Lord Glenbie, another visitor to Geneva that summer, noted in his Swiss travel diary that Byron was being “cut” by everyone. Byron summed up the downside of fame in the lines:
With false Ambition what had I to do?
Little with love, and least of all with Fame!
And yet they came unsought, and with me grew,
And made me all which they can make—a Name.
Because the Villa Diodati was larger than the Shelley cottage, it became the favored place for the five young people to gather. Claire, who still had not revealed her pregnancy to anyone, hoped to put her relationship with Byron on a sounder basis—if nothing else, to persuade him to acknowledge her as his mistress. The only way she knew how to do this was pursue him.
Byron evidently used Polidori as a kind of chaperone to make it difficult for Claire to catch him alone. Polidori, meanwhile, developed a crush on Mary and sought to impress her with his knowledge of literature and science. Byron noticed this, and on one occasion prompted Polidori to make a fool of himself. Early one afternoon, as the two men stood on the second-floor balcony of the Villa Diodati, they saw Mary stroll up the hill toward the villa. Rain had made the ground slick and she was having a little difficulty. Byron told Polidori, “Now you who wish to be gallant ought to jump down this small height, and offer your arm.” At once, Polidori swung himself over the balcony rail, but when he dropped to the ground, he slipped badly and sprained his ankle. Byron could not stifle his laughter, even though he helped carry Polidori inside and gave him a pillow for his foot. It turned out to be a serious injury that hobbled Polidori for the rest of the year.
Polidori got his revenge. While the group was out boating, whether by design or accident, Polidori struck Lord Byron with an oar on his knee. The blow was hard enough to cause Byron to turn his head away to hide the pain. As reported by Thomas Moore, Byron’s friend and biographer:
After a moment he [Lord Byron] said, “Be so kind, Polidori, another time, to take more care, for you hurt me very much.”—“I am glad of it,” answered the other; “I am glad to see you can suffer pain.” In a calm suppressed tone, Lord Byron replied, “Let me advise you, Polidori, when you, another time, hurt any one, not to express your satisfaction. People don’t like to be told that those who give them pain are glad of it; and they cannot always command their anger. It was with some difficulty that I refrained from throwing you into the water; and, but for Mrs. Shelley’s presence, I should probably have done some such rash thing.” This was said without ill temper, and the cloud soon passed away.
Byron did much of his best work late at night—he went to bed at dawn and did not get up until the afternoon—and the four others adjusted to his schedule. For Shelley and Mary, this gave them the mornings to study and read and sail. Mary happily had Shelley to herself: they had hired a twenty-one-year-old Swiss woman called Elise to help take care of William, and Claire was distracted by her desperate pursuit of Byron.
Mary did, however, have a new rival for Shelley’s attention. Everything exotic and strange attracted Byron, and Shelley fell into that category. When Byron finally rose from his bed, he often went sailing with Shelley in the boat the two of them had purchased.
Byron was intensely stimulated by Shelley’s ideas and it showed in the outpouring of work he accomplished that summer—he completed the third canto of Childe Harold, wrote The Prisoner of Chillon, and began Manfred. Their friendship had less influence on Shelley’s poetry; Byron may even have had an inhibiting influence on the younger man, who later said, “I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, and there is no other with whom it is worth contending.”
Mary was not unaware of Byron’s handsome profile. She would later write of him, “Beauty sat on his countenance and power beamed from his eye.” He and Shelley were such opposites: one fair, the other dark; the younger man frail and neurasthenic, the elder robust and athletic. Shelley’s voice was high-pitched, while Byron’s was deep and dramatic. Nonetheless, for Mary, Byron’s intellect was his true attraction. She was flattered by any signs that he admired her opinions.
The two men had contrasting attitudes toward women. Shelley wanted intellectual companions as well as lovers, whereas Byron held women in low esteem and, with the exception of his sister, did not take them seriously. That attitude certainly extended to Claire, who was merely a sex object to him.
When storms drove the five inside, they read aloud to one another or simply talked late into the night. Mary described those wet evenings to Thomas Moore: “We often sat up in conversation till the morning light. There was never a lack of subjects, and grave or gay, we were always interested.” Byron usually chose the topic of conversation and directed his remarks at Shelley, showing that he didn’t care to hear the others’ views. Mary the Dormouse listened intently as Byron and Shelley discussed art, literature, science, politics, and philosophy. The two men were fundamentally different in their view of humankind. Byron believed that people were born with a set nature and they could choose only to deal with, protest, or endure their human conditions. Shelley felt that people were more plastic—that they could succeed in perfecting themselves and overcome anything.
One night, the conversation turned to what Mary called “the nature of the principle of life.” The theory of vitalism, popular among the Romantics’ contemporaries, held that an élan vital, or life force, distinguished living things from nonliving things. Some thought that there was a connection between the élan vital and electricity. Byron, Shelley, and Polidori had heard of Luigi Galvani, an Italian scientist, who had shown in 1786 that he could produce muscular contractions in dead frogs by touching them with a pair of scissors during an electrical storm. In so doing, Galvani conjectured the existence of an “animal electricity” that produced life. Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, carried the work a step farther. In 1803 Aldini performed experiments on human corpses, using a Leyden jar. He claimed that by applying electricity, he could make dead bodies sit up, raise their arms, clench their fists, and blow out candles placed before their mouths. Stories had circulated in Europe that dead bodies had even been brought back to life.
Seated quietly to the side, sometimes making clear copies of Byron’s poems that could be sent to his publisher (Byron hated this kind of tedious work, which both Mary and Claire did for him), Mary filed away everything she heard. She was not completely ignorant of modern science, though her father had not made it a part of her education. As a girl, she might have heard Humphry Davy discuss his experiments with light, heat, and gases at her father’s house, although Godwin indicated what he thought of science when, referring to Davy, he said, “What a pity such a man should degrade his vast talents to Chemistry.” But living with Shelley, a science enthusiast from boyhood, had broadened Mary’s knowledge.
What Mary brought to the summer was a lifetime of reading. Just during 1815 and the summer of 1816, she read works by Goethe, Schiller, Calderon, Dante, Tasso, Ariosto, Alfieri, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Matthew “Monk” Lewis, as well as Byron and Shelley. Many novels, most of them in the popular Gothic genre, were also on her reading lists—as indeed they were for the other members of the group as well. The Romantic writers and thinkers did not view the genre with disdain, but rather embraced it as part of their revolt against eighteenth-century rationalism. Gothic authors, they felt, were tapping into deep, primal feelings.
On June 16, the weather was particularly dramatic and as the five huddled around the fireplace of the Villa Diodati, Byron selected a volume of German ghost stories (called “flutter” stories because of their effect on the hearts of readers) translated into French. The book was Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d’histoires d’apparitions de spectres, revenants, fantomes, etc. The word fantasmagorie describes the theatrical art of making ghosts and other phenomena appear through optical illusions. The spectacle was invented in 1798 when the Belgian Étienne Gaspard Roberts staged a show using lanterns and transparent slides to project images. The shows frightened and delighted audi
ences with visions of disembodied heads, skeletons, and spectral figures. Mary and Shelley had in fact attended one of these spectacles in London on December 28, 1814, at the same performance where they had heard Andrew Crosse’s lecture on electricity. Mary must have remembered that occasion when Byron read the title of the book, for she was fond of words, and she had noted “phantasmagoria” in her journal eighteen months earlier.
The tales in the book Byron now read from were written in the same spirit as Roberts’s show. Byron obviously chose them for the effects he could create, reading in his sonorous, emotional voice. Anyone who has ever been in an isolated house during a storm knows the feelings the imagination can produce in that situation. Every lightning flash and thunderclap made Byron’s listeners jump. Each movement of the shadows thrown by the candles added to the nervous tension.
One of the stories in the collection concerned twin sisters, one of whom had died. A young duke arrives at the castle of the dead girl’s father; he relates that he has recently seen her in Paris. The girl’s father has her grave opened because he wonders if she may have been “re-animated.” The body is still there, but a year after the girl’s death, it has remained uncorrupted. At the climax of the story, at the surviving girl’s wedding, the dead sister appears and takes her place as the lover of the groom. Mary could not have helped noting the comparison between herself and Claire, who had competed with her for Shelley earlier, and had now returned to intrude again. But before Mary had much time to ponder any parallels, Byron began another tale, one that he must certainly have known spookily mirrored Mary and Percy’s own situation. This was “La Revenant,” about a girl who defies her father by marrying someone he does not approve of; later she loses her baby and then is abandoned by her husband. Through it all, thunder cracked and the moaning of winds provided a sort of lamenting chorus.
Recalling that fateful evening years later, Mary did not describe herself as being particularly disturbed by the tales. Instead, she said they “excited in us a playful desire of imitation.” Byron, pleased with their reaction, suggested that each of them write a ghost story. To Mary, for some reason, he gave added encouragement. “You and I,” he told her “will publish ours together.” Byron was not in the habit of putting himself on an equal basis with a woman, and certainly not from the standpoint of writing ability, so he may very well have said this simply to annoy Claire or Polidori, who clearly would have liked to publish something as Byron’s equal. But once said, a die was cast. (Mary herself ignored Claire’s role in the contest when she wrote later, “There were four of us.”)
Those few words of encouragement from Byron were sufficient to spur Mary. “I busied myself,” she wrote “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.” But as creative people know, the Muse resists when commanded to speak. Frustratingly, Mary had trouble getting started.
Polidori, eager at the chance to please Byron, struggled as well. He noted in his journal on the next day, “The ghost-stories begun by all but me.” Byron, of course, had no difficulties, for he always had a topic: himself. The hero of his piece was an aristocrat, Augustus Darvell, who was traveling in Turkey. The story’s narrator, his companion, realizes that Darvell is possessed by some mysterious secret. Darvell even makes the narrator promise to bury him after his death and tell no one where. But after eight manuscript pages, Byron grew bored with the effort and quit. He felt more at home in verse than he did in prose. (Even his letters are series of thoughts separated by dashes, as if he were writing lines of poetry.)
For his part, Shelley began a story that Mary later said was “founded on the experiences of his early life,” but like Byron he soon gave up the effort. Ever-loyal Mary explained that Shelley was “more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story.” Apparently he had lost the ability that had enabled him to write two Gothic novels while still a teenager.
Polidori, laid up with his injured ankle, finally came up with something. Fifteen years later, Mary remembered Polidori’s story with words that were less than admiring:
Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole—what to see I forget—something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry [“Peeping Tom,” who was blinded because he looked at Lady Godiva during her famous ride], he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to despatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted.
Perhaps as a result of Mary’s lack of enthusiasm, Polidori abandoned this effort. But eventually another idea came to him, different from the one she describes, and he would develop it into a figure of horror whose only rival was her own creation.
Vampires were among the topics discussed by the circle of five at Byron’s villa that summer. The hidden secret of the hero of Byron’s aborted ghost story was that he was actually one of those frightening undead creatures that are found in the myths of many cultures. The idea that life could be extended, even to the extent of immortality, by consuming the blood of others was an old one—and of course it fit right in with the overriding question of the summer: what was the source of the élan vital that distinguished living things from nonliving? Romantic writers—including Byron, who had referred to vampires in his poem The Giaour—found the image of beings who fed on the lifeblood of others an appealing metaphor. And that metaphor was sometimes applied to the brutally self-centered poets themselves. When Shelley had abandoned his pregnant wife for Mary, Harriet had written a friend, “In short, the man I once loved is dead. This is a vampire.” She was not the only one to think of Shelley, or Byron, in such terms.
The rains continued, and the group still gathered nightly at Byron’s villa. Shelley was very fond of tea, and Byron had it served even late at night. Once more, around midnight of June 17-18, the group started to tell ghost stories. This time Byron showed them a poem he had received just before leaving England. It was “Christabel,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom Byron had mocked in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The older poet bore no grudge, and now wanted Byron’s help in getting a new book of poetry published. Mary, of course, knew Coleridge well; all her life she remembered the thrill of hiding behind the sofa with Claire, listening to him read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to her father and a group of his friends. More recently, Byron had been similarly entranced, as Coleridge had recited for him one of his new poems, “Kubla Khan,” written under the influence of opium. The once-critical Byron had been overcome with the magnificence of Coleridge’s voice and words, and was more than willing to help by sending “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel” to his publisher, John Murray.
“Christabel” fit right in with the group’s other readings at the villa. It was about a female vampire, Geraldine, who sucks the strength from the pure maiden Christabel. The stanza in which Geraldine undresses and exposes her true nature to Christabel reads:
Then drawing in her breath aloud,
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast;
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom and half her side—
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
Oh shield her! shield sweet Christabel.
At that point Byron paused for dramatic effect. The silence was broken by a shriek; Shelley stood up, put his hand to his head, and ran out of the room screaming. Polidori and Byron followed, and the doctor calmed Shelley by throwing water in his face and administering some ether. Polidori described the incident:
. . . his lordship having recited the beginning of Christabel . . . the whole took so strong a hold of Mr. Shelly’s [sic] mind, that he sudden
ly started up and ran out of the room. The physician and Lord Byron followed, and discovered him leaning against a mantel-piece, with cold drops of perspiration trickling down his face . . . enquiring into the cause of his alarm, they found that his wild imagination having pictured to him the bosom of one of the ladies with eyes . . . he was obliged to leave the room in order to destroy the impression.
Shelley had long shown an obsession with breasts, and he harbored decidedly complicated feelings about them. (His bizarre attempt to breastfeed Harriet’s baby had been but one manifestation of this.) He had been looking at Mary just before his hysterics began. Was he thinking that it was her breasts that had eyes, and if so, what secrets did they perceive when they looked at him? Whatever the case, Byron was shocked at Shelley’s behavior, for as he noted in a letter to a friend, Shelley did not lack courage.
Mary might have used the incident as a spur to her own creativity, but still her Muse was not speaking. As she came down to breakfast each morning, the others asked her, “Have you thought of a story?” and, she recalled, “each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.” She wanted so much to achieve something great, to compete with people whom she respected. In some ways, the summer had been happy, but many concerns dragged at her spirits, distracting her from what she wanted to do. Though she was not yet nineteen, she had experienced the death of one child and now had an infant to care for. She was, still, an unmarried mother in an age when that was far more disgraceful than today. The father of her children had turned out to be more mercurial than she had bargained for, and now complained of ill health though he had not yet turned twenty-four. Claire’s presence was a constant reminder that Percy might at any time decide to take up with another woman. Despite all the philosophical reasons for regarding marriage as slavery and prostitution, Mary yearned for exclusivity. Not having it hurt her self-confidence; she blamed herself for looking for unconditional love from people—Godwin and Shelley—unable to give it. Finally, her beloved father was not speaking to her, even though Mary had presented him with a grandson named William. She had to do more than that to win back his affection.
The Monsters Page 17