By Stuart Mitchner
“’Then, what is life? I cried.’”
—from The Triumph of Life
The sequence of literary events that began on July 2, 1961, with the suicide of Ernest Hemingway ended on July 8, 1822, with the drowning of Percy Bysshe Shelley. As my wife just pointed out, I can’t begin in 1961 and end in 1822. But when your weekly companion is A Book of Days for the Literary Year, Hemingway is literally just around the corner; plus Nathaniel Hawthorne, born July 4, 1804, is smiling handsomely out at you from between the two dates; and everything comes full circle anyway because the day Shelley’s boat sank in the Gulf of Spezia is the very day in 1918 when Red Cross volunteer Hemingway was wounded in the trenches in nearby Fossalta.
Celebrating Alice
On the lighter side, it seems that after almost 250 years of having little to celebrate on July 4, the Brits have adopted Alice in Wonderland Day to mark the day in 1862 that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson told the tale to 10-year-old Alice Liddell, the model for the heroine. According to nationaldaycalendar.com, “many Brits celebrate the day by dressing up as Alice or other characters in the book.” There are also story times, exhibitions, and Mad Hatter tea parties, a custom that might play well in post-Inauguration Day America.
Shelley’s Inferno?
Harold Bloom calls the project Shelley was working on when he died, “the most despairing poem, of true eminence, in the language.” The Triumph of Life “would bewilder and depress us were it not for its augmented poetic power.” Elsewhere, Bloom associates the enormous 548-line “fragment” with “a pattern of deepening despair in the cycle of Shelley’s poetry,” from “the dead end of Alastor” to “the highly qualified hope of Prometheus Unbound,” to “the natural defeat of imaginative quest in Adonais” to “the unfinished but totally hopeless” last work, “which is not a Purgatorio but an Inferno. Shelley’s heart, when he died, had begun to touch the limits of desire.”
The Rock Star
Reading around in Shelley’s terza rima epic, I couldn’t help thinking of the shaggy dog story of the quest for the meaning of life that always ends with a mountaintop sage proclaiming, “Life is just a bowl of cherries…. Isn’t it?” My preferred rendition of this parable is “In Held ‘Twas I” on Procol Harum’s second LP, Shine On Brightly. While playing fast and loose with reality in an April 2006 piece about poet Paul Muldoon’s “3-car-garage band Rackett,” I portrayed Shelley as a flamboyant rock star with flowing hair, a fantasy I see prefigured in The Triumph of Life through references to “wild dance” and “savage music, wilder as it grows,” and “that fierce Spirit, whose unholy leisure / Was soothed by mischief since the world begun, / Throw back their heads and loose their streaming hair, … Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air” and “As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now / Bending within each other’s atmosphere, Kindle invisibly….”
Keep in mind that Shelley presumably never had a chance to proof the text, which breaks off just in time for the time-honored question: “’Then, what is life? I cried.’”
“Dear Jane!”
In the copy of The Norton Anthology of English Literature I lived with during my year as a Norton college traveler, Shelley’s last two poems are addressed to “Dear Jane,” the common law wife of his close friend Edward Williams, who drowned with him on July 8, 1822. Thanks to their placement in the anthology, readers come to the Jane poems — with their exalted concluding lines (“Where the earth and ocean meet, /And all things seem only one / In the universal sun”) and (“Where music and moonlight and feeling / Are one”) — fresh from the searing last stanza of “Adonais,” Shelley’s elegy for John Keats, with its presaging of his own death: “my spirit’s bark is driven / Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng / Whose sails were never to the tempest given…. I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; / Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, / The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.”
Tensions
In his 2008 biography, James Bieri notes that in the early months of 1822, Shelley became increasingly close to Jane Williams, who was living with her partner Edward Williams in the same building as the Shelleys. Expressed in some of the last poems he ever wrote, Shelley’s “obvious affection for Jane was to cause increasing tension among the two couples.” It’s not clear that tensions between Shelley and Williams had anything to do with the accident that killed them. According to wordsworth.org.uk, Shelley’s boat the Don Juan (which he apparently also referred to as the Ariel) had additional top-masts and sails fitted to make it faster, so that Shelley could outpace Byron’s new boat when they raced each other in the Bay of Spezia. “It’s not entirely clear whether Shelley was aware how dangerous this modification was, and how unstable the Don Juan might prove to be, especially when fully rigged.” On July 8, he sailed to Lerici from Livorno, planning to take with him Williams and an 18-year-old boat-boy named Charles Vivian. “There were warnings of bad weather, but despite the fact that Shelley had no particular need to travel that day, he insisted on setting sail. The next time the boat was sighted was several hours later, in the midst of the storm, toiling in heavy seas and carrying a reckless amount of sail in such high winds. The captain of another boat risked the safety of his own crew to go alongside and offer to take Shelley and his companions on board, but Shelley refused, and when the man called to them that they must take in sail or perish, Shelley seized Williams’ arm to prevent him, crying ‘No!’”
It was 10 days before the bodies were found, and by then Shelley was identifiable only by the clothes he wore, and the book of Keats’s poems in his pocket. The bodies were buried in the sand where they were found, near Viareggio, to satisfy Italian quarantine regulations. A month later, Shelley’s body was dug up again and burned on a pyre on the beach, in the presence of Lord Byron and Shelley’s friends Edward Trelawney and Leigh Hunt, as memorably depicted in the painting by Louis Edouard Fournier. In something of an O’Henry ending (Chekhov and Hemingway would have done it differently), Shelley’s heart refused to burn, and Trelawney fished it from the ashes and gave it to Hunt. Later, and after a rather unseemly struggle, Hunt surrendered it to Mary, “who kept it wrapped in silk in her writing case, until the end of her days.”
Shelley’s ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, the stone inscribed with the lines from Ariel’s song in The Tempest:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Calling Hawthorne
I was going to go deeper into Shelley’s subtle but brazen courtship of his best friend’s wife (“Best and brightest, come away! Fairer far than this fair Day”), but it would take an artist as great as Nathaniel Hawthorne, America’s gift to literature, born on Independence Day, four years into the 19th century.