Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (16 page)

As soon as he reached his room, Lord Byron fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid.
From Polidori’s diary, 1816

The wet summer of 1816 and the inconvenience it caused a party of distinguished literary tourists (Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont and John Polidori) is well known. Novels have been written and films made about it. The bad weather began, far away, in Indonesia, with the eruption of Mount Tambora. It hit seven on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, making it the largest such event in a thousand years. The result, worldwide, was the ‘year without a summer’ and a less deadly eruption of Gothicism in Villa Diodati, alongside Lake Geneva, where the English tourists were staying. Pent up by the foul weather, they beguiled the rainy days and nights with light reading and a competition to write the most spine-chilling ghost story which their bored minds could come up with.

Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) was evidently struck by the fact that Milton had once resided in Villa Diodati. She elected to rewrite
Paradise Lost
as
Frankenstein
. Shelley and Byron rather fizzled out: literature was, in the final analysis, more than a parlour game for them. None the less, as a striking entry in Polidori’s diary, for 18 June, testifies, they remained receptive listeners: ‘L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s
Christabel
, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water on his face, and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. S[helley], and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.’

The author of ‘The Vampyre’, ‘Dr’ Polidori was, like the eighteen-year-old Mary, young – barely twenty. The two got on well. A graduate of Edinburgh medical school (the youngest ever to qualify, supposedly), Polidori had learned his sawbone trade (which he despised) on cadavers supplied by Edinburgh’s famous ‘resurrectionists’. Medical science needed corpses: the gallows and the stillborn (the only legitimate supply) were inadequate. Neither would rotting cadavers do. Anatomists needed ‘fresh’ meat – still warm, ideally – and, in a world without refrigeration, a constant supply of such bodies. Burke and Hare, the most notorious of the resurrectionists,
solved the demand-and-supply problem by murder. Their colleagues in the resurrection trade, like Victor Frankenstein, dug up what the gravediggers had buried, only a few hours earlier.

Polidori had written his thesis on ‘somnambulism’. He was fascinated by the paranormal. A second generation Italo-Englishman, he was handsome, politically radical and a vibrant conversationalist. He had found himself at the Villa Diodati by a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck. Byron, immersed in sexual scandal, had decided that England was too hot for him. He would decamp and he needed a travelling companion – preferably a physician. Byron was taken with Polidori, whom he had met socially. The young man was recruited for the duration of the tour abroad, on a handsome stipend of £500.

Polidori was flattered to the point of intoxication. Byron’s closest friend, John Cam Hobhouse, loathed ‘Polly-Wolly’ and sowed as much distrust as he could. It was unnecessary. The young doctor soon got on Byron’s nerves and things were not helped by ‘The Vampyre’. Clearly the hero of that short tale, Lord Ruthven
is
Byron. ‘Ruthven’ was one of the titles of the noble villain-hero in Lady Caroline Lamb’s revenge novel
Glenarvon
, which came out in May 1816. It too may well have been light reading at the Villa. It was Lamb, a discarded mistress, who described Byron as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’. He, with studied insouciance, dismissed
Glenarvon
as so much ‘fuck and tell’. Whether he wanted to pay £500 p.a. for more fuck (or ‘suck’) and tell was something else. Intended as flattery, Polidori’s story was tactless. The plot of ‘The Vampyre’ is simple. The sinister Lord Ruthven takes the handsome young Aubrey on a continental tour with him. On his travels, Ruthven cold-bloodedly destroys every young person who comes his way. Finally, having sucked Aubrey dry, he turns his dead, grey, irresistible eye on Aubrey’s sister:

Aubrey’s weakness increased; the effusion of blood produced symptoms of the near approach of death. He desired his sister’s guardians might be called, and when the midnight hour had struck, he related composedly what the reader has perused – he died immediately after.

The guardians hastened to protect Miss Aubrey; but when they arrived, it was too late. Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!

No need to call for the ether. One’s spine is obstinately unchilled. Byron had soon had more of the young man than he could stand and sent him on his way to cross the Alps, alone, friendless and penniless. On his return to England, Polidori drifted, gambled wildly, and suffered a disastrous head injury in a coach accident in 1818, which exacerbated a temperamental disposition towards melancholy.

‘The Vampyre’ – that failed compliment – was long forgotten until it rose from the grave in suspicious circumstances. Henry Colburn, the most unscrupulous publisher in London, published it in 1819 as ‘by Lord Byron’. Polidori protested bitterly. How Colburn (nicknamed the ‘prince of puffers’ for his advertising stunts) came by the text has never been explained. He had earlier published
Glenarvon
. With Byron’s name attached to it, ‘the trashy tale’ was sensationally popular. There was nothing new about vampires as such, but what ‘The Vampyre’ did was to remodel the image, to ‘Byronise’ it. Polidori profited not at all from the runaway success of his story. He died aged twenty-five, suicidally depressed, and probably by a self-administered dose of prussic acid.

The workshop of filthy creation.

‘The author of
Frankenstein
’ enjoys a bigger reputation with posterity than the vampirophiliac Polidori. Both concepts proved eminently filmable but the new maps of literature introduced by the feminist movement of the 1960s have firmly lodged ‘Mary
Wollstonecraft
Shelley’ (the double barrelling is significant) into a canon which has no place for ‘Polly’. She was born in north London, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. He was the author of
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
(1793); she was the author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792). Mary never knew her mother, who died of puerperal fever a week after her daughter’s birth. Natal trauma scenarios haunted Mary through life and are central to her most famous novel. She grew up with a stepsister, Fanny (the illegitimate daughter of her mother). Godwin then remarried and brought another illegitimate stepsister, Claire Clairmont, into the family.

Whatever their rights, there was a plurality of women at 29 The Polygon, Somers Town. It was an educational advantage for Mary that the family’s penury meant most of her learning happened there. Books and radical ideas were as everyday items as breakfast – and more plentiful. Godwin never made money from his writings. As his only legitimate daughter, Mary was her father’s favourite (but not her stepmother’s)
and he took unusual pains to cultivate her mind. Among a range of other subjects, he had her tutored in Latin and Greek. Orthodox educational opinion of the time would have likened it to teaching dogs trigonometry. In her 1831 Preface to
Frankenstein
, Mary recalls ‘writing stories’ from her earliest years. Godwin too wrote stories – for example, what is plausibly claimed as the first detective story in English literature,
Caleb Williams
(1793). Mary was a published author at the age of twelve, and she was (her father recorded) as pretty as she was intellectually precocious.

Prominent thinkers and leaders of the Romantic movement made it a point to visit Godwin. The most important date in Mary’s young life was 11 November 1812 when she met Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Harriet, who were making the de rigueur visit. Shelley, who was rich, was a financial benefactor to the ever hard-up philosopher. Over the next months he and Mary fell in love – during clandestine meetings at Wollstonecraft’s gravestone, it is romantically recorded. She was not yet sixteen, he was in his early twenties. Godwin found the relationship rather too radical, so the couple duly eloped, without permission, in July 1814 and left for Europe – currently in its pre-Waterloo lull. Shelley’s pregnant wife and child were not wanted on the trip. Shelley was no novice at this kind of escapade: Harriet Westbrook had only been sixteen when he had eloped with her to Scotland.

The product of this free-love honeymoon, the poem ‘Mont Blanc’ – and connection with Mary – marks a palpable growth in Shelley’s poetry. But they ran out of money and returned to public obloquy in September, by which time Mary was now pregnant. The child (born in February 1815) died soon after birth. Shelley had, for love, lost not merely public respect but his private wealth. However, things looked up with a handsome bequest from his grandfather and the couple retired to a comfortable house in Windsor (lyricised in Mary’s later novel,
The Last Man
). Their second child, William, was born in 1816 – still some months before his parents married. It was not a happy event: their marriage was only made legal by virtue of the heavily pregnant Harriet drowning herself in the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park. It was a month before her decomposed body was discovered, allowing Percy and Mary to legitimise their union.

The Shelleys then took flight again. There ensued the momentous creative cauldron at Villa Diodati – the ‘league of incest’, as moralists of the time called it. Unlike her husband, who kept urging her towards rational adultery, Mary was neither a believer in free love nor Byronic recklessness. There were good examples not to be. On the way to Switzerland they were accompanied by Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, pregnant and abandoned by Byron. Mary was still nursing her four-month-old son. Alongside Lake Geneva, during this ‘wet ungenial summer’, the company of writers enlivened their confinement in the villa with ghost stories. Mary –momentously – contributed
Frankenstein
as part of the fun.

Over the next few years, the Shelleys were largely nomads in Italy where Mary, not yet twenty, gave birth to a third child, Clara. Ostensibly the Mediterranean climate was kinder to Percy’s chronically weak lungs. Italy was unkinder to little Clara’s bowels, and she died in infancy of dysentery. Mary was again pregnant while watching her daughter die and sank into profound depression. Novels were, amidst all this domestic catastrophe (Shelley was never a faithful husband), taking form in her mind and in notebooks, including the Italian set
Valperga
(published in 1823) and the remarkable study of father–daughter incest
Mathilda
. Mary’s fourth child, Percy, would, mercifully, survive. His father did not. Shelley was drowned in a squall, sailing in the Gulf of Spezia.

The young widow devoted the remainder of her life to the two Percys (her second child, William, had also died of malaria in 1819). She installed herself as the custodian of her husband’s literary legacy and, having partly reconciled herself with his family, her son’s education. Percy was destined to be the inheritor of a title and a fortune. The family insisted, using the lever of a £250 p.a. allowance, on Mary and her son returning to England, where she was unhappy and chronically lonely and he was turned into exactly the kind of Englishman his father detested. Nor were Mary’s relations with her father always good. Mary’s financial situation eased when young Percy succeeded to the family title in 1844. She was not, however, to enjoy any happy years, dying of a brain tumour, still in her early fifties. Her radiant beauty had been wiped out by smallpox, some while before. Everything, even death and decay, happened to Mary Shelley too young.

She published novels in the 1820s and 1830s – most of them with the ‘Prince of Puffers’, Henry Colburn, for cash down and not much of it. Fiction was no longer a parlour game for her. The most interesting of Shelley’s later novels is
The Last Man.
The action is set in the last years of the twenty-first century. England has become a republic. The abdicated royal family figure centrally around the person of the anchorite philosopher-narrator Lionel Verney. Shelley and Byron appear under thinnest disguise. The third volume (the climax is tediously late in coming) features a worldwide plague which provokes first anarchy (the Irish make a spirited assault on Albion), then universal death to the human race. Lionel is left – a Robinson Crusoe of the future, the sole survivor of the ‘merciless sickle’. Conceptually
The Last Man
is, like
Frankenstein
, strikingly original. And, clearly enough, it allegorises Mary’s late-life loneliness. But, as a story, it is sawdust – and unimaginative. Nautical transport two centuries hence is still by sail and wars are fought with the sword. Nor, it would seem, has medicine made great progress.

A stronger case can be mounted for
Mathilda
. The dying heroine narrates her father’s incestuous advances on her and her love for the young poet, Woodville,
who is later drowned. Is the novel (written during her deepest depression in 1818) a veiled indictment of her father? The blunt fact is that nothing Shelley wrote after
Frankenstein
is anywhere as good as
Frankenstein
. Why? The male chauvinist reply is that her husband helped her out. Without Percy she was only half a writer. So, perhaps, would he have been without her.