The Monsters

by Dorothy Hoobler

  Byron was accompanied by his longtime valet, Fletcher, and his personal physician, the young, handsome, and earnest John Polidori. Polidori was as much interested in a literary career as a medical one, and unknown to Byron, the doctor had been promised five hundred pounds by Byron’s own publisher to write an account of the poet’s European tour. When they left England, Polidori began a journal to use as a source. Like other literary “evidence” about the group, it does not exist in original form. It begins on April 24 and continues to the end of the year, but there is a significant and frustrating gap from June 30 to September 16. In addition, the diary was later copied and edited by Polidori’s sister, who burned the original after removing passages she found improper—and because her brother was traveling with Byron, they must have been numerous.

  Polidori was from a distinguished literary family. His Italian grandfather, Agostino Ansano Polidori, had combined literature with medicine by writing a long poem in ottava rima on the human skeleton, titled Osteologia. John’s father, Gaetano, studied law, but went on to become a secretary for Vittorio Alfieri, the Italian Romantic poet. He remained with Alfieri for four years and nursed him through a near-fatal illness, but it was rumored that the poet was jealous of his assistant’s good looks, which attracted women. After parting ways with Alfieri, Gaetano went to England, where he met and married Anna Maria Pierce, a governess. John William, the oldest of their four sons, was born on September 7, 1795. Though Gaetano himself was not a devout Catholic, he raised his sons to be Roman Catholics, while the couple’s four daughters were brought up in the Anglican Church. Catholics in England had freedom to worship in their faith at this time, but they still lacked political rights. (Byron had spoken out for Catholic emancipation in the House of Lords.)

  Young John went to Catholic schools and excelled at his studies. His religious education left a mark on the boy, whose first choice for a career was to be a priest. His father, however, urged him to study medicine, and John always did what his father wanted even when he resented it. At the age of fifteen, Polidori entered the University of Edinburgh, one of the most highly regarded medical schools in Europe. Here he studied all aspects of medicine—anatomy, surgery, chemistry, pharmacy—and one extracurricular activity necessitated by the serious shortage of cadavers for anatomical study: along with other students, Polidori dabbled in grave-robbing, an activity that certainly helped foster a Gothic imagination.

  Polidori always had ambivalent feelings about medical school. At one point, he wrote home and expressed the desire to go fight for Italian independence. His father responded that he was “a madman fit for a strait waistcoat.” He advised his son to cool down and finish his degree. John obeyed but showed his feelings in a letter to his father: “You wound my heart by blaming me for what I cannot prevent. . . . The first part of your letter is nothing but a thorn, which pierces me the more as I always wait for your letters in the hope of something pleasant.”

  With his soft, dark eyes and curly hair, Polidori, like Lord Byron, was physically gorgeous, but his father’s bullying had humiliated him many times and he never established a sense of confidence. In addition, high expectations had put relentless pressure on him. All of this left him moody and overly sensitive, traits that made him difficult to deal with. He took up writing poetry to console himself, composing Ximenes, a tale of revenge and seduction. It also featured a suicide, perhaps the beginning of Polidori’s obsession with that topic.

  Polidori always seemed to be searching for a father figure who would approve of him. One of the first was William Taylor, a Norwich intellectual. Taylor was a scholar and translator but he had a dark side: he was fascinated with suicide and nightmares. Taylor helped John write the dissertation for his medical degree. Polidori had become interested in sleepwalking from reading fiction about it, and in the dissertation, he described a case of somnambulism (or as he termed it, oneirodynia) that his uncle Luigi, himself a fine doctor, had treated. The patient was a ten-year-old boy who did everything in his sleep—not only walked but used the chamber pot, attacked a servant, talked, and prayed. Polidori showed his literary bent by prefacing the dissertation with the sleepwalking scene from Macbeth. It earned him his degree at the age of nineteen, though he still did not particularly want to practice medicine.

  Instead, Polidori tried his hand at writing for several British literary and political journals, and became involved with the fight against capital punishment, publishing an article, “On the Punishment of Death.” Sir Henry Halford, a distinguished London physician, became interested in the young man and introduced him to Byron. It seemed like a good match; Byron needed a physician to travel with, because his frequent crash diets sometimes endangered his health. For Polidori, the poet was another potential father figure, who could help him achieve his aspirations for a writing career. Moreover, Polidori spoke Italian and French as well as English, which would be useful in traveling on the Continent.

  Of course, it would likely have been better if Byron and Polidori had taken time to become better acquainted, but the poet hired Polidori just two days before he was about to leave England. It soon became clear that their personalities did not mesh well. Polidori continually tried to find some way of impressing Byron, but as with his father, he failed miserably. Byron quickly took a dislike to him, dubbing him “Polly Dolly,” and making him a frequent target of his often-vicious wit.

  It was probably just as well that Polidori was able to keep his journal out of Byron’s hands, for the poet would have laughed at its prose. Polidori described their crossing the English Channel:

  The sea dashed over us, and all wore an aspect of grief . . . The stars shedding merely a twilight enabled me to see the phosphoric light of the broken foam in all its splendour. But the most beautiful moment was that of its first appearance: no sound around save the sullen rushing of the vessel, and the hoarse cries of the heaving sailor; no light save a melancholy twilight, which soothed the mind into forgetfulness of its grief for a while—a beautiful streak following the lead through the waves.

  They landed at Ostend in Belgium. There, Polidori wrote breathlessly, “As soon as he reached his room, Lord Byron fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid.”

  In more restrained language, Polidori wrote his sister Frances on May 2: “I am very pleased with Lord Byron. I am with him on the footing of an equal, everything alike: at present here we have a suite of rooms between us. I have my sitting-room at one end, he at the other. He has not shown any passion; though we have had nothing but a series of mishaps that have put me out of temper though they have not ruffled his.” Polidori was too optimistic in describing the status of his relationship with the poet. Once, when they were in a hotel overlooking the Rhine, Byron set him straight. Polidori had boldly asked what Byron could do better than he, aside from writing poetry. Byron responded, “First . . . I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door. Secondly, I can swim across that river. . . . And thirdly, I can give you a d——d good thrashing.”

  Byron enjoyed visiting the sites of famous battles. While in Belgium, he and Polidori went to Waterloo, where only a year before, Napoleon had suffered his final defeat at the hands of a coalition led by England’s Duke of Wellington. Though forty thousand men had died there, Byron wrote Hobhouse that the battlefield was “not much after Marathon & Troy” (both of which he had earlier seen), and because he admired Napoleon added, “I detest the cause & the victors—& the victory.” Avoiding France, the travelers crossed Germany to Switzerland, stopping at Morat, the scene of a fifteenth-century battle where the Swiss had defeated the Burgundians in a bloody fight. Byron raided an ossuary, taking some bones as souvenirs. Writing to Hobhouse, he reported, “I brought away the leg and wing of a Burgundian.”

  Unlike Shelley, Byron did not like the Swiss. He called their country “a curst selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants, and still less their English visitors.” Still, he was looking f
orward to his summer at one of the world’s most beautiful locations. As Byron and Polidori were crossing the Jura, they tried to determine where the “clouds were mountains or the mountains clouds.” When he saw the lake, which he called by its French name, Byron reported, “Lake Leman woos me with its crystal face.”

  On May 25, Byron and his party checked into the Hotel d’Angleterre, where the Shelley party was also staying. Signing the hotel register, the poet put down his age as one hundred, apparently because the journey had been so exhausting. The ever-vigilant Claire soon spotted his signature and sent a note: “I am sorry you are grown so old, indeed I suspected you were 200, from the slowness of your journey. I suppose your venerable age could not bear quicker travelling . . . I am so happy.” Byron ignored her.

  The day after he arrived, Byron received a letter from his friend Hobhouse informing him of Caroline Lamb’s revenge. She had just published a bestselling novel titled Glenarvon—a wildly fictionalized account of her affair with Byron. The book was currently the talk of London, but Hobhouse noted loyally that it had only hurt Caroline’s reputation further. He added,

  You will hardly believe it but there is not the least merit in the book in any way except in a letter beginning “I love you no more” which I suspect to be your’s—Indeed she had the impudence to send a paragraph to some paper hinting that the whole novel is from the pen of Lord B.—I do not like to contradict it for fear of selling the book by propagating the lie—Her family are in a great quandry [sic] and know not what to do. I presume she is actually a personal terror to them.

  Caroline even had the effrontery to lift two lines from Byron’s own poem, The Corsair, to use as the epigraph for her book: “He left a name to all succeeding times, / Link’d with one virtue and a thousand crimes.” Later in the year, when Byron read the book, he commented, “It seems to me that, if the authoress had written the truth, and nothing but the truth—the whole truth—the romance would not only have been more romantic, but more entertaining. As for the likeness, the picture can’t be good. I did not sit long enough.”

  Byron had another woman, closer to hand, to worry about. He had not responded to Claire’s letters, but since they were all staying in the same hotel, it was impossible to avoid her. Two days after Byron’s arrival, Claire saw him and Polidori take a boat onto the lake; by the time they returned, she had brought reinforcements, Mary and Shelley, to the quay, where she introduced them. Shelley, she knew, was intensely curious about Byron, and fortunately Byron took to him at once. Byron extended an invitation to Shelley to dine that evening with him—pointedly excluding Claire and Mary.

  Polidori managed to insinuate himself into the dinner, but he wasn’t a very good listener, for his journal entry for that date includes a description of Shelley that manages to be wrong on several counts: “the author of Queen Mab, came; bashful, shy, consumptive [incorrect diagnosis]; twenty-six [Shelley was twenty-three]; separated from his wife; keeps the two daughters of Godwin [Claire wasn’t Godwin’s], who practice his theories.” Polidori seemed to be under the impression that Claire and Shelley were lovers, although he realized that she was, or had been, Byron’s as well.

  A few days later, Polidori breakfasted with the group he thought of as “the Shelleys.” Percy told a self-justifying story about his marriage to Harriet, claiming that when they met he had believed he was dying and married her only so she would benefit from his estate when he passed on. Shelley also told Polidori that his father had tried to consign him to a mental institution and that he was only saved from that horrible fate by Dr. Lind, his favorite teacher at Eton. This seems to have been self-dramatization on Percy’s part.

  The five young people, greatly talented but each terribly flawed, quickly drew closer together. Byron and Shelley, who could be standoffish with strangers, found themselves to be kindred spirits and soon began boating together. They had long conversations about all the subjects they were interested in—including art, literature, science, politics, and philosophy. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

  Byron also took up with Claire, who had refused to be ignored. She wrote him: “I have been in this weary hotel this fortnight & it seems so unkind, so cruel, of you to treat me with such marked indifference. Will you go straight up to the top of the house this evening at half past seven & I will infallibly be on the landing place & shew you the room.”

  He gave in. As he wrote Augusta later that summer: “Now—don’t scold—but what could I do?—a foolish girl—in spite of all I could say or do—would come after me—or rather went before me—for I found her here. . . . I could not exactly play the Stoic with a woman—who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophize me.”

  Before long, the two parties became dissatisfied with the hotel and decided to find places to live on the opposite side of the lake. On June 1, the Shelley group became the first to leave, moving into the Maison Chapuis, a small waterside cottage by a cove on the southern shore where the two poets would keep a sailboat. The majesty of the scenery became even more awesome when the thunder and lightning raged and the Shelleys watched from their windows as the storms became “grander and more terrific.” Mary wrote: “We watch them [the thunderstorms] as they approach from the opposite side of the lake, observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens, and dart in jagged figures upon the piny heights of Jura, dark with the shadow of the overhanging cloud, while perhaps the sun is shining cheerily upon us. One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld.”

  Sometimes, as a storm was blowing up outside, Mary heard the sound of singing from the direction of the water. This was Byron’s way of battling the winds, as he boldly crossed the lake in a small open boat in spite of the weather. Each evening he came to visit them and afterward, even as late as midnight, he would go back to the hotel in Secheron. Polidori, who avoided these trips, said that they were made “often whilst the storms were raging in the circling summits of the mountains around.” The oarsman who rowed Byron’s boat recalled that on one occasion, he warned the poet that they were in danger of sinking, and Byron stripped, ready to attempt to swim ashore if the boat foundered. At this time Byron was working on the third canto of Childe Harold, and it is clear from some of its stanzas that the strange weather provided inspiration for him:

  The sky is changed!—and such a change! Oh night,

  And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,

  Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light

  Of a dark eye in woman! Far along,

  From peak to peak, the rattling crags among

  Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud,

  But every mountain now hath found a tongue,

  And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,

  Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!

  And this is in the night:—Most glorious night!

  Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be

  A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,—

  A portion of the tempest and of thee!

  How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,

  And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!

  And now again ’tis black,—and now, the glee

  Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth,

  As if they did rejoice o’er a young earthquake’s birth.

  On the tenth of June, Byron rented the much larger Villa Diodati, “the prettiest place on all the Lake,” he recalled, just a ten-minute walk from Shelley’s new dwelling. From its second-floor balcony there was a stunning view of the water and the mountains beyond, but the house also attracted Byron because it had associations with John Milton, a poet he particularly admired. It had been the property of the Diodati family, one of whose members was Charles Diodati, Milton’s schoolmate and only close friend. Their personalities had been opposites: Diodati was carefree and adventurous, Milton bookish and almost antisocial. Milton had spent some time at Lake Geneva with Diodati before the pre
sent villa house was built. Tragically, Diodati was destined to die young. In the elegy Milton had written for him, the poet said that they were “most intimate friends from childhood on.” Their loving relationship had a deep resonance for Byron.

  The new residences did not, however, guarantee privacy. Byron’s reputation had preceded him, and the news that he was now involved with one or more of the Shelley group—famous in their own right—set the local rumor mills churning. English tourists could keep up to date with the news from home by reading the gossipy Galignani’s Messenger, so they knew all about Byron, Caroline, Augusta, and Annabella. The chitchat about him was to be a continual nightmare for Byron. Jacques Dejean, the hotel proprietor, rented telescopes to his guests so they could watch the comings and goings at Villa Diodati. Some oglers mistook tablecloths hanging to dry over the balcony for petticoats—starting the story that the women took them off when they visited Byron. The poet remembered it bitterly: “There is no story so absurd that they did not invent it at my cost. I was watched by glasses [telescopes] on the opposite shore of the Lake, and by glasses too that must have had very distorted optics. I was waylaid in my evening drives—I was accused of corrupting all the grisettes [young girls] in the Rue Basse. I believe that they looked upon me as a man-monster.” Unfortunately for those who hoped to glimpse a spicy scene through their telescopes, “it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house,” as Mary recalled. Despite—or perhaps because of—this, many now believed that Byron was sleeping with both of the Godwin stepsisters. The Lutheran clergyman John Pye Smith, traveling in Switzerland that summer, wrote that on August 9, “at about a mile & a half from the town, we passed the house in which Lord Byron lives, in a sullen & disgraceful seclusion. Besides his servants, his only companions are two wicked women. He sees no company; and Mr. Ferriere told us that no person of respectability would visit him.” The poet Robert Southey repeated some of these rumors and added that Byron and Shelley had formed a “League of Incest.” Byron never forgave him for it, though he later pointed out reasonably that since none of them were actually blood kin to any of the others, incest could not have entered into their relations.