The Monsters

by Dorothy Hoobler

  The editor who wrote an introduction to the original publication of Polidori’s book noted that the London Journal of 1732 printed an account of a case of vampirism in Hungary. A man named Arnold Paul (or Arnod Paole), who had served in the army on the borders of Turkish Serbia, complained that while there he had been tormented by a vampire. He had found a way to counter the threat by eating some of the dirt from the vampire’s grave and rubbing himself with its blood. However, Paul himself, after returning to his home village, fell off a hay wagon and broke his neck. After his burial, he himself became a vampire, and many people complained of being tormented by him. A local magistrate gave permission to open Paul’s grave. When his corpse was disinterred, it was found to be uncorrupted. A stake was driven through its heart, upon which a shower of blood spurted from the body and Paul cried out as if alive. Similar sightings and stories about vampires were recorded throughout the eighteenth century.

  The editor also noted that in many parts of Greece, the transformation into vampire form is thought to be some kind of punishment after death. That belief, the editor speculated, may have inspired certain lines from Byron’s poem The Giaour:

  But first, on earth as Vampyre sent,

  Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent;

  Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

  And suck the blood of all thy race;

  There from thydaughter, sister, wife,

  At midnight drain the stream of life;

  Yet loathe the banquet which perforce

  Must feed thy livid living corse,

  Thy victims ere they yet expire,

  Shall know the demon for their sire;

  As cursing thee, thou cursing them,

  Thy flowers are withered on the stem.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Wet with thine own best blood shall drip

  Thy gnashing tooth and haggard lip;

  Then stalking to thy sullen grave —

  Go—and with Gouls and Afrits rave;

  Till these in horror shrink away

  From spectre more accursed than they!

  Polidori’s monster, however, had modern touches that would influence all future vampire tale-tellers from Bram Stoker to Anne Rice. His vampire, Lord Ruthven, was an aristocrat, not a peasant or outcast as folkloric vampires were. Second, the vampire really is Ruthven and not a spirit that inhabits his body. Third, Ruthven is a traveler, a wanderer through the world. Finally, he is a seducer who preys on innocent victims; women, rather than being repelled, are attracted to him. All these elements were innovations introduced by Polidori—and of course all were inspired by none other than Lord Byron.

  Byron had been the first to start writing a ghost story in response to his famous challenge. Writing came easily to him, and when he got down to work was capable of producing hundreds of lines of poetry in a night. However, prose did not seem to be his métier, for after writing only a few pages, he gave up the effort. What he did complete was intriguing. Told from the point of view of a young man, it describes the narrator’s acquaintance and travels with Augustus Darvell, “a man of considerable fortune and ancient family.” As in many of Byron’s epic poems, the narrator and Darvell travel to the East, exploring Greek ruins near Ephesus. Darvell shows a familiarity with the area that indicates he has been there before. He tells the narrator that he has returned to die. He has one last request: giving the narrator his ring, he makes him swear to throw it into a certain spring near the Bay of Eleusis. Afterward, he must go to the temple of Ceres and wait one hour. Darvell refuses to explain what will happen next.

  This is, of course, a hook calculated to draw the reader into the story, and shows Byron’s narrative skill. Unfortunately, readers were destined to be disappointed, for after describing Darvell’s sudden death, and the rapid decomposition of his body (“his countenance in a few minutes became nearly black”), Byron left his task, never completing the story.

  The sudden darkening of the face after death was commonly held to be one of the attributes of vampires. It is obvious that the event the narrator will observe if he follows Darvell’s instructions is the reappearance of his friend. If Byron had decided to continue, he would have told his own vampire story, which would have been a logical outgrowth of the discussions that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. Both deal, in a sense, with immortality. Mary envisions it achieved through science; Byron, through supernatural means. Byron’s vision is thus closer to the traditional Gothic tales; Mary rises above them.

  Byron dated his fragment June 17, 1816. At that time Polidori was still floundering with the hackneyed effort Mary described in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein. He eventually incorporated it into another story, but must not have gotten very far with it in the summer of 1816, for it is never mentioned again in anyone’s journals or letters.

  After the Shelleys and Claire left Lake Geneva, Byron had less need for Polidori. At the beginning of the 1816 trip, Byron had been taking large amounts of laxatives to keep his weight down, and required a doctor’s presence to ensure he didn’t damage his health. Now he allowed himself to relax as old friends such as John Cam Hobhouse came to visit him at Villa Diodati. Hobhouse reported to Byron’s sister, “A considerable change has taken place in his health; no brandy, no very late hours, no quarts of magnesia, nor deluges of soda water.”

  Polidori became not only superfluous, but also a burden, since he required emotional tending. Once, thinking that he was going to be fired, he had gone to his room with the intention of committing suicide. Byron appeared at the door and offered his hand as a “sign of reconciliation.” On another occasion, Polidori got into an argument with a local apothecary about the quality of the magnesia he was supplying. Incensed at the man’s “impudent” tone, Polidori struck him, breaking his eyeglasses. He was hauled into court and ordered to pay for the damage. Byron could not have been pleased at attracting further notoriety. All in all, as Byron explained in a letter to his sister, “I had no use for [Polidori] & his temper & habits were not good.”

  Byron eventually found some way of dismissing Polidori without putting him into a suicidal depression. In a letter to his father, Polidori put the best face on things, perhaps parroting whatever Byron had told him: “We have parted, finding that our tempers did not agree. he [sic] propos[ed] it & it was settled. there was no immediate cause, but a continued series of slight quarrels. I believe the fault, if any, has been on my part, I am not accustomed to have a master, & there fore my conduct was not free & easy.”

  Polidori was not ready to return to England, and decided to travel to Italy, the land of his forebears. Shipping his trunks ahead to Milan, he set out on foot from Geneva. It was an ambitious trek, and his travel journal reveals only that he suffered from ill-fitting shoes and sore feet. It took him fifteen days, and when he arrived, he found waiting for him another letter of rebuke from his father: “your letter produced in me a twofold and opposite sensation: gratification at your having quitted a man so discredited in public opinion, and sorrow at seeing you almost a vagrant, and at the uncertainty at your lot.” In other words, not only did his father disapprove of what Polidori had been doing, he also disapproved of his not doing it any longer.

  Byron had been generous with severance pay, and Polidori could for the time being enjoy some of the finer things in life. He spent some evenings at La Scala, where he met a well-known literary priest, Father Ludovico di Breme, author of an Italian work on Romanticism. At Father di Breme’s box, Polidori was introduced to prominent visitors such as Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal. One evening Byron appeared as well, and Stendhal misunderstood the relationship between the two men, later recalling that Polidori was Byron’s “pimp.”

  Even here, Polidori managed to make a spectacle of himself that rivaled the one on stage. One night an Austrian officer who wore a large fur hat was blocking Polidori’s view of the stage. Polidori asked him to remove it, and the officer took offense. He asked Polidori to step out
side, and Polidori, expecting a duel, willingly did so. However, the officer merely wanted to arrest him without a fuss. Byron, feeling that he was honor-bound as an Englishman to come to Polidori’s defense, rushed to the local guardhouse with some friends. Stendhal, who had followed out of curiosity, described the incident: “There were fifteen or twenty of us gathered around the prisoner. Everybody was talking at once. M. Polidori was beside himself and red as a beet. Lord Byron, who on the contrary was very pale, was having great difficulty containing his rage.” Finally, one of Byron’s friends suggested that those without titles leave the room. That left Byron and some others, who guaranteed Polidori’s good behavior by writing their names on a card. Impressed, the Austrians released Polidori, but the next day he was unceremoniously expelled from Milan.

  Still on foot, traveling in the midst of a thunderstorm, he made his way to the town of Arezzo, where his uncle Luigi Polidori lived. The uncle wrote to his brother in England praising his nephew but sounding a note of alarm about his gambling and problems with money. Polidori hatched a plan to go to Brazil as medical advisor to the Danish consul. He sought his former employer’s assistance, and Byron wrote to John Murray asking if he could get Polidori some letters of recommendation from friends in the British government. But the Brazil venture did not come to pass.

  Polidori practiced medicine in Italy for a while, and traveled with an English family, the Guilfords, whose father had died while they visited Pisa. Apparently Polidori supervised his embalming and now prepared to take the body back to England. He bid a final farewell to Byron at Venice, where the poet gave him some books for Murray and two miniatures of himself for Byron’s sister. Byron could not help ridiculing Polidori’s efforts. In a letter to another friend, he wrote, “The Doctor Polidori is here on his way to England with the present Lord Guilford—having actually embowelled the last at Pisa & spiced & pickled him for his rancid ancestors.—The said Doctor has had several invalids under his proscriptions—but now has no more patients—because his patients are no more.”

  In the spring of 1817, Polidori settled in Norwich, opening a medical practice. He did not prosper, possibly because he had few connections in the community, but also because his religion made him something of an outsider as well. He was continually forced to borrow money from his father and godfather—always a terrible and humiliating experience. Both made him beg and offered advice as if he were still a child. His father wrote in a letter, “It is, however, time for you to put your head to work, for if you did not start using your judgement at the age you have now reached, I despair of your ever making use of it. Independence is what every sage and prudent man must aspire to, but it cannot be obtained by one who does not know how to limit his expenses to the means that he can readily obtain.”

  Bad luck stalked Polidori. In September, he suffered a brain concussion when his carriage struck a tree. Polidori lay unconscious for several days, and faced a long convalescence. For the rest of his life, he experienced aftereffects of the injury, and it seemed to affect his speech.

  Polidori had not given up on writing. As Byron later said, “Instead of making out prescriptions, he took to writing romances; a very unprofitable and fatal exchange, as it turned out.” A month before the carriage accident, Polidori had completed a verse play, Ximenes, and submitted it to John Murray. Murray was apparently embarrassed at having to turn it down and appealed to Byron to write a “delicate declension of it, which I engage faithfully to copy. I am truly sorry that he will employ himself in a way so ill-suited to his genius; for he is not without literary talents.” Byron let his sadistic tendencies get the better of him and responded with one of the cleverest, yet cruelest, rejection letters ever written.

  Dear Doctor—I have read your play

  Which is a good one in its way

  Purges the eyes & moves the bowels

  And drenches handkerchiefs like towels

  With tears that in a flux of Grief

  Afford hysterical relief

  To shatter’d nerves & quickened pulses

  Which your catastrophe convulses.

  I like your moral & machinery

  Your plot too has such scope for Scenery!

  Your dialogue is apt & smart

  The play’s concoction full of art —

  Your hero raves—your heroine cries

  All stab —& every body dies;

  In short your tragedy would be

  The very thing to hear & see —

  And for a piece of publication

  If I decline on this occasion

  It is not that I am not sensible

  To merits in themselves ostensible

  But—and I grieve to speak it—plays

  Are drugs—mere drugs, Sir, nowadays —

  It goes on for sixty-eight more lines, with witty references to Murray’s other authors, including Byron himself. If Murray had actually sent it to Polidori, the young man would certainly have been crushed, since the style made it unmistakable that Byron wrote it. In any case, the combination of a rejection (even a dull, polite one from Murray) and his serious head injury must have depressed him deeply.

  He was like many young people whose parents have pushed them to achieve goals set by the parents. Once the degree has been earned, the medals won, the mountain climbed, they are then unsure what they really want to do with their lives. Those with artistic leanings find that the Muse does not always smile on people who spend long hours hard at work. Polidori had hoped that by traveling with Byron he would learn to write like Byron—but nothing can teach anyone how to become a genius.

  However, living with Byron gave Polidori a subject, one that was sure to attract an audience, for it was the same subject that the poet used for his own wildly popular work: the image Byron had created of himself. In Polidori’s work, however, Byron would be transformed from the dashing hero tormented by a mysterious secret in his past. He would become the malicious Byron that Polidori hated.

  Just when Polidori wrote The Vampyre is not known for certain. Much about its composition remains shrouded in mystery, for he claimed it was published without his permission. It first appeared in the New Monthly Magazine on April 1, 1819. Accompanying the tale was an “Extract of a Letter to the Editor from Geneva,” which purported to explain the circumstances under which the story had been written. Whoever penned the letter certainly knew of the events of the summer of 1816 at Villa Diodati. He (or she) described in detail the evening when Byron challenged his guests to write “a tale depending on some supernatural agency.” The letter-writer even acknowledged that “Miss M. W. Godwin” had written Frankenstein as a result. This fact was still not generally known at the time, and many people believed Shelley or Godwin had been the actual author. Most surprising, however, was the letter-writer’s assertion that this new work, The Vampyre, was Byron’s “entry” in the contest.

  Byron first heard about it later in the month through a letter from John Murray, in which Murray gave his version of events:

  [Here is] a copy of a thing called The Vampire, which Mr. Colburn [Henry Colburn, owner/publisher of the journal] has had the temerity to publish with your name as its author. It was first printed in the New Monthly Magazine, from which I have taken the copy which I now enclose. The Editor of that Journal has quarrelled with the publisher, and has called this morning to exculpate himself from the baseness of the transaction. He says that he received it from Dr. Polidori for a small sum, Polidori saying that the whole plan of it was yours, and that it was merely written out by him. The Editor inserted it with a short statement to this effect; but to his astonishment Colburn cancelled the leaf [page] on the day previous to its publication . . . fearing that this statement would prevent the sale of this work in a separate form, which was subsequently done. He informs me that Polidori, finding that the sale exceeded his expectation, and that he had sold it too cheap, went to the Editor, and declared that he would deny it.

  Some critics have felt that Polidori intentionally put Byron�
��s name on the story to increase its sales, but surviving letters and documents show that Polidori was horrified at the work’s publication, which apparently was a surprise to him. When Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse, who knew Polidori, insisted that he publicly explain the origin of the manuscript, Polidori wrote the editor of the New Monthly Magazine in May:

  As the person referred to in the Letter from Geneva, prefixed to the Tale of The Vampyre in your last Number, I beg leave to state, that your correspondent has been mistaken in attributing that tale, in its present form, to Lord Byron. The fact is, that though the groundwork is certainly Lord Byron’s, its developement is mine, produced at the request of a lady, who denied the possibility of any thing being drawn from the materials which Lord Byron had said he intended to have employed in the formation of his Ghost story.

  In other words, Polidori had merely written it as a response to a second challenge, by an unnamed woman who wanted to see what he could make of the story Byron had begun. This mysterious woman—possibly his one-time lover Madame Brélaz, whom he had met in Switzerland—was presumably the source of the manuscript that appeared in the New Monthly.

  Byron chimed in with a letter, published in a rival magazine, airily denying authorship of The Vampyre. “If the book is clever it would be base to deprive the real writer—whoever he may be—of his honours—and if stupid—I desire the responsibility of nobody’s dullness but my own. . . . I have besides a personal dislike to ‘Vampires,’ and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to divulge their secrets.” Despite these letters of denial, when The Vampyre was published in book form, readers still believed that the tale had been written by Lord Byron. His name guaranteed a big sale; this was not the first time someone had tried to pass off work as Byron’s.