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| John Polidori. |
Everyone knows the scene. On a stormy Transylvanian night
lit by a full moon and serenaded by the howling of a wolf, a mysterious coach
pulls up to a dilapidated castle. Timidly, the coach’s passenger makes his way
to the castle door. As the door slowly creaks open, we finally see the lord of
the manor—a formally dressed nobleman with regal bearing—a creepy and ironic image
of a proper European aristocrat.
At which point, Count Dracula bids us welcome.
Dracula is not like other traditional monsters. His
elegance and sophistication set him apart. Much like a Bond villain, Dracula
could almost pass as a head of state or a captain of industry. The horror comes
from our knowledge that underneath that polished exterior lurks a creature
ripped out of nightmares and campfire stories. And that contrast between the
outer and inner character provides the complexity that separates not only
Dracula, but most modern vampires from all those more interchangeable creatures
that go bump in the night.
Such was not
always the case. The vampires of folklore were a far cry from Bela Lugosi,
Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman, or even Tom Cruise. They were more zombie than
Victorian gentleman—blood sucking parasites risen from the grave to haunt many
a Middle Eastern or European village.
The modern vampire was born, not in the pages of Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1897), but rather
in a story that was written over 75 years earlier. The first modern vampire’s
name was Lord Ruthven, and like his fraternal twin—Frankenstein’s creature—he
originated in Geneva, Switzerland during the summer of 1816.
As many readers may already know, that summer featured
the first meeting of two of the most celebrated and controversial English
poets—Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. Shelley was travelling with his soon-to-be
wife, Mary Godwin, and her step-sister, Claire Clairmont. Byron was traveling
with his newly-hired personal physician, the young John Polidori. As the story
goes, they challenged each other to see who could create the best ghost story.
Ironically, the two stories that have had the most impact didn’t come directly
from the famous poets, but rather from Mary, who completed Frankenstein in 1818, and Polidori, who published a novella, The Vampyre, in 1819.
But The Vampyre didn’t
actually begin with Polidori. The central conceit of the story originally came
from Byron. Later published as “Fragment of a Novel,” Byron’s story is told by
an impressionable young man who is fascinated by an older man named Augustus
Darvell. The young narrator can’t quite figure out the older Darvell, a “man of
considerable fortune and ancient family,” but Byron’s readers would’ve most
likely recognized Darvell as a colorful, enigmatic reflection of Byron
himself—or at least of his popular persona.
Through a series of affairs, Byron had become the most
controversial literary figure in England—“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” as
Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his lovers, famously put it. In fact, as he
journeyed to Switzerland in 1816, he had been permanently exiled from England.
Like the early 19th century equivalent of a rock star, Byron was the
Romantic era’s most notorious “bad boy,” and he made news wherever he went.
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| Lord Byron. |
In the story fragment, the mysterious Darvell garners
similar attention—particularly from the narrator—but Darvell gradually grows
pale and weak. Warning the young narrator to tell no one, Darvell prepares for
his death, providing precise instructions for his burial and directing the
young man to throw a ring into the Bay of Eleusis on the 9th of the
month and then to go to the temple of Ceres on the following day with the
implication that something … interesting would happen.
And with that, Darvell dies. And then—
Well, it’s not called a fragment for nothing. That was as
far as Byron got. The fragment reads mostly like a teaser, really, although
Byron does lay the groundwork for something particularly dark early on when the
narrator notes, “Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there
must also be evil.” The young man says he hasn’t found such evil in Darvell
yet, but the line seems a clear indication of where the story would eventually
go.
The fragment would most likely have never seen
publication had Polidori not reworked the same scenario in writing The Vampyre. Byron and Polidori hadn’t
really got along and the young doctor was soon fired after the summer of 1816. When
Polidori expanded upon the basic elements of Byron’s story fragment—younger man
obsessed with mysterious older man, death of the older man, sworn oath to keep
the death a secret—the young doctor managed to ride on Byron’s coattails while simultaneously
enacting a bit of literary revenge.
And along the way, both he and Byron managed to transform
a crude village folk monster into the Romantic, aristocratic, modern vampire.
In expanding the story, Polidori strikes an uneasy
balance between Gothic horror and a portrait of his time spent with Byron. These
two threads are evident in the supplemental material he uses to pad the
beginning of the tale. The first is an excerpt of a letter that explores his
time with Byron in Geneva as well as with Percy Shelley, Mary, and Claire. He
then follows up this literary context with an introductory essay on the history
of vampire folklore in the Middle East, Greece, and Europe. Then, before
beginning the tale, Polidori attempts to interweave the two threads by
including part of a poem by Byron that alludes to vampirism.
Conflating the reputation of England’s most notorious
celebrity poet with the concept of a vampire certainly held promise—as Byron
himself seemed to recognize—but the shifts in mood in Polidori’s story often
cause it to lose its grip on the reader. As the tale begins, Polidori
introduces us to a young man, Aubrey, who is fascinated with a mysterious
nobleman who has caused a stir in London society. Lord Ruthven, it seems, had
become a focal point for bored socialites, in part because no one seemed fully
able to understand him. He was joyless and spurned the advances of some of
society’s more provocative women. However, he seemed to cultivate relationships
with the most virtuous women of the city, drawing them in and then leading them
astray.
After Lord Ruthven surprisingly asks to accompany Aubrey
on his grand tour of Europe, the younger man notes how Ruthven manages to find
and embrace vice at every stop, hanging out in gambling halls and corrupting
young men and women—seemingly as sport.
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| From Vampire Tales #1, by Ron Goulart, Roy Thomas, and Win Mortimer |
The Vampyre is
top heavy with this kind of material, which seemingly fits more properly in a
comedy of manners than in a Gothic horror tale. It’s almost like Pride and Prejudice had Jane Austen
focused more on the exploits of Wickham than of Elizabeth and Darcy. Lord
Ruthven, as the stand-in for Byron, is a glamorous and compelling object of
attention, but he is ultimately viewed as a corrupter—someone who needs these
virtuous people around him in order to satisfy some unholy urge to destroy. And
by the story’s end, Lord Ruthven manages to destroy most everyone with whom he
comes into contact.
Polidori does attempt to keep the horrific elements on
the menu, but he doesn’t seem all that comfortable integrating them into his
story. The most violent and disturbing descriptions come, not from the tale,
but rather from his introduction where he details a particular case of an
alleged vampire that was staked, decapitated, and burned.
Polidori is clearly more comfortable with the
Byron-as-vampire metaphor than with frightening his readers. Once Lord Ruthven
“dies” and forces Aubrey to swear that he will keep his death a secret, the
story seems to jump haphazardly to its conclusion. Put more bluntly, once
Polidori runs out of elements from Byron’s story fragment, it seems he can’t
end the tale quickly enough.
There are a few thrills—Aubrey’s fight in the dark with
an unseen and unrecognized Lord Ruthven provides the most suspenseful moment,
and Polidori’s periodic attempts to connect Lord Ruthven’s behavior with the
supernatural add to the sense of dread.
But The Vampyre’s
lasting impact is the reimagining of the vampire of European folklore into an
icon of Romanticism. No longer a mindless parasite from the grave, the modern
vampire emerges in this story as a formidable creature of horror and myth—elegant,
enigmatic, and Romantic.
Since then, most of the vampires of popular
culture—Varney, Carmilla, Dracula, Barnabas Collins, Kurt Barlow, Lestat,
Spike, Angel, and even, I guess, Edward Cullen, owe a debt to Lord Ruthven as well
his birth parent, Lord Byron, and his adoptive parent, Dr. John Polidori.
------
Greg Carpenter is the author of The British Invasion: Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and theInvention of the Modern Comic Book Writer. His writing has appeared on Sequart.org, RogerEbert.com, and PopMatters.
He also has a Ph.D. in English, but he kindly asks that you not hold that
against him. He currently teaches university courses in Comics, Shakespeare,
and both American and World Literature.
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