Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Holmes Richard

Author:Holmes, Richard [Holmes, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Travel, History, Writing
ISBN: 9780007388547
Amazon: 0007388543
Goodreads: 22543409
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 1985-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

He did not make me uneasy. Anyone who had grown up in the Sixties could understand Shelley’s attitude to marriage and divorce; his principle that love was “free”; his ideal of the equal partnership and mocking attitude to conventional monogamy; his belief in the liberating force of love. How else could one make any sense of poems like Epipsychidion, written at Pisa in 1821? Besides, Arnold seems to have thought that Shelley was some Byronic seducer—“inflammable”—going off like gunpowder whenever a pretty woman came into his orbit. That was hardly the case. Shelley was a much rarer and more interesting species—the man who acted on principle, who acted out of sympathy and truth of feeling, who deliberately defied convention—and, to his utter dismay, caused chaos as a result. And it was this that made me uneasy, and fascinated me.

Many of my friends, married, living together or living in various forms of communities and groups seemed to be going through the experiences and crises that Shelley’s various households went through. This was enormously important to me. When I wrote about Shelley I seemed to be writing about my own friends, practically at first-hand. Most unsettling of all—when I wrote about Shelley’s women friends and lovers—I seemed to see faces, hear voices that I already knew. I do not say I knew them in the same way as Shelley—that would be absurd—but I had met people very like them, and seen them in situations very similar, and knew that they existed.

Moreover, I slowly realised that part of the fascination of the Shelley story was that it would be the same for every reader of my generation. For us, and maybe for others, the story was a, continuing one. It was, in Shelley’s own phrase—so often used mockingly—“a pure anticipated cognition”. It was, as he wrote of the Maniac in Julian and Maddalo, a story which, “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.”

The role of Claire within this life was crucial. What had happened in Shelley’s first marriage to Harriet Westbrook was sufficiently well known and understood. The causes of their unhappiness—their differences of background, their intellectual incompatibility, their extreme youth—were clear and indeed almost commonplace, though no less sad for that. But the second marriage to Mary Godwin—beginning with the elopement to France and Switzerland, together with Claire—was something altogether different. It was a deep relationship, and not a simple one. It could be interpreted in one of two ways. Either it was a conventional marriage that survived, under great stress—often a creative stress—various outside entanglements and internal explosions, and brought Shelley and Mary side by side as far as the Casa Magni. Or else it was from the start a radically unconventional marriage, a dynamic and unstable relationship which required a second woman (and possibly a second man) to keep it in working equilibrium. On this interpretation the second woman was Claire Clairmont.

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