The Dark Side of a Romantic
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
The Dark Side of a Romantic Shelley: The Pursuit By Richard Holmes Dutton. 829 pp. $22.50 Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell There have always been two Shelleys. The first is "Ariel," Matthew...
...Mary Shelley wished to write a biography of her husband, but was prevented by his father, on whose financial support she was dependent...
...This ethereal being, with a feminine face and open collar, describes himself as "a pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift," but lacerated by persecution (mostly from his aristocratic family and critics...
...Her daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Shelley, destroyed and altered documents to conceal discreditable material, further complicating the creation of a satisfactory portrait...
...If Holmes' own imagery is occasionally obtrusive, as when he tells us that "Shelley had indeed managed to penetrate far upstream in his own mind," this is minor to the achievement of the book...
...Her diary and the brief notes she left make us feel more acutely the loss of the biography she might have written...
...Shelley, Holmes points out, was constantly haunted by visions of demons, particularly of his own double...
...Richard Holmes' Shelley: The Pursuit increases our understanding of a complex man, and should be a valuable reference work for years to come...
...Mary reports two appearances of the double a week before he died...
...Though lacking her sister's intelligence and beauty, Claire possessed more emotional directness and a sense of humor...
...After her husband's death, she and her son were dependent on grudging support from a disapproving father-in-law...
...During his marriage to Harriet, his sister-in-law had always been on hand to take care of the couple...
...The greatest benefit from the affair (which embittered both parties) was the friendship that sprang up between the two poets...
...Shortly after, he met himself walking in the garden...
...Small wonder that when a friend suggested Eton would teach her son to think for himself, Mary exclaimed, "O God...
...If Claire emerges as the dark heroine of Holmes' drama, Mary is also seen as a heroic figure...
...He seeks intellectual beauty, often through platonic attachments to women he idealizes...
...This Shelley wrote such Romantic lyrics as The Sensitive Plant, To a Skylark and Adonais?that elegy for an equally fated contemporary, John Keats...
...These rumors were denied by Mary, who nevertheless described her sister as "the bane of my life...
...He suffered from persecution mania, believing without foundation that his father had tried to have him committed to a madhouse...
...Her boy succeeded to the Shelley estates and title...
...The outward events of his short life are not always clear...
...and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I might be happy...
...A more dubious result was the birth of a daughter...
...He warns us that Shelley lovers will be disappointed, and, indeed, his picture is often unpleasant...
...Negotiations surrounding this child drew Shelley and Claire closer together, and at the time of its premature death they may have briefly become lovers, even conceiving a child of their own...
...Her health was bad, and of the five children she bore Shelley, only one survived...
...Holmes's most significant re-evaluation concerns Claire Clairmont's role in Shelley's emotional life...
...Claire was often led by her feelings, yet she was a shrewd and acute observer...
...This Shelley proselytizes for atheism and free love (Queen Mab...
...The other Shelley is a Radical Agitator...
...The first occurred when he entered her room while sleepwalking and woke to see a vision of himself strangling her...
...Confusion about his sexual identity made him prefer triangular relationships with women...
...Holmes relies on her journal and correspondence to fill in many details, and for a caustic tone absent from other documents by Shelley's intimates...
...she had an edition of Shelley's poems published and saw his reputation grow...
...The memoirs of friends are prejudiced and contradictory...
...Holmes has produced a work admirable not only for its scholarship and balanced judgments, but for its focused portrait of Shelley...
...His poetry deals with abstractions, complex concepts and the personification of emotions...
...An American adventurer's attempts to obtain alleged love letters to her from Shelley and Byron inspired Henry James' The Aspern Papers...
...He abandons his wife and his children to run off with the daughter of feminist leader Mary Wollstone-craft and political philosopher William Godwin...
...He is a vegetarian and a pacifist...
...Her father, in spite of his radical theories, was indignant over her elopement with a married man, although he continued to accept financial aid from her "seducer...
...Another critic called Prometheus Unbound "Godwin's Political Justice put into rhyme...
...Similarly, Holmes is most interested in Shelley's ideas as expressed through imagery, rather than with the more familiar lyric poetry...
...Teach him to think like other people...
...she herself became a minor literary celebrity...
...Expelled from Oxford, he scoffs at conventional society and morals, listing his profession in Swiss hotel registers as "democrat, philanthropist and atheist...
...preaches rebellion and abolition of incest taboos (The Revolt of Islam) and advocates a workingman's revolution against the British government (The Mask of Anarchy...
...A famous passage in Prometheus Unbound describes this phenomenon: The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden...
...For know there are two worlds of life and death: One, that which thou beholdest...
...W. H. Auden claimed Shelley had a tin ear...
...That apparition, sole of men, he saw...
...When Claire's family blackened Harriet's character to whitewash Shelley's, she observed, "Harriet's suicide had a beneficial effect on Shelley—he became much less confident in himself, and not so wild as he had been before...
...The Radical Agitator is a perennial cult-hero of the Left, presenting the poet as a kind of 19th-century John Lennon...
...The Shelley family helped to promote the "Ariel" image in an effort to exonerate the dead man from his less admirable actions...
...After T. S. Eliot's attacks, Shelley's poetic reputation suffered a decline...
...The first is "Ariel," Matthew Arnold's "beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain...
...But recently, an awareness of Shelley's influence on W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, among others, together with a new appreciation of Romantic literature, has revived interest in one of the 19th century's important spokesmen...
...This friendship was, Holmes thinks, "the kindest and most successful of all his relationships with the opposite sex—a field in which his successes were sometimes startling, but seldom lasting...
...Byron, disapproving of the morals of Claire and the Shelleys, sent the girl to a convent school, "that she may be a Christian, and a married woman, if possible...
...She was her husband's secretary and critic, kept an informative diary of their lives, ran a household and raised her children, read, studied and did her own writing, including Frankenstein...
...The price of this activity, however, was an emotional withdrawing from Shelley and increasingly severe depression...
...but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live Till death unite them and they part no more...
...Yet Shelley is difficult to write about...
...Despite 800 pages on one who died before his 30th year, we are not subjected to every detail that can be unearthed...
...In a strikingly new interpretation, Shelley: The Pursuit, Richard Holmes tries to reconstruct "a darker and more earthly, crueller and more capable figure," neither effete lyricist nor revolutionary gadabout...
...the image said to him, "How long do you mean to be content...
...it is the less well known aspects of Shelley's life, like his early political activities and his philosophical theories, that are covered at length...
...When his wife, Harriet, commits suicide, he disclaims responsibility, blackens her character and marries Mary...
...The precocious daughter of brilliant parents, she seemed hardly equipped at 16 to embark on a life of exile, penury and social ostracism...
...The last period of her life brought some improvements...
...Shelley abhorred physical violence, but was prone to uncontrollable outbursts...
...He lives with Mary Godwin and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, in an irregular menage, and, at one point, shares Mary with his best friend...
...Claire is best remembered for her pursuit and brief capture of the literary lion of the age, Lord Byron —she figures in his Episychidion, a long, symbolic account of his relations with women...
...but to have won, then cruelly to have lost, the associations of four years, is not an accident to which the human mind can bend without much suffering...
...He was dishonest in financial matters...
...In fact, certain incidents recorded in other sources, such as the fatal sailing accident, are dealt with in a few sentences...
...For eight years of marriage and 30 of widowhood, she remained loyal to Shelley, and fully appreciated his genius...
...His ideas were described as muddled, he was accused of emotionalism, his philosophy was termed escapist...
...After the death of two of her children, she wrote in her journal, "We have now lived five years together...
...While both characterizations represent facets of a complex and divided personality, they tell us more about the poet's admirers...
...Painstaking research combined with the techniques of modern psychology reveal a man of brilliant intellect and sensitive temperament alienated from family, class, religion, and society...
...When Shelley and Mary eloped to the Continent, the younger Claire was taken along, ostensibly because she spoke French but really because Shelley had never lived alone with one woman...
...She lived with the couple for several years, and was Shelley's confidant and companion when Mary was either ill or writing...
...Carefully documenting Shelley's recurring nervous breakdowns and suicidal depressions, Holmes presents the poet's drowning in the Gulf of Spezia at the age of 29 as the culmination of a life directed toward self-destruction...
...Claire outlived them all, dying in Florence in 1879...
...This suited a Victorian audience that could only tolerate Shelley's sexual and political attitudes as a form of idealism...
Vol. 59 • January 1976 • No. 2
