Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (38 page)

After an interval of more than two years, Byron and Shelley had much to talk about. Since their previous meeting Byron had written more of his masterpiece,
Don Juan
,
and Shelley had produced a rich body of work, which instilled in him a new confidence about his poetic abilities. They renewed their conversation about poetry, although, perhaps as a result of Shelley’s increased confidence, they differed ‘more than ever’, since Byron affected ‘to patronise a system of criticism fit only for the production of mediocrity’.
³³
They discussed Allegra (now four-and-a-half), who, Byron reported, was growing very beautiful. Shelley had an opportunity to see this for himself when he visited Allegra at the Convent of Bagnacavallo. He observed that she was treated with kindness by the nuns, even after ‘she made me run all over the convent like a mad thing . . . and began ringing the bell, which calls the nuns to assemble.’ Asked whether she had any messages for her father, she replied that she wanted both Papa and ‘
mammina
’ to visit her. Allegra’s ‘
mammina
’ was probably Teresa – the pretty lady who occasionally brought her presents and dresses – rather than Claire, whom she had not seen since before her second birthday. Shelley was nevertheless reassured to learn that Byron had no intention of leaving Allegra in her convent indefinitely, since he, like Claire, was convinced the nuns would only give her a poor and prejudiced education.

There were, however, pressing matters apart from Allegra’s future to be discussed. Byron reported a claim by Elise Foggi, passed on by the Hoppners, that Shelley had fathered a child with Claire at Naples, and that both Shelley and Claire had treated Mary brutally. When Shelley related this in a letter to Mary, she responded, as he requested, with a horrified denial. Her letter was directed to Isabelle Hoppner but was written for Byron’s eyes. Byron sensibly doubted Elise’s veracity, but he did not care sufficiently about clearing his friend’s name to confess to the Hoppners that he had told Shelley about the rumours, and nor did he ever forward Mary’s letter to them. In any case, he had more immediate concerns to discuss with Shelley, and many of their afternoons and evenings were taken up with talking about Byron’s plans for the future. He could not stay in Ravenna, and the Gambas were talking of relocating (with Teresa) to Geneva, in order to escape the political anger directed towards them after the failure of the Carbonari.

With Shelley’s help, Teresa and her father were persuaded to stay in Italy.  He proposed that both they and Byron should move to Pisa, to join the colony of sympathetic individuals gathering there. The Williamses and Mrs Mason were
in situ
, and Shelley believed that Horace Smith and his family were on their way to join them.  Claire was based in Florence, so would not be present to bother Byron. And, over the course of his Ravenna visit, Shelley made a suggestion which would allow the Hunts to join them in Italy as well. For some time, Byron had been toying with the idea of starting a literary journal, at one point asking Thomas Moore to join him as a fellow editor in Italy. Now Shelley reshaped and broadened that idea into a project which could provide gainful employment for Hunt. Hunt would come to Italy to edit a new journal, which he would produce in partnership with Byron. Shelley volunteered to act as facilitator, to bring Hunt to Italy and to organise Byron’s accommodation in Pisa. He secured a loan from Byron to fund the Hunts’ journey, and wrote eagerly to Hunt of the benefits of the project: ‘there can be no doubt that the
profits
of any scheme in which you and Lord Byron engage, must, from various yet co-operating reasons, be very great.’
³⁴
After some vacillation, both Byron and Hunt agreed to his proposal. The Gambas prepared to move to Pisa, and Hunt and Marianne packed up their belongings and made arrangements to transport their family to Italy by boat.

Writing to Mary of his plans, Shelley outlined the benefits of remaining in Pisa and of gathering their friends around them. In the company of the Williamses, the Hunts, Byron and the Masons, they could put down permanent roots in Italy,  celebrated in ‘Julian and Maddalo’ as a ‘paradise of exiles’. He also outlined the dilemma which was central to his emotional and intellectual existence, about how best one should live one’s life. ‘My greatest content’, he confessed, ‘would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you & our child to a solitary island in the sea, would build a boat, & shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world.’ Recognising this to be an impossible dream, he suggested ‘the other side of the alternative (for a medium ought not to be adopted)’: ‘to form for ourselves a society of our own class, as much as possible, in intellect or in feelings; & to connect ourselves with the interests of that society.’
³⁵
This was a mature reworking of the meeting of ‘unprejudiced members of the community’ which Shelley had proposed to Hunt back in 1811. The Pisan version of this community would be comprised of individuals buffeted by the blows of a cruel world: by the deaths of children and friends, by political repression, and by the vitriol of critics. In companionship they would take refuge from all that hurt them. From the safety of Italy, unhampered by the vicious libel laws of England, Hunt, Byron and Shelley would produce a journal which might still have the power to change the world.

Shelley returned to Mary at the end of August, and together they made preparations to receive their community of exiles, now slowly making its way toward them across land and sea. They returned to Pisa in the autumn and settled themselves in large unfurnished apartments on the Lung’Arno. Shelley rented a
palazzo
for Byron opposite their own home, on the other side of the river. The ground floor of Byron’s house was set aside for the Hunts, who were expected to sail from England before Christmas. Claire was fetched from Livorno, where she had been all summer, and spent a short holiday with the Shelleys before returning to Florence.

On 1 November 1821 Byron’s cavalcade rolled into Pisa, complete with travelling carriage, mountains of baggage, over a dozen horses and a menagerie of exotic household pets. Allegra remained in her convent, far away now from both her mother and her father. Claire left Pisa to return to Florence on the day of Byron’s arrival and passed his ‘travelling train’
³⁶
on the road. Her last encounter with the man who had changed her life was a fleeting glimpse of his carriage from the window of a public coach.

8

Corsairs

Byron’s new home was the Palazzo Lanfranchi, a cavernous Renaissance building overlooking the Arno. Three days after his arrival Edward and Jane Williams moved back to Pisa from Pugnano, and took rooms in the same building as the Shelleys. Edward was introduced to Byron by Shelley, and was rather dazzled by his celebrity. He was surprised that Byron bore so little resemblance to the brooding figure of popular imagination: ‘so far from being . . . wrapt in a melancholy gloom he is all sunshine, and good humour with which the elegance of his language and the brilliancy of his wit cannot fail to inspire those who are near him.’
¹
Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin arrived in Pisa for the winter and was equally entranced by its newest and most famous resident. He spent long evenings drinking at the Palazzo Lanfranchi, during which he assiduously wrote down Byron’s pronouncements on his life, his work, and his acquaintances. Medwin saw himself as the Boswell to Byron’s Johnson, recording the words of the great man for posterity (and, of course, to ensure a posthumous reputation for himself, just as Boswell had). Everyone – Byron included – found Medwin’s incessant scribbling rather comical, and Byron, knowing that his every word was being recorded, ensured that his conversation was suitably outrageous. Byron’s friends were less amused when Medwin rushed his
Conversations of Lord Byron
into print in 1824, particularly since the volume was full of inaccuracies and shredded the reputations of men and women who had known Byron for much longer than Medwin himself. But in 1821, Medwin was accepted into the fold of the Pisa group. Like John Taaffe, who frequently joined Byron’s parties, he was a figure of fun and nobody guessed he would go on to refashion his new friends in print so unscrupulously.

Byron’s position at the centre of the Pisan group was unassailable. He was rich, famous, brilliant, had a large house and the resources with which to entertain his friends, not to mention a glamorous Italian mistress. He rose late, breakfasted, and then rode out from Pisa with Shelley, Pietro Gamba (Teresa’s brother), Medwin, Taaffe and Edward to a farm where they practised shooting. It was Byron who provided the horses and who negotiated shooting rights outside the city walls, since the governor of Pisa would not allow him to fire his pistols in his own garden at the Palazzo Lanfranchi. They used silver coins wedged atop split canes for targets, and Shelley and Byron vied to prove their prowess, competing with each other for the title of best shot. Sometimes Mary and Jane rode out with Teresa in her carriage to watch the fun; sometimes Jane and Edward (who found the permanent presence of others a little wearing) would hide away, and walk out to meet the group on their return. Usually Byron dined alone, called on Teresa, and then returned to his
palazzo
, where he worked late into the night by candlelight, with a bottle of wine at his elbow – first on a tragedy,
Werner
, and subsequently on new cantos of
Don Juan
. Every Wednesday he put aside his work to host a dinner party for his new acquaintances. These were heavy drinking, heavy eating affairs, and they could be something of a penance for Shelley, who usually ate and drank little, rose much earlier in the morning, and was overawed by Byron’s productivity. On rainy days Shelley and Edward played billiards in Byron’s
palazzo
and Shelley and Byron discussed the progress of the latter’s poetry, just as they had done in Venice. Edward and Shelley also made occasional expeditions down the Arno in Shelley’s boat, sometimes taking Mary and Jane with them.

It was an exceptionally well-documented winter. All its participants, but particularly those, like Edward and Medwin, who knew themselves to be in the company of more talented men, recognised that the confluence of personalities in Pisa was extraordinary; that they were living through (in the words of a youthful Keats, anticipating his meeting with Hunt) ‘an Era in [their] existence’.
²
While Medwin wrote down Byron’s conversations, Edward kept a diary, in which he recorded discussions with Byron about women, politics, and poetry. Edward’s diary recorded a strange incident which took place in mid-December, when Medwin reported rumours that a man was to be burnt alive for sacrilege in the nearby province of Lucca. These rumours turned out to be incorrect, but not before Shelley and Byron had dispatched John Taaffe to Lucca to investigate, and Byron had been prevailed upon to use his influence to stop the punishment taking place. On other occasions Edward recorded Byron reading his poetry aloud in draft, and the admiration with which his recently published works were read by his friends.

Mary was particularly delighted by Byron’s work, as her letters to Maria Gisborne testify.
Cain
, she wrote, was ‘a revelation’, and quite unlike anything she had read before. ‘Of some works one says – one has thought of things though one could not have expressed it so well – It is not thus with Cain.’
³
Mary’s enthusiasm for Byron’s work can only have exacerbated Shelley’s renewed feeling of poetic inferiority. He wrote little that winter, directing most of his energy into an abortive drama based on the life of Charles I. Nor did it improve her relationship with Claire, who reacted badly from Florence to news of Mary’s cordial friendship with Teresa Guiccioli.
⁴

Byron was an amusing and invigorating companion, but his arrival in Pisa marked a shift in both the daily patterns of the group’s activities and its delicate, complicated relationships. Mary quickly realised that she would not again occupy the central position she had enjoyed during the Swiss summer of 1816. The group which now coalesced around Byron divided along gender lines. The men rode and shot, and gathered for dinner parties at Byron’s
palazzo
. Mary, Teresa and Jane were not invited to these gatherings, and instead had to content themselves with riding out to watch the shooting from a carriage, with paying calls on each other, and with receiving their male friends at home on the nights when Byron did not require their company at the Palazzo Lanfranchi (Byron himself rarely called on Mary that winter). For the most part Mary kept her thoughts on her exclusion from dinner parties and literary conversation to herself, but she could not resist conveying a mild complaint to Marianne Hunt, at whose Hampstead house she had enjoyed the company of a group notable for its equitable inclusion of men and women. ‘How I wish you were with us in our rambles!’ she wrote, while Marianne was still in England, waiting to sail to Italy. ‘Our good cavaliers flock together, and as they do not like
fetching a walk with the absurd womankind
, Jane . . . and I are off together, and talk morality and pluck violets by the way.’
⁵
By this point Mary was genuinely fond of Jane and enjoyed her company, but it was something of a disappointment for the author of
Frankenstein
to be reduced to flower picking with a female companion while the men talked politics and poetry.