Shelleyan Top Ten Moments - 2017

Welcome to my inaugural, year end "Shelleyan Top Ten" list. The eligibility criteria for an appearance on this list is pretty straight forward (and subjective!) First the event or occurrence must have contributed to raising the awareness of Percy Bysshe Shelley among the general public. Second, it also needs to have come to my attention - which is not omniscient (this means my list is not necessarily definitive!). Finally, I also have ranked on the basis of whether the moment was unusual or unexpectedly brilliant.

In any event, these sorts of lists are supposed to be fun and are designed to provoke debate and conversation.  So let the discussion begin.

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The 10 Best Shelley Moments of 2017

10.        Entering the list at number ten is the Penn-Shelley Seminar series that is overseen by Eric Alan Weinstein. The seminar brings scholarship from around the world together to examine the life and work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Over the past three years, more than a dozen Penn faculty members spanning five separate departments have contributed as have almost forty visiting scholars -including me!  You can watch my most recent presentation by clicking the link to "The Radical Shelley in His Time and Ours". Together Eric and his team have produced nearly 100 hours of unique digital scholarly content, all of which is being made freely available. An associated MOOC became of of the world's favourites in 2016. Say what you will about MOOCs, hundreds of people participated in Eric's course as did I. It is fair to say that my entire Shelley project was inspired by that course. Like Shelley, Eric wants to change the world; Shelley can help us to do this. I look forward to the relaunch of the Shelley MOOC in 2018!!! You can learn more about Eric's initiatives here.

9.         At number 9, we have Paul R Stephens (follow him on Twitter here) who launched a series of “On This Day" Tweets that focus on memorable excerpts from the letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Featuring over 300 selections so far, the series also matched the prose with very carefully chosen works of art. Paul is a Shelley scholar working on his PhD at Oxford. With Paul’s permission, I began republishing his selections on The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley Facebook page in November with the addition of a couple of paragraphs of my own commentary.  These posts have proved to be a huge hit, drawing hundreds of reactions and scores of comments and shares. What makes Paul’s selections so clever is the manner in which they draw attention to different aspects of Shelley’s multifaceted character.  So, well done Paul, don’t stop now!!!!

8.         In the summer of 2017, the Keats-Shelley Association of America (full disclosure: I am a Board Member) announced an ambitious online communications strategy which involves revamping its website and launching Twitter and Facebook feeds. The organization has hired Shelley scholar Anna Mercer as the official coordinator. She currently oversees four communication fellows. I have been advocating for this since I joined the Board as I believe social media (despite all of its drawbacks) is an essential tool to build communities. I look forward to great things from this initiative in 2018.

 7.        In March of 2017, English fashion designer John Alexander Skelton deployed Shelley's Mask of Anarchy in his spring runway show. This is an example of members of the general public engaging with Shelley and the radical past and unusual ways. You can read my article, "Shelley Storms the Fashion World" by clicking the button below. Skelton has to be one of the first clothing designers in history whose clothing line was inspired by a bloody massacre.  This might strike many as unusual, but I think it is actually quite an important example of art interfacing with politics and political protest – in a manner Shelley would have whole-heartedly approved.

6.         Frankenreads is another initiative of the Keats-Shelley Association of America. It enters my list at number 6.  An ambitious project it is designed to get people around the world thinking about and reading Frankenstein, the concept is built around a massive, world-wide reading project slated for Halloween of 2018.  While this project is virtually entirely focused on Mary, it can nonetheless function as a gateway through which we can interest Mary Shelley enthusiasts in Percy - after all, he was an active and not insubstantial collaborator on the novel. You can learn more about this brilliant KSAA project here.

5.         Flying in under the radar at number five is Tess Martin's brilliant animation short based on Shelley’s fragmentary poem, The Dirge. You can read the poem here. There is speculation that the poem was based on a true story about Ginevra degli Almieri, who was thought dead of a plague that swept the city of Florence in the year 1400, and was put in a vault to be buried the next day. But she then awakens and is mistaken for a ghost by both her husband and her parents. Martins gorgeous, ghostly interpretation of the poem is exquisite. It is one of the years great Shelley events. Thanks to Tess Martin and Max Rothman the good folks at Monticello Park Productions. I have an upcoming article on this magnificent project.

4.         Shelley took an unexpected star turn in the summer blockbuster, Alien Covenant. This is deserving of fourth place on the list!!  After the movie was released, I was very excited to hear that Shelley's poem Ozymandias features prominently.  The poem's theme is woven carefully into the plot of the movie, with David (played again by Michael Fassbender) quoting the famous line, "Look on my works ye mighty and despair." David, as followers of the movies will know, is a "synthetic humanoid" - one in a long line of such creatures, one of the most famous being Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. That David quotes the poem without a trace of irony is central to the question of whether or not these creatures are fully human or not. For David, not to see that Shelley is employing one of his trademark ironic inversions, suggests that something is not quite right with him. That he mistakenly attributes the poem to Byron is another twist altogether. Enjoy Zac Farini's terrific review, "David or the Modern Frankenstein" by clicking the button below.

3.         During the summer of 2017, I published in three installments, for the first time, the text of a speech given by Shelley devotee and crusading journalist Paul Foot. It was an epic one-and-a-half-hour extemporaneous speech delivered to the London Marxism Conference of 1981.  I have estimated that the project took over two hundred hours – involving laborious transcription, research and editing. The entire speech was ultimately collected together and published on my website in the fall of 2015 by my research and editorial associate, Jonathan Kerr. You Paul epic speech "The Radical Percy Bysshe Shelley" by clicking the button below. Here is a link to the only audio we have, so you can listen along!! Here's to one of the greatest of all Shelleyans, Paul Foot. We will never forget you Paul, you left us too soon.

2.         Sitting in the number 2 position is the Shelley Conference 2017. The project was the brain child of Shelley scholars Anna Mercer and Harrie Neal, who were motivated by their frustration with the fact that, in Anna's words, there is no "regular event, academic or otherwise, dedicated solely to the study of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s works. Neither is there such an event for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.” Given the outsize influence these two writers have had on our modern world, this fact is astonishing.  The Conference was a wonder and featured keynotes by three of the world’s leading Shelleyans: Nora Crook, Kelvin Everest and Michael O’Neill.  You can watch these here, here and here.  Slowly, I am also releasing panel presentations – but the process is somewhat time consuming.  My hope is that this conference will be followed by many more. Anna? Harrie? Percy and Mary owe you big time -- so do we all. Read Anna's article "Why the Shelley Conference" by clicking the button below

The Best Moment of 2017

1.         Pride of place this year goes to Jeremy Corbyn who adopted Shelley's poetry from The Mask of Anarchy as the foundation of his election campaign. The election slogan itself, “For the Many. Not the Few”, had a catalytic effect on the electorate and we can only guess at how many voters it mobilized. Corbyn then went on to quote Mask of Anarchy on several occasions.  The most memorable were at his campaign-concluding rally, and then after the election at Glastonbury. Both occasions were electrifying. Corbyn’s harnessing of Shelley earns pride of place in my year end list because it awoke tens of thousands of people to Shelley’s existence. Opportunities like this tend to be generational – and we just experienced one. His use was also a perfect illustration of why Paul Foot thought Shelley was so important. Shelley doesn’t just supply ideas (though there are plenty of those), he furnishes us with inspirational rhetoric and enthusiasm. Paul wrote, “Of all the things about Shelley that really inspired people in the years since his death, the thing that matters above all is his enthusiasm for the idea that the world can be changed”. Well, thanks to Jeremy Corbyn, we just witnessed such change first hand. Read my article "Jeremy Corbyn is Right: Poetry Can Change the World" by clicking the button below.  Watch the speech below (Shelley is quoted at 2:40). Thank you Mr, Corbyn, your job now is to bring some of Shelley's egalitarian dreams alive. Don't stop with the slogan; Shelley can be your best friend. Don't let us all down.

If you have some moment I have missed, write to me here: graham@grahamhenderson.ca.  2017 was also a terrific year for my website and the associated Facebook and Twitter accounts.  You can read about my progress in building a modern Shelley community here: "The Year in Review - 2017" .  I have big plans for 2018. Happy New Year to everyone. Here's to a magnificent, Shelley-packed 201811

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The Worst Moment of 2017

Now, most folks also offer a reflection on the worst moments of the previous year.  I am no different. For me, hands down, the worst moment of 2017 for Shelley was the release of Haifaa al Mansour’s atrocious re-invention of the lives of Mary and Percy.  It is a hot mess. What facts she doesn't distort to suit her fictional story line, she simply invents.  A fact checker could spend weeks correcting her mistakes. Here it is in a nutshell: the film makers want you to believe that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in a single night based entirely on personal experiences of abandonment and bereavement. No collaboration. No apparent research. Yeah, it is THAT bad. In trying to put Mary on a pedestal it actually completely trashes her reputation for meticulous research, collaboration and hard, hard work. Oh, and after having been abandoned by Shelley in her hour of need (portrayed as a heavy drinker who directly causes the death of her first child) - a man who has stolen credit for her novel - she takes him back at the end of the movie with no questions asked. Because, ya know, that's how it happens in teenland, right?  It also trashes the reputation of almost everyone around her. Despite my hopes it would not find general release, it has. So Shelleyans can look forward to an invented story of Frankenstein’s creation which is jam packed with misrepresentations, false claims, fabrications and innuendo. You can read more about in my article, "The Truth Matters".  This publicity photo pretty much sums up the movie. This is what you will get - a ridiculous, fatuous teen drama. Avoid it if you can. Shame on those who made this film.

The Truth Matters - a Review of Haifaa al-Mansour's Movie, Mary Shelley

THE TRUTH MATTERS

Haifaa al-Mansour’s new movie Mary Shelley premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September 2017. For those anticipating a nuanced, balanced and careful study of the relationship between two of the world’s authentic literary geniuses, Mary and Percy Shelley, I am sorry, you will be disappointed. For all of its pretensions, this movie seems to be little more than a sort of thinking person’s Twilight or maybe Beauty and the Beast: two hot, beautiful young people with perfect skin and hair are thrust together by chance, torn apart by circumstance only to be at last happily reunited. It is riddled with factual errors and the plot involves an almost complete rewrite of history. Percy and Mary, as depicted in Mary Shelley, are essentially props whose lives have been casually rearranged to allow al-Mansour and her screenwriter to concoct a myth about the creation of Frankenstein. Were the movie to carry a warning, “based on a true story”, it would not go far enough. Mary and Percy have been done a disservice. The true story of Mary, Percy and Frankenstein deserves to be told – but it will await yet another day.

The real-life relationship between Mary and Percy offers us one of the very few examples of a male/female creative partnership between co-equals that was characterized by mutual respect and collaborative cooperation.  Yet for 200 years they have largely been subjected to binary analyses in which one or other of the two has been cast in an invidious role to exalt the other. We have only just now reached the point where they are being seen, as Anna Mercer recently remarked, for what they were: “two incredibly talented authors, who dedicated their lives to the study and writing of radical and innovative literature.”

Indeed, a major conference founded on this concept took place in London on 15 and 16 September 2017. As conference co-organizer and Shelley expert Anna Mercer wrote recently:

Our speakers will pay attention to biographical details in order to gauge how their shared lives (and also their shared travels) influence their texts, as opposed to the texts revealing truths about their lives. Can we remove the damaging opinion that the Shelleys’ relationship was something defined by scandal, infidelity, gossip, and anti-establishment teenage pursuits? They certainly would have wished we could do so. Let us return to their writings, and not the many, many biographical speculations created by scholars and other writers, some with good intentions, some without.

The proof is in the marketing...

al-Mansour tacks in exactly the opposite direction, creating a host of new biographical speculations designed to suit her theory that Frankenstein is almost completely autobiographical - reinforcing, as Anna Mercer recently pointed out to me, a lamentable sexist stereotype in wide circulation regarding female authors.

To make her point, al-Mansour offers up a veritable orgy of speculation that focuses on just the sort of “scandal, infidelity, gossip and anti-establishment teenage pursuits” which Mercer cautions us to avoid. I am increasingly of the view that acts of historical vandalism such as this are a variant on cultural appropriation. al-Mansour, apparently with full knowledge that she was rewriting history, created a narrative which she offered to the public with absolutely no warning about the veracity of the story. The story appears to be true; it looks and feels real. Clearly this is irresponsible and misleading; but I think it is worse. Mary and Percy had real lives - lives about which we know a LOT.  To warp and twist those stories to present a narrative about the creation of Frankenstein which suits the director's idea of how great works are created is a misappropriation of their lives; put bluntly, it is a fraud on history - a lie.

The characters, with the possible exception of Mary (but more on that later) are dismayingly two-dimensional: Percy is presented as an “irresponsible narcissist”; Byron is a “blood-sucking devourer of souls”; William Godwin (author of one of the most important philosophical works of his century: Political Justice) is a pottering, befuddled shopkeeper; Claire Clairmont is a gold-digger in search of a “poet of her own”. There is even an evil step-mother thrown in for good measure: Claire’s mother, Mary Jane, whom Godwin married after the death of Mary's mother (and, yes, I am aware the real Jane Clairmont was very difficult). There are some elliptical visual clues about who these people actually were. We see a flash of the title page of Political Justice; there is a glimpse of Shelley's poem, Queen Mab in a gorgeous bound gilt edition that of course never existed); and we see Byron swanning around a theater like a rock star. But these flash by and despite them, unless you know the historical background of these people, you would have no idea that some of these people were the intellectual titans of their age.

This is a movie that abandons virtually all pretense to historical accuracy in the opening five minutes. We all have come to expect this from the silver screen.  But it is one thing for directors in search of sensationalism and a “good story” to veer far from the truth (how often do we see the words “based on a true story”), but it is entirely another when the director in question has explicitly set out to tell the truth.  al-Mansour is unequivocal in this regard. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter director spoke of "finding inspiration in how Shelley defied what was expected of her." She said, “I think a lot of people know Frankenstein and, of course, the green monster, everybody knows that. But they don’t know her.” al-Mansour purports to set the record straight, to tell the world who the real Mary Shelley was. You can not do this by manipulating the truth.

It occurred to me that it might be valuable to approach Mary Shelley (the movie) simply as a fairy tale – a movie with made up characters and a moral. al-Mansour’s herself described the movie as a “coming of age story” about a “strong woman.” Does it stand up? Does the story-line make sense? Do the characters feel real? Is Movie Mary the “strong woman” al-Mansour purports her to be?

Well, here are our two protagonists as the film presents them:

Douglas Booth as Shelley. As an aside, Shelley was famous for wearing his shirts open at the neck. The movie could not even get this right.

Percy Bysshe Shelley. This character is a poet and is presented early on as a revolutionary. He is impossibly handsome and clearly aware of his charms – a ladies’ man!

What he is rebelling against is uncertain, though he clearly does not like religion (that much was true). To make this point, there is a scene in which Percy takes Mary into an empty church, steals the sacramental wine and drinks it from the chalice while lounging on the altar – he such a bad boy. Here are some of the “anti-establishment teenage pursuits” to which Mercer points. Percy clearly has a gift for words – we hear a few snatches of some romantic poetry - but he is also something of an extroverted showman. He is explicitly characterized as an “irresponsible narcissist”. Percy is also dismissive of others – ridiculing or humiliating those who disagree with him – including Mary.

As for his relationship with Mary, in the course of approximately one year, he repeatedly lies to her, sleeps with her half-sister Claire, maybe sleeps with Byron (whose very public kiss on the lips Percy does not refuse), is psychologically and verbally abusive to Mary and demonstrates an alarming facility for "mansplaining". Unlike the real Percy who remained with Mary until his death, Movie Percy abandons her for months in her hour of need after stealing the credit for her book. Yikes. This Percy spends much of his time drunk - swigging directly from the bottle (the real one was a vegetarian teetotaler). He plays an abject fanboy to Byron's rock star, which is such a disappointment given the deep, complex and abiding relationship these two towering intellects developed in real life. Oh, and according to the movie he literally causes the death of their first child. He’s quite a catch, isn’t he!?

But maybe he is smart? Well, while we occasionally see Percy scribbling on scraps of paper, there is very little evidence that he has produced anything of significance whatsoever. There are suggestions that he is famous. For example, two star-struck young women encounter him in a park and implausibly identify him as “the poet Shelley” and ask for an “autograph” (he complies with what actually appears to be a ball point pen!). The real Shelley was of course almost completely unknown and how anyone could have identified him in an age before photography and celebrity magazines is difficult to ascertain. So, it would appear then that Movie Percy is “airport famous”. But wait! alMansour also treats to scenes in which we see him angry, sullen and despondent as his poetry is repeatedly rejected by publishers.  So which is he? Airport famous or rejected-poet-in-the-garret? Movie Percy also never discusses with Movie Mary any of the sophisticated philosophical theories for which his real counterpart was famous. Despite what appears to be a fetish for books, we never see him actually reading one - either alone or with Mary. This is something for which the real couple are well known; their book lists are legendary. Late in the movie, after he has read Mary’s novel, he bursts in upon her with empty praise for its brilliance and then offers one of the most astoundingly stupid, mansplained editorial suggestions in the history of literature.  There are many more examples of this. The movie version of Percy is a drunk, a dullard and a dupe.

The characters in Bloomsbury where the Shelleys never lived.

But does he have money? He certainly appears to: swaggering into Mary’s home and promising to lavish money on the Godwin family. After eloping, he and Mary move into a fashionable address in Bloomsbury. While the two very briefly lived in Bloomsbury, clearly alMansour never bothered to find out exactly how they lived.

In our movie, they live in opulent luxury - an opportunity to dress up they actors in period costume. This is false. While Shelley's father was wealthy, Shelley had great difficulty accessing any of this wealth as he and his father had dramatically fallen out over his atheism. To this point we know nothing about this and Percy is presented as an independently wealthy young aristocrat.  It is therefore a shock to Mary when the creditors arrive in the middle of the night to seize everything. Movie Percy even lied about his wealth, it would seem.

Do I have any takers for this cretin?  al-Mansour has one: Mary Shelley. The question is why? Those familiar with the biography of the real Percy can readily understand why a precocious young genius like Mary would chose to be with him. She sought out an equal – just as he did. For all his faults, the real Shelley was nothing like the dim-witted, pretty-boy showcased in Mary Shelley. But what would be the motivation for Movie Mary to pick Movie Percy?

Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley, shown here having her hair carefully arranged, because, well, you know, people's hair in 1816 was perfect.

Mary Shelley. This character is a preternaturally brilliant and drop dead gorgeous teenage girl with aspirations to write.

She overcomes a tyrannical step-mother who opposes her interest in books and writing. She has a befuddled father who owns a book shop and seems to live with his head in the clouds but who offers her perhaps the crucial piece of advice in the film: that she, must “find her own voice” and ignore what other people have to say.  Movie Mary is presented as a character with a strong moral compass who reveres her dead mother and cares for everyone around her. She is driven, passionate, self-assured and inspiring. She is not cowed in the presence of Lord Byron, instead stands up to him at a critical point, getting, as they say, “right up in his grill”.  She forces Byron (played in a preposterously over the top manner by Tom Sturridge) to take responsibility for the daughter he fathered with Claire – in real life it was Percy who undertook this tricky and distasteful task.

It is widely believed that Frankenstein was written in response to Lord Byron’s challenge that his guests at the Villa Diodati (Percy, Mary, Claire and Dr John Polidori) compose a “ghost story”. In our movie, only Mary and Polidori rise to the occasion – Percy and Lord Byron being too piss-drunk to do much more than fall about the room – at one point Byron actually leaps on a divan and imitates a baboon replete with monkey noises. Embarrassing. But Mary overcomes all of this! Back in London, and with zero support from her hopeless boyfriend, and with her father’s voice literally ringing in her ears (“do it yourself baby!”), she writes all 60,000 words of Frankenstein in the course of a single night – pausing only for a midnight snack. I am not making this up. She triumphantly slaps it down on a bewildered Percy’s writing desk first thing the next morning. “Take that, you deadbeat” one can imagine her saying before she turns on her heel and storms out of the room.  Mary also, entirely on her own, arranges to have her book published, having faced down a blizzard of rejection notices (the world of early 19th century publishing being imagined as identical to our modern version – it was not). In real life it was Percy who found a publisher for the novel.

Boom!  What a superwoman.  Which begs the question: what does this superwoman want with that super-loser. The movie provides absolutely no satisfactory answers.  But boy, does this gal want her man.

Note the credit.

Mary Shelley, is, however, more than a movie about “boy meets girl” – or at least it pretends to be. It is about the creative process itself.  How the heck did one of the most famous novels of all time actually get written? Alas, al-Mansour seems to have replaced the “great man” theory of history with the “great woman” theory. Mary works entirely in isolation. In contrast with the real Mary Shelley who was an extraordinarily voracious reader, the movie Mary appears to read nothing. She relies instead on her own sources of inspiration. And here they are: the ghost stories of her childhood, the death of her mother and her daughter Clara, the abuse and abandonment she suffers at the hand of Percy, a demonstration of galvanism, an article on galvanism supplied by Polidori, and a dream in which a corpse is brought to life.  This raw material is sufficient to allow her to produce a complex 60,000 word novel in a single night. This is nonsense.

One of the grievous sins of this movie is that it utterly removes Mary from her intellectual milieu. She is presented as the archetypal lonely genius. Anyone who has an even remote familiarity with Mary, Percy and their circle will know that they had a thriving network of brilliant friends all of whom fed off one another. This portrait brilliantly emerges from the pages of Daisy Hay's wonderful book, Young Romantics. For example, we know for a fact that Shelley played a large role in influencing the Wordsworthian character of Childe Harolde, Canto III. This famous Canto was written while the group was at the Villa Diodati during the summer of 1816. In the movie, Mary and Percy do visit Byron, but the entire episode is presented like a sort of weekend bacchanal during which Percy and Byron are far too drunk to discuss poetry let alone write a single word. Mary was an active participant in this circle. In reviewing Hay's book, Michael Holroyd noted:

“The originality of this engrossing narrative comes from Daisy Hay's unusual focus on the passionate allegiances and literary influences between her characters. With great skill she weaves in and out of the lives of these poets, novelists, and philosophers, their husbands, wives, lovers, and children, exploring the dual nature of the creative impulse, its individuality, and the stimulus of kindred spirits. It is a most impressive achievement.”

These are facts.  And they are not unknown facts.  For someone like al-Mansour, who proudly notes that she was a literature major, to have ignored them is irresponsible.

The real Mary actively collaborated with the real Percy - and she was inspired by the writing of many famous people, including her mother and father and classical Greeks such as Aeschylus; whose plays she was familiar with through Percy.  Aeschylus' play Prometheus Bound played a large role in the novel Frankenstein which was, after all, subtitled, The Modern Prometheus. Percy Bysshe Shelley himself actually contributed around 5,000 words to Frankenstein and made editorial suggestions - this is a small but significant role. This is not speculation and al-Mansour simply could not have missed this fact - an entire book was written on the subject by a distinguished professor of literature, Charles Robinson.

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A page of Frankenstein on display at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Percy's handwriting is the dark ink, Mary's in a lighter ink.

The actual manuscripts for Frankenstein may be found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. You can see the marginal suggestions Percy made and the contrasting handwriting.  But nope! Not Movie Mary, she does it alone.  Oh, and she does it exclusively in pencil when every single version we have of the manuscripts is in ink.

The concept of great art as something created in a vacuum is an idea that has been dying a slow yet richly deserved death. In the case of Mary and Percy, we know for a fact that the two of them collaborated on Frankenstein.  This doesn’t weaken Mary’s claim to authorship – it enriches it.  Two brilliant people worked together; each respectful of the other’s genius.  What a story that would be! Except that is not the story al-Mansour tells. She had an opportunity to celebrate one of the more unusual creative partnerships in history. Instead, in order to uplift Mary, she felt it necessary smash Percy to atoms and deny his collaborative role in the creation of Frankenstein. Worse, it distorts Mary's actual creative process. We have her journals! We know that she laboured over the manuscript for months even years: polishing, honing, researching and rewriting. What agenda does it serve to lead people (particularly the young people to whom this movie seems to be pitched given the casting of heart-throbs) to believe that writing a 60,000 word masterpiece is something that happens overnight? Leonard Cohen famously took 6 or more years to write Hallelujah.

al-Mansour has effectively stolen Mary's world from her and replaced it with something almost sterile and antiseptic - despite all of the Hollywood melodrama. How much richer and more exciting was Mary's real life.

This sums it all up. Elle Fanning with her perfect hair and ever present pencil working in isolation seeking inspiration only from her own experiences.

How bad does this get? At the end of the movie, Mary’s father brings together a group of people at his bookshop – ostensibly to celebrate the publication of Frankenstein but actually to allow for a staged confession by Percy.  Like so many of the scenes in the film, this never happened.  But who cares, this is Hollywood, right?

SPOILER ALERT

Settle in, boys and girls, here is how our fairy tale ends.  Mary, tipped off to the meeting by her father, sneaks into the gathering unobserved and hides in a corner.  Godwin thanks the assembled throng of aged, whiskered, white males for coming. He notes that the novel was published anonymously. It is further alleged that Percy capitalized on this by writing a signed introduction which he knew would invite the world to conclude he had written the novel. To underline this point, al-Mansour manufactures a meeting that NEVER happened.  She imagines Mary and Polidori coming together to console one another: Percy is point blank accused of stealing the credit for Frankenstein and Byron for stealing the credit for Polidori's book, The Vampyre.

Godwin then offers a precis of the novel which incredibly casts Percy in the role of Victor Frankenstein and Mary in the role of the monster. He says it is a novel about:

“…the absolute necessity for human connection. From the moment Dr. Frankenstein’s creature opens its eyes it seeks the touch of its creator, but he recoils in terror leaving the creature to the first of its many experiences of neglect and isolation. And if only Frankenstein had been able to bestow upon his creation a compassionate touch, a kind word, what a tragedy might have been avoided.”

Wow. Just wow. At this point Percy slips into the room to applause. He pauses for dramatic effect, makes eye contact with Mary and begins:

“I know many of you wonder who could have written this horrific tale and why it was published anonymously. I see some of you suggest the work belongs to me. Indeed, you could say the work would not exist without my contribution. But to my shame, the only claim I remotely have to this work is inspiring the desperate loneliness that defines Frankenstein’s creature.  The author [voice breaking] of Frankenstein is of course, Mary Wollestonecraft Godwin. It is a work of singular genius and she is indebted to no one in its creation.”

This we know, as a matter of public record, is a lie. But as a movie-land mea culpa, it is a tour de force and Movie Percy executes it with every ounce of his formidable masculine charm. We are now at the moment of truth, are we not? How does this powerful, vindicated woman respond to her abuser? Slap him and leave the room? Throw a drink in his face? Sue him? Surely if we are all honest with ourselves we are rooting for her to give him the heave ho. But no. In this perverse fairy tale, the abused must take back her abuser. Because, what?  That’s true love!?!?! Whoa.

Percy’s confession produces the desired cinematic result. Here are the last words spoken in the movie:

MWG:        Percy?

PBS:           Mary?

MWG:        I really thought you’d left for good.

PBS:           I never promised you a life without misery. But I underestimated the depths of despair that I regret you had to endure.

MWG:        I lost everything to be with you Percy. We set out to create something wonderful. Something beautiful. But something volatile seethed within us. Behold, the monster, galvanized. [referring to herself]. But if I had not learned to fight through the anguish, I would not have found this voice again. My choices made me who I am and I regret nothing.

Kiss and fade to black.

ARE. YOU. KIDDING. ME. This? This is the moral of our fairy tale? Is this a role model for young women? If you are going to create a fairy tale which pays scant attention to the truth, why would you have your protagonist absolve her abuser in such an abject manner and take him back. This is not empowering. Surely a 21st Century happy-ending would see Movie Mary smack Movie Percy upside the head and walk out on him (or at least read the rat-bastard the riot act). That ending would at least have been consistent with the lies the movie is founded upon. That ending would have had me on my feet.  As it stands, the movie utterly fails to provide any motivation for Mary to take Percy back. That, ladies and gentlemen, is one helluva plot failure.

In addition to the wholesale rewriting and manipulation of history, errors abound, some of them egregious and some benign.  For example, one of the end title cards notes that Byron’s daughter died at the age of ten – this is not true, she died in 1822 at age 5.  For a mistake like this to have slipped by the people involved with the movie speaks volumes about their concern for the truth. The cavalier rearrangement of the truth to suit the movie’s plot line is characteristic of the movie.  It feels at times like the lives of Mary and Percy are reduced to the status of stage props to suit a theory held by the creative team of Mary Shelley. 

What makes this a truly bad movie is that is aspired to be so much more and fell so dramatically short.  Unlike a superficial and trite film like Ken Russell’s atrocious Gothic, Mary Shelley aspires to be taken very, very seriously.  And, sadly it will be taken seriously. I have read almost all of the reviews (almost all of them are tepid).  None of them dig below the surface. Mary Shelley has the potential to corrupt the way people think about Mary and Percy for a generation. And this is unfortunate because the movie has appropriated and distorted one of the most important and nuanced creative relationships that we know of, and renders it in a flat monochrome. The protagonists of this film should be role models for no one. This is not how Frankenstein was written; this is not how their lives were lived.

Had al-Mansour confined herself to recounting the actual facts surrounding the creation of Frankenstein, her movie would have been so much more compelling and satisfying, because the story would ring true. Mary Shelley could have offered a much better insight into the creative process involved in the writing of Frankenstein and two of the greatest literary talents in the English language. It could have told the truth, and the truth matters.

Good lord.  What did we expect? Explain to me why Booth, who is not the star, is seated in the center.  Oh wait...never mind.

Shelleyana!! My Father's Shelley, Part Two

"Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, "Remain thou, thou art so beautiful'."

Letter to John Gisborne, 18 June 1822. The Letters of Shelley, II 435-6

We all know what happened 16 days later; the past, the present and the future were indeed obliterated.

It is the anniversary of Shelley's death today [this article was written on July 8th 2017], and I thought the best way to observe this sad occasion was to turn again to the enormous impact Shelley on me and my dad's life - though we had radically different ideas about exactly who Shelley was. The "different" Shelleys were the subject of my essay, My Father's Shelley: A Tale of Two Shelleys." I want to further explore this theme by digging into a photographic album I discovered among my father's effects after he died. It is a slim volume entitled "Shelleyana". I think we will find much to reflect upon, and Shelley may perhaps seem less remote and more immediate.

My father's interest in Shelley must have started very early for reasons that will emerge quickly.  And that fact that it did so inevitably leads my to conclude that his mother, Edith Wills, must have had something to do with it.  She had an absolutely incalculable effect on his life.  One of the reasons I know this is that shortly before his death I came into possession of hundreds of letters that he had written to her.  She appears to have kept almost all of them. There is a generous sprinkling of those she wrote to him, but he does not appear to have been as concerned for posterity as she was.

My father was born in 1916 in Montreal, Canada. Very early in life he exhibited an aptitude for, and an interest in, the arts.  This came from his mother, and not his father.  He assiduously studied music and was good enough that he was in a position at one point to chose a career as a professional pianist.  But he abandoned this for the stage. In his late teens he was active in the Montreal theatrical community.  Then he did something truly extraordinary. In 1936, at age 18 he boarded a ocean liner and sailed for England to pursue an acting career.

While he did not appear to have set the acting word on fire, he did seem to progress his career until the Second World War ruined his dreams as it did those of almost everyone else on the planet.

The cover of my father's Shelley "scrap book".

While in England he also took the time to pursue a passion of his: Percy Bysshe Shelley. I know this because I have an unusual little scrap book which I found on his shelf with the rest of his Shelley materials. It is a bit shabby now, but he appears to have spent considerable effort to put it together - beginning in 1937.

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"Shelleyana"

Now the term "Shelleyana" is an interesting term in and of itself, and I have been unable to find any "official" definition for it.  It is used to refer to collections of materials that pertain to Shelley and his circle. It is clearly a coined term and I can think of no other example of it. There is an affectionate overtone; it strikes one as diminutive. It is even a little cloying.  All of which is entirely in keeping with the manner in which Shelley was viewed by a large segment of the literate intelligentsia in the 19th century. I wrote about this in my article, "Shelley in the 21st Century."

Many people who held Shelley in high esteem had collections of "Shelleyana".  These might be relics, or they might be first editions, or they might be rare or unusual books about him or those he was close to. For example, here is an article from the New York Times in 1922 extolling a particular collection of Shelleyana which was available to the public on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death.

My father always referred to his collection of books on Shelley as his "Shelleyana".  And as suits the reverential, almost hagiographic overtone, which the term connotes, his scrap book begins with not one, but THREE portraits of the poet - each accorded its own page.

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Amelia Curran's 1819 portrait of Shelley which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery

This is the most famous, even iconic, of the portraits.  Shelley sat for Curran in Rome on May 7 and 8 in 1819. Curran was known to Shelley and Mary and they had last encountered her in Godwin's home in 1818.  Crucially, this painting was NOT finished in his life time, and must be considered to be an extremely unreliable likeness.  Shelley's biographer, James Bieri notes, "It has become the misleading image by which so many have misperceived Shelley." We know that neither Mary nor Shelley liked it - nor did his friends.  The history of this painting and its effect on the way in which Shelley came to be regarded can not be underestimated, but this is not the time and place for such a discussion. Suffice to say that it played directly into the hands of those Victorians who preferred to imagine Shelley as a child-like, almost androgynous being - this is the "castrated" Shelley (in Engles' famous phrase). The man in this painting is NOT my Shelley - but it was most decidedly my father's Shelley.

Here is the second:

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A crayon portrait based on the painting by George Clint

Well, what can you say?  Here Shelley has lost almost all of his masculine characteristics and the ethereal being the Victorians (and my father) so came to adore is born. We are getting very close Mathew Arnold's vision of Shelley as "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain".  Clint's portrait was painted in 1829 years after his death, and is known to be a composite of Curran's painting and a sketch by Shelley's friend, Edward Williams.

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Sketch by Edward Ellerker Williams, Pisa, 27 November 1821

Curran's painting was repainted several times and each time, Shelley become less recognizable, more child-like, more androgynous, more ethereal. I believe these images of Shelley played a central role in the re-invention and distortion of his reputation.  For example, here is Francis Thompson (one of his Victorian idolators) writing in 1889:

“Enchanted child, born into a world unchildlike; spoiled darling of Nature, playmate of her elemental daughters; "pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift," laired amidst the burning fastnesses of his own fervid mind; bold foot along the verges of precipitous dream; light leaper from crag to crag of inaccessible fancies; towering Genius, whose soul rose like a ladder between heaven and earth with the angels of song ascending and descending it;--he is shrunken into the little vessel of death, and sealed with the unshatterable seal of doom, and cast down deep below the rolling tides of Time.” - Francis Thompson, "Shelley", 1889

The story of the incalculable damage that these stylized images wrought, divorced as they were from reality, has yet to be properly told. But I think it is fair to say that had no portraits of Shelley ever existed, we might see him in a very different light today.  I think that portraits like these fed a particular vision of Shelley that my father fed off.  Looking into the eyes of these three Shelleys, it is difficult to see the revolutionary, the philosophical anarchist, the atheist that he was.

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Postcard purchased at the Bodleian by my father, July 1937

On the next page we find, not unsurprisingly, a postcard my dad purchased in July, 1937 in Oxford at the Bodleian. It displays certain Shelley "relics".  These are: (1) the copy of Sophocles allegedly taken from Shelley's hand after his body washed ashore; (2) locks of Shelley's and Mary's hair; (3) a portrait of him as a boy; (4) his baby's rattle; and (5) his pocket watch and seals.

The idea that Shelley was found with that book in his hand is a story we owe to one of the most notorious liars in history, Edward Trelawny who for his entire life trafficked in stories derived from his association with Shelley and Byron - two men, both dead, who could not contradict his lies. There are certain element of his biography of Shelley which we can take at face value, but they are few and far between.  But stories like that, when the become "relics" and part of "Shelleyana" feed myths. My dad was always fond of Trelawny - and Trelawny did my father the ultimate disfavour of serving up a vision of Shelley that was almost completely divorced from reality.

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Onslow Ford's Shelley Memorial, University College, Oxford. Commissioned in 1891.

Next up, entirely predictably, is one of the great abominations in the canon of Shelleyana - the famous (or infamous) Shelley Memorial at University College, Oxford. The history of this hardly bears repeating. It was so routinely disfigured and disrespected by young Oxford students that today it is actually encased in a cage. It was Shelley's daughter-in-law who perpetrated this imaginative, shambolic disaster.  Paul Foot absolutely shreds this statue in his speech, "The Revolutionary Shelley"

Not content with this, she went further and commissioned Henry Weeks to reinvent Shelley as Christ and Mary as, well, another Mary. The resulting statute was, according to my father, refused by Westminister on the grounds of his atheism - if this anecdote is in any way true, I rather doubt his atheism had anything to do with it; more likely it was the monstrously poor taste in which the statue was executed. You be the judge:

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Henry Weeks, Shelley Memorial, Christchurch Priory, Bournemouth, England

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Shelley's birthplace, "Field Place", Horsham, Sussex.

It is now that the scrapbook becomes more interesting, for it becomes clear that my 19 year old father was engaged on a sort of pilgrimage, following in the footsteps of Shelley. The preceding pages feature postcards clearly acquired on a visit to Oxford in July of 1937; a visit clearly focused almost exclusively on Shelley.  However, the previous year, and almost immediately upon his arrival in England, he traveled to Shelley's birthplace where he took a sequence of poorly composed but magical photographs:

There are thousands of beautiful pictures of Field Place; these are awful. But that is not the point. These photographs have a haunting, poignant, other-worldly quality. They were taken by an 18 year old boy who was enthralled by his hero, Shelley. And they take us back in time almost a century.  He kept a very detailed diary of those years, and his thoughts and reflections in this pilgrimage are memorable and touching.

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The graves of Mary, Mary Wollestonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Florence Shelley and the latter's wife, Jane Shelley

Dad also visited the graves of Mary, Mary Wollestonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Florence Shelley and the latter's wife, Jane Shelley.  As he notes, "They are all in one plot of ground (barely sufficient for five people to die down)....One stone does for all." Interestingly, Mary had refused Trelawny's offer of the plot he had reserved for himself beside Shelley's grave in Rome. I have always found that curious, though none of Shelley's biographers offer any thoughts on this.  Had she not refused, it would have been she and not Trelawny who is buried beside Shelley.  This is, I think, a great loss; for more than one reason.

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The home in Marlow in 1937

Prior to visiting Oxford in July of 1937, my father also dropped by Marlow to visit Shelley's home in that location. The pictures are somewhat clearer and he records the inscription above the dwelling which includes the line "...and was here visited by Lord Byron."

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Lechlade, Gloucestershire, 1936

One of my father's favourite poems by Shelley was "Lechlade:A Summer-Evening Churchyard" so, of course he went there in 1936.  In a chemist shop owned by a man named Davis, he was informed that according to local legend, Shelley had strolled through a particular path in the town composing the poem. The top photograph shows this path, the bottom, the neighbouring cathedral. 

We now come to one of the more significant fabrications of literary history. The cremation of Shelley. Here is the painting by Louis Edward Fournier;

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Louis Edward Fournier, "The Burning of Shelley", 1889.

It is not for me to debunk the many myths created by one of history's great liars, Edward John Trelawny (Bieri does an excellent job in his biography of Shelley). Shelley was indeed cremated by the bay of Lerici.  The body had washed ashore after 10 days rotting in the ocean.  It was thrown into a shallow grave and covered with lime.  It was only over a month later that permission was finally received to exhume the body and cremate it - and what they found was horrific - the body was "badly mutilated, decomposed and destroyed." Mary was NOT at the burning and Byron refused to witness it himself. This painting, like so many of the other signal components of the Shelley myth, was hagiographic in tone and divorced from reality. But to an impressionable 19 year old Canadian on a pilgrimage in the footsteps of Shelley, it was as good as gold.

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Upper right, Keats' tomb. Lower left, Trelawny, lower right, Shelley, Photographs 1950

The Second World War then stole almost 10 years from my father's life, as it did for so many millions more.  He was lucky to be demobilized quickly and lucky again to find employment quickly. He became a journalist and rose very quickly to become the most famous Canadian broadcaster of his era. I will tell THIS story elsewhere. In 1950 he secured an extraordinary assignment.  Tour the world and send stories back to Canadians eager to learn about strange an exotic locales.  One of the places he went was Rome and it will surprise no one reading this that he made a beeline to the Protestant Cemetery and Shelley's grave.

The photographs are poorly composed and either under or over exposed.  But again, they have an intensity, a nostalgia and a haunting quality which are undeniable. So many things strike me.  why did my father have his picture taken at Keats' grave and not Shelley's? He had very little time for Keats. Why only a picture of the tombstone itself? I have been in the Cemetery. It is an extraordinary lace and it must have been even more extraordinary in 1950 when the world was literally bereft of tourists.  The photograph of Shelley's grave, in many formats, graced our home through out my life.  My father curiously never had it properly framed or preserved - and the negatives are long lost.  But I treasure these images, the more so for their faded character, there soiled nature and their shop-worn corners.

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Larry Henderson at Casa Magni, Lerici, Italy, September 1986

My father was a thorough man, and in 1986, as a vigorous 70 year old he made his way to the Bay of Lerici to visit the site of Shelley's death and his last domicile, the Casa Magni. Anna Mercer has made her own pilgrimage to Lerici, and her wonderful story, "In the Footsteps of the Shelleys" can be found here.   He can be seen here, in one of his very typical poses, in front of Shelley's last home.

From his first pilgrimage in 1936, to his last 50 years later in 1986, my father was devoted to the man and the poet he perceived Shelley to be.  While we could never find any common ground in our mutual appreciations for Shelley, which I wrote about in "My Father's Shelley: A Tale of Two Shelleys", I have come to realize that in his passion for Shelley, I am my father's son (and perhaps my grandmother's grandson!). I do not know if my father's and grandmother's love for this man will descend to another generation of Hendersons, but if it does not and if it ends here, it has be a truly memorable run. And were Shelley alive to have witnessed all this, as a man who believed that the world could indeed be changed one person at a time, I am hope he would be well and truly satisfied.

THE WIND has swept from the wide atmosphere
  Each vapor that obscured the sunset’s ray;
And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair
  In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day.
Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,        
Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.
 
They breathe their spells toward the departing day,
  Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;
Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,
  Responding to the charm with its own mystery.        
The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass
Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.
 
Thou too, aerial pile, whose pinnacles
  Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire,
Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells,        
  Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire,
Around whose lessening and invisible height
Gather among the stars the clouds of night.
 
The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres;
  And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,        
Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,
  Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around;
And, mingling with the still night and mute sky,
Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.
 
Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild        
  And terrorless as this serenest night;
Here could I hope, like some inquiring child
  Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight
Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep
That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned at sea, 8 July 1822.

"Death is mild and terrrorless as this serenest night."