In Search of Mary Read online

  Will starts to wrestle around in his buggy, and I am quite relieved. For once his timing is welcome, as there’s nowhere else to go. It’s come down to head-chopping: for or against. So I ask if we can walk around outside to distract Will. Professor Belissa doesn’t mind at all: he jumps up and gallantly holds the door open for us. As we step outside, I ask a question that is probably rather pointless at this stage. But I can’t help myself:

  “What about the women of the Revolution?”

  “Obviously it’s complicated,” he says. Well fancy that. “You can see this period as a moment when women took the power to speak, to say things, and to demand things.”

  “But they didn’t seem to get them. Or even if they did, it was rolled back afterwards, like the divorce laws.”

  He executes a perfectly delicious French shrug and ignores this, continuing: “But you can also see it as a period in which the women were excluded from political life. Some historians, especially the Americans and feminists, they see it in this way.”

  “And those ‘Americans and feminists’, are they right or wrong?”

  “Both!” he says with delight.

  Chapter Eleven

  How Not to Betray the Light?

  This slightly maddening encounter has provoked more questions than answers. The defence of complexity is worthwhile in principle, but the struggle for simplicity strikes me as a whole lot more useful. Professor Belissa lights a cigarette and walks us to the Metro, exuding elegant smoke and chatting away merrily. I’ve enjoyed meeting him very much, but can’t help wondering what he made of it. But then… a British Wollstonecraft fanatic with a baby. What did he expect?

  Later on I am still reflecting on Professor Belissa and his apparent ease in accepting the price of the Revolution. Perhaps he’s right that the blood-soaking and distracting violence has stopped me from seeing the good that happened. Wollstone-craft is harrowed by the violence: she publicly cries out at the sight of the blood-stained street. She makes such a fuss that she herself is at risk: concerned bystanders hurry her away to safety. Her once-pumped enthusiasm now tempered, she writes:

  Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

  But then, she is right here at the heart of it all, escaping the old ways and traditions. Here at the decapitation of the Ancien Régime, the birth of the values of modern civilization. Unprecedented freedom is springing up all around her. And freedom has unforeseen consequences: it is also freedom for your enemy. William Blake, the Enlightenment’s own illustrator, knows this when he says of Milton’s Paradise Lost that Milton is “of the devil’s party without knowing it”.

  And maybe it’s bloody, but what’s the alternative? Back home Wollstonecraft has some powerful enemies. England, so recently the scene of that magnificent ding-dong between Wollstonecraft and Burke, is now in full backlash mode. The suspicion she arouses as a foreigner in France pales beside the hostility she would face if she returned. She’s not welcome in England. The vibrant debate of 1792 is annihilated in repressive measures bearing names like the Aliens Act and the Treason Trials.

  The 1793 Aliens Act is the government’s response to the thousands of refugees (or émigrés, for your posh refugees: several noted Marquises and Chevaliers become waiters and window cleaners in their new English lives) fleeing the Revolution in France. This legislation requires all arrivals from France to register with the authorities, and failure to do so means imprisonment without trial. On top of the suspension of habeas corpus, prohibitive taxes are imposed on pamphlet publishing, and large public gatherings are banned. Anything to squash public interest in the shockwaves emerging from France.

  The 1794 Treason Trials are an especially ugly expression of establishment fear. Growing numbers of people, inspired by the French, have begun to call for a more representative government, and an end to MPs buying their titles. The most outspoken are accused of revolutionary tendencies. They are spied upon and harassed by the government. They are arrested, and in a hearty assertion of proper traditional values, they face being hung, drawn and quartered. Even when acquitted, the defendants are crucified by the press.

  Wollstonecraft’s luminous circle of radical friends is surrounded by darkness. Her oldest champion and supporter, the big-hearted publisher Joseph Johnson, gets caught in the crush. Despite having published works on both sides of the revolutionary divide, Johnson is thrown in prison and thereafter sticks to the safety of publishing Shakespeare. Tom Paine is tried and found guilty in absentia. William Blake ends up in court on trumped-up charges of treason.

  This anti-revolutionary bonfire consumes many, including Johnson’s close friend Joseph Priestley. Priestley is cut from the same eccentric, self-made cloth as Wollstonecraft. A Yorkshire chemist and preacher, he speaks seven languages, discovers oxygen and tries to reinvent Christianity. He also accidentally creates fizzy drinks, which a certain Mr Schweppe then exploits to make a fortune. When he joins the call for political reform, his house is burnt down, he is savaged in the press and his family is attacked. He eventually flees to America.

  If people like these are having their effigies burned at the stake back in England, then no wonder France feels forward-looking. Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution defends the Revolution’s principles, but suggests with a sigh that the French just aren’t ready. Looking back over the Channel she must have spotted that the French don’t own the intellectual property rights over Terror. When she gets offered a safe passage home in the darkest hour, Wollstonecraft has no intention of heading back. Non, merci. She will take her best chances here with the Revolution, in all its messy hopefulness.

  I promised not to do any ghost-hunting, but I can’t help myself. Thanks to Richard Holmes we easily find the address where Wollstonecraft lived on first arriving here in Paris. It’s 22 Rue Meslay, just off the Place de la Republique. This is the place where she has the spooky visions, keeps the candle alight all night and misses her pet cat. These days the house is a shirt shop. In a narrow, ordinary street full of other shirt shops.

  The shop window is packed with special offers: three shirts for 30 Euros. As we stare in, an aspiring young accountant carrying a plastic bag steps out of the door. He’s wearing – good grief – those slip-on loafers with a tassle. How could he know that his ill-shod footsteps are blaspheming hallowed ground? Tread softly, because you tread on my hero. The stiffly folded shirts are wrapped in cellophane, and they range all the way from white to very pale blue. This is even less atmospheric than Yoga Lady’s bathroom in Kragerø.

  I ask a passer-by to take a photo of me and Will smiling awkwardly in front of the shirt shop. It’s all a bit rubbish. But there is good news: a détente has been reached between us and Parisian food. Seasoned travellers that we are, Will and I have taken to buying a few essentials and dining on park benches. It’s a high-risk enterprise in November, but with surprising dividends. We have the best bread, the best cheese and unparalleled views.

  A swift assessment of the benches generally reveals the same availability: every bench has one person sitting in the middle, with strategic bags and/or coat placed either side to occupy the space. Will and I gradually formulate the following counter-occupation algorithm:

  1)

  Select the most bureaucratic-looking bench-dweller on offer (NB: not eccentric whiskery types who might start a conversation or people in twos who won’t notice).

  2)

  Plonk myself down right next to him.

  3)

  Start singing at Will in a nauseating mummy voice.

  4)

  Within roughly three minutes we have our own bench.

  Paris has another park every few steps: once you start looking and if you’re not too choosy there’s no end of them. Our hard-won benches are the ideal place to watch Paris and its people streaming past, each wrapped in a private lunch-break drama. I indulge in the traditional scorn of the tourist towards other tourists. We of course
look far more authentic and local: look at us – we’re eating cheese. There’s a steady supply of enthusiastic pigeons to feed or chase, depending on Will’s mood. Some chocolate mousse and a “borrowed” teaspoon, and we’re in heaven.

  Beside us, under a neighbouring bench, a brown cluster of sparrows swoops down. Piaf! I haven’t seen these for ages, since the inexplicable sparrageddon wiped them from Britain’s city streets. I watch them bouncing about in the dust. Why do you insist on hopping? Can’t you evolve and learn to walk? No wonder you’re facing extinction. Get a grip, sparrows. Check out the pigeons, larging it, eating and shagging all over town. And walking. Even the ones with no feet. That’s how you conquer an urban landscape. I throw a chunk of baguette and they descend on it, squabbling.

  Among the flow of passers-by and birds there’s time and space to reflect, and to realize the extent to which I’ve blithely crowbarred the concerns of my own life into the encounters we’ve had. Looking back, Norway was a giddy abandonment of domesticity. But this trip has leant back towards the theme, testing and poking it, holding it up to the pale-yellow Parisian light to see whether it alters somehow.

  Having babies seems to make us different. Is this a good thing or something we should ignore? Where does motherhood fit into a revolutionary landscape? What is there, in the space between Hannah’s Jacobins saying “Home is the woman’s domain” and Alice’s equality, where maternity is equal to four weeks’ sick leave for cancer? I’m still not sure.

  Will eyes me while I lick the lid of the chocolate mousse.

  We still have two Parisian days left, and there is no one else to talk to but Will. I’m quite glad. My head is filled with the apparently conflicting spheres of domesticity and Revolution. Will and I hang out in the kids’ end of the Jardin du Luxembourg: I push him on at least a hundred different swings, and we play among the golden leaves.

  Around Will I read, with a rare and hungry devotion. The immersive effect of reading is very much deepened by being foreign – even more so by being a bit lonely. When Will has a nap and when he nods off in his travel cot at night, I rush to find my page. Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes. My own footsteps have drawn an uncertain wobbly circle. His are confident: his footsteps are strides.

  Holmes heads here to revolutionary Paris as a young man drawn to the 1968 student uprising. He gets up close to the febrile anti-establishment fervour, with its massive demos, barricades and rifle-wielding troopers crushing down the young and the hopeful. Only one literature can describe this: “What I was feeling, and what my friends were feeling, seemed to be expressed perfectly by the Romantics, and no one else.”

  He goes on: “The whole ethos of the Sixties – that youthful explosion of idealism, colour, music, sex, hallucinogenic states, hyperbolic language and easy money … was based on a profoundly romantic rejection of conventional society, the old order, the establishment, the classical, the square…”

  Like Wollstonecraft, Holmes arrives once the action is well underway, and he watches for long enough to get a sense of its unravelling. Disillusionment follows, in “communes that went broke, free unions that became bad marriages, university faculties that became hotbeds of rivalry, artistic spirits who became addicts and breakdowns, travellers who came home sick and sorry, women who became exhausted one-parent families, a world of little presses and alternative newspapers that dropped into oblivion, and a Paris where the Bourse remained and Les Halles was destroyed.”

  Reading this I get an uncomfortable feeling. It’s going to happen all over again, isn’t it? Will there always be an equal and opposite reaction – a Napoleon for every Paine? Will the beautiful young renegades keep selling out or getting squashed in the backlash? It’s not easy to keep the Wollstonecraft fires burning. As Holmes asks: “How not to betray the light?”

  And it’s the pursuit of answers to these very questions that brings Holmes here on his Footsteps mission. This is how he finds Wollstonecraft, his “guide”.

  “There was something … like a wild waterfall in the headlong, broken, plunging quality of Mary’s life. I stood and gazed at it roaring through the streets of Paris, visible only to me.”

  Let me see! I lean up against my guide, looking over his shoulder, trying to glimpse this roaring waterfall visible only to him. The waterfall escapes me, but the proximity is seductive. He’s never boring, and we only have a couple of tiffs. Once when he portrays her transformation into motherhood as a shrinking act. He whittles her world down to three people in a room, a narrow cameo of the nuclear family. You can hear the disappointment:

  “She who had prided herself, for half a lifetime, on her independence, her vocation as a writer, her revolutionary duty to her fellow women, was now committed to achieving and sharing domestic happiness of the most traditional kind.”

  Even if you accept these two states as necessarily exclusive, the bar seems to be set higher for women writers. The slightest perceived deviation in their private behaviour and all credibility is at stake. (Have male authors endured such scrutiny? Dickens had several hundred kids and no one suggested he might stop writing.) Yes, Wollstonecraft spends time in Neuilly and Le Havre. So would you if you were an illegal alien with the guillotine in full swing. What matters is that she doesn’t resign or recant: she’s still writing.

  Even more annoyingly, Holmes credits Imlay with giving Wollstonecraft a new voice, greater insight, better writing. This is not right. It’s true that she retreats into domesticity. Maybe she even enjoys it – and why the hell not: may the indignant lightning of liberation strike me down. And behold: she then emerges with a new voice. Old Quickfire McShoot-’em-up is replaced by the personal honesty of Letters from Norway. It’s a new kind of writing. But this is not thanks to Imlay. It’s thanks to the baby.

  This isn’t to argue that motherhood begets uniquely searing artistic sensibility. Take Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee and Virginia Woolf, to name a few. No, it’s not like squeezing out a sprog can instantly genius you up. But it’s a creative act and can be useful as such. I spent a decade of motherhood pretending it hadn’t made the slightest difference, working in a newsroom for God’s sake. You’re not even supposed to smile, let alone cry or have passions or be convulsed with the love of fellow humanity. But why not give free rein to that new, forever-raw nerve?

  Enough ungrateful squabbling: Holmes is a maestro. He brings me closer to Wollstonecraft, and I longingly savour the art of his pages. He fancies her too, and that makes me fancy him: we are an experimental Wollstonecraftian ménage. Me and Mister Holmes, we’ve got a thing going on. Even though we’ve never met.

  How can you not love a writer so dedicated that he gets trapped, entangled in veg-patch netting as he attempts an illicit poetry reading in the same location it was written? He escapes by climbing a pear tree. I sense his mistrust of arrogant long-haired Saint-Just types, and share it, more than I initially realize.

  Holmes draws a straight line from the French Revolution to the uprising of 1968. He links the Romantics to the hippy generation’s free love and flower power. That movement, too, is “international: the counter-culture took to the road and passed all frontiers, entered all cities; just as the first Romantics had set out on their wanderings”. As he leaves Wollstonecraft behind and moves on with her next generation, the Romantic offspring, my doubts will soon be reinforced.

  The Wollstonecraft gene pool is such a catalogue of bleakness, it seems to be cursed. The first-born daughter, Frances, is now dead. That mini sidekick on the Scandinavian adventure, whose flushed cheeks and pattering footsteps lifted her mum’s heart? She has succeeded where her mother failed and committed suicide. Hers are the baby steps that my Will retraces. But the “little frolicker”, lavishly adored and written about by her mother, dies a lonely death by laudanum in a Welsh hotel room. She is buried, unacknowledged, in a pauper’s grave.

  The remaining descendent is Mary Shelley, and she forms one third of the travelling
circus of misery and death that Holmes describes in the next stage of his Footsteps. Mary Shelley, her husband Percy, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, plus their assorted children and visitors, are hoboing around Italy taking residences here and there. These children of the Revolution wander, fleeing debtors and the outrage of their own families, onwards in search of the Golden Age.

  They are stalked by death. Mary Shelley, a teenage mum with no mother of her own, suffers the loss of three children. The first child, Clara, dies shortly after her premature birth. The next, Clara Everina, dies at one year old. Her remaining child, the beloved William (or “Will-mouse”), dies aged four the following year.

  The stepsister Claire has a baby too. Her happy “ten minutes” with Lord Byron leaves her pregnant and “discomposed” for the rest of her life. What’s a man supposed to do when these teenagers throw themselves at you, moans Byron. He hates her, but eventually agrees to take charge of the illegitimate baby in exchange for a guarantee of no further maternal contact. The Shelleys go along with it – people are starting to talk. The child is then dumped in a convent, where she dies aged five.

  There’s confusion around another baby that the group apparently adopts in Naples. She, too, is abandoned, and she also dies. Wait, which dead baby is whose? Keeping up with the spiralling death tally isn’t easy. Meanwhile Percy develops a roving eye and is almost certainly having a bit of the other with Claire, as they move from one Italian town to the next.

  Holmes follows in their footsteps as they travel on, seeking new horizons and burying children along the way. It gets so grim I can hardly look. The climax comes at their final residence in Italy, Casa Magni. Like the ending of a Jacobean tragedy, the stage is now heaped with corpses, large and small. And when Percy dies at sea, he doesn’t go down alone: a friend and a boat boy also perish with him.