Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  “Yes, but why did you come?”

  “To help. Whatever else?”

  “Do you think a lot of money figures in an assignment like this?” I said.

  She smiled. “It never does, does it?”

  “What do you want? Accuracy? A positive spin?”

  “‘Spin’?”

  “You’ve got a sympathetic mouthpiece here. I want to give today’s readers your take on these stories.”

  “Accuracy, certainly,” she said. “Insofar as any fallible mortal has the capacity to ensure it. I would also desire that you neither overpraise these pieces nor claim too much for them as exemplars of … science fiction?” She cast a skeptical glance at the multicolored paperbacks converging in the corner behind her.

  “Brian Aldiss—” I began.

  “Yes, I know of him,” she said. “I would have visited him ere calling upon you, but that the prolificity and the reputed excellence of his work have to some extent cowed me.” Here she shrugged enigmatically within her shawl.

  “Well, I see neither of those things kept you from coming to Pine Mountain. Anyway, Aldiss says that Frankenstein sired the literary genre known today as science fiction.”

  “Yes. But of The Last Man he wrote that my prose had ‘run a little to fat’; that ‘one often wishes for more conversation and fewer descriptions, and altogether less rhetoric’ in it.”

  Had that comment, even more than Aldiss’s formidable output and reputation, derailed her plans to visit him? Swallowing the question, I noted that three of her five supernatural tales—“Dodsworth,” “Valerius,” and “The Mortal Immortal”—clearly represented short-fiction forays into the category that she had inadvertently or intuitively invented as a teenager.

  She smiled again. “We must forgive adolescents their excesses.” Perched before me as a fifty-three-year-old woman who had died in the winter of 1851, restored to health and animated by her own singular élan vital, she looked strangely at home on my stool. Her center-parted hair had more silver than chestnut in it, and the lines around her mouth and nose heightened the dry, satiny quality of her skin. “Before I intruded, what had you intended to write in your remarks?” she said.

  “That I thought I knew why the reanimation of the dead had such centrality in your work.”

  “Pray, enlighten me as to your thesis.”

  I really didn’t want to do that—in her presence. I wanted to hide it in a pseudo-Freudian essay and hope that no one but pseudo-Freudians ever stumbled upon it. To say it aloud struck me as tantamount to bludgeoning her over the head with, well, a baseball bat. At last I said, “Subconscious wish-fulfillment fantasies.”

  “Louder, man. The seething of that queer device,” nodding at my space heater, “obliterates your utterance.”

  Obliterates. Utterance. (Aldiss had her pegged.) But I repeated my suspicion, louder, and my face grew hot.

  “Do you hypothecate I never saw this bent in myself? Fie. Who among us wouldn’t resurrect a departed loved one?”

  I hesitated.

  “You don’t wish to pursue the matter?”

  “I guess. It definitely inclines us to more conversation and fewer descriptions.”

  “As for the rhetoric, let us each stand watch.” She lifted her hands in a quick minstrelish gesture.

  “Possibly you lost more than your fair share of loved ones to death,” I said.

  “Not possibly. Unquestionably.”

  “Your mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died as a consequence of delivering you. Your first baby by Percy Shelley, a daughter, died only eleven days after her birth. Your next two children, William and Clara, died young in Italy, the girl at only a year and two days, the boy at three and a half. In 1819, you gave birth to the only child to survive both you and your husband, Percy Florence, who came on November 12—by a mild coincidence my birthday in a distant future year. Another child miscarried in the summer of 1822, shortly after your stepsister Claire’s child Allegra by Lord Byron died, and not long before Shelley and a friend drowned off Leghorn when a squall capsized the boat Ariel. Which isn’t to mention the suicide of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook, that allowed you to marry, or the laudanum overdose of your half sister Fanny Imlay, which the Godwins gave to the world as a somehow natural demise. Or the fact that in Missolonghi, two years after Shelley’s death, Lord Byron, your friend and Claire’s former lover, contracted a fever and—”

  “Please. Your recitation fatigues me. I inly rehearse it more often than you may surmise, but I much prefer to dwell on the beautiful and the good.”

  “Like what?”

  “At age five I beheld the Frenchman Andre-Jacques Garnerin accomplish the first parachute jump in England. My father took me outside to see it, for M. Garnerin dropped himself from a balloon over the fields behind the St. Pancras church, in whose graveyard—” She stopped.

  “—your mother lies buried,” I said. “A biographer says that you and Shelley first made love behind her tombstone in that graveyard.”

  “That, too,” she whispered, not looking at me. “At sixteen I found that experience as galvanic as, at five, I had found the Frenchman’s spectacular descent.”

  “This biographer also says that Godwin taught you to read by tracing the letters on the tombstone’s inscription.”

  Head up, she rebuked me: “The beautiful and the good! Sir Walter Scott praised Frankenstein in Blackwood’s. Later, he said that he preferred it to any of his own novels. How I took cheer from that unsought encomium.”

  “What else heartens you?” I said.

  “The success, then and now, of that novel.”

  “Elias Canetti has said, ‘Whoever can embue mankind with a myth has accomplished more than the most daring inventor.’ He cites you as one having that ‘rare distinction.’”

  “I know him not, but I earnestly thank him.”

  “Even so, Mrs. Shelley, I think I know where both that myth and your obsession with the idea of reanimation come from. I’d planned to say so in my introduction—without however disputing your genius in dramatizing it.”

  She ignored me. “I also take great pride in having edited and annotated my husband’s poetry. I preserved and elucidated it, I vindicated his character. It required too many years for the world to laud my contributions there.”

  “Mrs. Shelley—”

  “We dared, both he and I. My novella Mathilda, which I composed even as Shelley brought his verse tragedy The Cenci to completion, had no publication during my lifetime for the very reason that his play had no staging during his. They both deal forth-rightly with incest, and our age had no stomach for such a theme. My novella entered print—in your country, I must tell you—only after I had endured bodily extinction one hundred and eight years. That Shelley and I continually hurled aesthetic defiance, however, even yet gratifies me.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You pushed the envelope.”

  “Oh, no. More often we posted it overland to the Channel.”

  “Mrs. Shelley—”

  “Yes, yes. Say what you so obviously wish to say.”

  I shuffled through my notecards to a Journal passage dated March 19, a month after her first child’s death: “‘Dream that my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold and that we rubbed it by the fire and it lived—I awake and find no baby—I think about the little thing all day …’”

  My visitor merely looked at me.

  “Reanimation,” I said. “A year before you, Shelley, Byron, and Polidori held your little ghost-story contest in the Villa Diodati. I think it signifies.”

  “Every life signifies, and a lost life sends out as many ripples as the sun has rays, even if one does not always stand at a place to break and disarrange them.”

  If she meant this epigram to cut, I sidestepped its point.

  “I feel—” I began.

  She again lifted her hands. “I thank you for the impulse behind, but reject, your pity. Only children who die young get through life without
some dreadful loss, and generally such children represent that most dreadful loss to those who love them. Life chastises as well as exalts. Anyone of even idiot ken knows that. Raise me not to sainthood on the commonplace foundation of my sufferings. Given so easy a criterion, even you might merit a quarter arc of halo.”

  This hit, even if rhetoric-freighted, stung. “Pardon me if I find biography a key to your reanimation hang-up.”

  She actually laughed. “Consider my pardon bestowed. But also that my Prometheus and these five stories constitute only a fraction of my life’s work.”

  “An important fraction.”

  “I would hope every fraction in some measure important, as you must regard each constituent arc of your incomplete halo a promise of future wholeness.”

  “This halo crap has a vicious circularity, Mrs. Shelley.”

  “My, my. No need for such unimaginative vulgarisms, sir.”

  “Could we get back to your stories?”

  She lifted her eyebrows and her hands.

  “Roger Dodsworth comes back to life,” I said. “You shift him from Cromwell’s time to your own. You speculate briefly on all the ‘learned disquisitions’ that some future humanity would produce to account for the huge gap between the birth and death dates on Dodsworth’s tombstone. How do you account for them? Did he thaw into life?”

  “Doesn’t the story say so?”

  “What about Valerius in ‘Valerius: The Reanimated Roman’? In his case, the story doesn’t say.”

  “Then why not assume that he thawed into life too?”

  “In Italy?”

  “Italy also has snow. Romans did not always sit in the sun watching African beasts maul unrecanting Christians in the ensanguined arena of the Coliseum. Indeed, Valerius during his original incarnation never encountered a Christian, nor had any presentiment of the Emperors.”

  “He dislikes the priest whom he meets in your own time and despairs of the fact that Rome now bears the title ‘the Capital of Christianity.’”

  “That troubles you?”

  “Oh, no. It rings true.”

  “I concur, but tell me why you think so.”

  “It rings true to Valerius’s character, but also to yours. As a girl—a young woman, actually—you twice went to live in Dundee, Scotland, with the family of a wealthy sailcloth maker, Mr. Baxter. You formed a lasting friendship with his daughter, Isabel, four years your senior. In your story, Isabell Harley, although you give her first name an extra ‘l,’ forms a fast friendship with poor anachronistic Valerius, who calls her ‘the only hope and comfort of my life.’”

  “The name Isabel, whatever its orthography, has always appealed to me. Why shouldn’t I christen a suitable character with a favorite name?”

  “No reason at all. But the Baxters belonged to a strict Calvinist sect called the Glassites. During your second stay in Dundee, from June 1813 to March 1814, attention to the Glassites’ strictures destroyed any lingering respect that you may have had for Christianity.”

  “Their practice of it,” my visitor corrected me.

  “When the Glassites excommunicated Isabel for marrying her older sister’s widower, calling the union incest, your disgust grew. Some of this attitude colors Valerius’s negative view of Christianity, even if that opinion has real credibility in the frame of his fictional predicament.”

  “Thank you, I suppose. How you do enjoy speculating.”

  “Anyway, your treatment of Valerius points me to a passage in ‘Dodsworth’ where you argue that if philosophical novels had an audience nowadays, someone could write a good one ‘on the development of the same mind in various stations, in different periods of the world’s history.’ Because you wrote ‘Valerius’ in 1819, seven years before ‘Dodsworth,’ I see you explaining in the later tale your aim in both.”

  “Bravo.” She clapped—a brief velvety thumping.

  “Did you know that twentieth-century science fiction has exploited the idea of translating figures from the past into other time periods and turning them ‘naked of knowledge into this world’?”

  “Truly?”

  “Occasionally. We call such tales alternate or alternative histories. You may have pioneered them.”

  “But not very deeply into the wilderness. You flatter me. You also discover in these quotations the reason—the foremost reason—for my visit to you today.”

  I leveled a cynical squint at her.

  “You have a dilemma?” she said.

  “You didn’t exactly arrive here ‘naked of knowledge.’”

  “Ah. A lady—even if she practices rebellion against the grosser conventions—never arrives anywhere totally naked, and even in death I have kept my eyes and ears open.”

  I chuckled. “And as Emily Sunstein says in her biography, you always had an abiding faith in the imperishability of ‘the spirits of all aspiring and great individuals.’”

  “An abiding faith,” she said, “that often flickered.”

  “In ‘The Mortal Immortal: A Tale’ you present the reader a character, Winzy by name, who—”

  “Yes. It troubled me to find after the story’s publication in 1833 that some readers saw Winzy as a Dickensian name, like Pickwick or Gabriel Grub, when, in fact, as many scholars have since noted, it comes from the Scottish winze, or ‘curse,’ for my Winzy must bear his life and growing estrangement forever.”

  I scratched a note. “Still, it doesn’t strike me that Winzy, who frets over the appearance of one gray hair, bears a curse as terrible as do Swift’s struldbrugs, who not only live forever but suffer continuous enfeeblement.”

  My visitor shrugged. “If decay proceeds continuously, then the mind will at length cease to comprehend its predicament. Indeed, the author of these grotesqueries”—the pot calling the kettle black? I wondered—“himself confessed that the least miserable among them had dwindled into dotage and lost their memories. Swift neglected to foresee that all his struldbrugs would one day reach a state of irreversible fatuity. My Winzy, however, must live in daunting knowledge of his immortality and separateness. Forever.”

  I conceded the point. “I had started to say that Winzy attains to immortality by drinking an elixir vitae, a potion scientifically, or at least alchemically, decanted. In fact, that detail has led some to label your story science fiction.”

  “Good for them.”

  “The American writer Gary Jennings once even published a tale in Fantasy and Science Fiction using some of your story’s prose and naming you—‘Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’—as his collaborator in its byline.”

  “Really? Then integrity persists. Here and there.”

  “Do you see the alchemist Cornelius Agrippa’s potion as the end result of a technological or a magical procedure?”

  “I have no authoritative opinion.”

  “Why not? You wrote the story.”

  “The potion forwards the plot but has no value as an index of its theme. Winzy carries the theme, Winzy’s character.”

  “As character focuses the tales of Dodsworth and Valerius?”

  “Yes, but Valerius exercises more influence over his tale’s mood and direction than does the icy Dodsworth over his.”

  “One more point about ‘The Mortal Immortal’ before we move on to ‘Transformation’ and ‘The Dream.’”

  “Move quickly,” she said. “My time here has contracted—compressed—to a vibrating point, and this point desires to abstract me from my place among the living for … who can say?” Finger by finger, she removed a glove and laid the back of her pale hand to her paler brow.

  “Do you feel ill? Can I get you a Coke?”

  “Coke? You employ coal residues as a medicament?”

  “Coca-Cola. A soft drink.” In desperation, I added, “Would you prefer a hot beverage? Some tea?”

  “No, no. I recover, sir. Proceed.” She lowered her hand and essayed a grim wan smile.

  “The passage in ‘The Mortal Immortal’ where Winzy begins to notice his, well, out
-of-placeness among the villagers affected me strongly. They aged. He didn’t. Eventually, they came to regard him with ‘horror and detestation.’”

  “Yes. True.”

  “In my followup to Frankenstein, the creature has a like experience in the Eskimo village Oongpek.” I took a paperback copy of the novel from a niche in my rolltop. “Listen: ‘That I appeared immune to these natural depredations, continuing youthful in my hideousness, did not go unremarked. Many Oongpekmut, especially those of generations subsequent to mine, regarded my persistence among them as uncanny … I watched in dismay as they … withdrew from me their trust and affections.’” I looked up for my visitor’s reaction.

  She smiled ambiguously, not unlike Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility. “Masterfully derivative. But I do ken the similarity of the experiences of my Winzy and your pasquinadal version of my confiscated creature.”

  “Mrs. Shelley, I treat your creature with respect. I—”

  She waved a hand. “Did I venture here today to talk about your book? Please. Eternity loses patience.”

  I calmed myself, breathing as deliberately as a Buddhist monk—Thich Nhat Hanh, perhaps.

  My visitor waited me out. “Better?”

  “Yes.” I cleared my throat. “The two fantasies among your supernatural tales—how do you feel about them?”

  “I prefer ‘Transformation’ to ‘The Dream.’ ‘The Dream’ I had to rewrite—partially—to accommodate the details of Miss Louisa Sharpe’s illustration for The Keepsake. By moving an indoor scene outdoors for this painting’s sake, I sacrificed a portion of my vision and a degree of the story’s integrity and excellence.” She sighed. “The things one will do for money.”

  “‘The Dream’ has some fine atmospherics anyway,” I said. “The dark boat gliding, the soundless oars, Constance stretched out on St. Catherine’s couch on the ledge above the Loir. Any fan of Poe would get off on it.”

  “Thank you. If ‘get off on it’ implies approval.”

  “You outface Poe, though, by arranging a character-driven happy ending, in which Constance’s dream allows her to see—my favorite line in the story—that ‘to make the living happy’ doesn’t mean ‘to injure the dead.’”