Mary, Frank and Me
as told by the ghost of Percy Bysshe Shelley channeled
through Doc Walton
Mary was the
uncontested beauty of our group, a walking wraith of sunshine and light. We all loved her, none so much as I of
course, and there was not a man or perhaps a woman as well, for we were a
libertine lot after all, among us who would not have gladly changed places with
me, the object, for reasons I will never understand, of her eye. But I wish not to linger here on Mary's
physical charms as I will spend a lifetime singing her song elsewhere inspired
by the realization that the beauty I find in nature was awakened first in me by
the mere sight of her. I wish, rather,
to speculate how it all came about, the work that made Mary's name known to
all.
We had gathered as
we often do near Lake Geneva, Switzerland.
The year as I recall was 1816.
Lord Byron, a dear friend and at that time the only one of us to have a
farthing to fling, had invited us to stay at his baronial lodgings for the
summer in the Villa Diodati at Cologne.
Mary and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont who was at the time pregnant
with our host’s child, along with a young doctor friend of Lord’s, one John
Polidori, and I had all been friends for some time, drawn together by our
liberal views and our commitment to the literary arts. We were to spend the days exploring the
countryside with its renowned botanical lushness - surely fodder for my pen -
boating on the lake, writing, and in general taking the air to clear one’s head
of the wine and laudanum to which we had ample access during the long evenings
spent together reading each other’s works and engaging in conversations the
like of which would curl the hair of an ordinary citizen of the day were he or
she to overhear the religious blasphemy, the sexual openness, and the political
diatribes we each were prone to espouse.
Mary’s views, I must mention, were surprisingly among the darkest and
she often called upon me to offer up one of my verses to ease her gloomier
moods.
The weather that
summer, as if to dampen our group’s usually high spirits and turn our thoughts
as well as our physical selves inwards, was abominable. There was incessant rain accompanied by
cannon-like thunder and blinding bolts of lightning that left one both deaf and
sightless if caught outdoors or too near an open portico. Mary alone seemed
undisturbed by lightning’s sudden intrusion and raw power; an indicator I
suspect here in hindsight of what was to become. Among the dreariest of conditions was the
constant chill that pervaded if one ventured beyond the reach of hearth’s fire.
We were all, with Polidori’s possible
exception, of an emotional disposition - none more so than Mary - and
consequently were affected by the weather more than others of lighter heart
whose personalities allow them to shake off the gloom of a grey day and carry
on if not cheerfully at least with the optimistic outlook that the next day
will dawn warmer and brighter .
It was during an
evening of rainfall such as I have described, that Lord Byron, to fill a
conversational void brought on by the lack of wit that accompanies a group
depression, suggested that he read aloud from not some of his lovely verses,
but rather, from a book of German ghost stories that he had found among the
villa’s meager library offerings. We
agreed eagerly - anything to change the mood - and listened attentively as he
did so. Polidori, a passionate man and
imaginative writer, followed the reading with a story of his own creation. It involved a hideous blood sucking beast. It was sketchy and incomplete, but found us
all paying rapt attention during the telling.
Polidori had no ending for his tale and asked us to find a conclusion
for him. Not one among us agreed to the
request for none could duplicate the unique style of Polidori’s imaginings. He was left to find his own ending, a task he
accomplished somewhat later with surprising results. Just before we retired for the evening, Lord
Byron put forth the suggestion that we all write our own horror stories and
read them aloud at some future date, the group to decide then whose tale of
terror was best. I readily acquiesced
along with the others even though I knew that my being a lyrical poet put me at
somewhat of a disadvantage. My tale, if
I may shamelessly trumpet it now, was penned much later as I was slow to find a
theme. It was ancient mythology and
Mary’s story that inspired me eventually to pen Prometheus Unbound. The date
for our group’s original offerings was set for three weeks hence.
Two stories of
historical note were born as a result of that evening’s challenge. Mary’s, of course, is most certainly the more
famous, but Polidori’s Vampyre had as
lasting a consequence on the literary endeavors of the future as Mary’s “Modern Prometheus.” Vampyre
gave us a creature that Bram Stoker would meld with his vision of the undead
and deliver in his brilliant gothic novel Dracula. But it is Mary’s horrible yet somehow
sympathetic creation that endures unrevised to this day.
How such a monster
had been wrought from the mind of a gentle, well bred, woman of the age I will now endeavor to
explain.
Mary was but a
child of sixteen years and I a lad of barely twenty-one when we fell deeply in love. Her father, William Godwin, a philosopher and
writer of some reputation in his own right, once a friend, was no longer so for
reasons I wish not to detail here for they have little if any impact on my
subject. Allow me to just recall that he
did not approve of a union between Mary and me and it was for this reason our
affair took on a clandestine aspect. We
met often in secret and in the most unlikely of places, a truly ghostly setting.
We gathered during night’s darkest hours in the cemetery that held the coffin
of Mary’s own mother. It was upon the
lush grass growing from the soil above her grave that Mary and I consummated
our love. This location and the deeds
done there, I would submit, planted the first seed in Mary’s fertile
imagination that would grow in time to become her most famous creation.
After months of
planning Mary and I fled from her father’s domain never to return. We wandered
Europe for a few years uncertain where to alight. I had early on some family money and earned a
bit more as a critically acclaimed but as yet not popular and thus not often
published poet. When my family disowned
me for my scandalous behavior and ceased my funding we were often nearly
destitute. We had, however, acquired
many good friends, Lord Byron among them, and from time to time accepted their
patronage. We wished during our better,
more flushed hours, to have a child and although Mary’s womb proved as fertile
as her imagination, her body initially proved incapable of bringing one to full
term and our first three were lost. This,
it seems to me was the second psychological factor in her mind’s sculpting of
what would become Victor Frankenstein and his monster. What parent I ask you would not wish to bring
life to that which they had conceived but remained unborn?
There then lacked
but the asking for the tale to arrive on the page and our group had done just that,
much as writer’s groups in your modern era often inspire works that would never
have been wrenched from minds busy elsewhere were it not for suggested topics.
Mary brought her Frankenstein to us in a shortened form
that long ago day and it was quickly deemed the best of all. It was at our insistence that she would later
lengthen to completeness her fantastic tale.
Though it is
impossible to fully explain the nature of one’s creative effort, Mary did
reveal to me as we sipped champagne on the date of the book’s first publication,
that the parts for her story were all lodged randomly in her subconscious and
her task was simply – if the word simply applies here - to dredge them, sort
them, and pen them to paper. She wanted
a creature equal in its gruesomeness to Polidori’s own. - we were, after all,
in a competition, albeit of our own devising – and she found it in Victor
Frankenstein’s assemblage of body parts robbed from the graves of the recently
dead. The lightning Mary so often
pondered would spark the monster to life and then would follow the agony of its
existence as a being separate and apart from all others; an agony that could
and would lead to violence. Victor
Frankenstein, perhaps the original “Mad Scientist,” would bear the ultimate
responsibility for the abomination he brings to life and the consequences of
its actions. He would follow it to the
far corners of the earth endeavoring to put an end to the torment that both he
and the creature share… but to no avail.
His inhuman creation not born of woman cannot die and will wander the
earth for eternity. In the end a
tragedy, not a horror story at all.
But the book was
not received that way and Mary tried unsuccessfully to distance herself from
her famous Frankenstein by writing
other books. None, though, would prove
to have an impact anything near that of her singular masterpiece of the macabre. For several years following the book’s
publication her notoriety would bring distress, but she would ultimately come
to understand and accept that she and Victor Frankenstein’s undying monster
would make her, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, immortal as well.
