With the arrival of Trelawny, who had a friend in the boatbuilding business, it suddenly became possible for Shelley to realise a lifelong dream, to own a seagoing boat of his own. Byron, acting on impulse, had to have a bigger and a better one. There was much excited talk of how they would spend the summer, all together, sailing up and down the Tuscan coast. Already, in the first half of February, Shelley and Williams were scouting for a summer base where the whole group could be together, by the sea.22 As late as 5 March, Mary could still write of these summer plans, paraphrasing Wordsworth for the benefit of Marianne Hunt, ‘we are a colony “which moves altogether or not at all”’. Mary had a reason for encouraging the Hunts to delay no longer in joining them. Two days later, writing to Maria Gisborne, she was more frank: ‘We shall have boats & go somewhere on the sea coast where I dare say we shall spend our time agreably [sic] enough for I like the Williams’ exceedingly – though there my list begins & ends.’23
Something had happened to change the dynamics of the ‘nest of singing birds’. Already, Shelley was confiding to Hunt that ‘Particular circumstances, – or rather I should say, particular dispositions in Lord B's character render the close & exclusive intimacy with him in which I find myself, intolerable to me.’24 Three weeks later, Shelley had made up his mind. The plan for the summer was off. He wrote to Claire, ‘I shall certainly take our house far from Lord Byron's, although it may be impossible suddenly to put an end to his detested intimacy.’25
Part of the problem was, again, Allegra. Claire, who was now living in Florence, had been approached by Elise Foggi, the Shelleys’ former maid who had been responsible for the allegation that had reached Byron the year before, that Claire had given birth to Shelley's child in Naples. Claire panicked, and decided she must leave Italy at once. She wrote to Byron, announcing this intention, and begged him to let her visit Allegra in the convent at Bagnacavallo before she went. At the same time, she also wrote to the Shelleys. Shelley at once fetched Claire back to Pisa. Over four days staying with them Claire agreed not to leave the country. During this time, Mary learnt something that shocked her very much, to judge from the tone of her journal entry for 25 February.26 There was no obvious reason for Byron to refuse Claire's request. In her letter she made no claims on him. In the past he had promised her access to Allegra, and once, in Venice, had even granted it. But Shelley may have been rattled too, and at once rushed off to Byron to intercede for Claire. It was the worst possible thing he could have done.
Byron turned on Shelley, as only he was capable of doing. There was at least one face-to-face quarrel, probably in the last days of February. Its echoes can be heard in Shelley's letter to Hunt on 2 March. They can be heard again in a joint letter he and Mary wrote to Claire three weeks later, and yet again in the words of an acquaintance who had heard Shelley speak of what had happened. Shelley had seen ‘a gleam of malicious satisfaction’ pass over Byron's face. ‘“I saw his look,” Mr Shelley said; “I understood its meaning; I despised him, and I came away.”’27 The informant seems not to have understood what it was that Shelley feared in that moment. Byron must have said something to remind him that he knew of the allegations about Shelley and Claire, and the child born in Naples. Shelley had seen, at those weekly dinners at the Lanfranchi, how carelessly and how cruelly Byron could dissect the affairs of absent friends and acquaintances. The very scandal that Claire was preparing to flee Italy to avoid was liable to break any day, right here in Pisa, thanks to Byron's propensity to malicious indiscretion. Shelley never had any proof that Byron did this, and probably in fact he did not. But he might, at any time when Shelley was absent, have entertained the company with a version of the story that Elise Foggi had brought to the Hoppners in Venice. If that were to happen, Shelley confided to Claire, he might have no choice but to challenge Byron to a duel.28 Only this fear explains Claire's complaint to Mary, that ‘you wished to keep me as much out of L.B.'s mind as possible, that he might not mention me to the people by whom he is surrounded’.29
On Shelley's side, by the end of March, the friendship with Byron was over. He continued to admire him as a poet, and he was determined to fulfil his obligations to Leigh Hunt over The Liberal. But ‘intimacy’ with Byron was a thing of the past.
Byron, having vented his feelings, was not going to back down over Claire and Allegra. But he knew he had been in the wrong to round so violently on Shelley. Within days of when the quarrel must have happened, he was defending Shelley from the latest attack by Southey, in a letter to Moore: ‘As to poor Shelley, who is another bugbear to you and the world, he is, to my knowledge, the least selfish and the mildest of men – a man who has made more sacrifices of his fortune and feelings for others than any I ever heard of.’ Mary surely read Byron correctly, when she wrote to Maria Gisborne on 7 March, ‘For the present S[helley] is entangled with Lord B[yron] who is in a terrible fright lest he should desert him.’30 With their differences over Claire and Allegra threatening to turn friends and collaborators into enemies, the advantage was not all on Byron's side. He knew he needed Shelley, at least as much as Shelley needed him. The ‘Pisa circle’ continued to meet as regularly as before.31 But the time was not far off when it would be Byron's turn to be on the defensive.
All this was only part of the story, the part on the surface. These spats and tantrums were no more than the outward symptoms of a tension between the poets whose origins lay far deeper, in the character and the imaginative life of each of them. Shelley's growing loss of self-esteem, as it might be termed today, would culminate in talk with Trelawny about suicide, and the cry of despair at the human condition that is his last long, uncompleted poem, The Triumph of Life. Byron's presence, his wealth, and his status all had this effect on Shelley, though there might well have been other causes too. The evidence has been sifted by Charles E. Robinson, who concludes that Shelley was distressed by his own feelings of envy towards Byron. At the same time, he felt trapped in a vicious circle: ‘without fame, he could not earn money; without money, he was too depressed to write; unable to write, he could never attain fame’.32
At some time between November and 22 January, perhaps as an immediate response to reading Cain, which he admired above anything that Byron had written, Shelley adapted some discarded lines from Hellas to make a sonnet addressed to Byron. Its conclusion reveals Shelley at his most abject, in this bitter twist to an image drawn from Schiller's ‘Ode to Joy’:
the worm beneath the sod
May lift itself in homage of the God.33
The ‘worm’ here is kin to the serpent, ‘shut out from Paradise’, according to another poem of the same time, a love poem addressed to Williams’ wife Jane.34 Worm, serpent, or ‘Snake’: in Shelley's imagination, he felt himself excluded, demeaned, inferior. It had been meant in play, but for a poet who had also likened himself to a ‘tender plant’, a metaphor like that was not harmless fun.
Nor was it for Byron. If Shelley was now the ‘Snake’ – the nephew of the serpent in the Garden of Eden – the Devil had always been Byron's own part. Behind all the ‘byronic’ heroes of his poems and dramas lies Milton's depiction of Satan, the defiant rebel angel in Paradise Lost. According to Lady Byron, during the short time that he had lived with her, Byron's ‘imagination [had] dwelt so much upon the idea that he was a fallen angel that I thought it amounted nearly to derangement’. Echoing the same idea (and quite probably something Byron himself had said in conversation), Shelley could describe Byron, in a letter written in January, as ‘this spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying body’.35
Byron as the fallen angel, Shelley as ‘the Snake’. Southey's libel against the ‘Satanic school’ of poetry had really struck home. And, as luck would have it, it was on the evening of 4 February that Southey's second onslaught reached the Casa Lanfranchi. Medwin gives a vivid account of the scene, and Byron's immediate rage.36 The next day Byron drafted a long rebuttal, addressed to the editor of the Courier, which had carried Southey's attack, but i
t seems he never sent it. To everyone in Pisa he ranted that he was going to ‘call out’ Southey. A letter addressed to the Poet Laureate, amounting to a challenge to a duel, was actually sent, care of Byron's banker, Douglas Kinnaird. But Byron's instructions were perhaps intentionally ambiguous, and Kinnaird ignored them. The challenge never reached Southey.37
It was in this fervid atmosphere that Shelley attempted to intervene, at the end of that month, as the voice of Byron's conscience in the matter of Allegra. The fury of Byron's reaction, his otherwise quite gratuitous intransigence, and Shelley's lurid fears of having to fight a duel over it, now begin to make sense. While Shelley was debasing himself in his imagination as the ‘worm’ before his God, Byron saw in Shelley a rival for a role he had long ago reserved for himself. In the person of Shelley, Byron was confronted with what he might himself have been, if he had not been Byron.
During January, at the Casa Lanfranchi, they talked about doubles. The idea of the doppelgänger, the sinister other, or dark side of the self, was not new to this company. It had cropped up during the ghostly conversations in Switzerland, five and a half years before. Now, a translation of Goethe's Faust had been sent from England. It arrived on 12 January and at once they began eagerly to discuss it. In the introduction to the translation, they read this: ‘the easiest clue to the moral part of this didactic action is, to consider Faust and Mephistopheles as one person, represented symbolically, only in a two-fold shape’.38 Shelley, who had been learning Spanish, thought he had found the source for this idea in a play by the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Calderón. He entertained the company with an account of its story.
Not long after this, towards the end of January 1822, Byron embarked on what is surely his strangest work, the unfinished play The Deformed Transformed. In Medwin's hearing, he described it as ‘a Faustish kind of drama’. Before he sent it to be published, he would add a note acknowledging the debt to Goethe.39 In this play Byron gave an entirely new twist to the theme of the doppelgänger. The Deformed Transformed has an urbane wit and a lightness of tone, that derive in part from Goethe and in part from the Byron of Don Juan. But just like his previous plays, it dramatises personal and immediate anxieties of Byron's own, in this case to do with the ‘Pisa circle’ out of which it grew.
The play's hero, Arnold, is a hunchback, deformed so hideously that his crude and simple-minded peasant mother rejects him. On the point of killing himself from despair, he is prevented by the miraculous apparition of the ‘Stranger’ – the Devil in light disguise. The Stranger offers to exchange Arnold's crippled body for that of a mighty hero of his choosing. Arnold accepts the deal. There follows a brief beauty contest, in which the Stranger conjures up the images of victorious generals from antiquity, and the philosopher Socrates (ugly, but with a mind to compensate). Arnold opts for the body of Achilles. Reincarnated in his new body, he is now ready to distinguish himself as a hero in war, and sets out for the field. With him goes his shadow – his old deformed body, now occupied by the Stranger. This image of his former self Arnold will never shake off. It is the price of the deal. The pair then head for Rome. The year is 1527, and Arnold performs valiantly during the siege and sack of the city, while the devil who accompanies him has all the best lines. Having saved the beautiful Olimpia from the mayhem, Arnold is disconcerted to find his advances to her rebuffed, despite his gorgeous body and chivalrous action in saving her. At this point the text breaks off.
In this bizarre concoction, Byron outdoes Goethe, Calderón, the Shelleys, and himself in earlier works, in doubling the doppelgänger. One pair is formed by Arnold the hunchback and the suave Stranger/Devil. Arnold's deformity is Byron's own, exaggerated to extremes. So, too, is his sense of physical inferiority. Byron had never forgotten being scolded by his own mother as a ‘lame brat’, just as Arnold is by his, in the play's opening scene. That is one side of the coin. The other is the Stranger, who can fix everything by the magic of an incantation. The Devil's wit and way with words are Byron's too.
But Arnold's transformation and reincarnation in the body of Achilles involves a second doubling. It is not a two-way exchange of identities that the Stranger offers. While the Stranger/Devil adopts Arnold's old identity, Arnold himself acquires an entirely new one, a third identity that he picks, as it were, off the shelf. Achilles is described:
The god-like son of the Sea-goddess,
The unshorn boy of Peleus, with his locks
As beautiful and clear as the amber waves
Of rich Pactolus rolled o'er sands of gold,
Softened by intervening chrystal, and
Rippled like flowing waters by the wind…
Look upon him as
Greece looked her last upon her best, the instant
Ere Paris’ arrow flew.40
This is an Achilles imagined at the very moment before his early death, a moment made timeless by the devil's magic power – or the poet's imagination. Byron may not yet have read Hellas when he wrote these lines, but he surely had its author in mind. The ideal specimen of manhood that he conjures up from ancient Greek mythology for his alter ego Arnold to adopt is made of the very same stuff as Shelley's Greece, that was ‘Based on the crystàlline sea / Of thought and its eternity’. From this point on, The Deformed Transformed becomes Byron's fantasy of exchanging his own identity (the composite made up of Arnold and the Stranger/Devil), not quite for that of Shelley, but, rather, for the embodiment of the Shelleyan ideal.
By comparison with Byron's idea of his own deformity, physical and perhaps also moral, Shelley was tall and physically whole. He still had his absurdly youthful good looks, while Byron was becoming appalled by the signs of premature ageing in himself. Shelley's beliefs had something unearthly about them that Byron often deplored. But – a rare thing for him – he never ridiculed them either. ‘Shelley believes in immortality’, he wrote to Moore, with something like awe, just after their quarrel at the end of February.41 Byron the sceptic, the railer, the scoffer, ‘lame brat’ or cloven-hoofed fallen angel, could never match up to an imaginary ideal like Shelley's Greece in Hellas, or Achilles as he is described in The Deformed Transformed. On this reading, Shelley and his unearthly ideals tormented Byron as the ‘other’ that he himself could never be. After all, almost from their first meeting, nearly six years before, Shelley had been nagging Byron to transform himself from what he was into something that better matched Shelley's idealistic conception, be it the great poet of the age or the saviour of Italy.42
In the play's working-out, Byron probably intended to get his own back. The beautiful Olimpia would have fallen for the scoffing devil in Arnold's old, hideous body. Arnold would have been beside himself with jealous rage. Even in the written parts, there is something vacuous about Arnold's role inside his gorgeous carapace. He has little to say for himself. But if this was to be Byron's imaginative victory over Shelley, it would still have been a pyrrhic one. What may have been intended as the final consummation is summarised in an account that derives from Medwin's recollection of another Pisa conversation. Here the hero's name is given as Alfonso. He challenges his rival
and demands satisfaction. They fight; his rival scarcely defends himself; at the first thrust he receives the sword of Alfonso in his bosom; and falling, exclaims, ‘Are you satisfied!’
The mask and mantle of the unknown drop off, and Alfonso discovers his own image – the spectre of himself – he dies with horror!43
For Arnold to kill the devil inside his own discarded body will be to kill himself.
The fury that Byron turned on Shelley, in real life at the end of February 1822, was the fury that he had imagined for Arnold rounding on his devilish double. They were both of them rebel angels. Each was in awe of the other to such an extent that both nurtured fantasies of self-destructive violence, as the only way to end a coexistence that was at once intolerable and as inescapable as Arnold's with the Stranger and the body of Achilles.
If The Deformed Transformed was indeed planned
to end with Arnold killing his other self, this might also explain why, after Shelley's death, Byron had not the heart to finish it. What Shelley himself thought of the parts of the play that he read is lost in the conflicting recollections of Medwin and Trelawny.44 Mary, when she copied Byron's manuscript in Genoa that autumn, while coming to terms with her bereavement, would enjoy the play enormously – perhaps because she recognised its backhanded tribute to her husband.45
The end of the ‘Pisa circle’
An incident on 24 March had the temporary effect of healing over these divisions. It was a Sunday. Byron and his party were riding back to town from their regular pistol shooting practice. As they approached the Porta alle Piagge they were overtaken by a horseman in a hurry. Taaffe briefly lost control of his mount. Byron decided that he and his party had been deliberately insulted, and overreacted as only he could. There was an affray at the gate, when the guard had to intervene. Shelley was knocked to the ground and briefly lost consciousness. A visiting English friend of Byron's had his face slashed open with a sabre. One of Byron's servants was badly wounded. Byron forced a way through the soldiers and set off to notify the police. Returning to the scene, on his way he encountered the offender again, and challenged him on the spot. To his chagrin, the man turned out to be a mere sergeant of dragoons. It came down to class. Sergeant Masi was unworthy to fight a duel with a peer of England. It was left to Byron's coachman (probably without his master's knowledge) to ambush the sergeant shortly afterwards and stick a pitchfork into his side.
Byron's War Page 14