HE POET AND THE VAMPYRE
The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters
By Andrew McConnell Stott
Pegasus. 434 pp. $29.95
Friday night, at least a few vampires and Frankenstein monsters will knock on
our doors even as old Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi films play once more in
darkened family rooms. Some of us may even sit down to reread Mary
Shelley’s “Frankenstein” or Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”
But how many people even know about John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819),
the first story in English about a magnetically charismatic aristocrat who
acquires renewed vitality by preying thirstily on beautiful young women?
While Polidori may call this fiend Lord Ruthven, he nonetheless obviously is
modeled after the poet who was notoriously “mad, bad, and dangerous to
know”: Lord Byron.
In “The Poet and the Vampyre,” Andrew McConnell Stott, a professor of
English at the University at Buffalo, has produced a learned, constantly
entertaining and deliciously gossipy account of the erotic and personal
entanglements that led up to, and away from, the most famous wet evening in
Romantic literature: As the rain poured down outside the Villa Diodati in
Switzerland on June 16, 1816, the restless, self-exiled Byron announced to a
group of friends, “We will each write a ghost story.”
”The Poet and the Vampyre: The Curse ofByron and the Birth of Literature's Greatest
Monsters” by Andrew McConnell Stott. (Pegasus)
Those friends included the poet, atheist, vegetarian and political radical Percy
Bysshe Shelley; his teenage lover and future wife, Mary, who was the daughter
of the political thinker William Godwin and the feminist icon Mary
Wollstonecraft; and Byron’s doctor, the 20-year-old John Polidori, whose
sister Frances became the mother of the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (notorious himself for having his wife’s grave dug up so
he could retrieve the poems he had impulsively thrown into her coffin). In the
next day or so, Byron scribbled “eight leaves” about the mysterious Augustus
Darvell, then stopped; Polidori worked on a similar tale, perhaps adopting
some of his patient’s ideas, and then forgot about it. Only Mary persisted, and
over the next 18 months she produced a masterpiece, “Frankenstein.”
Away from the villa that night, though a key figure in this story, was 18-yearold Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Mary and soon to be the mother
of Byron’s daughter Allegra. Of them all, she was the most hurt by what Stott
calls “the curse of Byron.”
And what is that? Nothing overtly supernatural, it was simply the poet’s
callous selfishness and psychological cruelty to those around him, especially
the adoring Claire and the youthful Polidori. But what can you expect from the
equivalent of a rock star? Byron slept with scores, perhaps hundreds, of
women (including, it is widely believed, his sister) and quite possibly a few
young men. His coach was an exact replica of Napoleon’s.
Though infinitely kinder, the emotionally fragile, ethereal-looking Shelley
steadfastly rejected all constraints on human liberty, no matter what the cost.
When he first ran off with the then 16-year-old Mary, his wife, Harriet, was
expecting their second child. The guilty couple brought Claire along as a
supposed chaperone, though the world believed, and Stott suspects, that
Shelley eventually slept with her, too.
Because the two stepsisters couldn’t get on together, Claire eventually was sent
away, but — possibly from a desire to one-up Mary — she began to write
letters to the famous author of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” frankly offering
herself to him. After resignedly granting her wishes, Byron never really wanted
to see her again, but when Claire turned up in Switzerland, what choice did he
have, especially when the woman begged for a renewal of their intimacies?
If Byron found Claire tiresome, he regarded Polidori as an egregious upstart.
The young doctor yearned for recognition as a playwright; the
merciless Byron laughed at his verse dramas and, after four months, fired him.
Polidori then wandered around Italy, looking unsuccessfully for a medical
position before finally returning to Britain, “having been abroad nine days shy
of a year, during which time he had attempted suicide, been arraigned for
assault, traversed the Alps on foot, threatened to kill Shelley, and been sacked
by the only paying patient [Byron] who hadn’t died.”
Back in London, Polidori still dreamed of literary success. One afternoon he
opened the New Monthly Magazine to discover that his horror story, the one
he had worked on at the Villa Diodati, had been published without his
permission and attributed to — you guessed it — Byron. How this came about
is unclear even now, but worse was waiting: “The Vampyre” proved wildly
successful and was translated into several languages, but poor “Polly” —
as Byron called him — never saw a cent. Disappointed and despairing, the 25year-old gave up and poisoned himself with prussic acid.
In fact, suicide and sudden death haunted Byron’s circle. Mary and Claire’s
stepsister Fanny overdosed on laudanum. Shelley’s long-suffering wife,
Harriet, drowned herself. Three of Mary’s four children by Shelley died young:
a girl 12 days after birth, Clara as a baby, and William at 3. Pretty, blue-eyed
Allegra, in her turn, succumbed to typhus at 5, partly becauseByron, who
stubbornly insisted on bringing her up, soon neglected her. Stott ends “The
Poet and the Vampyre” just as 29-year-old Shelley and his friend Edward
Williams arrive at the Bay of La Spezia, where they both drowned while
boating.
Byron himself succumbed to fever at 36 in 1824, fighting for Greek
independence. Mary, fierce guardian of Shelley’s reputation, lived till 1851.
After rejecting a proposal from the smitten Thomas Love Peacock (author of
the gothic parody “Nightmare Abbey”), Claire spent her life as a governess to
many of the aristocratic families of Europe. She ended her days in Italy, living
with a niece and, because she had kept valuable letters and manuscripts from
her youth, being prey to fortune-hunters. These last years — she died in 1879
— inspired Henry James’s ironic masterpiece “The Aspern Papers.”
Because Stott’s approach in “The Poet and the Vampyre” is entirely
biographical, he does not discuss “Frankenstein,” nor does he examine the
development of the Byronic vampire in 19th- and 20th-century literature.
What this excellent book offers instead is an enthralling, if ultimately tragic,
soap opera and lots of fascinating information.
One paragraph describes all of Byron’s maladies, another tells exactly how a
body-snatcher would remove a corpse from its coffin, and still another reveals
the erotic possibilities of the various boxes at Milan’s La Scala opera house.
Did you know, moreover, that M.G. Lewis, author of “The Monk,” visited Villa
Diodati that same momentous summer or that Shiloh was Byron’s nickname
for Shelley? Not least, I particularly relished Stott’s sprightly diction: “a rialto
of possibilities,” “the brutal comedy of his worldliness,” “temulent illusions,”
“a horde of corvine devotees.”
In the end, Stott writes, Claire Clairmont and John Polidori were the victims
of “the low-grade fever that was the Romantic obsession with celebrity.” Once
exposed, it infected them forever and brought them nothing but pain. That, in
truth, is the real curse of Byron.
Dirda reviews books every Thursday in The Washington Post.