Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (43 page)

Despite his doubts about the future of
The Liberal
, its foundation was a huge achievement for Shelley. At last Hunt and Byron, the twin poles of his intellectual existence, were united in a creative partnership of his making. Hunt’s problems, however, meant that it took longer to settle him and his family in Pisa than Shelley had anticipated, and Edward was waiting for him anxiously at Livorno, impatient at the delays which prevented him from returning to Jane and their children. Mary continued to send Shelley distraught letters, and Edward was painfully aware that at Casa Magni, Jane was bearing the brunt of her unhappiness. ‘I am tired to death of waiting’, he told her. ‘This is our longest separation, and seems a year to me.’
⁵⁶
Shelley wrote to Jane too, three days before his departure from Pisa. ‘I fear you are solitary & melancholy at Villa Magni – & in the intervals of the greater & more serious distress in which I am compelled to sympathize here, I figure to myself the countenance which has been the source of such consolation to me, shadowed by a veil of sorrow.’
⁵⁷
He wrote to Mary too, but in a different vein. ‘How are you my best Mary?’ he asked. ‘Write especially how is your health & how your spirits are, & whether you are not more reconciled to staying at Lerici at least during the summer.’
⁵⁸

On 7 July Shelley returned to Livorno. The following day he and Edward met Trelawny and his boat builder Daniel Roberts at the
Don Juan
to prepare for their journey back to Lerici, a few hours’ sail away. It was a swelteringly hot afternoon, and both Shelley and Edward were anxious to be home before the weather broke. They intended to race the sun across the bay, and to return in triumph to the waiting women at the Casa Magni. Just after 2 p.m. they set sail, accompanied by their boat boy, an English eighteen year old named Charles Vivian. Roberts remained on the shore, his sailor’s eye trained on some clouds forming on the horizon. An hour after their departure he saw a storm come up and, through his telescope, spotted the
Don Juan
in the distance, taking in its topsails. Then the clouds hid it from view. Out at sea, waves engulfed the boat, filling its open hull with water and ripping off its false stern and masts. Shelley, Edward and Charles Vivian were drowned.

PART THREE

After the Storm

9

The Future

Violent storms battered the Bay of Lerici too. Edward had written to Jane that he expected to sail by Monday (8 July) but initially Mary and Jane assumed that their husbands had not appeared back at the Casa Magni because of the weather. When a boat from Livorno sent word that Shelley and Edward had set sail at the beginning of the week, the two women dismissed the news as ill-informed rumour. But by Wednesday, when the storm had calmed and there was still no sign of the
Don Juan
, serious anxiety began to mount. By Friday lunchtime Jane was so worried that she decided to travel to Livorno to find out what had happened, but was then prevented from carrying out her plan by the return of rough seas and high winds. This meant she was at the house later that day when a letter from Hunt arrived. It was addressed to Shelley, and contained the worst possible news. ‘Shelley Mio’, Hunt had written, ‘pray let us know how you got home the other day with Williams, for I fear you must have been out in the bad weather, and we are anxious.’
¹

Horrified by the discovery that Shelley and Edward had sailed at the beginning of the week, Mary and Jane set out immediately for Pisa, in the hope that Hunt could tell them more. Claire, who had remained at the Casa Magni after Mary’s miscarriage, stayed behind to look after Percy and Jane’s children, two year old Medwin and baby Dina, aged sixteen months. Mary was still ill and weak, but she and Jane were rowed across to the town of Lerici, from where they travelled post to the Palazzo Lanfranchi. Though Hunt was asleep when they arrived, Byron was up late working, and a smiling Teresa emerged from his apartments to greet them. Both she and Byron were shocked by Mary’s state: deathly white, half-fainting, and barely coherent. But they could not comfort her, since all they knew was that Shelley had left Pisa the previous Sunday, and it was clear to both of them from Mary’s account that something had gone hideously wrong. They made strenuous efforts to persuade Mary and Jane to rest for a few hours in Pisa before continuing to Livorno, but their pleas were ignored and the two women travelled on through the night to find Trelawny, who had seen the
Don Juan
set sail. It was 2 a.m. by the time they arrived in Livorno and neither Trelawny nor his friend Daniel Roberts could be located. They slept for a few hours in their clothes at an inn, waiting for daylight. The following morning they went in search of Roberts, who confirmed that Shelley and Edward had indeed left the previous Monday. He described their impatience to be gone, and recalled that Shelley was in ‘one of those extravagant fits of good spirits in which you have sometimes seen him’. Roberts also described how he had stood on the shore waiting for the storm to clear, and how, as the clouds lifted, he trained his telescope on the horizon, expecting to see the
Don Juan
returning to harbour in Livorno. But, he told Mary, in words she later reported to Maria Gisborne, ‘there was no boat on the sea’.
²

Even as the horrible truth began to emerge, Mary and Jane refused to despair.  Perhaps the
Don Juan
had been blown off course to Corsica, or perhaps – and rumours circulated to this effect – they had been run ashore further up the coast.  Accompanied by Trelawny, Mary and Jane left Livorno to return to Lerici, to see if letters or news awaited them there. Their journey took them past the town of Viareggio, where they learnt that the
Don Juan
’s dinghy had been washed to shore, along with one of its water casks. By the time they reached Lerici Mary was close to delirium. ‘Looking down the river’, she later recalled, ‘I saw the two great lights burning – A voice from within me seemed to cry aloud that is his grave.’
³

They arrived home on Saturday, 13 July, five days after Shelley and Edward set sail. Mary later remembered the week which followed as ‘a universe of pain’.  Strong winds blew, the sea remained stormy, and the villagers, who were celebrating a fiesta, spent their nights dancing on the sands, running in and out of the sea in front of Casa Magni, and singing – or, as Mary said, ‘screaming’, ‘all the time one perpetual air’.
⁴
For six days there was no further news. Then, on 19 July, Claire intercepted a letter to Trelawny (who was searching for information in Livorno) from Roberts, informing him that two bodies had been discovered on the beach at Viareggio. Claire could not bear to confront either Mary or Jane with this latest rumour which, Roberts stressed, he had not yet had time to confirm.  Instead, she wrote desperately to Hunt, asking for his advice. ‘I cannot break it to them’, she confessed. ‘Nor is my spirit, weakened as it is from constant suffering capable of giving them consolation, or protecting them from the first burst of their despair.’
⁵

In fact, Claire was not required to tell Mary and Jane of Roberts’s fears.  Later that evening Trelawny arrived at Casa Magni. He had seen the bodies. Edward’s was badly mutilated, but Trelawny was able to identify him by his boots.  Shelley’s corpse had also suffered, after over a week in which it was attacked by rough seas and hungry fish. The flesh from his face and hands had been stripped away, but Trelawny recognised him from the books on his person: a volume of Sophocles in one pocket, and Keats’s
Lamia
– bent backwards, as if it had been stowed away in a hurry – in the other. Charles Vivian’s corpse was the last to surface, and only his skeleton had survived the sea’s ravages. All three bodies were immediately buried in quicklime graves on the beach, in accordance with Tuscany’s strict quarantine laws.

Trelawny broke the news to Mary, Jane and Claire and then escorted them back to Pisa, where they took refuge in the Shelleys’ old apartment. On 15 August, Trelawny, Hunt and Byron returned to the coast without the two widows to cremate their friends. The ceremonies were orchestrated by Trelawny, and the strange rituals he designed have entered Romantic mythology. He requested official permission to disinter Shelley and Edward from their temporary graves, and was permitted to do so on condition that both bodies were cremated next to their original burial plots. He brought with him a portable furnace – a peculiar iron contraption on a stand – and collected fuel of the type ‘used by Shelley’s much loved Hellenes on their funeral pyres’.
⁶

They began with Edward.  Then, on 16 August, almost a month after the bodies had surfaced, Trelawny, Byron and Hunt met at Shelley’s grave on the beach at Viareggio. Byron, who had seen plenty of burning flesh at Edward’s ceremony the day before, absented himself from Shelley’s cremation, and swam far out to sea, giving himself bad sunburn in the process. Hunt remained in the carriage, not, he later claimed, because he was unable to bear the sight of Shelley’s mangled flesh, but because he was overcome with emotion. So Trelawny was left to fulfil the role of high priest in a pagan rite of his own design. The scene he orchestrated on the beach at Viareggio was quite as theatrical as any of his fantastic stories. He later claimed that Byron wanted to take possession of Shelley’s skull, but that he refused this request, on the grounds that Byron ‘had formerly used [a skull] as a drinking-cup’ and ‘I was determined Shelley’s should not be so profaned.’
⁷
Trelawny rewrote his account of Shelley’s cremation many times during his long life, rendering it more mystical with each iteration. But the description he produced in his first memoir of his poet friends,
Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron
, was dramatically graphic:

After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.
⁸

Byron, observing events from the sea, was overwhelmed by the tragic grandeur of the scene. ‘You can have no idea’, he wrote to Thomas Moore, ‘what an extraordinary effect such a funeral pile has, on a desolate shore, with mountains in the back-ground and the sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frankincense gave to the flame.’
⁹

Richard Holmes has written that the story of Shelley’s life remains caught ‘in the glamorous headlights of [his] death’.
¹⁰
In the years following his cremation at Viareggio, Shelley would be transformed from an ordinary mortal into a visionary being. This process of transformation reached its pinnacle in 1889, when Louis Fournier painted a highly romanticised version of the ceremony, complete with a kneeling Mary and a ‘miraculously undamaged’ corpse.
¹¹
In fact, there was nothing very romantic about either Shelley’s death or his funeral. Trelawny and Daniel Roberts later sought to avoid the suggestion that their faulty boat design caused Shelley’s death, by claiming that the
Don Juan
was rammed by pirates, but Shelley died because he and Edward were inexperienced sailors who ignored weather warnings and were unable to handle their unwieldy craft. Shelley’s cremation – imagined by Fournier as a scene of holy solemnity – was dominated by the stink of burning flesh, a crowd of gawking villagers, and the soldiers drafted in to maintain quarantine regulations. After Trelawny’s ceremony was over, an undignified quarrel broke out between Mary and Hunt about who should keep Shelley’s heart, which somehow miraculously escaped the flames. In fact, the cherished relic was probably Shelley’s liver, but Hunt was only persuaded to relinquish it to Mary when Jane Williams persuaded him that Shelley would have been horrified at the idea of his friends quarrelling over one of his organs.

Otherwise, however, Jane did not behave well in the aftermath of Shelley and Edward’s death. Bereft of her husband, her friend, and her position as Shelley’s muse, she responded by lashing out at Mary behind her back. She told Hunt that Mary had made Shelley unhappy in the last months of his life; that she failed to provide him with the emotional and intellectual support he needed. She continued to spread malicious gossip about the Shelleys’ relationship after she returned to England. There was nothing in Jane’s behaviour before Shelley’s death to suggest that she disliked Mary, although their relationship was complicated by Shelley’s fascination with Jane. She may genuinely have felt that Mary had not made Shelley happy and that, during their difficult residence at Casa Magni, she did not make a sufficient effort to be a pleasant companion. Jane was not clever or intuitive, and she struggled to understand Mary’s antipathy towards the house and its surroundings. She also struggled to understand Mary’s response to Shelley’s death, which contrasted sharply with her own reaction to the loss of Edward. Mary hid her emotions beneath a frozen façade throughout the summer of 1822, and, as a result, several of her friends quite unfairly thought that she was insufficiently distressed by the loss of her husband. Jane probably found her apparent coolness both baffling and alienating, and she may also have resented the way that Edward’s untimely death was eclipsed by the tragedy of Shelley’s demise.