Frankenstein Unbound (8 page)

“How d’you do, Mr. Bodenland, you are in time to listen to a little revision!” He pulled a paper from his pocket and began to read a poem, assuming a somewhat falsetto voice.

“Some say that gleams of a remoter world

Visit the soul in sleep—that death’s a slumber,

And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

Of those who wake and live! I look on high—”

Byron clapped his hands to interrupt. “Sorry, I disagree with those sentiments! Hark to my immortal answer—

“When Time, or soon or late, shall bring

The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead—

Then your remoter worlds, old thing,

Will lie extinguished in your head!

“Forgive my coarse and characteristic interruption! But don’t work the poet business so hard. I don’t need convincing! Either you are a worse poet than I, in which case I’m bored—or you’re better, when I’m jealous!”

“I compete only with myself, Albé, not with you,” Shelley said. But he tucked his manuscript away with a good grace. Albé was the nickname they had for Byron.

“That game’s too easy for you! You always excel yourself,” Byron said kindly, as if anxious that he might have hurt Shelley’s feelings. “Come on, have some wine, and there’s laudanum on the chimney piece if you need it. Mr. Bodenland was about to tell me of some tremendous thing that cheered him recently!”

Shelley sat close, pushing away the wine, and looked into my face. “Is that indeed so? Did you see a ray of sunshine or something like that?”

Glad of the diversion, I said, “Someone told me today that the bad weather was caused by all the cannonballs discharged on the field of Waterloo last year.”

Shelley burst into laughter. “I hope you have something more tremendous than
that
to tell us.”

Put on my mettle, I told them as simply as I could of how Tony, Poll, and Doreen had made their “Feast,” burying their doll (I substituted doll for scooter) and covering the mound with flowers, and how, at the end, as a simple token of courtesy or affection, Tony had presented his penis for Doreen’s pleasure.

Although Shelley smiled only faintly, Byron roared with laughter and said, “Let me tell you of an inscription I once saw scrawled on the wall of a low jakes in Chelsea. It said, The
cazzo
is our ultimate weapon against humanity’! Though the Italian word was not employed, come to think of it. Can you recall a graffito more charged with knowledge?”

“And maybe self-hatred, too,” I ventured, when I saw Shelley was silent.

“And below it another hand had scribbled a codicil: ‘And the vagina our last ditch defense’! Your noble savage of the slums is nothing if not a realist, eh, Shelley?”

“I liked the tale of the Feast,” Shelley said to me. “Perhaps you will tell it to Mary when she comes over, without adding the—unimproving tailpiece.” His gentle manner of saying it robbed the remark of any reproof it might otherwise have carried.

“I’ll be delighted to meet her.”

“She’ll be here in an hour or so, when she has dried off from her boat trip with Polidori. And when she has fed our little William and tucked him into bed.”

That name—little William!—recalled me to more serious things. The sick, chiseled visage of Frankenstein returned before my eyes. I fell silent. The two poets talked together, the dogs slunk back into the room and fought under the window, the fire flickered. The rain fell. The world seemed very small. Only the perspectives of the poets were large: they had a freedom and a joy in speculation—even when the subject of speculation was a gloomy one—which steadied one’s faith in human culture. Yet I could see in Shelley some of Victor’s nervous mannerisms. Shelley looked like a haunted man. Something in the set of his shoulders suggested that his pursuers were not far behind. Byron slouched back stolidly in his chair, but Shelley never kept still.

A servant was summoned. The laudanum bottle was brought out. Byron tipped it gently into his brandy. Shelley consented to having a draft in wine. I took another glass of wine myself.

“Ah, a man can drown in this stuff!” said Byron, appreciatively sipping.

“No, no, you need a whole lake to drown properly,” said Shelley. “In this stuff you
float!
” He rose and began to dance round the room. The dogs yapped and growled about his heels. He ignored them, but Byron lurched to his feet with a bellow. “Get those mankey hounds out of my room!”

As the servant was kicking them out, Mary Godwin entered, and I found myself flushing—part with the wine, no doubt, but mainly with the agonizing exhilaration of confronting the author of
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

To see her standing there! Although my emotions were engaged, or perhaps because they were engaged, a flash of revelation lit my intellect. I perceived that the orthodox view of time, as gradually established in the Western world, was a mistaken one.

Even to me then, it was strange that such a perception should dawn at that moment, when dogs were barking, wind was blowing in, everyone was making a hubbub, and Mary Shelley stood before me. But I saw that time was much more like the growth of Mary’s reputation, devious and ambiguous, than it was like the straight line, moving remorselessly forward, which Western thought has forced it to prefigure.

That straightness of time, that confining straightness, was one with the Western picture of setting the world to rights. Historically, it was easy to see how it had arisen. The introduction of bells into all the steeples of Christendom had been an early factor in regularizing the habits of the people—their first lesson in working to the clock. But the greatest advance in regularity was soon about to descend on the world in which I found myself: the introduction of a complex railway system which depended on exact and uniform timing over whole countries, not on the vagaries of a church steeple or a parson’s watch. That regularization would reinforce the lesson of the factory siren: that to survive, all must be sacrificed to a formal pattern imposed impersonally on the individual.

The lesson of the factory siren would be heard too in the sciences, leading to the horrible clockwork universe of Laplace and his successors. That image of things would dominate men’s notions of space and time for more than a century. Even when nuclear physics brought what might seem less restrictive ideas, those ideas would be refinements on, and not a revolution against, the mechanistic perception of things. Into this straitjacket of thought Time had been thrust. It had come to the stage in 2020 when anyone who regarded Time as other than something that could be measured precisely by chronometer was shunned as an eccentric.

Yet, in the coarse sensual world over which science never entirely held sway, Time was always regarded as devious. Popular parlance spoke of Time as a medium wherein one had a certain independence of movement quite at variance with scientific dogma. “You’re living in the past.”

“He’s before his time.”

“I’ll knock you into the middle of next week.”

“We are years ahead of the competition.”

The poets had always been on the side of the people. For them, and for some neglected novelists, Time would always be a wayward thing, climbing over life like a variegated ivy over some old house. Or like Mary Shelley’s earlier reputation, cherished by few, but always there, diversifying.

She went over to Shelley and gave him a book, telling him that Claire Claremont was sitting by little William— “Willmouse,” she called him—and writing letters home. Shelley started to question her about Tasso’s
La Gerusalemme Liberata,
but Byron called her over to him. “You may give me a kiss, dear Mary, since it is soon to be your birthday.”

She did kiss him, but somewhat dutifully. He patted her and said to me, “Here you see the advantages of heredity nobly exemplified. This young lady, Mr. Bodenland, is the product of the union of two of the great minds of our time, the philosopher, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the great philosophical female minds to rank with my friend Madame de Stael—who lives just across the lake, as you may know. So we have here beauty and wisdom united, to everyone’s great advantage!”

“Do not let Lord Byron prejudice you against me, sir,” said Mary, smiling.

She was petite. She was fair and rather birdlike, with brilliant eyes and a small wistful mouth. As with Shelley, she was irresistible when she laughed, for her whole countenance lit up—she gave you her enjoyment. But she was much more still than Shelley, and on the whole very silent, and in her silence was a mournful quality. I could see why Shelley loved her—and why Byron teased her.

One thing struck me about her immediately. She was amazingly young. Later, I saw by a date in a book that she was not yet eighteen. The thought went through my mind, She can’t help me!—it must be years yet before she will come to write her masterpiece.

“Mr. Bodenland can tell you a story about little children and graves,” Shelley told her. “It will make your flesh creep!”

“I couldn’t tell it again, even for such worthy ends,” I said to her. “It would bore the rest of the company even more than it did the first time.”

“If you are staying some time, sir, you must tell it me privately,” Mary said, “since I am setting up shop as a connoisseur of grave stories.”

“Mr. Bodenland is a connoisseur of the Swiss weather,” Byron said. “He believes it was the cannon at Waterloo which caused the clouds such hemorrhage!”

Before I could protest at the misrepresentation, Mary said, “Oh, no, that’s not so at all—that’s a very unscientific remark, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir! The bad weather universal in the northern hemisphere this year is entirely attributable to a phenomenal volcanic explosion in the southern hemisphere last year! Isn’t that interesting? It proves that winds are distributed all over the globe, and that the whole planet enjoys a circulatory system like—”

“Mary, dear, you upset
my
circulatory system when you parade these ideas you pinch from Percy,” Byron said. “Let the weather get into anything but
not
the claret and the conversation! Now, Shelley, tell me what you were reading when you were skulking in the woods today.”

Shelley put ten long fingers to his chest and then flipped them up at the ceiling. “I was not in the woods. I was not on earth. I had fled the planet entirely. I was with Lucian of Samosata, adventuring on the moon!”

They began a conversation on the advantages of lunar life; Mary stood meekly beside me, listening. Then she said to me, quietly so as not to disturb the talk, “We shall eat mutton tonight—or Lord Byron and Polidori will, for Percy and I avoid meat. You must join us, if you will. I am just going to see if the cook is attending to the vegetables.” With that she went towards the kitchen.

Mention of Polidori reminds me that the little Italian doctor had entered with Mary. No one had taken any notice of him. Even I forgot to note him. He poured himself some wine and went over to the fire to drink it. Then, evidently annoyed about something, he tramped upstairs to his room.

Now he suddenly reappeared, clad in nothing but a pair of nankeen trousers, rushing down the stairs and leveling a pistol at my head!

“Ho, ho! A stranger in our midst! Hold, signore, how did you get into Diodati! Fiend or human, speak or I shoot!” I jumped up in fright and anger. Shelley too leaped to his feet, shrieking, and knocked his chair over, so that Mary came running back into the room.

Only Byron was unmoved. “Polly, stop behaving like a demented Tory at Calais! You are the stranger here, the fiend of Diodati. Kindly take yourself back upstairs and shoot yourself very very quietly, depositing your carcass somewhere where it will not annoy us!”

“It’s a joke, Albé, isn’t it? It’s just my Latin temperament, like your Albanian songs, isn’t it?” The little doctor looked from one to the other of us, all concern, hoping for support.

“As you well know, Polly, neither Lord Byron nor I have any sense of humor, being British,” said Shelley. “Kindly desist! You know how bad my nerves are!”

“I’m so sorry—”

“Dematerialize!” shouted Byron.

As the man fled back upstairs, Byron added, “Heavens, but the man is stupid!”

Mary said, “Even the stupid hate being made to look foolish!”

The rain having petered out for a while, we all went outside to stare at the sunset, about which the two poets made lurid remarks. Claire Claremont arrived, giggling and nuzzling up to Byron when she could in a manner distinctly unlike her half sister’s. I thought she was a silly girl, and judged that Byron thought the same; but he was a lot more patient with her than he had been with Polidori.

Nothing pleased me more than to be allowed to take supper with them. They were interested in my opinions but not my circumstances, so that I did not have to invent any tales about my past. Polidori came down to supper and sat next to me without saying anything. He and I were eating heartily when Byron threw down his fork and cried, “Oh for the horrors of polite society again! At least they knew how to treat meat! This is a mockery of mutton!”

“Ah,” said Shelley, looking up from his carrots, “lampoon!”

“That’s a very beefy pun for a vegetarian!” said Byron, laughing with the rest of us.

“In a few generations, all mankind will be vegetarian,” said Shelley, waving a knife through the air. His conversation changed course with his moods. “Once it is generally realized that the animals are such close kin to us, then meat-eating will be disdained as too near to cannibalism for comfort. Can you imagine what a civilizing effect that will have on the multitude? A hundred years from now, the march of the physical sciences—oh, Albé, you should have talked to old Erasmus Darwin about that subject! He foresaw the time when steam would invade every domain—”

“Just as it invaded this mutton?”

“Steam is the basis of all the present-day improvements. Mind you, it’s only the very beginning of a revolutionary improvement in all things. We who have harnessed steam are now harnessing gas as another powerful servant. And we are merely the precursors of generations who will harness the great life-force of electricity!”