Shelley: The Pursuit (111 page)

On 10 June the Shelleys left Rome. They drove slowly northwards, and arrived in Livorno seven days later. Mary gave up writing her journal. Shelley wrote numbly to Peacock: ‘You will be kind enough to tell all my friends . . . . It is a great exertion to me to write this, & it seems to me as if, hunted by calamity as I have been, that I should never recover any cheerfulness again.’
²⁶
Claire noted without comment their arrival at the Aquila Nera Inn at Livorno, and a visit to the Gisbornes. She refers to a small country house Shelley took on the outskirts of Livorno in the third week of June, the Villa Valsovano near the village of Monte Nero some 3 kilometres to the south of the port. Then her diary too breaks off. Mary did not begin her journal again till August 1819; and Claire’s diary does not recommence until January of 1820. The Roman spring had deceived them; they were almost crushed by life.

[1]
Prometheus Unbound
did not reach England until the end of 1819, and was not published until the summer of 1820. It was then printed as the title poem to a collection of Shelley’s Italian poetry. It was reviewed steadily from June 1820 until the end of 1821. Despite the fact that the reviews were mixed — the
Quarterly
crucified it,
Blackwood’s
praised and generously defended it — the book did not sell. Public opinion was against Shelley’s work in London, and the book was regarded as disreputable rather than daring. It is not certain how much money Ollier lost on the edition, but the jibe went that Prometheus was unbound because the publisher could not afford to bind it up. This was undoubtedly the greatest of Shelley collections printed during his lifetime.

[2]
Perhaps it was not so lucky. The present painting in the National Portrait Gallery shows no sign of scorching, which suggests that Miss Curran touched it up after hearing of Shelley’s death. The ‘official’ portrait is both wooden and querulous, and the mouth and neck are sentimentally finished. It is interesting to compare the style with the buxom life and energy in Miss Curran’s painting of Claire.

[3]
In September 1819 Shelley commissioned Miss Curran to execute a copy of the Reni portrait, to be used in England as the frontispiece to the first edition of
The Cenci
(1820).

21. The Hothouse: Livorno 1819

The summer of 1819 at Monte Nero was a time of great unhappiness in Shelley’s household. The bustling
ménage
that had left Dover in 1818 was now grimly depleted. The sense of childlessness affected all three of them: Claire had lost her darling Allegra at Milan; Clara had died at Venice; Shelley’s little Elena had been left behind at Naples; and now finally their favourite, their only son, Willmouse was buried at Rome. The household seemed to be infected, it was a ruin, a graveyard.

Shelley, as ever, fought strongly against the crisis of feeling. Though he wrote miserably to Peacock at the end of the month about the heavy weight of ‘misfortune added to exile, & solitude’, and spoke secretly of his desperate longing to return to England he soon drew a line with a curt ‘Enough of melancholy’, and would talk only of books and politics.
¹
Claire busied herself with looking after Mary, for she too, like Shelley, always showed herself unexpectedly strong and stubborn in times of emergency. But it was Mary, who had just begun to recover during the spring from the depression of Naples, who was hardest hit. She had a total relapse of feeling, and plunged into an even greater mood of despair and isolation which was in effect a severe nervous breakdown. She wrote few letters during these months, and these as she wrote to Miss Curran were ‘stupid’. ‘I no sooner take up my pen than my thoughts run away with me & I cannot guide it except about
one
subject & that I must avoid.’
²
And more succinctly: ‘I never shall recover that blow. . . . Everything on earth has lost its interest to me.’ To Marianne Hunt she showed perhaps unconsciously how she again blamed Shelley: ‘We came to Italy thinking to do Shelley’s health good — but the Climate is not any means warm enough to be of benefit to him & yet it is that that has destroyed my two children.’ This letter too was short: ‘if I would write anything else about myself it would only be a list of hours spent tears & grief [
sic
].’
³

The following March, Claire explained to Byron how bad things had been.

‘Last May I had promised to go to Venice but Shelley could not do it. Our little boy died and we came to Livorno — here I was nearer [to you] but Mary was so melancholy and so sickly that I cannot imagine how she could have been left alone.’
⁴
For Claire to have thrown away a chance of seeing Allegra, Mary must have been desperate indeed.

Shelley realized clearly enough what was happening to Mary, but he took a deliberate decision to remain beyond the radius of her misery, and to help her from the outside only. He decided that it was best to leave her to live out her own feelings and despair by herself. He continued his reading and writing through the summer, and took certain practical measures to establish his routine independently of hers. It was a harsh but characteristic commitment to his own craft. A fragment of a poem he wrote puts the matter simply:

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,

And left me in this dreary world alone?

Thy form is here indeed — a lovely one —

But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,

That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode;

Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,

Where

For thine own sake I cannot follow thee

Do thou return for mine.
⁵

This poem Shelley wrote to her directly, like a letter; but Mary did not allow it to be published until the second edition of the
Poetical Works
of 1839. He also twice tried to write of William’s death itself, but the two poems came out stiffened and formalized by grief, and remain unfinished. One breaks off on the brink of the discovery of one of Shelley’s most celebrated elegiac phrases:

Let me think that through low seeds

Of sweet flowers and sunny grass

Into their hues and scents may pass

A portion —
⁶

It was only two years later, in
Adonais
that Shelley finally found the completion of that line of thought and verse.

The Villa Valsovano, where with the help of the Gisbornes the stunned household found themselves residing by the end of June, provided Shelley with the ideal place to embark on a period of recuperation. It was a spacious, simple stone building, dating back at least two centuries, part country villa and part farmhouse. It was within sight of the sea, but set in its own garden and
olive plantation on rising ground which gave a magnificent view of the surrounding countryside. It was outside the bustle of Livorno, but close enough to the municipal walls to make the walk to the Gisbornes’ house an easy and pleasurable daily excursion.

Mary described it listlessly as ‘an airy house’, but judging by her letters she barely seems to have taken it in until the end of August. It was only then that she began to notice the charm of the deep green lane that led up to the villa gate, and the sleepy singing of the local peasants who worked in the surrounding fields. The furrowed rows contained a fascinating mixture of vines, cabbages, olives, fig and peach trees, corn and even apparently celery. It was a typical
podère
, a mixture of farm and kitchen garden, perfectly calculated, Mary thought, to appeal to Leigh Hunt. Mary spent much time sitting on one or other of the many stone arbour seats which were concealed round the garden, watching the peasants at work. It seemed to soothe her: ‘they work this hot weather in their shorts or smock frocks (but their breasts are bare) their brown legs nearly the colour only with a rich tinge of red in it with the earth they turn up. — They sing not very melodiously but very loud — Rossini’s music
Mi revedrai, ti revedro
, and they are accompanied by the cicada . . .’
⁷

But for Shelley the great thing about the Villa Valsovano was its tower. It was really a kind of balcony placed on the roof. It was glassed in on all sides, and suspended Shelley in the blazing sunlight above the landscape of the farm and the blue curving line of the bay, as if he were encased in one of his solitary floating airships. The design is characteristic of the Livorno region, and can still be seen more or less elaborately incorporated into the modern buildings along the front. For Shelley it became his fortress of physical and intellectual light. He ascended into it, closing behind him the darkness and human misery below. Mary much later recalled: ‘Shelley made [this] his study; it looked out on a wide prospect of fertile country, and commanded a view of the near sea. The storms that sometimes varied our day showed themselves most picturesquely as they were driven across the ocean; sometimes the dark lurid clouds dipped towards the waves, and became water-spouts that churned up the waters beneath, as they were chased onward and scattered by the tempest. At other times the dazzling sunlight and heat made it almost intolerable to every other; but Shelley basked in both, and his health and spirits revived under their influence. In this airy cell he wrote the principal part of “The Cenci”.’
⁸
It was now the second draft of his poem that Shelley was slowly labouring over. But sealed off in his cell, too hot for anyone else to stand the direct sunlight, he worked on alone.

Shelley forced himself to adopt a regular routine. He awoke usually at 7 in the morning, and lay reading in bed for half an hour; he then dressed and breakfasted alone. ‘After breakfast,
ascend my tower
, and read or write until two. Then
we dine — after dinner I read Dante with Mary, gossip a little, eat grapes & figs, sometimes walk, though seldom; and at ½ past 5 pay a visit to Mrs Gisborne who reads Spanish with me until near seven. We then come for Mary & stroll about until suppertime.’
⁹
Shelley, who could already read and translate Lucretius, Plato and Dante from the original, had decided that it was a good moment to turn to a fourth language in order to read the work of the great Spanish playwright Calderón. Maria Gisborne was also a great help to Shelley with Mary, and the suppers which rounded off the day were frequently eaten
en partie
. When Shelley did decide to walk out, it was either to visit the Gisbornes alone, or else to take Claire to the sea. He found Mary a difficult companion. Claire was the best, but she was sometimes moody and unreliable in the old manner, and as Shelley said, ‘sometimes does not dress in exactly the right time’. Claire had always had a weakness for sleeping through not only breakfast but also
dinner
; however, when she did manage to come, she was Shelley’s closest company. Milly Shields, their English servant, also seems to have supplied Shelley with a mild diversion, when she took to star-gazing in the garden after dark. Shelley wrote: ‘Milly surprised us the other day by first discovering a comet, on which we have been speculating. “She may make a stir, like a great astronomer.”’
¹⁰

Another instrument of Shelley’s recuperation was Peacock’s first box of books, which having been sent off by sea in November the previous year, had finally arrived at Livorno harbour. Shelley was especially interested by eight back numbers of Cobbett’s
Political Register
, and a copy of his lively democratic and agrarian sermon
A Year’s Residence in the United States of America
, about his period of exile in 1817. Cobbett had been chased out of England by the threat of a government prosecution for seditious or blasphemous libel, but was now back at work in the Home Counties. Shelley’s opinion of Cobbett was markedly changing, along with his whole approach to the mass democratic movement in England. ‘Cobbett still more and more delights me, with all my horror of the sanguinary commonplaces of his creed. His design to overthrow Bank notes by forgery is very comic.’
¹¹
Shelley could not have written these two sentences eighteen months previously.

The box also contained, besides the works of Scott, which were handed over to Mary, the first copy of Peacock’s
Nightmare Abbey
. The book was passed eagerly round from hand to hand, even to the Gisbornes, and they all thought back to the summer at Marlow in 1817. It seemed long ago. Shelley wrote his serious and complimentary appreciation to Peacock: ‘I suppose the moral is contained in what Falstaff says: “For God’s sake talk like a man of the world.’” He had no resentment, so much else had happened since the garden days at Marlow.
¹²

Later he told Peacock: ‘I have a study here in a tower something like Scythrop’s — where I am just beginning to recover the faculties of reading and writing. My health, whenever no Libecchio blows, improves. — From my tower I see the sea with its islands, Gorgona, Capria, Elba & Corsica on one side, & the Apennines on the other.’
¹³