The Devil and Percy Shelley

...Wroe, by refusing to complete Shelley’s own indictment, fails her end of the bargain, and the reader, instead of stepping in like Goethe’s angels to save him, can’t help but damn Shelley in her place...

...When Wroe recounts the poet’s failed attempt to save Fanny from suicide, her writing reads almost as incantation: From what did he wish to save her...

...Dramatically, these words meant Faust’s death, the end of the bargain he had struck, the moment Mephisto could steal his soul...

...Figuratively, they signify refl ection, seizing a moment that soon recedes, and the personal damnation that inevitably follows looking back on an infernal career...

...Some years later, after Shelley and Hogg were both expelled for The Necessity of Atheism—close to the fi rst published instance of avowed godlessness in the history of England—the young poet, again like Goethe’s Faust, took up a scheme to reclaim land from the sea...

...That’s certainly how Shelley’s friends—those who experienced his wild moods directly, without the nostalgic glow of a bygone age—fi rst approached the task...

...This is ironically appropriate since Shelley, despite his declared motto “Know thyself,” rarely understood his own motives...

...Thomas Love Peacock, turning to satirize his friend in the classic roman ? clef Nightmare Abbey, added a fi ne sense of comic timing to Shelley’s natural fl air for the dramatic...

...Yet by indicting Shelley, rather than pleading for him, Holmes enlists sympathy for the struggling, self-deceiving artist, and his Shelley ends with a sense of admiration slowly displacing that initial condemnation, much like the end of Faust...

...Ann Wroe’s daring new biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), perhaps the most inadvertently comic of the Romantics, reminded me just how Faustian a fi gure the poet cut...

...The other is his bifurcated Faust, whose structure, everyone knows, comes in two parts, but which few realize splits just as well into two characters: Faust and Mephisto, the revolutionary spirit of the age with its constant comedic antidote...

...Wroe’s biography doesn’t deny these blemishes, neither does it plead or condemn, instead fl oating over Shelley’s sins in a kind of trance...

...as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not...

...he pleads for Shelley as an advocate pleads for his client, and this strain of pleading . . . is unserviceable to Shelley, nay, injurious to him, because it inevitably begets, in many readers . . . impatience and revolt...

...The role of the biographer changes with the age...

...This line of thinking may seem profoundly tasteless—questioning the attempt to save a young woman from suicide—and yet it is decidedly Shelleyan...

...Wroe’s idealizing impulse is, in many ways, admirable...

...Matthew Arnold’s review of Edward Dowden’s 1886 biography provides a representative sample: “Professor Dowden holds a brief for Shelley...

...But she abdicates all interpretation, and these expressions of Shelley’s despair read more as mood swings than attempts at critical balance...

...Holmes, despite his marvelous mimicry of Shelley’s headlong lifestyle—“I go on until I am stopped, and I never am stopped”— often gives the sense, with his devotion to daily detritus, the encrustations of chronology, that Shelley barely managed to squeeze in the occasional poem between haggling with loan sharks, running from creditors, and chasing after women...

...The poet himself was no less callous when Harriet Westbrook, the estranged mother to his two children, hurled herself into the Serpentine: “Everything tends to prove . . . that beyond the mere shock of so hideous a catastrophe having fallen on a human being once so nearly connected to me, there would, in any case, have been little to regret...

...Similarly, Shelley’s old friend Hogg, the poet’s fi rst real biographer, tells a story so comic that it would seem an obvious fi ction if the author hadn’t witnessed it fi rsthand...

...Rather than writing the life of a man into which poetry erupts occasionally, my hope is to reconstruct the world of a poet into which earthly life keeps intruding...

...when that failed, he settled for raising his own unkempt locks, attaching his body to an early electrical generator and asking his friend, Thomas Hogg, to wind the machine until he could set off gunpowder with nothing but a touch...

...As a student at Oxford he tried to raise the devil...

...Being Shelley, Wroe’s faithful, fl awed new biography, throws out both chronology and judgment in a bold and fi nally doomed attempt to achieve fresh perspective on the poet...

...Absent a Mephisto to damn him, Shelley took on the role himself with his Triumph of Life, the hellish fi nal poem left fragmentary when he drowned...

...It is an attempt to write the life of a poet from the inside out: that is, from the perspective of the creative spirit struggling to discover its true nature...

...Hence, the deep irony in his repeating Faust’s famous words: “Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful...

...And yet it was ridiculous to think this way...

...But Wroe’s ridiculous structure—trading chronology for a misguided tour through the elements of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air—only exacerbates the sense that Shelley learned nothing from the tragedies he induced...

...Weimar Classicism was one result...

...Shelley often achieved some self-refl ection after the fact, and his best poems derive their strength from these personal doubts...

...Instead of a brief in Shelley’s defense, Holmes fi led an indictment: “Shelley’s Demons were never to prove intractable or rigid: on the contrary they adapted themselves to his interests and assimilated his intellectual developments with an almost sinister ease...

...Wroe doesn’t neglect to mention the agonized poems Shelley wrote in response: “They die—the dead return not—Misery...

...Scandalized by Hogg’s lack of poetic piety, the Shelley family forced him to cut his biography short, and the next 120 years saw a series of Shelley apologists do nothing but damage to the poet’s reputation...

...Wroe’s maddening confl ation of events reminds us why this revolution grew necessary: The Romantic Age, with its hope for personal (as well as political) reform, displaced the assumption of permanent traits with a belief in, if not progress, at least development...

...for the chronicler of Shelley, with his Faustian career, the only proper approach may be Mephistophelean, a kind of comic counterweight to the poet’s Romantic excess...

...He lingered over the gluey putrefaction of the fl esh, the clinging, choking air of his own decay, his eaten eyes...

...Halfway through a discussion of metempsychosis, Shelley apparently snatched a child from a local Oxford woman, dangled it over Magdalen bridge, and proceeded to inquire, “Can your baby tell us about pre-existence, Madam...

...That, after all, is the inevitable conclusion of a book based on Shelley’s claim that, for the poet, “time and place and number are not...

...The poet, renamed Scythrop or Gloomy Face, orders “a pint of port and a pistol,” set promptly for 7:25, but then manages to postpone impending doom by directing the butler to reset his watch...

...After achieving worldwide fame with The Sorrows of Young Werther, he spent the next 60 years trying to live down the youthful indiscretion...

...Holmes, while retaining great respect for Shelley’s poetry, showed how the gentle jokes of Shelley’s friends masked “extremely characteristic pieces of calculating duplicity...

...The virtuous man, dying in the regenerated world of Queen Mab, was full of calm wonder and hope...

...and yet no one knew the comedy of the Romantics better than Goethe, the movement’s great wayward father...

...He even equaled Faust’s (female) death count by causing the suicides of two young women: Harriet Westbrook, his estranged wife, and Fanny Godwin, unrequited lover and half-sister to Mary...

...Shelley, despite all his bluster, indeed learned from his mistakes, came to admit that Utopia, while the necessary concept—the light which like a star / Beacons from the abode where the eternal are—must remain a fl eeting vision on this earth...

...It wasn’t until Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit, originally published in 1974 and recently rereleased, that the poet’s life fi nally received the deeply skeptical, Mephistophelean treatment it deserves...

...As Mary wrote long after the poet’s death: “It will be suffi cient to say that, in all he did, he at the time of doing it believed himself justifi ed to his own conscience...

...Besides, Death’s worm-ridden winding-sheets were also mysteriously seductive...

...At times, being human, he could not repulse a shudder of horror...

...It takes seriously Shelley’s statement that a poet “participates in the eternal, the infi - nite and the one...

...If earthly life was prison, then death was release, the dissolving of the bonds of the body...

...Her introduction aptly sums up the project: This book is an experiment...

...No doubt such moody, incantatory writing befi ts a book intent on Being Shelley, but Wroe’s choice of subtitle— The Poet’s Search for Himself—suggests an effort at self-criticism that her work hardly attempts...

...This impish remark may seem a mere anachronism, a fashionable contempt for the past...

...In Shelley’s “younger” poems, as he called them, Death was already “a calm habitation” and a friend...

...Rousseau, Goethe, and Wordsworth, with their pioneering bildungs-biographies, all rejected such a static view of character...