The Monsters

by Dorothy Hoobler

  The relationship went from bad to worse. Byron quarreled with Annabella’s parents and refused to attend her birthday party. He also made clear his disappointment that Annabella did not seem to have as much money as he had hoped. Annabella, on her part, thought her husband’s sometimes violent behavior was a sign of insanity. Worst of all, Augusta spent a great deal of time in their flat in London, ostensibly to assist now that Annabella was pregnant. Annabella studied medical journals to try to understand the man she had married, for she deeply wanted to help. But nothing could save their marriage, for Byron and Augusta were unable to keep their secret while living in such close proximity. Byron, now drinking heavily, apparently also confessed his homosexual escapades to Annabella.

  In January 1816, a month after giving birth to Byron’s daughter, significantly named Augusta Ada, Annabella left him and returned to her parents’ house. (The daughter, always called Ada by her mother’s family, would grow up to be a mathematics prodigy who helped develop an early form of the computer; she also lost a fortune gambling on horses, convinced she could devise a foolproof system of betting.) Byron professed to be shocked when his wife left him, even though he had been openly hostile to her for some time. Byron wrote to his half-sister: “She—or rather—the separation—has broken my heart—I feel as if an Elephant has trodden on it—I am convinced I shall never get over it—but I try.” He added, “I breathe lead.”

  Despite the chaos in his personal life, he still managed to write. In 1815 he published Hebrew Melodies, which contains what are perhaps his most famous lines: “She walks in beauty . . .” The Bride of Abydos was snapped up by the reading public because no one could miss the parallel between its tale of the doomed love between two cousins and the gossip about Byron and his sister that was starting to make the rounds. Annabella never publicly gave her reasons for leaving Byron. Her father had no such scruples, and he spread the news of the young lord’s scandalous relationship with his half-sister. Byron, who had been the toast of the town only a little while before, was now universally reviled. He appeared at a reception given by Lady Jersey—astonishingly, bringing Augusta along as his companion—where most of the guests turned their backs on him. (Not all his sex appeal had evaporated, however; one former admirer stepped forward to tell him, “You had better have married me.”) Socially, Byron became virtually a pariah. Now just a curiosity, when he went out in public, people followed him with telescopes and opera glasses. His debts were piling up as well. Byron agreed to a legal separation from Annabella and decided to leave England.

  This, then, was the man to whom Claire Clairmont, seventeen and inexperienced, wrote a letter asking him to accept her love. Claire, having only recently returned to London from her “exile,” wanted to make a conquest that could surpass Mary’s. In Claire’s eyes, there could be no bigger catch than Byron. So it was that she sent him this appeal:

  An utter stranger takes the liberty of addressing you. It is earnestly requested that for one moment you pardon the intrusion, & laying aside every remembrance of who & what you are, listen with a friendly ear. . . . It may seem a strange assertion, but it is not the less true that I place my happiness in your hands. . . .

  If you feel . . . tempted to read no more, or to cast with levity into the fire, what has been written by me with so much fearful inquietude, check your hand: my folly may be great, but the Creator ought not to destroy his Creature. If you shall condescend to answer the following question you will at least be rewarded by the gratitude I shall feel.

  If a woman, whose reputation has yet remained unstained, if without either guardian or husband to control she should throw herself upon your mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she has borne you many years, if she should secure to you secrisy [sic] & safety, if she should return your kindness with fond affection & unbounded devotion could you betray her, or would you be silent as the grave?

  The message was signed with a false name, though Claire soon revealed her true one.

  Byron did not respond. He received many such requests from young women, though few as determined as Claire. She wrote him several more such letters, including one that informed him, “I have called twice on you but your Servants declare you to be out of town.” She claimed to need his advice: “I am now wavering between the adoption of a literary life or of a theatrical career.” She tried to impress him by quoting Dante in the original Italian, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate” [abandon all hope, ye who enter here],” and commenting, “I think it is a most admirable description of marriage.”

  Only the letters she wrote him still exist, but it is evident from them that at some point he began to write her back. Why he did so is unclear. Her sheer persistence may have impressed him—she says he called her “a little fiend” (a name that he also used for Caroline Lamb). In one letter, Claire sent him some of Shelley’s poems, her way of letting Byron know that she was Shelley’s companion. Claire asked Byron to give Shelley advice: “If you think ill of his compositions I hope you will speak—he may improve by your remarks.” As it happened, Shelley himself had earlier sent Byron a copy of Queen Mab, and Byron had been impressed.

  The Shelley reference may have been Claire’s trump card, for Byron had heard of Shelley’s running away with “the daughters of Godwin,” and Byron too was known as an admirer of Godwin. At any rate, he agreed to meet Claire, not at his home, but at a room at the Drury Lane Theatre, where he was a “literary advisor.” Dante’s warning should have been on her mind, because she was entering the world of the man whose charm and beauty made him, as mothers warned their daughters, “the most dangerous man in Europe.”

  Claire used the meeting to expand the relationship. Now she sent him requests to come to his house. Byron apparently expressed some interest in meeting Mary, and Claire responded, “I will bring her to you whenever you shall appoint.” In a later letter, however, she started to set down conditions: “Will you be so good as to prepare your servants for the visit, for she [Mary] is accustomed to be surrounded by her own circle who treat her with the greatest politeness.” The meeting went well, and Claire wrote to Byron afterward, slipping in a request that indicates she knew of his plans to leave England: “Mary is delighted with you as I knew she would be; she entreats me in private to obtain your address abroad that we may, if possible, have again the pleasure of seeing you. She perpetually exclaims, ‘How mild he is! how gentle! So different from what I expected.’”

  But the affair was not moving quickly enough for Claire, and she cast aside any feigned delicacy to take the initiative. She sent Byron a letter that plainly offered him her sexual favors: “Have you then any objection to the following plan? On Thursday Evening we may go out of town together by some stage or mail about the distance of 10 or 12 miles. there we shall be free & unknown; we can return early the next morning. I have arranged every thing here so that the slightest suspicion may not be excited.” Many years later, Claire explained her actions:

  I was young, and vain, and poor. He was famous beyond all precedent, so famous that people, and especially young people, hardly considered him as a man at all, but rather as a god. His beauty was haunting as his fame, and he was all-powerful in the direction in which my ambition turned. It seems to me almost needless to say that the attentions of a man like this, with all London at his feet, very quickly completely turned the head of a girl in my position; and when you recollect that I was brought up to consider marriage not only as a useless but as an absolutely sinful custom, that only bigotry made necessary, you will scarcely wonder at the result, which you know.

  It was not very difficult to get into Byron’s bed, and Claire soon found herself his mistress. Or as Byron later described the affair, “if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours, there is but one way . . .” It meant little to Byron—he insisted to Augusta, “I am not in love—nor have any love left for any.” But to Claire it was a transforming experience. Years later she called the sexual experience perfect.
She scribbled on a note to Byron: “God bless you—I never was so happy.” In old age, however, she would have another view of the situation. “I am unhappily the victim of a happy passion; I had one like all things perfect in its kind, it was fleeting and mine lasted ten minutes but these ten minutes have discomposed the rest of my life.”

  In fact her involvement with Byron in England was more like two months than ten minutes. Toward the end of it, she asked more and more insistently what his address overseas would be. “I assure you,” she wrote, “nothing shall tempt me to come to Geneva by myself since you disapprove of it [and] as I cannot but feel that such conduct would be highly indelicate.” In the end, he gave her only the address, “Geneva, Poste Restante,” the equivalent of general delivery. That would not deter Claire, who proved even more persistent than Caroline Lamb, and had another trump card to play: she was pregnant, a secret she would keep until the summer.

  Byron, though deeply in debt, had a coach specially built for his travels in Europe—an exact replica of the one Napoleon had used. Virtually a palace on wheels, it was large enough to hold his bed, a traveling library, and a chest with a complete dinner service for two. It required four to six horses to pull it, and drew crowds wherever Byron traveled. The bill for it was five hundred pounds. It was characteristic of Byron that he never paid it. He fled England in April 1816. A mob of creditors descended on his London home almost immediately, stripping it of everything of value.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE SUMMER OF DARKNESS

  I busied myself to think of a story.—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.IfI did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name.

  —Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein, 1831

  MARY SHELLEY WROTE the words above some fifteen years after the “haunted summer” of 1816 on Lake Geneva. Her journals for that crucial summer, along with all but two letters, are lost—possibly destroyed intentionally in the image-cleansing effort that she and her daughter-in-law undertook later. Their absence leaves a gap in our knowledge, and requires us to accept Mary’s explanation for the source of her inspiration.

  The forces that brought together the five young people who met at Byron’s villa are clear enough. Byron himself was fleeing England and the scandal that enveloped his name. He intended to spend the summer relaxing, but not so far away that friends from England could not visit him. France was less appealing to him now that the monarchy had been restored, and so he chose Switzerland as a base. Claire, of course, had to pursue Byron because he was her love-trophy and the father of the child growing within her. Claire had disclosed the latter fact to no one else as yet; instead, she enlisted Shelley and Mary as her companions by revealing only the first of her secrets: she had become Byron’s lover.

  But, still, why did Mary agree to go? It must have seemed like a repetition of her original elopement with Shelley, in which Claire tagged along. Moreover, Mary now was nursing a five-month-old son, William, and that could not have made traveling any easier. Shelley, still complaining of illness, had wanted to go to sunny Italy that summer, but—intrigued by the possibility of meeting Byron—his intentions changed after Claire’s announcement. So Mary had to follow him, even if reluctantly, unaware that she was heading toward her destiny, but perhaps sensing that Byron could help her accomplish what she had to do.

  The spectre of her mother always hung over Mary, reminding her that she had an obligation to live up to her heritage, to prove herself a worthy daughter. Now that Mary had incurred the displeasure of her revered father, it seemed even more important for her to achieve something momentous, as her parents had. Living, studying, reading with Shelley had taught Mary a great deal, and she was conscious of her ripening talents. Would it not be possible, she may have asked herself, that she could learn even more from Byron, a man renowned for his creative genius?

  The act of creation and the supremacy of imagination were, of course, of central concern to all the Romantic writers. From her girlhood, Mary had listened to discussions of creativity among the visitors at her father’s home. Samuel Coleridge had written that imagination is an “echo of the Infinite.” William Blake believed that man could become divine through love and imagination, and he combined poetry and art to tap the deepest resources of the human psyche. Mary’s own creation, a man who hoped to assume divine powers as the father of a brand-new race of humans, would be right in line with this creative tradition.

  During that fateful summer in Geneva, nature showed the full force of its power. Byron, Shelley, and Mary all wrote letters about the unusual weather. Byron complained, “We have had lately such stupid mists—fogs—rains—and perpetual density—that one would think Castlereagh [a British Tory foreign minister hated by Byron] had the foreign affairs of the kingdom of Heaven also—upon his hands.” Not since the year of Mary’s birth had the weather been this bad. Unknown to them, the frightening natural phenomena were the result of a catastrophic volcanic eruption in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) the year before. The cataclysm literally tore the top off Mount Tambora, reducing its height by 3,600 feet and sending some thirty-five cubic miles of debris into the air—the greatest such disaster in recorded history. The dust particles dispersed in the atmosphere and eventually circled the globe, cutting off the light of the sun, cooling air temperatures, and causing frequent storms.

  Thunderstorms punctuate Mary’s novel just as they did her summer, and in the most prosaic of ways a storm played a part in the novel’s creation: it forced the five friends indoors, where the contest began. Many years later on a return trip to Geneva with her son, Mary would see her achievement as part of her time in Switzerland “when first I stepped out from childhood into life.” Viewed in isolation, her novel appeared with all the unpredictable brilliance of a jagged bolt of lightning. But the emotions surrounding that summer had come from a long-brewing storm that at long last liberated Mary’s creativity. She blossomed with a masterpiece that made her Mary Wollstonecraft’s true daughter.

  On May 2, 1816, the Shelley party—Percy, Mary, Claire and little William—set out from England. They retraced the route of their elopement trip two years earlier, but this time had more money and could travel in style by closed carriage. Mary’s spirits rose, for she was leaving behind her disapproving father as well as the melancholy she had felt on the anniversary of the death of her first child.

  When they reached France, Claire sent a note to Byron’s Geneva address, using Mary as bait: “you will I suppose wish to see Mary who talks & looks at you with admiration; you will, I dare say, fall in love with her; she is very handsome & very amiable & you will no doubt be blest in your attachment; nothing could afford me more pleasure.”

  The travelers moved through France to the border with Switzerland, where they had to ascend a steep pass over the Jura Mountains. Riding in a carriage drawn by four horses, with ten men walking alongside to steady it on the treacherous mountain road, they left the town of Les Rousses just as night was falling. While snow pelted the windows and the men outside yelled commands at each other, the carriage struggled up the rugged terrain. Mary, peering out, was thrilled by the awesome scenery, finding it “desolate” yet “sublime.”

  On May 14, the Shelley party descended from the peaks to the shore of Lake Geneva. They took a suite of rooms at the Hotel d’Angleterre in Secheron, a suburb on the outskirts of Geneva. Mary was energized by the beauty of the snow-capped Alps that hovered around them, “the majestic Mont Blanc, highest and queen of all.” Three days after their arrival, she wrote to Fanny in exhilaration, “I feel as happy as a new-fledged bird, and hardly care what twig I fly to, so that I may try my new-found wings.” She and Shelley rented a small sailboat and took it out on the lake. Mary treasured those happy moments, when if the weather permitted th
ey often stayed out till ten o’clock in the evening and on their return were “saluted by the delightful scent of flowers and new mown grass, and the chirp of grasshoppers, and the song of the evening birds.” She and Shelley continued their literary pursuits, reading and writing all morning long. Mary started to write a children’s book that she later gave to her father to publish. The couple also began to translate Godwin’s Political Justice into French as another gift to the greedy philosopher, who sent Shelley a letter with the exciting news that Godwin had found someone willing to purchase some of Shelley’s property, so that Shelley could give Godwin more money.

  Like other tourists, they explored. The area around Geneva had many literary associations. Such people as John Milton, Voltaire, the historian Edward Gibbon, and—for them, best of all—Rousseau had been born nearby or had lived in temporary homes along the lake by the city. That summer, the well-known writer Madame de Staël, former participant in the French Revolution (who had fled during the Terror), lived nearby, as usual hosting both intellectuals and the socially prominent at her salon. It was a bracing atmosphere.

  Meanwhile, Claire was anxious because Byron, who had left England before them, had not yet arrived. She visited the post office and saw, uncollected, the letter she had sent him from Paris. She now left a second one, saying, “I leave this for you that you may write me a little note when you do arrive.”

  Byron was taking his time. His huge Napoleonic carriage (with the initials L. B. prominently painted on the sides) attracted attention, and crowds gathered round it to catch a glimpse of the most notorious man in Europe. His estranged wife, Annabella, who received news of him regularly, learned that “the curiosity to see him was so great that many ladies accoutred themselves as chambermaids for the purpose of obtaining under that disguise a nearer inspection.”