The Eternal Return Volume I Douglas Shields Dix

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THE ETERNAL RETURN
Volume I
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THE ETERNAL RETURN
Douglas Shields Dix
Last Man Editions

Prague
e Eternal Return
Copyright 2010 by Douglas Shields Dix
is is one of a Limited Edition of 50 hardbound copies
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, without
written permission, from the author, except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First published in 2010 by
Last Man Editions

Berlínská 7
102 00 Prague 10 - Hostivař
Czech Republic
For Mary & Claire

“Wenn jener Gedanke über dich Gewalt bekäme, er würde dich, wie du bist,
verwandeln und vielleicht zermalmen; die Frage bei Allem und Jedem
‘willst du diess noch einmal und noch unzählige Male?’ würde als das grösste
Schwergewicht auf deinem Handeln liegen! Oder wie müsstest du dir selber
und dem Leben gut werden, um nach Nichts mehr zu verlangen als nach
dieser letzten ewigen Bestätigung und Besiegelung?”
“If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are
or perhaps crush you. e question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire
this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions
as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to
yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal
confirmation and seal?”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenscha, 1882

Invocation
Everything that happened was selected, desired, willed. . .eternally. Despite

the endurance of interminable longing and loss, despite the intensities of
rapture and abjection, despite the moments circling around their own
obliteration, despite the convergence of loves of an uncompromising and
unremitting nature: I willed the eternal return of what happened, and I will
the eternal return of what is happening still. . .
e eternal return: what cannot be spoken of. . .the dwarf whispering in

Zarathustra’s ear, the leap of faith to something unseen, something beyond the
daily movements of rising and falling, something within the moment that we fear
as it resonates within the void. To will eternally this here, this now, this time and
place, this person I am, these persons to whom I am bonded, everything that fills
this moment. . .to say “yes” to this moment as if it would come back again
and again in an eternal repetition, is, finally, to realize that this moment
will not return. Never. e fear of this recognition breeds habits, plans, goals,
orders, systems. . .entire universes – all in a vain, enzied rush to escape the
grasp of such singularity and the mortality that aches within it. To face it
carries us to a realm where each moment rings with its vibrations,
transforming the very shape of our lives: the rhythms of our days, the patterns
of our nights, the faces we see in the mirror each morning. . .
To will the eternal return is to will the fullness of each moment against the
certainty that such a moment will never return again, for what returns is not
this moment, but the absolute singularity of another moment, another
willing, leading us moment by moment to our ends. To abandon ourselves
to the eternal return is to live in the awareness of our mortality, and to accept
this awareness as a task to be taken up as we go forward across the limited
time that is ours, and ours only. All of tenderness springs om there, and to
love is to affirm life in another in the face of this annihilation. . .
Volume I

y mid-morning a shimmering gauze of blue haze was already gathering
B above Emilia-Romagna to the south. ey had le Padova at 9:30
on an ordinario heading southwest, and within twenty minutes the first
verdant clusters of the Colli Euganei came into view – protuding
mounds of calcareous rock rising abruptly from the low scrub of the Po
plain. Was of air pungent with the smells of the countryside – heath,
broom, ilex, and turpentine trees – buffets the worn curtains of the
cabin. e man, dressed in a short-sleeved, black linen shirt and black
slacks, stands holding the handle of the train window, taking in the land-
scape rushing by. e woman accompanying him sits languidly on the
worn, straight-backed train seat opposite. She takes an occasional sip
from a bottle of mineral water, and intermittently adjusts her loose,
black cotton dress as she crosses or uncrosses her slender legs. She has
decided to give herself over completely to the journey, taking a position
of measured calm inversely proportional to his state of heightened
expectancy. He sits down facing her and pats her gently on the knee, and
she smiles at him.
“. . .we’ll be there soon. . .just look at those hills!”
“. . .they’re so strange. . .”
“. . .the landscape’s not what I imagined it would be like when I was
looking at the map in Prague: I imagined a series of rolling hills, but these
hills seem more like some sort of chthonian creatures ready to lurch out of
nether region. . .”
“. . .I was thinking the same thing. ey’re beautiful – I’ve never seen
anything like it. . .so, do you think they came this way from Venice?”
“. . .they must have come this way – there were no trains then, of course,
but this is the direct route, so they saw exactly these hills, these plains. . .”
“. . .how long do you think the journey would have taken them back
then?”
“It’s about sixty kilometers or so from Venice directly, so probably
seventy kilometers by road, and, in this heat, a carriage traveling at, say,
ten kilometers an hour, maybe less. . .perhaps nine or ten hours, if you
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add additional time for resting and the time spent crossing the lagoon by
boat – aer all, there was no causeway back then. . .”
“. . .the heat must have been terrible in their carriage – at least we have
the breeze from the train. . .”
“. . .yes, and they had not only the heat and the length of time to
contend with, but also poor road conditions, plus the lack of any ameni-
ties. . .”
“. . .what?”
“. . .oh, sorry – it’s an American euphemism for public toilets. . .”
“. . .yes, I can see how that would add to their difficulties!”
“. . .I’ve always been amazed by their itineraries – they traveled consid-
erable distances, especially during their four years here in Italy. ey
probably took it for granted – as much as we do the train, but still, it
must have been difficult. . .and then, when Mary was later forced to
come so quickly with the children across the Apennines from Bagni di
Lucca – the heat must have been terrible. . .”
“. . .didn’t you go to the Bagni di Lucca with Michael?”
“. . .yes, it was beautiful – an entirely different landscape – high hills
lush with chestnut and plain trees. . .”
“. . .did you find the house?”
“. . .it took us a little while – it wasn’t obvious, because it was unmarked.
Michael asked for directions in Italian at a grocery where we were buying
our lunch, and the owner responded, ‘Casa P.B. Shelley?’ Michael hadn’t
heard Shelley referred to by his initials before, so he thought the man was
saying something about ‘Casa pipistrelli’ – the Italian word for ‘bats’. . .”
“. . .what?”
“. . .let me think. . .in Czech I think it’s ‘netopýr,’ isn’t it? – the mouse with
wings?”
“. . .that’s right – ‘netopýři,’ plural. . .”
“. . .anyway, I was startled when I heard his name – it was such
a surprise!”
“. . .did the man know where the house was?”
“. . .no, but then we went to the magistrate, and they told us how to get
there – it was up a hill a ways, near a house where Montaigne had stayed. . .”
“. . .it must have been a popular place. . .”
“. . .it was a well-known spa town back then – Heinrich Heine also
stayed there in the mid 19th century, but, in 1818, Shelley complained
that they only heard English voices everywhere. We found another villa

with a plaque there, and it turned out to be a house where Byron had
stayed later – probably on Shelley’s advice. At first I thought they had
confused the two poets, Byron being the more ‘tourist-worthy’ of the
two, but right next door we found Shelley’s house, the Casa Bertini –
now called the Villa dei Chiappa. . .”
“. . .did it have a plaque?”
“. . .no. . .it’s situated so you can only see it from an angle – it’s right at
the top of some steps where the walk curves towards the Byron villa. . .”
“. . .did you go inside?”
“. . .no, it’s a private residence now, so we thought there was no point in
disturbing anyone, although now I wish we had. . .we went around the
back to try to see the garden, but it was hidden by the overgrowth. We
were tired and hungry, so we settled for having our lunch on the stone
ledge fronting the Byron villa, in sight of the Casa Bertini. . .”
She takes another sip of water, hands him the bottle, and gazes out the
window at the passing hills.
“. . .here’s Monsélice now, so we’re almost there – it’s the next town. . .”
Sun-bleached railway buildings slip gradually into view as the train
shudders to a halt, creaking and squealing before coming to a full stop.
The heat immediately pours in through the window – a tangible pres-
ence, enveloping the few people getting off the train, retarding their
movements as if they were held back by an invisible net. The harsh
sunlight gives a vibrating intensity to even the most neutral of colors,
making the drab, concrete station waver in the heat like a mirage. After
a short pause there’s a groaning of metal and the train reluctantly
lurches forward. They scan every crag, tree, and building they pass,
searching for some sign that they have arrived at their destination. She
leans forward in her seat and looks intently out the window, infected
by his excitement. After a few minutes the train passes a blue and
white sign labeled “Este” and comes slowly to a halt. They are the only
ones disembarking at the small station, and in the mid-morning heat
they seem like figures from a de Chirico painting. A man at the ticket
window glances at them as they walk through the station, stopping
briefly to check the train schedules for the return trains. Outside the
station they hesitate, facing the station cul-de-sac and the street into
the town, lined with a few small businesses and one restaurant. She
wipes her brow with a handkerchief, and looks at him tentatively.
“. . .it doesn’t look promising. . .”

“. . .this can’t be the town yet – the station must be a little way out of
the center. It should only be a short walk from here. . .”
“. . .well, there’s only one way to go. . .”
“. . .let’s take it easy. . .”
Aer a short walk the town center gradually unfolds around them:
houses, small shops, cafes, and finally a small central square with porti-
coed sidewalks. ey walk slowly across the square, turning on to the
main street leading to the castle grounds.
“. . .there’s the castle!”
“. . .let’s cross over. . .”
ey hasten their steps to the intersection across from the castle
grounds, crossing over to the pebbled frontage outside the castle walls –
now reconstructed and enclosing a city park. ey walk around the
perimeter on the two most accessible sides – the streets are modern,
paved, and fronted by small businesses and houses.
“. . .the garden of their villa was supposed to have come quite close to the
castle walls, with only a small ravine and road between them, but it was
nothing like this. . .it may have been destroyed, if it was on either of these
two sides. Let’s walk through the grounds and look on the far side – over
there, through that gate. . .”
ey enter the castle grounds: trimly-landscaped gardens, well-tended
trees, and smooth, pebbled paths. ere is no keep – only outer walls,
their crenellations reconstructed with red bricks outlined against the
mottled black and gray stone of the original walls. Old men and women,
and an occasional mother and child, stroll slowly down the paths or
recline on the benches in the shade of the intense, late morning sun. ey
walk across the grounds to the opposite side and through a portal in the
walls: the road turns away from the castle walls, and only a dirt lane skirts
the wall as it rises up a hill, finally obscured by trees and overgrowth. e
only dwelling in sight is across the road a distance from the walls: a small
albergo, backed by a line of trees and dense bushes.
“. . .it doesn’t look like any buildings were ever here on this side, and it
looks like a wilderness up that way. . .”
“. . .that leaves only the far side. . .”
“. . .let’s get some water first – this heat is exhausting me. . .”
“. . .do you want to build up the suspense?”
“. . .perhaps – or to stave off disappointment. . .in any case, if I don’t
drink something now, I’ll drop from the heat. . .”

ey walk back to the main square and sit at a sidewalk table of a small
café. A waitress takes their order, and returns with two glasses and a large
bottle of mineral water. ey pour the water into the glasses, drink, and
fill their glasses again. He places his sunglasses on the table and wipes the
perspiration off his forehead with a dark blue handkerchief, then pulls
a black notebook out of his shoulder bag and begins reading. She lights
a cigarette, and then touches his hand.
“. . .maybe we can ask in the museum near the castle gate. . .”
“. . .we’ll find it – if it still exists. . .”
“. . .so what was it that brought them here, anyway?”
“e villa here was a summer house included with the lease of the Villa
Mocenigo – the villa Byron was renting in Venice. It was called the villa
I Cappucini because it was built on the ruins of a Capuchin monastery. It
wasn’t being used, so Byron invited them to stay here. It was a way for
Claire to see her daughter, Allegra, without disturbing Byron, who
couldn’t stand the sight of her by then. . .”
“. . .and Claire and Shelley came here alone at first?”
“. . .yes, Mary was still in Bagni di Lucca when they arrived in Este. One
of the reasons they came to Italy in the first place was to deliver Allegra to
Byron. She had been sent with their servant, Elise, in April, 1818, from
Como to Venice – just aer they arrived in Italy. . .”
“. . .it must have been horrible for her – to have to send her own
daughter away, and not even to see where she was to live. . .”
“. . .it was – Claire was tormented by Allegra’s departure, even though
she had chosen it, and even more tormented when Byron, aer Allegra
arrived in Venice, sent a letter that spoke of Allegra as if Claire were never
to see her again. . .”
“. . .was that their agreement? I thought Claire was expected simply to
leave Byron alone, but would be able to see Allegra whenever she
wanted?”
“. . .the terms were interpreted differently by both sides. Byron had
agreed to acknowledge the child as his own, meaning its economic future
and social status would be secured, but only if Claire would relinquish
any hope of their coming together – in matrimony or otherwise, and
would give up the child to his guardianship, from that point on seeing
Allegra only by agreement, and only under the cover of being known as
her ‘aunt’. . .”
“. . .that’s horrible – how could she have agreed to it?”

“. . .Shelley thought so as well, and later he reproached her for her orig-
inal decision in a letter, reminding her that he had spoken against it. For
Claire, it was a choice about her daughter’s future: a child born out of
wedlock and unacknowledged by its father during that period had little
hope at all, while a child that would be acknowledged as Lord Byron’s
would have had the whole world open to it. . .”
“. . .so when they came here was she going to Venice to try to take her
back?”
“. . .no, only to visit her. Aer a few weeks at Bagni di Lucca, Claire’s
anguish over Allegra’s welfare suddenly intensified when she received
two letters from Elise in Venice. . .”
“. . .what did they say?”
“ey’re lost, so we only have a description of them: they were mostly illeg-
ible and apparently quite disturbing where they were legible. Years later, in
her dotage, Claire wrote to Trelawny – one of the members of their circle in
the final years – that Elise had reported in one letter that one day Byron had
come into the nursery, and aer watching Allegra playing for a while,
announced, suddenly, that Allegra would grow into a very pretty woman. . .
and that he would then take her for his mistress!”
“. . .that sounds just like him. . .”
“. . .Elise’s horrified response was that the joke was improper given he
was the child’s father. Byron replied that he wasn’t joking at all – that
he could and would do it, because ‘the child was Mr. Shelley’s.’ Elise
wrote Claire the next day, and upon reading the letter, Claire was
suddenly confronted with Byron’s evil and wanted to go to Venice
immediately. In order to calm Claire’s fears, Shelley decided to go
directly to Venice with her and appeal to Byron to allow her to see
Allegra. Shelley hadn’t seen Byron since Geneva, two years earlier, so
for him the trip had the double motivation of assuaging Claire’s fears
and reestablishing contact with Byron. He and Claire left for Venice,
leaving Mary in Tuscany with their children – Clara and William, and
some friends. . .”
“. . .how long had it been since Claire had seen Allegra?”
“. . .they had sent Allegra to Byron in April, 1818, and they arrived here
in late August – so, it had been four months. . .”
“. . .she should never have given her up, it seems to me. . .”
“. . .she may have thought she could still find a way to win Byron –
her letters certainly continued to hint at the possibility, although in

a rather resigned way. . .perhaps she hoped that the child would become
a lasting bond between them – indeed it was, which affected Byron in
a way exactly opposite than she hoped. . .”
“. . .I hate Byron for forcing her to make such a choice. . .”
“. . .Byron saw her as an irritant at best: she came into his life at a rather
unfortunate time, and she forced her attentions upon him. He had no
desire for any further entanglements; indeed, part of his reason for
leaving England was to cut himself off from many of the connections he
still had there. He thought so well of himself and his own status that he
didn’t wish to share himself with anyone who wasn’t of his own aristo-
cratic class, while simultaneously isolating himself because he despised
almost all the members of his own class. Shelley critiqued his snobbish-
ness in the prologue to the poem Julian and Maddalo, which he wrote
here in Este. He never stopped insisting on his class status to Shelley in
one way or another. . .”
“. . .I thought Shelley came from the upper classes as well, didn’t he?”
“. . .he was the son of a country squire with a landed estate, but still, that
was not high enough for Lord Byron. In some regard Byron’s attitude
must have been a combination of self doubt and a psychological
distancing mechanism – he told Edward Trelawny, once, that he had no
intimates. . .”
“. . .so, if Byron hated Claire so much, how was she able to see Allegra in
Venice?”
“. . .when they arrived in Venice they went to where Allegra was living in
the care of the Hoppners – a British diplomat and his wife. Claire remained
there with Allegra while Shelley went to see Byron – that’s how Shelley was
able to arrange the stay here in Este. Shelley lied and told Byron that he,
Mary, and Claire had been visiting Padua, and that he had come alone to
Venice, leaving the women in Padua. Byron, who was extremely happy to
see Shelley again, was in a particularly obliging frame of mind just then –
at first he agreed to send the child to them for a visit, then he suggested that
they take the house in Este as a way to prolong Shelley’s stay, but keep
Claire at a distance. It seemed perfect: to be complete, the plan simply
needed Mary to come so quickly from the Bagni di Lucca to cover Shelley’s
lie to Byron. He wrote her a letter in the early hours of the same morning
following his day with Byron. In the end, it was about ten days between the
time Claire, Shelley, Allegra, and their maid Elise arrived here in Este, and
when Mary arrived with the children – William and Clara. . .”

“. . .he was trying to please everyone, it seems. . .”

“. . .yes, but his primary virtue – what everyone referred to as his ‘good-
ness’ – was also his worst fault, and it was here at Este that this emerged
most clearly. . .”
“. . .because of the conflict between Mary and Claire?”
“. . .because of how he wasn’t managing the situation with Mary and
Claire. . .”
“. . .but what were his relations to them? I’ve never been clear about it. . .”
“. . .it’s not clear – that’s what I want to work through while we’re here
in Italy. One thing that’s certainly a myth is that Shelley’s belief in ‘free
love’ meant promiscuity: Mary, Claire, and Shelley never shared the same
bed, as they are shown doing in Ivan Passer’s film Haunted Summer, and
it certainly wasn’t the ongoing love-fest depicted by Ken Russell’s over-
the-top film Gothic. It wasn’t a ménage à trois, but a parallel intimacy,
with Shelley in the middle. Mary and Claire were, aer all, step-sisters,
and Godwin had always stood as a dominant figure for them, so their
sibling rivalry as children must have been intense: the two women lived
in kind of symbiotic love-hate relationship, exacerbated by the differences
in their temperaments. Mary was cool and calm, while Claire was fiery
and temperamental; Mary was intellectual while Claire was sensual;
Mary was to a certain degree passive, prone to melancholy, and sensitive
to the point of hyper-sensitivity, while Claire was active, vivacious and
impulsive to the point of being impetuous. e two intimacies, for
Shelley, meant twice as much conflict to be borne, and it took all that
much more energy for him to address their oen conflicting needs and
desires. . .”
“. . .but Mary knew about his relations to Claire, didn’t she?”
“. . .he seems to have told Mary only as much truth as she was able or
willing to bear, and given the hiatus in Shelley and Claire’s relations,
which seems to have lasted from the period of her first liaison with Byron
until their time here in Este, there had been heretofore little to hide. . .of
course, once their intimacy resumed again, disaster followed almost
immediately. . .”
“. . .Clara’s death?”
“. . .and much more. Let’s pay, and I can tell you more while we’re
walking. . .”
ey buy another mineral water, and walk slowly back to the main
gates of the castle. e castle grounds are now almost entirely empty.
8
“. . .are you sure you don’t want to ask someone at the museum?”
“. . .let’s check up this street first, and come back if we can’t find it up
there. . .”
ey walk past the museum and on up the road until they reach a side-
street. She suddenly grasps his arm and points to the street sign.
“. . .look! ‘Via Cappucini’! It was at the site of a Capuchin monastery,
wasn’t it?”
“. . .yes it was. . .I’m sure we’ll find it now. . .”
ey walk slowly down the street in silence, considering the location
and appearance of each of the houses as they go: most have been built in
the 0th Century. e street becomes a dirt lane aer an intersection with
a gravel road: beyond are vineyards stretching to the summit of the hill.
She walks a few meters down the gravel road, and suddenly calls to him
excitedly.
“. . .I think it’s. . .yes, it’s here!”
She is standing opposite a brick and stucco boundary wall with rusted
iron gates – the corner of a large estate. To the le of the gates is a worn
marble plaque. e villa is about fiy meters down a tree-lined path from
the gate, visible only from the front, the boundary wall extending thirty
meters across the front of the property. e main entrance – a spiked,
wrought-iron gate with a signet in its center – has meter wide stone steps,
cracked in the middle and buckled downwards. On the le side of the
wall are two low gates for coaches opening on the front of a coach house
on the le perimeter of the property. From the main gates a path extends
to the villa – a meter’s width of slate in the middle of a wide dirt path
bordered by oak trees filtering and dappling the strong mid-day sunlight.
e house is obscured by trees and lush overgrowth – all they can see
from their vantage point is an arched wooden door down the path, and
an adjoining low wing shaded in front by a pergola leading to the main
villa. e villa itself is partially obscured by the trees. Across the lane from
where they are standing there is a depression forming a natural dry moat,
and fieen meters on the other side of it are the castle walls. e road
dips downwards towards the albergo they had seen earlier from the other
side, bordered by the high wall and the overgrown hedge that had
prevented them from seeing the villa’s perimeter walls.
“. . .‘In questa villa tra il 1817 e il 1818 soggiornarono i poeti GEORGE
GORDON BYRON. . .PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY’. . .”
“. . .we couldn’t see it from the castle because of all of this overgrowth. . .”
9
“. . .the sign’s not quite correct. Byron never saw this villa, to my knowl-
edge, and Shelley was here only from the end of August, 1818, until
October of the same year – that’s typical: they exaggerate its significance
in one regard, while obscuring its real significance. . .but I suppose that’s
understandable; aer all, they couldn’t very well put up a plaque that
said, ‘Here Percy Bysshe Shelley began writing two of his greatest poems
and set in motion a series of traumatic events that would ultimately lead
to his self-destruction and to the partial destruction of the people he
most loved.’ e various myths make it all safe for human consumption
– practically making their lives seem conventional in their unconven-
tionality, when compared to the truth of what happened. . .”
“. . .but I wish we could go in – it’s maddening to be so close. Do you
think anyone is living here now?”
“. . .probably some caretaker drops by from time to time, at least. . .”
She sits down on the top step and takes a long drink of mineral water,
then offers the bottle to him. Taking it, he sits down beside her, and sips
it while gazing at the sky to the south. e heat haze over the south
obscures the horizon. Only the rustle of a few birds and the soughing of
the branches overhead in the hot summer breeze animates the scene. She
brushes the hair from her eyes, and turns to look back through the
wrought-iron gate.
“. . .so what is the truth – what really happened here? Tell me from the begin-
ning. . .”
He takes another sip of water, wipes his brow with his handkerchief,
and turns around to face the villa behind them.
“. . .Este represents an intersection of so many different forces in
Shelley’s life – in all of their lives. It’s not entirely clear what actually
happened here, and there’s considerable disagreement over it – it’s really
a mystery, so there’s only theories and hypotheses. . .”
“. . .is it about his relationship to Claire?”
“. . .partially, but there’s so much more to it than that – so little atten-
tion has been paid to this period in the popular mythology about the
Shelleys and Byron, and what came aer it in their lives. e focus has
always been on the Geneva period – their summer with Byron at the Villa
Diodati; however, I firmly believe that the time they spent in Italy, later,
was the most important part of their lives. e ‘Byron summer’ in Geneva,
in 181, was merely a vacation, but when they came to Italy to stay they
were true exiles. Shelley’s most mature writing would come during this
10
period – the period from 1818 to 18. at’s when he threw off his
romantic idealism for a sophistication that stretched the limits of thought
and literature. Even more, I’m interested in how they lived, coped,
suffered, and managed their Enlightenment experiment in living – espe-
cially in the face of the enormous losses they incurred. It’s as much about
how they lived and endured as it is about what they managed to write. . .”
“. . .but it’s also about us in a way, isn’t it?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .do you think we can avoid their mistakes?”
“. . .I hope we can. ey made serious mistakes, but they le behind
a legacy of a different way of living and loving. I felt that we needed to
come here, to this precise place, as an inspiration. . .but perhaps we can
learn something that will help us in our own experiment. . .”
“. . .I hope so, because it isn’t easy. . .”
“. . .the easy way is always to follow one’s times. . .”
“. . .we’re in no danger of doing that. . .so, from what I remember from
before, I only know that when Mary arrived here in Este, the baby was ill
and died in Venice when they were trying to take her to the doctor there
– she blamed Shelley and Claire for what happened, didn’t she?”
“. . .yes, although it’s a little more complicated than that. . .in a way, it
was the beginning of the end of a certain kind of closeness between Mary
and Shelley, or at least the end of the naive kind of intimate closeness
where one feels one can communicate everything to the other – every
thought, feeling, or emotion. Such intimacy, such imaginary comple-
mentarity, cannot last – if it ever really begins, which I doubt. . .”
“. . .do you think she stopped loving him?”
“. . .no, I don’t think so. Something always remained – a deep attach-
ment, despite everything. . .you can see it in how his death affected her
later. I don’t agree with the critics who try to make it all black and white,
as if love could only exist within one dominant inflection. It was the end
of the first major phase of their relations – something died, certainly, but
something else began. . .”
“. . .so was Shelley to blame? He couldn’t have known what would
happen, could he? He was trying to please Claire by bringing her together
with Allegra again. . .”
“. . .there were so many demands on him – he was the center of the
community that formed around him. I don’t think some people, like
Byron, realized that fact until after his death. It was exactly because of
11
what everyone called his ‘goodness’ that he wanted to meet the various
demands of those closest to him: not only those of Claire, Allegra, and
Mary, but Byron as well – at least in the Este period. His ‘goodness’ was
primarily his sensitivity to the needs of others, his lack of guile and
possessiveness, his high spirits, his hopes for humanity. . .finally,
I suppose, his energy, or his capacity for affirming life. People forget
that long before Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Shelley was advancing
a strangely affirmative nihilism that didn’t culminate in existential
despair, but opened outwards towards life and mystery. Of course all
the dangers of his life came from this mode of existence – existence
beyond the reactionary norms of his society. His experiments some-
times ended in disaster – for example what happened here. . .”
“. . .which was what?”
“. . .when he and Claire first arrived in Venice, he went with Byron
riding on the Lido for hours – in fact, his idea for the long poem Julian
and Maddalo came from that ride. . .but, in reality, all the while Claire
was anxiously awaiting the outcome at the Hoppners’. Clearly he was
trying to please Byron, but he wrote to Mary that he would have
preferred telling Claire about the arrangement immediately. When the
possibility of staying in Este was brought up, he seized the chance of
making Claire happy, as well as strengthening his friendship with Byron,
but, carried away, he wrote his letter to Mary in the middle of the night,
begging her to depart as soon as possible in order to cover over his
previous lie to Byron about their all being already present in Padua. . .”
“. . .and that’s what caused the tragedy?”
“. . .regrettably, yes. . .and you know the outcome: by the time Mary
arrived ten days or so later in September, the heat had exacerbated a fever
that little Clara had been suffering since she was in Bagni di Lucca. . .”
“. . .but Shelley couldn’t have known that, could he?”
“. . .no, but given it was his own impetuosity that caused the situation, he
probably should have traveled back to Bagni di Lucca to help her pack, or he
ought to have given her more time to manage things. In any event, aer her
arrival they all stayed here in Este for another ten days, with Clara’s situa-
tion worsening by the minute. When they finally saw the necessity of
bringing her to a doctor, he decided to forego the doctor in Padua for one in
Venice, thus making it a journey of over twelve hours rather than six – part
of which were in the heat of the day. en, when they reached the lagoon, he
realized he had forgotten their passports. . .”
1
“. . .they needed passports to enter Venice?”

“. . .Italy wasn’t unified until mid-century – it was a collection of city-
states and principalities, many under the control of Austria following the
Napoleonic wars. . .”
“. . .so what did they do?”
“. . .they were detained crossing the lagoon, but Shelley managed to
convince the officials to let them cross anyway. ey arrived by gondola,
he put Mary and the baby in an inn, and he set out to look for Byron’s
doctor. Meanwhile Mary, understandably hysterical with fear, had
another local doctor summoned, but nothing could be done, and Shelley
returned just in time to witness Clara’s last convulsions – she died in
Mary’s arms. . .”
“. . .Mary must have been devastated by it. . .it’s difficult to imagine. . .”
“. . .the next day she began her journal entry with the sentence, ‘is is
the journal of misfortune.’ She didn’t even begin to emerge from her grief
until their son Percy was born over a year later, and by then she had
become a very different woman – far more driven by the need for security
and stability than she had been. . .”
“. . .I can sympathize with her – she must have been grasping for some
secure foundation. . .how did it affect their relationship?”
“. . .Mary withdrew from Shelley emotionally: Shelley no longer shared
every thought and feeling with her as he had done in the past; perhaps
that’s inevitable in any relationship, but in their relationship, the breach
was intensified by the tragedy. Understandably, he turned even more fully
to Claire to make up for the understanding and sympathy he was lacking
from Mary. . .”
“. . .so, is that the story – Mary’s despair and withdrawal, and Shelley’s
turn towards Claire? at would be enough, really, but somehow
I suspect that’s not all there is to it. . .”
“. . .it’s not so easy to recount the rest of what happened – even if we did
have all the facts. e biographers and critics, even when they admit that
the evidence is not available to ascertain the truth, oen act as if there is
a bedrock of truth that could be reached if the facts were finally available.
I’m not so certain. In fact, I tend to believe the opposite is the case: there are
layers of truth, endless layers, but no bedrock. Facts need to be organized,
and that’s where the facts become interpretations – more or less plausible
or interesting interpretations, but interpretations nonetheless. Interpreters
can never fully transcend their biases: their moralities, beliefs, ideologies –
1
their histories and cultures. It’s difficult enough to suspend the beliefs one
consciously holds about the world, but that’s just a beginning, as then there
are all the forms of belief one holds on to unconsciously. . .”
“. . .what do you mean?”
“. . .anything from whether one sees one’s actions as self-determined or
as connected to fate, socialization, or a specific historical process; or
whether one sees the self as largely conscious and rational, or unconscious
and irrational. For example, I never really realized how much of a self-
determinist I was until I began living in Prague: it was only aer being
abroad a while that I realized how American I was, despite my protesta-
tions to the contrary. At first I saw only the socio-historically-
determined fatalism of Czechs, but aer a while I realized how socio-
historically-determined my own sense of freedom was – and I wasn’t
exactly a libertarian before, which made it all the more disconcerting. . .”
“. . .but you’ve changed a great deal since you’ve been living in Prague
– I can see the contrast when you’re with other Americans. So many of
them see themselves as individualists, and supposedly so free from their
history. . .”
“. . .people never know what it is they take for granted until something
removes them from their social context – they’re already largely determined
in regard to what and how they think about their lives, their selves. . .at least
until something significant intervenes – like how the Velvet Revolution
affected our lives, or, just the fact of living in another culture for a longer
period of time, or some traumatic event. . .”
“. . .but if it’s so difficult to step outside one’s frame of reference, how
can biographers or historians even hope to approach their subject?”
“. . .many biographers are quite conservative: most are traditional
humanists, and haven’t absorbed the insights of 0th century thought –
a greater theoretical complexity, a greater skepticism towards what consti-
tutes a fact, or what constitutes human subjectivity. . .for example, I have
yet to see a biography informed by Heidegger or Lacan, let alone by
Deleuze and Guattari!”
“. . .actually, it seems to me that even the idea of a ‘definitive biography’
is peculiarly Anglo-American – I haven’t seen the same kind of claims to
completeness in biographies from biographers in other countries. . .”
“. . .I think you’re right – it says something about Anglo-American
positivism and empiricism. I look at it this way: there are events, and
layers of facts surrounding the events – facts recorded in one way or
1
another, but almost all textual, in any case. But even with these facts there
are immense problems: whose records, whose facts, do we believe, and
how much or how little? ere are the various versions and interpreta-
tions of the events by contemporaries, then add to that the critics and
biographers between then and now, with all of their various agendas.
at the Victorian, the Modern, and the Postmodern periods separate us
from Shelley’s period is not an unimportant point: three entirely
different epochs with their particular ways of thinking and perceiving.
Look at the biographies and accounts of Shelley, Mary, or Claire by those
who actually knew them: can we trust omas Hogg’s biographical
account – a man who only knew Shelley before his exile, and who later
maintained that poetry was an utterly useless activity? From what we
know, Shelley shouldn’t have trusted Hogg at all – he was like a character
out of a Henry James novel, desiring to live a different kind of life than
the norm, but in the end too cowardly to maintain it, and instead living
vicariously through Shelley. . .when he wasn’t making fun of him. . .”
“. . .it reminds me of several people we know. . .”
“. . .they exist in every period. Hogg was even more radical than Shelley
when they met at Oxford, and they were expelled together for not admit-
ting the authorship of Shelley’s e Necessity of Atheism pamphlet;
however, he later became a solid member of the establishment –
a barrister, I believe. He tried to seduce Shelley’s first wife Harriet, totally
misconstruing what Shelley meant by ‘free love’ in a sort of block-headed,
literal manner, then apparently had some kind of relationship with Mary
that ultimately came to a bad end as well. . .and, even then, aer Shelley’s
death, he ended up marrying Jane Williams, the last woman Shelley was
inspired by. . .”
“. . .I know the type: they’re like – what do you call those big birds that
eat dead animals?”
“. . .bald, with a hooked beak?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .‘vultures,’ or sometimes ‘buzzards,’ depending upon where they’re
found. . .”
“. . .yes – men like that are like vultures. . .”
“. . .what is it in Czech?”
“. . .‘sup’ – the plural is ‘supi’. . .”
“. . .Shelley had many strange birds around him. omas Love Peacock
was another one: his surname fit him also, for he seems to have strutted
1
about like a peacock. What’s ‘peacock’ in Czech – the bird with the beau-
tiful tail who sounds like it’s crying?”
“. . .it’s páv in the singular, pávi in the plural. . .”
“. . .‘páv’. . .does Czech have the association between peacocks and
pride? In English there is the saying ‘proud as a peacock’. . .”
“. . .Czech has it also: ‘Pyšný jako páv’ – but who was Peacock, anyway?
I don’t remember hearing about him. . .”
“. . .he was another so-called friend of Shelley’s, but he caricatured
Shelley and his circle in a comic novel he wrote called Nightmare Abbey,
and his later memoirs of Shelley, published long aer Shelley’s death,
were not so much different from his novel: he made of Shelley a rather
humorous figure. . .”
“. . .another vulture. . .”
“. . .yes, a new hybrid I suppose – the ‘peacock-vulture’: ‘Páv sup’ –
would that be how you would say it?”
“. . .you have to make it into an adjective in Czech – it would be pávovitý
sup. . .”
“. . .that’s nice – I like that about Czech: qualities can be communicated
more easily than in English. Anyway, Peacock, like Hogg, also gave up his
radicalism quite early, and made a career in the India House, which was just
then becoming a vanguard to the quickly consolidating British Empire. . .”
“. . .not exactly a trustworthy account. . .”
“. . .not at all. . .”
“. . .did Shelley have any real friends?”
“. . .none that le any realistic and sympathetic accounts. Byron had the
necessary skill, but not the sensitivity to do what Shelley did when he
wrote the poem Adonaïs as a tribute to Keats aer his death – and Shelley
hardly even knew Keats! Edward Trelawny, who knew Shelley only in the
last year of his life, was quite favorable to Shelley in his memoirs, but they
were obviously distorted by his own character. Trelawny was so full of
himself at the time he knew Shelley that there’s a good deal he couldn’t
see, or distorted. His gravestone is typical: he had himself buried next to
Shelley in Rome, the inscription on his tomb claiming their lives had
been ‘undivided’ – rather an overstatement, given they knew each other
for only a year! He seems to have desperately wanted to make himself the
epitome of the late romantic poets, and his memoirs of them seem to
have been an attempt to make his own life of exploits an active extension
of their lives and works. . .”
1
“. . .what kind of exploits?”

“. . .he tried to live up to the popular image of the romantic hero but
he became almost a caricature in the process. After Byron’s death he
continued to be involved with the Greek struggle: he was actually shot
during an assassination attempt, and he was shot again during a duel in
Italy. He would do stunts like swimming Niagara Falls above the falls.
Later he used to mingle with London high society, walking about
without socks on, posing as the ‘aged romantic hero’ and perhaps not
realizing that ‘aged’ was never part of the definition. . .”
“. . .without socks?”
“. . .I suppose he had some idea that ‘real adventurers don’t wear socks.’
Actually Claire, who met him in London at that time, made fun of his lack
of socks and his posing, and offered to knit him a few pairs as a joke.
Trelawny was hurt, and taunted her via letter for not being exciting any
more – he called her an ‘old aunt’ in response. He played his pose so well
that when he was quite old he was asked to sit as the model of the old
seafarer in Millais’ painting e North West Passage. . .”
“. . .without socks?”
“. . .with socks! In his memoirs he stressed throughout that Byron
couldn’t compete with his own real-life exploits, although he was consid-
erably more humble when discussing Shelley, whose poetry and life he
seems to have genuinely revered. . .but even reverence – perhaps especially
reverence – can distort the facts terribly. . .”
“. . .how did Trelawny describe Mary and Claire?”
“. . .perhaps I should first mention that he proposed to both of them. . .”
“. . .proposed what?”
“. . .marriage. . .”
“. . .did he dare? Another vulture!”
“. . .yes, but both women turned him down, although Claire had a brief
encounter with him of some sort aer Shelley died, and she flirted with
him for years by letter. . .”
“. . .I thought she was devastated by Shelley’s death?”
“. . .she was, certainly. I don’t think she was ever serious about Trelawny:
he was someone there for her in the aermath, but that’s not exactly a point
of attraction. . .in the end, nothing came of it, and she expressed no regrets
about it. . .”
“. . .and what about Mary?”
“. . .Trelawny’s memoirs expressed quite a bit of anger towards Mary. . .”
1
“. . .because she turned him down?”

“. . .partially perhaps, but I think really because she tried to remake
Shelley into an angelic figure for the Victorians: she passed over his
involvement with Claire, and avoided that part of him that fought against
tyranny and injustice. . .and also that part of him that went out shooting,
riding, and sailing. . .”
“. . .you mean the parts of him that she refused to accept. . .”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .so how did Trelawny deal with Mary in his memoirs?”
“. . .he described her as someone who was always trying to drag Shelley
back to convention – someone who caused him a good deal of pain due
to the stalemate in their marriage. . .”
“. . .do you believe him?”
“. . .partially – it’s important to balance the various versions, especially
against a few recent accounts that have tried to make of Mary merely the
poor, put-upon victim of her philandering husband. . .”
“. . .and what about Claire?”
“. . .Trelawny didn’t even mention her name in his memoirs, but that
was because Claire specifically asked him not to. . .”
“. . .why? Didn’t she want the facts to emerge?”
“. . .that’s exactly the problem: the journals and letters of those closest
to Shelley give an incredible amount of information not given elsewhere,
but in certain ways they are even worse than the ‘vultures’ – at least in
regard to the presentation of certain facts. Both Mary and Claire lived
long enough to see the romantic period pass into the Victorian period,
and both responded to the changes around them by burying and
distorting what they had lived through with Shelley. . .”
“. . .both? I thought Mary was the one who was the most guilty of distor-
tions. . .”
“. . .yes, that’s true: Mary comes out looking far worse than Claire – espe-
cially when the motives for their distortions are considered. At first there
had been an understandable reason for her to be more subdued about
accounts of their lives: Shelley’s father, Sir Timothy, didn’t want to see the
name ‘Shelley’ in print, and he would have cut her off entirely if she
published anything by or about Shelley. When Shelley died, Mary felt very
guilty about the part she had played in their difficulties, and she began to
compensate by idealizing Shelley, shaping his image retrospectively into
that of the ethereal, unworldly being that he became for the Victorians.
18
As she grew older, and as the Victorian age and its hypocritical morality
progressed, she began increasingly to distort the facts. It goes without
saying that Shelley’s relationship with Claire was totally submerged. . .”
“. . .what did Claire say about all of it – why didn’t she write her own
version of what happened to set the record straight?”
“. . .Trelawny, Hogg, and others were very angry with Mary for
distorting the facts, but Claire didn’t want her relation to Shelley publi-
cized. She wanted to protect her anonymity. . .”
“. . .to protect it from what – Victorian morality?”
“. . .among other things, but as she lived abroad, she had other, more
important reasons to downplay her relations with Shelley. Aer Shelley
died, Mary had far fewer problems, given she was his legal wife: she went
back to England with her son, Percy Florence, and entered society again.
Aer all, she was the well-known author of Frankenstein by then:
a dramatized version of the novel was already playing at the opera when
she returned to England. Meanwhile, for Claire, life wasn’t so easy,
although it was considerably more adventurous. She traveled to Vienna
to live with her brother, Charles Clairmont, and was immediately caught
in the web of Metternich’s secret police. ey had found out about her
connection to Shelley’s circle and tried to deport her and her brother for
‘subversive activities’; at the time, he was doing nothing more subversive
than teaching English, and she being a governess. . .”
“. . .that’s terrible – it’s like under communism. . .”
“. . .the communists didn’t invent the secret police – in fact, the Hapsburg
Empire under Metternich had one of the most extensive spy networks in
the world at that point in history – the communists just perfected what
was more or less already an established tradition. . .”
“. . .her brother had enough well-placed Viennese friends to clear
their names, but, given she had almost cost him his position, she
decided to move on to Moscow to take a position there as a governess.
A few years later she was refused a position in a good family because an
English professor there reported her former connections to Shelley
and Byron to her prospective employers. So, you can see her problem:
she couldn’t hold positions where she cared for children if she were
known as the ‘notorious Claire Clairmont, Byron and Shelley’s secret
lover.’ Until 18, when Shelley’s father finally died and she received
an inheritance Shelley had arranged for her from the estate, she wasn’t
19
in a position, as a single woman, to take the risk of letting her true

identity be known. . .”
“. . .but why didn’t she leave some memoirs that would tell her view of
the events aer she died?”
“. . .Trelawny, in their last flurry of letters to each other before she died,
tried to push her to do just that – to recount her life with Shelley. . .”
“. . .did she?”
“. . .she wavered back and forth between admission and total denial.
She told Trelawny that she was very angry that William Rossetti’s biog-
raphy had even mentioned her; in fact, she had asked Rossetti when he
had come to speak to her to suppress her relations to Shelley and Byron,
and not to mention anything about Allegra. She told Trelawny that her
actions ‘had nothing to do with the poet’ – of course that’s a way to admit
and deny it simultaneously, as perhaps she felt her actions had only to do
with the man. . .”
“. . .what was she afraid of by that time?”
“. . .what she told Trelawny, and what the truth actually was, are obvi-
ously quite different: She told him she was afraid of how it might affect
her niece, Pauline, who was living with her at the time. . .”
“. . .what did she mean by that?”
“. . .Claire feared her niece would be blamed for living with a ‘disgraced
woman’ – but her niece was a spinster of fiy years old by that time!”
“. . .hardly someone whose reputation would have been ruined solely
by her association with Claire Clairmont. . .”
“. . .yes, her reputation was either already ruined or confirmed by then,
I should think. . .”
“. . .do you think she really saw herself that way – as a ‘disgraced
woman’?”
“. . .one can imagine that in the midst of the Victorian period to be
known as the secret lover of Byron or Shelley would have been difficult to
deal with, especially for a woman in her position – single, living in Florence
with her niece and her grandniece from a small inheritance. One has to
keep several things in mind when considering her replies to Trelawny, not
the least of which was that she was almost eighty years old during an age
that did not officially approve of sexual relations at all, let alone the kind
of ménage she had had with the Shelleys. Gossip and scandals were as
common then as they are now, and by that time there were already several
books written with titles like ‘Byron: His Life, Loves, and Secret Amours’
0
– Claire didn’t want to be merely a chapter in such a book. Besides,

Trelawny, although he was sympathetic, didn’t exactly ask Claire for the
information in a manner that would be likely to get a response: he asked
her to recount ‘Shelley’s follies,’ no doubt hoping that she would reveal
something about her own relations with Shelley. . .”
“. . .I would guess she didn’t even respond to his question. . .”
“. . .we’ll never know whether she did or didn’t: in her response she first
refused, then she began to recount some of her memories, but there are
four pages missing right aer a reference to his phrase ‘Shelley’s follies.’
ere are similar gaps in many of the journals and letters, so even if the
facts were there, they’re missing now. It’s not an easy matter to see where
the truth ends and the distortions begin – perhaps it’s impossible due to
the clutter, the layers of facts, the layers of interpretation: there’s no pene-
trating through to clarity, for that would be to assume there was clarity
for them when they were all alive, and I doubt that very much. Is there
such clarity in our lives?”
“. . .that’s true – I only know a few people who think they have clarity, and
they’re usually boring. . .and, in any case, in the end they turn out to have
been wrong. . .”
“. . .it’s difficult to form a narrative, even a fragmented narrative, out of
what happened. Este was a place of beginnings and endings for Shelley
and those around him, and, as with any life, it flows at different velocities,
directions, and depths: beginnings that were endings, and endings that
were beginnings. ere is no clarity, beyond certain privileged moments –
for him in his present, for us in ours. . .”
“. . .but you must believe some knowledge is possible, some way of
reaching back to what happened then – aer all, why did we come here?
Otherwise, we may as well be lying on the beach right now at some resort,
soaking up the sun. . .”
“. . .you know why we came. . .”
“. . .yes – we came to try to get closer to them, closer to what happened,
for the sake of our attempts to live differently, and so we can learn some-
thing in order to help us avoid the same mistakes. . .”
“. . .precisely. Something does connect – whether we can reach the past
or not, whether we can know we have reached the past or not. Coming
to, seeing a place like this – perhaps it’s cliché, but a true cliché for all that
– helps connect the ideal and the real, words and things. e words are
permanent, infinitely reproducible, while these stone steps are already
1
cracked and disintegrating. . .and yet, all the same, they’re so astonish-
ingly here. . .”
“. . .yes, I feel something too. is is not simply an old villa like the
next one down the road: Claire, Shelley, Mary, Allegra, Clara, and
William were all really here. . .and now they’re gone, just as we are here
now and will be gone, too. . .”
“. . .I think that when people live with a certain intensity, there’s an
overflow – an excess of energy or will. Some people have more life, dead,
than many who are living. We were attracted to that energy in these
people, and we’re consequently touched by all of this – even implicated
in it. Certainly we are separate beings, with a different story, but some-
thing about their lives attracted us because of how we live – even if the
circumstances are different. History flows on, and we are in it and of it,
and by our choice to come here, to focus on their lives, we bring ourselves
into a certain proximity to those events. To read their words – in poems,
novels, letters, journals – is, in a certain sense, to give over to those ener-
gies, those combinations of meaning, intensity, and affect. . .”
“. . .it’s as if the present were being haunted by the past, the way you are
speaking of it. . .”
“. . .yes, as well as the past being haunted by the present. We, also, are
ghosts here: if there are such things as ghosts, than we, the living, must be
ghosts as well: we are just as indeterminate, fleeting, dissoluble, as any of
our ideas of ghosts. is house will still be here aer we leave today. . .we
are haunting it now. We’re so attached to our sense of being embodied
individuals that we refuse to admit what we really are: self-reflective ener-
gies in the midst of a temporal flux that has a determinate beginning and
ending as an organic life form, and a less determinate existence as a non-
organic life form aer that ending. . .”
“. . .what do you mean by ‘non-organic life form’?”
“. . .I’m borrowing the term from the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze,
who used it to describe the unbound energies produced by what were once
living humans. e most obvious example is a book like Shelley’s poetry,
which, when it sits on a shelf, is merely a dead object, but when it comes
into contact with a mind, releases new energies, and, in certain cases like
my own, or now yours, produces something like a mutation or intensifica-
tion of energies. On a less complex level, any memory trace we have of
a dead or even absent person is similarly a non-organic life form – how that
person lives on inside of us in dream, reverie, or memory. . .”

“. . .yes, I’ve oen thought that with the dead it’s really more we who
have died in them, for they are still in us, haunting us, while they’ve taken
all their memories of us with them to the grave. . .but isn’t that just
memory?”
“. . .yes, memory traces – even a book is just a formalized memory
tracing, and if it’s imaginative, it’s a recording of that imagination. . .but,
still, that doesn’t really answer the question, what is memory?
Individually, at the most fundamental biological level, it is a highly
complex process of burning pathways through our synapses.
Collectively, it is a matter of the formal manipulation and recording
of symbols – but that doesn’t seem to account for it fully. We are, it
seems to me, intensifications of energy, but the boundaries are not so
clear, and when we die, while the center and origin of the intensity
ceases being, the leftover energy continues on in those we have
touched in our lives, and, in certain cases, can actually multiply and
transmute itself into new forms – a primary example being the artist or
writer who is misunderstood during their own lifetime, but who
acquires an even more intense existence posthumously. Their exis-
tences aren’t bounded by anything more than the formal permanence
of the work – the fixed characters on the page, or strokes of paint on
a canvas, but, paradoxically enough, this leads to infinite interpreta-
tion, infinite transmutation of energy, as the energy that is there is
taken up by new energies contained within embodied life-forms. The
more something affects you, the more it speaks to what is there inside
you, and also the more it intensifies it, opens it to a different inflec-
tion, causes something else to be born between you and what you are
being affected by. Although we were drawn here because we felt
ourselves akin to them, we’re a different story – something else
inevitably happens, but something else is born of the connection. . .”
“. . .something else? Something different, I hope. . .at least in regard to
the difficulties. . .”
“. . .I hope we can learn something from them – to see farther down the
same path, to avoid some of the reefs they foundered upon. . .”
“. . .and discover new ones?”
“. . .it’s inevitable – it comes with trying to imagine new ways to live in
our own epoch, with trying to enact those imaginings. . .”
She gets up, brushes herself off, turns and looks through the gate at the
villa beyond, gathered in its own stillness.

“. . .so there’s more to what happened here?”

“. . .yes, much more. Not until later would what happened, here, be
fully over. . .perhaps it’s not even over now – it brought us here, didn’t
it?”
“. . .so, go on telling me about it. . .”
“. . .I will – but first, let’s go have lunch. We’ll come back aerwards –
if anyone’s here, they won’t be around now in this noonday heat. ey’ll
be eating or sleeping. . .”
He stands up, stretches, and places his hands on the bars to the gate.
e heat is intense even in the shade, the air thick and heavy. She hands
him the mineral water, now almost empty.
“. . .yes, I’m dying of hunger – I really will become a non-organic life
form if we don’t have something to eat soon. . .”
“. . .so let’s try that albergo down the road, and complete our circuit
around the castle. I’ll tell you more over lunch. . .”


ere are certain moments that we will never escape, that will never take
their proper order within the succession of our days: they resonate within
time, set apart om the moments unfurling behind and before us, opening
us to an outside beyond the flow of time. Such moments, when encountered,
press their weight against the balance of time, and even when the days give
way to months and years such moments stubbornly remain – unmoving,
seizing us in our dreams even as we silently rebel against their awesome force.
What I sought was found in such moments, and only in such moments:
I have been falling ever since – falling through a void that leaves me bere
of words. I thought I knew who I was when such a moment first struck me
with its singularity: I thought I was a man with a certain name, a certain
purpose, a certain mode of life. Now I do not even know what my name
stands for, except as a container to fix me within an identity – an identity
drawn around a wandering center encompassing each moment, and each
silence.
The will that was released through me came from somewhere else, and
I was riven through as if hit by a bolt of lightning. I speak of my beginning
to will: there was no beginning, but simply the gradual releasing of myself
into a current I could not resist. The feeling was not one of choice, but of
a coming into coincidence with a will that could not be discerned, but only
followed; that could not be seized, but which seized me with a ferocity re-
moving me from any lingering illusion of wholeness.
Is this a narrative I am trying to write? Perhaps the unfolding of its own
untelling – spaces piled around words that seek to come to rest within the very
act of creating recognitions: this paradox leads these words to scatter like sand,
but perhaps there is a hope being drawn here that for a fleeting instant a shape
will be cast, or the shadow of a shape – enough, perhaps, to trace a dim recog-
nition of the path I have forged as I sought to cross the farther reaches of
a wilderness towards the vision that held me transfixed.
I did not will these events; rather they willed me, and my own anguish
could not tear om me a joy that seized me even as I faced the possibility of
irrevocable loss, and what was to be, for me, the end of at least one life. I am
searching for something, and I would not dare say that I have found it in
these lines, which lead me on away om one world towards a darkness which
envelopes me as I go forward, girded only by the certainty that I am
responding fully to my destiny. I am searching – advancing and departing
simultaneously, and I would not even pretend to say that where I have been
is a haven now made safe for others, for I know assuredly that it is not.
I was once told not to write these lines by someone who was not quite
a iend, and yet someone I would not say bore me any enmity: someone who
knew to some degree where I was determined to go. His words were a kind of
admonition, or perhaps a reproach or even a warning, but there remained
to me only the echo of the moments passing, and of those echoes, only, was
I certain. ey reverberated in my mind at every step of the way, drawing
me onwards so that the shape of my life took on a certain symmetry: in these
moments I breathed, felt, hungered, loved, and longed for the presence of
those who would never be brought to this existence again, and that is why
I willed my bond to them as if they were the absolute fate life yielded to me.
When I maintain I did not will these events, I do not mean to say that
I did not desire them or even play a direct role in bringing them about: these
events willed me to the shape of their affirmations and catastrophes as much
as I had willed the shape of my own arrivals and departures. I came to
a rising strength, knowing that under my feet resided the crushing weight of
the earth, a weight that would one day draw me under as assuredly as it
spins its way through the rhythms of its seasons, bearing us along with its
burden of torments and joys.
I return always to certain moments: I wonder if I have ever le them.
Everything I would like to recount revolves around these moments –
moments that brought together all whom I have ever loved, all that I was
ever to grasp, and all that I was ever to lose. I was brought to an opening
through which I saw the scene of sacrifice not as myth, ritual, image or
symbol, but as an act moving beyond itself towards something indefinable.
With these words I seek to come closer to this opening, but only through
a degree of deflection: nothing ever submits itself to the kind of scrutiny
I wish to bring to bear upon it. My words and the vague outlines they aspire
to draw are like a shroud as it is removed om a corpse for burial – but here
there is no body, only the indistinct impression le by something that existed
once, but is there no longer. . .

At the restaurant they are the only guests. ey sit at a small table on
a shaded terrace and order a carafe of white wine, mineral water, and two
caprese salads. e drinks are brought immediately: they quickly drink
the first glassful of water, pouring out more from the sweating bottle.
“. . .what really amazes me about it all is how the myths so easily take
over from the reality. . .”
“. . .the myths are not only in many ways false, but they also detract
from what is essential. ey started almost immediately aer Shelley’s
death in 18, and accelerated greatly aer Byron’s in 18. at’s when
the memoirs and biographies began to be written, and when the distor-
tions began in earnest. . .”
“. . .you said more than the pages from the letters were missing. . .”
“. . .there were entries destroyed in all of their journals, but especially
those connected to Claire: over three years of entries in Claire’s diaries
from 181 to 1818 disappeared. Letters disappeared – including almost
the entire secret correspondence between Claire and Shelley, written
when Claire had moved to Florence following the Hoppner scandal. . .”
“. . .were those the letters Henry James wrote about in e Aspern Papers
– did they actually exist?”
“. . .yes. We know that in addition to the normal correspondence
between Shelley and Claire that would have been seen by Mary, there
were secret letters that Shelley and Claire exchanged from the time
she lived alone in Florence onwards, using false names and third-party
addresses: given their secrecy, I think we can assume their contents
were intimate. Actually, the biographer in James’ story is based on
someone who existed in real life: his name was Edward Silsbee, and
he tried to get the letters from Claire when she was in Florence – not
Venice, as in the story. Whether or not she had already destroyed
them we’ll never know. If they contained such intimate contents that
they had to be sent secretly, it’s possible they were disposed of imme-
diately after they read them – or I would imagine at least Shelley did
so, to avoid Mary seeing them. . .”
9
“. . .was Silsbee as awful as he was portrayed in e Aspern Papers?”

“. . .in some ways he was worse. It’s true that he would have done
anything to get the letters, and apparently he did insinuate himself into
Claire Clairmont’s household in Florence when she was an old woman –
even having an affair with Claire’s niece, Pauline, who was forty-seven at
the time, and all in order to obtain the manuscripts and letters. . .”
“. . .who exactly was Pauline?”
“. . .she was the daughter of Claire’s half-brother Charles. She had
evidently been quite in love with Silsbee, and wanted him to marry her,
but he refused, so she settled for taking him as a lover. His notes barely
mention her except in relation to Claire Clairmont. ere’s a rumor that
aer Claire’s death he actually proposed marriage to Pauline in exchange
for Claire’s letters which she had supposedly inherited, but she refused
him, and wanted money instead – I guess she had learned her lesson.
ere are some accounts of his having boasted about his trickery to
others, which is how James heard about him. . .”
“. . .why did he do it – did he think that the truth was in the missing docu-
ments?”
“. . .I would assume so, because their existence probably seemed to hold
out the promise of a definitive answer to the secret of their relationship,
but I would guess even if we had them, they would only touch upon the
truth. What kind of reality do you think someone could construct from
our letters or journals? ere’s so much there, but there’s so much missing
– a moment’s self-reflection is so limited, especially when one is writing
to, or about, another person. . .”
“. . .that’s true: one always projects an image of the one being written to
at the time one is writing; and anyway, I dislike my writing, so there’s little
in my journals that would amount to anything I feel that would adequately
represent me. . .there’s so much that’s not there. . .”
“. . .and my journals and letters would fill volumes, but I find it embar-
rassing to read them, even to myself. Whenever I come upon a new real-
ization, it’s contradicted by something else later on – it’s never adequate to
who or what I was at the time. It’s more like making a sketch, taking notes,
making an index for a library that will never exist. On the other hand, my
journal entries do bring something back to me when I reread them – some-
thing real, or at least real in feeling. . .”
“. . .so how would one arrive at a decision about the truth – with
Shelley, for example: how does one sort through the myth to obtain, well,
0
not the truth, but, then, what would it be. . .a provisional or speculative
truth?”
“. . .I don’t think one can ever finally fully arrive at the truth, but one
can see through all the layers of myth, lies, and distortions, even if no final
layer of truth emerges. Take Claire, for example: the myths would have
it that she was kind of a ‘hanger-on’ – a silly fool who had no place better
to be, and who was madly trying to find her way back to Byron. e facts
don’t match this picture, or, rather, they only portray a small portion of
the truth. She was anything but a silly fool, and she was perhaps the
strongest and most independent of the three – at least in the end: she had
the strength to live quite an intense life aer Shelley’s death as a single
woman on the continent – living in Vienna, Moscow, Dresden, London,
Paris, and finally Florence. Of course, she was a bit of an extra when she,
Shelley and Mary first ran away to the continent in 181 when both
women were only seventeen, but when her mother came aer them and
implored her to come back home, she made a fateful decision to stay on,
without having any claim to Shelley’s affections. It was an amazing thing
to have done, especially given that, as step-sisters, they did not get along
very well, and considering their age. . .”
“. . .but why did whoever destroyed the journals and diaries especially focus
on Claire – to protect the myth of Shelley and Mary as the perfect couple?”
“. . .I think mostly because it detracted from the image of the ‘angelic’
Shelley ‘too good for this earth’ – the image that Mary was instrumental
in creating aer his death. . .”
“. . .so do you think it was Mary who might have done it?”
“. . .perhaps some of it – especially Shelley’s journals and letters that
were in her possession, but I doubt she destroyed much, as it would have
been too much like destroying a part of Shelley, and she couldn’t have
stood that. She tended to omit what she couldn’t face, and to rewrite
their history in her own image: when she edited Shelley’s collected works
she wrote introductions that distorted the facts considerably – so much
so, that, as I mentioned earlier, Claire, Trelawny, and Hunt were quite
justifiably angry at her. Claire pointed out to Silsbee that one poem enti-
tled ‘To Mary’ in the 189 edition was actually about Claire, and
evidence suggests she was right. . .”
“. . .she did it intentionally?”
“. . .in some cases it was conscious intention, but I think there was an
element of repression and denial in what she did: she seems to have
1
wanted to erase her behavior during their last years together, which she
felt very guilty about. . .”
“. . .his loss must have been devastating to her aer all the others they
had endured together. . .but if Mary was only responsible for some of the
distortions and deletions, who else could have been responsible?”
“. . .I think the Victorians en masse are largely to blame: one age oblit-
erating the truth of another age. e circle around Shelley and Byron had
become legends by mid-century, and there were plenty of suspects –
indeed anyone who came into contact with the materials, which were
closely controlled by one definite culprit: Lady Jane Shelley. . .”
“. . .who was she?”
“. . .the wife of Shelley’s son, Percy Florence. She ended up being the admin-
istrator of a good deal of the remaining literary estate, but I also don’t rule
out the Victorian critics and scholars, who probably thought they were
performing the sacred mission of rescuing the truth of the poetry from the
‘scandal’ of their lives. . .”
“. . .as if it needed to be rescued. . .”
“. . .it happens all the time – the more innovative the writer, the more
likely a critical apparatus is set up around him or her that seizes interpre-
tive control – of the texts and the lives. Critics today don’t seem any less
likely to succumb to their biases, but the biases change – bias is bias,
whatever its ideology. I think critics today have been quite correct in
redressing the tendency traditional scholars have had for hero-worshipping
Shelley at the expense of Mary, but at times there’s something tendentious
about how some of them simply turn it around, raising Mary at the expense
of Shelley – one feminist critic even argued that Mary’s mourning for him
was in bad faith, given his supposed male chauvinism. . .and even worse in
my mind, some have added to the usual denigration and exclusion of
Claire, who, of the two women, was far more independent and strong-
willed. . .”
“. . .yes, Mary seems almost passive in comparison to Claire, although
aer the death of her children, it’s understandable. . .”
“. . .Lady Jane Shelley went so far as to have made a statue of Shelley
and Mary as a pieta. Mary was posed as the Virgin Mary, and Shelley
as a drowned Christ – of course Claire is nowhere to be seen. She had
it commissioned after Mary’s death – not even Mary would have gone
that far. Claire was simply forgotten – after all, how many pietàs have
you seen that include Mary Magdalene?”

“. . .actually, there’s one on the Charles Bridge: the Virgin Mary and
Mary Magdalene, and someone else, I think. . .maybe it’s an angel, or an
effeminate-looking evangelist. . .”
“. . .really? I’ve never noticed it – I’ll take a look the next time I cross
the bridge. . .”
“. . .there’s one thing I really don’t understand: from what I know,
Byron was promiscuous, bi-sexual, incestuous, and had illegitimate chil-
dren; he was a scandal during his own age, but, despite everything, his
poetry sold incredibly well in England all the while, and to the present
day his excesses are largely forgiven. Shelley, on the other hand, had
intimate relationships with – how many women in his life?”
“. . .no more than four that we know of for certain – two of whom were
his wives. . .”
“. . .and if I understand it, his intimacies almost always took place
within the context of love, right?”
“. . .love and inspiration. . .with perhaps a single brief exception, yes. . .”
“. . .but Shelley was hardly published at all in his own lifetime, was
considered more or less a monster by his own countrymen, and he still
seems the object of a certain form of direct suppression. . .why? Was it
because Byron was a Lord?”
“. . .that’s certainly a part of it. Byron critiqued his class, but he never
gave up its privileges, while Shelley wrote political poetry that deeply
questioned his class and its values, and worst of all, gave up his right to
inherit his father’s estate, breaking the patrimonial pattern: this was
a very dangerous precedent for most of English society, while Byron
was merely an amusing aberration appealing to their deepest desires.
Debauchery and decadence are perfectly acceptable if they ultimately
uphold, even inversely, the established social norms. . .”
“. . .what about Shelley’s attitude towards religion – certainly that
couldn’t have helped his reception?”
“. . .Byron wasn’t exactly a regular churchgoer but he more or less le the
matter alone, while Shelley spoke out openly against the church – any
church. When he toured Switzerland he wrote the words, ‘Democrat,
Philanthropist, Atheist’ in Greek in the registers of various inns, and Byron,
coming across one, even crossed it out for Shelley’s protection. . .but it
caused a scandal anyway – it was noticed, and reported back in England. . .”
“. . .but why cover up the relation to Claire? It doesn’t connect to class,
and only peripherally to religion – was it his espousal of free love?”

“. . .if Shelley had meant by ‘free love’ something more or less like
Byron’s libertinage, while he still probably would have caused a scandal,
I believe he wouldn’t have been as thoroughly condemned as he actu-
ally was in the end. People can deal with almost any form of immorality
if it’s merely the inverse of the moral norm, but Shelley went beyond
the dichotomy moral/immoral by breaking the unspoken rule against
loving more than one person at a time – a rule that was crucial for the
reproduction of the social hierarchy – and it still is. . .despite the 0th
century claims of freedom and individualism in post-industrial society,
society still interferes with our private lives, which are never as private
as we believe them to be: I’m not sure we’re all that more free today in
regard to who and how we can love, although we flatter ourselves that
we are. . .”
“. . .but it’s so hypocritical! What’s designated officially ‘immoral’ ends
up being more acceptable than something that doesn’t fit any of the
normal categories. . .”
“. . .it’s totally hypocritical – as hypocritical now as it was then.
Victorian critics suppressed Claire’s role in his life for supposedly
‘moral’ reasons, but even now critics who see Shelley as a chauvinist
follow as moral a model when they critique him, extol Mary, and forget
about Claire except as one of Shelley’s ‘other women.’ By the standards
of the time, or even now, he was hardly a chauvinist – quite the oppo-
site. If one begins by condemning his relations to Claire as a slight to
Mary without seeing those relations as equally legitimate, then of course
he looks bad. If, on the other hand, you see him as related to both
women equally but in differing ways, as I believe he was, a different story
emerges. Certainly he was capricious; idealistic to excess at times –
perhaps most of the time; ungrounded, and perhaps even dangerous in
his youthful naiveté – all of which shouldn’t be understated; but he
wasn’t possessive or jealous, and was tolerant and nurturing of the inde-
pendence of both Mary and Claire to a degree unheard of then, and
which is still extremely rare even today. He provided them a life they
could never have lived if they remained in England. ey were both
emotionally devastated by his death and never married again, even
though they both received several offers. at doesn’t make him an ideal
by any means – like everyone, he had his demons, and like all men, he
had the evils that are particular to his sex. e way he abandoned his
first wife, Harriet, was heartless and ultimately tragic, and Shelley

suffered desperately from the ultimate outcome of it – her suicide.

ere’s always room for criticism, as long as it’s qualified by a sense of
the particular reality, and not clouded over by some abstract ideal of
pure, normative behavior, which is never attained by anyone, anyway.
at he had a second partner is, by some critics, attributed to his male
dominance – an exercise of masculine prerogative, but it forgets that
Claire also exercised her prerogative with Byron, as apparently Mary may
also have done with Hogg. . .”
“. . .when did their relationship actually develop – I mean Shelley and
Claire?”
“. . .in a way it was there from the very beginning – aer all, when they ran
away to the continent the first time, all three le together even though only
Shelley and Mary were lovers at that time. I believe it became more intimate
when Mary was pregnant with their first child, in London in 181, although
it isn’t clear, as the pages from their journals are missing for large portions
of the period. Whoever was trying to cover it up perhaps revealed more than
they concealed by their censorship. . .”
“. . .so how did it happen?”
“. . .Mary was confined to her bed from the fih month of her pregnancy
onwards, leaving Shelley and Claire to themselves. ey would go out for
long walks together: in the Kensington Gardens, along the Serpentine –
where Shelley indulged his fondness for floating paper boats. . .”
“. . .a strange occupation, given how his life ended. . .”
“. . .and a stranger location, given it was in the Serpentine where
Harriet’s body would later be found. His life was full of self-referential
symbols – at least in retrospect. One of the most characteristic was his
penchant for launching fire balloons: you know – a bit of wood, string,
a candle, and a cloth balloon. It would slowly rise, and would either
collapse when it hit the first current of air, or burst into flames and fall
to the earth. . .”
“. . .that’s certainly symbolic of Shelley. . .but did Mary mind his walks
with Claire?”
“. . .there’s no evidence she did in the beginning: she knew that walking
was something Shelley loved, and was something she herself rarely did
with as much enthusiasm even when she was healthy enough to do it.
Claire stressed to Silsbee at the end of her life that it was during their
walks that she got to really know Shelley – she claimed she knew him
even better than Mary knew him. . . ”

“. . .do you think it was during one of their walks that they made love
for the first time?”
“. . .I’ve wondered about that – perhaps, but it’s more likely that it
would have been late at night after Mary was asleep: they would stay
up long after Mary went to bed – she retired early at that point –
talking about philosophy and radical politics. Shelley liked to create
moods, frightening himself and those around him with his stories,
which were terrifying precisely because he believed them himself, and
reacted to them so intensely. It’s something that can be traced back to
his childhood, when he would frighten his little sisters with stories of
the ‘Old Tortoise’ living in the pond on their estate, or of an old magi-
cian hidden in a secret room in the attic. There was a hysterical side
to his nature, and he would put himself into a nervous frenzy at times
– the stories became a way of heightening the intensity and the
tension. . .”
“. . .sexual tension?”
“. . .yes, that too. It reached a certain crisis during a scene described
in all of their diaries: Claire had returned to her room after one of
these sessions and suddenly found her pillow had mysteriously moved
when her back was turned to the bed: she burst into the bedroom of
Mary and Shelley in a hysterical fit, and he spent the rest of the night
talking with her, trying to calm her down. . .”
“. . .trying?”
“. . .you get a sense of what was really happening in his journal: he took
precisely that moment to tell Claire that Mary was pregnant, and
although he doesn’t link the events – aer all, he shared his journal with
Mary – I suspect that was the reason Claire became so hysterical. She
actually started having convulsions. . .”
“. . .if she was in love with him, finding out about the pregnancy would
have been devastating. . .”
“. . .yes – clearly there was some kind of displacement of jealousy and
sexuality going on in these sessions. . .”
“. . .was Shelley in love with Claire by then?”
“. . .he was certainly drawn to her, and the situation seemed to promote
it as a possibility, plus there was some precedent: he formerly had very
close relations with two of his own sisters, relations that became
forbidden aer the fight with his father that cut him off from his estate.
Aer all, Mary and Claire were step-sisters, so there was even a degree of

incest involved – at least symbolically. . .incest plays a role in several of

his poems and dramas. . .”
“. . .and there’s no direct evidence from that period le?”
“. . .large chunks of Shelley and Mary’s journal are missing from the
period, and Claire’s journal has been torn away from November,
181, until 1818!”
“. . .someone did a rather good job of destroying the evidence. . .”
“. . .but there is one piece of remaining evidence. . .”
“. . .what is it?”
“. . .it’s a poem from the period – if that can be taken as evidence. It was
entitled, due to Mary’s editing, ‘To Mary Wollstonecra Godwin,’ but
it’s quite clearly written for Claire. . .”
“. . .is it the one that Silsbee mentioned?”
“. . .yes. She said that the poem was a result of a fight she had had with
Shelley: there was considerable conflict during the period following the
scene I just mentioned, and clearly they were trying to sort out,
consciously and unconsciously, how it would be between them all, or at
least how it would be between Claire and Shelley. We do know the
sessions continued, and were rather intense – to the point that they were
afraid to enter the house, and they actually moved to another residence
due to their fear over the strange happenings. We do know that the
tension between Claire and Shelley finally reached the point of a major
quarrel in October, as we have their journals for that period. . .”
“. . .what did they quarrel about?”
“. . .it’s unclear. e aermath was that Claire was quite contrite, and
accepted her faults, while Shelley came to a new understanding and
partial acceptance of her impetuous nature, and. . .”
“. . .and what?”
“. . .I have no evidence, but I believe it was some time during this period,
perhaps when they made up aer this argument, that they made love for
the first time. . .”
“. . .you get that from the poem?”
“. . .yes – as much as a poem can function as a kind of evidence. e
poem has to be about Claire, not Mary: clearly some argument has
occurred, and as a result it’s clear from the poem that they reached a new
stage of intimacy. Mary dates the poem in June of that year, but in her
notes she admits she’s only guessing, especially about the shorter ones.
I think it must have been written at some point aer their argument. . .”

“. . .do you have it?

“. . .yes. . .here it is. . .”
“. . .can you read it to me?”
“. . .it was never completed, just like many of his short lyrics written in
response to some crisis. . .
Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed;

Yes, I was firm – thus wert not thou; –
My baffled looks did fear yet dread
To meet thy looks – I could not know
How anxiously they sought to shine
With soothing pity upon mine.
To sit and curb the soul’s mute rage

Which preys upon itself alone;
To curse the life which is the cage
Of fettered grief that dares not groan,
Hiding from many a careless eye
e scornèd load of agony.
Whilst thou alone, then not regarded,

e . . . thou alone should be,
To spend years thus, and be re-warded,
As thou, sweet love, requited me
When none were near – Oh! I did wake
From torture for that moment’s sake.
Upon my heart thy accents sweet

Of peace and pity fell like dew
On flowers half dead; – thy lips did meet
Mine tremblingly; thy dark eyes threw
eir so persuasion on my brain,
Charming away its dream of pain.
We are not happy, sweet! our state

Is strange and full of doubt and fear;
More need of words that ills abate; –
Reserve or censure come not near
8
Our sacred friendship, lest there be

No solace le for thee and me.
Gentle and good and mild thou art,

Nor can I live if thou appear
Aught by thyself, or turn thine heart
Away from me, or stoop to wear
e mask of scorn, although it be
To hide the love thou feel’st for me.
. . .I think it’s clearly about Claire – from the mentioning of her ‘dark
eyes’ to the parts about their ‘strange state’ and ‘sacred friendship,’ to the
need to hide her love behind a mask of scorn. ey reached a peak of
conflict, and then. . .something must have happened. I know that it may
seem strange to get evidence from a poem, but Shelley’s short lyrics were
almost exclusively responses to events in his life, especially those written
to or for someone. . .”
“. . .yes, it seems clear to me as well – it simply couldn’t have been
written as a response to Mary. Did the crisis continue?”
“. . .other events reached their peak, too, at that point. Before their rela-
tions could develop further Shelley was on the run: someone, perhaps
Godwin, had contacted the authorities about some of his bad debts, and
he had to go into hiding – it was really quite terrible for a while, for it
meant he could only meet Mary and Claire secretly, and at the worst
point he even begged his former wife, Harriet, for money. . .”
“. . .she didn’t give it, I assume. . .”
“. . .of course not – Mary chided him for even trying. In any case, the crisis
ended when he secured a loan and they all moved to a new address. . .”
“. . .so there were no further conflicts between Claire and Shelley?”
“. . .yes, there were conflicts – the period at the new address coincided
with the period when Claire’s journal was deleted. is was the period,
I believe, when their love was fully achieved, but only aer one more trial.
Somehow the Godwins had gotten word that Claire wasn’t entirely
happy, and they managed to get her to come visit them. ey made one
last attempt to retrieve her from Shelley’s grasp. . .”
“. . .did she consider it?”
“. . .according to their account, they suggested she take a job as
a governess outside of London, and she told them she would only agree
9
if she could still publicly maintain her radical principles, and have
freedom to write and visit Mary and Shelley – something she must have
known they would never consent to. . .”
“. . .so she returned to Shelley?”
“. . .yes, but only aer she first discussed it with Shelley. . .of course we
have no record of what they actually discussed together, but clearly, given
we know he was greatly upset by her absence, he must have convinced her
to stay by persuading her that their bond was deeply meaningful to him
– that was when she changed her name: first from Jane to Clara, then to
Clare, and, finally, Claire, to symbolize her transformation – her passage
away from her family. . .”
“. . .and perhaps also that she joined her life to Shelley’s: she would only
have returned to him if she was sure of his love. . .”
“. . .I agree – in fact, it was Shelley who gave her the new name. Claire
told Silsbee that he named her Claire because it meant ‘transparent’ –
a reference to her temperament, and how she couldn’t hide her feelings. . .”
“. . .given the situation, it was very courageous of her – especially given
the period. . .but what was Mary’s response to all of this – I mean to
Claire’s decision whether to stay or not? Certainly she must have known
about it?”
“. . .she knew about it, but she was ill from her pregnancy at the time
and had little say in it – although we do know she had a long talk with
Shelley. She was probably against it – he could be remarkably convincing:
he probably told her that to keep Claire with them was ‘striking a blow
against tyranny,’ or something like that, and, in a way, he was right –
but he certainly didn’t mention the intimate side of his relations with
Claire. . .”
“. . .how could Mary have failed to notice?”
“. . .partially due to the pregnancy, and partially because this was the
period when Thomas Hogg reappeared in Shelley’s life, dominating
Mary’s attention. . .”
“. . .the ‘vulture’?”
“. . .that’s him. He entered their lives with his typical lack of tact: the
first thing he asked Shelley was how were his ‘two wives.’ Gradually,
Shelley steered Hogg towards Mary, and Hogg, as usual, was only too
willing. . .”
“. . .why did Shelley do it – to compensate for his guilt over his rela-
tionship with Claire?”
0
“. . .partially no doubt, but Shelley at that time believed in the possi-

bility of creating a radical community based on free love. Mary’s journal
entries suggest there was something like a developing love relationship
between herself and Hogg, although, given her pregnancy, she seems to
have been holding him off in regard to physical intimacy. . .”
“. . .seems?”
“. . .we don’t really know – once again, the pages are torn out of all the
journals and diaries at that point. . .”
“. . .do you have any idea what happened?”
“. . .certainly there were problems, and omas Hogg was one of the
biggest problems – that’s for certain. Shelley overestimated him, and
didn’t realize it until later. Hogg was a friend from his Oxford days: they
were both expelled for writing and distributing the pamphlet e
Necessity of Atheism. Shelley had first tried to pair up Hogg with his sister,
and then later, when Shelley eloped with his first wife, Harriet
Westbrook, and her older sister, Eliza, came along. . .”
“. . .Shelley eloped with two women before Mary and Claire?”
“. . .he never intended to elope with two women – there just happened
to always be an extra woman coming along! Eliza had come along as a sort
of chaperon, but the relations between Shelley and Harriet soured before
anything ever developed between himself and Eliza – if anything ever
could have developed, which I doubt, as she was a bit of a ‘stick-in-the-
mud’. . .”
“. . .what’s that?”
“. . .another idiom – it means someone who refuses to come along. . .anyway,
Hogg came aerwards to rendezvous with them and misconstrued the
whole situation, presumably interpreting Shelley’s more or less naive
notion of a community of liked-minded spirits and free love as an invi-
tation to freely take what he could for himself: he apparently tried to
seduce Harriet, with the result that Shelley fled to the Lake District with
the horrified sisters. He wrote Hogg an angry, admonishing letter. . .”
“. . .and Shelley forgave him aer that?”
“. . .it wasn’t because of his jealousy that they fled, but because Harriet
was so upset by what had happened. . .”
“. . .he was still a friend later, when he started coming to see Mary?”
“. . .Shelley forgave him, and trusted his intentions: as Byron once told
him, his greatest virtue was his greatest fault – that he was ‘too good.’
I don’t think Shelley realized, at that time, the complexity of human rela-
1
tions, and he was clearly still in the thrall of his own vision of the
perfectibility of the human race – an idea he partially received from
Godwin. He was quite extraordinary in regard to his own lack of guile
and possessiveness, but he was quite foolish to think that others could so
easily rid themselves of such emotions. . .”
“. . .do you think that such a community is possible? I have my doubts. . .”
“. . .if by ‘community’ you mean a shared intimacy that extends in all
directions like a commune, then I have my doubts – unless it’s celibate
like a monastery, and even then I wonder: if the people are together all
the time. . .well, drives will find an outlet! e problem is that one
doubles and redoubles the intensity of emotions within such a circle,
especially if it is creative rather than ascetic, and by doing so you increase
geometrically the pressure on the various thresholds of the people
involved. It seems inevitable that such circles become increasingly
unstable with each additional member, and even if physical intimacy is
not involved at all, they inevitably break up – of course not without first
reaching certain intensities. I would never deny that certain circles or
groups were intensely productive, but I don’t believe it can last. . .”
“. . .communism began with a similar intention to break down class
barriers, but it certainly didn’t bring people together – quite the oppo-
site: in the social sphere it was a disaster, breeding a culture of envy,
loathing and suspicion. . .”
“. . .all of which is there in capitalism too, but they know how to hide
it better! But back to intimate relations, a connection between two
people is difficult enough to maintain; a three-way connection may be
possible, but is inherently unstable – the sociologist Georg Simmel
wrote about it in his work on dyads and triads. Any larger group
becomes deeply unstable, for it keeps breaking apart into twos and
threes. Still, it doesn’t mean we can’t connect to others serially. . .”
“. . .what do you mean, ‘serially’?”
“. . .for example, person ‘A’ might have an intimate relation with
persons ‘B’ and ‘C,’ but one is asking a bit much to expect persons ‘B’ and
‘C’ to have an intimate relation with each other as well. . .”
“. . .unlikely, or impossible?”
“. . .I wouldn’t say impossible, but more difficult. Even if it’s only an
intimate friendship, it would take hard work and great sensitivity on
everyone’s part. If you add sexuality to the mix, it makes it even harder,
for it assumes bi-sexuality can be maintained by at least two of the part-

ners, plus the tolerance of the third. Of course, it all depends on the
thresholds of the persons involved, but, as you know, even with serial
connections there’s considerable stress on the person in the middle: one
has to have a special need for such relations. . .”
“. . .but it’s mostly men who have the need for more than one partner,
isn’t it?”
“. . .not necessarily. I can think of several examples of women: Virginia
Woolf if you consider non-sexual versions, and Anaïs Nin or Marguerite
Duras, for example, if you have a sexual component. It’s unusual, but prob-
ably happens more oen than anyone suspects: the average affaire de cœur
begins with this impulse, but usually either fizzles out in the end due to jeal-
ousy or possessiveness, or simply replaces the old relationship, due to the
stress it causes – and perhaps a lack of capacity, or imagination. . .”
“. . .what do you think Shelley was thinking when he brought Hogg
into it? It seems to me a terrible lapse in judgment on his part, given what
Hogg had done in the past. . .”
“. . .I agree. I think the problem was he didn’t imagine anything: his
tendency was to see the dangers of stasis within the traditional forms of
relationship, and he advocated a disruption of those forms. . .”
“. . .so what happened to their community?”
“. . .from what we know, Hogg and Mary became quite intimate during
those months: she appears to have been promising him sexual intimacy in
her letters to him, but putting him off until aer she gave birth. . .”
“. . .and Shelley really encouraged it?”
“. . .it seems so, although he soon realized he needed to guide Hogg to
the appropriately ‘purified’ emotions: at that time he actually wrote
a review of one of Hogg’s novels – Hogg was an amateur writer – where
he subtly suggested that Hogg’s vision of the relations between the sexes
was too coarse, and needed to be tempered. . .”
“. . .but what did he expect? What did Shelley mean exactly by ‘free
love’?”
“. . .Shelley was more or less a neo-Platonist at that point, and a bit of
a Puritan as well, believe it or not. . .I think he had no problem with Hogg
loving Mary or Mary loving Hogg – he was just, well, a bit naive about
the appetites of others. He felt a purified love was possible that would
purify sexuality along with it, and he expected that whatever he was
feeling towards Mary and Claire would be felt by Hogg as well: physical
intimacy was part of it, but it had to be a ‘higher’ sense of it. . .”

“. . .and so Hogg blundered in again and couldn’t manage it, I suppose?”

“. . .Hogg wasn’t Shelley by any means – he lived vicariously through him,
but could never live up to his ideals. I think he was a little too insistent – or
at least Mary’s letters from the period seem to suggest he was. . .”
“. . .so did Hogg and Mary ever consummate their relationship?”
“. . .I think it’s possible that they did, briefly, based on a few of the
remaining letters, but their relations ended as quickly as they began. . .”
“. . .what happened – did Mary become frightened and withdraw from
him?”
“. . .it’s more complicated, and more tragic, than that: Mary gave birth
to a baby prematurely – that was in February, 181 – but two weeks later
she woke up and found it dead. . .”
“. . .that’s terrible! Poor Mary. . .”
“. . .yes, it ravaged her. She turned to Hogg in her grief; in fact, he
moved in with them a few days later, and it seems that this was when they
must have become physically intimate, as a reaction to her loss. is is
known because Shelley wrote a note to Hogg aer a short trip to the
Berkshires with Mary in April, and he suggested he was both aware and
approving of their intimacy – but it didn’t last. . .”
“. . .it couldn’t last, I would guess: Hogg’s presence could only have
reminded her of her loss – a loss of what would have been a permanent
bond to Shelley. . .it must have been too much for her to stand. . .”
“. . .I agree. . .it was the beginning of a very stormy period for all of
them. Mary recoiled from it all. Hogg was ultimately banished – he with-
drew from their circle soon aer he started his law school term, and then
he seems to have simply disappeared for a long while. Mary almost imme-
diately began to feel Claire as a burden, and her journal entries from the
period show her being increasingly sarcastic about her, referring to her as
‘the lady,’ or Shelley’s ‘friend.’ She wanted to withdraw with Shelley
alone, with Claire out of their lives. . .”
“. . .it’s an understandable reaction – postnatal depression is difficult
enough, but then to have lost the baby? She must have felt she was losing
everything, and clung to Shelley as her only bond, seeing Claire as the
primary threat to that bond. . .”
“. . .exactly. . .her irritation grew until, in early May, Claire was forced by
the situation to move to Lynmouth – near the sea in Devon. Mary wrote
– I think a bit callously – in her journal, ‘the business is finished’ – as if
it had been some terrible trial for her. She ends that volume of the journal

declaring that her new journal begins with ‘our regeneration,’ so she must
have felt, as you said, that something between herself and Shelley needed
bridging – without Hogg or Claire in the way. . .”
“. . .where did Shelley and Mary go?”
“. . .it’s all a mystery because their journals are missing from this period,
and there are so few letters. Clearly they all needed to sort things out –
especially Shelley. Shelley toured the west of England with Mary in May
and June, and at one point they were staying in Torquay, so perhaps they
visited Claire; but then Shelley le Mary in Clion in late June, disap-
pearing until August – supposedly house-hunting. My guess is that he
also went to see Claire in order to talk things over with her – at least
Mary was aaid he had gone to see her, because she asked him rather
nervously in a letter whether or not he was ‘with Clairy.’ e only real
evidence is a poem from the period. . .”
“. . .Shelley’s poems seem very good evidence to me. . .”
“. . .the shorter ones he wrote, then, concerned his disillusions with love
and with his ideals of what was possible for people seeking new modes of
existence. . .”
“. . .read one to me. . .”
“. . .here – this is the one beginning ‘Oh! there are spirits of the air’. . .”
“. . .oh, that one – yes, it’s beautiful, but I didn’t know the biographical
context when I read it before. . .”
“. . .he’s clearly leaving his neo-Platonic, idealized vision of love behind
and facing its realities, although the poem doesn’t really reach any reso-
lution – he merely seems tormented at the end. It’s actually entitled ‘To
– ,’ although it’s usually referred to by its first line. In her editorial notes,
Mary said that it was written to Coleridge ‘in idea,’ but this seems
another example of her bad faith aer his death. She couldn’t stand to
look back and see his disillusion with love occurring so early in their rela-
tionship. Some critics, also in bad faith – or so it seems to me, have
assumed it was written to himself, as he addresses himself in the poem,
but oen his poems with such titles refer not to who is addressed within
the poem, but to who is addressed by the poem. I believe it was for Claire,
for why else wouldn’t he have written the name if it was for Mary, as he
did with several other poems addressed to Mary?”
“. . .read it for me, please. . .”
“. . .here it is:

Oh! there are spirits of the air,

And genii of the evening breeze,
And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair
As star-beams among twilight trees: –
Such lovely ministers to meet
O hast thou turned from men thy lonely feet.
With mountain winds, and babbling springs,

And moonlight seas, that are the voice
Of these inexplicable things,
ou didst hold commune, and rejoice
When they did answer thee; but they
Cast, like a worthless boon, thy love away.
And thou hast sought in starry eyes

Beams that were never meant for thine,
Another’s wealth: – tame sacrifice
To a fond faith! still dost thou pine?
Still dost thou hope that greeting hands,
Voice, looks, or lips, may answer thy demands?
Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine hope

On the false earth’s inconstancy?
Did thine own mind afford no scope
Of love, or moving thoughts to thee?
at natural scenes or human smiles
Could steal the power to wind thee in their wiles?
Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled

Whose falsehood le thee broken-hearted;
e glory of the moon is dead;
Night’s ghosts and dreams have now departed;
ine own soul still is true to thee,
But changed to a foul fiend through misery.
is fiend, whose ghastly presence ever

Beside thee like thy shadow hangs,
Dream not to chase;—the mad endeavour

Would scourge thee to severer pangs.

Be as thou art. y settled fate,
Dark as it is, all change would aggravate.
. . .he sounds resigned – like a much older man, but he was only twenty-
three when he wrote it. . .”
“. . .it’s quite bleak. Do you think he really meant it when he wrote
‘faithless smiles’?”
“. . .one has to consider his position at that point in his life. It refers to
all the disappointments in love and friendship he had suffered by then,
which would definitely include his family, his relation to his first wife
Harriet, his friendships with Hogg and Godwin, and, to some degree, his
disenchantment with Claire and Mary as well – or at least with his images
of them. ey were tearing him in different directions, and his resolve
was simply to live with his grief over the loss of his ideals about love. He
wrote his short essay, ‘On Love,’ around that time, and you can see there
the change in his vision. It opens with a less-than-ideal summation of the
gap of understanding between lovers: ‘I found my language misunder-
stood like one in a distant and savage land.’ It’s a strange essay, for he
seems to be trying to hold on to his idealism about love, but beyond any
attempt to actually realize it in the world. He defines love as ‘. . .that
powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond
ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insuffi-
cient void and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with
what we experience in ourselves. . .’ ”
“. . .but wasn’t his seeking a community an attempt to realize his
ideals?”
“. . .he’s only speaking of the symptoms of love, not anything about its real-
ization; in fact, the essay is more or less an analysis of love as what Freud
would call a drive. He describes something curiously like the psychoanalytic
conception of an ego-image – a kind of limited core-self which contains our
positive image of ourselves: ‘the ideal prototype of everything excellent or
lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man,’
but it’s stripped of the non-ideal – ‘everything we condemn or despise.’ is
ideal self, then, seeks an ‘anti-type’. . .he writes,
. . .the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly esti-

mating our own; an imagination which should enter into and

seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have

delighted to cherish and unfold in secret; with a frame whose
nerves, like the chords of two exquisite lyres, strung to the
accompaniment of one delightful voice, vibrate with the vibra-
tions of our own; and of a combination of all of these in such
proportion as the types within demands. . .
. . .”
“. . .in other words, one perfect person with whom we would merge. . .”
“. . .yes, but he realizes, at least by that point, that it was impossible. e
next line states, ‘this is the invisible and unattainable point to which love
tends,’ and he claims that it even operates without a human object, which
is why it’s closer to a drive. . .”
“. . .what did he conclude? Did he suggest a way beyond such idealiza-
tions?”
“. . .not in this essay, although in Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude – his
second major long poem completed in the autumn of that year – he
suggested the dangers of seeking one’s anti-type, and there he at least
implies another way. . .”
“. . .what is it about?”
“. . .it’s rather strange – it’s more or less an allegorical dramatization
of the dangers of seeking the embodiment of one’s anti-type, the specific
danger being that of drowning in the well of one’s narcissism. e
protagonist, simply called ‘the Poet,’ begins life quite content with the
beauties surrounding him in nature, but later begins to seek a human
embodiment of his desires. e crucial moment for him comes when he
has what seems to be a kind of poetic wet dream: he dreams about
a woman who comes to him and seduces him – the seduction scene is
quite erotic. . .”
“. . .read it to me!”
“. . .I won’t be responsible for the consequences. . .”
“. . .I think you can handle it. . .”
“. . .it’s not the how that disturbs me right now, it’s the where. . .anyway,
here it is. . .
Sudden she rose,

As if her heart impatiently endured
Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned,
8
And saw by the warm light of their own life

Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil
Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare,
Her dark locks floating in the breath of night,
Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips
Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly.
His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess
Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled
His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet
Her panting bosom:. . .she drew back a while,
en, yielding to the irresistible joy,
With frantic gesture and short breathless cry
Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.
Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night
Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep,
Like a dark flood suspended in its course,
Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.
. . .”
“. . .that is rather erotic – I could share some ‘short, breathless cries’
right now. . .if only it weren’t so hot. . .”
“. . .the heat makes my brain a bit vacant also, even without the erotic
frenzy. . .”
“. . .so then what happens in the poem – I assume he goes to seek the
woman, his anti-type?”
“. . .yes. When he awakens, he’s seized by the image he’s had of the
woman. He decides to pursue her – or ‘it,’ and in the rest of the poem he
passes through increasingly bizarre landscapes, symbolic of his enflamed
mind, as he travels by a small boat up a river in search of her. . .”
“. . .I assume he doesn’t find her?”
“. . .the word ‘vacant’ in the passage says it all: the image is empty, as it’s
only his obsessive projection. During one moment, quite a ways into his
journey, he experiences a faint repetition of the dream when he gazes at
his own image in a pool and senses the figure of the woman again – of
course indicating the dream’s narcissistic nature, but this time she’s only
two eyes hanging ‘in the gloom of thought.’ is simply sets him off on
his futile search again, but as Shelley suggested in ‘On Love,’ to seek the
anti-type is only to return to oneself – the prototype. . .”
9
“. . .does he at least become aware of the futility of his search?”

“. . .there’s no real climax to the poem, either negative or positive, for the
persona within the poem simply dies – and it’s a strangely passive death:
he rests, and his heart and breathing slowly cease while he watches the
setting moon. However, for Shelley himself, there’s clearly a new awareness
that can be seen in the preface to the poem; in fact, it says a great deal about
what he had learned by then: ‘e intellectual faculties, the imagination,
the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions. . .’”
“. . .wait – what’s a ‘requisition’?”
“. . .it’s a strange use of the word here: normally, a ‘requisition’ is
a formal request – it tends to be used today in government or military
parlance. Shelley means something like a demand, requirement, or need
– there was no psychoanalytic terminology in existence then. . .”
“. . .I understand – it’s probably nároky in Czech. . .go on. . .”
“. . .‘have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of correspon-
ding powers in other human beings. e Poet is represented as uniting
these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain
for a prototype for his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he
descends to an untimely grave’. . .while he doesn’t really spell it out
directly, there are the rudiments of a new vision. . .at least inversely. . .”
“. . .if he’s wrong to unite these requisitions to a single image, then
I suppose he’s implying that one ought not expect completion through
a single other human being, as he had discovered again with Mary. . .”
“. . .and Claire as well – two different women, two different modes of
being: one more intellectual and sensible, the other more sensual and
emotional; both dynamic, enchanting beings, but neither, of course,
the non-existent ‘anti-type’. . .as the French psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan said, we can expect ‘supplementarity’ in our love relations, but
not ‘complementarity’ – we can expect some fulfillment of our needs
and desires, but not complete fulfillment. . .”
“. . .but did Shelley really accept these limits?”
“. . .I think he did: in the preface Shelley goes on to critique those
who do not love, and it’s clear this critique concerns as much those
incapable or refusing to love, as those, like the poet in the poem, who
do not love because they’re seeking only their anti-type. Given he
accepts the anti-type as impossible, and yet sees not loving as the
greater offense, I assume he decided to settle for simply loving those
he loved as best as he could, despite all the difficulties. . .”
0
“. . .but he seems to be rather critical in certain parts of the poem. Who

do you think he had in mind – Mary?”
“. . .yes, to an extent – aer all, ‘On Love’ does seem to have a specific
listener as its audience. It’s not that she didn’t love him, it’s that her love
refused to accept large parts of his being – and I’m not only speaking
about Claire, which would be understandable given the circumstances.
Because of her upbringing by Godwin, I think she held to the belief that
Shelley was her anti-type, which was difficult for him to live up to. . .”
“. . .but what about Claire? Didn’t she also believe she could be his anti-
type?”
“. . .Claire had the advantages specific to the position of the ‘other
woman,’ in that she knew her situation was shared to begin with. . .”
“. . .but that didn’t stop her from believing that she would become the
woman in Shelley’s life, did it?”
“. . .it never does – she probably hoped for precisely that. . .I doubt
Shelley would have le Mary for so long in Clion if he was certain about
his decision to remain with her. Clearly he had to work things out with
Claire. . .”
“. . .what was the result?”
“. . .it’s speculation, but I would guess that he chose to maintain the
status quo, but with the difference that Claire became an imperceptible
bond. . .”
“. . .and Mary the perceptible bond?”
“. . .it was the easiest way, given the stresses they had all been through. . .”
“. . .finally, aer what seems to have been some wavering, he took
a house in Bishopsgate near Windsor that Peacock had found for him –
Mary joined him there in mid-August. . .”
“. . .and where did Claire go?”
“. . .I assume she stayed the summer in Lynmouth, but it’s somewhat
unclear what happened to her. Shelley, Mary, and Claire’s half-brother
Charles went on a boating expedition in September and we know Claire
wasn’t with them, because Charles was writing to her. She visited Ireland
with her brother later in the autumn, and the trip seems to have been
funded by Shelley. e next direct evidence she was with them is
Godwin’s mentioning her spending the New Year’s holidays with Shelley
and Mary at Bishopsgate, but there are checks from Shelley written to
her from October onwards, so clearly Shelley was taking full responsi-
1
bility for her, wherever she was – perhaps back in Lynmouth, and then
later in London. She mentioned something about it to Silsbee. . .”
“. . .how do you think they managed it? I doubt Mary would have been
very happy about either his supporting Claire, or her coming to
Bishopsgate to live with them. . .”
“. . .as I said, Shelley seems to have taken up a position of impercepti-
bility from that point onwards in regard to Claire. I doubt he mentioned
to Mary the funds going to Claire, and for a considerable period he seems
to have had a separate life with her, hidden from Mary. In any case, Mary
was pregnant again – probably since July, based on when she gave birth.
By the time of Claire’s return in January, 181, she would have been in
the final trimester, so, once again, she had the physical evidence of her
bond with Shelley that she needed, and that seems to have helped change
her attitude towards Claire a bit – at least enough to tolerate visits from
her. . .”
“. . .Claire must have felt le out again, didn’t she?”
“. . .oh, without doubt. Mary gave birth to William Shelley on January
, 181, and I think that it’s not coincidental that this was the same
period when Claire began her pursuit of Byron. She told Silsbee, later,
that she was very angry at both Mary and Shelley: she must have real-
ized that she would never fully replace Mary in Shelley’s affections, and
that her presence would always be contentious. If she wanted a poet all
to herself, she realized she would have to look elsewhere: her first and
last attempt was her relationship with Byron. . .”
“. . .she was aiming rather high, wasn’t she – given Byron’s reputation?”
“. . .she was young – eighteen at the time – and she mistakenly believed
that Byron would accept her as a fellow outcast and ‘free spirit.’ Claire
had sent a series of coquettish letters to Byron, introducing herself at first
as a woman who wanted advice about an acting career, and then later as
a budding author wanting advice. She ridiculed social mores – Byron
wrote to someone later that she introduced herself by proclaiming, ‘I am
an atheist,’ and flaunted her own connections to Shelley, who was then
known in certain circles because of his radical poem Queen Mab. Shelley
had sent Byron a copy of it two years earlier, and Claire sent a copy of
Alastor. She also cited her connections to Mary, who, although unknown
herself, was the daughter of the infamous Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecra. Finally, she offered herself sexually to Byron, who, by
then, had gained his reputation as someone who was – in Lady Caroline

Lamb’s o-quoted words, ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’. . .”

“. . .and he accepted, no doubt. . .”
“. . .not immediately, but she was persistent. He was rather skittish due
to his recent separation from his wife, and the fact that the newspapers
were ready to report even the slightest rumor about him. . .”
“. . .so how was Claire able to overcome his defenses?”
“. . .at one point she actually included, in a letter to him, an assessment
of her personality written by Shelley, who had no idea how it would be
used. . .”
“. . .what did it say?”
“. . .let me find it. . .here it is – apparently she was already beginning to
grate a bit on Byron’s nerves:
My dear Lord Byron you call me a ‘little fiend’ – I thought it

so criminal to doubt anything you said that I was much
impressed by this appellation. In the course of the Evening
I asked Shelley if he thought I was of a gentle disposition. I give
you his exact words. ‘My sweet Child, there are two Clare’s –
one of them I should call irritable if it were not for the nervous
disorder, the effects of which you still retain; the nervous Clare
is reserved & melancholy & more sarcastic than violent; the
good Clare is gentle yet cheerful; & to me the most engaging
of human creatures; one thing I will say for you that you are as
easily managed by the person you love as the reed is by the
wind; it is your weak side.’ I do not report this through vanity;
I know Shelley is too fond of me not to be indulgent, yet
I think it is an honorable testimony to that part of my character
you have accused that the man whom I have loved & for whom
I have suffered much should report this of me.
. . .”
“. . .what was the ‘nervous disorder’?”
“. . .there’s none that I know of – I think it was Shelley’s way of referring
to her moods and her temper. . .”
“. . .what did she tell Byron about her relations with Shelley?”
“. . .what would you assume?”
“. . .it’s clear that she and Shelley had been lovers in the past – at least
given the references. . .”

“. . .it seems obvious to me as well, but critics have discounted it. . .that
she was a lover of Shelley is quite clear: when Shelley writes that she is
‘easily managed by the person she loves,’ how could he have known this
if he weren’t referring to himself – and who else could he be referring to?
Claire had no other men in her life before Shelley, and anyway, an edito-
rial bracket here shows that she first wrote ‘easily managed by the person
she loves,’ and then deleted the words ‘and I’. . .”
“. . .it seems obvious to me – she wrote it the first time to hide her rela-
tions with Shelley because she was afraid Byron might be jealous, and
then she changed her mind and let it stand. . .”
“. . .I agree, but it’s little details like this that allow the interpretation to
be bent whichever way the biographer wishes. . .”
“. . .but how can they deny it when she writes ‘the man whom I have
loved & for whom I have suffered much. . .’”
“. . .it’s clear for anyone with an honest instinct, but for the kind of critic
who wants to camouflage realities they don’t want to accept, anything’s
possible. . .”
“. . .so what did Byron think?”
“. . .when he considered, later, whether or not he was the father of
Allegra, he didn’t conclude it was quite probable because Shelley was not
Claire’s lover, but only because she hadn’t been living with him at the
time she began seeing Byron; of course, his reasoning was actually faulty:
Claire wasn’t living with Shelley and Mary, but there’s evidence that at
the time Shelley and she were passing nights together in an apartment
they were renting in London. In any case, I’m not making a point about
the facts, but rather a point about what he thought were the facts, and, by
the time he was in Venice, he had some doubts about his own paternity,
although we’ll never know if they were real doubts, or merely cruelty. . .”
“. . .so when did Claire finally make love to Byron?”
“. . .that’s unclear as well. According to one version of the story, they
met several times without making love in Byron’s private rooms at the
Drury Lane eatre, but consummated their relationship at an inn
outside of London on April 0th, based on the fact that Claire’s letters
have an urgency about the meeting: they stress the need for secrecy, and
seem to indicate the consummation of their relations; however, if it’s
true, then Allegra must have been conceived precisely at that meeting,
and only there, for Byron departed for the continent on April , and
during the intervening days Claire was sending him letters imploring

him to see her again and he clearly wasn’t granting her wish: on April
she addressed a letter to him that ended with the postscript, ‘Please
write. I shall die if you don’t write’ – we have no indication that he did,
and he was gone the next day. . .”
“. . .couldn’t the child have been conceived in Geneva?”
“. . .the child was born on January 1 – exactly nine months aer their
meeting on April 0. We know Claire didn’t see him again until May ,
which would have been too short a time before the birth. . .”
“. . .so that was a rather lucky encounter, or I suppose unlucky, in retro-
spect. . .”
“. . .I’m inclined to believe she planned it that way, but still, it seems too
lucky, so I think there’s another way to read the events. ey may have had
any number of trysts in Byron’s rooms at the theater or his house, as one of
Claire’s letters is ambiguous: she’s either complaining about meeting him
at his house because she fears they will be interrupted, or fears it because
they had been interrupted – that would account for her desire to meet
somewhere they could have their leisure, and it would also give a wider
margin for the conception to have taken place. . .”
“. . .plus, from what I know about Byron, he probably preferred brief
interludes, and a meeting out of town gave her more time with him. . .but,
you don’t think there’s any chance it was Shelley’s child?”
“. . .we’ll never have any way of knowing that for certain either way, but,
instinctively, I believe it must have been Byron’s. Claire may have been
spending some time with Shelley, but she was genuinely in pursuit of
Byron, then, and her letters show her as trying to strike out on her own in
order to gain her independence. I don’t think she would’ve risked giving
up the child to Byron if she wasn’t sure it was his child. . .”
“. . .how much did Mary and Shelley know about their relations?”
“. . .Claire made a point of bringing Mary to meet Byron at the theater,
but she also instructed Byron to avoid using Claire’s familiar name, as she
didn’t want Mary to know there was a degree of intimacy between them,
so Mary didn’t know about the intimacy until they reached Geneva, and
seems not to have known about the pregnancy until a good part of the
summer was over. . .”
“. . .and Shelley?”
“. . .that’s more difficult to know: clearly he knew as much as Mary did
at first, which is very little, but then he must have known much more to
agree with Claire’s desire to go to Geneva. . .”

“. . .but wasn’t Shelley jealous of Claire – how could he stand knowing

she was in love with Byron?”
“. . .Shelley was remarkable for his lack of possessiveness, but, yes,
I imagine there was some jealousy – there must have been. . .”
“. . .you would be jealous in the same situation, wouldn’t you?”
“. . .I admit I’d be jealous, although I can imagine it partially being
mitigated by whoever the other writer was – if they were of the caliber
of Byron, then perhaps not. Shelley was interested in Byron as
a prospective colleague for whom he felt great sympathy – for both
poetical and political reasons. That Byron was going into exile mirrored
Shelley’s own sense of self at the time, and he must have identified with
Byron’s flight from society, seeing him as a potential ally. . .”
“. . .why did Shelley feel so driven towards exile just then?”
“. . .first of all because he felt he was totally unappreciated in England:
while Queen Mab had received some good notices in the radical small
presses, Alastor was widely ridiculed as being incomprehensible. en,
there was the matter of Godwin, who had been pressing Shelley for
money all that winter. . .”
“. . .why – as compensation for losing his daughters?”
“. . .Shelley had initially helped Godwin financially out of a sense of
being ‘brothers in the cause of liberty,’ but aer Shelley eloped with Mary
and Claire, Godwin seems to have expected something like reparations
for the loss of his two daughters, although it was never said explicitly.
Shelley helped him for a while – probably both out of guilt and because
Mary pressed him to help, but Godwin’s demands only increased, and by
that time Shelley was feeling increasingly bitter about the whole thing:
he was clearly being used by Godwin, who seemed like a bottomless pit.
It was in that period when the whole issue came to a head, and Shelley,
who was staying in London without Mary’s mediating presence, wrote
Godwin a letter unleashing his fury towards him. He charged him with
hypocrisy in regard to the fact that he had refused to deal with Shelley
following Mary’s departure on moral grounds, but when it came to
needing money, Godwin was suddenly willing to bend his principles. . .”
“. . .I suppose that didn’t make Godwin very happy. . .”
“. . .they could hear his shouting, by letter, all the way to Italy. However,
the final blow driving Shelley into self-imposed exile came with the end
of a legal proceeding regarding his father’s estate: Shelley had hoped that
he would find a way to profit from some complex dealings about the

property, but the suit went against him, and he continued to receive only
the thousand pounds annually he had already been receiving. At that
point he simply wanted to leave England, and Claire’s proposal gave
some shape to his plans. Aer a rather quick decision, they departed for
Geneva. . .”
“. . .here’s the waiter – do you want anything more. . .?”
“. . .I’m not so hungry because of the heat – but will you share a pasta
with me?”
“. . .yes, which one?”
“. . .whichever – you choose. . .”
“. . .so something light – how about the spaghetti al pesto?”
“. . .fine. . .”
“. . .and more wine?”
“. . .I don’t know, we’ll pass out with this heat if we have more, but
perché no?”
“. . .uno spaghetti al pesto, e ancora mezzo litro di vino bianco, per favore. . .”
e waiter takes their order, returns with another carafe of wine, and
then disappears into a back room, where a television can be heard
playing.
“. . .it’s all so good – I could live here forever. . .”
“. . .I could too – but I wonder if I would ever get anything done. . .”
“. . .maybe you wouldn’t need to get anything done. . .”
“. . .that’s possible, but on the other hand, you know what Goethe
wrote: ‘Alles in der Welt lässt sich ertragen, Nur nicht eine Reihe von
schönen Tagen’. . .”
“. . .translation?”
“. . .paraphrased, ‘nothing is harder to bear than a succession of beautiful
days’. . .”
“. . .oh, I don’t know about that – I’m really enjoying this particular
succession of sunny days!”
“. . .I remember when I came to Italy with Michael: I was supposed to
teach him the thought of Deleuze and Guattari in exchange for him
teaching me the thought of Niklas Luhmann. We ended up doing hardly
any work at all: instead, we ate fresh fish at seaside restaurants, admired
the scenery, and spent a good deal of time staring out to sea. We
concluded that the cisalpine environment isn’t conducive to social
theory: we found we were too content! It’s no wonder one of the few
Italian thinkers to get anything done in the 0th Century was Gramsci,

who was in prison, locked away from all this distracting beauty. A certain
kind of angst is necessary for high theory, it seems, provided only by the
inclement environment of places like northern European cities, such as
Paris, Berlin, and Frankfurt. My guess is contemporary Italian thinkers
like Eco, Vattimo, Negri, and Agamben get their dosage of angst from
their various travels, because if they were ‘stuck’ here, they be overcome
with the beauty – and, anyway, with the exception of Agamben they are
all from the north. . .”
“. . .maybe if you live in a country like this, you don’t need theory!”
“. . .or perhaps the ideal would be eight to ten months in a northern
European capital like Prague to get one’s work done, and a few months
a year here – preferably in early spring and late autumn in order to cut
the long winters off at either end. . .”
“. . .I’m agreeable to that – so when do we start?”
“. . .there’s no time like the present: this will be our first year on the
plan, which we will undertake incrementally, adding a week each year
until we reach our goal. . .”
“. . .that’s fine with me. . .”
“. . .now if we could only find a way to pay for it!”
“. . .not to mention finding time off from our jobs. . .”
“. . .details, mere details. . .”
“. . .so, getting back to our story, what do you think Claire was really
expecting from Byron? Did she think he would fall in love and stay with
her?”
“. . .she may have hoped so, but by the time they were on the continent
heading for Geneva she realized that the odds were against it – look at this
passage from a letter she sent ahead to Byron: ‘I know not how to address
you; I cannot call you friend for though I love you yet you do not feel even
interest for me; fate has ordained that the slightest accident that should befall
you should be agony to me; but were I to float by your window drowned, all
you would say would be “Ah voila!” ’. . .”
“. . .then Byron never had any feelings for her – even at the beginning?”
“. . .perhaps for a single moment he had a fondness for her – in late
March he did, aer all, write the stanzas ‘ere be none of Beauty’s
daughters’ with her in mind. e truth, however, is that his capacity for
attachment had been worn out aer a long series of affairs, plus he had
reason to fear any woman in pursuit of him – aer all, he already had had
his famous, disastrous affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. I think by that
8
point he only truly loved his half-sister Augusta: that, of course, was
already the scandal being whispered about, adding to the more open
scandal of his separation from Lady Byron. He was in terrible spirits as
he entered his period of self-imposed exile: it was the worst possible time
for Claire to have made a play for him. . .”
“. . .what about Geneva? Both the Russell film and the Passer film show
Claire and Byron making love there. . .”
“. . .Byron seems to have unthawed enough to sleep with her again – at
least at the beginning of the summer. He wrote to Augusta a short while
aerwards, ‘I was not in love, nor have any love le for any, but I could
not exactly play the role of stoic with a woman who had scrambled eight
hundred miles to unphilosophize me.’ eir relations continued for
a while, but at some point they stopped – I suspect it was in late June aer
Byron returned from his trip on the lake with Shelley. . .”
“. . .aer he found out about the pregnancy. . .”
“. . .no doubt. . .there’s no hard evidence, but there’s a piece of circum-
stantial evidence: Byron and Shelley le for a week-long tour of the lake
by boat on June rd. On June th, Shelley draed a will in which, among
other bequests, he le twelve thousand pounds from his future estate to
Claire – six thousand for herself, and six thousand for another to be
chosen by her, so clearly Shelley knew about the pregnancy by then.
I would guess Shelley told Byron, Byron reacted negatively, and when
Shelley saw his reaction he realized he needed to create some sort of secu-
rity for Claire and her child – it’s typical of him. Also, their boat was
almost swamped during a sudden summer storm, and, because Shelley
couldn’t swim, he was undoubtedly frightened for his life: he must have
realized that only Mary and William would have been legally taken care
of in the event of his death, and he wanted to be sure that everyone
connected to him would be taken care of if the worst ever happened – as
he also le bequests to Harriet and their two children. . .”
“. . .and how did Byron treat Claire when they returned?”
“. . .her pregnancy seems to have immediately become an issue. Claire
sent a note to him in early July begging him to send for her, or for Byron
to come visit them at the Maison Chapuis – the small villa below the Villa
Diodati they were renting on the lake. He apparently refused. . .”
“. . .a note? ey only lived a few hundred meters apart!”
“. . .it seems that by mid-July Byron decided that he would no longer
tolerate Claire’s presence at the Villa Diodati. The trip to the Alps that
9
Shelley, Claire, and Mary took at that time must have been partially
intended as a kind of pressure-release valve for the situation. They left
on July 1st, and returned on the th, when Byron deigned to see them
all together. It’s highly likely that the decision about the child was made
on August nd, when Shelley and Claire went up to the Villa Diodati
alone. . .”
“. . .Mary didn’t go?”
“No. Her journal indicates Byron didn’t wish her to be there. I would
guess it was because he knew there would be a scene, and he didn’t want
to reveal the more cruel part of his temperament in Mary’s presence. . .”
“. . .so what changed Byron’s mind, in the end, about taking care of the
child?”
“. . .it must have been the influence of Shelley – and perhaps also Mary
as a mute witness in the background. You know the rest: the arrangement
was made – the child would have Byron’s name and protection in
exchange for Claire’s giving up any further claim on it, save for visiting it
in the guise of an aunt. At first Byron suggested he would turn the child
over to the care of his half-sister Augusta, but Claire vehemently refused,
demanding it should be under the care of one of its parents until it was
seven years of age. Byron agreed. Shelley offered that he would support
Claire during the time of her pregnancy – a fact which in itself reveals
the closeness of their bond, for it could only harm Shelley’s reputation
further if it were to become known, and it called for their being extremely
clandestine. Claire didn’t fully acknowledge what Shelley had done for
her by agreeing to this arrangement until much later, when she realized
Byron’s true intentions. . .”
“. . .when did they agree Byron would receive the child?”
“. . .there was no specific arrangement: the child was to be turned over
to Byron when it would be possible to do so without harming it. . .”
“. . .as if that were possible! Losing its mother could only be harmful to it!”
“. . .Shelley argued the same point to Claire, and, of course, Claire lived
to regret her decision. . .perhaps she felt that Byron might still relent. For
a considerable time she seems to have been quite deluded about the possi-
bility of Byron still having some feeling for her, and over the next half year
or so she faced a dreadful awakening to the truth – that he had no feeling
for her at all, except contempt. . .”
“. . .didn’t she realize it when he forbade her to see him alone at the
Villa Diodati?”
0
“. . .Claire was in a kind of hormonal daze, it seems: the truth simply

wouldn’t penetrate. She seems to have taken Byron’s refusal to see her as
merely his paranoia about inviting further scandal – you can see that in
the fact that she was still happily willing, throughout the rest of August,
to fair copy some of Byron’s poems from the lake tour. . .”
“. . .fair copy?”
“. . .the age of mechanical reproduction was yet to come: copying was
an arduous process, and for exiles like Shelley and Byron, a risky process
as well. We take for granted typewriters and computers, but back then
a final draft would have been full of erasures, lines crossed out and
inserted lengthwise – a real mess. The fair copy sent to the publishers
had to be fully copied out in legible handwriting, which took weeks.
Claire fair-copied the third canto of Childe Harold earlier in the
summer, and now The Prisoner of Chillon and some shorter lyrics.
Shelley agreed to hand-deliver these copies to Murray, Byron’s
publisher, upon their arrival in England. They were the only extant
clean copies, so there was always a risk of their loss. Actually, it turned
out to be rather disturbing for him: Murray immediately agreed to pay
Byron two thousand guineas – over twice Shelley’s annual income –
for the canto of Childe Harold alone, while he had rejected Shelley’s
Alastor the previous January. It’s no wonder that Shelley’s output
always dwindled when he was in Byron’s proximity. . .”
“. . .what did they write in Geneva?”
“. . .Byron’s stay in Geneva was quite fertile – aside from the canto
of Childe Harold and The Prisoner of Chillon, he wrote several signif-
icant lyrics, such as ‘Darkness,’ ‘The Dream,’ and he even wrote a lyric
entitled ‘Prometheus’ – a theme Mary had taken up in Frankenstein.
Shelley, meanwhile, wrote just two medium-length lyrics: ‘Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’ – exceptional poems to be sure,
but compared to his usual output, he was blocked. In the notebooks
he kept during his lake tour with Byron he was able to only write
a fragment of a lyric. . .”
“. . .on what?”
“. . .on the topic of his inability to write – here, I’ll read it. . .
My thoughts arise and fade in solitude,

e verse that would invest them melts away
Like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day:
1
How beautiful they were, how firm they stood,

Flecking the starry sky like woven pearl!
. . .meanwhile Byron, on the same trip, was elegizing the lake one moment,
personifying one of the prisoners in the dungeon of Chillon the next –
pouring forth a torrent of verse. . .”
“. . .why was Shelley so inhibited by his presence – was it because Byron
was so much better known then?”
“. . .certainly that was part of it, but it was more than that, as Shelley
was always inhibited by Byron. eir personalities were very different:
Byron was insufferably haughty, and his airs were something Shelley
could barely tolerate, especially because Byron held to ideas that were
retrograde in Shelley’s opinion: his class status, his ideas about the treat-
ment of women, and, while hardly religious, Byron wasn’t the type to
attack organized religion the way Shelley did. Shelley wrote to Peacock
that summer, ‘Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, and as
such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar
prejudices, and as mad as the winds’. . .”
“. . .but what do you think about Byron’s poetry – in comparison to
Shelley’s, I mean?”
“Byron was by far the better ‘versifier’. . .he seemed to have an incredible
facility to work within a closed system of rhyme and meter. . .”
“. . .but not a better poet?”
“. . .it all depends on how one defines poetry. For their period he
certainly had a better grasp of the fundamentals. He was able to
consistently write verse that was harmonious and elegant, which is all
the more remarkable given at the same time his themes were often so
scornful and even cynical: indeed, I believe the tension between the
beauty of the verse and his irony and wit is where his artistry prima-
rily resides. . .”
“. . .and Shelley?”
“. . .Shelley, judged from the same criteria of what a poet was ‘supposed’
to be then, could occasionally write verse that contained lines of aston-
ishing beauty, but his over-all effect could run to obfuscation one
moment and to a kind of preciousness or even hysteria the next; Shelley,
aer all, almost patented the motif of the swooning poet reaching the
point of inexpressibility. . .”
“. . .how do you mean, exactly?”

“. . .ok, look at this line from ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ which is

typical: ‘Sudden, the shadow fell on me; I shrieked, and clasped my hands
in ecstasy!’ A bit strident, don’t you think?”
“. . .but it’s Shelley. . .”
“. . .yes, it all goes together. His obfuscation is the primary difficulty
about his poetry – reading a Shelley poem is oen an exercise of
suspended meaning that can be far more arduous than the longer
passages of writers like Marcel Proust or Henry James: clause is
embedded within clause, so that one oen has the feeling of reading
a long periodic sentence that keeps opening and opening – and the
opening doesn’t only occur on the level of the subordination of clauses,
but also on the level between the metaphor’s tenor and its vehicle. . .”
“. . .in plain English?”
“. . .the complexity is increased both in terms of the thoughts embedded
within thoughts, but also in the stretching and breaking of the link
between the metaphor and what it’s expressing. . .to be honest, on the
purely poetic level taken alone, I sometimes find myself surprised at how
bad a ‘great poet’ Shelley can be at times. . .”
“. . .then what do you find so great about him?”
“. . .it’s in the same effects, but considered from a different perspec-
tive. My bias is towards literature that moves towards creating new
forms of meaning, not that which perfects existing forms – towards
what Jean Paulhan in Les fleurs de Tarbes referred to as literary ‘terror-
ists’ as opposed to ‘rhetoricians.’ The German romantic critic Friedrich
Schlegel claimed that the merging of poetry and philosophy produced
‘prophecy’ or ‘vision’: one would never use these words to describe
what Byron was doing, but in Shelley’s best poetry, he’s clearly
emerging as what Rimbaud would later term a ‘voyant’ or ‘seer’. . .a new
language is being created – or as Gilles Deleuze has put it, a foreign
language emerges from within the native language, with new meanings,
new forms of perception and feeling. Shelley’s poetry is an exploration
of the limits of representation: he was attempting to work out a mode
of being that was able to sustain itself in the face of the void opened in
representation by the Enlightenment – he began his writing career
closer to Rousseau, and ended as a poetic Kantian. . .”
“. . .you’ll have to explain that. . .”
“. . .the two major lyrics he wrote during that summer show precisely
what I mean: ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ is an attempt to express

a hidden force that refuses to reveal itself except in the fleeting moments
when beauty is manifested in the world. Like Kant, he’s aware that it may
not only be the mysteriousness of the force that renders it invisible, but
also the mind’s incapacity to comprehend it. You can see it in the opening
stanza of the poem:
e awful shadow of some unseen Power

Floats through unseen amongst us, – visiting
is various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower, –
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening, –
Like clouds in starlight widely spread, –
Like memory of music fled, –
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
. . .he makes it clear that this power is a mystery, although the single
aspect revealed by this mystery is beauty. e second stanza becomes
a question, asked directly of this ‘Spirit of Beauty,’ as to why this spirit is
so transient, and, consequently, human life so full of desolation when the
spirit is absent:
Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou does shine upon
Of human thought or form, – where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
is dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, – why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

. . .in the third stanza, my favorite, he takes the question further, saying
that this mystery has never given any real answer – that consequently
men have tried to fill in the answer with futile attempts to represent
the mystery with some religion or philosophy, but the mystery always
evades them, and uncertainty always breaks through any attempts to
represent the meaning of life, or the nature of God:
No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

To sage or poet these responses given –
erefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells – whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
y light alone – like mist o’er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
rough strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.
. . .I especially like the last line – typically Shelleyean. . .”

“. . .it’s beautiful – it reminds me of the lines at the end of Passer’s film. . .”
“. . .yes, they’re very similar. . .”
“. . .where does the poem go from there?”
“. . .he goes on to describe how inconstant the lives of men are, and to
suggest that if this power remained constant, human life would be
Godlike – immortal and omnipotent, but because it obviously doesn’t
remain constant, he addresses this mysterious power directly, imploring
it to remain, and explaining that without its presence, life is meaningless:
Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart

And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
ou messenger of sympathies,
at wax and wane in lover’s eyes –
ou – that to human thought art nourishment,

Like darkness to a dying flame!

Depart not as thy shadow came,
Depart not – lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.
. . .it’s slightly ambiguous here – you have to read ‘were’ in the third
line as ‘would be,’ and ‘didst’ in the fourth line as ‘if’. . .otherwise, the
poet is setting up a kind of continuum: at one extreme, this spirit
would be present always, and man would be immortal, while at the
other extreme, this spirit is absolutely contingent and temporal,
leaving us to an absolute mortality – nothing but the grave. The poet
hopes that through the lastingness of beauty we have at least some
kind of hold on immortality, although he clearly fears the worst. . .”
“. . .the line ‘Like darkness to a dying flame’ is interesting: it’s a strange
way to speak of nourishment – it’s the blackness of the background, an
absence, that nourishes, and not a positive presence. . .”
“. . .exactly – it continues the idea of this power as a negative affirma-
tion – very similar to Kant’s conception of the ‘supersensible substrate
of being’. . .”
“. . .where does he go from there?”
“. . .the next stanzas deal with Shelley’s boyhood, and his first encounter
with this spirit: he first says he sought spirits but didn’t encounter any,
and then the spirit of beauty’s shadow – again not its positive presence
– ‘fell’ on him, followed by the line I read, where he seems overcome with
ecstasy. . .”
“. . .it seems almost sexual. . .”
“. . .I think it was, in a way – Shelley tended to conflate the various forms
of ecstasy and bliss in a way that made sex spiritual, and spirit sexual: it’s
quite overt in the next stanza, where he expresses how he dedicated
himself to this spirit. . .look at how he expresses this dedication:
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine – have I not kept my vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantom’s of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers
Of studious zeal or love’s delight
Outwatched with me the envious night –

ey know that never joy illumed my brow

Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
is world from its dark slavery,
at thou – O awful LOVELINESS
Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.
. . .he seems to be suggesting that whatever he does, from his studies to

his love-making, has been done with the hope of being invested with and
ennobled by the spirit of beauty. . .”
“. . .why ‘awful loveliness’?”
“. . .he means something closer to ‘awesome’ – it’s a Kantian distinc-
tion between beauty, which is positive and joyful, and the sublime,
which is negative in the sense of being unrepresentable: ‘awful’ in this
sense means ‘inspiring awe’ – the affective force transfixes, or even
overwhelms, rather than delights. Look at the next stanza – what the
poet hopes to gain from the spirit is ‘calm,’ and, after the restlessness
of the poem, this last stanza is actually very tranquilizing. . .
e day becomes more solemn and serene

When noon is past – there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
us let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm – to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
. . .through the metaphor he connects his desire to a need for solemnity,

serenity, harmony – what the autumn gives to the day, he wishes to be
given to replace the intensities of youth. . .”
“. . .the last line isn’t clear to me – why ‘to fear himself’?”
“. . .I’m not sure – I can only speculate that by now Shelley himself
realized the dangers of his quest: Mary realized it when she subtitled
Frankenstein the ‘New Prometheus,’ signifying the creation of the new

Enlightened man. She certainly saw the dangers – and not merely the
dangers of living with a professed radical whose life was in perpetual
crisis. Shelley was at risk, and she sensed it. . .”
“. . .it’s clear in Frankenstein – the monster pursuing its creator. . .but
what was the real danger for Shelley?”
“. . .there’s a strange relationship in the romantics between the asser-
tion of freedom from the social order and an increase in fears and anxi-
eties. . .it’s understandable, as whatever one calls it – evil, the will to
power, aggressivity, chthonian energies, or drives, these forces don’t
disappear merely because an old world-view is discarded. . .quite the
contrary! e social system plays a role in diffusing and sublimating these
forces, and without the structure set up by the system, both creative and
destructive energies become more free-ranging – more difficult to
contain, or even identify. Shelley questioned everything, but unlike the
rationalists or empiricists, he saw that there was something uncontrol-
lable and absolutely mysterious in nature, and he questioned man’s ability
to master it or act rationally in accord with it – you can see this already
in Alastor and ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ which are both about
uncontrollable forces. . .indeed, one might read the end of the ‘Hymn’ as
the poet’s recognition that he had to bring his life into accord with this
mysterious spirit, or else. . .”
“. . .or else what?”
“. . .he’s uncertain, but he recognizes the danger. Look at his only other
completed poem of that summer, ‘Mont Blanc,’ written during the excur-
sion he went on with Mary and Claire to Chamonix – it was on the
glacier near Chamonix that Mary set the encounter between
Frankenstein and his monster. Shelley’s poem seems almost a reply to
Wordsworth, and especially the Wordsworth of the ‘Intimations of
Immortality’ ode: where Wordsworth received confirmation of an
immortal world, Shelley’s ‘trance sublime and strange’ brings an experi-
ence of inaccessible otherness. . .I can’t help thinking that the ‘some’ he
begins the third section with was a nod to Wordsworth. . .
Some say that gleams of a remoter world

Visit the soul in sleep, – that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live. – I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
8
e veil of life and death? or do I lie

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far around and inaccessibly
Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
at vanishes among the viewless gales!
Far, far above piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears, – still, snowy, and serene. . .
. . .Shelley doesn’t offer an antithesis, but counters with his actual, affec-
tive experience of the mountain. He’s uncertain about what is being
unveiled, and sleep seems to him not to open onto something else, but is
‘inaccessible’ – somehow his mind gains no hold on the scene before him.
He’s not le cold, but he certainly experiences nothing that would assure
him about God – quite the opposite. He attributes the power of
dissolving traditional faith to the mountain, and it’s replaced by
a different sort of reverence – a reverence of feeling, an experience of
sublimity in the face of the unknown:
e wilderness has a mysterious tongue

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with nature reconciled;
ou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
. . .again, he emphasizes feeling against any religious system. . .”

“. . .and serenity again, like in the ‘Hymn’ when he sought ‘calm’ – he
seems to have been seeking peace, more than anything else. . .”
“. . .it’s a strange sort of serenity, though, as it’s not the serenity of faith,
but rather of unknowing, or of a letting go to it. Shelley moves in the
direction of uncertainty, rather than certainty, as the last lines show:
e secret Strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
9
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
. . .it seems to me that he posits a mysterious force, but at the same time,
with his last question, opens up the possibility of there being only
vacancy. . .”
“. . .how does he reconcile his atheism with things like a ‘spirit of
beauty,’ or the ‘secret strength of things’?”
“. . .that’s what both Byron and Monk Lewis – who had arrived at the
Villa Diodati for a visit in August – wondered. . .”
“. . .who is Monk Lewis?”
“. . .he wrote the gothic novel The Monk, and some other gothic
romances. He and Byron both maintained that one couldn’t be both
an atheist and a believer in ghosts, spirits, or forces, but I think they
missed the point of Shelley’s form of skepticism. Shelley’s argument
against religion was primarily socio-political – he was against the
certainties that led to restrictive social behavior or moralism, and
against how Christianity was used to uphold a certain form of life. Like
Nietzsche, I’m guessing he would have held the idea that there was only
one true Christian – and he died on the cross. Behind the use of reli-
gion in England – to uphold a class-based society with all of its contra-
dictions and hypocrisies – was a sense of certainty: certainty about
what God’s plan for man entailed. Shelley rightly recognized the crux
of the Enlightenment challenge to traditional Christian society.
Shelley’s ‘atheism’ was against religious certainty, but he didn’t want
to replace this certainty with the negative certainty of atheism; rather,
he wanted to leave it open as a mystery or force, which was how he had
experienced it in his own life, with the result that he was open to enter-
taining supernatural phenomena. . .”
“. . .so, to go back to my question, what was the danger Mary was seeing
– the lack of limitations, the danger of over-stepping. . .of a Prometheus
or Faust?”
“. . .yes. Although Mary became increasingly conservative and timid
over time, she was right in her fears. It’s rather easy to reveal the arbi-
trariness underlying all social forms, but it’s quite another matter to
depart from those forms at will in search of a truer or at least different
form of life. . .”
0
“. . .and I assume especially when Shelley was so skeptical of reaching

the truth. . .”
“. . .that’s the paradox – the same skepticism that had allowed Shelley to
doubt his society and its truths prevented him from merely adopting new
truths. To give him credit, Shelley increasingly became aware of the
dangers. Shelley’s shiing attitude to Rousseau is a good index, for it
reveals the level of his self-awareness. During that summer they all were
reading Rousseau’s novel Julie, set on Lake Leman, and Shelley brought
the novel along on his boat trip with Byron; in fact, they visited sites asso-
ciated with Rousseau, and Shelley reveled in it. Although he wrote to
Hogg that he found the novel ‘absurd & prejudiced,’ he could still declare,
then, that Rousseau was the greatest human mind since Milton.
Rousseau’s dependence on fine feeling, his belief in innate human good-
ness, and the exile he underwent due to his ideas – all these things brought
Shelley to a high degree of identification with Rousseau. . .however, there’s
another Rousseau, who became increasingly paranoid, self-obsessed, and
prone to blanket-condemnations of society. . .”
“. . .but Shelley seems to have avoided those dangers, didn’t he?”
“. . .oh, not entirely. He never reached the extremes of pessimism that
Rousseau was prone to towards the end of his life, but that may have been
because he didn’t live nearly as long. Certainly by the time he was writing
his last major work, e Triumph of Life, Rousseau had become a prob-
lematic figure for him, which is why he used him as a figure in the poem:
he saw the contradictions in Rousseau’s life, and by that time he saw quite
clearly the problems he had experienced in his own life through his own
modified Rousseauism – his belief in freedom and human perfectibility.
In fact, one of the more frightening incidents that occurred that summer
was just such a lesson. . .”
“. . .the hysterical fit he had when they were telling ghost stories?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .I only know what the Ken Russell film shows – that it was some
sort of drug-induced frenzy. What really happened?”
“. . .it probably was partially drug-induced, but it touched on some
real issues in Shelley’s life then. What happened was that late at night
at the Villa Diodati Byron had been reciting some lines by heart from
Coleridge’s poem Christabel. . .”
“. . .what’s the poem about?”
“. . .it’s unfinished, but the plot follows Christabel, a young maiden,
1
and her enchantment by a woman who’s some sort of lesbian vampire

figure. . .”
“. . .a lesbian vampire? Sounds interesting. . .”
“. . .it’s a curious poem. While Christabel is wandering in a forest near
her house thinking about her betrothed, she comes upon a beautiful
woman named Geraldine who’s been kidnapped by five knights and
deposited there to await their return – presumably to rape her.
Unbeknown to Christabel, Geraldine is really a kind of sorceress who
seeks access to her chamber to gain power over her body and soul. e
scene Byron recited was when she finally enters the chamber, casts a spell
on Christabel with her eyes, tells her to undress and get into bed while
she prays, and then, while Christabel watches, Geraldine disrobes,
revealing. . .well, the narrator doesn’t say. . .”
“. . .it’s unclear – the narrator mentions her ‘bosom’ and ‘side,’ but
describes nothing, saying only that it’s ‘a sight to dream of, not to tell’ –
somehow the lack of specificity makes it even worse, not to mention that
the narrator himself becomes hysterical as well, shrieking ‘Oh shield her!
Shield sweet Christabel!’”
“. . .what happens then?”
“. . .she gets into bed with her, and some sort of spell overcomes
Christabel at the touch of Geraldine’s bosom. . .otherwise, nothing is
stated clearly – some kind of lesbian vampirism is implied, but, you know,
Coleridge had his problems with women, so it’s hard to know what he
was thinking when he wrote the poem. . .”
“. . .why do you think it affected Shelley so intensely?”
“. . .Shelley apparently bolted right aer the part where the narrator
shrieks. He was most likely under the influence of laudanum at the time:
he had been listening to the poem, looking at Mary, and for some reason
thinking of a woman he had heard of who had eyes in her breasts rather
than nipples – that part, at least, Ken Russell got right in his film,
although he put the eyes in Claire’s breasts, rather than Mary’s. Shelley
then ran from the room, shrieking hysterically. Dr. Polidori followed him,
threw water in his face, and applied ether. It must have been the
vampirism, for Polidori reported that Shelley raved on hysterically about
a whole series of incidents in his life when others had wanted something
from him – about a friend’s attempt to seduce his wife, about other
friends drawing upon him as if he were a bank. All of these things were

verifiable incidents in his life, and some of them were quite recent. . .”
“. . .the first incident was about Hogg, right?”
“. . .right. . .”
“. . .but I thought the whole thing with Hogg was forgiven and
forgotten. . .”
“. . .the whole thing was a hysterical return of the repressed. Everyone
spoke of Shelley’s ‘goodness’ – but he had been too good, or too naive,
to realize how much he had been taken advantage of by those who
claimed to be friends, and it all seems to have hit him squarely then.
But it wasn’t merely a past matter: when they were leaving England for
Geneva, apparently there had been some talk of Hogg’s joining them,
and Shelley had been forced to write a quick note to Hogg explaining
why they had left without him. In mid-July, a month after this scene,
Shelley wrote a diplomatic and rather duplicitous letter to Hogg
explaining why he shouldn’t join them for the summer, so it must have
been pressing on his mind. . .”
“. . .why didn’t he want Hogg to join them? – because of Claire’s preg-
nancy?”
“. . .that’s the reason Shelley intimated, but I’m not so sure. I think it
was partially because they weren’t in the mood to be reminded of the past
– especially Mary, who was finished for good with ‘free love.’ Shelley may
also have wanted to keep Byron to himself – Byron certainly wouldn’t
have had much patience for Hogg, in any case. However, I think he
simply didn’t want to deal with Hogg. . .”
“. . .why did Shelley put up with him so long?”
“. . .I think it was an effect of the trauma of his family life: he had lost
his whole family by the time he was twenty years old, and Hogg had been
the replacement. For a period he was the only person Shelley really was
close to, but later he outgrew him, and it was probably too painful for
him to admit it to himself. . .”
“. . .and what about the other incidents he mentioned to Polidori –
Godwin, I assume, was the one drawing on him like a bank?”
“. . .yes, and Peacock too: Shelley sent Peacock a bank draft from Italy
– ostensibly to cover the costs of liquidating the house at Bishopsgate,
but I think more of a bribe to get Peacock to act on their behalf to find
another house in the area. . .”
“. . .all the vultures closing in – and the image of the vampire-woman
must have stood for it all. . .”

“. . .yes – Shelley, like Rousseau, had been naive about the human race,
assuming that others acted with the same unselfish motivations he usually
acted from, and the truth suddenly emerged into full consciousness. . .”
“. . .but was there a reason for it to all to emerge now?”
“. . .it may have been partially caused by being around Byron’s super-
cilious and cynical attitude: even though Shelley radically disagreed with
Byron, he couldn’t help being affected by him, and perhaps it also
stemmed from his distance from England, and his feelings about his new
state of exile. . .”
“. . .but why breasts with eyeballs?”
“. . .consider: the poem is about a devouring vampire-like woman.
Shelley was looking at Mary at the onset of his hysterical act – or at least
Polidori said so. In June, 181, when the summer with Byron
commenced, Mary was the mother of a five month old infant, and her
breasts undoubtedly had enlarged in recent months. Shelley had found
out about Claire’s pregnancy precisely in those days when they were
telling the ghost stories. Finally, we know that the first time Mary was
pregnant he had totally displaced his anxiety onto Claire, who became
his intimate as a result. Here we have the same anxiety, but doubled. . .”
“. . .so he felt trapped?”
“. . .he felt immersed in the maternal, with nowhere to turn – perhaps like
any man with a pregnant partner, if they’re honest with themselves. Aer all,
a child suckling at the breast is a bit like a vampire, and that doesn’t even begin
to touch on the emotional needs of children and what they drag out of their
parents – and especially their mothers. . .and beyond maternal vampirism
there’s emotional vampirism: Mary came to him with a psyche that was
deeply insecure and needy. Among all those who were drawing energy from
him at that time, Mary was by far the neediest: Shelley was only just realizing
that the same compulsion to merge that allowed him to forge such a close
intimacy with Mary led to an emotional bondage. . .”
“. . .but he must have been attracted to her for precisely that reason. . .”
“. . .fair enough. . .what he first saw in her was a woman who was ready
to worship him as the liberator of humankind he was attempting to be;
what he didn’t see was the needy woman whose mother had died a few
months aer her birth, who had lived in an emotionally incestuous rela-
tionship with her father, and whose need for security probably could
never be fully answeredby anyone. Even without Claire there, Shelley
would have had difficulties, and these, of course, were made more intense

by his own guilt at having abandoned his first wife, Harriet. In a way,
I think he eventually learned how to manage – he gradually ceased
expecting to have all his needs answered by one person, and this lessened
the threat of Mary’s demands. . .”
“. . .so you think his hysterical attack was due to the pressure of her
needs?”
“. . .partially, at least – he needed to stop thinking he could be every-
thing to everybody. . .”
“. . .you mean he had to become more like Byron. . .”
“. . .perhaps, but Shelley never came anything close to being like Byron
– I’m not sure Byron ever managed to handle the needs of others, so he
just ran away from them. Shelley stayed, and learned how to be with
others without feeling that he was being drained or limited by them, or
at least he learned how to deal with itusually by seeking solitude when he
needed re-charging. . .”
“. . .what got us started on his hysterical fit was my question about the
dangers they faced – about what Mary was afraid of, when she subtitled
Frankenstein, ‘e Modern Prometheus’. . .Shelley found a way to cope
with his intimates, but did he also find a way to cope with the dangers of
being beyond the norms of his society?”
“. . .the question he continued to face was how to go beyond his
society’s norms without falling into a black hole. . .”
“. . .did he succeed?”
“. . .he acknowledged the difficulties, and made an attempt to sur-
mount them. To do so without destroying oneself, it seems one must
create flexible defenses that both allow the movement beyond social
norms while protecting against the dangers of being so exposed. I believe
it’s a very thin threshold indeed between what allows and what stops
this movement on the one side, and what allows movement and what
becomes self-destructive on the other side. One has to always be
watching, analyzing, locating the point where the quest stops and the
old fears begin, bringing on reactivity in the name of security, or, the
point where the movement beyond is in danger of spilling over into the
abyss. . .”
“. . .so Mary’s danger was the former, Shelley’s the latter?”
“. . .in a way, yes – it was one of the most crucial questions brought
about by the Enlightenment, in my opinion: how to be an autonomous,
self-reflective being. How to assess the possibilities of action, individu-

ally and socially, intensively and extensively, when the normative social
structures previously taken as natural come to be seen as socio-histori-
cally determined. . .”
“. . .I understand the dangers of reactivity, but what about the dangers
on Shelley’s side – of going too far?”
“. . .the dangers are implicit in any movement away from fixed social
structures. Creative writing from the romantics onward became an
activity of considerable risk for those who would come to be known as
the avant-garde. If you consider the late romantics, it was deadly: among
the British, Keats, Shelley, and Byron all died as young men, Coleridge
was lost to his addiction, and Blake was a bit mad; and, among the
Germans, Novalis died young, Hölderlin went mad, and Kleist
committed double suicide. . .”
“. . .and for Czechs, there was Mácha – dead at twenty-six, and don’t
forget Pushkin, dead at thirty-eight, although given it was during a duel,
perhaps that doesn’t count. . .”
“. . .I think it counts, for it was his romantic sensibility that predisposed
him to dueling, just as Shelley’s predisposition for a certain riskiness in
his boating led to his death as well. Romanticism is far too complex and
varied a phenomena to define easily, but certainly it was in contrast to
the mode of neo-Classicism – Classicism was a matter of the creation
and consolidation of forms, as if the artist were a God, while
Romanticism was more of a process – a heroic process in defiance of the
Gods, hence such figures as Prometheus and Faust. For poets, the process
was oen as important as the product, which is the reason for the
emphasis on the lyrical expression of the self at a given moment, and as it
changed over time. One of the results was the fragmentary nature of
many Romantic works, as they approached and reached the limits of
representation, or perhaps just the premature end of a lyrical outburst.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, Romanticism involved summoning
forces from the Earth, and the burgeoning and breaking out of those
energies towards a beyond – a dynamic becoming. If you consider late
Romanticism, it already anticipated modernism – it hadn’t yet discov-
ered the full force of abstraction, but it was close, sensing its imminent
arrival: in the fragments, in the complexity of metaphor, and in the inten-
sities and movement towards a pure dynamics of energy you find in long
poems like Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Blake’s e Four Zoas,
Goethe’s Faust, or Keats’ Hyperion. . .”

“. . .I wonder what it felt like for Mary – what she sensed when she was
writing Frankenstein that summer, observing Shelley and Byron together,
witnessing Shelley’s hysterical fit. . .”
“. . .what does her novel tell you about what she saw?”
“. . .that she saw two men of genius possibly being drawn to their own
self-destruction at the hands of their own creations – or at least she feared
that possibility. . .”
“. . .yes – Frankenstein is that fear made tangible. It’s one of those
books that hit a raw nerve – then and now: the simple fact it has
survived in our consciousness, living through all its permutations –
from the play version put on in London five years after she published
it, to the various film versions, says something about how its deeper
themes continue to haunt us, and for the same reasons she was
haunted. The creation of life in the novel is really an extended
metaphor for the Enlightenment vision of life-as-creation, and
whether or not we can truly take on our own lives as such creations,
and the possible consequences of attempting it. It’s a cautionary tale,
and still quite relevant. . .”
“. . .so she finished it that summer?”
“. . .she worked out the general idea that summer, and finished a good
deal of it aer their return to England. . .”
“. . .how long did they stay on in Geneva aer the arrangements about
Claire and her child were made?”
“. . .they remained until almost the last day of August. Mary’s journal
shows that Byron and Shelley went out boating together every day, and
they apparently went up to the Villa Diodati almost every evening,
although it’s not clear if Claire went or not – certainly she never went
alone. Several times Byron came down to their house to visit, but when two
of Byron’s friends, Hobhouse and Scrope Davies, arrived, Shelley must have
decided it was time to depart, and they le on August 9th. . .”
“. . .did Byron say anything to Claire, as he does in the Passer film?”
“. . .she referred to his having said he will write to her. . .”
“. . .did he?”
“. . .never. He only wrote to Shelley, although Claire held on to her
hopes for a good while. Her behavior during the period after they
returned is rather irritating : she stupidly doted on a man that
despised her, and ignored the sacrifice Shelley had made on her
behalf. . .”

“. . .but she was pregnant with Byron’s child – she would have been
even worse off if she didn’t cling to some kind of hope, no matter how
hopeless the situation really was. . .”
“. . .that doesn’t make it any less stupid, or blind. Look at this letter she
wrote the day they le – it’s the letter of a lovesick girl, who seems to have
no idea to whom she is writing, or how this letter would infuriate him:
My dearest friend,
When you receive this I shall be many miles away don’t be
impatient then with me. I don’t know why I write unless it is
because it seems like speaking to you. Indeed I would have been
happier to have seen & kissed you once before I went; it would
have made me quite happy but now I feel as if we parted ill
friends. You say you will write to me dearest; do pray; & be
kind in your letters. ere is nothing in the world I love or care
about but yourself & and though you may love others better
there are none more faithfully and disinterestedly attached to
you than myself. My dreadful fear is lest you quite forget me.
I shall pine through all the wretched winter months while you
I hope may never have one uneasy thought. One thing I do
entreat you to remember & beware of any excess in wine; my
dearest dear friend pray take care of yourself. If there is
anything you may want in England pray let me do it for you.
I shall feel so happy in procuring or gratifying any of your
wishes. I am ashamed to say how much I love you for fear of
being troublesome & yet I think you would be kinder to me if
you could but know how wretched this going makes me.
Sometimes I feel as if you were dead and I make no account of
Mary and Shelley’s friendship so much more do I love you.
ink sometimes of me dearest will you. Write to me soon &
let me hear of your happiness and health. May you have every
thing you like, hear nothing but good news & enjoy the
greatest health. Farewell my dearest Lord Byron. Now don’t
laugh or smile in your little proud way for it is very wrong for
you to read this merrily which I write in tears. I am fearful of
death yet I do not exaggerate when I declare I would die to
please or serve you with the greatest pleasure nay I should feel
as happy in so doing as I now feel miserable. Farewell then
8
dearest. I shall love you to the end of my life & nobody else,
think of me as one whose affection you can count on & never
pray, never forget to mention your health in your letters. May
every good & every happiness be yours.
Your own affectionate Clare
. . .”
“. . .it’s sad. . .”
“. . .it’s pathetic! She had no idea to whom she was writing, and how
much he would have hated her every word. . .”
“. . .yes, but I understand what made her write it – in a way it says it
all: it’s quite clear that she was both hoping for the best and expecting
the worst. She was totally distraught – she must have felt she was
leaving everything behind. . .”
“. . .can you see yourself writing such a letter?”
“. . .once I could have – when I was a romantic fool, believing in true
love and complementarity, and confusing hormones with actual relations
. . .and, if you ever le me? I don’t know what I would write, but it might
well look something like that. . .”
“. . .it seems to me those are your hormones speaking now. . .”
“. . .of course, but it doesn’t make a difference. I try to do everything
I can to distinguish my real feelings from my hormones, but in the end
they can’t be entirely separated. . .”
“. . .but you do see how Byron would have reacted to it, don’t you?”
“. . .it would have been unbearable to him – it’s so impossibly sweet,
and guilt-provoking as well. . .”
“. . .there’s a perfect English word for what it is: ‘cloying’ – her letter is
a perfect example of it. . .”
“. . .he would have hated it, I can see that, but he was a bastard in any
case, so that doesn’t say anything. . .and yet there’s something he also
must have liked about it: I think he must have enjoyed watching the
women in his life tortured – plus there’s the fact he kept it. . .”
“. . .Trelawny said he kept every little scrap of paper sent to him. . .”
“. . .aha! A closet sentimentalist! I would have guessed it. He probably
thought he would gloat over all the women who loved him in his old age. . .”
“. . .but what about the game she was playing – pretending to love him
the most of anyone?”
9
“. . .she was writing to Byron, the man whose baby she was carrying –
even if she did love Shelley, she wasn’t going to remind Byron of it. . .”
“. . .in English one would say she was ‘hedging her bets’ or playing it
safe: she must have guessed that he wondered about her relation to
Shelley, but simply the fact she lumped Mary and Shelley together says
a great deal, for her relations to each were entirely different. In a certain
sense I believe she really did love Byron in a way that she never loved
Shelley: she was in love with him, hormones and all, and if she ever was
in love with Shelley, it was only in the beginning – in a clandestine way
that she never avowed. She had the good luck to have been able to live
with him and dissolve all her illusions before their intimate relations
started for real. . .”
“. . .have some more wine. . .”
She pours him another glass of wine from the carafe, and then pours
the remaining wine into her own glass.
“. . .thanks – na zdraví. . .”
“. . .na zdraví. . .”
“. . .so where did they go when they returned to England, and how did
they manage to hide Claire’s pregnancy – weren’t there any questions
about it?”
“. . .they traveled via Portsmouth in order to avoid London, and then
traveled on to Bath, where they took some rooms while Shelley went on
to London to deal with some business. . .”
“. . .aer Geneva Mary could stand the proximity of Claire again?”
“. . .in the beginning, at least – it seems that Claire’s pregnancy and her
continued infatuation with Byron reassured Mary that her own bond to
Shelley was exclusive; however, they very quickly obtained separate lodg-
ings, partly in order to be imperceptible to the outside world, but perhaps
also to relieve the friction of the situation. Shelley addressed letters from
both addresses, so he was clearly moving back and forth between them. . .”
“. . .you said that you think Shelley and Claire’s relations weren’t phys-
ically intimate then?”
“. . .at least not until Allegra was born – largely because of Claire’s
hopes for Byron, which she continued to express through letters to him
during the autumn. e letters became increasingly forlorn and pathetic
– she slowly realized that he would never write to her, and Mary and
Shelley bore the brunt of her disappointment, on top of all the other
major disasters from that period. . .”
80
“. . .what disasters?”
“. . .the first came quickly – in early October, a month aer their return
from England: Fanny Godwin, Mary’s half-sister and Claire’s stepsister,
committed suicide in Swansea. . .”
“. . .who was she? I didn’t realize they had another sister. . .”
“. . .Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecra, came into her marriage to
Godwin with a three year old daughter, Fanny – an illegitimate child she
had had with an American named Gilbert Imlay: he had abandoned her
when she got pregnant, and she had attempted suicide – not a very good
omen for her daughter. Mary, her only child with Godwin, was born soon
aer, but Wollstonecra died almost immediately, and Godwin was le
with both Mary and Fanny. He then married Mrs. Clairmont, who came
into the marriage with Charles and Claire. Apparently Claire and Charles
always thought they were full brother and sister, but research has shown
that Charles’ father actually died before Claire was born, and so Claire’s
true father is a mystery. . .”
“. . .a complicated set of relations. . .”
“. . .very. . .”
“. . .but why did Fanny commit suicide?”
“. . .that’s been a matter of some speculation. She seems to have been
a little pathetic. She always tried to make everyone happy, so she ended up
emotionally stretched between Godwin’s household and Shelley’s and not
really at home in either. You can see from her letters that she really wanted
to be like her sisters, but couldn’t manage the necessary break from her
family. Towards the end she was about to embark upon a plan that would
take her to Dublin to be a schoolteacher. She was to live with her aunts
there, but about two weeks before her suicide they had refused to take her
in – for what reason, it’s not clear, but probably because she would have
been seen as an illegitimate child. She may have made some last-minute
appeal to join Shelley’s entourage, but the evidence isn’t certain. In her
late letters to Mary she discusses having met Shelley during one of his trips
to London, and in several letters she complains that Shelley never wrote to
her, which indicates a certain kind of interest. All we know for certain is
that she went to Swansea, via Bath and Bristol, and that she might have
met Shelley in Bath for a few hours the day before her suicide. If so, given
they were hiding Claire’s pregnancy, he probably didn’t even allow her the
possibility of a casual visit, and he may not have taken her distress seriously
– which at that point was a terrible mistake. . .”
81
“. . .how did they find out about it?”

“. . .he was at Claire’s when he received her note: Claire told Trelawny
later that Fanny’s note said ‘come bury me,’ but she didn’t know what else
it said, as he threw it into the fire upon reading it. He jumped up and le
immediately for Bristol. He returned that night at :00 A.M. with no news,
and set out again in the morning when he discovered some indication that
she had gone on to Swansea. It was there that he discovered what had
happened: she had checked into an inn and had committed suicide by
drinking a bottle of laudanum. Her name was torn off the suicide note. . .”
“. . .do you think Shelley did it?”
“. . .I don’t know: if so, it would probably have been to save the family
any further social scandal – in any event, Godwin would have
concurred: he turned back to London when he discovered what
happened, and it became a family secret – Charles Clairmont still
didn’t know about Fanny’s death a year later. . .”
“. . .do you think she was really in love with Shelley?”
“. . .Godwin thought she had been in love with Shelley from the
beginning, but he’s not a reliable witness. More tellingly, Claire told
Silsbee that Fanny was in love with Shelley: why would Claire have
done so if it wasn’t true? It seems to have been a kind of infatuation –
she was always gushing in her letters about Shelley and Byron: she did
meet Shelley when he was in London in September, but in a letter to
Mary she mentioned Shelley had been ill. It sounds like she was more of
a bother to him than anything else – to all of them. . .”
“. . .how did he respond to it?”
“. . .he was deeply disturbed by it – there’s a lyric fragment about it. . .here
it is:
Her voice did quiver as we parted,

Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came, and I departed
Heeding not the words then spoken.
Misery – O Misery
is world is all too wide for thee.
. . .actually, this is based on the 189 edition, where Mary edited out
another line at the beginning: ‘Friend, had I known thy secret grief,’ and
a whole second stanza. . .”
8
“. . .why would Mary have censored it – to cover over the possibility

that they could have somehow stopped her?”
“. . .Mary probably felt guilty: there’s a journal entry a week or so before
the suicide where she responds to a letter from Fanny with the words,
‘Stupid letter from Fanny.’ I think they all were feeling some responsi-
bility for the suicide; however, aside from the poem, only Claire’s letter
to Byron indicates how it affected them. She wrote that it made Shelley
deeply ill, and made her think of suicide herself, as no one so close to her
had ever died. . .”
“. . .you said there was more than one disaster. . .”
“. . .the worst blow was yet to come: in December, authorities discov-
ered the body of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, in the Serpentine – she had
been missing for almost a month, although Shelley had not been aware of
it at the time. . .”
“. . .what happened to her – was it a suicide?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .because Shelley had abandoned her?”
“. . .certainly Shelley’s actions in abandoning her played a major role in
it, as otherwise she would not have been led into the dire straits in which
she found herself. . .”
“. . .what happened?”
“. . .from the evidence I’ve looked at, it seems to me the most trust-
worthy account was given by Claire in a letter to Trelawny when she was
in her 0s – and even so there’s some room for doubt due to the passage
of time. Claire told Trelawny that Harriet had formed a liaison with an
army officer who had been sent abroad. She had become pregnant, didn’t
want her family or Shelley to know about it, and, with help from her sister,
had taken rooms elsewhere in London. Having received no letters from
her lover, she feared that yet another man had abandoned her, and so she
threw herself into the Serpentine. In her suicide note she blamed both
herself and Shelley, telling him that if he had never le her, she might still
be alive, or words to that effect, but this may have been partially to camou-
flage the pregnancy, and to provoke guilt so that her final wishes would
be obeyed. . .”
“. . .which were?”
“. . .she then wrote him that it was her wish that their daughter Ianthe
remain with Harriet’s sister Eliza, and that their son Charles would go to
him. . .”
8
“. . .it must have been devastating for him – what did he do?”
“. . .I don’t think he had the maturity yet to face it, because in the begin-
ning he brought himself to believe in a version of events which saw the
story in an even more terrible light in regard to both Harriet and her
sister Eliza: he wrote to Mary that Harriet had been driven from her
house, had fallen into prostitution, that she had fallen in love with a horse
groom named Smith – who actually was merely the landlord of the
rooms she was renting, and that, having been deserted by him, she took
her life. He added that he thought Eliza’s plan was for the children to
gain Shelley’s estate. . .”
“. . .it’s clear what he was doing was to cast blame in every direction but
his own. . .”
“. . .yes, and what made it worse was that he refused to honor Harriet’s
last wish – to allow Ianthe to stay with Eliza. . .”
“. . .did he want both the children?”
“. . .he wrote to Eliza that he has been ‘awakened to his duties as a father’
by the tragedy, which may have been partially true, but I think he also was
looking for a way to assuage his guilt – he was determined not to be like
Rousseau, who supposedly abandoned his children; consequently, a custody
battle commenced – the Westbrooks fighting for both children in response
to Shelley’s claims for both. . .”
“. . .did he ever accept any responsibility for what happened?”
“. . .of course – I think many of his actions at the time were merely
public posing, covering over the real grief and guilt he was feeling. Claire
told Trelawny, decades later, that she felt it had been ‘good’ for him – that
he had become far less confident in himself as a result, and consequently
‘less wild.’ You can see what he felt in a lyric he wrote about both suicides,
entitled ‘Death’:
ey die – the dead return not – Misery

Sits near an open grave and calls them over,
A youth with hoary hair and haggard eye –
ey are the names of kindred, friend and lover,
Which he so feebly calls – they all are gone –
Fond wretch, all dead! those vacant names alone,
is most familiar scene, my pain –
ese tombs – alone remain.
8
Misery, my sweetest friend – oh, weep no more!

ou wilt not be consoled – I wonder not!
For I have seen thee from thy dwelling’s door
Watch the calm sunset with them, and this spot
Was even as bright and calm, but transitory,
And now they hopes are gone, thy hair is hoary;
is most familiar scene, my pain –
ese tombs – alone remain.
. . .you can see that he was deeply distraught. He later wrote to Byron that
Harriet’s suicide caused him a shock ‘which I know not how I have
survived.’ e shock had more than emotional effects: I think it was this
shock that drove Shelley to get married to Mary, which in the end was
a mistake – a disservice to his relationship with Claire. . .”
“. . .but I thought he was against marriage?”
“. . .he was against it, and, from accounts he gave to Byron and Claire,
he continued to be; it was the external events that pressed upon him,
although we’ll never be sure exactly what happened. . .”
“. . .what external events?”
“. . .at the very least there was the custody case: it appears that his lawyer
told him that he would have no problems acquiring custody of his children
if he were married to Mary – this, anyway, is what he wrote to Mary. . .”
“. . .and Claire? Claire must have been in despair, now that Mary would
be seen as the legitimate partner in the eyes of society – didn’t he think
of how Claire would have felt?”
“. . .I agree, I agree – in fact this whole series of events represents Shelley
at his worst. I don’t think he should have done it precisely because of
Claire. . .still, I think there’s a bit more to it all. On the day he was
married, he wrote Claire a letter that was rather ironic about the whole
event – look: ‘ank you too, my kind girl, for not expressing much of
what you must feel – the loneliness and the low spirits which arise from
being entirely le. Nothing could be more provoking than to find all this
unnecessary. However, they will now be satisfied and quiet.’ What
follows was some ironic mention of the attention Godwin was now
paying to him as the legitimate husband of his daughter and some discus-
sion of Claire’s mother, who continued to treat him badly. . .but, look
what he says here: ‘Her sweet daughter is very dear to me’ – by no means
is he speaking about Mary. . .”
8
“. . .he’s clearly trying to soen the blow. . .”

“. . .yes, but he himself saw the marriage as being based on appearance’s
sake in regard to the custody situation, and Shelley wanted Claire not to
feel too put out by it. What’s unclear is exactly how much pressure was
put on Shelley by Godwin – and perhaps Mary. . .”
“. . .I don’t follow – what pressure?”
“. . .clearly from his letter to Claire a degree of irony towards it all
can be seen, but the question is whether and how much Shelley was
pressured to marry her. Clearly he wouldn’t have bowed to pressure
from Godwin alone – he never had before; however, in a letter to
Byron he mentioned that the marriage had principally Mary’s feel-
ings in respect to Godwin as its object. . .”
“. . .what? Mary wanted to be the ‘good’ daughter to her father by
marrying Shelley?”
“. . .perhaps. He does go on to write, ‘I need not inform you that this is
simply with us a measure of convenience, and that our opinions as to the
importance of this pretended sanction, and all the prejudices connected
with it, remain the same’ – but I sense that was his feeling, not Mary’s. . .”
“. . .but would he really have done it if Mary had been pressing him only
for Godwin’s sake?”
“. . .certainly not in principle, which is why I give at least passing
credence to a story later given out by Claire’s mother, who must have
been a witness to whatever happened. Claire’s mother had written to
a friend years later that during one meeting when Godwin was pressing
Shelley to marry, Mary suddenly reminded him that both Harriet as well
as Fanny had been in the same room once, and that she would also
commit suicide if he refused to marry her – he supposedly turned pale,
but then agreed to it. . .”
“. . .do you believe the story?”
“. . .the letter was from Claire’s mother, who’s known to be unreliable
in many other cases – it seems she was a vindictive busybody. On the
other hand, Claire believed it – but Claire was not so charitable in her
old age either, especially towards Mary. . .”
“. . .what does your instinct tell you?”
“. . .my instinct tells me that it’s an exaggeration of the facts, but not
of the general feelings. Shelley had received an extreme shock from the
deaths of Fanny and Harriet, and he would have wanted to do what-
ever was possible to gain some equilibrium, given the circumstances –
8
after all, he was only twenty-four, and he suddenly was facing the
consequences of his actions, realizing that no amount of good inten-
tions or even good deeds could shield him from evil, his own included.
I would guess that he initially entered into the arrangement willingly
in order to gain custody – what other reason would he have had for
speaking to Godwin? That he may have wavered due to Godwin’s
pressure is highly possible, and that Godwin would have then been
backed up by Mary makes perfect sense. Not only did Shelley have
a shock from the suicide, but also, when he realized that the
Westbrooks would be bringing the case to court and trying to prove
him ineligible as a father, he realized he might actually face a criminal
trial for sedition, which, if prosecuted successfully, would result in not
only his losing the case with the Westbrooks, but possibly even losing
his children by Mary. I think he was against the marriage, but fright-
ened into it, and certainly, given what we know about Mary, it all
suited her very well – she would be legally ‘his woman’. . .”
“. . .so what was the result of the court case?”
“. . .the worst thing that could have happened, in regard to the children:
when the judgment was reached in March neither the Westbrook family
nor Shelley received custody of the children – the children went to
legally-appointed guardians. . .but this was aer a long, drawn-out
process. . .”
“. . .what? ey could do that then?”
“. . .they can do it now, if they deem it necessary. . .”
“. . .poor Shelley – it must have turned him entirely against England. . .”
“. . .when the verdict came through, finally, it was the last straw. . .but it
didn’t happen quite yet. . .”
“. . .and what were the results in regard to the relations between Mary
and Claire – the marriage, I mean? Didn’t it intensify the rivalry between
them?”
“. . .no, actually. e marriage occurred on December 0, 181, and
Claire’s baby was born two weeks later, on January 1, 181. On Mary’s
side, these two events, together, must have given her some false hope that
she had ‘won’ – that she was the only woman in Shelley’s life, but she was
still uncertain enough to keep asking for ‘absentia Clariæ.’ On Claire’s
side, the baby must have taken the greatest amount of her attention: she
had a little life to take care of, and it must have taken her mind off the
marriage. In March they moved into Albion House in Marlow, to the
8
west of London, and Claire rejoined the household with her new-born
daughter, at first named ‘Alba’ aer their nickname for Byron – ‘Albe,’
and then, upon Byron’s instructions, ‘Allegra’. . .”
“. . .was the name because of Claire’s musical interests, or because of
how rapidly the child was conceived?”
“. . .I don’t know – a bit of both, I would guess. Shelley took consider-
able trouble to fit Claire into the household: he had a portrait of Byron
framed for her, he had a piano installed to accompany her singing, and
in the garden they had their gardener plant seeds from alpine wildflowers
they had brought from Switzerland. . .”
“. . .a gardener? I thought they had massive debts!”
“. . .they did, and the debts grew even worse in this period, but Shelley
wanted them to be comfortable, and racking up debt was one of
Shelley’s specialties. . .”
“. . .and yours. . .”
“. . .yes, alas. . .actually, I’ve come to realize that most of the writers
I admire were terrible with money: Coleridge, Hölderlin, Baudelaire,
Mallarmé, Joyce, Robert Musil, D.H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, Lawrence
Durrell, Malcolm Lowry. . .I don’t know what it is, but I suppose writers
see themselves as an unrecognized aristocracy of sorts – aer all, it’s
a hard life, and one needs some comforts. Shelley also had two servants –
Elise and Milly Shields – primarily for the children, which freed Mary
and Claire more for their own pursuits. ey weren’t exactly destitute,
but the bills kept piling up. ey lived happily enough at Marlow – in
the beginning, anyway. Here’s what Shelley wrote to Byron in late April:
‘We spend our time here in that tranquil uniformity which presents
much to enjoy and leaves nothing to record. I have my books, and
a garden with a lawn, enclosed by high hedges, and overshadowed with
firs and cypresses intermixed with apple trees now in blossom. We have
a boat on the river, in which, when the days are sunny and serene, such
as we have had of late, we sail. . .’”
“. . .it sounds ideal. . .”
“. . .it was, in those green moments. Mary was happy with the garden,
Claire with the piano, and Shelley with the large library in the house,
which he immediately furnished with books and statues of Apollo and
Venus. They were about a five minute walk from the Thames, where
Shelley moored his small boat – he would often spend time lying in it
reading. On the other side of the river was Bisham Woods, where
88
Shelley would walk and read – he dedicated an altar to Pan there.

Peacock had helped them find the house: he lived nearby, and was
a frequent visitor – frequent enough that he was able to gain enough
material to write a parodic gothic novel about the household, entitled
Nightmare Abbey. . .”
“. . .what did Shelley think of it – was he insulted?”
“. . .it fortunately didn’t reach them until they were in Italy two years
later – when enough time and life had passed to lessen any insult it
might have caused. . .”
“. . .was it that insulting?”
“. . .more embarrassing than insulting, actually: I doubt Shelley was
disturbed too much by the comic portrayal of himself as Scythrop –
a radical out to change the world although his pamphlets only sell a few
copies, but there’s a faint hint of truth in all the hyperbole about his plot-
tings and paranoias. I think the fact he’s portrayed as having two women
– the intellectual Stella and the musical Marionetta, crude pictures of
Mary and Claire – would have been the difficult part to face, given they
were all reading it; however, even in this, Peacock portrayed some truth –
for example, when he describes the dismay of Scythrop as he discovers that
Stella is radically anti-marriage, but nonetheless monogamous. . .”
“. . .did Shelley react to it?”
“. . .he claimed to have been delighted by it, although he omitted to say
anything about it specifically. I don’t know – I suppose a person needs
a few fools around to offset one’s own foolishness a bit. . .”
“. . .perhaps, but vultures who live off of one’s life?”
“. . .speaking of vultures, Hogg was also around again. . .”
“. . .Mary stood for it?”
“. . .she found him insufferable by then: negative, loud and boorish –
he was confined to staying with Peacock when he was visiting. She
referred to the two as ‘the menagerie,’ and I suppose to an extent they
were. I don’t know the ultimate source, but there are several references
that suggest both of them proposed to Claire about that time. . .”
“. . .both?”
“. . .Claire was apparently taking rather good care of herself in this
period: several commentators mention that, while not beautiful, she had
a certain vivacity and was dressing rather well, while Mary seems to have
been moving in the opposite direction, towards becoming a ‘nature girl’
– letting her hair grow a bit wild, neglecting her dress in a rustic way.
89
Apparently Shelley was letting himself go as well: in one letter Mary begs
him to get a haircut. . .”
“. . .how was Shelley dealing with both of them in such proximity – do
you think Shelley resumed his physical relations with Claire at Marlow?”
“. . .in lieu of any certain evidence, there’s only a poem or two from the
period which are known for certain to have been written for Claire: she
mentioned the most important one, ‘To Constantia, Singing,’ to Silsbee
decades later, and on the copy she gave him she noted that Mary was
prevented from seeing it. It was published the year aer under the pseu-
donym ‘Pleyel,’ which itself says a good deal, as Pleyel was the lover of
a woman named Clara in a novel by Charles Brockden Brown, which
they all had read. . .”
“. . .was there any special reason for her being addressed by him as
‘Constantia’?”
“. . .as far as I can guess, just the connotations of ‘constancy’: when
Claire entered the Catholic Church as an old woman, she actually had
herself christened ‘Clara Mary Constantia Jane Clairmont,’ so while she
wasn’t faithful to Shelley’s anti-religious spirit, she was faithful to their
clandestine relations. . .”
“. . .what’s the poem about?”
“. . .you know at least part of it – it’s the poem Shelley recites in the
Passer film. . .”
“. . .I thought that was written in Geneva as part of the contest with
Byron. . .”
“. . .that’s a myth – something Passer put into his film to remind the
audience that ‘these men are poets’; it was actually written in Marlow as
a private response Shelley had had to one of the singing recitals Claire
gave there. . .”
“. . .read it to me now. . .”
“. . .all four stanzas?”
“. . .I want to think about it in this context. . .”
“. . .here it is – or at least what has come down to us. . .
y voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers

O’ershadowing me with so and lulling wings;
e blood and life within thy snowy fingers
Teach witchcra to the instrumental strings.
My brain is wild, my breath comes quick,
90
e blood is listening in my frame,

And thronging shadows, fast and thick,
Fall on my overflowing eyes,
My heart is quivering like a flame;
As morning dew, that in the sunbeam dies,
I am dissolved in these consuming ecstasies.
I have no life, Constantia, but in thee;

Whilst, like the world-surrounding air, thy song
Flows on, and fills all things with melody:
Now is thy voice a tempest, swi and strong,
On which, as one in trance, upborne
Secure o’er woods and waves I sweep
Rejoicing, like a cloud of morn;
Now ‘tis the breath of summer’s night,
Which, where the starry waters sleep
Round western isles with incense-blossoms bright,
Lingering, suspends my soul in its voluptuous flight.
A deep and breathless awe, like the swi change

Of dreams unseen, but felt in youthful slumbers,
Wild, sweet, but uncommunicably strange,
ou breathest now, in fast ascending numbers:
e cope of heaven seems rent and cloven
By the enchantment of thy strain,
And on my shoulders wings are woven
To follow its sublime career,
Beyond the mighty moons that wane
Upon the verge of Nature’s utmost sphere,
Till the world’s shadowy walls are past, and disappear.
Cease, cease – for such wild lessons madmen learn:

Long thus to sink, – thus to be lost and die
Perhaps is death indeed – Constantia, turn!
Yes! In thine eyes a power like light doth lie,
Even though the sounds, its voice that were,
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Between thy lips, are laid to sleep –

Within thy breath, and on thy hair
Like odour, it is lingering yet –
And from thy touch like fire doth leap:
Even while I write my burning cheeks are wet –
Such things the heart can feel and learn, but not forget!
. . .”
“. . .do you think he really meant the line, ‘I have no life, Constantia,
but in thee’?”
“. . .it’s modified by the next line: while she’s singing he has no other life
– but still, it has a certain degree of ambiguity, and the whole poem is
rather rapturous in a way that goes beyond merely referring to her
singing. Aer all, he’s comparing the effect of her singing to something
like a wet dream, a rapture, and the effect culminates in a sexual climax –
her ‘ascending’ breath leading to the ‘consuming ecstasies’. . .”
“. . .she must have been quite flattered by it. . .”
“. . .he wrote several poems to Mary, but nothing ever quite so flattering. . .”
“. . .and this one is specific enough that Mary couldn’t retitle it for the
Complete Poems. . .”
“. . .yes. e other poem he wrote at the time entitled, ‘To Constantia,’
doesn’t reflect well on Mary at all. . .”
“. . .it’s just a fragment – the first stanza is about how Mary’s presence
affected Claire negatively: clearly Mary is the ‘moon’ he’s referring to –
this poem is the earliest reference to her as the moon, a figure he would
use several times later. . .”
“. . .why the moon?”
“. . .in reference to her coldness, or perhaps her moods. It breaks off aer
the second stanza, but it seems to be referring to Claire’s relations to Byron:
e rose that drinks the fountain dew

In the pleasant air of noon,
Grows pale and blue with altered hue –
In the gaze of the nightly moon;
For the planet of frost, so cold and bright,
Makes it wan with her borrowed light.
9
uch is my heart – roses are fair,

And that at best a withered blossom;
But thy false care did idly wear
Its withered leaves in a faithless bosom;
And fed with love, like air and dew,
Its growth –
. . .as far as I can tell, he could be referring to how Claire placed herself
carelessly within Byron’s ‘faithless bosom,’ but the result was it somehow
fed her with love – although it’s not clear if the growth isn’t her belly with
Allegra, or her blossoming into a woman aer Allegra’s birth. . .perhaps
Shelley wasn’t clear whether he was pleased or not, which may have been
why the poem was abandoned. . .”
“. . .but I thought Mary was better about Claire then. . .”
“. . .she complained about Claire’s sullen moods in a letter, although
Claire probably had reason for them: it was finally beginning to sink in,
aer the birth, that Byron would not change his mind about her. He
seems not to have given her much thought at all – something that would
become an issue by mid-summer, for it seemed he was going back on his
offer. . .”
“. . .was Allegra’s parentage common knowledge in their community?”
“. . .their friends knew, but they created a somewhat elaborate ruse for
the servants and for other visitors like Godwin: they had had their
friends, the Hunts, bring Allegra to Marlow and introduce her to the
household as the daughter of a friend who had come to see them. is
wore thin as time went on, of course, and by July, Shelley, probably at
Mary’s instigation, was writing Byron letters trying to find out what his
plans were concerning the child, but the problem wasn’t solved until the
following spring. . .”
“. . .who were the Hunts?”
“. . .Leigh Hunt was a poet and the editor of The Examiner, a liberal
review that had actually given Shelley some positive press from time to
time. Hunt had spent some time in jail for criticizing the Prince Regent
– something Shelley couldn’t help but admire. His prison time wasn’t
so severe, as he was allowed to have his family and children with him.
He had his cell walls painted as a trellis with roses and the ceiling
painted as the sky, and he spent his time there translating Italian poetry.
He and Shelley had become friends the previous winter in London, and
9
Shelley had attended a number of his social gatherings; in fact, he met

Keats several times in Hunt’s presence. Hunt was more a conversa-
tionalist and editor than a poet, although both Keats and Shelley were
influenced a bit by Hunt’s poetry, which was not a very good thing at
all, as they both acquired from Hunt his tendency to make adverbs
from participles – words like ‘tremblingly,’ ‘lingeringly,’ ‘crushingly,’
and so on, although Keats caught that particular disease a bit more,
because he was younger and more impressionable. . .”
“. . .how did Keats and Shelley get along?”
“. . .Keats and Shelley never really got on that well, due partially to the
difference in their class background – Keats was solidly middle class.
Also, when they met Shelley had just come through the period when he
had dealt with Harriet’s death and the chancery case, so he tended to be
rather stridently anti-government in public as a consequence – or that’s
what Keats remembered. Most of all, Shelley, at that time, tended to
look down at Keats as a something of a younger colleague still in his
apprenticeship – an attitude that would change later in Italy aer
Shelley received the volume of Keats’ poems containing Hyperion, but
by then it was already too late: Keats died before they met again. But
Shelley’s relations with Hunt were always very warm. Although Hunt
was older, he tended to look up to Shelley as a kind of superhuman
being, and, of all of Shelley’s friends over the years, he came closest to
having been a real friend: he received some financial help from Shelley,
but he seems to have always kept the balance-sheet between them equal
– publishing reviews of his work, hosting him at his Hampstead home,
introducing him to other writers and intellectuals. . .”
“. . .so he wasn’t a vulture. . .”
“. . .no, not at all. He, his wife Marianne, and their four children spent
most of May and June with the Shelleys; in fact, their son, ornton, who
was seven at the time, remembered the time quite vividly: he wrote about
how Shelley would ‘do the horn’ – he would twist his long hair into
a horn, get on his hands and knees, and then charge the children snuffling
and growling as if he were a wild beast. He was always doing things like
that – sliding down a chalk bank behind the house raising a cloud of
chalk dust, or pushing the tables around with the children on them.
ornton remembers that he was able to see things from a child’s
perspective. ere were – let me think. . .yes, seven children there:
Allegra, William, the four Hunt children, and part of the time there was
9
a little local girl named Polly Rose, who Shelley decided to ‘educate’ on
the spur of the moment as a sort of experiment based on Rousseau’s
Émile. She was there a few hours every day – she also le memoirs of
Shelley. . .”
“. . .the house must have been full of life. . .”
“. . .full to the brim. Although Shelley signed the two political pamphlets
he wrote in Marlow as ‘e Hermit of Marlow,’ as you can see he was
living amidst quite a crowd. He even had to escape to the woods or to the
river to get his writing and studying done. . .”
“. . .was he writing anything important, then?”
“. . .he began writing his longest poem, e Revolt of Islam, at the end of
April, and finished all twelve cantos by September. Much of it was
written in his boat on the river: he would escape from their little commu-
nity and float down the river, or simply anchor it near an island, or at an
abbey down the river a bit. . .”
“. . .what does the title refer to?”
“. . .initially it had been called Laon and Cyntha aer the names of the
two protagonists, but aer he edited it for his publisher, Ollier, he
changed the title to e Revolt of Islam. e title is a mere orientalism –
a way to write a poem about revolution in a more imperceptible way: the
poem was Shelley’s way of thinking through the possibilities of struggling
against tyranny via revolution, analyzing what went wrong with the
French Revolution, and trying to correct it with the idea of setting up
something like a blueprint for a future revolution. e poem is specula-
tive, although Shelley hated didactic poetry, and stressed in his preface
to the poem that he was writing a narrative. . .”
“. . .I know he was trying to incite feelings against tyranny, but isn’t
there a certain danger in what he was doing?”
“. . .insofar as the poem handles directly political topics, there’s not only
the danger of a kind of ideological fanaticism emerging from it, but
there’s perhaps an even greater danger emerging – at least for literature:
boredom. I have to admit that e Revolt of Islam is, for me, one of
Shelley’s most insufferable poetic creations. ere’s some beautiful
poetry in it, but it keeps being betrayed by the end it’s being put to – or
rather not the end, but his sense of the means to that end. I think where
he went wrong was not his analysis of the political problems, which is
incisive enough – especially for that time, but in his motivations and feel-
ings when writing the poem. He correctly assessed the problem of the
9
French Revolution as being a result of the unreadiness of the citizens for

the results of the revolution, in that they lacked the education to deal
with a democratic situation. . .”
“. . .it reminds me of another country to the north we both know so
well. . .”
“. . .to be sure. . .”
“. . .go on. . .”
“. . .I think he was blinded by the events of the previous year: there was
tyranny in England, and certainly England’s resistance to reform due to
its fear of the French Revolution was creating an intolerable situation, but
Shelley’s writing was fueled more by the chancery court ruling which he
took as a particular instance of that tyranny. He wrote two poems about
it – one addressed to the Lord Chancellor, the other addressed to his son
William – where he quite clearly associates what happened to him with
the tyranny present in England. While there’s certainly some truth to his
charges, in that the court did take his political opinions and mode of life
into account when they were considering the case, I can see a court in any
country reaching the same conclusion looking only at the evidence
pertaining to the case: he did abandon his family, and from that time
onwards he didn’t even try to see his children, as far as we know. He claims
he had been ‘awakened to his duties as a father,’ but even when the court
had given him monthly visiting rights, he never availed himself of them
during his last year in England. . .”
“. . .so he never saw his children by Harriet again?”
“. . .no. . .”
“. . .that’s terrible. . .”
“. . .Shelley was unable to face his own role in Harriet’s death, and,
rather than facing his own evil, his own ‘fiend,’ as he called it, his psyche
simply displaced his guilt by linking the events to the terrible political
conditions in England – at least at that time. . .”
“. . .did he ever come to realize the enormity of what he had done?”
“. . .I think he finally did turn around and face himself aer the events
that happened here in Este and in Naples, but during his time at Marlow
he wasn’t yet able to deal with it – indeed, all the evidence indicates that
he was dosing himself with laudanum during the period, which brought
on painful attacks in his side in June of that year, and again in the
autumn. . .”
“. . .laudanum is like opium, isn’t it?”
9
“. . .it’s a liquefied tincture of opium – extremely addictive. Shelley’s

first experience with laudanum seems to have been in 1811, aer he had
eloped with Harriet and they had fled to the Lake District. It’s taken
orally, and tends to have a rather nasty effect over time on the stomach
and liver – that may be why Shelley suffered such spasms in his side. . .”
“. . .was that his only vice?”
“. . .yes, as far as I know. He only drank on occasion – usually wine. He
didn’t smoke, and he was a vegetarian. . .”
“. . .that’s not so bad. . .”
“. . .he didn’t need much with his somewhat manic temperament, which
at that point was apparently rather irritating. e people who met him at
Hunt’s house – Keats and others – saw him as provocative and ungoverned:
I can imagine that he was very irritating then for a certain kind of person –
taking every chance to attack the views of others, prodding and provoking
them. You know the type: the irritating, young radical who thinks he has
the answer to everything. I suspect that much of what is wrong with e
Revolt of Islam is due to his unrestrained radicalism. Shelley wrote other
poems later that also demanded a considerable amount from the reader, but
with poems like Prometheus Unbound, which I see as the antidote to this
poem, I feel there’s some return on the investment of energy in it, whereas
with e Revolt of Islam I felt I was mostly reading it for the insights it gave
me into the development of the more mature poet. . .”
“. . .what is it actually about?”
“. . .briefly, it follows the unsuccessful exploits of a revolutionary
couple – Laon and Cyntha, in their attempts to overthrow tyranny. In
the first cantos we are given the story of how Laon and Cyntha grew
up together – in the original poem as brother and sister. She starts the
revolution against tyranny, is captured, imprisoned, and escapes, while
meanwhile Laon captures the city with a revolutionary army. Cyntha
returns disguised as Laone, and lectures the revolutionary army on
atheism, freedom, and free love. The tyrant’s troops make a counter-
attack in the sixth canto, and all of Laon’s army is killed, but Laon is
rescued by Cyntha, riding in on her horse. In the next cantos, Cyntha
tells Laon the story of her own capture, imprisonment, insanity, and
final escape via friendly mariners, who she converts to the principle of
free love – oh, I forgot to mention she’s raped, and gives birth to
a child. . .”
“. . .not by the ‘friendly’ mariners, I hope!”
9
“. . .that would have been a strange twist in the plot – but no, by the
tyrant’s troops. . .”
“. . .I thought perhaps the mariners were like Hogg, and became a little
too friendly. . .”
“. . .I know, I know – the whole poem is all rather silly. . .”
“. . .so then what happens?”
“. . .next, at the city, Cyntha stirs up an insurrection, Laon arrives, the
insurrection is put down, and they escape. Laon rides down to see the
state of the city: there are long descriptions of the people under tyranny
– of plague, famine, and decadence. Laon agrees to give up his life in
return for Cyntha’s escape to America, and just as he’s about to be burned
at the stake, Cyntha arrives, dismounts, and takes a place on the bier next
to him. ey die, and in the epilogue they are taken away by a moonstone
and pearl boat, piloted by her child, towards a sunlit ocean. at’s it. . .”
“. . .it all sounds rather baroque. I wonder why he ended it that way. . .”
“. . .it was meant to be a poetic representation of tyranny and the need
for revolution, diagnosing the dangers of the revolution in regard to its
coming too fast and too soon: that they die in the end is meant to signify
that the time is not yet right. Some of its poetry is really quite beautiful,
but as I said, the content of much of it makes it quite tedious. . .”
“. . .can you see anything in it that reflects their life at Marlow?”
“. . .not really, except that the love between the protagonists is vaguely
illicit, and might represent the relations Shelley had with Mary and
Claire in an indirect way. . .”
“. . .illicit how?”
“. . .Cyntha and Laon at one point seal their bond by their love-making,
which in the original version is clearly an incestuous act. In the preface
of the original version, Shelley wrote that he wanted to ‘break through
the crust of those outworn opinions on which established institutions
depend,’ but evidently he broke through a little too far, as Ollier refused
to publish it. Finally, he removed all the direct references to their rela-
tions as brother and sister; however, the theme is still clearly there in the
text. . .”
“. . .what was the point of the incest? I don’t understand what he was
trying to do with it. . .”
“. . .incest comes up several times in his poetry. I wouldn’t push the
psychoanalytic explanation too far, but clearly his early experiences with
his favorite sisters and his mother carries on in his relations with Mary
98
and Claire, not to mention the quasi-incestuous overtones of their being

step-sisters; but, ultimately, I think it’s something else, as he clearly has
a horror of biological incest – such as that he portrayed later in his drama
e Cenci. In getting rid of the marriage bond, Shelley wasn’t desiring
promiscuity, but rather what he thought was a deeper kind of bonding
that didn’t need external social supports. If there’s anything new in the
poem, it’s in Shelley’s portrayal of the relations between the sexes – sexual
union and bonding not as a pre-given social construct and norm, but as
a process discovered and created between particular people, and when
those bonds go deep enough, flesh and blood are somehow symbolically
shared, creating a familial tie without the aid of church or state in a kind
of quasi-incest. . .”
“. . .like Dracula – a blood tie?”
“. . .that’s right – but mutual. . .”
“. . .how did people in his time react to it?”
“. . .he completed it in late September, and it was finally released in early
January, 1818: the reviews were scathing – in fact, that was one of the key
factors that ultimately pushed Shelley into exile. Leigh Hunt reviewed it
favorably, but when a copy finally reached Byron, he couldn’t make
anything out of it. It’s a pity, really, for Shelley was earnest and sincere in
his revolutionary attitudes, and not just a poseur: during his time in
Marlow, for example, he arranged to buy blankets for the poor people in
the neighborhood. One day he met a woman walking in her bare feet and
he immediately gave her his shoes! He was always doing such acts of
generosity, not to mention all the financial support he had given to
Godwin, Hunt, Peacock, and the others. . .”
“. . .but could he afford it?”
“. . .no, which is all the more reason it’s remarkable. As summer gave way
to autumn, he found himself increasingly in difficult financial straits: Hunt,
Peacock, and the others outside of his intimate circle – his so-called
‘friends’ – hadn’t the slightest inkling that he was suffering from such anxi-
eties. . .of course, Mary’s pregnancy didn’t help relieve the tension. . .”
“. . .she was already pregnant with another child?”
“. . .yes, she gave birth in early September – a year and a half had gone
by since William was born. . .”
“. . .I keep forgetting that everything happened so quickly. . .”
“. . .they were all together only eight years total – the last four years in
Italy. . .”
99
“. . .it’s difficult to grasp it – their peaceful periods must have only been
a few months at most. . .”
“. . .the time in Bath had been relatively quiet, and also the spring and
summer at Marlow, but aer that the problems mounted again: the pains
in his side had returned partly in response to the dampness of the house –
they discovered the house was so damp that some kind of blue fungus or
mold was creeping over many of his books. I suppose there were psycho-
somatic reasons for his pains as well. He must have felt things were closing
in on him – there were their debts, the responsibility of Allegra, William,
and now a baby girl they named Clara. . .”
“. . .it’s interesting that they chose to name her aer Claire – as if Mary
had soened her attitude. . .”
“. . .yes, but if she had soened her attitude any, it only got worse aer
the birth. . .”
“. . .why?”
“. . .it seems there was a good degree of territoriality on Mary’s part aer
Clara was born on September nd. Within three weeks, Shelley went to
London with Claire – ostensibly to take care of financial matters and to
bring the completed manuscripts of e Revolt of Islam and Frankenstein
to the publisher, but I think it was also, among other things, Shelley
putting distance between himself, Mary, and the newborn baby. . .”
“. . .and running away to be with Claire?”
“. . .perhaps partially, although Claire was with him only three days,
aer which she returned to Marlow with the bad news that Shelley was
to be liable for Harriet’s debts. Mary was frantic: she wrote Shelley letters
nagging him about everything – about their debts, about Claire, about
Peacock’s visits, about their future plans. He wrote back that they had to
go to Italy – for both his health and to deliver Allegra to Byron, but she
couldn’t see how they could afford it, and her fears were worsened when
Shelley was actually arrested and imprisoned for two days in mid-
October. . .”
“. . .had he been in London the whole time?”
“. . .he had come to Marlow the weekend before, and le again, finally
returning the last week of October and departing again in early
November – this time taking Mary with him to town while Claire stayed
with the children. ey stayed two weeks, and then Claire came to town
and Mary went back to take care of the children. Shelley returned with
Claire to Marlow at the end of November. . .”
100
“. . .that they were able to share the childcare seems hopeful, doesn’t it?
e problems between them must not have been that bad. . .”
“. . .Mary’s problems were deeper than jealousy: while she was surely
jealous and possessive, and the situation made her even more so, she had
insecurities rooted far deeper in her psyche, undoubtedly connected to
her mother’s early death and her relation to her father. e same is true of
Shelley: it wasn’t just his debts or his problems balancing his relations to
Mary and Claire that were bothering him, it was also something else,
something deeper. . .”
“. . .what?”
“. . .look at what he wrote to Godwin on December th:
My health has been materially worse. My feelings at intervals

are of a deadly & torpid kind, or awakened to a state of such
unnatural & keen excitement that only to instance the organ
of sight, I find the very blades of grass & the boughs of the
distant trees present themselves to me with microscopical
distinctness. Towards evening I sink into a state of lethargy &
inanimation, & oen remain for hours on the sofa between
sleep & waking, a prey to the most painful irritability of
thought. Such with little intermission is my condition. e
hours devoted to study are selected with vigilant caution from
among these periods of endurance. It is not for this that I think
of traveling to Italy, even if I knew that Italy would relieve me.
But I have experienced a decisive pulmonary attack, &
although at present it has passed away without any consider-
able vestige of its existence, yet this symptom sufficiently shows
the true nature of my disease to be consumptive. It is to my
advantage that this malady is in its nature slow, & if one is suffi-
ciently alive to its advances is susceptible of cure from a warm
climate. In the event of its assuming any decided shape, it would
be my duty to go to Italy without delay, & it is only when that
measure becomes an indispensable duty, that, contrary both to
Mary’s feelings & to mine as they regard you, I shall go to Italy.
I need not remind you, beside the mere pain endured by my
survivors, of the train of evil consequences which my death
would cause to ensue. I am thus circumstantial & explicit
because you seem to have misunderstood me. It is not health
101
but life that I should seek in Italy, & that not for my own sake
– I feel I am capable of trampling on all such weakness – but
for the sake of those to whom my life may be a source of happi-
ness utility security & honour – & to some of whom my death
might be all that in reverse.
. . .how does it seem to you?”

“. . .the force of it seems to be a veiled threat – as if Godwin had the power
to stop him. I take it Godwin wasn’t happy about the Italian plan?”
“. . .not at all – he would not only lose direct contact with his
daughter and step-daughter, but he must have also suspected he would
lose any chance of gaining financial help from Shelley. Shelley had
treated Godwin as a surrogate father for quite a while, and that, plus
the fact Mary was so deeply connected to him, accounts for the diffi-
culty Shelley had in simply cutting him off when he started demanding
more money. . .”
“. . .I understand that, but otherwise the letter seems rather hysterical:
did he actually have tuberculosis?”
“. . .I doubt it – there’s no later evidence of the disease. I do think he
was ailing, and even ailing seriously, but rather from a combination of
anxiety, depression, and perhaps from laudanum abuse. . .”
“. . .he seems like a cornered animal – especially when he writes, ‘It is
not health but life that I should seek in Italy. . .’”
“. . .he was cornered, although by what, he didn’t know. In December
he tried to write about it in an unfinished poem entitled Prince
Athanase: it turned out to be a poem about his inability to write a poem
about his problem. . .”
“. . .but surely he must have had some idea about what was troubling him?”
“. . .you be the judge. He begins by suggesting there is some problem, but
he lists a series of possibilities that are precisely not what’s bothering him:
ere was a youth, who, as with toil and travel,

Had grown quite weak and gray before his time;
Nor any could the restless griefs unravel
Which burned within him, withering up his prime

And goading him, like fiends, from land to land.
Not his the load of any secret crime,
10
For nought of ill his heart could understand,

But pity and wild sorrow for the same; –
Not his the thirst for glory or command,
Baffled with blast of hope-consuming shame;

Nor evil joys which fire the vulgar breast,
And quench in speedy smoke its feeble flame,
Had le within his soul their dark unrest:

Nor what religion fables of the grave
Feared he, – Philosophy’s accepted guest.
For none than he a purer heart could have,

Or that loved good more for itself alone;
Of nought in heaven or earth was he the slave.
What sorrow, strange, and shadowy, and unknown,

Sent him, a hopeless wanderer, through mankind? –
. . .he goes on to establish that the Prince is a liberal and a do-gooder –

of course like Shelley himself, and he again asks the cause of his sadness,
characterizing his symptoms:
What sadness made that vernal spirit sere? –
He knew not. ough his life, day aer day,

Was falling like an unreplenished stream,
ough in his eyes a cloud and burthen lay,
rough which his soul, like Vesper’s serene beam

Piercing the chasms of ever rising clouds,
Shone, soly burning; though his lips did seem
Like reeds which quiver in impetuous floods;

And through his sleep, and o’er each waking hour,
oughts aer thoughts, unresting multitudes,
10
Were driven within him like some secret power,

Which bade them blaze, and live, and roll afar,
Like lights and sounds, from haunted tower to tower
O’er castled mountains borne, when tempest’s war

Is levied by the night-contending winds,
And the pale dalesmen watch with eager ear; –
ough such were in his spirit, as the fiends

Which wake and feed an everliving woe, –
What was this grief, which ne’er in other minds
A mirror found, – he knew not – none could know;

But on whoe’er might question him he turned
e light of his frank eyes, as if to show
He knew not of the grief within that burned,

But asked forbearance with a mournful look;
Or spoke in words from which none ever learned
e cause of his disquietude; or shook

With spasms of silent passion; or turned pale:
So that his friends soon rarely undertook
To stir his secret pain without avail; –

For all who knew and loved him then perceived
at there was drawn an adamantine veil
Between his heart and mind, – both unrelieved

Wrought in his brain and bosom separate strife.
. . .that’s a clear clue – the separation between heart and mind, which
suggests some unconscious grief. e poem goes on to pose some
hypotheses by his friends, and the first fragment ends with the statement
that the grief remains unspoken:
For like an eyeless nightmare grief did sit

Upon his being; a snake which fold by fold
10
Pressed out the life of life, a clinging fiend

Which clenched him if he stirred with deadlier hold; –
And so his grief remained – let it remain – untold.
. . .at that point he actually footnoted his own poem, admitting his inca-
pacity to reach some conclusion: ‘e author was pursuing a fuller devel-
opment of the ideal character of Athanase, when it struck him that in an
attempt at extreme refinement and analysis, his conception might be
betrayed into assuming a morbid character. e reader will judge whether
he is a loser or gainer by this difference. . .’”
“. . .I don’t know what to think about it. . .the poetry is brilliant – it
gives an vivid portrayal of his symptoms – he seems to have been
searching for something, and not finding it. . .”
“. . .I think he had repressed a great deal: he was writing this poem
exactly one year aer the discovery of Harriet’s suicide, and that grief and
his guilt has a great deal to do with his problem. . .but more than that,
more than even the problems he was facing with his debts, with three
children and both mothers dependent upon him for their well-being,
I think he was facing a crisis in his vision. is mysterious ‘grief’ he
mentions, while certainly a realization of his own guilt, his own evil – in
the sense of not being able to purge all the negative motivations from his
psyche, or the negative results of his positive motivations – was more
than simply this, and more than simply the psychoanalytic leovers of
his childhood. . .”
“. . .is it what you spoke of before as the ‘fiend’? – I noticed he mentions
it several times in the passage you just read. . .”
“. . .yes, or what Freud would call the death drive. e drives are usually
sublimated by social structures, but for the writer or artist who seeks
freedom from such restrictions, the sublimative effect is diminished, or
even cancelled. Some degree of sublimation is possible through work, but
creative energy is very volatile – creative and destructive energy are
perhaps the same drive energy in two different inflections: in one inflec-
tion, bound, directed, and focused, and in the other, chaotic, explosive,
and dangerous when it overflows its bounds. It’s very difficult to simply
turn off or contain the flow of this energy, once it’s been released. . .”
“. . .Frankenstein again. . .”
“. . .exactly. Shelley was actively stepping outside the bounds of social
norms in the social experiment that was his life, and in his writing
10
pursuing new imaginative forms – but he underestimated the dangers

of these unbound energies. . .”
“. . .could he have done anything to be safer – short of putting limits
on his life and his writing?”
“. . .he shouldn’t have taken the dangers for granted: at that time in his
life, Shelley felt good intentions were enough. Like Rousseau, he saw
nature as benevolent, and failed to see its malevolent aspect, and this
went doubly for the forces of nature operating inside himself. . .”
“. . .but is recognizing the malevolence enough?”
“. . .I think once one recognizes the dangers, one must take further
precautions for every step beyond the limits. . .that’s somewhat more
difficult. For every step out and beyond, one must create new micro-
rules, as every step beyond moves one step away from the safety-net of
normative structures and into the realm where creative energy blurs over
into its destructive forms. Shelley should have paid a bit more attention
to his reading of Spinoza – he seems to have known the Tractatus-
eologico-Politicus well enough, but as far as I know, not the Ethics: it’s
the Ethics that gives a detailed account of these energies and affects, using
somewhat different terms, but I think the result is the same. Shelley’s
problem was precisely that he didn’t see the necessity of any strategy: he
was too influenced by the idea that liberation itself would lead to neces-
sarily positive benefits – unlike someone like William Blake, who saw the
necessity for ‘arming oneself for intellectual strife,’ and whose visions and
mode of life contained the dangers far more effectively. . .”
“. . .but, then again, perhaps the beauty of Shelley is the danger he
confronted. . .”
“. . .yes, I admit that’s true – he was a flame that flared up and
exhausted itself in a moment of incandescence. . .but I think he hoped
for a new approach, somewhere in-between the two extremes, and
I believe his decision for exile – to seek an entirely new context, was
the positive step he needed to create such a new approach, both inten-
tionally and unintentionally. . .”
“. . .so, what was the final factor in his decision to leave?”
“. . .aside from these more abstract motives, which I’m not sure he
could have articulated at that time, his whole life seems to have been
headed towards exile, starting with his estrangement from his family,
and then later from his society. Shelley’s various failures to reach anyone
in his writing must have been terribly difficult for him to take; however,
10
deciding to leave – even if they were partly using the pretext of the
warmer Italian weather and the need to deliver Allegra to Byron – must
have been incredibly difficult: aer all, he was limiting the audience for
his writing significantly more than it was already limited, which was
a great deal, and as a poet, what else was there for him? But exile was the
trajectory of his life from the very beginning – there was no place for
him in the England of his time, as England was girding itself against the
revolutionary impulses sweeping the continent, and consolidating its
gains from the Napoleonic wars in order to become the dominant
empire of the 19th century, if it wasn’t already. Empires have no choice
but to be reactionary in their move towards consolidation, while
Shelley’s very being, right down to his affects, emotions and feelings,
was the opposite of the society around him – there was nowhere le to
go but away. . .”
“. . .how quickly did they leave, once the decision was made?”
“. . .the final decision was made in late January, and it must have been
the right one, as it immediately brought an end to his period of depres-
sion. Two economic considerations played a role in the decision: first,
they found a buyer for the lease on their house in Marlow; second,
Shelley was able to conclude a reasonably large post-obit loan, by means
of insuring his own life against the chance of his death occurring prior to
his father’s death. It was a decent amount of money – at least four thou-
sand pounds or more, which would have been something like one
hundred thousand dollars or more now, given it was four times his annual
stipend from the estate. . .”
“. . .but if the estate was to be entailed to Shelley’s eldest son rather than
Shelley, how could Shelley get the loan?”
“. . .I don’t really know. I imagine that when his father died, the assump-
tion may have been that all outstanding loans would be paid even if Shelley
didn’t take over the estate. Shelley basically was selling the future at a loss
to pay for the present, which I suppose made sense given that he didn’t
stand to inherit anything, and in retrospect was very lucky, as Sir Timothy
outlived him by a long while. By the time he took this last loan, his credi-
tors evidently caught on that his position in regard to his father was uncer-
tain, to say the least, and it seems they realized that if Shelley were to die
first, they might not see their loans repaid. e net result was that Shelley
raised money insuring his own life against his possible early death – the
creditors were simply hedging their bets against that possibility. . .”
10
“. . .it’s a bit ironic, considering what happened. . .”

“. . .very ironic. I would have hated to be the lawyers who settled his
estate – I think a whole book could be written about Shelley’s finances
alone. . .”
“. . .and yours. . .”
“. . .no comment – it gives me a headache to think about it. In any
case, the outcome was that Shelley had enough to set them up in Italy
– provided the one thousand pound allowance from his father
continued. . .”
“. . .did he give any of it to Godwin?”
“. . .Shelley had learned his lesson by then. Godwin suggested he leave
the whole amount in England under an account that would need both
their signatures to release it as a way of ensuring Shelley’s return at some
point, but Shelley refused to, and aer an exchange of letters, Shelley
refused to correspond with him any more. . .”
“. . .did they leave right away?”
“. . .no, not until March. In February they moved to an apartment on
Great Russell Street in London, and spent the month preparing and
socializing. Shelley couldn’t have realized it then, but it was the last time
he would see most of his friends – except for Hunt. ey attended the
theater, the ballet, and the opera, seeing Mozart’s Don Giovanni several
times, and visiting the newly acquired Elgin Marbles at the British
Museum – British colonialism was entering its triumphal stage at that
point. Hogg and Peacock came to dinner throughout the month, and
they went to dinner at the Hunts’ several times. Almost the last thing
they did, which was rather out of character for Shelley, was they had all
three children christened – Claire’s daughter was christened Clara
Allegra. . .”
“. . .what did Claire think about taking Allegra to Byron? By then she
must have been very bonded to her. . .”
“. . .she wrote a letter to Byron on Allegra’s birthday, January 1, where
she expresses all her doubts and fears about it – you can see how deeply
she had become attached to her:
My affections are few & therefore strong – the extreme soli-

tude in which I live has concentrated them to one point and
that point is my lovely child. I study her pleasure all day long
– she is so fond of me that I hold her in my arms till I am
108
nearly falling to delight her. We sleep together and if you

knew the extreme happiness I feel when she nestles closer to
me, when in listening to our regular breathing together,
I could tear my flesh in twenty thousand different directions
to ensure her good and when I fear for her residing with you
it is not the dread I have to commence the long series of
painful anxieties I know I shall have to endure it is lest
I should behold her sickly & wasted with improper manage-
ment lest I should live to hear that you neglected her.
. . .Claire was rightly concerned about her, but when she was writing this
letter the final decision hadn’t yet been made, so the reality hadn’t set in.
I think the period prior to their arrival in Italy was like a dream for them
– the time must have flown by in that kind of dizzy unreality that comes
from unmooring oneself from the known. When everything was finally
ready, they le for the continent at dawn on March 1, 1818. For Shelley
it was for the third and last time: he would never set foot in his native
land again. . .”
They take a last swallow from their wine glasses, pay, gather their
things, and leave. They are the only figures walking down the road
through the undulations of heat rising from the asphalt. The town is
silent.
“. . .the wine is getting to me – and the story as well. So, what shall we
do – go back to the villa now?”
“. . .I don’t know – I want to go back to the villa eventually, even if just
to look at it again, but maybe we can find someone there a bit later. . .”
“. . .if they feel like I do, they’re probably sleeping now. . .”
“. . .yes, I’m also sleepy. We can take a sonnellino on the grass in the castle
park, under a tree. . .”
“. . .that sounds wonderful, but you’ll have to carry me. . .”
“. . .one step in front of the other – we’ll be there soon, and you can
collapse in the shade. . .”
“. . .and then you can tell me more about what happened here. . .”
“. . .there’s so much more to tell – if it even can be told! I’m only putting
it all together myself for the first time. . .there are so many gaping holes,
so many mysteries, that I wonder if even a fraction of the truth can be
reached. . .as Shelley wrote in one of his short lyrics,
109
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;

How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! — yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever. . .
. . .”
110

I have abandoned any desire for a return to the illusion of a secured, settled
existence, for I know now that it is only an illusion: there is for me now only
the return of the vertiginous moment of willing, and within that moment
the opening, interminably, of the void before me. I do not hold myself over
or above those who cling to the illusions of the day – of the stability and
certainty of purposeful activity, but this possibility is no longer available to
me. e point beyond which one cannot return has been reached: what
initially appeared as a malquiescent dawn has taken on the refulgent
glimmer of a black sun, and night has become a blinding radiance that
beckons me in its proximity.
is benighting began as a process of enfolding – first of the layers of my
present existence, then of layer upon layer of the past: periods of time,
sequences of events, even distinct moments became detached like crystals om
the flow of my life, combining and recombining, gaining meanings that they
lacked in the original moments of their occurrence, meanings that resonate
against other temporal sequences, other events and moments. When
I departed, leaving everything behind, this process accelerated, so that each
moment became haunted by the shadow tracings of the same action occur-
ring in another place, another time, and the purity of events themselves
shimmered within the interstices of these simulacra.
is multiplicity was disconcerting at the outset: I felt I was losing a great
deal, for it was not only the devastating loss of certainty about where I had
been and the people I had known and loved there, it was also the loss of any
distinct, singular memory of that past, which now became multiplied like
an image reflected in a shattered mirror. What disturbed me most of all was
the dawning realization that there was no foundation for my memory: that
memory was built through accretion, taking as much om the present as
om the past – perhaps even om the future, or our anticipation of it.
Initially I sensed something was being lost, but this feeling was replaced by
a deeper sense that nothing was ever lost – that it became embedded in
a labyrinth of time that could never be fully reclaimed, but nor could it be
eradicated.
In these early moments the glare of this night was too bright to be borne,
and I tried to hide in the day: avoiding the shadows, avoiding the voices
(even my own) that summoned me back to the darkness. I tried to live like
others, oblivious to the night surrounding me. I tried to live as if being
thrown into existence on this planet were to be interpreted merely as
“earning a living” – strange phrase, and how easily it expands to encompass
the entirety of human life within the banality of its deadening necessity: the
space that money occupies and controls – a space that expands to become
everything when this phrase is allowed to conquer and colonize existence.
I tried to live like this in the full light of day, but whatever that will was
which was gathering within me, it would not allow me this escape: like
a grayness that suddenly enshrouds a sunny day in spring reminding us that
the universe can take other forms, I would find myself drawn away om the
succession of moments into a timeless realm where each moment became the
core of infinite reverberations. e night was inescapable: in retrospect, I can
see that every attempt I made to evade its grasp only brought me more deeply
within its embrace, every attempt to assert my will only brought me into
conjunction with what was willing itself through me. . .
Was Odysseus blown off course for ten years, or, rather, was he blown
towards his own destiny? Were the wayward meanderings of his return
voyage mere contingencies, or were they the embodiment of fate itself ? And
who was the man who finally did return to the rock of Ithaca, dropped there
as if om the mist of a dream? Was return possible for one whose fate had
transformed him into the timeless image of the wanderer, despite the lasting
bonds that drew him inevitably back? Why did he then depart Ithaca again,
walking landward, oar upon his shoulder, until no man recognize it? To
what inner necessity was he responding? e same will that had mastered
every adversity in his struggle to return home became that which drove him
outward again – and what must he have felt as he gazed upon the sea for
the last time?
. . .on a foreign shore, a crisp wind in his hair – a solitude, a sovereignty

. . .beholding alassa – the mother of all, for the last time: here, now, this
place, this moment. . .eternally. . .

e two figures, alone in the castle precincts, seek cover from the fierce
mid-aernoon sun under the shade of a plane tree. e man lies down,
resting his head on his shoulder bag, while the woman reclines perpen-
dicularly to him, resting her head on his hip. She lights a cigarette, and
smokes it with closed eyes – the tendrils of smoke coiling up from her
hand where it lay in the grass.
“. . .tell me a nap-time story – tell me what happened to them next. . .”
“. . .the full treatment?”
“. . .yes – I want to hear it all. . .”
“. . .I thought you wanted to sleep. . .”
“. . .I’ll tell you when I do – just a little while longer. . .”
“. . .then I’ll have to get out my notebook – just a minute. . .”
He pulls the bag from behind his head, rummages through it, and pulls
out a black notebook.
“. . .ready?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .so, they arrived in Calais where they bought a coach, and then,
avoiding Paris, traveled on through Rheims and Dijon, reaching Lyon by
the first day of spring. Shelley’s letters to England detailed the journey –
he wrote to Hunt,
We have journeyed towards the spring that has been hastening

to meet us from the south; and though our weather was at first
abominable, we have now warm sunny days, and so winds, and
a sky of deep azure, the most serene I ever saw. e heat in this
city today is like that of London in the midst of summer. My
spirits and health sympathize with the change. Indeed, before
I le London my spirits were as feeble as my health, and I had
demands upon them which I found difficult to supply.
. . .from there they crossed the frontier at Les Échelles, then on to Chambéry,
reaching Turin on April 1st and Milan by April th. ey stayed there for
11
a while, visiting the opera and seeing the sights. While they were near it, they
went to Lake Como, and looked at the Villa Pliniana – a villa they were
considering renting for the summer. . .”
“. . .did he have any second thoughts about leaving?”
“. . .from Milan he wrote to Peacock expressing how he missed the
times in Marlow, revealing, indirectly, the loss he was feeling:
I oen revisit Marlow in thought. e curse of this life is that

whatever is once known can never be unknown. You inhabit
a spot which before you inhabit it is as indifferent to you as any
other spot upon the earth, & when, persuaded by some necessity
you think to leave it, you leave it not, – it clings to you & with
memories of things which in your experience of them gave no
such promise, revenges your desertion. Time flows on, places are
changed, friends who were with us are no longer with us, but what
has been seems yet to be, but barren & stript of life. . .
. . .but this was only an inkling of what was to come – I don’t think any
of them fully realized what their self-imposed exile meant until aer they
had experienced significant losses. e first came immediately. . .”
“. . .Allegra?”
“. . .yes. Shelley wrote to Byron from Milan that they had arrived in
Italy, and suggested to him that he might pick up Allegra during a visit
in the summer. Byron’s answer was lost, but what it expressed is clear
enough from the responses Claire and Shelley sent back to him on April
: there’s no doubt that he wrote to them as if Allegra would never see
Claire again. Claire’s letter set out her demands in no uncertain terms:
when she wrote it, a certain Mr. Merryweather had already arrived to pick
up the child. . .”
“. . .what a horrible name – considering the circumstances!”
“. . .yes, one can imagine the sort of lugubrious character he must have been!
Claire refused to release Allegra to him until her demands were met. . .”
“. . .good for her! Do you have the letter?”
“. . .yes. She wrote,
My dear friend,
Your messenger will remain here at my request until I hear
from you again. I cannot send my Child under the impression
11
produced by your letter of the 1th to Shelley and the

messenger has been told that her health which is not perfectly
good makes it necessary that we should write & hear from you
before she can depart. Pardon me but I cannot part with my
Child never to see her again – Only write me one word of
Consolation – Tell me that you will come and see Shelley in
the Summer or that I may then be somewhere near her – Say
this and I will send her instantly. I cannot describe to you the
anguish with which I bring myself to contradict your expec-
tations or in any manner to oppose your will but on this point
I am firm – If you will not regard me as her mother, she shall
never be divided from me. I had hoped that your intimacy
with Shelley would have stood in lieu of all these conditions
which it is so painful to urge. But you say you will not visit
him while I am there.
I do not wish to tease you with my presence if I might only
see my Child. Yet my dear friend why should my presence
tease you? Why might not the father & mother of a child
whom both so tenderly love meet as friends? I cannot think
it is your intention to let her grow up without knowing her
mother. I entreat you to write & say that this is not the case –
Do not take this as a menace or condition imposed upon you
but pity the anxiety of a mother whose child is her only good.
Only set my mind at peace on this point & hope I shall never
again have to annoy you as I fear this does. My God! if you
did but know what happiness you would confer in visiting
Shelley this summer and letting me see my Child. But do what
you please with regard to everything else but indeed I cannot
part on the terms you insinuate in your letter to Shelley. Pray
send me all my letters back again if you have not destroyed
them since you can not value them for what they are the
expressions of a sincere & disinterested attachment. It would
be a satisfaction for me to know whether you return to
England this Spring or not. One thing more. Remember my
dearest friend my life as it were lies with you. Remember what
you felt at my age & think if it is not a lamentable sight to see
one human creature beg from another a little mercy and
forbearance. You must know that you have all the power in
11
your hands. My dearest friend I entreat you to spare me.

Whatever you do I still pray for your happiness & health.
Whatever my fate may yours still be great & glorious as it has
been.
Clare
. . .you can see the problem – she’s still confusing the issue of the child
and the possibility of her still having some relation with Byron. at
would have driven Byron mad. . .”
“. . .but she does ask for her letters back – she must have realized it was
hopeless. . .”
“. . .yes, but, on the other hand, she makes a good point when she asks
him why her presence ‘teases’ him so much: in a letter Byron wrote to
Hobhouse he mentioned once that he refused to see her to prevent
another addition to the family – it’s a rather strange statement, almost as
if he feared being near her because he couldn’t control himself. . .”
“. . .if that was truly the case, he would have never let her near him
again. . .”
“. . .well, yes – he never did, actually. . .”
“. . .he never saw her again?”
“. . .once – from a distance, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself in
the story. . .”
“. . .ok – so go on. . .”
“. . .Shelley’s letter to Byron worked considerably better. When Shelley
wrote his letter, Merryweather had not yet arrived, and so he didn’t feel
the urgency that made her letter so frantic, yet he understood how to
appeal to what did matter to Byron – his esteem and reputation in the
world. . .”
“. . .do you have it here?”
“. . .yes. . .
My dear Lord Byron

Clare will write to you herself a detail of her motives and feel-
ings relating to Allegra’s being sent as you desire. Her inter-
ference as the mother of course supersedes mine, which was
never undertaken but from the deep interest I have ever felt
for all the parties concerned. Here my letter might well close,
but that I would not the affair should finish so. You write as
118
if from the instant of its departure all future intercourse were

to cease between Clare and her child. is I cannot think you
ought to have expected, or even to have desired. Let us esti-
mate our own sensations, and consider, if those of a father be
acute, what must be those of a mother? What should we think
of a woman who should resign her infant child with no
prospect of ever seeing it again, even to a father in whose
tenderness she entirely confided? If she forces herself to such
a sacrifice for the sake of her child’s welfare, there is something
heroically great in thus trampling upon the strongest affec-
tions, and even the most unappeasable instincts of our nature.
But the world will not judge so; she would be despised as an
unnatural mother, even by those who might see little to
condemn in her becoming a mother without the formalities
of marriage. She would thus resign her only good, and take to
herself, in its stead, contempt on every hand. Besides, she
might say, ‘What assurance have I of the tenderness of the
father for his child, if he treats the feelings of the mother with
so little consideration?’ Not to mention, that the child itself
would, on this supposition, grow up either in ignorance, or in
contempt of one of its parents; a state of things full of danger.
I know the arguments present in your mind on this subject;
but surely, rank and reputation, and prudence are as nothing
in comparison to a mother’s claims. If it should be recorded
that you had sought to violate these, the opinion of the world
might indeed be fixed on you, with such blame as your friends
could not justify; and wholly unlike those ridiculous and
unfounded tales which are told of every person of eminent
powers, and which make your friends so many in England, at
the expense of those who fabricated them.
I assure you, my dear lord Byron, I speak earnestly, and
sincerely. It is not that I wish to make out a case for Clare; my
interest, as you must be aware, is entirely on the opposite side.
Nor have I in any manner influenced her. I have esteemed it
a duty to leave her to the impulse of her own feelings in a case
where, if she has no feeling, she has no claim. But in truth, if
she is to be brought to part with her child, she requires reas-
surance and tenderness. A tie so near the heart should not be
119
rudely snapt. It was in this persuasion that I hoped (I had

a thousand other reasons for wishing to see you) that you
would have accepted our invitation to Pliniana. Clare’s pain
would then have been mitigated by the prospect of seeing her
child with you, and she would have been reassured of the fears
which your letter has just confirmed, by the idea of a repeti-
tion of the visit. Your conduct must at present wear the aspect
of great cruelty, however you justify it to yourself. Surely it is
better if we err, to err on the side of kindness, than of rigour.
. . .he went on to ask for reassurances for Claire’s sake, and he stated that
if the messenger arrived he would be detained until Byron sent further
orders. It seems that Byron offered to reimburse Shelley for any costs of
taking care of the child – Shelley refused, of course, and suggested it was
offensive for him even to offer. . .”
“. . .but did it work?”
“. . .apparently it did: a letter from Byron arrived on April th – Claire’s
twentieth birthday, by the way – and, from Shelley’s letter in return, it seems
as if Byron must have tried to be conciliatory, as Shelley apologized for
having misunderstood his letter. It also seems Byron assured her that she
would be able to visit the child that summer. Consequently, the child was
released with Merryweather on the following day, along with Elise. . .still,
it was a terribly difficult thing to have to do. . .”
“. . .even with Byron’s reassurance it must have been deeply traumatic
for her – regardless of whether she thought she was doing the right thing.
I can’t imagine doing it. . .”
“. . .in a letter she wrote to Byron before sending Allegra she reiterated
her reasons: ‘I have sent you my child because I love her too well to keep
her. With you who are powerful and noble and the admiration of the
world she will be happy but I am miserable and neglected. . .’”
“. . .I still don’t know how she could have done it – she must have been
devastated. . .”
“. . .she was – she wrote in the same letter, ‘I assure you I have wept so
much tonight that now my eyes seem to drop hot & burning blood. . . .’
Byron’s coldness and cruelty towards her from that point onwards
removed any of her remaining illusions about his ever having a relation-
ship with her, and in the loss of this illusion and the loss of Allegra, she
was shattered – barely able to drag herself from one moment to the next.
10
Shelley tried to mediate somewhat, and in his letter you can see him
trying to temper Byron’s worst tendencies:
Clare, as you may imagine, is dreadfully unhappy. As you have

not written to her, it has been a kind of custom that she should
see your letters; and I daresay you know that you have some-
times said things which I do not think you would have
addressed to her. It could not in any way compromise you to
be cautious in this respect, as, unless you write to her, I cannot
well refuse to let her see your letters. I have not seen any of
those which she has written to you; nor even have I oen
known when they were sent.
. . .one can well-guess Byron’s reaction. Shelley went on to explain that

the reason they were going south to Pisa was to take Claire’s mind off of
her loss. He implored Byron to send a letter assuring them of Allegra’s
arrival:
. . .I shall attempt to divert Clare’s melancholy by availing

myself of some introductions at Pisa. Clare is wretchedly
disconsolate, and I know not how I should calm her, until the
return of post. I ought to say that we shall be at Pisa long before
the return of post – when we expect (pray don’t disappoint us)
a letter from you to assure us of the safe arrival of our little
favourite. . .
. . .they le Milan three days later for Pisa. . .”

“. . .did Byron write to them?”
“. . .Elise wrote them a letter, and Byron added a few lines. is was
enough to reassure Claire – at least for the time being. She seems to have
been a little better by mid-May, when she wrote again to Byron, trying to
get him to tell her something about Allegra. She wrote, ‘My dearest
friend you cannot think how unhappy I have been but I am now better.
I know you will let me see my Chick again soon and for the rest I can
only hope when you see how good I am that you will be kinder to one
who can never forget you,’ but she changes her tone back to the half-
fawning, half-gloating tone he must have hated: ‘My dear Lord Byron
now don’t expect too much of me. I begin to feel uneasy to hear again of
11
my darling. I am very proud of her and I wish to know whether you think
her pretty & particularly her eyes. She has some looks very like yours. If
anything is taken from her, the surprise and astonishment she expresses at
your extreme audacity is yourself all over. . .’”
“. . .what did Byron think of Allegra?”
“. . .you can imagine – a fieen month old child – to Lord Byron? He
did grow fonder of her when she was a bit older, but at this point he
seems to have been projecting his own problems with women on to her:
by August of that summer he was writing his sister Augusta that Allegra
actually looked more like Lady Byron than Claire – which speaks for
itself, and he was comparing her more ‘capricious’ nature to his own. . .”
“. . .at least he was honest about himself. . .”
“. . .up to a point. In any case, once they had received the letter from
Elise, they moved on to Pisa. eir first impression of Pisa was rather
negative, so they only stayed long enough to wait for the arrival of the
letter before moving on a few days later. . .”
“. . .so where did they go?”
“. . .they traveled on to Livorno, where they stayed for much of May.
It’s a town they never did get to like – I can’t say I like it much either.
Shelley referred to it as ‘this most unattractive of cities,’ while Mary
simply wrote in her journal ‘stupid town’ – but they made some impor-
tant friends there: the Gisbornes. . .”
“. . .English friends?”
“. . .yes. Livorno was a kind of English colony – in fact, the English had
typically anglicized its name as ‘Leghorn’. . .”
“. . .who were the Gisbornes?”
“. . .Maria Gisborne had been married to an English architect named
Willey Reveley and had borne him two sons – one died, and the second,
Henry, was about four years older than Shelley and still living with her
in Livorno when they met. As Mrs. Reveley, she had helped Godwin by
nursing Mary aer her mother, Mary Wollstonecra, died. Her own
husband died soon aer, Godwin proposed marriage to her, but she
married a merchant named John Gisborne instead. He was an unsuc-
cessful businessman who had come to Livorno in 181 with the idea of
working in some English business there, but it never came through, so
they were living off of his estate. Shelley considered him, at least in the
beginning, an insufferable bore, but all of them were delighted by Mrs.
Gisborne, who had been brought up by her father in Constantinople as
1
a free-thinker. e son, Henry, was an engineer – then busy designing

a steamship which later Shelley would help finance. . .”
“. . .they were lucky to find them – how did they know about them?”
“. . .I think they had an address from Godwin. e value of their friend-
ship, at least then, was primarily as a guide to expatriate life in Italy – in
fact, they were the ones who directed Shelley to look for a house in Bagni
di Lucca, where they moved in June. . .”
“. . .where exactly is that?”
“. . .Livorno is right on the sea, just northwest of it is Pisa, and then
about the same distance beyond is Lucca: up the river valley about thirty
kilometers or so is the Bagni di Lucca. I was there about the same time
in June that they moved there: the ridges there rise up quite steeply from
the town, and it’s all very lush and overgrown with chestnut and plane
trees – it’s quite beautiful. But it was also a bit of an English colony back
then: Mary complained in a letter that all they heard there were English
voices. Shelley was always escaping the town to the hills and streams
beyond. Shelley wrote this letter to Peacock about their lives there aer
they had settled in a bit:
Our life here is as unvaried by any external events as if we were

at Marlow, where a sail up the river or a journey to London
makes an epoch. Since I last wrote to you, I have ridden over to
Lucca, once with Claire, and once alone; and we have been over
to the Casino, where I cannot say there is anything remarkable,
the women being far removed from anything which the most
liberal annotator could interpret into beauty or grace, and
apparently possessing no intellectual excellences to compensate
the deficiency. I assure you that it is well that it is so, for the
dances, especially the waltz, are so exquisitely beautiful that it
would be a little dangerous to the newly unfrozen senses and
imaginations of us migrators from the neighborhood of the
pole. As it is – except in the dark – there could be no peril. . .
. . .”
“. . .he’s rather critical of the Italians – I wouldn’t have expected that
from him. . .”
“. . .I think it’s one of the phases of culture shock – at least as far as
I have experienced it: first one is a tourist, and the natives seem like so
1
much local color, blending in with the scenery. en, if one stays a few
months, one becomes an expatriate, constantly comparing and
contrasting one’s own culture to the host culture – with one’s own
culture, at first, always gaining the upper hand: the natives end up
seeming like demons sent to torment one. . .”
“. . .and then what happens – one finally gets used to it?”
“. . .some people remain in this state of expatriation, especially if they
are connected to a country that has the power to colonize – back then
the British Empire, now the American Empire. Others either assimilate
to the host culture as émigrés – sometimes becoming more nationalist
than the locals. . .”
“. . .oh, like those in Prague who speak colloquial Czech and hang out
in pubs. . .”
“. . .that’s what I mean. . .or there are those, like Shelley, who enter
a state of ‘positive expatriation’ – accepting a permanent state of being
neither here nor there, of being an ‘outsider’ or ‘foreigner’ – in the
sense that Simmel or Kristeva meant it. . .or, what I call becoming
‘sovereign’. . .”
“. . .‘sovereign’?”
“. . .a term I borrowed from Georges Bataille and adapted to suit my
own purposes. For Bataille, sovereignty was a state of freedom beyond
utility, where one’s time was one’s own. According to Bataille, it’s
encountered most intensely in what he called ‘miraculous moments’
where reason was swept aside – laughter, tears, or rapture, and it resem-
bles something like a mystical vision, although what one experiences is
the negativity of the abyss, making of it an affirmation. I agree with
him, but I think that a certain state of affirmative foreignness can also
produce the same result – provided one allows it to happen, and
doesn’t either cling to one’s own cultural background and sense of
home, like negative expatriates, or entirely assimilate into the foreign
culture surrounding one. It produces a state of detachment or discon-
nection from the usual socialized qualities of a nation or people – the
‘-ness’ of people: the ‘American-ness’ of Americans, the ‘Czech-ness’ of
Czechs, and so on. In any case, Shelley was at this stage of his life only
a negative expatriate – even if he did explicitly reject much of the polit-
ical and social life of England. Increasingly, though, he would move
towards becoming a foreigner – towards becoming sovereign. . .”
“. . .what about Mary and Claire?”
1
“. . .aer his death Mary collapsed back into Britishness, while Claire
became largely sovereign – she attained experientially what Shelley spent
his short life working through primarily conceptually. . .”
“. . .but that takes us ahead of the story quite a ways, doesn’t it? Getting
back to it, what about Shelley’s letter – he wrote that he and Claire went
to Lucca together. . .”
“. . .they stayed over-night there, but Mary could hardly complain:
while she enjoyed walking in the woods near the Bagni di Lucca, she
didn’t like the longer trips, which were rather rugged – on one of their
trips Claire fell off her horse, and returned home alone while Shelley
went on. It wasn’t the kind of thing Mary wanted any part of. . .”
“. . .what about the casino he mentioned in his letter?”
“. . .it was new – the one in Bagni di Lucca was one of the earliest
licensed casinos in Europe. I think they only went a couple of times –
Shelley wrote Godwin that Mary and Claire refused to dance, and he
didn’t know whether it was from ‘philosophy or Protestantism’. . .”
“. . .is it still there?”
“. . .the building is still there, but I don’t know if they use it as a casino
anymore. In any case, most of their recreation was quiet reading – they
read Ariosto and Tasso in order to learn Italian, but they also went for
rides and walks around the area, and Shelley, especially, liked to go to the
river during the heat of the day and sit in the pools of water. He described
it in one of his travel letters:
e atmosphere here, unlike that of the rest of Italy, is diversi-

fied with clouds, which grow in the middle of the day, and
sometimes bring thunder and lightning, and hail about the size
of a pigeon’s egg, and decrease towards the evening, leaving
only those finely woven webs of vapour which we see in
English skies, and flocks of fleecy and slowly moving clouds,
which all vanish before sunset; and the nights are forever
serene, and we see a star in the east at sunset – I think it is
Jupiter – almost as fine as Venus was last summer; but it wants
a certain silver and aerial radiance, and so yet piercing splen-
dour, which belongs, I suppose, to the latter planet by virtue of
its once divine and female nature. I have forgotten to ask the
ladies if Jupiter produces on them the same effect. I take great
delight in watching the changes of the atmosphere. In the
1
evening, Mary and I oen take a ride, for horses are cheap in
this country. In the middle of the day, I bathe in a pool or foun-
tain, formed in the middle of the forests by a torrent. It is
surrounded on all sides by precipitous rocks, and the waterfall
of the stream which forms it falls into it on one side with
perpetual dashing. Close to it, on the top of the rocks, are
alders, and above the great chestnut trees, whose long and
pointed leaves pierce the deep blue sky in strong relief. e
water of this pool, which, to venture an unrhythmical para-
phrase, is ‘sixteen feet long and ten feet wide’, is as transparent
as the air, so that the stones and sand at the bottom seem, as it
were, trembling in the light of noonday. It is exceedingly cold
also. My custom is to undress and sit on the rocks, reading
Herodotus, until the perspiration has subsided, and then to
leap from the edge of the rock into this fountain – a practice
in the hot weather exceedingly refreshing. is torrent is
composed, as it were, of a succession of pools and waterfalls,
up which I sometimes amuse myself by climbing when I bathe,
and receiving the spray over all my body, whilst I clamber up
the moist crags with difficulty.
. . .”
“. . .it sounds perfect just now – did you see the pools when you were
there?”
“. . .no – we probably would have had to stay there for a week
wandering about the woods to find it – I wish we could have, but the
time, the expense. . .it was enough to see the house, the landscape, the
casino. . .”
“. . .that’s the trouble – I wish we had time to stay here longer, and get
a feel for it at different times of the day and night, but there’s never
enough time. . .”
“. . .but in a way there was never enough time for them either: they
arrived in June, and by mid-August Shelley and Claire were already gone,
and Mary le at the end of August. is rare period of tranquility lasted
eight or nine weeks, at the most. . .”
“. . .what brought it to an end?”
“. . .it was when the two letters from Elise arrived – on the 1th and 1th
of August. ey le the 1th, so you can see how upset Claire was: the
1
letters frightened Claire enough for her to want to immediately set out
for Venice, aer not having seen Allegra for three and a half months.
Shelley decided to escort her for safety’s sake, but perhaps also to prevent
the possibility of some rash action on her part, knowing what was likely
to happen if Claire and Byron were to meet without a mediator. . .”
“. . .when was the last time they had had a chance to be alone together
like this? I assume not since they arrived on the continent. . .”
“. . .it was at least since they were in London the previous autumn. Even
more, it threw them together in a common cause, and that, in concert
with Claire’s despair, was enough to produce an intense renewal of their
intimacy. I doubt it was initially planned as a time to be alone. . .”
“. . .how long were they together, exactly?”
“. . .let’s see – there was the journey itself, which took a week, and then
they had ten days alone here in Este with just Allegra and Elise present,
making for a total of three weeks. . .”
“. . .so that finally brings us up to their time here: you said earlier that it
was a crucial period of transition in Shelley’s life. . .”
“. . .absolutely: for Shelley, his days here were the beginning of the
mature phase of his work. He conceived and began Prometheus
Unbound here, writing the entire first act and sketching out the rest.
He completed the whole play by the time they reached Florence in
1819, when some of the worst disasters had already happened. He also
virtually completed the first draft of Julian and Maddalo here. There
was a small summer house at the villa where Shelley would spend the
mornings writing, which is what I would really like to see – if it still
exists. . .”
“. . .but what about the mystery you spoke of – is it that their intimacy
began again in full here?”
“. . .for me, the fact that they were intimate is no mystery, but keep in
mind that I have a minority view: very few biographers or critics believe
there was a physically intimate relation between Shelley and Claire. In
fact, I’ve read a recent biography of Claire that entirely dismisses the
possibility, and an even more recent biography of Trelawny that fails to
even mention it! e mystery I mentioned didn’t actually unfold until
later, in Naples, where, the following December – to get to the crucial
point – Shelley was registered as the father of Elena Adelaide Shelley, and
Mary was registered as the mother. . .”
“. . .a-ha. . .I assume she wasn’t the real mother. . .”
1
“. . .there’s every indication that Mary didn’t even know her name was
being used on the birth certificate. . .”
“. . .so, was it Claire’s child?”
“. . .wait, it’s all very complicated. . .”
“. . .but who could be the mother, if not Claire?”
“. . .it’s more complicated than that. . .”
“. . .how can it be? Aer all, one can’t be a little bit pregnant. . .”
“. . .well it is, trust me – it’s difficult to explain, precisely because it’s
a real mystery. I can only tell you the various bits and pieces of evidence,
and what conclusions I’ve drawn from the evidence. . .”
“. . .but you can at least tell me that it wasn’t Claire, for certain, can’t
you? How could Mary have avoided seeing her pregnancy if they were
traveling and living together?”
“. . .that’s an important point, so keep it in mind. . .what I can tell you
now is that, in my opinion, Claire probably was not the mother – or at
least not the mother of the child baptized Elena Adelaide Shelley. . .”
“. . .what does that mean?”
“. . .I can give you several versions – or suppositions, rather – about
what happened, and various fragments of evidence. . .”
“. . .don’t keep me in suspense. . .”
“. . .ok, to begin with, one thing scholars do know is that there was
a scandal later about the whole matter, when simultaneously Elise went
to the Hoppners, while Paolo tried to blackmail Shelley. . .”
“. . .who was Paolo?”
“. . .Paolo was a coachman and all-purpose servant that they hired at
Bagni di Lucca. When Shelley summoned Mary to Este, Paolo brought her
and the children. Paolo met Elise – Allegra’s governess – for the first time
here in early September, which is important in regard to the mystery. We
know that some time between their meeting and the whole party’s arrival
in Naples, these two formed what Mary euphemistically called, in a letter,
‘an attachment’ – that Elise was perhaps pregnant as a result, and that Mary
arranged their marriage, aer which they le their service. It was later that
the blackmail began, when Paolo approached Shelley for money not to
disclose the secret of the existence of Elena Adelaide Shelley: it was aer
her death by fever, a little over a year later, that the blackmail began. . .”
“. . .wait, this is going a little too fast. . .”
“. . .sorry – I don’t know any other logical way to tell it. Anyway, Elise,
while Paolo was blackmailing Shelley, went straight to the Hoppners to
18
disclose, if not the story, than a story – a fact which is, in itself, quite
curious, as the whole point of blackmail is to threaten the disclosure of
something, and if it is already disclosed, there’s no longer any point to
the blackmail. . .”
“. . .but why did she do it – what was her story?”
“. . .that question is close to the center of the mystery – at least in
regard to her motivations. We do know her story, or at least the story
she told the Hoppners, via an extant letter from Hoppner to Byron,
although due to the fact that the Hoppners were currying his favor and
knew he despised Claire, there’s room for considerable misrepresenta-
tion in their account, just as there is room for misrepresentation in
Elise’s telling of it. Even Byron wrote to Hoppner to say that he didn’t
exactly trust her evidence, which he described as merely ‘Queen’s
evidence’. . .”
“. . .what did he mean by that?”
“. . .I forget the specific reference, but the sense it carries is about the
queen being able to summon whatever evidence she wants to fit her
version of the events – a bit like the queen in Alice in Wonderland. In this
case, Byron pointed out to Hoppner that Elise had been removed from
their service, and had been trying to get back to them; therefore, she had
ulterior motives, and certainly things were not as bad as she indicated if
she did want to go back. . .”
“. . .so what was her story?”
“. . .for what it’s worth, she claimed that Claire had been pregnant with
Shelley’s child, that she had tried to abort the child when they were in
Padua, that she had been brought to term in Naples, that the child had
been named Elena Adelaide Shelley, and that the child had been given
up to a foundling hospital and the doctor paid off to keep it quiet. . .”
“. . .all without Mary’s knowledge?”
“. . .Elise claimed that somehow Mary had been kept from knowing,
that Claire had been urging Shelley to leave her, and that the two treated
Mary horribly. . .”
“. . .that’s incredible – I can’t believe it! You don’t think it’s true, do
you? I can’t believe Claire would give up a child, especially aer she lost
Allegra, or that either Claire or Shelley would intentionally treat Mary
so terribly. . .”
“. . .I think it has a few small grains of truth in it, woven through with
falsehoods. . .”
19
“. . .what did Byron think?”

“. . .well, you first have to take into account that, aside from his skepti-
cism towards Elise, there’s some indication that he himself may have
seduced her – it’s possible he got her pregnant. . .”
“. . .what? is is all becoming more complicated than I imagined. . .”
“. . .I’ll come back to that. . .anyway, he did write to Hoppner that while
he didn’t trust the details of the story in full, it was ‘just like them’
– a judgment that was rather unfair for someone who claimed to be
Shelley’s friend, but he may have been concerned with appearing to have
the ‘right’ moral attitude in front of the Hoppners, who by then he had
realized were shameless busybodies. In any case, his judgment didn’t
prevent Byron from later moving to Pisa to be closer to Shelley and his
entourage, so he couldn’t have been so scandalized by it, even if he
believed it. . .”
“. . .so you doubt Elise’s story?”
“. . .in many of its aspects. e account that’s closest to what I’ve come
to believe is the truth is that of Holmes, one of Shelley’s more recent
biographers. . .”
“. . .Sherlock Holmes?”
“. . .given the mystery it’s appropriate, but no, his name is Richard
Holmes. Holmes weighed all the evidence for and against Elise’s account
being correct, and decided against the story. . .in part. First of all, for
Claire to have given birth in December to a viable child – which Elena
Adelaide Shelley definitely was as she lived for over a year aer her birth
– it would have meant that she was conceived in late winter or early
spring at the latest, which is possible, but seems unlikely from what we
know, given they were all traveling together and Claire was terribly
distraught about Allegra at the time. Second, Mary’s letters and journals
do not seem to reveal any knowledge of the pregnancy and birth, and it’s
unlikely Claire could have been in the last trimester of pregnancy without
Mary having known about it; aer all, they were together the whole time,
and they all climbed Mount Vesuvius together a couple of weeks before
the birth – although it’s true Claire was carried most of the way, like
a courtesan, because she was ill. In any case, I doubt she would have made
the ascent if she were in the last month of pregnancy, even as a cover-up.
Later, when Mary wrote to deny the story to Mrs. Hoppner in order to
clear the scandal, she swore on the death of her living child that Claire
was not the mother of any child by Shelley, something I doubt she would
10
have done untruthfully, given the losses she had already suffered. ird,
and perhaps most telling of all, Claire would not have abandoned her
child, given her grief over Allegra. Later, when the news arrived that the
mystery-child had died of fever, her diary shows that Claire was
unmoved, even oblivious, whereas Shelley was deeply affected, and that
seems the most decisive evidence to me. . .”
“. . .so is there any truth to Elise’s account?”
“. . .Claire was sick in Padua, and went to a physician: Holmes advances
the possibility that she was trying to provoke or procure an abortion.
en, Mary’s journal mentions Claire being unwell and bed-ridden on
the same day that the child was born. . .”
“. . .but what else could have happened?”
“. . .considering all the evidence, Holmes’ belief, which he admits is
based on the available evidence only, is that the person who gave birth
on that day to Elena Adelaide Shelley was the Swiss servant Elise. . .”
“. . .Elise? Are you joking? So why did Paolo marry her? Perhaps it was his
child – they did have an affair, aer all, and Mary said she was pregnant. . .”
“. . .Holmes points out quite correctly that Paolo met Elise for the first
time in early September, and the child was born in December, so it
couldn’t possibly have been his child, if Elise was indeed the mother. . .”
“. . .but then why would Paolo marry her if he knew she was pregnant?”
“. . .according to Holmes – and his case is a very good one, it seems to
me, and still worth considering in its details – for Elise to have given birth
in December she must have conceived when they were in Como. Holmes
points out that two incidents there might suggest that Mary had discov-
ered a tryst between Elise and Shelley: first, Shelley was caught by the
police in the forest with a loaded pistol – they said he was acting
‘strangely,’ but he said he was just going to discharge it safely, as it had
been loaded during the whole journey. . .”
“. . .so, a possible suicide attempt – if Mary had found out about an affair?”
“. . .exactly. Second, the normal servant for Allegra was their other
servant, Milly Shields, but when the time came to send someone with
Allegra, Elise was sent, which Holmes suggests could have been Mary’s
attempt to prevent any further relations between them – although she
may have been sent as the older and more experienced woman, given she
was going to Byron’s residence: Elise was thirty, aer all, the oldest of all
of them, and she has been described as having been rather haughty, seeing
herself on the same level as her employers. . .”
11
“. . .but why the blackmail – certainly it would only turn against her if
the truth about her being the actual mother came out, wouldn’t it? Why
would she turn it into a story about Claire, when it could be so clearly
turned against her if it was revealed that it was her own child?”
“. . .that’s a crucial point speaking against Holmes’ story. Holmes
suggested that Shelley supported the child with a cash allowance, and
there’s evidence of him arranging money to be sent to Naples. Given the
allowance would have been cut off when the child died, that would have
been the likely time for the blackmail to have begun. Holmes’ guess is
that if there was some truth in her story about Shelley she used it to shield
her own story, and given that they both were guilty, when she was cut off
from the Shelleys she wanted revenge on Claire: as I mentioned before,
she wanted to return to them, and later was at least somewhat friendly
with Claire in Florence. . .”
“. . .wait, what are you saying? What was the truth in her story?”
“. . .that Claire had sexual relations with Shelley in Este, and possibly
even became pregnant and tried to have an abortion at Padua. . .”
“. . .so are you suggesting they were both pregnant by Shelley?”
“. . .Holmes thinks it’s possible. Holmes believes there was a possi-
bility that Elise was pregnant and gave birth to Elena Adelaide Shelley
at the same time that Claire was three months pregnant, and that Claire
miscarried or aborted the same night Elena was born. He cites Shelley’s
play The Cenci, written soon afterwards, as a kind of literary evidence:
Count Cenci’s two sons die on the same night, and the night chosen
in the play is precisely the night Elena’s birth was registered. I would
add, to support his version, that perhaps Mary would have known
about Elise, but the doctor’s coming could have been a cover for
a miscarriage or abortion by Claire that Mary wouldn’t have known
about. . .”
“. . .do you believe it?”
“. . .no. I did for a while, but I don’t now. I believe that the mystery lies
elsewhere, although I believe that due to the nature of Elise’s story, it’s
entirely possible that Claire was three months pregnant and did have
a miscarriage or an abortion. But I don’t believe Elena was her child, and
I also don’t believe that Elise fully knew what was really happening:
I believe that her story was a patchwork of truth and lies, all told as a way
to get back at them for her dismissal. . .”
“. . .but what’s wrong with his version of events?”
1
“. . .even Holmes states that he believes his version is true only as

a hypothesis. Due to his uncertainty, he placed it in an appendix to the
chapter, apart from the rest of his biography, and in a later book he
returned to his own story and decided against it, even going so far as to
consider the possibility suggested by Newman Ivey White, Shelley’s first
supposedly ‘definitive’ biographer, that Elena was a child adopted by
Shelley in Naples. . .”
“. . .what?”
“. . .yes, I know. . .people will go to great lengths in order to protect their
heroes, and I believe White was doing just that. He discounted the child’s
being Claire’s or Elise’s, and because he was still le with the direct
evidence of there actually being a child, he concocted this story, using the
little girl Shelley had educated at Marlow as a precedent. . .”
“. . .so tell me – what do you think?”
“. . .it seems to me that if Elise had been involved – if she had conceived
a child with Shelley at Como, she had too much to lose if the blackmail
plans backfired. Aer all, the worst part of her story was that Claire did
have a child, and it turned precisely on the fact that, if Holmes is right, it
was actually Elise’s child, and thus Elise’s scandal. Holmes argues that she
was projecting her own guilt onto Claire – that she was jealous of Claire,
rather than Mary. It’s possible, but I instinctively feel that while Paolo may
have cooked up the blackmail, it seems unlikely Elise would have had
anything to gain from telling the Hoppners – if she were indeed the
mother of the child. However, Mary did explicitly say that she forced them
to marry because Elise was pregnant and that she was in danger of
a miscarriage, so there’s still her pregnancy to account for: the outcome
was never made clear, as far as I know. ere’s mention of a child in a letter
to Mary in July, 181, that was six months old, but that child would have
been conceived in May, 180, so it was probably Paolo’s child, but there’s
no mention of an earlier child. Holmes argues she couldn’t have been
pregnant enough to have caused this concern if it had been a child with
Paolo, given they met in early September and the birth was late December,
as their affair wasn’t discovered until they were on their way to Rome, in
late October, which may have been too early to even be concerned about
a miscarriage, but it’s still possible, it seems to me. . .”
“. . .it’s possible they formed their connection right away, and Mary just
didn’t notice it – she was rather distracted at the time with her grief over
Clara. . .”
1
“. . .yes – or, I still think it may have been a child of Byron’s. From what
we know, he tended to treat servants as chattel. Much of what Elise had
said in her letters was not legible, but she was clearly hysterical, and, being
alone in his household with no other women around, she clearly felt
threatened. Claire mentioned to Silsbee that there were rumors that Elise
had become Byron’s lover. . .”
“. . .so, hold on. . .if I follow you correctly, you think that the child that
lived – Elena Adelaide Shelley – was neither Mary’s, nor Claire’s, nor
Elise’s. . .right?”
“. . .right. . .”
“. . .and I suppose I can assume, can’t I, that it wasn’t a child of the other
servant?”
“. . .no, it wasn’t Milly Shields’ child. . .”
“. . .therefore you think there was another woman involved?”
“. . .Holmes’ argument convinced me for a long time, even though it
was the most outlandish of all of the possibilities in terms of proprieties,
given that Shelley. . .how to say it? I suppose it’s only possible with some
terribly convoluted verb tense: he would have had to have had sexual rela-
tions with all three women – Mary, Claire, and Elise – in a short space of
time. While anything is possible, it doesn’t strike me as in keeping with
Shelley’s character: free love aside, he tended to go through seasonal shis
with the women in his life. When Mary was indisposed, he was with
Claire, and when Claire was indisposed, or distant, he was with Mary –
and so on. In any case, many critics have either tried to reduce the possi-
bilities to two women – Mary and Elise, or Mary and Claire, unless, like
White, they were inventing fables. My assumption was also, at first, that
if it wasn’t as Holmes had said – involving three women in their
entourage, then it was either just Shelley and Elise, or Shelley and Claire,
not something more complex, and I leaned towards believing that it was
Claire’s child one moment, Elise’s child the next. . .”
“. . .has the mystery been uncovered – has someone found out?”
“. . .not for certain, but there’s been some additional evidence uncov-
ered. I found a new possibility suggested by the editor of Claire’s corre-
spondence. at this editor should have been the one to point to the
truth is somewhat ironic, for she’s one of the group of scholars who cate-
gorically denied Shelley had any sexual relationship with Claire. . .”
“. . .why would it matter so much – aren’t biographers and critics
seeking the truth?”
1
“. . .I’m not even sure I believe in biography any more, or at least

‘definitive biography.’ I think it’s a historically and culturally delim-
ited genre that came into existence initially during the Renaissance,
and in its current form with the rationalism and empiricism of the
Enlightenment, which is why the majority of biographies are written
in English, as in the Anglo-American world positivism reigns supreme.
One must believe in unified selves in order to write a classical biog-
raphy, and that’s becoming increasingly difficult in our epoch, when
the self is de-centered – by language on the one hand, by society and
history on the other. One can sense the problem in Holmes’ biog-
raphy: I think in a way it is as good as the traditional form of literary
biography can get, and I like it very much, especially the sense I get
that Holmes wasn’t at first entirely sympathetic to his subject, but
then Shelley grows on him, gets under his skin – it’s really quite
extraordinary. However, you can see the problem: he wants to specu-
late, and yet sees his ‘duty’ to positivistic biography intervening – duty
to the genre, to the belief in an arrived-at final truth lurking out there
somewhere. So, he decided to place his speculations in an appendix,
but even that wasn’t enough, so in a later book about his work as
a biographer he returned to the subject with a greater freedom to spec-
ulate, and the strange thing was that he backed away a bit from his
earlier position. . .”
“. . .so do you think biographies shouldn’t be written?”
“. . .certainly not – they’re very helpful resources. I would merely
redraw the definition of what ‘definitive’ means, placing a skeptical
frame around it. While the current form of biography avoids theoret-
ical speculation, or diverging from the designated facts, no critic or
biographer would dare lie about the truth, or withhold facts, so in the
gaps where they interpret, or weigh certain facts more heavily than
others, we can find other possibilities of interpretation that fit the
same facts. In the case of this particular editor, it may well have been
due to her desire to take the focus off of Shelley’s relation to Claire
Clairmont that she actually uncovered the truth, or another fragment
of it. . .”
“. . .but I don’t understand her motivation in the first place: you’re
implying she couldn’t tolerate the idea that Shelley had two women in
his life. . .”
“. . .yes, I think so. . .”
1
“. . .it’s as if she was jealous. . .”

“. . .I don’t think that can be underestimated as a motivation – but not
really jealousy per se – rather a kind of protectiveness towards his repu-
tation, or perhaps more towards hers. . .”
“. . .was his life really so scandalous? Like you said, Byron’s life seems
far more scandalous, in comparison. . .”
“. . .society determines what is considered immoral as strictly as it
determines what is considered moral: the creation of concepts like
‘lover,’ ‘mistress,’ and ‘kept woman’ seem like ways to moralistically
prevent such breaches of fidelity through threatening social ostracism
for the women who inhabit these categories, but I believe they operate
the opposite way – they channel behavior into defined modes of being
that, even though ‘officially’ scandalous, maintain a certain order and
hierarchy, and consequently inversely prop up the social order.
I believe for Shelley’s society morality was a cover for the building
blocks of the social order – the class system, private property, patri-
mony, inheritance. . .”
“. . .you sound like a Marxist. . .”
“. . .hardly – one needn’t be a Marxist to accept that these structures
played a significant role in Shelley’s society. A mistress, courtesan, or
prostitute was not a true threat to the social order – indeed, she was oen
a status symbol, as only men of the higher classes could afford them, and,
in some cases women. . .”
“. . .women?”
“. . .certainly. For example, Byron would soon become involved with
Teresa Guiccioli, a married woman. Italian society of that time tolerated
upper-class woman to have a sort of courtly lover called a ‘cavalier
servente’ – but their affairs, unlike the French courtly lovers, were not
expected to be chaste. e husband had full knowledge of it, and clearly
it was only women of the upper classes who could afford to do it, or
perhaps their husbands could afford to allow them do it. . .”
“. . .so, you’re saying that if Claire had been merely Shelley’s mistress,
she wouldn’t have been so threatening. . .”
“. . .precisely, and, as I said before, it was partly due to class reasons,
partly due to questions of patrimony – and the whole social schema that
supported it. Shelley’s greatest scandal, remember, was the giving up of
his rights of inheritance, and his threatening to break up his father’s
estate. . .”
1
“. . .but it’s terrible – it’s so hypocritical: certain supposedly immoral

relations were considered officially wrong, but were rightly wrong, while
Claire was not condemned for being Byron’s mistress and the mother of
his illegitimate child, but for being one of Shelley’s two women. . .”
“. . .she would have been condemned for it if biographers even admitted
it as a possibility! You can add to that another taboo – the fact that Mary
and Claire were step-sisters: two step-sisters connected intimately with
a third party ended up being far more scandalous to English morality
than the lesser scandal of Byron having intimate relations with his half-
sister Augusta, not to mention hundreds of other lovers, so one cannot
simply attribute the scandal to the incest taboo. No, the point is that Lord
Byron maintained the hierarchy and social order, while Shelley ques-
tioned it and even attempted to dismantle it. . .”
“. . .that explains the reaction then, but why should critics today, like
this editor, still cling to the story that Claire was never Shelley’s lover, let
alone not one of his partners?”
“. . .why indeed? e most immediate answer is wanting to shield
Shelley from his many detractors, but this begs the question as to why his
having been involved with two women was so especially scandalous.
Many of the same people who accept homosexual relations as a matter of
course tend to lump a relational configuration like Shelley’s in the same
category as Muslims or Mormons having multiple wives, which is a cate-
gory confusion, I think, between a conservative ideology and something
considerably more radical and open. . .”
“. . .but why the double-standard between homosexuals and. . .what
should one call this?”
“. . .perhaps ‘plural relations’ – I think the emerging term is ‘polyamory,’
to distinguish it from the connotations of polygamy. . .”
“. . .so weren’t Shelley’s ‘plural relations’ freely chosen and entered into
as. . .what is the term used in America?”
“. . .‘consenting adults’. . .”
“. . .yes, weren’t they all ‘consenting adults’?”
“. . .of course, but that’s precisely the point: I think that even if one does
imagine such relations freely entered into by intelligent, responsible
human beings, there’s still something taboo about them to most people
– even those who would accept homosexuality on the one hand, or
promiscuity on the other. e first point to remember is that they’re
extremely rare, and, if we use Shelley as a male example, and someone like
1
Anaïs Nin or Marguerite Duras as the female examples, one can see why
they’re rare: they’re difficult to maintain and manage, and clearly the
reason this difficulty was endured by the people involved was some
absolutely singular need. Anything singular is unusual, and society has
never quietly endured the unusual – it unsettles things. . .”
“. . .unsettles things? How? What was being unsettled?”
“. . .I think Duras gets to the point in her book, Détruire, dit-elle –
Destroy, She Said in English, where her protagonists, with their strange
multi-relations, are described as ‘mutants.’ At the time it was published,
she gave an interview that was influenced by the times – the events of May,
198, in Paris, where she discusses a real ‘communism’ of human relations.
Although her terminology is somewhat dated and perhaps unfortunate,
I think she grasps something, in that what her protagonists threaten is
a mutation away from a strictly demarcated individualism. . .or, rather,
their mutation is perspectival, in that they simply notice and act on what
is already and always the case – that we are not the unified selves that
modern western society takes for granted. . .”
“. . .I understand why it’s so unusual, but why does something beyond
the usual couple relation necessarily produce such a threatening muta-
tion?”
“. . .perhaps not necessarily. One can imagine a society with stable, fixed
relations – such as the polygamy I mentioned before in certain conser-
vative religious formations like Islam and Mormonism, but even the stan-
dard love affair in contemporary western society tends towards stability,
or what Georges Bataille called an ‘oppressive conjugality’. . .”
“. . .how do you mean?”
“. . .certainly love affairs begin as a destabilizing dri away from the
social norm – that’s why they can be so delicious, and risky, but how long
is it before the settling process takes over, leading, usually, to either the
abandonment of the affair and a return to the original couple, or the
abandonment of the original couple and the establishment of a new
couple?”
“. . .so you doubt the openness can be maintained?”
“. . .it’s not that I doubt that it can be maintained, it’s that I doubt many
people really want it maintained, at the deepest level. Proust wrote, ‘We
live only with what we do not love, with what we have brought to live with
us only in order to kill the intolerable love. . . .’ Western literature is full
of cautionary tales about the dangers of unbridled passion – Romeo and
18
Juliet, Tristan and Isolde – when the sex drive merges into the death drive
– perhaps they’re only a difference in intensity of the same drive. . .”
“. . .so the danger in Shelley’s mode of relation was this intensity?”
“. . .the reason the mode of someone like Shelley is different from the
norm is that they are moving towards a destabilizing mutation, and
there’s a direct relation between their writings and their lives, in regard to
this variability. . .”
“. . .what do you mean by ‘variability’?”
“. . .I’m mixing the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann with the
philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari: by variability I mean the social
equivalent to natural selection – the experimental aspect of human life
that attempts new ways of adapting successfully to the environment –
and in the case of humans, this is largely the social environment. The
force of mutation or adaptive selection is countered or restricted by the
stabilizing force of the social system, which takes up these adaptations
when they’re deemed useful by society, watering them down in the
process. It’s a dialectical process, endlessly agonistic or conflicted, as
both the forces of variability and stabilization tend towards excess, and
in a sense need each other to disrupt their respective processes, for if
stabilization becomes too strong, the system can no longer adapt
quickly enough to its environment, but if variability becomes too
strong, chaos ensues – a cancerous mutation. . .”
“. . .so the former case – too much stabilization – would be like Czecho-
slovakia under communism, when the country began to fall apart
economically in the 1980s under the weight of its own lack of
momentum. . .”
“. . .precisely. Like Luhmann, I believe the role of the artist or writer,
as it has developed since Romanticism, has been to communicate the
changes in the environment to the society, which was something
Shelley anticipated when he spoke of poets as ‘hierophants of unap-
prehended inspiration’ and ‘the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which
futurity casts upon the present.’ They’re like human antennae, who
relay their ideas and images and experiments to the more conforming,
cautious majority, who then take up their adaptations in more domes-
ticated, safer forms. . .”
“. . .but what about Shelley? He was ostracized by his social system, and,
from what you tell me, his poetry and ideas continue to be ignored or
distorted – wasn’t he a failed experiment?”
19
“. . .the more radical the experiment, the longer it takes to be tested and
adapted by society; however, the experiments that took the longest to be
adapted have oen turned out to be the most fruitful. at Shelley’s life
was just such an experiment I haven’t a doubt. . .”
“. . .but what aspects of his experiment have been taken up by society?”
“. . .there were many aspects of his experiment, but, just taking his
experiment in intimate relations by itself, one must look at the wider
context. I think every human experiment begins with an idea or concept,
which is then applied practically. First of all, the idea that we are free, and
therefore free to determine our lives, was an Enlightenment belief –
implied by Kant, Locke, Rousseau, and others. Within that horizon, the
belief that love relations could take a different form than they had previ-
ously taken was first advanced by Rousseau in his novel Julie. Today it’s
difficult even to recognize what was so new in the novel, for we take its
concept for granted, but, for that moment in history, the idea that love
could be based on the open, mutual sharing of equal selves was new. . .”
“. . .surely people fell in love and shared their selves before Rousseau’s
novel, didn’t they?”
“. . .did they? I’m not so sure. Certainly sexual desire has always existed,
and certainly people have fallen in love with one another since ancient
history, but sharing their selves as equal, individualized selves? What
was new was the idea of love defined as a continuous dialogue between
growing, evolving, open, and equal individualities – a free sharing of
interiorities that can be seen in the letters the lovers share in Rousseau’s
novel. What’s significant about the epistolary form of the novel is that
it allowed the reader to see more closely that their love was a sharing of
interior monologues, of selves. at was new – so new, in fact, that it
was revolutionary: I once read that while Rousseau’s political treatises
may have provided a part of the blueprint for the macropolitical side of
the French Revolution, it was his novels that provided the fuel and
passion that spurred the micropolitical side of the revolution – espe-
cially in women. If sales are any consideration, it must have worked, for
Julie swept Europe. . .”
“. . .when was it published?”
“. . .in 11. It was translated into English by 1, and by 181 it had
already gone through fieen editions in English alone. . .”
“. . .really? I would have thought that the English wouldn’t have
allowed his works to even enter the country. . .”
10
“. . .they saw it ‘only’ as a novel, when, for the time, it was closer to being
a war machine – a Trojan horse. For example, e Social Contract was
written only a year aer Julie, but it took almost twenty-five years longer
to be translated into English – in 19. Still, ideas need people willing
to be the first experimenters, and those have largely been, since the
Romantic period, the artistic avant-gardes – people like the Jena
Romantics in Germany, or Shelley and his circle. As I mentioned before,
while Shelley thought many of Rousseau’s ideas rather far-fetched, in
Geneva the whole circle passed Julie around to one another to read, and
they visited sites around the lake where events in the novel had taken
place. . .”
“. . .so what we’re doing now with Shelley was first pioneered by Shelley
himself, visiting the sites associated with Rousseau?”
“. . .it’s certainly possible – tourism was just beginning then, and literary
tourism was, if anything, even newer. At any rate, certainly Shelley’s ideas
about love were an extension of what he read in the novel, mixed with
what he had read in Godwin, Mary Wollstonecra, and others in
England. His actions were a practical application of those ideas. e fact
that Mary and Shelley were not married at first is insignificant compared
to the fact that they saw their lives as an open sharing of their evolving
selves. e refusal of the marital bond was only a symptom – the idea
being that the social considerations behind most marriages in regard to
class, status, and family line were trivial in comparison to what was
happening between two selves in relation to one another. . .”
“. . .so if I understand your point, you’re saying that what modern
society takes for granted at the end of the 0th century – that two people
in a love relation evolve both independently and in relation to each
another – was pioneered by people like Shelley?”
“. . .it first had to be conceived in an entirely abstract way by
Enlightenment thinkers who developed conceptions of human
autonomy like Spinoza, Rousseau, and Kant; then it needed to be
thought through and enacted relationally by individuals like Shelley, the
Schlegels, and Hölderlin. e general society resisted it, then slowly tried
it on: it began to be adapted more widely – usually first by artistic circles,
and then by those striving to be modern or progressive, until by the 190s
it became a part of youth culture, and by now it’s generally taken for
granted, at least in postmodern societies. Of course, as society adapted
it, it became increasingly watered-down, so that I would argue few inti-
11
mate relations today exhibit the intensity of relation that Shelley had
with Mary or Claire. . .”
“. . .not to mention that society would still consider Shelley having rela-
tions with both women somewhat problematic. . .”
“. . .certainly, but I doubt whether such plural relations ever would or
could catch on – aer all, it’s difficult enough to maintain such an inti-
macy with one person, let alone two. . .”
“. . .but how is it related to the idea of shared intimacies?”
“. . .shared intimacy is strongly connected to the idea that people evolve
individually, and that this evolution is free-flowing and unpredictable –
that love might flow in more than one direction is a possible conse-
quence, but most people find it perverse, unnatural, immoral, or, in prac-
tice, impossible. . .”
“. . .‘immoral’? It seems somewhat hypocritical to me that people today
quite regularly fail in their relationships, replace their partners, and
consider it ‘moral,’ while a person like Shelley is designated ‘immoral’ for
having established and maintained two long-term relationships. . .”
“. . .of course you’re right, but if it were merely a matter of immorality,
they would have stressed what he did as a bad example, rather than
suppressing it. If Shelley’s actions are immoral, they are so only in the
same sense that Galileo was immoral – because he was a dangerous agent
of variability. What is disturbing is the simple fact that he placed the
bond of love between individuals higher than that church, state, or
society, or, as he put, ‘Love is the sole law which shall govern the moral
world’. . .in a way it’s not that different from the lessons taught by another
radical: Jesus. . .”
“. . .but of course Shelley’s ideas involved eros. . .”
“. . .yes, and he went on to try to enact it. . .”
“. . .not always successfully, it seems to me. . .”
“. . .few experiments are ever entirely successful – even Shelley wasn’t
immune from temptation. . .”
“. . .which finally brings us back to the story – you’ve been drawing out
the suspense wonderfully, but now tell me, who was the mother of Elena?”
“. . .it appears there was another woman, who was to Shelley a bit like
Lady Caroline Lamb was to Byron – an upper-class ingénue seeking
a romantic poet of her very own. Byron, as well as Thomas Medwin,
appear to have been told about this mystery woman, and apparently
Claire knew the story as well, and divulged at least a part of it to
1
Edward Silsbee. None of them ever mentioned her name, but Medwin,
Shelley’s cousin and first biographer, was told that she claimed she had
renounced her family and friends in order to follow Shelley throughout
the world, living a life of ‘free love and poetry.’ He seems to have
refused her several times, but she followed them to Geneva, and
appears to have been one of the many English tourists spying on Byron
and Shelley via telescope when they went on boating expeditions on
the lake. . .”
“. . .are you joking?”
“. . .not at all – women tourists were said to have fainted upon even
catching a glimpse of Byron. According to Medwin, the mystery woman
followed them to the continent the second time as well. Where we get
closer to the realm of fact again is when Shelley rode down to Naples
from Rome ostensibly to secure their lodgings in advance: there’s vague
evidence from Medwin that during this two day period Shelley lodged
once with this young woman, although whatever Medwin believed or
was told about this incident, he seems to have thought the woman was
still in her mad and fruitless pursuit of the poet. If the editor’s suspicion
is right, this meeting between the two was to inform Shelley of a more
fruitful meeting earlier that had resulted in her pregnancy – or, perhaps
he already knew of it by mail, and they were meeting to decide what to do
about it. Given the recent death of Clara and Mary’s subsequent grief,
this pregnancy obviously would not have come as welcome news, and if
indeed Claire were pregnant as well, then these two events together
would have given him cause for unbearable discomfort and excruciating
psychic pain – the kind he recounted in his ‘Lines Written in Dejection’
ode, written in Naples during that period. . .but here we must look to
Silsbee and Claire for evidence. . .”
“. . .Medwin said nothing more?”
“. . .no – he seems to have been le with the belief that while this
woman did pursue Shelley first to Geneva and then to Italy, he gallantly
held her off the whole time. He believed that the woman died mysteri-
ously in Naples, although Claire, in her dotage, said the woman was still
alive, and found this reason enough not to tell Silsbee of her actual iden-
tity, but what she did tell, according to his notes, roundly confirms that
at the very least there is a very distinct possibility that this other woman
was the mother of the child. . .”
“. . .would Mary have known?”
1
“. . .at some point: there are indications that she was told of the plan to
return to Naples later, although whether she knew about Elena is
unknown. Aer his death she certainly wanted to play down that part of
Shelley’s life. . .”
“. . .so, what came from Silsbee?”
“. . .notes – literally scraps of paper he used when he was interviewing
Claire before her death in Florence in the 180s, fiy years later. On one
scrap there’s a note that there was a married woman in Naples, and that
Shelley ‘got into a scrape’ with her. . .”
“. . .are those Claire’s words, or Silsbee’s?”
“. . .Claire’s. e editor of her journals pointed out that in a letter Claire
wrote to Mary she used precisely the same phrase to describe another
woman who had become pregnant out of wedlock. From the notes that
still exist, Silsbee appears to have taken down the points rapidly – or was
even writing them down secretly. . .perhaps Claire didn’t want him to
record anything at all, and he was writing it down when he went to the
bathroom or stepped out for a cigarette – who knows? e notes
mention that Mary knew all about it, which does seem to fit the facts –
at least later, when the blackmail started. Claire also said that the ‘Lines
Written in Dejection’ ode was inspired by this event. . .”
“. . .did Claire give any other clues about her identity?”
“. . .she said she was sworn to secrecy – in an early interview with
Silsbee her secrecy seemed to hinge upon whether the lady was dead or
alive, and Claire didn’t seem to know, although part of the secrecy had
to do precisely with the fact she was a real ‘lady’ – Claire intimates she
might have been a well-known member of the aristocracy. In a later
interview she told him the lady was still alive, and that she wouldn’t
identify her. . .”
“. . .do you believe her?”
“. . .yes I do. . .clearly Silsbee kept coming back to the issue, and she had
some reason for not telling him – she never told anyone else, aer all. It
must have been difficult not to divulge more, as Mary and Lady Jane
Shelley had already gone far in eradicating Claire’s role in Shelley’s life:
it must have been a great temptation to set matters straight, but she main-
tained their imperceptibility to the very end. . .”
“. . .I can imagine how she was pulled between wanting to tell and
wanting to protect Shelley – wanting to be acknowledged as someone so
close to him, and fearing that the world might never shake off its new-
1
found Victorian conservatism, and would condemn her, and him, to the
hell of posterity. . .”
“. . .even in telling as much as she did, she wanted to protect him. . .”
“. . .did she tell Silsbee what she thought about his relationship with
Mary?”
“. . .yes, she said that she felt his love for Mary was ‘intellectual’ – that
Mary was ‘cold.’ Of course, that’s partly just Claire speaking, given the
history of the three, although it speaks to a certain paradox: Shelley had
initially fallen in love with Mary, and their relations, over time, became
very deep but strangely frozen. ere’s some truth to what Claire said
about Mary being ‘cold’ – others, from Trelawny to Jane Williams, testi-
fied to her coldness. It was the opposite with Claire: her relation with
Shelley arose from circumstances, not out of initial infatuation or
passion, and it became quite passionate – but in a less tempestuous,
‘falling-in-love’ sort of way. Claire was described in Epipsychidion, written
later, as a ‘comet’ – coming close to him and then traveling away again,
and that image describes their relations well: firmly connected to the
point of fusing, then explosive, then distant – first when she went away
aer the death of Mary’s first child, then later when she pursued Byron,
and then even later when she lived in Florence, while Shelley and Mary
lived in Pisa. ey certainly loved each other deeply, but with a very
different kind of love than Mary and Shelley had for each other. Shelley
was more likely to go on adventures with Claire, and later Shelley was
more likely to share confidences with her, especially given Mary’s
emotional withdrawal following the death of Clara. Claire definitely
knew more of the truth about Shelley than anyone – and not just the
truth of their relations. In her own way she was faithful to that truth,
while Mary tried much more to distort the truth – truths she herself
couldn’t face, and then later wanted to disguise. Claire seems to have
known a good deal more all along. . .”
“. . .so she never told anyone who the mystery woman was?”
“. . .no, just the hints she gave Silsbee, but they were enough, I believe,
to make an educated guess. . .”
“. . .based on what evidence?”
“. . .initially, I noticed that the editor of the letters advanced as a possi-
bility the daughter of one of Queen Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting: Lady
Charlotte Campbell Bury. She had married, divorced and then re-
married the Reverend Edward John Bury, the tutor of her children: it
1
created a minor scandal because he was fieen years younger than her; in
fact, he had received his baccalaureate from Oxford the same year Shelley
was expelled. Apparently she at some point became a friend of Godwin’s,
which creates another connection, and she was a woman writer – writing
both poetry and melodramatic novels with titles like Flirtation, e
Divorced, and Love. She was also the anonymous author of a scandalous
work entitled Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting – a ‘tell-all’ account of the
secret lives of the aristocracy, and she certainly lived the life she wrote
about: a friend of hers was shocked when Bury’s reaction, upon hearing
that one of her daughters was unhappy with her husband and wanted
a separation, was to suggest that she find a lover as quickly as possible so
she could get a divorce. . .”
“. . .let me guess: that daughter was the one who went to Shelley?”
“. . .possibly. Lady Bury was on the continent precisely during the
period from 1818 – 18 with her daughters, so there’s the coincidence
of time and place, a vague connection to Shelley, plus names like ‘Elena’
and ‘Adelaide’ appear frequently in the family tree. . .”
“. . .so which daughter was it?”
“. . .the editor advanced the one with the closest sounding name:
Adelaide Constance Campbell, and I must admit for a long while
I thought it was her as well. . .”
“. . .and now you don’t?”
“. . .no, because I found more convincing information in a new biog-
raphy of Shelley by a clinical psychologist who seems to have been an
amateur Shelley aficionado. His name is James Bieri: like me, he must
have been obsessed with finding out the truth, and I think he did. He
thinks Adelaide Constance Campbell would have been too young: it’s
difficult to tell, because what I can find out about her is that her birth
date is only listed as ‘before 180’. I do know at the time Shelley would
have come into contact with the family in 1818, two half-sisters, Eliza
Maria Campbell and Eleanora Campbell, were respectively 1 and 19
years of age, so if it was Adelaide Constance Campbell, she’d have to be
at least a year younger than Eleanora. . .”
“. . .18? It’s still possible – even down to 1 or 1. . .”
“. . .yes, but there’s more. Silsbee recorded that the mystery woman was
married already. We do know that Eliza was married to a rather unat-
tractive man, and that her mother and sisters showed no restraint from
committing adultery, seeing themselves as ‘freethinkers’; and a younger
1
sister, Harriet, wrote that there had been a family crisis in Naples at the
precise time Shelley was there, involving Eliza and Eleanora. . .”
“. . .both? Perhaps the sister didn’t know the details. . .”
“. . .I would guess the two might have traveled together to Naples – their
Mother was still in Rome. Given Eliza was married, and considering what
Silsbee said, my bet is on Eliza. I think it interesting that Mary and Claire
saw the daughters in Pisa, and that the daughters also visited Emilia
Viviani at her convent – but I don’t know what to make of it all – it seems
the more we know, the more mysterious it all gets! Anyway, going back to
the blackmail plot, Elise may have assumed Elena was Claire’s child, not
knowing about the existence of Eliza if they were really forced to hush it
up. If Holmes is right about Claire having had a miscarriage at about the
same time, the two events could clearly have led Elise into the confusion
she had about the matter. Also, Elise, later in 18, did meet Claire again
in Florence: she confessed her role in the Hoppner scandal, and Claire
had Elise write to both Mr. and Mrs. Hoppner denying the story she had
told them clearly as a way to prevent further blackmail attempts, and to
clear her name. Apparently, aer the initial disturbance, Elise and Claire
became more friendly – it’s doubtful this would have happened if it had
turned out to have been the child of either. . .”
“. . .so, let’s see if I have this straight: you believe the story is this young
woman from an aristocratic family, who married young and who was
already bored, fell in love with Shelley – either due to her stepfather’s
reports of his behavior at Oxford, or perhaps despite her stepfather’s
reports, or merely because he was associated with the infamous Byron;
that she offered herself to him in London, later getting up the nerve to
follow him again to the continent, where probably, just aer they arrived
in Italy, Shelley had given in to her. . .and that they parted, and then the
entourage went on to Bagni di Lucca aer sending Allegra and Elise to
Byron, while Eliza went with her family – where?”
“. . .somewhere else in Italy presumably, certainly to Rome, but even-
tually to Naples: we have no evidence, but just as certainly we don’t
know what drove the Shelley entourage from Rome to Naples after
only a week – especially given they returned and remained in Rome for
much longer after those events transpired. I would guess he told her
they would eventually arrive in Rome, and he found a letter from her
post restante. . .”
“. . .asking him to come to her in Naples?”
1
“. . .yes – it’s hardly likely that she was alone – probably her sister was
there with her. In any case, Shelley was forced to deal with it in secrecy
for all their sakes, given they were already attracting scandalous gossip –
and especially for Mary’s sake, given Mary had just lost a child. . .”
“. . .so what happened – why didn’t she keep her child?”
“. . .Medwin’s account says she died, but Shelley probably lied to
Medwin about her death in order to protect the lady in question. I assume
she le the child in Naples to avoid any scandal – she was part of the
peerage, aer all, and destined to become a ‘Lady’ herself – an illegitimate
child just wouldn’t do. If he felt that they could go back later and retrieve
the child at their own discretion – and from the evidence this seems to
have been the case – then it seems unlikely the child would have been with
its mother. Elise told the Hoppners that Shelley paid the midwife to give
the child to a foundling hospital; however, the evening Elise and Claire
met again in Florence in 18, Claire wrote in her journal something
about Elise giving the Naples ‘commission’ to her husband, which was
later crossed out. e editor seems to think that it was some task in the
present tense, but Paolo was not with her then, so I am guessing it was
a mistake in tense and that Claire was possibly making a euphemism for
the fact that the child – the ‘commission’ – was given to Paolo to be taken
away: we know the child was taken to a specific address in Naples. Elise
may have lied to the Hoppners to hide her own connection to what
happened. I would guess that she and Paolo took the child under their
own care with Shelley’s full knowledge. Indeed, given he and Elise le the
Shelley entourage at that precise point – a mid-way point between the
child’s birth in December and its baptism in February – it’s possible that
Shelley’s transfer of money went to Paolo and Elise as a partial severance
payment, and also as a payment for taking care of the child until later when
he planned to send for her. We know that Elise came to see them in
Florence in January, 180 with some disturbing piece of news, and that
by the time they were in Pisa, in March, Shelley was forced to ride to
Livorno to see their friends, the Gisbornes, about giving them the money
to send to his Naples lawyer – to give to someone else. As far as we know,
there was no blackmail attempt yet, so it seems that the money was to
cover the upkeep of Elena, who was then fourteen months old. We know
Elena died on June 9th, and that Paolo started the blackmail attempt on
June 1th – only a few days aer the child died, so he must have been
taking care of the child with Elise, or was in direct contact with whoever
18
was. . .”
“. . .this is getting rather complex – just what are you suggesting?”
“. . .I don’t know – I’m just trying to weigh the possibilities. That
Eliza Campbell would willingly give up her child is very possible given
her standing, as despite her youthful idealism in pursuing Shelley, she
was married to an English Lord, Sir William Gordon-Cumming, had
four children with him, and lived on until 18. Also, it’s possible that
Paolo and Elise were kept in the dark about it all: handed a child to
dispose of, or take care of, they would have naturally assumed, given
Elise knew about Shelley and Claire’s connection, that it was Claire’s.
The child was kept at a specific address, as the death certificate was
found by White, so it was either taken care of by Paolo and Elise, or by
foster parents. . .”
“. . .I’m ready to accept that she was the mother – due to the name
mostly, but one thing I don’t understand is why Elise herself would have
gone to the Hoppners – unless it was to make good on the threats of the
blackmail. . .”
“. . .she must have been angry – she and Paolo had been sent away by
Mary because of their connection. She wanted to get back to them, and,
failing that, she wanted to get back at them: the story was told to harm
them, and she extenuated what she knew about their entourage, and told
what she believed to be the truth without knowing what had really
happened. But there are still so many gaps, so much is missing – in fact,
enough missing, as I’ve mentioned, that scholars can and do maintain to
this day that Shelley and Claire had no connection whatsoever, and, in
terms of actual empirical evidence, they are within the bounds of
evidence. . .”
“. . .do you believe your own interpretation?”
“. . .I believe I am near to the truth about Shelley’s relation to Claire.
As far as the mystery of the child goes, I am convinced at moments I am
right, but then just as suddenly thrown into doubt: each possibility –
Claire, Elise, Eliza, has at least one overwhelming fact: with Eliza it’s the
name in conjunction to Claire’s later statements; with Claire it’s Elise’s
report to the Hoppners and the fact of Claire’s illness at the same time
of the birth; with Elise it’s the fact she was reputedly pregnant. I still hold
to Eliza or perhaps her sister Eleanora being the one, possibly in conjunc-
tion with Claire’s pregnancy, which would account for the mix-ups in
Elise’s story – a mixture of Holmes’ theory with the new evidence given
19
by Bieri. . .”
“. . .and if your theory were correct, what do you make of it?”
“. . .not much, actually. Whatever the case, I would always have believed
Shelley was intimate with Claire. at Shelley would have surrendered
to an insistent young woman is a little hard to believe at first, but he was
not used to the kind of adulation Byron was receiving, and it must have
been a new experience to him – aer all, Byron was more or less
a celebrity, and their time in Geneva connected Shelley’s name to Byron,
making him a celebrity for the first time in his life as well. . .”
“. . .why were they so popular? Most people today can’t even name their
own country’s contemporary poets. . .”
“. . .in Shelley’s case, his popularity first came more through association
with Byron than by his own poetry, but Byron was riding the wave caused
by Walter Scott’s Waverly novels – his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was
published the same year, 181. Novelists like Samuel Richardson and
Henry Fielding had sold well in the 18th century, but it was nothing like
the sales popular novelists like Scott, or poets like Robert Burns and
Byron, were seeing. A part of it was due to the rise in literacy of the
middle classes, part of it the role literature was beginning to play within
the society as it gained an autonomous position. . .”
“. . .autonomous?”
“. . .as the hierarchically-ordered social system of pre-modernity gave
way to the functional differentiation of modernity, literature acquired
greater autonomy, and consequently became a form of dissemination of
new ways of thinking and living. Many of these novels seem somewhat
tame by today’s standards, but they were the primary source for the new
sensibilities sweeping Europe in the wake of the French Revolution –
despite the European-wide conservative reaction. A young woman like
Eliza Campbell may have had to read her Julie or Waverly or Childe
Harold guardedly, but once she did, if she took it seriously, where were
the aspirants to these new sensibilities to meet her newly awakened
yearnings? I would guess she headed straight to the source – Byron, and,
given he was unavailable, toward his less well-known contemporary,
Shelley. So if a young woman was quoting to his face his own thoughts
on ‘free love’ and offering herself as Claire did to Byron? As Byron said
about Claire, he ‘could hardly have played the stoic.’ Shelley was human,
aer all, he wasn’t perfect, and during the time the brief affair happened
he couldn’t have foreseen the future distress of either Claire in regard to
10
Allegra, or Mary in regard to losing Clara. I don’t fault him his one early
dalliance with his own slowly developing fame – not with notorious rakes
like Byron on the same horizon. . .”
“. . .I don’t fault him either, but the consequences were disastrous for
him, given everything else that happened. . .”
“. . .certainly – I’m sure he regretted it bitterly. Nonetheless, it forced
on him a far more complex and mature view of the world. When all is
said and done, what I find fascinating is how here, in Este, life took
a sudden fateful turn for Shelley, toppling him fully from his former
certainties and idealism and irrevocably shiing his outlook and his
writing. In a way, he learned that ‘free love’ wasn’t free at all: that the
truth of being bonded to both Mary and Claire meant a precarious
balance – he was forced to find meaning in the suffering itself, not
through trying to transcend the suffering idealistically. . .”
“. . .you don’t think there’s a way to avoid the suffering?”
“. . .no, I don’t. It must be faced head on, and something inside me tells
me that the amount of meaning in one’s life is somehow crucially related
to how one endures and learns from one’s suffering – what do the stoics
say? ‘To become worthy of one’s suffering.’ Shelley had previously fled
from his sufferings – the sufferings of his youth, the loss of his family, his
country, his first wife and their children. I think the ‘fiend’ that was
pursuing his poetic personae throughout his poetry since Alastor was
founded on this repressed negativity – his refusal to face mutability, loss,
suffering. Shelley only matured when his pride and ideals were shattered,
and he was forced to suffer as a consequence of his actions. He learned
to face rather than run from the inevitability of loss, from what he only
now learned was a part of his own self – his passions, his drives, his nega-
tivity. I think he was changed for the better, becoming a better person –
and certainly a better poet. . .”
“. . .I want you to tell me about the poetry he wrote here – but aer
a nap – I’m so drowsy from this heat, and the wine. . .it’s so strange to be
right here, right now – it’s like a dream. . .”
“. . .so close your eyes – sleep awhile, and dream. . .”
11

ere were others: each in her singularity was a living flame, each a move-
ment that came to inhabit me as I advanced into a futurity that these words
can only trace – an opening to presences inhabiting me with desire, longing,
loss, and a savage joy that whispers to me just how soon it will all come to an
end. . .
My ties to each were forged not through a willed possession of the other, but
through an oblique relation to an interior space that would never be reached.
eir existences were hovering instants for me, bearing me through a dark-
ness like two wavering flames. To each in the intricacy of her existence I was
brought to bear witness: perhaps what we desired om each other was
nothing more than this act of bearing witness. We were bound together to
keep watch and in so doing we drew forth something absolutely singular om
each other. e web of connection between us was irrevocable, but this irrev-
ocability was as agile as the passing moments – as agile as our lives. . .
I hadn’t expected I would meet with such a strange and forceful intensity.
What emerged threw me back upon myself again and again, so that even as
I found myself, I lost what I thought I had found almost immediately.
I would not even pretend to know the nature of what willed itself through
me, nor the inflections of desire that would yield moments of bliss as oen as
it would yield moments of agony and anguish. How I found myself outside
the thresholds that transfix the laws of desire is a mystery I find myself
circling around endlessly. . .
Love is not about exchange, security, possession, or certainty: love is

a touch charged with loss – absence in the midst of presence, presence in the
midst of absence. Love is a relinquishment on the threshold of a consum-
mation, an arrival swollen with the anguish of departure. e other ruptures
us, opens us to an outside that pours in, sweeping us away as we recognize in
the other the inevitability of our own dissolution in time. . .

By the time they awoke within the castle precincts the light had already
soened. In the south thunderheads rise above the plain, brilliant in the
late aernoon sun. e tree branches sough above them in the intermit-
tent breeze. He reaches for the mineral water, and takes several swallows.
She stretches her arms, yawns, and turns to him.
“. . .how long have we been sleeping?”
“. . .over two hours – it’s just aer five. . .”
“. . .really? It seems longer. . .you know, I did dream about them. . .we
were there, or here rather, but they couldn’t see us. . .I don’t remember
anything more. . .”
“. . .I dreamt something about here too, but I can’t remember. . .daytime
dreams are always so strange. Have some water – the wine has probably
dehydrated us a bit. . .”
“. . .thanks. . .”
He lights a panatela, then hands the lighter to the woman, who lights
a cigarette.
“. . .it’s still so hot, but at least the sun is not so intense. . .”
“. . .nobody’s here. . .they have the right idea: go home, sleep, come out
later when it’s cooler. . .”
“. . .it’s just as well – there’s no one to disturb us. Shall we go back to
the villa, to see if anyone is there?”
“. . .let me clear my head a little first. . .”
He slowly rubs his brow with his thumb and middle finger, gazing at
the billowing thunderheads in the distance.
“. . .Shelley was right – the cloudscapes are incredible here. It reminds
me of the sky I used to see when I lived in Colorado, or when I would go
down to Arizona and New Mexico. . .”
“. . .it’s beautiful – do you miss it?”
“. . .I miss the landscape and the sky. . .in the Czechlands you rarely see
clouds reaching the same heights, and by late August it’s oen so hazy you
can hardly distinguish the clouds from the sky – it feels enclosed, the sky is
lower somehow. Maybe it’s also the sense of history – America has natural
1
beauty, but it’s as strangely vacant and open as Europe is enclosed. . . it’s
been a long time since I’ve been there. . .”
“. . .I’d like to see it with you some day. . .”
“. . .and I’d like to show it to you. . .it would be so strange – it would
probably be far more foreign for me than it is here in Italy! Like that
Henry James story e Jolly Corner, where the expatriate American imag-
ines the self he would have been if he had stayed in America, and realizes
that he would have been a different person altogether. I feel somehow
closer to Shelley’s world – even though it’s so distant temporally – than
I feel spatially to the landscapes of America, or temporally to the land-
scapes of my own youth. . .”
“. . .what was it that made you interested in Shelley in the first place?”
“. . .I was initially attracted to the myth – the breaking of social norms,
the intensity of their lives, and even the romance of the tragedy of
Shelley’s death. At my university they only taught Wordsworth and
Keats, a little Coleridge, and only later, in graduate school, did I become
interested in Blake – but Shelley was passed over almost entirely, save for
one or two lyrics, and Shelley’s not the kind of poet easily read outside
of his biographical and socio-historical context. I guess I do remember
reading ‘Ozymandias’ much earlier; actually, now that I think of it, it was
the very first poem they taught us in elementary school – beyond nursery
rhymes, of course – in order to show us what poetry was! I must have
been only eight or nine. . .”
“. . .do you remember what you thought?”
“. . .it seemed very deep to me at the time – I saw immediately that the
language was different from normal language. Of course, they told us
nothing about Shelley then or later: it’s one of those poems that works
well merely as an exercise. Until I started reading him seriously a few years
ago, I didn’t even realize that ‘Ozymandias’ was an exercise: it was
a contest he was having with another poet, Horace Smith, on a preset
theme. . .”
“. . .still, that’s better than what I experienced under communism in the
Gymnasium: at my school in Opava we were taught little about the
English or German romantics, and only a bit more about the Czech
romantics like Mácha and Erben: they considered them ‘decadent bour-
geois individualists’ when they even mentioned them at all! Socialist
realism was the officially-approved literature, but mostly we were forced
to do all kinds of mathematics and practical tasks: they wanted us to
1
contribute to the industrial state economy and secure the communist

utopia nobody believed in anymore, so most of the humanities were seen
as irrelevant. . .”
“. . .yes, I can imagine. . .the self, the sublime, freedom of self-determi-
nation, the exceeding of limits – all far too dangerous. . .but it was also
true, for different reasons, in the United States, except in small doses –
the ‘greatest hits’ of Romanticism: poems like Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern
Abby’ or ‘Intimations of Immortality,’ Keats ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ or
Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ What about Czech Romanticism –
what is it like?”
“. . .the two most famous poets from the period are Karel Hynek Mácha
and Karel Jaromír Erben. . .”
“. . .when did they live?”
“. . .Mácha lived only until twenty-six years old. . .”
“. . .like Keats. . .”
“. . .he lived from 1810 to 18. I forget when Erben was born, but he
lived much longer – until 180. Mácha is oen compared with Byron – at
least in his tendency towards self-dramatization, and he was very influenced
by Byron’s poetry. Erben reminds me of what you say about Wordsworth,
in the sense that he became increasingly conservative over time. . .”
“. . .tell me more about them. . .”
“. . .Mácha was from Prague – he studied philosophy and law at Charles
University. He was an amateur actor, and was known for being quite
theatrical in his manners and dress – he affected the mannerisms of his
hero, Byron, and wore a long cloak lined in red. He was supposedly quite
handsome – he had a way with women, anyway. ere was a small scandal
when they finally published his uncensored diaries: in his poetry he
would write quite sweetly about ‘Lori,’ his girlfriend, but in his diaries he
was quite vulgar, listing how many times he had sex with her and how –
but the diaries went unpublished for a long time, so as not to spoil the
romantic image for all the teenagers who used to go and lay flowers under
his statue on Petřín hill every first of May. . .”
“. . .really? Poor girls, now they’ll know what really goes on in their
boyfriends’ minds. . .”
“. . .I think they know already! ere are stories about how Mácha went
out drinking and sang all the old Czech folksongs – they were forbidden
then, you know. He was known for going on long walks – to Vienna, and
even to Trieste and Venice. . .”
1
“. . .Rimbaud was also quite a walker – he made his way to Vienna and
back. . .”
“. . .Mácha apparently bedded Austrian farm girls along the way, to
make the trip interesting. . .”
“. . .and his poetry – what is it like?”
“. . .Mácha’s most well-known poem is a long poem call Máj – ‘May’ –
that he wrote at the end of his life. I’d say almost every Czech can recite
a few lines of it, or at least the opening. . .”
“. . .so go ahead, let me hear it, if you can remember your lessons well. . .”
“. . .I’ll give it a try:
Byl pozdní večer – první máj –

večerní máj – byl lásky čas.
Hrdliččin zval ku lásce hlas,
kde borový zavánĕl háj.
O lásce šeptal tichý mech;
kvĕtoucí strom lhal lásky žel,
svou lásku slavík růži pĕl,
růžinu jevil vonný vzdech. . .
. . .that’s where my memory fails me. . .”

“. . .it sounds beautiful – something about a beautiful May evening, isn’t
it? Can you translate?”
“. . .well, vaguely. . .it means something like, ‘It was a late evening,
the first of May, a May evening, the time of love. . .a dove’s voice. . .
called to’. . .I don’t know, perhaps ‘rapture’ or ‘bliss’. . .’where scented
pine woods lay. . .of love whispered the silent’ – what’s that stuff that
grows on trees?”
“. . .moss?’
“. . .yes, moss. . .‘a flowering tree lied of love’s sorrows, a nightingale sang
his love to a rose, the rose giving out its sweet fragrance’. . .not very poetic,
but it’s the best I can do quickly. . .”
“. . .what’s the rest of the poem about?”
“. . .it’s about a young man who is abandoned by his family and
becomes the head of a gang of thieves in the forest. . .”
“. . .like Robin Hood?”
“. . .not really – the plot is that the hero, Vilém, kills a man who seduced
his lover. e man turns out to have been his father, so he’s accused of
18
patricide, and is publicly executed. . .before he dies he thinks of his fate,

and the endless silence he’s about to enter. . .”
“. . .it sounds quite oedipal. . .”
“. . .oh, I think it’s very oedipal – the killing of the father, the sex
between the father and the would-be daughter-in-law. . .and there’s
a kind of oedipal return to childhood at the end – the idea of lost child-
hood is behind much of his work. . .”
“. . .and what about Erben?”
“. . .in a way, the difference between Mácha and Erben is a matter of
how each saw the changes happening around them – what we’ve been
talking about in regard to Shelley. Mácha celebrates nature but doesn’t
deify it: it has no purpose, and we make our way through life as individ-
uals in the face of darkness and uncertainty, unrelieved by the comfort of
some sort of truth beyond love and passion; whereas for Erben, Mácha’s
individualism was a real problem, and he suggested a kind of passive
humility in the face of truth, which went along with his focus on timeless
myths – in fact for Erben, a return to myth and folk culture was a reac-
tion to the Enlightenment. I prefer Mácha’s passionate nihilism over
Erben’s folk wisdom. . .”
“. . .what are Erben’s poems like?”
“. . .there’s one called ‘Vrba,’ or ‘Willow,’ which is typical: whereas
Mácha’s hero is an individual, Erben’s are always connected to universal
types. In ‘Vrba’ the hero is a man who sits down to breakfast with his wife,
and complains to her that for two years he’s had anxiety during the night,
as somehow the fact that she’s not completely with him is disturbing to
him – this is very vague, but there’s clearly a sexual connotation. His wife
tells him that he should be ‘humble before his destiny,’ but he refuses to
bow down to destiny, and so he decides to cut down a willow tree that
somehow symbolizes his wife to him – or at least that part of her he
cannot gain access to: the wife dies simultaneously with his cutting down
of the tree, somehow living on abstractly as a mother. . .”
“. . .the transformation of the young wife into a mother – oedipus again. . .”
“. . .all his poems are like that: love and death, the child excluding the
life of the parent – all connected to some universal myth which leaves us
in a kind of passivity or fatalism. . .”
“. . .what happened to them?”
“. . .Erben’s fatalism led to a kind of conservatism and cowardice: for
example, he avoided meeting the writer Božena Němcová – the woman
19
on the five-hundred crown note, because she was under surveillance by

the Austrian police, and he didn’t want to get into trouble. . .”
“. . .and Mácha?”
“. . .he got his girlfriend pregnant and was supposed to marry her: six
days before the marriage he went into a fit of rage because of her
supposed infidelity to him. He died three days later – I’ve read some-
where it was cholera. . .”
“. . .I like that – he stayed in character until the end, suffering jealous
rage and shitting himself to death! It’s fitting – aer all, his hero Byron
died delirious from swamp fever in Greece. . .”
“. . .the people who make him an icon of Czech culture would be
shocked by your irreverence!”
“. . .really?”
“. . .I’m joking, but it’s true that he became an icon – they even disin-
terred his remains and reburied him at Vyšehrad in 198 aer his home
village fell within the Sudatenlands aer the Munich accords. . .Vyšehrad
is the ‘Westminster Abbey’ of the Czechs. . .”
“. . .Czechs aren’t the only ones who use their national culture as
a support for cultural nationalism – look at how the British used
Shakespeare, or the Germans used Schiller and Goethe. All of them are
probably turning over in their graves. . .”
“. . .who did the Americans use?”
“. . .I suppose if there’s anything like a ‘national poet’ it’s got to be either
Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, or the less salacious side of Walt Whitman.
A good deal of American literary culture has actually been against the
status quo, or, when writers thought they were representing the positive
side of the culture, like Walt Whitman, they were embarrassing in other
ways to those wanting a national poet – Whitman’s erotic poetry, and
especially his homoerotic poetry, is an embarrassment for the puritanical
side of America. . .”
“. . .so what do they do with him?”
“. . .in high school they teach sanitized, domesticated versions of every-
thing – the ‘nicer’ poems of Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman. I was
in graduate school before I realized Whitman’s writing was brilliant, and
the same thing with Dickinson. . .it takes time and effort to penetrate the
myths. . .”
“. . .but to go back to the point, what about the myths regarding
Shelley?”
10
“. . .I can partially understand why the myths were created – the inten-
sity of their lives, of their writings, are hard enough to represent. . .it’s as
if there needed to be a kind of shorthand; therefore, the myth. . .”
“. . .of the two great poets in exile?”
“. . .the myth varies, but it usually makes too much of the relationship
between Shelley and Byron, as if Mary and Claire were just bystanders,
which isn’t true at all. . .”
“. . .and what does the myth make of Shelley’s idea of free love?”
“. . .it either avoids it altogether, or it makes it seem as if there were
nightly orgies wherever they went – like in Ken Russell’s film, Gothic. In
reality, Mary had sexual relations exclusively with Shelley, aside from
what may have been a very brief period with Hogg, while Claire had rela-
tions with Shelley exclusively, save for the brief liaison with Byron, and
an impassioned embrace by Trelawny aer Shelley died. Shelley and
Byron you know about: Byron was a libertine, which isn’t the same as
free love – at least in the way Shelley conceived of it. . .”
“. . .so what aspects of the myth attracted you?”
“. . .certainly the two great poets in exile, the idea of Shelley’s pursuit of
knowledge and experience at any cost, his guilelessness and goodness – which
was not a myth, but the myth obscures the costs of that goodness. ere’s
also the drama of his tragic end: on the beach near Viareggio, Shelley’s body
being burned as Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny looked on. I remember once,
when I was quite young, seeing that image in some film or docu-drama, and
the power of it swept me away – it seemed to me then, and even now, the
epitome of Romanticism. It’s only partially true, of course: Byron swam out
to his boat, the Bolivar, and became quite sick from it all. . .”
“. . .so all that was before you le America?”
“. . .yes. It was only later, aer I had le, that I began reading them more
closely. eir exile is rarely portrayed – everyone knows only about
Geneva, where they were merely tourists. When I started reading more,
I became obsessed – I began finding other similarities with my own life:
Shelley’s estrangement from his upper-middle class family origins, his
disdain for the milieu of his own upbringing, with its hypocrisies and
shams, his hatred for the schools he attended, his hatred for the essential
conservatism and abuses of power of England, and then his exile. . .”
“. . .but how could it happen? – neither Shelley nor you were born into
a poor family – Shelley was the eldest son, and you were a son in an upper
middle class family. . .”
11
“. . .that’s right. . .”
“. . .so why would either of you turn against all the privileges of your
position? Most people in his world, and in yours, would have readily
traded places with you, wouldn’t they? What makes certain people finally
turn away from their upbringings, while most stay within them?”
“. . .that’s a difficult question. It would be too easy to say that one simply
sees into the contradictions of one’s society, and decides against them in
order to ‘live in truth,’ as Havel puts it. If it were so easy, everyone would
do it – and you know that wasn’t the case during the communist years. . .”
“. . .or now. . .”
“. . .certainly not. You know, during his childhood Shelley lived in kind
of a familial paradise with his mother and sisters at Field Place – his
father’s estate in Horsham, Sussex; but, because of the rigidity of the
masculine order that he, as eldest son, inhabited, he was forced to leave:
he was sent off to a boarding school at age eleven or so. You can see how
violent his reaction was to it in the fact that the day he was to leave for
school he set his house on fire with some kind of device timed to coin-
cide with his departure. . .”
“. . .is that true?”
“. . .as far as I know, yes. He was born with an incredibly sensitive nature,
and his father was, from all accounts, a quite an obtuse man who more or
less decided to separate him from his sisters and mother in order to prepare
him for his tasks as a man in the social order. e public school he entered
only affirmed his father’s values – a masculine order that was antithetical
to his sensibility, and which he hated fiercely. Aer he was expelled from
Oxford for his pamphlet, ‘e Necessity of Atheism,’ his mother and sisters
bowed to the father’s will and refused to see him. It was the final straw: his
hatred for the authority of his despotic father became a hatred towards all
authority, and finally all cultural restrictions and restraints – and there were
good reasons, too: whenever a culture is in the process of becoming ascen-
dant, as Britain was becoming increasingly in the Napoleonic and post-
Napoleonic period, it becomes reactionary. Britain at that time was under
the Castlereagh administration, which was reacting to the repercussions of
the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, and consequently was
deeply repressive in its fears of internal and external threats and ideologies.
e social order, then, was thoroughly rigid and patriarchal in a way diffi-
cult to imagine now – the pressures on Shelley, the eldest son, were too
much, and Shelley refused them, radically. . .”
1
“. . .so what was happening in his family was a microcosm of what was
happening in his society at large?”
“. . .right. I think we tend to see history as something that happens
‘over there’ – somewhere else, unless the events actually interfere in
some direct manner in our daily lives, but it’s only through historical
distance that we can see that the very air we breath in our daily lives is
permeated with our own historical moment. Consider Shelley’s day of
birth – August th, 19: six days later, on August 10th, the French
king’s Swiss guard was massacred when a mob raided the Tuileries.
That moment was probably the decisive one of the French Revolution,
for prior to that event it looked as if it were possible to create and main-
tain a constitutional monarchy; instead, there was the Reign of Terror,
followed by a European-wide cataclysm. But what was happening inside
France didn’t effect Great Britain nearly as much as the twenty-two
years of almost continuous continental warfare that followed, which
was as much a dual between France and Great Britain for world
economic supremacy as it was a war between revolutionary and anti-
revolutionary forces. Until the British defeated the French at Trafalgar
in 180, Britain lived under an almost continuous fear of French inva-
sion, and then, following Trafalgar, Napoleon’s Continental System
attempted to force Britain into economic submission, and it nearly
worked – the subsequent recession was felt throughout Great Britain.
By the time the Third Coalition had defeated Napoleon in April, 181,
Shelley was twenty-two years old – three months later he left for the
continent with Mary and Claire, but they were back in England before
Napoleon’s return from Elba in March, 181, and his defeat at
Waterloo in June. My point is that Shelley’s formative years coincided
almost precisely with these years of pitched military, political and
economic battles, and then, when he came of age, his country was
setting about the business of consolidating its global ascendancy. While
the vast majority of British never even saw a French soldier or ship,
their presence over the horizon must have affected every aspect of their
daily lives – and no society is as rigid as a society at war. The British
had been fighting for both economic and ideological reasons, and you
can imagine what the established order must have thought about
anyone sharing sympathies with the ideology of the enemy. In fact, for
the average person it’s impossible even to consider another reality
outside the one society prescribes for them. . .”
1
“. . .and what about your situation? What were you escaping – was
American society so repressive? Few Czechs would understand why you
would want to leave the U.S.A. and come to Prague. . .”
“. . .there are certain similarities between Shelley and myself: Shelley
and I were both born into ascendant empires geared up for wars that were
fought beyond their borders and that led society to become polarized
between reactionary and radical elements. In my case, I was born the year
Kennedy was elected – at the tail end of the baby-boom generation: the
Cold War had already developed into a hot war in Korea, and would
soon become hot again in Vietnam. America had been long-reaping the
benefits of its postwar ascendancy, but the tremors of the 190s were
already rumbling under the surface. e United States practically tore
itself apart during my childhood. Kennedy’s assassination knocked the
first major hole in the wall, and Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ only held it up
for a little while longer, before the whole edifice of Eisenhower-era
normality came tumbling down. . .”
“. . .were you aware of what was happening?”
“. . .up to a certain point everything was terribly vague for me, as it is
for all children; in fact, aside from the first appearance of the Beatles on
television in 19, I have no really distinct memories of any of the histor-
ical events happening around me in the early 0s – sure, I knew about
some of the general events like the war in Vietnam and the race riots, but
not much else; aer all, I was a little boy living in a northern New Jersey
suburb – a town called Westfield. . .it was something like John Cheever’s
‘Shady Hill’ – an outwardly idyllic suburb hiding a cauldron of anguish
and angst. I think the whole town had been blissfully unaware, then
suddenly everything came into focus in 198: I was only eight years old,
but from that point onwards my memory is crystal clear. It began, as far
as my own awareness is concerned, with the assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr., in April of that year. I remember the school flag was at
half-mast, and they stopped the normal lessons and spent the day
teaching us a new word: ‘prejudice.’ en, a day or so later, my sister
taught me another word: ‘riot.’ We lived less than twenty kilometers from
Newark, where more than twenty people had died during race riots the
summer before, and riots erupted again aer King’s death – across the
whole United States more than forty people were killed, and thousands
injured. . .”
“. . .were you afraid?”
1
“. . .I just remember a strange feeling in the air, and we couldn’t go

downtown. . .it all seemed distant, then, but that was only the beginning.
When Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June of ‘8, I distinctly
remember the event, the mood, and even his face on the cover of Time
magazine – in a kind of a Roy Lichtenstein-like illustration. From then
on the news only got worse – from the Chicago Democratic Convention
to Vietnam, the anti-war protests. . .the invasion of Czechoslovakia was
just a distant murmur to most Americans amidst the pandemonium.
I think the culmination of all the chaos came a couple of years later with
the shootings at Kent State. . .”
“. . .what was that?”
“. . .sorry – I forget sometimes that we don’t share contexts and times:
I suppose ‘Kent State’ is to Americans of the ‘0s what ‘Jan Palach’ is to
Czechs. In 190, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of students
protesting the illegal invasion of Cambodia at Kent State University: they
killed four students, and wounded nine others. . .”
“. . .that’s terrible! We were never told anything about it. . .”
“. . .and we didn’t hear about Jan Palach! To draw out the parallel with
Shelley, I would compare, loosely, the Kent State shootings to the
Peterloo massacres that occurred in Manchester in 1819, which also
occurred at a radical protest meeting, and brought on a massive over-reac-
tion on the part of the local authorities who killed about ten people. Kent
State represented the symbolic end of the 0s; aer that, nothing made
any sense at all any more. . .but that’s all hindsight. . .actually, something
really terrible happened right there in idyllic Westfield, the suburban
utopia, no more than five kilometers or so from my house: for me, it’s
symptomatic of the whole sickness of society, then. . .”
“. . .what was it?”
“. . .the John List killings. . .”
“. . .in 191, in an upper-middle class neighborhood across town,
a father, John List, slaughtered his whole family – three children, his
mother, his wife. . .”
“. . .my God! – why did he do it?”
“. . .he was this typically American weird mix of moralistic Christian
and materialistic businessman – a real control freak. They had three
children, and the oldest daughter, who was sixteen, had been picked
up by police for being out after midnight a few weeks earlier: she had
1
already been influenced by the 0s counter-culture, and was dressing

in mini-skirts and smoking marijuana. She was the generation of my
oldest sister, and went to the same high school. List thought his family
was all going to hell because his wife refused to go to church any more
and was defending the daughter against his authoritarian rigidity. On
top of all that, he couldn’t keep a job, and he was secretly living off his
mother’s money and a second mortgage on his house. He’d dress up
and pretend to go to work in the morning, and then just sit reading at
the train station all day – the same train station from which my father
commuted into Manhattan every day! Finally, List decided to kill his
family. . .”
“. . .did he give a reason?”
“. . .yes actually – he wrote a letter to his church pastor. It was again this
weird fusion of religious and economic nonsense: he told him that he
wasn’t sure he could keep his family ‘pure’ in the future, but also that he
didn’t want them to experience poverty – he felt they’d be better off dead
than not Christian. . .”
“. . .that bastard! So he killed them instead?”
“. . .yes! Only in America can you find such a peculiarly twisted mix of
moralistic religion and materialism. . .”
“. . .did they ever catch him?”
“. . .yes, but it gives me the shivers to think about it. He went to Denver,
Colorado at almost the same time that my own family moved there –
when my father’s company relocated. He took up a new identity, remar-
ried, joined a church, and even taught Sunday school!”
“. . .that’s unbelievable. So when did they catch him?”
“. . .eighteen years later. . .”
“. . .he lived a new life for eighteen years aer doing what he did? How
was he found?”
“. . .they aired his case on one of those true-crime television shows in
1989, and a former neighbor recognized him and tipped off the FBI.
I asked my older brother about it once much later – about how he saw
the whole thing, as he was seven years older and much more aware of
what was happening: he said that most of his friends felt that it might
have happened to any of their fathers! ose were strange times. . .”
“. . .I begin to understand, now. . .”
“. . .but for me, the real trauma of the period was when my family
moved to Colorado in the summer of 19. . .”
1
“. . .why Colorado?”
“. . .many companies relocated west, then, and I think one motivation
must have been just to escape the clutter and chaos of the east coast; plus,
I guess they received tax incentives in the conservative west. e move
coincided with the total absurdity of the 0s, but, as I said, it’s difficult to
see where one is, historically – it’s difficult to see that one is in anything
at all, for it seems to be everything: there’s no distance, no temporal or
spatial horizon to view it from. . .”
“. . .it was the same under communism – when it’s the only horizon, it’s
hard to see beyond it. . .”
“. . .looking back, I can see that things were especially terrible, but at
the time I simply thought it was my own personal situation – an alien-
ated adolescent in a strange environment. e whole country was going
through wrenching times: just when it seemed the dislocations of the 0s
were over, suddenly the Watergate scandal came along and disillusioned
anyone who hadn’t been disillusioned already. I survived by just a hair’s
breadth: the American west was an entirely different world, and it was
a nightmare for me. . .”
“. . .why was it so horrible?”
“. . .it was like entering a time warp: I was only an observer of the 0s
because of my age, but it seemed as if the 0s had never reached the
Denver suburbs, or only reached it in some bizarre way. American foot-
ball seemed to be the central activity: you were either a football player,
or cheerleader, or band member, or outside of it totally. I was totally alien-
ated, and immersed myself in nothing but jazz and literature: I had read
a good deal of Hesse, Camus, Beckett and Kaa by the time I was fieen
– almost all hand-me-downs from my older brother’s friends. It was the
only way I could survive in that cultural wasteland. I couldn’t see that
what I was doing, what we were all doing, was just reflecting the self-
immersion and withdrawal of the entirety of American society in the 0s.
Everyone was so concerned with ‘doing their own thing’ – the only
ideology le standing when the debris of the 0s was carted away. ey
called it the ‘me generation’ – that period saw the birth of shopping-
mall culture: ‘shopping’ became an activity in itself. I got my first job at
a chain bookstore in a mall south of Denver, and saw firsthand the micro-
social effects of the totally artificial environment it created: alienation,
a safe anonymity in a crowd, everything channeled towards materialist
desires – creating desires rather than answering needs. . .”
1
“. . .I think Czechs would like a little more of that now, aer the end of
the socialist experiment. . .”
“. . .no doubt. . .in moderation it’s not a bad thing, but Americans have
a tendency to always go too far. at was when the spirit of social change,
block by reaction and exhaustion, tipped over into destruction – there
were armed terrorist groups like the Weather Underground and the
Symbionese Liberation Army – they’re the ones who kidnapped the
heiress Patty Hearst: an iconic image from my adolescence is her wielding
a submachine gun at a bank robbery in 19. . .”
“. . .what happened to her?”
“. . .well, it’s a real specimen of the freak show that constitutes American
life! She was kidnapped, but clearly she became involved with it all. Her
defense team was headed by the best lawyer her daddy’s money could buy:
F. Lee Bailey – he’s the guy that helped get O.J. Simpson off the hook. . .”
“. . .did he get her acquitted?”
“. . .no, she was convicted of armed robbery and served until 199 when
her sentence was commuted by Jimmy Carter! Speaking of Carter, he
actually named the sickness of the times in a speech: he called it ‘the
Great Malaise.’ I think a small part of the reason he was hated by many,
then, was that he put his finger on the real issue while everyone else was
trying so hard to forget about it. I realize it was far worse in
Czechoslovakia under the ‘normalization’ period of the 0s and 80s, but
you, at least, knew clearly what the problem was, didn’t you? I think
Americans in the 0s had nary a clue. . .”
“. . .I was a child during the worst of it. We knew the regime was bad, we
despised the Russian soldiers, and there were enough people who incar-
nated the worst of communism in daily life to make it dreadful a good
deal of the time. One couldn’t easily travel to the west, the stores were
without goods, it was impossible to advance along a career path or even
attend university without connections – oen communist connections.
So many people were informers, collaborators, or simply passive cowards
– they did a good job of spreading the net as far as possible. at’s why so
many people want to forget about it all now, because of how they were
implicated in it. We thought we knew, then, what the problems were, but
many of them didn’t become clear until aer 1989, when suddenly we
could only blame ourselves and not the regime. . .”
“. . .and soon aer Czechs couldn’t even blame the Slovaks, aer the
country split in two. . .”
18
“. . .that’s right. If you hadn’t come into my life, I’d probably be caught
in the same black hole as so many other people I know are these days –
people are so lost now. ey hardly know how to act, what to do with all
this freedom – the lack of any guidelines or models worth following, and
the stubborn leovers from the past: the nasty shopkeepers, the culture
of envy, the ‘our family and to hell with everyone else,’ the ‘foreigners be
damned’ attitudes. at’s what they did to us. I’m not sure people yet
fully realize what was done to them – it may take several more genera-
tions to sort it all out, but by then, what else may happen? You’re right,
though – we at least thought we knew what was happening then. . .but
now? What to be against, what to be for? In some regards it’s obvious,
but in others, it’s very difficult to tell. I can get a greater distance from it
being with you, seeing it through your eyes. . .”
“. . .an observer’s perspective makes it easier to see a different culture,
and finally to see one’s own, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to live
– quite the opposite. Look at Shelley: he went from a repressive situation
that was quite deadening to the total dislocation of self-imposed exile and
all of the suffering it involved. . .”
“. . .but it also gave him freedom. . .”
“. . .that’s true – once one has had a taste of such freedom, it’s difficult,
perhaps impossible, to return to a settled life, but, as Goethe wrote,
‘freedom has to be fought for anew every day.’ Now it’s impossible for me
even to consider living in America – ‘the land of the free’ – as I would find
it impossibly stifling, and yet many Americans think that convenience,
technology and material wealth yield them a kind of absolute freedom. . .”
“. . .it’s ironic that many Czechs used to take you as a representative
American. . .”
“. . .they simply don’t know any better. It’s true that Czechs project
their stereotypes on me, but many Americans I meet in Prague do so even
more – at least Czechs who don’t really know Americans don’t know
what to expect, so they have fewer prejudices, but there’s nothing so
annoying as the type of American who simply assumes that since you are
both Americans abroad you automatically agree with them about how
everything is awful outside of America, and how everything is better
‘back home.’ It’s especially bad at the American Embassy. When they find
out I don’t agree with their attitudes they’re disturbed, and when they
find out I have no plans of going back, some look at me as if I were some
sort of traitor or criminal. . .”
19
“. . .really? Why is that? While Czechs tend to dislike Czech émigrés,

I can’t imagine any Czech who would be surprised to find a Czech
abroad who wasn’t intending to return. Do Americans really think it’s
best there?”
“. . .the majority do – that’s what they were brought up to think.
That’s part of the insidiousness of it: I was taught, from my childhood
on, that the United States was the wealthiest and most powerful nation
on earth – which is true enough, but also the most honorable, just and
free nation on earth, which is open to dispute, to say the least. Anything
Americans are not the best at, they downplayed; for example, culture
doesn’t seem to matter so much, and other cultures only matter insofar
as they measure up to, accept, and melt into the Protestantism-without-
the-metaphysics, materialist ethos that is ‘Americanism’ at its middling
best. . .”
“. . .is that why so many Americans are so ignorant about other cultures?”
“. . .I think many Americans tend to travel through the world like astro-
nauts in space suits: it’s all Disneyland to them, and Central Europe is
homogenous. . .”
“. . .but it’s not just Americans who do that. . .”
“. . .yes – citizens of any wealthy and powerful country share the same
tendency towards jingoism. . .”
“. . .Czechs do it too: when I was growing up, my family and my uncle’s
would head off together to somewhere like Yugoslavia or the Black Sea,
eating Czech food we had brought along, and forming a little Czech
community. You can see the same thing, now, with these packaged vaca-
tions – where mostly Czechs get on a plane, fly to a hotel with mostly
Czechs in a foreign country, and then act, well, Czech. . .”
“. . .yes, but Czechs don’t walk into a store in a foreign country, say
‘Dobrý Den,’ and expect to be understood – as Americans do. . .”
“. . .but English is a world language. . .”
“. . .but most American tourists simply assume it’s just like back home
and rarely adapt. For example, for you, what is the single most distin-
guishing feature about a group of Americans you come upon in Prague?”
“. . .they’re very loud. . .”
“. . .exactly. My point is that it wouldn’t occur to most of them that the
culture around them isn’t so loud: in fact, most wouldn’t even notice the
difference, and would wonder why people are staring at them. I believe
the true definition of tourism pure and simple is, ‘to be somewhere
10
without having to be touched by it’: to truly know something or some-

where is to be affected, and perhaps changed by it. Tourists need not ever
arrive at their destination – perhaps dare not arrive, or they would have to
stop being tourists. at’s true of American tourists, Czech tourists,
German tourists, Japanese tourists – any tourist. . .still, when a German
tourist arrives in the United States or France, they don’t find a German
film in every cinema, as Americans do. e United States is more than
an affluent nation, even more than a superpower: it’s become an empire,
dedicated to securing and extending the American way of life at all costs,
and it’s the first empire in existence where many of its citizens generally
fail to realize or acknowledge that it is an empire. . .”
“. . .they have to know it – it’s obvious: how could they not know it?”
“. . .when they do know it, it will be too late! I had to be out of the
country for years before I could gain a more objective sense of America’s
place in the world. I knew the rest of the world existed, but all of this –
what was outside of it, beyond it – didn’t become truly real until I was
here for quite a while. It’s difficult to describe the mono-cultural ‘bubble-
effect’ there, where the whole world is merely seen as so many not-yet-
perfected extensions of America; and, because America colonizes
economically and culturally, rather than territorially, it doesn’t fit the
previous description of empires, and can hold on to its innocence and
ignorance. Many Americans remain in their space suits without even real-
izing it – at least until they start expanding geographically!”
“. . .so you finally took off your space suit?”
“. . .yes, and I found out that I could breathe the air aer all; in fact,
I found the air was fresher outside! Even as someone who was university-
educated and well-traveled, who liked foreign literature and films,
I didn’t emerge out of the bubble until I had been gone long enough for
it to become a memory. ere’s an incredible apparatus of normalization
and homogenization in the United States – but I’m not the first to have
noticed it: Alexis de Tocqueville noticed it, Henry Adams did, Henry
James did, Henry Miller did too. . .”
“. . .from propaganda?”
“. . .I think the most effective apparatus of cultural homogenization is
mass media, and the single most important change for me in living
abroad was disconnecting from it – simply unplugging. . .”
“. . .it seems in so many of the Americans films we’re now getting in
Prague there’s some sort of underlying assumption that justice, truth and
11
happiness will prevail: ‘poor girl gets wealthy boy,’ or vice versa, no matter
what disaster is happening, from the sinking of the Titanic to the end of
the world – it’s absurd. . .”
“. . .yes, I suppose if I were to coin a word that best describes Americanism
it would be ‘positivity’ – which includes everything from empirical science
and technology to philosophical pragmatism and Hollywood happy
endings. Somehow in the rush to create a society that would alleviate
human inequalities and operate on Enlightenment principles, something
was lost while something was gained. e focus on pragmatic facts, on
concrete projects, side-tracked the complexity of value, and reduced the
unknown to the domain of the ‘what-would-one-day-be-known.’ I think
in the early days they should have done the equivalent of reading more
Kant, or at least Hume, and far less Locke – although I doubt they read
much philosophy at all! Of course they had a country to create, and quite
quickly at that, so that necessitated the focus on pragmatism, but the self-
delimitation of the positivist approach has resulted in a values vacuum, and
that has finally led to the current frantic seeking for ever-renewed, ever-
intensified pleasures and sensations, as if unconsciously there was an acute
awareness of the emptiness at the core of it all. . .”
“. . .I don’t want to stereotype a whole nation, but certainly with many
of the Americans I’ve met – admittedly mostly tourists, but also many
who are working in Prague – I had this feeling they see every problem as
solvable, and their lives as largely controllable. . .”
“. . .American media perpetuates that attitude. . .”
“. . .I know Czechs are hopelessly fatalistic, given their history, and
that’s an opposite extreme, but it always amazes me how convinced
Americans are that they’ll be able to control precisely the direction of
their lives – like automobiles, simply shiing the gears and steering it
wherever they want to go. . .”
“. . .and they are surprised when it breaks down, as all cars and all lives
inevitably do. . .”
“. . .but certainly they must know life isn’t perfectible?”
“. . .I think the phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration of
Independence isn’t just a chance phrasing – it indicates the source of the
problem: Americans live in the thrall of the imaginary. Even when prob-
lems are pointed out, it gets swept up into a new synthesis that promises
to solve the problems, and meanwhile people are wondering what’s
missing in their lives, and they start striving aer phantoms to fill the gap
1
– Americans are always going on about finding their way back to an ideal
of ‘family’ or ‘community’ or ‘freedom’ that never existed in the way they
imagine it, if it ever existed at all. . .”
“. . .or going forwards towards ‘happiness’ and ‘success’ – the Americans
I’ve met always view their lives as moving forwards to some pre-planned
goal. . .”
“. . .‘running with arms outstretched towards the orgastic future that
year by year recedes before us’. . .”
“. . .the end of e Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald had it precisely right, and
Gatsby staring out at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock – his
romantic dream and his catastrophe: it’s the quintessential American
story. . .”
“. . .so what would be the remedy – is there something like ‘negativity’
to balance positivity?”
“. . .well, as I said, philosophical negativity is best represented by the
philosophy of Kant: it starts with the distinction between what can be
known through empirical observation – the positive or phenomenal
realm of scientific facts, which Kant terms synthetic a posteriori judgments
and which are mere syntheses of analytic judgments, and consequently
mere ‘appearances’; and the noumenal realm, which, when it can be repre-
sented at all, can be represented as synthetic a priori judgments which
combine intuitions with speculative concepts – all of which is limited by
our cognitive predispositions anyway, or presentations of the truth
through art and other means, which cannot be represented. . .”
“. . .in plain language?”
“. . .science is useful but cannot reach the purpose or meaning of things;
speculative thought or philosophy helps us grasp value, but it can never
reach anything like the precision of science and is not verifiable; art can
show but cannot tell. . .”
“. . .so ‘negativity’ is the unknown area behind appearances, and what
remains outside the limits of the human mind. . .”
“. . .yes – in Kant’s view. . .”
“. . .but how would you see negativity being manifested in everyday life
– in other words, if positivity in practice produces the pursuit of happi-
ness, pleasure and sensation, what would negativity produce?”
“. . .awe, wonder, mystery – in short, meaning. . .but part of it means
surrendering the belief in the complete controllability of situations – it
1
entails a degree of modesty, and giving over to uncertainty, loss, and at

times even suffering. . .to an awareness of one’s mortality – what
Heidegger called a ‘Being-towards-death,’ what Bataille termed the ‘inner
experience’. . .”
“. . .but given there’s so much wealth and power in the United States, it
isn’t likely anyone is going to choose negativity willingly, is it? In the
Czech Republic, and indeed most of Europe, it’s forced upon one by
history. . .”
“. . .yes, that’s the difficulty: no one willingly chooses to face and accept
limitation and loss. Americans have a strong tendency to run away from
their history, tearing it down and paving it over – ‘running orgastically’
towards the future’ as Fitzgerald said . . .”
“. . .so what do you think will happen there, eventually?”
“. . .I think the greatest danger comes from the fact the American
society in the mid-90s is too self-satisfied and too complacent – too
appropriating of any alternative views: in short, it’s in danger of
suppressing variability – but that’s nothing new, as that’s the danger of
any empire. e mind-deadening effect of unquestioned values Nietzsche
inveighed against, or the conformity and ideological fog of the bour-
geoisie that Baudelaire and Marx complained about, are not all that
different from the hypocrisy and ossification of value that Shelley and
Blake raged on against in early 19th century British society – or Jesus or
Jan Hus sought to reform in their societies. Of course, the particulars and
even ideologies are different in every time and place, but the ‘gravitational
pull’ is towards the comfortable, stabilizing norm, whatever it is at a given
historical moment. Norms are needed, of course, but the history of
humanity has been the history of forgetting that we created those norms. . .”
“. . .it was the same under communism – the majority wanting the comfort-
able life: the cottage, the long vacation, the short work hours and minimal
effort, the ‘state pretending to pay, the people pretending to work’. . .commu-
nism in the 0s and 80s was one vast depression that people took for the
normal rather than merely the norm, for there was little to compare it with,
given the borders were closed. Most people sensed something was wrong,
but they projected it onto the communist system – not seeing how they
had become part of the system itself, whether they were in the party or not,
or even if they were dissidents. ere was so little trust, social relations were
so rigidly delimited, so distorted – you know well enough how neurotic
human relations can be there, still. . .”
1
“. . .I’ve noticed that even in the most self-assured Czechs I’ve met in
Prague who’ve lived for some time under communism one can detect
some effect of the past – but most oen I’ve encountered a general histor-
ical amnesia about communism. . .”
“. . .I wonder, sometimes, how you can stand living there – and even
more that you do so voluntarily. . .”
“. . .I can choose a bit more than a native how much I want to be
affected by it. I have to admit that it’s why I am so slow to learn the
language: I don’t want to know what the people on the bus are
discussing, as it’s roughly the same in all modern societies – last night‘s
soap opera or the price of cheese; and, as I said, I don’t want to know
what the American expatriates talk about either, so I keep myself
detached and sovereign. Being in a foreign country helps a great deal, and
especially a foreign country with a history, where I can lose myself in the
dimension of time. . .”
“. . .yes, I can see it’s both harder and easier for you to be in Prague –
harder because you’re a foreigner, and must make your own way outside
of the usual channels, and easier because you can ignore so much of the
everyday irritation, and because you were brought up in a country that
at least, ideally, gave you at least a feeling that you have the right to your
freedom – something I still struggle with. . .“
“. . .the ‘feeling of freedom,’ yes, but not as much of the real thing as
Americans constantly claim: I feel much more freedom living abroad
even in a less free society precisely because I’m eed om having to follow
norms, and therefore eed to choose outside the norms. Anyway, I think
freedom is more about intensive than extensive constraints. I’m less
extensively free in Prague due to the negative economic aspects of it, but
far more intensively free because I don’t have the voices in my head. . .
I have this outsider’s position. . .”
“. . .‘outsider’ is a good way of putting it. You’re not really an exile,
because you could go back if you wanted to, and you’re certainly not an
expatriate – all those self-posturing bores who hang around Prague cafes
with other expats posing for the imagined eyes of their friends back
home. . .but that’s really the crucial point, isn’t it? Your lack of a sense of
home, or, rather, your choice of homelessness. Your home isn’t there in
America, and yet it isn’t fully in Prague. You aren’t an émigré, as you
refuse to assimilate. . .as you said before, you’re sovereign – a foreigner
wherever you go. . .”
1
“. . .but I didn’t leave America knowing that’s what I would become.

Shelley didn’t know he would stay away either: the reasons he gave
himself for leaving were that he needed a warmer climate for his health,
to escape his creditors, and the practical matter of bringing Allegra to
Byron. On some level he must have known he needed to leave, but he
certainly didn’t articulate it until aer the fact. He was born into an age
of transformation and crisis, like ours, and that had everything to do with
unmooring him from his past. . .but once he set out, it was towards an
unknown. One has to be something like a cartographer, and map Shelley
onto his family, his family onto his culture, his culture onto the age, and
then suddenly you see something beyond his works that gave rise to the
works, and which the works themselves expressed and took further. . .he
found a new life, a new inspiration, and the power to keep going on with
his experiment in living beyond the bounds of his society. . .”
“. . .but Shelley was destroyed in the end. . .perhaps you can avoid some
of the dangers he encountered, but there are still significant dangers,
aren’t there? – especially with people who don’t understand. . .”
“. . .that’s why it’s best to be as imperceptible as possible, to borrow
a term from Deleuze and Guattari; aer all, we can’t expect that others
will ignore us – we’re provocative, just as anything that veers away from
the norm is provocative. . .”
“. . .they can live their own lives. . .”
“. . .look what happened to Shelley and Byron – the shiploads of sight-
seers with telescopes peering into their private lives. . .and look how many
of their so-called ‘friends’ turned out to be more-or-less literary spies,
prying into their lives and reporting their secrets to the outside world, with
its banal moralism and small-minded sensibilities. It’s best to be imper-
ceptible, in order not to be labeled as scandalous, different, or abnormal by
what Strindberg referred to as the ‘right-thinking people’ . . .and to send
any messages to the world in bottles tossed into the sea from a great
distance in time and space. In any case, that may well have been what
Shelley’s writings were, given the few people they reached during his life.
e ‘right-thinking people’ are still with us – you know that even better
than I. . .”
“. . .yes, I’ve lived my life with a nation of them: the secret policeman
was nothing compared to the neighbor, the teacher, the classmate – even
one’s family and friends at times. . .but how can one remain impercep-
tible? How can one remain beyond the perception of those who want to
1
see? ey’re everywhere, asking their leading questions, comparing, ques-

tioning, trying to get inside you in order to find out what’s there, and
root it out if it isn’t acceptable to them. . .”
“. . .it takes a large measure of caution and many layers of defense.
I always let people have some of what they want – as much as they can
stand, really, but I don’t advertise about what else is there inside, behind
a few more closed doors and a few more stone walls. at’s usually
enough – they receive what they are able to. . .”
“. . .but how do you decide between those allowed access and those kept
out?”
“. . .I don’t decide. . .they decide for themselves – based on whether they
want to understand or not, by their reactions as they get closer. . .in the
end, it isn’t difficult to decide who to let in, who to keep out: the majority
of people I meet place themselves solidly in the latter group within the
first five minutes of meeting them, by their set of fixed assumptions about
life. . .”
“. . .it’s a bit of an aristocratic attitude, isn’t it?”
“. . .as I said, I prefer the word ‘sovereign’ – aristocrats are part of a class,
while I try to be as singular as possible, by just being who I am and not
suppressing it. . .and yet, finally, I don’t think it’s other people who are
the worst problem – the worst of what happened to Shelley came from
himself, and I’m sure the same will be true of us. . .”
“. . .but what about events like the blackmailing? at certainly came
from others. . .”
“. . .of course, but they laid themselves open to it by not taking care to
be imperceptible enough, and I suppose through placing too much trust
in people like Elise and Paolo. . .then, when the blackmail began, I think
they panicked, and over-reacted. . .”
“. . .it’s understandable given the circumstances; but isn’t the point,
really, that there’s a big difference between the ideality and the reality?
In an ideal world Mary would have been more tolerant and accepting of
Claire’s presence, Shelley would have been able to manage the conflicts
between the two women better, and they all would have managed to be
more imperceptible and less open to the manipulations and threats of
others. ey would have all worked together, rowed the boat in the same
direction. . .but is that ideal world even attainable?”
“. . .you’re right, that’s the question. I don’t believe there’s a relational
utopia waiting for anyone out there – a pure state of Hegelian intersub-
1
jectivity and mutual recognition is as mythical, to me, as the Marxist

utopian dream of a classless society, but I still believe in some kind of
evolution in human relations – a higher level of being beyond merely the
atavism of primitive, territorial instincts. at’s what I’m wondering
about – whether there’s a way through the impasse they encountered.
Este, for me, represents that impasse, but it’s also what finally knocked
Shelley out of the orbit of his idealizations, and the abjection and despair
he experienced in the aermath accomplished the rest. . .”
“. . .but the results were tragic for him. . .”
“. . .all lives encounter some tragedy, but a half-life lived in fear, reac-
tivity, and pettiness is a different kind of tragedy than a life lived fully
open to love and loss. I find their works beautiful, as their lives were:
there were intense moments, where, if only briefly, everything came
together. . .such moments are worth a whole lifetime of comfort and
security. . .”
“. . .and where do you think our worst dangers reside?”
“. . .also within ourselves – with everything that comes under the term
‘reactivity’: jealousy, possessiveness, anxiety, fear. . .as well as habit, terri-
toriality, insecurity, impatience, insensitivity, inattentiveness – all of
which we’ve been guilty of at one time or another, and will be again,
no doubt. . .”
“. . .but I think we are doing better than they were – we know, accept,
and are trying to make it work. . .”
“. . .yes, but for how long – have we faced any real trials yet?”
“. . .nothing like they faced. . .I hope we never have to, but that’s hoping
too much. . .”
“. . .I’m not thinking of their tragedies. . .I’m thinking about the passage
of time – the problems of equilibrium and disequilibrium that come with
maturing, with facing one’s mortality, with simply facing oneself: life can
never be predicted or planned in advance. . .”
“. . .that’s what bothers me – I always want our lives to be settled, even
though I know it’s impossible. . .”
“. . .still, there are moments – for Shelley and Claire, the ten days they
were here alone were a kind of settled existence. . .”
“. . .with tragedy lurking around the next corner. . .”
“. . .it will always be there ready to strike – if not around the next corner,
then the one aer that. . .”
“. . .that’s not particularly comforting. . .”
18
“. . .that’s why one has to learn to live as completely as possible in

moments such as these. . .”
“. . .so let’s make the best of this one – shall we go see the villa again?”
“. . .yes, maybe we’ll find someone there. . .”
19

To these others I had tied my destiny: a destiny given over to unremitting
anguish and inevitable loss. Nothing could prevent this loss, and to live the
eternal return meant to love my fate and to accept what was wrought om
these relations. . .
One must be careful not gaze too hard and long into the abyss, or the
abyss will gaze back long and hard into you, invading the foundations
of your being. For her such a threshold had been crossed, had been forced
upon her by circumstances relentless in their intensity. Her face bespoke
a wavering pain that held her just at the limit of her equilibrium: her
tears would flow under the slightest provocation, bringing her near
again, as always, to what had left her forlorn and deserted in the world.
She had been abandoned by the buoyancy of hope life yields to the young,
greenly held within their vanities: night had unexpectedly fallen too
soon, leaving her open and spilt upon the world, mutilated and torn. She
had become a visible symbol of her own sacrifice to some ancient and
angry god, left behind to return alone to the world of the day. For those
around her she was a disconcerting figure, reflecting for others a reality
they wanted to wish away into some other, timeless realm, where one can
believe that what inevitably happens always happens to the other, never
to oneself. . .
I saw in her the burnt offering she had become from that point
onwards, and found her an open wound from which something
absolutely singular was emerging, for she had not constructed any kind of
abode around her but the night, which is the demolition of all structures.
We became a sacrifice for one another: each witness to the other’s steady
advance towards annihilation, each praying for a deliverance that would
never arrive. . .
ere was another. . .

In the beginning I had simply beckoned her to come: there was an irides-
cence in her eyes, and I was surprised by my desire for her which I had come
upon suddenly in a moment when I hadn’t even suspected its existence. . .
e first time we spoke, words emptied om her as if she had been waiting
her whole life to speak. Immediately I knew I would never find her, and that
there would be nothing like an answer to the question I would ask of her. . .
When she spoke, I sensed a covert destiny hidden within her, enclosing her
in an order of being that drew one in as much as it turned one away – an
evasiveness not unlike a figure come upon suddenly in the darkness of
a dream. e words she chose to encircle her also served to protect her: they
enclosed her within their periphery like a chambered nautilus, a spiraling
enigma that curved beyond my gaze. She was a disembodied instant, held
back just before the advent of her fall – her vertigo at this brink drew me
towards her and pressed her forward towards me within the thrall of an
obsession that was difficult to endure. . .
In the persistence of my fascination I came to see that something held her,

grasping her and imposing there a seemingly immutable order. She was
aaid to lose her world although something within her knew she was losing
it already in every passing moment. . .
She came as if she had no will of her own, and om that moment on she
remained. . .

Late aernoon light filters through the trees, dappling the ochre walls of
the villa. A dark green Range Rover is parked outside the gates. Under
the pergola fronting the middle wing of the villa are two white plastic
chairs and a white plastic table upon which is a coffee cup and a portable
radio. e man and woman pause in front of the main gate.
“. . .someone’s here. . .”
“. . .what should we do? ere’s not exactly a doorbell. . .”
“. . .we could just call out. . .”
“. . .would you come if some strangers were calling out at your door – and
in a foreign language?”
“. . .it depends – wait, there’s someone coming out. . .”
A man dressed in cream-colored trousers and a sky-blue short-sleeved
shirt steps out of one of the arched doors at the end of the front path,
turns, and continues speaking to someone inside. When he turns toward
them again they gesture to him with a hesitant wave and he walks down
the slate path towards them.
“. . .here’s another chance to try your Italian. . .”
“. . .but I studied it years ago. . .”
e man realizes immediately what they want when they point to the
plaque on the wall. He explains in basic English that he is a businessman
living in Padova, that he has recently bought the villa, and that he intends
to rebuild it as a country home for his family, bringing the vineyard
behind back into production as a hobby. He believes Byron has lived
there, and does not seem to know about Shelley. eir presence seems
evidence to him of the value of his purchase: he gives them a brief tour,
concerned primarily with explaining his plans for the villa. ey follow
him through the door of the coachhouse – the tiled floor is matted in
dirt, the dark wood ornamentation of the stalls coated in thick dust. Dust
floats in a thin sha of sunlight streaming through a small double-paned
window above one of the stalls where the carriage was kept. Although
the building has been stripped of everything but that which was an inte-
gral part of the structure itself, it is largely intact.
18
They follow him out and down the path towards the wing that was
invisible from the lane and he points to the upper floor and tells them
Byron’s bed is still inside. There is a well to the side of the courtyard,
and separating the court from the main path is a small, bricked-in
garden with wildflowers and yucca plants. The wing’s gray, weather-
beaten shutters are all closed. They walk up the four stone steps to the
front door: he unlocks it and the door creaks open. Inside it is dark,
dusty and moldering. He asks them to wait, and after a moment he
opens the shutters in the first room, bathing the room in light and
revealing a dining room: there are piles of white plaster littering the
floor, and the plaster still on the walls and ceiling is faded and stained
with years of dampness. The pattern shows through faintly: pale blue
and white, round convoluted circles of stucco on the ceiling radiating
out from a chandelier of bronze grape leaves with places for eight
candles. A whole patch of the ceiling has lost all of its plaster which
forms piles of white dust and rubble on the floor below it, leaving the
wooden floorboards and ceiling beams above showing through. The
door and window frames are all dark wood, the unbroken panes rippled
and distorted with age. The man tells them he must return to Padova,
but he gives them permission to wander in the living quarters and on
the grounds, and explains that when they leave they should tell the
groundskeeper inside the door from where he first emerged. He gives
them his card, they thank him, and he departs after pausing a moment
to speak to the groundskeeper. After the sound of his car fades away,
they are left in silence. They look at each other, then around them, and
suddenly burst out laughing at their good fortune.
“. . .can you believe it? is is perfect. . .”
“. . .it’s unbelievable. . .”
“. . .I wonder who else has ever seen this?”
“. . .it doesn’t look like it was used since they were here. . .”
“. . .I don’t know, but it’s possible – it would have been about one
hundred-seventy-five years ago. I know what fiy or even one hundred
years of disrepair looks like, but I have no idea how to judge this! In any
case, it hasn’t changed – I mean, it’s fallen apart, but this is basically what
they must have seen: this is the plaster they saw, the glass they looked
through, the door handles they opened, the chandelier they lighted – it
must be, based on its age!”
“. . .it gives me a shiver. . .”
18
“. . .me too. I didn’t expect a quaintly reconstructed tourist trap, like

Wordsworth’s house in Grasmere, but I also wasn’t expecting this – this
is amazing!”
She crosses the hallway to the room opposite and opens a window – it
is an empty drawing room, half the size of the first room. He begins
slowly climbing the wooden stairway.
“. . .is it safe?”
“. . .yes, very solid. . .I want to find the bed he mentioned – it over-
looked the castle, so it must be in one of the front rooms up here. . .”
“. . .wait, I’m coming with you. . .”
“. . .so come. . .”
“. . .I’ll wait until you open the windows up there – I hate dark places. . .”
“. . .it’s not so dark. . .”
He turns on the landing, feeling his way with his fingertips on the wall.
He finds a wooden door, and opens its latch with a creak. Stale, cool air
envelopes him. He walks to the window and opens the window and shut-
ters, letting light and heat wa in. rough the window he can see the
green foliage of the front yard, and, beyond, the variegated walls and
crenellations of the castle. He turns, and against the far wall he sees
a small night table and a dark mahogany bed, its headboard and foot-
board rising straight up, then curling back in an ornate scroll.
“. . .come on up, it’s here!”
“. . .ok. . .where are you? oh, I see. . .”
She enters the room, where he is opening a second window. He turns
and points at the bed.
“. . .there it is. . .”
“. . .to je nádhera! Do you think they really slept here?”
“. . .it has to be it – it’s the right age, and this is the master bedroom.
Shelley wrote of a room overlooking the castle – see, it’s right there. . .”
“. . .it’s beautiful, but it’s so small: I couldn’t even fit here, and for you
it would be impossible!”
“. . .Shelley was considered tall by the standards of his day, but he would
seem like a child to us – an average-sized man, then, would be five eight
or nine. . .”
“. . .what?”
“. . .sorry – human measurements are the one measurement that never
seem real to me in the metric system. . .about this high compared to me. . .”
“. . .probably 1 or so. . .”
18
“. . .so Shelley was probably 1, and Byron would have been up to your
nose: we would be giants to them. . .”
“. . .what about Shelley’s other features? I only know that painting – the
one in the biography. . .”
“. . .that’s the Curran portrait: it was painted in Rome, but there are
references mentioning that it was a bit idealized – it wasn’t completed
until aer Shelley’s death, when the artist filled in the details based on
memory. Actually, it was Silsbee who thought to ask Claire about such
things as the physical details of their appearance – and I’m glad he did, as
there are very few records otherwise. She told Silsbee that Shelley was
quite beautiful – that she had never seen such a face, except on one
Russian woman she met later. He had dark blue eyes, and she described
him as having had a ‘marble forehead’ – broad, smooth, and white. He
was tall for the time, as I mentioned, and quite thin. . .”
“. . .probably due to his vegetarianism. . .”
“. . .or his laudanum habit. Somewhere either in the recollections of
Medwin or Trelawny he was described as holding himself with
a somewhat stooped upper back towards the end, as if he bore the
weight of the world on his shoulders. His voice matched his physique
– it was evidently quite high-pitched, and even higher-pitched when
he got carried away, which was often. He was like one of the spirits
of the air he wrote about – not effeminate so much as hypersensitive.
Claire jokingly referred to him as the ‘exotic’ when she was in
Florence after his poem ‘The Sensitive Plant,’ but his energy and
intensity formed the center of their circle: even Byron, as tireless as
he was, acknowledged it. I sometimes think that energy is the primary
aspect that matters in life – there’s some sort of connection to
a primordial source. . .”
“. . .and Claire – what did she look like?”
“. . .that’s harder to say: by the time Silsbee saw her, she was in her late
0s, and she had already lived an intense and incredibly difficult life –
she didn’t suffer fools. . .”
“. . .she didn’t suffer Silsbee, you mean. . .”
“. . .she certainly knew what she was doing with him – James was right
about that in e Aspern Papers. Her niece Pauline, who was jealous of
Silsbee’s attentions to Claire, said that Claire would play the role of a silly
girl when Silsbee came around – a woman of her advanced age! Silsbee
sensed Claire was not quite straight with him: he described her as
18
Byronic in her temperament – strong-willed and capricious, which makes

sense given what I’ve already told you. . .”
“. . .and when she was younger – when she was with Shelley, what was
she like?”
“. . .she was far more vivacious, more passionate, and more sexual than
Mary, and created a good many scenes because of it. I sometimes wonder
if Mary’s real reason for wanting her to leave didn’t have as much to do
with Claire’s fluctuating, volatile temperament as with Mary’s jealousy.
She told Silsbee that she thought she knew Shelley better than Mary,
because she was the one who went on long walks with him, as she had
the stamina for it: it seems to have been true, according to the journal
entries that still exist. Because their relations had to be clandestine from
the start, Claire and Shelley had fewer illusions to work through –
a certain self-awareness arose out of the circumstances. Claire seems to
have read as much as Mary – their reading schedules were virtually iden-
tical, as they passed books between each other. She kept as complete
a journal as Mary did – perhaps even more complete, given that Shelley
shared Mary’s journal. Claire was far more fluent in foreign languages –
she spoke French and Italian, taught Shelley German, and later picked
up quite a bit of Russian when she was in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
She was so capable of inhabiting a foreign language and sensibility that
when Medwin met her in Pisa for the first time he thought he was
meeting an Italian woman! Of course she sang beautifully, but she never
had the same urge to write as they did – although she did do some
writing, and even wrote a novel at one point, and a story. . .”
“. . .was any of it ever published?”
“. . .we don’t know what happened to the novel, but the story was
published under Mary’s name, later, because Claire wanted to retain her
incognito. Other than that, there’s the remnants of her journals and many
of her letters, which were, in their own way, works of art: Mary later
commented on how wonderful her letters were, and tried to provoke
Claire to write more oen to her. . .”
“. . .did she?”
“. . .the problem was that she needed an active correspondent, and Mary
became increasingly withdrawn as time passed while Claire maintained
her exuberance. Her life was gregarious – a life of experience, and she had
a great deal of it. . .”
“. . .but what did she look like in her prime?”
18
“. . .the Curren portrait of Claire is rather unflattering, and she didn’t

like it. From what we know she had dark, curly hair; penetrating, dark
blue eyes; and was rather voluptuous. She certainly wasn’t the blonde
airhead portrayed in Passer’s film, nor the silly and depraved sex object
of Ken Russell’s farce, although he, at least, seems to have cast someone
who could have been likened to her physically. She certainly had more
sex appeal than Mary, who was more intellectual, more fragile. She had
a very mercurial personality, and it must have animated her features quite
attractively. . .”
“. . .‘mercurial’?”
“. . .like mercury – the silver liquid that’s in thermometers. . .”
“. . .oh, ‘rtuť’ in Czech – the adjective would then mean something like
‘temperamentní’…”
“. . .it means to be fluctuating, unpredictable, in any case. . .”
“. . .it’s so strange to think that they were right here: do you think
Shelley and Claire made love in this very bed?”
“. . .it’s possible. I have no doubt that their relations were intimate at
the time they were here. . .this is the master bedroom, and this bed is the
right age for it. . .”
“. . .it’s incredible – I don’t know how it’s possible that it’s still here. . .”
“. . .I wonder what use was made of this villa over the years – perhaps
because it’s such a small town it was just neglected. ey did manage to
put the plaque up, so someone knew of its significance – perhaps they
thought it would draw tourists. It all seems fantastic to me, as if we
stepped straight into the past. . .”
“. . .how many generations ago would that have been?”
“. . .let me think. . .something like six generations ago: Claire lived until
189 – that’s about 11 years ago. . .”
“. . .it’s as if time stopped here aer they le. . .I can feel them here. . .”
He walks from the bed to the window and looks out in the direction
of the castle wall.
“. . .look, down there – I think that’s the summer house! Let’s go down
and have a look – you go ahead of me and I’ll close the windows. . .”
“. . .good – I don’t want to be alone in the dark up here. . .”
Downstairs they take a last look at the room, close the windows and
shutters, and go out together, closing the door behind them. ey walk
down the stone steps to a path, and turn le onto another path that takes
them to the far side of the house and the garden.
188
“. . .there should be a pergola from the back door to the garden – I don’t
see anything – it must have been here. . .look, there!”
He points to a small structure through the trees, about thirty meters
from the side of the house.
“. . .but there are two of them – see, there’s that other little house at the
end of the garden. . .”
“. . .yes, that one has a pergola over the door, and there are more
windows – more light for reading and writing. . .it must be the one. . .”
e stucco on the outside of the summer house is flaking off, revealing
only bare brick in places. e glass-paneled door has windows to each
side and an arched transom. e building is five meters square, six meters
high. In the wall above the transom is another circular space for
a window, now open to the air. e door has a small pergola built over it,
hung with grape vines. Inside, against the walls on three sides, is a shelf
of stone, fiy centimeters high and a meter from the walls in every direc-
tion but the door. e stones of the shelf are rough, crumbling, and
uneven, and there are several window frames and half of an old coach
wheel propped up against the rear wall. ere is considerable light in the
room, as the high circular space catches the late aernoon sun shining
over the castle walls.
“. . .this must be it – it fits all the descriptions: this was where Shelley
came every morning to work when they were here. . .”
“. . .tell me the whole story in detail again – exactly what they were
doing while they were here. . .”
“. . .let’s sit down. . .”
“. . .fine. . .”
She pulls a plastic bag out of her shoulder bag and spreads it on the
shelf of stone. He sits next to her.
“. . .I have it here: Claire, Allegra, Elise, and Shelley arrived here from
Venice in the last week of August, 1818, and they were here for ten days
or so before Mary’s arrival. It was during the first ten days here that he
conceived the over-all scheme of Prometheus Unbound, and draed the
whole first act – perhaps sitting right here, perched against this wall. . .”
“. . .does that part of the poem reflect anything about their stay here, or
anything about what was happening in their lives, then?”
“. . .every poem he wrote expressed something about his life, but, as
I said, the longer poems were oen far less explicit – far more metaphor-
ical, symbolical, and abstract. Whereas poems like Alastor, Julian and
189
Maddalo, and Epipsychidion can be read fruitfully with the specifics of

his life in mind, Prometheus Unbound is very abstract – it’s certainly
related to the concerns in his life at the time, but it would be wrong to
read it as a one-to-one correspondence to his life. In the longer poems he
tried to shape his particular experiences into idealizations that would
extend, enhance, and universalize them – to transmute the chaos of his
life into significance. Mary mentioned in her notes to the poem in the
189 edition that while other poets clothed the ‘ideal in the real,’ Shelley
clothed the ‘real in the ideal.’ Prometheus Unbound was particularly dense
with imagery taken partly from his own work translating Aeschylus’
Prometheus Bound. e system of images and metaphors he uses is aston-
ishing: there are political, psychological, mythical, and even scientific
associations throughout the poem. e characters are more than simply
symbols or metaphors: they are powers, forces, affects – he was seeking
to distill and crystallize the energies of life into poetic forms. I believe he
was seeking a language to describe the intensive, psychological level of
being in a continuum with wider social and historical forces – something
like what William Blake was independently accomplishing at the same
time. Like Blake, he saw the contradictions in everything – how emotion
or intellect or instinct could become dangerous if isolated from one
another, and the need for a mode of integration on both a personal and
social level. . .”
“. . .so he held on to his belief in political – or at least micropolitical –
revolution?”
“. . .I think both Shelley and Blake were trying to work through a belief
in the possibility of liberation while at the same time recognizing the
dangers and risks of believing any liberation is ever final. at’s the bril-
liance of the poem – how the poet shis perspectives so that we are
constantly brought to reexamine our own assumptions about any solid
reality, any final position. . .”
“. . .was he responding to Mary in the poem – to Frankenstein – I mean
to her subtitle, ‘A Modern Prometheus’?”
“. . .it’s possible – perhaps he felt he was looking for a way to move
beyond the danger: after all, by beginning with Prometheus already
shackled to the rock he was admitting there were dangers, and now the
key was to try to surmount them. It’s clear he identified himself with
the hero – with his striving and with his sufferings. Look at these lines
from the preface: ‘The moral interest of the fable, which is so power-
190
fully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would

be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high
language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary.’
He compares him to Satan – clearly he had Milton’s Satan in mind,
but, he writes here,
Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than

Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and
patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of
being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy,
revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement. . .Prometheus
is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and
intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and truest motives
to the best and noblest ends. . .
. . .”
“. . .that definitely sounds like Shelley. . .”
“. . .while the first act of Prometheus was fleshed out here prior to the
arrival of Mary, the final act and final dra of the whole poem wouldn’t
be completed until sixteen months later – aer much of the worst had
happened. You can sense this in the poem – the difference between how
it started and where it ended. It’s really a turning point for him, midway
between the radically naive optimism of a poem like Queen Mab and the
dark pessimism of his last long poem, e Triumph of Life. Clearly he
wanted to write a hopeful poem about the possibility of radical political
and social change, but you can sense something happens in the poem: it
shis in the middle, and while it keeps trying to rise to its own occasion,
you get a sense that when it tries to represent the actual revolution in the
later acts, the poet is really grasping for something that has become
simply grains of sand in his hands. He enacts, as a poet, the very lesson
that the poem came to illustrate. . .it seems to me the poem is truly
a battle between parts of his own nature. . .”
“. . .so the part he wrote here – the first act – is optimistic?”
“. . .I wouldn’t quite say that – it’s just clear in this act that the trajectory
of the poem is towards liberation. It opens with the well-known scene of
Prometheus chained to the cliff, with two ‘Oceanids’ – daughters of
Oceanus – at his feet: Panthea and Ione. . .”
“. . .a reference to Claire and Mary?”
191
“. . .I think that the Panthea figure, if close to anybody, is closest to

Claire. Prometheus’ exiled lover, Asia, is closer to Mary, who, of course,
was far away at the time of the writing. . .”
“. . .and Ione?”
“. . .I don’t think one can really say – these are imaginative qualities,
aer all, but I do think there is some reflection of the situation he hoped
for, idealistically. . .”
“. . .you mean peace between Mary and Claire. . .”
“. . .at least. He certainly hoped as much for a revolution in private
life as for a revolution in the public realm – they were intrinsically
inter-connected realms for him. It’s difficult to give a sketch of the
poem, as actually not much can be said to happen in any traditional
sense of the word. A key to the metaphors is given quite early in the
poem: the Earth – Prometheus’ mother, speaks as a character, and
explains that her own suffering is due to a curse that Prometheus
himself cast on Jupiter after he was bound to the cliff. When
Prometheus asks her how he can get rid of the curse, he is told his
words must somehow be restated: at that point she explains to him
that there is a kind of double world he must gain access to in order to
do this. . .it’s very strange. She summons an image of the magician
Zoroaster – in Ancient Persian, Zarathustra: how one day he met his
double walking in a garden – a being from the world of shadows, with
whom he will be reunited when he dies. . .”
“. . .why was Shelley so obsessed by doubles?”
“. . .he was seeking a reason for the failure of revolution and goodness in
something close to a proto-Freudian theory. You can see it in what
happens next: suddenly there emerges a being from this nether realm –
the ‘phantasm of Jupiter,’ who speaks the curse of Prometheus again. . .”
“. . .it’s interesting that Prometheus cannot bring himself to speak it. . .”
“. . .on some level he’s confronting his own negative impulses, which
had been split off: that’s the crux of the issue for Shelley also, as he was in
a way exorcising his idealism in this period, and confronting his own
destructive drives – his own ‘fiend’ or ‘evil.’ You can see it in how deeply
the repeated curse affects him – he can hardly believe he was responsible
for it: ‘Were these my words, O parent?. . .It doth repent me: words are
quick and vain; Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. I wish no
living thing to suffer pain. . .’”
“. . .does this li the curse?”
19
“. . .it seems to give Prometheus a certain additional reserve of quiet

strength in his self-sacrifice, and it also seems to lead to a certain strength
in the Earth’s ability to aid him, but there are no clear results: everything
is diffuse in the poem – another aspect of his mature style. Immediately
aer this he is visited by Jupiter’s messenger, Mercury, who tries to
bargain with him over his knowledge of a secret that could lead to the
end of Jupiter’s reign. He refuses, and the furies are set upon him: their
torments are mostly psychological, and, of course, directly suited for the
optimist he is – their tormenting lesson for him is about how good inten-
tions will always lead to the worst results in the end. Look, here, where
he tells Panthea how he sees the forces of ‘truth, liberty and love’ reduced
by the victors to ‘strife, deceit, and fear’. . .”
“. . .a reference to the French Revolution?”
“. . .most likely: the reformer’s worst nightmare – that his reforms will
lead to terror. e only thing that saves Prometheus is when Earth
summons a group of spirits – I don’t know what they are, but they are
connected to spring: they proclaim themselves the ‘guides and guardians
of human thought,’ and they seem to try to give an upli to the human
spirit, although the stories they tell are not particularly happy – the one
spirit who speaks of love suggests that when one goes to sleep with
a vision of love, one awakes to find ‘the shadow of pain.’ Despite this, the
only hope he has aer what has passed is love: ‘. . .and yet I feel Most vain
all hope but love. . .’”
“. . .you’re right – the whole thing is rather abstract. . .”
“. . .but look – this is an interesting passage, which intersects with his
existential condition here in Este: in reminding him of love, the spirits
remind him of his distant love, Asia, but he despairs that she is so far
away, and claims there is ‘no solace le.’ At this point Panthea jumps in to
remind him that she is there with him: ‘Hast thou forgotten one who
watches thee e cold dark night, and never sleeps but when e shadow
of thy spirit falls on her?’ His response is to reassure her: ‘I said all hope
was vain but love: thou lovest.’ She responds ‘Deeply in truth,’ and then
goes on to describe Asia in her exile – quite sympathetically, actually, and
she hurries off to her – and that’s the end of the first act, which was all
he actually completed here in Este. . .”
“. . .what do you make of it in regard to their situation – anything?”
“. . .there’s an imaginative projection here that everything will work out
well between them all. . .the whole poem is about an attempt at a revolution
19
in human relations privately and publicly, and while it modifies and

qualifies its prediction drastically compared to the earlier poetry, there
is still hope for some progression. . .”
“. . .progression towards what?”
“. . .as he says at the end, it’s only a hope for the possibility of love – he
fully acknowledges that revolutionary hopes may be impossible: for
Shelley, at this point, it was the hope that love could be freed from its
social determinations. is is even more clear in the second act – the
opening is really quite extraordinary. He switches the scene to focus on
the character Asia. . .”
“. . .why ‘Asia’?”
“. . .I think Shelley named her Asia precisely to suggest a certain distanced
view, not to mention the distance between himself and Mary – physically
as well as emotionally. e act opens with Asia waiting in a vale for the
arrival of her sister, Panthea, and what transpires between them is really
quite astonishing. Panthea arrives and tells Asia that her reason for being
late was that she was in a deep sleep where she experienced two dreams, but
at this point she can only remember one. Asia asks to look into Panthea’s
eyes to see the dream, and Panthea tells her how Prometheus spoke to her,
comparing her to Asia and asking her to look into his eyes. . .here, look at
this passage where she describes the dream, it’s very sexual:
. . .the overpowering light

Of that immortal shape was shadowed o’er
By love; which, from his so and flowing limbs,
And passion-parted lips, and keen, faint eyes,
Steamed forth like vaporous fire; an atmosphere
Which wrapped me in its all-dissolving power,
As the warm aether of the morning sun
Wraps ere it drinks some cloud of wandering dew.
I saw not, heard not, moved not, only felt
His presence flow and mingle through my blood
Till it became his life, and his grew mine,
And I was thus absorbed, until it passed,
And like the vapours when the sun sinks down,
Gathering again in drops upon the pines,
And tremulous as they, in the deep night
My being was condensed. . .
19
. . .Panthea tells her that the only sound she heard Prometheus utter was
Asia’s name. . .”
“. . .of course – he must have been guilty when he was writing this: aer
all, he had just been very intimate with ‘Panthea’. . .”
“. . .yes, and Ione becomes a kind of projection screen: aer Panthea
awakes from the dream, Ione tells her how, aer sensing Panthea’s dream,
she no longer knows what she herself desires, as she can sense that some-
thing has happened to her – here she says, ‘. . .when just now we kissed,
I felt within thy parted lips the sweet air that sustained me, and the
warmth of the life-blood, for loss of which I faint, quivered between our
intertwining arms. . .’”
“. . .how do you read that? It sounds like she was somehow involved as
well – at least vicariously. . .”
“. . .somehow the desire that Panthea shared with Prometheus in her
dream is felt by Ione. I read it as simply the fact that love, or desire, is
contagious – it spreads in all directions. Otherwise, if we read it more
specifically, we could read Ione as Elise – who of course probably did
know about and was affected by Claire’s relationship to Shelley; aer all,
she knew enough about their relations to try to blackmail them later. . .”
“. . .do you think it can be read so specifically?”
“. . .no, not really – certainly not as the poem was intended to be read:
but still, in a way, yes – for our purposes. Aer all, something influenced
him to include these sections, and I have never really been convinced by
the various critical explanations of this section and what follows. One
imagines a universe, but there’s always some sort of foundation in the real
– at least in terms of human energies. . .but a ‘real’ we will never know,
for sure. . .I doubt Shelley knew it, or could know it. . .”
“. . .so, what is Asia’s reaction to the dream?”
“. . .it’s interesting that the actual passage is quite tame compared to the
passage Shelley cancelled from the poem. In the cancelled passage, there’s
a reaction which was probably closer to how Mary’s reaction would have been
if she had ‘seen’ Shelley in Claire’s eyes – look, she’s almost killed by it: Asia
says, ‘Li up thine eyes Panthea – they pierce they burn!’ to which Panthea
responds, ‘Alas! I am consumed – I melt away e fire is in my heart – ’ then
Asia, ‘ine eyes burn burn! – Hide them within thine hair – ’. . .Panthea: ‘O
quench they lips I sink I perish’. . .Asia: ‘Shelter me now – they burn It is his
spirit in their orbs. . .my life Is ebbing fast – I cannot speak – ’ and, finally,
Panthea says, ‘rest rest! Sleep death annihilation pain! aught else. . .’”
19
“. . .that sounds closer to the truth, given that Claire wouldn’t have been
able to hide her own feelings fully, and Mary would have sensed some-
thing between them. How did the passage he actually included describe
it?”
“. . .he went for the more idealistic version, to say the least. Here Asia
asks to read Panthea’s eyes, and she sees a change in their ‘deep, blue,
boundless heaven’ – it’s quite a difference. . .”
“. . .what does she see there?”
“. . .she can first see Prometheus, ‘arrayed In the so light of his own
smiles,’ which gives her joy, but suddenly a shadowy shape clouds her
view of him, which Panthea says is her other dream – the darker one she
forgot, which then comes into her mind: she has seen the spring buds
blown from the trees by a sudden ill wind, and on the blown leaves is
written ‘follow, follow.’ is, in turn, jogs Asia’s memory of her own
dream of how she and Panthea were wandering under ‘dense white fleecy
clouds’ blowing across the mountains, and in Asia’s dream the clouds also
have written on them ‘follow, follow,’ and the wind blowing through the
pines gives rise to sounds ‘like the farewell of ghosts,’ which, again, call
out ‘follow, follow’. . .”
“. . .follow where?”
“. . .it’s abstract, but the images are all associated with transience – the
leaves that fall, the clouds that scud across the sky, the blowing wind: at
this point of the poem we are witnessing the love each has for Prometheus,
and his distance from them brings them to an understanding of what his
loss would mean to them. Within Asia’s dream she asks Panthea to look
at her, and she sees within Panthea’s eyes the words ‘follow, follow,’ but
suddenly the sound actually occurs in the forest around them – first as an
echo of their words, then as a tangible voice, which they indeed follow.
ey are slowly drawn into this other realm – the realm of shadows intro-
duced before, presided over by this incredibly strange figure of
Demogorgon – really the core of negativity in the poem. . .”
“. . .and what does he, or it, represent – the unconscious?”
“. . .Shelley’s poem combines the mythic, the symbolic, the archetypal,
the religious, the psychological, the social, the philosophical – and takes
all of these modes of perception and knowledge into consideration only
to reject them in favor of a position beyond the transcendental thresh-
olds they represent, a negative realm of unknowing – something like
Kant’s concept of the noumenal world opposed to the phenomenal.
19
Demogorgon in his cave is the guardian of whatever this realm is, and it’s
fitting that even he, or ‘it’ – whatever it is, doesn’t know the answers it’s
guarding. Asia questions him about the origins of reality, drawing him
out: she arrives at the realization that Jupiter is enslaved by whatever this
master is, and when she asks who it is, Demogorgon responds as follows
– it’s an incredible speech:
If the abysm
Could vomit forth its secrets:—but a voice
Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless;
For what would it avail to bid thee gaze
On the revolving world? What to bid speak
Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these
All things are subject but eternal Love.
. . .it doubles back upon itself, as the progression to ever higher levels of
rulership finally ends up opening out to something beyond our compre-
hension – the ‘imageless truth’. . .”
“. . .but he does give a privileged position to love, which isn’t ruled by
time, chance, or fate. . .more wishful thinking on his part. . .”
“. . .given the circumstances he was in, yes, but it’s le open – one has to
give him credit for that. Asia’s response to Demogorgon is that she
already knew all this before, and consequently knows that each person
must judge for themselves: ‘So much I asked before, and my heart gave
e response thou hast given; and of such truths Each to itself must be
the oracle. . .’”
“. . .if Asia and Panthea are even traces of his hope in regard to Mary’s
acceptance of Claire, then certainly it’s wishful thinking – very few
women could easily accept seeing their man in another woman’s eyes, or
seeing the other woman in his eyes. . .”
“. . .I think that’s what accounts for the strange abstraction of the final
acts of the play – I’m not even sure I can characterize them. What
happened between its conception and its completion threw the play
entirely out of its orbit. It veers back and forth between a description of
what the liberation looks like and its complication, as the poetry moves
between a celebration of something that looks like oceanic merging, and
the opening of a possibility for further liberation. It makes sense, in a way,
because there’s a dialectical movement in the poem between Prometheus,
19
who must learn to temper his action with passivity, and Asia, who is
passive and must learn to act. In the third act Jupiter is overthrown, and
there’s a description of the world aer his fall. Shelley seems torn
between describing a celebration of liberation, and a realization that the
liberation is not all that the idealist in him would have hoped for – in
one section there’s even a description of people waking up to the revolu-
tion to find the world ‘somewhat changed,’ and then sinking down to
sleep again. . .”
“. . .it reminds me of the ‘Velvet Revolution’. . .”
“. . .yes, there were those who went back to sleep, or who never awoke!
Anyway, by the time Shelley wrote the third and fourth acts he knew that
there wasn’t going to be a final revolution – not in public life, and also not
in his private life. In the third act the key is simply mutability: any revolu-
tion is limited by the finite beings who experience and enact it. But aer
the recognition of necessity in the third act, the fourth act explodes again
in an almost ecstatic celebration of the earth and moon within their new
post-revolutionary status, with Panthea and Ione as the sole observers. . .”
“. . .a private revolution – or an imaginary one?”
“. . .I’m not sure. . .perhaps something like Blake’s view of revolution –
everything happening simultaneously. Many critics consider the last act
an aerthought, and an unfortunate one at that, but there’s something
fascinating about it. I think that he was extrapolating from the particular
to the universal and then back again – back from the abstraction of
oceanic merging to a full realization of passionate, bonded love in its
particular forms. ere’s a kind of mating ritual that takes place between
the earth and the moon, and if you consider that Mary was symbolically
associated with the moon and its coldness later on in Epipsychidion, it
isn’t stretching it too much to suggest that, on some level, Shelley may
have been projecting himself as the earth and Mary as the moon in this
section. In the intervening period between their stay in Este and when
this last act was written, Mary had utterly withdrawn into herself. It was
during the autumn of 1819, sixteen months later, that she was pregnant
with their son, Percy Florence Shelley. is pregnancy saved her life, as
otherwise she may not have been able to go on: the last section of
Prometheus Unbound was written that same autumn. Here, look at these
lines, where the earth speaks of how it has brought life again to the dead-
ened moon:
198
How art thou sunk, withdrawn, covered, drunk up

By thirsty nothing, as the brackish cup
Drained by a desert-troop, a little drop for all!
And from beneath, around, within, above,
Filling thy void annihilation, love
Burst in like light on caves cloven by the thunder-ball.
. . .and the moon’s reply:
e snow upon my lifeless mountains

Is loosened into living fountains,
My solid oceans flow, and sing, and shine:
A spirit from my heart bursts forth,
It clothes with unexpected birth
My cold bare bosom: Oh, it must be thine
On mine, on mine!
. . .the same sense of regeneration is expressed in his other great poem

of that period, ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ and for much the same
reason – that life had emerged out of all the death they had experi-
enced. . .”
“. . .so the poem simply ends like that – with this new birth?”
“. . .I’ve reduced it tremendously, but, yes – save that the last words are
those of Demogorgon, who warns that the balance may be unsettled
again at any time, but who also proclaims that it’s love that is the
conquering force – love defined as the power of bonding, merging,
forgiving, letting go:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
is, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
is is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
199
. . .he extols the endurance of suffering, forgiveness, resistance to power,

hope, and goodness: Prometheus learned the lesson of a quiet giving-over
to his suffering, while Asia learned the lesson that truth is only to be
found within one’s own self – albeit as a faint voice. Despite the fire-
works, there will be no final revolution, no final conquering of evil. It’s
a mature vision – at least in comparison to the earlier poetry. . .”
“. . .how was the poem received?”
“. . .he sent it to his publisher, Ollier, who bound it up with several
shorter lyrics, including the lyric, ‘Ode to the West Wind.’
Contemporary accounts suggest that no more than twenty or so copies
were sold – a contemporary joke had it that Prometheus Unbound was
unbound because no publishers would bind and sell it!”
“. . .he must have been crushed. . .”
“. . .he was gradually developing a thick skin about it all, and adopting
a view Mallarmé would articulate at the other end of the century – that
there was no audience, no ‘people,’ existing yet for the works he was
writing. . .”
“. . .and now they’re here, but they’re a very small minority. . .”
“. . .I think Shelley would have been happier with a dedicated few rather
than the popular mass audience Byron was getting. . .”
“. . .still, it must have been rather discouraging at the time – to have
written such a long poem, and then to have only a few readers. . .did he
write any short works while they were here?”
“. . .before Mary arrived he wrote only one – a short, unfinished lyric
addressed to her in Bagni di Lucca aer they had just arrived in Este the
first time. . .here it is:
O Mary dear, that you were here

With your brown eyes bright and clear,
And your sweet voice, like a bird
Singing love to its lone mate
In the ivy power disconsolate;
Voice the sweetest ever heard!
And your brow more. . .
an the sky
Of this azure Italy.
Mary dear, come to me soon,
I am not well whilst thou art far;
00
As sunset to the spherèd moon,

As twilight to the western star,
ou, belovèd, art to me.
O Mary dear, that you were here;
e Castle echo whispers ‘Here!
. . .the blank is a word he didn’t fill in. . .”

“. . .given what happened, it’s understandable he didn’t finish it. . .”
“. . .there wasn’t much time – but I’m sure that he felt guilty even before
Clara died. at’s one of the lessons he learned here: that it isn’t as easy
to enact ‘free love’ as he first thought. He had to learn to balance their
concerns in a way that wouldn’t lead to situations like the one he found
himself in – if that’s even possible. . .”
“. . .so nothing else was written here?”
“. . .after Mary arrived there was nothing written until they returned
to Este after Clara’s death. Mary arrived with the children and the
servants Milly Shields and Paolo Foggi on September th, and from that
time onwards Claire was ill with her mysterious illness, while Shelley
was ill from eating some bad cakes, and Clara, of course, was ill from
the fever that began in Bagni di Lucca. It was a little over two weeks
later that Shelley and Claire went to see the doctor in Padua: I think
it’s significant that they went alone together, and having missed the
appointment, Shelley sent Claire back to Este, and went on himself to
Venice to see Byron – Shelley feared he had been neglecting him, espe-
cially given his hospitality in offering the villa in Este for their use. He
returned after a day in Venice to meet Mary and Clara at Padua as he
had planned, but they decided to go on to Venice to Byron’s doctor, as
Clara’s condition had severely worsened. I’ve already told you the tragic
outcome of it all. After Clara’s death, Mary and Shelley were a week in
Venice mostly being comforted by the Hoppners and Byron, then they
returned to Este – which would have been around the end of
September: that’s when he drafted ‘Lines Written Among the
Euganean Hills’. . .”
“. . .well, it’s been totally over-looked by critics, and I think precisely
because it’s the kind of poem where the biographical context really does
give it another dimension. It took me several readings to see that the
narrative context is the passing of one beautiful, serene autumn day, over
01
the course of which the poem is being written. e poem recounts the
poet’s experience of the passing of the day itself, which he metaphorizes
as a green island amid the stormed-tossed sea of life – in sections it’s quite
specifically referring to their situation here. . .”
“. . .read it to me. . .”
“. . .it’s quite long. . .”
“. . .so read the sections about Este – about the feelings he had here. . .”
“. . .these are the opening lines:
Many a green isle needs must be

In the deep wide sea of misery,
Or the mariner, worn and wan,
Never thus could voyage on
Day and night, and night and day,
Driing on his dreary way,
With the solid darkness black
Closing round his vessel’s track;
Whilst above the sunless sky,
Big with clouds, hangs heavily,
And behind the tempest fleet
Hurries on with lightning feet,
Riving sail, and cord, and plank,
Till the ship has almost drank
Death from the o’er-brimming deep;
And sinks down, down, like that sleep
When the dreamer seems to be
Weltering through eternity;
And the dim low line before
Of a dark and distant shore
Still recedes, as ever still
Longing with divided will,
But no power to seek or shun,
He is ever dried on
O’er the unreposing wave
To the haven of the grave.
. . .the island metaphor works as a way to spatialize the temporal, to give

an image to his life then – a few moments of safe refuge, which was
0
always enveloped by misery. He would continue to use both the boat

metaphor and the island metaphor in his later poems. . .”
“. . .that’s what days like this are like – serene islands, floating in time,
before we go back to the usual turmoil. How does it continue?”
“. . .it shis here a bit – he deliberately wants the reader not to consider
heaven as such a place of refuge: the poem would be meaningless for the
kind of Christian he anticipates who sees everything as God’s grand
design, and life’s misery as being compensated for in heaven. He’s quite
Nietzschean in this, for his concern is with how we act, here and now:
What, if there no friends will greet;

What, if there no heart will meet
His with love’s impatient beat;
Wander wheresoe’er he may,
Can he dream before that day
To find refuge from distress
In friendship’s smile, in love’s caress?
en ‘twill wreak him little woe
Whether such there be or no:
Senseless is the breast, and cold,
Which relenting love would fold;
Bloodless are the veins and chill
Which the pulse of pain did fill;
Every little living nerve
at from bitter words did swerve
Round the tortured lips and brow,
Are like sapless leaflets now
Frozen upon December’s bough.
. . .”
“. . .‘bitter words’ – perhaps like Mary’s aer Clara’s death?”
“. . .yes – especially given the next stanza is a clear reference to little
Clara, who was buried out on the Lido in an unmarked tomb: Shelley
sees his own fate as connected to hers – he is the ‘wretch’ come to lie
down next to the little grave. . .
On the beach of a northern sea

Which tempests shake eternally,
0
As once the wretch there lay to sleep,

Lies a solitary heap,
One white skull and seven dry bones,
On the margins of the stones,
Where a few gray rushes stand,
Boundaries of the sea and land:
Nor is heard one voice of wail
But the sea-mews as they sail
O’er the whirlwind up and down
Howling, like a slaughtered town,
When a king in glory rides
rough the pomp of fratricides;
ose unburied bones around
ere is many a mournful sound;
ere is no lament for him,
Like a sunless vapor, dim,
Who once clothed with life and thought
What now moves nor murmurs not.
. . .”
“. . .why does he imagine her remains as ‘unburied’?”
“. . .certainly because it was an unofficial burial ground, but also I think
it’s an objective correlative of his grief, which was still gaping wide open
when he wrote these lines: imagine burying a one year old baby in the
sand. . .”
“. . .I would want to lie down right on the spot, and die. . .”
“. . .part of him did, I think – certainly a significant part of his rela-
tionship to Mary was buried there. The poem then shifts back to the
present moment, and the poet’s arrival back to Este from Venice and
Padua that morning. He recognizes the irony of being here among all
this beauty and serenity with agony surrounding him on all sides.
After describing the surroundings, he expands his meditation outward
to include the histories of Venice and Padua, with all of their histor-
ical miseries, contextualizing his own misery within the totality of
human suffering until he returns back to the scene around him – the
sun reaching noon, his soul being pervaded by the scene surrounding
him:
0
Noon descends around me now:

Tis the noon of autumn’s glow,
When a so and purple mist
Like a vaporous amethyst,
Or an air-dissolvèd star
Mingling light and fragrance, far
From the curved horizon’s bound
To the point of Heaven’s profound,
Fills the overflowing sky;
And the plains that silent lie
Underneath, the leaves unsodden
Where the infant Frost has trodden
With his morning-wingèd feet,
Whose bright print is gleaming yet;
And the red and golden vines,
Piercing with their trellised lines
e rough, dark-skirted wilderness;
e dun and bladed grass no less,
Pointing from this hoary tower
In the windless air. . .
. . .the ‘hoary tower’ is the place where we are sitting right now, and the
trellises – those right outside the door here. . .”
“. . .it’s strange to imagine that moment from the point of view of this
moment – to hear words written over a century and a half ago now, in
the same place. . .I wonder if he could have imagined his future readers
sitting right here, reading his poem. . .”
“. . .unfortunately, he hardly expected his poem to be heard in the
England of his own time. . .”
“. . .that’s terrible. . .but tell me, how does the poem end?”
“. . .by late aernoon, the voyage of that single day is coming to an end,
and the metaphorical ship’s ‘pilot,’ personified pain, returns to the helm
in order to cast them off into the sea of misery again. He then imagines
that there must be other islands, other brief moments of happiness,
awaiting him on the sea of life, and other souls voyaging over the sea
towards him – and he hopes that he might build some kind of refuge
against misery, even going so far as to imagine that it could be a kind of
catalyst for changing the world. . .here, I’ll read a few lines:
0
Other flowering isles must be

In the sea of Life and Agony:
Other spirits float and flee
O’er that gulf: even now, perhaps,
On some rock the wild wave wraps,
With folded wings they waiting sit
For my bark, to pilot it
To some calm and blooming cove,
Where for me, and those I love,
May a windless bower be built,
Far from passion, pain, and guilt,
In a dell mid lawny hills,
Which the wild sea-murmur fills,
And so sunshine, and the sound
Of old forests echoing round. . .
. . .”
“. . .the idealist again. . .”
“. . .very much so. . .Shelley still hoped for an earthly paradise when
he wrote this poem, and hoped it could be made universal, but I think
he changed quite soon after this: what he experienced here was the
beginning of the end of his belief in an earthly utopia brought about
through radical political means, and the beginning of a more mature
mode of thinking. He gave up thinking there was a way for the world
to finally meet his own vision of it, and began concentrating on how
he could hold onto his own vision, despite the world. . .”
“. . .but what about Mary – do you think Mary ‘saw Shelley in Claire’s
eyes’ when she arrived here as Asia saw Prometheus in Panthea’s eyes?”
“. . .her concern for Clara probably distracted her, although surely she
would have been aware that Shelley and Claire had been alone together
for three weeks. . .”
“. . .aer Clara died it was probably difficult for Mary to see Claire with
Allegra. . .”
“. . .that’s probably the reason why Claire remained with Allegra in
Este while Mary and Shelley returned to Venice in mid-October. There
were clearly changes in the nature of their intimacy after Clara’s death
– the ‘bitter words’ and ‘guilt’ mentioned in the poem. The bond
0
between Mary and Shelley was never broken, but there was a chasm
opened between them that would never again be fully bridged. At some
point between the time they were in Este and the time they were in
Naples, he wrote a scathing poem about this breach between them,
entitled ‘Invocation to Misery’: it clearly refers to Mary, and Mary must
have realized it, as it’s the only poem she didn’t include in the collected
poems she tried to publish in 18. He represents Mary as misery
personified. . .”
“. . .do you have it?”
“. . .yes, here:
Come, be happy! – sit near me,

Shadow-vested Misery:
Coy, unwilling, silent bride,
Mourning in thy robe of pride,
Desolation – deified!
Come, be happy! – sit near me:

Sad as I may seem to thee,
I am happier far than thou,
Lady, whose imperial brow
Is endiademed with woe.
Misery! we have known each other,

Like a sister and a brother
Living in the same lone home,
Many years – we must live some
Hours or ages yet to come.
‘Tis an evil lot, and yet

Let us make the best of it;
If love can live when pleasure dies,
We two will love, till in our eyes
is heart’s Hell seem Paradise.
Come, be happy! – lie thee down

On the fresh grass newly mown,
Where the grasshopper doth sing
0
Merrily – one joyous thing

In a world of sorrowing!
ere our tent shall be the willow,

And mine arm shall be thy pillow;
Sounds and odours, sorrowful
Because they once were sweet, shall lull
Us to slumber, deep and dull.
Ha! thy frozen pulses flutter

With a love thou darest not utter.
ou art murmuring – thou art weeping –
Is thine icy bosom leaping
While my burning heart lies sleeping?
Kiss me; – oh! they lips are cold:

Round my neck thine arms enfold –
ey are so, but chill and dead;
And thy tears upon my head
Burn like points of frozen lead.
Hasten to the bridal bed –

Underneath the grave ‘tis spread:
In darkness may our love be hid,
Oblivion be our coverlid –
We may rest, and none forbid.
Clasp me till our hearts be grown

Like two shadows into one;
Till this dreadful transport may
Like a vapour fade away,
In the sleep that lasts alway.
We may be dream, in that long sleep,

at we are not those who weep;
E’en as Pleasure dreams of thee,
Life-deserting Misery,
ou mayst dream of her with me.
08
Let us laugh, and make our mirth,

At the shadows of the earth,
As dogs bay the moonlight clouds,
Which, like spectres wrapped in shrouds,
Pass o’er night in multitudes.
All the wide world, beside us,

Show like multitudinous
Puppets passing from a scene;
What but mockery can they mean,
Where I am – where thou hast been?
. . .”
“. . .it’s devastating – he didn’t let her read it then, did he?”
“. . .I strongly doubt it. Clearly Mary felt more than grief – she blamed
him and Claire for what happened, and held herself at a distance, which
you can see in the phrases ‘robe of pride’ and ‘imperial brow,’ and all the
images of coldness in the poem. . .”
“. . .but he still hopes they will be able to transcend it – although it’s
not clear if it will be via suicide or a kind of death-in-life. . .”
“. . .it’s a hope that their bond will remain, despite everything. It
turned out to be true, but there was always a degree of coldness in Mary,
a degree of distance between them. . .who knows what would have
happened if Shelley had lived beyond the age of twenty-nine? He
turned more to Claire and others for his emotional needs from that
point onwards. . .”
“. . .what about Claire? What was she doing, what was she feeling,
during that period?”
“. . .we can only speculate, as with much of the story. . .I imagine that
it made Claire realize, all the more, the preciousness of her time spent
with Allegra, and the precariousness of her position vis-à-vis both
Byron and Shelley. It’s a tragic irony of the situation that Allegra may as
well have been dead from this point onwards as well, for this short
period of time together in Este was the last time Claire would ever see
Allegra. . .”
“. . .what? How is that possible? I thought Allegra lived for. . .how much
longer?”
09
“. . .Allegra lived for over three years longer. I couldn’t believe it either
when I first realized it aer plotting out their whole chronology. Of
course Claire couldn’t have known it at the time. . .”
“. . .Claire never saw her again. . .that’s so difficult to take in. I knew he
refused to let her see Allegra later, but it never occurred to me that the
last time came so soon, and here, in Este. . .”
“. . .from that point onwards Byron’s resolve hardened, and he refused
her access to the child, which grew worse the more Claire grew frantic
and reproached him for it – they were caught in a cycle of recriminations
that only made the situation increasingly worse. . .”
“. . .it’s horrible – it changes my sense of the place. ey had so much
happiness here in the beginning – until Clara died, and everything disinte-
grated. . .‘sea of misery’ is right! Tragedy is waiting around every corner. . .”
“. . .but we’re viewing it from the standpoint of eternity, their whole
lives spread before us: the future was inaccessible to them, and there were
times when they could fully live in the moment, and enjoy their green
islands. . .”
“. . .but it’s frightening to see it all at once – that both children were
really lost here. . .that’s so terrible. . .”
ey go out onto the lawn between the small tower and the hedge
fronting the road, and sit on a small stone bench ten meters from the
summer house.
“. . .what were their final days here like?”
“. . .at the end of October Shelley came to help Claire pack, and, prob-
ably, to discuss what had happened with her. ey had four days alone
together here. . .”
“. . .they had enjoyed such intimacy here, but the memory of it must
have been connected to the loss of Clara – they must have felt so guilty.
Did Shelley write to Claire from Venice aer Clara’s death?”
“. . .there’s an interesting point about that: Holmes was able to discover
something – most likely because he was the only one really trying to find
anything! He wondered why there wouldn’t have been at least one letter
that hinted about their time alone in Este – hinted because Mary oen
had access to the letters Shelley sent to Claire, and unless he sent a secret
letter, he had to assume Mary might read it. . .”
“. . .are there any letters existing from that time?”
“. . .yes. ere’s one letter Shelley sent from Venice to Este to tell Claire
about Clara’s death – it described the events leading up to her death. . .”
10

“. . .yes. . .this is what he wrote:
My dear Claire,
We arrived at Venice yesterday about five o’clock. Our little girl
had shown symptoms of increased weakness and even convul-
sive motions of the mouth and eyes, which made me anxious
to see the physician. As she passed from Fusina to the Inn, she
became worse. I le her on a landing and took a gondola for
Dr. Alietti. He was not at home. – When I returned, I found
Mary in the hall of the Inn in the most dreadful distress. Worse
symptoms had appeared. Another Physician had arrived. He
told me there was no hope. In about an hour – how shall I tell
you – she died – silently, without pain.
And now she is buried.
e Hoppners instantly came and took us to their house –
a kindness I should have hesitated to accept, but that this unex-
pected stroke reduced Mary to a kind of despair. She is better
today. I have sent a message to Albè, to say that I cannot see
him today – unless he will call here. Mary means to try and
persuade him to let Allegra stay.
All this is miserable enough – is it not? but must be borne. . .
– And above all, my dear girl, take care of yourself,
Your affectionate friend,
P.B.S.
. . .it seems there’s no clear reference suggesting anything especially inti-

mate between them, but Holmes wondered about an etched-out line,
following the ellipsis aer the words ‘but must be borne.’ As the letter
itself was in a collection in America, it was a while before he could satisfy
his curiosity, but when he did check it, it turned out to be significant: the
erased line turned out to have said, ‘Meanwhile forget me &’ – then
a word he couldn’t decipher – he thought it said either ‘relive’ or ‘revive
not the other thing’: either possibility would be a veiled hint at their rela-
tions. . .still, I wonder. . .”
“. . .what?”
“. . .well, Holmes is probably right because he saw the original letter,
but ‘relive’ or ‘revive’ both seem odd words to me. . .given her trip to the
11
Paduan physician, I can’t help wondering if he didn’t write, quickly and

a bit illegibly, ‘relieved about the other thing’. . .”
“. . .the abortion?”
“. . .Holmes does think that’s why she went to see the physician, and,
well, ‘abortion’ isn’t exactly the right word: given that their sexual rela-
tions had probably commenced again at Este, it likely was about
bringing on a missed period, so probably involved drinking some
potion or other. . .”
“. . .and either he was simply relieved because it did work, or, if she truly
was pregnant at the same time as Eliza, because he thought it had worked.
Still, it’s only a hypothesis – I guess we’ll never know. . .”
“. . .but who does Holmes think deleted it?”
“. . .Holmes wrote that the deletion was made in ink contemporary
with the writing, so he assumes probably Claire, who would have saved
the letter but wouldn’t have wanted Mary to come upon it. He also made
the point that even the deletion, given it was done then, says something
about what happened at Este – if it had to be handled so indirectly, and
then crossed out. . .”
“. . .I can understand how they must have felt: given their period of inti-
macy here was followed so closely by the death of Clara they would have
felt miserable. Do you think they really le off their intimacy again?”
“. . .I think for a while they did: there’s a poem from the period that
may well have been written about this temporary decision, called ‘e
Past’. . .”
“. . .read it, please. . .”
“. . .ok. . .here it is:
Wilt thou forget the happy hours

Which we buried in love’s sweet bowers,
Heaping over their corpses cold
Blossoms and leaves, instead of mould?
Blossoms which were the joys that fell,
And leaves, the hopes that yet remain.
Forget the dead, the past? Oh, yet

ere are ghosts that may take revenge for it,
Memories that make the heart a tomb,
Regrets which glide through the spirit’s gloom,
1
And with ghostly whispers tell

at joy, once lost, is pain.
. . .it certainly reveals something about the situation – aer all, there it
all is: memories, regrets, lost joy, and some hope. He seems to be trying to
convince her that they cannot turn away from their past. In any case,
circumstances would have made it very difficult for them to continue
their intimate relations in Naples. It might well have been in Rome that
their intimacy was re-engaged, and certainly by the time they were in
Florence and Pisa. It must have seemed for them a lifetime’s distance
away by then, even though it was actually only a year. . .”
“. . .so in their final days here alone they must have spoken of the future
– the future of their relationship. . .”
“. . .yes, and none of them could have guessed what was in store for
them in Rome, so I would speculate that perhaps they didn’t extinguish
the intimacy fully, then, as his letter, written in grief and haste, suggests,
but they must have become far more realistic about it. In any case, the
tragedy of Clara and the difficulty of their relations didn’t prevent him
from draing a good part of one of his major poems during precisely that
last four day period here before they all returned to Venice: he wrote
Julian and Maddalo during that time, right here in the summer house –
it’s one of my favorites. . .”
“. . .does it reflect their situation here, or was it abstract like Prometheus
Unbound?”
“. . .even though the precise events are transformed, I think it’s more or
less a direct expression of the results of the whole trip in terms of his
changed sensibility: of his friendship and conflict with Byron, of his rela-
tions with Claire, of the tragedy of Clara’s death, and of the consequences
to his relationship with Mary. You can see clearly the shi in his own
sensibility in the poem: the Julian character is still the earlier idealist
Shelley arguing against the pessimism of Maddalo – the character based
on Byron, but there is a considerable degree of self-directed irony in
regard to his own idealism. Listen to these lines from the preface:
Julian is an Englishman of good family, passionately attached

to those philosophical notions which assert the power of man
over his own mind, and the immense improvements of which,
by the extinction of certain moral superstitions, human
1
society may be yet susceptible. Without concealing the evil in

the world, he is for ever speculating how good may be made
superior. He is a complete infidel, and a scoffer at all things
reputed holy; and Maddalo takes a wicked pleasure in drawing
out his taunts against religion. What Maddalo thinks on these
matters is not exactly known. Julian, in spite of his heterodox
opinions, is conjectured by his friends to possess some good
qualities. How far this is possible the pious reader will deter-
mine. Julian is rather serious.
. . .”
“. . .that fits Shelley perfectly. What does he say about Maddalo?”
“. . .I think he gets Byron perfectly as well:
Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of ancient family and

of great fortune, who, without mixing much in the society of his
countrymen, resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city.
He is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable, if
he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the
redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be
proud: he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary
mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense
apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and
his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men;
and, instead of the latter having been employed in curbing the
former, they have mutually lent each other strength. His ambi-
tion preys upon itself, for want of objects which it can consider
worthy of exertion. I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can
find no other word to express the concentered and impatient
feelings which consume him; but it is on his own hopes and
affections only that he seems to trample, for in social life no
human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming than
Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious
conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as by
a spell. He has traveled much; and there is an inexpressible charm
in his relation of his adventures in different countries.
. . .”
1
“. . .that sounds quite accurate as well. . .”

“. . .compared to the abstractions of Prometheus Unbound, the poem is
surprisingly concrete – almost as if he needed to ground himself by
recording some of the events of the period. It opens with one of their
horseback rides down the beach of the Lido – of course it was barren and
windswept back then, not a line of resorts it became by the end of the
19th Century:
I rode one evening with Count Maddalo

Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice:—a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shiing sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this;—an uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
e waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes
A narrow space of level sand thereon,
Where ‘twas our wont to ride while day went down,
is ride was my delight. —I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
e pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows; and yet more
an all, with a remembered friend I love
To ride as then I rode;—for the winds drove
e living spray along the sunny air
Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,
Stripped to their depths by the awakening North;
And from the waves, sound like delight broke forth
Harmonizing with solitude, and sent
Into our hearts aerial merriment.
So, as we rode, we talked. . .
1
. . .one gets a wonderful sense of the banter between them, which becomes
more serious as they cross the lagoon in a gondola and begin to argue their
respective positions. Maddalo has the gondolier pause in mid-journey to
enjoy the vista of the city against the summer sunset – Shelley even
mentions the Euganean Hills in the distance. . .”
“. . .it must have been wonderful, then, just to float there – no
vaporettos, no motorboats. . .”
“. . .untreated sewage emptied straight into the canals. . .”
“. . .perhaps not all that wonderful, but still, it must have been beau-
tiful. . .”
“. . .yes, I can imagine it – imagine them floating in the lagoon in the
so twilight, just the waves lapping against the gondola. ey suddenly
hear the bell from a nearby church, and Maddalo tells Julian that it’s the
bell from the lunatic asylum, calling the inmates to Vespers Mass. Julian
makes a brief diatribe against a church that has nothing of real comfort to
offer the inmates, following which the two men part, and the gondola
takes him home. e next morning, Julian goes to Maddalo’s palace,
where he meets a little girl who is clearly modeled upon Allegra. . .
e following morn was rainy, cold and dim.

Ere Maddalo arose, I called on him,
And whilst I waited with his child I played.
A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made,
A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being,
Graceful without design and unforeseeing,
With eyes – oh speak not of her eyes! – which seem
Twin mirrors of Italian Heaven, yet gleam
With such deep meaning, as we never see
But in the human countenance: with me
She was a special favorite. I had nursed
Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first
To this bleak world; and she yet seemed to know
On second sight her ancient playfellow,
Less changed than she was by six months or so;
For aer her first shyness was worn out
We sate there, rolling billiard balls about. . .
. . .he must have put it in the poem to please Claire. . .”
1
“. . .it’s quite charming – did it actually happen?”

“. . .unless it occurred the very first night they were in Venice, it must
be an imaginative transposition of his time with Allegra at Este: Allegra
was never in the presence of both men when he was visiting, as far I know,
as she was always with Claire. . .”
“. . .there are no figures for Claire or Mary in the poem?”
“. . .yes and no: not as concrete characters – he was writing it in the
period aer the death of Clara, so he would have avoided it, but I do
believe that somehow everything that happened, and how Shelley was
affected by it all, was transposed into the strange figure of the ‘Maniac’ –
the Maniac character is really what takes the poem out of one realm and
into another, more mysterious realm, revealing the psychic stresses and
pressures Shelley had been through. . .”
“. . .where does he come in?”
“. . .already in the preface, where a short description is given of him:
Of the Maniac I can give no information. He seems, by his own

account, to have been disappointed in love. He was evidently
a very cultivated and amiable person when in his right sense.
His story, told at length, might be like many other stories of
the same kind: the unconnected exclamations of his agony will
perhaps be found a sufficient comment for the text of every
heart.
. . .Shelley makes his story deliberately vague: everyone is le by someone,

or someone dies, or some relationship turns out badly. . .”
“. . .or what Shelley was undergoing when he wrote it. . .”
“. . .yes. . .in some sense it’s a figure of the irrational, passion, chance, fate
– everything that breaks into ordered lives. e Byron character, Maddalo,
mentions him during their morning conversation: Julian has been arguing
for the perfectibility of the human race, while Maddalo has been arguing
the opposite. Maddalo initially brings up the Maniac as an example of
someone who had argued the same belief in social perfection as Julian, but
who was driven mad in the end – perhaps by the discrepancy between his
experience and his ideals. ey decide to visit him in his cell on the island,
and he becomes the crux of their argument, a kind of case-study in human
nature and despair. Maddalo only knows a bit about the Maniac’s history:
1
A lady came with him from France, and when

She le him and returned, he wandered then
About yon lonely isles of desert sand
Till he grew wild—he had no cash or land
Remaining,—the police had brought him here—
Some fancy took him and he would not bear
Removal; so I fitted up for him
ose rooms beside the sea, to please his whim,
And sent him busts and books and urns for flowers,
Which had adorned his life in happier hours,
And instruments of music—you may guess
A stranger could do little more or less
For one so gentle and unfortunate. . .
. . .it’s clearly a projection – as if he were transposing his own grief onto

what he feared he might be becoming. It’s not difficult to imagine Shelley
in the place of the Maniac – this is the description of what they see when
they first come to his cell:
ere the poor wretch was sitting mournfully

Near a piano, his pale fingers twined
One with the other, and the ooze and wind
Rushed through an open casement, and did sway
His hair, and starred it with the brackish spray;
His head was leaning on a music book,
And he was muttering, and his lean limbs shook.
His lips were pressed against a folded leaf
In hue too beautiful for health, and grief
Smiled in their motions as they lay apart—
As one who wrought from his own fervid heart
e eloquence of passion, soon he raised
His sad meek face and eyes lustrous and glazed
And spoke—sometimes as one who wrote, and thought
His words might move some heart that heeded not
If sent to distant lands: and then as one
Reproaching deeds never to be undone
With wondering self-compassion; then his speech
Was lost in grief, and then his words came each
18
Unmodulated, cold, expressionless;

But that from one jarred accent you might guess
It was despair made them so uniform:
And all the while the loud and gusty storm
Hissed through the window, and we stood behind
Stealing his accents from the envious wind
Unseen. I yet remember what he said
Distinctly: such impression his words made.
. . .the words of the maniac tell a somewhat different story than Shelley’s,
but I think the shadow tracings of his feelings and experiences are
expressed there – there’s some evidence that the Maniac section was actu-
ally written, or at least greatly revised, aer the events in Naples, and the
story he tells seems vague enough to be a conglomeration of Mary, Claire,
and Eliza Campbell. . .but it’s difficult to tell, as his narrative is frag-
mented, layered, and just how everything fits together is unclear – and
I think intentionally so. It’s difficult enough to understand the Maniac’s
narrative in the poem: to try to make sense of Shelley’s life via the poem,
or of the poem via his life, only complicates the issue further – one is le
simply siing through the fragments, and gaining glimpses of the narra-
tive, or narratives, behind them. e Maniac begins by explaining how
difficult it has been not to tell anyone of his despair, which is clearly how
Shelley handled the whole period in his own life given he was the only
one who knew the truth about everything that transpired, and Claire,
Mary, and others only received fragments:
‘Month aer month,’ he cried, ‘to bear this load

And as a jade urged by the whip and goad
To drag life on, which like a heavy chain
Lengthens behind with many a link of pain!—
And not to speak my grief—O, not to dare
To give a human voice to my despair
But live and move, and, wretched thing! smile on
As if I never went aside to groan
And wear this mask of falsehood even to those
Who are most dear—not for my own repose—
Alas, no scorn or pain or hate could be
So heavy as that falsehood is to me—
19
But that I cannot bear more altered faces

an needs must be, more changed and cold embraces,
More misery, disappointment, and mistrust
To own me for their father. . .Would the dust
Were covered in upon my body now!
at the life ceased to toil within my brow!
And then these thoughts would at the least be fled;
Let us not fear such pain can vex the dead.
. . .”
“. . .did he really hide it so well?”
“. . .yes – for example, Mary didn’t even know about the existence of
this poem or the other melancholic poems he wrote during this time until
aer he was dead. Look what she writes in her notes to the shorter poems
of this period – she seems unaware, blaming it on his physical suffering:
At this time Shelley suffered greatly in health. He put himself

under the care of a medical man, who promised great things, and
made him endure severe bodily pain, without any good results.
Constant and poignant physical suffering exhausted him; and
though he preserved the appearance of cheerfulness, and oen
greatly enjoyed our wanderings in the environs of Naples, and our
excursions in its sunny sea, yet many hours were passed when his
thoughts, shadowed by illness, became gloomy, – and then he
escaped to solitude, and in verses, which he hid from fear of
wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of
discontent and sadness. One looks back with unspeakable regret
and gnawing remorse to such periods; fancying that, had one been
more alive to the nature of his feelings, and more attentive to
soothe them, such would not have existed. And yet, enjoying as
he appeared to do every sight or influence of earth or sky, it was
difficult to imagine that any melancholy he showed was aught but
the effect of the constant pain to which he was a martyr.
. . .I think if she had been ‘more alive to the nature of his feelings’ her feelings
would have been somewhat more ambivalent than she expresses them here. . .”
“. . .do you think she’s being truthful? I realize she knew nothing at the
time, but later – surely she would have at least suspected something?”
0
“. . .if she had been aware she would never have admitted it publicly,
but I don’t think she was aware – that’s where Mary was severely limited.
She was honest, sincere, sensitive, and yet she deeply feared the darker
side of human nature, the result being she tended to shut down her
awareness, and consequently her feelings. . .”
“. . .but still, I feel sorry for her. . .”
“. . .oh, I certainly feel sorry for her, and understand her plight, but that
doesn’t change the fact that she was self-limiting in certain crucial ways
– the same self-limitations that led to her coldness, and finally her
emotional paralysis. . .”
“. . .so when the Maniac refers to ‘more changed and cold embraces,’ he
wasn’t exaggerating?”
“. . .apparently not at all. . .”
“. . .how does he continue?”
“. . .as I said, it’s all jumbled together without any coherence: in the next
fragment he switches from describing his torments to describing himself
working it through in his mind – how guilty he was, how much a victim:
‘What Power delights to torture us? I know

at to myself I do not wholly owe
What now I suffer, though in part I may.
Alas, none strewed sweet flowers upon the way
Where wandering heedlessly, I met pale Pain
My shadow, which will leave me not again—
If I have erred, there was no joy in error,
But pain and insult and unrest and terror;
I have not as some do, bought penitence
With pleasure, and a dark yet sweet offence,
For then,—if love and tenderness and truth
Had overlived hope’s momentary youth,
My creed should have redeemed me from repenting,
But loathèd scorn and outrage unrelenting
Met love excited by far other seeming
Until the end was gained. . .as one from dreaming
Of sweetest peace, I woke, and found my state
Such as it is.—
. . .”
1
“. . .I assume the ‘loathèd scorn and outrage unrelenting’ is from

Mary?”
“. . .it’s possible it might have been a description of Mary – or it
might be entirely imaginary: that’s the trouble with using the poetry
for evidence, as to assume any direct correspondence is facile at best,
dangerously inaccurate at worst. . .still, for those who know the story,
there are aspects of the poem that are clearly references to his life;
for example, the next short stanza is one of those points where the
poem betrays its real source, for clearly a second woman suddenly
emerges in the Maniac’s story. Where the other was ‘scornful’ and
‘unrelenting,’ this one is ‘compassionate and wise’ – but she disap-
pears from the poem, so she’s clearly a musing of Shelley’s rather
than of the Maniac’s. It’s as if the narrative persona slips for
a moment:
O ou, my spirit’s mate

Who, for thou art compassionate and wise,
Wouldst pity me from thy most gentle eyes
If this sad writing thou shouldst ever see—
My secret groans must be unheard by thee,
ou wouldst weep tears bitter as blood to know
ey lost friend’s incommunicable woe.
. . .”
“. . .Mary. . .or Claire?”
“. . .it could be either, or both, given that Mary would not have wanted
to know about Claire or Eliza, and Claire did not know about Eliza.
The most we can say is that it is clear there’s a second woman who
couldn’t be told something. This secrecy must have been tormenting
him, for the scene where the Maniac suddenly bursts out with the truth
is extraordinary – almost as if the poet were suddenly giving us
a glimpse into his own mind and the sudden frenzy he feels to tear the
‘veil’ from his mind and speak out. If there’s anything in the poem that
he wouldn’t have wanted Mary to see, it’s in this section and the stanzas
that follow – he uses ellipses throughout to show his derangement. It
starts here:

‘I must remove
A veil from my pent mind. ‘Tis torn aside!
O, pallid as death’s dedicated bride,
ou mockery which art sitting by my side,
Am I not wan like thee? at the grave’s call
I haste, invited to thy wedding-ball
To greet the ghastly paramour, for whom
ou hast deserted me. . .and made the tomb
y bridal bed. . .But I beside your feet
Will lie and watch ye from my winding sheet—
us. . .wide awake though dead. . .yet stay, O stay!
Go not so soon—I know not what I say—
Hear but my reasons. . .I am mad, I fear,
My fancy is o’erwrought. . .thou art not here. . .
Pale art thou, ‘tis most true. . .but thou art gone,
y work is finished. . .I am le alone!—
. . .where the previous stanza was vague, here it’s clear – I think these
words are quite clearly written out of his feelings for Mary aer she had
withdrawn from him emotionally, ‘wide awake though dead.’ When he
says ‘Am I not wan like thee?’ it could refer to the difference between
their feelings aer Clara died. . .”
“. . .it’s too intense not to have been written with the situation in mind
– he couldn’t have just happened to come upon these images. . .”
“. . .when you think about it, there really are so few literary works that
reveal the mind in extremis truthfully – that reveal how a person can
deeply love another and yet at certain moments feel a total hatred for
them, that are able to represent the depths the mind can plunge to when
such a crisis is reached. at was what Greek tragedy was supposed to
evoke in the audience – a dizzying confrontation with the abyss. In any
case, the various fragments are hard to reconcile as being about the same
woman – the next stanza shis the focus to what seems, if it is referring
to anybody, the mystery lady:
‘Nay, was it I who wooed thee to this breast

Which, like a serpent, thou envenomest
As in repayment of the warmth it lent?
Didst thou not seek me for thine own content?

Did not thy love awaken mine? I thought

at thou wert she who said, “You kiss me not
Ever, I fear you do not love me now”—
In truth I loved even to my own overthrow
Her, who would fain forget these words: but they
Cling to her mind, and cannot pass away.
. . .”
“. . .what does ‘fain’ mean?”
“. . .it’s archaic – it means ‘willingly,’ but here it’s somewhat unclear, for
the suggestion is that the woman would willingly want to forget she
seduced him. . .none of it is a one-to-one correspondence – it’s a transmu-
tation of his entire history. e next section is the most intense description
of self-loathing I’ve ever read, with perhaps the exception of Oedipus
tearing out his own eyes. e Maniac claims he has no pride le, compares
himself to a worm, and then there’s this terrible image of self-castration. . .”
“. . .self-castration?”
“. . .imaginary self-castration, but it’s still horrifying and, what’s worse,
it’s not even with a knife – he imagines himself simply pulling it off with
his bare hands!
‘at you had never seen me—never heard

My voice, and more than all had ne’er endured
e deep pollution of my loathed embrace—
at your eyes ne’er had lied love in my face—
at, like some maniac monk, I had torn out
e nerves of manhood by their bleeding root
With mine own quivering fingers, so that ne’er
Our hearts had for a moment mingled there
To disunite in horror—these were not
With thee, like some suppressed and hideous thought
Which flits athwart our musings, but can find
No rest within a pure and gentle mind. . .
ou sealedst them with many a bare broad word
And cearedst my memory o’er them—for I heard
And can forget not. . .they were ministered
One aer one, those curses. Mix them up
Like self-destroying poisons in one cup,

And they will make one blessing which thou ne’er

Didst imprecate for, on me,—death.
. . .it’s quite intense, isn’t it?”

“. . .very – one doesn’t write things like that unless it reflects something
about one’s own psychic state. . .”
“. . .he felt deeply abject: Clara’s death and Mary’s withdrawal must
have felt like fate’s punishment – not to mention whatever happened
with his Naples ‘charge’ and her mother. e wildness of the Maniac’s
rantings and ravings were certainly no stranger to him: Shelley had come
to realize that much of life was out of his control, and that what he might
have done in one moment out of a sense of idealized love and goodness
could end up with disastrous consequences. Of course, aer this, in
Naples and in Rome, his life became even more uncontrollable: all of his
poetry from that period onwards is trying to work out the chasm
between his vision and its attainment – between his sense of the possi-
bilities of life and the actual facts of his life, which is what the dialectic
of this poem is ultimately about. . .”
“. . .what follows – what could follow – the stanza you just read?”
“. . .the Maniac raves a bit more: the next stanza is pure Shelley, but the
old Shelley, wondering how someone with such good intentions could
turn out to be hated so deeply by another. It’s meant to be pathetic, in all
of the senses of the word. . .
‘It were
A cruel punishment for one most cruel,
If such can love, to make that love the fuel
Of the mind’s hell; hate, scorn, remorse, despair:
But me—whose heart a stranger’s tear might wear
As water-drops the sandy fountain-stone,
Who loved and pitied all things, and could moan
For woes which others hear not, and could see
e absent with the glance of fantasy,
And with the poor and trampled sit and weep,
Following the captive to his dungeon deep;
Me – who am as a nerve o’er which do creep
e else unfelt oppressions of this earth,
And was to thee the flame upon thy hearth,

When all beside was cold—that thou on me

Shouldst rain these plagues of blistering agony –
Such curses are from lips once eloquent
With love’s too partial praise—let none relent
Who intend deeds too dreadful for a name
Henceforth, if an example for the same
ey seek. . .for thou on me lookedst so, and so—
And didst speak thus. . .and. . .thus. . .I live to show
How much men bear and die not!
. . .here the persona of the Maniac melds into Shelley himself, and two
stanzas later, where he addresses his own writing of these words, the
representation of the Maniac speaking becomes the representation of
Shelley writing:
‘How vain
Are words! I thought never to speak again,
Not even in secret,—not to my own heart—
But from my lips the unwilling accents start,
And from my pen the words flow as I write,
Dazzling my eyes with scalding tears. . .my sight
Is dim to see that charactered in vain
On this unfeeling leaf which burns the brain
And eats into it. . .blotting all things fair
And wise and good which time had written there.
. . .but the writing is ‘in vain’ – and in the next stanza there appears to be
a direct address to the woman: he advises her to be ‘milder’ for his sake
and her own, as nothing will bring back what she has lost. . .
‘ose who inflict must suffer, for they see

e work of their own hearts and this must be
Our chastisement or recompense—O child!
I would that thine were like to be more mild
For both our wretched sakes. . .for thine the most
Who feelest already all that thou hast lost
Without the power to wish it thine again;
And as slow years pass, a funereal train

Each with the ghost of some lost hope or friend

Following it like its shadow, wilt thou bend
No thought on my dead memory?
. . .the mixing of the Maniac and Shelley is clear here, for the reference to
something ‘lost’ applies to Mary, but applies in no clear way to the
Maniac’s woman. His speech ends with his assurance that he won’t harm
her or himself, that he forgives all, and that he will tell nothing – that he
will ‘hide under these words, like embers, every speck of that which has
consumed me.’ He hopes that ‘oblivion hides this grief’. . .”
“. . .he did a very good job of hiding it – both in the poem and in his
life. Does the poem end with this speech?”
“. . .no, there’s a denouement. Julian and Maddalo go away aer the
Maniac falls asleep, and their argument is entirely forgotten. ey are le
to brood upon his fate, and they only conclude that his ravings were close
to poetry – that poets oen experience such madness. Julian, the Shelley
character, idealistically muses on the possibility of staying in Venice,
befriending the Maniac, and slowly bringing him back to human society,
but he gives up this scheme as merely a product of the moment and
nothing else. e poem ends with him returning to Venice aer an
absence of many years, finding Maddalo has gone away traveling to
Armenia, and the Allegra character, now a woman, receives him, telling
him that the woman who had caused the Maniac’s problems had
returned, met him, and le again without him. Julian is astonished, and
asks her if she knows the reason the woman le: aer refusing at first, she
tells him something, but it isn’t even communicated to the reader. e
poem closes with the line: ‘. . .but the cold world shall not know. . .’”
“. . .that’s it?”
“. . .that’s it. e poem was a very private catharsis of his feelings, just as
Epipsychidion was to be later. He simply gathered the poem up with
several others written during this period and sent them to Leigh Hunt in
August, 1819, but they weren’t published during his lifetime. . .”
“. . .only Hunt saw the poem during Shelley’s lifetime?”
“. . .it’s possible Claire did, but she made no mention of it. . .”
“. . .and it’s considered one of Shelley’s major poems, right?”
“. . .yes. e pre-crisis Shelley would have at least had it privately printed
as a pamphlet or in a book, but the post-crisis Shelley was more resigned to
his lack of renown, and was considerably more clandestine in his life – even

with his friends. His letters to Peacock, Hogg, and Hunt about that whole
period offer nothing more than a single sentence about his not being in high
spirits around that time. . .”
“. . .that’s understandable given the circumstances, and given how they
had already treated him. . .”
“. . .and given how many critics have treated him until this day. Aer
his death, critics and commentators quickly took control of his legacy
mostly recasting him as a weak, ineffectual ‘spirit of the air,’ until critics
in the second half of the 0th century finally reached a level of sophisti-
cation to deal with his œuvre. But I sometimes wonder if the academic
critical enterprise is more about deploying, controlling, and policing
meaning and value – turning his poetry into either pure aesthetics, or
a cautionary tale, or drawing ideological conclusions posited from the
outset. Shelley was seeking a new way to live, despite everything.
Sometimes I wonder if he realized just what he had undertaken – just
how much he was challenging his own society’s social and class structure,
its hypocrisy, and with little or no financial support except for his
minimal allowance from the estate – supporting at any given time six or
seven people, and giving spiritual and emotional support to many more.
He had to live this way – he couldn’t live any other, so his poetry
explored ways of coping, ways of dealing with the difficulties in the face
of the fact that his reality became increasingly bleak, increasingly tragic.
His poetry was always seeking ways through and beyond – even the
bleakest poems. When he was here in Este, he probably thought it had
reached the bottom – he had no idea it would get much worse. . .”
“. . .it’s hard to believe it could have gotten any worse, but given
I already know Claire would never see Allegra again, I can imagine it. . .”
“. . .I can tell you now, if you want. . .”
“. . .no, leave me in suspense for a while, so I can take it all in. When did
they finally leave here?”
“. . .Shelley returned with Allegra to Venice aer the four days in Este
on October 9th, leaving Claire behind. He and Mary took their leave of
Byron on the 1st, returned to Este, and aer packing for five days, they
le for Rome on November th. ey wouldn’t see Byron again for
almost three years. If my theory is correct, Shelley probably discovered
a post restante letter from Mrs. Campbell in Rome, which would have
prompted his early journey alone to Naples. It seems unlikely to me that
he would have gone alone unless there was something pressing, and
8
private, to attend to – and, as you know, that’s when everything came to

a head, and almost immediately. Whatever did happen had to be kept
secret from Mary, who was lost in her own grief – facing any of this in
the wake of the loss of Clara would have been impossible for her to bear.
I think much of his torment in Naples was not only caused by the terrible
consequences of the one – or possibly two – pregnancies, but also by the
sheer fact he had to keep it entirely secret from Mary. . .”
“. . .how do you think he managed it?”
“. . .on the surface he appeared like a tourist, along with Mary and
Claire. In the first days they spent there in December they even had time
to visit the summit of Mount Vesuvius, but – and this seems rather telling
– Shelley collapsed in a fit of nervous exhaustion following the descent.
ey visited Pompeii as well, and the Sibyl’s Grotto at Cumae, where
Mary staged the prologue to her novel, e Last Man. It’s hard to
imagine the psychic stress he must have been under, tip-toeing around
Mary’s grief when the circumstances were so compromising to him. All
of this went into one of his most famous poems, ‘Stanzas Written in
Dejection, Near Naples,’ another poem that was in the batch that he sent
to Hunt with Julian and Maddalo. . .”
“. . .that one I do know. . .”
“. . .it’s one of the most anthologized of his lyrics, and yet, while it
certainly stands alone as an excellent poem, when the whole story behind
it is considered, I believe it has a much deeper resonance. . .”
“. . .can you read it for me?”
“. . .here, I’ve found it:
e sun is warm, the sky is clear,

e waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
e purple noon’s transparent might,
e breath of the moist earth is light,
Around its unexpected buds;
Like many a voice of one delight,
e winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
e City’s voice itself, is so like Solitude’s.
I see the Deep’s untrampled floor

With green and purple seaweeds strown;
9
I see the waves upon the shore,

Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone, –
e lightning of the noontide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.
Alas! I have nor hope nor health,

Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth
e sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned –
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.
Others I see whom these surround –
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure; –
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.
Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.
Some might lament that I were cold,

As I, when this sweet day is gone,
Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,
Insults with this untimely moan;
ey might lament – for I am one
Whom men love not, – and yet regret,
Unlike this day, which, when the sun
Shall on its stainless glory set,
Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.
0
. . .given that the Maniac’s scene in Julian and Maddalo had not yet been
completed when he wrote this, and Prometheus Unbound only completed
in Rome, I think one can date the moment of Shelley’s existential,
psychological and poetic maturity to this poem. . .”
“. . .but the last part is a little unclear to me: he seems to be saying that
these others ‘might lament,’ and yet they would ‘regret’. . .so that unlike
the day, which lingers on in memory because it is ‘stainless,’ he is not
‘stainless,’ and so would be the cause of their regret – is that right?”
“. . .yes, that’s it. . .”
“. . .but how could he really think they would have regretted his
memory?”
“. . .there’s undoubtedly some self-pity there, but at that moment he
must have wondered if there would be any love le for him aer what
happened – certainly Mary had turned away from him. . .”
“. . .but what about Claire?”
“. . .she didn’t exist as solace at that moment for many reasons –
possibly the pregnancy or miscarriage, or their mutual sense of guilt and
complicity in Clara’s death, or the fact she had just le Allegra again, or
the fact he couldn’t tell her about Eliza Campbell. . .most likely, a mixture
of all of these things. . .”
“. . .it must have been horrible to have had so many difficulties – to
know that he was the cause of them, and to know that he could not share
them with those who loved him best. . .”
“. . .I think he was forced by these events to see his own limitations, the
limitations of those closest to him, and the limitations of life itself. He
expressed it in another short lyric he wrote during this period, ‘Li Not
the Painted Veil,’ which is more abstract than the ode, but perhaps even
more depressing, as it’s more universal. He uses the figure of the veil of
Isis to reveal the dangers:
Li not the painted veil which those who live

Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread, – behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
eir shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lied it – he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love,
1
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught

e world contains, the which he could approve.
rough the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.
. . .the veil is based on the veiling of an image of Isis in Saïs, Egypt, which
bore the inscription, ‘I am everything that has been, that is, and that shall
ever be: no human mortal has discovered me behind my veil.’ It was
a standard theme of the romantics – especially the German romantics
because of its Kantian connotations. Schiller also wrote a poem called
‘e Veiled Image of Sais’ about a youth who lis the veil, is struck
unconscious, and is unable to explain what he saw – he spends the rest
of his life warning people not to li it. Novalis, also, wrote on a similar
theme in his unfinished, poetic novel, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais – e
Apprentices of Saïs: within the novel there’s a fable of Hyacinth and Rose
Petal. Hyacinth, a young man, falls in love, dreams of the veiled image,
and when he lis the veil, Rose Petal falls into his arms; however, a variant
version is more interesting: when the protagonist lis the veil, he sees
himself – the self as unknowable. For Shelley, the veil is similar, for the
narrator is seeking ‘things to love’ behind it, and discovers nothing but
the cynical world of Diogenes. e events in Este and Naples had
brought him face to face with certain truths – with the vagaries of love,
with the consequences of his incapacity to accept certain of life’s limita-
tions. By the time their period in Rome ended, Shelley had been forced,
by fate, to accept these limitations, and was a changed man. . .”
“. . .when did they depart for Rome?”
“. . .they le Naples for Rome the last day of February, 1819. e Rome
sojourn started out well enough: they took rooms on the Corso, and they
became tourists – visiting the ruins, galleries, and private collections.
ey took daily rides among the statues and fountains of the gardens of
the Villa Borghese, and they each adopted a different part of Rome as the
setting for their activities – Shelley writing, Claire reading, and Mary
drawing. . .”
“. . .did Mary recover at all from her depression?”
“. . .when they le Naples, Mary was still in a deep depression – although
it wasn’t so deep during this period to prevent them from conceiving

a child, as she knew she was pregnant by April. She wrote about her depres-
sion in her journal and letters, but it seems to have only affected her in
moments. For example, she writes the following about her depressions:
‘God knows why but I have suffered from them, ten times over, than I ever
did before I came to Italy. Evil thoughts will hang over me – but this is only
now and then. . .’”
“. . .and how was Claire spending her time?”
“. . .Claire was taking singing lessons and reading: her favorite place was
on the steps of the Temple of Aesculpius in the Villa Borghese, on an
island in the gardens there – she was reading Wordsworth, Schlegel, and
Shelley’s translation of the Symposium. . .”
“. . .and you think she and Shelley had resumed their intimacy?”
“. . .she seems to have accompanied Shelley on quite a few of his moon-
light walks, and there’s one reference, in a fragment, to awaiting an
‘aethereal lover’ among the ruins in Rome. . .”
“. . .I suppose they had to be very secretive, so the moments of intimacy
they had were infrequent. Also, she was no doubt deeply upset about
Allegra. . .”
“. . .yes: I think it was in Rome that she finally resigned herself to the
impossibility of any relation to Byron, and began to pit herself against
him – with, predictably, even worse results. In May, she wrote him a long
letter in response to her having heard from Mrs. Hoppner about
a possible plan for a Mrs. Vavassour, a widow, to adopt Allegra as her
daughter and educate her. . .”
“. . .she must have been furious!”
“. . .she was more frantic than furious. She began the letter rather calmly,
looking at all sides of the issue, but soon she was imploring him not to
‘throw away his great treasure to strangers,’ and cajoling him to take better
care of Allegra, especially given she seems to have feared she wouldn’t get
a chance to see her. Here, I’ll read the second part – it’s quite poignant, and
even more so in retrospect, given how prescient she was:
I am very unhappy about Allegra – Mr. Bell, one of the first

English surgeons who has seen Shelley, ordered him to pass
the summer at Naples & says if S – has any consumptive
symptoms left by the approach of next winter he must pass
the cold season at Tunis. So you may think how vexed I am
about her – I really think I never shall see you or her again.

And if Shelley were to die there is nothing left for us but

dying – My dearest Lord Byron – all the good you can do
for me is not to hate me, but for Allegra everything depends
upon you. Do not make me mention what you ought to do
for her, for I know that every word that falls from my mouth
is a serpent or toad to you like the wicked sister in the fairy
tale. It is not mine but your fault that they are not Pearls &
Diamonds. Think therefore for yourself & do what you
know you ought to do for her. If I knew that it were done
I should be a great deal happier for I really am most
wretched about her & fear I ever shall be. I dare say all my
writing is useless. I write so little that I cannot express what
I mean. Pray think of that child’s miserable condition if you
were to die, without any one to take care of her except her
mother who is hated & detested by everybody – She would
be dependant all her life without any hope – like me she
would never see the end of it – her days would pass one after
the other like the unraveling of a ball of thread, line after line
each like the past and yet forever hoping – People talk of the
stabbing of the Italians – the English do worse – (they take
your heart & squeeze it out of your body put it back in your
body & and then ask you how do you do?)
You know very well what I mean concerning Allegra – do it
for it can make no difference to yourself & does greatly to me.
Let me hear then that it is done & I shall ever think of you
with affection & gratitude – Could I hinder the past I would
– & then you should not be teased – I hope that in making
my unhappiness you have found your own happiness but I fear
not. How is your health? I always fear you will die suddenly
with a fever living the life you do. But that Heaven forbid.
May you live long & happy my dearest Lord Byron. And take
care of your health. Likewise pardon in me the only fault
I ever committed towards you – that of Co-existence. Visit
Allegra oener than you have. You ought indeed.
Your affectionate
Claire

. . .it’s as if she were gazing in a crystal ball without realizing it: she never
did see Allegra or Byron again, Byron did die of a fever, and she guessed
correctly that handing Allegra over to strangers would be for the worse. . .”
“. . .and she anticipated Shelley’s death as well, although not the cause
– but was Shelley as sick as she writes?”
“. . .it may partially have been a reference to his despair in Naples; aer
all, Claire seems to have been oblivious to the real cause, and would, like
Mary, have attributed his problems to his physical ailments, which
continued, as always, flaring up especially when his existential conditions
were dismal. Shelley wrote to Peacock from Rome that his ‘spirits’ were
‘not the most brilliant,’ but by the end of March his health was better, and
he was actually quite active in Rome with his reading and writing
schedule. He was reading Euripides, Lucretius, and Milton, and he
decided upon the Baths of Caracalla as his writing studio – he wrote most
of the second and third acts of Prometheus Unbound perched on top of
the ruins there. He wrote a beautiful description of the Baths to Peacock:
The next most considerable relic of antiquity considered as

a ruin is the Thermæ of Caracalla. These consist of six enor-
mous chambers, above 00 feet in height, and each enclosing
a vast space like that of a field. There are in addition a number
of towers & labyrinthine recesses hidden & woven over by the
wild growth of weeds & ivy. Never was any desolation more
sublime & lovely. The perpendicular wall of ruin is cloven
into steep ravines filled with flowering shrubs whose thick
twisted roots are knotted in the rifts of the stones. At every
step the aerial pinnacles of shattered stone group into new
combinations of effect, & tower above the lofty yet level
walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one
rapidly traveling along the plain. The perpendicular walls
resemble nothing more than that cliff in Bisham wood which
is overgrown with wood, & yet is stony & precipitous – you
know the one I mean, – not the chalk-pit, but the spot which
has that pretty copse of fir trees & privet bushes at its base, &
where Hogg & I scrambled up & you – to my infinite discon-
tent – would go home. These walls surround green & level
spaces of lawn, on which some elms have grown, & which are
interrupted towards their skirts by masses of the fallen ruin

overtwined with the broad leaves of creeping weeds. The blue

sky canopies it, & is as the everlasting roof of these enormous
halls. But the most interesting effect remains. In one of the
buttresses which supports an immense and lofty arch which
‘bridges the very winds of Heaven’ are the crumbling remains
of an antique winding staircase, whose sides are open in many
places to the precipice. This you ascend, & arrive on the
summit of these piles. Here grow on every side thick entan-
gled wildernesses of myrtle & the myrtelus & bay & the flow-
ering laurustinus whose white blossoms are just developed,
the wild fig & a thousand nameless plants sown by the
wandering winds. These woods are intersected on every side
by paths, like sheep tracks thru the copse wood of steep
mountains, which have been seen from below. In one place
you wind along a narrow strip of weed-grown ruin; on one
side is the immensity of earth & sky, on the other, a narrow
chasm, which is bounded by an arch of enormous size,
fringed by the many coloured foilage & blossoms, &
supporting a lofty & irregular pyramid, overgrown like itself
by the all-prevailing vegetation. Around rise other crags &
other peaks all arrayed & the deformity of their vast desola-
tion softened down by the undecaying investiture of nature.
Come to Rome.
. . .in writing Prometheus Unbound in that spot he was writing about the
downfall of empire from the midst of imperial ruins. . .”
“. . .he sounds a little nostalgic about England. . .”
“. . .he had been gone a year when he wrote this, so there was some
nostalgia, but it was balanced by a growing sense of exile, and its necessity
for him. Shelley was already aware of the contempt in which he was held
by the English, and he wrote to Peacock a few weeks later that, save for
five or so people, he was seen in England as a ‘rare prodigy of crime &
pollution whose look even might infect.’ is was driven home by an
event that occurred in early May: Shelley was collecting his mail at the
post office when a man standing behind him suddenly cried out, ‘What,
are you that damned atheist Shelley?’ and then proceeded to knock him
to the ground. . .”
“. . .really? at’s terrible! What did he do?”

“. . .he seems to have given a few blows back to the man, but the fight
appears to have been broken up rather quickly. He was understandably
deeply shaken by the experience. . .”
“. . .I can imagine. . .”
“. . .they decided the next day to move from the Corso to a building at
the top of the Spanish steps, near the Trinita dei Monti. ey took rooms
next door to Aemilia Curran, a friend of the Godwins: she was a free
spirit – an Irish radical, living alone, totally adapted to continental life.
She painted, and over the space of a few weeks she painted all of their
portraits – the portraits of Shelley and Claire you’ve seen, but also
portraits of Mary and William which have been lost. . .”
“. . .that’s a pity. . .”
“. . .she wasn’t a terribly good painter, and Mary thought her portrait
made her look ‘dowdy’. . .”
“. . .it’s a somewhat archaic word – it means plain, or a bit old-fashioned. . .”
“. . .I guess ‘ošumělý’ would be closest in Czech. . .and was Shelley writing
anything, then?”
“. . .at some point when they lived on the Corso Shelley had ventured
over towards the Jewish Quarter and visited the Palazzo Cenci,
a Renaissance palace. He had obtained a manuscript detailing the life of
Count Cenci and his family back in Livorno, and he had obtained
a portrait of Beatrice Cenci, his daughter, in April – but visiting the
palace activated his imagination, and he began draing a play based on
their lives a few days later. . .”
“. . .what is their story?”
“. . .the primary events occurred in 198 and 199. e story Shelley
would have known, which is a mixture of fact and fable, is that Count
Francesco Cenci, the owner of the palace, had been ruined when he was
forced to pay a large fine for having sodomized and beaten both his male
and female servants – he also beat his sons Giacomo and Bernardo, and
his daughter Beatrice. In order to save money, he moved his second wife,
Lucrezia, and his daughter to the castle of La Petrella on a mountain near
the Neapolitan border. He more or less imprisoned them there, raping
his wife in front of Beatrice, and attempting to sodomize his fieen year
old step-son – there’s a rumor he may have raped his daughter as well. So
Beatrice became the lover of a castellan there, and together with him, her
brothers, her step-mother, and a coachman, they plotted to kill Count

Cenci. Her brother sent opium, and the coachman and castellan carried
out the murder aer drugging him. Rumors from villagers in the area
alerted the authorities to possible foul play, and, although public opinion
was completely on their side, the family was arrested and tortured in
order to wrest a confession from them. . .”
“. . .tortured? How?”
“. . .it was called the strappado: they tied the arms of the victim behind
their back, and lied them off the ground by the arms: this dislocated the
shoulders, which were then reset, and the whole process began again –
until they confessed. . .”
“. . .that would make anyone confess – to anything. . .”
“. . .that’s just it – Beatrice refused to confess or implicate her family in
the plot under torture, and only confessed when it became clear that they
would execute her and her family anyway. In September, 199, they were
led to their execution: on the way, they tore out the muscles and tendons
from Giacomo’s torso with red-hot pincers. . .”
“. . .strašné!”
“. . .then they decapitated the mother and Beatrice, and, saving the
worst for last, clubbed Giacomo to death with a mace, followed by decap-
itation and quartering. . .”
“. . .but why? ey were the real victims, aer all. . .”
“. . .as far as I understand it, following their arrest there had been some
other familial murders in Rome – mostly concerning estates and inheri-
tances: the authorities wanted to make an example of them to prevent
further murders – an exercise in arbitrary punishment, which probably
didn’t function at all as it was intended, given the crowd was entirely on
the side of the family, and especially Beatrice. . .”
“. . .it must have maddened Shelley to hear about it, given his attitudes
to patriarchy and state authority. . .”
“. . .it did, and the result was that he identified entirely with Beatrice: he
kept her portrait on his wall, and there are certain aspects of his descrip-
tion of her, in his preface, which echo his own ideal self, and are clearly
psychological projections. Shelley wrote,
In the whole mien there is a simplicity and dignity which,

united with her exquisite loveliness and deep sorrow, are inex-
pressibly pathetic. Beatrice Cenci appears to have been one of
those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell
8
together without destroying one another: her nature was

simple and profound. e crimes and miseries in which she was
an actor and a sufferer are as the mask and mantle in which
circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene
of the world.
. . .he saw her as an essentially good person thrust into evil circumstances
from which she had no escape; unfortunately, the story has been shown
by historians not to have been such a clear-cut case between good and
evil. . .”
“. . .it wasn’t true?”
“. . .Cenci was not as nearly monstrous as the legends made him, and
his children were not nearly as ‘good’ as legends made them. His sons
were reputedly as dissolute as their father, and even Beatrice is now
known to have had an illegitimate child, which is probably why he quar-
reled with her – but the incestuous rape and other aspects of his crimes
are unfounded, and were obviously embellished by the Roman popula-
tion, who saw the myth as illustrating the fight of the common people
against evil aristocracy. . .”
“. . .another veil lied. . .”
“. . .yes, but Shelley never knew it, and anyway, he had his own agenda
in his play: in the play he wanted to explore what happens to good in an
evil world; however, as he initially conceived it, the play was merely
meant to be something like Mary’s Frankenstein – a bit of a crowd-
pleaser, to make up for the lack of an audience for his poetry. He was
quite impressed with how the story of the Cenci family was universally
known in Rome: he thought he could adapt it successfully for the
London stage, and gain some of the success that had eluded him. In the
end his motivation changed. Although he had completed the first dra
by May 9th, the real issues of the play wouldn’t be worked out until that
summer – when his revision of the play became a form of mourning. . .”
“. . .mourning? For whom?
“. . .it’s bitterly ironic that Mary had written a letter saying that ‘only
malaria could chase them from Rome,’ because it was malaria that did chase
them away in the end. Mary had chosen the Colosseum as one of her
favorite places to sketch, and she would go there with little William. At
that time it was overgrown with foliage, and down in the ruins underneath
there was no drainage, so the water collected in pools, breeding malaria-
9
carrying mosquitoes. William, who was three and a half then, came down
with a fever in late May, 1819. He was attended daily by an English physi-
cian but the symptoms grew worse, and on June th he went into convul-
sions and almost died. He was brought out of it, and Shelley stayed up for
three days and nights watching over him; but, just as they were thinking he
might recover, he died, suddenly, at noon on June th. . .”
“. . .Pane Bože! I can’t even imagine it. . .I’m not sure I could have gone
on living aer that. . .”
“. . .the effects were catastrophic for all of them. Claire told Silsbee that
Shelley threw himself on the sofa sobbing – that she had never seen such
sobbing. You can imagine the effect it had on Mary, who never fully recov-
ered from it – her third lost child. Shelley sent Peacock this terse letter the
next day – its brevity betrays the intense shock and grief behind it:
My dear friend,
Yesterday aer an illness of only a few days my little William
died. ere was no hope from the moment of the attack. You
will be kind enough to tell all my friends, so that I need not
write to them—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—
If the things Mary desired to be sent to Naples have not been
shipped—send them to Livorno.
We leave this city for Livorno tomorrow morning where we
have written to take lodgings for a month. I will there write
again—
Yours ever affectionately
P B Shelley
. . .Shelley wrote a description of William to Hogg a few weeks later –

there are very few descriptions of him elsewhere. . .”
“. . .he must have needed to describe him in order to try to preserve
what was lost – do you have it?”
“. . .yes. . .this is what he wrote:
Our misfortune is, indeed, a heavy one.—Your little

favorite had improved greatly both in mind and body
before that fatal fever seized him. He had lost all shades of
0
ill-temper, and had become affectionate and sensible to an

extraordinary degree, his spirits had a very unusual
vivacity—it was impossible to find a creature more gentle
and intelligent.—His health and strength appeared to be
perfect; and his beauty, the silken fineness of his hair, the
transparence of his complexion, the animation and deep
blue colour of his eyes were the astonishment of everyone.
The Italian women used to bring each other to look at him
when he was asleep.
. . .”
“. . .did he write any poetry about William?”
“. . .Shelley tried to turn his grief into verse, but failed – he couldn’t
bring himself to complete the two lyrics he started. Listen to this frag-
ment – it’s quite poignant:
My lost William, thou in whom,

Some bright spirit lived, and did
at decaying robe consume
Which its lustre faintly hid, –
Here its ashes find a tomb,
But beneath this pyramid
ou art not – if a thing divine
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother’s grief and mine.
Where art thou, my gentle child?

Let me think thy spirit feeds,
With its life intense and mild,
e love of living leaves and weeds
Among these tombs and ruins wild; –
Let me think that through low seeds
Of sweet flowers and sunny grass
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion—
. . .he breaks it off there – he couldn’t bear to finish it. In fact, as Holmes

noticed, the last line wouldn’t be completed until two years later, when
1
he placed it in his elegy for John Keats, Adonais: ‘He is a portion of the
loveliness Which once he made more lovely’. . .”
“. . .I can understand both his need to try, and why he couldn’t accom-
plish it – trying to hold on to what’s lost. . .”
“. . .other writers have tried also, and failed: there’s Mallarmé, who lost
his son Anatole, and one might also count Joyce, whose daughter Lucia
was lost to insanity, as was Victor Hugo’s daughter Adele – there’s
a Truffaut film based on it. Otherwise, I’d hardly call Byron’s attitude or
relation to Allegra fatherly! Goethe lost four of his children very early in
infancy, and then his rather pathetic son, August, when his son was forty,
so it’s not quite the same. Mallarmé attempted to write poetry on the loss
of his son, but could only come up with fragments, like Shelley, some of
which were quite poignant – he le them with the papers he wanted
burnt at his death. Joyce seems to have put the loss he felt in regard to
Lucia’s insanity into Ulysses as both the death of Bloom’s son Rudy, and
the departure of Bloom’s daughter, Milly. . .”
“. . .it must be terrible to deal with the loss of a child – it’s not in the
natural order of things. . .”
“. . .the child usually sees their parents into the darkness, carrying their
memories for them, but when a child dies, the parent has experienced
their child’s entire journey from out of the abyss of time and back again
– the child is entirely contained within the parent’s memory. e impulse
to transcribe the child into writing is an attempt to somehow situate the
burden of grief in words, in an effort to make one’s own memory perma-
nent. . .”
“. . .can it work?”
“. . .you can see the difficulty that Shelley and Mallarmé faced – at best,
the emotions and intensities can be transformed. ere are the dangers
of a break-down into unrepresentability on one side, and pathos, in the
worst sense, on the other: by abandoning their poems in the midst of
their anguish and grief, Shelley and Mallarmé avoided the latter difficulty,
giving themselves over to the former. ey ultimately sublimated their
grief in less directly personal works, as did Mary. . .”
“. . .Mary? She could write aer William’s death? I can’t see how she
even could have survived it. . .”
“. . .no, she didn’t write immediately – even her journal was broken off.
In fact, ultimately, I think the only thing that saved her from self-destruc-
tion or madness was the fact she was already four months pregnant. . .”

“. . .but it must have frightened her, terribly – the possibility of further

loss. . .”
“. . .yes – you can see her fear in her eventual treatment of Percy
Florence, who she held as close to her as Godwin tried to hold her aer
Mary Wollstonecra’s death. She began writing a short novel on Shelley’s
twenty-seventh birthday, August th. . .”
“. . .what was it about?”
“. . .well, it’s interesting, and a bit strange: like e Cenci, her novel also
focused on incest. . .”
“. . .incest?”
“. . .father-daughter incest, to be precise, but let’s wait – it’s getting late,
and we need to catch the 0:0 back to Padua if we don’t want to change
trains twice. . .we can eat at the albergo. . .”
They stand, brush themselves off, and walk up the short path to the
house. In front of the servants’ wing an old man – small, stooped, bald,
his tan face creased with the wrinkles – sits under the pergola smoking
a cigarette and listening distractedly to the portable radio. When he
sees them he smiles and gets up. They indicate with gestures that the
house is closed and that they are leaving. He nods and smiles, and
walks with them to the front gate, unlocks it with an old iron key, lets
them out, and locks it behind them. They thank him, wave goodbye,
and he turns and walks slowly back to his chair. They pause a moment,
looking back at the villa – now almost fully in the shadow of the hill-
side, the sun touching only the tops of the trees, and begin walking to
the station.
“. . .it’s beautiful here – it’s sad to leave. . .”
“. . .I always have that feeling when I visit places like this – places
connected to some author, or some book that has deeply affected me, or
some historical event. I felt the same when I visited D. H. Lawrence’s Kiowa
Ranch outside of Taos, or Joyce’s Martello tower in Dalkey, or the castle
where Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies. Much of what is compelling about
Prague, for me, is the proximity of the former haunts of writers like Kaa,
Rilke, Holan – knowing I live among their ghosts helps me cope with the
daily grind of life there. . .”
“. . .did coming to Prague change your thoughts about their writing?”
“. . .yes, entirely – or rather I should say that it deepened them. I first
read Kaa’s works in a different world, where he was taught in an almost
abstract manner as an example of proto-existentialist absurdity, and

placed alongside Camus or Sartre on the one hand, or Beckett and

Ionesco on the other. ere was absolutely no socio-historical under-
standing of his context: he was taught as a German writer – there was
little understanding of the difference between the Austro-Hungarian
empire and Germany, let alone the even more marked difference between
German-speaking Bohemians and the rest of the German-speaking
world, or the German-speaking and Czech-speaking communities of
Prague. I know now that if he were to be classed with any other major
modernist writer, it would have to be Rilke. Despite the difference
between Kaa’s Jewish background and Rilke’s Catholic background,
the simple fact they were both born in Prague within eight years of one
another, given the special position of German-speakers there, makes
many aspects of their outlook strikingly similar, despite the immediate
differences in their writing. . .”
“. . .do you know if they ever met in Prague?”
“. . .no, they didn’t. Rilke was sent, when he was eleven, to a military
academy in upper Austria, and then, at age fieen, to another one in
Moravia – in fact, the same academy Robert Musil would attend four
years aer Rilke had le, and about which he wrote the novel, Die
Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless – or, in English, something like e
Confusions of Young Törless. Rilke returned to Prague when he was seven-
teen in order to attend the Gymnasium, and he stayed in Prague for four
years – until he moved to Munich when he was twenty-one. . .let’s see,
that would have been 189 through 189, and given Kaa was born in
188, Kaa would have been between nine to thirteen during that
period. At best, Kaa might have noticed him walking down the street:
Rilke was in his ‘dandy phase’ then, and he dressed rather ostentatiously
– one critic I read noted he would walk down the streets in an old-fash-
ioned formal coat and black hat, holding an iris in one hand and with
a look of longing in his intense eyes. . .”
“. . .Kaa’s eyes are also rather intense. . .”
“. . .they both have a bit of the look of a hunted animal that longs to be
somewhere else – perhaps in a different universe. . .”
“. . .they were hunted, in a way. We didn’t even read Kaa when I was
in school, and I never even knew Rilke or Musil existed, let alone that
they lived in Prague and Brno. . .”
“. . .the Swedish playwright, August Strindberg, lived in Brno too, for
a few years. . .”

“. . .I didn’t know that – you see! e communists considered them all

bourgeois individualists, but I think it’s even more due to Czech nation-
alism – the German-speaking world that had existed in Bohemia and
Moravia was simply ignored, except by a few people with more open
minds. . .”
“. . .so they were considered ‘Germans’ by the Czechs as well?”
“. . .largely. . .Kaa was and is a reminder of those who are no longer
here – Jews, German-speaking Bohemians, not to mention the fact it
would disturb the version of ‘Czechness’ that the cultural elite have been
building there. Aer all, Kaa’s status in world literature eclipses any
Czech-speaking writer, so Kaa is a bit of an embarrassment for those
who are nationalists. . .”
“. . .so, while I had to make my way through historical and cultural
ignorance, you had to make your way through deliberate historical and
cultural obfuscation – I’m not sure which is worse. I gained a consider-
ably deeper understanding of both Kaa and Rilke when I came to
Prague – partly because so much is still the same: the mindless bureau-
cracy, the baroque web of clandestine maneuverings, the subterranean
power struggles, the submerged and yet pervasive presence of eros. I feel
I’m in a daily discourse with Kaa or Rilke just walking the streets. . .”
“. . .for most Czechs they may as well have been from a different
universe. . .but it’s the same thing with you – your reality and concerns
are so far from the norm in Prague that you also live in a kind of alter-
nate reality. . .”
“. . .that doesn’t bother me – in fact I sought it out. I didn’t choose to
stay in order to assimilate to a new culture – as I said before, I don’t want
to live in America as an American, I don’t want live in Prague as a would-
be Czech, or the worst kind of homeward-looking American expatriate.
I want to be somewhere else – ‘Weg-von-hier, das ist mein Ziel,’ as Kaa
wrote: ‘Away-From-Here, that is my destination’. . .”
“. . .away to where?”
“. . .rather to when. . .it’s timeless moments I’m seeking – those
moments when the realm of the transitory touches the realm of the
eternal. Such moments, like today for us, are like time warps, where one
realm touches the other – usually the two are kept well apart, and we lose
ourselves in the transience of our daily lives. . .”
“. . .that’s true. . .Shelley, Claire, Mary, their children, and even Byron,
all came alive for me here, and even aer we leave, I’ll always remember

this time and place as an intense experience – for us, in this moment, and
its connection to them, in theirs. . .but I hope we can avoid the worst
parts – the turmoil and tragedy they experienced. . .”
“. . .the worst can’t be avoided if we seek such intensities: Nietzsche
wrote, ‘Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? then you said Yes, too, to all
woe’. . .deep joy is far more difficult to endure, for it demands the accept-
ance and endurance of just as deep a despair. It’s what we were speaking of
before, in regard to American culture – the difference between a mode of
life that accepts negativity, and one that denies it. Pleasure, ‘fun,’ happiness
is all possible there, but I simply found it all unreal, in a way. . .somehow
there’s an attempt there to ward off what are seen as negative emotions,
and it ends in millions taking anti-depressants when they can’t manage
it. . .”
“. . .when I think of it, ‘fun’ is an entirely American concept: it’s not
translatable into Czech – at least not in the way Americans seem to mean
it. ere’s radost, which is pleasure, joy, or delight; štĕstí, which is happi-
ness; zábava, which is amusement or entertainment; and perhaps the
closest is legrace, which is oen used to translate fun, but actually means
something closer to funny or amusing. ‘Fun’ seems to be something else,
or at least what I see the word applied to. . .”
“. . .that’s true, actually – one never thinks about words one takes for
granted in one’s own language until one comes up against another
language where they are untranslatable. It seems to me that what
Americans really mean when they say the word ‘fun’ is something like
‘mindless, visceral amusement,’ with an emphasis on the ‘mindless’
part: someone riding a rollercoaster, or playing with a Frisbee is
‘having fun,’ while you’d never use it to describe reading a book or
attending a concert of classical music. I’m not against fun per se – it’s
just that in America it became a kind of be-all and end-all to life: it
ends up being a physical anti-depressant, cutting off the intensities –
the highs along with the lows, or, at best, reducing the intensities to
only exhilaration. . .”
“. . .I’ve noticed that in Americans. What I’ve always wondered is
whether the surface-level ‘happy’ attitude of my American colleagues is
faked or not: I’m now convinced that while it’s not fake, they’re not
necessarily happy – but they certainly think they are: there seems to be
a good deal of willing oneself to be happy, as if to be anything else were
abnormal. I find that somewhat disturbing. . .”

“. . .that’s a good part of what drove me away, but it’s not that I find
something better elsewhere. . .for me, the greatest shock of realization
from my travels was that the forms of human pettiness were so vast.
Schopenhauer wrote, ‘National identity is another name for the partic-
ular form which the pettiness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in
every country. Every nation mocks other nations, and all are right.’ One
thing that can be said about Germany, despite its severe faults, is that it
certainly bred astute self-critics: Schopenhauer, Heine, Nietzsche, and
even Goethe. . .”
“. . .what about the United States? You’re American, aer all, so your
critical attitude must have come from somewhere. . .”
“. . .in the United States it was mostly writers and essayists who took
up the task of national self-critique: aside from activists like Thoreau,
Robert Bly or Adrienne Rich, or minority writers like Ralph Ellison
and Richard Wright, the target of critique was usually the philistinism
of the United States by writers like Henry Adams, Nathanael West,
H.L. Mencken, or Gore Vidal. Those considered major American
writers, if they were concerned with social critique at all, combined it
with other, more universal concerns – writers like Melville, James,
Eliot, Faulkner, or Pynchon. I wonder how much an effect they really
have had. Many of those I just mentioned, if they didn’t collapse into
conservatism, either went abroad, died young, or went into seclusion.
Of course, the American authors who most influenced me, aside from
some of the major ones like Melville or James, are either entirely idio-
syncratic – like Poe, Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Djuna Barnes;
or they are agonizingly inscrutable poets – like Wallace Stevens,
Charles Olson and John Ashbery; or they are not even considered
serious authors, like, Raymond Chandler, Henry Miller, Patricia
Highsmith, and Jim Thompson; or they are simply largely unknown,
like Paul and Jane Bowles, George Oppen, Jack Spicer, or Marguerite
Young. I was always equally, if not more, influenced by European
authors, in any case. . .”
“. . .with Czech writers it’s somewhat different: there’s social criticism
in writers like Božena Nĕmcová and Karel Čapek, and there were
certainly critics and satirists of the Austro-Hungarian empire like Hašek,
or of the communist period – like Kundera and Havel, but the country is
too uncertain of its status, given its history, and its literature is too young
– its writing is caught up with building a national consciousness,

although in day-to-day life I think Czechs oen cannot really stand the
worst aspects of each other’s Czechness. . .”
“. . .yes, I saw some poll a year or two ago about how citizens of different
countries compared in their esteem for their average fellow citizen: the
most favorably disposed towards each other were the Americans, the least
favorably disposed were the Czechs – either extreme indicates a signifi-
cant distortion of reality, in my opinion. . .”
“. . .but which is worse? I think the Czechs are worse – my compatriots
drive me insane. . .”
“. . .Czechs can be quite petty, but I think the Americans are worse: I’m
not especially fond of the way Czechs treat each other, and especially how
foreigners are treated by Czechs, but cynicism is less dangerous than
hypocrisy, and, aer all, at least Czechness stays put in the Czech
Republic, while Americans export their Americanness abroad – at least
since the postwar period. . .”
“. . .that’s true, but in terms of escaping it? At least the United States is
so vast that one has a choice, or a place to hide – and, if one is a writer,
there’s at least a strong tradition of turning away. In the Czech Republic,
excepting the dissident writers during the communist period, if one is
a writer it’s truly either publish or perish, and if one publishes, one is
already in danger of becoming a part of it all. . .”
“. . .yes, that’s the ‘small nation, small language syndrome’ – Gombrowicz
writes about it in his Diaries in regard to Polish culture, and Poland is a large
‘small nation’ compared to the Czech Republic. . .”
“. . .if one isn’t a writer, and merely wants to be le alone, it’s still quite hard,
as all these little baroque webs of connection you mentioned really add up in
the end. ey’re almost impossible to evade and still get somewhere. . .”
“. . .yes, I can see that now: I realize that as an American I took for
granted the possibility, in the United States, to simply uproot and move
to another state, climate, and even sub-culture two thousand kilometers
away, or even to move to a new apartment in a different part of the city.
In Prague, finding a decent apartment is a daunting enough task for
a comparatively well-paid foreigner on the black market, and far worse
for a Czech with a normal salary. One is almost condemned to endure
one’s pre-determined place. . .”
“. . .most Czechs don’t even see that they are condemned: they take as
natural facts weekends at the cottage, vepřo-knedlo-zelo, hockey and foot-
ball and, of course, pivo. . .”
8
“. . .as Americans take as natural facts recreational vehicles, synthetic

diet-food concocted in a lab, American football, handguns, and shop-
ping malls. . .”
“. . .so how does one escape it all, if one desires to – needs to?”
“. . .well, what do we face compared to Shelley? ey were fleeing from
the economic and political structures of their times, and the micro-polit-
ical structures of relation and affiliation – everything that their lives
brought into question. ey came to realize that their primary defensive
strategy was what Shelley intimated when he ended Julian and Maddalo
with the words, ‘but the cold world shall not know’ – imperceptibility,
or living in such a way that one appears to have a degree of adherence to
the social norm on the surface in one’s daily life where the battles do not
matter, while living as one desires where it matters, and affecting fewer
people, but more deeply. Otherwise, ‘they’ will come aer you, and wear
you down. . .”
“. . .the ‘right-thinking people’ again?”
“. . .yes, and they come in all forms, from red-neck reactionaries to trendy
radicals. I don’t mean one must conform to the norm, but simply to wear
one’s difference more intensively than extensively. ere’s always the
danger, when marking oneself externally, of either identifying oneself to
one’s potential enemies, or of creating a trend or fashion – which is not
exactly changing anything very deeply: both lead to a cessation of becoming
– the former singular, the latter en masse. . .”
“. . .so you think one should avoid any external display of difference?”
“. . .no, not at all – I just think the important differences are intensive,
and one ought to avoid self-designation of one’s intensive nature: there’s
no reason anyone but oneself, or one’s inner circle, should know the
deeper reasons why one acts, speaks, thinks, or feels the way one does. e
kind of self-proclamations of Surrealism and Dadaism seem terribly dated,
confining, and dangerous to me. I choose the way of Joyce’s Stephen
Dedalus, living by the way of ‘silence, exile, and cunning,’ or Marcel
Duchamp, who lived by ‘silence, slowness, and solitude,’ or Deleuze’s
three ethical imperatives of ‘imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and imper-
sonality’ aided by a dose of Spinoza’s ‘sobriety and caution’. . .”
“. . .but it seems a bit paranoid. . .”
“. . .the paranoia is justified – one doesn’t want one’s attempts to do or
be something singular to be taken up and marketed too quickly as the
next trend: that’s the surest way to dri back into the ossified norm.
9
ere’s a relevant excerpt from one of Paul Bowles’ letters to Jane in her
novel Two Serious Ladies: something like, ‘When you think you’re going
ahead, make sure you’re not really standing still. In order to go ahead, you
must leave things behind which most people are unwilling to do. . .’”
“. . .but do you think it’s even harder to ‘go ahead’ now than during
Shelley’s time?”
“. . .despite all the supposed freedoms we have, I think for someone to
truly go ahead now is considerably harder. . .”
“. . .but how did we come to this?”
“. . .do you mean ‘we’ the world, or ‘we’ us?”
“. . .both. . .”
“. . .we wouldn’t be here right now if we hadn’t fallen through a crack
– a crack in the social structures, a crack in the vapid materialism of both
the communist and capitalist varieties, and they are, aer all, two sides
of the same dull coin. . .”
“. . .and we’ve been falling ever since, it seems. . .”
“. . .as Shelley, Mary and Claire were falling. . .”
“. . .and is there only falling? I know what we’re falling om, but what
are we falling to. . .?”
“. . .falling towards – always ‘away from here,’ towards something else. . .”
“. . .so there’s no bottom, no end to the falling?”
“. . .there are several ways we could reach bottom – the worst would be
if we stopped falling because we arrived at some form of stabilization:
first anxiety and fear, then conservation, then reaction, and, in its worst
form, denial of life, denial of the other – for the other is what always
impels us out of our stabilities. Barring that this first risk of stabilization
is evaded, we could somehow lose control of the process, falling into
a black hole or abyss. . .”
“. . .like Shelley?”
“. . .perhaps – or Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Woolf, or Plath. . .”
“. . .so the key is to fall for as long as possible?”
“. . .I believe so – to live life as intensely as possible, for as long as
possible. . .however, if there has to be a choice, intensity seems preferable
to longevity. Baudelaire wrote that he had lived three seconds for every
one second of an average bourgeois: he died at , which would mean
18 years by his calculations, and, having read his biography, I believe
him. But it’s like a tight-rope walker – one can fall off either side: Shelley
fell off the intensity side of the tight-rope, dying young, while
0
Wordsworth fell off the stabilization side – living long, losing intensity,

becoming conservative, and writing dull poetry. . .”
“. . .so who lived both intensely and long?”
“. . .it’s rare, but when it happens, it’s usually when the person is involved
in a much larger project of variability, like Goethe, Blake, Musil, or Joyce, so
that there’s a structure to direct and contain their striving, and yet enough
opened-endedness to allow continuous becoming. . .”
“. . .and for the normal person who lacks a project?”
“. . .different people have different thresholds, but I’m not entirely
convinced that many people make it a habit to regularly challenge and
risk their thresholds: there are too many rewards for not doing so, for
simply going at the pace of the society – but that’s just my suspicion.
Certainly who we end up hearing about are those who make waves, not
to mention the fact that not all societies are so taken by fame: I have no
doubt that, for example, Tibetan monks live intense but anonymous lives
trying to coincide with immanence, which is really what’s at the bottom
of it all, anyway. . .”
“. . .immanence?”
“. . .one possible definition or attribute might be the cessation of the
fleeting moment, an interpenetration with pure time. . .”
“. . .that sounds quasi-religious. . .”
“. . .well, perhaps some religions, but not others. Most religions are like
psychic safety nets, comforters for minds which seek some stability in the
face of the abyss – especially those that presuppose the continued exis-
tence of an active consciousness, even if only in a disembodied form.
Immanence, as I define it, is a merging with the flow of temporality – not
the fleeting present, but pure time. . .”
“. . .do you mean eternity?”
“. . .not in the way it is normally meant. Consider what’s le aer we
die – not the corpse or ashes, but what’s le of our lived existence. On
the most basic level one can start with what of our being remains aer
our deaths – from the memories of those who survive us to the indirect,
subliminal effects we’ve had on all of those who have come into contact
with us, from our children and their genetic inheritance to, if we have le
works, an estate, or institutions, the social and historical inheritance we
are connected to, or are responsible for creating – if I remember correctly,
the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has a somewhat similar
concept that he calls the ‘memetic’ inheritance, although it’s a pity he
1
missed the chance to call it the ‘semetic’ aer semiotics, which might have
been better. A poet like Shelley intensely affected everyone around him
personally, but the power of the symbolic forms he le behind in his
poetry continue to act as energies long aer his death. . .”
“. . .the non-organic life-forms you spoke of before?”
“. . .yes. e symbolic forms wouldn’t have been produced if he hadn’t
been who he was, so it’s difficult to separate the life from the forms, or the
forms from the life, but, clearly – even if his books were le to gather dust
on a shelf for a century, or canonized to the point of ossification and
thereby ‘made safe for human consumption’ – some organic life form, some
person, comes along sooner or later and opens them, the process of inspira-
tion takes place, and those energies can suddenly grow like a seed. . .”
“. . .so immanence is connected to immortality, or greatness?”
“. . .one aspect of this kind of posthumous immanence is rather the
continued effect of one’s energies in the world of the living aer one has
died, so that one can say that artists or thinkers who continue to be
disseminated, who continue to have an influence on the living, have
attained an intense posthumous immanence. e traditional view of the
genius tends to locate that greatness in the self and the works, and not in
the energies that a self, through its work, has generated, liberated, or
sustained: or, in other words, in being rather than becoming. at’s why,
in my opinion, the artists, writers, or thinkers who have the greatest influ-
ence are those with the most becoming, the most variability – who open
vistas, unbinding energies. ose vistas needn’t necessarily be contained
in a unified artwork, approach, or style. Look at Shelley or Mallarmé: in
the case of the former the poetry is oen unwieldy, and at times even bad,
but there’s also the life connected to the poetry, and the openings it
represented. In the case of Mallarmé, despite proclaiming he was engaged
in writing the Book, he never actually completed more than a slim volume
of poems, and yet I would argue both have endured precisely because of
the openings they discovered and explored, and which have allowed
further openings for others. . .”
“. . .but if such influence is a sign of immanence, wouldn’t you say that
great religious figures like Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed have attained
the highest form of immanence, given they established world religions
that still influence millions?”
“. . .certainly. . .”
“. . .so it is a religious perspective, in a way. . .”

“. . .only if a religion can be said to exist without a doctrine, without

a designation of God, and without making any claims to absolute truth.
I would be considered a heretic by the members of any of these religions,
given that while I would accept each of these figures as having attained
the highest form of immanence, I also see a continuum between their
existences and the rest of the human race, rather than seeing them as
somehow apart – I see them as men, not as metaphysical beings. . .”
“. . .but are only those who are well-known aer their deaths imma-
nent?”
“. . .no, not at all: I believe everyone attains some degree of immanence
when they die – from the subtle memory traces they leave in others who
have been touched by them, to an immanence of the system or epoch or
culture they have been a part of, not to mention I’ve only been speaking
of posthumous immanence: there are moments of immanence in one’s life
as well, when anyone may have an intuition of pure time. Let me explain
it this way: in the ninth Duino Elegy Rilke wrote, ‘Just once, everything
only once. Once and no more. And we, also, only once. And never again.
But this having existed once, even if only once: having been once on
earth, can it ever be effaced?’ e last word might be translated as
‘refuted,’ ‘revoked,’ or ‘nullified’ – or, as the poet Stephen Spender trans-
lated it, ‘cancelled.’ e point is, can something that has happened ever
be said not to have happened? Let’s say the sun suddenly sent out a jet of
gas in this direction right now, and it wiped out the entire earth. How
would you characterize the status of this moment?”
“. . .given that there would be no record of it having happened – no
traces le in a biographical or historical text, no one to remember this
moment: would you be inclined to say that this moment never
happened?”
“. . .no – of course it happened. . .”
“. . .but how would it exist, where would it exist – without a conscious-
ness to be aware of it? Berkeley’s idealist answer was ‘in the mind of God,’
while, alternately, the materialist answer would be in the backward traces
le by all the atomic particles – if we had the capacity to track them all.
In my mind these explanations simply beg the question, or paste an easy
answer over the mysteriousness of it all. It seems to me there is something
like a ‘pure time,’ or what Mallarmé termed simply ‘eternity,’ that has
some sort of strange subsistence within flowing time. . .”

“. . .so would ‘pure time’ be how everything truly was and is, in a sort
of cosmic history that is unknowable to humans?”
“. . .that’s one way of saying it. I’m not saying I have any idea what that
would be – the only thing I do know is that it’s beyond human compre-
hension. If we cannot imagine moments such as this as not having
happened if they were suddenly effaced, we’re le positing a kind of pure
flux of time which somehow subsists within normal time. Furthermore,
there seems to be a kind of strange synchronicity between the two times
– even Einstein said, ‘the distinction between past, present, and future is
only an illusion.’ I’m no scientist, but when I read about the various spec-
ulations that have been made, it always brings me back to Blake’s vision
of all time existing simultaneously – ‘I see the Past, Present, and Future
existing all at once, before me,’ or Eliot’s ‘And the end and the beginning
were always there Before the beginning and aer the end. And all is
always now,’ or even Goethe, when he has Werther say, ‘How can
I perish? How can you perish? Do we not exist?’. . .”
“. . .so what are you saying?”
“. . .I’m not sure – it’s more of a feeling than a knowing. . .”
“. . .so what is your feeling? When do these connections between
temporalities occur. . .during mystical visions?”
“. . .yes, in a way, but more than merely the religious forms of mysticism.
It seems that what we seek – from zen satori to the ecstasy of St. John of
the Cross, from the aesthetic beauty of Beethoven’s late quartets to that
of Shelley’s poetry, from the scientific explanation of the beginning of
time to its philosophical explanation – is to coincide with pure time, eter-
nity, or what I am calling immanence. e problem is that while we can
come very close to what I call a ‘Being-towards-immanence’ –
a bastardization of Heidegger’s term ‘Being-towards-death,’ full imma-
nence is always just out of reach. . .”
“. . .because to reach it is to die?”
“. . .yes, or short of dying, it’s the loss of the self in madness. Mallarmé’s
character Igitur experiences it when he tries to coincide with eternity: he
exclaims, ‘I was the hour which is to make me pure,’ but it leads to the
breakdown of Igitur as a subject, and his dissolution into a darkened abyss
of static objects in the room where his presence is a mere shadow.
Mallarmé tried to transcribe it, but by bringing it back into language, he
lost it – the threshold cannot be crossed without there being a biological
death, and at times Mallarmé felt he was very close to death indeed. . .”

“. . .so a ‘Being-towards-immanence’ is when we come to an awareness

of this dissolution?”
“. . .yes, and it can be deliberate, or it can steal up upon one, such as
suddenly being affected by a piece of music. In Blanchot’s La folie du jour,
the narrator suddenly comes upon it – what he terms the ‘madness of the
day’ – in the most innocuous of circumstances, as he crosses over the
threshold of a doorway. . .”
“. . .what happens to him?”
“. . .he is seized by delirium, then he describes himself as in a corridor
where, like Igitur, he’s enveloped in an unearthly cold, and as he loses
consciousness and gives over to the feeling he describes himself as
expanding ‘as high as the stone of the sky’. . .”
“. . .does he survive it?”
“. . .yes and no – the work is partially based on an event that happened
to him in the war, when he was stood up against a wall to be shot and
then just as suddenly released: in a later work he describes himself as
having been ‘freed from life.’ Somehow this event punctured a hole in
the threshold between the two aspects of time, and from that moment
forwards he would suddenly find himself sliding towards the other
time. . .”
“. . .but these are extraordinary experiences – do they occur for normal
human beings, in normal circumstances?”
“. . .not in daily life, but we all have some experience that brings us
suddenly towards something like this interpenetration of realities –
moments that penetrate us so deeply that they remain etched into our
very beings. . .but such moments needn’t be so extreme, in regard to their
cause: one can suddenly have one while one walking down the street,
looking out a window, sitting by the side of a river, or remembering a day
like today. . .”
“. . .I know what you are saying: I felt it today, for I truly felt our time
was coinciding with their time. I feel it right now, as we stand here – that
somehow, part of us will always remain here. . .”
ey pause for a moment on a small bridge over a canal a short distance
from the station, and turn to look back. e high rear tower of the castle
across from the villa is just visible above the tree line in the distance. e
sky to the north is blue and cloudless, while thunderheads creep north-
wards from the south. ey hear thunder in the distance, as the leaves
around them begin to stir in the gathering breeze.

“. . .the storm is going to break soon. at’ll cool things off – for

a while, anyway. . .”
“. . .we’ll make it to the station just in time. . .”
“. . .it’s so difficult to leave. . .”
“. . .well, as I’ve just been saying, we’re not leaving – part of us will
always remain here. . .eternally. . .”

II

Moments passing: the double cone of time holding and releasing us simul-
taneously – transfixing each moment for eternity while bearing us ever
onwards towards our ends. . .
. . .holding to a vision as to a single flame in absolute darkness, I plunge into

the pure past of what has been and what will always be, retracing the infinite
nappes of space and time, om vertex to vortex. . .
. . .wending pastward in time on its braided course, the world unwinding

through sixty-five thousand sunrises and sunsets like grains of sand held in
the cupped palm of a hand. . .two thousand waxing and waning moons spaced
between two presents. . .one hundred and seventy five journeys through the
seasons. . .spiraling back through what was wrought on earth. . .the lives
brought in and out of existence, passing like the summer rising of ephemera,
the endless pulse of human concord and conflict, cataclysms and catastrophes,
destinies raveling and unraveling in the warp and we of time. . .
. . .waing silently through space – over the Ligurian sea, the Gulf of La
Spezia, San Terenzo, Lerici, the pink and white marble quarries of Carrara,
the Apuan Alps, Monte Sumbra, Bagni di Lucca, le Pizzorne, Péscia,
Montecatini, Monte Albano, Vinci, Empoli, the Arno river valley, spiraling
downward towards the Cascine Forest west of Firenze. . .
. . .a solitary man walks through the autumnal woods in the late aernoon,
the wind gusting through the branches of the silver birch and plane trees,
green and yellow palmated and serrated leaves falling around him to the
forest floor with each gust. He has a slightly stooped posture and a halting,
erratic gait. His great-coat is clenched closely around him, collar turned up
around his face. His long, unruly graying brown hair blows wildly in the
wind. He stops for a moment, looks around him, then upwards towards the
western sky – listening to the wind whirring through the trees. He bends
over variously to examine a stone, a seed pod, a leaf. He mutters to himself
repeated words, then pauses, eyes closed. He starts briskly walking again,
wind-driven, weaving through the trees like a madman. . .suddenly, he
exclaims to himself – “. . .and he dared to write ‘the path of mighty waters
closes in upon him. . .a still deepening ocean before him, he sinks like lead to
the bottom!’” He bursts out running through a small clearing in the trees,
trips over a root hidden by the dead and dying leaves, sprawls forwards to
the ground, and lies there, still, for several moments. Slowly he rolls over,
gazing at the clouds driing rapidly overhead. He raises his hands towards
the sky, then looks at his dirty palms – one of them is bleeding. . .he pulls
om it a spiked seed pod, lies back, resting, holding the pod distractedly in
his hand while gazing at the glowering sky rising over the hills to the west –
billowing thunderheads, darkly threatening. e wind picks up, gusting
forcefully through the trees, leaves tossing and swirling through the air over
him. He slowly gets up, brushes off his coat, and walks on, murmuring to
himself – “. . .decaying leaves, decaying leaves. . .once green, like. . .like my
hopes. . .as my hopes were like fire. . .now decayed like the leaves – yes, that’s
it. . .my pages, my poems. . .as my hopes were like fire, so my decay shall be like
ashes. . .yes – my poems, my leaves, falling. . .all burned, ashes, forgotten. . .and
the clouds. . .loose clouds. . .like my now graying hair. . .like the locks of the
approaching storm. . .a dirge of lament for. . .a dirge for the dying year. . .and
what will come? What will be? ere’s nothing le, nothing. . .everything
crumbles, everything falls into decay and ruin. . .everything will be no
longer. . .nothing but darkness, everything lost in the end. . .the coming storm,
an uncontrollable bursting of thunder and lightning. . .then all is swallowed
up, savagely blown by the wind. . .the west wind, to be destroyed and buried
in the sands of time. . .”
“. . .but look! – the Arno. . .its flowing water swollen with rain. . .rain om
the hills, clouds om the sea. . .the cycling of nature, of the seasons, of death
and. . .of birth”. . .he looks again at the seed pod, breaks it apart with his
finger, and rolls the seeds between his palms. . .he throws the seeds to the
wind – “. . .through the scattering of seeds, these seeds, my seeds – my leaves,
my thoughts. . .so that even if dying, even when dead, there remains some-
thing. . .some spark of life om the ashes of the dying year, driven, as these
seeds are driven. . .carrying inside them life. . .the spark to quicken a new
birth. . .yes, that’s it – as she carries inside her a new life. . .towards what
has been and what will be bursting forth – a new birth, a new life, yet
again, yet always and forever for the first time. . .”

orning sunlight blazes through the mauve-tinted window of the
M air conditioned first-class compartment. e two figures are alone,
sitting opposite one another. ey observe the passing scenery of the
Venetian Plain as the train heads south from Padova. e man gestures
out the window at a passing train station.
“. . .we’ll go southbound past Rivigo, across the Po into Ferrara, then
on to Bologna and Florence. . .”
“. . .how long will it take?”
“. . .we arrive there at 9:, so a little under an hour and a half. . .”
“. . .not even enough time to get comfortable – when do we arrive in
Pisa?”
“. . .11:. . .”
“. . .that’s long enough for you to tell me what happened between the
time they le Rome, and the time they arrived in Pisa. . .”
“. . .they actually lived in two places: first near Livorno, then in
Florence. . .”
“. . .so why don’t you want to stop in Florence now if it comes next
chronologically?”
“. . .Florence, in my eyes, is really far more important in regard to
Claire’s life – especially her life aer Shelley’s death, so chronologically
it’s better if it comes aer Pisa and San Terenzo. When we return, I’d like
to find her house there. . .”
“. . .the house Silsbee visited?”
“. . .that’s the one. . .”
“. . .I’d like to see it too. . .”
“. . .and I’d like to go to Antella – it’s a little town southeast of Florence
where Claire was buried, but, you know, Florence is almost intolerably
packed with tourists in summer – the kind who limit their Italian itiner-
aries to Florence, Rome, Venice, and a three-hour stop-over at Pisa to see
the ‘leaning tower’. . .I’d like to limit our time there. . .”
“. . .that suits me – Venice already was bad enough. We face enough
tourists in Prague. . .”

“. . .yes – the ‘stream of un-consciousness,’ as Michael called it. . .”

“. . .that’s appropriate. . .”
“. . .so, where should I begin?”
“. . .begin with when they le Rome. . .”
“. . .ok. eir decision to leave Rome happened quite quickly. ey had
William buried in the Protestant cemetery: not being Catholic or Jewish,
he had to be buried there with the rest of those the Church considered
‘heretics’. ey later tried to arrange either a pyramid or obelisk to be
erected over his grave, but, finally, they had to settle for a plain stone slab
– I hope we can find it when we’re there. Later, aer Shelley died and his
ashes had been sent to Rome, Joseph Severn, Keats’ friend, was placed in
charge of seeing to their burial in January, 18: he had been instructed
to disinter William, and bury him with his father, but when they looked
under the slab, they found only the skeleton of an adult. . .”
“. . .what do you think happened?”
“. . .I suppose they had to make room for further burials and moved the
stone. Anyway, they departed for Livorno on June 10th, arriving a week
later. ey stayed at an inn until they rented the Villa Valsovano – near
the town of Montenero in the hills above Livorno. ey stayed there
through the whole summer of 1819, departing from Livorno at the end
of September and remaining in Florence until the end of January, 180.
ey were in each place about three-and-a-half months. . .”
“. . .why did they choose Livorno?”
“. . .for Mary’s sake: the Gisbornes were still in Livorno, and I think she
wanted to be near someone with whom she had a deeper personal
connection. Given Maria Gisborne had nursed Mary aer her mother
died, there had been this maternal closeness from an early age. . .”
“. . .does the villa still exist?”
“. . .unfortunately, according to Holmes, it was destroyed towards the
end of the last century: the villa was on a farm located on a rise halfway
to Montenero – not in the town itself, which is quite a way up the hill.
Mary described the villa in her note to Shelley’s play e Cenci:
Some friends of our were residing in the neighbour-

hood of Leghorn, and we took a small house, Villa Valsovano,
about half-way between the town and Monte Nero, where we
remained during the summer. Our villa was situated in the
midst of a podere; the peasants sang as they worked beneath

our windows, during the heats of a very hot season, and in the
evening the water-wheel creaked as the process of irrigation
went on, and the fire-flies flashed from among the myrtle
hedges: – nature was bright, sunshiny, and cheerful, or diver-
sified by storms of a majestic terror, such as we had never
before witnessed.
At the top of the house, there was a sort of terrace.
ere is oen such in Italy, generally roofed. is one was very
small, yet not only roofed but glazed; this Shelley made his
study; it looked out on a wide prospect of fertile country, and
commanded a view of the near sea. e 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 waterspouts, 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 e Cenci.
. . .as far as I know, the little tower is a common feature of villas in that
part of Italy. Shelley wrote to Peacock that he was able to see Elba and
Corsica from his vantage in the tower. . .”
“. . .I notice that she doesn’t mention the loss of William. . .”
“. . .oh, she does – here, a little further on: ‘We suffered a severe afflic-
tion in Rome by the loss of our eldest child, who was of such beauty and
promise as to cause him deservedly to be the idol of our hearts. We le
the capital of the world, anxious for a time to escape a spot associated too
intimately with his presence and loss.’ She was inconsolable. . .you can
sense the toll William’s death must have exacted from her by the fact that
Mary’s journal broke off without a word aer his death and didn’t start
again until almost two months later, August th – Shelley’s twenty-
seventh birthday. . .”
“. . .what did she write when she started it again?”
“. . .she began the journal again with these words: ‘I begin my journal on
Shelley’s birthday – We have now lived five years together & if all the
events of the five years were blotted out I might be happy – but to have

won & then cruelly have lost the. . .’ – and here the word she uses is
poignantly understated – ‘. . .associations of four years is not an accident
to which the human mind can bend without much suffering. . .’”
“. . .it must have been terrible to have lost all of her children, and by –
how old was she then?”
“. . .believe it or not, she was only twenty-two. . .”
“. . .it’s so hard to imagine. . .”
“. . .she wrote later that she thought she would never recover from it,
and, in a way, I don’t think she ever did. She spiraled deeply into herself,
and even Shelley couldn’t find her. ere are two short lyrics he wrote
about it – here’s the first:
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,

And le me in this dreary world alone?
y form is here indeed—a lovely one—
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
at leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode;
ou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.
. . .this is the 189 edition. In the aborted 18 edition of the poems she
le out the poem entirely, but even in the 189 edition she le out an
additional line: ‘Do thou return for mine’. . .”
“. . .she must have le it out due to her grief – or her guilt. . .”
“. . .yes, and the other poem speaks even more plainly of the chasm that
opened between them because of her grief:
e world is dreary
And I am weary
Of wandering on without thee, Mary;
A joy was erewhile
In thy voice and thy smile,
And ‘tis gone, when I should be gone too, Mary.
. . .Shelley sensed the unbridgeable chasm between them, but he was too
grief-stricken himself to be able to help her. One critic upbraided him for
supposedly not sharing in Mary’s grief, which in my mind shows

a distinct lack of sensitivity for how different people, different genders,

cope in the face of grief, and especially grief caused by the death of
a child! As the poems reveal, he felt dragged into Mary’s abyss, and
needed to isolate himself from it for the sake of his own equilibrium, so
he would go up to his room in the tower and close himself off from the
world below – sometimes for the whole day. . .”
“. . .how did Mary survive it?”
“. . .ironically enough it was Claire who helped her the most then.
Despite their problems with one another, it was in severe crises like these
that the bond between Mary and Claire revealed itself. Claire wrote to
Byron that she couldn’t imagine leaving Mary alone when she was so
melancholy. Claire even gave up a rare chance to see Allegra. . .”
“. . .did she know she was giving up the chance?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .did Mary know?”
“. . .probably not. . .”
“. . .it’s probably always like that – the failure to see the other’s sacri-
fices. . .and how was Claire affected by it all?”
“. . .she was certainly affected by the loss of William, for she loved him
deeply, but someone had to manage things – Mary and Shelley were the
beings closest to her, and she needed to attend to them. Her own journal
also stopped at the time of William’s death, and didn’t pick up again
until the following year. . .”
“. . .our difficulties seem small in comparison, and yet they kept on
living, loving, and writing. . .”
“. . .that’s what inspires me about their lives – how despite what they
went through, they carried on with the experiment of their lives. . .”
“. . .so Mary never came out of mourning?”
“. . .she never fully got over it of course, but she recovered incre-
mentally. In June and July she spent a good amount of time just sitting
on the stone arbor seats in the garden in silence, but by August she was
six months pregnant, and the life inside her must have reawakened her.
She began reading again – some of Sir Walter Scott’s novels that
arrived and, with Shelley, Dante’s Purgatorio, Paradise Lost, and even
the Bible. . .”
“. . .telling choices. . .”
“. . .yes, and very influential for their next works; in fact, I think the
primary distraction for Mary was that she started writing a short novel,

eventually entitled Mathilda. Given she was finished by mid-September,

she must have buried herself in the writing of it. . .”
“. . .is this the one about incest?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .what motivated her to write it?”
“. . .I think the loss of William, plus Godwin took it upon himself to
respond to the news of William’s death by sending a totally unfeeling
letter verging on a threat to disown her if she didn’t get Shelley to send
him more money. . .”
“. . .he wasn’t exactly a sensitive man. . .”
“. . .no, and in her state of mind it must have sent her reeling. Certainly
a portion of her time sitting in the garden must have been devoted to
reassessing her whole life up to that point – especially in regard to how it
had been influenced by her relation to her father. . .”
“. . .is there any indication that her relation with him was incestuous?”
“. . .not physically incestuous, but certainly it had been emotionally
incestuous – she later confessed to Maria Gisborne her ‘excessive and
romantic attachment to her father.’ I think the shock of her grief must
have brought her face to face with the truth about her psyche, and that’s
what she explored in Mathilda, which is as much a loosely camouflaged
psychic autobiography as Shelley’s Epipsychidion would be later on. . .”
“. . .is there any significance to the title?”
“. . .in Dante’s Purgatorio Matilda is the name of the last woman tempting
the pilgrim on the summit of Mount Purgatory before the appearance of
Beatrice in her car of light. She’s innocent – something like the figure of
Eve before the fall, or women before the loss of their virginity: the pilgrim
is drawn to her innocence, but it’s a desire tainted with sexuality – the only
true love is his spiritual love for Beatrice, who appears immediately aer he
encounters Matilda. . .”
“. . .Beatrice was the woman he worshipped from afar, wasn’t she?”
“. . .Beatrice, in real life, was a young woman that Dante worshipped
anonymously and who became the subject of his La Vita Nuova. He had
seen her a handful of times at a distance from the age of nine, and one
day she greeted him in the street, which inaugurated his ‘new life’ of
idealized love. But the next time he saw her she failed to greet him, and
it plunged him into despair. en, aer a certain foreboding on the part
of the poet, she died at the age of twenty. In the Purgatorio she descends
from heaven and takes over from Virgil as the pilgrim’s guide. . .”
8
“. . .so what was Mary trying to suggest by the name – was she identi-
fying with Matilda?”
“. . .in a way, perhaps yes – given the change in her personality from that
point onwards. Dante believed in a strict division between love and sexu-
ality: only a chaste, innocent, spiritual love could prevent love from being
sullied. Shelley’s entire belief-system was based on the alternate hope that
the higher aspirations of such a spiritual love could be maintained within
a love that included intimate physical relations. Mary, who had agreed
with him about this at the beginning of their relationship, seems to have
diverged from this belief: just as she saw the danger of Promethean
questing in Frankenstein, she seems to have been awakened to the
demonic operating within human sexuality. I think that naming her
protagonist Mathilda indicates her awareness of these dynamics, and
especially how they’re manifested in the parent-child relation. . .”
“. . .what actually happens in the novel?”
“. . .it has many autobiographical resonances: Mathilda’s parents are
only married for a year and a half when Mathilda’s mother dies while
giving birth to her, echoing what happened to Mary’s mother, Mary
Wollstonecra. ere it diverges a bit: Mathilda’s father leaves the
country due to his grief, leaving the baby with his half-sister and
returning when she’s sixteen – it’s simply a device to bring the narrative
quickly forward in time to the problem she’s exploring. By that time
Mathilda looks just like her mother, and the father and daughter live an
Edenic existence together. When the step-sister dies, the father and
daughter move to London, where Mathilda acquires a suitor; the father,
however, dismisses him, claiming that his daughter is still too young. . .”
“. . .how close is that to reality?”
“. . .quite close, with a few transpositions. Obviously Shelley was not so
easily dismissed as Mathilda’s suitor, but certainly Godwin had been
appalled by Shelley’s announcement that they were in love, and he would
have been appalled even if Shelley hadn’t already been married. In any
case, there’s a general truth sketched there about the closeness of Godwin
and Mary which is very accurate. . .”
“. . .what happens next?”
“. . .having rejected the suitor, the father begins to avoid Mathilda’s
company. She seeks him out, and when she embraces him affectionately,
he initially responds, but then draws away from her. He departs for the
family estate where he had lived with her mother and summons Mathilda
9
there, but she finds her father cold and withdrawn. She’s certain he
harbors some tragic secret, and one day she follows him on a walk that
takes him to the edge of a cliff where she confronts him. He refuses to
confess his secret and she argues that he must hate her, to which the
father replies ‘yes,’ but then he proclaims he loves her in such a passionate
way that he swoons and faints at her feet. . .”
“. . .does she finally understand?”
“. . .yes – she’s horrified, and runs back to the estate and composes
a farewell letter to him, refusing to come down for dinner that evening.
When the father comes to the closed door of her room, she hides, but he
doesn’t enter. She falls asleep, and dreams that she has gone to her father
to tell him about her decision to leave him: she finds him in the woods,
dressed in a white robe and looking pale. She follows him to the edge of
the cliff, where he jumps to his death. At this point she awakens when
the servant brings her a letter from her father begging her understanding
and forgiveness, describing the torment he’s undergoing, and promising
that she will never hear from him again. She guesses he is suicidal, runs
aer him, but cannot find him. Entering a cottage by the sea, she sees
a rigid form enshrouded on a bed, discovers it’s her dead father, and she
faints to the floor beside him. One critic pointed out that the scene is
really quite sexual: the rigidity of the corpse symbolically representing
the rigidity of the penis, and her swoon, the swoon of sexual climax. . .”
“. . .do you agree?”
“. . .it’s a bit much, but certainly there’s something to it. . .”
“. . .what else happens – or is that all?”
“. . .that’s where the Shelley character enters. She stages her own suicide
and enters a convent in a remote part of Scotland where she lives for two
years mourning her father. At this point she meets Woodville, a young
poet grieving the death of his fiancée. He urges her to confess the cause of
her grief, and she finally consents, setting an appointed time and place.
ere she has prepared a cup of poison for them both to drink, but
Woodville refuses to drink the poison, claiming that as long as he has the
capacity to bring hope or happiness even for an hour to another human
being, he has an obligation to live. He leaves her, and she wanders into
the woods, thinking of Dante’s Matilda: a storm comes, she’s consumed
by a fever, and, while she’s dying, she composes a letter to Woodville,
which is the book itself – a confession of her father’s incestuous desires.
She sees herself becoming a ‘bride of death,’ and her impending death
0
seems sweet to her, for she’ll finally be able to be united with her father in
what she calls an ‘eternal mental union’. . .”
“. . .that’s the end?”
“. . .yes – what do you think?”
“. . .I don’t know what to think! I suppose that the cup of poison is like
her grief, and Woodville’s turning away from it suggests Shelley’s with-
drawal from the abyss of Mary’s breakdown. I know it’s a novel, but was
there any indication Mary may actually have wanted Shelley to commit
suicide with her?”
“. . .she did write someone in the autumn that she felt it might have
been better if she had also died on June . So, the suicidal feeling was
there, but I doubt if anything was ever stated explicitly between them.
Clearly there was a significant chasm between them aer William’s death
that was never healed in Shelley’s lifetime. Aside from everything else
between them, it was caused by the difference in their ways of grieving
and in their orientation towards life aer William’s death, because he
could not follow her to the ‘hearth of pale despair.’ Shelley sublimated
his grief working in his tower – work that included his fragments to
William and his lyrics to Mary, as well as e Cenci. is must have
seemed to Mary a refusal to mourn. Mary, in contrast, lived her life in an
increasingly conservative manner – drawing, consolidating, and control-
ling her boundaries in order to try to prevent any further loss. . .”
“. . .I can’t blame her, given what happened. . .”
“. . .I don’t blame her either, but there’s a price to be paid either way
one handles one’s grief, or one’s life. She may have eliminated some of
the risks, but the problem is that one can’t simply curtail one aspect of
one’s life – the holding-on becomes global, affecting one’s entire sensi-
bility, and the result was the coldness that everyone who knew Mary
increasingly noticed from that point onward. . .”
“. . .but I still don’t see what she was doing with the incest theme – how
did her realizations fit into the way of living she began to adopt, unless. . .”
“. . .unless what?”
“. . .unless the ‘eternal mental union’ she spoke of stood for a new orien-
tation of her relations. . .”
“. . .I think it was exactly that: in a certain way she became at least
Matilda, if not Beatrice, in her self-purification. She didn’t commit
suicide, but she killed the passion in herself. Her coldness clearly affected
her emotional as well as her sexual relations with Shelley. . .”
1
“. . .and what about her relations with Godwin?”

“. . .it’s strange, but Mary sent him the only manuscript of the novel. . .”
“. . .she sent it to him?”
“. . .yes, and it obviously hit a nerve, because he found it ‘disgusting and
detestable’ – to use precisely his words. When Mary asked for it to be
returned he refused, and it was found among his papers at his death.
I think that speaks very well to his awareness of what the book was really
about. I don’t think Mary ever fully worked through her relations to him.
When she began her next novel, Valperga, what seems to have motivated
her was making money to send to Godwin, which she did in the end –
the entire profits were made over to him. . .”
“. . .her ambivalence is there at the end of Mathilda – as if she both
wanted him dead, and yet still wanted to be with him. . .”
“. . .yes – Mathilda’s desire for ‘eternal mental union’ is simply a way to
have the desire consummated without the guilt of incestuous sexuality –
Mathilda becomes Beatrice. It’s questionable, however, just as Dante’s
attitude towards Beatrice is questionable. . .”
“. . .because love purified of sexuality cannot be maintained?”
“. . .because, as Lacan writes, relations always contain an aspect of
impossible jouissance: it oen becomes a choice between curtailing the
impossible through its domestication, or living with the endlessness of
yearning which is the limitlessness of the drives. . .”
“. . .like the Proust quote you mentioned about ‘killing the intolerable
love’. . .”
“. . .but the ‘intolerable’ jouissance is only ‘killed’ in one manifestation,
and always emerges in another: it always ends with the perpetuation of
those very drives! Mary was working out how her desire had been formed
by Godwin and then transferred to Shelley, and the outcome was her
decision to turn down her passion to a very low flame indeed. She felt
the need for severe caution by that time, as she associated unbridled
passion with the terrible events that had happened. . .”
“. . .wasn’t she over-reacting?”
“. . .certainly – in trying to curtail desire through suppressing passion she
ended up shutting herself down emotionally, and living a half-life. . .”
“. . .and the other extreme?”
“. . .opening oneself too much, without caution, can lead to real dangers.
We each instantiate drives of the whole species: although we like to
pretend that our desires are fully under our control, there’s a point where

unbound desire shades into something else, something destructive – eros

into thanatos, perhaps. When two people come together, two infinities
are connected: within those combined infinities, one can locate intensi-
ties – aspects of one being that respond intensely to aspects of the other,
but it’s difficult, and even frightening at times. e kind of intensifica-
tion I’m speaking of seeks to perpetuate Proust’s ‘intolerable,’ or what
Bataille termed the ‘impossible’ – one aspect of which is what he called
a ‘naked erotic search.’ e search takes place within the thrall of loss – of
self, of the other. . .”
“. . .loss of control?”
“. . .it’s possible. . .one comes up against loss pure and simple – loss of
a stable self, loss of consciousness even, and within that sensed loss, the
traces of the ultimate loss. . .dissolution and death. Lacan felt much the
same way, and might have been influenced by Bataille: he felt that jouis-
sance involved reaching a threshold of singularity, but the point where it
dissolved that same singularity was dangerously close. . .”
“. . .so, as you see it, Mary wanted to curtail this search, while Shelley
wanted to continue it?”
“. . .it’s about living as intensely as possible – or, as Bataille wrote, it’s
about when ‘the subject assumes in himself alone the full truth of the
moment.’ Shelley’s life was precisely such a search, and the search existed
at all levels: emotionally, socially, politically, philosophically, spiritually. . .”
“. . .but what kinds of relations did he envision?”
“. . .for example, he saw that marriage as defined by his society was far
more concerned with the economic and social matters than with the
particularities of the individuals involved; indeed, he saw the social struc-
tures as controlling and even blocking love. Shelley sought to release this
energy. He rightly saw that if we throw over our pre-conceived notions
of a cosmos dictated by a king or priest, we are not le with emptiness,
but with vast energies that could take any form – good or evil. . .”
“. . .but what did he mean by good and evil?”
“. . .it seems to me that for Shelley neither good nor evil was self-evident,
timeless or unchanging – except at the extreme of absolute good and evil.
It’s not a matter of the relativity of good and evil, but the relativity of
human conceptions of good and evil which shi over time: what was good
one day possibly becoming evil the next. We cannot define good and evil
once and for all, because human meanings easily become distorted by
these energies – but it doesn’t mean we toss the whole thing up in the air.

Shelley stands between Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche: while certainly their
analyses were far more advanced conceptually, they withdrew themselves
from life in direct proportion to the distance they had traveled out and
beyond, while Shelley was a different sensibility, concerned with living out
these ideas experientially in his life, and representing them poetically and
dramatically. In regard to love relations, Shelley was seeking love freed
from the distorting bonds of society, and he discovered that even love has
two faces, depending on whether it is reactive or active. . .”
“. . .for example, Mary or Claire. . .”
“. . .yes, if you like – at least at that moment. . .”
“. . .so you see him as the avant-garde of love relations. . .”
“. . .yes, in a way, but his attitude didn’t come out of thin air: it brought
together certain concepts emerging in the Enlightenment – a certain
concept of human freedom and autonomy, a concept of the individual
and his or her relation to the other, a concept of love as a sharing of inte-
riorities. ese had been only recently conceived by Enlightenment
philosophers – Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant. Shelley’s
writings are largely an avant-garde application of Enlightenment
concepts, using poetic images and descriptions. . .”
“. . .was he alone in this?”
“. . .he was one of a group of people self-consciously enacting Enlight-
enment principles in an intense way. I’d also include the Jena romantics
– certainly Novalis and Hölderlin, and, to an extent, the Schlegels,
Friedrich and August. . .”
“. . .did Shelley know their work?”
“. . .he only knew some of the critical writings of August Schlegel. It’s
a pity he didn’t know of Novalis, for they had a good deal in common –
Shelley’s atheism and political radicalism were not really so far from
Novalis’ or Hölderlin’s Spinozism and Kantianism. Both Novalis and
Hölderlin had the same pure spirit, the same desire for application of
philosophical concepts to affective experience; and strangely, Novalis also
died at age twenty-nine, just like Shelley. . .”
“. . .of what?”
“. . .his young fiancée, Sophie, had died of tuberculosis. He contracted
tuberculosis himself – perhaps from her, and died about two years later:
he raised her to a kind of pure form aerwards in his Hymnen an die
Nacht – Hymns to the Night, where he called for the night, embodied by
Sophie, to ‘consume’ his body with ‘Geisterglut’ – ‘spirit fire’. . .”

“. . .it’s as if he had a death wish. . .”

“. . .in a way he did, or rather he knew the dangers. . .”
“. . .for example, the theorist Julia Kristeva believes that writers engaged
in textual experimentation are engaged in a dangerous crossing of the
‘thetic’ threshold. . .”
“. . .in plain English, please. . .”
“. . .when we enter language as children, our subjectivity is formed via
the linguistic splitting of our reality into subject and object: we acquire
a symbolic access to the world at the cost of losing direct access to our
drives, which become filtered, diffused, and even muted through our
language. Writers engaged in linguistic experimentation – especially that
involving lyrical or orphic effusion of one type or another, are placing
pressure on that threshold – they’re in danger of becoming immersed in
pure drives again, being swallowed up by the boundary loss of undiffer-
entiation. . .”
“. . .that’s a little clearer – so you are saying that they return to some-
thing like a pre-verbal state?”
“. . .yes, they risk losing the structure of their subjectivities and
descending into depression, psychosis and even death. Certainly it would
explain a great deal about why it is poets and other experimental writers,
are so endangered. I’ve never accepted the positivist studies done in the
Anglo-American world, which usually conclude that sick minds are
attracted to poetry: I think it makes far more sense to suggest a certain
type of open-ended lyricism can be dangerous to the mind. I think
a similar process must have affected artists like Van Gogh, Munch, or
Gauguin, or jazz musicians like John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Bud
Powell. . .”
“. . .but in their case, it wouldn’t have involved language. . .”
“. . .I think it’s more the lyrical or orphic aspect that is so dangerous,
the opening to the muse in such an immediate way. Certainly something
similar is happening in expressionist painting, jazz improvisation, or
modern free-form dance. . .”
“. . .look! – there’s the Po. . .”
“. . .the vegetation is so lush – there’s probably hordes of mosquitoes
and midges there. . .”
“. . .‘midges’?”
“. . .those little flies that swarm around water and have nasty bites. . .”

“. . .oh, mušky – yes, they’re terrible. . .”

“. . .but it’s beautiful – from in here, at least. . .”
“. . .like Shelley’s life: it’s beautiful if one is safely distant in space and
time, but it seems increasingly frightening to me as we look more closely
at everything that happened. . .”
“. . .it worries me too. I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that if
I can work out an understanding of the problems they encountered I can
find a solution to apply to my own life, then, suddenly, I realize that each
new life, each new configuration of lives, brings new problems into exis-
tence – perhaps insoluble problems – or at least insoluble within the span
of our own lives. . .”
“. . .insoluble because we lack the distance from which to see ourselves?”
“. . .partially, but also because any solution is always an aspect of an
experimental process of selection, of becoming, of variability – so, by
definition, there’s no model of what a correct solution would be until
history shows it to have been the right adaptation for that specific time
and situation, and even then, it’s never certain. We can make a provi-
sional assessment of our lives as they unfold, but the final outcome will
be determined by the shape of our whole lives – by what traces we leave
behind of our passing, and how those traces are taken up by others. . .”
“. . .immanence, again. . .but still, it seems to suggest that our lives only
have meaning if we end up becoming famous. . .”
“. . .not at all! e traces we leave behind might be great works or deeds,
but, as I said, for the average person the traces also include the children
we leave behind, the infinite ripples our lives have had on the others we’ve
come into contact with. Just as there are writers like Kaa and Shelley
and Dickinson who were largely unpublished and unknown in their life-
times, I’m certain there are people whose names we don’t know, but
whose lives expanded outwards to touch the lives of many others in essen-
tial ways: teachers, therapists, restaurant owners, fashion designers –
anyone who takes their life seriously. e list is endless, . . .”
“. . .but there’s no hope to assess a life from its midst?”
“. . .it’s a bit like the Kaa quote – ‘ere is hope, infinite hope, but
not for us’: perhaps it’s not that desperate, as some assessment is possible,
but still, I believe that the more variability our lives embody, the more
uncertain is the ultimate outcome – the ‘solution’; on the other hand,
I also agree with Marcel Duchamp when he said, ‘ere is no solution,
because there is no problem’. . .”

“. . .now you’re just playing with me. . .”

“. . .not at all! Duchamp was interested in the process of art, not the
product. One of his greatest gestures, in my mind, was his designating his
large glass, La Mariée Mise A Nu Par Ses Célibataires, Même, ‘definitively
unfinished’ – it acknowledges how we’re always in medias res in our
works, our lives. I’m just trying to say that we will always lack a perspec-
tive from which to judge our ‘solution,’ and it especially holds when one
is assessing the variability side of human existence. Look at Shelley’s life:
we can only now just begin to assess, from our perspective, the outcome
of his experiment, but for him it was profoundly uncertain – a contin-
uous struggle between his belief in the process of what he was trying to
do in his life and work, and the oen terrible consequences that he expe-
rienced as a result of being – what to call it? – I suppose ‘an agent of vari-
ability’ expresses it adequately. His poems and essays exist as written
traces of the struggle – his attempts to come to terms with what
happened to him as a result of his actions, and to draw some conclusions
from it all. . .”
“. . .I can see that, but, to return to their story, what I don’t understand
is if Mary was trying to come to terms with her father and with how her
childhood experiences affected her later life with Shelley, what was
Shelley trying to do by writing e Cenci – that was also concerned with
father-daughter incest, wasn’t it?”
“. . .yes, but with the tyranny of father-daughter incest: Mary’s novel
had more to do with the tragedy of it, but, curiously enough, I think they
each identified with their main protagonists – Mary with Mathilda,
Shelley with Beatrice Cenci. . .”
“. . .how did it work as a point of identification for him – he had
a tyrannical father, certainly, but he wasn’t emotionally affected the way
Mary had been. . .”
“. . .for Shelley the same tyrannical principle embodied by Count Cenci
was operating within society – the church, the state, and even in the
general reception of literary works. He felt his poetry had been totally
rejected by society, so he wanted to find out whether he could reach an
audience in a more traditional way – through the vehicle of a serious but
popular drama. He deliberately tried not to include what he called the
‘peculiar feelings & opinions which characterize my other compositions,’
and in writing to Hunt, he made it clear that the play ought to be offered
anonymously, so the public wouldn’t come to it with any preconceived

notions based on his authorship. In the notes to the play, Mary cited his
letter: ‘I wish to preserve a complete incognito, & can trust to you, that
whatever else you do, you will at least favour me on this point. Indeed
this is essential, deeply essential to its success.’ He really felt he had
a chance to have the same kind of popular success that Mary had had with
Frankenstein. . .”
“. . .and did he?”
“. . .the response was not quite as favorable, but the play did receive
a good deal of attention when it was brought out in the summer of 180.
It sold well for a tragedy, and even had a second edition printed in 181.
Part of it was due to the shock-value of the play – and it was a shocking
enough play that when Antonin Artaud wanted to exemplify his concept
of a ‘eater of Cruelty’ in 19, he chose e Cenci for the first produc-
tion, Artaud himself playing Count Cenci. . .”
“. . .was it just the incest theme that shocked people?”
“. . .the incest and cruelty were shocking enough, but I think what was
most shocking was the lack of any real justice in the play. Shelley, whose
earlier works all presented a universe where justice and even revolution
is still attainable, completely gave up his idealism in the wake of William’s
death. Look what he wrote to Hunt about the play:
ose writings which I have hitherto published, have been

little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehen-
sions of the beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them
the literary defects incidental to youth and impatience; they
are dreams of what ought to be, or may be. e drama which
I present to you is a sad reality. I lay aside the presumptuous
attitude of an instructor, and am content to paint, with such
colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has been.
. . .”
“. . .what do you think of it – is it worth reading?”
“. . .it’s ok, but it lacks any real narrative twists and turns, ups and downs
– it simply reveals the triumph of evil and the incapacity to act against
evil without falling into evil oneself. . .”
“. . .what’s the basic plot?”
“. . .the play opens with Count Cenci paying off one of the Pope’s minions
in order to escape punishment for some crime he has committed. At a banquet
8
he announces exultantly the deaths of two of his own sons – a speech which
disgusts the guests, and which causes his daughter, Beatrice, to speak out
publicly against him. To take his revenge, he rapes her – an act which causes
her to plot his murder with her stepmother and two brothers. e murder is
carried out, but they are caught, brought to Rome by the church, tortured to
gain a confession, and executed for the murder. at’s it. . .”
“. . .why did he identify with Beatrice – because of his own persecution?”
“. . .remember how he described her from what I read before? e part
about ‘the crimes and the miseries in which she was an actor and
a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which circumstances clothed
her for her impersonation on the scene of the world. . .’”
“. . .why does he use the word ‘impersonation’?”
“. . .I think with the idea of spirit or energy having been embodied for
a moment on earth – it’s close to what I mean by immanence. e essen-
tial point of identification is that she was a victim of circumstances, and,
beyond that, he’s showing his recognition that to act in any way against
evil is only to commit more evil. e moment one begins acting in the
world, one becomes entirely suspicious of the motives of others, a belief
that Shelley found intolerable, but increasingly necessary. . .”
“. . .it’s an extreme position. . .he began as such an idealist, so the world
must have seemed doubly evil to him, as he had twice as far to fall. . .”
“. . .the play is relentless in its negative view of human nature, but I don’t
think he could ever have held to such a position for long – the play was
a product of his grief. . .”
“. . .it helped him work through his mourning?”
“. . .slowly. . .that summer he spent the mornings in his tower writing,
but he wasn’t entirely shut down, like Mary. In mid-August he wrote this
description of an average day to Peacock:
My employments are these, I awaken usually at , read half an

hour, then get up, breakfast. Aer breakfast ascend my tower,
and read or write until two. en we dine – aer dinner I read
Dante with Mary, gossip a little, eat grapes & figs, sometimes
walk, though seldom; and at ½ past pay a visit to Mrs.
Gisborne who reads Spanish with me until near seven. We
then come for Mary & stroll about till suppertime.
. . .”
9
“. . .and what was Claire doing, aside from helping Mary?”

“. . .he mentions her later in the letter. . .here: ‘I do not walk enough.
Claire, who is sometimes my companion, sometimes does not dress in
exactly the right time – I have no stimulus to walk’. . .”
“. . .what was that about?”
“. . .Claire was apparently rather lazy that summer, sometimes not
dressing until lunch or even supper – but it was a hot Italian summer, and
she was grieving for William as well, not to mention her missed oppor-
tunity to see Allegra. . .”
“. . .do you think Claire and Shelley were intimate then, or was there
another break?”
“. . .there are a couple of fragments that may be from the period indi-
cating they were still intimate – in a clandestine way, of course. Here’s
one:
Follow to the deep wood’s weeds,

Follow to the wild-briar dingle,
Where we seek to intermingle,
And the violet tells her tale
To the odour-scented gale,
For they two have enough to do
Of such work as I and you.
. . .”
“. . .he seems guilty in the last lines. . .”
“. . .to use the words ‘such work’ is certainly self-deprecatory, so I would
read it as an awareness of guilt, and even self-contempt. ere’s another
fragment that sets it out more clearly, devoting a stanza to lovers, and
a stanza to a mother who has lost her child:
When a lover clasps his fairest,

en be our dread sport the rarest.
eir caresses were like chaff
In the tempest, and be our laugh
His despair – her epitaph!
When a mother clasps her child,

Watch till dusty Death has piled
80
His cold ashes on the clay;

She has loved it many a day—
She remains, — it fades away.
. . .”
“. . .what is ‘chaff’?
“. . .there’s a saying in English, ‘separate the wheat from the chaff’ – it’s
the unused part of the grain. . .”
“. . .oh yes – in Czech ‘oddělit zrno od plev’. . .”
“. . .the metaphor means their caresses were simply blown away as so
much useless matter in the gale caused by the storm of events – which
seems an adequate description of how they must have felt about what
happened in Este, Naples, and Rome. Claire and Shelley did have
moments together that summer – they had their walks, and they did go
to the sea together from time to time. e estrangement between Shelley
and Mary pushed Claire and Shelley closer together, but I would guess
that their intimacy was very subdued that summer. . .”
e train lurches suddenly and slows.
“. . .this will be Ferrara, and then on to Bologna. . .”
“. . .it looks hot out there. . .”
“. . .it should cool down a bit past Bologna, when we start heading over
the Apennines towards Florence. . .”
“. . .I hope so – now I know why so many Italians come to Prague in the
summer. . .”
“. . .and why Czechs go to Italy. . .”
“. . .if one must suffer, why not suffer in surroundings like these?”
“. . .I wonder. . .”
“. . .what?”
“. . .I was just wondering if I’d miss Prague if we le. . .”
“. . .miss what? Fatalism? Inertia? Envy? Nationalism? Czechs haven’t
changed so much in the post-Communist period. . .”
“. . .you’re hyper-critical – I think there’s quite a bit of difference for
those who want it. . .”
“. . .there are more tourists. . .”
“. . .you’re cynical! Really, do you think you’d miss it if you were away
for longer?”
“. . .I can’t even guess what I would feel – at this moment I can say
I would be happy if I never saw the whole country ever again. . .”
81
“. . .I know the feeling, but still. . .”

“. . .I’m not sure – I’d be happy wherever you were. . .”
“. . .that’s a different issue – I was just wondering how connected I am
to the place, and testing it through you. . .”
“. . .I’m not the best person to use for that test. . .”
“. . .I’m just wondering for myself: when I’m away, I can see what’s
horrible about it even more clearly – the bureaucracy, the xenophobia, the
pettiness, the superior attitudes betraying their own provincialism. . .”
“. . .so, do you think you would miss Prague if you le?”
“. . .I’m not sure ‘miss it’ are the right words – I’m not sure one can ever
truly leave it once you’ve lived there for any period of time. . .as Kaa
wrote, ‘Mother Prague has claws’. . .”
“. . .did Shelley miss England – they’d been away, then, for how long?”
“. . .sixteen months, which still wasn’t long enough for Shelley to feel
like an exile, although I think the reality of his position was beginning to
sink in by then. He wrote a letter to Peacock in late August, and spoke of
where they might live when they returned to England. He compared the
English landscape of his memory to what he could see from his tower. . .”
“. . .and he preferred the Italian landscape?”
“. . .no – he actually preferred the English landscape, but the telling part
is that he admitted it may well have been because of the memories
attached to the English landscape – he ends that section of the letter, ‘So
the ghosts of our dead associations rise & haunt us in revenge for our
having let them starve, & abandoned them to perish.’ ere’s a certain
ambiguity in his words – from my own experience, I had a period of
mourning for the past that occurred between the first and second year
away, and lasted well into the third year, and he seemed to have been expe-
riencing it, then. I think it was even more in evidence in September, when
he suddenly learned about a serious political event back in England. . .”
“. . .what was it?”
“. . .it came to be known as the ‘Peterloo Massacre’: it had taken place in
a field near Manchester on August 1th, but Shelley only heard of it the
first week of September when Peacock sent him an account by express
post-coach. Over fiy thousand workers had held a public meeting in
a field near Manchester demanding parliamentary reform, and when the
militia was sent in to arrest the primary ring-leader, a child was trampled
to death. In the ensuing mêlée ten more people were killed and several
hundred were severely injured. Historically, it was a significant event: one
8
thing people tend to forget when assessing Shelley’s strident radicalism

was that the political leaders of his historical period were deeply reac-
tionary, and his frequent use of the word ‘tyrant’ in his letters and works
wasn’t an exaggeration. Ten years aer his death there were significant
reforms, but from the midst of his times – the period of British
triumphalism following the final defeat of Napoleon and the rise of colo-
nialism – he seemed like a voice crying in the wilderness. . .”
“. . .so Shelley must at least have felt his radicalism was confirmed and
justified by the massacre. . .”
“. . .he felt they were holding a revolution without him, so his imme-
diate reaction was to seize the moment as a harbinger of the revolution he
felt sure was to come, and, in order to help it along, he launched into
a radical political poem entitled, e Mask of Anarchy. It began with the
lines, ‘As I lay asleep in Italy there came a voice from over the Sea,’ and
went on for ninety stanzas or so, excoriating the massacre, and spurring
the people to resistance. It was completed in twelve days, and he took it
immediately to Florence to post it to England. . .”
“. . .I haven’t heard you mention it – is it a good poem?”
“. . .it’s not to my taste. Not much of his directly political poetry –
Queen Mab, e Revolt of Islam, e Mask of Anarchy – really moves me,
although I respect his motivations. It seems to me that his overtly polit-
ical poetry tends towards his worst fault as a poet – stridency. In e
Mask of Anarchy he set aside his usual complexly-layered style for one that
was straightforward, and it limits the poem’s appeal to me even more,
although he hoped it would make it more accessible to the masses. . .”
“. . .I assume it wasn’t. . .”
“. . .he sent it directly to Leigh Hunt certain that it would be published
immediately, but Hunt was a liberal, not a radical, and others had been
imprisoned and fined for publishing pieces far less radical than Shelley’s
poem. In any case, Hunt had already been to prison, and he didn’t want
any more of it. He laid the manuscript aside, and it wasn’t published for
another thirteen years. Hunt published it in 18 to coincide with the
first Parliamentary Reform Bill, which gave evidence to the rightness of
Shelley’s cause, but, by then, the poem was merely a curiosity, and not the
spur to revolution Shelley had hoped it would be. . .”
“. . .what was Shelley’s reaction to Hunt’s decision?”
“. . .he didn’t know about it right away – it was months before he real-
ized it. It was probably for the best, though, as it would only have cast
8
more derision on Shelley’s name, and to what end? e revolution did

not come, and one poem by an expatriate poet wouldn’t have changed
the fact that England was a deeply reactionary empire, and would become
even more so as it entered the Victorian Age. ere’s a certain irony to
the fact that Shelley addressed some of his most vehemently radical
letters to Peacock, who had meanwhile joined the India House – one of
the bastions of British colonialism! In one letter, written a few weeks
earlier, Shelley asked Peacock exactly what it was he did in the India
House, with special emphasis on the word ‘did,’ and I’m not sure he ever
received an answer. . .”
“. . .did Shelley ever realize that he would have no influence on events
in England?”
“. . .by the time Shelley realized it, he had already changed his belief that
a revolution could be successfully accomplished once and for all. e
Mask of Anarchy, and a few poems and essays that soon followed, were
swan songs to his belief in revolutionary political and social change,
although he always believed in the need for social transformation. He
never became conservative like Wordsworth, he merely became more
pragmatic. I think his momentary revolutionary fervor actually repre-
sented something far more important in his life: it sounded an end to his
ideas about the possibility of returning to England. By the time he
emerged from that period, I think any remaining illusions he had of
returning were over, and he became a self-imposed exile. . .”
“. . .did you also have some moment of realization that you wouldn’t
return to the United States?”
“. . .I suppose there was a time when I came to realize it more strongly,
but, like Shelley, I don’t think I was able to realize what was happening
until it was already a fait accompli. When the day came, I was astonished
to discover how much the ground had been prepared for it all along. . .”
“. . .how is that?”
“. . .I suddenly noticed, in retrospect, how many of my favorite writers
were expatriates or self-imposed exiles – and not just the obvious choices,
like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry James, or D.H. Lawrence, but
even the less obvious ones: Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Paul and
Jane Bowles, Robert Musil and Ingeborg Bachmann, Djuna Barnes and
Patricia Highsmith. Even those writers I valued who weren’t technically
exiled or expatriated had some aspect of displacement in their lives.
Marguerite Duras, for example, who was born in French Indochina and
8
spent the first eighteen years of her life there before returning to her
native land – if to go for the first time somewhere can even be called
‘returning’; or, Lawrence Durrell, who was born in British India, and only
went to England when he was twelve, leaving again, for good, at age
twenty. . .”
“. . .Anaïs Nin was like that too, wasn’t she?”
“. . .she had her childhood in Europe, went to the United States when she
was eleven, returned to Europe with her husband, and then went back to
the United States when the war started. en, there are the ‘internal exiles’
– those writers who went into a kind of exile without even leaving the
country, like Emily Dickinson hiding in her father’s house; or Wallace
Stevens hiding in a corporate job and a suburban lifestyle; or Kaa – hiding
in his father’s house and his work; or Poe, hiding in a bottle and a journal-
istic career; or omas Pynchon and Maurice Blanchot, simply hiding. . .”
“. . .whose exile interested you first?”
“. . .at first I was deeply interested in Joyce and Lawrence, but while
I knew they were self-imposed exiles, at the time it simply didn’t register
for me as a significant fact. I knew they had le somewhere, and that it
had been difficult, but it didn’t occur to me that their exile had opened
up a whole new world to them. . .”
“. . .I assume you don’t mean the world they ended up in. . .”
“. . .one doesn’t intentionally leave one’s homeland simply to find
another – unless one is a refugee. On the most basic level, living abroad
creates a double awareness – one is always aware, in each act, of the differ-
ence between one’s native culture and one’s adopted culture, and this has
the effect of making the socio-historical contingency of both cultures
obvious. On a superficial level, for me, an American, it meant initially
only realizing that iced drinks, wearing shoes inside houses, automobile
culture, frenzied mass media, shopping as a function of desire rather than
need, superficial friendliness, credit-cards, air-conditioning, wastefulness,
and convenience stores were not universal facts of human existence. As
you know, I now live happily without any of those things. On a deeper
level it meant making recognitions about historical and cultural struc-
tures of feeling and sensibility which in turn brought about a major reori-
entation towards my own cultural and linguistic origins. . .”
“. . .so how much of America is le in you?”
“. . .everything that was already there before I le remains, but it’s been
dwarfed by everything else I’ve experienced. Otherwise, there are two
8
sides to every coin: for example, while I hold on to a certain way of

conceiving of my freedom that was bred into me, I’ve dropped many of
the ways of living that I would have previously claimed were yielding me
that freedom, because I’ve come to see them as the illusions of my social-
ization – romanticized le-overs from the ‘do your own thing’ era of the
0s, 0s, and 80s, including, like Shelley, many reflex beliefs about human
progress and the perfectibility of the species. . .”
“. . .did you ever consider that the belief in freedom itself might be just
another illusion?”
“. . .certainly the late 0th century American version of freedom is
largely an illusion – the kind of individualism that assumes everyone is
sealed in the room of their own self, freely decorating it to their own
private delight. From a distance I can now see that the supposed diver-
sity of American culture is a facade fronting an incredible pressure to
conform, so I now see little difference between the American right-wing
reactionary interpretation of freedom-as-autonomy, and the American
le-wing interpretation of freedom-as-enlightened-self-creation. . .”
“. . .but you still believe in freedom?”
“. . .of course, but as something far more abstract, and far more difficult
to realize – not a superficial, socialized self making choices from a pre-
determined set of possibilities – the American consumer model of
freedom. . .”
“. . .so a life of self-imposed exile yields more freedom because it takes
one away from the reflex actions of one’s socialization?”
“. . .it may yield more of a certain kind of pure, abstract freedom, and
produces, indeed necessitates, the position necessary to deal with it:
individual sovereignty – or I suppose I should say ‘the continuous
attaining of individual sovereignty,’ as it is, by definition, never fully
accomplished. However self-imposed exile also has severe limits in
regard to certain freedoms to act; for example, one rarely has power
within the society one adopts, or if one does, it is only a supplemen-
tary power gained through a high-degree of assimilation. Where self-
imposed exile produces the most freedom is intensively: freedom of
thought and creation – variability. Of course it goes without saying
that thinkers, writers, and artists have the most use for that kind of
freedom, but whatever it is they discover on their voyage out can be
brought back for others to reflect upon and utilize in a less extreme
manner. . .”
8
“. . .so you feel you wouldn’t be able create or think as well if you
remained in the United States?”
“. . .given my interests I find it easier living abroad. . .perhaps if I had
created circumstances that would allow me to withdraw from the fray
and live a more isolated existence in America I would have been able to
find what I needed, but that may be more difficult to find than departing.
I don’t know how writers like omas Pynchon are able to do it: it’s diffi-
cult to live in seclusion in any country, and considerably more difficult
when that country is a media-dominated empire. ere’s a point where
the benefits of the wealth and opportunity that powerful countries afford
for writers begin to be outweighed by the negative effects: even though
there’s an expansiveness, it’s a controlled expansiveness, perhaps because
empires risk disintegrating at the edges. Look at the Austro-Hungarian
Empire: at the outermost point of its physical expansion, towns had to
be administered in German by law, even if it wasn’t the local language –
that’s why the poet Paul Celan happened to speak German, as Bukovina
was a marginal area of the empire, and so German was the language by
law. e American empire doesn’t exhibit the physical, territorial expan-
sion of previous empires save for economically. . .well, at least not yet, as
I suspect the day will come! For the moment it expands intensively –
within the cultural and social spaces of other countries, and it has its own
methods of restriction. . .”
“. . .but isn’t it enough to know about it – to be aware of the risks and
dangers of living in an empire?”
“. . .in an empire it becomes extremely difficult. Look at the British
Empire during Shelley’s time: from the romantics, Southey, Coleridge
and Wordsworth remained in the country aer their various jaunts
abroad, while Keats, Shelley, and Byron departed for good. Southey and
Wordsworth’s gis were crushed by their own success: one should beware
of the laurels heaped on one by empire, for nothing will so assuredly take
the intensity away from one’s inspiration and variability as the ‘good life’
as defined by an affluent, powerful society. Coleridge’s gi disintegrated
not so much because he retreated the way Wordsworth and Southey did,
but because he didn’t have the strength to go either way, so he floundered
about, finally letting his addiction consume him – but, of course, addic-
tion is another by-product of empire and affluence. My point is that it
isn’t only the negative restrictions on thought that are risky to inspira-
tion, but even the positive aspects of empire as well, such as its affluence
8
– and this is true several times over in the United States, where ever since
Hemingway it’s been a cliché for a writer to be ruined by success, afflu-
ence and lionization. . .”
“. . .so if one is born in an empire, it seems one had better go into self-
imposed exile, or hope one isn’t ‘discovered’ immediately. . .”
“. . .well, only if one aspires to be a certain type of writer or thinker. . .”
“. . .but what risk is worse? If we’re speaking about risk, it seems Keats,
Shelley and Byron underwent the worst risks, as they all died young. . .”
“. . .true, but they all died still in their ascent, or perhaps at their apogee
– we’ll never know. Some of their best work was produced in the last year
or two of their lives – perhaps an example of Nietzsche’s ‘a right time to
die.’ Whatever opened them to write what they did also endangered
them greatly, but that openness was the whole point of their lives. If one
wants only a comfortable life, than of course the trail they blazed is an
absurd one to follow, but if one is trying to pursue new modes of thought,
experience, and expression, by definition one is at risk, and the risk is
worth it. . .”
“. . .but why does a person go plummeting into the abyss when they are
confronting – well, what is it?”
“. . .the limits of language, the arbitrariness of their own culture, the
relativity of value – even the intensity of the lyricism they were exploring;
aer all, as I said earlier, the experimental jazz musicians in the 0s and
0s faced the same risks – John Coltrane died at forty, Charlie Parker at
thirty-five, Bud Powell at forty-two. . .even white jazz musicians like Chet
Baker, Art Pepper and Bill Evans all became heroin addicts, and died rela-
tively young. ere’s nothing beyond language and culture, or rather
there’s plenty – there’s everything, but there’s no social reality outside of
language. . .”
“. . .but is it really such a risk – can people really lose their language?”
“. . .yes, it happens quite regularly – under the influence of drugs, reli-
gious ecstasy, emotional and physical distress. For writers like Shelley,
taking language to the extreme limit of representation was part of the
program of his writing, of his life. Shelley wrote, ‘We are on that verge
where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look
down the dark abyss of how little we know’. . .and there have been poets,
exiles, who have lost their language. Look what happened to Hölderlin
in France – the lines from one of the dras of the late poem,
‘Mnemosyne’: ‘We are a sign, without meaning, without pain, and we
88
have nearly lost our language in foreign lands.’ He wrote some of his
greatest poetry aer he returned from Bordeaux, where something
intense happened to him, but he finally descended into non-sense and
silence, and was confined to his tower in Tübingen. Baudelaire actually
did lose his language in Brussels – I know it came from a cerebral hemor-
rhage, but it was his way of living intensely that led to it, and the same
can be said of Nietzsche’s final breakdown and silence in Turin. . .these
are extreme cases, I know. . .”
“. . .so perhaps people are right to be afraid. . .”
“. . .they are right to fear the extreme limit, but the opposite extreme is
even worse, in my view. . .”
“. . .I don’t mean playing it safe – just a bit safer than Shelley; aer all,
I don’t want you slipping off the edge. . .”
“. . .I’m not a lyric poet, so I don’t run quite the same risk. . .”
“. . .no, but you’re drawn to Shelley because of the openness and inten-
sity of his life. . .”
“. . .but I have one distinct advantage to Shelley. . .”
“. . .as I said, I know what happened to him, and I think I understand
part of the reason why. . .”
“. . .but aren’t there also key similarities? For example, don’t you feel
the same anger and disgust Shelley did for his native land when you hear
something absurd about it?”
“. . .I feel the same anger and disgust, but I have quite a different atti-
tude about what can be done about it. Shelley was actually shocked when
the liberal press – even Hunt’s journal, e Examiner – refused to
comment any more on the Peterloo massacre. I have a couple of centuries’
worth of cynicism between me and that attitude, and know what to
expect from the media – no real analysis of anything. Are kids shooting
up the schools? Well, blame it on guns, put metal-detectors up at all the
entrances – but whatever you do, don’t even dare suggest it might have
something to do with the nature of the society. . .”
“. . .so you’re not going to write the equivalent to e Mask of Anarchy?”
“. . .I didn’t say that! Maybe someday I will, but I won’t expect it to be
published, and if it is published, I won’t expect it to be read, and of it is
read, I won’t expect anybody to do anything about it, and if they do
anything about it, I won’t expect anybody to follow my suggestions in
the spirit they were meant. . .but, that’s not so different from what
89
Shelley, by the summer of 1819, felt about what was possible. Aer all,
e Mask of Anarchy only made some vague suggestions about mass
demonstrations of passive protest, but really didn’t suggest anything
more specific than that. . .”
“. . .on the other hand, Shelley is read now – you’re reading him. . .”
“. . .exactly, and that’s where his greatest lasting effect was in the end –
the putting into language of his views on life, politics, society, personal
relations, beauty and truth, so that they can now operate as part of the
discourse of humanity as it converses with itself about how to carry on.
Marx said it’s not enough to interpret the world, the point is to change it:
I believe that to interpret the world is already to begin changing it, albeit
at a much more moderate pace. I used to feel that to respond to every
event the way Shelley was doing was necessary: I see now that there’s
a different danger of being swept away by the moment, by the feeling one
has to constantly intervene. Certainly if it’s an emergency that necessi-
tates immediate action, I’m for swi action, but otherwise, if one doesn’t
enlarge the distance one has between oneself and events, one risks
becoming just another trend, or even another agent of the system –
precisely at the moment when one is trying to be something different. . .”
“. . .so how does one maintain the necessary distance – through
choosing self-imposed exile? Not everyone can go into exile. . .”
“. . .not everyone can, of course, but there’s no reason why they should:
it’s always a trade-off between sovereignty and security, between the
stability of the system and the risk of variability. In the end, we do what
we feel compelled to do: variability chooses us, rather than our choosing
variability, and it’s the same with self-imposed exile. . .”
“. . .what about the practical aspects of his exile – they lived compara-
tively luxuriously, didn’t they?”
“. . .the fact Shelley didn’t have to make his living from the Italian
economy made it somewhat easier. What was really a meager allowance
from his father’s estate would actually go quite far in Italy then given the
differential in economies, but it’s hard to make comparisons, particularly
given that their lives didn’t include things we take for granted – elec-
tricity, telephones, dependable plumbing with hot running water, televi-
sion, refrigerators, central heating, automobiles, computers, and so on.
Of course, our economy doesn’t include many of the things that they
took for granted – horse-drawn coaches, servants and the whole class
system that made them possible, considerable leisure time, and cheap
90
housing. ink about it: how much would we need to support ourselves
in a villa with rooms for everyone in key cities equivalent in importance
to what Florence, Rome, or Pisa were then, while affording two or three
full-time servants? I think it would cost well over ten thousand dollars
a month in any western European city, and in Prague probably well over
a hundred thousand crowns a month. It’s not quite a fair comparison,
and, in any case, they didn’t have it easy: they were always moving, and
there were times when the quarterly payment from his father’s estate was
late, throwing them into an economic crisis. . .”
“. . .the crisis part of it sounds familiar. . .”
“. . .unfortunately, but the expatriate economy is not quite the same
now: British expatriates in Italy at that time, Americans in the Paris of
the 190s living among the postwar ruins – they all took advantage of
the economic differential, making their money in one economy while
living in another. at’s why so many writers were expatriates – it was
probably the only way to survive, for many. Prague was affordable for
a year or two following the fall of Communism, but, as you know, it’s
expensive to live on black market rents while making a living from the
local economy. . .”
“. . .not just for expatriates – for anyone who isn’t connected; but, tell
me, if you could trade situations with Shelley, would you? I don’t mean
trading lives, but let’s say you could somehow live here in Italy under the
same immediate conditions. . .”
“. . .that’s a difficult question. . .”
“. . .hypothetically. . .”
“. . .you know how I love Italy, but. . .”
“. . .but?”
“. . .if it were a direct trade of situations, I think I’m a little too used to
things like electric light, hot water and heating, computers and tele-
phones, not to mention being able to play Beethoven’s late quartets,
Dexter Gordon’s sixteen minute version of Body and Soul, Tarkovsky’s
Nostalgia, or Fellini’s 8 ½ whenever I please – and those are only the
trivial things! What would really make the difference are things like
having antibiotics to give to my sick child. . .”
“. . .but what if it were merely a trade of location – would you want to
live here in Italy?”
“. . .that’s still a difficult question – it’s the reverse of the Prague ques-
tion. . .”
91
“. . .I know, but I’m curious. . .”

“. . .I’d like to live in Italy for part of the year – four months or so, but
no more. . .”
“. . .why not?”
“. . .because I think I would end up being too ‘happy’ for my own good. . .”
“. . .on the most basic level, I think I need a bit of central European
gloom in order to get my work done! Otherwise, while I do enjoy the joie
de vivre and friendliness of Italians very much, and while I do have some
real difficulties with the. . .how to put it? – perhaps ‘mécontentement de
vivre’ of the Czechs, strangely, as an exile and given my temperament,
there’s something poignant to me about the whole socio-historical situ-
ation of Czechs and Slovaks that’s le deep traces in their mode of being.
You can see it in the way you say goodbye to one another when you’re
going away – even if only for a short period: you stand there waving until
the very last moment, as if you would never see the person again. . .of
course, in a region that has been directly or indirectly controlled by
a foreign power for most of it’s existence, there’s a reason to behave that
way. I think we ought to treat those closest to us as if they might disap-
pear forever at a moment’s notice, for eventually, they will. . .we all will.
I don’t mean one should be morbid and constantly live in fear and
anguish about one’s mortality and the mortality of those one loves, but
certainly there’s more meaning in such an attitude than its opposite. . .”
“. . .do you mean the Italians?”
“. . .no, I was actually thinking more of the Americans again – or more
specifically the background I came from, where mortality was swept
under the carpet and a false positivity reigned – like in Hitchcock’s film,
e Trouble with Harry, where they just go on as normal, even though
there’s a corpse popping up everywhere. Here in Italy I think there’s
a genuine joy – as my friend Michael once observed, ‘Italians like them-
selves.’ I can understand it – even the food in a typical Italian railway
station is oen better than many restaurants in Prague! I think if one is
born into that, and knows nothing else, it’s good fortune, but my
temperament somehow needs stretches of gloomy days and a sense of
tragedy. . .not all of the time, of course – I need my green islands. . .”
“. . .so what months would you want to live here?”
“. . .not in high summer – this heat’s intolerable for too long. In April
and May, then again mid-September through mid-November. . .”
9
“. . .and in Prague the rest of the time?”

“. . .perhaps – except maybe in August: there’s no oxygen any more
there with the heat. August should be in the Alps, or Ireland – but it’s all
dreaming, at least for now. . .”
“. . .still, it’s a nice dream. I’m content with what we have – an occa-
sional green island. . .speaking of August, isn’t that where we le them –
at the end of the summer in Livorno, wasn’t it?”
“. . .yes. ey were a bit more active in September – especially Claire:
her half-brother Charles had arrived from Spain in early September and
was with them through November, so he was a distraction. Shelley used
him to learn Spanish better, reading Calderón with him. ere was also
Henry Reveley, the Gisbornes’ thirty year old son, who fell in love with
Claire and proposed marriage to her, although I’m not sure it wasn’t just
a plan of Mrs. Gisborne’s for a convenient match for her son. Claire
wrote that she had ‘tried’ to like him, but found she couldn’t: he was a bit
dull – an engineer with nothing in common with Claire, although
Shelley, on the other hand, was quite taken with his idea to design and
build a steamship, and offered to help finance it. But the main project of
the month was deciding when and where to move. . .”
“. . .why did they decide upon Florence?”
“. . .they had heard that a very good Scottish surgeon, Dr. Bell, was
living there, and Mary didn’t want to take any chances with her next
child. Shelley went to Florence toward the end of September to arrange
lodgings, and to send the manuscript of e Mask of Anarchy to Hunt.
Upon his return in early October they set out, spending a night in Pisa
and a night in Empoli. ey moved into the house of a woman with the
absurd name of Madame Merveilleux du Plantis. . .”
“. . .French?”
“. . .English – I assume she had a French husband. Actually, when we
get to Florence we could take a quick look at the building – we have
about an hour between trains, and the Palazzo Marini is supposed to be
right next to the train station, according to the map – see, here on the
Via Valfonda. . .”
“. . .where do we put the bags?”
“. . .in the short-term storage. . .we’re slowing down, so this must be
Bologna – we’ll be in Florence in an hour. . .”
“. . .that’s just enough time to finish telling me what happened there. . .”
“. . .they were only there until late January, 180. . .”
9
“. . .why so short a time?”

“. . .initially their plans were open-ended, and Shelley even wrote to
a few people suggesting they were going to remain there, but that winter
happened to be the coldest winter for decades – there were even snow-
storms, and it badly aggravated Shelley’s illness. . .”
“. . .it’s difficult to imagine snow here when it’s in the upper thirties. . .”
“. . .and the storms weren’t only meteorological – the quarterly payment
from London had failed to come due to some clerical error. ey only
found out about it when a check written to Henry Reveley to build his
steamship wasn’t honored. ey were anxious about their finances for
weeks, and it was only settled in late November. Also, Shelley experienced
another blow to his self-confidence as a poet during this period – it
occurred almost immediately aer they arrived, and it le him badly
shaken. . .”
“. . .it wasn’t another assault, was it?”
“. . .it was worse, or at least the effects were: it was a published assault in
full view of the eyes of his English contemporaries. Shelley had gone to
Delesert’s English library looking for a review of his e Revolt of Islam
that both Hunt and his publisher Ollier had mentioned to him: the
review had appeared in the most widely-read English intellectual journal,
the Quarterly – the edition of April, 1819. He expected to find a piece
of literary criticism, and instead found a long, ad hominum attack against
his poetry, his principles, and, ultimately, his entire mode of life. It
wounded him very deeply. . .”
“. . .who wrote it?”
“. . .Shelley immediately assumed that it must have been Southey, but in
fact it was a man named John Taylor Coleridge. . .”
“. . .the poet?”
“. . .no, no – that’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge. is man was a distant
relation of the poet. . .”
“. . .why did he do it?”
“. . .he had been a school-mate of Shelley’s at Eton, so who knows what
petty incident might have happened there that would have made him
take up his acid-dipped pen? Certainly there were ideological reasons
involved: this particular Coleridge was a firm member of the establish-
ment, and later became a King’s Bench judge. . .”
“. . .so what did he write?”
“. . .it was quite terrible, and even more so when you consider that
9
Shelley had been mostly overlooked by his contemporaries up to that

point, so it would have been his first real notice. . .and the review wasn’t
superficial – the reviewer had dug up the first edition of the poem that
had been withdrawn, Laon and Cythna, and made much of its incest
theme. What was even worse was that the reviewer gave a thumbnail
sketch of Shelley’s entire life – from his expulsion from Oxford to innu-
endo about Harriet, Mary and Claire. He ended the piece with
a disturbing image, which is more disturbing in retrospect. . .here,
Holmes quotes it:
Like the Egyptian of old, the wheels of his chariot are broken,
the path of mighty waters closes in upon him behind, and
a still deepening ocean is before him: – for a short time are
seen his impotent struggles against a resistless power, his blas-
phemous execrations are heard, his despair but poorly assumes
the tone of triumph and defiance, and he calls ineffectually on
others to follow him to the same ruin – finally, he sinks ‘like
lead’ to the bottom, and is forgotten. So it is now in part, so
shortly will it be entirely with Mr. Shelley.
. . .it’s strangely prescient – of both the chariot of his last poem, e

Triumph of Life, and the ‘sinking like lead’ of his death. Novalis wrote,
‘the life of a truly canonical person is thoroughly symbolic’ – which was
true of both of them. . .”
“. . .how did Shelley react to the review?”
“. . .according to Medwin, there was someone at Delesert’s who recorded
his immediate reaction: he saw a young man reading who suddenly stood
up, laughed loudly and hysterically, and ran out of the room laughing all the
way down the stairs. Despite the laughter, I’m sure he was deeply distraught
– neither Mary nor Claire mentioned his reaction, so I think he kept it to
himself. You can see how he was initially trying to come to terms with it in
his letters: there’s one undated fragment of a letter to the Quarterly, indig-
nantly demanding they produce evidence of the accusations, and charging
them with slander – one critic dates it about ten days later, but it strikes me
as being psychologically much closer to his initial reaction. . .”
“. . .did he send it?”
“. . .no – thank goodness! He thought better of it, and broke it off in
mid-sentence. You can imagine what a slander suit would have been like
9
– parading the facts of his life around for all to see. He decided that
a better public approach would be to show that he didn’t take it seriously.
e day aer he read the review he wrote to Ollier that the only remark
he took seriously in the review was its accusation that he was plagiarizing
Wordsworth. is he deflected by claiming that all the poets of the
period were ‘plagiarizing’ Wordsworth in one way or another, in that they
shared a similarity in their mode of expression due to the spirit of the age
acting upon all of them equally – and he was quite right! Otherwise, he
made fun of what he called the ‘operatic’ ending of the letter, and when
he wrote Ollier again, two months later, he was able to make even more
light of it – here, I’ll read it:
ere is one very droll thing in the Quarterly. ey say that
‘my chariot-wheels are broken’. Heaven forbid! My chariot,
you may tell them, was built by one of the best makers in
Bond Street, and it has gone several thousand miles in perfect
security. What a comical thing it would be to make the
following advertisement! — ‘A report having prevailed, in
consequence of some insinuations in the Quarterly Review,
that Mr. Shelley’s chariot-wheels are broken, Mr. Charters, of
Bond Street, begs to assure the public that they, aer having
carried him through Italy, France, and Switzerland, still
continue in excellent repair.’
. . .but, despite the lightness of his tone here, the attack truly did upset
him, and I think, in the end, it was crucial for his relation to his own
writing, for it forced him to make a choice between that side of himself
that egoistically desired acclaim from his contemporaries, and the sover-
eign artist, dedicated to his task. e result was almost immediate: from
out of the cauldron of his suffering he answered with his most celebrated
lyric, ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ e poem can stand on its own, of course,
but it means so much more given its context. It was conceived and almost
entirely completed on October th: Shelley had been walking along the
Arno in the Cascine forest outside the city and saw a storm approaching
over the mountains from the west. e blowing leaves suddenly gave him
the inspiration when he seized upon the wind as both a destructive and
creative force, tearing the leaves from the trees but also scattering the
seeds for new growth. . .”
9
“. . .I know the poem, but could you read it to me, since we’re going
there. . .”
“. . .let me find it. . .here it is. . .
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

ou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
e winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until
ine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, O, hear!
ou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,

Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplied from the head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
e locks of the approaching storm. ou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
9
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!
ou who didst waken from his summer dreams

e blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! ou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

e sea-blooms and the oozy winds which wear
e sapless foilage of the ocean, know
y voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: O, hear!
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swi cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
e impulse of thy strength, only less free

an thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
e comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, li me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
98
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swi, and proud.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!
e tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And , by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
e trumpet of a prophecy! O wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
. . .aside from one or two shrill lines, it’s quite nice, really – the reader is
not only being told about the transcendence of his doubt and agony, but
is shown its very occurrence. . .”
“. . .do you think the poem reflects Mary’s pregnancy at all?”
“. . .very much so – he must have been acutely aware of how close she
came to committing suicide aer William’s death, and how the advent
of the child saved her. Even before its birth she showed renewed energy
– for example, a week aer Shelley completed the ‘Ode to the West
Wind’ she fair-copied the entirety of the next long poem Shelley wrote,
Peter Bell the ird. . .”
“. . .what is that?”
“. . .it’s partially a satire, partially a parody of Wordsworth’s Peter Bell.
Unlike the ode, it’s more important for what it reveals about Shelley than
for its poetry: while the ode wrests affirmation from the maw of nega-
tivity, Peter Bell the ird worked through the Shelley’s feelings about
99
the Quarterly review and his own sense of himself as a poet using
Wordsworth as a foil. In fact, he must have come up with the idea during
a visit to Delesert’s a day or so before he wrote the ode, as it was then that
he saw another parody of Wordsworth’s poem, Peter Bell II, by a lesser
poet – John Hamilton Reynolds. . .”
“. . .I’ve never heard of him. . .”
“. . .neither had I – he’s a nonentity. I think that the Quarterly reviewer’s
point about plagiarizing Wordsworth must have set Shelley off, and he
set off at a gallop, for he completed the 1 stanzas of the poem in the
three days following the writing of the ode. . .”
“. . .what kind of poem is it?”
“. . .it’s a satirical phantasmagoria following Wordsworth to hell – or,
rather, London, which Shelley casts as a stand-in for hell. It’s closer to
something Byron or Peacock might have written, and he thrusts in all
directions – at poets, critics, politicians, and high society. Aside from its
value as a quick revenge through mockery, it was a way for him to justify
his own position outside of society – his own aesthetic stance as a poet,
really. Having made sure to complement, in the poem, the work of the
early Wordsworth, he takes the late Wordsworth to task, not only
because Wordsworth became a fusty old conservative, but even more
because his poetry became tedious. He’s scathing about it. . .here, listen
to this:
Peter was dull – he was at first

Dull – oh, so dull – so very dull!
Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed –
Still with this dullness was he cursed –
Dull – beyond all conception – dull.
No one could read his books – no mortal,

But a few natural friends, would hear him;
e parson came not near his portal;
His state was like that of the immortal
Described by Swi – no man could bear him.
His sister, wife, and children yawned,

With a long, slow, and drear ennui,
All human patience far beyond;
00
eir hopes of Heaven each would have pawned,

Anywhere else to be.
But in his verse, and in his prose,

e essence of his dullness was
Concentred and compressed so close,
Twould have made Guatimozin doze
On his red gridiron of brass.
A printer’s boy, folding those pages,

Fell slumbrously upon one side;
Like those famed Seven who slept three ages.
To wakeful frenzy’s vigil-rages,
As opiates, were the same applied.
Even the Reviewers who were hired

To do the work of his reviewing,
With adamantine nerves, grew tired; –
Gaping and torpid they retired,
To dream of what they should be doing.
And worse and worse, the drowsy curse

Yawned in him, till it grew a pest –
A wide contagious atmosphere,
Creeping like cold through all things near;
A power to infect and to infest.
. . .it continues on like that until the end. . .”

“. . .who was Guatimozin?”
“. . .the reference is to the last Aztec emperor who was captured and
tortured to death by Cortés for not revealing where the Aztec hoard of
gold was – in other words, Wordsworth’s late poetry is so dull even a man
undergoing torture on a red-hot gridiron would fall asleep out of
boredom. . .that’s boring indeed! Of course the later Wordsworth is quite
boring. His poetic focus had always been his own memories, but the
conception of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ represented by his
earlier Lyrical Ballads didn’t hold up when he continued to write from
memory in his later works. Memory is not a bottomless well one can keep
01
returning to – at least not without caution. Shelley wasn’t alone in his

feelings: omas De Quincey roundly criticized Wordsworth in his
Recollections; Keats referred to Wordsworth’s poetical mode as the
‘egotistical sublime’; Byron would eventually attack him in e Vision of
Judgment – like Shelley’s poem, a satirical piece; and even his friend,
Coleridge, broke with him, citing in his journal Wordsworth’s ‘self-
vorticity.’ Wordsworth and Southey both became deeply conservative –
pro-monarchy and pro-Anglican church, but perhaps worst of all, for
Shelley, was the dullness that resulted. . .”
“. . .wasn’t Shelley asking for trouble – critiquing Wordsworth like that,
given his importance?”
“. . .in 1819 he was only just gaining his real importance, but by the time
the poem was actually published, in the 189 edition, Wordsworth had
become an institution, and Mary felt compelled to deny, in her notes,
that the poem was even about him except in the most ideal terms. It’s
understandable, given the circumstances: Southey was the poet laureate
of England in 189, and Wordsworth succeeded him in 18 until the
end of his life in 180, so she had to be careful given she was trying to
cultivate Shelley’s memory. She also mentioned, in her notes, that the
poem had ‘so much of himself in it,’ which seems a strange thing to say
given the poem is so atypical, but I think I know how she meant it: not
in regard to actual events, not in regard to the subject matter or style, but
rather how it revealed his spirit, his capacity to turn his rancor and bitter-
ness into something playful and light, unlike Byron, who tended to
brood, becoming increasingly resentful and sardonic as time went on. . .”
“. . .so Shelley was able to get over his feelings about the critical review. . .”
“. . .Ode to the West Wind gave him a new confidence in his own powers
as a poet, and Peter Bell the ird allowed him to transform his bitterness
into levity while at the same time letting him explain to himself the
merits of his own path as a poet. By the first week of November, Shelley
embarked on another prose piece that put him on the counter-attack, but
in a less direct way: on the same day he completed Peter Bell the ird he
began writing a long, open letter to Hunt’s journal, e Examiner,
defending Richard Carlile, who had been on trial since October for sedi-
tion due to his reportage on the Peterloo massacre and for publishing
such books as omas Paine’s Age of Reason. Carlile had been convicted
and sentenced to three years in jail. . .”
“. . .that’s as bad as under Communism. . .”
0
“. . .it was a terribly reactionary regime. His letter was essentially an

essay on freedom of the press, but it argued from a legal point of view
that the trial was a miscarriage of justice in its very form: he argued that
Carlile, a deist, was not tried by his peers; that other booksellers went
unpublished for selling books just as ‘dangerous’ – such as Hume, or
Godwin; and that Carlile’s purpose in selling his books was economic
and lacked any wicked intent. . .”
“. . .did Hunt publish the letter?”
“. . .again, no – it was too dangerous. . .”
“. . .did Shelley ever realize that Hunt was discarding his material?”
“. . .in the end he did. Peacock sent Shelley the recent three issues of
Hunt’s Examiner, which arrived in mid-December: when Shelley real-
ized that nothing sent to Hunt had been published there, he wrote Hunt
a letter lightly chastising him. Shelley must have been disappointed,
though, as he considered Hunt his one true friend in England. To give
Hunt a bit of credit, while he was a coward politically, due to his previous
prison sentence he wasn’t without his redeeming features in regard to
Shelley: he did write in the Examiner a riposte to the personal attacks on
Shelley in the Quarterly, and defended Shelley based on the time his own
family had spent at Marlowe: he testified that while he and his wife were
visiting, Shelley did nothing other than read and write, go out in his boat,
read to his friends in the evening, help the poor of the neighborhood,
and go to bed early. He suggested the same mode of life was continuing
in Italy. . .”
“. . .did Hunt know about Shelley and Claire?”
“. . .I doubt it – I doubt he even suspected anything. Otherwise, his
account was true enough. . .”
“. . .did he publish anything of Shelley’s then?”
“. . .just a short love poem entitled ‘Love’s Philosophy’ that Shelley had
written for Sophia Stacey. . .”
“. . .I thought you would ask that – it was only a lark. . .”
“. . .what?”
“. . .sorry – it’s an idiom: it was just for amusement. ere were
numerous English girls around when they were in Florence – for
example, the two daughters of Madame du Plantis. Actually, it was
Charles Clairmont who truly was up to something – he was courting
Louisa du Plantis. ese were all rather silly women. Shelley mentioned
0
in a letter that Louisa was ‘in and out of love with Charles as the wind
happens to blow,’ and his campaign failed in the end; in fact, Charles was
upbraided by ‘Madame Marvelous’ due to his conduct – and so was
Claire. . .”
“. . .why Claire?”
“. . .she had borrowed a device known as a ‘chiroplast’ – it helped
pianists to hold their fingers in the right form – and had failed to return
it in time, which caused a minor commotion. In any case, Charles
departed for Vienna in early November. . .”
“. . .what happened to the daughters?”
“. . .Zoide married a Prussian language teacher, Louisa was a spinster,
and they all lived together with their mother in Brighton in what must
have been a staid, Victorian existence. . .”
“. . .Charles was lucky to escape. . .”
“. . .it would seem so. In any case, there was a general mood of lightness
that would carry over into December and January, certainly largely brought
about by the birth of Percy Florence Shelley on November 1th. Shelley
wrote to Hunt, ‘Poor Mary begins (for the first time) to look a little
consoled. For we have spent as you may imagine a miserable five months.’
Mary’s letter to Marianne Hunt announcing the birth was somewhat
more muted – let me find it. . .here it is:
. . .he is my only one and although he is so healthy and prom-

ising that for the life of me I cannot fear yet it is a bitter
thought that all should be risked on one, yet how much sweeter
than to be childless as I was for five hateful months – Do not
let us talk of those five months; when I look back on all
I suffered at Leghorn I shudder with horror yet even now
a sickening feeling steps in the way of every enjoyment when
I think – of what I will not write about. . .
. . .”
“. . .I can understand her feelings – I would be frightened to death
about the child given what had happened to the others. . .”
“. . .she would always be overprotective of Percy Florence. Even though
the birth was easy, Mary decided it best to spend much of November,
December and January in bed: it was, aer all, the coldest winter in
Florence for decades, and she didn’t want to take any chances. . .”
“. . .who decided on the name ‘Florence’?”
0
“. . .Sophia Stacey, actually. . .”

“. . .so, now, tell me who she was, if she was so important to have poems
written to her, and to be suggesting names for babies. . .”
“. . .she was the ward of one of Shelley’s uncles, and being chaper-
oned on a tour through Italy by an old spinster, Miss Corbet Parry-
Jones. She must have heard about her ‘bad cousin Shelley’ and his
connection to Byron through the family grapevine, and I would guess
withheld the relevant information from her chaperon when she
steered her towards Florence and the same boarding house where
Shelley was staying. . .”
“. . .so another Eliza Campbell?”
“. . .perhaps she wanted to be, but Shelley had learnt his lesson, and
seems to have merely been toying with her. I have no evidence of it, but
I always wondered whether E.M. Forster’s novel, A Room with a View,
might have been loosely adapted from accounts of their visit: the spin-
ster and her ward visiting Florence, the Shelley-like character tempting
the serious young lady – all transformed, of course. . .”
“. . .did Sophia fall in love with him?”
“. . .I think she believed she did: aer all, she mentioned in her diary the
times Shelley helped her down off the carriage. . .”
“. . .it sounds more like an adolescent infatuation. . .”
“. . .I think that’s all it was. . .Shelley was free to spend quite a lot of
time with her – they learned Italian together, and he conducted Sophia
and her chaperon, Miss Parry-Jones, around the galleries. Sometimes
Claire would go along with them. . .”
“. . .to see the galleries, or to see Shelley flirting with Sophia?”
“. . .both, I imagine. . .”
“. . .so you’re certain nothing was happening between them?”
“. . .one can never be certain; aer all, it was Shelley’s habit to become
– let’s say ‘erratic’ – whenever Mary had an infant to nurse, but I really
think it was just a flirtation. Look at this poem, ‘I Fear y Kisses Gentle
Maiden’:
I fear they kisses, gentle maiden,

ou needest not fear mine;
My spirit is too deeply laden
Ever to burthen thine.
0
I fear thy mien, they tones, thy motion,

ou needest not fear mine;
Innocent is the heart’s devotion
With which I worship thine.
. . .he admits his attraction, but claims he is too burdened for her to ever
fear him. I think that puts his position quite well. . .”
“. . .was it published?”
“. . .Mary published it in the 18 edition, but as ‘To — ’: I think she
knew quite well who it was written to – there was no one else who could
have been a candidate for the label ‘gentle maiden.’ I think Shelley was
using her as he would use Emilia Viviani later in Pisa – as a muse. Look,
here’s another brief poem he wrote, almost as chaste as the last. is one
wasn’t published by Mary at all, and had to be published by Shelley’s
biographer, William Rossetti, in 180, before it saw the light of day. It’s
simply entitled ‘To Sophia’:
ou art fair, and few are fairer

Of the Nymphs of earth or ocean;
ey are robes that fit the wearer –
ose so limbs of thine, whose motion
Ever falls and shis and glances
As the life within them dances.
y deep eyes, a double Planet,

Gaze the wisest into madness
With so clear fire, – the winds that fan it
Are those thoughts of tender gladness
Which, like zephyrs on the billow,
Make thy gentle soul their pillow.
If, whatever face thou paintest

In those eyes, grows pale with pleasure,
If the fainting soul is faintest
When it hears they harp’s wild measure,
Wonder not that when thou speakest
Of the weak my heart is weakest.
0
As dew beneath the wind of morning,

As the sea which whirlwinds waken,
As the birds at thunder’s warning,
As aught mute yet deeply shaken,
As one who feels an unseen spirit
Is my heart when thine is near it.
. . .”
“. . .I can see why Mary didn’t publish it – it’s dangerously close to an
invitation. . .”
“. . .there’s no sport in flirtation unless it skirts danger zones! An invi-
tation or suggestion is not the same as a fulfillment: he merely practiced
the art of ‘upping the ante’ with Sophia. . .”
“. . .what’s that mean?”
“. . .it’s a term from the card game poker – it means raising the bet
before the cards are dealt. e poem that Hunt published, ‘Love’s
Philosophy,’ raised the ante even more, by moving from stating how she
‘shakes him’ to asking her to ‘mingle’ with him:
e fountains mingle with the river

And the rivers with the Ocean,
e winds of Heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine? –
See the mountains kiss high Heaven

And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?
0
. . .but it’s rhetorical – it’s moving ever a step closer, without crossing
a certain line. . .”
“. . .but he’s asking her to cross that line!”
“. . .I think he’s merely giving her a little thrill. Aer making it seem he’s
talking about love-making, the poem ends by asking only for a little kiss. . .”
“. . .perhaps, but a kiss opens doors, and then what next?”
“. . .Sophia was only there for a short time – until just aer Christmas.
e poem was perfectly timed – in fact, ‘Love’s Philosophy’ and two other
poems were inscribed into a copy of Hunt’s anthology e Literary Pocket-
Book, and sent to her aer her departure. ey never met again. . .”
“. . .what were the other two poems?”
“. . .they complete the cycle. One of them, entitled ‘Good-night,’ is
clearly an invitation to love-making:
Good night? ah! no; the night is ill

Which severs those it should unite;
Let us remain together still,
en it will be good night.
How were the night without thee good,

ough thy sweet wishes wing its flight?
Be it not said, thought, understood —
en it will be — good night.
e hearts that on each other beat

From evening close to morning light,
Have nights as good as they are sweet;
But never say good night.
. . .”
“. . .Shelley is more than opening doors there. . .”
“. . .yes, but, as I said, he probably inscribed it in the book aer she had
departed, and anyway he followed it with a poem that places the whole
dalliance in the distant past – entitled ‘Time Long Past’:
Like the ghost of a dear friend dead

Is Time long past.
A tone which is now forever fled,
08
A hope which is now forever past,

A love so sweet it could not last,
Was Time long past.
ere were sweet dreams in the night

Of Time long past:
And, was it sadness or delight,
Each day a shadow onward cast
Which made us wish it yet might last —
at Time long past.
ere is regret, almost remorse,

For Time long past.
‘Tis like a child’s belovèd course
A father watches, till at last
Beauty is like remembrance, cast
From Time long past.
. . .‘sweet dreams,’ ‘regret, almost remorse’ – he’s given her a beautiful,

youthful dream, but nothing more than that, it seems to me. . .”
“. . .but why do it at all?”
“. . .partially for inspiration, partially as a way both to have his fantasies
and avoid the problems they caused when he actually acted them out. . .”
“. . .I’ll never understand men. . .”
“. . .oh, I don’t know if it’s only men: it was Sophia’s fantasy as well,
aer all! Women are not as pure as all that; aer all, what was Sophia
doing flirting with a married man? She did it in a way that was plausibly
deniable – to others, and especially to herself. . .”
“. . .what about Claire – what did she think about all this flirtation?”
“. . .he must have let Claire know about it – at least as a bit of fun he
was having. I think she was oen right there with them. She went to the
galleries with them, and I think she must have shared Sophia’s interest in
music – as the poem mentioned, Sophia played the harp. Claire thought
enough about her to mention the letters Sophia sent in her journal.
Shelley and Mary’s journal only mentions one or two letters. . .”
“. . .is there any record of the time Claire spent alone with Shelley
during that period?”
“. . .I would guess there was a break in their intimate relations – partially
09
because there were so many people around, partially because the birth of
Percy Florence may have evoked some residual guilt in them about Clara,
and partially due to Shelley’s health. During much of the cold spell that
hit in January, Shelley was suffering from a pain in his side, so he stayed
indoors reading with Mary: e Tempest, Sophocles, and the Bible. Claire
meanwhile continued visiting galleries with the du Plantis girls – there’s
even a mention made of her having had a snowball fight with them
during one of the snowstorms. . .”
“. . .and what about her relations with Mary?”
“. . .things were apparently calm at that moment, probably due to
Mary’s withdrawal with her child. . .”
“. . .and husband. . .”
“. . .perhaps, but Claire didn’t seem to be distressed by it: at one point
in her journal Claire speculated on a maxim of Pythagoras’ that odd
numbers are more perfect than even because they cannot be divided: she
applied the rule to marriage, and concluded that it was the reason the
couple was unstable. . .”
“. . .implying that three is better?”
“. . .she was being hopeful. . .”
“. . .and what about Allegra?”
“. . .she noted Allegra’s rd birthday on January 1th in her journal, but
there were no letters to or from Byron during the period. Over-all, the
months in Florence were a period of relative calm. . .”
“. . .speaking of Florence, I think we’re arriving. . .”
“. . .yes, this is it – we’re right on time. . .”
“. . .the station is huge. . .”
“. . .you’ll soon see how many tourists there are. . .”
“. . .I see already. . .”
“. . .we have an hour – the train to Pisa departs at 10:. . .”
“. . .which side of the station is the Palazzo Marini?”
“. . .it should be on that side. . .got everything?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .ok, let’s go. . .”
The train eases smoothly into the station. As they come out of the
air-conditioned compartment the heat covers them like a veil. They
place their luggage on a cart, walk down the tourist-thronged platform
and then to the end of the line of travelers waiting at the left-luggage
office.
10
“. . .it’s not exactly cooler, is it?”

“. . .I really thought it would be. . .”
“. . .so this awaits us upon our return – what do pensions cost here?”
“. . .Florence is the most expensive place we’ll be staying – another
reason I want to minimize our time here. We can look and see if there are
any decent pensions near the Palazzo Marini, so we needn’t search when
we return. It’s not that beautiful around here, but it will be less expen-
sive, and to stay right near where Shelley lived would be wonderful. . .”
“. . .I’d be happy with anything – all we need is a bed and a shower. . .”
Aer checking their luggage they walk out of the station hall past the
taxi stand to a pedestrian crossing. Across the street is a tan, sandstone
neo-Renaissance building with a red-tiled roof, six stories high and
extending the length of the block. Down the block to the right is a take-
away pizza restaurant, and just beyond it a large McDonalds’s restaurant;
to the le some boutiques and small shops. Diagonally across from them
is the large main entrance to the building, a guard standing outside.
When the light turns green, they cross the intersection and stop on the
sidewalk near the entrance. To the le above the entrance is a marble
plaque, with the words: ‘TRA IL 1819 E IL 1820 IN QUESTI
LUOGHI GIA DI VIA VALFONDA PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
LAVORO AL ‘PROMETEO LIBERATO’ COMPOSE L’ODE AL
VENTO OCCIDENTALE.’
“. . .why do they have to give the poems in Italian – the average English
tourist wouldn’t get it. . .”
“. . .why do we call Firenze ‘Florence’ in English, and – what is it in
Czech?”
“. . .‘Florencie’. . .I suppose because people are lazy to learn foreign
names. . .”
“. . .exactly. . .”
“. . .so this is the actual building?”
“. . .no, it can’t be – this is neo-Renaissance, not Renaissance, but
I wonder when they replaced the original building, and why. . .”
“. . .do you want to ask the guard?”
“. . .we have nothing to lose. . .”
He walks to a little room just inside the entrance where the guard has
disappeared, and then returns, aer a minute, to where she is waiting on
the sidewalk.
“. . .were you able to find anything out?”
11
“. . .sì!. . .this is the site of the building where Shelley stayed, but not the
building itself: the original building was destroyed during the war – it
had been the headquarters of the Nazis, and was bombed by the
Americans. I don’t know why they didn’t declare it an open city, like
Rome. . .”
“. . .a city that won’t be defended, and therefore needn’t be fought for:
it’s done exactly to avoid this kind of thing. . .”
“. . .it’s a pity. . .”
“. . .well, at least this is the site of the building where Shelley stayed in
Florence. eir rooms would have looked upon the Santa Maria Novella
– the church right over there. . .”
“. . .it’s beautiful – Shelley always chose beautiful places. . .”
“. . .and there was no train station, then. Let’s just walk around the
other side of the block and see if there’s a pension there. . .”
“. . .isn’t it a bit noisy here?”
“. . .we could always ask for a room at the back – it’s a convenient
distance from the station, and would probably be quite reasonable. . .”
ey walk down the block to the Piazza Adua, turn sharply around the
corner, and walk up the Via Ceninni. A half-block down they see a sign
for a pension.
“. . .I don’t know precisely when we’ll be back here, so I’m not going to
book it – I’ll just go up and take a quick look. Could you buy some water
in that café there while I go up – and do you want something to eat?”
“. . .no, I can wait until Pisa – and you?”
“. . .if you’re fine, I can wait as well – back in a moment. . .”
She buys a large bottle of mineral water from a vendor while he disap-
pears into the entrance of the pension. A minute later he appears again,
just as she’s paying.
“. . .it’s fine – very inexpensive, the rooms are nice, they speak English,
and he said that if we come by noon we can certainly get a room in the
back. . .”
“. . .shall we go find the Pisa train now?”
“. . .yes. . .here, let me carry the water for you. . .”
“. . .thanks. . .”
ey retrace their steps back to the station, pick up their luggage, and
find their platform and train – a regionale. ey embark, again finding
an unoccupied compartment.
1
“. . .when do we arrive – it’s quite quick, isn’t it?”

“. . .at 11:, so a little over an hour. . .”
“. . .why did they decide to go to Pisa in the first place?”
“. . .Naples and Rome were out of the question because of the bad
memories each city carried, and they associated Florence, perhaps unfairly,
with the cold inland weather they had experienced, not to mention it was
even then a tourist trap full of people like Miss Parry-Jones and their
wards. ey had been comfortable in Tuscany and they liked the
Gisbornes, but Livorno was too much of an English colony, and a busy
seaport. Pisa was a university city, and it was central to all the various
places they might want to travel: Florence, Livorno, and even Lucca and
the Bagni di Lucca to the north. More importantly, they had introduc-
tions to an English family living in Pisa called the Masons, plus they had
heard that there was an internationally-renowned doctor at the university
named Dr. Andrea Vaccà, which calmed Mary down considerably in
regard to Percy. It was a significant move for them, for although they
didn’t know it, they would remain within the vicinity of Pisa longer than
any other place they stayed in Italy – two years. ey had lived in eight
different places during the two years they had already spent in Italy. . .”
“. . .it must have been maddening to be moving all the time. Did they
know where they would stay in Pisa?”
“. . .no – like us, they le it to fate. ey took the first chance they could
to move aer the bad weather passed, and, on January th, they took
a boat with all their belongings as far as Empoli. ey le in the morning:
a journey that will take us thirty minutes took them five hours, and that
was fast in comparison to a coach. From Empoli they took a coach, and
arrived at Pisa at five in the evening. ey stayed at an inn called the Tre
Donzelle, right near the main bridge. . .”
“. . .do you think it still exists?”
“. . .unless another American bomb hit it, it should be there. . .”
“. . .how long do you want to spend in Pisa?”
“. . .as long as it takes: I would guess it would take us a couple of days to
see everything and get a sense of the town. On one of the days we’ll go
north of the town to San Giuliano, where they lived for two seasons. It
shouldn’t be so difficult to find a room – Pisa is nothing like Florence,
except for around the Duomo. For most tourists it’s a stop-over and
nothing more, but that’s exactly what I hope is charming about it. Henry
James wrote that it had the other-worldly decadence of a formerly great
1
city. It was already quite faded during Shelley’s time: during his first visit
he noticed that it seemed, in his words, strangely ‘depopulated,’ with
buildings dilapidated and whole areas abandoned. James wrote, ‘if one
had experienced some terrible disappointment in life, Pisa would be
a charming city to wait for death in’. . .”
“. . .that doesn’t sound very inviting. . .”
“. . .and I suppose should warn you that because the maremma has
slowly enclosed Pisa over time in summer it can be extremely humid with
mosquitoes. Many of the locals simply leave town now, not to mention
that it’s still a university town, and there’s not much happening at the
university in summer – but, on the other hand, it will seem more
authentic. . .”
“. . .we’ll survive. Where did they finally find a place to stay?”
“. . .they found their first residence with the help of their new friends
the Masons: it was called the Casa Frassi, and it may be the hardest resi-
dence to locate of all of them. All I know about it is that it was right on
the Arno, somewhere on the northwest side of the river – we simply have
to hope it’s marked somehow. . .”
“. . .how long did they live there?”
“. . .for about five months – from February through the middle of June.
In the beginning they had two bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and
a servant’s quarters on the mezzanine floor. In mid-March they moved
to the top floor where Shelley was able to have a study to himself. ey
paid the equivalent of about five pounds sterling a month, or sixty per
year – a little less than a third of their yearly income. . .”
“. . .and the Masons? Who were they?”
“. . .Mrs. Mason was actually Lady Margaret Mountcashel. She was the
daughter of Lord Kingsborough of Cork: Mary’s mother, Mary
Wollstonecra, had been taken on as a governess there when Margaret
was fourteen, and although she only remained there for a year, it was long
enough for her feminist and republican ideas to have their influence on
the young woman. . .”
“. . .it’s a small world. . .”
“. . .very small. She married the Earl of Mountcashel, but although she
had familial duties she had an avid interest in politics, joining the United
Irish Party – the party, founded by Wolfe Tone, which sought Irish inde-
pendence from England. Following the Act of Union in 1800, her family
le Ireland – going first to London, where they met Godwin and Mrs.
1
Clairemont, and then to the continent. In Rome, in 180, she met George
William Tighe and began an affair with him. She le her husband in 180
and returned to England with Tighe, taking the name ‘Mrs. Mason’ from
Mary Wollstonecra’s Stories om Real Life, and meeting Godwin from
time to time. ey had two daughters named Nerina and Laurette: the
former was about five, the latter about eleven when they met them. ey
moved to the Casa Silva in Pisa, in 181, and mostly avoided the English
there due to the scandal of their elopement. . .”
“. . .how did they know the Masons were there?”
“. . .I’m sure Godwin told them, as he supplied a general letter of intro-
duction for them when they first departed for the continent in 1818. ey
met for the first time back in the autumn, when they were moving from
Livorno to Firenze. Although Mary, Claire and Shelley all liked them very
much, Claire had a greater regard for Mrs. Mason than Mary: Mary later
wrote to Mrs. Gisborne, in 18, that she found Mrs. Mason ‘cold’. . .”
“. . .Mary wrote that? I thought Mary was the one who was supposed to
be cold?”
“. . .Mrs. Mason had gone through a great deal of difficulty in her own
life, so she tended to lack sympathy for Mary’s depressions. In fact, she
had written to Mary the preceding December suggesting that she had
better try to put the past behind her for the sake of her baby. I don’t think
Mary disliked her; in fact, letters Mary wrote during that period show
clearly that Mrs. Mason was affecting them all with her political radi-
calism. It’s just that she played a greater role in Claire’s life. . .”
“. . .did she know about the intimacy between Shelley and Claire?”
“. . .I very much doubt it, although she was a shrewd woman, and may
have suspected it as a possibility. I don’t think she knew many things
about them: when things became difficult later in regard to Paolo’s
attempts to blackmail them about Elena Adelaide Shelley, she seems not
to have known anything at all about the matter. . .”
“. . .and what were her relations to Claire?”
“. . .Claire called Mrs. Mason her ‘Minerva’ – the Roman name for the
Greek goddess Athena. Mrs. Mason had a major influence upon Claire,
and over the next eighteen months or so helped her develop herself. She
tried to help Claire gain independence from the Shelley household. . .”
“. . .did Claire want to be independent of the household?”
“. . .no, of course not, but when the Paolo blackmail began, they were all
frightened by it, plus there had been some pressure from Mary. . .”
1
“. . .again?”
“. . .Mary continued her nesting again with Percy Florence. She was still
deeply despondent; indeed, it seems to have gotten worse, and by March,
180, was becoming intolerable. A new letter was discovered from
Shelley to the Gisbornes that had not been available when Shelley’s
collected letters were published, or to Holmes when he wrote his biog-
raphy, and it reveals the seriousness of the situation. . .”
“. . .I only have extracts of it, copied out from e Clairemont Correspondence
. . .here, in a letter of March 11th he writes,
Mary has resigned herself, especially since the death of her

child, to a train of thoughts, which if not cut off, cannot but
conduct to some fatal end. Ill temper and irritation at the
familiar events of life are among the external marks of this
inward change, and by being freely yielded to, they exasperate
the spirit, of which they are expressions. . . .It needs a slight
weight to turn the scale to good and evil. Mary considers me
a portion of herself, and feels no more remorse in torturing me
than in torturing her own mind – Could she know a person in
every way my equal, and hold close and perpetual communion
with him, as a distinct being from herself; as a friend instead
of a husband, she would obtain empire over herself.
. . .”
“. . .did he have anyone in mind?”
“. . .I think he’s making a point about their relationship, not about her actu-
ally finding a friend. As I mentioned before, due to her abnormally close rela-
tion to her father Mary had difficulty seeing Shelley as a separate being, which
must have been especially intolerable to him given his need for autonomy. . .”
“. . .but he must have realized it when he got involved with her. . .”
“. . .no doubt he did, but the mind has an infinite capacity for self-delu-
sion: he sought someone who would fill the void le in him by the loss of
his mother and sisters, and found someone who was attached to him to
the point of almost merging. He grew more independent over time, but,
due to the circumstances, Mary grew more dependent. ere was a crisis
building again, and Claire tried to relieve some of the pressure on the
household by her almost daily visits to the Masons. She got on especially
1
well with Mrs. Mason’s two daughters, and went out walking almost
daily with Laurette, the eleven year old. . .”
“. . .what did Shelley think of Mrs. Mason and her husband?”
“. . .he enjoyed them very much. He seemed especially fond of George
Tighe, or ‘Tatty,’ as they called him, and took some interest in his horti-
cultural pursuits; in fact, both Tatty and Mrs. Mason seemed to enjoy
gardening – so much so that Shelley wrote a poem, in March or April,
using their garden as a metaphor, entitled e Sensitive Plant. Clearly
Mrs. Mason was the inspiration for it. . .”
“. . .I don’t know it. . .”
“. . .yes you do, or at least you know the final lines of the poem – they’re
used by Passer at the end of his film. . .”
“. . .oh yes, they’re beautiful – what does the title refer to?”
“. . .I think Shelley saw himself as the ‘sensitive plant’ – at least Claire
teased him about it in some of her letters. Do you know the plant it refers
to? In English it’s also called the ‘touch-me-not’. . .”
“. . .no, what is it?”
“. . .it’s a tropical plant – when you touch it, the leaves immediately droop. In
the poem it’s one of the plants in an Edenic garden that’s tended by a gracious
woman – an obvious reference to Mrs. Mason. e ‘sensitive plant’ is set apart
from the other flowers and plants. . .here, it begins with a description of it:
A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,

And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
And closed them beneath the kisses of the Night.
And the Spring arose on the garden fair,

Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
But none ever trembled and panted with bliss

In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide with love’s sweet want,
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.
. . .”
1
“. . .‘companionless’?”
“. . .clearly Shelley felt a lack of companionship with Mary, even
though he was spending a good deal of time in her presence. Claire’s
journal only mentions a few times when they were taking walks
together at that time. There’s more about it a bit later – he describes
the sensitive plant as full of love, but somehow unable to share it with
anyone:
But the Sensitive Plant which could give small fruit

Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,
Received more than all, it loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver, –
For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;

Radiance and odour are not its dower;
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not, the Beautiful!
. . .the neo-Platonic Shelley again, seeking perfection in love. . .”

“. . .what about the character based on Mrs. Mason?”
“. . .she’s introduced in the second part, here:
ere was a Power in this sweet place,

An Eve in this Eden; a ruling Grace
Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream,
Was as God is to the starry scheme.
A Lady, the wonder of her kind,

Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind
Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion
Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean
Tended the garden from mourn to even:

And the meteors of that sublunar Heaven,
Like the lamps of the air when Night walks forth,
Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth!
18
. . .her beneficial ministrations to the garden are described in detail –

watering, tending, removing insects from the plants; but her real value is
shown inversely through her absence: she dies at the end of the second
part, and in the third part the untended, decaying garden is described at
length as it decomposes in autumn and finally winter – a decomposition
which is set against the decomposition of the woman’s corpse. e
descriptions verge on the disgusting – listen to this:
Between the time of the wind and snow

All loathliest weeds began to grow,
Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck,
Like the water-snake’s belly and the toad’s back.
And thistle, and nettles, and darnels rank,

And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank,
Stretched out its long and hollow shank,
And stifled the air till the dead wind stank.
And plants, at whose name the verse feels loath,

Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,
Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,
Livid and starred with a lurid dew.
And agarics, and fungi, with mildew and mould

Started like mist from the wet ground cold;
Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead
With a spirit of growth had been animated!
Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,

Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,
And at its outlet flags huge as stakes
Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes.
And hour by hour, when the air was still,

e vapours arose which have strength to kill;
At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt,
At night they were darkness no star could melt.
19
And unctuous meteors from spray to spray

Crept and flitted in broad noonday
Unseen; every branch on which they alit
By a venomous blight was burned and bit.
e Sensitive Plant, like one forbid,

Wept, and the tears within each lid
Of its folded leaves, which together grew,
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.
. . .what do you think?”

“. . .it seems almost mad – as if there were some sort of tremendous
pressure crushing him. . .”
“. . .yes, very much so. I think it was a delayed emotional reaction to
everything that had happened: aer all, William had died less than a year
before, and even the Naples incident was only a little over a year behind
him. e political poetry and essays he had written over the past eight or
nine months were deeply felt, but also were a displacement of his grief.
en, at the end of winter, 180, in Pisa, I think his grief began to come
pouring out in his verse in this sublimated, distorted way. On a certain
level the poem can be read as being about how the ‘sensitive plant,’ Shelley,
weathered that terrible winter: about the possibility of something being
salvaged from the wreck of his life. It’s a distorted, intensified version of
Ode to the West Wind. e conclusion to the poem, aer the excessive
vision of all the torment and ugliness of the decaying garden, comes, in
contrast, as a kind of balm – a seeking for meaning amidst all the decom-
position and decay, a movement from pure materiality to immanence. . .”
“. . .it begins with a couple of stanzas you don’t know, and then the lines
from the end of Haunted Summer:
Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that

Which within its boughs like a Spirit sat,
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say.
Whether that Lady’s gentle mind,

No longer with the form combined
0
Which scattered love, as stars do light,

Found sadness, where it le delight,
I dare not guess. . .
. . .and now the lines Passer used in his film. . .
. . .but in this life

Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,
It is a modest creed, and yet

Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
at garden sweet, that lady fair,

And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:
‘Tis we, ‘tis ours, are changed; not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight,

ere is no death nor change: their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.
. . .it reminds me of Rilke’s Duino Elegies – in his insistence that there’s

something immutable in the very midst of mutability. . .”
“. . .they’re beautiful lines. . .”
“. . .wait – look! ere in the distance – do you see the leaning tower?”
“. . .where? Oh now I see it. . .it really is leaning!”
“. . .it looks like a child’s toy from here. . .”
“. . .the cathedral and that round building look as if they were made
from white lace. . .”
“. . .the round building is the baptistry. . .”
“. . .we’re really here – I can hardly believe it. . .”
“. . .and we made it on time. . .”
1
“. . .do you mean the train schedule, or before the tower falls over?”
“. . .both, I suppose. . .we’d better gather up our things – we’ll be there
in a minute. . .”
“. . .I’ll change some money first, and then we can go to the accommo-
dations office. . .”
“. . .and then lunch?”
“. . .aer we drop our things at the hotel, why don’t we buy some wine,
cheese, and bread, and go eat outside somewhere by the river? I want to
avoid the Campo dei Miracoli with its swarms of tourists in the aernoon
heat. . .”
“. . .that sounds perfect – I wish we were there already. . .”
“. . .first we’ll have to lug our bags in this heat. . .”
“. . .aer we get the money changed, and check in to a hotel, and go to
buy the cheese and wine, and. . .”
“. . .just imagine we’re already on the bank of the river: ‘Lang ist die Zeit,
es ereigner sich aber das Wahre’. . .”
“. . .it’s Hölderlin’s first version of Mnemosyne: ‘ough the time be
long, truth will come to pass’. . .”
“. . .the truth is fine, but I’d prefer a glass of wine. . .”
“. . .‘Es reiche aber, Des dunkeln Lichtes voll, Mir einer den duenden
Becher, Damit ich ruhen möge; denn süss Wär’ unter Schatten der
Schlummer’. . .”
“. . .more Hölderlin?”
“. . .yes, from Andenken: ‘But someone pass me the fragrant cup full of
the dark light, so that I may rest now; for sweet it would be to drowse
amid shadows’. . .”


Moments passing: the double cone of time, holding and releasing us simul-
taneously – transfixing each moment for eternity, while bearing us ever

the pure past of what has been, what still is, and what will always be,
retracing the infinite nappes of space and time, om vertex to vortex. . .
Friedrich Hölderlin: Bordeaux, Easter 1802
. . .a lone figure departs mid-morning om the rear entrance of a large white
stone neo-classical townhouse at the northern end of the Allées de Tourney in
Bordeaux. e elms and lindens along the avenue rustle gently in the
morning breeze above the strollers returning om matins, while bells toll
continuously. e foreigner walks north-northeast along the outer ramparts
of the Chateau Trompette, the plain of the Champs de Mars to his le.
Beyond the massive, moated fortress can be seen the masts of the many ships
docked along the riveront. He follows the line of ramparts around its
perimeter to the Garonne. He turns northward at the embankment along
a gravel path shaded by lines of silver poplar and clusters of oak that leads
him through the properties and gardens onting the wide, brown river, now
flowing inland with the tide. Outside some of the larger dwellings women are
preparing tables for the first Easter feast since 1793. e smell of roasting
meat already hangs in the unseasonably warm spring air. e habitations he
passes become increasingly scattered as the city recedes behind him, gradually
giving over almost fully to garden plots. He crosses a brook flowing into the
Garonne next to a mill shaded by a leafy canopy of elm, in its courtyard a fig
tree and a lichen-covered stone font where he stops briefly for a drink of water.
For several kilometers he follows the riverbank until he reaches a landing:
there he embarks in a flat-bottomed ferry across the river to another landing
under the bluffs rising above the village of Lormont. He finds a path up
through the wooded bluffs, scrambling his way to a vantage point on a rocky
promontory at the top. ere he is a solitary witness to the vista which opens
out upon the expanse of the river arcing below him: the city in the southwest
shimmering like a mirage in the late morning sun; the verdant oblong patches
of the vineyards of the Haut Médoc across the river stretching to the horizon;
the uppermost reaches of the Entre-Deux-Mers region in the north forming
a peninsula between the confluence of the Garonne and Dordogne rivers at
the Bec d’Ambès – the narrow spear of the Île Cazou beyond, the Gironde
curving into the distance, finding its way to the sea. . .
“. . .the Port de la Lune. . .flowing silently through the fertile land to the sea
as if it were following an unspoken command. . .ships arrive and depart
again to the world beyond – new worlds. . .sailors are entirely apart om
the celebrations on the mainland, casting off towards new horizons –
departing before they have even fully arrived. . .below, in the village, they
prepare for the feast – the bells in the medieval cupola resound continuously:
they will clasp hands and dance in a circle, as they have for centuries,
rejoicing in the return of the spring – and now rejoicing in the return of
Easter as well. . .how strange – I thought I had come om the political back-
wardness of Schwaben to a land where liberté, égalité, and aternité
reigned, but I find here the ideals of the revolution already cast aside and
the past traditions re-embraced. . .but this is the Gironde, so is it truly
surprising? e Girondins, who began as radicals and ended as conserva-
tives, unleashing forces they could not hope to control: ‘Plutôt la mort que
l’esclavage!’ e people move two steps back for every one step forward, ebbing
and flowing like the tides on the river – or the birds in their seasonal
migration. . .voiding the forward motion of historical progression towards
enlightenment and returning to the cyclical rhythms of nature. ese sun-
browned men and women are of the earth, the sea, the sun, the sky – the
ancient circle dance of celebration captivates them far more than the rites and
doctrines of the Church. ey respond powerfully to the natural reality before
them – they have a certain quietness and contentment that the Germans will
always lack, despite the current German nature worship. . .‘nature in a bottle’
as an accompaniment to reason – as if that were the entirety of the world!
Yes, it was best that I went abroad – they do not need me, whether it be my
attempts to grasp and interpret the truths of the Greeks, or to give voice to
new directions in our pseudo-enlightened age. ere is nothing for me there,
now, especially with Diotima lost to me. . .two years ago. . .but no, I must
not dwell on that, for it will drive me mad! Be calm, calm. . .it is not good
to be alone with such thoughts. . .I would need to speak to someone of the
matters of my heart – my memories of those days of love, and then. . .of
what happened to me, to us. . .but there is no one to speak to – where are
my friends? In Jena the ‘professors’ have forsaken me it seems – ‘Hen kai
Pan” indeed! Schelling refused my invitation to write for Iduna; Hegel is
now merely his shadow as they try to complete the Kantian philosophy
together; Sinclair is given over wholly to politics; I broke with Neuffer
over his belittling comments about poetry; and that leaves only
Böhlendorff, and he suffers as much as I do – no, the times are not
conducive to poets. I am alone, and lonely. It is better that I seek
companionship across the reach of time to the past among those whose
works I love, and to the future – to the people to come. . .it is the only way
to survive this benighted age. . .”
“. . .there is a stillness in the open air, a Grecian light emanating om the
sky and saturating the luxuriant verdure of the open earth. In the distance
thunderstorms already brightly gather – later the trees stung by the sun
among the vine-covered hills will be reeshed. e river evokes in me memo-
ries of the Neckar, with stepped vineyards growing almost to the edge of the
river, but here the wines are mostly red – a condensation of the southern
sunlight. . .our Rieslings are insubstantial compared to the clarity and rich-
ness of the wines here. . .oh, to have a wineskin now and to drowse in the
shade of a tree, seeking oblivion in that nepenthe!”
“. . .strange that both Dionysus and Christ ruled over wine – ‘in vino veritas’:
both were conceived by a mortal woman and a god, both were twice born, both
were associated with trees, both were resurrected, both represent a transforma-
tion of self, a meeting between time and eternity. . .but there are differences –
a transformation om sparagmos to Eucharist, om ecstasy to incorporation. . .”
“. . .there’s something elemental about this southern light, this brilliance,

which overtakes my senses, drawing me towards the silent source of every-
thing: all the holy places of the earth come together around one place,
between the determinate and the indeterminate, between time and eternity
– I feel I am becoming everything at once. . .”
“. . .but the heavenly fire may scar the soul as readily as the fire that springs
om the earth: the abyss beckons – there is an abyss below into which one
may plunge, but there is also an abyss above: one can as well fall into height
as into depth. . .”
“. . .here my language is foreign and strange to those I meet, but at the same
time my language now becomes fully my own. . .and, I am becoming my
language – dissolving into that flow like the streams below joining the river
on its course through the Gironde. . .language speaks through us as we cede
ourselves to its embrace, and are drawn back through and beyond its
rhythms towards the silence of its unknown source. . .”

“. . .so how do you feel aer your shower?”
“. . .like a new person – I thought we’d never get here. . .”
“. . .it’s a nice room. I’ve been lying here looking at the ceiling – espe-
cially that crack there that crosses the stucco: I like it – it goes with the
decadence of the place, as if it were all disintegrating, but in a serene and
dignified way. I checked the map: see, we’re nicely situated here – halfway
between the Arno and the Piazza Duomo, but away from the noise of the
main street. . .”
“. . .what’s that down there?”
“. . .where?”
“. . .down below in the back yard next door – those sheets. . .”
“. . .tables and chairs, I guess it’s some sort of backyard restaurant –
maybe it’s the garden for the restaurant next door. Let’s take a look at the
menu on the way out – maybe it’s worth a try. . .”
“. . .I will. . .I wish this thing wasn’t here on the window. . .”
“. . .we’re lucky that ‘thing’ is there, as there’s likely to be plenty of
mosquitoes here! It’s called a screen – oh, that’s right, you don’t have
screens in the Czech Republic, just those gauzy white curtains. . .”
“. . .which don’t keep the mosquitoes out especially well. . .”
“. . .there are lots of little details like that in the Czech Republic I oen
wondered about – the lack of decent shower curtains, the funny square
door handles that I always bruise myself on, the practically useless plastic
toilet seats that are always breaking. . .”
“. . .all remnants of communism, my dear. . .”
“. . .I know, I know – on the other hand, I’ve realized since I’ve been in
Europe that the only quality of American life I truly miss is its conven-
ience: supermarkets open all night and Sundays, postage stamps where
the adhesive actually functions, staplers and pens that are usable – there’s
always someone ‘building a better mousetrap,’ as they say there. . .”
“. . .you don’t miss the freedom?”
“. . .every virtue contains a vice: the problem is someone actually has to
work at those all night grocery stores! No, the American fetish for ‘work,
9
work, work’ and pointless productivity doesn’t leave all that much time
to enjoy one’s so-called ‘freedom.’ I’ve experienced far more freedom
abroad than I ever did there, but as I said before, that may also be situa-
tional – the freedom of the ‘stranger in a strange land’. . .”
“. . .and all the headaches of being a foreigner as well. . .”
“. . .of course, but you have to pay a price for everything in life-there’s
always a trade-off. . .there, I’m all set – are you ready to go?”
“. . .just let me get my things together. I’m starving. . .”
“. . .so am I. We can go back through that market area we passed on the
way here and get what we need. . .”
“. . .ok, I’m ready. . .”
“. . .let’s see, do I have everything? Camera, books, wallet. . .fine, let’s go. . .”
Aer returning the key to the rack in the hall, they walk down the
narrow flight of stairs and out into the lane, pausing a moment to look
at the menu on the next doorway.
“. . .Cagliostro – ristorante entoteca. . .it looks quite good – and look,
even cheese, chocolate, and cigars for dessert! We can have a late dinner
here when we return. . .”
“. . .what time is it now?”
“. . .:0 – it will be :00 before we have our lunch, so we’ll probably
not want to eat until later, like the Italians – we could eat right here, and
then go up to bed aerwards. . .”
“. . .that sounds fine to me. . .”
“. . .let’s see – this is the Via del Castelletto, so I think we head down the
lane and turn right there on the Via Tavoleria, then le at the main street
where the church is – yes, here it is on the map: the Via San Frediano,
then it’s about a block up where we turn again on to the Via D. Cavalca.
I saw a wine store there – they probably have chilled wine and mineral
water. . .”
“. . .lead the way. . .”
ey walk down the old stone cobbles of the narrow alleyway onto the
wider lane, then out past the Church of San Frediano. e men at the
paramedic station near the entrance to the church play chess quietly in
the shade, but otherwise they have the street to themselves.
“. . .it’s so calm and quiet here – like Shelley said – ‘depopulated’. . .”
“. . .it’s the mid-day nap now – the ‘pisolino,’ or ‘Pisa piso-lino’ if you
prefer. . .”
“. . .I like the quiet, in a strange way. . .”
0
“. . .I do too. . .I think the store is somewhere along here. . .Via D.

Cavalca. . .yes, there it is. . .”
ey enter the store, buy an inexpensive bottle of Vernaccia di San
Gimignano and mineral water. Further down the lane they stop at a small
shop and buy a loaf of Pugliese bread, a portion of Tuscan pecorino
cheese, and some olives.
“. . .I hope this cheese lasts in the heat. . .”
“. . .what can it do, go bad? – it’s already decaying!”
“. . .but the smell will get worse. . .”
“. . .we’ll eat soon, I promise. . .”
“. . .so where to?”
“. . .from here we can walk to the Piazza Garibaldi – just around the
corner: it’s where they stayed when they first arrived here. en we can
walk down the northwest side of the Arno: somewhere between the
Piazza and the Cittadella, where the tower is, was the Casa Frassi. . .”
“. . .was?”
“. . .perhaps is – I found no record of precisely where it was, beyond
being on the northwest side of the river. We can take a look on the way to
the tower, and find a place to eat by the bridge. We’ll be eating in the
shadow of the Torre della Fame, where Count Ugolino was walled up
with and supposedly cannibalized two of his children. . .”
“. . .what!? Is it true?”
“. . .well, Dante records it in the Inferno: historically, he was imprisoned
in 188 with two of his sons and two of his grandsons and le to die of
starvation, but whether he ate them or not, I don’t know. Also, it has
since been proven that the tower near the Cittadella was not the prison
where they were held. . .”
“. . .do they know which one it was?”
“. . .they think it was in a prison near the Piazza dei Cavalieri – around
the corner from our hotel. . .”
“. . .where did Shelley think it was?”
“. . .my guess is he thought it was the tower we’re heading towards. . .”
“. . .well, it’s all still pretty horrible, wherever it happened. . .”
“. . .Ugolino was a tyrant – Pisa was better off without him. . .”
ey walk diagonally through the Vetto Vaglie, a small market square,
and through an underpass into an L-shaped alleyway.
“. . .look, the alley is called Donzelle – one of these buildings ought to
be the Tre Donzelle. . .”
1
“. . .or all three, based on the name. . .”

“. . .let’s go around to the front. . .”
ey walk a short way down the alley to the Piazza Garibaldi, then
cross at the intersection to the embankment sidewalk, pausing to look at
the ochre, three-storey building.
“. . .I suppose it must be this one – at least Holmes thinks it is, as he
gives a picture of it in his book. . .”
“. . .do you have any reason to doubt it?”
“. . .not really, but the ‘Tre’ makes me a little suspicious – it could refer
to any or all three of the buildings backed by the alley. In any case, it
doesn’t really matter – they stayed in one of them for a few nights. . .”
“. . .so, which way do we go?”
“. . .that way – towards the red tower. . .”
“. . .it looks almost new. . .”
“. . .it was bombed during the war and reconstructed – you can tell
where the newer brick meets the line of the older stones. . .”
“. . .I’m surprised we’ve seen so many bombed buildings – I thought
Italy surrendered quite quickly. . .”
“. . .not quickly enough, unfortunately: Pisa suffered its worst bombing
in August, 19. In 19 the primary front shied to France aer the
Normandy invasion, and the Italian campaign stalled a bit north of here,
so the Allies just kept bombing and bombing. ey tried to go aer
mostly headquarters and railway lines – the Cittadella was probably
where they had some military here, plus there’s a railway bridge just
beyond the bridge you can see there – bombing in those days wasn’t such
a precise skill, as Prague citizens can attest. . .”
“. . .what do you mean? Prague wasn’t bombed. . .”
“. . .oh yes it was! I was surprised myself when I found out. It’s one of
those little-known facts – probably because aer 198 the Czechs hated
the Soviet Union so much they didn’t want to draw any undue attention
to the mistakes of the Americans. . .”
“. . .in 19 a squadron of American heavy bombers got lost on their
way to bomb Dresden, and then, when they saw a city below through
a hole in the clouds, they dropped their bombs. . .”
“. . .how could they have mistaken Prague for Dresden?”
“. . .from ten thousand meters up, a European city situated on a river at
night looks like any other European city situated on a river at night, and

a strong tailwind could easily have sent them off course further south-
eastwards from Dresden. . .”
“. . .was anyone hurt?”
“. . .about seven hundred people were killed, actually. . .”
“. . .seven hundred?!”
“. . .it shocked me too when I found out. . .”
“. . .where did the bombs land?”
“. . .do you know that railway bridge that crosses the Vltava under
Vyšehrad?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .that must have been what they were aiming for, and they knocked
down a swath of buildings on either side of the river there. Do you know
that church with the two pointed modern steeples near there?”
“. . .yes, that’s the Klášter na Slovanech – I think in English it’s called
the Emmaus Monastery. . .”
“. . .it has the new steeples because it was partially destroyed during the
bombing raid. . .”
“. . .I knew it was damaged during the war, but I didn’t know it was by
American bombers. . .”
“. . .now you know. ere’s a good deal that happened during that war
that isn’t generally known. . .”
“. . .look there! What’s that little white church over there – the one with the
little spikes? It’s so strange there, sitting perched right on the river wall. . .”
“. . .I was reading something about that church. . .yes, here it is: that’s
Santa Maria della Spina, from the 1th century – it supposedly houses
a thorn from the crown of thorns. When they lived here it was close to
the water level, but it kept being flooded, so they moved it to its present
position. . .”
“. . .did Shelley mention it?”
“. . .they didn’t say much at all about Pisan landmarks aside from the
Campo dei Miracoli, but people take for granted what they see every day;
for example, when was the last time you mentioned the Charles Bridge
or any other Prague landmark in your letters or journal?”
“. . .point taken. . .so, do you think any of these houses could have been
the Casa Frassi?”
“. . .I can only rule out those that are too modern; as for the rest, it really
could have been any of them. . .”
“. . .maybe we can ask somewhere. . .”

“. . .we can try, but I would guess the average Pisan would simply send
us to Byron’s palace. . .”
“. . .but maybe we could find some local historian. . .”
“. . .during the summer holidays? I doubt it – it’s a bit like Prague here,
where nothing gets done in the summer. . .”
“. . .still, to know it was along here somewhere is something. . .”
ey follow the gentle curve of the river, the tower gradually looming
up in front of them – a spade-like, red-bricked structure that rises forty
meters above them, capped by a covered observation platform. Next to
the tower, fronting the river, is a partially ruined three storey square
building composed of jagged white stone mixed with newer red bricks.
ey pause at an open archway of the building, facing the river.
“. . .this is where the old bridge used to be – see that arched section in
the building over there, in direct line to where we’re standing?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .it’s the remnants of the bridge Shelley wrote about in his poem,
Evening: Ponte al Mare, Pisa. . .”
“. . .it was also bombed?”
“. . .apparently. See how close the railroad bridge is over there? at’s
what they were probably targeting. . .”
“. . .to je škoda. . .where shall we sit?”
“. . .there’s a bench over there, across the road leading to the new bridge. . .”
“. . .that’s fine. . .I hope the wine is still cold. . .”
ey cross the road and sit on a park bench with it’s back against the
low river wall. In front of them are the arched ruins of the Cittadella wall,
the tower rising above them across the road to their right. ey spread
the bread and cheese between them on the bench, open the bottles of
wine and water, and place them on the wall behind them.
“. . .you first – cheers. . .”
“. . .na zdraví. . .it’s delicious – it’s so much better than most Czech
wine. . .”
“. . .and this cheese is so much better than Czech cheese – are there any
sheep cheeses in the Czech Republic?”
“. . .it’s unusual, but it is made – the generic name is ovčí sýr. ere’s
a specific version of it made in Karlovy Vary called ‘Abertam,’ but
I suppose there are others made in the mountains. . .”
“. . .I don’t know how countries using the same ingredients can end up
with such different results. . .”

“. . .the Communists spoiled everything – they had no taste whatso-

ever, and wanted to level all differences: no fancy cheeses, no fine wines,
no imported fresh fish. . .”
“. . .on the other hand, Italians have been no strangers to socialism!
I think good taste and an ‘art of living’ is simply a feature of certain
cultures – some, like Italy and France, have it, and others don’t. . .”
“. . .did Shelley ever mention the food here?”
“. . .not that I can recall. I’d be very interested to know what they ate
here, but I suspect that Shelley’s vegetarianism and rather dis-embodied
mode of existence made it all irrelevant. . .”
“. . .so, where were we – winter or spring, 180, right?”
“. . .thereabouts – I’ve been moving back and forth a bit: it’s difficult
to keep the chronology straight here in Pisa because they were moving
around so much. When they were living at the Casa Frassi they weren’t
completely without problems, but there was nothing truly serious
happening – at least for the moment. Shelley was still suffering from his
winter ailment, but he had seen Dr. Vaccà who assessed his problem
quite accurately: he saw it as primarily a nervous disorder, and
prescribed baths, exercise, and suggested Shelley refrain from taking any
‘special medicines’. . .”
“. . .laudanum?”
“. . .probably. . .”
“. . .was Shelley addicted?”
“. . .it’s not as bad as opium or heroin, but it is addictive, and it’s espe-
cially hard on the digestive system. It was probably the source of his side
spasms – in his liver or pancreas. I always wondered if he had partially
chosen the image of Prometheus because of his liver endlessly being torn
out by the eagle and endlessly regenerating. Vaccà also diagnosed Claire
as scrofulous: she wrote in her journal, ‘Vacca calls & says I am scrofu-
lous and I say he is ridiculous’. . .”
“. . .it’s a tubercular infection of the lymphatic glands, especially in the
neck – it can be caused by drinking infected milk. It turned out later that
Vaccà was right, and Claire had to be treated. . .”
“. . .did it have any lasting effects?”
“. . .in her case, no. It’s the same bacillus that causes tuberculosis of the
lungs, but I don’t know why in some cases it infects the lungs, and in
others, not – it must have something to do with the person’s resistance.

During that period scrofula normally infected only children – speaking

of which, there was a small epidemic of measles in their community in
early March. Until then, Claire had been walking daily with Mrs. Mason’s
daughter, Laurette, but both of Mrs. Mason’s daughters and Percy
Florence came down with the disease. . .”
“. . .Mary must have been worried – in small children it can be very
dangerous. . .”
“. . .I’m sure she was, aer what had already happened. . .”
“. . .did Claire go out walking with Shelley?”
“. . .she only recorded a few walks in her journal. Shelley seems to have
been staying inside reading with Mary, but by mid-March Claire’s atten-
tion was fixed entirely on Allegra and Byron, in any case. . .”
“. . .she had received a letter from Mrs. Hoppner on March 1th : the
letter is lost, but it must have mentioned Byron’s latest move. He had
fallen in love with the nineteen year old Countess Teresa Guiccioli, and
had followed her – first to Ravenna, and then to Bologna. . .”
“. . .a Countess! Was she married?”
“. . .yes, so Byron became her ‘cavalier servente’ – a lover supposedly
accepted by the husband. . .”
“. . .and was he accepted?”
“. . .I don’t know – it seems more like it was an arrangement where they
were separated but didn’t want to go through the formality of a divorce,
or the economic consequences! In August, Byron had requested that the
Hoppners send Allegra to Bologna. Claire, who hadn’t seen Allegra for
a year and a half, seized upon the fact that Allegra was now much closer
and wrote Byron a letter asking him to send Allegra to them for a visit.
She stressed that because of Mary’s grief and Shelley’s illness, they
wouldn’t be able to come to get her themselves. . .”
“. . .I assume Byron didn’t agree. . .”
“. . .no, he didn’t, but it was a while before he responded. Claire hadn’t
received anything by April rd when she wrote to him again; by then she
had learned he had settled in Ravenna. She argued that the summers in
Venice and Ravenna were bad for Allegra’s health, and that they would
take her to the Bagni di Lucca which would be cooler. She asked him to
send Allegra as far as Bologna, and made a veiled threat that if he refused,
she herself would show up in Ravenna. . .”
“. . .did the threat produce any response?”

“. . .almost immediately, but not from Byron directly: Madame Hoppner

had received a letter from Byron about the matter, which she partially
quoted in a letter she sent to Claire – the Hoppners were rather disgusting
busybodies and they really had no business relating any of its contents. . .”
“. . .what did it say?”
“. . .I don’t know precisely what they wrote, but I have Byron’s letter to
them, written on April nd. is is the important part:
About Allegra – I can only say to Claire – that I so totally

disapprove of the mode of children’s treatment in their family
– that I should look upon the Child as going into a hospital.
– Is it not so? Have they reared one? – Her health has hith-
erto been excellent – and her temper not bad – she is some-
times vain and obstinate – but always clean and cheerful –
and as in a year or two I shall either send her to England – or
put her in a Convent for her education – these defects will be
remedied as far as they can in human nature. – But the Child
shall not quit me again – to perish of Starvation, and green
fruit – or to be taught to believe that there is no Deity. –
Whenever there is convenience of vicinity and access – her
Mother can always have her with her – otherwise, no. – It was
so stipulated from the beginning. – e Girl is not so well off
as with you – but far better than with them; – the fact is she is
being spoilt – being a great favourite with everybody on
account of the Fairness of her skin.
. . .”
“. . .what a bastard – blaming them for what happened!”
“. . .yes, but the Hoppners only paraphrased it, leaving out the worst. . .”
“. . .what was Claire’s reaction to it?”
“. . .she wrote in her journal for April 0, ‘A letter from Mad –
Hoppner concerning green fruit & God – strange jumble,’ and on May
1st she wrote, ‘I spend the day in cogitation (and I write to my damn’d
Brute)’ – clearly a reference to Byron’s tendency to refer to Claire as
‘a damned bitch.’ Based on the letter she wrote that day, the letter from
the Hoppners must have omitted the worst, for she was still calm enough
to respond to her perception of his accusations, reminding him of his
promise to allow her access, reassuring him that she would follow his

dietary instructions, and declaring that she would bring Allegra up as

a believer, contrary to his claims; but, it was all for nothing, because
Byron had meanwhile written a letter directly either to Claire or Shelley
that did state the worst parts of his letter to the Hoppners. . .”
“. . .what was her response? She must have been enraged. . .”
“. . .there’s only a partial dra of the letter extant, but still, I think it
must be quite close to the letter that was actually sent. She was obviously
very angry, but she still answered his accusations – shall I paraphrase it?”
“. . .please. . .”
“. . .I’ll smooth over the rough parts – she oen gives variants: ‘My Dear
Friend, I have received your letter’. . .she goes on to state that the
Hoppners have always been kind to her, and she knows nothing about
any negative opinions they have expressed. She explains that he will gain
nothing by destroying Allegra’s mother, that her health is frail and that
she has avoided speaking of it so as not to give any joy to Byron inadver-
tently. She then says, ‘I am shocked by the threats at the conclusion of
your letter.’ She writes that while he can torment and even destroy her,
he can never eradicate her love for Allegra. She mentions that he has
threatened to put Allegra in a convent to deprive her of her domestic ties,
and to give her a religious education. She points out – quite rightly it
seems to me – that if there had been any real stipulations over visitation,
such stipulations would have prevented her time with Allegra in Este. She
explains that what happened to Mary’s children was not a problem of
upbringing, but ‘Such beautiful creatures seldom live, & they inherit
from their parents (both extremely delicate) complaints which I grieve
to think may render it difficult should they ever rear one.’ Note that she
echoes his letter, so she must have known about that part. She claims her
own strength was already injured by her nursing of Allegra night and day,
but she claims she will always take the best of care of Allegra when she is
with her. Any ideas to the contrary, she suggests, have been given by the
‘gossipings’ of a servant that they refused to expose out of ‘delicacy’ for
Byron. Here the dra is broken off. . .”
“. . .what was that last part about?”
“. . .evidently Paolo, their old coachman, was already beginning to
threaten them somehow in regard to Elena Adelaide Shelley, but the
reference to Byron concerned Allegra: although those who lived in close
proximity to Byron knew of Allegra, it was still being kept a general secret
from the public at large. . .”
8
“. . .did the letter do any good?”

“. . .Byron wrote a letter to Shelley which is lost, but based on Shelley’s
response Byron had clearly gone through all his reasons again, including
the parts about ‘green fruit and God’ – perhaps a bit more sensitively
than he had with the Hoppners. It seems Byron wanted to forestall
Claire’s threat to go to Ravenna. . .”
“. . .was Shelley offended?”
“. . .if he was, he covered it up. From that time onwards, though, Shelley
began to be very much caught between Byron and Claire. While he was
clearly far more on Claire’s side than Byron’s, he couldn’t afford to show
it for either of their sakes, and he took a much more subtle line than she
would have liked. I’ll just read the passages concerning Claire:
On a return from an excursion among the mountains, I find

your letter. Clare tells me that she has already answered what
relates to the differences of opinion between you and her about
Allegra; so I am spared the pain of being an interlocutor in
a matter over which, I believe, I have no influence either as it
regards her, or you. I wish you had not expressed yourself so
harshly in your letter about Clare – because of necessity she
was obliged to read it; and I am persuaded that you are
mistaken in thinking she has any desires of thwarting your
plans about Allegra – even the requests that annoy you spring
from an amiable and affectionate disposition. She has
consented to give up this journey to Ravenna – which would
indeed have been a material inconvenience, and annoyance to
me, as well as you – but which, for such a purpose, I hardly felt
that I could refuse. When we meet, I can explain to you some
circumstances of misrepresentation respecting Allegra which,
I think, will lead you to find an excuse for Clare’s anxiety.
What letters she writes to you I know not; perhaps they are
very provoking; but at all events it is better to forgive the weak.
I do not say – I do not think – that your resolutions are unwise;
only express them mildly – and pray don’t quote me. . . . I hope
you know what my feelings, and those of Mary have ever been,
about Allegra. Indeed, we are not yet cured of our affection for
her; and whatever plans you and Clare agree upon, about her
future life, remember that we, as friends to all parties, would be
9
most happy to be instrumental to her welfare. I smiled at your

protest about what you consider my creed. On the contrary,
I think a regard to chastity is quite necessary, as things are, to
a young female – that is, to her happiness – and at any time
a good habit. As to Christianity – there I am vulnerable;
though I should be as little inclined to teach a child disbelief, as
belief, as a formal creed. You are misinformed, too, as to our
system of physical education; but I can guess the source of this
mistake. I say all this, not to induce you to depart from your
plan (nor would Clare consent to Allegra’s residing with us for
any length of time), but only to acquaint you with our feelings
on the subject – which are, and must ever be, friendly to you,
and yours.
. . .clearly he was appealing to Byron’s ego – he was trying to assess the

situation and act as a kind of buffer between them. Aer all, Claire could
be totally abrasive and Byron totally haughty. Shelley was the same kind
of buffer between Mary and Claire – in either case, it was a difficult posi-
tion to be in. . .”
“. . .they were positions he put himself into. . .”
“. . .certainly, but if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been Shelley. . .”
“. . .I suppose not, but I can understand his relations with the two
women far better than I can understand his relation to Byron – especially
given how Byron was hurting Claire. . .”
“. . .I know it’s difficult to understand, but despite their differences
Byron shared a lot with him: how many other exiled English romantic
poets with somewhat similar political beliefs were there in the world? In
a way, Byron was his last link to England, and his only link to a signifi-
cant writer. At that time Shelley still felt there was the possibility of
a resolution to the Allegra issue: Byron hadn’t yet said no to Claire’s
visiting her, and Shelley hoped his intervention would help the situation,
so there was every reason to be as polite as possible while gently
correcting Byron’s misconceptions, no matter how offensive and insen-
sitive they had been. . .”
“. . .so, let me guess: nothing happened. . .”
“. . .unfortunately not: the visit to Ravenna was cancelled, and no other
plans were made – largely because of the crisis involving Elena Adelaide
Shelley and the Paolo blackmail, which occurred in early June. . .”
0
“. . .you mentioned that Paolo was somehow already bothering them

prior to June. . .”
“. . .yes, but the blackmail began in earnest aer Elena Adelaide Shelley
died. ere’s no hard evidence, but I think it’s quite clear that Paolo and
Elise must have been her foster parents, or at least they had close connec-
tions with the people who were her foster parents. In the beginning of
March, Shelley had gone to Livorno to discuss the matter with the
Gisbornes, and he gave them a substantial sum for what must have been
the continued upkeep of Elena in Naples. He instructed them to make it
over to a lawyer named Del Rosso in Naples, and he instructed them in
a letter that if they had any information about the matter, to write to him
under the pseudonym ‘Mr. Jones,’ which indicates Mary didn’t yet know
about the situation, and, I would assume, neither did Claire. . .”
“. . .it must have been difficult for Shelley. . .”
“. . .I think the stress he was under can be seen in some of the poems he
wrote during this period – their strangeness, their intensity: you can see
it in ‘e Sensitive Plant,’ and even more so in a piece he wrote then enti-
tled, ‘A Vision of the Sea.’ It’s been largely ignored by critics, who are
simply at a loss as to what to do with it. I think it’s a remarkable poem,
and gives a view of his psyche during that period which is terribly
disturbing. . .”
“. . .in my view, it’s a phantasmagoric emotional projection of the life
they had been enduring through a figure that resembles mostly Mary, but
also Claire. She’s in a ship that’s caught in a tempest – a figure that he
must have partially picked up from reading e Tempest with Mary that
spring. Six of the sailors have been hit by lightning and are lying charred
and dead on the deck, a seventh is impaled by a splintered piece of the
deck and is hanging dead, and two tigers that had been chained in the
hold have emerged onto the deck, where they are torn between cowering
from the storm and threatening the lives of the two survivors – a woman
and her child. If the storm subsides, the tigers will advance, but if it
continues to rage, they will all perish. In the midst of it all, the woman is
trying to lull her child asleep – what she says to the child is very poignant:
. . .Smile not, my child

But sleep deeply and sweetly, and so be beguiled
Of the pang that awaits us, whatever that be,
1
So dreadful since thou must divide it with me!

Dream, sleep! is pale bosom, thy cradle and bed,
Will it rock thee not, infant? ‘Tis beating with dread!
Alas! what is life, what is death, what are we,
at when the ship sinks we no longer may be?
What! to see thee no more, and to feel thee no more?
To be aer life what we have been before?
Not to touch those sweet hands? Not to look on those eyes,
ose lips, and that hair,all the smiling disguise
ou yet wearest, sweet Spirit, which I, day by day,
Have so long called my child, but which now fades away
Like a rainbow, and I the fallen shower?’
. . .”
“. . .how does the poem continue?”
“. . .the storm grows in strength, subsides, and suddenly the boat comes
into view again – one of the tigers is in a furious struggle with a huge sea-
snake. Sharks appear to devour the tiger, then a boat appears and the men
on board shoot the other tiger. . .”
“. . .and they’re rescued?”
“. . .I’ll read the ending:
One fragment alone, —

Tis dwindling and sinking, ‘tis now almost gone, —
Of the wreck of the vessel peers out of the sea.
With her le hand she grasps it impetuously,
With her right hand she sustains her fair infant. Death, fear,
Love, Beauty, are mixed in the atmosphere,
Which trembles and burns with the fervour of dread
Around her wild eyes, her bright hand, and her head,
Like a meteor of light o’er the waters! her child
Is yet smiling, and playing, and murmuring; so smiled
e false deep ere the storm. Like a sister and brother
e child and the ocean still smile on each other,
Whilst —
. . .”

“. . .‘whilst’ what?”
“. . .just ‘whilst —’: it breaks off there; but, aer all, where could the poem
have gone from there – she and her child are rescued and live happily ever
aer? It’s unlikely. e deep is still there – it’s always there. e boat rescuing
her? It’s just another boat, awaiting the next storm. Shelley could write about
a ‘green island’ when he was in Este, but by this time he couldn’t summon up
such an image – he simply le it unfinished. . .”
“. . .I can understand how it would have been difficult to finish the poem:
the world must have seemed like a monstrous place, and, given what was
happening with Allegra just then, it must have seemed as if there was no
refuge. I don’t know how he could have gathered the strength to write it. . .”
“. . .I don’t think he had a choice – as the title indicates, it reads like an
overpowering vision. . .”
“. . .a terrifying vision. . .”
He takes another drink from the wine bottle, and offers it to her.
“. . .here, have some more wine. . .”
“. . .thank you. . .this cheese is delicious – I didn’t know there were so
many kinds of pecorino. . .”
“. . .neither did I. . .”
“. . .and the poem about this tower – when did he write it?”
“...itwaswritteninNovember,180,buthismoodwashardlyanybetterthen...”
“. . .it’s about Count Ugolino eating his children?”
“. . .no, he turned it into more of a meditation on the city – on how the
past haunts the present. Shall I read it?”
“. . .please do. . .”
“. . .let me see. . .ok, I’ve found it. . .
Amid the desolation of a city,

Which was the cradle, and is now the grave
Of an extinguished people, — so that Pity
Weeps o’er the shipwrecks of Oblivion’s wave,

ere stands the Tower of Famine. It is built
Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave
For bread, and gold, and blood: Pain, linked to Guilt

Agitates the light flame of their hours,
Until its vital oil is spent or spilt.

ere stands the pile, a tower amid the towers

And sacred domes; each marble-ribbèd roof,
e brazen-gated temples, and the bowers
Of solitary wealth, – the tempest-proof

Pavilions of the dark Italian air, –
Are by its presence dimmed – they stand aloof,
And are withdrawn – so that the world is bare;

As if a spectre wrapped in shapeless terror
Amid a company of ladies fair
Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror

Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue,
e life of their sweet eyes, with all its error,
Should be absorbed, till they to marble grew.
. . .”
“. . .it’s haunting – again he uses shipwreck as a metaphor. . .”
“. . .yes – not green islands, but the tower, which represents for him
the weight of Pisan history: the Pisans’ very vitality has been sapped
by their history, which has an intangible hold upon them. The poem
is an inversion of ‘The Sensitive Plant’: there, eternity is an abode
that can contain all the harmony and beauty of life, but eternity in
this poem is human history and all its debacles. It reminds me of
Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on History’ – the fragments he was
writing in the weeks before his suicide at the French border when he
thought he was going to be caught by the Nazis. One of them
describes a Paul Klee drawing as the ‘angel of history’ – the angel is
imagined being swept backwards into the future, and piled in front
of its feet is the debris of history. Benjamin writes that the debris is
‘what we call progress’. . .”
“. . .was Shelley as pessimistic about history?”
“. . .yes and no. At the time he wrote this poem he was writing his essay
‘A Philosophical View of Reform’; also, there had been a republican revo-
lution in Spain during that period, and it inspired him to write his ‘Ode
to Liberty.’ So, he wasn’t completely pessimistic, but this other, darker
current continued to run through his poetry. . .”

“. . .what about the poem he wrote about this bridge – I mean the
bridge that used to be here?”
“. . .that poem was written about a year later – sometime at the
end of the summer in 181. Again, eternity is the theme. . .here it
is. . .
e sun is set; the swallows are asleep;

e bats are flitting fast in the gray air;
e slow so toads out of damp corners creep,
And evening’s breath, wandering here and there
Over the quivering surface of the stream,
Wakes not one ripple from its summer dream.
ere is no dew on the dry grass to-night,

Nor damp within the shadow of the trees;
e wind is intermitting, dry, and light;
And in the inconstant motion of the breeze
e dust and straws are driven up and down,
And whirled about the pavement of the town.
Within the surface of the fleeting river

e wrinkled image of the city lay,
Immovably unquiet, and forever
It trembles, but it never fades away;
Go to the. . .
. . .there’s a word missing here. . .
You, being unchanged, will find it then as now.
e chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut

By darkest barriers of cinerous cloud,
Like mountain over mountain huddled – but
Growing and moving upwards in a crowd,
And over it a space of watery blue,
Which the keen evening star is shining through.
. . .”

“. . .he le out the most important word again. . .”

“. . .yes, but I like these omissions – they speak eloquently of the failure
of representation: the poem is so formally perfect, so even-toned, that
somehow its incompletion is its completion. e poem is a sketch of this
hovering moment of perfection, as the river reflects the city back to itself:
the calm tranquility of the city that is both trembling in its eternal reflec-
tion, but also irrevocably here as if the two temporalities were interpen-
etrating. Against that, he suddenly interposes these lines of self-reflexive
address, ‘Go to the. . . You, being unchanged, will find it then as now’. . .”
“. . .but go to the where?”
“. . .given the previous image, and the context of the whole poem,
I think he was seeking some figure that would reveal how there’s
a persisting core, a line of life that ‘never fades away’ despite the transi-
toriness of everything. I don’t know what figure he could have used –
perhaps ‘source,’ or ‘font,’ or ‘origin,’ but all of these seem limited to me,
and they don’t rhyme anyway. . .”
“. . .not to mention that it would be difficult to find a rhyme with ‘now’
– there’s nothing that fits. . .”
“. . .or that fits without being ridiculous: he had the choice of changing
the end line, using some half-rhyme that would have weakened the
couplet, or leaving it unfinished, and so he le it as it is. . .”
“. . .in any case it’s lovely – he evokes such tranquility. . .so, where were
we? Claire was upset about Allegra, Byron was refusing her access, and
the blackmail crisis was just occurring, which is where we le off, I think,
unless something else happened I don’t know about. . .”
“. . .no, that’s right. . .”
“. . .so what happened?”
“. . .it’s difficult to know precisely, as Mary coded her journal with little
pictographs, but given Paolo is indicated by name on June 1th with the
symbol of a crescent moon, we can assume that the same crescent moon,
used in a journal entry on June th, indicates something was happening
concerning him, and it occurs aer some other strange markings. Mary’s
entry for the next day, June 8th, reads, ‘A better day than most days &
good reason for it though Shelley is not well. Claire away at Pugnano.’
We know from Claire’s journal that she had gone with Laurette all day
to see the Casa Poschi in Pugnano – the future home of Edward and Jane
Williams. Certainly her absence was the reason for the day being better
than most for Mary. Given how serious the crisis turned out to be for

their lives, I think it’s not difficult to guess what must have occurred, at
least in outline: the blackmail threat had arrived, and whatever it was,
Shelley was finally forced to inform Claire and Mary about the existence
of Elena. . .”
“. . .that must have been difficult. . .”
“. . .yes, and consider the situation: not only did they have to deal with
the sheer fact of it, but, in the case of Claire, she had to hide any jealousy
or anger from Mary, while Mary would have been given an additional
reason to fear that Shelley was indeed capable of such infidelities. Add
all that together, and what do you get?”
“. . .I would say two women fighting about anything and everything but
the real issue, which couldn’t be voiced directly. . .”
“. . .exactly! In early July Claire wrote these lines in her journal, ‘Heigh,
ho, the Claire and the May, find something to fight about every day’. . .”
“. . .it would be funny, if it weren’t so sad. . .”
“. . .it was a terrible period for them all. In fact, Elena had died of fever
on June 10th, although Shelley didn’t know about it until July. Paolo, who
probably realized his claim for legitimate money from Shelley had disap-
peared, was already in Livorno by June 1th pressing forward his black-
mail threat. . .”
“. . .but there’s something I’m not clear about: if Elena wasn’t Claire’s
child, and if Paolo’s blackmail threat involved exposing Claire as her
mother, then once that untruth was exposed, what was le of the black-
mail threat – was having a bastard child really so scandalous that one
could be blackmailed over it?”
“. . .I think you’re right. Certainly out-of-wedlock liaisons were scan-
dalous especially when a child was involved, but if that was the only issue
it hardly merited blackmail. Considering the whole context of their
lives, I think the reason it was so sensitive a matter was Shelley realized,
via the attack on him in the Quarterly, that his enemies could and would
use his personal life against him. Although the writer had avoided
specifics, he clearly had been hinting about details of Shelley’s private
life, such as Harriet’s suicide. Certainly whatever happened in Naples,
if known and used in the same way, would have added a tremendous
amount of ammunition to the charges that Shelley’s principles were
immoral. ey were in a vulnerable position as exiles, and they couldn’t
afford further scandal. . .”

“. . .the situation frightened them enough that they spent the night of
June 1th at the Casa Silva, where I would guess they informed the
Masons in some way and decided what course of action to take. Claire
wrote in her journal for that day, ‘Oh Bother.’ e next day Shelley went
alone to Livorno to consult with the Gisbornes’ lawyer, Del Rosso, which
apparently produced some kind of result, as Mary wrote to the Gisbornes
that the Paolo affair had been dealt with. . .”
“. . .had it?”
“. . .just the blackmail side of it. e aer-effects of it all affected their
behavior in one way or another the rest of their lives, the most immediate
consequence being the canceling of their decision to move to the Bagni
di Lucca over the summer – perhaps because of the large numbers of
English people there. ey first moved back to the Casa Frassi – Claire
flippantly commenting in her journal, ‘e King of England with all his
merry men marched up a hill then marched down again.’ ey packed
up yet again, and, on June 1th, they moved into the Gisborne’s house,
the Casa Ricci, in Livorno. Mary wrote in her journal on June 1th a typi-
cally understated sentence, ‘we are unhappy and discontented’. . .”
“. . .I understand why! How long did they stay in Livorno?”
“. . .until August th. It was a very unsettled period for them all, and yet
Shelley was able to compose poems like ‘To a Skylark,’ one of his most
anthologized lyrics. I’m not at all convinced that it’s one of his better
poems: I think the anthologies have been driven by the formalist
ideology of unity and completion, which may be fine for a certain kind of
poet, but for Shelley it simply reduces his entire output of lyrical poems
to those that oen don’t contain his best poetry. . .”
“. . .supposedly it was inspired by a walk they went on: it uses the song
of the skylark as a figure of perfect beauty, against which the imperfec-
tion of human life is contrasted. ere’s only one stanza I actually like:
We look before and aer,

And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell
of saddest thought.
8
. . .I prefer his lyrics where something more particular is at stake – for

example, a sonnet he wrote then considering the possibility of suicide.
Aer he found out about Elena’s death on July th he must have felt he
was reliving the Naples period: in a letter to the Gisbornes, he wrote, ‘My
Neapolitan charge is dead. It seems as if the destruction that is consuming
me were an atmosphere which wrapt & infected everything connected
to me.’ He must have written this sonnet contemplating and rejecting
suicide around that time:
Ye hasten to the grave! What seek ye there,

Ye restless thoughts and busy purposes
Of the idle brain, which the world’s livery wear?
O thou quick heart, which pantest to possess
All that pale Expectation feigneth fair!
ou vainly curious mind which wouldst guess
Whence thou didst come, and whither thou must go,
And all that never yet was known would know –
Oh, whither hasten ye, that thus ye press,
With such swi feet life’s green and pleasant path,
Seeking, alike from happiness and woe,
A refuge in the cavern of gray death?
O heart, and mind, and thoughts! what thing do you
Hope to inherit in the grave below?
. . .it’s a poetic version of the adage, ‘suicide is a permanent solution to

a temporary problem’. . .”
“. . .how serious do you think he was about suicide?”
“. . .there was a discussion with the Masons about prussic acid or
cyanide, but, other than that, I would guess his thoughts followed along
the lines suggested in the sonnet. . .”
“. . .so how did he cope with what had been happening?”
“. . .I think one of the methods was contained in a longer poem from
that period, ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne,’ which I think is more interesting
for its biographical details and for its representation of Shelley’s sensi-
bility than for its poetic quality. It’s set in Henry Reveley’s workroom,
which Shelley turned into his temporary study, and he describes all the
various gadgets and diagrams and machinery that were to be used for the
steamship piled around the room. In it he devotes a few lines to the fact
9
he was taking laudanum again – in the first part of the poem it’s
mentioned as he catalogues the various implements and containers
around him:
. . .a china cup that was

What it will never be again, I think –
A thing from which sweet lips were wont to drink
e liquor doctors rail at – and which I
Will quaff in spite of them – and when we die
We’ll toss up who died first of drinking tea,
And cry out, – ‘Heads or tails?’ where’er we be.
. . .then later, at the end of the poem, when he’s remembering their good
times together and hoping for their return, he mentions that as a result of
Mrs. Gisborne’s presence he will ‘strangle’ his bad nerves, ‘And they shall
never more sip laudanum,’ which is actually a way of saying that he won’t
quit until she arrives. It’s a poetic conceit, so I wonder if she had chided
him on its use; but, in any case, he clearly decided not to heed Dr. Vaccà’s
suggestion that he avoid ‘special medicines’. . .”
“. . .do you think laudanum affected his poetry?”
“. . .I think the kind of distanced, tranquil view of life he was able to
attain in moments of desperation must have been aided by the drug, but
that’s not unusual – Baudelaire and Rimbaud used drugs, and many 0th
century poets were amazing drinkers: Hart Crane, Dylan omas,
eodore Roethke, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop,
Jack Spicer – I could go on and on. As to the question of Shelley’s coping,
I think some of his desperation in that period was partially displaced onto
his lashing out at a person he thought was his enemy: on June th he
wrote a letter to Southey about the attack in the Quarterly, accusing him
of writing the critical review. . .”
“. . .but that happened quite a while before, didn’t it? What brought
him to write the letter just then?”
“. . .I think the blackmail crisis brought the public attack in the
Quarterly back to the surface of Shelley’s consciousness. His frenzy and
paranoia is obvious in the letter, where he tried, and failed miserably, to
be diplomatic: it’s a little difficult to be gracious when you are directly
accusing someone and giving your judgment in advance. . .”
“. . .did Southey answer it?”
0
“. . .he answered in the same vein of false magnanimity that Shelley

had used, first denying he had written the review, and then continuing
on to state exactly what the review had said about Shelley’s private life,
and urging him, because of his guilt, to turn to God before it was too
late. . .”
“. . .Shelley would have loved that. . .”
“. . .it was like waving a red flag in front of a bull, and Shelley walked
right into the bullring. . .”
“. . .he wrote again?”
“. . .yes, unfortunately: in August he wrote suggesting that Southey
didn’t practice what he preached because he lacked charity, and he went
on to defend himself indirectly about what had happened with Harriet –
asking for an admission of wrong on Southey’s part, and suggesting
Southey had abandoned the ‘great cause.’ Strangely enough, he also had
Ollier send Southey copies of e Cenci and Prometheus Unbound, as if
they would justify his position. . .”
“. . .I assume Southey didn’t apologize?”
“. . .no. Shelley was asking for it: Southey wrote back in September,
claiming to do Shelley the justice he deserved by naming, directly, every
event he was aware of that, in his mind, brought Shelley’s morality and
views into question – even comparing Shelley to Count Cenci, and
urging him again towards Christianity. . .”
“. . .Shelley didn’t write back, did he?”
“. . .no, thank goodness. e correspondence was broken off for good.
ere’s a poetic fragment that probably came from the period, but
Shelley broke it off before finishing it, probably recognizing how self-
pitying it was. . .here it is:
Alas! this is not what I thought life was.

I knew that there were crimes and evil men,
Misery and hate; nor did I hope to pass
Untouched by suffering, through the rugged glen,
In my own heart I saw as in a glass
e hearts of others. . . . And when
I went among my kind, with triple brass
Of calm endurance my weak breast I armed,
To bear scorn, fear, and hate, a woeful mass!
1
. . .fortunately, Shelley wasn’t only making enemies then: in July, he wrote

to John Keats. He had heard that he was ill and staying with Hunt, so he
invited him to come stay with them in Italy for his health, sent his best
wishes, and faintly-praised his Endymion. . .”
“. . .‘faintly’? What did he really think?”
“. . .to quote him directly, he wrote, ‘I have lately read your Endymion
again & ever with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains,
though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion.’ Shelley thought
that if Keats had reduced the poem to fiy pages of fragments, he would
have had a much better poem – and he was right. I was forced by an espe-
cially sadistic professor to read the whole of Endymion in an introduc-
tory literary studies seminar as an undergraduate, and it was a rather
daunting experience. He didn’t even bother to tell us that the critical
reception of the poem, then and now, has been rather negative –
a ‘sublime failure,’ or words similar to that, is the usual response. . .”
“. . .and did Keats answer him?”
“. . .yes, in August. He was pessimistic about his own prospects of survival,
but said that he had already made his own plans to come to Italy. In regard
to his poetry, he agreed with Shelley about Endymion, but to some extent
took Shelley to task for having aimed e Cenci at a popular audience. He
hadn’t received Prometheus Unbound yet, but suggested that Shelley might
apply advice he had once given to his own work – not to rush to publish. . .”
“. . .did they continue their correspondence?”
“. . .there was so little time le: Keats arrived in Naples in October.
Shelley sent him a letter inviting him to come to Pisa, but Keats had
already gone on to Rome, and the letter was lost. Keats had a relapse in
December, and died in February. . .”
“. . .I wonder if they would have gotten along. . .”
“. . .I suspect there would have been problems, in the long term: what
Byron became for Shelley, Shelley might have become for Keats. Shelley
even hedged his invitation: he mentioned to Claire that if Keats did come,
he would have to be housed separately – something he didn’t ask of
Medwin, who, by the way, Shelley also invited during this period, along
with Edward Williams and his wife, who Shelley hadn’t even met yet. . .”
“. . .when did they come?”
“. . .Medwin would come in October, Edward and Jane Williams not
until the end of January. It seems like a short time, but a great deal was to
happen before then, as was usual in Shelley’s life: as Keats described

Shelley in his letter, he was someone ‘who perhaps never sat with your
wings furl’d for six months together.’ It’s true: Shelley went to Pisa in late
July to find a new house, and rented the Casa Prinni in San Giuliano.
ey moved into it on August th, and they lived there until the end of
October when the village was flooded. We’ll go there first thing
tomorrow morning – it should be just a train stop or two to the north of
here. . .”
“. . .and for the rest of today?”
“. . .what would you like to do?”
“. . .to see the leaning tower, of course!”
“. . .yes, that’s what I was thinking – it’s inevitable, isn’t it? I’ll just finish
the wine. e direct way to the tower is straight back the way we came,
and le at the Via Roma, but let’s go back to our street – that way we can
walk through the Piazza dei Cavalieri on the way. . .”
“. . .ready?”
“. . .yes, let’s go. . .”
“. . .I just want to go out on the bridge a moment – to see the Arno
from roughly the place where Shelley would have been inspired for his
poem. . .”
ey walk out onto the bridge spanning the Arno, pausing for a few
minutes to view the row of ochre, cream, and umber buildings along the
riverfront and the mountains rising in the distance. ey cross back to
the embankment, walk past the tower and down the sidewalk next to the
river wall.
“. . .the reflections of the buildings on the water are just as he described
them – ‘the wrinkled image of the city’. . .”
“. . .yes, so serene. . .it’s not only the Casa Frassi that was along there
somewhere, but also the Casa Galetti – where they moved aer the house
at San Giuliano flooded in October. . .”
“. . .how long were they there?”
“. . .until March, so about five months. ey then moved to the Casa
Aulla for two months – I’ve found no record where it was, aside from
also being here along the river front somewhere. . .”
“. . .and then?”
“. . .in May, they moved back to a different house in San Giuliano. . .it
should be just at the base of those mountains there – that’s Monte
Pisano. . .”

“. . .the mountains are amazing. . .”

“. . .‘under white clouds, cielo di Pisa. . .out of all this beauty something
must come’. . .”
“. . .who are you quoting?”
“. . .there was another poet here – I mean aside from Byron. . .”
“. . .who?”
“. . .Ezra Pound wrote his Pisan Cantos here. He was imprisoned by
the U.S. Army for treason somewhere just outside of Pisa – first in an
open-air cage for about three weeks, and then in a tent: that’s where he
wrote the Pisan Cantos, before they sent him to his trial in the United
States. . .”
“. . .I only knew that they put him into an asylum – he was a fascist,
wasn’t he?”
“. . .he was sympathetic to Mussolini, but I think he was deeply deluded
and didn’t really understand what fascism was: he thought fascism would
avoid the problems of capitalism and communism through creating
a quasi-mythic order that would foster a society sympathetic to high
culture. . .”
“. . .what!?”
“. . .he thought a strong-handed government leading to a unified society
with strong support for the arts would usher in a new era. Unlike
Germany, which classified everything modernist as ‘degenerate,’ fascism
in Italy did, for a period, ally itself with modernism, adopting the
machine-worship of the Italian futurists – artists like Balla and Marinetti.
Pirandello also became a fascist. Pound, who had pioneered movements
like imagism and vorticism, felt that under Italian fascism avant-garde art
would have its day, but he simply failed to see the contradiction between
an ideology that blended nationalism with populism on the one hand,
and an experimental high culture that was highly variable on the other
hand. To support the cause, he began giving radio broadcasts against
Roosevelt and the allies, punctuated with virulent anti-Semitism, and all
his usual ranting against ‘usura, usura’. . .”
“. . .Pound was one of those people who thought that lending money
for interest was the source of all evil. . .”
“. . .I thought that was Marx. . .”
“. . .there are certain similarities in regard to their respective takes on
exchange value, but Pound’s ideology was the right-wing version of it. He

thought that once money was taken off the gold-standard, the world
became corrupted – that somehow when value became exchangeable,
everything lost its value, and life was cheapened. . .”
“. . .so what did he think was the answer?”
“. . .he espoused something like a paternalistic Confucianism that led
the people toward a less alienated, less materialistic life – of course with
aesthetic value taking precedence. Like Heidegger’s view of Hitler, he
simply projected his own hopes onto a pure power politics driven by the
worst xenophobia, and failed to see, or filtered out, its excesses. His father
was a gold assayer for the U.S. Mint, so that must have been the oedipal
key lurking behind his ideology, or so it seems to me. He was reacting to
American provincialism, which is understandable, but he was from
Hailey, Idaho, and I think he still retained a certain amount of provin-
cialism: Gertrude Stein wrote that he was a ‘village explainer, excellent if
you were a village, but if you were not, not,’ and in his obituary in e
Times they were even more scathing, writing that ‘his life was a long self-
education in public.’ Pound was a cracked egg in all but aesthetic matters:
he truly did give invaluable advice and help to writers like William Carlos
Williams, H.D., Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but I think he really
became unhinged in Europe. For me, he represents the opposite danger
to what happened to Shelley: I can sympathize with his reaction to
American philistinism, but trying to connect aesthetics to politics in
order to found a top-down society based in high culture? It’s doomed to
produce some sort of crypto-fascism. . .”
“. . .‘crypto-fascism’?”
“. . .it’s a term I use for anything that’s implicitly fascist. Anyway, in my
mind, the point of the avant-garde is to be avant, and not to try to make
the avant the standard! It’s bound to fail. . .”
“. . .what happened to Pound in the end?”
“. . .he was tried, found insane, and committed to St. Elizabeth’s mental
hospital outside of Washington, D.C. He was released in 198 aer
a group of famous writers joined together and signed a petition, and he
returned to Italy, settling in Rapallo, where Nietzsche wrote the opening
pages of Zarathustra – up the coast a bit towards Genoa. He died in
Venice in 19, and was buried in San Michele. . .”
“. . .not a totally bad end. . .”
“. . .no, but his ‘stock’ has really fallen over time: there’s been a gradual
realization that his excesses were more than simply momentary aberra-

tions, as recently published letters show that he was anti-Semitic to the

end, and it’s come out that while in St. Elizabeth’s he even met with
figures who wanted to keep the south segregated! It’s a pity that his legacy
is so marred, for he was truly generous to so many in the modernist move-
ment, and he was a key inspiration for experimental writers from the
Beats to the Black Mountain poets. . .”
“. . .I suppose the closest the Czechs have to such a figure is Vítěslav
Nezval, who was a key member of the modernist avant-garde group
Devětsil in the 0s and 0s, but who later became a communist and wrote
propaganda poetry – there was even a long homage to Stalin!”
“. . .poets should never cosy up to power – whatever the ideology! It’s
a recipe for boredom, at the very least, and unfortunately much worse. . .”
“. . .wait a minute, look there!”
“. . .where?”
“. . .at that little church – doesn’t the sign say Galetti?”
“. . .you have better vision than I – let’s cross over and have a look. . .”
ey cross the road to the church: a small, two-storey white Baroque
structure, eight meters wide with a door and a single window above it.
To its le and right stand houses of four storeys, with the fading ochre
walls and dark green shutters typical of the city.
“. . .yes, you’re right. . .‘Chiesa Galetti’ – so one of these houses on either
side must be the Casa Galetti. According to the information I have, it
should be next to a marble palazzo, so it’s probably the one to the le. . .”
“. . .somebody’s coming out – should we ask him?”
“. . .I’ll go. . .”
He goes over to a man in his mid-twenties unlocking a bicycle within
the entryway of the house. ey speak for a minute, and then come out
onto the sidewalk, where the Italian man gestures to each side and
upwards as if embracing the whole building. Aer speaking a few
moment more, the man on the bicycle rides away down the embank-
ment.
“. . .so, is it the right one?”
“. . .yes, but apparently it extends much further back behind there, so
that actually much of the block is taken up by the casa. I know they had
rooms in the front, looking out onto the river, so it was one of these
windows here. I would guess it looks pretty much as it did then. . .”
“. . .take a picture of it. . .”
“. . .I’ll have to cross over to the embankment to get it all in the frame. . .”

“. . .at least we found one of them. . .”

“. . .I’ll tell you what happened here over lunch tomorrow, out at San
Giuliano. . .there, I’ve got it. . .”
“. . .so, where do we go from here?”
“. . .this is our road, here – are you ready for the tourists?”
“. . .as ready as I’ll ever be. . .”
“. . .so let’s go. . .”
“. . .is that the lane to our pension?”
“. . .yes – I remember the café there. . .”
“. . .we need some more water – I’ll go get it. . .”
“. . .I’ll wait here. . .”
She crosses the street and enters the café while he waits outside the
Chiesa di San Frediano. e paramedics are still sitting in the shade
playing chess. She returns with the water, and they continue down the
road to the Piazza dei Cavalieri.
“. . .which way do we go?”
“. . .through the clock tower there – one of those towers was the real
prison of Ugolino. . .”
“. . .that’s where the line of tourists is heading, so we must be on the
right path. . .”
“. . .I hate being a tourist, but I suppose one is under an obligation to
see a ‘wonder’. . .”
“. . .what did Shelley say about the leaning tower?”
“. . .I know they visited it for the first time when they came through
Pisa in 1818. Shelley showed it to Medwin in the autumn, but I don’t
remember his making any comments about it. . .”
“. . .I think we’re getting nearer, based on the number of hotels and
restaurants around. . .”
“. . .it should be around the next turn and down the road a little bit –
see, there’s the Duomo. . .”
“. . .look at all the people. . .”
“. . .ah, there’s the tower!”
“. . .I didn’t expect it to be leaning so much. . .”
“. . .four meters or so at the top. . .”
“. . .is it my imagination, or is the cathedral leaning too?”
“. . .it is leaning – or sinking, actually. . .do you want me to take one of
those funny pictures of you holding up the tower?”
“. . .no thank you!”

“. . .suit yourself. . .do you know why I think so many people come
here?”
“. . .I guess among other reasons it’s because they want to be among the
last people to see it before it falls over. . .”
“. . .exactly! Humans are perverse: I don’t think there would be so many
people here if it were simply the ‘Tower of Pisa,’ and not in any danger of
falling – most people wouldn’t even mind if it happened to fall while
they were here so they could claim to have been among the last to have
seen it standing. . .”
“. . .just as long as it doesn’t fall on top of them! In the end, the tower
will still be standing and they will be the one’s who’ve fallen! Look at that
group over there – half of them look like they’re ready to drop already in
this heat. . .”
“. . .most of those who built it died before it was completed: it took two
hundred years to complete it. . .”
“. . .when was it completed?”
“. . .in the mid 1th Century – at roughly the same time as the Charles
Bridge in Prague. . .”
“. . .it’s seen a lot of people come and go. . .”
“. . .in Henry James’ day many of those restaurants and gi shops over
there were English tea rooms – the British were in the majority of tourists
for much of the 19th Century, exercising their imperial prerogatives. . .”
“. . .now it’s the Americans. . .”
“. . .yes – thank god most tourists come and gawk and then move on to
the next gawking-sight on their itineraries: there’s nothing quite so unset-
tling for me than to be around large groups of my fellow countrymen
acting as if they were in Disneyland or Las Vegas – ‘stream of uncon-
sciousness’ indeed! Shelley felt the same about the English, which is why
he settled here rather than in Livorno. . .”
“. . .the Americans will one day be replaced by others. . .”
“. . .yes, but you could never get them to admit that: a majority of
Americans are a bit like Nately in Catch 22 – you know, the character
played by Art Garfunkel?”
“. . .the one in love with the Italian whore?”
“. . .that’s him. He thinks the United States will hold its position of
supremacy forever, and the old man at the brothel, a stand-in for Italy as
a whole, tells him that Italy has survived by always adapting to the
conquerors, whoever they were. . .”
8
“. . .it sounds a bit like the Czechs. . .”

“. . .to a certain extent, but it seems to me that Czechs lack the equiva-
lent of the Roman historical legacy, so they don’t have any nostalgia for
some past grandeur – unless it’s a longing for Charles IV and the Holy
Roman Empire, which I doubt. . .”
“. . .but isn’t the hubris of America simply the hubris of any powerful
country? I’m sure the Romans under Augustus, the French under
Napoleon, the British during the 19th Century, and the Germans under
Hitler felt the same – that their empires would last forever. . .”
“. . .certainly, as undoubtedly what happened to them will happen to
the U.S.A. in time as well. . .”
“. . .still, it’s hard to imagine the American empire coming to an end. . .”
“. . .it’s always hard to imagine it before it happens; then, aer the fall,
it seems inevitable. I think it was Schopenhauer who wrote that truths
always pass through three stages: first it’s ridiculed and dismissed, then
it’s violently opposed, and finally it’s accepted as self-evident – there’s
very little time between the nd and rd stages. . .”
“. . .and what stage do you think we are at now?”
“. . .I think the first stage: suggest to most Americans that the U.S.A. is
an empire and they ridicule it, arguing that the U.S.A. doesn’t take terri-
tory. When you suggest a kind of economic imperialism, they ridicule it,
only a few ‘violently oppose’ it. I think we’ll move quickly to the second
stage now that the Cold War is over – I give it ten years to progress to the
point where the empire is fully acknowledged, while the inevitability of
its passing will still be violently opposed. . .”
“. . .and stage three – being accepted as self-evident?”
“. . .I won’t even try to predict that! As Georges Bataille wrote in 199
about the war, ‘History is incomplete: when these words are read, the
outcome of the war taking place now will be known to the smallest
schoolchild but nothing can give me now the knowledge that schoolchild
has’. . .if you project yourself back to September, 199, it would be impos-
sible to guess the enormity of what was about to happen. It’s the same for
us and the future. I’m only saying all empires come to an end, inevitably,
and the American Empire will also. . .”
“. . .and who takes over then – the Chinese?”
“. . .perhaps, although my admittedly utopian hope would be for some
sort of enlightened global administration to take over – the United
Nations, for example, aer it goes through another few transformations;
9
however, I’m also aware of my history: Hegel looked out his window in
Jena at ‘the man on horseback’ – Napoleon, and hoped for something
similar – a system based on rationality. Look what happened! I’ve lived
long enough to doubt that any reasonable world government will ever
happen – or, if it did, the result wouldn’t be a globalization of enlight-
ened reason and democratic goodwill, but rather a hyper-extension of the
current globalization of heartless, systemic, corporate capitalism, or even
worse. . .”
“. . .that’s quite pessimistic. . .”
“. . .yes, but I have a streak of optimism too: not about any enlightened
system coming about, but about what lies beyond any system. e
philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy wrote about it in his essay La communauté
désœuvrée. . .”
“. . .it’s hard to translate – in English it was translated as e Inoperative
Community, which says nothing at all about its contents; transliterated it
would be something like the ‘de-worked’ or even ‘un-worked commu-
nity,’ which doesn’t make much sense in English either. e ‘decon-
structed community’ might be a bit closer in certain ways, but that gives
it a Derridean connotation it doesn’t truly have, and to make a precise
translation one would have to create some sort of stylistic abomination
that paraphrases only its meaning, like ‘the finite community’ or some-
thing like that, which is still quite far from the full sense of it. . .”
“. . .so, what is it about?”
“. . .he tries to rethink the concept of community, adding an existential
aspect to the socio-political aspect. At one point in the essay he writes,
‘community is what happens to us in the wake of society’: in other words,
rather than something that occurs as the active intention of a given social
policy or ideology, community is his name for what happens as a conse-
quence of a given social policy. at’s why he uses the nautical metaphor
of the ‘boat’ of society passing and creating a wake – community being
what happens to us as we are le bobbing up and down in the wake. . .”
“. . .wait, let me work this out for myself: would I be right to say, for
example, that communism proposed certain plans that were supposed to
bring about an ideal community – I’m thinking of the five year plans
leading to the happy optimism of the workers portrayed in films of the
Stalinist period; when, in actual fact, we survived communism by
retreating into family life, apartment and cottage culture, and so on. . .so,
0
community according to Nancy would be the forms of community

which actually happened in contrast to the idealized version of what was
supposed to happen?”
“. . .yes, that’s the essence of it. Societies have always projected images of
an ideal community, and then set out to achieve them – oen with disas-
trous results. . .”
“. . .communism being the perfect example . . .”
“. . .yes – Enlightenment thinkers since Rousseau have imagined a lost,
ideal world that needs to be re-attained, such as his ‘state of nature,’ or
Marx’s ideal of ‘un-alienated man,’ or Tönnies’ idea of ‘Gemeinscha.’ If
you think about it, it’s a metaphor that lies deep within the western tradi-
tion – back to the expulsion from the Garden of Eden in the Old
Testament, and the hope for ‘paradise regained’ in the New Testament. . .”
“. . .so Nancy’s concept would define all these projections and the
attempts to achieve them through social policy ‘society,’ and what actu-
ally happens between people ‘community’?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .and what does he think ‘actually happens’. . .”
“. . .he sees it through the lens of a le-leaning, revised Heideggerianism:
once you strip away all the ideological projections of community you are le
with the lowest common denominator of our Mitsein – our shared exis-
tences, our shared mortalities. He refers to it as our ‘compearance’ or ‘co-
appearance’: our coming into existence along with all the others we share
our existences with – the six billion or so beings who exist on this planet
right now, and who will all be gone aer another hundred years or so. . .”
“. . .that’s one of those facts that are obvious but somehow veiled: that
the entire bio-mass of human beings currently existing will be entirely
replaced within a century, give or take a few thousand people that will
live beyond the age of one hundred – if that’s called living! It’s aston-
ishing when you imagine it. . .”
“. . .the reason we don’t grasp the full magnitude of it is that it all
happens incrementally. Nancy refers to this overlapping of existences as
the ‘exposition of finitude,’ and at one point refers to it as a ‘triple
mourning’ – that of our births, our deaths, and the deaths of the other.
Our parents’ generation witnesses our births, and then our generation
witnesses their deaths, and then we witness the birth of our children’s
generation, and they witness our deaths, and so on. is interconnecting,
finite web of mutual witnessing is the common denominator of commu-
1
nity – whereas all our plans, social policies, projects, religions and ideolo-
gies are merely the impossible but inevitable attempt to guide our exis-
tences in some direction through regulative ideas. . .”
“. . .but how do we guide society, as surely some societies produce better
results than others?”
“. . .yes, but one has to understand the nature of what makes those
results ‘better’: for Nancy, the ‘better’ society is the one which provides
the best environment for community – this exposition of finitude – to
happen. You know only too well that some forms of society try to control
or minimize this ‘exposition’ or ‘compearance’ – through censorship or
controlling the forms of human relation that take place, for example.
Actually, there’s a crucial paradox in all of this – indeed, it’s the gist of
his essay: when a society attempts to plan, organize, or structure the type
of community that takes place, and especially when it sets out to tran-
scend our finitude through evoking the greater whole of the community,
those very actions can tear apart this delicate web of inter-locking mortal-
ities. He takes Nazi Germany as an example, but also mentions many
other versions of what he terms the ‘immanent community’: when
a society tries to transcend the mortalities of its individual members
through some form of communal merging. ese are always attempts to
bridge time and eternity fully and finally, usually through religious or
quasi-religious means; for example, ideologies that project an end to
history through the realizing of an ideological utopia, a socio-economic
system, or a religious eschatology; or, the realization of some sort of
master plan of national, racial or ethnic purity. At their core is always
some belief in the merging of individuals into a larger whole, usually with
the goal of sublating our individual mortalities into a larger whole that
supposedly will live forever. Nancy maintains that such societies are ‘soci-
eties of death’ rather than immanence, and the Nazis are the most
obvious example of such an outcome. . .”
“. . .but before you spoke of ‘immanence’ as an affirmative term; it seems
negative the way Nancy uses it. . .”
“. . .it’s true that there seems to be a divergence between how Spinoza
or Deleuze use the term ‘immanence’ and how Nancy uses it when he
speaks of an ‘immanent community,’ but I think their usages can be
reconciled conceptually. I think the key to this difference is that imma-
nence – as the interpenetration of time and eternity we’ve been speaking
of, isn’t something that can be organized or experienced collectively

without dire results: when such experiences do occur, they occur indi-
vidually and by chance. . .”
“. . .why do you think that is?”
“. . .I’m not certain, but you can see something like the same issue in
Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, which operates as an existential decisionism
on the level of the individual, but slips into something rather more
dangerous when he writes of the collective. e individual attains
‘authenticity’ through the resolution with which they enact their life
projects in the full awareness of their mortality. Although Heidegger
doesn’t use the word ‘immanence,’ his idea is that we acquire this authen-
ticity as the result of a ‘Being-towards-Death’ – an experience of the truth
of our own mortality that bears some resemblance to an experience of
immanence. So far, so good! But the moment Heidegger begins to write
of the ‘resolution’ of a whole nation, blabbing about ‘the historial destiny
of the German volk,’ he slipped into a crypto-fascism that was enacted as
an actual fascism in his real life, when he joined the Nazi party. Georges
Bataille, whose work Nancy utilized in his essay, came dangerously close
to the same precipice, but unlike Heidegger he saw it before he could slip
into that abyss. . .”
“. . .what did he see in the abyss?”
“. . .it’s not entirely clear what he saw, because it happened in the secret
society Acéphale he founded with his lover Laure, Pierre Klossowski,
André Masson, and a handful of others. In the late 0s they were trying,
out in the forest near his home in St. Germain en Laye, to evoke an expe-
rience of the sacred as a way to generate oppositional energies to what
was happening in Nazi Germany. He discovered that such communal
energy produced what he termed a paradoxical ‘sur-fascism,’ and he
broke off the experiment. What he came to realize is precisely that such
an experience of immanence – what he referred to later as an ‘inner expe-
rience,’ is a sovereign, singular experience that might be evoked but
cannot be planned, and that if one tries to evoke such an experience in
a collective situation, there are serious risks involved. While Bataille felt
the experience had to happen in solitude, once it had happened it had no
real meaning until it was communicated – that’s where community enters
back into it. Nancy agrees with him about this, and he ends his essay
citing Bataille and arguing that community is best promoted through
such communication; therefore, the society that fosters such communi-
cation, fosters community. . .”

“. . .that immediately disqualifies Nazism with its book burnings, and

communism with its proscribed books lists. . .”
“. . .and I even wonder about hyper-capitalist, ‘information’ societies
like ours, where the market prevails over everything, and the super-satu-
ration of information drowns out authentic voices – it seems a new form
of what Heidegger called ‘Gerede,’ or ‘idle talk’. . .”
“. . .but if I understood it correctly, isn’t Nancy saying that no matter
how much the society distorts community, there’s always ‘exposition of
finitude’?”
“. . .yes, that’s true. At one point he writes, ‘we cannot not compear’:
even in the extermination camps dedicated to the ending of all commu-
nity, community happened – it’s happening here, now, among all these
throngs of tourists. We’re here, now, compearing. . .”
“. . .and at a place like this, it feels doubly transitory – as if everyone is
already a ghost. . .”
“. . .yes, I have that feeling too – it’s like what Shelley wrote about the
Torre della Fame: its presence is a kind of spectral manifestation of eter-
nity: just as the tower in his poem turned the ‘ladies fair’ into marble,
these monuments turn us into marble in some uncanny way, by reflecting
our finitudes back to us – they’re unreal, or realer than real. . .”
“. . .what’s that building over there – the long one with the arches?”
“. . .speaking of the ‘exposition of finitude,’ that’s the Camposanto –
a cemetery supposedly founded on soil brought back from Golgotha
during one of the crusades: it was begun in the Middles Ages, but finally
completed during the Renaissance. ere’s a fresco there that I want to
see, e Triumph of Death – I think it may have partially inspired
Shelley’s vision in his poem, e Triumph of Life. Unfortunately,
American bombers dropped incendiary bombs on it during the war, the
lead roof melted, and the frescos were seriously damaged as a result. . .”
“. . .they bombed here, so close to the cathedral and tower – were they
insane?”
“. . .the only item of strategic interest are three railway lines that inter-
sect – over in that direction somewhere. . .”
“. . .I realize there was a war going on, but they must have seen how close
they were to the cathedral and the tower. . .”
“. . .humans have amazing tunnel-vision, especially during times of war,
when the instincts of aggression take over. You saw Catch : they were
just flyboys in those planes: focused only on their missions and saving

their own skins, and free to return to base as soon as they dropped their
bombs. . .”
“. . .I know, but it never ceases to amaze me. . .”
“. . .they’ve restored the frescoes enough so that we should be able to
get a good sense of what Shelley saw – apparently it’s pretty grisly. . .”
“. . .macabre: dead bodies, angels and devils fighting over people’s souls
– that sort of thing. . .”
“. . .and you think Shelley’s was inspired by it?”
“. . .not the theological implications, but precisely the question of fini-
tude – that death levels all classes, and lurks behind all of our lives. You
will see: one whole section of the fresco shows the upper classes having
a fine day in the park, while meanwhile death rages all around them.
ere’s a poem Shelley wrote from roughly around this time that might
even have been inspired by the fresco – and, of course, their lives. . .here
it is: it’s unfinished – a line is missing:
Death is here and death is there,

Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,
Above is death – and we are death.
Death has set his mark and seal

On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear. . .
. . .here’s where the line missing is. . .
First our pleasures die – and then

Our hopes, and then our fears – and when
ese are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust – and we die too.
All things that we love and cherish,

Like ourselves must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot –
Love itself would, did they not.

. . .I don’t think he showed it to anyone. . .”

“. . .it’s quite relentless – and a bit morbid. . .”
“. . .but it does contain a crucial turn in the last line: if we didn’t perish,
our love would perish – as our love is sustained by the inevitability of loss;
or, as Shakespeare wrote, we must ‘love that well which thou must leave
ere long’. . .”
“. . .looked at like that, it’s not so bad. . .”
“. . .so, shall we go ‘expose our finitudes’ to e Triumph of Death?”
“. . .that sounds a bit indecent. . .”
“. . .I didn’t mean it that way. . .”
“. . .oh yes you did!”
“. . .ok, I admit it – I did. . .”
“. . .so be serious now – think of all the history: the soil from Golgotha,
the Crusades, the Middles Ages, the Renaissance, Shelley, the bombs in
the Second World War – all the way to us. . .”
“. . .and beyond us. . .”



the pure past of what has been and what will always be, retracing the infinite
nappes of space and time, om vertex to vortex. . .
Friedrich Nietzsche: Lake Silvaplana, Early August, 1881
. . .a solitary wanderer ambles along a path near the southern shore of the glau-
cous glacial waters of Lake Silvaplana. e Majola wind blowing up the valley
om the south whips the water into undulant waves of shimmering golden
sparks and whitecaps in the aernoon sunlight. e path is shaded by stands
of arolla pine, silver fir, spruce, larch, and rowan. Over the gusting wind and
lapping waves there is only the occasional chirping of a marmot, and the
sudden buzzing of summer insects. e wanderer pauses intermittently,
leaning on his walking stick, breathing in the clear air and gazing at the
mountain peaks across the lake – Lagrev, Polaschin, Albana and Julier behind
it. He jumps nimbly om boulder to boulder across the Ova da Surlej stream
cascading down the mountainside, and descends onto the sedge and edelweiss
covered delta, diverging om the path to follow the lakeshore. On a small
peninsula he pauses at a pyramidal, cle boulder – three meters tall, a single
silver fir rising next to it – and leans back upon the rock, gazing down the lake
valley towards Sils-Maria and beyond towards the mountains rising to the
west – the vast, snowy bulk of Corvatsch peak rising in the south-southeast,
enshrouded with a veil of bright mist. Aer a short time he begins to tremble,
then to laugh out loud – first soly, then with a loud burst. He begins shaking
until tears roll down his cheeks, then suddenly he looks around, collects himself,
and slowly breathes in the alpine air, overtaken by tranquility. . .
“. . .it’s so quiet here. . .this landscape is something altogether different – far

more southern. e cisalpine air pours up the valley like clockwork every
aernoon – taken up by the alpine heights, then cleansed and purified; even
the light is more radiant, but soer. August already – the summer is slipping
away; soon it will be time to go south, perhaps to Genoa or Turin. . .but I am
here, now, fully alive, my joy uncontainable – I feel as if I could explode!
Still, I must gather strength: in July, I felt so close to death – the violent
pains, the headaches. . .as if the energies were too much for this ail body,
this fortuitous encounter of myriad impulses and instincts. To be here, now,
by this precise rock, this precise tree, under this pristine sky – the waves
lapping, mists driing om the peaks. . .only this brief interval – once, and
never more. . .when I die, all will be over – but to have lived, and such a life!
ere’s still so much to be done. . .moments in time, passing one by one, but
here it seems as if another reality looms behind these shapes. . .eternal. . .the
clouds forever changing shapes – infinite, or finite? If this collocation of vapors
were to return as they are now aer eons and eons pass, what if?. . .and if I were
to return as I am now – everyone and everything caught in an infinite repeti-
tion of the same. . .but to what purpose? None at all. . .without purpose and
without end, all time without aim, recurring infinitely – could it possibly be?
e universe would be in a perpetual flight om itself. . .and a perpetual
refinding of itself again and again – but that would mean everything om that
mountain peak down to this lowly spider crawling in the shadow of this boulder
– all would perpetually return. . .and we too – all the heroes and their great
feats – Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon. . .all the thinkers and artists –
Socrates, Michelangelo, Spinoza, Bach, Goethe, Beethoven. . .but also all
the masses of servants and shopkeepers, with their pettinesses, resentments,
and envy – innumerable times. . .ach! It is a weight too heavy to be borne
. . .unless? A thought begins to dawn on me – it cannot be refused, for that
would only be weakness: such a vision must not only be embraced, it must
be affirmed; it must not only be made bearable, it must be made beau-
tiful! Could this be the bridge across? Here, now, this thought coming to
me two thousand meters above the sea, and that much higher above all
humanity. . .the veil is torn. . .”
“. . .I must endure this intensity that exceeds the limits of my body, I must
evoke the powers necessary to hold to this vision, to bear this intolerable
weight, to justify life in and of and through itself. . .life, only, as the meaning
of life! Not only to bear it, but to will it: to will this infinite repetition, to
will the whole madness of the universe – to will the eternal return of this
experience, of this mood, of this highest feeling. . .”
“. . .but who am I aside om these thoughts, these energies? Perhaps only the
extremes return – those intensities uncontainable within the confines of a mortal
body: to be overtaken by this will, even to the point of destruction. . .going under,
but in order for others to cross over! To add to the larger sum beyond oneself,
to the future beings that will come into existence as I have emerged om all
those who have gone before. . .this thought must be annunciated and enun-
ciated. . .I must prepare myself for the time when I will go down om these
heights, and speak. . .”

“. . .shall we sit in the back garden?”
“. . .yes, let’s. . .”
“. . .how about over by the hedge there?”
e grass lawn of the restaurant garden is enclosed by a hedge, with
white sheets draped over a series of parallel wires forming a partial
canopy. ey choose one of the linen-covered tables near the perimeter,
seat themselves in the black, wrought-iron chairs, and scrutinize the
menus brought to them by the waitress. From inside the restaurant comes
the strains of so jazz – Chet Baker, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Charlie
Haden. e maître d’ comes to take their order for drinks and appetizers,
tells them the specialties of the day in English, and offers to explain the
menu. ey order a bottle of Cabreo La Pietra chardonnay, mineral
water, and two octopus salads as appetizers.
“. . .so, what do you think you will have as a main course?”
“. . .I think I’ll have the ravioli special he mentioned – with the
Branzino. . .”
“. . .what’s Branzino?”
“. . .it’s a fish – sea bass in English: normally I’d avoid it because of all
the little bones, but in ravioli it will be just the meat. . .”
“. . .that sounds good – I’d like to try something new. . .”
e waiter returns with the wine and some bread, opens the wine for
tasting, and takes their order.
“. . .the wine is delicious. . .”
“. . .it’s better than what we had this aernoon – and quite a bit more
expensive as well. . .hmmm. . .I taste a hint of vanilla. . .”
“. . .it’s delicious! How much more expensive?”
“. . .don’t worry about the money – we’re celebrating being here. . .”
“. . .in that case, thank you. . .”
“. . .you’re most welcome. . .”
“. . .it’s a relief to be away from the hordes of tourists. . .”
“. . .they won’t be bothering us from now on – that’s what’s nice about
having one’s own itinerary. . .”

“. . .part of our itinerary was that you were going to explain the eternal
return to me. . .”
“. . .if I can. . .Jaspers, Heidegger, Deleuze, Klossowski, and others have
tried, but the eternal return is rather ambiguous. . .”
“. . .from what you’ve told me, it seems it’s a way of making choices: one
ought to will only what one can imagine coming back eternally, and, if
not, one is only half-willing, and therefore not living life fully. . .”
“. . .that’s the existential inflection of the concept. As I initially understood
it, one wills the eternal return of a moment as if it would return precisely
because nothing returns: we are all mortal. Actually, according to Gilles
Deleuze, one thing does return: the moment of the dice throw, the moment
of the freedom of once again choosing to act as if one wanted the moment
to return, eternally. Every moment opens to the possibility of a different
choice, a different willing, a different throw of the dice. . .then, when the
dice fall, there’s the resultant determination, which is immediately followed
by the possibility of a new throw, and so on. Every moment is different in
its intensity, value, and significance, but precisely the same in regard to the
structure of its being willed eternally – or half-willed, or not willed at all.
I suppose it might be seen as a different way of putting William Blake’s
‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’. . .”
“. . .but what if the world doesn’t want to go along with your will?”
“. . .that’s why Nietzsche also invoked, along with the concept, the idea
of amor fati – the imperative to love one’s fate, to accept the way the dice
have fallen: if you fully will something, you must accept – embrace even
– the consequences of your having willed it, good or bad. He wrote that
if you have ever said ‘Yes to any joy,’ then you have also said ‘Yes to all
woe.’ He entitled the section where he first refers to the eternal return in
e Gay Science, ‘e Heaviest Weight,’ and the next entry is entitled
‘Incipit tragoedia’ – ‘the tragedy begins’. . .”
“. . .but it’s very difficult, isn’t it? – can one really treat each moment
like that without going crazy?”
“. . .certainly it’s extremely difficult, but for Nietzsche there was a virtue
in the intensity that comes through active willing, rather than adapting
passively to the world. Nietzsche detested the life that was only half-
willed – the overly-cautious life that fawns and cringes, bowing down to
greater forces, conforming to the herd from fear of the consequences if
one does not. He hated the kind of exhaustion of life that occurred when
people became reactive, small-minded, and miserly in their emotions,

affects, feelings, and actions. Conformity was a major source of such reac-
tivity – the ‘-ness’ of everything: he hated the Germanness of the
Germans, and probably would have hated the Czechness of the Czechs,
and the Americanness of the Americans – which is why he offended
everybody, for they confused the whole point of his critique, which was
against small-mindedness and reactivity. He believed we should act out
of that deeper voice within us, which is the pure will. . .”
“. . .but isn’t that the kind of heroic idealism that caused him to be taken
up by the Nazis?”
“. . .that’s largely a travesty of his legacy in Germany: because of his
sister, he was co-opted by the very people he would have hated – the anti-
Semites and the National Socialists. He was an exile, aer all, just like
Shelley, and couldn’t stand his country – couldn’t stand its petty provin-
cialisms; in fact, at one point he tried to trace his lineage to Polish aris-
tocracy – by that time almost an extinct species, due to the partitions of
Poland throughout history. . .”
“. . .so if he was against reactivity and small-mindedness, what was he
for, exactly? Under communism we were taught he advocated a race of
‘supermen’. . .”
“. . .that’s partially based on the distortion of some unfortunate comments
he made towards the end of his life, when his illness was starting to over-
whelm him. e primary virtue that emerges when action is pure is a certain
generosity of spirit – the outflow of one’s active energies as they meet and
combine with others, and transform and are transformed by them. It’s quite
close to Spinoza’s idea of active affects and passions in his Ethics: Nietzsche
discovered Spinoza late, but saw him immediately as a kindred spirit. . .”
“. . .then how is it different from existentialism?”
“. . .it’s more affirmative and open-ended compared to French existen-
tialism: Sartre started with the premise that there is no God, and that
we’re confined to the material facts of existence here and now; however,
there’s a good deal of nostalgia in Sartre for the old certainties, despite
everything, and it’s manifested in his despair over the state of humanity,
le ‘forlorn’ in the world, as he put it. . .”
“. . .but Nietzsche is most known for his pronouncement that ‘God is
dead,’ isn’t he? at seems quite nihilistic. . .”
“. . .Zarathustra proclaimed, ‘God is dead, and we have killed him.’ As
far as human society was concerned, it appeared to him that God had
been dethroned as a force, except for a vestigial moralism. It’s merely an

early recognition of a historical fact, heralding the modern, secular

society we live in, where belief is le to the private sphere – or at least it
is supposed to be! Nietzsche was much closer to Kant than he ever
admitted – at least in terms of seeing the absolute truth as beyond our
cognitive capacities. What actually does exist is a mystery, and precisely
because it remains a mystery we have to will our actions towards what-
ever it is we do choose to believe, despite not having any certainty about
it. It is our ethos that matters – in the sense of our mode of life, action,
and behavior, which are, aer all, the willing of a faith or belief in some-
thing that one acts in accordance with. From a certain point of view it’s
like Kant’s idea of adopting maxims that we then take as laws to be
obeyed – although in Kant’s case it’s far more from a social and moral
sensibility that we act within the ‘as-if’ universalism of the categorical
imperative, and in Nietzsche’s case it’s from an individual, sovereign
sensibility that we act according to what gives us the ‘höchste Gefühl’ –
the ‘highest feeling’. . .”
“. . .I’m not sure I follow. . .”
“. . .Kant’s categorical imperative implores us to ‘act as if the maxim of
your action where to become, through your will, a maxim of universal
law’: he doesn’t believe we can finally know the universal, but we can
aspire to reach it through approximations. e point in Kant is to strive
for an ultimately unattainable universality in the hope of coinciding with
the common good, while one might see Nietzsche’s position as an inver-
sion of Kant’s position: Nietzsche also believes we must strive, but rather
than striving for the universal, we strive, or will eternally, that which gives
us each individually the ‘highest feeling.’ Both conceptions are formal,
in that it is up to each of us how we fulfill them, but Nietzsche’s version
throws away the striving towards universality, as he thought Kant was
merely placing a rational over-lay on Christianity, maintaining it’s ‘herd’
morality. For Nietzsche, Christianity, as it had developed, had become
something stifling and dull – something that had sapped people’s will,
making them reactive rather than charging them with active energies.
Shelley believed the same, and wrote an essay arguing that Christ was one
of the first social reformers, but his dynamic teachings had been gradually
overtaken by the political structures of the church. . .”
“. . .but how does one arrive at a sense of what one wants to will? If one
is raised in a society, like mine, where a passive will has been taken as the
norm, how does one develop an active will?”

“. . .there’s something mysterious about his sense of will that keeps it

from becoming a mere individualism – a mere ‘I will’: the idea of a stable,
unified self isn’t a part of his philosophy, which is another point the Nazis
got wrong when they turned his philosophy into a kind of heroic egoism
– a ‘Triumph des Willens’. His idea of the ‘will to power’ is not merely the
part of us that chooses to act for the sake of augmenting our own power –
he leaves it more indeterminate than that, as, aer all, what is power, actu-
ally? Whatever it is – whether one conceives of it as energy, drive, or life-
force – we are le with something that cannot be reduced to rationality,
to ideology, or to some final definition or term. Nietzsche saw it as a neces-
sary burgeoning forth of the life force – necessary not only for survival,
but also for whatever presses us forward towards increased power, towards
a movement beyond our thresholds and limits, towards. . .”
“. . .evolution. . .progress?”
“. . .no. . .he was careful to distinguish his thought from the progres-
sivism of Darwin, or Spencer’s notion of the ‘survival of the fittest’; in
fact, Nietzsche believed that the ‘higher type’ was usually the least likely
to survive. He felt that Darwin’s focus on the species missed an essential
point about the individual: that what individuated it and made it ‘higher’
oen made it succumb to the others; that the ‘higher types,’ as he referred
to them, oen were overwhelmed by the lower types, and their singu-
larity, their variability, was diluted or even overtaken by the masses. He
wasn’t pessimistic about it, just realistic – he saw it as something in the
nature of things, an essential tension or conflict. In fact, his affirmative
stance is what differentiates him from the somewhat dour positions of
philosophers like Sartre and Heidegger. Zarathustra warned against two
dangers – not taking the eternal return seriously enough and taking it too
seriously. . .”
“. . .what would taking it too seriously be?”
“. . .taking it in a spirit of morose seriousness. Zarathustra wanted it to
be an affirmation, a joy – and by joy, he meant an intense existence, full
of meaning and significance that we bring to it, not given by a religious or
ideological system. . .ah, speaking of joy, here are our salads. . .”
e waitress brings the octopus salads to their table, and pours them
more wine.
“. . .what’s not clear to me is how he reconciles the fact that he seems to
be suggesting a kind of affirmative energy as the highest force, but at the
same time he doesn’t connect it to the preservation of that energy. . .”

“. . .but that’s just it – the purest energies are not preserved, but instead
are given over to becoming, to reaching for higher summits at the same
time that they come dangerously close to their own extinction. He
connected genius with some sort of sickness, physical or mental, for just
that reason. . .”
“. . .but what would be the point of pure energies if they didn’t aspire to
their own perpetuation?”
“. . .the purer the energy, the more energy it could combine with and
enhance, increasing the intensity of existence and the power of life. For
him, an ascendant life was one which was capable of transforming and
increasing its energies as it met and combined with others, and conse-
quently increased the energy of others as well – it was an energy dynamics
of existence, something akin to William Blake’s ‘energy is infinite delight.’
While survivability might be a factor – because perpetuating life was
perpetuating the potential of energy, it was an insignificant factor consid-
ered by itself, because on a purely individual level it became the conserva-
tion of life, and therefore a reactive energy. . .but that brings me to the
other inflection of the eternal return – an aspect of the concept that didn’t
make sense to me at first, and still seems very strange to me. . .”
“. . .strange how?”
“. . .we’ve been talking about what Deleuze termed the ‘existential
aspect’ of the eternal return – the selective process whereby one utilizes
the concept to derive an individualized and intensified ethos, but
when Nietzsche came upon his insight, it was a different aspect which
struck him most violently: what Deleuze termed the ‘cosmological
aspect.’ Something mysterious happened when Nietzsche went to stay
in Sils-Maria in the Engadine Alps in lower Switzerland, in early
August, 1881: he was walking along the shore of Lake Silvaplana when
he came to a large, pyramidal boulder near the shore; he claimed it was
there that he was struck by the truth of the eternal return like a light-
ning bolt. He felt overwhelmed and shattered, and he always faltered
when he tried to represent it – to explain it. He only came close to its
real sense when he tried to present it – to show it first as a parable, then
as part of Zarathustra’s narrative; indeed, in a sense the whole
dramatic form of Thus Spoke Zarathustra was an attempt to create
a theater for this thought, which could not be represented through
normal exposition. . .”
“. . .so what is the cosmological aspect?”
8
“. . .I know it seems crazy, but he came to a sudden, quasi-mystical reve-

lation that everything that exists will return, in an infinite repetition. . .”
“. . .exactly the same way as it’s happening now? So we will eat this same
dinner again and again?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .well, that wouldn’t be too bad. . .but that’s insane!”
“. . .I agree, but that’s what he first concluded from the experience: he
initially seems to have thought that everything actually does return eter-
nally. It struck him deeply enough that he even tried, uncharacteristically,
to enlist the aid of science to try to ‘prove’ his vision. . .”
“. . .how?”
“. . .he argued that while time itself was infinite, the permutations of
matter within time were not; therefore, everything was bound to return
again aer vast epochs of time – he read Julius Robert von Mayer’s book
on celestial dynamics, where he found the conclusion that the amount of
matter in the universe was finite, but its state variable. . .”
“. . .but wouldn’t there also be an infinite number of permutations of
this reality? For example, while this dinner would return, so would all
the other possible dinners – where we would order different entrées,
drink different wines, or experience an earthquake or a plane crash in the
middle of it, and so on. . .”
“. . .that would follow if he had held to his initial vision of the eternal
return, but he seems to have come to the view that only that which has
been willed most intensely returns; in fact, Gilles Deleuze looks at the
eternal return as a wheel, where the centrifugal force of its rotation
throws off anything without the intensity to retain its grip, so it’s not
specific individuals or events which return in their entirety, but certain
intensities. . .”
“. . .‘intensities’? What do you mean?”
“. . .the concept was developed by the French Nietzscheans – Deleuze
and Foucault, of course, but perhaps even more by Pierre Klossowski. . .”
“. . .Klossowski – you mentioned him before, didn’t you?”
“. . .he was the son of Baladine Klossowska, one of Rilke’s lovers. His
father was an art historian, and Rilke took Pierre and his younger brother,
the artist Balthus, under his wing during their adolescence, arranging for
them to live in Paris with the help of André Gide. He became a member
of Georges Bataille’s secret society Acéphale in the 0s, and it was Bataille
who introduced him to Nietzsche’s work. He compiled several essays he
9
had written into an amazing book entitled Nietzsche et le Cercle Viscieux

– ‘Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.’ Klossowski explored the relation
between the eternal return, the will to power, and the chaotic maelstrom
of life-energies that is the foundation of human existence. Nietzsche
believed his terrible headaches, his vertigo, his nausea, and his psychic
suffering were due to his body being overwhelmed by energies that
exceeded his limits: he saw his life as a mere interval, where these chaotic
flows of impulses and energies were instantiated at a single site. . .”
“. . .an ‘interval’?”
“. . .according to Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche, a single body,
a single life, is only a spatial and temporal interval for these forces: more
intense forces outlast the life of a single person, and are taken up in other
intervals, other human lives. . .”
“. . .let me get this straight: is he saying that there are forces beyond an
individual, or that the individual is only these forces?”
“. . .both, in a way, but his emphasis is on the latter: in Klossowski’s
reading of Nietzsche, there is an intensive flux and reflux of chaotic,
tempestuous life-energies which are instantiated through the individual,
but not bounded by the individual: the individual is like a cork bobbing
on the waves, most of his or her impulsions coming from outside. It’s due
to the fact we perceive it from our limited perspectives, enclosed within
our bodies and psyches, that we feel we are the source of all those
impulses. . .”
“. . .it sounds like a cross between Freud’s notion of the unconscious
and the transmigration of souls. . .”
“. . .there are similarities between Freud’s later ideas about the drives,
especially the death drive, but Freud’s conception of the unconsciousness
still seems somewhat delimited in comparison to Nietzsche’s conception.
In Nietzsche’s view, this chaos of impulsions is entirely primary, and our
sense of identity comes from the set of signs we utilize to attempt to fix that
identity, ranging from our proper name to our repertoire of explanations
and self-descriptions of who we are, of what we are doing, and of why we
are doing it. e irony is that even these signs, which range from words to
normative value structures, are written in a language system that also comes
from outside us. Klossowski calls the various illusions of continuity and
meaning we project on to the world ‘phantasms’ – they are inevitably
obsessional and in a state of tension, for they are attempts at a merely fortu-
itous cohesion in the face of the incoherence and chaos of life-energies. . .”
80
“. . .and how does it compare to the transmigration of souls, or rein-

carnation?”
“. . .again, most theories of metempsychosis see the soul as too unified
– either being reborn at different stages, or purified over time, but in this
view, the energies are far more diffuse, like a current of wind blowing
through a field of wheat. . .”
“. . .but I don’t see the connection between the eternal return and these
energies. . .”
“. . .Klossowski saw the eternal return as the moment where one becomes
aware of these energies – aware that while one’s own, individual life is once-
and-for-all, the energies underlying one’s self are eternal; however, the self
dissolves into these immanent energies precisely at the moment of its
reaching the strength to realize their existence. Nietzsche referred to the
moment as a ‘hohe Stimmung’ – it has been translated into English as a ‘high
tonality of the soul’: as one reaches this point, one’s ego, one’s rationality,
disintegrates as bounded consciousness merges into the boundlessness of
the energies. . .”
“. . .but what happens then – can it be endured?”
“. . .it’s a strange paradox, for while one is thrown outside oneself into
that moment of pure becoming, one forgets oneself; but, when one
returns to consciousness one forgets the experience, and forgets the flux
of identities one is composed of – in fact, you must forget, because if you
didn’t, you would never emerge from the chaos. . .the revelation would
be a break-down in one’s coherence as a self. . .”
“. . .so, if I have this right, what actually does return is the moment of
remembering the revelation, until one forgets it again. . .”
“. . .that’s right. . .”
“. . .but is that something an individual would willingly embrace? It
seems like a kind of death. . .”
“. . .there certainly is an aspect of death about it – or at least a death of the
self: everything is risked in that moment, as one is brought into coincidence
with pure becoming – a pure flux and reflux of energies. I think there must
always be some resistance to it: consciousness intervenes in order to create
a meaning for one’s life, because one cannot live in that state of pure becoming.
ere’s something like it in Lacan, also, where the breakdown of the symbolic
and imaginary psychic structures throws one into a psychosis. . .”
“. . .but wait, I’m confused: I understand the existential aspect you
described, where one uses the idea of the eternal return as a selective
81
process, and I think I understand the idea that certain intensities, if willed
strongly enough, return – as it’s obvious that anyone whose works or
actions were done with enough intensity will bring about the continued
existence of their energies: aer all, the fact we’re here exploring Shelley’s
life through his writing and actions is evidence enough of that. . .and yet,
what you are describing now seems to dissolve the very self that is doing
the willing, but to what end?”
“. . .I share your confusion – and I think Nietzsche did as well:
Klossowski admits that Nietzsche, in his late works and notebooks, was
still working through these ideas up to the point of his break-down in
Turin. From what I understand, Klossowski’s point is that the willing of
the eternal return is the willing of a merging of oneself with the intensity
of that chaos of life-energy – what Nietzsche referred to as the will to
power, the result of which is. . .well, it’s difficult to describe. For
Nietzsche, the will to power – which of course was just a term for what-
ever that wind of will that blows through us actually is – seemed to be
that inchoate energy of life that desires its own augmentation. It’s never
at an equilibrium, but presses us always to desire more, so we are in
a continuous metamorphosis. Klossowski emphasized the fact that this
is not the mere shiing of masks of identity, but an actual becoming
through these successive states. . .I’m trying to remember exactly how he
put it – I think he wrote, ‘to lead intention back to intensity’: in other
words, we begin as a self, intentionally willing such intensities eternally,
and we end up obliterating the very self that has done the willing through
its ultimate absorption in the intensity of life-energy. . .”
“. . .but that still begs the question, doesn’t it? Why would one will that
to happen?”
“. . .let me put it this way: consider those individuals who do embrace
intensity either in their works or their actions – for example, serious artists,
thinkers, or writers. ere’s a direct relation between the intensity with
which they engage their works and the quality of the works themselves,
which ultimately we judge by some combination of their singularity and
their lastingness. In the case of such figures, the willing of the eternal return
comes via the willing of the kind of intense concentration and creativity
that has brought about the works. At some point, their ‘intention leads
them to intensity,’ and their intensity leads to an annihilation of self –
either directly, in the case of the instabilities that intensity leads to in figures
like Hölderlin, Novalis, Shelley, Keats, Nerval, Schumann, Nietzsche, Van
8
Gogh, Munch, Nijinsky, Artaud, Woolf, Plath, Charlie Parker, or Rothko;

or indirectly, in the sense that there’s a certain obliteration of the self in
those figures who give themselves completely over to the task of the work
which possessed them, as was the case with figures like Kant, Beethoven,
Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Mahler, Rodin, Proust, Joyce, or Picasso.
eir selves are dissolved in their works, and in how society takes up the
work once it has been created. e result is a kind of posthumous, inor-
ganic life for their energies, and organic life insofar as organic beings like
us are affected by and instantiate their energies. . .”
“. . .so, as I understand it, it’s a paradox: the reason for enduring such
self-annihilation is that one lives beyond one’s bodily dissolution via
these disembodied energies. . .”
“. . .right, it’s paradoxical in a certain regard, but I believe the paradox is
resolved by understanding that both positions are the same thing seen from
different viewpoints – the individual and the species. Nietzsche once wrote
that one wills the eternal return to stave off dissolution and incomplete-
ness, but the paradox is that it isn’t the dissolution of the self that mattered
to him, but the dissolution of the species – or at least as embodied by what
he referred to as the ‘higher beings’ and how they were enacting the possible
future of the species at the threshold of the species’ evolution. e indi-
vidual is an illusion, or perhaps a ‘perspective,’ while the truer reality is the
flux of energies that flows through the species; therefore, it isn’t really about
the mere self-aggrandizement of a single individual human life via renown,
but rather about expanding the potentiality of the species: it has to do with
what Nietzsche called sovereignty. Nietzsche and Klossowski sketched out
what it is, but not why it is. I think Nietzsche would answer the question,
‘What is the meaning of life?’ by simply stating ‘life,’ in all its ambiguity,
adding ‘the will to power’ to designate the always expanding nature of life.
Certainly the formation of singular and sovereign individuals, ‘agents of
variability,’ as I call them, has a purpose in expanding human existence, but
that’s not the same as saying there’s an intrinsic meaning beyond itself – or
at least one that is knowable. . .”
“. . .but how does an individual come to will these forces – or, perhaps
I should say, how do these forces ‘choose’ an individual through which
to be willed?”
“. . .it’s probably unknowable, but certainly a life lived in a certain way,
like Shelley’s, opens one to these forces which are enacted through one’s
choices. . .”
8
“. . .but obviously not everyone is affected so intensely – aside from

Nietzsche and people like the others you named, it seems to me that the
eternal return is only for the select few. . .”
“. . .yes, certainly only a select few can take it as far as Nietzsche did –
he’s an extreme case. Klossowski’s book suggests a different view of
Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin than the usual accounts: whereas most
biographers and critics see it as the unfortunate result of Nietzsche’s
syphilis, Klossowski suggests that it was part of a general trajectory that
led Nietzsche to the point where he coincided with this deeper flux of
life energy and ceased being bounded by his identity, giving over to the
flow of energies that have taken up various names in history – signing
himself, in his final letters, ‘Dionysus,’ ‘the Crucified,’ and a whole host
of other names. To Jacob Burckhardt, he wrote he was ‘greeting the
immortals,’ and it turned out to be true! Burckhardt always dismissed
Nietzsche as a precocious child, but nowadays Burckhardt is a footnote
in the history of historiography – an important footnote, of course, in
that he was the first to frame the idea of the Renaissance, but in compar-
ison to Nietzsche’s accomplishments and renown he pales in compar-
ison. . .”
“. . .so Klossowski sees his final insanity as something good?”
“. . .good?. . .perhaps an apotheosis, in that it was his loss of identity
that enabled his total dissolution into pure energy. You can see a similar
extreme in Hölderlin, who referred to himself, in his final poems written
from his tower, as ‘your humble servant Scardanelli’; and in Artaud, who
in the asylum at Rodez referred to himself as ‘God,’ the ‘Anti-Christ,’
‘Cain,’ ‘Saint Antonin,’ and so on; still, as I said, these are the extremes,
and they might fruitfully be compared to people speaking in tongues
during ecstatic religious rituals. ose artists who give themselves over to
the task of the work might also be seen as enacting a similar but more
moderate dissolution of their identities in their works when they create
their worlds – for example, James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, which I think
presents the same process, in that each of the characters melts into the
universal: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker is both a man and Everyman
– ‘Here Comes Everybody,’ as he’s also referred to; or, in a different
manner, the vast panoply of characters in Balzac’s world. . .”
“. . .but is it possible for less extraordinary individuals – for example,
would you see someone losing themselves in compassion for the plight
of others as an example?”
8
“. . .certainly – it’s contained in the very word ‘selflessness’: giving over

to the underlying flow of things needn’t be only artistic, and it needn’t
even be this complete giving over: Nietzsche wrote that to experience
a moment that one would want to return eternally even once is to want
the return of everything. To have had a single perfect day, for example, will
affect all one’s days, so that at even the worst of times, there is the lingering
trace of that day imbuing all the other days with its intensity. . .”
“. . .here’s the food. . .”
e waitress removes the salad plates, while the maître d’ sets the plates
on the table, pours the rest of the wine into their glasses, takes their order
for a second bottle, and wishes them a good meal.
“. . .ravioli was the last Italian pasta dish I held out against, because I had
this image of the ravioli I was fed as a boy in America – it was terrible: it
came from a can, and was this chewy pasta wrapped around some
synthetically-produced cheese, smeared in a sickeningly sweet tomato
sauce. . .”
“. . .at least you had that – in Czechoslovakia under communism you
had to request a little cup of ketchup separately to go with the mass of
rancid bread crust and leathery cheese substance that was supposed to be
pizza. . .”
“. . .that’s changed – in Prague, anyway. . .but there’s still a long way to
go to reach this. . .”
e maître d’ comes with second bottle of wine and two new glasses,
opens it for tasting, and aerwards pours them each another glass.
“. . .so, here’s the most difficult question of all: do you believe the
theory?”
“. . .which part of it?”
“. . .any of it. . .”
“. . .I don’t believe the cosmological aspect in the strict sense, especially
when he’s trying to be scientific in order to support it. . .”
“. . .‘strict sense’? Do you believe it in any sense?”
“. . .considering just the cosmological aspect, from a philosophical point
of view Heidegger was right that Nietzsche had no business trying to justify
a philosophical position via scientific means, as they’re entirely different
enterprises. Scientifically, the return of precisely the same state of matter
even once, let alone eternally, seems rather far-fetched to me. . .but, then
again, whether you’re looking at the universe as a whole through the lens
of string theory, or the latest data on genetics from the study of the
8
genome, or at something in between – like the weather as seen through

the lens of chaos theory, there is something to be said for the notion that
the world is a flux of becoming, with certain states recurring time and
time again. . .but precisely the same state? Take the weather as an example:
seasons recur, and even periodic cycles – but precisely the same day with
the same cloud formations? I think not. . .”
“. . .but what about all the other aspects of the concept you’ve been
talking about?”
“. . .I believe a good deal of it in regard to these immanent, inorganic
energies that surge through us and exist beyond our spatial and temporal
identities, and I believe in the existential aspect of utilizing our realiza-
tion of it as a process of selection and intensification. . .”
“. . .but can one will those energies, the way that Nietzsche imagines?
It’s still not clear to me whether the energies determine the person they
select, or the person chooses to will the energies. . .”
“. . .I’m not sure if it was clear to Nietzsche himself – at times he felt
himself a giant walking among the dwarves of his own age, but most of
the time he felt he was a victim of forces, of thoughts, stronger than he
could endure. . .but, still, he ‘loved his fate’. . .”
“. . .have you ever experienced anything like what Nietzsche experi-
enced?”
“. . .the eternal return?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .yes, I believe so. . .I would say I’ve had an experience that had aspects
of what he described. . .not so much the feeling that we return again and
again, but rather the feeling of being released into that flux of energies,
into eternity – but it’s not so easy to describe it. . .there’s something very
true about Klossowski’s insisting on the loss of identity. Maurice
Blanchot wrote, if I remember correctly, ‘the self has never been the
subject of this experience,’ and I think what he meant is that at the very
point of the experience, the self is dissolved into that flux. at part of it
seems very accurate to me. . .only later, aer the experience, did I realize
what it meant for me. . .”
“. . .tell me about it. . .”
“. . .well, it doesn’t seem like much to tell, but for me it changed every-
thing. . .I was walking down a street: it was along a white wall, on the
other side of which was a small, private park. It was late spring, about
seven or eight o’clock in the evening, and I looked up at the trees in the
8
park – the sun filtering through them, a clear blue sky above. . .suddenly,
I felt myself lose my hold on everything – a feeling of melting, releasing
into. . .hovering, but seemingly motionless. . .a strange kind of light – no,
it wasn’t the light, it was in my gaze itself, although I can’t really describe
it. . .I don’t know how long it was – it felt like an eternity, but anyone on
the street watching me probably wouldn’t have noticed anything strange
about me at all. . .aerwards, or I hesitate to say ‘aerwards’ because it
seemed immediate, it came to me – more a feeling than a thought, of
absolute freedom, but also a feeling of fate, even though they seem
contradictory. . .both lightness and heaviness – a feeling of falling
upwards into the sky – like when Hölderlin wrote ‘Man kann auch in die
Höhe fallen, so wie in die Tiefe’ – ‘One can as well fall into height as into
depth’. . .”
“. . .when did you realize its full significance for you?”
“. . .at first it was only an abstract feeling, but then, what grew in me
was the sense that I was the center of my own destiny, my own choices,
and that no one was watching – I kept repeating that to myself, over and
over: ‘no one is watching,’ ‘no one is watching’. . .”
“. . .did you mean God or society?”
“. . .everything really – God, society, my family, my friends. . .it’s uncanny,
really, because I felt I had been a mature adult making my way in the world,
but I began to see how many of my choices had been based on reacting to
what life placed before me, rather than actively creating my life. Aer this
experience, I began to act more in concert with how I felt at the deepest
level – it felt even a bit dangerous. . .”
“. . .it’s bound to collide with how others feel. . .”
“. . .to say the least! I became more certain of myself, less willing to put
up with the follies of others – I lost many friends, or, rather, I broke with
many people I had previously considered to be friends. It affected my
work life, too: I had had trouble putting up with the self-serving petti-
ness and self-importance of academic life before I had the experience, but
aerwards it became intolerable, so I put myself in a situation where I was
beholden to no one – with no real superiors or colleagues, and, conse-
quently, no obligatory collegiality. . .and finally, I even broke away from
that in the end. . .”
“. . .broke away to what?”
“. . .to a sovereign life. I don’t regret it, despite the risks and difficulties
involved: it’s charting unknown territories, so one has to exercise caution,
8
and still caution is never enough: one learns and grows through one’s
inevitable mistakes – a mistake-free or trouble-free life would be a very
static one, I’m afraid. . .”
“. . .I suppose that’s why Nietzsche added the concept of amor fati to
the eternal return – we’re not going to escape our fate, so we should
embrace it. . .”
“. . .it takes a great deal of strength to say, as Nietzsche did, ‘I love not
knowing the future’. . .”
“. . .I agree – but, speaking about the near future, do you want some
dessert?”
“. . .let’s see what they have. . .”
He summons the waitress to their table, and she brings them a dessert
menu.
“. . .look at all of these desserts: cheeses, chocolates – and the cigars!”
“. . .this is all new to me: what do you suggest?”
“. . .here, this is good, and it’s a classic – very light: Semieddo di
zabaione al Marsala. . .”
“. . .it’s quite simple, but delicious: it’s an egg frothed up with sugar and
a sweet Marsala wine at just the right temperature to become fluffy and
creamy, in this case served semi-cold in summer. . .”
“. . .will you have it also?”
“. . .yes. . .”
“. . .all right. . .”
“. . .and I think I’ll give myself a really special treat for being here in Pisa. . .”
“. . .a cigar?”
“. . .yes. . .here’s a very nice cigar-digestif combination – a 190 Darti-
galongue Armagnac with a Cohiba Lanceros – quite enticing. . .”
“. . .is that a good combination?”
“. . .the cigar is one of the best, as far as I’m concerned, and we’ll see
about the Armagnac. . .”
e waitress comes to clear their plates and take their order.
“. . .there’s something I’m not clear about. . .”
“. . .yes?”
“. . .as I understand it, for Nietzsche – or at least for Nietzsche in
Klossowski’s interpretation, reality is this ebb and flow of energies, of
becoming, but what is the relationship between becoming and being? Is
becoming just being in motion – in time?”
88
“. . .well, that’s the question – I’ll need that cigar to be able to answer
it! Nietzsche himself wasn’t always entirely clear on the question, so
anything I have to say is speculation. First of all, Nietzsche felt the true
state of reality was one of becoming, and that any positing of being would
be to ‘slander’ reality: by the positing of being he meant any kind of meta-
physical speculation about the world beyond appearances. . .”
“. . .but isn’t positing the ultimate nature of reality as becoming equally
positing a metaphysical belief ?”
“. . .yes – of course there’s a bit of a paradox there, but the point is that
Nietzsche insisted that the world was as you see it, not transcendently
hidden behind appearances; however, at the same time, like Kant, he
insisted we have no real understanding of those appearances. In fact,
whenever we posit some ultimate knowledge of reality, we pin down
becoming, turning it into being. For example, Nietzsche felt that
becoming does not reach a final state – does not flow into being: it has an
equal value at every moment, or, rather, no value at all. Actually,
Nietzsche felt if the world could attain being just once in its existence, it
would come to an end – but he didn’t feel that was possible. If you think
about it, it’s an overturning of Platonism: where Plato posits an ultimate
world of ideals behind the flux of reality, Nietzsche suggests the flux of
becoming is exactly that, with nothing behind it. For Nietzsche, any such
positing of universals was the result of men suffering from the state of
becoming, and was due to our subjectivity – our need to delimit exis-
tence through positing goals and attributing ultimate meanings. . .”
“. . .but isn’t willing the eternal return doing precisely that – projecting
a meaning onto the flux of becoming?”
“. . .I think Nietzsche rather saw it as a movement where one first aligns
oneself with the flux of becoming through acknowledging it, and then,
in the full light of that acknowledgment, one wills the eternal return
anyway. . .”
“. . .so his position is that interpretations are always just fabrications. . .”
“. . .that’s right. . .what emerges is not a transcendental truth coming
from beyond us, but an existential meaning coming from within.
Nietzsche felt we couldn’t live in a state of pure becoming, as it would
be deadly for us. Klossowski actually revels in those dangers in his sense
of the ecstatic loss of selood that comes, but, in truth, Nietzsche was
rather ambivalent about going that far. He went only so far as to say that
the ‘higher men’ will not be crushed by this vision of pure becoming
89
without being: without ultimate meaning, without absolute truth,

without a philosophical system like Hegel or an ideological system like
Marx, without a transcendent God. e higher man will be able to hero-
ically wrest from the flux of becoming self-willed forms of life. In his final
notebooks he wrote a famous line about it: ‘To imprint the character of
being upon becoming – that is the highest will to power’; of course, that
line became one of the key points for Heidegger’s attack upon Nietzsche
in his famous cycle of lectures on Nietzsche, from 19 through 190. . .”
“. . .why?”
“. . .the short answer is that Heidegger saw the line as a significant piece
of evidence that Nietzsche had tried, and failed, to rid his philosophy of
metaphysics, in that having rid philosophy of being, Nietzsche was
bringing it back in again. . .”
“. . .do you agree?”
“. . .no, not at all. In regard to that one line, Heidegger’s argument is
wrong by the simple fact that the next line in that same fragment suggests
that this ‘imprinting of being upon becoming’ is a ‘dual falsification by
the senses and by the mind’: in other words, while we wrest meaning out
of chaos through our will to power, our doing so, as I said before, is
a fabrication, and we must know it. Heidegger conveniently ignored
those qualifications; nonetheless, we’re just touching the tip of the
iceberg of the complex relation between their philosophies – and that
relation cuts to the very question of being and becoming, given that
Nietzsche is considered the ‘philosopher of becoming’ while Heidegger
is considered the ‘philosopher of being’. . .”
“. . .and that brings us back to the question. . .”
“. . .as I said, it’s a difficult question!”
“. . .so how do you see the difference between their philosophies?”
“. . .well, there’s a bit of bad faith in Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche:
he declared that his lectures were designed to bring Nietzsche’s work to
an ‘unfolding,’ as if he were giving them their just tribute, but the truth
is, like most philosophers, he was cleaning the slate of his predecessors in
order to create a position for himself within the history of philosophy.
I think it’s especially true in the case of Heidegger’s relationship to
Nietzsche, because they are both vying for the title of the philosopher
who brought a close to the western metaphysical tradition and inaugu-
rated a new tradition. Critics have noted that there are implicit references
to Nietzsche in Heidegger’s Sein und Seit on every page, and yet
90
Heidegger only explicitly refers to Nietzsche three times, whereas he pays

considerably more explicit attention to philosophers like Kant and Hegel
who matter significantly less to him. . .”
“. . .so he deliberately covered over Nietzsche’s influence?”
“. . .deliberately? I think it was closer to what Harold Bloom calls the
‘anxiety of influence,’ where the younger figures wrestles in an almost
oedipal manner with the adopted ‘father’ figure. In any case, Heidegger
basically asks Nietzsche’s texts to play by a different set of rules than they
set for themselves. For Heidegger, Nietzsche was metaphysical in several
regards, but especially in the nexus of the concepts of the eternal return
and its relationship to the will to power and the Übermensch. He felt that
Nietzsche’s overturning of Platonism simply re-inscribed the same terms,
arguing that what Plato had taken for the world of appearances was the
real reality: for Heidegger, the whole notion of ‘real reality’ should have
been discarded. He had a number of other problems too, but of course,
the actual problem for Heidegger was that Nietzsche’s philosophy of
becoming had no room for an analysis of Being – in a certain sense, it
even contradicted Heidegger’s philosophy. . .”
“. . .you’re losing me. . .”
“. . .look at it this way: on the one hand there is a great deal in common
between the two philosophers – both wanted to overturn metaphysics;
both hunted down the forms of bad faith in everyday life – Nietzsche
through his genealogy, Heidegger through his analysis of Being; both
projected an existential way of being that entailed forging one’s own
destiny. . .and yet, despite those great similarities, there’s a fundamental
disparity between them circling around the question of being and
becoming. Heidegger essentially felt the real problem with the history of
western philosophy is that it has obscured ‘Being,’ taking it as referring
to entities, not as existence in itself. For Heidegger, what matters is the
pure fact of ‘Being’ beyond the entities that are beings. Nietzsche’s
emphasis on the will to power and willing the eternal return is focused
on the entities doing the willing, not on Being in this larger sense, while
Heideggerian Being is transcendent to beings, and thus cannot be
controlled by a will to power. So, for Heidegger, the only perspective
from which to philosophize, transcendent Being, is not recognized by
Nietzsche, while for Nietzsche, the whole point is to abolish any tran-
scendence: each finds the other metaphysical for different reasons. . .”
“. . .so, they are opposites to each other?”
91
“. . .to a certain extent they are, although I’m not so convinced it is an

unbridgeable chasm – even Heidegger admitted that Nietzsche’s thought
concealed something ‘unthought’; for example, the kind of ecstatic shat-
tering of subjectivity that seems to occur as a result of the revelation of
the eternal return might even be the source of how Heidegger sees the
‘ecstases of temporality’ that we are assailed by when we have an
authentic relation to our own being-in-time. . .”
“. . .here comes some ecstasy right now. . .”
e waitress brings two crystal bowls of zabaione, a large cigar ashtray,
and small tray with a cigar, wooden matches, and a cigar cutter.
“. . .so how did you like the zabaione?”
“. . .it’s delicious – very light. . .
He removes the yellow label, cuts the cigar, chars the end with a match,
and then lights it with a series of light puffs followed by a long drag.
“. . .what about your cigar?
“. . .perfect. . .”
“. . .and the Armagnac?”
“. . .very nice – just what I needed. So, to return to what I was saying,
Nietzsche’s conception of becoming as a pure flux of life energy is, in my
view, not really all that different from Heidegger’s conception of Being,
for in Nietzsche’s view, this world of becoming – in which all space is
absorbed into time, seems synonymous with Being itself, in the same way
that temporality becomes an absolute horizon for Heidegger; in fact, you
might say that for Heidegger becoming is ‘being in motion,’ as you called
it earlier. . .”
“. . .does he say actually anything about becoming?”
“. . .not much – but I believe the reason why is precisely that the tempo-
rality of Being is so close to Nietzsche’s conception of becoming: it’s the
anxiety of influence again, so rather than making a direct comparison and
thereby calling attention to the similarity, Heidegger critiqued it by
calling it metaphysical. Where they differ the most is in their modes of
existence, and that influences their philosophical take on the question of
Being and becoming: Heidegger was fundamentally a provincial – a ‘sly
peasant,’ as Jean-François Lyotard called him. He was a nationalist who
kept slipping into the trap of talking about the destiny of the German
‘Volk,’ and who fell headlong into the mirage of German renewal offered
by the National Socialists. Nietzsche, in contrast, was a singular and soli-
tary cosmopolitan of sovereign sensibility and aristocratic bearing who
9
could adapt and thrive in Switzerland, Italy, or the south of France, who
despised his German roots, and who would never have fallen for the Nazi
ideology, despite what use they tried to make of his thought. Heidegger
was married to a frumpy Hausau, was eminently adapted to the dull
routine of academia, and, if his relations to the poet Paul Celan are
indicative, was rather obtuse in regard to his capacity for sympathy with
other people. Nietzsche seems to have been a – well, what to call it? –
perhaps an ‘ambi-sexual,’ who was so singular he could live with no one,
was entirely ill-adapted to academic life, and apparently was so sensitive
to others that it led, in the end, to empathy even for the beaten horse
whose neck he threw his arms around just before his final breakdown.
eir emotional and affective ‘climate’ was entirely different: Nietzsche’s
emotions and passions flew in all directions – tears of joy and tears of
despair: he was a philosopher who could dance, laugh and sing.
Heidegger, judging from all accounts, was rather somber, sober, and
lacking in any joy and lightness. If Nietzsche’s philosophy was the ‘gay
science,’ Heidegger’s was the ‘grave science.’ A friend of mine once made
the remark that Heidegger’s sensibility was ‘Catholic’ and Nietzsche
‘Protestant,’ and there’s some truth to it: despite both being lapsarian,
Nietzsche’s mode of being involved a great deal of self-castigation with
all its emphasis on ‘down-going’ and ‘overcoming,’ while Heidegger’s
mode of being seems a far more quiescent, ‘leave-things-be’ temperament
verging on the zen-like in his late works. . .perhaps the best way to explain
it is via Heraclitus, who was important to both thinkers. You know what
he said about rivers, yes?”
“. . .something about not being able to step into the same river twice?”
“. . .yes – it’s an image of becoming: in Sein und Seit Heidegger oen
posits images of authentic and inauthentic existence through images of
water. Authentic existence, or what Heidegger termed ‘Eigentlichkeit,’ is
connected to an awareness of the ‘thrownness’ of existence –
‘Geworfenheit,’ which he compared to taking a plunge into water: we are
simply thrown into our existences, and he compares the way we repress
this insight in everyday life via our being distracted by the ‘they’ – social
reality – through several processes, one of which he calls, using another
water metaphor, ‘eddying.’ If authenticity is being aware of how we are
carried forward for a finite period in the current of time, then false
consciousness is caused by the clouding of that awareness when we are
drawn by the ‘eddies’ or little whirlpools towards the shore by a variety of
9
attitudes: from simple ‘everydayness’ and ‘busyness,’ to what Heidegger

called, in one of those amazing phrases of his, ‘Alles-gesehen und Alles-
verstanden-haben,’ the attitude of ‘having-seen-everything and having-
understood-everything’. . .”
“. . .I know that attitude only too well! So if being drawn towards the
shore leads to inauthenticity, then I assume releasing oneself into the
center of the river, the flow of time, is the authentic position?”
“. . .sort of. . .Heidegger didn’t seem to think we could actually remain
there in the middle of current, but we could glean insights there, and
arrive at what he termed an authentic ‘Sein zum Tode’ or ‘being-towards-
death’ – basically an existential realization of one’s mortality. He
described two extremes leading away from it towards inauthenticity:
either running away from the realization into one of those attitudes
I mentioned, or dwelling on it too much to the point of paralysis. In
general, to follow out the river metaphor, he seems to have advocated
a regular fluctuation between experiencing the flow in the middle, and
moments of resting from it on the banks. . .”
“. . .so our lives are to be like a day of bathing?”
“. . .yes, in a way. Actually Bataille used very much the same metaphor
in Le Coupable – it’s so much like Heidegger that I wonder if he hadn’t
been reading him, or discussing him with Blanchot. He talks about
‘swimming through time’s waters’ and its various stages, including action,
rest, anguish, and then explosive loss of self, or what he termed ‘unpro-
ductive expenditure.’ He argues that the mistakes we make come from
a fear and avoidance of the water, on the one hand, or trying to use
a method, on the other. Swimming must be a ‘letting go’ – it’s very close
to Heidegger, with a bit more emphasis on the loss of self, or ‘ecstases of
temporality,’ as Heidegger termed it. . .”
“. . .so would Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return be an immersion
in the flow of becoming, and Klossowski’s view of the loss of identity
a result of the immersion?”
“. . .something very much like that. . .in my view, Nietzsche was more
courageous than Heidegger: where Heidegger developed an idea in his
later work of a ‘listening in to Being’ as if he were on the bank of the river
with his hand to his ear straining to hear the sound of the deeper stream,
Nietzsche advocates plunging into the current of becoming and swim-
ming against that current in a heroic but ultimately tragic effort before
inevitably going under. Nietzsche distrusted the more tranquil view of
9
eternity as timelessness; for example, he thought Spinoza’s concept of

eternal essences was naïve. For Nietzsche, the closest we come to eternity
is when the permutations of becoming ‘wash up’ something again aer
eons and eons, but, as I said before, awareness of the eternal return only
comes with the revelation – the ‘high noon’ when Zarathustra proclaims,
‘Quiet! Quiet! Did not the world become perfect just now? Did I not
fall – hark! – into the well of eternity?’. . .it’s an eternity of immanence,
not transcendence. . .”
“. . .so for Nietzsche eternity is merely the infinity of time passing,
against the background of which the awareness of the eternal return
appears periodically. . .”
“. . .that’s it exactly. . .”
“. . .but it seems there’s at least one suspended moment when the real-
ization comes. . .”
“. . .it seems so, although I think he would see that as something like
a glitch in time caused by losing consciousness. Although Heidegger also
appears to be against the possibility of eternity, I’d say that it lurks every-
where in his sense of Being. Actually, if I had to choose between the
visions, it would be for neither – I’d choose something closer to Henri
Bergson’s sense of time, duration and eternity, which is like a synthesis
of both: Bergson sees the present as a pure becoming, whereas the past
is where Being resides – it is in many ways identical with eternity. . .”
“. . .but it is Being that has passed, isn’t it? Can eternity have tempo-
rality? It’s precisely what is out of time I thought. . .”
“. . .his idea of the ‘a priori pure past’ is certainly composed of present
moments that have passed and are passing, but for Bergson, the past still
exists: in fact, he inverts our standard intuitions about time, in that he
sees the present moments passing – our ‘now’ – as having been, while he
sees the past still having a virtual existence in the present. . .”
“. . .you will have to explain that a bit more. . .”
“. . .at one point in Matter and Memory Bergson represents the ‘pure
past’ as an inverted cone of past events intersecting a plane which repre-
sents the present moment: see, this plane would be the horizon of the
present, and then as you move up or down the cone, here, closer or
further from the vertex, or present moment, the more or less contracted
or expanded the past is, so that, for example, the events of your personal
past would be closer to the vertex, while as you move further away from
the vertex you would be moving backwards in history and wider in social
9
space – each moment connected to all the others. For Bergson, the point
where the cone intersects the plane – the present – is actually only the
most contracted point of the past, as human consciousness is structured
so that we cannot experience the present directly and remain in a state of
rational consciousness. . .”
“. . .but what would he say to those who say that we experience the
present all of the time?”
“. . .he would say that what we are really experiencing consciously is
already memory – the immediate past, while the actual ‘pure present’ is
the point where action takes place, and only action – as no direct percep-
tion of the pure present is possible; actually, I think it was Kundera who
wrote that ‘the present always eludes us’. . .”
“. . .that’s right – and he also wrote that ‘all the sadness of life comes
from that fact’. . .”
“. . .we are suspended between our projected future – for example, ‘I
will take another drag on this cigar’ – and the immediate effect of that
activity in the immediate past. . .ummmm, nice. . .the two are so close
that they seem to overlap – in fact, Bergson wrote that the present is actu-
ally ‘the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.’ Our expe-
rience of the present blends them together, so that, in the same way the
persistence of vision causes the individual frames of a film to appear as
continuous motion, we feel as if the present were truly a conscious event,
and not something our perceptual and conceptual apparatus manufac-
tures out of past patterns and future projections, as the pure present itself
is too fleeting to bring into direct consciousness. . .”
“. . .let me see if I understand this: the pure present cannot be
consciously experienced, and therefore it must be experienced as the past
– which of course means the immediate present, surrounding us as we
exist in this ‘just-aer-now’ reality, is actually an existing past. . .”
“. . .that’s right, and, to go a step further up the cone, this immediate
past recedes, where its existence – or perhaps, following Deleuze, the
word subsistence is better, for it is a virtual existence – is still with us on
multiple levels. It can be recalled consciously as active memory, in
which case we make what Bergson calls a ‘dive into ontology’ as we
locate and experience the memory, bringing the past of a present
moment into our current present – or I should say our immediate past,
as the present moment is always just out of sight – or, we can recall the
past as an involuntary memory. . .”
9
“. . .the Proust experience. . .”

“. . .precisely – a past moment suddenly invades our present, and, as
Proust shows, we can be more in that past-present than our present-
present, carried away in time. Then, even more diffusely, our whole
past experience operates semi-consciously or unconsciously in every
present moment, which of course attaches to the whole of human
history – almost everything we do is an instantiation of the past at
various levels of contraction and expansion. To use the analogy of
language, it feels as if we had a total freedom to say whatever we want,
but we are utilizing a grammar, syntax, phonetics, morphology, and
semantics that derive from the entire system of language synchronically
– in its current state in time, and diachronically – in its historical state.
How often do people speak in predictable ways, and how much of our
lives are awash in clichés and worn-out formulas? The pure past is a bit
like a behavioral, conceptual, and historical repertoire from which we
draw our actions, thoughts, feelings, emotions, instincts, and affects –
unconsciously on the expanded level, consciously on the contracted
level. . .”
“. . .but then what prevents us from a mere repetition of the past –
where is there freedom?”
“. . .that’s precisely the issue in most of Bergson’s work. In his first work,
Time and Free Will, Bergson distinguished between the superficial and
fundamental aspects of our selves. On the superficial level, much of
human behavior is precisely as I just described it: over-determined by the
repetition of the past where we simply enact this repertoire of past
actions. For Bergson, a good deal of human behavior comes under this
aspect of the superficial self, as he sees truly free acts as exceptional. He
associated true freedom with the singularity of the fundamental self in
its deepest manifestation unfolding over time, emphasizing that a free act
involved a gestation period, followed by its sudden advent – like a fruit
which has slowly ripened on a tree and which suddenly drops. e act
itself is both born out of a series of past actions leading up to it, and
a rupture with the past. Later, in his book Matter and Memory, he delin-
eated what is a rather more complicated version of freedom, concluding
there are not just free and determined acts, but a continuum between the
two extremes, and most importantly an interplay between the level of
matter and the level of spirit. . .”
“. . .spirit?”
9
“. . .from what I understand about his use of the term, it’s something
like what Spinoza meant by the ‘attribute of thought,’ which he
contrasted with ‘extension’; in other words, spirit would be anything
from intensive states of consciousness to our linguistic and symbolic
systems to non-organic life forms, in the sense of life-energies once they
are disconnected from the individual who instantiated them. . .”
“. . .like the traces of Shelley, Mary, and Claire we are seeking. . .”
“. . .yes. For Bergson, the site of action was in the pure present, and it is
our faculty of immediate perception and the reflexes of our body that
keep us operating within what he termed ‘the rhythm of necessity.’ What
opened the possibility for freedom was our faculty of memory – in the
larger sense of pure memory: memory is not something inside us, rather
we are in memory, which he called the ‘domain of spirit.’ e function of
memory is to grasp via intuition in a given moment the multiple
moments of duration through which our perceptions confront matter,
and to match the perceptions with the repertoire of memory images so
as to be able to create action. He describes it as a certain tension – as the
various habits we have ‘ascend’ from matter to seek similar memory
images, while memory images descend from spirit towards habits: the
greater the tension produced within a given duration, the more intensity
of life we have, and consequently the greater amount of freedom. . .”
“. . .I know I am always asking questions like this – probably a reflex
from being brought up under socialism where we pretended an equality
that didn’t, in fact, exist, but what determines the difference between
those who remain merely mechanical, and those who experience greater
degrees of freedom – what leads to that greater intensity?”
“. . .if there are fewer memory images available to create this tension,
there are fewer possibilities open in that instant; therefore, it seems to
depend on the extent of memory one is able to draw upon and process
via reflection, which obviously means the level of one’s intelligence, but
it is a very special form of intelligence. Bergson writes of a more complex
nervous system with a higher retention of the past, so that one has the
ability to wait before reacting, and then place a given perception received
into the context of a richer variety of possible reactions. I would guess
that includes anything from individual, psychological memory to socio-
historical and cultural memory. . .”
“. . .let me see if I understand it correctly: we cannot ‘be’ in the pure
present, but that’s where action occurs, so our freedom depends upon
98
what occurs in that precise ‘now’. . .”

“. . .right. . .”
“. . .and, consequently, if we have a larger repertoire of memory images,
in that moment of combination of image and impulse, we will have
a larger variety of reactions to the moment, and the greater chance of
spirit over-determining matter with a new possibility – therefore greater
freedom. . .”
“. . .precisely. . .”
“. . .but how would you see the difference between Nietzsche’s concep-
tion of the intensely willed act and Bergson’s conception of the free act?”
“. . .at first glance they seem rather different, in that Bergson’s idea of
the free act arises indirectly out of the general level of spirit one attains,
while Nietzsche’s comes directly from the intentional act of willing, but
they’re more alike than meets the eye: I believe Bergson’s conception of
duration is very similar to Nietzsche’s conception of becoming. Consider
the fact that Bergson wrote that our bodies are a ‘section of the universal
becoming,’ and that he saw our mind as carving out reality from the flux
of becoming: it’s remarkably close to what Nietzsche wrote. While
Nietzsche wrote that we ‘imprint being upon becoming’ through willing
the eternal return, Bergson wrote that free acts are those that are ‘able to
fix, at long intervals, that becoming to which their own becoming clings,’
and Bergson saw the purpose of this was ‘to be able to obtain a fulcrum
for our action’. . .”
“. . .so if Heidegger’s sense of the moment of eternity is one of being,
and Nietzsche’s one of becoming, what would it be for Bergson?”
“. . .his particular emphasis, which can be seen in his book e Two
Sources of Morality and Religion, is not so much on the mystical experi-
ence, per se, as on what he felt should derive from the mystical experience:
it shouldn’t be a static moment of contemplation, but should result in
action in the world, which suggests a bit of both. What I find interesting
to speculate about is that Bergson’s theory suggests that rather than
having to choose between a timeless moment of eternity and one which
melts into the pure becoming of passing moments, there might be two
possible portals to this other reality outside our quotidian one, both
involving a shattering of consciousness and selood: one portal would
lead into the pure present – into pure becoming, and that would obvi-
ously lead to an experience something like that Nietzsche had at Sils-
Maria, and which one finds in William Blake, Klossowski and Bataille;
99
and, the other portal would lead to the experience of the pure past or
eternity, the timeless moment one finds in Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Rilke,
or Eliot. . .”
“. . .so one portal represents the penetration into the pure present, the
other the pure past?”
“. . .yes. . .and for Bergson, as I said, the importance of the experience
must be how it affects one’s actions in the world. . .”
“. . .in other words, the future – but what about the future? It occurs to
me that if somehow the past continues to exist as this pure past or eter-
nity affecting the present, it might also affect the future. . .”
“. . .Bergson only said that the pure present is a combination of the pure
past and our projection of the future, but aside from that, he has no
conception of a ‘pure future’; however, it seems to me that his figure of
the cone actually gives a very nice image of how the pure past does affect
the future, because, if you think about it, the geometrical description of
how a cone is constructed is that you take a straight line, or generatrix,
and with it intersect a fixed point, or vertex, on a plane. . .let me show
you – I’ll draw it here. . .there, like that. . .and then you ‘stir it’ like
a swizzle stick in a martini glass so that the unfixed end of the line moves
around a fixed curve, or directrix, forming the surface of the cone, or
nappe. . .if you imagine the generatrix passing through the plane as an
infinite line, it draws the mirror image of the opposite nappe on the other
side of the plane. . .like this. . .so, for every cone you really have another
‘virtual’ cone meeting at the vertex – it’s a bit like Yeats’ cones from
A Vision, although his cones interpenetrate one another. . .”
“. . .so, the upper, actual cone is the past, the lower, virtual cone is the
future. . .”
“. . .yes, but, as far as I see it, not the future as something pre-determined
or pre-existing, but as a state of possibility and potentiality that has more
or less contracted or diffused states of anticipation and projection in rela-
tion to the contracted or diffused states of the past on the other side of
the cone. . .”
“. . .so the future projections are mirroring the image of the past?”
“. . .not in the sense of an absolute determination of the future: while we
do have a strong instinctive element determining our actions, we are
potentially capable of diverging from the mechanisms of habit; still, the
future is not merely a void waiting for us to populate it with our actions:
it seems to me that in the same way immanent energies from the past act
00
in the present and create susceptibilities and even determinations for

future action with varying degrees of contraction and expansion, as on
the past side of the cone. . .”
“. . .do you mean in regard to the degree to which the past affects the
future?”
“. . .yes. . .the point of contraction closest to the vertex of the present
would be the densest point of probability, while as you move further
away from the vertex into the future side, probability decreases or
weakens into potentialities and possibilities: for example, we project
a trip tomorrow – our immediate future, to San Giuliano, and so when
tomorrow arrives this immediate past will have had a direct relation to
our immediately past intention, just as we had, in the somewhat more
distant past, a vaguer idea of this entire trip which we are realizing now,
but not quite in the way we imagined it. To jump from the more
contracted to the more diffuse relation between past and future, Shelley’s
existence in the early 19th Century, and his coming to Italy from 1818 to
18, could in no way have directly anticipated our journey here and
now, but it certainly has played the determining role in our decision: the
intensity of his choices then relates to our decision now – albeit far more
diffusely. . .”
“. . .so over time the past becomes more diffuse, more indirect. . .”
“. . .yes, but in the case of this intensity Bergson speaks about it is still
powerful – aer all, to live an existence so intensely that it brings others
to explore the memory-traces indicates a considerable degree of imma-
nence. . .”
“. . .is it the intensity itself that causes the effect on the future?”
“. . .according to Bergson, the greater the tension between spirit and
matter the greater the intensity, and the greater the intensity the greater the
potential for freedom: putting that in the context of Nietzsche, it would
mean the free willing of active energies, and in its most intense form, the
willing of the eternal return and the sovereignty which results. . .”
“. . .but is the intensity merely a complex form of cause and effect?”
“. . .at the outer limit it seems to be about evolution – or at least that’s
the direction Bergson chose to take in his book, Creative Evolution. ere,
he argued against Lamarck – the standard version of evolution in the
France of his day, which he found too deterministic and end-oriented;
instead, he advanced the concept of what he termed ‘creative evolution’:
an open-ended process that began with the initial life impulse – ‘élan vital’
01
– which diverged into the energies of instinct and intelligence. He saw

instinct, which he connected to matter and mechanism, as invariable, and
intelligence, which he connected to spirit, as variable, but he felt neither
alone was capable of arriving at any real truth. e closest we can get to the
truth is what he termed intuition, which he saw as a mixture of the abstrac-
tion of intelligence with the immediacy of instinct. He felt that the knowl-
edge intuition yielded, primarily through our self-awareness of the dura-
tion of our own subjectivity, led to what he termed a ‘metaphysics of life.’
is wasn’t an absolute knowledge but an approximate knowledge; but
still, it opened a movement towards higher stages of spirit. . .”
“. . .it reminds me somewhat of Luhmann, with the instinctive side
playing the role of the system, the creative side playing the role of vari-
ability. . .”
“. . .the primary difference between them was that Luhmann focused
upon the invariable or systemic side of life, while Bergson focused upon
the variable or ‘creative’ side: with Luhmann I always get the sense that
any freedom or variability is bound to become determined almost imme-
diately, while Bergson believed human consciousness was able to break
free of determinations. . .”
“. . .but coming back to the ‘why?’ question. . .I don’t suppose there’s
any real answer, then, is there?”
“. . .I suppose whether one labels it ‘will to power’ or élan vital, being
or becoming, it’s all the same, really: as I said before, the meaning of life
seems to be simply ‘life,’ or at least outside of any metaphysical or reli-
gious dogmas or ideologies. . .”
“. . .but Bergson believed in an open-ended evolution, and Nietzsche
spoke of the Übermensch, so clearly there was a direction, if not a goal. . .”
“. . .yes, and Luhmann spoke of increasing functional differentiation
and complexity, and yet neither he nor Nietzsche held the idea that such
complexity would be qualitatively ‘better’: Nietzsche held the view that
it was false to hold the sentient world of animate nature as somehow
higher than the inanimate world, while Luhmann’s works exhibit a kind
of dark pessimism about society. Of the figures we’ve been discussing,
only Bergson could really be seen as somewhat within the Enlightenment
tradition, believing in a clear ‘onwards and upwards’ of the spirit. . .”
“. . .and there’s Shelley too. . .”
“. . .of course, but even Shelley seems to have reached a rather pessimistic
end. . .”
0
“. . .but tell me – what do you think?”

“. . .truly? I think that to say the meaning of life is any of these things,
or even to say it is just ‘life,’ is already to say a great deal. I agree with the
attack on metaphysics launched by Nietzsche and Heidegger, as it was an
attack against what I call ‘bed-time stories’ – the stories that people tell
themselves thinking they are speaking of the deep truth and mystery of
life, but which actually mask the real mystery of life. I’m not against the
kind of religious, metaphysical beliefs that are open-ended and sustain
mystery, but those religious ideologies that try to harmonize and tran-
quilize life behind platitudes, explanations, and certainties, and which
produce the kind of petty moralizing of the ‘right-thinking people’?
I detest them as much as I detest the kind of common-sense, matter-of-
fact scientific mindset that likewise thinks it can explain away all the
mysteries of life. In my view, philosophers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and
Bergson are and always will be metaphysical, but in the best sense of the
word, in that they replace the easy answer with an answer that extends
the mystery, taking questioning as far as they can without closing it down
– as do the various 0th century attempts to take this kind of speculative
thought further by thinkers such as Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski,
Deleuze, Luhmann, Nancy, and others. . .”
“. . .so you don’t think their answers amount to saying life is only the
will to power, or just the flux of becoming, or merely life?”
“. . .no, I think their philosophies are very affirmative: they function to
keep things open and variable, and they give us ways to think about how
we conduct our lives in a post-Enlightenment world where there are few
clear-cut ethical rules, which is saying a great deal given we live in a world
over-whelmed by religious fanatics and ideologues on the one hand, and
superficial empiricists and ‘realists’ on the other. . .”
“. . .how do you mean ‘post-Enlightenment’? Do you think we are
already enlightened?”
“. . .not at all – it means we are beyond the era when we believe
Enlightenment projects will be fully and finally achieved. I think the ‘revo-
lutions’ of 1989 conveniently represent a date exactly two centuries aer
the French Revolution – arguably the first full-fledged Enlightenment
project – when we can symbolically declare the end of such projects with
the collapse of communism. Kant declared in his 18 essay, ‘What is
Enlightenment?’ that his period was decidedly not an enlightened age, but
was an ‘age of enlightenment’: Michel Foucault, writing a reflection on
0
Kant’s essay using the same title two centuries later, declared, ‘I do not
know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood.’ It’s not that the
Enlightenment projects were wrong, it’s just that they were focused too
much on a progressivism or utopianism which projected the reaching of
a final stage of history, but which hasn’t been borne out by history. . .”
“. . .certainly not by communism. . .”
“. . .that’s one of the key points behind my interest in Shelley: Shelley
saw the openings that the Enlightenment offered in regard to self-deter-
mination and self-creation beyond the given social order, although, like
everyone then, he failed to see that liberty was just the beginning, not
the end of the process – that the fight for it was interminable. He failed
to see, at least at first, that Enlightenment ideals were regulative ideals,
not ultimate truths, and that there was a need to establish new rules and
forms to replace the old, out-dated rules and forms: new rules of behavior
that were flexible enough to allow freedom and personal sovereignty, and
yet capable of delimiting the risks involved in stepping beyond the social
order caused by losing the protective nature of social norms. He can’t be
entirely blamed for that, as he was swept up by the currents of an age of
revolution based upon Enlightenment principles and the fight for liberty.
While the American Revolution was tainted by slavery, and the French
Revolution tainted by the Terror, during his lifetime he saw what at least
initially appeared to be real transformations in society – such as the
democratic revolution in Spain in 180, or the beginnings of the
Risorgimento in Italy. e revolution in Naples occurred in 180, and it
inspired his ‘Ode to Liberty’; or, perhaps even more inspiring for him,
was the fight for Greek independence which began in 181 – in Pisa they
would come to know a key player in that struggle, Prince Mavrocordato.
Of course, his idealism was severely tempered over time – by the tragic
events of his personal life, but also by the historical events that occurred
– such as the insurrection in Naples eventually being crushed by the
Austrians in 181; however, by and large he felt the spirit of the age was
towards increasing liberty and Enlightenment. If he had lived a few
decades longer, he would have been seriously disillusioned – despite such
advances as the Reform Bill of 18. For us, aer the close of the two
century period when Enlightenment-inspired projects were embarked
upon, we can see quite clearly both the positive and negative conse-
quences. One can see, as Adorno and Horkheimer suggested, that the
Enlightenment was transformed from a demystification of myth into
0
a myth itself, and one can see also how the revolutions of 188, 191,
and 198 turned out, in the end. . .”
“. . .not terribly well. . .”
“. . .the hearts of the revolutionaries were in the right place, but they
didn’t grasp the full risks – and the strategies necessary to deal with the
risks. at’s the main point really: I call the figures I mentioned ‘post-
Enlightenment’ thinkers precisely because they do assess the dangers and
risks: they recognize that the process of liberation is interminable – that
utopia will never be reached, and, they recognize that the complexity of
life will always be finally beyond our grasp. . .”
“. . .wouldn’t some people call them cynical?”
“. . .I would call them skeptical, not cynical, and ‘affirmatively’ skeptical
at that: for me, post-Enlightenment thinkers with their speculative forays
into becoming, sovereignty, immanence and other concepts are crucial
in exploring ways of existing beyond the Enlightenment era, whose proj-
ects have all largely failed by now, but without either entirely giving up
or being naively optimistic. at’s why I also call them ‘post-ideological,’
as they are seeking ways of proceeding that do not depend on theologies,
ideologies, or mythologies. . .”
“. . .I understand your point, but given that the ideas of these thinkers
are so complex and alien to the usual set of unquestioned assumptions
that drives the average individual, I don’t see how they will ever have any
influence. . .”
“. . .perhaps no immediate influence, but I believe it’s true of all concepts
since the Enlightenment that when they appear they seem alien, strange,
and complex; then, they are taken up by an avant-garde or elite milieu and
‘tested’ through application; then they are disseminated as a sign of
distinction or esoteric fashion; then perhaps a youth culture takes them
up; then, in the end if they have survived all that, they are taken for
granted – perhaps aer a century or so. Concepts and ideas that we take
for granted, such as Kantian autonomy, needed first to be digested by
other thinkers, then applied as a form of self-creation by avant-gardes like
Schlegel, Shelley, and Baudelaire, then became part of a bundle of ideas
taken up by such groups as the Freemasons, then applied more widely in
elite milieus like the le-bank in Paris, and then finally taken up by youth
culture – before they entered the culture as a whole aer the 0s. . .”
“. . .but didn’t you say that when variability is taken up by the social
system, it’s diluted – like you said about Nietzsche’s view of evolution?”
0
“. . .certainly that’s true – by now autonomy in western, capitalist soci-

eties has come to mean freedom to choose a ‘lifestyle’ or perhaps even
‘freedom to choose a particular commodity’: it’s strange, really, as we’ve
reached the point where there’s enough heterogeneity in society to allow
all kinds of possible choices, but in actuality there’s very little experi-
mentation happening in the manner of what went on in the 0s, let alone
the kind of experimentation that Shelley embarked upon; and, when
there is experimentation, it’s usually merely a matter of style: a pierced
nose or tongue, a tattoo, a dye job – getting you hair dyed pink is hardly
the kind of autonomous choice that it was for Charles Baudelaire when
he dyed his hair green!”
“. . .that’s my point – maybe there’s simply too many of us on the planet
now for a single person’s variability to matter all that much. . .”
“. . .I wonder about that too, as it seems to me that it’s equally possible
that the thinkers I mentioned might turn out to be voices crying in the
wilderness of a neon-lit dark ages, which, in my worst moments, I fear we
are entering – if it hasn’t already arrived. . .”
“. . .but Shelley must have felt that way too – a voice crying in the
wilderness, with no one listening. . .”
“. . .yes, yes, that’s true – but those were particularly terrible times, too:
living in the aermath of a European-wide war, many countries either still
under occupation, like Italy, or with an ultra-reactionary government,
like France, England, and the Austrian Empire – it must have been
stifling. . .”
“. . .not to mention the difficulties of living abroad, with one’s natural
audience cut off from one. . .”
“. . .yes, Shelley felt that keenly. . .”
“. . .I was thinking of you, not Shelley. . .”
“. . .well, anyway, you are listening to me. . .”
“. . .yes, and it’s been a very pleasant bedtime story, but of the good sort,
not like the ones you were critiquing – it leaves everything open. . .”
“. . .so, shall we go?”
“. . .yes, I’m ready. . .”
“. . .I’ll take a few last puffs on my cigar, and then we can pay and go. . .”
“. . .thank goodness it’s only out the door and up the stairs. . .”
“. . .and straight to bed – we will have an early start tomorrow. . .”
0


Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Castle, January, 1912
. . .perched high on a promontory on the calcareous cliffs of the northern

Adriatic, the Duino castle looms in the night through heavy rain driven by
the Bora wind lashing southwestwards om out of the Hungarian basin.
On a cliffside path under the ramparts onting the sea a solitary figure paces
back and forth clutching himself in the gale, the collar of his greatcoat turned
up around his neck. . .
“. . .what can I write to bring her to her senses. . .oh Clara, Clara, what are
you doing? Why should we divorce? We’ve always been singular beings –
om the very beginning it was this way. . .and now only because I dared
suggest you ought to be with our daughter more, it has all come down to this
. . .it doesn’t make sense – I thought we were beyond all this. . .”
“. . .aer the eviction om the Hotel Biron I am more rootless than ever:
where should I go? Look at my life now, it is awash with women: Sidie in
Janowitz, Marthe in Paris, Mimi in Venice – all importuning me to come to
them, when now I just want to be alone. What brings me to always begin
again, when I know what will inevitably happen? e initial yearnings, the
delights and ecstasies, then soon, too soon, there’s that pressure for more,
subtly but surely building, followed by the slow unfolding of disenchantment,

and, only rarely is it not, then, a terrible ordeal, as it was with Valerie. Lou
and I managed it, finally, but only because of her own will to be ee; still, she
sided with Clara in Munich. Somehow when there’s an intimacy hovering
but un-enacted, as with the Princess, here, the un-enacted is closer to the
purity of relation one hopes for om love: Dante’s relation to Beatrice, or
Goethe’s Gustgen – or perhaps even more when death is a wall between, as
with Novalis’ Sophie, or Hölderlin’s Susette. . .or, my Paula: then there can
be something like the pure relation – oh, if only it were possible for two living
beings to love purely, to touch without grasping, without holding – the dead
have something to teach us, surely. . .but how to attain and enact what they
know? Like those Attic stelae in Naples – stone hands gently laid as if aaid
what they touch might shatter – that is the pure relation, that is how we
should all touch one another. . .”
“. . .it is never enough, these moments when that other world is sensed like
something in the periphery of vision that disappears as one turns to catch
a glimpse of it. Can it ever be beheld here and now, and with what eye would
one see it? How would one cross over without losing oneself ? Can one
approach that space of eternity, does it sense me standing here above this
abyss, here in the night? Is there something in the wind – does it taste us, or
is it just cosmic space, dissolving us into the pure void. . .my self, my relation
to others, ultimately dissolved, diffused like particles in the wind? Who, if
I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?”
“. . .whence came those words? It’s not om outside. . .it’s here, inside me,
but not me. . .I feel suspended, ready to fall – something speaking in me,
through me. . .the strongest sensation of something tangible around me –
pure energy, like an angel. . .something opening in me, yielding me joy,
despair, and terror all at once. . .”
“. . .how to speak of it – to embody the pure, unseen relation? It is impossible

to be here and there simultaneously. . .it feels. . .like dying. I begin to sense
something beyond our imperfect interpretations, which have no real home
for us, anyway. . .but to attain this vision more fully one must give up the
posturing of the living: to imagine the dead – composed, completed.
Everything that was once so vague and conflicted in the midst of life gives over
to the shape of a life, its inner essence suddenly visible – but how to become
closer to such purity without dying ourselves? I sense already the hovering pres-
ence of death, where everything singular is obliterated. . .strange. . .to lay aside
one’s proper name the way a child discards a broken toy. e torrent raging
around me is eclipsed by unseen eternity immersing both the living and the
dead. e other realm must be everything as it was, is, and ever will be –
but can we inhabit it? Only in a moment of vision can we grasp the totality
of time, of eternity. . .”
“. . .it is through love we can sense the eternal most poignantly – but not the
love that holds to the other, as if we could plant an oak and spend a lifetime
resting under its shade. . .so quickly that sense of having found god through the
other is replaced by the oscillations of fear and satiety, or the inertia of habit.
e surge of nature speaking through us exhausts itself, withdrawing itself back
again towards its mysterious source. at is why those loves that do not rush
towards consummation more oen yield the glimpse of eternity. . .”
“. . .then there is art: beauty is a fissure in time opening to the eternal, but as
beauty crosses over to the sublime it becomes a terror that hovers on the brink of
destroying us. It is for the artist to create such openings, to become such an opening
– like John on Patmos, or Hölderlin aer his return om Bordeaux. . .an
Aeolian harp sounding to the touch of the unseen wind. . .to risk being enveloped
by the night – and even, if necessary, to be engulfed by it. . .”

Aer a brief train ride to the north of the city they disembark from the
regionale at the San Giuliano Terme station. e pale yellow and green,
19th century station seems little-used, the inside marked by the smudges
of bats and brash hieroglyphics of local graffiti artists. ey walk through
the station out onto a lane lined with chestnut trees leading to the main
road, where they cross to the opposite side and walk slowly along a small
canal towards the village. Rising behind the town are the foothills of the
Monte Pisano, the first crest topped with a stand of umbrella pines, the
ridges beyond covered in low scrub.
“. . .this is one of the canals Shelley would punt along in his little flat-
bottomed boat – over to Pugnano to the Williams’ house, and even
down the Serchio as far as the sea several times. e back of their house
had access right on to the canal, so one of those houses along there ought
to be where they lived. . .”
“. . .what are those ruins up there on the hill?”
“. . .it looks like a ‘folly’ – an ornamental, fake ruin that was quite preva-
lent in the 19th Century. It must have been connected to the spa: the
baths where even more popular aer Shelley’s time, in the mid-19th
century, but then their popularity peaked. . .”
“. . .are they still in use?”
“. . .I think so. at large yellow building – there, with the clock, is prob-
ably the main spa building. We’ll turn there – that’s the road leading into
the crescent fronting the baths. . .their first house here should be some-
where to the le. . .yes, there! Isn’t that a plaque on the second building?”
“. . .I think so. . .yes, it is!”
ey walk towards the second building on the crescent: it is a pale
yellow, two storey building with six green-shuttered windows on the top
floor, and three barred windows and two entrances on the bottom floor.
Written across the façade are the words, “MONTE DEI PASCHI
SIENA,” and on the right-hand side is a white marble plaque with
a round, green-black bas-relief of Shelley’s head. e plaque reads,
1
IN QVESTA CASA DEI PRINNI

DIMORO
NEGLI ANNI 1820 E 1821
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
COR CORDIVM
NELLA PVRITA
DEL BEL PAESE TOSCANO
COME SOTTO ATTICI CIELI
CREO IL CAPOLAVORO
ADONAIS
IL MUVNICIPIO
DEI BAGNI DI s. GIVLIANO
LI IV AGOSTO MCMXXXI
“. . .what does it say?”

“. . .something like, ‘In this House of Prinni lived in the years 180 and
181 Percy Bysshe Shelley,’ then in Latin, ‘heart of hearts’ – a stock
phrase. . .then, something like, ‘In the purity of beautiful Tuscany under
Attic skies he wrote the masterpiece Adonais, town of Bagni di San
Giuliano, August th, 191’ – so, it was put up on Shelley’s birthday, and
during the fascist period – that took some courage!”
“. . .look at the address – the crescent is called Largo P.B. Shelley. . .”
“. . .that’s nice. . .”
“. . .it’s a beautiful location – Shelley had such good taste in houses. . .”
“. . .yes – I prefer his choices to the boastful opulence of Byron’s various
palaces. Let me get a few photographs, and then we can walk up to those
ruins to take a look around before it gets too hot. By the time we come
down, it’ll be time to buy some lunch – we can sit in the shade of one of
those trees in the park over there in front of the baths. . .”
“. . .as long as we stop for a rest at the top. . .”
“. . .I agree. . .it looks like the best way up there is to go around the back
of the spa. . .”
ey walk onto the grounds of the spa, cross a wide, pebbled path to the
front of the building, and, aer finding no clear passage, turn le and follow
another path back out to the side of the crescent. ey walk up a service
drive through an arch to the back of the spa buildings, then up some stone
1
steps to a path. e path leads upwards, switching back and forth at fiy
meter intervals. ey rest several times because of the already-mounting
heat, stopping to drink mineral water and look at the view. Finally, they
reach the ruins at the top – a series of arched colonnades open to the sky.
Towards the south, beyond the red-tiled roofs of the buildings of the town,
there extends green fields bordered by hedgerows and cypresses, dissolving
into the buildings of Pisa, enveloped in a heat haze that obscures almost
everything but the spectral shapes of the Campanile, the Duomo, the
Camposanto, and the Baptistery. To the east the slopes of the Monte Pisano
rises upwards, partially covered with olive groves. ey sit on a boulder
outside the perimeter of the structure, facing south across the plain.
“. . .it’s beautiful. . .”
“. . .yes, truly. . .”
“. . .so, let’s take a rest, and you can tell me when and why they came
here. . .”
“. . .well, by then – August, 180 – imperceptibility was a primary
concern due to the blackmail crisis: it’s quite secluded here from the rest
of Pisa, and yet not so far as to make daily trips possible. Claire was
already keeping a bit of distance from their household in response to the
crisis: in July, she spent quite a bit of time with the Masons – first in
Livorno sea bathing, and then at the Masons’ house in Pisa, presumably
waiting for the scandal to blow over. . .”
“. . .did Shelley visit her?”
“. . .yes, Shelley saw a great deal of her, visiting her every day or two
wherever she was, and going on walks with her; but the crisis was very
much on Shelley’s mind in early August – he even mentioned it, without
giving the details, in a letter of reckoning he wrote to Godwin. . .”
“. . .‘reckoning’?”
“. . .a settling of accounts. Shelley told Godwin, once and for all, that
he wasn’t going to send him any more money. . .”
“. . .what did Mary think?”
“. . .I would guess she didn’t even know about it: he was enacting his
general plan to minimize any negative stimuli, and, as a result, things
were rather calm in August – even with Claire around. Some sort of truce
had been reached, as Shelley wrote to the Gisbornes: ‘Mary, who, you
know, is always wise, has been lately very good. I wish she were as wise
now as she will be at , or as misfortune has made me. She would then
live on very good terms with Claire’. . .”
1
“. . .it surprises me how open he was about the situation. . .”

“. . .yes, but it’s still in the realm of the plausibly deniable. In any case
I do think, in the face of the more general danger of the blackmail crisis,
a certain rapprochement was reached between them all. On August 11th
all three of them walked to Lucca, where Mary and Claire saw the sights
together and spent the night while Shelley climbed to the top of Mount
San Pellegrino – an expedition he had hoped to accomplish back in the
days when they were living at the Bagni di Lucca. It’s quite a distance –
it took him the whole weekend. . .”
“. . .the women could stand being le alone together?”
“. . .according to both their journals they even seemed to enjoy it. . .”
“. . .why did Shelley go alone?”
“. . .the mountain is quite a distance to the north of the Bagni di Lucca;
plus, it’s seventeen hundred meters high – even Claire wouldn’t have
been up to it. I think he also needed the time alone to think through
their position in the aermath of the blackmail; aer all, they were still
considering what to do in the long run. . .”
“. . .did he leave any record of what he was thinking then?”
“. . .not his precise thoughts, but there’s certainly a record of his fren-
zied state of mind at that time: during the weekend trek he composed
a visionary poem, ‘e Witch of Atlas.’ Mary hated it – she claimed that
she felt it was evidence of the stress he was under, and in her comments
to the poem in the 189 edition she directed attention to the lack of
acclaim Shelley was feeling then. Listen to what she says, here: ‘Shelley
did not expect sympathy and approbation from the public; but the want
of it took away a portion of the ardour that ought to have sustained him
while writing. He was thrown on his own resources, and on the inspira-
tion of his own soul; and wrote because his mind overflowed, without
the hope of being appreciated’. . .”
“. . .and what do you think of the poem?”
“. . .Shelley anticipated her objections in the poem itself – in the
opening stanzas he speaks directly to her, telling her she’s wrong to be
against the poem because of its abstract nature. . .”
“. . .what is the poem about?”
“. . .the poem is visionary in the sense that he uses his imagination to
create a hyper-real figure that would enable him to gain a wider perspec-
tive on his life – on life itself. He came to it, in his solitude at the top of
Pellegrino, like Zarathustra on top of his mountain – such a high, soli-
1
tary perspective forces one to grasp the whole of life, and, metaphori-
cally, that’s just how the poem operates. It’s an early, not entirely
successful attempt at what he would try again later in e Triumph of
Life, and I think it’s precisely the nature of the vision he saw that was so
troubling to Mary. e figure of the witch is a supernatural being who
has incredible powers, and she creates a hermaphroditic being that rides
with her on her boat – it sort of sits there huddled on the deck near the
rudder. . .”
“. . .what do you think it represents?”
“. . .it’s sort of a muse or conjurer: at one point she calls to it, and
somehow its dreams then spill into the water – it’s as if she needed it
in order to gain access to the unconscious. She finally sweeps down on
the world of sleeping humans, gaining access to some of the more
destructive aspects of the human soul, which is probably what
disturbed Mary. . .here, listen to this section:
But other troubled forms of sleep she saw,

Not to be mirrored in a holy song –
Distortions foul of supernatural awe,
And pale imaginings of visioned wrong;
And all the code of Custom’s lawless law
Written upon the brows of old and young:
‘is,’ said the wizard maiden, ‘is the strife
Which stirs the liquid surface of man’s life.’
And little did the sight disturb her soul. –

We, the weak mariners of that wide lake
Where’er its shores extend or billows roll,
Our course unpiloted and starless make
O’er its wild surface to an unknown goal: –
But she in the calm depths her way could take,
Where in bright bowers immortal forms abide
Beneath the weltering of the restless tide.
. . .it’s not as relentless as his later vision in e Triumph of Life, but still,
it was quite a task to imagine this strange being who could see under the
surface of life, rather than the limited visions of those who are simply
crossing the lake on its surface. . .”
1
“. . .does the vision go on?”

“. . .Shelley tries to ground the abstractness of the figure in particulars
– she’s able to ‘mingle’ her soul with all of the sleepers, and see their
truths: he compares her to a ‘sexless bee,’ in that she can taste all the
desires of the sleepers as a bee tastes flowers. When one reads the poem
and imagines her power of entering into all these souls – well, Mary must
have lived in a kind of dread to imagine what might be found in Shelley’s
soul, or Claire’s. . .or her own. e witch is the cause of various kinds of
transfigurations – a figure of unconscious desire: one cannot take her
‘pranks’ as somehow separate from the dreamers; for example, here, in
this stanza, he described lovers whose love had been so fleeting that ‘ey
hardly knew whether they had loved or not’. . .”
“. . .I doubt Mary would have been happy to read that. . .”
“. . .no, that’s for certain. I think the vision he had at the top of the
mountain contained the core of his mature vision, although it wasn’t by
any means fully realized in the poem: life as mutable, human desire as
uncontainable and unknowable, the heart of unreason at the core of all
human activity – again, not quite as stark as e Triumph of Life, but he
was well on his way there. . .”
“. . .I can see that it might have been too much for Mary – it would have
been difficult for her to face the cynicism of it aer she had been through
so much. . .”
“. . .it’s a bleak vision – although the poem is strangely enjoyable. Critics
have mostly avoided it, as they avoided ‘A Vision of the Sea’ and his other
phantasmagorias. In a certain way they anticipate Kaa: they are totally
fanciful, like Kaa’s animal fables, and yet realer than real. . .”
“. . .too real for Mary, anyway! But what happened – was Mary able to
accept the situation more, aer the trip?”
“. . .it was certainly calmer, but they were all still frightened from the
blackmail scandal, so in July and August Claire stayed mostly with the
Masons in Pisa, or in Livorno, but Shelley saw a good deal of her. Claire
and the Masons came here to San Giuliano in August for the festival of
St. Bartholomew – there were horse races in the streets, and Mary
recounted that Shelley recited his ‘Ode to Liberty’ from the upstairs
window to the people gathered in the square which was filling up with
pigs being brought to market: their grunting gradually drowned out his
recitation – he finally broke it off with a fit of hysterical laughter! He later
used the ‘chorus’ of pigs in his comic-drama, Swellfoot the Tyrant. . .”
18
“. . .did Claire remain with them, or go back to Pisa?”

“. . .it was decided, probably right aer that weekend, that Claire would
spend the month of September in Livorno, ostensibly sea-bathing for her
health. . .”
“. . .‘ostensibly’?”
“. . .well, she actually did sea-bathe, but they were still concerned about
the scandal and what to do about it. . .”
“. . .where did she stay?”
“. . .probably at the Gisbornes’ house – while they were in England.
Shelley accompanied her there in early September, staying with her for
two days before he returned to San Giuliano. He continued to visit her in
Pisa when she returned for the weekends, and he went to get her at the
end of the month. . .”
“. . .did he bring her here to San Giuliano?”
“. . .no, he brought her back to the Masons’ house in Pisa. It was then
that they finally decided what to do about the situation, and, unfortu-
nately, an event happened in early October that drove Shelley to make
what I believe was a fatal error in regard to his management of their rela-
tionship. . .”
“. . .well, when the Gisbornes returned from England, they stopped by
the Casa Silva in Pisa to drop off a package of books with Claire, and
continued on to Livorno without stopping off at San Giuliano. Shelley
sent a note the next day inquiring why they hadn’t stopped by, and then
he accompanied Mr. Mason to Livorno on the 1th to investigate further.
He returned the same day and reported to Mary that the Gisbornes were
acting rather strangely, so, on the 1th, Mary traveled to Livorno herself.
Apparently she was received rather coolly, but there was no indication of
the real problem, save that Mrs. Gisborne told her that she posted her
a ‘foolish’ letter – apparently the appearance of Mary in the flesh made
her reconsider her actions. When Mary returned to San Giuliano that
evening, Shelley was waiting for her with Mrs. Gisborne’s letter, and he
was very upset. . .”
“. . .what was the letter about?”
“. . .the letter itself no longer exists, but Mary’s letter of response,
written that very evening and dispatched with Shelley the next day, does
exist, and gives a sense of how seriously they took it. . .”
19
“. . .yes – I’ll read the most important parts:
A Veil is now taken off from what was mysterious yesterday,

and I now understand your refusal to visit us, and Henry’s
curious, and, at last, almost rude reply to my invitation – I see
that the ban of the Empire is gone out against us, and they say
who put it on must take it off. . . .But what terms need to be
made with Pariahs. And such, thank God a thousand and
a million times, we are; long – very long, may we so continue.
. . .Now is the time! join them, or us – the gulph is deep, the
plank is going to be removed – set your foot on it if you will,
and you will not lose the sincere affection of one who loved
you tenderly.
. . .the ‘them’ she refers to is, specifically, Godwin and company at

Skinner Street. . .”
“. . .what did Godwin tell them?”
“. . .the Gisbornes had been the go-betweens between del Rosso, the
lawyer, and Paolo, but whatever they knew about the scandal clearly
wasn’t the whole truth. Shelley had only recently written Godwin his
scathing letter cutting him off, so, when the Gisbornes met the
Godwins, each side had information that the other wasn’t aware of and
the result must have been a heightening of suspicion on both sides. Mrs.
Gisborne indicated in her journal that Godwin had informed them of
Fanny’s suicide, maintaining that she had been in love with Shelley; she
also mentioned that Godwin didn’t believe Byron was the father of
Allegra. . .”
“. . .meaning Godwin thought Shelley was Allegra’s father. . .”
“. . .yes, but the Gisbornes would have soon put that to rest: they knew
all about Allegra and Byron, and from Mrs. Gisborne’s journal, it seems
that they may even have thought the whole Paolo affair was about the
knowledge of Allegra’s existence as Byron’s illegitimate daughter by
Claire – at least I’m doubtful that they knew anything about the rumors
concerning Shelley and Claire. . .”
“. . .so you don’t think the Gisbornes came to believe that Shelley and
Claire were lovers?”
“. . .I doubt it. . .I would guess that Godwin’s story about Fanny, and
perhaps about Harriet as well, was enough to upset their view of Shelley. . .”
0
“. . .did the Gisbornes ever directly confront them with what they thought?”
“. . .something was said in the ‘foolish’ letter, but I suspect it was merely
innuendo. . .”
“. . .so what did they choose – did they break completely from them?”
“. . .the Gisbornes did not visit them until April, 181, and friendly rela-
tions were not reestablished until the following July. Shelley, Mary, and
Claire felt the break as a serious betrayal: it le them feeling very vulner-
able and isolated. Unfortunately, I think they panicked because of it, and
that led to the fatal error: they felt they had to protect themselves from
further scandal, and what happened with the Gisbornes was the last drop
leading to their decision that Claire should move away from them – at
least for a period of time, anyway. . .”
“. . .who decided that – Shelley?”
“. . .it appears the decision was primarily made as a result of the
connivance of Mary and Mrs. Mason, and only with Claire and Shelley’s
grudging cooperation. ey worked out an arrangement whereby Claire
would be the paying guest of the family of a Dr. Bojti in Florence –
a colleague of Dr. Vaccà and friend of the Masons. She was there osten-
sibly to learn German – Florence was far enough to be clandestine, but
not so far that they couldn’t meet frequently. . .”
“. . .what did Claire and Shelley think about it?”
“. . .as you can imagine, they were very unhappy about it all, but it was
meant as a temporary solution – for just a month to start. . .”
“. . .was it?”
“. . .Claire returned a month later, but she and Shelley decided that she
should continue living in Florence. She wouldn’t return to the house-
hold, fully, until close to the end, which was, aer all, less than twenty
months away: there was simply no time to re-establish a different
domestic situation, and that’s why I think it was one of Shelley’s worst
errors in judgment. . .”
“. . .but what could they have done differently? Mary couldn’t stand
living with Claire, could she?”
“. . .true. In fact, Mary indicated Claire’s departure in her journal with
a private symbol – a sun: I suppose it indicated her happiness at being
relieved of the ‘Claire situation,’ and whenever Claire returned from that
point on she indicated it with a sun, or a circle with a dot in the center
of it. I’m not sure what Shelley should have done for certain: should he
have told Mary the whole truth – could she have stood it? I doubt it, and
1
yet I think his real mistake was that he allowed the external situation to
dictate events: he allowed Mary and Mrs. Mason to have too much of an
influence, when, instead, I think he should have calmly managed to find
a place for Claire somewhere closer in Pisa. en, he should have
managed it better with Mary – at least getting her to accept Claire’s pres-
ence, if nothing else. . .”
“. . .would that have been possible?”
“. . .I realize this is all speculation based on our historically privileged
position, but I think he should have shown Claire that he was willing to
take the risk of arguing with Mary for her closer presence to them – but
of course I understand they must have seen it differently: the blackmail
crisis, the attack in the Quarterly, the loss of the Gisbornes as friends –
all combined to frighten them into over-reacting, rather than calmly
waiting for it all to die down. . .”
“. . .they must have felt quite exposed. . .”
“. . .I agree – perhaps it couldn’t have happened any other way. I realize
from my own experience that being an expatriate makes one even more
vulnerable to hyper-defensiveness and paranoia, but still, it seems to me
they allowed themselves to be spooked into over-reacting, and given what
happened in the months that followed, there was something loosened in
their bonds that they never had the time to repair. . .”
“. . .so when did Claire finally go?”
“. . .Shelley took her to Florence in mid-October, and they spent a last
night together in an inn. Shelley le the next evening aer helping Claire
move into her new residence with the Bojtis, opposite the Pitti Palace. . .”
“. . .it must have been extremely difficult for her. . .”
“. . .she was very lonely: about a week later, she went to the Boboli gardens
behind the palace for a walk, and she wrote in her journal, ‘ink of thyself
as a stranger & traveler on the earth, to whom none of the many affairs of
this world belong and who has no permanent township on the globe’. . .”
“. . .she sounds quite desperate – it must have been hard to have no one
around her to confide in about anything, and especially about Allegra. . .”
“. . .the family had little girls, so she must have at least enjoyed their
company, but still, it couldn’t have been easy. . .”
“. . .what about Allegra?”
“. . .a few weeks previously Claire had a dream where Byron’s servant
Fletcher, together with Elise, had arrived to tell her that Allegra was on
her way from Ravenna to visit her. . .”

“. . .and was there any chance of such a visit?”

“. . .we don’t have the contents of her letters from the period, but Byron
told Shelley in late August that he would decline any further correspon-
dence from Claire because of its provocative nature, so she must have
been begging him to see Allegra. . .”
“. . .he probably tore them all up. What did Shelley write to Byron?”
“. . .he agreed to be the go-between, but he also chided Byron about
being so upset with Claire, writing that it was natural for her to feel the
way she was feeling. He argued that the best way to calm her would be
simply to allow her to see the child. Apparently, there had been some
rumors of Byron returning to England and leaving Allegra behind with
someone in Italy, and Shelley used this pretext to suggest Claire be
allowed access to see Allegra. . .I think I have it – yes, here it is:
If you really go to England, & leave Allegra in Italy, I think

you had better arrange so that Claire might see Allegra in your
absence if she pleases. – e objections now existing against
a visit, either to or from her, would then be suspended; & such
a concession would prevent all future contention on the
subject. People only desire with great eagerness that which is
forbidden or withheld. – Besides that, you would show your-
self above taking offence at any thing she has written, which
of course you are.
. . .Richard Holmes pointed out, rightly, that in this part, here, Shelley
for the first time used an imperative with Byron – suggesting what he
‘had better’ do, and that it indicated the beginning of his siding more
fully with Claire – I think he’s right. . .”
“. . .did Byron go to England?”
“. . .no, it was an unfounded rumor. . .”
“. . .and did Byron listen to any of Shelley’s other advice?”
“. . .you know the outcome: they never were able to arrange another
visit for Claire to see Allegra. She couldn’t have known that then, of
course. . .”
“. . .that’s terrible. . .what was Shelley’s reaction to Claire’s departure?”
“. . .he was disconsolate – it can be seen in one of the unfinished frag-
ments he wrote at the time: you know it, because it’s the fragment that
Stephen Dedalus kept reciting to himself in Ulysses. . .”

“. . .the one about the moon?”

“. . .that’s the one – here, I’ll read it. . .
Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, –
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
at finds no object worth its constancy?
ou chosen sister of the Spirit,

at gazes on thee till in thee it pities. . .
. . .that’s where the fragment ends. . .”

“. . .it almost sounds as if he had read in Claire’s journal about being
a ‘stranger and traveler’. . .”
“. . .yes, the ‘chosen sister of the Spirit’ line seems as if he must have had
Claire in mind – but he wasn’t entirely companionless, for he met Medwin
in Pisa upon his return from Florence, and traveled back with him to San
Giuliano where Medwin moved into Claire’s former bedroom. . .”
“. . .his childhood friend?”
“. . .yes – his cousin, actually, and they attended school together. e
account he wrote of Shelley aer his death was marred with inaccuracies,
but there are a few interesting observations, such as his description of
meeting Shelley and Claire at that time. He describes very well the toll
time had taken on them both – here’s what he said about Shelley:
It was nearly seven years since we had parted; but I should

immediately have recognised him in a crowd. His figure was
emaciated, and somewhat bent; owing to near-sightedness,
and his being forced to lean over his books, with his eyes
almost touching them; his hair, still profuse, and curling natu-
rally, was partially interspersed with grey, as he says in Alastor
‘sered by the Autumn of strange suffering’; but his appearance
was youthful, and his countenance, whether grave or
animated, strikingly intellectual. ere was also a freshness
and purity in his expression that he never lost.

. . .Shelley was only 8 then. . .”

“. . .and Claire – how did he describe her?”
“. . .that’s even more interesting – he met her upon her first return to
Pisa, aer the month’s absence:
She might have been mistaken for an Italian, for she was
a brunette with very dark hair and eyes. As she possessed
considerable accomplishments – spoke French and Italian,
particularly the latter, with all its nuances and niceties – she
was much courted by the Russian coterie, a numerous and
fashionable one in that city. ough not strictly handsome at
that time, for she had had much to struggle with, and mind
makes its ravages in the fairest, most, she was engaging and
pleasing, and possessed an esprit de société rare among our
countrywomen. From her personal appearance at that time,
I should conceive, that when Byron formed an intimacy with
her at Geneva in 181, she must have been strikingly hand-
some.
. . .Claire was only at the time, although Medwin thought she seemed
or . . .”
“. . .they’re both described as if they were five or ten years older. . .”
“. . .they’d certainly been through enough to age them that much. . .”
“. . .and did they keep in contact with one another during this period?”
“. . .there were two sequences of letters – a more or less open series that
Mary was aware of, and a secret sequence that presumably was largely
destroyed; in fact, in one of the few surviving letters from Shelley to
Claire, he concluded by reminding her to tear the letter up. . .”
“. . .are those the letters that Henry James’ story referred to – what was
it called?”
“. . .e Aspern Papers – yes, those must have been the ones, because
there had been no other significant period of separation between them
since Claire had been banished to Lynmouth in 181, aer the failure of
their first community. In his six page letter of October 9, written just
a week aer she went to Florence, you can see their intimacy quite clearly
– it’s really unbelievable, to me, that certain critics and biographers can
still maintain that they weren’t intimate aer reading such letters. . .”

“. . .yes. . .look – he immediately begins the letter by referring to the

other letter sequence, and their need to hide their communications from
Mary: ‘I wrote to you a kind of scrawl the other day merely to show that
I had not forgotten you, and as it was taxed with a postscript by Mary, it
contained nothing that I wish it to contain’. . .”
“. . .that’s clear enough – if there was a need for secrecy that says every-
thing. . .”
“. . .then, he writes this about the situation:
ey tell me you look very melancholy and disconsolate,

which they impute to the weather. You must indeed be very
uncomfortable for it to become visible to them. Keep up your
spirit, my best girl, until we meet at Pisa. But for Mrs. Mason,
I should say, come back immediately and give up a plan so
inconsistent with your feelings – as it is, I fear you had better
endure – at least until you come here. You know, however,
whatever you shall determine on, where to find one ever affec-
tionate Friend, to whom your absence is too painful for your
own return ever to be unwelcome. I think it moreover for
your own interest to observe certain —
. . .he leaves it blank there. . .”

“. . .I understand why they had to be careful in regard to their intimacy,
but why were they being so careful in regard to Mrs. Mason? It’s almost
as if they felt they were doing it for her. . .”
“. . .I’ve wondered that too. His next letter to Claire, written two weeks
later, was almost entirely taken up with advice on how to arrange her
return to Pisa aer the month was up without giving up the possibility
of remaining in Florence if she decided to, or of offending Mrs. Mason,
who it seems had some connections there. . .”
“. . .but were they serious about needing the connections? I thought
they just wanted to get Claire an independent situation so they could
remain imperceptible?”
“. . .I think partially because her connections were potentially quite
good – including an Italian princess. . .but also, remember, the Masons
were really the only friends in all of Italy that they felt they could count
on a little, for the Gisbornes were no longer to be trusted, and Byron was
unreliable; indeed, Shelley wrote a letter to Hunt where he stated quite

bluntly that Hunt was really his only true friend le. It tormented Shelley
and Claire to live apart, but they were trying to play it safe. e conse-
quences were terrible for them both: Claire was deeply depressed, as you
can see, and Shelley somatized his depression in his chronic side spasms,
no doubt due to trying to quell the pain of absence with laudanum. . .”
“. . .at least he had Medwin. . .”
“. . .yes, but look, he writes here, ‘Medwin’s cheerful conversation is of
some use to me, but what would it be to your sweet consolation, my own
Clare?’ Medwin was a bit of a bore. One way Shelley seems to have dealt
with it was by cooking up a scheme to travel to the middle east to visit
Greece, Syria, and Egypt – this scheme increasingly played the role of
some sort of fantasy of escape for Shelley. . .”
“. . .escape from what. . .Mary?”
“. . . .perhaps. . .scholars don’t like to admit it, because they have so
much invested in the image of the Shelleys as a ‘literary couple,’ but yes,
it’s possible. Look what he writes here: ‘How far all this is practicable,
considering the state of my finances I know not yet. I know that if it were
it would give me the greatest pleasure, and the pleasure might be either
doubled or divided by your presence or absence. All this will be explained
and determined in time; meanwhile lay to your heart what I say, and do
not mention it in your letter to Mary.’ So, at the very least, the idea of the
scheme was to be withheld from Mary . . .”
“. . .but was the scheme serious?”
“. . .he mentioned a wealthy friend of Medwin’s who was supposed to
help finance it, but he never appeared. at would suggest it was just
dreaming, but, on the other hand, he did ask Claire to look in the book-
stalls in Florence for an Arabic grammar and dictionary: the ‘trip to the
east’ became a kind of motif in Shelley’s letters and works from that point
onwards. It seems to have represented the possibility of escape, but, then
again, he was always wavering between his idea of community and his
idea of escape. . .”
“. . .and did Claire return aer the month was up?”
“. . .she returned to Pisa on November 1st. . .”
“. . .here?”
“. . .no – I forgot to mention that the canal overflowed and flooded the
house here a few days aer Shelley returned from Florence with Medwin,
and they were forced to return to Pisa: that’s when they moved to the
Casa Galetti – the one we found yesterday. ey occupied the whole first

floor, and some rooms at the top where Medwin had a bedroom and
Shelley a study – and a bit of privacy, for the first time in a while. . .”
“. . .where did Claire sleep when she came?”
“. . .I don’t know. During the daytime she oen went to visit Mrs.
Mason to talk about her experiences in Florence and her future. en,
Shelley and Claire made a daytrip to Livorno on the th, not returning
until late that evening: they must have spoken about her future possibil-
ities. . .”
“. . .did they come to a decision?”
“. . .yes, they decided it would be best if Claire returned to Florence for
another month, but she remained in Pisa with them until just before
Christmas. ey spent much of December socializing with a new circle of
acquaintances and friends they had made in the Pisan community:
Professor Pacchiani – a brilliant conversationalist and renegade from the
university; Tommaso Sgricci – a flamboyant homosexual who was
successful as a sort of one-man cabaret act; the exiled Greek Prince
I mentioned before, Alexander Mavrocordato – Mary especially liked
him, and he peaked Shelley’s excitement about the possibility of Greek
liberation from the Turks; then there was John Taafe, a bogus count who
Shelley found interesting because of his interest in translation; and, the
most important person to enter their circle then for Shelley was Teresa
Viviani, a young Contessa – Claire met her nearly every day that month,
and wrote to her when she couldn’t due to the weather. . .”
“. . .she was 19, the daughter of the governor of Pisa, and so quite visible.
She was being kept at a convent while her parents found a suitable
husband for her, and was by all accounts extremely attractive: Medwin
described her as having long black hair, the physique of a Greek sculp-
ture, eyes that seemed to change color with her mood, and pale, clear
skin. She was also quite accomplished, writing her letters in an Italian
that Mary described as being equivalent to authors from the finest epoch.
Claire, Mary, and Shelley were all quite taken by her, and they called her
Emilia. . .”
“. . .did Shelley fall in love with her?”
“. . .I wouldn’t put it quite that way – I’m not sure she was ever quite
real to him. She seems to have represented for him the interior struggle
between what he had hoped for from women all his life, and what was
actually possible – perhaps that’s why his fascination with her only lasted
8
long enough to inspire him to write Epipsychidion, and dissolved rapidly

aer he completed the poem. Mary referred to the poem pejoratively as
‘Shelley’s Italian Platonics,’ but I think it turned out to be a ‘counter-
Platonics’ – a struggle against his Platonism in love, against his idealiza-
tions. . .”
“. . .what does the title mean?”
“. . .an ‘epi-psyche’ is the ‘over-soul’ or ‘meta-soul’ – in this case it’s the
Platonic ideal of the perfect love, so a poetical version of the ‘anti-type’ he
wrote about in his essay, ‘On Love.’ e poem is extremely autobio-
graphical: a ‘history of his heart,’ as he referred to it at one point. I think
it was partially an indirect way of working through his feelings about his
relationships in the wake of Claire’s absence. . .”
“. . .when did Claire leave again?”
“. . .she le for Florence on December rd. Shelley’s immediate reac-
tion was to fall ill until well into January, suffering from his typical pains
in the side, as well as an infection of the eyes that made it impossible for
him to read or write for two weeks. Claire also was quite ill then: in
a letter Shelley wrote to her on January nd he suggested that her illness
may have been due to ‘dejection of spirits.’ It was in the same letter that
Shelley mentioned to Claire that he was seeing Emilia ‘from time to
time,’ and that she ‘enchanted him infinitely’. . .”
“. . .what did Claire think about that?”
“. . .we don’t know directly – the letter she wrote to Shelley has disap-
peared, but, based on his answer to her letter, she must have been more
than a little jealous. He wrote,
I see Emily sometimes: and whether her presence is the source

of pain or pleasure to me, I am equally ill-fated in both. I am
deeply interested in her destiny, & that interest can in no
manner influence it. She is not however insensible to my
sympathy, & she counts it among her alleviations. As much
comfort as she receives from my attachment to her, I lose. –
ere is no reason that you should fear any mixture of that
which you call love.’
. . .which, by the way, is another clear piece of evidence that his relation-
ship with Claire was far from Platonic, as why would she care so much
about his falling in love?”
9
“. . .yes, that much is clear, but his letter seems a little suspicious to me
– whether it was fascination or idealization, it still seems to me he fell in
love with her. . .”
“. . .I’m not saying he didn’t, just that he was aware of it – that he was
using her intentionally as a muse, and that it was under his control. . .”
“. . .a controlled loss of control? Is that possible?”
“. . .Shelley was certainly rationalizing his desires, of course, but still
I believe it was more like courtly love than anything else – partially an
inspiration, partially a catharsis. It’s clear he’s struggling against himself
in the poem. . .”
“. . .I think that’s you rationalizing, now!”
“. . .possibly, but that doesn’t make it any less a true account of what
was happening: he was falling in love with love itself, but he wanted to
establish a new kind of love: he had been reading about Dante’s chaste
love for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova, and it became an ideal for him. For
the first time he tried to keep some distance from his own love in order to
examine it from a second-order perspective. . .”
“. . .‘tried’? I take it he didn’t succeed. . .”
“. . .the poem enacts his obsession, but then culminates by breaking off
at precisely the point when he realized he had somehow gone astray – he
realized that the idea behind the poem had failed. . .”
“. . .which was what – that his love for Emilia could remain pure and
chaste?”
“. . .it’s more complicated than that: a large part of the poem was
a retrospective reflection on his love life until that point in time, so he
was very careful about the poem, and he asked that it only be published
in a limited edition – only for the ‘initiated,’ to use his word. He pref-
aced it with a fabricated story about its ‘real’ authorship, and he also
denied its autobiographical nature to John Gisborne, at first. A month
before he died he sent Gisborne another letter where he admitted its
truthfulness. . .”
“. . .yes, here – he has just discussed some of the poems he sent to
London for publication, where Gisborne was then acting as something
of a literary agent for him:
e ‘Epipsychidion’ I cannot look at; the person whom it

celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno; and poor Ixion starts
0
from the centaur that was the offspring of his own embrace.
If you are anxious, however, to hear what I am and have been,
it will tell you something thereof. It is an idealized history of
my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with some-
thing or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits
cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in
a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal.
. . .he realized that the poem not only contained a good deal of truth
about his own history, it contained truth about how his ideals had failed;
and yet, he felt it should stand as it was – that there was truth in it despite
its failure, or rather because of its failure: it was the very truth of that
failure. . .”
“. . .wasn’t he afraid of revealing himself ?”
“. . .he sent his publisher, Ollier, an introduction to the poem that seems
to make it the work of somebody else:
e writer of the following lines died at Florence, as he was

preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades,
which he had bought, and where he had fitted up the ruins of
an old building, and where it was his hope to have realized
a scheme of life, suited perhaps to that happier and better world
of which he is now an inhabitant, but hardly practicable in this.
His life was singular; less on account of the romantic vicissi-
tudes which diversified it, than the ideal tinge which it received
from his own character and feelings. e present Poem, like the
Vita Nuova of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class
of readers with a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to
which it relates; and to a certain other class it must ever remain
incomprehensible, from a defect of a common organ of percep-
tion for the ideas of which it treats. . .
. . .this was the most covert of his proposed introductions – in an earlier

version he went so far as to say the author had been accompanied ‘by
a lady supposed to be his wife, & an effeminate looking youth, to whom
he shewed so excessive an attachment as to give rise to the suspicion that
she was a woman’. . .”
“. . .even the version he decided upon is quite daring, given the blackmail. . .”
1
“. . .yes, not to mention that in the earlier version ‘a lady supposed to be

his wife’ indicates, to me, that he was thinking of Claire and Emilia, not
Mary – as Claire knew about his plan to head east. . .”
“. . .what was Mary’s reaction to the poem?”
“. . .she didn’t even see it until she was editing the poems aer his death:
out of all of the major poems in Mary’s 189 edition, it’s the only one
which Mary refused to write an introduction to. . .”
“. . .that alone says a great deal. . .”
“. . .but in the poem itself she does figure – although I have to admit it’s
not entirely in a positive light. . .”
“. . .how is she portrayed? I remember just the part about the planets –
Shelley as the earth, Mary the moon, Emilia the sun, and Claire. . .she
was a comet, wasn’t she?”
“. . .yes, it’s a strange poem – I’m not sure he had all his metaphors fully
under control, and the trajectory of the poem enacts precisely the ambi-
guity in his relationship to Emilia, and its final unraveling. e poem sets
itself up as an extended ode to courtly love with Emilia as its intended
audience, but even in its opening verses there’s a bizarre mixture of the
chaste and the passionate, as he wavers between seeing her as a sister and
a lover. . .here, listen. . .
I never thought before my death to see

Youth’s vision thus made perfect. Emily,
I love thee; though the world by no thin name
Will hide that love from its unvalued shame.
Would we two had been twins of the same mother!
Or, that the name my heart lent to another
Could be a sister’s bond for her and thee,
Blending two beams of one eternity!
Yet were one lawful and the other true,
ese names, though dear, could paint not, as is due,
How beyond refuge I am thine. Ah me!
I am not thine: I am part of thee.
. . .what do you think of that?”

“. . .so he wants her to be his twin sister, and then both she and Mary
would share his name, right? It’s a rather strange appeal. . .for a kind of
incest, if I’m not reading too much into it. . .”

“. . .no, you’re right. en, when Emilia appears in the poem, it’s very much
like Beatrice’s appearance in Dante, but filtered through the death drive. . .
She met me, Stranger, upon life’s rough way,

And lured me towards sweet Death; as Night by Day,
Winter by Spring, or Sorrow by swi Hope,
Led into light, life, peace. An antelope,
In the suspended impulse of its lightness,
Were less aethereally light: the brightness
Of her divinest presence trembles through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew
Embodied in the windless Heaven of June
Amid the splendour-wingèd stars, the Moon
Burns, inextinguishably beautiful. . .
. . .then, a few stanzas later, these effusions build to the point of becoming
almost embarrassing – it’s no wonder Mary didn’t comment upon the
poem. . .listen to this:
Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate

Whose course has been so starless! O too late
Belovèd! O too soon adored, by me!
For in the fields of immortality
My spirit should at first have worshipped thine,
A divine presence in a place divine;
Or should have moved beside it on this earth,
A shadow of that substance, from its birth;
But not as now:—I love thee. . .
. . .and it continues on in that semi-hysterical vein. . .”

“. . .he certainly writes as if he weren’t in control of his feelings – as if he
wanted them to take a different form. . .”
“. . .the whole Platonic aspect of the ‘epipsyche’ seems to speak of his
feelings as if they were emerging unbidden from within himself – out of
what we now call the unconscious; however, it’s not entirely irrational,
as right aer this passage he gives his clearest poetic statement about what
he meant by ‘free love’:

I never was attached to that great sect,

Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
e dreariest and the longest journey go.
True Love in this differs from gold and clay,

at to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; ‘tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
e Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow
e heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
e life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object, and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity.
. . .despite the irrational effusions of the rest of the poem, this part is quite
clear – of course, it’s rather an idealization. . .”
“. . .quite an idealization, given he seems to be trying to make it
a universal position. . .”
“. . .true, but I think the issue he’s considering is of importance not
merely to those people who embark on such complicated relations, but to
everyone. . .”
“. . .it certainly must be more difficult to sustain plural or polyamorous
relationships than to sustain love relations between only two people –
which is hard enough; nevertheless, it’s the same problem operating in
either case. We all have a dual nature: we have both reactive and active,

territorializing and de-territorializing, systemizing and variable aspects to

our natures – to borrow terms from Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, and
Luhmann. In love relations, one aspect is our possessive, territorial instinct
– our atavistic, habituated side, which incorporates the loved other into
ourselves, distorting and twisting the other so that they fit our psyche. e
other aspect is higher, in a way, and is directed towards the other – caring
for them, loving them, trying to help the other find their happiness, to
grow, to become themselves – in the Nietzschean sense of the phrase. It
tolerates change and transformation, and even aides the other towards this
development, despite the fear of loss. It’s quite difficult to deal with both
aspects, and whatever caused Shelley’s situation to disintegrate speaks to
the problems of any love relation, but in a more magnified sense. . .”
“. . .so what Shelley calls ‘division,’ you call ‘territoriality’ – that the real
point of free love is to be open to the other, rather than trying to police
them and foreclose their possibilities?”
“. . .yes. . .and whatever tolerance and openness is necessary with one
other is only multiplied considerably when there is another involved, so
it’s the same continuum of possibilities. . .”
“. . .but what did Shelley conclude – what do you conclude, given the
whole thing seemed to have crumbled for him?”
“. . .I conclude that love is impossible!”
“. . .no, seriously, what do you think?”
“. . .that it’s always difficult – actually, the poem itself comes to the same
conclusion – at least implicitly. I think Shelley realized he had made
serious errors – indeed he admitted to John Gisborne, later, that the
poem was a history of his errors – and especially the error of looking for
his ideal, his ‘epipsyche,’ in a mortal dress. . .look at this passage:
In many mortal forms I rashly sought

e shadow of that idol of my thought.
And some were fair – but beauty dies away:
Others were wise – but honeyed words betray:
And One was true – oh! why not true to me?
en, as a hunted deer that could not flee,
I turned upon my thoughts, and stood at bay,
Wounded and weak and panting; the cold day
Trembled, for pity of my strife and pain.
. . .”

“. . .who does he write about when he writes, ‘why not true to me?’ –
does he mean Claire and Byron?”
“. . .perhaps. . .remember his intended audience for the poem was
Emilia in the first instance, and he would have had reasons to disguise
Claire as a second intimate in his life – although I’m not sure he has
concrete references in mind. Clearly he was disappointed with his hopes
for love up to that point in his life. . .”
“. . .and he believed Emilia would cure his wound?”
“. . .she represented the inspiration of a new, idealized configuration of
love for him – it seems a strange concoction of free love and courtly love,
which he juxtaposes with what he had already experienced. e parts
about Mary and Claire were astonishingly frank – here’s the section
where he describes his relations to Mary, who he figures as the moon to
Emilia’s ‘sun’:
When, like noonday dawn, there shone again

Deliverance. One stood in my path who seemed
As like the glorious shape which I had dreamed
As is the Moon, whose changes ever run
Into themselves, to the eternal Sun;
e cold chaste Moon, the Queen of Heaven’s bright isles,
Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles,
at wandering shrine of so yet icy flame
Which ever is transformed, yet still the same,
And warms not but illumines. Young and fair
As the descended Spirit of that sphere,
She hid me, as the Moon may hide the night
From its own darkness, until all was bright
Between the Heaven and the Earth of my calm mind,
And, as a cloud charioted by the wind,
She led me to a cave in that wild place,
And sate beside me, with her downward face
Illumining my slumbers, like the Moon
Waxing and waning o’er Endymion.
And I was laid asleep, spirit and limb,
And all my being became bright or dim
As the Moon’s image in a summer sea,
According as she smiled or frowned on me;

And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed:

Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead: –
For at her silver voice came Death and Life,
Unmindful each of their accustomed strife,
Masked like twin babes, a sister and a brother,
e wandering hopes of one abandoned mother,
And through the cavern without wings they flew,
And cried ‘Away, he is not of our crew.’
I wept, and though it be a dream, I weep.
What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep,

Blotting that Moon, whose pale and waning lips
en shrank as in the sickness of eclipse; –
And how my soul was as a lampless sea,
And who was then its Tempest; and when She,
e Planet of that hour, was quenched, what frost
Crept o’er those waters, till from coast to coast
e moving billows of my being fell
Into a death of ice, immovable; –
And then – what earthquakes made it gape and split,
e white Moon smiling all the while on it,
ese words conceal: – If not, each word would be
e key of staunchless tears. Weep not for me!
. . .I don’t think he could have been more direct. . .”

“. . .‘warms not but illumines’; ‘cold chaste bed’ – it must have hurt
Mary very much to read that, not to mention the section about the death
of the children and its aermath – her ‘eclipse,’ and the ‘death of ice’ he
experienced as a result. . .”
“. . .yes – Mary’s coldness only partially thawed aer Percy’s birth: in
the final months of Shelley’s life everyone noticed it – Claire, Trelawny,
Edward and Jane Williams, and even Emilia felt Mary’s reserve. Mary
had become too cold – Shelley needed passion to fuel his inspiration, and
the passion between them had evaporated aer the death of the children.
en, with Claire away in Florence, he was lost. With Emilia he thought
he could isolate the element he needed for pure inspiration, eliminating
the more primal aspects of the drives and producing a kind of non-sexual
passion. . .”

“. . .isn’t that asking a little too much?”

“. . .of course it is, but Shelley wouldn’t have been Shelley if he didn’t
risk those thresholds – the poem stages that risk. Look at these stanzas –
first, where Emilia is to him like sunlight in a dark cavern, and then he
imagines a world of love where Emilia’s ‘sun’ would complement Mary’s
‘moon’:
At length, into the obscure Forest came

e Vision I had sought through grief and shame.
Athwart that wintry wilderness of thorns
Flashed from her motion splendour like the Morn’s
And from her presence life was radiated
rough the gray earth and branches bare and dead;

So that her way was paved, and roofed above
With flowers as so as thoughts of budding love;
And music from her respiration spread
Like light, — all other sounds were penetrated
By the small, still sweet spirit of that sound,
So that the savage winds hung mute around;
And odours warm and fresh fell from her hair
Dissolving the dull cold in the frore air:
So as an incarnation of the Sun,
When light is changed to love, this glorious One
Floated into the cavern where I lay,
And called my Spirit, and the dreaming clay
Was lied by the thing that dreamed below
As smoke by fire, and in her beauty’s glow
I stood, and felt the dawn of my long night
Was penetrating me with living light:
I knew it was the Vision veiled from me
So many years – that it was Emily.
Twin Spheres of light who rule this passive Earth,

is world of love, this me; and into birth
Awaken all its fruits and flowers, and dart
Magnetic might into its central heart;
And li its billows and its mists, and guide
8
By everlasting laws, each wind and tide

To its fit cloud, and its appointed cave;
And lull its storms, each in the craggy grave
Which was its cradle, luring to faint bowers
e armies of the rainbow-wingèd showers;
And, as those married lights, which from the towers
Of Heaven look forth and fold the wandering globe
In liquid sleep and splendour, as a robe;
And all their many-mingled influence blend,
If equal, yet unlike, to one sweet end; —
So, ye, bright regents, with alternate sway
Govern my sphere of being, night and day!
ou, not disdaining even a borrowed might;
ou, not eclipsing a remoter light;
And, through the shadow of seasons three,
From Spring to Autumn’s sere maturity,
Light it into the Winter of the tomb,
Where it might ripen to a brighter bloom.
. . .he’s mapping out a perfect universe of love. . .”

“. . .and what about Claire – does she exist in this imaginary universe?”
“. . .she makes her appearance as well – as a comet. . .”
“. . .read me the passage about her. . .”
“. . .let’s see. . .here it is:
ou too, O Comet beautiful and fierce,

Who drew the heart of this frail Universe
Towards thine own; till, wrecked in that convulsion,
Alternating attraction and repulsion,
ine went astray and that was rent in twain;
Oh, float into our azure heaven again!
Be there Love’s folding-star at thy return;
e living Sun will feed thee from its urn
Of golden fire; the Moon will veil her horn
In thy last smiles; adoring Even and Morn
Will worship thee with incense of calm breath
And lights and shadows; as the star of Death
And Birth is worshipped by those sisters wild
9
Called Hope and Fear – upon the heart are piled

eir offerings, – of this sacrifice divine
A World shall be the altar.
. . .there’s rather an excess of idealism there. . .”

“. . .I should say there is! Especially the part about the Moon ‘veiling
her horn’ – it’s rather wishful thinking in regard to Mary. I assume the
comet going ‘astray’ and breaking in two is hinting at Claire’s seduction
of Byron, her pregnancy, and her departure for Florence. . .”
“. . .yes, I think so. . .”
“. . .but given everything that happened – given that Claire was forced
to go away, wasn’t he afraid of the same thing happening again? I don’t
understand what he expected from his relationship with Emilia. . .”
“. . .I’m not convinced he expected anything – or at least anything
concrete. I think on one level he was quite serious when he said that it was
a fiction, a fantasy. At that point Mary was emotionally distant and Claire
was physically distant: he needed some form of inspiration, some intensive
movement, and he seized upon Emilia as exactly what he needed as a muse
– and she was perfect, wasn’t she? Aer all, she was locked up in a convent
– what was he going to do, break in and kidnap her?”
“. . .so, you see it entirely as a fantasy – just a reaction to what was
happening in his relationships to Mary and Claire?”
“. . .well, not entirely, but largely. . .look at these passages, where he fits
Emilia into his plan for traveling to the east – here it’s to some Greek
island. . .look at how he describes it – it’s absurdly idealized:
Emily,
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow;
ere is a path on the sea’s azure floor,
No keel has ever ploughed that path before;
e halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
e treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles;
e merry mariners are bold and free:
Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?
. . .he goes on and on about the island for another eighty lines or so, then
. . .here. . .he describes the domestic arrangements on the island. . .
0
is isle and house are mine, and I have vowed

ee to be lady of the solitude. —
And I have fitted up some chambers there
Looking towards the Eastern air,
And level with the living winds, which flow
Like waves above the living waves below. —
I have sent books and music there, and all
ose instruments with which the high Spirits call
e future from its cradle, and the past
Out of its grace, and make the present last
In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die.
. . .and a bit later, he continues, but slowly this chaste paradise gives way
to something else – look at how the island itself becomes eroticized. . .
Be this our home in life, and when years heap

eir withered hours, like leaves, on our decay,
Let us become the overhanging day,
e living soul of this Elysian isle,
Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile
We two will rise, and sit, and walk together,
Under the roof of the blue Ionian weather,
And wander in the meadows, or ascend
e mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend
With lightest winds, to touch their paramour;
Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore,
Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea
Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy, —
Possessing and possessed by all that is
Within that calm circumference of bliss,
And by each other, till to love and live
Be one: – or, at the noontide hour, arrive
Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep
e moonlight of the expired night asleep,
rough which the awakened day can never peep;
A veil for our seclusion, close as night’s,
Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights;
1
Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain

Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again.
. . .see what I mean – ‘burning kisses’? It’s hardly the innocence he’s trying
to make it. . .”
“. . .and what about Mary? She’s not even mentioned! I don’t see where
all this is heading – I don’t see how he could have ended the poem, or
continued on with a relationship with Emilia. . .”
“. . .I think the poem was meant to be a vehicle for him to idealize the
particulars of his relations with women as a whole, to connect them to
some over-all ideal, or principle, hence his miniature lecture on ‘free love,’
and the title of the poem itself. e problem was he had multiple moti-
vations, and his sexual drives slipped in through the back door, and
somehow gained ascendancy; but – and this is where he deserves credit
– he somehow knew it, and knew enough to stop the poem when it
began to go astray. . .”
“. . .and he also stopped the relationship?”
“. . .well, eventually. . .here, look at this passage where he loses control,
moving from an idealization of his relation to Emilia to something that
is far more sexual, but then he breaks it off at the point of climax – and
I mean that metaphorically and literally:
And we will talk, until thought’s melody

Become too sweet for utterance, and it die
In words, to live again in looks, which dart
With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,
Harmonizing silence without a sound.
Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,
And our veins beat together; and our lips
With other eloquence than words, eclipse
e soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being’s inmost cells,
e fountains of our deepest life shall be
Confused in passion’s golden purity,
As mountain-springs under the morning Sun.
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,

Till like two meteors of expanding flame,

ose spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable:
In one another’s substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbued
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. Woe is me!
e wingèd words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of Love’s rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire. –
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!
. . .the last few lines are typical Shelley swooning – they’re almost
embarrassing: the poet’s soul bared, his being overcome by his own
drives. . .and yet, there are very few writers who so nakedly reveal them-
selves up to the edge of the emotional breakdown of expression. Among
the romantics there are a few such moments in Novalis, Hölderlin,
Keats, and Nerval, and among the proto-moderns and moderns there
are such moments in writers like Rimbaud, Trakl, Tsvetayeva, Artaud,
and Bataille, but I don’t think that such effusions can be easily main-
tained for long without form – pure expression spills over the bound-
aries of language and either dissipates in pure noise or in the kind of
ellipses that Bataille uses, or finally dissolves the person expressing
something: I think that’s why Rimbaud or Laura Riding simply
stopped writing, or why writers like Hölderlin, Nerval, and Artaud fell
into silence or went mad. . .”
“. . .but what, finally, was he trying to do with the poem?”
“. . .with Epipsychidion Shelley tried desperately to make some kind of
sense out of the history of his relationships and out of his drives, or,
failing that, some kind of aesthetic order out of it all. At the very least it
worked autobiographically to create significant representations of his
relations to Mary and Claire. . .”
“. . .and Emilia. . .”

“. . .and I believe, finally, that he needed his sense of the ‘epipsyche,’ or

ideal love, in order to trace the lineaments of his real loves – to give them
a shape, an order, in relation to his ideal. e failure of the poem is that he
didn’t grasp his own contradictions until he reached the end of it and broke
it off, and, rather than rewriting it to represent more directly the facts of
his life and the difficulties that had ensued, he le it in its state of broken-
off idealization. He was aware of it, because he claimed that he wanted to
remedy his lapse some day by writing his own version of the Symposium in
order to finally set forth what he really felt about the nature of love. . .”
“. . .it’s a pity he didn’t get to it. . .”
“. . .yes, but, in a way, his whole life, his entire œuvre, is an exposition of
the nature of love – from the best to the worst aspects of it, it seems to
me. e idealism he was steeped in was the worst of it, and led to the
worst excesses – his failure to gauge the thresholds of others in relation to
his own, and so on; but, in his actual relations, the sheer fact he had such
a tolerance for the vagaries of Mary and Claire, his generosity, his
dynamic spirit – that’s the best of what Shelley was as a man. . .”
“. . .but what actually did happen with Shelley and Emilia in the end?”
“. . .it’s clear that he met Emilia a number of times alone, if we are to
believe some of the short lyrics he wrote then; however, I admit he later
told Byron not to mention a conversation that had passed between them
concerning Emilia. . .”
“. . .aha!”
“. . .‘aha’ what?”
“. . .I suspected there was something else. . .”
“. . .what – are you jealous?”
“. . .not of him, but of you – of how you’re defending him. . .”
“. . .I’m not defending him! ese meetings were at the convent anyway,
and they would have had to have been chaste – or chaste enough. . .”
“. . .nothing, really. I simply mean that whatever might have happened
certainly couldn’t have been very much. . .”
“. . .how much ‘not very much’?”
“. . .you’re not really jealous, are you?”
“. . .you seem to be a little too much on his side about all this. . .”
“. . .I’m just telling you the facts as best I know them. We really don’t
know what went on between them, although it seems for a period Shelley
was hatching some sort of plot to release her from the convent. . .”

“. . .and do what with her?”

“. . .I don’t think he thought that far ahead, and, anyway, the plan came
to nothing. Whatever happened between them happened very briefly,
for he had completed the poem by mid-February, and it seems as if his
fascination with her climaxed with the writing of the poem itself, because
aer he finished it his visits to her began to dwindle as spring progressed
– no doubt also because her parents arranged to have her engaged to
someone, and, when she was married later that summer, his contact with
her broke off entirely. . .”
“. . .how did Shelley react to her marriage?”
“. . .he took a sort of revenge on her, in that he wrote a poem about it
called Ginevra: in a way it’s a companion piece to Epipsychidion, repre-
senting the opposite of the free love espoused there – it’s metaphoric of
what happens when one marries not for love, but to suit custom, tradi-
tion, or to make a ‘good match.’ Ginevra is the Emilia character, and the
poem opens with a rather devastating description of the state of her mind
aer she’s just taken her marital vows – listen to this:
Wild, pale, and wonder-stricken, even as one

Who staggers forth into the air and sun
From the dark chamber of a mortal fever,
Bewildered, and incapable, and ever
Fancying strange comments in her dizzy brain
Of usual shapes, till the familiar train
Of objects and of persons passed like things
Strange as a dreamer’s mad imaginings,
Ginevra from the nuptial altar went;
e vows to which her lips had sworn assent
Rung in her brain still with a jarring din,
Deafening the lost intelligence within.
. . .it’s as if she had her brain sucked out. . .”

“. . .‘lost intelligence’ is rather harsh! So what happens to her?”
“. . .before her wedding night she meets her true love, Antonio, and she
proclaims that true love cannot be sundered by any earthly or unearthly
causes. She gives him her wedding ring, and vows that she will die rather
than consummate the marriage – then she kills herself. . .”
“. . .she kills herself ?”

“. . .yes – her matrimonial bed becomes her funeral bier, and her death
is described in a rather macabre manner, with rats nesting in her heart,
and worms in her hair. . .”
“. . .I think Shelley was hoping a little too much from Emilia, and
pushing his vengeance a little too far – did she ever see the poem?”
“. . .I doubt she ever saw the poem – he would have been quite cruel if
he had shown it to her. I believe it may well have been written for his own
satisfaction, as a way of poetically ‘killing’ his idealization of Emilia in
Epipsychidion with a contrary idealization: in a way, once she was
married, she was dead to him. He knew that aer her marriage she was
more or less doomed to convention. Actually, if he had been more cynical
and less idealistic, like Byron, then aer her marriage would have been
the time to have had an affair with her, as it appears that while Italian
women of that time were reluctant to sleep with anyone prior to
marriage, once they were married, they could and did freely choose their
amours. . .”
“. . .and is that what happened to Emilia – is it known?”
“. . .it’s rather sad and pathetic, really. She had asked them all to
discontinue visiting her as the wedding approached the following
summer, although she did ask Shelley to continue writing her in
a guarded manner. There’s no evidence that he ever wrote again,
probably because right before her marriage she requested a sum of
money from Shelley which seems a kind of blackmail, although she
claimed it was for a friend. She married a man named Biondi in
September of that year, to whom her intelligence was seen as a disad-
vantage rather than an asset. Mary wrote later that the rumor in Pisa
was that Emilia was leading her husband ‘a devil of a life’ – whatever
that means! Still, it must have been hard for her: she gave birth to
four children – none of which survived childhood, and she left her
husband a few years later, finally moving to Florence, where Medwin
recounts having met her later living alone, quite impoverished, and
where she died in 18. . .”
“. . .that’s sad, but I suppose, in a way, it gives evidence to Shelley’s
points about the hypocrisy of marriage then. Did Mary or Claire ever
fully realize what was going on with him when his infatuation was
happening?”
“. . .Mary must have realized something, as she expressed relief when
the spell passed and Emilia finally married. Claire, aside from noticing

that the frequency of Shelley’s letters had dropped off, was largely
unaware of the intensity with which Shelley had fallen under the thrall
of Emilia, and there’s no indication she ever read or reacted to
Epipsychidion. In any case, as the focus on Emilia lessened over the spring,
their attention was taken up by the arrival of Edward and Jane Williams
– friends of Medwin. . .”
“. . .Edward was with Shelley in the end, wasn’t he?”
“. . .yes, and Jane was the last woman Shelley would be infatuated with
– although that took a while to develop, as when they arrived in mid-
January, Jane was seven months pregnant. . .”
“. . .who were they?”
“. . .Edward Williams was a year younger than Shelley. He had been in
the Navy and he had met Medwin while they were both dragoons in the
East India Company. He had le the dragoons early, but had been there
long enough, like Medwin, to get at least a partial pension, which was
enough given the economic differentials to live fairly well on the conti-
nent at the time. ey had lived with Medwin for a year in Geneva, had
heard of Shelley, and as Medwin could secure them introductions, aer
spending the winter in the south of France, they set sale for Livorno.
Another reason they came was that they were not married, and they
wanted to avoid the inevitable scandal they might run into in Geneva:
Jane had already been married once, had le her husband, and had her
first child with Williams in England. . .”
“. . .how old was she?”
“. . .she was twenty-three. She was described as extremely pretty, with
large dark eyes and dark hair. Shelley was not immediately attracted to
her, but later she became his muse. Williams was quite pleasant, had some
literary pretensions to be a playwright, and enjoyed the kinds of outdoor
pursuits Shelley enjoyed, joining in the various walking, riding, sailing
and shooting expeditions. I think what was most important about him,
for Shelley, was that he wasn’t competitive, and allowed Shelley the kind
of welcoming listener that he needed – especially later, when Shelley was
being overwhelmed by Byron’s presence. . .”
“. . .that’s rare among men. . .”
“. . .true. Trelawny, who gave Shelley his due, was always ready to
compete with Byron, and Byron – well, what can I say? Oh, that reminds
me that another positive aspect of Williams was that he was rather liberal
in his treatment of Jane, and certainly never seems to have had any suspi-

cions or possessiveness about her in regard to Shelley. In a certain way –

more natural and less forced – this was to be the community Shelley had
hoped for all along. . .”
“. . .excepting the absence of Claire. . .”
“. . .yes, but she would be integrated back into the community fully by
the end. . .”
“. . .and in the meantime?”
“. . .Claire was trying to make the best of it, enjoying what she could of
life in Florence – walks along the Arno and in the Boboli gardens,
enjoying the Carnival in February. She was also working hard on her
German in the hopes of becoming the companion of some Grand Dame.
Shelley complimented her on her efforts, and wrote that she was
‘Germanizing very fast’. . .”
“. . .but why German?”
“. . .perhaps because her brother was in Vienna – that’s where she ulti-
mately went, anyway. . .”
“. . .and Shelley was for such a scheme?”
“. . .no, I don’t really think so – just enough to be encouraging, because
in one letter he seemed rather alarmed she might actually get such a posi-
tion. I think he was resigned to the fact of her being ‘parked’ there for
safety for the time being, but ultimately was waiting for a way to bring
her back. Look at how he ends this letter in January:
I wish to Heaven my dear girl that I could be of any avail to

add to your pleasures and diminish your pains – how ardently
you cannot know – you only know, as you frequently take care
to tell me, how vainly. – I can do you know other good than in
keeping up the unnatural connexion between this feeble mass
of diseases & infirmities and the vapid & weary spirit doomed
to drag it through the world – . I took up the pen for an
instant, only to thank you. – & if you will to kiss you for your
kind attention to me, & find I have written in ill spirits which
may infect you – Let them not do so. – I will write again
tomorrow, Meanwhile
Your’s most tenderly,

S. –
8
. . .of course it’s rather self-pitying. . .”

“. . .and rather self-serving, given the circumstances – that he was in the
midst of his infatuation with Emilia. . .”
“. . .perhaps. Jane, on the other hand, was to become something more,
but the threat was more for Mary than for Claire. . .”
“. . .so when was Jane’s child born?”
“. . .in mid-March, without a problem. . .”
“. . .at the Casa Galetti?”
“. . .actually, Medwin had le by the end of February, and by early
March, Shelley had moved to something that biographers and editors
called the ‘Casa Aulla’ where they stayed for two months – but I’m a little
skeptical about the name, which I haven’t been able to trace to any of
their journals or letters. . .”
“. . .in Czech ‘aula’ means a large lecture hall. . .”
“. . .in German too, as well as entrance hall – and the same in Italian
– that’s why I wonder if it wasn’t just a large hall in the Casa Galetti, as it
doesn’t make sense that they would have moved house there for only two
months. What information we do have is that they wanted a larger space
for entertaining guests, so my guess is that they may have taken a hall in
the same building. . .”
“. . .and perhaps they took the additional space because the baby was
coming. . .”
“. . .Medwin had stayed with them, so perhaps Edward and Jane were
staying with them too, and given the baby was born a week aer the
move, maybe you’re right. Whatever the case, I doubt Shelley would have
noticed the distraction then, because he was so deeply immersed in his
next project. . .”
“. . .which was?”
“. . .his most famous essay – A Defence of Poetry, which was written in
response to a critique of English poetry published in Ollier’s journal,
Literary Miscellany, by his friend Peacock. . .”
“. . .Peacock? Why was Peacock attacking poetry?”
“. . .Peacock had argued that most men were more concerned with
political and scientific concerns, poetry lacked an audience among the
best minds, and that it had therefore begun to pander to the ‘dregs of the
intellectual community,’ which preferred ‘mawkish sentiment with an
absolute negation of reason and knowledge’. . .”
“. . .was it an attack on Shelley?”
9
“. . .I don’t think it was meant to be, but, of course, there’s no way he

could have avoided offending Shelley, even if his real targets were the
more popular poets of the day. Peacock did not give poetry much credit
for seriousness, and that was reason alone to provoke Shelley to what
he termed, in a letter to Peacock, a ‘sacred rage’ of inspiration, spurring
him to pen the definitive statement of his own art, and perhaps all liter-
ature. He immediately began re-reading Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetrie
and concentrating his energy on considering why he had especially
chosen poetry as his vehicle; after all, his thinking was fully immersed
in the social and political conditions of humanity, and he might as well
have written essays or treatises or even novels. Instead, he, as well as the
other British and German romantics, had primarily chosen the most
aesthetically complex form, and consequently the most difficult to
defend. . .”
“. . .I always wondered why he chose to express his political and social
concerns in poetry, especially given he said he was so much against
didactic poetry. . .”
“. . .but that’s the key really. On the one hand Shelley hated poetry that
was only pretty verses, and he agreed with Peacock’s condemnation of
the sort of poetasting drivel that was being passed off as popular poetry
then – and believe me, some of the stuff is horrendous! On the other
hand, it’s true that he also hated didactic poetry: despite his strong opin-
ions, Shelley hardly ever veered into explanations or dogmas in his poetry.
He disliked precious and pretty sentimentality on the one hand, and
stern moralism or pedantry on the other. His definition of poetry was
really a definition of literature, in that he collapsed poetry and prose into
the same definition, writing in the Defence ‘the distinction between
poetry and prose is a vulgar error’ – and he did the same with poetry and
philosophy, much as the Jena romantics had done. He suggested, for
example, that several great philosophers, like Plato and Bacon, were poet-
ical, while many great writers – like Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton,
were philosophers. . .”
“. . .so what did he think was the defining factor of poetry – or literature
– as he meant it?”
“. . .his idea is somewhere between Keats’ notion of negative capability
and Blake’s sense of the imagination – let me read his definition. . .let’s
see, oh, yes, here it is:
0
. . .poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and

enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of
a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry
lis the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes
familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it re-produces
all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its
Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who
have once contemplated them as memorials of that gentle and
exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and
actions with which it coexists. e great secret of morals is
love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification
of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action,
or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must
imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself
in the place of another and of many others; the pains and
pleasures of his species must become his own. e great instru-
ment of moral good is the imagination; and poetry adminis-
ters to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the
circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with
thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of
attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other
thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose
void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens that faculty
which is the organ of the moral nature of man in the same
manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would
do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong,
which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical
creations which participate in neither. By this assumption of
the inferior office of interpreting the effect, in which perhaps
aer all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would
resign the glory in a participation in the cause.
. . .so literature is conceived as a socially transformative energy, but

without ideological content, enlarging the imagination through the
creation of ‘intervals and interstices’ – a negative space, in the sense of
void of positive or ideological conceptions, but allowing for the opening
or clearing of a space for new possibilities. It’s a kind of micropolitics,
which bridges the impasse between the aesthetic and the political –
1
Mukařovský suggested something very similar a hundred years later – did

you study the Prague School of linguistics at the university?”
“. . .we were taught the Prague School, but mostly the purely linguistic
aspects: functional sentence perspective, historical grammar – but
nothing at all about aesthetics. . .”
“. . .the aesthetic aspect was the only part we studied – mostly
Jakobson. Anyway, Mukařovský didn’t agree with the modernist
notion of a totally autonomous aesthetic, and yet he clearly didn’t
reject the aesthetic as a category: in fact, he saw aesthetic ‘self-suffi-
ciency’ as the hallmark of art, but rather than a category separable
from other values, he saw the aesthetic as a ‘conductor’ of the energies
of the various extra-aesthetic values in a work – he was as much against
the reduction of art to its merely formal properties as he was against
the reduction of art to its mere content. Mukařovský didn’t try to
deny the effect of art on society, but rather than seeing the aesthetic
as swallowing the other extra-aesthetic values, he saw it as actually
releasing these values from their attachment to corresponding values
in the world, which in turn created the even stronger, less ascertain-
able effect of art upon society. . .”
“. . .so, Shelley’s idea is that the poet is concerned with cause rather than
effect – with the actual releasing of transformative energies, but without
limiting them to a specific normative or political value. . .”
“. . .yes, that’s it. Mukařovský saw that the aesthetic transformed these
values into a different dimension, but rather than their existing in an airy
void of eternal beauty, they were then able to form a dynamic of value
that, when brought into coincidence with the world, created real
tensions, real effects, but effects tempered by the fact they were not actu-
ally deployed directly in the world, although they certainly could influ-
ence the world in an indirect manner. . .”
“. . .so, a kind of experimental testing-ground for new values. . .”
“. . .yes, but an active testing ground, functioning as a stimulus to values
enacted in the society – the ‘cause’ that Shelley speaks of, which is
strangely detached from the effect, but nonetheless able to create possi-
bilities that were fully realized in the social world, particularly during
times of social transformation. is occurs even if the artwork isn’t at all
oriented towards the social world. . .”
“. . .but is the artist aware of the effects he or she might be causing?
I understand that the causal relation is rather indirect, or that the artist

might not intend any effect at all, but I’m wondering how aware they are
of the effect as it is happening. . .”
“. . .perhaps they could be, but I think in the cases of both Shelley and
Mukařovský this is unnecessary; and for Shelley, the artist is rather
a passive character, which is really quite interesting for it represents the
turning point that had occurred in his life and his writing: in his earlier
life he had truly believed that social transformation based on rational
Enlightenment values could be obtained in a more or less controlled,
direct manner – his life was just such an experiment in trying to enact
social transformation, and you see what happened. . .”
“. . .it went totally out of control. . .”
“. . .to say the least! So how could he hold to his former values when his
experience contradicted them? Byron represented one possible response:
total cynicism. Shelley refused this response, although he wasn’t sure
where he was heading, and, in a way, this essay articulated directly what
conclusions he had been reaching in his poetry and in his life. Certainly he
couldn’t control things actively, but he could create dynamics in his work
and his life which sustained and opened the possibility of the world he
envisioned – a kind of immanent potential. e poet was one path to such
potentials, which, in keeping with this essential passivity, arrived from
somewhere else – for example, listen to this oen-quoted section. . .
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to

the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ‘I will compose
poetry.’ e greatest poet cannot say it; for the mind in creation
is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an incon-
stant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises
from within like the colour of a flower which fades and changes
as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are
unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.
. . .there’s little active control of the process, as you can see. . .”

“. . .where did he think this ‘invisible influence’ came from?”
“. . .at the risk of sounding flip, the concept of ‘zeitgeist’ was in the air
then – the arc of German idealism had just reached its apogee in the work
of Hegel and Schelling, followed by its crash and burn in Schopenhauer,
who had just published his magnum opus. While Shelley would not have
read any of their works directly, he would have received at least a bit of

Schelling indirectly through Coleridge’s work, which he did read closely

and with great interest – look at these final lines of the essay:
It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated

writers of the present day without being startled with the elec-
tric life which burns within their words. ey measure the
circumference and sound the depths of human nature with
a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are them-
selves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifesta-
tions; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets
are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the
mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the
present; the words which express what they understand not;
the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they
inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are
the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
. . .as you can see, the poet is something like an antenna for what’s
happening within society – ‘hierophant’ is a very good word for it, for it
suggests a person who acts as a relay between this world and the world of
spirit, very much like Mukařovský’s idea of the aesthetic as a conductor
of energy between realms. . .”
“. . .or what you said about the future yesterday – about the potential-
ities that exist in correlation to the pure past: Shelley’s idea about the
‘shadows which futurity casts upon the present’ seems quite similar. . .”
“. . .very much so, or as the workings of variability – the function of the
artist being both to venture out and grasp the nature of the evolutionary
transformations in the environment and to communicate them, as well
as experimenting with possible modes of adaptation as a way to respond
to the transformations occurring, or, even to help bring about those trans-
formations. . .”
“. . .so was Shelley heard – was their any response to the essay?”
“. . .not during his lifetime, regrettably: as soon as Mary had clean-
copied it, he sent it on March 1st in the hope that it would be published
in the next issue of Ollier’s Miscellany as an answer to Peacock. In fact, it
was first published with his other essays in 180, eighteen years aer his
death. . .”
“. . .why – because it was so radical?”

“. . .I can only speculate, but my guess is because the essay was so long
and difficult, and clearly ahead of its time. . .”
“. . .but Ollier published some of his works, didn’t he?”
“. . .yes, but certainly not everything, and only in limited editions when
he did. . .”
“. . .it must have been maddening for Shelley – ‘unacknowledged’ is
right! I don’t know how he could have stood it for so long. . .”
“. . .I think he must have taken some solace from a belief in something
quite close to the conception of immanence we were speaking about
yesterday: in the Defence he speaks of great poets like Dante as being
a ‘bridge thrown over the stream of time’ – look at this passage here,
. . .a great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the

waters of wisdom and delight; and aer one person and one
age has exhausted all of its divine effluence which their pecu-
liar relations enable them to share, another and yet another
succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of
an unforeseen and an unconceived delight. . .
. . .so, I think he must have hoped that what he was writing might have
universal significance that would eventually be recognized – as he found
there was a certain similarity between his position and Dante’s. . .”
“. . .because they were both exiles?”
“. . .that certainly, and also because their political positions proved to be
prescient – history would prove that they both were ‘mirrors of the gigantic
shadows which futurity casts upon the present’: in Dante’s case, his vision
of an enlightened supra-regional political entity to quell the fighting
between the Italian city-states, as well as his belief in the separation of
church and state; and, in Shelley’s case, his view of the necessity of
Enlightenment socio-political ideas, and his micropolitics – his attempt to
live outside of the normative value structures of his time. . .”
“. . .and both were condemned by their times. . .”
“. . .yes, and in both cases their writings did not truly emerge until later:
Dante did not even begin writing the Divine Comedy until he was exiled
in 10 and only completed it just before his death in Ravenna, while
Shelley – well, you know his publishing record during his life. . .”
“. . .and yet they are now the names we know as ‘Dante’ and ‘Shelley,’
while the names of their condemners are largely forgotten. . .”

“. . .that’s really the crux of the matter: because of their variability they
attained immanence, while their detractors are condemned to oblivion
through their pettiness and small-mindedness. . .”
“. . .but wasn’t there also some truth in Peacock’s position – that the
importance of poetry to society was coming to an end?”
“. . .it’s ironic that Peacock wrote his essay on the decline of poetry from
the midst of one of the great ages of poetry in all of human history; but,
having said that, it’s true that he foresaw the decline of the position of
poetry as a vehicle of variability. Byron’s Childe Harold was the apogee
of an age of poetry – I doubt any work of poetry before or aer had the
same European-wide and even world-wide impact. Walter Benjamin
wrote that Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, published in 18, was the last
volume of poetry to have truly a European-wide audience, and
Baudelaire’s audience was already quite select compared to Byron’s. e
novel took up what had previously been the position of poetry, overlap-
ping it for a time, and then over-taking it. Sir Walter Scott’s novels were
selling quite well at the same time as Byron’s poetry – actually Scott
began writing novels aer he gave up writing poetry that had to compete
with Byron’s; and then came Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, ackeray,
Trollope, Eliot, Hugo, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky – so Peacock was right
about poetry, but not about literature. . .”
“. . .and do you think the novel has now seen its day as well?”
“. . .well, if there was an apogee of the novel as an art-form, then it
certainly was during the modernist period with novelists like James,
Hardy, Forster, Conrad, Schnitzler, Proust, Joyce, Beckett, Kaa, Musil,
Broch, Mann, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Lawrence, Woolf and Faulkner.
Aer that it seems to thin out considerably: at mid-century there were
still experimental novelists of great power and inventiveness – Durrell,
Miller, Nin, Lowry, Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Genet, Marguerite Young,
omas Pynchon, Kundera, and then, a bit later, the fanning out of the
genre into other ethnicities and cultures you see in Richard Wright,
Goytisolo, Márquez, Rushdie, or Toni Morrison; but, then again, placing
the writings of a Beckett or Robbe-Grillet into the same generic category
as Hugo or Dickens is like using the classification ‘dog’ to include both
Great Danes and Chihuahuas! e novel as conceived by Goethe or
Balzac was a way of exploring the formation of an individual by their
society, while the works of writers like Beckett or Duras are a voiding of
the self, a desubjectivization. Poetry went through a similar evolutionary

process – from the lyric self to the voiding of self in its extreme forms in
Mallarmé and others. . .”
“. . .but what would be the novelistic equivalent of Childe Harold –
I mean a novel of a certain quality that also caught the spirit of the age
enough to reach a mass audience? I don’t mean the most important for
literature per se, or merely the one with the greatest sales, but the novel
that combined a certain level of quality with a certain linkage to the zeit-
geist of the time it was published. . .”
“. . .I suppose each national culture has its own version – I would guess
for the Czechs it would be Hašek’s e Good Soldier Schweik. . .”
“. . .yes. . .and for the United States, what? e Great Gatsby?”
“. . .that would be my choice – it reveals the futile, idealistic rushing
forward into the future at the expense of the past; but perhaps it could
also be Huckleberry Finn or e Scarlet Letter. . .”
“. . .and I guess for the UK it would be Austen or Dickens. . .”
“. . .yes, and for France, Victor Hugo or Balzac. . .”
“. . .and Germany?”
“. . .I don’t know. . .maybe Mann’s Buddenbrooks, or perhaps Remarque. . .”
“. . .and Italy?”
“. . .perhaps Lampedusa’s e Leopard. . .”
“. . .but I notice we’re not mentioning anything recent. . .”
“. . .I think genres have life-spans in the same way that cultures do, and
maybe the serious novel that rings a note in the zeitgeist is exhausted – or
at least for the time being. Perhaps truly variable writers are not emerging
due to the current state of the literary market, or perhaps a new genre is
emerging and isn’t identified yet. . .”
“. . .or perhaps whatever energy there was in literature migrated to
a different art-form, like cinema. . .”
“. . .yes, that’s highly possible; however, Jean-Luc Godard has written that
the history of cinema has already come to an end! He wrote that while only
art survives an era, it isn’t seen as art until its era has ended. . .”
“. . .then we’ll know the art-form of this era when it is over. . .”
“. . .there’s always some sort of art – Godard sees it as a means of
survival. . .”
“. . .but there have been periods in history when the art wasn’t exactly
memorable – look at the dreadful art supported by the Nazis or the
communists. . .”
“. . .true, but there was also dissident literature. . .”

“. . .when it wasn’t stamped out. . .under Czech communism there was

still dissident art, but under Stalin. . .or Hitler?”
“. . .only exile art. It’s true that when a social system is too rigid there’s
little room for the kind variability that produces innovative and
compelling art. Shelley or Byron likely wouldn’t be the Shelley or Byron
we know now if they had remained at the heart of the empire: they would
have gone the way of Wordsworth and Southey, in the end – system-
sanctified dullness. . .”
“. . .maybe that’s happening now, but rather than censorship and
concentration camps, it’s caused by the whole global media system,
attuned to market and entertainment values that treat culture like fast
food or a ride on a rollercoaster. . .”
“. . .that’s what Gilles Deleuze thought – he felt future innovative
writers wouldn’t find a publisher, and that we’d be le facing the dull-
ness of ‘standardized novels’ – mere imitations of the great novelists of
the past. . .”
“. . .I think it’s already happening. . .”
“. . .yes – in Shelley and Byron’s era books were the only real mass
media: you couldn’t turn on a television or a radio, or put on a CD or
DVD. Books are still read of course, but they take time to read, even more
time to write, and the postmodern world is too full of distractions. Even
Shelley, despite all his problems, had a vast amount of time to read and
write, whereas for me to squeeze out the three or four hours daily neces-
sary for my writing, I have to plan for it like I’m planning a military
campaign! So many other concerns are clamoring for attention, not least
of all the need to make a living of some sort. . .”
“. . .do you think you could ever make a living just writing?”
“. . .and write what I really want to write? I doubt it, but in any case I think
a writer has to be involved with the world in some concrete way beyond
their writing – it’s a matter of grounding oneself in real life and experience.
ere are very real dangers facing any serious writer these days. . .”
“. . .which dangers do you mean?”
“. . .in the 0th Century, especially, there’s been the increasing temptation
of the marketplace: for those who make their living writing, it’s perhaps the
primary danger, for one adapts oneself to what is selling in terms of both the
lure of money, and perhaps, even more, to the lure of fame. . .”
“. . .but wasn’t the same danger existing for writers like Balzac, Melville,
or Dickens? ey all bowed to public taste in order to sell their books. . .”
8
“. . .yes of course; however, all of them held to the integrity of their

visions, whereas I think now it’s becoming increasingly more difficult –
perhaps it was Hemingway who first truly encountered the dangers of
media-induced fame, and it helped bring about his destruction. . .”
“. . .and who was first to realize it among European writers?”
“. . .hmmm, I don’t know – I would say Sartre, possibly. . .”
“. . .Sartre? Why?”
“. . .I think he became hyper-conscious that he was being observed, that
he had an image to uphold, and I think it had to have a negative effect on
him and his work – although certainly he was not as extreme a case as
Hemingway. . .”
“. . .I understand the negative effect of fame and wealth, but scrounging
for money can’t be good for the creative process either. . .”
“. . .perhaps not for one’s longevity and sanity, but I think, all in all,
more writers who were poverty-stricken retained their visions than
writers in the limelight – look at Hölderlin, Keats, Rimbaud,
Dostoyevsky, Beckett, and Georges Bataille: their situations were quite
desperate, but their writing was always sublime. As far as employment is
concerned, I believe that, despite all, it certainly has contributed to the
works of writers: Williams Carlos Williams the baby doctor, Eliot the
banker, Kaa as a clerk in an insurance company, or Wallace Stevens the
vice-president of an insurance company. Of course they complained
about it, but would Eliot’s ‘hollow men’ or wastelanders be so hollow and
wasted without his experience at the bank? Or would Kaa’s vision of
society be so perverse and paranoid without his experience of the inanity
and faceless bureaucracy at the insurance company? I’m certain that
Joyce’s stints at English teaching for non-native speakers in Trieste and
Rome helped his polyglotism, as did Mallarme’s teaching at the lycée. . .”
“. . .and what about your teaching – has it helped your writing?”
“. . .I’m certainly no Joyce or Mallarmé, but it has definitely helped my
writing in many ways, although I think what’s crucial about my situation
is the fact that I am teaching abroad. I’m certain my writing would have
been swallowed by my working life if I had remained in the USA. . .”
“. . .why?”
“. . .everything there was pushing me to become a professor and scholar,
not a writer and thinker. Everything is so focused on a career-track
emphasizing publishing papers in specialist journals, working for tenure,
and demanding all kinds of committee work once you actually get tenure
9
– one’s time is eaten away, like the fairies in Ruiz’s film ree Lives and
Only One Death. It’s true that teaching abroad still takes me away from my
writing, but, on the other hand, if I were working at the insurance
company, like Kaa, writing would be the only place where communica-
tion could take place; as a teacher, I feel I do have another place to
communicate where I get immediate feedback, and sometimes I even hear
from students who remember something that I said years later. . .that’s
a kind of immanence too. . .”
“. . .but are students enough?”
“. . .not always, but, anyway, I think that the kind of immanence that
comes from a book is not merely supplemented by one’s direct inter-
actions with people, it oen depends upon them – depends upon how
one is in relation to others: I doubt Shelley, Kaa or Bataille would have
quite the same importance without the community of people that they
drew to themselves because of who they were, not just what they wrote.
Byron said ‘Shelley was without exception the best and least selfish man
I ever knew’; Milena Jesenská said ‘Kaa was the best of us’; and
Blanchot never stopped writing about Bataille in some way or another,
and dedicated his book L’Amitié to him. I don’t know how to explain it,
exactly: it isn’t merely that a given writer has supporters who put forward
his case to the world, it’s somehow connected to how a writer’s energy
affects others, and somehow there’s an immanent energy that is released
and returns to buoy him or her up – even aer their death. . .”
“. . .I understand exactly what you mean – Shelley is the perfect
example: I get the feeling at times that his writing exists more as an
evidence of his life, than his life as an evidence of his writing. e writing
gives us a glimmer of who he was, and what was lost – which is not to say
that the writing isn’t great in itself, but it wouldn’t have been so great if
Shelley wasn’t himself such a fantastic being – the writing is like a shadow
tracing of that being, and we continue to read it because that being
happened to leave writing that was in places as complex, ambivalent, and
interesting as he was. . .”
“. . .I couldn’t have said it better. . .”
“. . .it’s starting to get hot, and I’m starting to get hungry: shall we go
back down and find some shade?”
“. . .yes, and I can tell you the rest of what happened here over lunch. . .”
0


Georges Bataille: Saint Germain en Laye, Late Summer, 1939
. . .in the Forêt de Marly near St. Germain en Laye, a man walks along
a path on a September night, the trees looming as dark shapes against the
starry, moonless sky. In the distance, soundless flashes of heat lightning arc
luridly across the sky, starkly revealing the trees surrounding him in fleeting
luminescences, then plunging him into an even more obscure darkness. He
veers onto a narrower path, where, aer twenty meters, he stops, listens
a moment, then lies down on the forest floor in a small clearing, gazing
upwards at the innumerable stars burning themselves into oblivion as they
reel across the firmament above. He senses time as if it were a bird of prey
hovering above him, and for a moment he shudders om a brief vision of
himself as a small bird grasped in its talons, his throat slashed by its sharp
beak. He shakes the vision off, laughs to himself, and aer serenely observing
the spinning abyss above him for a while longer, he stands up, brushes
himself off, and walks back to the wider path. . .
. . .half an hour later, he walks up the path leading towards his house on the
hill, feeling strangely light and empty. He senses something, and looks up at
the flicker of the false dawn. Suddenly, it is as if the sky had shattered,
revealing the abyss behind it – he feels the darkness penetrating, drawing
him out and away om himself, opening to a vision that holds him in its
thrall: the movement of the seasons, the consuming and re-consuming of

existence by itself, demanding, among its inexorable toll of ceaseless annihi-
lation in the endless cycles of time his own release in death – a world in
which he is torn apart, wounded, sacrificed. . .
. . .a dense point of light approaches, gliding across space and time until it
resolves itself into a figure which raises a crystal sword, bringing it down
upon him with a single, silent blow, scattering him like sand. . .
. . .in the calm that overcomes him in the wake of his vision, he is suddenly
seized by the vivid memory of his dead lover – the memory of her loss devas-
tates him, leaving him wandering in the desert of his grief. . .
“. . .in the final weeks she seemed to gird herself in preparation for the
struggle that cononted her, arming herself even against me – opening up
all the old wounds and conflicts, reproaching me for the past. In the midst
of her anger, she gave over to those terrible fits of coughing which suffocated
her – and yet, her closed eyes would suddenly open for brief moments,
shining with a radiance as if startled by the world around her, wanting to
take in as much of it as possible – in such moments attaining a calm and
limpid beauty. . .”
“. . .towards the end, in early November, she succumbed to fits of anger and
delirium, but what was worst of all was when she became lost inside herself,
driving me away into the night – nights of drunkenness and dissipation,
days of torpor and lassitude. . .but, always, I returned to her bedside to face
her again – her suffering, her maledictions. . .or, worst of all, the oblivion of
her forgetting. . .”
“. . .there was that day when the sun suddenly appeared for a brief moment
against the row of trees opposite my window, their reddish-brown leaves
ablaze with light. . .I went to Laure in her room, bringing her a last rose of
summer I found in the garden. In that moment – her last moment of
consciousness – she suddenly became lucid, smiled, and whispered her last
sentence: ‘It’s ravishing.’ She brought the flower up to her lips and kissed it
as if she had wanted to grasp, in that moment, everything that was soon to
escape her. . .but this lucidity only lasted for an instant – in a terrible gesture,
she raised it in ont of her eyes as if it were something alien, gave a sudden,
guttural moan, and cast it away, giving me a withering look that still makes
me shudder. If I had been aaid, in that moment, everything would have
been lost between us forever, but I was overcome with tenderness towards
her. . .in that moment I loved her utterly while the world dissolved around
me. . .”
“. . .then – how much later I do not know – her eyes became suddenly fixed,
riveted on the light by her bed. She clutched my wrists tightly as if she wanted
me to draw her away om what was tearing her infinitely away. . .but, then,
her grip loosened its hold, she released me and sank backwards, withdrawing
om the world around her. She began breathing convulsively – I knew the end
was approaching, that we would never speak to one another again, we would
never feel each other’s touch. . .I broke down sobbing when I realized this,
wracked with grief, the world crumbling pitilessly around me, leaving me at
the extreme limit of my being, wanting to reach her across that void. . .to forge
a new way to relinquish myself in order to bridge the chasm between us – the
chasm between my life, and her death. . .”

ey sit on a green-slatted wooden bench in the shade of the Linden trees
lining the broad, pebbled path leading to the front of the terme. Between
them on the bench is a clear plastic container with olives, two slices of
Talegio and Fontina cheese lying on brown waxed paper, a half loaf of
crusty Tuscan bread, some apricots, and bottles of acqua minerale and
Chardonnay sweating in the heat. ere is no one about, and the only
sound is the intermittent rasping of the cicadas.
“. . .so when did they return here?”
“. . .they returned here on May 8, 181, and Edward and Jane Williams
took a villa a couple of kilometers from here in Pugnano. . .look, it’s this
small town here on the map – they used to boat along the canal to it. . .”
“. . .when did they get the boat?”
“. . .for Shelley it had been a choice between getting a horse or a boat,
and as the horse would have needed a groom, he decided upon the boat,
which was the real beginning of his love for sailing. He, Williams, and
Henry Reveley, the Gisborne’s son, had bought a small boat in Livorno,
fitting it with a mast and a sail. Actually, during their first voyage up the
Arno to Pisa at night there was a nautical disaster when Williams stood
up to adjust something, lost his balance, and the boat capsized. Reveley
dragged Shelley to shore, and they had to go seek aid in a peasant’s house
nearby, where they stayed the night. . .”
“. . .they saved the boat?”
“. . .Reveley was a strong swimmer, and he was able to save it with
Williams. The next day he went back to Livorno to repair the boat,
having a keel added to it to make it more stable. Shelley saw the whole
thing as a good omen – a kind of baptism as it were, but he still didn’t
bother to learn how to swim, even though it was his second close call.
The boat became his hobby that summer, and he spent a good deal of
time boating with Williams on the canals around here, and even down
the Serchio to the sea and then south to Livorno once, which was
rather foolhardy, given it was just a three meter wooden-framed boat
with treated canvas stretched across it – really only meant for use in

the canals. He wrote a kind of silly poem about one of their expedi-
tions, ‘The Boat on the Serchio,’ but it has its charms – it begins quite
nicely. . .
Our boat is asleep on Serchio’s stream,

Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream,
e helm sways idly, hither and thither;
Dominic, the boatman, has brought the mast,
And the oars, and the sails; but ‘tis sleeping fast,
Like a beast, unconscious of its tether.
e stars burnt out in the pale blue air,

And the thin white moon lay withering there;
To tower, and cavern, and ri, and tree,
e owl and the bat fled drowsily.
Day had kindled the dewy woods,
And the rocks above and the stream below,
And the vapours in their multitudes,
And the Apennine’s shroud of summer snow,
And clothed with light of ary gold
e mists in their eastern caves uprolled.
. . .aer a short description of the morning and of all the activities men
and women are set about doing, there’s a description of the figures of
‘Melchior’ and ‘Lionel’ – Shelley and Williams – and how their lives are
different from the rest:
Melchior and Lionel were not among those;

ey from the throng of men had stepped aside,
And made their home under the green hill-side.
It was that hill, whose intervening brow
Screens Lucca from the Pisan’s envious eye,
Which the circumfluous plain waving below,
Like a wide lake of green fertility,
With streams and fields and marshes bare,
Divides from the far Apennines – which lie
Islanded in the immeasurable air.
8
. . .they argue a bit about how they might have le earlier, and then aer
completing all their preparations, embark on their expedition, laced with
comic irony, as they make it seem as if the Serchio were a raging river,
whereas it’s usually just a placid canal:
e chain is loosed, the sails are spread,

e living breath is fresh behind,
As, with dews and sunrise fed,
Comes the laughing morning wind; –
e sails are full, the boat makes head
Against the Serchio’s torrent fierce,
en flags with intermitting course,
And hangs upon the wave, and stems
e tempest of the. . .
Which fervid from its mountain source
Shallow, smooth and strong doth come, –
Swi as fire, tempestuously
It sweeps into the affrighted sea
In morning’s smile its eddies coil,
Its billows sparkle, toss and boil,
Torturing all its quiet light
Into columns fierce and bright.
. . .the poem ends rather strangely: the expedition is mentioned no longer

– it simply ends with an overtly sexual image of the river surging forth
from between the marble cliffs at the foot of the mountains, bringing the
fertility resulting from its climax to the plains below. . .
e Serchio, twisting forth

Between the marble barriers which it clove
At Ripafratta, leads through the dread chasm
e wave that died the death the death which lovers love,
Living in what it sought; as if this spasm
Had not yet passed, the toppling mountains cling,
But the clear stream in full enthusiasm
Pours itself on the plain, then wandering
Down one clear path of effluence crystalline
Sends its superfluous waves, that they may fling
9
At Arno’s feet tribute of corn and wine;

en, through the pestilential deserts wild
Of tangled marsh and woods of stunted pine,
It rushes to the Ocean.
. . .and that’s it. . .”

“. . .it’s very sexual – and very strange, as the poem begins so lightly. . .”
“. . .I don’t want to make too much of it, but the connection between
sex, death, and the implied return to the maternal ocean. . .it’s almost as
if he had a death-wish – I mean the fact that he had all the boating acci-
dents without bothering to learn how to swim. . .”
“. . .it’s strange that he had the presence of mind to leave Claire and
Allegra something in his will aer the boating incident with Byron in
Geneva, but not the presence of mind to learn the basics of swimming. . .”
“. . .and even stranger given it was actually the April day he returned
from his dunking in the Arno that he learned Keats had died in Rome
the previous February. His reaction to Keats’ death really shows a projec-
tive identification – most blatantly in the preface of his elegy to Keats,
Adonaïs, written in early June. Look, here he describes the Protestant
cemetery in Rome where Keats, and his son William, were buried: ‘It
might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried
in so sweet a place. . .’”
“. . .he really did have a death drive!”
“. . .he uses the whole preface of the poem to blame the reviewers of
Endymion in the Quarterly for provoking the onset of the final stage of
Keats’ tuberculosis. . .
e savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the

Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his
susceptible mind: the agitation thus originated ended in the
rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption
ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgments from more
candid critics of the true greatness of his power, were ineffec-
tual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted.
. . .and that’s just the beginning – he gets quite carried away: he wrote to
Claire that he had ‘dipped’ his ‘pen in consuming fire to chastise his
destroyers.’ It’s fortunate that he passed the poem around a bit before
0
publishing it, because it might well have been worse – it was John Taafe who
was able to influence Shelley to tone down the preface considerably. . .”
“. . .I thought Taafe was a fool and a bore. . .”
“. . .he was, but in this case Taafe was right, and Shelley must have real-
ized that if somebody like Taafe would have seen the preface as far too
personal, than Shelley was opening himself up to further scorn from his
critics. . .”
“. . .but was it true that Keats had died as a result of his feelings about
the review?”
“. . .it’s true that Keats was a sensitive soul, but I think Shelley was
getting carried away a bit, and projecting his own feelings. When he sent
the poem to Byron, he even admitted it in his accompanying letter:
. . .I need not be told that I have been carried too far by the
enthusiasm of the moment; by my piety, and my indignation,
in panegyric. But if I have erred, I console myself by reflecting
that it is in defence of the weak – not in conjunction with the
powerful. And perhaps I have erred from the narrow view of
considering Keats rather as he surpassed me in particular, than
as he was inferior to others: so subtle is the principle of self
I have been unwillingly, and in spite of myself, induced to
notice the attack of the Quarterly upon me; it would have
been affectation to have omitted the few words in which
I allude to it.
. . .and it’s even clearer in the poem itself, which Mary wrote later was
more about Shelley than it was about Keats. It’s hard not to see the poem
as containing something like a death-wish, placed within the context of
a perspective on death that seems very much like a form of disembodied
energy and immanence. . .”
“. . .when did he write it?”
“. . .he worked on it in the early days of June – perhaps while he was
sailing alone in his new boat. He felt the poem was better than anything
he had written up to that point. . .”
“. . .was it?”
“. . .in my opinion it’s quite good, but not his very best – I prefer poems
where he loses control a bit more, and delves deeper, like Julian and
Maddalo and Prometheus Unbound; but that isn’t to say there aren’t some
1
brilliant passages, of course, and to give Shelley credit, beyond the circle
of Keats’ closest friends, Shelley was one of the first to recognize Keats’
genius. His elegy to him followed the rules of the poetic tradition more
than he had done in the past. . .”
“. . .I didn’t think the rules mattered so much to him. . .”
“. . .they didn’t, but I think he felt the power of the elegiac form he was
utilizing, and he didn’t realize how much he was transforming it to suit
his purpose – which was to create a narrative framework for how he had
come to see the trajectory of the life of the kind of poet he was. . .”
“. . .the ‘exiled romantic poet’?”
“. . .yes, or perhaps the exiled lyric, Orphic, or visionary poet; for
example, as much as he admired Byron’s poetry, I think he saw Byron as
doing something diametrically opposite in his poetry. Shelley and Keats
were sacrificing themselves for beauty, which is why he used a trans-
formed version of the Adonis myth. . .”
“. . .transformed how?”
“. . .in the myth, Adonis is resurrected by Zeus aer he is slain by a wild
boar: he’s allowed to spend the summer months with Aphrodite, the
winter months with Persephone – so it’s about the eternally cyclical
aspect of nature, which Shelley borrows and transforms into his theory of
poetic immortality, or immanence. . .”
“. . .can you read me the passages you like?”
“. . .it’s difficult out of context, so I’ll paraphrase it until I reach the
passages. e first part is a lamentation for the dead Adonais, more or
less modeled on a standard elegy, but he introduces this character of
Urania who seems to be something like the maternal muse of poetry. e
narrator calls for her, the ‘most musical of mourners,’ to awaken and to
lament the loss of Adonais. He speaks of Milton, and of other poets, and
then finally of Keats, making it clear that the poet is moldering in his
tomb – the implication being that there’s no personal immortality of the
Christian sort awaiting him:
He will awake no more, oh, never more! –

Within the twilight chamber spreads apace,
e shadow of white Death, and at the door
Invisible Corruption waits to trace
His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place;
e eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe

Soothes her pale rage, nor dares she to deface

So fair a prey, till darkness, and the law
Of change, shall o’er his sleep the mortal curtain draw.
. . .this is followed by a description, over several stanzas, where the disem-

bodied images and thoughts from Keats’ poetry and the various objects
that inspired them hold vigil over his dead body, lamenting his passing.
en, spring comes. . .
rough wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean
A quickening life from the Earth’s heart has burst
As it has ever done, with change and motion,
From the great morning of the world when first
God dawned on Chaos; in its steam immersed
e lamps of heaven flash with a soer light;
All baser things pant with life’s sacred thirst;
Diffuse themselves; and spend in love’s delight,
e beauty and the joy of their renewed might.
. . .and it seems, for a moment, that this cyclical, natural renewal actually
is enough:
e leprous corpse touched by this spirit tender

Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath;
Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour
Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death
And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath;
Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
By sightless lightning? – the intense atom glows
A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.
. . .but you can see that a sudden doubt enters in: from the point of view
of eternity the cyclicity of the seasons is enough, but not from the point
of view of human mortality, because the mind, the ‘intense atom,’ goes
out, and in this next stanza the narrator goes into a kind of paroxysm of
questioning:

Alas! that all we loved of him should be,

But for our grief, as if it had not been,
And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!
Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene
e actors or the spectators? Great and mean
Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow.
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.
. . .the same ambiguity of perspective occurs when Urania awakes in the

next stanzas, for it is ‘Misery’ that succeeds finally in awakening her from
the paradise of beauty she inhabits – the earthly way she must pass to
arrive at the tomb is terrible:
Out of her secret Paradise she sped,

rough camps and cities rough with stone, and steel,
And human hearts, which to her aery tread
Yielding not, wounded the invisible
Palms of her tender feet where’er they fell:
And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they
Rent the so Form they never could repel,
Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May,
Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way.
. . .the image is a bit like ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ where the poet must
cut himself on the thorns of life in order to bring forth beauty – here
beauty herself cutting herself where she walks, and leaving behind flowers
where she steps. She gives an address to the corpse, bemoaning his death
and his weakness in the face of those who persecuted him, and this
creates an opening where others come to pay tribute: the ‘Pilgrim of
Eternity’ here is usually identified as Byron, although that was a bit of
wishful thinking on Shelley’s part, as the most Byron could produce on
Keats’ death was a couple of sardonic quatrains. . .”
“. . .you’re joking!”
“. . .no, I’m not. Byron didn’t think much of Keats – at least until he
heard Shelley’s opinion: he called Keats’ poetry a form of poetic ‘mental
masturbation,’ but I think the truth is that Byron feared a rival, and espe-

cially a rival who followed a different path. He disliked Keats’ criticism,

in print, of one of his heroes – Alexander Pope, for it cut too close to
being a criticism of Byron’s verse and its tendency to increasingly uphold
his sardonic wit over poetic beauty. Shelley had to cajole him to read
Hyperion, which Shelley saw as brilliant. . .”
“. . .so what did Byron write?”
“. . .I have it somewhere here – let’s see. . .here it is. . .
Who killed John Keats?

‘I,’ says the Quarterly,
So savage and Tartarly;
‘’Twas one of my feats.’
Who shot the arrow?

‘e poet-priest Milman
(So ready to kill man),
Or Southey, or Barrow.’
. . .pretty bad, isn’t it?”

“. . .it’s awful. . .”
“. . .he wrote it in July, so probably as a response to Shelley’s poem,
which was sent to Byron on July 1th – Shelley had hoped that Byron
would ‘veil all the lightnings of his song in sorrow,’ but he didn’t exactly
have Shelley’s sensitivity. . .”
“. . .to say the least. . .”
“. . .but he did accept Shelley’s opinion of Hyperion, finally, and actu-
ally instructed his publisher, John Murray, to omit anything negative that
he said about Keats in any of his publications – which is saying a great
deal, given Byron’s pride. . .”
“. . .I’m surprised he listened to Shelley. . .”
“. . .yes, it wasn’t oen that he deferred to anybody, but he definitely
respected Shelley’s opinion – with some reservations. I have somewhere
here another stanza Byron wrote about Keats from Don Juan, written
later, aer Shelley’s death. . .here it is. . .
John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,

Just as he really promised something great,
If not intelligible, – without Greek

Contrived to talk about the Gods of late,

Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate: –
‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.
. . .it’s hardly more than a grudging tribute. In any case, aer Byron’s brief
appearance in the Adonais, and another by Tom Moore, Shelley himself
appears – it’s actually quite long, going on for five complete stanzas out
of the fiy-five of the poem. . .”
“. . .all right. . .
Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,

A phantom among men; companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm
Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,
Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness,
Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray
With feeble steps o’er the world’s wilderness,
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.
A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swi –

A Love in desolation masked; – a Power
Girt round with weakness; – it can scarce upli
e weight of the superincumbent hour;
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,
A breaking billow; – even whilst we speak
Is it not broken? On the withering flower
e killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
e life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.
His head was bound with pansies overblown,

And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue;
And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,
Round whose rude sha dark ivy-tresses grew
Yet dripping with the forest’s noonday dew,

Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart

Shook the weak hand that grasped it; of that crew
He came the last, neglected and apart;
A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter’s dart.
All stood aloof, and at his partial moan

Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band
Who in another’s fate now wept his own –
As in the accents of an unknown land
He sung new sorrow; sad Urania scanned
e Stranger’s mien, and murmured: ‘Who art thou?’
He answered not, but with a sudden hand
Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow,
Which was like Cain’s or Christ’s – oh! that it should be so!
What soer voice is hushed over the dead?

Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown?
What form leans sadly o’er the white death-bed,
In mockery of monumental stone,
e heavy heart heaving without a moan?
If it be He, who, gentlest of the wise,
Taught, soothed, loved, honoured the departed one,
Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs,
e silence of that heart’s accepted sacrifice.
. . .‘in another’s fate now wept his own’. . .a ‘phantom among men,’
‘companionless,’ a ‘frail form,’ a ‘power girt round with weakness,’
a ‘herd-abandoned deer’ – all these phrases fit Shelley’s self-image quite
well. . .”
“. . .but what about the image of the sha – I see how he’s projecting
his own feelings of abjection, but it’s difficult to see how this leads to
auto-eroticism, as it seems to here. . .”
“. . .plus he’s in front of a corpse! I see it as the death drive and sexual
drive coming together, and that it’s implicitly tied to the later images in
the poem, as the poem is really an attempt by Shelley to come to terms
with his own relation to life and death – and, like Keats’ ‘I have been half
in love with easeful death,’ the pull he felt to end it all. It’s in the last
twenty stanzas or so where one feels the death-drive overtaking him. It

begins with this line – ‘the pure spirit shall flow back to the burning
fountain whence it came,’ which is followed by the kind of reversal
Shelley used in ‘e Sensitive Plant’:
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep –

He hath awakened from the dream of life –
‘Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife
Invulnerable nothings. – We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
. . .the reversal is that it’s not the dead poet who is decaying in the tomb as
in the first section of the poem, but we, the living, who are decaying. e
narrator of the poem was overcome at first, seeing merely finitude, but he
realizes here that something does live on, even if the individual is consumed:
not the consoling belief in personal immortality that religion promises –
Shelley was too honest to believe in that, but something like a disembodied
energy: the more a person gives over to that energy, burning incandescently,
the more that energy was transformed into this immortal fountain, which
seems very much like the immanent energy one finds in the eternity of
Spinoza, or the angelic realm of Rilke, or in Deleuze’s or Klossowski’s ideas
of disembodied energies – as you can see in this stanza. . .
e splendours of the firmament of time

May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
e brightness it may veil. When loy thought
Lis a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it, for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.
. . .but before he strives for such an apotheosis, there are some lines here
that are quite prescient about the graveyard in Rome where Keats was
8
buried and where Shelley would come to be buried: first, there’s what
appears to be a veiled reference to Shelley’s son William here, when he
writes ‘O go to Rome, which is the sepulchre, O not of him, but of our
joy’ – and it’s even stranger, here, when he poetically describes what
would become his own resting place in this stanza:
And grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time

Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;
And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned
e refuge for his memory, doth stand
Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath,
A field is spread, on which a newer band
Have pitched in Heaven’s smile their camp of death,
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.
. . .the pyramid is that of Caius Cestius, a self-important Roman magis-

trate from the time of Augustus Caesar whose only claim to fame is, well,
this pyramid. . .”
“. . .proving Shelley’s point. . .”
“. . .yes. . .I read that Keats suddenly had a desire to have books around
him in his final days: not to read apparently, but just to take comfort from
their presence. He didn’t hope for much, as he hadn’t completed
anything that he could truly stand by, but he did feel he had earned some
place among the English poets. Shelley sensed it too, and in the final
stanzas of the poem he was drawn towards the same death that had
enveloped Keats in some of the poem’s most famous lines. . .
e One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments. – Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled! – Rome’s azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
e glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
9
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

y hopes are gone before: from all things here
ey have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is passed from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither,
e so sky smiles, – the low wind whispers near:
‘Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.
at Light whose smile kindles the Universe,

at Beauty in which all things work and move,
at Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
e fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
e breath whose might I have invoked in song

Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
e massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
e soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
. . .it’s a perfect exemplification of immanence – the ‘white radiance

of eternity’ is far closer to something like Bergson’s ‘domain of
Spirit’ than it is to anything traditionally religious. Like Bergson, it’s
a materialist mysticism, or a mystical materialism – but it becomes
pointless to speak of mystical or material, for both evoke a kind of
ideology, both make claims to a kind of certainty about the world as
being either traversed by a metaphysical realm, or a purely material
level. . .”
80
“. . .but as you said, he seems to be desiring to enter this realm immedi-

ately – it’s a kind of death-wish or suicide. . .”
“. . .yes – just as the final lines of Epipsychidion strived for an apotheosis
of sexual energy, these last stanzas strive for an apotheosis of life within
death: there’s something very mysterious about how they combine a kind
of triumphalism with such abjection, for despite the fact he refers to an
‘abode,’ and with positive connotations like ‘sustaining Love,’ his
metaphors end up tearing themselves apart in the end, for what it really
amounts to, if you follow his figures, is a consuming fire or light. . .”
“. . .and it absorbs everything: our temporal lives are seen as a stained
glass window filtering the real light – the ‘white radiance of Eternity,’ so
that ‘flowers, ruins, statues, music, words’ – everything is only a mere
filter for this beyond, which dissolves it in the end. . .”
“. . .but it preserves everything that matters – everything that is willed
intensely enough, everything that can attain immanence. Keats once
wrote, ‘the excellence of every art is its intensity’. . .”
“. . .but what disturbs me the most is the pessimism of the third to last
stanza – the lines that say, ‘what still is dear attracts to crush, repels to
make thee wither’: was eternity really so much more attractive to him
then than his own life?”
“. . .he died a little more than a year later: the fact he uses the metaphor
of his ‘spirit’s bark’ – is disturbingly prescient, given what happened, and
yet, the poem is ambiguous: he’s ‘driven’ and ‘borne darkly, fearfully, afar,’
which suggests being blown or drawn against his will, but there’s also
some suggestion that he’s being attracted by the ‘beacon’ of Adonais,
which is more willed. Certainly Mary and others in their circle felt that
Adonaïs prefigured his own death a year later – Mary went so far as to
refer to it as a ‘prophecy’. . .”
“. . .but what were the circumstances causing him to feel that way –
Claire’s absence?”
“. . .primarily – along with Mary’s psychic paralysis. He wrote Claire
on June 8th – the day he finished the poem, that the only activity that gave
him some solace from ‘thinking too much’ was the composition of
poetry, which he felt ‘lied him above the stormy mist of sensations’. . .”
“. . .his life with Mary?”
“. . .that spring he was very much alone with Mary, except for the
time he spent with Williams boating and in Pugnano. While Mary
remembers the days as rather pleasant, she wasn’t exactly responsive
81
to his feelings, as she admitted in the notes to his poems after his
death. Shelley would give Williams his poem about the coldness of
their relations – about his being ‘shut out of paradise’ – the following
January, so it was to this period that the poem was immediately refer-
ring: spring, summer, and autumn of 181. . .”
“. . .and are there any shorter poems from this period that show his feel-
ings toward her?”
“. . .yes, although not all of them are so easily dated. One of them for
certain comes from spring: it’s a short, lighter-toned lyric called ‘e
Aziola,’ which mentions Mary by name. . .”
“. . .read it please. . .”
“. . .ok. . .
‘Do you not hear the Aziola cry?

Methinks she must be nigh,’
Said Mary, as we sate
In dusk, ere stars were lit, or candles brought;
And I, who thought
is Aziola was some tedious woman,
Asked, ‘Who is Aziola?’ How elate
I felt to know that it was nothing human,
No mockery of myself to fear or hate:
And Mary saw my soul,
And laughed, and said, ‘Disquiet yourself not;
‘Tis nothing but a little downy owl.’
Sad Aziola! many an eventide

y music I had heard
By wood and stream, meadow and mountain-side,
And fields and marshes wide, –
Such as nor voice, nor lute, nor wind, nor bird,
e soul ever stirred;
Unlike and far sweeter than them all.
Sad Aziola! from that moment I
Loved thee and thy sad cry.
. . .it’s rather melancholy, and even more so when you consider the cold-
ness of their relations, and that Mary was unaware of what was on his
8
mind; but still, it’s not as desperate as some of the others written during
then: for example, listen to this short lyric, entitled ‘Mutability’. . .
e flower that smiles today

Tomorrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies.
What is this world’s delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.
Virtue, how frail it is!

Friendship how rare!
Love, how it sells poor bliss
For proud despair!
But we, though soon they fall,
Survive their joy, and all
Which ours we call.
Whilst skies are blue and bright,

Whilst flowers are gay,
Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day;
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou – and from thy sleep
en wake to weep.
. . .there are several more like that, but you get the idea. . .”
“. . .and what was happening to Claire during this period – did she
visit?”
“. . .the last time she had visited was right before the holidays in
December, and her next visit would be in mid-June, so she was absent
almost half of a year – her longest recorded absence since they had been
together: even when she went to Lynmouth, in May, 181, Shelley prob-
ably visited her. . .”
“. . .how did it affect her?”
“. . .I think that the crisis which was slowly mounting during this period
could be attributed to her feelings of isolation – it was concerning
8
Allegra, of course: she had turned four in January, so, given Claire had
last seen her in October, 1818, by spring, 181, two and a half years had
passed. What precipitated the crisis was that she discovered, on March
1th, that Byron had put Allegra into a convent school in Bagnacavallo at
the beginning of March. . .”
“. . .that’s terrible! Why did he do it?”
“. . .it was for a combination of reasons. In January he had heard some
positive reports about Ada, his daughter in England, and he thought it
was time to educate Allegra as well: a convent education was the best
option available for women in Italy at that time, although what it really
educated women for was marriage, as was the case with Emilia Viviani.
To give Byron some credit, he and Teresa Guiccioli’s family were involved
with the Carbonari plots at that time, and during those months things
were heating up enough to make him consider the dangers involved with
keeping Allegra there in the ‘seat of war,’ as he put it in his journal.
However, I think the main reason was a combination of a lack of patience
with bringing up a small, willful child, and a caving into the demands of
Teresa, who probably wasn’t too happy to be seen with another woman’s
child given she wasn’t married to Byron herself. In regard to her behavior,
he wrote to Hoppner in February that ‘Allegra is well – but not well-
disposed – her disposition is perverse to a degree,’ which seems a little
harsh and lacking in sympathy in describing a four year old child who had
been taken from her mother. As far as the jealousy of Teresa goes, it
speaks for itself – Claire said the same to Silsbee decades later. . .”
“. . .how did she react when she found out about it? I guess she was
furious. . .”
“. . .yes – she was barely able to contain her anger when she wrote to him. . .”
“. . .what did she say?”
“. . .first she reminded him that he had promised to always keep Allegra
with him, and she declared he had violated their contract – here, I’ll read
a passage from the letter. . .
I have just received the letter which announces the putting of

Allegra into a Convent – Before I quitted Geneva you prom-
ised me verbally it is true that my child whatever its sex should
never be away from one of its parents. is promise originated
in my being afflicted at your idea of placing it under the
protection of Mrs. Leigh. is promise is violated, not only
8
slightly but in a mode and by a conduct most intolerable to

my feeling you as little as possible but were I silent now you
would adopt this as an argument against me at some future
period. I therefore represent to you that the putting Allegra
at her years into a Convent away from any relation is to me
a serious & deep affliction.
. . .she then goes on into a tirade against convent education. . .”

“. . .but was she right – was that part of the contract between them?”
“. . .the contract was verbal, so we’ll never know the precise terms of
their agreement, but I trust Claire more than Byron. Byron sent Claire’s
letter to Hoppner, writing that he had ‘no recollection’ of the agreement
and that he wouldn’t have made such an agreement about an unborn
child – but that’s clearly disingenuous, as he did make some sort of agree-
ment, and one thing he certainly did promise her were visiting rights,
which he had already broken. . .”
“. . .so what did she ask of him – to take Allegra back from the convent?”
“. . .no, she requested that she be sent to an English school:
I resigned Allegra to you that she might be benefited by

advantages which I could not give her. It was natural of me to
expect that your daughter would become an object of affec-
tion and would receive an education becoming of the child of
an english nobleman. Since however you are indifferent to
her, or that the purity of your principles does not allow you
to cherish a natural child, I entreat you as an act of justice to
allow the following scheme to be put into execution that
Allegra may have the benefits her mother can procure to her.
I propose to place her at my own expense in one of the very
best English boarding schools where if she is deprived of the
happiness of a home & paternal cares, she at least would
receive an English education which would enable her aer
many years of painful & unprotected childhood to be bene-
fited by the kindness & affections of her parents’ friends. is
school shall be chosen by your own friends, I will see her only
as oen as they shall decide because I hope to induce you by
this sacrifice of myself to yield the child to proper hands.
8
. . .she ended it by expressing how anxious she was to hear from him: ‘. . .
I cannot say how anxiously I expect your answer, since I read the letter
I have not had a moment’s content, fearing to allow myself ease, lest
Allegra should be suffering from neglect’. . .”
“. . .but could she really have paid for the school she mentioned in her
plan?”
“. . .Shelley would have ended up paying for it, of course. . .”
“. . .so what was Byron’s response?”
“. . .the letter was sent the third week of March. Byron never answered
Claire’s letters; instead, he sent it on to Hoppner in early April, with
a note written on it, ‘Dear Hoppner, e moral part of this letter upon
the Italians & etc. comes with an excellent grace from the writer now
living with a man & his wife – and having planted a child in the Naples
foundling & etc. – with regard to the rest of the letter – you know as well
as anyone how far it is or is not correct.’ He attached a letter to it where
he justified his decision based on the reasons I mentioned before, and,
especially for Hoppner, justified his choice against the English education
Claire proposed by arguing that she would have no chance to be settled
in England given her birth, and that she could best find a husband on the
continent. He also suggested the measure was temporary. What’s terrible
is that Claire had no idea, at that time, that Elise had already told
Hoppner about the Naples incident, and Hoppner had told Byron, so, as
you can see, her views hadn’t the slightest chance of being taken seriously,
given what both men thought about what had happened. . .”
“. . .and apparently thought was happening still. Did Hoppner agree
with Byron’s decision?”
“. . .he agreed that she should be sent off somewhere, but his preference
was to the house of some Protestant clergyman in Switzerland, as he had
the English prejudice against Catholicism. . .”
“. . .and did Shelley try to intervene?”
“. . .not yet: I don’t think he was aware of how disturbed Claire really was
then, and he presented his views on the matter to Byron as if he and Mary
were entirely behind Byron’s decision. Listen to this letter of April 1th:
I think I mentioned to you before that I never see any of

Claire’s letters to you. I can easily believe, however, that they
are sufficiently provoking, and that her views respecting
Allegra are unreasonable. Mary, no less than myself, is
8
perfectly convinced of your conduct towards Allegra having

been irreproachable, and we entirely agree in the necessity,
under existing circumstances, of the placing her in a convent
near to yourself. I think you ought to consider Clare’s oppo-
sition to this, if she makes any, as the result of a misguided
maternal affection, which is to be pitied, while we condemn.
I have not shown her your letter. Surely it is better to avoid
causes of irritation, though the only ill-effect should be to
torment the person who feels it. I need not say what pleasure
it would give me to hear from you on this, or any other
subject. Mary unites with me also in expressions of the
greatest interest for Allegra; and if circumstances should ever
occur, to induce you to change your present plans respecting
her, she entreats you to believe that she is most anxious to
show it.
. . .Byron responded to Shelley on April rd, writing ‘e child continues

doing well, and the accounts are regular and favourable. It is gratifying
to me that you and Mrs Shelley do not disapprove of the step which
I have taken, which is merely temporary’; however, he used the fact that
they were agreeable to his plan as another way to justify his reasoning for
placing her in a convent to Hoppner. . .”
“. . .but why did Shelley do it – wasn’t it a betrayal of Claire?”
“. . .I don’t want to justify it as I think it was a misjudgment on his part,
but from this time on – until the end of the Pisan community a year later
when he and Byron went their separate ways – Shelley was to become
increasingly caught between the warring parents. Initially I think he
accepted that putting Allegra in the convent at Bagnacavallo was
a temporary measure and that Byron’s judgment was a good one, but as
he realized over time how tormented Claire truly was, and also that the
measure wasn’t temporary at all, he switched to her side in the matter. As
to why he initially chose Byron’s side, I think it was simply because he
didn’t foresee the true nature of the problem, and he wished to flatter
Byron. You can see their lack of awareness in a letter they jointly wrote
on April : Mary went on and on about the Greek uprising, without the
slightest awareness that Claire might be depressed, while Shelley was
more sympathetic – he at least had detected her low spirits, beginning
the letter,
8
I hope you have somewhat recovered your spirits since you

last wrote to me; if so, pray tell me, as it makes me very melan-
choly to hear that you are so much depressed. e weather is
a medicine for almost any dejection which does not spring
from a naturally imperfect or deranged frame. My health is
very fluctuating and uncertain, and change of season brings
a change rather than relief of ills. I live, however, for certain
intoxicating moments, which are ‘ounces of sweets that
outweigh a pound of sour’, and which no person deprived of
memory need despair of possessing.
. . .in other words, he was living in memory – quite a daring thing to write
in a shared letter with Mary; otherwise, it seems he didn’t realize the
depth of Claire’s depression, as the only other point he makes about her
situation is asking her what she intends to do that summer: ‘We are yet
undecided for the summer – say something to fix our determination’. . .”
“. . .so when did he understand that Claire was so upset?”
“. . .it was certainly by the beginning of May, but before he could fully
grasp the situation with her, a quite serious situation of his own came up
which he had to deal with – his quarterly allowance was suddenly
suspended, throwing them all into crisis. . .”
“. . .what happened? Did his father do it?”
“. . .no – it’s a rather long and complicated story, but it seems the
payments due to the guardian of Shelley’s children, Charles and Ianthe,
had been suspended when Shelley had neglected to countermand a stop-
payment order he had issued at some point. e money had been lying
in an account somewhere waiting for a new payment order, and rather
than checking with Shelley’s banker or with Shelley, they simply sued and
deducted it from his quarterly income. In any case it was solved by the
late summer; meanwhile, they all felt understandably vulnerable – there’s
an account in Claire’s journal where she took a walk the day aer hearing
about the crisis to the Boboli gardens, and the wind soughing through
the trees reminded her of the sea, her exile in Lynmouth, and all the trou-
bles they had experienced in the five years since then – the crisis under-
scored the kind of helplessness she was already feeling about the Allegra
situation. . .”
“. . .she must have felt totally cut off. . .”
88
“. . .yes, she was in terrible spirits from mid-April through the end of
May. She had a dream on April 1st that Tatty Tighe had gone to
Bagnacavallo and had brought back Allegra: she told Shelley ‘now she
shall never go back again.’ When she awoke, there she was – alone in
Florence. Shelley was busy with the financial crisis, and the letter he sent
merely informed her about the nature of the trouble and reassured her
that she would receive money. Another missing letter from Mary and
Shelley received on April 1st must have been a birthday greeting – April
th was her rd birthday. en there’s a letter from Shelley on April 9th
that suggests she must have complained to him, for he wrote this
response:
It is not for want of interest in your plans and & feelings, that
I have not written to you: but, imagining that Mary managed
the rude stuff, the mass, of the correspondence; & not
knowing that I had any thing peculiar to say to you, I had kept
the silence of one to whom letters & indeed communication
of any kind, is either a great pain or a great pleasure. – So far
have I been from neglecting you in my thoughts, that I have
lately had with Mrs. Mason long & serious conversations
respecting your situation & prospects: conversations too long,
too important, & embracing too various a complication of
views to detail in a letter. – You can perhaps guess at some of
them. – I am most anxious to know your expectations &
determinations, at Florence. Whatever these may be, either
there or elsewhere, believe that no view which I can take of
any plan you may determine on, will be influenced by any
thing else than a consideration of your own ultimate advan-
tage. I feel, my dear girl, that in case the failure of your expec-
tations at Florence should induce you to think of other plans,
we, that is you & I, ought to have a conversation together.
. . .so you can see that he was beginning to suspect there was a problem. . .”
“. . .and did she have any plans?”
“. . .Claire received his letter May 1st and responded immediately, but
the letter is missing, so we have to guess its contents from the fragment of
a letter that Shelley wrote in response to it: it’s quite clear that she had
written an hysterical letter, clamoring for his attention – and she got it!
89
Here, look at this section that we do have, beginning with Shelley

defending what seems to have been his negative response to some plan
Claire had hatched regarding opening up a school. . .
Your setting up a school, precisely on Miss Field’s plan,

I certainly never approved, because I thought even in Miss
Field’s case, the prices & the whole plan ridiculously narrow:
& the whole affair seemed planned on that plausible scheme
of moderation that never succeeds. It was this that I wanted
to say to you. – But the idea of a school; especially under Mrs.
Mason’s protection, I confess appeared very plausible to me.
I should be glad, in case of transmigration to leave you under
such powerful & such secure protection as her’s: it would be
one subject less for regret, to me, if I could consider my death
as no irremediable misfortune to you; as in this case it would
not. – e incumbent of my reversion still flourishes; & you
must be aware that the sensations with which it has pleased
the Devil to endow the frame of his successor, are not the
strongest pledges of longevity. – You say that I may not have
a conversation with you because you may depart in a hurry
Heaven knows where – Except it be to the other world, (&
I know the coachman of that road will not let the passengers
wait a minute) I know no mortal business that requires such
post haste.
. . .so I think you can see that she must have been desperate, perhaps even
a bit suicidal. . .”
“. . .Shelley also talks of himself as not long from the grave. . .”
“. . .he was ill periodically all spring and summer from his usual
ailments, and he was quite right about the fortitude of the ‘incumbent
to my reversion’ – his father, who did outlive him by decades. . .”
“. . .but were they both serious?”
“. . .I think they were both exaggerating quite a bit – Claire in order to
get his attention, Shelley in order to make her feel a bit guilty by reminding
her of the precariousness of their lives. e idea of the school under Mrs.
Mason’s tutelage certainly was designed to calm her down. . .”
“. . .and did it?”
“. . .at least for the time being, but still, Shelley wasn’t taking her despair
90
entirely seriously – you can see it in the letter he wrote to Byron on May
: he invited Byron to Pisa for the summer, assured him that Claire was
pursuing an independent life in Florence, and he even tried to account
for whatever ‘absurd’ letters she may have written Byron by the negative
influence that their ‘solitary mode of life’ and his ‘abstract way of
thinking’ had had upon her. . .”
“. . .did he try to intervene for her any way?”
“. . .he did suggest that by sending regular and complete reports of
Allegra’s condition he would ‘save her some pain,’ but nothing more. He
simply didn’t grasp the seriousness of the matter, which you can see by
this journal entry of Claire’s in early June: ‘. . .I had a most distressing
dream – that I received a letter which said Allegra was ill and not likely
to live. e dreadful grief I felt, made awaking appear to me the most
delightful sensation of ease in the world’. . .”
“. . .that’s uncanny, given what happened in the end! I can understand
her torment. . .”
“. . .we have only a few of the letters that flew back and forth from
Florence to San Giuliano during that period, and there’s something like
a dozen letters, total, mentioned in Claire’s journal for the period going
to and fro. For example, one exchange that’s definitely missing – prob-
ably censored by Lady Jane Shelley – is a letter from Claire that offended
Mary in some way. . .look, here, at what Shelley writes to Claire on June
1th: he opens it by writing, ‘Have you made your mind up where you
would live, this summer? or is there any thing new in your plans? I hear
from you but seldom, now you cease to correspond with Mary’; and then
here, later on in the letter: ‘. . .I am trying persuade Mary to ask your
pardon, – I hope that I shall succeed – in the mean time, as you were in
the wrong you had better not ask hers, for that is unnecessary, but write
to her – if you had been in the right you would have done so’ – it seems
there was quite a ri between them. . .”
“. . .my guess would be that Mary seemed more concerned with things
like the Greek revolt against the Turks than with what was happening
with Allegra, and Claire must have finally lost her patience and said
something nasty to her. . .”
“. . .yes, it must have been something like that, because when you look
at Claire’s journal entries for the whole period – from the time she found
out about Allegra until June, she’s oen writing that she was in ‘low
spirits’; while in Mary’s journal for the same period, and especially in
91
April and May, there are many entries stating ‘it was a fine day’: that diver-
gence must have come to the fore in one of Mary’s chatty letters, and
Claire was probably offended that Mary could be so callous to her situa-
tion and she over-reacted; aer all, if it took Shelley a while to fully
realize Claire’s despair, it must have taken Mary considerably longer. . .”
“. . .and did they finally work it out?”
“. . .they appear to have resolved it later in June, when Claire came to
Pisa on her way to Livorno: part of the resolution was that they decided,
finally, that Claire should spend the summer sea-bathing in Livorno
rather than coming to stay with them in San Giuliano. Claire arrived in
Pisa on June 19th and stayed with Mrs. Mason. Shelley spent the next day
with her, and on June 1st Claire came to San Giuliano and spent the day
with him and Mary – Mary marked it in her journal with one of her
symbols for Claire. ere must have been a reconciliation, although it’s
very strange that in the evening, Shelley read them Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde. . .”
“. . .why strange? What is it about?”
“. . .it’s totally cynical about love – everyone is for sale, or is betraying
everyone else. Troilus, who is a prince of Troy, falls in love with Criseyde,
the daughter of a Trojan seer named Calchas. Calchas flees Troy to the
enemy camp, taking Criseyde with him. Although Criseyde has prom-
ised to return to Troilus, she is seduced by a Greek prince, Diomedes, and
she cynically remains with the Greeks out of a concern for her own secu-
rity. Troilus sees Criseyde’s brooch on Diomedes’ armor, runs into battle
in a rage, and is finally killed by the great Greek warrior, Achilles. . .”
“. . .and?”
“. . .there’s no ‘and’ – that’s it! Although Criseyde has sworn her love
to Troilus, she simply finds it more expedient to accept Diomedes, seeing
the way the wind is blowing. She’s a beautiful woman who uses her
beauty to advance her own ends, and who switches sides according to
where security and power lies, while Troilus is portrayed as a naïve youth
who is taken in by her, but who perhaps never really knew her anyway.
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, which Shelley knew as well, is even
more cynical – I remember one line from it, something like the
‘monstrosity in love is that the will is infinite, the execution confined; the
desire is boundless, the act a slave to limit. . .’”
“. . .I can see how the poem might fit the situation of Emilia, but why
read it to Claire and Mary?”
9
“. . .perhaps as a reminder of what they weren’t or didn’t want to

become as a result of their quarrel. In any case, their reconciliation was
more of a temporary truce, for Claire le with Shelley and Williams for
her summer residence in Livorno a day or two later, where she stayed for
a month bathing with some people she knew from Florence – a Countess
and her two daughters. She returned to Pisa the last week of July, coming
out to spend one day at San Giuliano with Mary, and then once again
before she returned to Livorno. Mostly Shelley was visiting her in Pisa,
so she was still effectively banished – but it wasn’t entirely because of
Mary: there were some discussions about the possibility of Byron coming
to visit in the summer, so having Claire there would have made such
a visit impossible. . .”
“. . .did the visit happen?”
“. . .by mid-July Shelley had written him a letter where he said ‘your
silence tells me not to expect you,’ and he went on to hint about a visit
to Ravenna. At the end of July Shelley went to Florence to see the
Gisbornes off – they were going to England – and to try to find
a house for his lawyer, Horace Smith, who was thinking of moving to
Italy. When he returned to San Giuliano, there was a letter awaiting
him from Byron, suggesting that Shelley come for a visit to Ravenna
immediately, so he left the next day. I think he saw it as an opportu-
nity to find out from Byron what his plans were concerning Allegra –
as to whether he would leave her in Bagnacavallo or take her to
Switzerland. He didn’t tell Mary that he would stop to visit Claire in
Livorno first. . .”
“. . .that says everything. . .”
“. . .yes, but he had learned something since Este: he had learned that
the onus was on him to manage it as imperceptibly as possible. He arrived
in Livorno on August rd, and the next day – his 9th and final birthday,
Claire wrote this in her journal:
Shelley’s Birthday 9 yrs. Rise at five – Row in the Harbour

with S – en call upon Countess Tolomei. en we sail out
into the sea. A very fine warm day. e white sails of ships
upon the horizon looked like doves stooping over on the
water. Dine at Giardinetto. S – goes at two. . .
. . .”
9
“. . .it seems that they had one of those perfect days we were speaking
about. . .”
“. . .yes, however Mary wrote the following in her journal on the same
day:
S. birthday – years are now gone – what changes what a life

– we now appear tranquil – yet who knows what wind – I will
not prognosticate evil – We have had enough of it – When
I came to Italy – I said all is well if it were permanent – it was
more passing than an Italian twilight – I now say the same –
May it be a Polar day – Yet that too has an end. . .
. . .it’s poignant and true, but I think the difference between their entries
says a good deal about their attitudes and ways of experiencing the world:
for Mary, everything is at risk of being lost, and must be grasped, drawn
in, and held, while for Claire, the day exists in and of itself, radiating
outwards from its perfection. . .”
“. . .yes, but that’s also because Claire lived for the day when she would
finally see Allegra again, while Mary feared the day she might lose Percy
Florence, having already lost two children. . .”
“. . .yes, I think that’s true. It’s strange to see this moment in time
from our perspective – it’s an almost iconic moment: Claire reunited
with Shelley for a perfect, intense day after her long time away – actu-
ally, an intense night too, as Shelley wrote to her from Empoli the
next day that he had ‘slept as one might naturally sleep after taking
a double dose of opium’. . .while Mary, normally in Shelley’s presence,
suddenly became more aware of the transitoriness of everything in his
absence. . .”
“. . .it’s sad that they couldn’t all be together. . .”
“. . .perhaps not all three together, but Shelley did write to Mary, asking
her to invite Claire to come visit her. . .”
“. . .and she did?”
“. . .surprisingly, yes – on August 1th, Mary arrived in Livorno with Jane
and Edward Williams, and they returned with Claire to San Giuliano.
Claire stayed there for ten days, while Shelley was with Byron. . .”
“. . .and is it known what they did together?”
“. . .Shelley and Byron, or Mary and Claire?
“. . .either. . .”
9
“. . .both the journals of Mary and Claire are mute during those days, but
we know a great deal of what was going on in Ravenna via Shelley’s letters
to Mary and to Peacock. It was a crucial visit for them all, for the result of
the visit would determine everything which would happen later. Shelley’s
primary purpose for the trip was to try to persuade Byron to come up with
a better plan regarding Allegra: he hoped to derail the ‘Swiss plan’ and
keep Allegra in Italy, and hopefully to talk Byron into putting her into the
care of some family or convent-school in Toscana, where Claire would
have access to her. It was also a crossroads for Byron: Teresa Guiccioli had
recently been divorced from her husband, Count Guiccioli, and at that
time actually feared that the Count might try to put her into a convent,
which was allowable for husbands at that time. . .”
“. . .really?! Even if they were divorced?”
“. . .yes! You can see in comparison just how advanced Shelley was in
his attitude towards women! Anyway, Teresa Guiccioli was actually
staying in Florence at that moment, while Byron still inhabited the palace
of Count Guiccioli in Ravenna. . .”
“. . .that’s crazy. . .”
“. . .I don’t quite understand how that happened, but certainly Byron
wasn’t comfortable with it, so he was casting about for somewhere to go and
Shelley’s appearance was just the right catalyst for him. I don’t think Shelley
in his wildest imagination could ever have predicted the result – that Byron
would decide to move to Pisa. Shelley spent ten days there. is passage
from a letter to Peacock gives a sense of the way they spent their time:
Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual

custom, but one must sleep or die, like Southey’s sea-snake in
‘Kehama’, at 1. Aer breakfast we sit talking till six. From six
till eight we gallop through the pine forests which divide
Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit
up gossiping till six in the morning. I don’t suppose this will
kill me in a week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer.
Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten
horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an
eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses,
walk about the house, which every now and then resounds
with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were masters of it.
9
. . .and he added a postscript concerning the menagerie. . .
Aer I have sealed my letter, I find that my enumeration of

the animals in this Circean Palace was defective, and that in
a material point. I have just met on the grand staircase five
peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder
who all these animals were before they were changed into
these shapes.
. . .actually Byron was merely keeping Italian hours – I’m sure that the
fact he had an Italian mistress played some role in that. Shelley never did
fully adapt to certain aspects of Italian reality. . .”
“. . .during all those early morning conversations and rides through the
pinewoods, what did they talk about – Allegra?”
“. . .yes, but in a peripheral way – I’ll come around to that in a moment,
because it’s connected with the decision Byron finally made to come to
Pisa. ey talked about everything, just as when they met in Venezia:
they talked of politics, and especially Byron’s current involvement in the
Carbonari; they talked of poetry – I think they must have spoken of
Southey’s ridiculous skewering of Byron and what Southey called the
‘Satanic school of poetry’ in his poem, A Vision of Judgment, and Byron’s
counter-skewering of Southey in his satiric riposte, e Vision of
Judgment, which Byron was writing just then. Byron also showed him the
th Canto of Don Juan, which Shelley thought was a masterpiece – he
despaired of ever equaling it. . .”
“. . .but did he care to? I thought Shelley was immune to feelings like
that. . .”
“. . .he was, but Byron wasn’t, and, in fact, despite all that they shared in
Ravenna, there was already the first sign of what would later become
a real problem between them – Byron’s haughty attitude, something
Shelley’s more egalitarian attitude couldn’t easily countenance. He wrote
about it to Peacock:
. . .Lord Byron & I are excellent friends, & were I reduced to

poverty, or were I a writer who had no claims to a higher
status than I possess – or did I possess a higher than I deserve,
we should appear in all things as such, & I would freely ask
him any favour. Such is not now the case – e demon of
9
mistrust & of pride lurks between two persons in our situa-

tion poisoning the freedom of their intercourse. – is is a tax
and a heavy one which we must pay for being human – I think
the fault is not on my side; nor is it likely, I being the weaker.
I hope that in the next world these things will be better
managed. – What is passing in the heart of another rarely
escapes the observation of one who is a strict anatomist of his
own –
. . .in other words, simple male competition, based on the fact that Byron
recognized that Shelley, while not his equal in rank, fame, or publication,
was certainly his equal – and I believe his better – in poetic ability, and
far surpassed him in his knowledge and intellectual power. . .”
“. . .I would have thought they were beyond such petty competition. . .”
“. . .Shelley was, Byron wasn’t – pride was one of Byron’s greatest weak-
nesses. . .”
“. . .that much is clear, but then how did the decision to move to Pisa
come about?”
“. . .the most important event that occurred during Shelley’s visit was
that Byron broke his vow of confidentiality to Hoppner and let Shelley
know about the visit of Elise to Hoppner. Shelley was totally blind-sided
by it. . .”
“. . .remind me of what she said. . .”
“. . .I’ll read the part of the letter where Shelley told Mary about it:
Lord Byron has told me a circumstance that shocks me

exceedingly, because it exhibits a degree of desperate &
wicked malice for which I am at a loss to account. When
I hear such things my patience & my philosophy are put to
a severe proof, whilst I refrain from seeking out some obscure
hiding place where the countenance of man may never meet
me more. It seems that Elise, actuated either by some incon-
ceivable malice for our dismissing her – or bribed by my
enemies – or making common cause with her infamous
husband has persuaded the Hoppners of a story so monstrous
& incredible that they must have been prone to believe any
evil to have believed such assertions upon such evidence. Mr.
Hoppner wrote to Lord Byron to state this story as the
9
reason why he declined any further communication with me,

& why he advised him to do the same. Elise says that Clare
was my mistress – that is all very well & so far there is
nothing new: all the world has heard so much & people may
believe or not believe as they think good. – She then
proceeds to say that Clare was with child by me – that I gave
her the most violent medicines to procure abortion – that
this not succeeding she was brought to bed & that I imme-
diately tore the child from her & sent it to the foundling
hospital – I quote Mr. Hoppners words – and this is stated
to have happened in the winter aer we le Este. In addition
she says that both I & Clare treated you in the most shameful
manner – that I neglected & beat you, & that Clare never let
a day pass without offering you insults of the most violent
kind in which she was abetted by me. – As to what Reviews
& the world says I do not care a jot; but when persons who
have known me are capable of conceiving of me – not that
I have fallen into a great error & imprudence as would have
been living with Clare as my mistress – but that I have
committed such unutterable crimes as destroying or aban-
doning a child – & that my own – imagine my despair of
good – imagine how it is possible that one of so weak &
sensitive a nature as mine can run further the gauntlet
through this hellish society of men. . .
. . .here there are three lines crossed out, making them illegible, and it goes
on. . .
You should write to the Hoppners a letter refuting the charge

in case you believe & know & can prove that it is false: stating
the grounds & proofs of your belief. – I need not dictate what
you should say, nor I hope inspire you with warmth to rebut
a charge which you only can effectually rebut. – If you will send
the letter to me here, I will forward it to the Hoppners. . .
. . .and the next day he immediately sent another letter spurring her
further on to her task. . .
98
My Dearest Mary,
I wrote to you yesterday, & I begin another letter today
without knowing exactly when I can send it, as I am told the
Post only goes once a week. –
I dare say the subject of the latter half of my letter gave you
pain: but it was necessary to look the affair in the face, & the
only satisfactory answer to the calumny must be given by you
– & could be given by you alone. – is is evidently the
source of the violent denunciations of the Literary Gazette –
in themselves contemptible enough, & only to be regarded
as effects which show us their cause, which until we put off
our mortal nature we never can despise – that is the belief of
persons who have known & seen you, that you are guilty of
the most enormous crimes. – A certain degree & a certain
kind of infamy is to be borne, & in fact is the best compli-
ment which an exalted nature can receive from the filthy
world of which it is it’s Hell to be a part – but this sort of
thing exceeds the measure, & even if it were only for the sake
of our dear Percy I would take some pains to suppress it. In
fact it shall be suppressed: even if I am to be reduced to the
disagreeable necessity of prosecuting Elise before the Tuscan
tribunals. –
. . .it’s interesting that the wording of his first message is rather peculiar:
it doesn’t flatly deny that he and Claire had been lovers, it simply side-
steps it as beside the point, focusing more on what he saw as the enor-
mity of the charges against him – abandoning the child and treating
Mary cruelly. en in the second letter, he plays on any worries she might
have regarding Percy Florence. . .”
“. . .and both messages also sidestep the actual facts about the child
itself, admitting nothing about its existence or what had actually
happened. . .”
“. . .that’s right, although I don’t believe there’s any solid proof that
Mary knew about Elena Adelaide Shelley: later Claire told Silsbee that
Mary ‘did know,’ but his note didn’t make clear what she knew, or when
she knew. Only Claire knew for certain about Elena, but then she wasn’t
informed about the scandal. . .”
“. . .it sounds like Shelley was really juggling things. . .”
99
“. . .he had learned that he needed to, and not just with Mary and
Claire: Holmes suggests that Shelley may have known all along that
Byron would not forward Mary’s letter to the Hoppners. . .”
“. . .meaning that its purpose was primarily to influence Byron?”
“. . .yes. I think Holmes concluded correctly, as Byron had already betrayed
Hoppner’s confidence by telling Shelley about it, so he certainly couldn’t
admit it to Hoppner, and it was far more important that Byron see Mary
and Shelley united in their stand, and that Claire had not been living with
them in a ménage à trois, because, as I said, perhaps the most important
aspect of his visit was to try to arrange some other situation for Allegra, and
that couldn’t be done if Byron thought they were libertines. . .”
“. . .that’s ironic, given the fact that Byron was the real libertine! He
was judging their situation as if they operated from his motivations. . .”
“. . .people oen do, and some more than others. Shelley was being
diplomatic, and it must be said, in the end, that Shelley actually accom-
plished everything amazingly well given the outcome: it wasn’t the best
outcome, but it was as good as could have been expected in the situation.
Mary did send her letter, Byron consequently was reassured enough to
decide almost immediately to move to Pisa. . .”
“. . .do you have Mary’s letter?”
“. . .yes, they printed it in a footnote – I’ll read it, but first I’ll read her
cover letter:
My Dear Shelley,
Shocked beyond all measure as I was I instantly wrote the
enclosed – if the task be not too dreadful pray copy it for me
I cannot – send that part of your letter – which contains the
accusation – I tried but could not write it – I think I could
have soon as died – I send also Elise’s last letter – enclose it or
not as you think best.
I wrote to you with far different feelings last night – beloved
friend – our bark is indeed tempest tossed but love me as you
have ever done & God preserve my child to me our enemies
shall not be too much for us.
Consider well if Florence be a fit residence for us – I love
I own to face danger – but I would not be imprudent –
Pray get my letter to M Hoppner copied for a thousand
reasons
00
Adieu dearest take care of yourself all yet is well – the shock
for me is over and I now despise the slander – but it must not
pass uncontradicted – I sincerely thank Lord Byron for his
kind unbelief
affectionately yours,
Mary WS
. . .and this is the letter for Mrs. Hoppner. . .
My Dear Mrs. Hoppner –

Aer a silence of nearly two years I address you again, and
most bitterly do I regret the occasion on which I now write.
Pardon me that I do not write in French; you understand
English well, and I am much too impressed to shackle myself
to a foreign language; even in my own my thoughts far outrun
my pen, so that I can hardly form the letters. I write to defend
him to whom I have the happiness to be united, whom I love
and esteem beyond all creatures, from the foulest calumnies;
and to you I write this, who were so kind and to Mr. Hoppner,
to both, of whom I indulged the pleasing idea that I have
every reason to feel gratitude. is is indeed a painful task.
Shelley is at present on a visit to Lord Byron at Ravenna, and
I received a letter from him today containing accounts that
make my hand tremble so much that I can hardly hold the
pen. It tells me that Elise wrote to you relating the most
hideous stories against him, and that you have believed them.
Before I speak of these falsehoods permit me to say a few
words concerning this miserable girl. You well know that she
formed an attachment with Paolo when we proceeded to
Rome, and at Naples their marriage was talked of. We all tried
to dissuade her; we knew Paolo to be a rascal, and we thought
so well of her that we believed him to be unworthy of her. An
accident led me to the knowledge that without marrying they
had formed a connection; she was ill, we sent for a doctor who
said there was a danger of a miscarriage. I would not turn the
girl on the world without in some degree binding her to this
man. We had them married at Sir W. A’Court’s – she le us;
turned Catholic at Rome, married him, and then went to
01
Florence. Aer the disastrous death of my child we came to

Tuscany. We have seen little of them; but we have had knowl-
edge that Paolo has formed a scheme of extorting money from
Shelley by false accusation – he has written him threatening
letters, saying that he wd. be the ruin of him, &c. We placed
these in the hands of a celebrated lawyer here who has done
what he can to silence him. Elise has never interfered in this,
and indeed the other day I received a letter from her,
entreating with great professions of love that I would send her
money. I took no notice of this; but although I knew her to
be in evil hands, I would not believe that she was wicked
enough to join in his plans without proof.
And now I come to her accusations – and I must indeed
summon all my courage while I transcribe them; for tears will
force their way, and how can it be otherwise? You knew
Shelley, you saw his face, and could you believe them? Believe
them only on the testimony of a girl whom you despised?
I had hopes that such a thing was impossible, and that
although strangers might believe the calumnies that this man
propagated, none who had ever seen my husband could for
a moment credit them.
She says Clare was Shelley’s mistress, that – upon my word,
I solemnly assure you that I cannot write the words, I send
you a part of Shelley’s letter that you may see what I am now
about to refute – but I had rather die than copy anything so
vilely, so wickedly false, so beyond all imagination fiendish.
I am perfectly convinced in my own mind that Shelley
never had an improper connection with Clare – at the time
specified by Elise’s letter, the winter aer we quitted Este,
I suppose while she was with us, and that was at Naples, we
lived in lodgings where I had momentary entrance into every
room, and such a thing could not have passed unknown to
me. e malice of the girl is beyond all thought – I now
remember that Clare did keep her bed for two days – but
I attended on her – I saw the physician – her illness was one
that she had been accustomed to for years – and the same
remedies were employed as I had before ministered to her in
England.
0
Clare had no child – the rest must be false – but that you
should believe it – that my beloved Shelley should stand thus
slandered in your minds – he the gentlest and most humane
of creatures, is more painful to me, oh far more painful than
any words can express.
It is all a lie – Clare is timid; she always showed respect even
for me – poor dear girl! She has some faults – you know them
as well as I – but her heart is good, and if we ever quarreled,
which was seldom, it was I, not she, that was harsh, and our
instantaneous reconciliations were sincere and affectionate.
Need I say that the union between my husband and myself
has ever been undisturbed. Love caused our first imprudence,
love which improved by esteem, a perfect trust one in the
other, a confidence and affection which, visited as we have
been by severe calamities (have we not lost two children?) has
increased daily, and knows no bounds.
I will add that Clare has been separated from us for about
a year. She lives with a respectable German family in Florence.
e reasons for this were obvious – her connection with us
made her manifest as the Miss Clairemont, the mother of
Allegra – besides we live much alone – she enters much into
society there – and solely occupied with the idea of the
welfare of her child, she wished to appear such that she may
not be thought in the aertimes to be unworthy of fulfilling
the maternal duties. You ought to have paused before you
tried to convince the father of her child of such unheard-of
atrocities on her part. If his generosity and knowledge of the
world had not made him reject the slander with the ridicule
it deserved what irretrievable mischief you would have occa-
sioned her!
ose who know me will believe my simple word – it is not
long ago that my father said in a letter to me, that he had never
known me to utter a falsehood – but you, as easy as you have
been to credit evil, who may be more deaf to truth – to you
I swear – by all that I hold sacred upon heaven and earth by
a vow which I should die to write if I affirmed a falsehood –
I swear by the life of my child, by my blessed and beloved
child, that I know these accusations to be false.
0
Shelley is as incapable of cruelty as the soest woman. To

those who know him his humanity is almost as a proverb. He
has been unfortunate as a father, the laws of his country and
death has cut him off from his dearest hopes. But his enemies
have done him incredible mischief – but that you should
believe such a tale coming from such a hand, is beyond all
belief, a blow quite unexpected, and the very idea of it beyond
words shocking.
But I have said enough to convince you, and are you not
convinced? are not my words the words of truth? Repair,
I conjure you, the evil you have done by retracting your confi-
dence in one so vile as Elise, and by writing to me that you
now reject as false every circumstance of her infamous tale.
You were kind to us, and I shall never forget it; now I require
justice; you must believe me, I solemnly entreat you, the
justice to confess that you do so.
Mary W. Shelley
. . .as you can see, it certainly was enough to convince Byron that what-
ever Elise said happened wasn’t true. . .”
“. . .although she gives Byron a little too much credit for his magna-
nimity, given he didn’t believe the story at first. . .”
“. . .yes, but I think they were flattering Byron as a way to urge him
towards such ‘unbelief’ – if he had any doubts le. . .”
“. . .but did Mary believe her own words?”
“. . .at least in the way she worded the letter she clearly did – but it’s an
interesting grammatical ambiguity when Mary writes, ‘I am perfectly
convinced in my own mind that Shelley never had an improper connec-
tion with Clare – at the time specified by Elise’s letter. . .’: if she had
placed a period aer Clare, it would be a total disavowal, but the dash
gives it a possible temporal limit, suggesting that ‘at the time’ there was
no ‘improper connection’ – but perhaps I’m reading into it. At the very
least, I think that Mary’s disavowal was in good faith in regard to what
she knew about what was happening in Naples: whether she knew of the
existence of Elena Adelaide Shelley or not, she could swear that Claire
did not bear a child that was then sent to a foundling hospital, and she
could swear that she was not ill-treated by Claire and Shelley, which is
not to say she and Claire didn’t fight quite a bit, or that their nerves
0
weren’t on edge very oen when they were in close proximity. As far as
Shelley and Claire having an ‘improper connection’ – as I said before,
I think that she strongly preferred not to know – and repressed whatever
evidence there was. . .”
“. . .not so much that she didn’t always wish for Claire’s absence – so
she must have suspected something. . .”
“. . .yes, but even then I think it was a suppressed suspicion – a kind of
psychic ‘shrouding’ of the reality, not unlike what we do with painful or
embarrassing memories. . .”
“. . .but was it the letter which led to Byron’s decision?”
“. . .it seems so – or at least it certainly solidified his resolve to come to
Pisa. Shelley gave the appearance of resisting it a bit, but I think he prob-
ably supported the decision in a plausibly deniable way; again, he was
working behind the scenes, so to speak. . .”
“. . .how do you mean – in regard to Byron?”
“. . .not so much with Byron – I think he was rather easy to convince, as
Shelley merely had to make it seem to Byron that it was the best possible
choice for his future; but with Mary, he had to get her to see the advan-
tages and make it seem as if she had played a significant role in the deci-
sion! Look, here, on August 10th he wrote to her and appears to be talking
it through with her – the pros and cons of having Byron so close:
What think you of Lucca for him – he would like Pisa better,
if it were not for Clare, but I really can hardly recommend
him either for his own sake or for hers to come into such close
contact with her. – Gunpowder & fire ought to be kept at
a respectable distance from each other.
. . .then he informs her of Byron’s ‘decision’ the next day. . .
You will be surprised to hear that Albè has decided upon

coming to Pisa, in case he shall be able with my assistance to
prevail upon his mistress to remain in Italy, of which I think
there is little doubt. – He wishes for a large & magnificent
house, but he has furniture of his own which he would send
from Ravenna. – Inquire if any of the large palaces are to let.
– We discussed Prato Pistoia Lucca &c. but they would not
suit him so well as Pisa to which indeed he shows a decided
0
preference. – So let it be! – Florence he objects to on account

of the prodigious influx of English. – Of course all this for the
present is to be kept a profound secret from Clare.
. . .my intuition tells me that he was doing something rather daring and
difficult: he was juggling everyone – Mary, Claire, and Byron, and hoping
for an outcome that would serve everyone’s needs. e advantages of
having Byron there in Pisa were threefold: first of all, it certainly was for
professional reasons, as one of the important decisions made while he
was in Ravenna was to start a journal with Byron, Shelley, and Hunt as
the three primary editors and contributors. Secondly, Shelley hoped to
solve the Allegra crisis, thinking Byron would bring her with him, or at
least bring her closer – see what he wrote to Mary on August 1th:
One thing of great consequence however; & which cannot be

thought of too soon is Allegra – & what is to be done with
her. On my arrival, before the Swiss scheme had been aban-
doned, I had succeeded in persuading L.B. to take her with
him, & had given him such information as to the interior
construction of convents as to shake his faith in the purity of
those receptacles. is was all settled, & now, on the change
of his plans to Tuscany, I wish to hold him to the same deter-
mination of taking her with him. – But how can I do this if
I have nothing in Tuscany to propose better than
Bagnacavallo? His own house is manifestly unfit, & no longer
a theatre of Venetian excesses is composed entirely of dissolute
men servants who will do her nothing but mischief. Is there
any family, any English or Swiss establishment, any refuge in
short except the Convent of St. Anna where Allegra might be
placed? Do you think Mrs. Mason could be prevailed upon,
to propose to take charge of her? I fear not.
. . .and, third and finally, there was the social consideration – the issue of
what kind of life they were going to live, henceforth. e Hoppner
scandal underlined their vulnerability, and I think that it cannot be
underestimated how shaken they were by it – especially as it had threat-
ened to turn even Byron against them. As Shelley saw it, they had either
to embark on the scheme, or go far away somewhere. . .”
0
“. . .the ‘Greek island’ scheme he wrote about in Epispsychidion?”

“. . .yes – or, the alternative was to create a community of like minds,
another one of Shelley’s long-held schemes. Look, here, how he presents
it to Mary the next day as if he were mulling through the pros and cons
and leaving it up to her decision, when in fact he steers it towards what
seems his choice – or at least his preferred choice at that moment: the
community of like-minded others. . .
. . .with Lord Byron & the people we know at Pisa we should

have security & protection which seems to be more question-
able at Florence. But I do not think this consideration ought to
weigh – What think you of remaining at Pisa? e Williams’s
would probably be induced to stay there if we did; Hunt would
certainly stay at least this winter near us, should he emigrate at
all; Lord Byron and his Italian friends would remain quietly
there, & Lord Byron has certainly a great regard for us – the
regard of such a man is worth – some of the tribute we must pay
to the base passions of humanity in any intercourse with those
within its circle – he is better worth it, than those on whom we
bestow it from mere custom. – e Masons are there – & as far
as solid affairs are concerned are my friends. – I allow this is an
argument for Florence – Mrs. Mason’s perverseness is very
annoying to me especially as Mr. Tighe is seriously my friend &
this circumstance makes me averse from that intimate contin-
uation of intercourse which once having begun I can no longer
avoid. – At Pisa I need not distill my water – if I can distill it
anywhere. – Last winter I suffered less from my painful disorder
than the winter I spent in Florence. – e arguments for
Florence you know, & they are very weighty – judge (I know
you like the job) which scale is overbalanced. –
My greatest content 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. – I would read no reviews & talk with no authors. – If
I dared trust my imagination it would tell me that there were two
or three chosen companions beside yourself whom I should desire.
– But to this I would not listen. – Where two or three are gath-
ered together the devil is among them, and good far more than
0
evil impulses – love far more than hatred – has been to me, except
as you have been it’s object, the source of all sorts of mischief. So
on this plan I would be alone & would devote either to oblivion
or to future generations the overflowings of a mind which, timely
withdrawn from the contagion, should be kept fit for no baser
object – But this it does not appear we shall do. –
e other side of the alternative (for a medium ought not to
be adopted) – is 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. – Our
roots were never struck so deeply as at Pisa & the transplanted
tree flourishes not. – People who lead the lives which we led
until last winter are like a family of Wahabee Arabs pitching
their tent in the midst of London. – We must do one thing or
the other: for yourself for our child, for our existence – ese
calumnies – the sources of which are probably deeper than we
perceive – have ultimately for object the depriving us of the
means of security & subsistence. You will easily perceive the
gradations by which calumny proceeds to pretext, pretext to
persecution, & persecution to the ban of fire & water – It is
for this, & not because this or that fool or the whole court of
fools curse & rail, that calumny is worth refuting or chastising.
. . .you can see perfectly well that he’s steering it towards the community
side, especially considering Mary was not exactly the person for shutting
herself up on an island. . .”
“. . .and he seems to be deliberately unconvincing about refusing the
presence of ‘two or three chosen companions’. . .”
“. . .especially when it was also clear that Byron’s presence in Pisa would
assure Claire’s absence. . .”
“. . .but what did they plan to do regarding Claire?”
“. . .there was no plan as of yet – the first step was simply getting Byron,
and hopefully Allegra, to Pisa. Allegra was one hundred kilometers away
over the Apennines from Claire, and if she were moved to Pisa, it would
reduce it to sixty-five kilometers over comparatively flatter landscape.
Shelley did manage to visit Allegra at Bagnacavallo – he wrote a descrip-
tion of his visit to Mary. . .
08
I went the other day to see Allegra at her convent, & stayed
with her about three hours. – She is grown tall & slight for
her age, and her face is somewhat altered – the traits have
become more delicate, & she is much paler: probably from the
effect of improper food. – She yet retains the beauty of her
deep blue eyes & of her mouth, but she has a contemplative
seriousness which mixed with her excessive vivacity which has
not yet deserted her has a very peculiar effect in a child. She
is under very strict discipline as may be observed from the
immediate obedience she accords to the will of her attendants
– this seems contrary to her nature; but I do not think it has
been obtained at the expense of much severity. Her hair,
scarcely darker than it was, is beautifully profuse & hangs in
large curls on her neck. She was prettily dressed in white
muslin and an apron of black silk with trowsers. – Her light
& airy figure & her graceful motions were a striking contrast
to the other children there – she seemed a thing of a finer race
& a higher order. – At first she was very shy, but aer a little
caressing and especially aer I had given her a gold chain
which I had bought at Ravenna for her she grew more
familiar, & led me all over the garden & all over the convent
running & skipping so fast that I could hardly keep up with
her. She showed me her little bed, & chair where she sate at
dinner & the carozzina in which she & her favourite
companion drew each other along a covered walk in the
garden.
. . .it’s quite a poignant description when you consider that this was the
last time any of them would see Allegra. . .”
“. . .ever? Byron as well?”
“. . .Byron never visited her at Bagnacavallo, even though Allegra wrote
him a beseeching letter right before his move to Pisa. In fact, I seriously
doubt he ever considered moving her from the convent closer to Pisa, so
Shelley’s entreaties were falling on deaf ears; but Shelley couldn’t have
known that, and he thought it was the beginning of a period when Claire
would finally be able to see her again, and so the second, more difficult
step would be to bring Claire closer without threatening Byron with her
presence. . .”
09
“. . .when did they tell Claire that Byron was coming – did they try to
keep it secret?”
“. . .Shelley told her as soon as he returned to San Giuliano, around
August 0th – she reported it in her journal. . .”
“. . .what was her reaction?”
“. . .I can only speculate, but it must have been very hopeful for all of
them, because in early September they went on a trip together to La
Spezia on the coast. . .”
“. . .together?”
“. . .yes – Claire arrived in San Giuliano for a visit on September th,
and they le the 8th: they went up the coast to La Spezia and sailed in the
bay, and on the way back traveled past the marble cliffs of Carrara in the
moonlight. It seems they had a perfect trip – a chance to relax, enjoy Italy,
and undoubtedly talk about the future. . .”
“. . .is it known what they talked about?”
“. . .no, but based on what happened in the next few weeks, I assume
that they made key decisions regarding their future: it seems they decided
that Claire should remain in Florence for the time being, and they
decided to make a more permanent residence in Pisa, because they would
move to their new apartments at the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa on the Arno by
late October, and Claire was even designated the task of helping them
find furnishings for it in Livorno. I think it is a crucial point that Claire
was brought in on the planning stages, as my guess is that in the long run
Shelley was intending to find a way to bring her closer – once they knew
where Allegra was going to be. . .”
“. . .so, it seems like something must have changed between them all. . .”
“. . .many things culminated in the decision. I suppose the episode with
Emilia Viviani may have brought Mary to realize that Claire’s absence was
not entirely a good thing, but most of all I think it was the Hoppner
scandal: it obviously shook them very much, and they realized that their
lives were too at risk not to be all rowing the boat in the same direction. . .”
“. . .crises have a way of clarifying things. . .”
“. . .at least temporarily, anyway! So, they returned on September 11th
and by the 1th Claire and Shelley went to Pisa together on the way to
Livorno, where Claire would spend another two weeks bathing and
shopping for furniture. She must have urged Shelley to write Byron, for
he also sent a letter on the 1th that, aside from telling him about the
wagons he sent to Ravenna for the move, asked him about Allegra:
10
Have you formed any plan for Allegra here? It would be very
easy to find a proper place for her in this part of the world;
and if you would be inclined to trust my recommendation,
I would of course engage that Clare should not interfere with
any plan that you might lay down. Of course, aer my expe-
rience, I cannot say much in favour of convents; but
respectable private families might be found who would under-
take the care of her. I speak freely on this subject, because I am
sure you have seen enough to convince you that the impres-
sions, which the Hoppners wished to give you of myself and
Mary, are void of foundation.
. . .but, despite his views, it was at some point within the next week or
two that Byron, or perhaps Teresa Guiccioli herself, informed him that
Allegra would remain in the convent. . .”
“. . .why? – was it Teresa meddling again?”
“. . .probably. . .”
“. . .women can be such bitches. . .”
“. . .yes – and men, bastards. . .”
“. . .that goes without saying! So how did Claire take it? – I’m sure she
was hysterical. . .”
“. . .she wrote tersely in her diary on October rd, ‘Letter from Shelley
that Allegra is not coming.’ A look at the emotions behind that terseness
can be seen in a letter she draed to Byron in February, at the apogee of
her crisis: she told him that having waited for two months in the autumn
she expected to be able to see Allegra once a week; when Byron suddenly
changed his mind, she had been overcome with a ‘fearful melancholy’
that had never le her, and premonitions that she would never see her
daughter again. Shelley realized the situation was serious enough to merit
a long visit to Claire: he arrived in Livorno on the th of October, and
they presumably spent the next several days together discussing it. . .”
“. . .I would have liked to hear what they discussed. . .”
“. . .I can guess Shelley tried to calm her down by suggesting he would
use the proximity to Byron to gradually wear away his resolve in regard to
Allegra. At that point, Shelley could never have imagined that Byron
would have le her in Bagnacavallo, and he probably assumed that Byron
wanted to consider the new situation before transferring her anywhere.
11
See, in this letter to Byron on October 1st, he’s still acting as if the possi-
bilities are open: ‘e Countess tells me that you think of leaving Allegra
for present at the convent. Do as you think best – but I can pledge myself
to find the best situation for her here such as you would approve, in case
you change your mind.’ I think he must have been quite optimistic,
because it was probably during his stay in Livorno that he began writing
his long poem Hellas, as he brought Claire back here to San Giuliano on
October 9th and he was already writing about the poem to his publisher,
Ollier, by October 11th. e poem is all about regeneration – and he
presumably had more than Greece in mind for such a regeneration: there
was the new decision to move to Pisa and the establishment of a more
permanent home there, the imminent arrival of Byron and the expected
arrival of Leigh Hunt to begin a new journal and a new community; and,
I think he must have thought it very possible that Allegra would finally
be moved closer. . .”
“. . .what is the poem about?”
“. . .it’s his penultimate long poem, and it takes as its general topic the
fight for Greek independence which comes to represent the fight for
freedom and democracy across Europe and the world. e following
April he wrote to Gisborne, ‘It was written without much care, and in
one of those few moments of enthusiasm which now seldom visit me,
and which make me pay dear for their visits’ – but of course he was always
overly modest about his efforts. Beyond being an occasional poem meant
to aid the cause of Greek independence, it’s essentially his contribution
to Hellenism, although obviously not the kind of conservative Hellenism
that took Greece as a model for imperial England that both he and Byron
detested, but rather Greece as a model of real democracy in its fight
against the Turkish occupation. It’s interesting how Greece fired the
romantic imagination given that of all the British or German romantics
and their idealizing of Greece, only Byron had actually traveled there!
Shelley, at least, had read and translated a great number of classical Greek
texts, unlike Keats who couldn’t read Greek at all. Shelley was the best
classicist of all the romantics – with perhaps the exception of Hölderlin
and the Schlegel brothers. Also, the fact that Prince Mavrocordato was
in their circle in Pisa also influenced him: they saw Mavrocordato
preparing for his departure for the war of independence, and received his
reports from Greece: Shelley dedicated the poem to him. It was
inevitable that Shelley would write something about Greece, and the
1
time had come. In the preface to the poem he argues that ‘We are all
Greeks,’ and he links the struggle there with the struggle in Europe – you
can see this linkage most clearly in this passage of the preface that Ollier
censored, fearing the repercussions:
Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect
upon the part which those who presume to represent their
will have played in the great drama of the revival of liberty,
with feelings which it would become them to anticipate.
This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the
oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders of the
privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called
Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common
enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence
of a mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the
earth are virtual members. But a new race has arisen
throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the
opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to
produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which
tyrants foresee and dread.
. . .Shelley was right – the Holy Alliance had been signed precisely as an
agreement to maintain European dynasties in the face of democratizing
influences. . .”
“. . .and the poem itself – how is it?”
“. . .well, it’s not really to my taste, although I like its general prem-
ises. We see the gradual building of the Greek cause against the Turks
from primarily the viewpoint of the Turks, although thrown in are the
visionary views of Christ, Mohamet, and Ahasuerus, the Wandering
Jew. The poem is somewhat poly-vocal, but if I were to distill the
essential point, it’s that empires come and go in a cycle of growth and
decay –
Worlds on worlds are rolling ever

From creation to decay,
Like the bubbles on a river
Sparkling, bursting, borne away.
1
. . .but the essential – thought – is eternal, as Ahasuerus proclaims:
Mistake me not! All is contained in each.

Dodona’s forest to an acorn’s cup
Is that which has been, or will be, to that
Which is—the absent to the present. ought
Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;
ey are, what that which they regard appears,
e stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it hath dominion o’er, worlds, worms,
Empires, and superstitions. What has thought
To do with time, or place, or circumstance?
Wouldst thou behold the Future?—ask and have!
Knock and it shall be opened—look, and lo!
e coming age is shadowed on the Past
As on a glass.
. . .but in his evocation of the rebirth of Hellas he isn’t evoking a return

to the past, or the mere cyclicity of history – what he envisions is a new
and different Greece emerging. ese are some of the final lines of the
poem, where he speaks most directly of this renewal. . .
e world’s great age begins anew,

e golden years return,
e earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
A loier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies.
1
A new Ulysses leaves once more

Calypso for his native shore.
Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,
If earth Death’s scroll must be!
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free:
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death ebes never knew.
Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
e splendour of its prime. . .
. . .and so on and so forth – it gets a bit bombastic at the end. Unlike

Adonais, about which he wrote that it was his ‘least imperfect’ poem,
when he wrote to people about Hellas he usually downplayed its impor-
tance. I think, though, it had at least one important reader – Byron:
there’s a direct reference to Byron in the poem, and then there’s another
place where Byron could choose to read himself into it:
e Greeks expect a Saviour from the West,

Who shall not come, men say, in clouds and glory,
But in the omnipresence of that Spirit
In which all live and are. . .
. . .I don’t think it would have influenced Byron just then, but aer
Shelley died I think it must have had some influence on his decision to go
to Greece. . .”
“. . .it’s a shame Byron could have such high-minded feelings about
Greece, but not about his treatment of Claire or Allegra. . .”
“. . .yes, it is: I’ve read two biographies of Byron, and in both cases they
downplayed or even avoided dealing in depth with his treatment of
Claire. at’s the nature of standard biographies – they oen avoid
dwelling on anything that would put their subject in a bad light. I have to
admit that while reading both biographies, I was brought into his mind
in a manner where I saw him quite sympathetically, and it was only
because I knew the story from the perspective of Shelley and Claire that
I was able to see it differently. Actually, it’s a very good lesson in the limi-
1
tations of human experience – to read separate biographies of two figures

that were involved in each other’s lives in order to see just how much the
perspective shis as you move from one to the other, and, for me, in the
case of Shelley and Byron, I’ve been able to see the story through both of
their eyes. ere are very few examples like it in history where two equally
key figures whose lives overlapped can be viewed so deeply from the
perspective of each. . .”
“. . .I’m trying to think of others. . .there’s Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. . .”
“. . .yes, or Fitzgerald and Hemingway – but even with those two exam-
ples, Miller and Nin were too close, as lovers, to get a clear sense of the
relative truth of their two perspectives, while Hemingway and Fitzgerald
weren’t close enough. Other examples would be Melville and
Hawthorne, Nietzsche and Wagner, Hume and Rousseau, Hölderlin and
Hegel, Van Gogh and Gauguin, Joyce and Beckett, Mallarmé and Manet,
Sartre and Camus, Goethe and Schiller, but I don’t think any of them
provided as much information as Shelley and Byron. I suppose there
must be a certain degree of friendship between the figures, a certain
rough similarity as well as dissimilarity in their existential positions and
intellectual outlooks – a certain dialectic, and, of course, also a discourse
recorded through letters and journals and the accounts of contempo-
raries. . .but also perhaps some – how to put it? – ‘pivot point,’ the way
that Claire and Allegra were for them. Actually, I can only think of one
other good example, except there’s not much work done on them yet, as
one of the two is still alive. . .”
“. . .who?”
“. . .Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot: the long-term friendship is
there; so is the mixture of a similarity of outlook with a difference in
inflection – Bataille’s gregariousness and passion versus Blanchot’s reclu-
siveness and ethereality; and there’s something of a recorded discourse. . .
well, that remains to be seen, but we have some letters and their works
themselves refer to their lives considerably, in a very indirect and some-
times obscure way. . .”
“. . .and the ‘pivot point’?”
“. . .that’s there, too, in the form of Denise Rollin, who was Bataille’s
lover and Blanchot’s – well, I don’t yet fully understand their relation-
ship, but I would use the word ‘intimate’. . .”
“. . .were they rivals?”
“. . .no, and that’s the biggest difference: neither had the pride nor the
1
competitiveness of Byron, and they were quite gracious with one another,
so, for me, they represent the ideal of what a male friendship ought to be
like – if we weren’t as a species prone to atavistic behavior. . .”
“. . .atavistic?”
“. . .primitive, territorial, possessive – the whole male competitiveness
thing I spoke of before in regard to Shelley and Byron. In my opinion,
a real step forward in human evolution would be when we can suppress
that atavism, and act in accord with a higher vision of things: for example,
in regard to friendship, a real putting aside of our atavistic nature –
a friendship that finally lived up to its name. . .”
“. . .wouldn’t that be a new utopianism?”
“. . .yes, I admit it. My hope would reside in this possibility: if we could
recognize that our atavism is never entirely overcome, but is always
lurking inside us, then the danger of utopianism might be alleviated.
I don’t think we’ll ever over-turn that aspect of our nature completely –
there will always be a will to power. Still, when I consider the friendship
between Blanchot and Bataille, I believe real friendship is possible – oh,
and by the way, there’s another interesting fact, although it’s merely
a coincidence. . .”
“. . .what?”
“. . .Shelley and Bataille both died on the same day, July 8th, but 10
years apart – Shelley in 18, Bataille in 19. . .”
“. . .that’s strange. . .”
“. . .and, also, another strange fact is that in both their cases, one of their
survivors would write a novel dealing indirectly with their deaths – and
with the same title, albeit one in English and the other in French! In the
case of Mary Shelley, it was her novel e Last Man, written in 18 aer
the death of both Shelley and Byron; in the case of Blanchot, it was his
récit, Le Dernier Homme, written in 19 when Bataille was greatly weak-
ened by his tuberculosis, and death just around the corner. . .”
“. . .and what do the titles mean?”
“. . .Mary’s book is about a plague that kills everyone on earth until
there’s only one man le, and it’s his narrative. It’s clearly a kind of
displaced working through of her feelings aer the deaths of Shelley and
Byron – I’ll tell you about it later. Blanchot’s book is partially a reference
to something he had once said to Bataille, and which Bataille recorded
in his book, L’Expérience intérieure: ‘Blanchot asked me: why not pursue
my inner experience as if I were the last man.’ It was partially a reference
1
to Nietzsche’s figure of the last man, partially Blanchot’s idea of another

method to reach a limit experience, which Bataille was discussing and
exploring in his book. Blanchot’s récit explores the theme of the last man
through the consciousnesses of three people: a man, a woman, and an
older man who seems to be dying. ey inhabit some type of sanatorium
together, and there’s a strange space of waiting at the limit of what seems
an interminable process of dying. . .”
“. . .what is that about?”
“. . .I think in both their cases it was a matter of their having felt that
they shared a privileged and rare discourse with a unique individual, and
when that individual died it must suddenly have been like finding oneself
with nobody to speak to any more. . .”
“. . .when Claire was away from them, she must have felt that way all
the time. . .”
“. . .and it would get even worse when she knew Shelley and Mary were
here in Pisa with Byron and the rest, while she was sequestered in
Florence. . .”
“. . .how soon was it before she went away again?”
“. . .another month or so. e rest of October Claire stayed primarily
with the Williams in Pugnano, and sometimes Claire went to San
Giuliano, and sometimes Shelley and Mary came to Pugnano. Shelley
quite oen went alone with Claire somewhere, then: he went with her
to Pisa on the 10th, they went for a walk along the Serchio on the 1th –
it even seems that Mary stayed at Pugnano on the 19th, while Claire and
Shelley stayed at San Giuliano!”
“. . .had things really changed that much?”
“. . .perhaps they realized that, in a way, the worst had already happened
– that those in the outer world who thought anything about them would
always think the worst no matter what they did. Otherwise, while they
still had to be imperceptible, they didn’t need to be paranoid about it. In
any case, this was all during the run-up to the arrival of Byron, as well as
to their own move to the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa on the th of October.
ey were already making preparations, and Teresa Guiccioli had already
arrived with her entourage at some point in October, as Shelley wrote
about her to John Gisborne. . .”
“. . .what did they think of each other?”
“. . .she recounted her impressions of him in her memoirs of Byron: she
noted that he was freckled, his hair streaked with gray, his teeth irregular,
18
that he was tall but stooped over, and despite these negative aspects he
had an expression she described as ‘godly and austere.’ He wasn’t nearly
so flattering – he wrote, ‘La Guiccioli his cara sposa who attends him
impatiently, is a very pretty sentimental, innocent, superficial Italian, who
has sacrificed an immense fortune to live for Lord Byron; and who, if
I know anything of my friend, of her, or of human nature will hereaer
have plenty of leisure & opportunity to repent of her rashness’. . .”
“. . .did Claire meet her?”
“. . .I seriously doubt it, and in any case there would have only been one
chance: Claire was going back and forth between Pugnano, San
Giuliano, and Pisa quite a bit during this period, and on October th,
two days aer Shelley and Mary moved to the Tre Palazzi, Claire was
there when Teresa Guiccioli called. ere’s no evidence anywhere that
they were introduced: my guess is that they kept her out of sight, because
they wouldn’t have wanted Byron knowing that Claire was there. . .”
“. . .perhaps she peered at her from a keyhole – I can imagine her
curiosity: to see the woman Byron had settled upon – it would be too
tempting! So, when did Byron finally come?”
“. . .he le Ravenna on the 8th – it’s strange, but on the road between
Ravenna and Bologna Byron by chance ran into his old schoolmate the
Earl of Clare, and he recorded that the five emotional minutes he spent
with him there at the crossroads would remain with him forever. . .and
then he passed the other Claire, also – just beyond Empoli, on November
1st, and he didn’t even notice her! at says everything about Byron:
totally enamored of his old school chum, and totally oblivious of the
mother of his child. . .”
“. . .I assume she noticed him?”
“. . .oh yes – she recorded it briefly in her journal, noting that she saw
him coming with his entourage while she was going away to Florence. . .”
“. . .she must have felt awful leaving while the source of all of her pain
was arriving. How did Shelley feel about her going away again?”
“. . .he was very busy preparing for Byron’s arrival, but I’m sure that
when things settled down, he felt terrible – there’s a poem about it, or at
least I assume it is, for an original copy was penned on the cover of his
book Adonais. e first stanza suggests he wrote it that autumn – before
or perhaps just aer she went away from Pisa again. It was entitled, in the
188 edition, ‘Remembrance’:
19
Swier far than summer’s flight—

Swier far than youth’s delight—
Swier far than happy night,
Art thou come and gone—
As the earth when leaves are dead,
As the night when sleep is sped,
As the heart when joy is fled,
I am le lone, alone.
e swallow summer comes again—

e owlet night resumes her reign—
But the wild-swan youth is fain
To fly with thee, false as thou.—
My heart each day desires the morrow;

Sleep itself is turned to sorrow;
Vainly would my winter borrow
Sunny leaves from any bough.
Lilies for a bridal bed—

Roses for a matron’s head—
Violets for a maiden dead—
Pansies let my flowers be:
On the living grave I bear
Scatter them without a tear—
Let no friend, however dear,
Waste one hope, one fear for me.
. . .it sounds to me like it was written for Claire. . .”

“. . .why pansies?”
“. . .‘pansy’ comes from the old French pancy, from which is derived
pensée – thought or remembrance – perhaps a reference to how he held
her in memory when she was far away. . .”
“. . .it sounds like he no longer believed summer would arrive again. . .”
“. . .such a summer, with its periods of relative calm, would never arrive
for him again, but he couldn’t have known that, then. . .”
“. . .oh that’s right – he only experienced a few weeks of the following
summer. I keep forgetting how quickly it all passed. Time is strange – it
0
expands, or contracts. It feels we’ve been here for weeks, and yet it has
passed before we even can get a grasp of it. . .”
“. . .yes, for me too. When they’re over these days will have seemed
fleeting, but now I feel we’re becalmed in an immense ocean of time. . .”
“. . .could you pass the wine, please?”
“. . .here you are. . .”
“. . .dĕkuji. . .”
“. . .prosím. . .”
“. . .I can see why they chose San Giuliano given they wanted to escape
prying eyes. . .”
“. . .yes, it’s quite far away from it all. It’s strange that they built the
village right at the foot of these hills – no wonder it was flooded every
year. . .”
“. . .did it flood again in autumn, 181?”
“. . .I think they had already moved to the center before the rains
arrived, but arrive they did, and with a vengeance – some of the worst
weather Shelley had ever seen occurred in December, and the Arno
flooded as high as the arches of one of the bridges. . .”
“. . .they’re lucky they missed it here – I don’t think they could have
stood another forced move. . .”
“. . .true, although there was one more forced move in their future,
unfortunately. . .you know, I can’t get over the uncanniness of visiting
places like this – it’s like we’re peering into time. . .”
“. . .yes, and I feel this strange sense of wanting to warn them of what’s
to come and I know I can’t: it’s like the feeling you get in a dream, when
you see what is about to happen, and you somehow can’t move to avoid
it. . .”
“. . .and then to think we face the same uncertainty – that life can so
suddenly derail like a runaway train, or veer off in an unexpected direc-
tion. . .”
“. . .but as you said before, perhaps if we can vividly imagine their lives
– what happened and especially why it happened, we can learn something
crucial about our own. . .”
“. . .so, what have you learned?”
“. . .many things: that Kaa was right when he told Gustav Janouch
that ‘patience is the master key of every situation’ – that precipitous
action creates more problems than it solves; that one should try to be
passionate without allowing oneself to be ruled by one’s passions; that
1
one should be the center of one’s actions, and should use whatever strate-
gies necessary to avoid being ruled by others; that one should not fool-
ishly flaunt one’s differences to others, and should strive for a degree of
imperceptibility – everything that they seem to have learned through
difficult experience. . .”
“. . .that’s why it’s so maddening to me to see it all unravel in the final
year, just as it seems they reached a new way of living. . .”
“. . .did they really find a new way?”
“. . .that’s what I’m trying to discover by being here and thinking it
through: I don’t really know if it was just bad luck in the end, or a series
of accumulating incidents caused by a series of miscalculations or
mistakes. . .”
“. . .and do you think the answer will be found in Shelley’s final
months?”
“. . .perhaps – if there is any answer. . .”
“. . .so let’s continue searching for it: what do we have le to see in
Pisa”?
“. . .the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa, of course, and the Palazzo Lananchi.
Otherwise, that’s about it, as everything that happened here from
November, 181 onwards happened between those two places – except
for the farm outside the city limits where they went on their shooting
expeditions, and there’s no record of where that was aside from the city
gate they departed from. . .”
“. . .so when will we go there to see the house – this evening or tomorrow?”
“. . .I thought we might go back to the hotel now and take a nap, then
aer we can go take a quick look at the houses before dinner, and aer-
wards come back and eat again at ‘our’ restaurant – as, aer all, there’s
no better time to start living the eternal return than in the present. . .”
“. . .that suits me. . .”
“. . .we can go back for a closer look tomorrow morning. . .”
“. . .that sounds perfect – and San Terenzo in the aernoon?”
“. . .we can take the aernoon train to La Spezia and hopefully book
a hotel in San Terenzo in advance at the travel office there, then take a bus or
taxi to San Terenzo and be settled-in by dinner with a view of the sea. . .”
“. . .are you sure there are hotels there? It must be a rather small place. . .”
“. . .no, but, as Nietzsche wrote, ‘I love not knowing the future. . .’”


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2010 11:05 Stránka 1

THE ETERNAL RETURN

THE ETERNAL RETURN

Douglas Shields Dix

Last Man Editions

is is one of a Limited Edition of 50 hardbound copies

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

First published in 2010 by

Last Man Editions

For Mary & Claire

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenscha, 1882

Everything that happened was selected, desired, willed. . .eternally. Despite

e eternal return: what cannot be spoken of. . .the dwarf whispering in

“. . .he was trying to please everyone, it seems. . .”

“. . .they needed passports to enter Venice?”

“. . .what kind of exploits?”

“. . .because she turned him down?”

in a position, as a single woman, to take the risk of letting her true

– Claire didn’t want to be merely a chapter in such a book. Besides,

“. . .so there’s more to what happened here?”

“. . .was Silsbee as awful as he was portrayed in e Aspern Papers?”

suﬀered desperately from the ultimate outcome of it – her suicide.

incest involved – at least symbolically. . .incest plays a role in several of

“. . .do you have it?

Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed;

To sit and curb the soul’s mute rage

Whilst thou alone, then not regarded,

Upon my heart thy accents sweet

We are not happy, sweet! our state

Our sacred friendship, lest there be

Gentle and good and mild thou art,

“. . .partially no doubt, but Shelley at that time believed in the possi-

“. . .and so Hogg blundered in again and couldn’t manage it, I suppose?”

Oh! there are spirits of the air,

With mountain winds, and babbling springs,

And thou hast sought in starry eyes

Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine hope

Yes, all the faithless smiles are ﬂed

is ﬁend, whose ghastly presence ever

Would scourge thee to severer pangs.

. . .the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly esti-

seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have

Sudden she rose,

And saw by the warm light of their own life

“. . .does he at least become aware of the futility of his search?”

“. . .but he seems to be rather critical in certain parts of the poem. Who

Lamb’s o-quoted words, ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’. . .”

My dear Lord Byron you call me a ‘little ﬁend’ – I thought it

“. . .but wasn’t Shelley jealous of Claire – how could he stand knowing

“. . .Claire was in a kind of hormonal daze, it seems: the truth simply

My thoughts arise and fade in solitude,

How beautiful they were, how ﬁrm they stood,

“. . .ok, look at this line from ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ which is

e awful shadow of some unseen Power

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

. . .I especially like the last line – typically Shelleyean. . .”

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart

Like darkness to a dying ﬂame!

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

ey know that never joy illumed my brow

. . .he seems to be suggesting that whatever he does, from his studies to

e day becomes more solemn and serene