Benevuti, the Professor of Painting at the Florentine Academy, came to nothing as Coleridge was for once beyond the point of projecting his charm in bad Italian. But at last they found an American sailor, Captain Derkheim of “the Gosport”, and Coleridge summoned sufficient energy to convince the Captain that they were cargo worthy of passage on credit. Captain Derkheim later said he had heard nothing like Coleridge since leaving the Niagara Falls.183
The effort of it all was so great that Coleridge awoke the next day screaming and trying to vomit, his right arm paralysed. It gradually wore off, but he believed he had suffered a “manifest stroke of Palsy”. Trying to calm himself, he finally sat and wrote a long letter to Allston at the Cafe Greco in Rome. He did not mention opium, but wrote frankly about his depression, his dangerous illness, and his thoughts of his children.
“But for them I would try my chance. But they pluck out the wingfeathers from the mind.” He praised young Russell for his “Kindness & tender-heartedness to me”; and worried about the Wallis family still in Rome. His farewell to Allston expressed passionate friendship, and a sense of star-crossed destiny as he prepared to leave. “My dear Allston! somewhat from increasing age, but much more from calamity & intense pre-affections my heart is not open to more than kind good wishes in general; to you & to you alone since I have left England, I have felt more; and had I not known the Wordsworths, should have loved & esteemed you first and most: and as it is, next to them I love & honour you. Heaven knows, a part of such a Wreck as my Head & Heart is scarcely worth your acceptance.”184
By 22 June, Coleridge and Russell were back at Pisa, waiting at the Globe Inn for a storm to disperse before boarding. It seems that it was too dangerous to linger in Livorno itself, because of possible arrest by French troops, and Captain Derkheim had already had to pass them off as American nationals. Coleridge would later embroider a much more dramatic story that Napoleon had issued a personal warrant for his arrest, and his “escape” from Rome to Livorno had been arranged through “the kindness of a noble Benedictine, and the gracious connivance of that good old man, the present Pope”.185
A warrant had certainly been issued for the British consul in Rome, Mr Jackson, and a general order to expel British nationals from Italy in May, which was why Coleridge was worried about the Wallis family. But the tale of a hectic personal pursuit was really a fiction, designed to cover up the otherwise inexplicable time he had remained in Italy with Allston, undecided about returning to England at all.186
Coleridge would soon present this whole latter part of his sojourn in the Mediterranean as a sequence of events almost entirely beyond his control: “retained” against his will by Sir Alexander Ball, “duped” by the consul at Naples Mr Elliot, and forced to live in hiding among the bohemians of Rome while pursued by Napoleon’s vengeful officers. In truth, he had acted much more wilfully, delaying and taking casual risks which would have appalled his family and friends.
The true chaos of his existence over the past eighteen months came to a head at Pisa. He was holed up in a cheap inn with an art student, virtually penniless, having a few books and presents in an old box, a supply of opium and an enema, and two precious Notebooks. He was in imminent danger of arrest, disguised as an American, and deeply uncertain if he wanted to return to England to take up his old life and identity. Once again he felt the best solution would have been if he had died in John Wordsworth’s place. “O dear John Wordsworth! Ah that I could but have died for you: & you have gone home, married S. Hutchinson, & protected my Poor little ones. O how very, very gladly would I have accepted the conditions.’187
On the night before their final departure for Livorno, he wrote a hymn to death, sitting in the window of the inn and watching the bolts of lightning crash down over the river Arno. “Sunday, June 22nd 1806. Globe, Pisa…Repeatedly during this night’s storm have I desired that I might be taken off, not knowing when or where. But a few moments past a vivid flash passed across me, my nerves thrilled, and I earnestly wished, so help me God! like a Love-longing, that it would pass through me!”188
Yet this Coleridgean death was no ordinary extinction. It was more like a transfiguration, a complete transformation of the terms of his existence. It would “take him off” to some other dimension. It was: “Death without deformity, or assassin-like self-disorganization; Death, in which the mind by its own wish might seem to have caused its own purpose to be performed, as instantaneously and by an instrument almost as spiritual, as the Wish itself!” It was Death which seemed almost like re-birth, Death which seemed like an act of love, preparing for something new, blowing away the old self:
Come, come, thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry Leaves from the Tree!
Flash, like a love-thought, thro’ me, Death!
And take a life, that wearies me.189
The imagery of winter, with its dead leaves, still promised the possibility of some other springtime, with the buds and blossoms of another life.
It would be easy to misjudge Coleridge’s mood of temporary despair on departing from Italy. Years later he would remember the “heavenly” valley of the Arno with affection, and put it into his poetry. He would write and lecture on Italian art, and recall the work of Michelangelo and Giotto as “deeply interesting to me…having a life of its own in the spirit of that revolution of which Christianity was effect, means and symbol”. He would fix on Italy as an ideal place of retreat, and an image of spiritual resurrection from the dead. “Were I forced into exile…I should wish to pass my summers at Zurich, and the remaining eight months alternately at Rome and in Florence, so to join as much as I could German depth, Swiss ingenuity, and the ideal genius of Italy; that, at least, which we cannot help thinking, almost feeling, to be still there, be it but as the spirit of one departed hovering over his own tomb, the haunting breeze of his own august, desolate mausoleum.”190
As he and Russell rattled along in the coach to Livorno, he looked tenderly on a group of “beggar children” running alongside and calling to them with a strange “shudder-whistle” of farewell. The Gosport set sail for England on 23 June 1806.
18
The passage took fifty-five days – almost twice the outward voyage – and lived up to Coleridge’s worst expectations. He spent much of his time in his cabin, sick and constipated, and for once kept no journal at all of his impressions. They were boarded by a Spanish privateer, but Captain Derkheim talked them free, after throwing official papers (including some of Coleridge’s Malta notes) into the sea. Coleridge submitted to twelve enemas, “my dread of and antipathy increased every time”, each administered by Derkheim in conditions of pain and humiliation. The sense of violation and punishment horrified him, as he later admitted to Southey. “Tho’ the Captain was the strongest man on board – it used to take all the force of his arm, & bring the blood up in his face before he could finish. Once I brought off more than a pint of blood – & three times he clearly saved my Life.”191
Both Derkheim and Russell continued to behave with “every possible Tenderness”, though their own feelings can only be imagined. For the rest it was a battering, claustrophobic voyage: “working up against head winds, rotting and sweating in calms, or running
