by Ty Roth
“This is what?” Gordon replied.
“Her last wish. This. Not the ashes; not the message in a bottle. It’s you and me together. That was her real last wish. This whole adventure was Shelly’s way of forcing you and me to be together. Don’t you see, she gave each of us pieces of the puzzle. I knew of the abortion, but she told you about her father. She told you where to spread the ashes, but she gave me the disc to play. We couldn’t have done this without each other.”
Gordon contemplated my theory for a second, then said, “Keats, you just may be right. It would be …”
“So Shelly,” I finished.
20
Now that she is gone, Shelly has entrusted her most prized possession—George Gordon Byron—to me. Gordon and I have started to hang out now and then. On the last Saturday of June, Gordon threw me on the back of his Jet Ski, and we spent two hours jumping the wakes of ferries, freighters, and powerboats as they crisscrossed Ogontz Bay. In July, I convinced Gordon to come with me to Planned Parenthood, where I’ve begun volunteering. Sha’niqua had the two of us stuffing envelopes until our fingertips bled. And, just this past weekend, we took the Corsair back to North Bass and visited with Shelly.
With high school behind him, Gordon’s second novel in the Manfred series has been completed and targeted for release next summer. He’s taking a year off from school to “get his shit together” and “to chill,” but Gordon with time on his hands sounds like a bad situation to me. He says that eventually he’d like to attend college back East, somewhere near his father’s relatives. I haven’t asked about it, but in a post on his website, Gordon congratulated his sister, Augusta, on her marriage to the son of a prominent family in Virginia, and on the birth of their baby girl, Elizabeth, who was born the very day of Shelly’s drowning.
I spent most of this past summer writing this manuscript and watching a mother and her three children slowly renovating and moving into the house next door. The oldest girl is stunningly pretty and around my age. I’ve heard the others call her Fanny.
In other news, the Disease has begun a surge, and Tom is sicker than ever. I’ve also picked up the guitar and have found that I am a quick study. I’ve begun to convert some of my poems to lyrics, having resigned myself to the regrettable reality that in the dismal condition of today’s poetry market, if I want my voice to be heard, I’d better put it to music. I’ve even got a few tracks posted to my page, and I’m putting together a webcam video for YouTube. Who knows? Maybe that’s my way to defeat this dying thing: my voice, my words, my music, even my unremarkable face forever inhabiting cyberspace.
Which brings me back to the beginning: love and death.
In the course of the three years during which my life had intertwined with Shelly’s, I’d pretty much come to accept the Trinity community’s final view of Gordon as a real asshole: oversexed, arrogant, and self-absorbed. What Shelly gave me, in sharing the story of their lives, was a more open-minded way of considering him—hell, a more open-minded way of considering everything and everyone. What Shelly gave me, in asking me to share the spreading of her ashes alongside Gordon, was a friend.
For his part, Gordon showed me that choosing not to burden another with an impossible love may be the most selfless act of love of all. He knew that he could never love Shelly the way she deserved to be loved. So he never came on to her, never seduced her. And, except for their onetime overreaching, they both understood and accepted that reality. She’d once told me in reference to Gordon, “He ignores me because he loves me.” It didn’t make much sense to me then. Now it is crystal.
Together they have shown me the selflessness required when choosing to love or not to love, and because of Gordon’s insistence on a life of his own defining, and Shelly’s identical insistence on her death, I’m a little less afraid of both.
Sometimes, if I find myself thinking about Shelly or the events of that day, I play the R.E.M. disc, and if I close my eyes, I swear I can feel the kiss she left on my cheek the last time I saw her, and I can smell the sea and the sand of the tiny strand where she lives forever.
So, what I said at the beginning, I’ll repeat at the end: learn to deal with the truth of dying, and you’ll experience the awesomeness of living. Death and love are real. That’s all I know on earth, and all I need to know.
AFTERWORD
Just as it would be a mistake to study Shakespeare’s history plays for an understanding of the succession of English monarchs from the thirteenth through much of the sixteenth century, one should not read So Shelly for its dogged adherence to historical accuracy. Like Shakespeare, I would never let historical facts get in the way of telling a good story. I hope that the transposition of Shelley, Byron, and Keats two centuries into the future demonstrates my faith in the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief.
Admittedly, my inclination throughout the storytelling process was to emphasize each of the poets’ “better angels,” for it is indisputable that they all possessed off-putting character flaws of differing degrees. On the relatively minor end of the spectrum, John Keats could be intensely self-absorbed and aloof. Percy Shelley, despite his heartfelt sympathy for victims of the wide variety of social injustices of the early nineteenth century, could be brutally insensitive to the emotional well-being of his most intimate friends and family members. Worst of all, in his egomania, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was often completely oblivious, if not downright cruel, in the treatment of his family and social intimates.
So, what of So Shelly is grounded in historical truth? To begin with, it is important to understand that the character of Shelly is actually a blending of the life and personality of Percy Shelley with that of his wife, Mary, the author of the classic novel Frankenstein. Both Percy and Mary had strained relationships with their fathers and distant, at best, relationships with their mothers or stepmothers. Percy’s father was fabulously wealthy. As a child, Percy was a bright and inquisitive boy who loved the outdoors, where his imagination ran wild. But in formal educational settings, he was a distracted student, peeved by being made to learn subjects in which he had little interest. During his university days, Percy had a falling-out with his father after he penned an essay titled “The Necessity of Atheism.” Their relationship never recovered, and the publication of the essay resulted in Percy’s expulsion from school and, ultimately, Percy’s status as a pariah.
Mary Shelley’s controversial feminist mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died soon after giving birth to Mary. Her father, the radical social philosopher William Godwin, soon remarried. Mary’s new stepmother was Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom Mary’s father had a daughter, Claire. Mary nurtured a strong dislike for her stepmother, who showed great favoritism for her own daughter and acted as a wedge between Mary and her father. Frances (Fanny) was actually Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter from a previous relationship—unlike in the novel, where I’ve made her Shelly’s stepsister along with Claire. Claire would later travel with Mary and Percy in a sort of threesome that inspired many scandalous rumors. During one such trip, on which Byron accompanied them, Claire became pregnant with his child, and she eventually bore him an illegitimate daughter, Allegra. Claire developed a stalkerlike obsession with Byron, which inspired in him great anguish and loathing.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the son of a sea captain, John Byron, nicknamed “Mad Jack.” John was absent for his son’s birth and abandoned Byron; his wife, Catherine; and his daughter from a previous marriage, Augusta, by the time Byron was three years old. John Byron had married Catherine only for her inheritance, which he managed to drain in the few remaining years of his dissolute life. Catherine had a weak-willed and cloying personality, but she was indulgent of her ungrateful son. Together, they lived in a country estate that had seen better days, but she couldn’t afford the necessary renovations.
Byron was born with a clubfoot, which mortified him his entire life. He took great pains to mask his handicap and to prove that he was a physical match for any “normal” boy. As a c
hild, he was sexually abused by his nanny, May Gray. He also had a tendency toward chubbiness. As he was incredibly vain regarding his appearance, in order to combat the weight gain, he undertook periods of a strict regimen of exercise and extreme dieting.
During his time in prep school, Byron was a big man on campus—a prankster, a gifted athlete, and a big spender. Not completely atypical of students in the English single-sex prep schools of the period, he also had, most likely, homosexual relationships with, or at least homoerotic feelings for, various boys, typically underclassmen. One of the most intense of these relationships was with William Harness.
Despite his clubfoot, Byron became a champion boxer and swimmer. During a tour of Turkey and Greece, he re-created Leander’s legendary swimming of the Hellespont. His traveling companion was John Hobhouse. On that trip, Byron also managed to deface the Temple of Poseidon by carving his initials in a pillar; they can still be seen today. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published when he was but twenty-four years old, was an overnight bestseller. Byron commented on its success, saying, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.” Manfred is a highly autobiographical verse drama, in which the title character expresses both incestuous longing for his sister and a deeply humanistic philosophy of living.
Byron had a tendency to fall in love with female relatives, among them a cousin, Margaret Parker; another cousin, Mary Chaworth (renamed Annesley in the novel); and, most scandalously, his half sister, Augusta. It is generally accepted that he and Augusta had an incestuous affair during which Augusta’s daughter, Elizabeth, was most likely conceived.
Two of Byron’s other most noted lovers were married women: Teresa Guiccioli and Caroline Lamb. Though obviously adulterous, his four-year affair with Guiccioli was one of the most stable romantic relationships of his life. His affair with Lamb, however, was as tempestuous as his affair with Guiccioli had been steady. After initially describing Byron as “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” Lamb began a summer affair with him. After his inevitable rejection of her, she became his stalker.
The last years of Byron’s life were spent supporting, both financially and by his own participation, the Greek war of independence from the Turks.
Although his poverty is often exaggerated, John Keats came from the lower middle class, at best, and he was much the social inferior of Shelley and Byron. Diminutive of stature, he shared Byron’s need to prove his worth. Unlike Byron, however, Keats avoided debauched pursuits and took a longer view. He was determined to leave an immortal impression before what he always knew would be his early demise. His fear of a premature death was the result of his seeing both of his parents die young. In addition, he had to nurse his dying brother, Tom, who succumbed to tuberculosis, like their mother.
Of the three second-generation Romantics, Keats died first and at the youngest age. Although he had a relationship—more of a long-distance mutual admiration society—with Shelley, he had virtually no contact with Byron. Unlike Shelley and, to some extent, Byron, Keats did not believe poetry should be used as a tool for social improvement. He believed it should exist as a monument to beauty.
He wrote of the poet’s experience of “negative capability,” which is a blending in and becoming invisible, yet remaining sympathetically sentient, within any environment. This talent is what makes Keats the ideal narrator of So Shelly and accounts for his relative absence from the story as compared to the overwhelming presence of Gordon.
In their lives and in their poetry, Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats crystallized what has proven to be the indomitable spirit of Romanticism. Its emphasis on energy, emotion, optimism, freedom, individual and social betterment, nonconformity, and righteous revolution continues to inspire new generations of young people who starve for a better way than that perpetually offered by the status quo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andronik, Catherine, M. Wildly Romantic: The English Romantic Poets: The Mad, the Bad, and the Dangerous. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007.
Eisler, Benita. Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame. New York: Knopf, 1999.
Grosskurth, Phyllis. Byron: The Flawed Angel. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
Motion, Andrew. Keats: A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.
Seymour, Miranda. Mary Shelley. New York: Grove Press, 2000.
Wroe, Ann. Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank the following people, without whom So Shelly would have never come to fruition:
My wife, Julie, who, for nearly twenty-five years, has tolerated my solitary nature and frequent disappearances into my dark places, yet has managed to be waiting for me upon my return every time.
My sons, Taylor, Travis, and Tanner, whose resilience, goodness, and courage in the face of their own adversities inspire me to adhere to my own credo: Work hard and believe in yourself, and good things will happen.
My parents, Tom and Barb, and my brothers and sisters: Kevin, Lori, Amy, J, Aaron, Troy, and Yon. Whatever I am, I am because of you.
My in-laws, Tony and Peggy Guerra, who not once, despite my lack of real-world skills, questioned my worthiness for their daughter.
My agent, Katherine Boyle, and all at Veritas Literary Agency, for spotting the potential in what proved to be a very rough draft.
My editor at Delacorte Press, Michelle Poploff, and her assistant, Rebecca Short. Their artistry turned a story with not much more than an interesting premise into a real novel, and turned a writer with an occasionally clever turn of phrase into an author.
My friend, Kelly Croy, whose relentless words of optimism and encouragement through four years of rejection continually drew me back to my laptop to eke out a few more words.
My twelfth-grade Modern Novel teacher, later a colleague and friend, Gary Kelley, who woke me to the power of the novel form and sparked a lifelong addiction to the genre. My students, past and present, who consistently prove that young people are beautiful and far more capable than that for which they are given credit.
R.E.M. and Better Than Ezra, whose music and lyrics, I believe, best capture the manic period of young adulthood and played an instrumental role in the production of So Shelly.
Each of you is among the countless atoms that form the pages of this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ty Roth teaches literature and English composition at both the high school and university levels. He has studied Romantic poets and enjoys teaching his students about them. He holds a sociology degree from Xavier University and a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Toledo. He lives with his family in Sandusky, Ohio, on the shore of his much-loved Lake Erie.