Edward Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 2000), first published 1858.
One didn't pick up a copy of Edward Trelawny's memoirs of his time spent with Shelley and Byron because one thought it would have something to tell us about our present coronavirus-dominated existence. And yet that is what one finds there—perhaps because it is what one would find anywhere, with covid on the brain.
All I can say is that mandatory quarantines play a surprisingly large role in Trelawny's iconic account of Shelley's demise—and, in the author's telling, may even have caused or hastened the poet's untimely death.
The Italian states at the time, it would appear, imposed such harsh quarantine penalties on ships at sea that many were afraid to risk even the slightest contact with a foreign vessel, for fear of being confined on shore for the next several weeks, missing the chance for income and pay in the interval. As a result, many refused to respond to signs of distress from other ships, preferring to sail by while pretending never to have seen a thing. Shelley might have been saved from drowning if this had not been the case.
But then again, maybe not. Trelawny establishes our beloved poet as no particularly fierce fighter for the preservation of his own existence. Earlier on in the book, Trelawny recalls a swimming incident in which Shelley simply sank to the bottom of the pond without making the least effort to save himself, and had to be fished out and recovered by the author himself.
Shelley also makes repeated references to the blessings of non-existence, throughout the memoir, and assures Trelawny that, if he were ever to find himself in a disaster at sea, he would immediately allow himself to perish, so that no more valuable person would sacrifice themselves in the effort of saving him.
A fascinating personal detail and an astonishing instance of life foreshadowing its future course. If, that is, it actually happened. Did it? Trelawny is of course notoriously unreliable. The very fact that his Shelley and Byron have become in part fictional characters in his recollections, however, allows them to obey the most effective conventions of storytelling.
The eventual fate of Trelawny's Shelley and Byron haunts their steps and utterances earlier in the story like a hell-hound. Shelley remarks to the author early in the memoir that he writes and must write even if there will never be an audience for his work—simply because it is how he skims the froth off the rim of his "boiling" brain.
Later on—in one of the most indelible and iconic moments of Trelawny's account (leaving an image that would recur in the powerful poem "The Fishes and the Poet's Hands" by the historical novelist Frank Yerby) —the cremation of the poet on the shores of Italy—that same magnificent teeming brain will literally boil from the heat of the flames.
Byron likewise, in his role as the insouciant aristocrat of Trelawny's concoction, remarks with indifference at one point in the book that he does not expect to live long. The Byrons, he tells the author, are a short-lived race. And, of course, we was dead at thirty-six.
Did it all actually happen that way? Maybe not. Does it matter? Trelawny's Shelley and Byron are almost as famous to us now as the actual two poets, and to learn the details of what Trelawny has to say about them is at least as good an exercise in plugging gaps in one's cultural literacy as to retrieve the details of their fully verified biographies.
For this reason, to be getting around to Trelawny only at this comparatively late stage of one's literary education is to feel that one failed in one's obligations as a teenage hero-worshipper of the two Romantic titans. As an adolescent, after all, I quickly and intuitively glommed onto the idea that Shelley and Byron were to be idolized, however aware I was of their enormous personal failings.
At that age, after all, the great theme of my intellectual career was the question of whether one could preserve one's political radicalism into old age, or whether one would inevitably be seduced away from it with time into a blinkered conservatism—a fate I feared with something of the same paranoid mania with which Des Esseintes dreads the possibility of religious conversion.
My contemporary foes at that age were Christopher Hitchens and other would-be leftists who had joined the ranks of the Bush-era Neoconservative world crusade. My historical enemies were Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, for having betrayed the liberal cause they had all embraced in youth by eventually becoming deep-dyed Tories.
The poems from the past that I used to conceptualize my experience in the present, in which I viewed myself as one of the last hold-outs for the good old left-wing movement, as so many of our former leaders were lured away by pieces of silver, were Browning's "The Lost Leader" and Shelley's sonnet on Wordsworth.
And my Romantic heroes, inevitably, were Hazlitt, Shelley, and Byron, none of whom ever forsook liberalism by going over to the side of monarchy and reaction—even if, in the case of the last two at any rate, they did not live long enough to reach the ripe age at which such defections and betrayals usually occur.
I knew then little about the two poets I had decided to deify within my personal pantheon, however, and to go back now and read one of the foundational texts about the myth of both men is a work of reparation. I am doing something that should have been done long before.
I am, however, not at all disappointed or let down by what I find in one of the core works of Shelley and Byron lore. Trelawny's account retains its extraordinary vividness and readability, all these long years since it was published.
I have, by the way, opted for the first edition of Trelawny's classic, the Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley & Byron, rather than the later Records of the same characters. I did so because this version is shorter, it takes precedence by being the earlier of the records, and because it is, by all accounts, the better of the two versions.
I am grateful to Carroll & Graf for putting this first of the two editions back into our hands in paperback format. I flag for future print runs the following copy-edits.
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p. 5 "cotemporaries" Could be period spelling, but other editions online seem to include the "n" in the now-standard spelling of the word.
p. 13 "chace [sic]" Again, could be period spelling, but other versions spell it in the usual manner
p. 15 "Woolstoncraft" This appears to be Trelawny's own idiosyncratic spelling of Mary Shelley's maiden name.
p. 30 "floated until be arrived" (sic -- should be "he")
p. 65 "Mephistophiles" -- not exactly an error, but not the standard spelling these days
p. 98 "Godwin observed to me,—'that [...]" In the text, the inverted comma before "that" is facing the wrong way.
p. 100 "Sidney [sic] Smith" —should be "Sydney." But the error could have been Trelawny's own.
p. 119 "Mary-said" sic—misplaced hyphen.
p. 190 "In the same mouth [sic], on the 17th of June" should be "month"
p. 192 "in search of the Commodore of the station. Hamilton, and stated my case." Period after "station" should be a comma.
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