The Devil and Percy Shelley

Ann Wroe’s daring new biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), perhaps the most inadvertently comic of the Romantics, reminded me just how Faustian a figure the poet cut. As a student at Oxford he tried to raise the devil; when that failed, he settled for raising his own unkempt locks, attaching his body to an early electrical generator and asking his friend, Thomas Hogg, to wind the machine until he could set off gunpowder with nothing but a touch. Some years later, after Shelley and Hogg were both expelled for The Necessity of Atheism–close to the first published instance of avowed godlessness in the history of England–the young poet, again like Goethe’s Faust, took up a scheme to reclaim land from the sea. He even equaled Faust’s (female) death count by causing the suicides of two young women: Harriet Westbrook, his estranged wife, and Fanny Godwin, unrequited lover and half-sister to Mary.

The role of the biographer changes with the age; for the chronicler of Shelley, with his Faustian career, the only proper approach may be Mephistophelean, a kind of comic -counterweight to the poet’s Romantic excess. That’s certainly how Shelley’s friends–those who experienced his wild moods directly, without the nostalgic glow of a bygone age–first approached the task.

Thomas Love Peacock, turning to satirize his friend in the classic roman à clef Nightmare Abbey, added a fine sense of comic timing to Shelley’s natural flair for the dramatic. The poet, renamed Scythrop or Gloomy Face, orders “a pint of port and a pistol,” set promptly for 7:25, but then manages to postpone impending doom by directing the butler to reset his watch. Similarly, Shelley’s old friend Hogg, the poet’s first real biographer, tells a story so comic that it would seem an obvious fiction if the author hadn’t witnessed it firsthand. Halfway through a discussion of metempsychosis, Shelley apparently snatched a child from a local Oxford woman, dangled it over Magdalen bridge, and proceeded to inquire, “Can your baby tell us about pre-existence, Madam?”

Scandalized by Hogg’s lack of poetic piety, the Shelley family forced him to cut his biography short, and the next 120 years saw a series of Shelley apologists do nothing but damage to the poet’s reputation. Matthew Arnold’s review of Edward Dowden’s 1886 biography provides a representative sample: “Professor Dowden holds a brief for Shelley; he pleads for Shelley as an advocate pleads for his client, and this strain of pleading .  .  . is unserviceable to Shelley, nay, injurious to him, because it inevitably begets, in many readers .  .  . impatience and revolt.”

It wasn’t until Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit, originally published in 1974 and recently rereleased, that the poet’s life finally received the deeply skeptical, Mephistophelean treatment it deserves. Holmes, while retaining great respect for Shelley’s poetry, showed how the gentle jokes of Shelley’s friends masked “extremely characteristic pieces of calculating duplicity.” Instead of a brief in Shelley’s defense, Holmes filed an indictment: “Shelley’s Demons were never to prove intractable or rigid: on the contrary they adapted themselves to his interests and assimilated his intellectual developments with an almost sinister ease.” Yet by indicting Shelley, rather than pleading for him, Holmes enlists sympathy for the struggling, self-deceiving artist, and his Shelley ends with a sense of admiration slowly displacing that initial condemnation, much like the end of Faust.

Being Shelley, Wroe’s faithful, flawed new biography, throws out both chronology and judgment in a bold and finally doomed attempt to achieve fresh perspective on the poet. Her introduction aptly sums up the project:

Wroe’s idealizing impulse is, in many ways, admirable. Holmes, despite his marvelous mimicry of Shelley’s headlong lifestyle–“I go on until I am stopped, and I never am stopped”–often gives the sense, with his devotion to daily detritus, the encrustations of chronology, that Shelley barely managed to squeeze in the occasional poem between haggling with loan sharks, running from creditors, and chasing after women.

Wroe’s biography doesn’t deny these blemishes, neither does it plead or condemn, instead floating over Shelley’s sins in a kind of trance. When Wroe recounts the poet’s failed attempt to save Fanny from suicide, her writing reads almost as incantation:

This line of thinking may seem profoundly tasteless–questioning the attempt to save a young woman from suicide–and yet it is decidedly Shelleyan. The poet himself was no less callous when Harriet Westbrook, the estranged mother to his two children, hurled herself into the Serpentine: “Everything tends to prove .  .  . that beyond the mere shock of so hideous a catastrophe having fallen on a human being once so nearly connected to me, there would, in any case, have been little to regret.” Wroe doesn’t neglect to mention the agonized poems Shelley wrote in response: “They die–the dead return not–Misery.” But she abdicates all interpretation, and these expressions of Shelley’s despair read more as mood swings than attempts at critical balance.

No doubt such moody, incantatory writing befits a book intent on Being Shelley, but Wroe’s choice of subtitle–The Poet’s Search for Himself–suggests an effort at self-criticism that her work hardly attempts. This is ironically appropriate since Shelley, despite his declared motto “Know thyself,” rarely understood his own motives.

As Mary wrote long after the poet’s death: “It will be sufficient to say that, in all he did, he at the time of doing it believed himself justified to his own conscience.” Shelley often achieved some self-reflection after the fact, and his best poems derive their strength from these personal doubts. But Wroe’s ridiculous structure–trading chronology for a misguided tour through the elements of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air–only exacerbates the sense that Shelley learned nothing from the tragedies he induced. That, after all, is the inevitable conclusion of a book based on Shelley’s claim that, for the poet, “time and place and number are not.”

Rousseau, Goethe, and Wordsworth, with their pioneering bildungs-biographies, all rejected such a static view of character. Wroe’s maddening conflation of events reminds us why this revolution grew necessary: The Romantic Age, with its hope for personal (as well as political) reform, displaced the assumption of permanent traits with a belief in, if not progress, at least development.

Shelley, despite all his bluster, indeed learned from his mistakes, came to admit that Utopia, while the necessary concept–the light which like a star / Beacons from the abode where the eternal are–must remain a fleeting vision on this earth. Hence, the deep irony in his repeating Faust’s famous words: “Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful!” Dramatically, these words meant Faust’s death, the end of the bargain he had struck, the moment Mephisto could steal his soul. Figuratively, they signify reflection, seizing a moment that soon recedes, and the personal damnation that inevitably follows looking back on an infernal career. Absent a Mephisto to damn him, Shelley took on the role himself with his Triumph of Life, the hellish final poem left fragmentary when he drowned.

Wroe, by refusing to complete Shelley’s own indictment, fails her end of the bargain, and the reader, instead of stepping in like Goethe’s angels to save him, can’t help but damn Shelley in her place.

Charles Petersen is on the editorial staff of the New York Review of Books.