9

Ghost Stories

The summer that Byron and the Shelleys spent in Geneva is best known
for the ghost-story project that inspired Frankenstein. This project itself is
best known from Mary Shelley's account of it in her introduction to the
1831 edition of Frankenstein, an account written fifteen years after the
fact, and wrong in almost every verifiable detail.1
It is not known precisely at what point in the summer the party began
reading Fantasmagoriana, the 'volumes of ghost stories, translated from
the German into French' by Jean-Baptiste-Benoit Eyries and published
in 1812, which Shelley refers to in her introduction,2 or when Byron
suggested that they should each write a ghost story, adding gallantly that
he and Mary Shelley should publish theirs together.3 He may well have
taken the idea from 'Les Portraits de la famille,' the first story in Fan-
tasmagoriana, which, like other ghost-story collections from Hoffmann's
to Peter Straub's, has a frame narrative: 'Every one is to relate a story of
ghosts, or something of a similar nature ... it is agreed amongst us that no
one shall search for any explanation, even though it bears the stamp of
truth, as explanations would take away all pleasure from ghost stories.'4
Polidori's journal, the only contemporary account of the project, first
mentions events related to it on 15 June. It was not a good day for
Polidori. 'After dinner, jumping a wall my foot slipped and I strained my
left ankle.'5 Byron corroborated this, referring in a letter twelve days later
to Polidori as laid up by 'a sprained ancle acquired in tumbling from a
wall - he can't jump.'6 Moore's account of the accident does not quite
contradict Polidori's, but as usual expands it almost beyond recognition.
According to Moore, Byron and Polidori were on the balcony at the Villa
Diodati when they saw Mary Shelley approaching the house, and Byron
said: 'Now, you who wish to be gallant ought to jump down this small
height, and offer your arm.' Polidori ungallantly 'chose the easiest part
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84 Byron: 1816

of the declivity' to jump from, but the ground was wet, he slipped, and
sprained his ankle. Byron helped carry him indoors, brought cold water
to keep down the swelling, and even went upstairs to fetch him a pillow
- 'an exertion,' Moore points out, 'which his lameness made painful and
disagreeable.' All Polidori would say to thank him was, 'Well, I did not
believe you had so much feeling' - a remark which (if he made it)
suggests that he still associated Byron with the automata of Edinburgh,
and which may have contributed something to the atmosphere that
inspired Shelley to write her story about a sort of automaton, one that
surprisingly turns out to have feelings. (If anyone lacks feelings, it is
Frankenstein, in the grip of his obsession.) 7
That evening, Byron again indulged Polidori's literary ambitions. If
this was an attempt to cheer up the invalid, it was not a success. 'Shelley
etc. came in the evening,' Polidori wrote, 'talked of my play etc., which
all agreed was worth nothing.' 8 Again, Moore has an incident that
corresponds to this, though he says it took place at the Shelleys'. Perhaps
this sort of thing happened more than once in Geneva; as it had hap-
pened already in Dover, Polidori clearly was not willing to learn from
experience. As in Dover, Byron read the play:
In spite of the jealous watch kept upon every countenance by
the author, it was impossible to withstand the smile lurking in
the eye of the reader, whose only resource against the outbreak
of his own laughter lay in lauding, from time to time, most
vehemently, the sublimity of the verses; - particularly some
that began ' Tis thus the goiter'd idiot of the Alps,' - and then
adding, at the close of every such eulogy, 'I assure you when I
was in the Drury Lane Committee, much worse things were
offered to us.' 9
(There is no such line in Ximenes; Polidori may, of course, have cut it. Or
it may have been in the lost Cajetan - not Boadicea, since Rossetti says
that this was in prose.)
Later in the evening, Polidori had a chance to regain some of his self-
respect by displaying his medical knowledge: 'Shelley and I had a
conversation about principles, - whether man was to be thought merely
an instrument.' 10 This corresponds directly to the conversation Mary
Shelley credits with inspiring the nightmare that inspired Frankenstein -
with the significant difference that she casts Byron, rather than Polidori,
as Percy's interlocutor:
Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron
and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener.
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Ghost Stories 85

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 its ever being dis-
covered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of
Dr. Darwin, (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said
that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then
spoken of as having been done by him,) 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 re-animated;
galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the com-
ponent parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought
together, and endued with vital warmth. 11

Moore does not mention this conversation, but his general remarks
about Polidori imply that he was hardly likely to have taken part in it:
Byron and Percy's 'more elevated subjects of conversation,' he says,
'were almost always put to flight by the strange sallies of this eccentric
young man.' 12 But their agreement does not necessarily mean that
Moore's and Mary Shelley's accounts are correct. They both consistently
belittle Polidori; Shelley may have wished (whether consciously or not)
to minimize his contribution to her novel, and Moore may simply have
been recounting what she told him. Polidori was discussing medicine
and politics with his other acquaintances in Geneva; there is no reason
why he should not have discussed the principle of life with Percy. A
week earlier, they had had a conversation on a similarly elevated subject:
they 'talked, till the ladies' brains whizzed with giddiness, about ide-
alism.'13 (Mary may partly be paying him back for the condescension this
displays.)
As a doctor, Polidori would have had something to say about the
principle of life; as a graduate of Edinburgh, where grave-robbing (or, to
use the suggestive euphemism then current, 'resurrectioning') was the
standard means of providing subjects for anatomy lectures, he may have
had something to say about the resuscitation of the dead.14 As an expert
on somnambulism, he may well have had something to say about
automata; for somnambulism (like Scottishness) is a form of auto-
matism. In 1815, Taylor had written to him, explaining that he no longer
walked in his sleep: 'I am now a very bad sleeper, but not an unconscious
automaton.' 15
Whoever took part in the conversation, the terminology in Polidori's
journal and in Shelley's introduction implies that they took similar
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86 Byron: 1816

positions in the contemporary debate on the nature of life. Polidori's

terms principle (which Shelley adopts) and especially instrument (which
she does not) recall (as does his thesis) the vitalism of Georg Ernst Stahl
(1659-1734), the founder of the phlogiston theory.16 The terms imply
that the body is an instrument designed to fulfil the purposes of life, and
that life is a subtle fluid (like phlogiston, as Shelley implies when she
speaks of 'vital warmth') pervading and animating the instrument. In the
words of John Abernethy, possibly the best-known vitalist of Regency
England, it is 'some subtile, mobile, invisible substance, superadded to
the evident structure of muscles, or other forms of vegetable and animal
matter, as magnetism is to iron, and as electricity is to various substances
with which it may be connected.'17 (Abernethy also conceives of both
magnetism and electricity as fluids.) The locus of the vital principle was a
matter of debate among vitalists. Abernethy's eminent predecessor,
John Hunter, had maintained that it pervaded the blood; Coleridge
travestied this theory with a biblical quotation that Bram Stoker would
later give to Renfield the lunatic: 'Now the Blood is the Life, is affirmed
by Moses - and has been forcibly maintained by John Hunter.'18
The conception of life as a fluid that can be pumped into a body by a
Frankenstein or sucked out of it by a vampire is a material one. It was not,
however, perceived as such, partly because it did present life as a very
subtle material substance, added to the inanimate body both as an
analogy to and as a prerequisite for the soul, and partly because the
opposing view, that life was a function or state of the body itself, was so
much more obviously a materialist one, 'in which man was considered as
an hydraulic machine whose pipes were filled with fluid susceptible of
chemical fermentations.'19 This was the view that had prevailed in the
Leyden of Hermann Boerhaave, so it may have been propounded in the
lecture notes Alexander Monro in had inherited from his grandfather;
Xavier Bichat was propounding a new version of it in France. In Regency
England, it was seen as a foreign and subversive view: in 1819, the Tory
Quarterly Review would begin an attack on its foremost English propo-
nent, William Lawrence, by expressing shock that 'an open avowal' of
'the doctrine of materialism ... has been made in the metropolis of the
British empire.\.'20
Polidori seems to have brought up both conceptions of life, but to have
favoured the more conservative, vitalist one. His question whether a
human being might be considered merely an instrument entertains the
possibility of materialism only to rule it out terminologically; an instru-
ment implies a vital principle to make use of it. The Quarterly Review
repeatedly used the same Stahlian term to refer to the body;21 on the
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Ghost Stories 87

other side of the debate, the Edinburgh Review, ridiculing Abernethy in

1814, referred as insistently to the body as 'the corporeal machine'22 - a
term which implies an unintended teleology just as the vitalist termi-
nology implies an unintended materialism. It is not surprising that
Polidori should have hesitated between the two conceptions.
Both seem to contribute to Shelley's novel, though it too seems to
favour vitalism over mechanism. Shelley's reference to Erasmus Darwin
is similarly ambivalent. Darwin was a radical thinker in many ways, but
he was a vitalist, conceiving 'the spirit of animation' as something 'finer
or more subtle than the electric matter,' which is 'acquired from the
atmosphere.'23 Darwin does not seem actually to have attempted to
animate any noodles himself, but in the notes to The Temple of Nature,
his last long poem, he does refer to 'the experiments of Buffon, Reaumur,
Ellis, Ingenhouz, and others' on spontaneous generation: 'One or more
of these gentlemen put some boiling veal broth into a phial previously
heated in the fire, and sealing it up hermetically or with melted wax,
observed it to be replete with animalcules in three or four days.' John
Ellis in particular observed, in a 'paste composed of flour and water ...
the animalcules called eels,' whose 'motions are rapid and strong':
Shelley's restless vermicelli may be a garbled version of these.24 Darwin
does not explain these experiments in terms of 'the spirit of animation';
this omission, and their lack of drama, may be why Shelley dismisses
them. But in moving on to galvanism, she is not moving far from the vital
principle that Darwin compares to 'the electric matter.'
Mary Shelley places the crucial conversation some time after the
agreement to write ghost stories. Everyone except her had begun: 'I
25
thought and pondered - vainly,' and 'each morning I was forced to reply
with a mortifying negative' to the daily question 'Have you thought of a
story?' Finally, Percy and Byron (or Polidori) had their conversation,
she had her nightmare that night, and the next morning she was able to
reply with a gratifying affirmative. She began writing the same day, with
the account of the animation of the monster.26 She may have had the
nightmare on the night of the fifteenth and begun her story on the
sixteenth, but she was not the last to start: her account of 'that blank
incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship' is a
device to create suspense and win the reader's sympathy.27 In fact,
Polidori was the last to start: 'The ghost-stories are begun by all but me,'
he wrote on 17 June - apparently as a mere matter of fact, not as a matter
for re ret. He appears to have been more concerned that at Odier's that
even; ~; he had 'Attempted to dance, but felt such horrid pain [he] was
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88 Byron: 1816

forced to stop.' On the eighteenth he added, just as matter-of-factly: 'My

leg much worse ... Began my ghost-story after tea.'28
Mary Shelley's account of Polidori's story is equally misleading:
Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady,
who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole - what to
see I forget - something very shocking and wrong of course;
but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the re-
nowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with
her, and was obliged to despatch her to the tomb of the Cap-
ulets, the only place for which she was fitted. The illustrious
poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily re-
linquished their uncongenial task.29
The also in her last sentence implies that he relinquished his task as
speedily as Byron and Percy did. In fact, he finished it, and published the
results in 1819 as Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus. One of the
characters, the hero's sister Julia, does spy on her father, though not
through a keyhole. It is a minor incident in the novel, and not much
comes of it - certainly not the bizarre metamorphosis that Mary de-
scribes. Polidori may, of course, have toned it down (just as he may have
rid Ximenes of the goitered idiot of the Alps); most of the novel, in its final
form, must have been written some time after his stay in Geneva, since it
draws on his later travels in Switzerland and Italy.30
If Shelley began her story the day after the conversation on the
principle of life, then she apparently began before Byron as well as
before Polidori: the fragment of a story that Byron eventually published
is dated 17 June, two days after the conversation. Hers would actually be
the first, not the last, of the surviving stories to have been begun.
It is usually assumed that the members of the Diodati circle told each
other their stories, as if around a camp-fire. The only explicit record is in
the highly inaccurate account of the episode that Byron gave Medwin (or
31
that Medwin recorded) six years later, and as soon as Shelley read
Medwin's book, she remarked categorically that the stories were 'never
related.' Even her distorted version ofErnestus Berchtold,however,
suggests that she had been told something of Polidori's story, and when
she first heard of the publication of The Vampyre, she would claim to
know something of Byron's story, describing it as 'very dramatic &
striking,' and adding, 'I dare say that we shall like it better than the
poetry in which he is engaged at present which is in the Beppo style' -
that is, better than Don Juan.32 Polidori too clearly knew Byron's story.
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Ghost Stories 89

He summarized it several times, most fully and coherently in his intro-

duction to Ernestus Berchtold:
Two friends were to travel from England into Greece; while
there, one of them should die, but before his death, should
obtain from his friend an oath of secrecy with regard to his
decease. Some short time after, the remaining traveller re-
turning to his native country, should be startled at perceiving
his former companion moving about in society, and should be
horrified at finding that he made love to his former friend's
sister.33
Byron's fragment breaks off after the oath and death, but Polidori's
account of it is accurate, except that the death occurs near the ruins of
Ephesus, not in Greece. The Vampyre, as Polidori wrote it later in the
summer, follows his outline of Byron's proposed tale closely, and con-
tains a version of the incident in Byron's fragment.
When it was published, under Byron's name, Byron wrote to Gali-
gnani's Messenger to disown not only the tale but also the monster: 'I
have ... a personal dislike to "vampires" and the little acquaintance I
have with them would by no means induce me to divulge their secrets.'34
Nothing in his fragment or Polidori's outline suggests that the dead
friend, Augustus Darvell, will come back as a vampire; the ending of the
fragment even suggests that he will not. His body begins to rot as soon as
he dies, and with unusual rapidity - 'his countenance in a few minutes
became nearly black'35 - and it is a distinguishing characteristic of
vampires that they do not rot.36 Dom Augustin Calmet, who in his
attempts to explode the vampire superstition became probably the great-
est eighteenth-century authority on it, reports in his Traite sur les appari-
tions des esprits, et sur les vampires, ou les revenans deHongrie, deMoravie,
&c. (rev ed 1751) that 'when they were pulled from the earth, they
appeared ruddy, with supple and flexible limbs, without worms or
corruption, but not without a very great stench';37 'a corpse as fat and fair
as if it were a man happily and calmly sleeping' would inevitably be
identified as a vampire.38 When the vampire is exhumed in one of the
first English literary treatments of the superstition, John Herman Mer-
ivale's 'The Dead Men of Pest' (1802), 'The corse, tho' laid som moneth's
space in mold, / Did shew like living manne, full blythe of glee, / And
ruddie, freshe, and comelie to behold.'39
One implication is that the earth refuses to accept the bodies of the
wicked - Calmet points out that those who die under excommunication
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90 Byron: 1816

are not supposed to rot either.40 Byron uses a form of this superstition in
Manfred, the Promethean drama which he began in the summer of 1816,
and which should probably be considered his real contribution to the
ghost-story project. Manfred longs to die and be taken to the 'rocky
bosom' of his 'Mother Earth,' but he cannot: 'There is a power upon me
which withholds, / And makes it my fatality to live.'41 The mysterious
power upon Manfred anticipates the more explicit curse placed upon
Byron's Cain by his mother, Eve: 'May the grass wither from thy feet! the
woods / Deny thee shelter! earth a home! the dust / A grave!'42 (These
prohibitions, of course, are a displaced form of the incest taboo.) Yet
Darvell not only rots but is buried with unusual rapidity: 'the earth easily
gave way, having already received some Mahometan tenant.'43
Polidori would later declare, however, that Byron had intended to
make Darvell come back as a vampire, and it seems unlikely that
Polidori's ambition for literary distinction would have allowed him to
give up his claim to the idea if it really had been his;44 Byron himself,
moreover, allegedly later referred to the fragment as 'My real "Vam-
pyre." ' 45 And even if Byron did not divulge the secrets of vampires to the
rest of the Diodati circle, he had already done so to the world at large, in
the curse placed on the Giaour:

But first, on earth as Vampire sent,

Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life-
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corse:
Thy victims ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire,
As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
But one that for thy crime must fall,
The youngest, most beloved of all,
Shall bless thee with a father's name -
That word shall wrap thy heart in flame!
Yet must thou end thy task, and mark
Her cheek's last tinge, her eye's last spark,
And the last glassy glance must view
Which freezes o'er its lifeless blue;
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Ghost Stories 91

Then with unhallowed hand shalt tear

The tresses of her yellow hair,
Of which in life a lock when shorn
Affection's fondest pledge was worn,
But now is borne away by thee,
Memorial of thine agony!
Wet with thine own best blood shall drip
Thy gnashing tooth and haggard lip;
Then stalking to thy sullen grave,
Go - and with Gouls and Afrits rave;
Till these in horror shrink away
From Spectre more accursed than they!46
This curse was certainly known to Polidori; he quotes another passage
from The Giaour as an epigraph to Ernestus Berchtold. It was also known
to Mary Shelley; one of the synopses of stories from Fantasmagoriana in
her introduction to Frankenstein recalls Byron's curse (it even includes
the image of flowers withered on the stem) more closely than it does
Eyries's story - despite her insistence that the incidents of the latter were
'as fresh in [her] mind as if [she] had read them yesterday':47
There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose
miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the
younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the
age of promise ... he advanced to the couch of the blooming
youths, cradled in healthy sleep. Eternal sorrow sat upon his
face as he bent down and kissed the forehead of the boys, who
from that hour withered like flowers snapt upon the stalk.48
Percy Shelley's story, according to his widow, was 'founded on the
experiences of his early life.'49 Holmes thinks that he never wrote it
down;50 Christopher Small has suggested that it may have frightened
him so much that he had to abandon it.51 He certainly frightened himself
with a memory of his early experiences, or infantile fantasies, on 18 June
under the influence of Coleridge's 'Christabel.'
The company had been discussing Coleridge enthusiastically for some
time. On 1 June, Polidori wrote: 'Heard Mrs. Shelley repeat Coleridge on
Pitt, which persuades me he is a poet.'52 The poem Mary Shelley read
was presumably 'Fire, Famine, and Slaughter' (1798), a 'War Eclogue' in
which the three grim personifications meet in 'a desolated Tract in La
Vendee' to rejoice over the work Pitt the Younger's policies have
provided for them, and to discuss how to reward him (Fire promises to
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92 Byron: 1816

'Cling to him everlastingly'). 53 Since this reading took place at most two
weeks before the inception of the ghost-story project, the poem's hints of
vampirism are worth noting. Pitt, Slaughter says, 'came by stealth, and
unlocked my den, / And I have drunk the blood since then / Of thrice
three hundred thousand men.' Famine brings up the oral sadism articu-
lated by the superstition: 'A baby beat its dying mother: / I had starved
the one and was starving the other!' 54 The figure of the vampire articu-
lates a fear of the hungry self and the havoc its hunger might wreak - a
fear corresponding to the fear of what a somnambulist might do without
knowing it - a primal fear that receives some secondary reinforcement if
life itself is conceived as a fluid that can be drained from the mother. 55
On 18 June, Polidori wrote to Murray on Byron's behalf to order a
number of books, the first on the list being Coleridge's Christabel: Kubla
Khan, A Vision; The Pains of Sleep, which Byron had recently persuaded
Murray to publish. 56 Byron particularly admired 'Christabel': he had
heard Scott recite it, had read it in manuscript, and apparently knew
much of it by heart. 57
After midnight that night the company at the Villa Diodati, as Polidori
puts it, 'really began to talk ghostly,' and Byron recited part of
'Christabel,' the 'verses ... of the witch's breast.' 58 These occur towards
the end of the first part of the poem. Christabel has gone out into the
forest at midnight to pray for her beloved. There she finds Geraldine,
who appears to be weary and in pain, and who claims to have been
abducted and then abandoned by five mysterious warriors. Christabel
invites Geraldine to come back to her father's castle, but as her father is ill
and cannot be awakened, she cannot have a bed made up for her guest,
and so she asks her to share her own. This is just what Geraldine wants:
she is not really a damsel in distress but some kind of supernatural being
- a witch, or a lamia, or perhaps even a vampire 59 - with evil designs on
Christabel. As she undresses for bed, the sight of her breast terrifies
Christabel (later, its touch will cast a spell on her):

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 full in view,
Behold! her bosom and half her side -
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!60
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Ghost Stories 93

When Byron got this far, 'silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shriek-
ing and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle.'
Given a chance to act as a doctor at last, Polidori acted quickly and
effectively: 'Threw water in his face, and after gave him ether.' Then he
found out what had alarmed him: '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.'61
In some of the manuscripts, Geraldine's bosom and side are described
explicitly, as 'lean and old and foul of hue' 62 - telltale characteristics of a
witch's breast - but Coleridge apparently decided later that it would be
more effective to leave them to the reader's imagination. It would be
interesting to know which version Byron recited, whether Percy Shelley,
in the grip of his own vision, ignored Coleridge's description, or simply
used his imagination as Coleridge had intended.
William Veeder has suggested that this vision may have inspired the
curious epithet 'bosom-eyed' in 'The Witch of Atlas.'63 The woman of
the vision seems eye-bosomed rather than the other way round; in any
cases, both the vision and the epithet seem to derive from an oral
masochism superficially unlike the sadism Polidori articulates in The
Vampyre, but very like his response to the Rubens side-piece in Antwerp,
in which the breast (rather than the voracious infant) is an object of fear,
a source of death rather than life. Since the confusion of identities is
characteristic of the oral stage, oral sadism and masochism are them-
selves often confused.
Shelley went on to reveal some of the things that were weighing on his
mind. This is the last of his confessions to Polidori; it is not much more
accurate than the others, but, given under such stress, it is more interest-
ing. 'He married; and, a friend of his liking his wife, he tried all he could
to induce her to love him in turn.' This is at least one of the ways he
responded to Thomas Jefferson Hogg's feelings for Harriet - and, later,
for Mary.64 He tried repeatedly to set up a sort of pre-Oedipal commune
whose members would share everything, including sexual relations; he
always failed, partly because of tensions within the commune, partly
because of external pressures. '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.' This
does not correspond to any recorded incident; it is a fantasy expressing
both his sense of persecution by the propertied class and his sense of his
own courage in resisting it non-violently. The most interesting of this
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94 Byron: 1816

series of confessions is a complaint about Godwin and Thomas Love

Peacock; it is literally justified, but treats them, figuratively, as vampires:
'He is surrounded by friends who feed upon him, and draw upon him as
their banker.'65
A few days later, on 22 June, Percy Shelley and Byron set out on a boat
trip around Lake Geneva. They visited the Chateau de Chillon, Gibbon's
house, and a number of spots sacred to the memory of Rousseau. Shelley
began his 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.' Byron wrote The Prisoner of
Chillon and some stanzas for the third canto of Childe Harold's Pil-
grimage; he also wrote letters to Hobhouse and Murray, explaining
pointedly to both that Polidori had had to be left behind because of his
bad ankle.66 And, as he walked with Shelley through a grove immor-
talized by Rousseau in La Nouvelle Heloise, both of them, as Moore puts
it, 'under the spell of the Genius of the place,' his feelings found vent in
the words 'Thank God, Polidori is not here.' 67
Polidori felt abandoned. His journal entry for the day they left is
desolate: 'Lford] B[yron] and Shelley went to Vevay; Mrs. Sfhelley] and
Miss Clare Clairmont to town. Went to Rossi's - had tired his patience.'68
But he recovered: he apologized to Rossi; he visited regularly with Mary
Shelley and Clairmont; and he fell in love.
The object of his affections was Madame Brelaz, a 'Portuguese lady'
whom he apparently met at the Bruce salon - she too took part in the
theatricals. The attachment does not seem to have been serious: Polidori
does not say much about her; he does not even mention her first name.
He says that he thinks she is fond of him too, that she is 'imprudent' and
'shows it too much publicly,' possibly because she is 'very jealous,' and
that one of her daughters is 'against [him] on account of it.'69 He seems to
have defied the Brelaz daughter. (If this was the Clementine Brelaz who
later became a noted landscapist, she cannot have been a very formida-
ble opponent, as she was only five in 1816. But perhaps her sister was
older.)70 He also defied other expressions of disapproval, finding them
hypocritical: Madame Saladin, the wife of the lover of paradox, paradox-
ically 'pretended prude in mine and Madame B.'s case, while she herself
has got Mr. Massey junior dangling, not unheard, after her.'71 (He also,
oddly, defied them by dancing: at Bruce's, 'in consequence of Massey
junior dancing extremely well... I danced a pantaloon-dance, by which I
made enemies; for, upon my refusing it at the Saladins', they thought it
was a personal refusal.')72
He also had to defy Byron's amusement, after Byron returned from his
excursion with Percy Shelley and learned about Polidori's love affair.
The evening he returned, Byron took Polidori over to the Shelleys',
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Ghost Stories 95

where he kept 'making jesting allusions to the secret he had just heard'
until Polidori lost his temper and burst out: 'I never ... met with a person
so unfeeling' - another in his series of accusations of automatism. Byron
objected to it violently, without, however, quite denying it: ' "Call me
cold-hearted - me insensible!" he exclaimed, with manifest emotion -
"as well might you say that glass is not brittle, which has been cast down
a precipice, and lies dashed to pieces at the foot!" ' 73 This is a claim to
having felt in the past, not to feeling in the present - like that of Mr
Cypress, the caricature of Byron in Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818),
who assured his friends that 'he should always look back [on them] with
as much affection as his lacerated spirit could feel for any thing.'74
Byron and Polidori went to Madame de Stael's chateau for the first
time on 12 July. As they entered, Mrs Elizabeth Hervey 'thought proper
to faint out of the house.' The hostess's daughter, impatient with such a
display of moral sensitivity, remarked: 'This is too much - at Sixty five
years of age!' Polidori notes that she was not only 'a great friend of the
Noels,' Byron's in-laws, but also '[Vathek's] sister.'75 Hervey was actu-
ally the half-sister of William Beckford, the author of Vathek and a
notorious homosexual, so the scandal about Byron's homosexual adven-
tures in the East and his incestuous affair with his half-sister, Augusta
Leigh, may have been particularly distressing to her.76 She was, as both
Byron and Polidori note, a novelist: her best-known novel was Louisa; or,
The Reward of an Affectionate Daughter (1790). She soon recovered from
her fainting spell, and came back to speak with Byron. His later account
of the incident is as flippant as Polidori's. Hervey's is quite the opposite:
he affected tender melancholy and much agitation. I could not
prevent his seizing my hands, but I behaved to him the whole
time of his stay with the most marked coldness in despite of all
the pains he took to conciliate me, and these were noticed by
everybody.
By the charms of his wit, his harmonious voice, and fasci-
nating manner, he completely enchanted Madame de Stael
without ever being able to change the bad opinion she has of
his morals.77
Byron naturally was more interested in speaking with de Stael, and
whatever her opinion of his morals, she was, he told Leigh, 'particularly
kind & friendly.' She had literary news from England - 'marvellous &
grievous things' to tell him about Glenarvon, the bizarre novel by his
former lover Lady Caroline Lamb, which combined a Gothic version of
their affair with an account of Irish revolutionary politics, a satire on
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96 Byron: 1816

London high society, and the legend of the Flying Dutchman.78 Henry
Colburn had published it on 9 May. Hobhouse had already warned
Byron about it in a letter written on 26 May.79 Byron's first responses to it
have a veneer of nonchalance. He wrote to Murray on 22 July:
I have not even a guess at the contents - except for the very
vague accounts I have heard - and I know but one thing which
a woman can say to the purpose on such occasions and that she
might as well for her own sake keep to herself - which by the
way they very rarely can - that old reproach against their
admirers of 'kiss and tell' bad as it is - is surely somewhat less
than --- and publish.
By the twenty-ninth, he had read Glenarvon; presumably de Stael had
lent him her copy.80 He read it with Polidori, commenting on the mixture
of truth and fantasy in its portrayal of the affair.81 Soon afterwards, he
dropped his pretence of nonchalance: 'Who can care for such a wretch as
C[arolin]e, or believe such a seventy times convicted liar?' he wrote to his
sister. Later, he referred to Lamb as 'that infamous Bedlamite,' and
declared - in an unpleasant echo of his mother-in-law's judgment on
him - 'Such a monster as that has no sex, and should live no longer.' A
year later, playing on her suggestive nickname - the Bat - in a stanza
intended for the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, he would
specify what kind of monster she was: 'Who sucks the slumberer's blood
- the Eagle? no, the Bat.'82
There are several possible reasons for his increasing harshness. He
knew, even before he read the novel, that Lamb had been contributing to
the ruin of his reputation, and the distress of his sister, by spreading the
sort of rumours that had also distressed Elizabeth Hervey.83 He objected
to 'the generous moment selected for the publication' of the novel, so
soon after his separation.84 He is likely to have objected violently to its
portrayal of him as an infanticide: he was a difficult husband but a very
sentimental father.
Moreover, Hobhouse had told him that Lamb had 'had the impudence
to send a... paragraph to some paper hinting that the whole novel is from
the pen of Lord B.,' and he may have been unpleasantly reminded of this
attempted imposture by another, which Polidori brought to his notice in
July and which, he wrote to Murray, 'appears to be about the most
impudent imposition that ever issued from Grub Street.'85
Unknown to Byron, Polidori was soon writing another book that
would eventually be published by Henry Colburn, and ascribed to
Byron. Polidori happened to mention Byron's idea for a ghost story to 'a
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Ghost Stories 97

lady, who denied the possibility of such a ground-work forming the

outline of a tale which should bear the slightest appearance of proba-
bility.'86 It has been suggested, unreliably, that this lady was Bruce;87 it
may equally have been Brelaz, or someone else entirely. Whoever she
was, Polidori took her judgment as a challenge, and in two or three 'idle
mornings by her side,' he wrote a tale based on Byron's idea: The
Vampyre.88
Polidori's tale is obviously parasitical on Byron's idea, but revises it in
ways that go beyond simple literary vampirism. Byron's fragment is told
in the first person retrospective: a mature and sophisticated narrator is
looking back on his 'novitiate' in life. It does not do much to exploit the
difference between the mature and youthful perspectives, though pre-
sumably, had Byron completed it, the narrator would have recognized
the irony of his having worked so hard to strike up an acquaintance with
the man who would later come back from the dead to seduce his sister:
'My advances were received with sufficient coldness: but I was young,
and not easily discouraged.' Darvell's insistence that the narrator swear
not to reveal his death is certainly suspicious. In the existing fragment,
however, Darvell is one of Byron's less sinister self-projections. He is
more like Mr Cypress than like Lara or Alp the Renegade: 'whatever
affections he might have possessed seemed now, some to have been
extinguished, and others to be concentred.'89 Nothing that he does or
says in the four and a half pages before the fragment breaks off is
particularly evil.
Polidori's tale has an omniscent and objective third-person narrator;
Aubrey, the character corresponding to Byron's narrator, is so naive that
as a narrator he would have a comic effect inconsistent with the tale's
grim tone. Even the omniscient narrative allows itself a little humour at
Aubrey's expense, as it describes how disastrously his education has
been mismanaged:
Left ... to himself by guardians, who thought it their duty
merely to take care of his fortune, while they relinquished the
more important charge of his mind to the care of mercenary
subalterns, he cultivated more his imagination than his judg-
ment. He had, hence, that high romantic feeling of honour and
candour, which daily ruins so many milliners' apprentices ...
He thought, in fine, that the dreams of poets were the real-
ities of life.
Aubrey has to be laughably naive to want to go travelling with Lord
Ruthven - the character corresponding to Byron's Darvell - a trans-
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98 Byron: 1816

parent monster who is guilty of a variety of human evils even before he is

revealed as a vampire. Aubrey encounters him at a potentially crucial
point in his own development, when he is about to abandon his poetic
dreams for the realities of social life. Unfortunately, beguiled by
Ruthven's air of mystery and 'allowing his imagination to picture every
thing that flattered its propensity to extravagant ideas, he soon formed
this object into the hero of a romance, and determined to observe the
offspring of his fancy, rather than the person before him.' 90
Ruthven is not only more transparently evil than Darvell, he is also
more transparently a portrait - or caricature - of Byron: a gloomy and
financially embarrassed but highly fashionable aristocrat, fond of travel
and successful with women. Polidori has even, impudently, named him
after Clarence Ruthven, Lord Glenarvon (and there is a minor character
in the tale who may be a caricature of Lamb).91 Perhaps, when Byron
read Lamb's novel with him, Polidori was struck by an anecdote about
one of Glenarvon's ancestors, who 'drank hot blood from the skull of his
enemy,' 92 which both suggests vampirism and recalls one of Byron's
most notorious stunts: having a drinking-cup made from a skull he had
found at Newstead Abbey. 93 Perhaps Polidori was turning the tables on
an employer who had made fun of him often enough, as he had turned
the tables on Gaetano in Ximenes. There is no evidence that he wrote The
Vampyre with the intention of publishing it; he would later claim that as
soon as he had written it he more or less forgot about it.94
I shall discuss the publication of the tale, and its astonishing influence,
in Chapter 17; it is not necessary to say much more about it here.
Eventually, even the innocent Aubrey sees through Ruthven, and at the
same time, his guardians write to him, urging him to leave his dangerous
travelling companion - much as Gaetano had urged Polidori not to
travel with Byron. So Aubrey suggests to Ruthven that they should part,
and Ruthven agrees. In the case of Polidori and Byron, it would happen
the other way around.

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