Frankenstein Unbound (12 page)

That last was a luxury I should not have allowed myself, for the toughs were on me. They got in each other’s way at the window. Ducking under their grasp, I fell into the garden, staggered up, running already, dodging a flying kick from Ernest, and was away down the path.

They had a long, long garden, with a high wall at the end. There was a trellis against it, which I could climb— but quickly enough?

As I flung myself at it, pounding footsteps were behind me. I hauled myself to the top of the wall, looking back as I prepared to jump.

Ernest was almost at my legs, then one tough, then the second, halting on the path, then Clerval and Elizabeth back by the house. The second tough was aiming his little pistol at me, using both hands to steady his aim—he had had sense enough not to fire when running and waste his one shot. He fired even as I jumped.

I fell into a lane. It was not a very high jump. The ball had hit me in the leg. It was not a bad wound, but entirely enough to make me land badly and wrench my ankle.

Staggering up, I leaned against the wall, panting and gasping, wondering how severely I was hit. With one leg bleeding and one crippled, I had no chance. My pursuers swarmed over into the lane and seized me.

In a short while, limping and protesting, I found myself at the local prison, pushed into a filthy stinking room with some two dozen other malefactors.

How bitterly I thought that night of the happiness I had left that morning! How longingly I recalled that other bed, with Sophocles beside it and Mary in it, as I camped out on unsavory sacks among the dregs of humanity who were my new companions!

By morning, I was covered in bites from a number of loathsome insects who fed better than I did.

However, I was far from despair. After all, I could not be punished for the death of Victor Frankenstein if he was not dead. Nor was I as isolated as might at first appear. For I knew there were English-speaking visitors in Geneva if I could only establish communication with them; they might be induced to take up my cause. And the Shelley party were near at hand—though the fluctuations of the time scale made it hard to determine whether they would recognize my name if they heard it. And there was the great Lord Byron, a powerful name, a man well known to espouse the cause of freedom. Perhaps word could be got to him.

Meanwhile, my first efforts must be to attract attention to myself and have myself removed from this common Bedlam in which I was shut.

In any case, I needed attention. Though my wound from the officer’s ball was not much worse than a flesh wound, it hurt me and looked bad. My trousers were caked with blood. Accordingly, without ever rising from my sordid bed, I lay and groaned and babbled, and altogether gave a wonderful impression of a man in extremity.

Since I was one of the first to awaken, my noise was far from popular, and I received a few kicks and blows from my neighbors, in their kindly efforts to speed my recovery. Their ministrations only aided my cries. Eventually, I stood up screaming, and then pitched down and rolled over in an attitude which (I hoped) suggested death!

A warden was called. He turned me over with his foot. I moaned. Another officer was called, and I was carried away, with much clanking of keys, eventually to find myself in a small room, where I was dumped in a negligent way on a table.

A doctor came and examined me; I moaned throughout the inspection.

My wound was probed and bandaged, and then the fool of a medico bled me, evidently under the impression that it would calm a supposed fever.

As they carried away a pannier of my blood, I felt almost as bad as I pretended to be. I was then dragged into a solitary cell, locked in and left.

There I stayed for two days. I was given some repulsive food which, by the end of the second day, I trained myself to eat. It gave me a bowel disorder within the hour.

On the third day, I was marched before a prison officer, who perfunctorily asked me my name and address, and if I would confess to where I had concealed the body of Victor Frankenstein. I protested my innocence. He laughed and said, “One of our foremost counselors is hardly likely to have an innocent man imprisoned.” But he was good enough to allow me some writing materials before I was taken back to my cell, formally charged with murder.

Letter from Joseph Bodenland to Mary Godwin:

My dear Mary Godwin,

Your novel found many readers of whom you never knew. This letter may never find you. But perhaps my compulsion to write in these circumstances is as strong as yours!

Nothing but disaster has attended me since I left your side. My one solace is that I was at your side. That is consolation enough for anything.

My hazy memory of your novel suggests that you were entirely too kind to Victor’s betrothed, Elizabeth, and more than entirely too kind to his friend, Henry Clerval. Between them, they have had me imprisoned, on the false accusation of having murdered Victor.

My release may come any day, since Victor has but to reappear among the living for the accusation to be proved false on all sides. However, you of all people know how erratic are his movements, moved as he is by guilt and persecution. To misquote you: “He is elusive because he is miserable.” Can you help me maybe, by discovering his whereabouts, and perhaps persuading him—through a third party if necessary—to return to his home, or to communicate with the prison officials here? He can bear me no malice.

How much time I have had to meditate on what transpired between us! I will pass in silence over my feelings for you, for they can mean little to you at present (though I am in some doubt as to when “at present” is), though I assure you that what briefly flowered between us one morning is a flower that will not perish, however many mornings remain.

What I will write about is the world situation in which I find myself. I bless you that you are an intellectual girl, like your mother, in an age when such spirits are rare; in my age, they are less rare, but perhaps no more effectual because of their greater numbers, and because they operate in a world where the male principle has prevailed, even over the mentalities of many of your sex. (I’d say all this differently in the language of my time! Would you like to hear it? You are an early example of Women’s Lib, baby, just like your Mom. Your cause will grab more power as time passes, boosted by the media, who always love a new slant on the sex thing. But most of those fighting girls have sold themselves out to the big operators, and work the male kick themselves, clitoris or no clitoris. End quote.)

I had put Victor down—and your poet too, I have to confess—as a liberal do-gooding troublemaker. This troublesome wish to improve the world! “Look where it’s got us!”—that was the assumption behind all I said at Diodati the other evening.

It was too easy an assumption. I can see that now, locked in this miserable cell with no particular guarantees that anything good is ever likely to happen to me again. When Justine Moritz was in this prison, the world outside had prejudged her before her trial. Perhaps I am being prejudged in the same way, if my name is even mentioned outside.

But who would there be to speak for me, who would take up my case? In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it will be different, at least in the nations of America, Japan, and Western Europe. That stone curtain will not descend which now shuts off the inmates of prison from the free world outside. Among prison inmates, I do not include debtors—but in the future, governments will not be foolish enough to imprison people merely for a debt.

How has this small improvement arisen?

(Of course, I use this particular approach to a general question because I have the subject of prison brought to my notice with a vengeance. But I fancy that if I found myself on the field of Waterloo with a foot missing, or in a dentist’s chair without benefit of anesthetic—a future form of laudanum—or faced with a work situation in which my family were slowly being starved and degraded, then my conclusions might reasonably be the same.)

Between your age and mine, Mary, the great mass of people have become less coarse. Beautiful though your age is, many though the intellects that adorn it, and ugly though my age is, cruel many of its leaders, I believe that the period from which I come is to be preferred to yours in this respect. People have been educated to care more, upon the whole. Their consciences have been cultivated.

We no longer lock up the mentally deranged, although they were locked up until well into the twentieth century; certainly we do not allow them to be paraded for the general amusement of our population. The population would no longer be amused. (How I loved you when you said to Lord Byron, “Even the stupid hate being made to look foolish!”!)

We no longer hang a man because, in despair for his family, he steals a sheep or a loaf of bread. Indeed we no longer hang men for anything, or kill them by any other method. We long ago ceased to enjoy hanging as a public spectacle. Nor do we imprison children.

Nor do we any longer allow children to become little workhorses for their fathers or for any other man. Child labor was stopped before your century drew to its end. Instead, educational acts were enforced, slowly, step by step, in tune with general opinion on the issue, in accord with the dictum that politics is the art of the possible.

Indeed, the whole emphasis of education has changed. Education, except for the sons of lords, was once directed at fitting a man for a job and, cynics would add, unfitting him for life. Now, with complex machines themselves capable of performing routine jobs, education concentrates to a great extent on equipping young men and women for life, and living better and more creatively. It may have come too late, but it has come.

We no longer allow the old to starve when their usefulness to the community is ended. Pensions for the aged came in at the beginning of the twentieth century. Geriatry is now a subject which is afforded its own ministry in the affairs of government.

We no longer allow the weak or foolish or unfortunate to perish in the gutters of a city slum. Indeed, slums in the old sense have been almost abolished. There are now such a variety of welfare systems as would amaze you and Shelley. If a man loses his job, he receives unemployment benefits. If he falls sick, he receives sickness benefits. There is a public health service which takes care of all illnesses free of charge.

So I could go on. Although in your native country, England, there are in my epoch six times as many people as in 1816, nevertheless, the individual is guaranteed a much better chance to lead a life free from catastrophe and, if catastrophe occurs, a much better chance to be helped to recover.

(Do I make it sound like a paradise, a utopia, a socialist state such as would delight Shelley’s and your father’s hearts? Well, remember that all this equality has only been achieved in one small part of the globe, and then mainly at the expense of the rest of the globe; and that this inequality, once such a national feature, is now such an international feature that it has led to a bitterly destructive war between rich and poor nations; and remember that that inequality is fed by an ever-hardening racial antagonism which enlightened men regard as the tragedy of our age.)

What accounts for these social improvements across the whole field of human affairs, between your age and mine? Answer: the growth of social conscience in the general mass of people.

How was that growth fostered?

The burden of Frankenstein’s argument is that man’s concern is to put Nature to rights. I believe that when his successors were actively engaged in that process, they often made devastating mistakes. Of late, my generation has perforce had to count up the debit column of all those mistakes, and in so doing has forgotten the benefits.

For the gifts of Frankenstein include not only material things like the seat coverings which you admired in my automobile—or the automobile itself! They include all the intangible welfare gifts I have enumerated—at what I fear you will think is “some length”! One of the direct results of science and technology has been an increase in production, and a “spin-off” or yield of such things as anesthetics, principles of bacteriology and immunology and hygiene, better understanding of health and illness, the provision of machines to do what women and children were earlier forced to do, cheaper paper, vast presses to permit the masses to read, followed by other mass media, much better conditions in homes and factories and cities —and on and on in a never-ending list.

All these advances have been real, even when dogged by the ills of which I told you. And they have brought a change in the nature of people. I’m talking now about the masses, the great submerged part of every nation. In the Western democracies, those masses have never again suffered the dire oppression that they suffered in England until almost the 1850s, when sometimes laboring men, particularly in country districts, might never have a fire in their hearths or taste meat all week, and faced death if they trapped a rabbit on the local lord-of-the-manor’s land. People have been able to become softer since those ill times, thanks to the great abundance for which technology is directly responsible.

If you kick a child all his schooldays, force him to labor sixteen hours a day seven days a week, yank out his teeth with forceps when they ache, bleed him when he is ill, beat him throughout his apprenticeship, starve him when he falls on bad times, and finally let him die in the workhouse when he ages prematurely, then you have educated a man, in the best way possible, to be
indifferent.
Indifferent to himself and to others.

Between your age and mine, dear Mary, a reeducation has taken place. The benefits of a growing scientific spirit have formed an overwhelming force behind that reeducation.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. To have an overwhelming force is one thing, to direct it quite another.

And the chief direction has come in your century—in your heroic century!—from poets and novelists. It is your husband-to-be who declares (or will declare, and of course I may misquote) that poets are
mirrors of the tremendous shadows which futurity casts upon the present,
and the unacknowledged legislators of the world. He is absolutely right, save in one particular: he should have specifically included novelists with poets.

But in your present, in 1816, novels are not much regarded. Their great day is to come in the next generation, for the novel becomes the great art form of the nineteenth century, from Los Angeles to New York, from London and Edinburgh to Moscow and Budapest. The novel becomes the flower of humanism.

The names of these directors of change in your country alone are still recalled, novelists who seized on the great socio-scientific changes of their day and molded a more sensitive appreciation of life to respond to it: Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, the Bronte sisters, Charles Reade, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, your friend Peacock, many others. And especially the beloved Charles Dickens, who perhaps did more than any man in his century—including the great legislators and engineers— to awaken a new conscience in his fellow men. Dickens and the others are the great novelists—and every other Western country can offer rival names, from Jules Verne to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—who truly mirror the tremendous futurities and shape the hearts of people. And you, my dear Mary, respected though your name is—you are insufficiently regarded as the first of that invaluable breed, preceding them by at least one whole generation!

Thanks to the work of your moral forces, powered by the social change which always and only comes from technological innovation, the future from which I come is not entirely uninhabitable. On the one hand, there is the sterility of machine culture and the terrible isolation often felt by people even in overcrowded cities; on the other hand, there is a taking for granted of many basic rights and freedoms which in your day have not even been thought of.

How I think of them now! My case can attract no eager newsmen. I can call on no congressman to worry on my behalf. I may expect no mass media to crusade, no millions of strangers to become suddenly familiar with my name and anxious for my cause. I’m stuck in a cell with a reeking bucket, and two hundred years to wait before justice can be done, and be seen to be done. Do you wonder I now see the positive side of the technological revolution?!

If you can summon Victor, as Prospero summoned his unhappy servants, or help me in any other way, then I’ll be grateful. But hardly more grateful than I am already, if grateful is an adequate enough word! Meanwhile, I send you these meditations, hoping they may help you to continue your great book.

And with the meditations, less perishable than a willow leaf,

My love,

JOE BODENLAND