The Lady and Her Monsters

by Roseanne Montillo

  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.

  June 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:

  Sweet Christabel her feet she bares,

  And they are creeping up the stairs;

  Now in the glimmer, and now in the gloom,

  And now they pass the Baron’s room,

  As still as death with stifled breath!

  And now have reach’d her chamber door;

  And now with eager
feet press down

  The rusties of her chamber floor.

  As lightning from the storm got nearer, it boomed across the lake and heightened the group’s mood—most of all that of Shelley, who seemed entranced by the cadence of the lyrics, by the piercing thunder that weaved relentlessly among Byron’s words, awakening a curious sensation in the listeners:

  Beneath the lamp the lady bow’d

  And slowly roll’d her eyes around;

  Then drawing in her breath aloud,

  Like one that shudder’d, she unbound

  The cincture from beneath her breast;

  Her silken robe, and inner vest,

  Dropt to her feet, and full in view,

  Behold! Her bosom and half her side—

  A sight to dream of not to tell!

  And she is to sleep by Christabel.

  Shelley fractured the silence by leaping from his chair and running out of the room. It was unclear what had frightened him—the poem, the mood in the room, or the weather outside the windows—but in the frenzy that followed, Polidori rose to the occasion. He followed Percy Shelley out of the room, took hold of him, and administered a good dose of ether.

  Later that evening Polidori jotted in his diary, “June 18—Lord Byron repeated some verses of Coleridge’s Christabel, of the witch’s breasts; when silence ensued, and Shelley suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water in his face, and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. Shelley and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.”

  As literary history and Mary Shelley’s own recollections have always stated, it was during one of those nights in June that Frankenstein fully presented itself to her as the story she had been waiting all her life to tell.

  “I placed my head on the pillow, I did not sleep . . . 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,” Mary Shelley detailed in her introduction.

  She continued, “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, at the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”

  Victor Frankenstein and his unearthly creature had finally arrived.

  Frankenstein observing the first stirring of his creature; print from the 1831 edition.

  Chapter 7

  FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS

  Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

  To mold me man? Did I solicit thee

  From darkness to promote me?—

  JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST

  In the days following the start of Byron’s ghost story competition, John Polidori spent a lot of time with the Shelleys, particularly with Mary. His diary entries include short notes about walks he took with Mary, as well as descriptions of the animated dinners and numerous conversations they shared. There is little detail about their creative minds; one entry, from June 28, says only, “all day at Mrs. Shelley’s.”

  What did they speak of during these times together? The contest’s participants had agreed not to reveal anything about their stories in progress while the writing was being done. But did Mary mention, even in passing, that she had begun to write? Did she tell Polidori what direction her writing was taking? Did she ask him for any scientific and anatomical information only a doctor might know? She had to have been aware of his feelings for her, but did she, in any way, take advantage of Polidori’s infatuation to sharpen her tale? If so, Polidori never made note of this in his diary, or if he did, his sister may have put it in the flames because she thought it was too salacious.

  By early June, Claire had told Percy about her pregnancy, though it’s unclear when they told Mary. But once Lord Byron became aware of the situation, he was not pleased. He knew Claire would need money to care for the child, and instead of accepting his responsibilities, he seemed offended and affronted. Observing this situation, Shelley had legal papers drafted that allocated a portion of his inheritance to Claire and her child.

  Byron had never been entirely fond of Claire, and now he felt conned by her. He went so far as to doubt the child’s paternity: “I never loved her nor pretended to love her, but a man is a man, and if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours there is but one way—the suite of all this is that she was with child—and returned to England to assist in peopling that desolate island,” he later wrote to his friend Douglas Kincaid. “Whether this impregnation took place before I left England or since I do not know; the [carnal] connection had commenced previously to my setting out—but by or about this time she is about to produce—the next question is, is the brat mine? I have reasons to think so, for I knew as much as one can know about such a thing—that she had not lived with S. during the time of our acquaintance—and that she had a good deal of that same with me.”

  With summer quickly coming to an end, Mary, Percy, and Claire left the shores of Lake Geneva on August 29. Claire and Lord Byron, though mostly Byron, had decided that Claire’s child would remain with one of its parents until at least the age of seven. And in order not to taint anyone’s reputation further, Claire would be referred to as the child’s aunt, which would allow her to see and care for the baby as she wished without inciting malicious rumors.

  Almost two weeks later, on September 16, John Polidori also left Villa Diodati. He marked it in his journal simply as “Left Cologny and Lord Byron at six in the morning.”

  By now Byron had become busy with his own life and had had enough of Polidori’s juvenile antics. Byron had wanted a physician who would help restore his mental and physical faculties. Instead, in Polidori he got someone who, despite his age, still acted like a boy and needed near-constant supervision, discipline, and assurance. Byron was unwilling to offer any of these.

  A few days after departing, Polidori wrote to his father, Gaetano, to tell him what had happened and to let him know his plans: “I was in agitation for my parting from Lord Byron. We have parted, finding that our tempers did not agree. He proposed it, and it was settled. There was no immediate cause,” he explained, “but a continued series of slight quarrels.”

  Blaming himself for what had occurred, Polidori added, “I am not accustomed to have a master, and therefore my conduct was not free and easy.” In the upcoming months, he planned to make his way toward his father’s native land, Italy, and there, if opportunities presented themselves, to try to settle as a doctor.

  The letter seemed to give Gaetano a certain amount of satisfaction that he had been proven correct and that Polidori had decided to leave “a man so discredited in public opinion.” But still, having glimpsed a streak of indecisiveness in his child, he feared that in the months to come, he would see his son become “almost a vagrant.”

  Byron was thrilled to have gotten rid of Claire’s presence and lustful gazes, and he was also happy that Polidori was gone. In a later letter to his sister, Byron described Polidori as merely useless. In the young man’s desire to please, he had been more of a hindrance. Still, Byron had to admit that his health had improved in the previous months, but he could not tell if that was due to Polidori’s ministrations or simply having been away from the nasty rumors of London.

  There were others in Byron’s circle who found Polidori distasteful and were relieved to see him leave. John Hobhouse, one of Byron’s closest friends, wrote in his diary: “Helped Dr. Polidori to settle his involved accounts with Lord Byron, and took leave of him . . . He is anything but an amiable man, and has a most unmeasured ambition, as well as inordinate vanity; the true ingredients of misery.”

  Polidori’s own diary entries lapsed as he sallied through Italy with a lot of hope but very few financial resources. When he landed in Milan, he stayed for a month and reconnec
ted with friends and acquaintances whose social calendar included galas, dinners, and most especially concerts at the famed Scala opera house. Though he enjoyed those outings and Milan society, his medical career did not prosper there; actually, there was no indication that anything remotely resembling a career was about to be established. As his savings dwindled, he traveled to Pisa, where, under the supervision of a local doctor, he began to care for Italians as well as English expatriates living in the area. Three people under his care died due to mysterious circumstances, and following local investigations, their deaths were attributed in part to his substandard care and his general skills as a physician were questioned.

  Italy was proving to be no better for him than Switzerland had been. With his patients dying and finances shoddy, Polidori wrote to his father again asking for money to return to England. He had come to believe that what his father had told him about his native land was all “but too true.”