1878 marks the appearance of the heavily modified second edition of Edward John Trelawny’s book of recollections concerning his brief relationship with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and the entourage or entourages both eminent men enjoyed on the Eurpoean Continent—and indeed beyond—during the living of their truncated and sexily cavalier lives. Trelawny was famously full of shit, a self-mythologizer and near-parody of the Romantic stud; he doesn’t treat Byron all that fairly quite possibly because the author of Don Juan had once been widely quoted (by numerous individuals with credible claims to having been present for the auspicious occasion) to the effect that Trelawny couldn’t tell the truth any more than he could spell or wash his hands. Twelawny is himself a celebrity in 1878 and also a man not far short of ninety years. As self-mythologizer, he is intent on securing his legacy. Can we call it setting the record “straight” and manage to keep the expression on our faces likewise? The 1858 first edition had been called Recollections of Shelley and Byron, this 1878 presum’d snow-job reimagined as Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. The addition of “and the author” is one thing, but the transmutation of “recollections” into “records” is exceedingly funny…and terribly telling. Early in the book—I cannot testify to whether or not this vignette appears in the first edition—Brawny Trelawny segues into a consideration of the would-be Shelley biographer Jefferson Hogg (1792-1862), a man who happens to both entirely abjure poetry and, according to our resident confabulator, provide the sole halfway credible written characterization of the only-posthumously-revered Shelley to have preceded his (Trelawny’s) own. Why does Shelley’s old pal Jefferson Hogg hate poetry? Well, the fucker is a barrister. We will discover very quickly, doubtlessly to our immense gratification, that this barrister is all the same not a barrister without a sense of humour, though it is of course decidedly the sense of humour of a British snob. Trelawny quotes Hogg talking smack: “Those who asked me to write it did not want a likeness of the poet as he was, but as they thought he should be; there are literary men who undertake such jobs; Tom Moore and others, who compile Lives and will say anything that is desired; they would introduce their man as a heathen deity, with a flourish of trumpets, a big drum, and mad poets dancing, the muses singing, and the poet in a triumphal car, covered with spangles, and crowned with tinsel.” Now, let me ask you: what does reading this passage immediately evoke for you? Are you like me? What immediately enters into my mind—marauding, ravening—are the films Ken Russell would make a century later and pithy dismissive reviews of same in the English press. Of course, I had to reluctantly oversee a Ken Russell Masters Series a couple years ago, and ’tis mighty likely you did not. Offer whatever thanksgiving you deem applicative.
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