Let Fury Have the Hour - Shelley and The Clash

Let Fury Have the Hour - Shelley and The Clash

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On 8 May 1970 the Beatles issued their final album and broke up - the music that I had grown up with was, I thought, finished and the world was unraveling. Ah youth. I was not yet 16. Then, when I was barely 18, the chess and hockey started - and things really went nuts.

In the summer of 1972 the American Bobby Fischer faced Boris Spassky, a Russian, in a chess (chess!!!!) match that came to be known as the “Match of the Century”. It dominated newspaper headlines for months. Without question this will be looked back on as the most famous chess match ever played - though not necessarily because of the chess - though it was brilliant. Garry Kasparov, a subsequent world champion, explains why:

“I think the reason you look at these matches was not so much due to the chess factor but rather the political element. This was inevitable because in the Soviet Union chess was treated by the Soviet authorities as a very important and a useful ideological tool to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the Soviet communist regime over the West. That is why Spassky’s defeat was treated by people on both sides of the Atlantic as a crushing moment in the midst of the cold war”.

“Then the chess and hockey started - and things really went nuts.”

Spassky (left) and Fischer in 1972

Spassky had barely resigned the match on 31 August 1972 when a mere 2 days later a very different and far more physical cold war contest began. On 2 September 1972 Canada and the Soviet Union squared off in what came to be known as the Summit Series. For decades the Soviets had dominated international hockey largely because the Canadian had never “iced” their professional players. For the first time, our best would face their best. 26 grueling days later the series ended with a dramatic last minute goal - Canada had defeated the Soviet Union. I know exactly where I was.

In that same summer, the Black September terrorists kidnapped and murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Then came an oil embargo that roiled the world. Next came Nixon’s epic disgrace and resignation. Over the next few years we would learn about the deaths of millions of Cambodians at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. During this same period wars erupted across Africa as former colonial states fought for independence in places like Rhodesia and South Africa.

In 1978 we were shocked by the mass suicides in what was called Jonestown. We were also introduced to the concept of serial killers thanks to the predations of David Berkowitz (the “Son of Sam”) and Ted Bundy. The threat of nuclear disasters also dominated our world culminating in Three Mile Island accident in 1979. The soundtrack for much of this period was a bizarre mishmash of “prog rock” and disco. Below the surface, however, we took shelter with Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith and holdovers from the late 60s.

Paul Henderson scores the winning goal with seconds left.

I am not going to suggest that the 1970s were uniformly terrible. Every era has its good and its bad. The chess was terrific and Canada’s national hockey team accomplished what was thought to be impossible. Mother Theresa won the Nobel peace Prize. Arthur Ashe won Wimbledon. Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. Louise Brown became the world’s first test tube baby. Secretariat blew away the field to win the Triple Crown. Billie Jean King beat that fool Bobby Riggs. Some amazing movies got made: Clockwork Orange, The French Connection, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Taxi Driver, and Alien. And musically, the decade went out in a blaze of rock and roll we called punk.

Somehow, during all of this confusion, I managed to come of age and become a man. I graduated from high school in 1973 and eventually went to University. I fell in love, out of love and back in love. I cemented friendships which have endured to this day. But what sustained me for the latter part of this decade was a couple of things: my love of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s and music - specifically, punk rock.

“ Let fury have the hour, anger can be power - The Clash”

I was young and fairly revolutionary in my thinking. I was studying English literature - Shelley and Blake were my heroes. I liked them because they opposed the status quo - they fought the system. Much like Shelley, I could not abide Wordsworth - not because of the poetry - but because he became a backsliding, reactionary, counter-revolutionary. He became as, Mary Shelley so succinctly put it, a “slave”. And there is nothing that youthful rebels despise more than seeing their heroes back-silde into conformity.

In the 1970s, Shelley was still an outcast in the academic community – his reputation had been almost irreparably damaged by the likes of Eliot and Leavis. It was only just then in the process of being resuscitated thanks to scholars such as Milton Wilson (with whom I had the luck to later complete my masters at the University of Toronto), the great Kenneth Neill Cameron and Eric Wasserman. To study Shelley was almost an act of rebellion in and of itself. He was a lot of very cool things: atheist, vegetarian, philosophical anarchist, feminist, anti-monarchist, republican and lots more. He was seriously rock and roll.

One of my favourite bands from the era was Buzzcocks, an English outfit fronted by a man named Pete Shelley. Pete had been born as Peter McNeish; but when he took to the stage he changed his name to honour his favourite romantic poet. I was enthralled by this idea and when I wrote my masters thesis, I included three musical epigraphs: two from the Sex Pistols and one from Buzzcocks. It was perhaps a stretch - however in my youthful rebellious mind I thought it was apt.

But was it really so far-fetched to tie together punk music and romantic poetry? To test this, I thought I would be fun to have a quick glance at one of the classics of the era to see if there are, in fact, any Shelleyan overtones. That classic? Clampdown by The Clash from the album London Calling. Let’s dig in.

To make this work, you really need to do me a favour.  You need to follow this link or this one or this one and give the song a few listens. When you are done that, come on back and let’s continue.

Clampdown is a song about the loss of youthful ideals. Written by Joe Strummer, one of the band's most fiercely anti-establishment members, the song charts the manner in which this can happen. And just as Shelley understood importance of language, so too did Strummer. He laments the manner in which society teaches its "twisted speech to the young believers"; the manner in which youthful revolutionary instincts are dulled by an inculcated appetite for money and the acquisition of luxuries.

We will teach our twisted speech
To the young believers
We will train our blue-eyed men
To be young believers

“You grow up and you calm down - you’re working for the clampdown. - The Clash”

The tendency of revolutions to fail to bring about meaningful change and progress was always a concern for Shelley; it is one of the reasons I think he was almost obsessed with language. I am not sure that, apart from Shakespeare, there has ever been a writer who not only understood the power of language, but who mastered it so completely. Words can free us; words can enslave us. Professor Michael O’Neill in his keynote address to the Shelley Conference 2017 digs into how Shelley uses language to challenge custom and habit; or, as O’Neill puts it, to "invite [his readers] to reconsider the world in which we live." This, to me, strikes at the heart of Shelley’s entire output; this was a man who believed that poetry (or more generally cultural products) could literally change the world.  I have written about this here and here.

In the case of Clampdown, Strummer castigates the youth of all generations, alleging, "You grow up and you calm down / You're working for the clampdown. For his part, he imagines a revolutionary resistance to the state:

The judge said five to ten-but I say double that again
I'm not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown

How familiar does this start to sound? I hear echoes of Prometheus facing down the Jupiter in Act 1 of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.  Both speakers see themselves as martyrs. In Clampdown, the protagonist is charged by the police for an act of rebellion against the state. At his trial, he defies his judge and asks for his sentence to be doubled. Then, spitting with anger: 

Kick over the wall cause governments to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
D’you know that you can use it?

“Kick over the wall cause governments to fall. - The Clash”

The state, however, is seen as cunning and subversive. It gets inside your head, it coerces you subtly; wears you down, urges conformity. Why fight the system? You will never win. At this point I hear the furies from Act 2 of Prometheus Unbound taunting Prometheus. Strummer himself imagines a subversive internal dialogue that erodes the will to resist:

The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you

Even the members of one's own class are not to be trusted: 

The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get runnin'
It's the best years of your life they want to steal

He then moves to the accusatory crescendo of the song:

You grow up and you calm down
You're working for the clampdown
You start wearing the blue and brown
You're working for the clampdown.

“Shelley was a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism - Marx”

Joe Strummer

And once this happens the conversion is complete. Youthful rebellion is replaced by aging complacency and conformity - the young rebellious Wordsworth becomes the old reactionary Wordsworth. The revolution, in other words, fails. It seems to me that there are some surprising echoes here of both Prometheus Unbound and Shelley's own life. The voices inside Joe Strummer’s head are the Clash's version of Mercury and the Furies. We all hear them. Unlike Shelley, however, Strummer had no real sense of the perfectibility of man. He saw only chaos and degradation – the endless cycles of revolution-tyranny-revolution. Shelley saw a way out. Not so Joe Strummer. 

Shelley, drawn by Edward Williams (If only PBS had a publicist!)

As a young man, despising Wordsworth as a sellout and extolling Shelley as a revolutionary, I clung to the message of Clampdown: which I took to be: "Don't grow up and turn into your old man; don't conform." Be Shelley, not Wordsworth. Now, of course, there was one flaw in my thinking. Shelley died before he had a chance to turn into a Wordsworth; before the voices in his head subverted his revolutionary impulses. And he has detractors who suggest that had he not died, this is exactly what would have happened - he would have grown up and become a proper Tory.

Possibly. But maybe not. Not everyone is destined to become a Wordsworth. Think for example of the great crusading journalist (and Shelleyan) Paul Foot. I wrote about him here. Or what about Ursula Leguin (another Shelleyan). Leguin and Foot never for a minute surrendered their ideals. I like to think Shelley would never have surrendered them either, would never have worked for the clampdown. And I am not alone, here is what Karl Marx said:

"The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand and love them rejoice that Byron died at 36, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at 29, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism."

But those voice in our heads........they keep calling - don’t they. Shelley knew that. Contrary to what many think, Shelley was not a utopian and Prometheus Unbound is not his vision of utopia. Have a close look at Act 3. After the forces unleashed by Demogorgon oust Jupiter, Demogorgon does not vanish - Shelley envisages that he retires to a cave beneath the world from whence he may be called forth again in the event the revolution fails. This underscores Shelley’s lifelong skepticism: you can fight for change, you can win, but you can just as easily lose everything you have gained down the road. The only cure? Eternal vigilance and an ever-renewing revolutionary imagination.

The rebellious spirit of the romantic poets is really not so far removed from that of the punk rock musicians of the 1970s and 80s. This is why the study of poets like Shelley (in particular) can offer so much to us today. There is a commonality of spirit, a sort of intellectual esprit de coeur, that unites them - that unites are true revolutionaries. And they all tell us one thing: we grow old at our own peril.

“Let fury have the hour, anger can be power”.

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.

2017 - The Year in Review

2017 was a busy year for Percy Bysshe Shelley and later this week I will publish my Top Ten Shelleyan Moments of 2017 - watch for it!! It was also a busy year for my website and its associated social media platforms. The website experienced 12,000 Unique Visitors 15,000 Visits and over 21,000 Page Views. This is up almost 90% year over year in Unique Visitors.

These numbers are huge for a poetry site. The audience is world-wide. Where are the visits coming from? Perhaps not surprisingly the UK leads the pack with 5,500 visits. In second place is the United States (3,500), followed by Canada (2,300) and Italy (1,100!!!). The top five is rounded out by Ireland (900).

The late, great Paul Foot.

By far the most viewed posts were those which involved the publication of Paul Foot’s epic 1981 speech to the London Marxism Conference: "Paul Foot Speaks: The Revolutionary Percy Bysshe Shelley".

In general, the more political my posts were, the more popular they were – a fact I find very interesting. Shelley’s politics is what seems to excite modern readers the most.  That said, my hugely popular photo essay about the cemetery where Shelley is buried in Rome was a close second.

I introduced video posts this summer with a visit to the beach at Viareggio where Shelley drowned. I wish I could do more of this, but I actually have a full-time job that is quite demanding.

I am sadly months behind in my Shelleyan projects – and what has suffered to most is writing time.  So, my solution this fall was to hire a paid research and editorial assistant, Jonathan Kerr. Jon is a recent PhD in Romanticism from the University of Toronto. You will start to see a lot more of him!

Clearly people love Shelley and are extraordinarily passionate about him. I have had literally hundreds of comments from folks around the world who tell me Shelley changed their lives.  Reconnecting people with him has been one of the most rewarding, enriching things I have ever done.

My Facebook, "The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley", page more than doubled its followers, cresting 3,000 in November. My Facebook analytics tell me that for an arts and humanities site, I have one of the most engaged audiences in the world.  I have introduced several features: every Tuesday you will find a poem and some commentary – this is selected and published by Jon Kerr. Then there is Throwback Thursday which will feature older article from the website – also selected by Jon. I am also republishing Paul Stephens brilliantly curated series of quotes from Shelley’s letters – and I have added commentary.  I try to schedule a link to an original article at least once a week. And, of course, I do my best to keep everyone up to date on Shelleyan news.

Over at Twitter we have over 700 real people following us. I make it a point to prune bots and advertising sites, so there the numbers are not inflated as they are in so many other feeds. I also have clear editorial guidelines. What you see in the feed is directly related in one way or another to Shelley’s ideas. Because he was such a renaissance man, this means the subject matter covered is wide indeed.

Operating “The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley” is a labour of love that requires a significant investment in time and money. Readers will have noticed that many of the Facebook posts are “sponsored”.  That sponsorship investment is made by me and I have actually spent several thousand dollars to build the audience – advertising is almost the only way I can guarantee you see my posts. But I believe it is worth it.

You can help reduce these costs by taking a couple of steps.  First, “Like” my page. I realize that some people worry about Facebook monitoring what you do or don’t like – but how much can it hurt to like a poetry site – and it really helps me.  My guess is that I actually have thousands more followers – but I can’t tell because they have not liked the site. Secondly, when you visit my page, at the top you will see three buttons side by side. “Liked” “Following” and “Recommend”.  If you hover over Recommend a drop down menu appears – select “See First”.

By doing this you have dramatically raised your chances of seeing my posts. Next, you can click the “Recommend Button”. Your recommendation will appear in your feed and help me spread the word. Finally, please rate my page. I have a sterling 4.8 (out of 5.0) rating – but more ratings boosts my sites credibility.  Phew, that is a lot. But doing this helps not just me, it helps Shelley.

Gazing out to sea at Livorno in May, 2017. Shelley sailed from here to his death. Just as on that day in 1822, the sky was brooding and storms threatened. It was an eerie moment.

Thanks to everyone who has been a part of this journey. Shelley was a highly motivated political creature who dedicated his life to changing the world. At some point he realized that he would never manage build sufficient momentum to do this in his lifetime. I think this was profoundly demoralizing. However, he recovered and I believe he started to write for future generations - in otherwords us.  If those of us who love him do not join him in this enterprise, then we are letting him (and ourselves) down. For my reflections on his relevance to the 21st Century, see my article, "Shelley in Our Time".

And with that I wish all of my readers a happy, restful holiday season.

Let Liberty Lead Us; Connecting the Radical Poetry of Cottingham, Eminem and Shelley

In Shelley's introduction to Prometheus Unbound, he proudly remarked that he had a “passion for reforming the world”. For a poet who struggled to publish his more radical poetry during his lifetime, he has a remarkable record for actually accomplishing his objective.  His effect upon the modern labour and union movements has been well documented. If we took a single example, his influence on Pauline Newman who, inspired by Mask of Anarchy, helped create the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (one of the most powerful and effective unions of the 20th Century) and the Worker's University (where courses on the radical poets of the French Revolution were taught), Shelley could be well satisfied. I have written about this here.

Today I want to look at two recent examples of poetry’s potential to reform the world: poet and performance artist Arielle Cottingham and rapper Eminem.

Arielle Cottingham at the Australian Poetry Slam Championship in 2016

Cottingham, a Texan now living in Melbourne, won the 2016 edition of the Australian Poetry Slam. She was recently interviewed by Andrea Simpson for the magazine ArtsHub. In an article meaningfully entitled, “Why We Need Poets More Than Ever Before”, Cottingham cited Shelley as an inspiration for her work and pointed to his famous comment in A Defense of Poetry: Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

I have unpacked what Shelley meant by this here. It was PMS Dawson who pointed out that Shelley used the term "legislator" in a special sense. Not as someone who "makes laws" but as someone who is a "representative" of the people. In this sense poets, or creators more generally, must be thought of as the voice of the people; as a critical foundation of our society and of our democracy. They offer insights into our world and provide potential solutions - they underpin our future.

I think this puts me in essential agreement with Cottingham who explained her own view to Simpson thusly:

[Shelley] argues that poets are the moral barometers of their times and circumstances – and look at the well-known poets today. Bob Dylan is lauded as the voice of a generation. Maya Angelou elevated the voice of the black woman to an unprecedented visibility. Gil Scott Heron wrote a single line of poetry so prescient that it became more famous than he himself did – "The revolution will not be televised." To quote Miles Merrill, "poets are more honest than politicians."

You can watch Cottingham’s championship performance at the Sydney Opera House here:

Cottingham’s electrifying peroration firmly positions her as a modern Shelleyan with designs on reforming the world:

We [women] will shout our poetry into every hurricane that history hurls at use. For we have always shaped history the way the moon shapes the tide; no matter how invisible it seems. We don’t have to be invisible anymore. So when the next storm comes, nail your doors open, bite down on your microphones, let history flood your lungs and unleash hurricanes of your own.

This make me think of another of Shelley’s remarks in the Defense where, using another extreme weather-related metaphor, he says,

The great writers of our own age are…the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social conditions or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging is collected lightening….

Well, speaking of discharged lightening, let’s now turn to Eminem. As Bari Weiss pointed out in the New York Times recently, rappers have led the way in providing opposition to the Whitehouse Racist's authoritarian-tinged presidency. But as she goes on to say:

Yet Eminem’s “The Storm,” a scathing four-minute attack on the “kamikaze that will probably cause a nuclear holocaust,” which he debuted at the BET Awards on Tuesday night, has already overshadowed all of these previous anti-Trump musical efforts. It’s made major news headlines. It’s already garnered 8.7 million views on YouTube. And there have been some two million tweets about the performance, with praise pouring in from stars including LeBron James and Ellen DeGeneres.

Weiss ties the greater impact to Eminem’s whiteness and the fact he comes from Detroit – both factors which pose something of an existential threat to the Whitehouse Racist:

Eminem knows that Republicans buy songs — his songs — too. His message to them is to stop buying. After focusing on the evils of the “racist 94-year-old grandpa” in the White House, he gives his Trump-supporting fans an ultimatum. “I’m drawing in the sand a line: you’re either for or against,” he says. “And if you can’t decide who you like more and you’re split / On who you should stand beside, I’ll do it for you with this,” he adds, giving his middle finger to the camera.

Weiss goes on to point out that those of his fans who support the Whitehouse Racist have already vowed never to listen to his music again. So Eminem has put a lot in play here. You can watch the full, searing, 4-minute recording of his freestyle cypher here:

Eminem opens by mocking Donald Trump's vague and meaningless "calm before the storm" threats.  But then, after a pause, he offers a real Shelleyan storm, discharging his collected lightening with a cold, calculated fury.

And speaking of cold, calculated fury, lets us finally turn our attention to Shelley. 

When Shelley famously declared that he was a lover of humanity, a democrat and an atheist, he deliberately, intentionally and provocatively nailed his colours to the mast knowing full well his words would be widely read and would inflame passions.

Shelley's words, written in 1816, appeared in a Chamonix hotel register. The top line reads, in Greek, I am a lover of humanity, democrat and atheist. BOOM!

The phrase, lover of humanity, however, deserve particular attention. Shelley did not write these words in English, he wrote them in Greek using the term: philanthropos tropos. This was deliberate.  The first use of this term appears in Aeschylus’ play Prometheus Bound. This was the ancient Greek play which Shelley was “answering” with his own masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound. 

Aeschylus used his newly coined word philanthropos tropos (humanity loving) to describe Prometheus, the titan who rebelled against the gods of Olympus. The word was picked up by Plato and came to be much commented upon, including by Bacon, one of Shelley’s favourite authors.  Bacon considered "philanthropy" to be synonymous with "goodness", which he connected with Aristotle’s idea of “virtue”. Shelley knew this and I believe this tells us that Shelley identified closely with his own poetic creation, Prometheus. In using the term, Shelley is telling us he is a humanist - a radical concept in his priest-ridden times.

When he wrote these words he was declaring war against the hegemonic power structure of his time. Shelley was in effect saying, "I am against god. I am against the king. I am the modern Prometheus. And I will steal the fire of the gods and I will bring down thrones and I will empower the people." And not only did he say these things, he developed a system to deliver on this promise.

As I watch the performances of Cottingham and Eminem, I can only wish Shelley could as well.  I can imagine the wide grin that would cross his face.

Now, here is an example of Shelley's own discharge of collected lightening: England in 1819. This is a poem whose words, with very minor changes, could apply to the the man Eminem called a racist 94-year-old grandpa:

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,--
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring,--
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,--
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,--
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,--
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless--a book sealed;
A Senate,--Time's worst statute unrepealed,--
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestous day.

My point in drawing attention to these two modern poets is to remind us that one of the true fountainheads of radical poetic opposition to tyranny and oppression was Shelley. And whether modern poets knowingly operate in that tradition, as Cottingham appears to, or not, they do function as the voice of the people and in that sense as our representatives; or as Shelley would have said, as our legislators. They are all philanthropos tropos: lovers of humanity.

Today the liberal arts and the humanities are under a similar attack by the parasitic, cultural vandals of Silicon Valley. Right across the United States, Republican governors are rolling back support for state universities that offer liberal arts education. The mantra of our day is "Science. Technology. Engineering. Mathematics." Or STEM for short.  This is not just a US phenomenon.  I see it happening in Canada as well.  There is a burgeoning sense that a liberal arts education is worthless.

Culture is worth fighting for - for the very reasons Shelley set out. What Shelley called a "cultivated imagination" can see the world differently - through a lens of love and empathy. Our "gifts" are not given to us by god - we earn them.  They belong to us.  We should be proud of them. The idea that we owe all of this to an external deity is vastly dis-empowering. And it suits the ruling order.

A corollary of this, also encapsulated in Shelley's philosophy, is the importance of skepticism.  A skeptical, critical mind always attacks the truth claims of authority.  And authority tends to rely upon truth claims that are disconnected from reality: America is great because god made it great. Thus, Shelley was fond of saying, "religion is the hand maiden of tyranny."

It should therefore not surprise anyone that many authoritarian governments seek to reinforce the power of society's religious superstructure. This is exactly what Trump is doing by blurring the line between church and state. Religious beliefs dis-empower the people - they are taught to trust authority.

Eminem has drawn a line in the sand. Shelley has discharged his collected lightening. Arielle Cottingham has unleashed her hurricane. Let's join them at the barricades. Let Liberty lead us.

Eugene Delacroix, July 28, Liberty Leading the People. 1831. Oil on Canvas. The Louvre.

The Revolutionary Percy Shelley in His Time and Ours

Today I am pleased to release the recording of my presentation "The Revolutionary Shelley in His Time and Ours".  This was delivered on November 15th 2016 as part of the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Shelley Seminar; run under the auspices of The Unbinding Prometheus Project and Penn Libraries. I hope you enjoy it.  You will find some introductory notes below.

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"I am a lover of mankind, a democrat and an atheist."

When Shelley wrote these words in the hotel register at Chamonix, he was, as PMS Dawson has suggested deliberately, intentionally and provocatively “nailing his colours to the mast”. The thumbnail above is a portion of the actual hotel register page. Shelley's handwriting can be seen in the top line. Here it is in full:

He knew full well people would see these words and that they would inflame passions. The words, however may require some context and explanation.  Many people have sought to diminish the importance of these words and the circumstances under which they were written.  Some modern scholars have even ridiculed him.  I think his choice of words was very deliberate and central to how he defined himself and how wanted the world to think of him.  They may well have been the words he was most famous (or infamous) for in his lifetime.

Shelley’s atheism and his political philosophy were at the heart of his poetry and his revolutionary agenda (yes, he had one).  Our understanding of Shelley is impoverished to the extent we ignore or diminish its importance.

Shelley visited the Chamonix Valley at the base of Mont Blanc in July of 1816. Mont Blanc was a routine stop on the so-called “Grand Tour.”  In fact, so many people visited it, that you will find Shelley in his letters bemoaning the fact that the area was "overrun by tourists." With the Napoleonic wars only just at an end, English tourists were again flooding the continent.  While in Chamonix, many would have stayed at the famous Hotel de Villes de Londres, as did Shelley.  As today, the lodges and guest houses of those days maintained a “visitor’s register”; unlike today those registers would have contained the names of a virtual who’s who of upper class society.  Ryan Air was not flying English punters in for day visits. What you wrote in such a register was guaranteed to be read by literate, well connected aristocrats - even if you penned your entry in Greek – as Shelley did. 

The words Shelley wrote in the register of the Hotel de Villes de Londres (under the heading "Observations") were (as translated by PMS Dawson): “philanthropist, an utter democrat, and an atheist”.  The words were, as I say, written in Greek.  The Greek word he used for philanthropist was "philanthropos tropos." The origin of the word and its connection to Shelley is very interesting.  Its first use appears in Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound” the Greek play which Shelley was “answering” with his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound.  Aeschylus used his newly coined word “philanthropos tropos” (humanity loving) to describe Prometheus. The word was picked up by Plato and came to be much commented upon, including by Bacon, one of Shelley’s favourite authors.  Bacon considered philanthropy to be synonymous with "goodness", which he connected with Aristotle’s idea of “virtue”.

What do the words Shelley chose mean and why is it important? Because here is exactly what I think he was saying: I am against god. I am against the king. I am the modern Prometheus, and I will steal fire from the gods and I will bring down kingdoms and I will give power to the people. This is an incredibly revolutionary statement for the time.  No wonder he scared people. But not only did he say these things, he was developing, as we will see, a system to deliver on this promise. Part of his system was based on his innate skepticism, of which he was a surprising sophisticated practitioner.  And like all skeptics since the dawn of history, he used it to undermine authority and attack truth claims. "Implicit faith," he wrote, "and fearless inquiry have in all ages been irreconcilable enemies. Unrestrained philosophy in every age opposed itself to the reveries of credulity and fanaticism."

My presentation will discuss his revolutionary programme and its application to our modern era.  Enjoy.

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.

View fullsize

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.

The Shelley Conference - London, 15-16 September 2017

On Friday and Saturday the 15th and 16th of September, in London, the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at University of York, is presenting a two day conference that celebrates the writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The event is organized by two brilliant young young Romantics scholars: Anna Mercer and Harrie Neal.

I will be speaking at this conference.

Keynote speakers include some of the very top people in this field: Professor Nora Crook, Michael Neill and Kelvin Everest.  But there are also a host of panel discussions that look excellent.  I strongly recommend this conference to anyone who can make it.  The price is right and many of the topics are mouthwatering.

Some of the names that will be familiar to my readers include: Mark Summers who will talk about "Reclaiming Shelley's Radical Republicanism";  Anna Mercer on the extent to which Percy and Mary collaborated; Jacqueline Mulhallen on "1817 - a Philosophical Year for Shelley"; and Lynn Shepherd on "Fictionalizing the Shelleys". 

As for me, my topic will be the subject of "Romantic Resistance."  Shelley's writing affords modern political activists a veritable treasure trove of ideas and, as one of my readers put it, "Words of Power".  As we contemplate a world in which wealth is concentrated in ever fewer hands, a world in which superstition and religion are increasing their pernicious influence, a world in which tyrants are proliferating, we must see that our world is very much Shelley's. We have need of his guidance.  He was one of the greatest political thinkers of any age.

The event takes place at the Institute for English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London Greater London WC1E 7HU (near to the British Museum).

Paul Foot understood this.  He persistently and passionately promoted Shelley's ideas to a generation of leftists whom he believed had lost their intellectual vigor as well as their connection to the problems of everyday people. 

Paul Foot

He offered this reason for restoring Shelley to prominence: modern activists need, he said in his famous speech to the 1981 London Marxism Conference,

"...a language which has some bite and zest and enthusiasm. That’s what we have to do and that’s why I think reading great revolutionary poets like Shelley is fundamentally important. It is filled with all kinds of images, all kinds of similes and metaphors - ways of saying things, different ways of saying things. The great masters of language really understood language and could use it like great musicians use the piano. These are things we need to soak up. Particularly when those great masters of language are in line with our politics."

But I think there is more, much more, than just language.  Timothy Webb once said of Shelley that “politics was probably the dominating concern of his life.” My presentation will demonstrate how Shelley’s politics, his philosophical skepticism and his theory of the imagination combine to offer some potent solutions for the troubles of the early 21st Century.  Given recent events, it is time that we cast a fresh eye on romantic, specifically Shelleyan, theories of resistance.

When Shelley declared in Chamonix that he was a “lover of humanity, a democrat and an atheist” he did so knowing his words would be widely read.  The “Chamonix Declaration”, as I refer to it, was a more revolutionary statement than has commonly been assumed.  I will offer a new interpretation of what Shelley meant by these words and the radical programme he proposed to upend the political and religious status quo.

Mont Blanc

To do this I will reopen the question of Shelley’s philosophical skepticism and the role it played in his theory of revolution.  For Shelley skepticismwas a critically important tool to undermine authority and attack truth claims. In an age of “alternative facts” and “fake news” the value of skepticism as a discipline and approach to tyranny is all too evident. Mere skepticism was not and still is not, enough, however, to effect permanent political change.

I will argue that Shelley therefore evolved a theory of the imagination, at a time almost exactly contemporaneous to the Chamonix Declaration, to provide a mechanism for permanent revolutionary change; the type of change that would avoid the backsliding into chaos and tyranny he witnessed in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Shelley has answers that remain as relevant today as they were in his time; just how we communicate those answers to the general public will also be discussed. Shelley famously wrote, "Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: the power is there," he did not mean for us to think the power lay outside us.  It is actually within us all.  We have the power to change the world.  But we have to act.  Paul Foot understood this well when he said:

Of all the things about Shelley that really inspired people since his death, the thing that matters above all is his enthusiasm for the idea that the world can be changed. It shapes all his poetry. And when you come to read Ode to the West Wind where he writes about the “pestilence stricken multitudes” and the leaves being blown by the wind; then you understand that he sees the leaves as multitudes of people stricken by a pestilence. You begin to see his ideas, his enthusiasm and his love of life. He believed in life and he really felt that life is what mattered.  That life could and should be better than it is. Could be better and should be better. Could and should be changed. That was the thing he believed in most of all.

Please join me and others in London on September 14-15 for a wonderful excursion into the brilliant minds of Percy and Mary Shelley.

Shelley Square in Viareggio, Italy.

Pecksie and the Elf. What's in a Pet Name?

This is me with the Elf on my left and Pecksie on my right at the Bodmer Foundation in Geneva

Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, like almost everyone else on the planet, had pet names for one another. She was "Pecksie" and he was "Elf".  PB's use of the name "pecksie" has actually attracted controversy. To find out why, I dug into the circumstances in which these names were used and the fascinating origin of "pecksie". Buckle up!

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Many years ago, while reading Anne Mellor's biography of Mary Shelley, I encountered her opinion of Percy’s use of a pet name for Mary. The name was “pecksie”.  In Mellor’s opinion, this demonstrated “that he did not regard his wife altogether seriously as an author”.  Cue my head exploding.

The pet name had appeared twice in the margins of a manuscript copy of Frankenstein that PB and MW had been jointly working on.  Nora Crook, one of the foremost Shelley scholars alive today, supplies the details here:

“On the manuscript of Frankenstein are two comments by P. B. Shelley which have become infamous. Writing quickly, Mary Shelley had left off the first syllable of 'enigmatic' and ended up with 'igmmatic' (she was prone to double the letter 'm' while her husband had an ie/ei problem with words like 'viel' and 'thier'). Later she confused Roger Bacon with Francis Bacon. He scribbled 'o you pretty Pecksie' beside the first and 'no sweet Pecksie—twas friar Bacon the discoverer of gunpowder.'”

Most scholars, but not all, looked upon these pet names and comments as benign, even endearing. But remarks such as Mellor's were enough to fuel a controversy that persists to this day.

At this point I think we need to pause and give our heads a collective shake.  Are we really having this conversation?  Hopefully not.  Nora Crook had, I think, a similar reaction and produced a brilliant, accessible, and sensitive essay on PB and MW's relationship, using the pet names as a jumping off point. She begins:

“Whether, however, a young woman who at nineteen could read Tacitus in the original would have felt intimidated by this may be doubted, especially one who called her spouse her 'Sweet Elf'.  Between Pecksie and Elf, in terms of diminution, there is, prima facie, little to choose, any more than there is between the protagonists in the Valentine's Day newspaper advertisements where Snuggle Bum pledges love to Fluffkins. Intimate pet-names are almost invariably embarrassing to read. We do not know enough about the contexts in which these arose, whether they pleased or annoyed at the time, whether 'Pecksie' and 'Elf' were pleasant banterings or counters in underground hostilities. It would seem wise to suspend judgement and use them as evidence neither of an unproblematically equal relationship nor of one in which Mary Shelley was subordinated.”

I might also add here that the “young woman” in question was the daughter of no less a personage that Mary Wollstonecraft (the author of Vindication of the Rights of Women) and William Godwin (the author of Political Justice).  Intellectually, she was a match for PB. 

Even more interesting is the fact that, as Anna Mercer demonstrates, in the Shelley household, the term “pecksie” was applied by each partner to the other!  For example, in a letter from 1815, Mary asked Percy to return one of her possessions, if he fails to do so, Mary tells him fondly, "I shall think it un-Pecksie of you".

This suggests that “pecksie” might have been more than just a pet name and rather a term that represented a constellated set of attributes. We might therefore be interested in what exactly it means to be “pecksie”; what behaviours or patterns of conduct fall into the category of “pecksian”? I think I am now in the position to shed some light on this!

So, let’s look at the origin of the term "pecksie". We begin again with Nora Crook suggests that it is "the name of the industrious bird in Mrs. Sherwood's The History of the Robins".  Mary Martha Sherwood was an incredibly influential, best selling writer of children's literature in 18th and 19th century England.  She was also an inveterate christian evangelist and proselytizer – which makes her books unlikely source material for the atheistical PB Shelley.  But is Sherwood the source of the nickname? No.

In this, Crooks is unfortunately mistaken.  The author of The History of Robins is not Sherwood, it was in fact Sarah Trimmer as Judith Barbour has pointed out.

And the correct spelling of the little robin’s name is in fact “Pecksy” and not "pecksie".  Trimmer was in her own right an extremely famous children's author. Originally titled Fabulous Histories, Trimmers' book was continuously in print and a favourite of parents and children alike until after the First World War. After 1820, the book came to be known as The History of Robins or more simply, The Robins.

Born in 1741, Sarah Trimmer’s first book did not appear until 1780.  Fabulous Histories, the book which established her reputation, was published in 1786. Today she is perhaps most famous for her periodical that systematically categorized and reviewed children’s literature: The Guardian of Education.  The Hockcliffe Project is a remarkable cache of early children's literature which has recently been digitized.  According to the uncredited author of the introductory essay on Sarah Trimmer:

“Trimmer's purpose in her Fabulous Histories was to teach children to behave with Christian benevolence towards all animals. Most of the book is spent inveighing against children and adults who torment animals, and also those who fall into the 'contrary fault of immoderate tenderness to them'. Both were common themes in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century children's (and adult's) literature. So too was the more overarching purpose of teaching the reader his or her place in the grand hierarchy of the universe. The reader learns that humans are at the head of creation, with power over all other living beings. Though this gives them the right to kill other animals and plants for food and to protect themselves, they may not without reason kill or hurt any creature without transgressing against the 'divine principle of UNIVERSAL BENEVOLENCE'.”

Trimmer aimed to teach these lessons by presenting the reader with two families, one of humans and one of robins. Both families, individually and through their interaction, are a microcosm of society. The reader is meant vicariously to learn the proprieties of family life and of behaviour to other parts of God's creation through the education by their respective parents of the two human children, Harriet and Frederick, and the four robin nestlings, Robin, Dicky, Flapsy and Pecksy. The human family, the Bensons, is fairly typical of the usual inhabitants of moral tales. They are affluent and landed. There is a largely absent father, and a loving if somewhat stern and pontificating mother. And there is one obedient and thoughtful child, Harriet, and another, younger sibling, more imprudent and thoughtless, but good at heart and responsive to a painstaking education. Though the family of robins was constructed on similar lines, with doting but stern parents and a brood which ranged from the docile and considerate Pecksy to the rash and conceited Robin, is was surely their presence which secured the book's lasting popularity.

Which brings us to the question of what it might mean in the Shelley household to be “pecksian”.  I do not want to over play this hand, but if it is true that both PB and MW aspired to behave in a manner consistent with a set of "pecksian traits" and reproved one another when they failed to, it is worth while trying to understand what those traits were.  It could tell us a surprising amount about the two of them.

Nora Crook would have us believe such behavior would be characterized as “industriousness”.  However, having read a fair portion of Fabulous Histories, I think Pecksy’s personality is typified by a very different set of personality traits: she is obedient, amiable, self-effacing, considerate of others, self-sacrificing and a peacemaker.

The four nestlings from Fabulous Histories: Dicky, Pecksy, Flapsy, and Robin.

While the other three baby robins are continually in trouble, Pecksy distinguishes herself by her serene and sweet behavior. She is almost something of a “goody two shoes” who “wished to comply with every desire of her dear parents”.  Perhaps not surprisingly, this makes Pecksy somewhat unpopular with her siblings, who grow quite jealous of her and are often reproved for this by their mother. For example:

“A few days after a fresh disturbance took place, all the little robins except Pecksy, in turn committed some fault or other for which they were occasionally punished; but she was of so amiable a disposition that it was her constant study to act with propriety, and avoid giving offence; on which account she was justly treated by her parents with distinguished kindness. This excited the envy of the others, and they joined together to treat her ill, giving her the title of the “pet”, saying that they made no doubt their father and mother would reserve the nicest morsels for their darling.”

Somewhat later we find this exchange between Pecksy and her mother after an incident which led to her being tormented by her siblings:

“‘I have been unhappy my dear mother’, said she, ‘but not so much as you suppose; and I am ready to believe that my dear brothers and sister were not in earnest in the severe things they said of me -- perhaps they only meant to try my affection. I now entreat them to believe, that I would willingly resign the greatest pleasure in life, could I by that means increase their happiness; and so far from wishing for the nicest morsel, I would content myself with the humblest fare rather than any of them should be disappointed.’ This tender speech had its desired effect it recalled those sentiments of love which envy and jealousy had for a time banished; all the nestlings acknowledged their faults, their mother forgave them and a perfect reconciliation took place to the great joy of Pecksy, and indeed of all parties”.

Later, Pecksy brings her mother a spider to eat. Her mother approvingly remarks, “How happy would families be if everyone like you, my dear, Pecksy consulted the welfare of the rest instead of turning their whole attention to their own interest”.

The day eventually arrives when the nestlings must learn how to fly.  Several misadventures occur, notably to the headstrong Robin, but not to the observant Pecksy:

"Pecksy was fully prepared for her flight, for she had attentively observed the instruction given to the others and also their errors; she therefore kept the happy medium betwixt self-conceit and timidity indulging that moderated emulation which ought to possess every young heart; and resolving that neither her inferiors nor equals should soar above her she sprang from the ground and with a steadiness and agility wonderful for her first essay, followed her mother to the nest who instead of stopping to rest herself there flew to a neighbouring tree, that she might be at hand to assist Robin should he repent of his folly;…”

Readers familiar with the values both PB and MW came to cherish and extol in their poetry and prose will not be surprised, I think, to see in the character of the little robin called Pecsky an intimation of what was to come.  That they themselves strove to behave in a “pecksian” manner and reproved one another when they failed (“I shall think it un-Pecksie of you.”) also tells us something about the value system operating in their home.

And can we go so far as to say PB's closing lines to Prometheus Unbound are pecksian?

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
   To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
   Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Prometheus Unbound, Act IV, ll 570-578

Too far??  Okay....maybe a wee bit! But you smiled...I know you did.

And there is another value system at operation here: the humane treatment of animals.  Trimmer's book was subtitled "The Instruction of Children Respecting Their Treatment of Animals".  While Trimmer was no vegetarian (she approved of the killing of animals as long as it was done "not without reason") she nonetheless sought to inculcate in children a benevolence toward animals.  Fabulous Histories is an excoriating morality tale in which those who torment animals are harshly punished. For me it is easy to trace a developmental arc for a sensitive child such as PB: from values such as these encountered in childhood, to the full blown vegetarianism of his adulthood.

To me, investigations like this are an eternal delight.  We start with an uncharitable aspersion cast at our poet by a critic – all because he used a pet name for his lover. We are led to a delightful essay by a leading Shelley scholar and from thence first to the wrong book, but then to the right one.  Along the way, we discover two largely forgotten giants of early children’s literature - Mary Sherwood and Sarah Trimmer. We finally arrive at a little robin – a nestling who embodied a set of character traits that came to be valued and extolled by two of the great writers of the 19th Century.  Not a bad excursion. Tell me that wasn't fun!! All aboard for the next one?

1816: The Message of Diodati

Percy and Mary Shelley joined Byron in Geneva for part of the summer of 1816.  They spent much of their time at Byron's residence: the Villa Diodati. It was there that some of the most important ideas of the Romantic era were conceived. Can we distill one of the core principles? I think we can. Join me for the first installment of my exploration the life and times of the extraordinary Percy Bysshe Shelley.  Episode One - 1816: The Message Of Diodati

Note to viewers.  This episode of The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley is a "pilot". It may be a little rough around the edges, but based on what I learned from its production, I can guarantee better production values going forward.  Please subscribe to my channel and leave me your comments.  If you have an idea for an episode, I would love to hear it.  Thank you and enjoy!