Shelley: The Pursuit (2 page)

Looking back after twenty years, I see more clearly the partialities and enthusiasms in what I researched and wrote, angrily rejecting much of the critical tradition, returning to original sources, and following Shelley everywhere over his own ground through England, Ireland, France and Italy. I have described the intense, dreamlike obsession of this work — a process of trial and error and self-education — in my later book,
Footsteps
. I have made some corrections and reparations (especially to Mary Shelley) there. But I believe the political and philosophical focus of the biography, the sense of Shelley’s energy and intellectual power, his impetuous physical impact on all those around him, still holds good. So I am content, on reflection, to let the book stand as a true history of my time in Shelley’s company. Others wiser and more scholarly than myself will continue to correct it, and to that end I have included a New Select Bibliography of more recent studies, many critical of aspects of my own work, which I urge the reader to consult. But above all I urge the re-reading of Shelley’s poetry and essays, especially after 1816: no other Romantic writer
learned
, and changed, and developed his art so swiftly.

The open-ended nature of biography is one of its mysterious attractions. No
Life
is ever definitive: it draws or rejects from past work, it reflects often
unconsciously the concerns and questions of its own age, and it passes on something hidden to the future. Every serious attempt at an historic portrait of the dead will subtly absorb the
milieu
and temperament of its living author, however objective he or she sets out to be. This is precisely the strength, rather than the weakness, of its subjectivity. It is the vital element that Hippolyte Taine, the first great European theorist of biography, curiously overlooked in his efforts to define a ‘scientific’ genre of Life Studies, as a sort of human botany. Biography is only scientific in the sense that it is experimental: it tests one version of the facts. But all good biography must do more, must risk more, if it is to live for any time in the imagination. It must finally transcend facts and documentation, and risk an artistic style and form appropriate to its age.

It is now evident to me that this biography, as I put it in
Footsteps
, was written by ‘a child of the English 1960s’. Nevertheless that happened to be a particularly fruitful moment to rediscover Shelley’s story, with its special explosive mixture of fantasy, poetry and radical ideas, so close to the passionate hopes and aspirations of that time. If the present age of the
fin-de-siècle
is a darker and less certain one, Shelley’s peculiar energy and idealism may stand out even more forcefully, a sharp flame against the shadows. What makes him cruel, and even absurd, may also gather a particular and poignant resonance. He, in the end, was a child of the European Enlightenment, and believed that the world could be revolutionized by language, and that fire was the element of imagination.

Much has changed in Shelley studies since I wrote. The Victorian penumbra has dissolved, the shade of Dr Leavis has retreated, and Shelley is again popular with students, though his extra-curricular attractions remain — thankfully — high. A brilliant effort of textual refinement and republication has continued in America, under the scholarly leadership of Donald H. Reiman with the resources of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library in New York and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Following K. N. Cameron’s pioneering work, much has been clarified in Shelley’s socio-political background. A new generation of literary critics has championed Shelley’s intellectual gifts, his ‘sceptical idealism’, and the glimmering metaphorical subtleties of his poetic language. Both deconstructionist and feminist critics have been drawn to his work, with often dazzling results. A notable, and properly maverick, group of British writers and scholars including William St Clair, Paul Foot, Howard Brenton, Claire Tomalin, Angela Leighton, Timothy Webb and P. M. Dawson have explored much that is new and controversial. There have been Shelley novels, Shelley plays, and Shelley films. A valuable scholarly survey and listing of much of this work is available in
The New Shelley: Later Twentieth Century Views
, edited by G. Kim Blank (St Martin’s Press, New York, 1991); and I have included a careful choice from, the whole field in my New Select Bibliography.

Some things do not change. André Maurois’s charming ‘Shelley Romance’, famously entitled
Ariel
(the first Penguin biography of 1925), was dashingly re-issued for Shelley’s bicentenary. It was a book that I mockingly referred to in my original Introduction, as the cause of much mischief in Shelley’s after-life. I found myself in the ironic position of being asked to write a brief panegyric for the back-cover of the new edition (Pimlico, 1991). My feelings about
Ariel
had not changed, but I had come to respect Maurois as an embattled pioneer of French biography, especially in his Lives of
Victor Hugo
(1954),
The Three Dumas
(1957), and above all
Balzac
(1965), which have still not received proper recognition in French criticism. Disguised in the hectic persona of a blurb-writer, I therefore tried to fit Maurois’s early and influential experiment with the ‘romanced’ form into the larger development of Shelley’s twentieth-century biography. I reprint here what I finally wrote — after much misgiving — for it bears on the whole complicated question of how biographies grow ‘out of date’, and yet may still retain a significant literary presence.

This remarkable little book almost succeeded in destroying Shelley’s reputation as a serious writer and poet for 50 years. Written in France in the 1920s, it is a sort of Jazz Age biography of the ‘bright young things’ of Shelley’s circle, narrated in a clipped, flippant, risqué style of unparalleled brilliance. Syncopating between fact and fiction, inventing dialogue, sentimentalising love-scenes, colouring-up landscapes, it traces the fiery and unforgettable young poet’s disastrous flight-path through a galaxy of ‘flapper’ girls, the two Harriets, Mary, Eliza, Cornelia, Claire, Emilia, and Jane, until finally quenched in the Gulf of Spezia. The great central period of Shelley’s creative work between 1817 and 1821 skims by in a score of effortless pages. Instead, he emerges as the enchanting Ariel-figure, a sexy spark arcing between the philosophic Godwin and the diabolic Byron, half man and half meteorite.

André Maurois later said ruefully that he had written the book to ‘exorcise’ his own youthful romanticism, but instead had inadvertently canonised it for an entire generation. So
Ariel
is now an historic landmark in modern literary biography, as fine as any miniature produced by Lytton Strachey or Harold Nicolson, a classic reminder of both the power and the perils of the form.

In a way my biography set out to destroy everything that Maurois’s stood for. But I now see that it was simply part of a much larger and continuing
biographic process of bringing the present to bear imaginatively on the past. One day perhaps a new Taine will define a discipline, if not exactly a science, of Comparative Biography in which we will all have played a part.

My own personal connections with Shelley hauntingly remain. In 1991 I was wrecked in a 28-foot sailing boat in the North Sea, but was pulled to safety with my two companions by an Airsea Rescue helicopter. Thinking again about the mystery of his last days on the Tuscan coast, when he saw visions and wrote the unfinished ‘Triumph of Life’, I briefly abandoned biography and tried another form of exploration, a radio-drama entitled ‘To the Tempest Given’. In 1992 I celebrated his 200th birthday by a more peaceful crossing of the bay of Lerici, in a small fishing boat out of Porto Venere, accompanied by my English rose.

Talking with a younger generation of readers, I see how Shelley has become increasingly a European figure, a Dante among English poets, and an image of Faustian daring, whose writing and travels still inspire that primary spirit of adventure into a wider world of ideal possibilities. Nothing is so moving to the biographer as finding an old copy of his book in a stranger’s hands, battered and wine-stained from its voyages, its margins scrawled, its poetry underlined, its pages bent with maps and postcards, its cover bleached with sun and sea. I hope this new edition has such luck.

R
ICHARD
H
OLMES
,
Paris, July 1994

Introduction

There will always be Shelley lovers, but this book is not for them. The angel they seek can be found in the golden reminiscences of Trelawny, or the charming romance by André Maurois, or within those innumerable slim selections of Shelley’s lyrics whose contents have remained virtually unaltered since the first anthology of 1829, a French edition in an olive cover. That fluttering apparition is not to be found here, where a darker and more earthly, crueller and more capable figure moves with swift pace through a bizarre though sometimes astonishingly beautiful landscape.

Of all the English Romantic poets, Shelley was the most determinedly professional writer. Many years after his death, Wordsworth called him ‘one of the best
artists
of us all; I mean in workmanship of style’. By the end of his life Shelley had mastered and translated from Italian, Spanish, German, Latin and Greek, and had rendered several fragments from Arabic. From the very start he was a writer who interested himself in political and philosophic ideas, rather than purely aesthetic ones. In contrast with his younger contemporary John Keats, who cordially disliked him, Shelley’s letters and essays are rarely concerned with the subject of Poetry as such, and with the possible exception of Robert Browning, Edward Thomas and perhaps Allen Ginsberg, he has never been a poet’s poet in the true sense.

Those celebrated late Italian lyrics — ‘To a Skylark’, ‘The Cloud’, ‘To Jane’, ‘When the Lamp is Shattered’ — which subsequently established his reputation among a sentimental Victorian reading public, and among generation after generation of school children, were never of serious concern to Shelley. For the most part they were products of periods of depression and inactivity, haphazard acts of inattention when the main work could not be pushed forward. Throughout his life, Shelley’s major creative effort was concentrated on producing a series of long poems and poetic dramas aimed at the main political and spiritual problems of his age and society. He accompanied these with a brilliant but little known series of speculative essays on more practical aspects of the same problems, sometimes witty and original, but always learned and controversial. One can speak of Shelley as a writer in the most comprehensive sense: poet, essayist,
dramatist, pamphleteer, translator, reviewer and correspondent. He was moreover a writer who moved everywhere with a sense of ulterior motive, a sense of greater design, an acute feeling for the historical moment and an overwhelming consciousness of his duty as an
artist
in the immense and fiery process of social change of which he knew himself to be a part. Shelley’s lyrics were mere sparks in this comet’s trail.

From the age of nineteen, Shelley passed through a series of personal crises, dictated partly by chance but increasingly by choice, which had the cumulative effect of forcing him further and further away from the family, class and cultural background into which he had been born. By the time his life was cut short, one month before his thirtieth birthday, he was a complete exile, both geographically and spiritually. The encroaching condition of exile plays a highly significant part in his story. At the time of his death his reputation was almost literally unspeakable in England, an object to be torn apart between the conservative and radical reviews, but not on the whole to be mentioned in polite London society. In this he was quite unlike his aristocratic friend and rival Lord Byron who, though similarly exiled, always had a tremendous popular following in England, and who by sailing to Greece instantly canonized himself on the altars of English liberalism. Moreover, while Byron had achieved perhaps the greatest international readership of the age, Shelley had achieved almost none. Thus while exile had brought Byron fame and the kind of notoriety that is quickly transmuted into fashionable glamour, it brought to Shelley both literary obscurity and personal disrepute. A few days after Shelley’s death, Byron wrote to Tom Moore in London, ‘there is thus another man gone about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken’ — but it was a mistake which his Lordship himself had frequently helped to compound.

Shelley’s exile, his defection from his class and the disreputability of his beliefs and behaviour, had a tremendous effect on the carefully partisan handling of his biography by the survivors of his own circle and generation, and even more so by that of his son’s. In the first, the generation of his family and friends, fear of the moral and social stigma attached to many incidents in Shelley’s career prevented the publication or even the writing of biographical material until those who were in possession of it, like Hogg, Peacock and Trelawny, were respectable Victorians in their sixties, who were fully prepared to forget, to smudge and to conceal. With one exception, almost no significant biographical material appeared until more than thirty years after his death. Shelley’s second wife, Mary, was the key to his biography both in her own experiences and in her access to papers. Yet Mary Shelley was actually prevented from writing anything fuller than the brief introduction to Galignani’s edition of the
Posthumous Poems
in 1824, and the editorial ‘Notes’ to the first
Complete Works
of 1839–40. She was prevented partly by the same considerations of propriety as Shelley’s friends, but even more by the fact that Shelley’s father, Sir Timothy Shelley of Field Place, specifically forbade any such publications until after his own death, on pain of the removal of the annuity, Mary’s only regular source of income, with which she was just able to support herself and her son — Sir Timothy’s grandson and heir — Percy Florence Shelley. Sir Timothy did not hesitate to remind Mary of this interdiction through his solicitor Whittan, and made the ban singularly effective by outliving his detested son by twenty-two years, and dying at the age of 90 in 1844. Mary, who had contented herself with enshrining the remembered image of her husband in a series of noble and emasculated figures in her fiction, especially
The Last Man
(1826) and
Lodore
(1835), died without further revelations only seven years later in 1851.