Literary Rogues (6 page)

His wife may have preferred eternal damnation.

During his first and only year of wedded bliss, Byron engaged in several trysts with other men and women. He also impregnated his own half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron carried a curl of his half-sister's chestnut hair with him, writing on an accompanying piece of paper that she was “
the one I most loved
.” But that gesture wasn't conspicuous enough for Byron, who had identical gold brooches fashioned for himself and his sister using locks of their hair. Byron even invited Augusta on his honeymoon with Anne—she politely declined—and moved in with his sister at one point, all to his wife's horror. After they separated, Anne discovered further evidence of her husband's depravity: a copy of the Marquis de Sade's
Justine
.

Anne was granted a legal separation from Byron just a year into their marriage. She was not going to stand by her man, as Sade's wife had done. In addition to the charges of incest, Anne alleged that her husband had sodomized her—a far more serious crime in the eyes of the law, punishable by death.

Byron's only friend during this difficult time was his trusty vial of Black Drop, an opium compound that calmed his nerves and numbed his emotions. He fled England to avoid the ensuing scandal and possible legal ramifications of his actions. “
I was unfit for England
; England was unfit for me,” he wrote, later telling Lady Blessington, “
Nothing so completely serves
to demoralise a man as the certainty that he has lost the sympathy of his fellow creatures; it breaks the last tie that binds him to humanity.”

Byron contemplated publicly rebuking his wife's allegations, but declared such a crusade hopeless. “Our
laws are bound to think a man innocent
until he is proved to be guilty, but our English society condemns him before trial,” he said. “I was thought a devil, because Lady Byron was allowed to be an angel. There are neither angels nor devils on earth.” Of course, the real reason Byron did not try to refute her charges was that the truth was indisputable.

And so Byron set off for foreign shores with his entourage of animals and trusty pistols. He had places to go, people to do...

“
Our sweetest songs
are those that tell of saddest thought.”

—
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

M
ary Wollstonecraft Shelley
(1797–1851) and
Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792–1822) were among the few contemporaries whom Byron ever considered friends. “
Poets have no friends
,” Lord Byron once said. “We sometimes agree to have a violent friendship for each other, but we do not deceive each other.”

Much like Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley had been characterized by his temperamental behavior as a child. Despite being a withdrawn and quiet bookworm, Shelley was prone to fits of rage when provoked. His classmates loved to torment him by pelting him with mud, pointing at him and chanting his name, and, most unforgivably, knocking his books from his hands. After one bully taunted him, a teenaged Shelley slammed a fork through the tormentor's hand. Such occasional violent outbursts earned him the nickname “Mad Shelley.”

Shelley's father, a wealthy landowner, sent his son to University College, Oxford. While there, Shelley wrote and published two gothic novels and a book of poetry without much success before cowriting and distributing a pamphlet titled “The Necessity of Atheism.” The self-published manifesto did not go over well with university officials, who promptly expelled Shelley after he refused to admit his authorship. After some arm twisting by Shelley's father, the administration agreed to let the young author back on campus under one condition: that he recant his atheist views. Shelley refused to compromise, an act of defiance that led to a falling-out between father and son.

Following his abbreviated university career, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen-year-old friend of his younger sister. Harriet came from a poor family, which outraged Shelley's father. The division between father and son widened, and Shelley was cut off from his allowance as a result. The newlyweds were poor, but Shelley wrote in a letter that they would “
live on love
.” In truth, he lived on borrowed funds from moneylenders, who either were unaware his father had cut ties with him or were confident the inheritance he received after his father passed away would cover the loans.

Shelley continued writing and self-publishing pamphlets, often distributing them in unorthodox manners, such as sailing them inside bottles or as paper boats over water and releasing them into the skies inside balloons. Around this time, Shelley began using laudanum to control panic attacks. Strung out on opium, with no money to speak of, Shelley was a frightful caricature of the proverbial starving artist. His wife, raising their firstborn child and pregnant with another, moved back in with her parents.

Shelley missed his wife so much that he fell in love with another woman. The new object of his heart's desire was Mary Godwin, the sixteen-year-old daughter of novelist William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (who had died just days after giving birth to her daughter). The Godwin household was an ideal situation for a literary young mind: as a child, Mary Godwin had hid behind the family sofa and listened to Samuel Coleridge recite his opium-inspired poetry to her parents. Prophetically, Mary's mother had once written, “
Many innocent girls become the dupes
of a sincere, affectionate heart, and are ruined before they know the difference between virtue and vice.” Little did she know that her words would one day apply to her own daughter, who fell head over heels for Shelley.

Godwin forbid his daughter from seeing Shelley; Harriet tried to assert herself, warning Mary to stay away from her husband. Even so, there would be no keeping them apart. Shelley showed up on Mary's doorstep with laudanum and a pistol on July 28, 1814. In good times, he looked “
wild and unearthly
, like a demon risen that moment out of the ground.” That night, he may have very well appeared to be the Devil himself. Against the backdrop of a raging thunderstorm, Shelley threatened to take his own life if they couldn't be together. Mary relented and ran off with her suicidal lover. Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, joined them on the run.

The trio sailed from England to mainland Europe. Shelley swam naked in streams while the stepsisters gazed on admiringly. Life was grand. Although Claire at first seemed like a third wheel, they were fortunate to bring her along: when they crossed France on foot, Mary's stepsister was the only one who could speak French. They were having such a great time, in fact, that Shelley wrote a letter to his wife, asking her to join them. Harriet, still pregnant, declined.

The trio ended their trek in Switzerland. They had no money; they were homesick. After six weeks they returned home. Shelley immediately got to work setting up a second family with Mary. In 1815, she gave birth to a girl, who died within a few weeks. They had another child the following winter. He made no attempt to reconcile with his wife. “
To promise forever to love
the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed,” Shelley once wrote. His estranged wife continued to raise their children, but had no recourse in the British legal system to extricate herself from the marriage.

In May 1816, Shelley and Mary (“Mrs. Shelley” on hotel ledgers) traveled to Switzerland with their infant son to meet Lord Byron, who was in self-imposed exile from England. The Shelleys rented a house near Byron's on Lake Geneva for the summer. Once again, Claire tagged along. Her arrival was unwelcome news for Byron: months earlier, a chance encounter between Claire and Byron had resulted in her becoming pregnant. He likely never expected or wished to see her again. “I
never loved her nor pretended to
love her,” Byron wrote. “But a man is a man—and if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night ...”
Well, what could he do?
Their reunion at Lake Geneva was mostly free of drama, although the shit hit the fan after Claire gave birth later in the year. Against Claire's wishes, Byron placed their daughter, Allegra, in foster care, where she died of a fever five years later. Claire never forgave Byron. She would later say that Byron had given her ten minutes of pleasure for a lifetime of pain.

But let's return to happier times. On June 16, 1816, Shelley, Mary, Claire, Byron, and Byron's doctor, John Polidori, capped off an evening by the lakeside by sitting around a campfire, telling ghost stories. Byron kicked things off by reciting Coleridge's supernatural poem
Christabel
. Shelley, frightened out of his mind, thought he saw a pair of eyes opening in Mary's breasts. He screamed in terror and fled. After Shelley returned and thoroughly inspected Mary's bosom, Byron suggested that each of them write their own story of the supernatural.

Later that night, Mary was awakened by a dream. “
I saw the hideous phantasm
of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion,” she wrote. With her husband's careful editorial eye and encouragement, Mary fleshed her dream out into a full novel. She was only nineteen, but she had writing in her blood. The resulting novel,
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,
was widely seen as an allegory for the Enlightenment. “I was required to exchange
chimeras of boundless grandeur
for realities of little worth,” Victor Frankenstein laments in its pages.

Reality soon interrupted Shelley and Mary's placid lake holiday. Byron hadn't been able to relax in Switzerland: he was still under the public's watchful eye—literally, as curiosity seekers with telescopes, eager for a glimpse of the scandalous poet in action, watched his every move. He bid Shelley (and his unborn child) adieu and left for Italy. Then Mary learned that her twenty-two-year-old half-sister, Fanny Godwin, had checked herself into a hotel room and fatally overdosed on laudanum.

In December, there was further bad news: Shelley's estranged wife Harriet, pregnant from an affair of her own that had gone sour, had thrown herself into the freezing waters of the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London. Authorities fished her body out of the water on December 10; twenty days later, Shelley and Mary tied the knot. Their haste was warranted, for legal purposes. Shelley wanted custody of his children and hoped that having a legitimate household with a husband and wife would help him sway the court's opinion.

Unfortunately, the court ultimately awarded custody of the children to foster parents on grounds of Shelley's unrepentant atheism. Shelley had done himself no favors by waving his atheist flag proudly at a time when England was predominately Christian. He was fond of signing his name in hotel ledgers with the addendum “
democrat, great lover of mankind
, and atheist.” The Shelleys had two children of their own over the next five years.

In 1818, the Shelleys moved from England to Italy, where Shelley planned to start a radical journal called
The Liberal
with Byron and one of his chief supporters, Leigh Hunt. The trio envisioned a controversial, groundbreaking collaboration.

Shelley's health, however, took a severe downturn in 1820. Although he had always been prone to hypochondria and disturbed moods, his mind showed signs of rapid deterioration. Shelley believed he encountered his doppelganger one evening on his house's terrace. “How long do you mean to be content?” his ghostly twin asked him. A visitor described Shelley as “tall, emaciated, stooping, with grey streaks in his hair.” The Shelleys were reeling from the deaths of their son, Will, in 1818 and their daughter, Clara, in 1819.

Shelley's hallucinations continued for the next several years. He was troubled by visions of a naked child rising out of the sea, clapping its hands. Things took a violent turn when Shelley awoke in the middle of the night to find his hands clenched around Mary's neck, strangling the life from her. (It's not clear whether this was his imagination or if he actually tried to kill his wife in his sleep.) All of this, the superstitious Shelley believed, foretold his death in some way.

On July 8, 1822, less than a month before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley drowned at sea.

While some speculate that he committed suicide or was attacked by pirates, the historical record tells a less fanciful tale: Shelley had been sailing with two shipmates from Livorno to Lerici in his schooner,
Don Juan
(a nod to Byron), when a storm overtook them and sank the boat. All three men onboard drowned.

Shelley's body was cremated in a funeral pyre on a beach. (His friends weren't being dramatic—this was a quarantine regulation made necessary by the plague.) Mary Shelley did not attend, as it was the custom that women not attend funerals at the time. Byron very nearly saved his friend's skull, though it fell to pieces before he could snag it from the flames. According to one legend almost too gruesome to be believed, Shelley's friend Edward Trelawny is said to have snatched Shelley's heart from the funeral pyre before it was set ablaze. An envelope allegedly containing the ashes of Shelley's heart was discovered among his daughter-in-law's possessions and is now buried at the family vault.