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 Shelleyâs attitude to marriage and divorce; his principle that love was âfreeâ; 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 seducerââinflammableââgoing off like gunpowder whenever a pretty woman came into his orbit. That was hardly the case. Shelley was a much rarer and more interesting speciesâthe man who acted on principle, who acted out of sympathy and truth of feeling, who deliberately defied conventionâand, 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 Shelleyâs 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 allâwhen I wrote about Shelleyâs women friends and loversâI seemed to see faces, hear voices that I already knew. I do not say I knew them in the same way as Shelleyâthat would be absurdâbut 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 Shelleyâs own phraseâso often used mockinglyââa pure anticipated cognitionâ. It was, as he wrote of the Maniac in Julian and Maddalo, a story which, âtold 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.â
The role of Claire within this life was crucial. What had happened in Shelleyâs first marriage to Harriet Westbrook was sufficiently well known and understood. The causes of their unhappinessâtheir differences of background, their intellectual incompatibility, their extreme youthâwere clear and indeed almost commonplace, though no less sad for that. But the second marriage to Mary Godwinâbeginning with the elopement to France and Switzerland, together with Claireâwas 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 stressâoften a creative stressâvarious 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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