|
Shelley with Byron in
Venice
Shelley and fellow poet Lord Byron, while lacking good
judgement and sense in many things, certainly knew how
to get it right when it came to travel. While the
older Wordsworth and Coleridge contented themselves
with tramping the mist-laden Lake District (the
former) or a pipe-full of opium among the rolling
hills of Somerset (the latter), the younger romantics
knew better. Keats, for practical reasons, may have
gone to Rome in a fruitless search for good health,
and his two contemporaries also chose Italy as their
destination, but not as a life or death matter. The
mellow brick, the sunlight on old buildings, the
romance of an ancient language and a classical past,
all this and more drew them south, as did, on a less
elevated plane, the beauty of the women (and men, in
the case of Byron) - not to mention the fact that
England had got just a bit too hot for the latter
thanks to all that hanky-panky with his half-sister
Augusta Leigh.
Percy Bysshe Shelley needed more than the humdrum
horizons of Horsham to fire his imagination. Thrown
out of Oxford, out of tune with his family back at
Field Place in Warnham, his peripatetic wanderings
through England, Ireland and Wales at an end - as was
to be his first marriage to Harriet Westbrook - he
turned to mainland Europe, and set off on a journey
with second wife Mary (whose fame as the author of
Frankenstein is now equal to his), which was to end
with his death by drowning near Leghorn at the age of
29. The story of his sailing accident, the burning of
his body on the beach at Spezia, and the snatching of
his heart from the ashes, is a tale oft told. What may
be less well-known is the time he spent earlier in
Italy, and in particular Venice.
I recently visited the polluted, sinking, overcrowded
network of crumbling buildings and murky canals that
constitutes La Serenissima, a city whose essential
magic, against all the odds, still triumphs over all
that the malign forces of nature and modern man can
throw at it, in search of the Venice that Shelley
would have known. A vain quest, one might have
thought, in the face of the package tour crocodiles
that clog up the narrow alleys, and the chains of
flashy gondolas, prow to stern, that thread their way
through the canals, their innocent cargoes obliged to
applaud each musical sally by accordionist or tenor,
hired for the occasion at vast expense.
But when the evening cools, and the St Mark's Square
crowds, their day in Venice done, retreat back to
their mainland bolt holes, peace returns to the city.
This is the best time to explore, and to get a feel
for Venice as it still is - a living city, and not
just a Renaissance theme park. This is also the time
to seek out the Venice that Shelley would have known,
the quiet squares and alley ways where he would have
walked and talked – particularly with his companion
Lord Byron - and where yet one more drama, in that
series of dramas that was to constitute his life, was
to take place. This is a snapshot of that time.
Percy Bysshe Shelley set off for the Continent in May
1816, and he met up with Lord Byron for the first time
in Geneva, with an introduction effected by Claire
Clairmont, who was by then Byron's mistress, and who
also happened to be half-sister to Mary Shelley. The
two young poets immediately hit it off, but later that
year Shelley returned to England. Two years later he
embarked again, and this time travelled as far as
Italy, where he met up again with Byron in Venice. The
latter (as ever) was living in some style in a palazzo
overlooking the Grand Canal, just where the bend in
the Canal is at its sharpest. This was one of four
palazzos in a row owned by the Mocenigo family, who in
their time had produced no less than seven Doges, and
who had been at the heart of Venetian history from the
very beginning. So there was Byron, in the Palazzo
Mocenigo-Nero for a couple of years, at a rent of £200
per year, surrounded by his menagerie of dog, fox,
wolf and monkey, not to mention an array of local
mistresses, the most tempestuous of which was
Margarita Cogni, a baker's wife. Having been rejected
by Byron, she first brandished a knife at him while he
sat calmly at table, and then - getting nowhere that
way - upped the drama stakes by throwing herself from
the balcony into the Grand Canal. That really was a
serious gesture, given the quality of the water in
those days - and it's not too good now, for that
matter.
Shelley arrived in Venice in a black gondola on a
mid-August Saturday, and in the company of Claire
Clairmont. Rain was driving across the lagoon, but by
mid-night they had found accommodation and shelter at
an inn. Later the next day he called on Byron at the
Palazzo Mocenigo, arriving in the Venetian way at the
front door, by gondola of course, and timing his visit
for 3pm, in the hope that by then Byron would be up
and about, with Saturday night's lady friends long
gone. Part of the reason for the visit was to try and
reach an accommodation between Byron and Claire in
respect of Allegra, their love child, over whom the
former was being unreasonable. Also, of course, both
men wanted to renew their friendship, and to talk all
that heady talk that so engaged them, of religion,
philosophy, politics, art, beauty – and no doubt love
and sex as well. And so they did, all that afternoon
and evening, in the parlour of the Palazzo, in a
gondola while crossing across to the Lido, and on
horseback 'along the sands of the sea'. The talk went
on until 5am the next morning, during the course of
which Byron offered, on a practical note, to donate
his rented villa at Este in the nearby Euganean Hills
for the use of Shelley and his party for the rest of
the summer.
Mary Shelley and their little daughter Clara joined
the other two at Este, but the latter was showing
signs of a fever brought on by dysentery, and her
mother became increasingly anxious. Such family
matters did not engage her father overmuch, and he
absorbed himself in early drafts of Prometheus Unbound
in a summer house in the grounds of the villa. He also
continued to visit Lord Byron, and all the while Clara
worsened. She began to need treatment badly, but
Shelley insisted on taking her with him on a
pre-arranged trip to Venice, instead of seeking
closer-to-home help. When the family reached Fusina,
where gondolas took passengers across the lagoon to
Venice, Shelley found that he had forgotten the
required travel permit, and with Mary by his side
becoming ever more frantic and Clara rapidly going
downhill, the party blustered its way through the line
of customs officers and managed to get across the
lagoon. But help was not at hand; Byron's doctor could
not be found – no forewarning had been given - and
when at last the servants at their inn got hold of a
local physician, all he could tell them was that there
was no hope for the little girl. She died an hour
after their arrival.
The relationship between Mary and her husband never
fully recovered from the death of Clara, which might
have been avoided had Shelley been more conscientious.
They stayed on at Este for a while, and Byron
attempted to distract them with trips to other
palazzos, museums and the local sights. Shelley
continued to ride out with his companion along the
sands of the Lido, but in his summer house he wrote
the sorrowful Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills.
In due course they moved on, and early November saw
the party travelling further south to Naples. It would
be three years before they were to meet up with Lord
Byron again, and by then time was running out for both
poets. In 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley was to drown in a
boating accident off the shores of Tuscany, just short
of his thirtieth birthday, and less than two years
later Lord Byron was dead as well, this time of a
fever while bound up in the cause of Greek liberation.
So Shelley's association with Venice was double-edged.
It brought him the challenge and stimulation of a
friendship with another great poet, with whom he had
much in common – but from whom he was also very
different. It also, of course, brought him great
sadness, and possibly an uneasy conscience. But his
brief time there also saw the emergence of a more
mature poetic style, and the first of his really great
works: Julian and Maddalo. The setting is Venice, and
for Julian read Shelley, and for Maddalo, Byron. For
those to whom romantic verse conjures up overblown
effusion, this poem will come as a welcome surprise,
and while it is a philosophical work, sourced from the
many Venetian conversations between the two men, its
style clear, elegant and controlled.
If to-day you take the water bus up the Grand Canal
from St Mark's Square to the Rialto Bridge, watch out
on your right as you turn sharply into the home
straight, with the bridge ahead of you. At this point
you will get a clear view of the Palazzo Mocenigo,
where there is a plaque on the wall, with Byron's name
on it. This is where his mistress threw herself into
the canal, and where Shelley drew up by gondola, to
talk the nights away. It is the only view you will get
of the Palazzo Mocenigo; I tried for hours to get to
it through the warren of lanes at the back, until a
helpful postman put me straight. As ever with Venice,
by water is the way to get about, and the frontage
views of the palazzos really are stunning, of course.
All you get from the back are old walls, narrow lanes
and locked doors.
But front or back, Venice, despite everything, is a
unique and wonderful place. How many visitors over the
years must have thought, along with Julian: 'if I had
been an unconnected man/ I, from this moment, should
have formed some plan/ Never to leave sweet Venice'. |
