Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny. David Crane

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ href="#litres_trial_promo">¹⁴

      There were quarantine laws to meet before the bodies of Shelley or Williams could be touched, but the man who claimed to have cremated his eastern bride was more than up to the challenge of a proper funeral. Mary Shelley had at first wanted her husband buried alongside their son in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, but in the end more exotic council prevailed. On 14 August, the body of Williams was finally exhumed and cremated in a macabre dress rehearsal for what was to follow. The next morning, with Byron and the newly arrived Leigh Hunt present, it was Shelley’s turn in a scene which in all its gruesome detail has etched itself onto the Romantic imagination.

      The lonely and grand scenery that surrounded us so exactly harmonized with Shelley’s genius, that I could imagine his spirit soaring over us. The sea, with the islands of Gorgona, Capraja, and Elba, was before us; old battlemented watch-towers stretched along the coast, backed by the marble-crested Appenines glistening in the sun, picturesque from their diversified outlines, and not a human dwelling was in sight. As I thought of the delight Shelley felt in such scenes of loneliness and grandeur whilst living, I thought we were no better than a herd of wolves or a pack of wild dogs, in tearing out his battered and naked body from the pure yellow sand that lay so lightly over it, to drag him back to the light of day; but the dead have no voice, nor had I power to check the sacrilege – the work went on silently in the deep and unresisting sand, not a word was spoken, for the Italians have a touch of sentiment, and their feelings are easily excited into sympathy. Byron was silent and thoughtful. We were startled and drawn together by a dull hollow sound that followed the blow of a mattock; the iron had struck a skull, and the body was soon uncovered. Lime had been strewn on it; this or decomposition had the effect of staining it of a dark and ghastly indigo colour. Byron asked me to preserve the skull for him; but remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinking-cup, I was determined Shelley should not be so profaned. The limbs did not separate from the trunk, as in the case of Williams’s body, so that the corpse was removed entire into the furnace … After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.

      Byron could not face this scene, he withdrew to the beach and swam off to the ‘Bolivar’. Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage. The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull; but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.¹⁵

      In the long years ahead, Shelley’s funeral would come to seem the making of Trelawny, the beginning of his public ministry as high priest and interpreter of English Romanticism. During the short time that he had known Shelley and Byron he had certainly become an integral part of their Pisan world, but the truth is that it was his role at their deaths and not the friendship of a few brief months which gave him his apostolic authority over a generation infatuated with their memory.

      In account after account over the next sixty years he would return to this summer of 1822 with ever new details, peddling scraps of history or bone with equal relish. Yet if his long-term strategy became one of ruthless self-promotion, in the short term Shelley’s death brought out a streak of selfless and generous kindness his earlier life had stifled. In the bleak and wearing months after the Don Juan went down, Trelawny almost single-handedly sustained the grieving widows, giving them not just unstinted emotional support but practical and financial help that earned their deep and genuine gratitude. ‘His whole conduct during his last stay here has impressed us all with an affectionate regard, and a perfect faith in the unalienable goodness of his heart,’¹⁶ Mary Shelley wrote to Jane Williams from Florence on 23 July 1823, shortly before her own departure for England where Jane had already gone. ‘It went to my heart to borrow the sum from him necessary to make up my journey,’ she wrote again only a week later, ‘but he behaved with so much quick generosity, that one was almost glad to put him to the proof, and witness the excellence of his heart.’¹⁷

      Through the desolate winter of 1822–3 Trelawny came closer to Mary than at any time in their long relationship, but it was with another of Shelley’s circle that he formed during this time what is possibly the most enduring, if impenetrable, friendship of his life.

      A curious compound of apparent opposites, of selfishness and generosity, common sense and fatuous silliness, of shrewd judgement and uncontrollable passion, of clinging dependence and brave and dogged self-sufficiency, Claire Clairmont is at once the most touching and exasperating member of Shelley’s and Byron’s world. She had been born in the spring of 1798 as the illegitimate child of a woman who went under the name of ‘Mrs Clairmont’, and at the age of three was taken with her brother Charles to Somers Town in London, where in the same year their mother met and married the widower of Mary Wollstonecraft, the great radical and political philosopher, William Godwin.

      From the earliest age, Claire thus found herself in one of the most free-thinking and politically conscious households in England, the step-daughter of a famous writer and step-sister to another in the future Mary Shelley. As a child, too, she was raised and educated with the same care that was expended on the boys of the family, and she grew up with all the principles and beliefs that lay at the core of the Godwin ménage, as exuberantly and unapologetically a child of the revolutionary age as if she had indeed been Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft’s natural daughter.

      When Claire was fourteen her half-sister, Mary, fell in love with the young poet and disciple of Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley was already a married man when he first met Mary, but two years later the couple eloped to France and took Claire with them, walking, riding and slumming their way across the French countryside until poverty and Mary’s pregnancy brought them back to England and reality.

      It is hard to imagine what the sixteen-year-old girl thought she was doing with Mary and Shelley in France at this time, but if her teasing and subversive presence in their lives is still one of the unresolved mysteries of biography, there was odder yet to come. Within two years of their triangular elopement and still only seventeen, she eclipsed Mary’s conquest of Shelley with a married poet of her own, throwing herself at Lord Byron with a reckless and infatuated passion that his indolent and self-indulgent nature was unable to resist. ‘An utter stranger takes the liberty of addressing you,’ she wrote to him above the assumed name of E. Trefusis.

      It may seem a strange assertion, but it is none the less true that I place my happiness in your hands … If a woman, whose reputation as yet remained unstained, if without either guardian or husband to control, she should throw herself on your mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she has borne you many years … could you betray her, or would you be silent as the grave?¹⁸

      If a whole life can ever be said to hinge on a single action or judgement, then Claire Clairmont’s unprovoked assault on Byron in the March of 1816 is it. In the wake of the scandalous collapse of his marriage Byron was certainly ready for a brief and loveless affair, but to Claire it was the most important moment of her life, a moment at once of complete fulfilment and self-destructive folly which she was to regret for sixty bitter years.

      Had the affair ended there and then, however, Claire Clairmont’s history might well have been very СКАЧАТЬ