Seeing Shelley Plainer

THE FORTUNE OF ETERNITY -- Percy Bysshe Shelley -- William-Frederick Press ($2.50).

THE SHELLEY LEGEND--Robert Metcalfe Smith & Others--Scribners ($5).

Percy Bysshe Shelley has been beckoning from the abode where the Eternal are. His signals, picked up by a literary Ariel who signs herself: "Shirley Carson Jenney, Clairaudient Psychic," are transcribed in The Fortune of Eternity. The book, she says, ''has been transmitted wholly thro' clairaudient dictation."

Author Jenney gives all credit for her 124-page collaboration to Poet Shelley, who has also supplied the foreword ("Whenever I have tried to compass the thought of mankind as possessing relevance to the eternal spheres, it has become clearly evident to me that the Earthman was choiring his way. . . . The prisms of chance do not allow too great an opportunity for merit or renown; they revoke the essential, and persuade mankind into linear aspects such as the ulterior powers descry for illusive dedications."). More surprising is a second foreword by William Ewart Gladstone, disembodied but still magisterial in the beyond.

The book includes two prose pieces.

One is The Script of Christ, which for some reason seems to have been dictated in the inspirational style of the late Aimee Semple McPherson. In the other, the book's title piece, Shelley proclaims the news that "GOD IS." There is also a sort of undertaker's garland of poems written since Shelley "passed over." Many of them, like From the Death of the Skylark, are unfortunately fragments. Sample:

Where the lofty splendors Linger o'er thy nest, And the passioning grandeurs Know some ritual blest Thy magic hours seek altars, which are to God behest!

Dome of Many Colored Glass. These ghostly skylarkings merely carry to the point of caricature the lovingly-labored transformation of Shelley from flaming infidel to versifying vicar at which Author Smith & Others* tilt grimly in The Shelley Legend. The "Shelley Legend," they say, "is a term used to characterize fallacious views about the life of Shelley and his writings which have grown up principally under the careful supervision first of Mary Shelley [Shelley's second wife], and after her death, in 1851, of Lady Shelley, wife of the poet's son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley." The authors' sensational charge: in building their dome of many-colored glass in which to enshrine Shelley as a plaster saint, Mary and Lady Shelley falsified biographical facts, suppressed and destroyed important letters and parts of journals and made liberal use of forged documents.

Chirographical Gumshoe. To clinch their point, the unromantic authors enlisted Louis A. Waters, a chirographical gumshoe, whose workaday job is special consultant in forgery cases for the New York state police. Says Author Smith: Chirpgrapher Waters "is not a Shelley specialist and has nothing about Shelley to prove other than that some manuscripts are in Shelley's hand and others are not." Expert Waters' findings: libraries and collectors are cherishing more forged Shelley documents than genuine ones; many of the Shelley family's documents are forged.

Well aware that they are launching a biographical buzz bomb, which may have serious repercussions in the autograph market, Author Smith & Others make haste to deny that their book is an attack on Shelley. They simply wish to show that "romantic, Pagan Shelley," whom they refer to as "the pardlike Spirit, beautiful and swift," never degenerated into respectability; that he was "a whirlwind of devastation, upsetting the life of nearly everyone with whom he came into contact and leaving an appalling trail of acrimonious litigation, financial chaos, childbirth and death, double suicide and disaster behind him."

Dactylic Don Juan. To Matthew Arnold's dictum that Shelley was "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain," Author Smith & Others snort an indignant Jig-gerypoo! Shelley, they insist, was a dactylic Don Juan, a Byron of the Bohemian underbrush. "The difficulty with the Shelley worshippers is that they cannot bring themselves to realize or to admit that

Shelley, as the family's persistent attempts to suppress the record show, believed in and practised free love throughout his life. . . ." ". . . the sisters and brothers of his soul . . . formed a procession that ceased only with his death."

When that occurred (by drowning, in the Gulf of Spezia, 1822), Shelley's second wife, Mary (the author of Frankenstein), was left penniless. For the sake of her small son, Percy Florence Shelley, the only one of their four children to survive the Italian climate or their father's theories of human happiness, she decided to go home and rehabilitate the Shelley name.

The most serious charge against Mary was that she had lured Shelley away from his first wife, Harriet Westbrook. Harriet was then carrying a child of Shelley's. After Shelley, Mary and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, had set up housekeeping in London, the Prophet of Perfect

Love begged Harriet to come and live with them. He suggested that she might share him with Mary as generously as Author Smith & Others show that Shelley was sharing Mary with his old Oxford chum, Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Instead, Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine.

One important part of Mary's rehabilitation program was to hush up and tone down this history, while shifting the blame for the episode from Shelley to Harriet. In this ambitious task she found an ambiguous and wholly unexpected ally--a U.S. blackmailer known to the authorities as De Gibler. Among the intelligentsia he was known as "Major" George Gordon Byron. He claimed to be Lord Byron's son by a secret marriage.

Biographical Black Market. This pseudo-Byron turned up in England and tried to introduce himself to Lord Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh. He was shown the door. He had more success in peddling forged Byron letters. Through a London book seller, "Major" Byron's wife sold 47 forged Byron autographs to Publisher John Murray. Soon she was back with a swatch of "lost" Shelley letters. Soon the "Major" was in touch with Mary Shelley. Their biographical black marketing was sometimes disturbed by shrill cries of "Blackguard!" from Mary.

How many forged letters and other documents Mary Shelley bought is not known. But the "Major," a talented craftsman, forged more than 100 Byron, Shelley and Keats letters. Said Editor Richard Monckton Milnes, one of his victims, "A monument of criminal ingenuity." Say Author Smith & Others: "But it seems clear that Mary wanted all the letters, whether bona fide or not. . . . From her point of view forged letters full of false or sensational statements about Shelley's life were just as threatening to her peace of mind and to the reputation she had by 1846 builded for Shelley. On the other hand, if the series of false letters contained, as they do, repeated outright charges or innuendo against Harriet, if they absolved Shelley and cast a fair light on Mary's devotion and sanctified their elopement--what a great temptation was there (forged so skilfully as the letters were) to buy these letters. Then she did not destroy them, but kept them in a packet marked 'Shelley Letters'; and this package was found by Lady Shelley after Mary's death--a year after."

Most important of these letters for Mary was one which Shelley was supposed to have written to her, right after Harriet's suicide:

"It seems that this poor woman [Harriet] . . . was driven from her father's house, and descended the steps of prostitution until she lived with a groom of the name of Smith, who deserting her, she killed herself. There can be no question that the beastly viper her sister, unable to gain profit from her connexion with me--has secured to herself the fortune of the old man--who is now dying--by the murder of this poor creature."

The use Lady Shelley made of this and other fraudulent material, claim the authors of The Shelley Legend, was indispensable to her Shelley hagiography. Her ladyship's activities are one of the most readable parts of The Shelley Legend. If Author Smith & Others are right, they helped to falsify most of the authoritative Shelley biographies.

This detailed record of pervasive scandal and skullduggery makes ripe reading. But it leaves the Elf, as Shelley liked to call himself, little more than a battered Ozymandias. An effort of memory is required to recall that the man under discussion is the author of Adonais and Prometheus Unbound. His sufferings and his mistakes were an inspired and sensitive mind's reactions to a world that sought to drown his voice even before the sea drowned his body, and he floated like the reflections he had watched despondently in the Bay of Naples, quivering in the wave's intenser day.

*The others: Martha M. Schlegel, Theodore George Ehrsam.

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