scene, instead of imagining it from our car parked outside.
In the morning, I’m wheeled out again, not into the light, but into the darkened x-ray room, where I’m spread out on a table, unetherised. There I’m examined for breakages and whatever else might have happened to all that stuff crammed inside my skin. My ribcage is briefly irradiated; I think of it lit up inside me. Then my arm is stretched out on a leaded mat marked out with white lines like a miniature tennis court. I’m being squared up and sectioned. The radiographer delivers the news sympathetically: my left hand, with which I write, is fractured, and will need a cast.
When you are young, you are conscious of your body’s perfection; the little god that you are. The older you get, the stranger your body becomes; a covert, skin-covered landscape of yourself, supported by your own scaffolding. I remember something Mark said about how your skeleton falls into place as you get older, getting comfy in its positions; he wriggled his shoulders as he told me this. I fall in with a pattern set by myself and my parents; I might or might not be recognised from my interior as much as anyone might or might not know me from outside. You know your own body as much as you know the wiring in your house. We all carry our selves as if we were burdens rather than miracles.
And what seems so familiar is nothing of the kind. I was once told that my shoulderblades were unnaturally far apart; that one shoulder was inordinately developed compared to the other; that one leg was longer than the other, too, and that my spinal column was bent in a sort of S shape. And complaining of shortness of breath after a long cold winter, I saw another doctor type on her screen that I had ‘air hunger’, as though I was greedy to live, taking up other people’s oxygen. So I wasn’t the same person I thought I’d been, all these years; I was as different as we all feel we are. After all, I’ve had at least six or seven skeletons in my life, my bones continually replaced. Like you I am a wonder of regeneration. Perhaps I might yet metamorphose and my scapulae grow those wings; or maybe being so strangely formed accounts for why I feel happier in the water – if only I could breathe there, too.
Later, I’ll open the envelope I’m given by the radiographer and look at the images illicitly, as if spying on myself. Sliding the disk into my white computer, I see my inner space: the shadowy me, the me-ness of me no one can see, not even me. It might be a photograph of my soul, or a sea creature with a wonky spine, all flickering and glowing, all clouds and bones, skeins and roots, growing into ghostly coral and pearls.
Back home I photograph myself in the mirror, through another lens. My pale eye looks out through the lurid bruises as they ripen, in the same way a piece of fruit ripens and decays. My face changes over the days, sequencing like a time-lapse film as it seeks to repair itself, to return me to me. I look closer at my eyes, as if I’d never seen them before or known what colour they were. I think of my mother’s eye, which was not the eye she was born with but a graft, a cornea taken from a young man killed in a motorbike accident in an unsuccessful attempt to treat her glaucoma. It was his eye, stitched into her own, that I looked at when I kissed her goodbye, on another hospital bed, her red hair turned silver, and splayed on her pillow.
I’m left with the altered topography of my body. A new natural history. My wounded eyebrow is restitched with electric-blue sutures, the spreading stain like badly-applied glam make-up, the bruises blushing pink and methylated purple
and iodine-yellow like some decadent flower beneath my skin. I yearn with sympathy for my stupidity. And I think, this is my last transformation, the last time I looked beautiful. The first was a long time ago.
In Edwin Ernest Morgan’s glamorous painting from the nineteen-thirties, Beacon Cove is alive with radiant sun-worshippers. They are arrayed along its semi-circular tiers which lead down to the sea like a temple to health. Men in soft white shirts and flannels, their collars upturned to signal their sporty appeal, chat with young women with bobbed hair, wearing tight bathing costumes that show off their lithe bodies and tanned legs. Agatha Christie liked to swim off this Torquay beach as a young girl, although on one occasion she nearly drowned here.
Books are read, children play. Emerging from the half-timbered, green-and-white-painted tearoom, once a lifeboat shed, an aproned waitress with a white headdress, looking a little like a nurse, serves tea to her customers sitting on cane chairs. Others lounge in shaded deckchairs. There’s a faint air of the interwar sanatorium; the artist painted his picture from the vantage point of the medicinal baths set on the rocky headland overlooking the cove, an establishment which contained and concentrated the elements of the resort, offering seaweed, sulphur and pine baths, and a Vita Glass Sun Lounge, complete with ‘the latest apparatus for administering ultra violet rays’. Like a railway poster or a postcard, continually reprinted to sell the sea, Morgan’s painting dates the eternity of a resort; the way it doesn’t change and always does. These people are the same people, always, only in different clothes. It doesn’t matter that when I visit Beacon Cove in the evening, its only occupants are a group of teenagers doing drugs, looking up at me shiftily from the concrete steps.