Lost romantic
PATRICK ANDERSON
The Journals of Claire Clairmont 1814- 1827 edited by Marion Kingston Stocking (Harvard/our 95s) In the summer of 1814 two young girls ran away from their home in London at the instigation of a poet who had fallen vio- lently in love with one of them and had been threatening suicide by laudanum or pistols for several weeks. Although married, the poet was disappointed in his wife: 'Every one who knows me must know that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a noble animal, but she can do neither.'
Thus it was that seventeen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her slightly younger step-sister Clara Mary Jane Clair- mont joined Shelley in a mad rush for Cal- ais and a six weeks' ramble across France to Switzerland and back. 'How dreadful', Shelley journalised, 'did this time appear; it seemed that we trifled with life and hope; a few minutes passed, she was in my arms —we were safe; we were on the road to Dover'. The Shelley household was in fact now established; `Claire' Clairmont was to remain part of it until the tragedy of 1822, although Mary Shelley often longed for the absence of this tactless, self-centred, musi- cally gifted young woman whose intimacy with her husband was at least questionable; amongst the emotional agitations, the flights from bailiffs, the frequent changes of address in England and Italy, the dying babies, the pursuit of poetry and philosophy was to prove unflagging.
Claire Clairmont's six journals are now published by a meticulous American scholar who has been at pains to decipher every crossed-out word ('enclosed in wide-angle brackets') and to repair every careless omis- sion (`square brackets enclose a reconstruc- tion of missing letters'). Since Claire made her daily jottings hurriedly and knew herself to be a poor speller, the reader has to negotiate an editorial scrubland whose com- plete honesty is ensured by entangling briars and quagmire hesitations, in addition to the heavy going occasioned by the dashes of a style so staccato as to suggest a shopping- list.
In view of the Shelleys' own journals and letters is it really worth the effort? One dis- appointment is that poor Claire seldom seems to have taken up her journal during what to us are the most exciting periods of her life, between 1814 and 1827. Her pur- suit of Byron in the weeks before his exile is not recorded, nor does she leave an account of the wonderful days on the shores of Lake Leman when the Words- worthian episodes in ChiIde Harold were being experienced and set down, Franken- stein was begun, and there was much Rous- seau-esque brooding on the part of both poets as they explored the countryside about Meillerie, Chillon, Clarens and Ve- vey. We learn admittedly of her happiness back in England with her baby daughter,
Allegra, but nothing of her last visit to the child at Este in 1818, after it had been con- signed to the care of Byron and the Hopp- ners. Similarly its death and the drowning of Shelley shortly afterwards were no doubt too painful to be mentioned. Only on Fri- day, 20 September, 1822 do we hear, 'We set out for Bologna. During the first part of the road 1 was too occupied with my own thoughts to attend to the scenery. I remem- bered how hopelessly I had lingered on the Italian soil for five years waiting ever for a favourable change instead of which I was now leaving it, having buried there every- thing that I loved'.
Byron had never pretended to love or even like her --'But a man is a man, and if a girl of eighteen comes prancing at you at all hours, there is but one way', he wrote to Kinnaird; again and again Shelley had tried to persuade her of the foolishness of her hopes; she persisted, however, in regard- ing Allegra's father as 'my dearest friend' and in congratulating herself on having had an affair of romantic perfection: 1 had one; like all things perfect in its kind, it was fleeting; and mine only lasted ten minutes . . . ' But this is in a letter, not in the Journals; there Byron is mentioned only briefly with the exception of some embit- tered 'Hints for Don Juan', a sarcastic sug- gestion as to how he might be caricatured, and an attack upon his poetry: 'His song is woven of the commonest and grossest ele- ments of our Nature . . . his poetry is the poetry of the body . . . '
The reasonably detailed and logical deve- lopment of such opinions comes as a relief after the endless jottings about books read (in itself a remarkable Shelleyan list, 'philo- sophy and poetry' with a vengeance), the lessons taken (from music to swimming),
the people met (but they have no faces), the scenes sketched (but her Alps and classical sunshine are poor things compared to her contemporaries.), the expeditions relent- lessly pursued in the face of despair and death. She left Italy for Vienna and then kussia; turned into a governess; grew a little more explicit as a writer, perhaps a little more imaginative; found, on her return to England, that Trelawney, an old flame, thought her 'horribly prudish . fish-like' and bade her, 'Adieu old Aunt', which was a strange fate for Byron's and perhaps also Shelley's mistress, the untidy girl who had only taken to wearing stays and dressing becomingly after her 'love- :hild' was born. It is years and years later hat she re-appears, dying in Florence at eighty-one, giving Henry James the post- humous gift of The Aspern Papers.
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