Shelley: The Pursuit (71 page)

The first thing was to get clear of the Hotel d’Angleterre, which was expensive and inconvenient; already stories were beginning to circulate about their curious
entente
. Shelley talked Byron into splitting the purchase of a properly rigged sailing boat, with a sufficiently deep keel and draught to withstand the occasionally violent squalls. Byron discovered a possible set of residences with a harbour, on the opposite southern side of the lake, near Compegny, about three miles beyond Geneva. There was a large porticoed house, with an extensive shaded balcony along its length, commanding a broad view of the Lake and the Jura. It was known as the Villa Diodati, and Milton had once occupied it. Below, about eight minutes’ walk down a narrow, tortuous track through the vine fields, was a smaller, two-storied chalet which gave directly on to the lake and commanded the small private harbour. This was known by the cheerful name of Montalègre. These seemed almost ideal properties for Byron and Shelley respectively, though the leases were rather high in the best Swiss fashion. Negotiations were opened with the landlords.

Meanwhile the talk continued between the two poets, and became more intimate. Shelley fascinated Byron with the lurid details of his career, which he narrated as commonplace, and Byron listened with amused sympathy. Polidori, who seems to have been present at many of these discussions, noted down the topics, some of them characteristically distorted by Shelley, and sometimes added his own caustic commentary. Of Harriet and Mary and Claire, he noted on the 30th: ‘[Shelley] gone through much misery, thinking he was dying; married a girl for the mere sake of letting her have the jointure that would accrue to her; recovered; found he could not agree; separated; paid Godwin’s debts, and seduced his daughter; then wondered that he would not see him. The sister [i.e. Claire] left the father to go with the other. Got a child. All clever, and no meretricious appearance. He is very clever and the more I read his “Queen Mab” the more beauties I find.’
²⁰

The next day, Shelley’s reminiscences went even further back into the mythologies of Dr Lind and Harriet Grove. ‘Shelley is another instance of wealth inducing relations to confine for madness, and was only saved by his physician being honest. He was betrothed from a boy to his cousin, for age;
another came who had as much [money] as he
would
have, and she left him “because he was an atheist”.’
²¹
Of Godwin Shelley talked bitterly. ‘When starving, a friend to whom he had given £2000 though he knew it, would not come near him.’ Mary impressed Polidori by reciting Coleridge’s grim satire against Pitt, ‘A War Eclogue’, in which the three voices of Fire, Famine and Slaughter chant of the statesman’s damnation — ‘which persuades me [Coleridge] is a poet’. Polidori was surprised by the taste among the Shelleys for the macabre, but glad when Shelley requested him to vaccinate little William, which he did on 2 June. The doctor received in thanks a gold chain and seal.

Shelley took Montalègre without more ado at the beginning of June, and Byron, whose negotiations had been more protracted, moved into the Villa Diodati, above them on the hill, ten days later. Their new boat arrived on 8 June, and Shelley established its moorings in the little harbour. Polidori noted: ‘Into the new boat — Shelley’s — and talked till the ladies’ brains whizzed with giddiness about idealism. Back; rain; puffs of wind.’ Other subjects Polidori noted were madness, and names involved in the Irish revolutionary movement. Shelley was also, according to Byron, busy ‘dosing’ him with Wordsworth. In the evenings sometimes Claire managed to slip away up to the Diodati. But it was not altogether easy, for she found Polidori’s presence awkward, and she was anxious, she wrote in a note to Byron, that his suspicions should not be aroused. This was clearly a defensive device of Byron’s, for we know that he had told Polidori of the relationship on the first night they dined with Shelley. But by June there was also another piece of information that Polidori may or may not have known. Claire was pregnant. For Shelley it was a cloud, but a distant one.
[1]

Things became easier for Claire when the two households drew together as a result of a spell of bad weather in the last fortnight of June. There was less sailing to be done, and they joined together in literary discussions and projects at the Diodati. The talk went on late into the evenings, and when the rain was falling, Shelley’s party often stopped over the night. Polidori was laid up on a couch, having slipped and sprained his ankle attempting to perform a gallantry for Mary on the path through the vine fields on 15 June. He had begun a play, which ‘all agreed was worth nothing’, but the conversation with Shelley on that same night led in intriguing directions. ‘Shelley and I had a conversation about principles — whether man was to be thought merely an instrument.’

Sitting in the long, candlelit drawing-room at the Diodati, with rain beating
at the large balcony windows, and thunder and lightning frequently descending across the lake from the Jura, the subjects turned upon the life force, galvanism and the principles of animation. Polidori had qualified in Edinburgh at the exceptional age of 19, and the discussion was balanced between his considerable knowledge of contemporary medicine and Shelley’s more speculative interest in Erasmus Darwin’s work, and the possible applications of the kind of electrical instruments Shelley had experimented with at Oxford. Mary, who sat silently with Claire, half drawn back in the flickering shadows, listened with fascination as the men talked and theorized. She recalled: ‘Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of it ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr Darwin . . . who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.’
²²

These speculative discussions, which continued on the nights of 16 and 17 June, became merged with the idea that, after the disappointment of Polidori’s play, they should all try their hands at writing a ghost story. The previous week Polidori had been discussing problems of somnambulism with Dr Odier in Geneva, and someone, perhaps Byron, had brought in a copy of a very rare collection of German horror stories, translated under the title of
Fantasmagoriana
. On the 17th they all went to a ball at Madame Odier’s for part of the evening, except Polidori with his bad ankle, and these subjects were continued. Polidori was annoyed to be left out, since he had taken a fancy to Mary and her free thinking, though she responded drily enough to his gallantries by saying that she thought of him as a younger brother. Surrounded by the irritability and frustrations of the young doctor and also Claire’s tensions, and deep in the world of horror stories and speculations, Shelley found himself slipping into a mood of morbidity and oppression. Mary too was assailed by disturbing ideas and fantasies, and for once she felt threatened by Shelley’s power to frighten and unsettle.

Shelley’s ghost story was never written down, but received a single explosive performance, on the night of the 18th. They were all sitting in the long room at the Diodati, and Polidori records what happened. ‘Twelve o’clock really began to talk ghostly. 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.’ In Coleridge’s poem, the witch, Geraldine, first appears as a beautiful and benighted princess, lost in the forest. But in reality she is a Lamia — a disguised serpent — and she is intent on both the spiritual and physical possession of the young girl, Christabel. Christabel’s father mistakenly gives Geraldine shelter in the castle. The witch is actually lodged in Christabel’s chamber, and when they retire to bed, she casts a kind of dreaming spell on her, and then proceeds to undress in front of her sleepy, half-closed eyes. The verse runs:

Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,

And slowly rolled her eyes around;

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 in full view,

Behold! her bosom and half her side —

Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue —

O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!
[2]

The others were much shaken by the suddenness and violence of Shelley’s outburst, and it was Polidori who went to Shelley and treated him in his capacity as a doctor. He managed to calm him, and with considerable tact succeeded in extracting the story of Shelley’s hallucination. ‘Threw water in 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.’ Polidori continued to talk to Shelley, as he lay on a couch recovering, and several of Shelley’s persistent fears were candidly revealed in these unguarded minutes. Polidori recorded: ‘ — He married; and a friend of his liking his wife, he tried all he could to induce her to love him in turn. He is surrounded by friends who feed upon him, and draw upon him as their banker. Once, having hired a house, a man wanted to make him pay more, and came trying to bully him, and at last challenged him. Shelley refused, and was knocked down; coolly said that would not gain him his object, and was knocked down again.’
²³

The emotional pressures resulting from Shelley’s communal attempts are clear from Dr Polidori’s notes, and it seems that he had at least partly succeeded in ‘interpreting’ Shelley’s hallucination in terms of the social and sexual contradictions in Shelley’s life. But there is no episode in Shelley’s career that exactly
matches the last incident. Shelley seems to have been trying to explain how he felt continually persecuted at places like Keswick, Lynmouth, Tremadoc and Kentish Town. Above all, he was trying to indicate to Polidori his absolute refusal to indulge in physical violence; a refusal that Polidori vaguely realized denied some important element in his temperament. Later, because of an incident during a sailing race, Polidori, who was himself extremely hot-tempered, threatened to challenge Shelley to a duel, until Byron intervened to say that he would accept any challenge on Shelley’s behalf. Polidori withdrew, as Byron had intended; but perhaps Byron would have done better to leave Shelley to deal with the matter himself.

Polidori later made use of this ‘fit of fantasy’, as Byron called it, in the ghost story he wrote, adapted from one thrown aside by Byron. It was published in 1819 as a pamphlet with a lurid woodcut,
The Vampyre
. Byron commented on this gothic tale in a letter to Murray in the same year, to the effect that Shelley ‘certainly had the fit of phantasy which Polidori describes, though
not exactly
as he describes it’.
²⁴
But at the time, writing from the Diodati to his publisher he was more puzzled; he could not understand what had got into Shelley, ‘for he don’t want courage’. The friendship between him and Shelley had not yet broken the barriers of gentlemanly good form.

Nonetheless Shelley’s ‘fit’ did not stop Byron going off alone with Shelley four days later on a sailing trip round the lake. The weather had improved on the 19th, and the Shelleys had gone back to more regular residence at Montalègre. The late night talks still continued at the Diodati, and it was probably on one of those days before Shelley’s departure that Mary experienced the awful nightmare that gave her the central idea for her own, most famous story:
Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus
. Her description of how this occurred, though clearly formalized for the occasion of her preface, is a classic example of the way in which the heightened consciousness of terror, which Shelley had so often played upon, was transmuted into creative inspiration. Mary had managed this, where neither Harriet nor Claire had survived the stress.

Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by before we retired to rest. When I placed me head on my pillow I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.
[3]
I saw — with shut eyes, but acute mental vision — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and
then, on the working of some powerful engine show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion . . . . His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade, that this thing which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter . . . . He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still: the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond.
[4]
I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story — my tiresome, unlucky ghost story! Oh! If I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!