It is at this moment as one begins to attempt to chart his steps, however, that it becomes obvious just how futile an exercise it is, and just how far at this point a traditional sense of ‘biographical’ time must give way to what could be called ‘Trelawny’ time. Because to any observer totting up the weeks and months spent shooting and hunting during these years a picture emerges of a life hopelessly and terminally adrift, and yet for Trelawny himself this same time seems to have been crushed into a series of defining highlights that obliterate all else, secular epiphanies which, in the great drama he made of his life, assert a pattern of significance – of destiny – that biography can do nothing but follow.
Throughout his life there would be an almost Marvellian fierceness in the way Trelawny would seize his opportunities and in 1820 this destiny seemed to him to lead nowhere but Italy. Through the summer of 1821 he hunted and fished with an old naval friend Daniel Roberts in the Swiss mountains, but beneath the seemingly aimless wanderings the real business of his life was already taking shape. In April 1821, Edward Williams had written to him from Pisa, where he and Jane were living after a bleak winter of ‘soupe maigre, bouilli, sour wine, and solitary confinement’ at Chalon-sur-Saône.5 He was, he told Trelawny, already an intimate of Shelley. They were planning a summer’s boating together, ‘adventuring’ among the rivers and canals of that part of Italy. ‘Shelley’, he wrote, tantalizingly
is certainly a man of most astonishing genius in appearance, extraordinarily young, of manners mild and amiable, but withal frill of life and fun. His wonderful command of language, and the ease with which he speaks on what are generally considered abstruse subjects, are striking; in short, his ordinary conversation is akin to poetry, for he sees things in the most singular and pleasing lights; if he wrote as he talked, he would be popular enough. Lord Byron and others think him by far the most imaginative poet of the day. The style of his lordship’s letters to him is quite that of a pupil, such as asking his opinion, and demanding his advice on certain points, &. I must tell you, that the idea of the tragedy of ‘Manfred’, and many of the philosophical, or rather metaphysical, notions interwoven in the composition of the fourth Canto of ‘Childe Harold’, are of his suggestion; but this, of course, is between ourselves.6
Trelawny printed this letter in his history of this period of his life, the Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author. Back to back with it, as if the intervening eight months had simply not existed, comes a second letter from Williams, written in the following December and giving the momentous news of Byron’s arrival.
My Dear Trelawny,
Why, how is this? I will swear that yesterday was Christmas Day, for I celebrated it at a splendid feast given by Lord Byron to what I call his Pistol Club – i.e. to Shelley, Medwin, a Mr Taaffe, and myself, and was scarcely awake from the vision of it when your letter was put into my hands, dated 1st of January, 1822. Time flies fast enough, but you, in the rapidity of your motions, contrive to outwing the old fellow … Lord Byron is the very spirit of the place – that is, to those few to whom, like Mohannah, he has lifted his veil. When you asked me in your last letter if it was probable to become at all intimate with him, I replied in a manner which I considered it most prudent to do, from motives which are best explained when I see you. Now, however, I know him a great deal better, and I think I may safely say that point will rest entirely with yourself. The eccentricities of an assumed character, which a total retirement from the world almost rendered a natural one, are daily wearing off. He sees none of the numerous English who are here, excepting those I have named. And of this I am selfishly glad, for one sees nothing of a man in mixed societies. It is difficult to move him, he says, when he is once fixed, but he seems bent upon joining our party at Spezzia next summer.
I shall reserve all that I have to say about the boat until we meet at the select committee, which is intended to be held on that subject when you arrive here. Have a boat we must, and if we can get Roberts to build her, so much the better … 7
With the entry of Byron into Shelley’s world Trelawny’s twin deities were in place. Even before Williams’s second letter, however, he was already making ready for Italy. He had shipped his guns and dogs to Leghorn in preparation for a winter’s hunting in the Maremma, but with this news of bigger game on the banks of the Arno, the woodcock were now going to have to wait their turn.
Travelling south from Geneva with his friend Roberts, shooting, fishing and sketching as they went, Trelawny finally reached Pisa in the January of 1822 to take up his place among the circle that had formed around Shelley. Since the early spring of 1818 when they left England for the last time, Shelley and his tribe of dependents had been wandering across the Continent, moving restlessly from one Italian town to another, from Milan to Bagni di Lucca, Venice, Naples, Rome, Leghorn, Florence, and then, in the January of 1820, to Pisa, his penultimate resting place in that ‘Paradise of exiles – the retreat of Pariahs’ as he called nineteenth-century Italy.8
At the beginning of 1822, when Trelawny first joined them, Shelley and his wife Mary were living above Edward and Jane Williams in the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa at the eastern end of the Lung’ Arno, diagonally across the river from the Palazzo Lanfranchi which Byron had taken the previous November. Anxious to be with them as quickly as he could, Trelawny had left Roberts at Genoa and hurried on alone. He arrived late, and after putting up his horse at an inn and dining, hastened to the Tre Palazzi to renew acquaintances with the Williamses and to meet Shelley. He was greeted by his old friends in ‘their earnest cordial manner’, and the three were deep in conversation,
when I was rather put out by observing in the passage near the open door, opposite to where I sat, a pair of glittering eyes steadily fixed on mine; it was too dark to make out whom they belonged to. With the acuteness of a woman, Mrs Williams’s eyes followed the direction of mine, and going to the doorway, she laughingly said.
‘Come in, Shelley, it’s only our friend Tre just arrived.’
Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall thin stripling held out both his hands; and although I could hardly believe as I looked at his flushed, feminine, and artless face that it could be the Poet, I returned his warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings he sat down and listened. I was silent from astonishment: was it possible this mild-looking beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with all the world? – excommunicated by the Fathers of the Church, deprived of his civil rights by the fiat of a grim Lord Chancellor, discarded by every member of his family, and denounced by the rival sages of our literature as the founder of a Satanic school? I could not believe it; it must be a hoax.9
This account was published in his Records almost sixty years after, at a time when Trelawny was established beyond challenge as the last and greatest of Byron’s and Shelley’s friends, and yet even if much of its ease is of a later date, he clearly slid into the world that revolved around the two poets as if he had known no other. Within twenty-four hours of this first sight of Shelley he was playing billiards with Byron at the Palazzo Lanfranchi, coolly holding his own in conversation (and there is no more conversationally demanding a game than billiards), the acolyte an immediate familiar, a welcome addition to the daily shooting parties and drama plans and as interesting an object to his new friends as they were to him.
Indeed, when Trelawny first burst upon Byron’s Pisan world that January, launching himself from nowhere with the same fanfare of lies that fill his Adventures, it seemed to them that here at last was the Byronic hero made flesh. Here was a Conrad with a Gulnare in every port, a Lara who had exhausted all human emotion, who had murdered and pillaged, whored and sinned; had loved only to cremate his Zela’s corpse on the edge of a Javan bay; betrayed and been betrayed, deserted from the Royal Navy, fought beside his pirate-hero De Ruyter, and all, as Mary Shelley noted with that fine lack of irony that is her hallmark, ‘between the age of thirteen and twenty.’10