The Lady and Her Monsters (18 page)

The villas and cottages surrounding the lake were occupied by local residents, but also by English expatriates who had heard about Byron's sexual perversions as well as Shelley's elopement. Often, while clamoring for tidbits, they directed their expensive telescopes toward the group's villas, hoping to catch a glimpse of something disreputable going on. On one occasion colorful tablecloths that had been left to dry in the open air were mistaken for the girls' petticoats. These eavesdroppers buzzed with gossip about the strange and scandalous ordeals taking place. They spun saucy tales to while away the sleepy afternoons, and some of them even reached all the way back to London.

Byron, Shelley, Mary, and Claire were well aware of the rumors being spread, and not surprisingly Byron enjoyed them. Some years later, in a letter Percy Shelley wrote to Countess Guiccioli, Byron's Venetian lover, he made his true feelings known:

Our dwellings were close together; our mode of life was quiet and retired; it could be impossible to imagine an existence simpler than ours, less calculated to draw down the aspersions cast upon us . . . Both Genevans and English established at Geneva affirmed that we were leading a life of the most unblushing profligacy. They said that we had made a compact together for outraging all held most sacred in human society . . . I will only say that incest, atheism, and many other things equally ridiculous or horrible were imputed on us. The English newspapers were not slow in propagating the scandal, and the notion lent entire faith. Hardly any mode of annoying us was neglected. Persons living on the borders of the lake opposite Lord Byron's house made use of telescopes to spy out all his movements. An English lady fainted, or pretended to faint, with horror on seeing him enter a saloon. The most outrageous caricatures of him and his friends were circulated; and all this took place in the short period of three months.

During the warmer parts of the days that summer, they boarded sailboats on the lake and tracked the various paths that lined the area, or they took excursions to the neighboring villages. But as the afternoons grew dark and the evenings even darker, the temperatures dipped, the thunderstorms plaguing the Continent due to the volcanic eruption still made themselves heard beyond the mountain ranges, and the yellow streaks of lightning sliced through the inky-black night.

That was when they convened at Villa Diodati around a blazing fire, its pleasing warmth inflaming their own imaginations. The whining of the wind made its way through the forest and the stormy weather pummeled the windowpanes, perpetuating a sense of mystery that directed the topics of their conversations.

“The thunders that visit us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before,” Mary wrote to Fanny. “We watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake, observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens, and dart in jagged figures upon the piney heights of Jura . . . One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The lake was lit up—the pines of Jura made visible, and all the same illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful over our heads amid the darkness.”

Thunder and lightning were already a part of their lives. Mary had been born during a thunderstorm, and Shelley was already familiar with the attributes of such atmospheric phenomena. Sitting in the shadow of Lake Geneva, they were all aware of Benjamin Franklin's, Humphry Davy's, and Luigi Galvani's works, the scientists' notions of the spark of life. Viewing and hearing the natural spectacle outside their windows, they could not help but converse about such possibilities, about the notion of reanimating the dead.

I
n the 1831 edition of
Frankenstein
, Mary Shelley wrote in her introduction: “Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of those, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated . . . Perhaps a corpse could be re-animated; galvanism had given token to such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and imbued with vital warmth.”

These words made it appear as if the conversations took place over an extended period of time and only between the two poets. That meant the rest of the group just stood by and listened. Polidori's diary recounted something different.

In an entry dated June 15, Polidori noted, among other details, “Shelley, etc. came in the evening; talked of my play etc., which all agreed was worth nothing. Afterwards Shelley and I had a conversation about principles—whether man was thought merely an instrument.”

After so many years, is it possible that Mary had simply forgotten about the other two people, Polidori and Claire, involved in the conversation on galvanism and the restoration of the dead, which in turn gave rise to her story? Whether or not the discrepancy occurred unintentionally, it was more likely that Dr. John William Polidori had been the one debating with Percy Shelley, not Lord Byron.

Shelley's knowledge about science, the occult, and medicine had been gained by reading various texts famously published at the time, but also from personal experience. Following his expulsion from Oxford University, he had spent some months with his cousin Charles Grove attending Joseph Abernathey's anatomical lectures in London. He had even debated becoming a surgeon. Polidori's experience with these matters was real and tangible. He had graduated at the top of his class from one of the most distinguished medical schools in Europe: the University of Edinburgh Medical School, where his classes had included “Anatomy, Surgery, The Theory and Practice of Medicine, Chemistry, Botany, Pharmacy, and the related discipline of Materia Medica.”

The institution was famous for churning out well-known physicians, but it also had a long-standing tradition of body snatching, which Polidori might very likely have recounted to the party, given that the subject fit with their evening conversations. It was also well known that a student who wished to attend that medical school but did not have the financial means could cover his tuition by providing professors with dead corpses to dissect. Thus, all over Edinburgh the graveyards were looted; doctors and lecturers always knew where the corpses were coming from, and the citizens also knew who was robbing the graves. It's not known if Polidori was a grave robber himself, but he had certainly heard of such behavior because its notoriety spanned the country and beyond its borders.

It is also all but certain that he worked on and examined bodies robbed from graveyards. Of particular interest to Polidori during his studies was somnambulism, or motor action, such as walking, during sleep. He was most especially interested in the philosophical attributes tied to the condition and how that related to the so-called principle of life. His studies on the subject did not make him an expert, but he had enough knowledge to write about it and discuss it with some authority.

In 1815 Polidori had finished his medical studies with a thesis titled “Oneirodynia,” a Greek word meaning “waking while in a dream,” or in better terms, waking-dream, the very state Percy Shelley often suffered from and to which Mary Shelley always attributed the arrival of her story
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
Polidori's thesis was not exceptionally long or scientific, and most of the writing was based on case histories from his uncle Aloysius Polidori, a doctor himself. Its pages make it clear that Polidori's interest was in the separation of the mind and the body, which many believed could occur during sleep.

He went to great lengths to describe the case of a ten-year-old boy who had been taken down by frequent headaches, and “whose paternal aunt was prone to epileptic insults.” It seemed that the boy was also prone to “chronic convulsions, a tremor of the knees, which was followed by the collapse of his body to the ground, pain in the head, and finally sleep.”

The boy's symptoms worsened and were only relieved when bloodletting was applied to him. Soon, though, he was also “chattering and gesticulating,” and had a vision of “French men . . . trying to attack him.” But of particular interest to Polidori's theories was that while those attacks were being experienced, if a flame was placed or swayed before the boy's eyes, which were open, he did not flinch or push it away, clearly indicating that his physical body was in one place, while his mind was somewhere else. To make matters worse, the boy's thirteen-year-old sister and a friend of hers of the same age soon began to suffer from the same symptoms.

While Polidori used the boy's case and others similar to his to validate and illustrate his research, he had neglected to consider the possibility that the subjects might have been lying, or simply embellishing what happened to them.

The conversations at Villa Diodati would not only have been on par with Polidori's level of understanding and knowledge, but they also would have offered him a chance to impress the group, most especially Mary Godwin, on whom he had developed a sort of amorous crush.

J
une 15 had not been a good day for Polidori. Earlier that morning, while perched on a balcony overlooking the lake, he had been urged by Lord Byron to hoist himself up and jump off its parapet. The Shelley party had been heading toward Villa Diodati, and Byron, who had become aware of the younger man's feelings for Mary and of his excessive sensitivity, had assured Polidori that such an acrobatic act would impress her. It did not, and he ended up spraining his ankle, which became more painful when Byron persuaded him to read aloud one of his plays. His rendition of the play, and the play itself, were thought of as useless and were relentlessly ridiculed for hours.

This must have made him feel like the resounding failure his father had warned him he would become. Even worse, Polidori had also become the butt of their jokes, most especially at the hands of Byron, who had nicknamed him “Polly-dolly.” Having been disparaged and mocked for his writing as well as for his painful and flirtatious jump, it made sense that, although wounded, he would have inserted himself in a conversation about the principle of life or somnambulism, because at least he knew more about the subject than the rest of them.

On that particular evening—June 15—and over the next three days, the famous ghost story competition to which
Frankenstein
has always been, in part, attributed took place. On June 17, Polidori noted in his diary, “Went into town; Dined with Shelley, etc . . . the ghost-stories are begun by all but me.”

Everyone else, including Mary, was already hard at work on their tale. That particular detail, however, contradicts slightly the account Mary later gave in her introduction to
Frankenstein,
where, in unflattering terms, she wrote, “Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a hole . . . I busied myself to think of a story . . . one which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake thrilling horror—one to make the readers dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beating of the heart . . . ‘Have you thought of a story?' I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.”

In Mary's version of events, she was the last to begin creating a tale, and she gave readers of her introduction the impression that the unfolding of her story took place over a substantial length of time, rather than a handful of nights. She also suggested that the participants in the contest shared their stories with each other as they were set down to paper, and that they were discussed and dissected around the fireplace. But that was not true. No one spoke of his or her doings; no one knew what the others were writing about. Several years later Mary Shelley herself agreed that the details of their stories were always kept most secret. But if that was so, how did she know what Polidori was writing about? Not only that, Polidori had never mentioned a skull-headed lady. He always maintained that the fragment he came up with during those evenings gave birth to his story “Ernestus Berchtold.”

The group's interest in writing their own ghost tales had not only sprung from their conversations about galvanism and the possibility of reawakening the dead, but also from the reading they were indulging in. They were all fascinated by
Das Gespensterbuch,
the voluminous collection of German ghost tales translated into French by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès. Retitled
Fantasmagoria,
the text was one of a handful of books Lord Byron had requested from his publisher in London. Populated by vampires, spirits, and tales of unbridled passion and unfulfilled love affairs, the stories inspired them to try their own hands at writing similar stories and must have prompted Byron to whisper the now-infamous words, “We will each write our own ghost story.”

The reading continued on the next evening. Byron must have leafed through a collection of poetry he had on hand, including a volume of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's that had been published some weeks before by John Murray; this included the rhyming poem
Christabel.
As Mary, Percy, Claire, and Polidori gathered round a fire, listening to the wind whip across the lake, Byron must have removed the volume from his pile, and speaking in that tone Lady Blessington remembered as “neither low or high,” began:

The lady leaps up suddenly,

The lovely lady, Christabel!

It moan'd as near, as near can be,

But what it is, she cannot tell—

On the other side it seems to be,

Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree.

The howling thunder outside the windows seemed appropriate accompaniment for the tales they were telling: