Frankenstein Unbound (7 page)

There were some fragments of my education in English literature which did return to me. And that was why I drove eastwards along Lake Geneva. I thought I had a good idea of where at least one copy of the novel would certainly be.

When I saw the next
Gasthof
coming up, I drew in to the side of the road, put on my raincoat, and walked along to it. I should mention that I had bought a few items of clothing that morning, before the trial began. I no longer looked quite such a time-traveler. (For most of the time, I had forgotten, was unable to remember, my previous existence!)

I was ravenously hungry. At the
Gasthof,
they set before me a beautiful soup with dumplings in it, followed by a huge white sausage on a small alp of potato and onion-rings. This I washed down with lager from a great stein as monumentally carved as the Parthenon.

As I picked my teeth and smiled to myself, I glanced at the newspaper which had been placed, furled on its stick, beside my plate. My smile sank under the horizon. The paper was dated Monday, August 26, 1816!

But this was May... At first, my mind could not adjust to the missing three months, so that I sat stupidly with the paper in my hands, staring at it. Then I commenced a tremulous search through its pages, almost as if I expected to find details of a timeslip between Geneva and where I now was.

The name of Frankenstein caught my eye. And there next to it stood Justine’s name. I read a short news item in which it was announced that Justine had been hanged the previous Saturday, the twenty-fourth, after several postponements of the event. She had been granted absolution of her sins, but had died protesting her innocence to the last. But—in my yesterday, Justine had still been alive. Where had June and July gone? How did August get there?

Losing three months is a far nastier experience than being jolted back two centuries. Centuries are cold impersonal things. Months are things you live with. And three of them had just been whipped from under me. I paid my bill in very thoughtful fashion, and with a trembling hand.

When I stood at the doorway, hesitating to dash into the pouring rain, I could see that the landscape had moved with the date. Two men who had come in to quaff down great glasses of
Apfelsaft
were now returning to their scythes in a field opposite, to join a line of sodden reapers there. The grapes that hung over mine host’s door were turning a dusky shade as the juice ripened in their skins. August was here.

The
Gasthof
owner joined me at the door and stared with contempt at the sky. “I take it you’re a foreigner, sir? This is the worst summer we’ve had in these parts for a century, they do say.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, indeed it is. The worst summer in living memory. No doubt but the discharging of all the cannon and musketry at the field of Waterloo caused an injury to the normal temperament of the sky.”

“Rain or no rain, I must get on my way. Can you tell me of an English poet staying in these parts?”

He grinned broadly at me. “Bless you, sir, I can tell you of two English poets! England must have as many poets as soldiers, so liberally does she scatter them hereabouts. They’re staying not two leagues from this village.”

“Two of them! Do you know their names?”

“Why, sir, one’s the great Lord Byron, probably the most famous poet in the world, after Johann Schlitzberger—and a smarter dresser than Johann Schlitzberger he is, as well.”

“The other English poet?”

“He’s not famous.”

“Shelley, is it?”

“Yes, I believe that’s the name. He’s got a couple of women with him. They’re down along the road by the lake’s edge. You can’t miss them. Ask for the Villa Diodati.”

I thanked him and hurried into the rain. What excitement was leaping inside me!

The rain had stopped. Cloud lay thick across the lake, hiding the mountain peaks beyond. I stood under trees, surveying the stone walls and vines of the Villa Diodati. My superior self was working out a way to approach and make myself known.

Suppose I introduced myself to Shelley and Byron as a fellow traveler. How much better if I could have introduced myself as a fellow poet! But in 1816 there were no American poets whose names I could recall. Memory suggested that both Byron and Shelley had a taste for the morbid; no doubt they would enjoy meeting Edgar Allan Poe—yet Poe would be only a child still, somewhere across a very wide Atlantic.

Social niceties were difficult to conduct across two hundred years. The fact that Lord Byron was probably the most famous poet in Europe at this time, even including Johann Schlitzberger, was not going to make things easier.

As I prowled about outside the garden wall, it came on me with a start that a young man was regarding me over the barrel of a pistol. I stopped still in my tracks.

He was a handsome young guy with a head of well-oiled reddish hair. He wore a green jacket, gray trousers, and high calf boots, and had a bold air about him.

“I’d be obliged if you would cease to point that antique at me!” I said.

“Why so? The tourist-shooting season opened today. I’ve bagged three already. You have only to come close enough to my hide and I let fly. I’m one of the best marksmen in Europe, and you are possibly the biggest grouse in Europe.” But he lowered his pistol and came forward two paces.

“Thank you. It would be embarrassing to be shot before we were introduced.”

He was still not looking particularly friendly. “Then be off into the undergrowth, my feathered friend. It makes me feel more than somewhat persecuted to have items of the British public lurking about my property—particularly when most of them haven’t read two lines of my verse together.”

I noted that he pronounced it in eighteenth-century fashion: “m’ verse.”

Taking the binoculars from round my neck, I proffered them, saying, “You observe how amateur my lurking was—not only did I not conceal myself, but I did not use my chief lurking weapon. Have you ever seen the like of these, sir?”

He tucked the gun into the top of his trousers. That was a good sign. Then he took the binoculars and peered at me through them.

Clicking his tongue in approval, he swerved to take in the lake.

“Let’s see if Dr. Polly is up to anything he shouldn’t be with our young Mistress Mary!”

I saw him focus on a boat which lay almost stationary beneath its single sail, fairly close to shore. But I wanted to take him in while his eyes were off me. Being so close to Lord Byron was somewhat like being close to big game—a lion encountered at the foot of Kilimanjaro. Although not a tall man, he had considerable stature. His shoulders were broad, his face handsome; you could see his genius in his eyes and lips. Only his skin, as I inspected him from fairly close quarters, was pallid and blotchy. I saw that there were gray hairs among his auburn locks.

He studied the sailing boat for a while, smiling to himself.

Then he chuckled. “Tasso keeps them apart, though their fingers meet on the pillows of his pastoral. The triumph of learning over concupiscence! Polly itches for her, but they continue to construe. Red blood is nothing before a bluestocking!”

I could make out two figures in the boat, one male, one female.

I heard my own voice from a remote distance ask, “Do you refer to Mary Shelley, sir?”

Byron looked quizzically at me, holding the glasses out but just beyond my grasp. “Mary Shelley? No, sir, I refer to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. She is Shelley’s mistress, not his wife. I thought that much was common knowledge. What d’you take ’em for, a pair of Christians? Though neither Shelley nor she are
pagans,
that’s certain! Even now, Mary improves her mind at the expense of my doctor’s body.”

This news, combined with his presence, caused me some confusion. I could only say stupidly, “I believed Shelley and Mary were married.”

He withdrew the glasses again from my reach. “Mrs. Shelley is left behind in London—the only proper treatment for wives, apart from the horsewhip. Mind you, our fair student of Tasso may—
may
succeed...” He laughed. “There is a tide in the affairs of women which, taken at the flood, leads God knows where...”

The topic suddenly lost interest for him. Handing the glasses back to me, he said of them with a haughty touch, “They’re well enough. I just wish they spied out something more entertaining than water and doctors. Well, sir, since I presume you know my name, perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me yours—and your business here.”

“My name is Joseph Bodenland, Lord Byron, and I am from Texas, in America, the Lone Star State. As for my business—well, it is of a private nature, and has to do with Mrs.—I mean, with Mary Godwin.”

He smiled. “I had observed that you were not a damned Englisher. As long as you are not from London, Mr. Bodenland, like all the rest of the tedious world—and as long as your business is not with me, and mercifully private, to boot—perhaps you will honor me by joining me in a glass of claret. We can always shoot each other later, if needs be.”

“I hope not, as long as the rain holds off.”

“You will find, if you are long here, that, in this terrible spot, Mr. Bodenland, the rain holds up, but seldom
off.
Every day contains more weather than a week in Scotland, and weeks in Scotland can drag on for centuries, believe me! Come!”

As if in support of his wild statement, rain began to fall heavily. “The sky squelches like a grouse-moor! Let’s get in!” he said, limping rapidly ahead of me.

We went into his villa, I in sheer delight and excitement and, I think, he in some relief at having someone new to talk to. What a spellbinder he was! We sat and drank before a smoldering fire while we conversed. I have tried to convey a pale memory of our meeting, but further than that I cannot go. The range of his talk was beyond me—even when not particularly profound, it was salted with allusions, and the connections he drew between things I had hitherto regarded as unconnected were startling. Then, though he boasted of this and that, it was with an underlying modesty which often spilled over into self-mockery. I was at a temporal disadvantage, for some things to which he made reference were unknown to me.

At least I gathered a few facts, which drifted down like leaves amid the mellow August of his talk. He lived in the Villa Diodati with his doctor, “Polly,” the Italian, Polidori, and his retinue. The Shelley manage was established close by—“Just a grape’s stamp across the vineyard,” as he put it—in a property called Campagne Chapuis: the Villa Chapuis, as I was later to hear it called, more grandly. “My fellow reprobate and exile” (that was how he designated Shelley) was established with two young women, Mary Godwin and her half sister, Claire Claremont. Byron raised both his eyebrow and his glass when referring to Claire Claremont.

Prompted by his remark, I recalled that Byron was now in exile. There had been a scandal in London—but scandals gathered as naturally round Byron as clouds round Mont Blanc. He had left England in disgust.

Beneath his glass lay a sheet of paper, sopping up wine. I thought to myself, if I could only get that back to 2020, how much it would be worth! And I asked him if he found his present abode conducive to the writing of poetry.

“This is my present abode,” he said, tapping his head. “How much longer I shall stay in it and not go out of it, who knows! There seems to be some poetry rattling about in there, rather as air rattles about in the bowels, but to get it out with a proper report—that’s the trick! The great John Milton, that blind justifier of God to man, stayed under this very roof once. Look what it did to him—
Paradise Regained
! The greatest error in English letters, outside of the birth of Southey. But I have news today that Southey is sick. Tell me something that cheered you recently, Mr. Bodenland. We don’t have to talk literature, y’know—I’d as leave hear news of America, parts of which still linger in the Carboniferous Age, I understand.” As I was about to open my mouth like a fish, the outer door swung open and in bounced two hounds, followed by a slender young man shaking raindrops from his head. He scattered water about from a blue cap he carried, while the dogs sent flurries of water everywhere. In the half-hour I had spent with Lord Byron, I had forgotten that it was again raining steadily.

Byron jumped up with a roar and offered the newcomer a plaid rug on which to dry his hair. The roar made the dogs scatter, barking, and a manservant to appear. The servant banished the dogs and threw logs into the great tiled stove before which we had been sitting.

It was plain how pleased the two men were to see each other. The patter that passed between them spoke of an easy familiarity, and was so fast and allusive that I could hardly follow it.

“I seem to have a veritable serpentine in my locks,” said the newcomer, still shedding water and laughing wildly.

“Did I not say last night that you were serpent-licked, and Mary agreed? Now you are serpent-locked!”

“Then forgive me while I discharge my serpentine!” he said while toweling vigorously.

“I’ll do my duty by a yet older form. Um
—‘Ambo florentes aetatibus, Arcades ambo
...’”

“Capital! And it’s a motto that would serve for us both, Albé, even if our Arcadia is liable to flood!”

Byron had his glass in his hand. In the excitement, the sheet of paper that had lain beneath the glass fluttered to the floor. I picked it up. My action recalled my presence to him. Taking my arm as if in apology for a moment’s neglect, Byron said, “My dear Bodenland, you must be acquainted with my fellow reprobate and exile.” So I was introduced to Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Yes, Byron introduced me to Shelley. From that moment on, my severance with the old modes of reality was complete.

The younger man was immediately all confusion, like a girl. He was habited youthfully, in black jacket and trousers, over which he had a dripping cape. The blue cap he tossed to the floor in order to grasp my hand. He gave me a dazzling smile. Shelley was all electricity where Byron was all beef—if I can say that without implying lack of admiration for Byron. He was taller than Byron, but stooped slightly, whereas Byron’s demeanor was almost soldierly at times. He was pimply, bony, beardless, but absolutely animated.