The Monsters (42 page)

I did not answer, but left the room, and sent the servant with the children to them. The next day I prevailed on them to return
with me to Pisa. The misery of that night and the journey of the next day, and of many days and nights that followed, I can
neither describe nor forget.

Grief left Mary virtually paralyzed, and Trelawny took charge of the funeral arrangements. The bodies were to be exhumed from
their rough graves and cremated. Trelawny had a portable iron crematorium built, and brought frankincense, salt, wine, and
oil to sprinkle on the bodies. On the fifteenth of August, he, Byron, and Hunt stood by as Edward Williams’s corpse was disinterred.
Byron was shocked by its appearance: “Are we to resemble that?” he exclaimed. “Why it might be the carcase of a sheep for
all I can see.”

The next day they dug up Shelley. His corpse was also badly decomposed, “a dark and ghastly indigo,” but Trelawny consoled
himself that the scenery, “lonely and grand,” was so much like Shelley’s poetry, “that I could imagine his spirit soaring
over us.” Byron asked Trelawny to save the skull for him, but Trelawny remembered the story that Byron had used a skull as
a drinking cup, and put the entire body to the torch. The materials they sprinkled on the corpse made the flames glow with
incandescence. Even so, Byron was so distressed by the smell that he stripped off his clothes and threw himself into the sea—the
only place where his limp did not hinder him. He headed for his boat the
Bolivar,
anchored a mile and a half offshore. Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage, while Trelawny watched the fire for four hours.
In the open air, wine had to be added to the fire to coax it —“more wine,” said Trelawny, “than he [Shelley] had consumed
during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver . . . the brains literally seethed,
bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.” After cooling the iron container in the sea, they gathered the
ashes and found that the heart had remained intact. Byron had returned, and the three men set off to eat and drink. Hunt remembered,
“We sang, we laughed, we shouted. I even felt a gaiety the more shocking, because it was real and a relief.”

Byron described the scene to a friend: “We have been burning the bodies of Shelley and Williams on the sea-shore, to render
them fit for removal and regular interment. You can have no idea what an extraordinary effect such a funeral pile has, on
a desolate shore, with mountains in the background and the sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frankincense
gave to the flame. All of Shelley was consumed, except his
heart,
which would not take the flame, and is now preserved in spirits of wine.”

Leigh Hunt took possession of the heart, and refused Mary’s request that he turn it over to her; Jane Williams finally convinced
Hunt to give it up. Mary would keep the badly charred object in a portable writing desk. The rest of Shelley’s ashes, kept
in a walnut case covered with black velvet, went on Byron’s boat to Livorno and then to the home of the English consul in
Rome. He was also a wine merchant so the ashes were stored in a wine cellar, awaiting a final decision on their disposition.

Just as her father could not bear to attend her mother’s funeral, Mary herself stayed at home during the cremation. She spent
the time writing a long letter to Maria Gisborne, telling everything that had happened since the beginning of the summer.
To Mary, the act of writing was the beginning of expiation. She felt guilty because her relationship with Shelley was in tatters
when he died. On the very day he left, they had quarreled, for she had felt his departure, at a time when she was still recovering
from her miscarriage, was a desertion. She recalled that on that day, “I called him back two or three times, & told him that
if I did not see him soon I would go to Pisa with the child.”

In August, Byron wrote to Thomas Moore of Shelley: “There is thus another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly,
and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice
now,
when he can be no better for it.” He was overly optimistic.

The first public announcement of Shelley’s death came from Leigh Hunt in the
Examiner
for August 4, 1822. He praised the poet: “Those who know a great mind when they meet it, and who have been delighted with
the noble things in the works of MR. SHELLEY, will be shocked to hear that he has been cut off in the prime of his life and
genius.” Other publications noted Shelley’s “fearless and independent spirit,” his “estimable” character, and “highly cultivated
genius.”

Less flattering opinions appeared as well. The publication
John Bull
noted: “Mr. Byshe [
sic
] Shelley, the author of that abominable and blasphemous book called
Queen Mab,
was lately drowned in a storm.”
The Gentleman’s Magazine
wrote in an obituary, “Mr. Shelley is unfortunately too well known for his infamous novels and poems. He openly professed
himself an atheist.” Charles Lamb wrote to a friend that summer from France, “Shelley the great Atheist has gone down by water
to eternal fire!” The response of Shelley’s own father was cold and emotionless. “To lose an eldest son in his life time and
the unfortunate manner of his losing that life,” wrote Sir Timothy, “is truly melancholy to think of, but as it has pleas’d
that great Author of our Being so to dispose of him I must make up my mind with resignation.”

Reliable old Godwin put his own feelings above the need to comfort Mary. When news of Percy’s death came via a letter from
Hunt, he wrote his daughter,

That you should be so overcome as not to be able to write is, perhaps, but too natural, but that Jane [Claire] could not write
one line I could never have believed. . . . Leigh Hunt says you bear up under the shock better than could have been imagined;
but appearances are not to be relied on. It would have been a great relief to me to have had a few lines from yourself. In
a case like this, one lets one’s imagination loose among the possibilities of things, and one is apt to rest upon what is
most distressing and intolerable. I learned the news on Sunday. I was in hope to have my doubts and fears removed by a letter
from yourself on Monday. I again entertained the same hope to-day, and am again disappointed. I shall hang in hope and fear
on every post, knowing that you cannot neglect me for ever.

He recalled that he had not been speaking or writing to her; that had been for her own good, Mary’s father explained. Now
that she has experienced tragedy, they are again on the same, miserable level:

All that I expressed to you about silence and not writing to you again is now put an end to in the most melancholy way. I
looked on you as one of the daughters of prosperity, elevated in rank and fortune, and I thought it was criminal to intrude
on you for ever the sorrows of an unfortunate old man and a beggar. You are now fallen to my own level; you are surrounded
with adversity and with difficulty; and I shall no longer hold it sacrilege to trouble you with my adversities. We shall now
truly sympathise with each other; and whatever misfortune or ruin falls upon me, I shall not now scruple to lay it fully before
you.

He invited her to come and live with him and his wife and, of course, asked what financial provision Shelley had made for
her.

Lord Byron told a friend after Shelley’s death:

He was the most gentle, most amiable, and
least
worldly-minded person I ever met; full of delicacy, disinterested beyond all other men, and possessing a degree of genius,
joined to a simplicity, as rare as it is admirable. He had formed to himself a
beau ideal
of all that is fine, high-minded, and noble, and he acted up to this ideal even to the very letter. He had a most brilliant
imagination, but a total want of worldly-wisdom. I have seen nothing like him, and never shall again, I am certain.

At the end of August, Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne describing the five weeks since she learned of Shelley’s death:

And so here I am! I continue to exist—to see one day succeed the other; to dread night; but more to dread morning & hail another
cheerless day. . . . At times I feel an energy within me to combat with my destiny—but again I sink—I have but one hope for
which I live—to render myself worthy to join him. . . . I can conceive but of one circumstance that could afford me the semblance
of content—that is . . . in collecting His manuscripts—writing his life, and thus to go easily to my grave.

Mary would, in time, become the custodian of Shelley’s memory and indeed place his reputation as a poet on a far higher level
than he ever achieved during his lifetime. It would be Mary who ultimately made Percy a great man. In doing so, she carried
out the words he wrote in “Ode to the West Wind”:

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Now fierce remorse and unreplying death

Waken a chord within my heart, whose breath,

Thrilling and keen, in accents audible,

A tale of unrequited love doth tell.

—“The Choice,” Mary Shelley, 1823

A
T PERCY’S DEATH
,
Mary was just twenty-four years old. Her identity had always been defined by those around her. First, she had been the daughter
of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin; then she became the companion and wife of Shelley. Now she would be known as the
widow of Shelley. Like her creature, she had no name of her own.

Despite the difficulties of their marriage, Mary had loved Percy, and she depended on him in many ways. They had always been
intellectual partners, and he had been her mentor from before the time she wrote
Frankenstein
. Literally her entire adult existence had been spent with him, and as bizarre as Percy’s behavior had sometimes been, it
was what Mary had come to experience as everyday life.

Unfortunately, Shelley had died at a low point in their relationship, and Mary would never be able to repair the rift, to
say what needed to be said, to resurrect the warmth and intimacy they had formerly shared. As the initial shock of his passing
wore off, however, Mary sought a way to resolve the conflicts between them. Words had been her refuge and now would be her
tools. Just as her mother had once created ideal versions of her own life, Mary would use her writing skills to repair her
marriage. She would go farther than that: she would create an ideal version of Shelley himself.

M
ary and Jane Williams, companions in grief, left the house at Lerici and moved back to Pisa, where Mary wrote lengthy and
feverish letters that were novelistic in their description of Shelley’s death and the events leading up to it. Mary now saw
clearly the foreshadowings of disaster, visions showing the interrelationship of writing and reality.

In September 1822, Jane Williams went to London and Mary rented a large house in Genoa, where she was soon joined by the Hunts
and their six children. Claire, after a brief love affair with Trelawny, headed off to Vienna to live with her brother Charles.
Byron felt a certain obligation toward Mary, and paid her to make legible copies of his poems. He was writing more cantos
of
Don Juan,
having received “permission” from his lover Teresa Guiccioli, who had felt that the earlier parts of the poem were too indelicate.
Mary also wrote for the new journal,
The Liberal,
that Hunt edited with Byron’s financial support. For the first issue she transcribed Shelley’s poetical translation of Goethe’s
Faust;
for the second she contributed a story of her own, “A Tale of the Passions, or the Death of Despina.”

Meanwhile, Mary began what was to be a years-long task: editing Shelley’s poems for publication. She wrote to people who might
have copies, among them Percy’s publisher Charles Ollier, Thomas Love Peacock, the Gisbornes, Hogg, and Godwin. Some of the
work reopened wounds that had hardly begun to heal. At one point she asked Peacock for a desk from the Shelleys’ former house
at Marlow, in which she had kept letters. When it arrived in Italy, she found that reading the letters brought poignant memories
of the ghosts of the past: “What a scene to recur to!” Mary reflected. “My William, Clara, Allegra are all talked of—They
lived then—They breathed this air & their voices struck on my sense, their feet trod the earth beside me —& their hands were
warm with blood & life when clasped in mine. Where are they all? This is too great an agony to be written about.”

Nevertheless, working on Shelley’s poems proved to be a tonic for Mary, and for the first time in the three months since his
death, she began writing in her journal. The new journal, which Mary called her “Journal of Sorrow,” began October 2, 1822.
Her entries and letters made it clear that one of the few things that she lived for now was her three-year-old son, Percy
Florence. “But [except] for my Child,” she wrote, “it could not End too soon.”

Mary felt the need to defend herself from the story being spread (unknown to Mary) by Jane Williams, that Percy had turned
to Jane for companionship because Mary was so cold to him. (That had been why Hunt initially had refused to give Mary the
heart of Percy after cremation.) Mary now used her journal to re-create a relationship with Percy—one that was “romantic beyond
romance.”

Hearing of these rumors, but not their source, she often tried to face her feelings honestly. “Oh my beloved Shelley,” she
wrote,

it is not true that this heart was cold to thee. Tell me, for now you know all things—did I not in the deepest solitude of
thought repeat to myself my good fortune in possessing you? How often during those happy days, happy though chequered, I thought
how superiorly gifted I had been in being united to one to whom I could unveil myself, & who could understand me. Well then,
I am now reduced to these white pages which I am to blot with dark imagery.