Or Was It His Liver?

Alan Halsey: The Text of Shelley’s Death. West House Books, 2001. £8.95.

First published in 1995 in an edition limited to 200 copies, The Text of Shelley’s Death has now at last been made available in an ordinary trade edition. Its author, Alan Halsey, is a bookseller, an independent scholar of the Romantic period, and a noted poet. The last two of those roles are equally drawn on in The Text of Shelley’s Death to create a work virtually sui generis in its exploration of a territory between scholarly inquiry and modernist poetics. Perhaps the only useful reference-point on the map of contemporary poetry is the work of the American poet Susan Howe.

Even after repeated readings the title remains unsettling. At one level, it is an accurate description of the opening title-sequence, which occupies most of the text: a 49-page collation of variant tellings of the story of Shelley’s death, set forth in the manner of a scholarly variorum. Halsey seems also to be slyly glancing at Barthes’ “death of the author” and at New Historicists’ strategic use of the words “text” and “discourse” to refer to any mode of signification within a culture, even nonverbal ones. But as we’ll see, other shades of meaning receive increasingly more weight in the other sections of the book (two prose pieces, an “index” and a bibliography). One speaks of the “text” of a speech or play, for instance, and the potential implication is that Shelley’s death is a fated performance of a pre-existing text.

The opening variorum has several jobs to perform, not all of them immediately apparent. Its first job is as an instrument of skeptical inquiry, assiduously dissolving the story of Shelley’s drowning into countless contradictory narratives. It starts off on the path of conventional narrative: “The painful story has been so often told and is so familiar, that it will best be narrated with the utmost brevity. On the afternoon of Monday, the 8th of July, Shelley and Williams, with the boy Vivian, set sail from Leghorn.” But soon every statement of fact or motive is engulfed in contradictions:

[del. When we were under weigh, the guard-boat refused to allow the Bolivar to leave as Trelawney’s health papers were not in order] Trelawney was to have been of the party but had had words with Shelly the morning they sailed. The Don Juan [del. therefore] embarked just after one o’clock
var. between two and three o’clock
var. at three o’clock
var. just after noon
var. after two
the Don Juan sailed alone out of harbour [var. almost at the same moment as two feluccas].

Every detail of the narrative turns out to be contested. Was his boat called the Don Juan or the Ariel? Was Shelley suicidal, or were “the two months we passed [in San Terenzo] the happiest he had ever known” (as Mary Shelley insisted)? Was he reading Sophocles, Aeschylus or Keats when he died? (One especially outlandish 1877 account has his corpse washing ashore with his copy of Aeschylus still gripped in his hand, open to the page he was reading.) Did the ship founder, or was it rammed by pirates? What was the ultimate fate of Shelley’s heart (or was it his liver?), which Trelawny saved from the incinerated corpse?

But if the initial effect of the variorum – of its virtuoso demonstration of the unreliability of human discourse – is a radical skepticism, such skepticism turns out to be only one aspect of Halsey’s project. One clue that he has got a different goal in mind is given by a stylistic choice that initially seems perverse: all of the variorum’s fragments are left unattributed, which often leaves the referents of pronouns “I” and “you” obscure. Nor does Halsey differentiate more from less plausible accounts: well-attested statements are set impartially beside easily disproved mistakes and falsehoods. Indeed, only a reader already well acquainted with Shelley’s life and works will be able to negotiate the variorum with confidence on a first reading. Are these omissions simply a mannerism – a deliberate but irritating insistence on this being a poem rather than a work of scholarship?

The next section, “Reversions on the Text,” both makes good many of these omissions, and suggests other ways of viewing the variorum which might explain them. In this essay Halsey begins to interpret and weigh the data. He discusses the different motives informing the accounts of Trelawny, Mary Shelley, Hunt and Byron; he entertains the idea of the boat’s being rammed, for instance, but notes that the theory was advanced by Trelawny and Captain Roberts, suggesting an effort at self-exculpation given that “they were in large part responsible for allowing Shelley and Williams to sail in a vessel which was probably at best half-seaworthy.” But the primary thrust of this section is to point up new patterns of meaning in the data, to suggest how patterns of naming and imagery saturate the narrative. Naming becomes a key theme. Shelley refers to himself as “Ariel” in a poem to Jane Williams, and Mary Shelley picks up the identification as part of her attempt after Shelley’s death to canonize an idealized version of him: it is she who calls the Don Juan the Ariel in her account. (The reader can now return to p.13 of the variorum and see that its linking theme is The Tempest.) Byron called him “Shiloh” (implicitly commenting on his Messianism), but also “the Snake” (with its very different religious implications). Halsey is interested, that is, in the intersection of history with myth, religion and allegory, kinds of fiction where authorship is blurred or irrelevant: the story/myth of Shelley was collectively authored by himself and by others. More strikingly, Halsey even hints at the possibility of its being scripted by an extrahuman “Will.” At least that is what I take it he is saying when, for instance, he speaks of Byron’s fulfulling in some accounts a preassigned role as a figure of evil: “Byron is the screen. The projection, from Will as projector, has to settle somewhere.”

Nate Dorward

Published in Thumbscrew 20/21

All site contents © Nate Dorward 1998–2007, unless otherwise stated. Send comments to ; more info about the site is available here.