In December
1831, Adventures of a Younger Son,
Trelawny’s memoir appeared. This, recall, was the book that Mary had helped
publish for her friend from brighter days—the summer of 1822, that summer just
before Bysshe and the others drowned. Trelawny had basically taken charge then,
arranging for the cremations on the beach at Viareggio, Italy, and for the subsequent
burial of Bysshe’s ashes in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery—where he himself would
one day lie beside the remains of his hero, Bysshe Shelley.
Trelawny’s
book, today, would earn something like the reaction to James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces, 2005. Oprah had
selected the volume for her Book Club—but then came the news that Frey had
exaggerated and fabricated, news Oprah did not take, uh, sitting down. Frey
went back on her show and endured a withering interview. And subsequent
widespread opprobrium in the literary community.
Trelawny
lived in a different time, though, and people were reading memoirs for
entertainment, not necessarily for factual accuracy. And so readers were
excited by his (exaggerated, fabricated) accounts of his sailing adventures in
the Indian Ocean, battles, visits to exotic islands, and so on. The memoir ends
before the summer of 1822, but Trelawny says at the end, I am continuing this history of my life.[1] This news did not
please Mary, who, as we know, did not cooperate with his subsequent account, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley
and Byron, which did not appear until 1858, seven years after Mary’s death.
In August
1832, some months after the publication of his book, Trelawny and his daughter,
Julia, 18, spent about a month with Mary. In her journal, Mary was both
complimentary and harsh with Trelawny. He
is a strange yet wonderful being, she wrote, —Endued with genius—great force of character & power of feeling—but
destroyed by being nothing—destroyed by [envy] and internal
dissatisfaction—At first he was so gloomy that he destroyed me—this wore off
somewhat ….[2]
The
Trelawnys left, and Mary wrote a piercing note in her journal about something
horrible—yet another horrible
occurrence in her still young life. My
poor dear Brother William Sep. 8th of Cholera—This is a sad blow to
us all ….[3] He was thirty-one.
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