I see in my copy of Maurice that I read it on October 28,
1998. I just checked my journal to see what else I was up to that day. It looks
like a day of reading and writing and errands (not much has changed in the ensuing
seventeen years!). Lawrence Block’s new Matt Scudder novel (Everybody Dies—hopeful title)
arrived in the mail; I had some Jack London correspondence (my obsession
with him and his work was evanescing: Mary Shelley had taken over); I was
reading Ernestus Berchtold, 1819, a
novella/long story by Dr. John Polidori, personal physician to Lord Byron
during the “Frankenstein summer” of
1816 in Geneva.
Okay, I just felt myself drift
away from Maurice and feel compelled
to write a bit about Polidori, who was barely twenty when he went with Byron to
Geneva. There, Byron soon soured on his acquaintance (Polidori was a bit …
uppity, considering his talents in a league with Byron’s and Bysshe Shelley’s;
not quite) and frequently made fun of
him, left him behind on boating excursions on Lake Geneva, and the like. He
developed a crush on Mary (a hopeless crush, I should add) but joined in the
“ghost-story competition” and wrote, as I’ve mentioned before, some of the
story that became The Vampyre (1819), one of the first vampire tales.
But he also wrote Ernestus, which I was reading at the
same time I read Mary’s Maurice. In
his introduction to the book, Polidori said that he had begun it back in Geneva.
It’s another supernatural tale—told in coming-of-age fashion. Young Ernestus
grows up, joins the military, has some adventures, gets involved with the
daughter of a Count, a man whom Ernestus observes apparently communicating with
some kind of spirit. And the ghost of Ernestus’ mother appears to him to offer
some advice.
Then there’s a
story-within-a-story about Count Filiberto Doni, the girl’s father, who tells
about his contract with a “malignant being,”[1] a contract that results in
murder and deception. The end.
Byron fired Polidori in Geneva in 1816. The
physician went on to Italy for a while, then returned to London, where he
abandoned medicine and studied law. Despondent, he committed suicide. He was
twenty-five.
 |
| Dr. John Polidori, 1795-1821 |
[1] “The Vampyre” and “Ernestus Berchtold: Or the Modern Oedipus,” ed.
D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Toronto: U of Toronto P), 1994, 137.
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