OF A GOLDEN AGE

Most people aren’t very familiar with Percy Shelley, a Romantic poet whose talents are counterweighted by his ego and biography. His most famous poem is Ozymandias, a compelling work for a variety of reasons: its intensely visual language and vivid diction; Shelley’s implications as to the staying power (or lack thereof) of political glory; the fast-life-early-death tale of Shelley himself, and the surpassing fame of his one-hit-wonder second wife (daughter of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft) whose legal name may as well be “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”

For me, the most important takeaway from “Ozymandias” was always the more permanent nature of art and the influence of its creator on the legacy of its subject. When you trust your image in the hands of your court sculptor, in a vaguely phrenological sense, that person holds complete control over what the future will hold for you and how your character shows in the pose, expression, and demeanor of the sculpture. In this case, Shelley’s vision is completely fictional, but speaks to our feelings of impermanence in the temporal world. Like Yukio Mishima, Shelley studied the place where action and art merge.

Zastrozzi is one of Shelley’s earliest works, a short Gothic novel published when he was an 18-year-old student at the Eton School. In it, aristocratic Matilda (a blend of Annie Wilkes and Kathryn Merteuil) steals both the man she loves and the woman he loves, and does so with the help of her bosom friend Zastrozzi.

Matilda pulverizes her true love Verezzi by swearing that his lover Julia has died, and when Verezzi takes the news so badly he nearly dies, she has to step up her game in order to win him to her side. She sweeps him off to her estate in southernmore Italy so the warm weather may revive him; she acts a particular way in order to cultivate his dependency and gratitude, with intentions to somehow alchemize these feelings into love. Matilda pursues and manufactures the moment when action becomes love: she alters the circumstances of Verezzi’s life with her resources and her bare hands until he turns to her out of Stockholm syndrome.

The book strikes comical notes, and often. Young Shelley was aware that Gothic horror was a spit-upon and lauded genre, but embraced it anyway and did so with art and moxie. I’m guilty of some descriptor-slinging in my life as a lady of letters, and I recognize a fellow slinger:

She again went to Verezzi’s apartment, but as she approached, vague fears lest he should have penetrated her schemes confused her: but his mildly beaming eyes, as she gazed upon them, convinced her that the horrid expressions which he had before uttered were merely the effect of temporary delirium.

I count eight adjectives or adverbs in that one sentence, not to mention the thicket of helping verbs. Temporary delirium indeed!

The book is short and fast, and its characters say such ridiculous things I couldn’t help but love it. The ending takes a characteristic Gothic twist, and also, it is very fun to say “Zastrozzi” over and over. Zastrozzi. Zastrozzi. Leave the gun, take the Zastrozzi.

For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

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