by Nick Smith
Fifty years ago, in January 1971, a small boy picked out a hefty, gold-embossed volume from his father’s bookshelf. It was the 1905 edition of Shelley’s Complete Works, edited by Thomas Hutchinson. The dusty tome fell open at something called Epipsychidion, an intriguing title. Multiple prefaces to the poem indicated that the poet had died, sailing from Leghorn to the Levant, accompanied by his wife and another woman disguised as a boy. The verses were addressed to The Noble and Unfortunate Lady, Emilia V______, now imprisoned in the Convent of _______. The boy greedily consumed these lines:
I never thought before my death to see
Youth’s vision thus made perfect, Emily,
I love thee; though the world by no thin name
Will hide that love from its unvalued shame. (lines 41-44)
It reminded him of a song he knew well, Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her’. It was both rhapsodic and incendiary, slamming the institution of marriage “with one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe” (l. 158), “the cold chaste Moon” (l. 281) and plotting his escape with his latest muse of many, the ethereal Emily. Like Paul Simon’s dream, Epipsychidion envisioned walking, talking, sleeping, waking and kissing Emily before the final rapturous fusion of two souls:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. (584-87)
Wow! Was this what Romantic poetry was all about? The small boy wondered whether his own relationships with the opposite sex would follow a similar pattern. I put Shelley back in the bookcase with a shudder.
It took a midlife crisis for my eyes to be opened to the desolate beauty of Shelley’s later works of exile and loss – The Mask of Anarchy, Epipsychidion, written 200 years ago in the grey Pisan January of 1821, and that final Ballardesque The Triumph of Life.
In Shelley’s Dantean dream-vision, “life” (or some kind of death-in-life, an invidious Wordsworthian Nature) is wilfully crushed under the wheels of a slow-moving juggernaut:
So ill was the car guided, but it past
With solemn speed majestically on … (lines 105-106)
There are echoes in Shelley’s last poem of one his first published works, his 1811 Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, which depicts the world as a ‘blood-stain’d heath’ (line 1):
Whilst fell Ambition o’er the wasted plain
Triumphant guides his car—the ensanguin’d rein
Glory directs; fierce brooding o’er the scene,
With hatred glance, with dire unbending mien,
Fell Despotism sits by the red glare
Of Discord’s torch, kindling the flames of war. (lines 7-12)
That car seems to have come full circle … if we imagine it capable of any deviation from its unbending path. Although Shelley does not mention it by name in The Triumph of Life, he may well have had in mind Puffing Billy (pictured), the world’s oldest-surviving steam locomotive and the mechanical ‘triumph’ of the 1810s.
The Essay is dedicated to Harriet W—b—k and, just a few months later in 1811, Shelley took his teenage bride to the Lakes after ‘Yorkgate’ (Shelley had persuaded his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg to proposition Mrs Shelley in York, in the poet’s absence). In the Lakes Shelley hoped to hunt out the Bard of Grasmere, ‘Puffing Billy’ himself, a poet whose later views and diminished abilities became the younger man’s own lightning-rod.
Shelley’s partial Triumph concludes with the Promethean poet asking his spirit-guide, Rousseau, the ultimate, unthinkable question:
‘Then, what is Life?’ I said … the cripple cast
His eye upon the car which now had rolled
Onward, as if that look must be the last,
And answered … ‘Happy those for whom the fold
Of (lines 544-48)
Talk about a cliff-hanger ending! Still in search of the answer, I devoured not just his poems but everything about his life.
My new passion needed a creative outlet, but what? Should I compose crosswords full of Shelleyan anagrams? Hell, yes!
Answers at https://drownedhoggday.wordpress.com/alex-hoggs-crossword-answers
Or maybe I should write plays? Yes, indeed, starting with Shelley and Hogg, a radio-drama that charted the strange shared experiences of the poet and his old college wingman, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a chap whose life-chances were severely compromised by his inability to feel sexual attraction for anyone who had not already been to bed with Shelley himself.
Ignoring the fact that the definitive Shelley play had already been written (Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry), I then wrote Free Love, a grim re-imagining of Shelley’s marriage to Mary Godwin, from the perspective of Claire Claremont.
Free Love was inspired, in part, by a serendipitous discovery while researching University College history. The ill-conceived nuptials took place on 30th December 1816. In the small hours of 30th December 1916, a hundred years later, in the Moika Palace, St Petersburg, Grigoriy Rasputin was poisoned, shot and drowned by Univ’s second most notorious old boy, Prince Felix Yusupov. Even more bizarrely, it was an assassination that seemed to be prefigured in T.J. Hogg’s one and only novel, Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff, in which the St Petersburg-born prince hatches a plan to murder another charismatic cult-leader, the Eleutherarch. Had Yusupov chanced upon this tome in the college library and plotted his crime while gazing at the brand-new memorial to Hogg’s drowned friend? It was a bewitching thought …
“Which Oxford college did Thomas Jefferson Hogg attend between 1810 and 1811?” John Humphrys asked, the first question on Mastermind one night in 2011. Several million viewers thought: Thomas Jefferson who? But I was in my element and that was not a difficult starter. I racked up 13 points on my specialist subject although I suspect the audience felt a little more in tune with the next one, the history of Luton Town F.C.
Still my late-found enthusiasm for all things Shelleyan was far from sated. In June 2016, 200 years on from that night on the shores of Lake Geneva, I insisted on taking family and friends to the Casa Magni in San Terenzo. We let the old beach-house for a week and found it hardly changed. I slept in Shelley’s white marble bedroom, checked for ghosts from the balcony and scribbled down some fresh lines written in the Bay of Lerici.
Casa Magni
Those lines became part of my own solitary novel, Drowned Hogg Day, published (of course) on 30th December 2016. My narrator, Alex Hogg, is a distant descendant of Shelley’s clodhopping pal, producing a series of blogs from 10th November 2016 onwards. The first line reads: ‘I have fifty days to live.’ I think the title should give you a pretty good idea of both the plot and the central themes of this black comedy.
If that was one way of re-examining historical events from a new angle, I found an even more bizarre approach in my next book, Bridge and the Romantics. The card-game was not invented in Shelley’s lifetime but nor was the motor-car and I did not let a small thing like that put me off. Here they all are – Shelley, Keats, Byron, Blake, the whole comedy troupe – playing bridge to an astonishing standard while enduring their personal traumas. This cover shows Shelley and Mary, the night before their wedding, temporarily reconciled with her father and step-mother, solving the most fiendish single-dummy problems known to man.
What next? The Revolt of Islam reinterpreted through the medium of origami? The full story of how Shelley invented a Middle English dialect and wrote a post-modern poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? A dive from a glacier to find the soggy remains of Frankenstein’s monster? Ballet music for The Cenci?
Or I could just get therapy instead …
Nick Smith studied English at University College, Oxford, completing a doctorate and training as a teacher. 
In 1989 he founded Oxford Open Learning (www.ool.co.uk) which is now the UK’s leading provider of distance learning courses for GCSE and A-level. As a writer, Nick is best known for his works on bridge, including Bridge and the Romantics (Master Point Press, 2019) which features the fictional card-playing exploits of Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron & co. He has also played for and captained the England bridge team. Nick has achieved doubtful celebrity as a regular on various TV quiz shows including Mastermind (where he answered questions on T.J. Hogg), Countdown, Only Connect and Eggheads. As a playwright, Nick was the winner of the Oxfordshire Drama Network Playwriting Competition of 2014 with Yusupov and Rasputin. Drowned Hogg Day is his first and last novel.
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