Frankenstein Unbound

by Aldiss, Brian

  I could make out two figures in the boat, one male, one female.

  I heard my own voice from a remote distance ask, “Do you refer to Mary Shelley, sir?”

  Byron looked quizzically at me, holding the glasses out but just beyond my grasp. “Mary Shelley? No, sir, I refer to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. She is Shelley’s mistress, not his wife. I thought that much was common knowledge. What d’you take ’em for, a pair of Christians? Though neither Shelley nor she are pagans, that’s certain! Even now, Mary improves her mind at the expense of my doctor’s body.”

  This news, combined with his presence, caused me some confusion. I could only say stupidly, “I believed Shelley and Mary were married.”

  He withdrew the glasses again from my reach. “Mrs. Shelley is left behind in London—the only proper treatment for wives, apart from the horsewhip. Mind you, our fair student of Tasso may—may succeed...” He laughed. “There is a tide in the affairs of women which, taken at the flood, leads God knows where...”

  The topic suddenly lost interest for him. Handing the glasses back to me, he said of them with a haughty touch, “They’re well enough. I just wish they spied out something more entertaining than water and doctors. Well, sir, since I presume you know my name, perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me yours—and your business here.”

  “My name is Joseph Bodenland, Lord Byron, and I am from Texas, in America, the Lone Star State. As for my business—well, it is of a private nature, and has to do with Mrs.—I mean, with Mary Godwin.”

  He smiled. “I had observed that you were not a damned Englisher. As long as you are not from London, Mr. Bodenland, like all the rest of the tedious world—and as long as your business is not with me, and mercifully private, to boot—perhaps you will honor me by joining me in a glass of claret. We can always shoot each other later, if needs be.”

  “I hope not, as long as the rain holds off.”

  “You will find, if you are long here, that, in this terrible spot, Mr. Bodenland, the rain holds up, but seldom off. Every day contains more weather than a week in Scotland, and weeks in Scotland can drag on for centuries, believe me! Come!”

  As if in support of his wild statement, rain began to fall heavily. “The sky squelches like a grouse-moor! Let’s get in!” he said, limping rapidly ahead of me.

  We went into his villa, I in sheer delight and excitement and, I think, he in some relief at having someone new to talk to. What a spellbinder he was! We sat and drank before a smoldering fire while we conversed. I have tried to convey a pale memory of our meeting, but further than that I cannot go. The range of his talk was beyond me—even when not particularly profound, it was salted with allusions, and the connections he drew between things I had hitherto regarded as unconnected were startling. Then, though he boasted of this and that, it was with an underlying modesty which often spilled over into self-mockery. I was at a temporal disadvantage, for some things to which he made reference were unknown to me.

  At least I gathered a few facts, which drifted down like leaves amid the mellow August of his talk. He lived in the Villa Diodati with his doctor, “Polly,” the Italian, Polidori, and his retinue. The Shelley manage was established close by—“Just a grape’s stamp across the vineyard,” as he put it—in a property called Campagne Chapuis: the Villa Chapuis, as I was later to hear it called, more grandly. “My fellow reprobate and exile” (that was how he designated Shelley) was established with two young women, Mary Godwin and her half sister, Claire Claremont. Byron raised both his eyebrow and his glass when referring to Claire Claremont.

  Prompted by his remark, I recalled that Byron was now in exile. There had been a scandal in London—but scandals gathered as naturally round Byron as clouds round Mont Blanc. He had left England in disgust.

  Beneath his glass lay a sheet of paper, sopping up wine. I thought to myself, if I could only get that back to 2020, how much it would be worth! And I asked him if he found his present abode conducive to the writing of poetry.

  “This is my present abode,” he said, tapping his head. “How much longer I shall stay in it and not go out of it, who knows! There seems to be some poetry rattling about in there, rather as air rattles about in the bowels, but to get it out with a proper report—that’s the trick! The great John Milton, that blind justifier of God to man, stayed under this very roof once. Look what it did to him—Paradise Regained! The greatest error in English letters, outside of the birth of Southey. But I have news today that Southey is sick. Tell me something that cheered you recently, Mr. Bodenland. We don’t have to talk literature, y’know—I’d as leave hear news of America, parts of which still linger in the Carboniferous Age, I understand.” As I was about to open my mouth like a fish, the outer door swung open and in bounced two hounds, followed by a slender young man shaking raindrops from his head. He scattered water about from a blue cap he carried, while the dogs sent flurries of water everywhere. In the half-hour I had spent with Lord Byron, I had forgotten that it was again raining steadily.

  Byron jumped up with a roar and offered the newcomer a plaid rug on which to dry his hair. The roar made the dogs scatter, barking, and a manservant to appear. The servant banished the dogs and threw logs into the great tiled stove before which we had been sitting.

  It was plain how pleased the two men were to see each other. The patter that passed between them spoke of an easy familiarity, and was so fast and allusive that I could hardly follow it.

  “I seem to have a veritable serpentine in my locks,” said the newcomer, still shedding water and laughing wildly.

  “Did I not say last night that you were serpent-licked, and Mary agreed? Now you are serpent-locked!”

  “Then forgive me while I discharge my serpentine!” he said while toweling vigorously.

  “I’ll do my duty by a yet older form. Um—‘Ambo florentes aetatibus, Arcades ambo...’”

  “Capital! And it’s a motto that would serve for us both, Albé, even if our Arcadia is liable to flood!”

  Byron had his glass in his hand. In the excitement, the sheet of paper that had lain beneath the glass fluttered to the floor. I picked it up. My action recalled my presence to him. Taking my arm as if in apology for a moment’s neglect, Byron said, “My dear Bodenland, you must be acquainted with my fellow reprobate and exile.” So I was introduced to Percy Bysshe Shelley.

  Yes, Byron introduced me to Shelley. From that moment on, my severance with the old modes of reality was complete.

  The younger man was immediately all confusion, like a girl. He was habited youthfully, in black jacket and trousers, over which he had a dripping cape. The blue cap he tossed to the floor in order to grasp my hand. He gave me a dazzling smile. Shelley was all electricity where Byron was all beef—if I can say that without implying lack of admiration for Byron. He was taller than Byron, but stooped slightly, whereas Byron’s demeanor was almost soldierly at times. He was pimply, bony, beardless, but absolutely animated.

  “How d’you do, Mr. Bodenland, you are in time to listen to a little revision!” He pulled a paper from his pocket and began to read a poem, assuming a somewhat falsetto voice.

  “Some say that gleams of a remoter world

  Visit the soul in sleep—that death’s a slumber,

  And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

  Of those who wake and live! I look on high—”

  Byron clapped his hands to interrupt. “Sorry, I disagree with those sentiments! Hark to my immortal answer—

  “When Time, or soon or late, shall bring

  The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead—

  Then your remoter worlds, old thing,

  Will lie extinguished in your head!

  “Forgive my coarse and characteristic interruption! But don’t work the poet business so hard. I don’t need convincing! Either you are a worse poet than I, in which case I’m bored—or you’re better, when I’m jealous!”

  “I compete only with myself, Albé, not with you,” Shelley said. B
ut he tucked his manuscript away with a good grace. Albé was the nickname they had for Byron.

  “That game’s too easy for you! You always excel yourself,” Byron said kindly, as if anxious that he might have hurt Shelley’s feelings. “Come on, have some wine, and there’s laudanum on the chimney piece if you need it. Mr. Bodenland was about to tell me of some tremendous thing that cheered him recently!”

  Shelley sat close, pushing away the wine, and looked into my face. “Is that indeed so? Did you see a ray of sunshine or something like that?”

  Glad of the diversion, I said, “Someone told me today that the bad weather was caused by all the cannonballs discharged on the field of Waterloo last year.”

  Shelley burst into laughter. “I hope you have something more tremendous than that to tell us.”

  Put on my mettle, I told them as simply as I could of how Tony, Poll, and Doreen had made their “Feast,” burying their doll (I substituted doll for scooter) and covering the mound with flowers, and how, at the end, as a simple token of courtesy or affection, Tony had presented his penis for Doreen’s pleasure.

  Although Shelley smiled only faintly, Byron roared with laughter and said, “Let me tell you of an inscription I once saw scrawled on the wall of a low jakes in Chelsea. It said, The cazzo is our ultimate weapon against humanity’! Though the Italian word was not employed, come to think of it. Can you recall a graffito more charged with knowledge?”

  “And maybe self-hatred, too,” I ventured, when I saw Shelley was silent.

  “And below it another hand had scribbled a codicil: ‘And the vagina our last ditch defense’! Your noble savage of the slums is nothing if not a realist, eh, Shelley?”

  “I liked the tale of the Feast,” Shelley said to me. “Perhaps you will tell it to Mary when she comes over, without adding the—unimproving tailpiece.” His gentle manner of saying it robbed the remark of any reproof it might otherwise have carried.

  “I’ll be delighted to meet her.”

  “She’ll be here in an hour or so, when she has dried off from her boat trip with Polidori. And when she has fed our little William and tucked him into bed.”

  That name—little William!—recalled me to more serious things. The sick, chiseled visage of Frankenstein returned before my eyes. I fell silent. The two poets talked together, the dogs slunk back into the room and fought under the window, the fire flickered. The rain fell. The world seemed very small. Only the perspectives of the poets were large: they had a freedom and a joy in speculation—even when the subject of speculation was a gloomy one—which steadied one’s faith in human culture. Yet I could see in Shelley some of Victor’s nervous mannerisms. Shelley looked like a haunted man. Something in the set of his shoulders suggested that his pursuers were not far behind. Byron slouched back stolidly in his chair, but Shelley never kept still.

  A servant was summoned. The laudanum bottle was brought out. Byron tipped it gently into his brandy. Shelley consented to having a draft in wine. I took another glass of wine myself.

  “Ah, a man can drown in this stuff!” said Byron, appreciatively sipping.

  “No, no, you need a whole lake to drown properly,” said Shelley. “In this stuff you float!” He rose and began to dance round the room. The dogs yapped and growled about his heels. He ignored them, but Byron lurched to his feet with a bellow. “Get those mankey hounds out of my room!”

  As the servant was kicking them out, Mary Godwin entered, and I found myself flushing—part with the wine, no doubt, but mainly with the agonizing exhilaration of confronting the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

  VIII

  * * *

  To see her standing there! Although my emotions were engaged, or perhaps because they were engaged, a flash of revelation lit my intellect. I perceived that the orthodox view of time, as gradually established in the Western world, was a mistaken one.

  Even to me then, it was strange that such a perception should dawn at that moment, when dogs were barking, wind was blowing in, everyone was making a hubbub, and Mary Shelley stood before me. But I saw that time was much more like the growth of Mary’s reputation, devious and ambiguous, than it was like the straight line, moving remorselessly forward, which Western thought has forced it to prefigure.

  That straightness of time, that confining straightness, was one with the Western picture of setting the world to rights. Historically, it was easy to see how it had arisen. The introduction of bells into all the steeples of Christendom had been an early factor in regularizing the habits of the people—their first lesson in working to the clock. But the greatest advance in regularity was soon about to descend on the world in which I found myself: the introduction of a complex railway system which depended on exact and uniform timing over whole countries, not on the vagaries of a church steeple or a parson’s watch. That regularization would reinforce the lesson of the factory siren: that to survive, all must be sacrificed to a formal pattern imposed impersonally on the individual.

  The lesson of the factory siren would be heard too in the sciences, leading to the horrible clockwork universe of Laplace and his successors. That image of things would dominate men’s notions of space and time for more than a century. Even when nuclear physics brought what might seem less restrictive ideas, those ideas would be refinements on, and not a revolution against, the mechanistic perception of things. Into this straitjacket of thought Time had been thrust. It had come to the stage in 2020 when anyone who regarded Time as other than something that could be measured precisely by chronometer was shunned as an eccentric.

  Yet, in the coarse sensual world over which science never entirely held sway, Time was always regarded as devious. Popular parlance spoke of Time as a medium wherein one had a certain independence of movement quite at variance with scientific dogma. “You’re living in the past.”

  “He’s before his time.”

  “I’ll knock you into the middle of next week.”

  “We are years ahead of the competition.”

  The poets had always been on the side of the people. For them, and for some neglected novelists, Time would always be a wayward thing, climbing over life like a variegated ivy over some old house. Or like Mary Shelley’s earlier reputation, cherished by few, but always there, diversifying.

  She went over to Shelley and gave him a book, telling him that Claire Claremont was sitting by little William— “Willmouse,” she called him—and writing letters home. Shelley started to question her about Tasso’s La Gerusalemme Liberata, but Byron called her over to him. “You may give me a kiss, dear Mary, since it is soon to be your birthday.”

  She did kiss him, but somewhat dutifully. He patted her and said to me, “Here you see the advantages of heredity nobly exemplified. This young lady, Mr. Bodenland, is the product of the union of two of the great minds of our time, the philosopher, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the great philosophical female minds to rank with my friend Madame de Stael—who lives just across the lake, as you may know. So we have here beauty and wisdom united, to everyone’s great advantage!”

  “Do not let Lord Byron prejudice you against me, sir,” said Mary, smiling.

  She was petite. She was fair and rather birdlike, with brilliant eyes and a small wistful mouth. As with Shelley, she was irresistible when she laughed, for her whole countenance lit up—she gave you her enjoyment. But she was much more still than Shelley, and on the whole very silent, and in her silence was a mournful quality. I could see why Shelley loved her—and why Byron teased her.

  One thing struck me about her immediately. She was amazingly young. Later, I saw by a date in a book that she was not yet eighteen. The thought went through my mind, She can’t help me!—it must be years yet before she will come to write her masterpiece.

  “Mr. Bodenland can tell you a story about little children and graves,” Shelley told her. “It will make your flesh creep!”

  “I couldn’t tell it again, even for such worthy ends,” I said to her.
“It would bore the rest of the company even more than it did the first time.”

  “If you are staying some time, sir, you must tell it me privately,” Mary said, “since I am setting up shop as a connoisseur of grave stories.”

  “Mr. Bodenland is a connoisseur of the Swiss weather,” Byron said. “He believes it was the cannon at Waterloo which caused the clouds such hemorrhage!”

  Before I could protest at the misrepresentation, Mary said, “Oh, no, that’s not so at all—that’s a very unscientific remark, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir! The bad weather universal in the northern hemisphere this year is entirely attributable to a phenomenal volcanic explosion in the southern hemisphere last year! Isn’t that interesting? It proves that winds are distributed all over the globe, and that the whole planet enjoys a circulatory system like—”

  “Mary, dear, you upset my circulatory system when you parade these ideas you pinch from Percy,” Byron said. “Let the weather get into anything but not the claret and the conversation! Now, Shelley, tell me what you were reading when you were skulking in the woods today.”

  Shelley put ten long fingers to his chest and then flipped them up at the ceiling. “I was not in the woods. I was not on earth. I had fled the planet entirely. I was with Lucian of Samosata, adventuring on the moon!”

  They began a conversation on the advantages of lunar life; Mary stood meekly beside me, listening. Then she said to me, quietly so as not to disturb the talk, “We shall eat mutton tonight—or Lord Byron and Polidori will, for Percy and I avoid meat. You must join us, if you will. I am just going to see if the cook is attending to the vegetables.” With that she went towards the kitchen.

  Mention of Polidori reminds me that the little Italian doctor had entered with Mary. No one had taken any notice of him. Even I forgot to note him. He poured himself some wine and went over to the fire to drink it. Then, evidently annoyed about something, he tramped upstairs to his room.