Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
Bad luck stalked Polidori. In September, he suffered a brain concussion when his carriage struck a tree. Polidori lay unconscious
for several days, and faced a long convalescence. For the rest of his life, he experienced aftereffects of the injury, and
it seemed to affect his speech.
Polidori had not given up on writing. As Byron later said, “Instead of making out prescriptions, he took to writing romances;
a very unprofitable and fatal exchange, as it turned out.” A month before the carriage accident, Polidori had completed a
verse play,
Ximenes,
and submitted it to John Murray. Murray was apparently embarrassed at having to turn it down and appealed to Byron to write
a “
delicate
declension of it, which I engage faithfully to copy. I am truly sorry that he will employ himself in a way so ill-suited
to his genius; for he is not without literary talents.” Byron let his sadistic tendencies get the better of him and responded
with one of the cleverest, yet cruelest, rejection letters ever written.
Dear Doctor—I have read your play
Which is a good one in its way
Purges the eyes & moves the bowels
And drenches handkerchiefs like towels
With tears that in a flux of Grief
Afford hysterical relief
To shatter’d nerves & quickened pulses
Which your catastrophe convulses.
I like your moral & machinery
Your plot too has such scope for Scenery!
Your dialogue is apt & smart
The play’s concoction full of art —
Your hero raves—your heroine cries
All stab —& every body dies;
In short your tragedy would be
The very thing to hear & see —
And for a piece of publication
If I decline on this occasion
It is not that I am not sensible
To merits in themselves ostensible
But—and I grieve to speak it—plays
Are drugs—mere drugs, Sir, nowadays —
It goes on for sixty-eight more lines, with witty references to Murray’s other authors, including Byron himself. If Murray
had actually sent it to Polidori, the young man would certainly have been crushed, since the style made it unmistakable that
Byron wrote it. In any case, the combination of a rejection (even a dull, polite one from Murray) and his serious head injury
must have depressed him deeply.
He was like many young people whose parents have pushed them to achieve goals set by the parents. Once the degree has been
earned, the medals won, the mountain climbed, they are then unsure what they really want to do with their lives. Those with
artistic leanings find that the Muse does not always smile on people who spend long hours hard at work. Polidori had hoped
that by traveling with Byron he would learn to write like Byron—but nothing can teach anyone how to become a genius.
However, living with Byron gave Polidori a subject, one that was sure to attract an audience, for it was the same subject
that the poet used for his own wildly popular work: the image Byron had created of himself. In Polidori’s work, however, Byron
would be transformed from the dashing hero tormented by a mysterious secret in his past. He would become the malicious Byron
that Polidori hated.
Just when Polidori wrote
The Vampyre
is not known for certain. Much about its composition remains shrouded in mystery, for he claimed it was published without
his permission. It first appeared in the
New Monthly Magazine
on April 1, 1819. Accompanying the tale was an “Extract of a Letter to the Editor from Geneva,” which purported to explain
the circumstances under which the story had been written. Whoever penned the letter certainly knew of the events of the summer
of 1816 at Villa Diodati. He (or she) described in detail the evening when Byron challenged his guests to write “a tale depending
on some supernatural agency.” The letter-writer even acknowledged that “Miss M. W. Godwin” had written
Frankenstein
as a result. This fact was still not generally known at the time, and many people believed Shelley or Godwin had been the
actual author. Most surprising, however, was the letter-writer’s assertion that this new work,
The Vampyre,
was Byron’s “entry” in the contest.
Byron first heard about it later in the month through a letter from John Murray, in which Murray gave his version of events:
[Here is] a copy of a thing called The Vampire, which Mr. Colburn [Henry Colburn, owner/publisher of the journal] has had
the temerity to publish with your name as its author. It was first printed in the New Monthly Magazine, from which I have
taken the copy which I now enclose. The Editor of that Journal has quarrelled with the publisher, and has called this morning
to exculpate himself from the baseness of the transaction. He says that he received it from Dr. Polidori for a small sum,
Polidori saying that the whole plan of it was yours, and that it was merely written out by him. The Editor inserted it with
a short statement to this effect; but to his astonishment Colburn cancelled the leaf [page] on the day previous to its publication
. . . fearing that this statement would prevent the sale of this work in a separate form, which was subsequently done. He
informs me that Polidori, finding that the sale exceeded his expectation, and that he had sold it too cheap, went to the Editor,
and declared that he would deny it.
Some critics have felt that Polidori intentionally put Byron’s name on the story to increase its sales, but surviving letters
and documents show that Polidori was horrified at the work’s publication, which apparently was a surprise to him. When Byron’s
friend John Cam Hobhouse, who knew Polidori, insisted that he publicly explain the origin of the manuscript, Polidori wrote
the editor of the
New Monthly Magazine
in May:
As the person referred to in the Letter from Geneva, prefixed to the Tale of The Vampyre in your last Number, I beg leave
to state, that your correspondent has been mistaken in attributing that tale,
in its present form,
to Lord Byron. The fact is, that though the
groundwork
is certainly Lord Byron’s, its developement is mine, produced at the request of a lady, who denied the possibility of any
thing being drawn from the materials which Lord Byron had said he intended to have employed in the formation of his Ghost
story.
In other words, Polidori had merely written it as a response to a second challenge, by an unnamed woman who wanted to see
what he could make of the story Byron had begun. This mysterious woman—possibly his one-time lover Madame Brélaz, whom he
had met in Switzerland—was presumably the source of the manuscript that appeared in the
New Monthly
.
Byron chimed in with a letter, published in a rival magazine, airily denying authorship of
The Vampyre
. “If the book is clever it would be base to deprive the real writer—whoever he may be—of his honours—and if stupid—I desire
the responsibility of nobody’s dullness but my own. . . . I have besides a personal dislike to ‘Vampires,’ and the little
acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to divulge their secrets.” Despite these letters of denial, when
The Vampyre
was published in book form, readers still believed that the tale had been written by Lord Byron. His name guaranteed a big
sale; this was not the first time someone had tried to pass off work as Byron’s.
Worse yet,
The Vampyre
had been registered by the book publisher, meaning that Polidori had lost the copyright. Polidori protested the unauthorized
use of his work and threatened a lawsuit, but in the end received a token payment of only thirty pounds. It must have been
galling to him, because the book became a bestseller.
Polidori’s tale is a reworking of Byron’s own failed attempt to meet his Diodati challenge, with a different setting and name.
In the eight-page fragment Byron completed, his vampire, Augustus Darvell, had been a wanderer who ends up in a Muslim graveyard
rotting from an inner corruption. Polidori changed the name of the character to Lord Ruthven, who is “killed” by a bandit’s
bullet, and he changed the locale of some parts of the story from the Near East to London. Lord Ruthven, not by coincidence,
is the name of the Lord Byron character in Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel,
Glenarvon
.
Polidori cast himself as the innocent Aubrey who is destroyed by Lord Ruthven. Ruthven appears as a striking and mysterious
figure in the fashionable drawing rooms of London, attracting the attention of all the ladies. Of course, Polidori had seen
the real-life Byron draw similar reactions when he visited the salons of Geneva. Aubrey, despite his observations of the Count’s
“deadly hue” and “dead grey eye,” is also drawn to him. Like Polidori himself, Aubrey eagerly joins his new friend on a tour
of the Continent. Along the way, however, Aubrey sees additional evidence of Ruthven’s vicious character, becomes disillusioned,
and leaves him. Aubrey heads for Greece to study antiquities and there falls in love with a young Greek woman named Ianthe.
Ianthe had been a dream maiden in Shelley’s
Queen Mab,
a poem that Polidori read and admired during the summer of 1816.
Ianthe and her parents warn Aubrey not to go to a certain place after dark, because it is the haunt of vampires. He disregards
their advice, and hears the cries of a woman coming from a hut. When he tries to rescue her, he is set upon in the darkness
by “one whose strength seemed superhuman.” Aubrey breaks free, and then villagers with torches arrive to save him. They find
the body of Ianthe, with the marks of a vampire on her neck.
Aubrey falls ill from a fever, and lies in a half-conscious state for some time; in his delirium he imagines that it is Lord
Ruthven who has killed Ianthe. But when he awakens, he finds that he has in fact been tended by Lord Ruthven, who arrived
in Athens and came to his aid. The two men begin to travel together again, and are set upon by bandits in the mountains. Ruthven
is mortally wounded, but as he lies dying he makes Aubrey promise to “conceal all you know of me,” in order to protect his
reputation. Aubrey swears an oath to comply with his friend’s last wish.
Aubrey returns to London, where his younger sister is about to be presented into society. At the reception, Aubrey hears someone
say in his ear, “Remember your oath!” He turns to find that Lord Ruthven has returned. Aubrey becomes aware that Ruthven intends
to court his sister, but feels honor bound not to reveal what he knows about the mysterious nobleman. The conflict drives
Aubrey nearly to madness, and again he spends a long time convalescing. When he becomes lucid, he learns that his sister is
preparing to be married to Lord Ruthven. Aubrey struggles to persuade her not to go through with the wedding, but he is regarded
as deranged. He ruptures a blood vessel and dies, but not before he finally breaks his oath and tells the whole story to his
sister’s guardians. They rush to rescue her, but are too late. The last sentence of the story reads, “Lord Ruthven had disappeared,
and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!”
The power of the story is clearly related to the way it plumbs Polidori’s own tortured relationship with Byron, which was
always an unequal one. Polidori desperately wanted to be in the first rank of artists but he was forever overshadowed by the
talent of others. His anxiety about his artistic ability was magnified by Byron’s sadistic teasing. Byron could not control
his contempt for Polidori for the same reason he could not bring himself to love Claire: both desired him too much—they were
needy
. Yet like Claire, Polidori not only resented, and even hated, Byron but was also attracted to him, a duality that must have
caused self-loathing. Polidori’s vampire story shows his fascination with the dark sexuality of the seducer and his fear of
being seduced. In
The Vampyre,
Ruthven dominates Aubrey just as Byron dominated Polidori. Polidori gained some revenge by depicting Byron as a vampire,
a monstrous and evil being who sucks the lifeblood from people who cannot resist his charms. Yet when the story later appeared
in a book version, the name of the central character was changed from Ruthven to Strongmore, possibly because the publisher
(or Polidori) feared a lawsuit.
Despite all of Aubrey’s efforts, evil triumphs completely at the end of
The Vampyre,
and in that too lies some of the tale’s peculiar power that has enabled its central character to survive several incarnations
over the two centuries since.
Frankenstein
is more conventional in that sense, for in the end, Victor is punished for his hubris, Captain Walton decides to abandon
his reckless quest, and the monster repents. Lord Ruthven never repents; he conquers, and will apparently continue to do so.
Mary’s monster is ultimately a good person with an ugly exterior; the vampire Lord Ruthven has a fascinating appearance that
masks the evil within.
There were other differences. Lord Ruthven is obsessed with sexuality while Victor avoids—even flees from—the sexual, regarding
it as a distraction from his work. His whole project is, in many ways, an effort to excise women—and sex—from procreation.
Victor’s ideals may have been noble (though the results are not), whereas Ruthven is truly wicked, but it is hard to know
who is the more alien—and alienated. Ruthven is a supernatural being; he can rise from the dead and reappear elsewhere. (When
Aubrey considers trying to kill him, Polidori wrote, “death, he remembered, had been already mocked.”) Victor Frankenstein,
on the other hand, attempts to control the powers of nature and use scientific means to “mock death.” But both, equally obsessed
with harnessing the élan vital, end up remarkably inhuman.
Annoyed that
The Vampyre
was being passed off as his own work, Byron sent the fragmentary beginning of his own vampire story to John Murray, who printed
it at the end of Byron’s poem
Mazeppa
. That still did not prevent many people from believing that Byron was the true author of
The Vampyre,
and Polidori’s story became popular, particularly on the Continent. Goethe reportedly felt it was Byron’s finest work. Not
long after its publication, plays and operas of the story attracted audiences.