Lake Geneva as Byron Knew It: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 49

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
The New York Times looks at Lake Geneva as Lord Byron knew it.

The Villa Diodati, where John Polidori was inspired to write The Vampyre.

The Alex Van Helsing series takes place on and around Lake Geneva because of the importance of the place to vampire literature. It was here that in 1816, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, the soon-to-be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Claire Godwin and Dr. John Polidori gathered and told ghost stories. Understand that this was June, but not a June we'd recognize. A volcanic eruption in Asia had cast an ashy pall over Europe and plunged Switzerland into a soggy, cold mess.

Writer Tom Perrottet paints a splendid picture as he explores the Villa Diodati (Byron's rented villa, where the action climax of Vampire Rising takes place) and remembers the Haunted Summer:

The gate was open, so I blithely strolled into the estate intending to knock on the door. As I drew near, I could easily imagine the bohemians of 1816 gathering by candlelight in the upstairs dining room to debate and carouse. Byron’s initial resistance to resuming his affair with the dark-eyed Claire did not last long. (“I never loved her nor pretended to love her,” he later wrote, “but a man is a man — & if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours — there is but one way.”) Sexual tensions festered as Dr. Polidori fell in love with Mary, and wild rumors began to spread among English visitors to Geneva. Curiosity seekers passed by in boats to peer at the women’s underwear on the washing lines — evidence, it was believed, that the Villa Diodati was a virtual bordello. Others would stop Byron on his evening rides to accuse him of corrupting the local girls and youth. The whole Swiss setup, one British newspaper reported back in London, was a sordid “league of incest.”

Wonderful article; read the rest here.

You can't get vampire literature without the Villa Diodati. Without the Haunted Summer and the rift that formed between Lord Byron and his physician you would have no The Vampyre, which created the first modern vampire. Without The Vampyre, there would be no Dracula.

Of course, these people are all characters in the background of Alex Van Helsing-- sometimes not even the background. I've made a conscious decision to have no flashbacks or scenes set in the past, so what we learn we learn from what the characters tell us. But in the world of the series, Byron is still around, and very much a threat-- and so is Claire. Polidori? The one who died of a drug overdose, a pathetic wretch to the end? Maybe not so much. pathetic, wretched, or dead when everybody thinks.

Note-- I've posted reviews of one movie about the Haunted Summer starring Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley here: Rowing with the Wind.

Polidori's Vampyre and Byron's Augustus Darvell

Over the past few days I was on vacation and read John Polidori's The Vampyre alongside Lord Byron's Augustus Darvell (AKA "A Fragment"), which are both reprinted in a recent Oxford collection. This turned out to be a fascinating little assignment for any vampire fan.

The importance of Polidori's Vampyre has been documented well enough; the story, first published in 1819, was an outgrowth of the 1816 Villa Diodati party at which Byron, inspired by the German horror anthology Fantasmagoriana, challenged his guests to each write a scary story.

Technically only two complete tales resulted from the challenge: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818, and Polidori's 1819 Vampyre. Polidori's story was the first modern vampire tale, taking the folkloric concept of the ghoulish, decrepit peasant wraith and transforming the vampire into a satire of upper-class devilishness. The villain, Lord Ruthven, is a thinly veiled parody of Lord Byron, Polidori's former employer and friend. But when Vampyre first appeared, it was credited to Byron, a fact that appalled both Byron and the actual author.

Polidori felt robbed of his due credit and Byron-- the single most famous author in England at the time-- felt besmirched, not by the portrait of him in the story, but by any writing he didn't perform. Further, Byron hinted at plagiarism: apparently Byron had told a story at the party that had come out very similarly to Polidori's Vampyre. This idea-- that Polidori had in fact stolen the story-- moved Polidori to write in a note in his 1819 novel Ernestus Berchtold that in fact Vampyre was suggested by a kernel of an idea from Byron:

The tale which lately appeared, and to which his lordship's name was wrongfully attached, was founded upon the ground- work upon which this fragment was to have been continued. Two friends were to travel from England into Greece; while there, one of them should die, but before his death, should obtain from his friend an oath of secrecy with regard to his decease. Some short time after, the remaining traveller, returning to his native country, should be startled at perceiving his former companion moving about in society, and should be horrified at finding that he made love to his former friend's sister. Upon this foundation I built the Vampyre, at the request of a lady, who denied the possibility of such ground- work forming the outline of a tale which should bear the slightest appearance of probability. In the course of three mornings I produced that tale, and left it with her.

Byron, meanwhile, insisted that his publisher release The Fragment that appeared at the end of Mazeppa. That story, though unfinished, hews closely to Byron's kernel.

Here is what I can report on reading them both together:

They are very different stories. Though Polidori clearly took Byron's idea as inspiration, the Polidori story is essentially a satire of Byron overall, and has a wry, cynical, almost modern voice.
[Aubrey] hinted to his guardians, that it was time for him to perform the tour, which for many generations has been thought necessary to enable the young to take some rapid steps in the career of vice towards putting themselves upon an equality with the aged, and not allowing them to appear as if fallen from the skies, whenever scandalous intrigues are mentioned as the subjects of pleasantry or of praise, according to the degree of skill shewn in carrying them on.

His description of Ruthven/Byron is withering: Ruthven is handsome, rakish, and demonically cruel, giving drink to drunks and money to gamblers, but hastening the destitution of the desperate and despoiling the pure. He is capable of great kindness, and nurses Aubrey back to health, before turning cruel again. And it turns out he's a literal vampire. The dramatic moment of the character's death in Greece-- shot by bandits in an action scene-- is only used to set up the vampire's return.

Byron's tale is not a complete story, but in general it is clearly a poetic work of heavy symbolism and high language. The central focus is still two men, one a Byronic character-- rich, dangerous-- but where Polidori's version is only begrudgingly sympathetic, Byron's is rather self-impressed:

I heard much both of his past and present life; and, although in these accounts there were many and irreconcilable contradictions, I could still gather from the whole that he was a being of no common order, and one who, whatever pains he might take to avoid remark, would still be remarkable.

The death of the remarkable Augutus is more like a piece of folklore-- he makes the trip to Greece specifically in order to die and begin a year-long rebirth, and he presses the narrator to complete this revival by throwing a ring into a river.

So: Byron's is a lovely enough-- but abandoned-- story; prose never held his interest. Polidori's story is funny if melodramatic, and very modern, especially in that it gave us the modern, Byronic vampire. One thing's for sure: without Polidori and Byron we would have no Byronic (wan, sad, sexy) vampire at all, no Dracula, no Carmilla.

Would love to hear anyone's comments!

Rowing with the Wind

"Why can I never learn to swim?"
"Because you do not want to. You have only to throw yourself into the water and float, then learn to move your arms."

For years I've been fascinated by the Villa Diodati party of 1816-- that famous gathering of Byron, Shelley, Mary soon-to-be-Shelley, her sister Claire, and John Polidori. The party figures in a novel I'm working on, so recently everything I consume seems likely to be drenched in Romanticism. (Literally, my evenings are spent moving from reading THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK or whatever might be requested, to editing and listening to Rob Zombie, to reading Byron and Shelley.)

Curiously, the events of the Diodati Part-- which are told very well in the recent book The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein-- have been made into several movies, all of which came out in the mid-80s. Catch them if you can. The greatest and weirdest is Ken Russell's Gothic, which attempts to capture the fever-dream weirdness of the Haunted Summer. There is one I haven't seen-- Haunted Summer, starring Eric Stolz and Alice Krige, a film now so obscure it's apparently not even being bootlegged anywhere.

But up til last week I was completely unaware of Rowing with the Wind, a strange Spanish-produced (but English-language) version from 1988, starring Hugh Grant as Lord Byron and Valentine Pelka as Shelley.

Unlike Gothic, Rowing with the Wind is not a work of grand vision. (Russell's film is something I need to post about separately.) Rather it's more of a magical realist picture where fantastic and horrible things happen but we understand them to be visions. There is one persistent vision in the film: Mary Shelley's creature, which haunts her. Rowing with the Wind is actually pretty funny-- Hugh Grant was never my idea of Lord Byron but plays the part with deft ironic abandon. He's always either making a cruel comment or screaming to the heavens, and seems to be half-joking the whole time.




(I should note that "Byron's" hair is also quite strange, beginning with a sort of up do that would have made sense in a Thompson Twins video, and finishing the film with some luxurious rock star locks.)

Still, it's a haunting film in parts-- the idea of the movie is that the tragedy of Mary Shelley's life-- an awful parade of drownings, suicides and infant death-- are a curse, a cosmic punishment that follows her for reasons unknown. On this point I can agree; her life was full of most horrendous pain.

Does the movie work, as a movie? Not as well as it should; it drags from episode to episode, sometimes having the feel of a TV biopic. Several of the events are out of context or compressed, a side-effect of any biopic.

On the other hand, the conceit of the creature-- here seen as a disturbing ghoul fairly similar to his description in Shelley's book-- actually following these characters around and cursing them is an interesting one. For one thing, it lets the filmmakers quote liberally from scenes from Frankenstein, especially around the death of William, Mary's son, and the fictional William, Victor Frankenstein's young brother.

I liked seeing the Romantics presented at roughly the correct age -- in 1816, Byron was 28, Shelley was 24, Polidori was 21, and Claire and Mary were 18. Here, only Polidori, played by a late-forties Spaniard, is miscast. (By contrast, in Gothic-- which again is a way more interesting film-- the ages of the actors are completely wrong.) The record will show that after the Summer which birthed The Vampire, Childe Harold Canto IV, and Frankenstein, Polidori would be dead in five years, Shelley a year later, and Byron two years after that. Within eight years, all but Mary and her sister Claire were dead. In between were tragedies no parent should ever endure, and they endured them again and again. The darkness of these things don't play as well against the humor of Byron and Shelley, and it's possible this is on purpose.

See this one back to back with Gothic.

I'm going to post the trailers for each film, with a caveat. The only trailer I can find for Rowing with the Wind is in Spanish. The DVD isn't, but the trailer is. (The movie was made in Spain.) The trailer for Gothic, from the same period, is not in Spanish, though I guess it would have been fun to find a Spanish language version of that one, too.