It’s a Series

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The transition between Lemony Snicket’s The Wide Window and The Miserable Mill, volumes three and four, respectively, of A Series of Unfortunate Events, is the gulf between what was portrayed in the 2004 movie and what wasn’t.  The books do show their age a bit in that some of the villains might be considered offensive these days, but the writing is clever and even educational.  Dealing with two of them together is, like the film, an attempt to forge a transition.  The Wide Window, which is both compressed and elaborated in the movie, doesn’t resolve itself as portrayed on the screen.  Of course Count Olaf is at large again and the Baudelaire orphans are left homeless once more.  In the movie Jim Carrey’s Captain Sham is perhaps his best character with his attempts at a cross between a sea captain and a Newfoundland landlubber.  The book raises the ethical issue of what laws it’s permissible to break to save your life, which is missing in the film.

The Miserable Mill, book four, reflects how dark these tales can be without the movie to lighten the mood a bit.  Maybe not quite enough to categorize them as horror, but enough to make them somewhat scary.  Here the orphans have reached the end of their family connections and are passed off to the owner of a lumber mill who puts them to work right away.  Of course, Count Olaf is lurking nearby and is working with an ophthalmologist who specializes in hypnosis.  It is actually a frightening thought to be hypnotized against your will.  The orphans learn to appreciate how difficult their siblings’ specializations are and, of course, make it through together.

Hypnosis is something I’ve never experienced.  I went to a show once where the stage performer attempted to hypnotize the audience.  I was fervently religious at the time, and it didn’t work on me.  I’d read that religious people are difficult to hypnotize (that is, those who haven’t been hypnotized already).  Since that time I’ve been curious if I might be hypnotized as an adult, and, if so, what it would be like.  As a mental state, hypnosis is still poorly understood.  It is used in literature, not uncommonly in horror.  I will, of course, continue working my way through A Series of Unfortunate Events because once you get started it’s difficult to stop.  It is obvious, however, that I’ve watched the film enough to have a sense of what transpired through The Wide Window.  Now, with and after The Miserable Mill, I have little recollection of what might be ahead.

Forgotten

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As most horror fans know, on a stormy night in 1816 a group of Romantics gathered and a scary story “contest” was suggested.  The best known result of this contest was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  More devoted horror fans will also know that John William Polidori’s short story, “The Vampyre,” also had its origins on that night.  It was built on a very slim skeleton suggested by Lord Byron.  Percy Bysshe Shelley’s efforts are lost to history.  As are those of the most overlooked of the group, Claire Clairmont; her story was finished some time later, unpublished.  Claire’s birth name was actually Jane, and she was Mary Shelley’s step-sister.  (Mary was Godwin at the time.)  Percy, Mary, and Claire had traveled to Geneva at Claire’s suggestion.  She was pregnant with Lord Byron’s child.  Shelley and Byron became fast friends and the three young men present on that night would all die within eight years.

Claire is unjustly forgotten.  Of the five gathered in Villa Diodati she lived the longest, making it to eighty.  She had a difficult but occasionally warm relationship with her step-sister.  This book by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton is the first real biography of Claire.  She lived a fascinating life.  Drawn from diaries, letters, and reminiscences of friends, as well as the other sources of the historian’s art, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys is quite readable.  And moving.  Claire was young and infatuated with Byron when she set out to seduce him.  He never returned the love she felt for him, and took responsibility for their daughter on the condition that Claire never see him again.  Her inability to see her own child was the great sorrow of her long life.

Claire went on to live in Italy, France, Russia, and Austria.  She was fluent in French, Italian, and German.  By all accounts she was a gifted musician.  She hobnobbed with high society, often by being a governess in aristocratic households.  She lived near poverty at times, but inherited a living from Percy when his father died.  It’s the sad fate of many who don’t get published that they are forgotten to history.  (Being published is, I hasten to add, no guarantee either!)  Claire’s personality comes through in this account as that of a strong, vivacious woman who defied the conventions of her era.  She made her own way in the world, never marrying, yet being sought out by those who latterly wanted accounts of Shelley’s life.  She’d lived with Percy and Mary for several years.  This is a story of a different but fascinating time.  I hope that future treatments of that famous night in 1816 might take a bit more notice of this deserving, if forgotten, woman.

Lemony Reptiles

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Having embarked on A Series of Unfortunate Events again, and having just finished The Reptile Room again, I might reflect on Lemony Snicket’s contribution to dark academia.  I mentioned to a friend recently that some dark academia aficionados consider the series to fall into that genre.  Having had the books read to her at a young age, she asked “Why?”  That got me thinking again about this wide, wonderful, amorphous category of books.  In my personal calculus, dark academia involves education—and this may be book learning undertaken independently—something going seriously wrong, and, in the best of it, a gothic atmosphere.  While A Series of Unfortunate Events is generally quite funny and fun to read, it clearly has the main elements I seek in classifying dark academia.  The Baudelaire orphans are pursued relentlessly by Count Olaf in a setting which, although difficult to place time wise, has Victorian aesthetics.

Of course, The Reptile Room is the second book utilized by the movie A Series of Unfortunate Events to get it up to feature length.  Reading it again revealed just how distorted my memory of the story had become by the movie.  The resolution of the scam by Stephano in the film is merely a distraction by the children to come to the real reveal in the book.  I’m not one to diss the movie.  It is quite gothic and it has many quotable moments, but it isn’t the same as the books.  I still remember when we first learned about these books from a niece, very young at the time, who enthused about them.  We were just a little cautious about reading scary stories to our daughter because one Roald Dahl book we read really was too gruesome for a child of tender years.  We immediately loved this series, however.

A quarter century or so is plenty of time to forget details.  Rereading these books also reminds me how influential they were on some of my own writing, although I read them as what passes for an adult at the time.  (I was old enough to be, and indeed was, a father.)  It occurs to me, as it likely did back then, just how clueless adults are.  Some of the descriptions of Count Olaf in this book could easily be substituted for a particular denizen of the Oval Office these days.  And, I suspect, children are able to see through those who constantly make up excuses to cover their own incompetence.  I’m looking forward to The Wide Window.

Dark Academese

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I thought I was having a stroke.  The words on the page just didn’t make sense.  Nouns were being used as verbs.  Gerunds were mugging nouns.  A subject for the sentence was impossible to be found.  Was this a brain seizure?  No, it was a piece of academic writing.  In a field in which I hold a terminal degree.  This made me feel plain terminal.  I wonder what has happened to academia.  My wife and I were going to be an academic couple.  We started out when there were defined academic disciplines and with a little bit of discipline-specific training you could read just about any journal article in said discipline.  Now hires are being made in what seem like completely made up fields.  People can’t explain their appointments, so they opt for addressing their current research project.  And I confirm with Toto that this isn’t Kansas anymore.

Fearing for my sanity, I asked my wife for a reality check.  She opined (probably correctly) that in the 1980s universities were issuing lots and lots of business degrees.  More and more people were thinking college was the same as job training, not teaching young people to think for themselves.  That could explain how the rules of grammar have been abandoned so that a humanities professor can make him/herself sound like a nuclear physicist.  And those of us with degrees from the early nineties are unemployable because the standard disciplines just aren’t on offer any more.  I scratched my head when the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh couldn’t get a position in religious studies approved but was launching a marina management major.  (No joke.)

I’m a fan of dark academia.  I think maybe it makes sense given the weirdness into which I’ve stumbled.  I like to think I have a reasonable education, but I often come across documents in my own field that I can’t hope to understand.  Perhaps I’m just a slave to S-V-O (subject-verb-object, to eschew obfuscation).  All I want is to be able to understand what I’m reading from my peers.  They’ve come to believe, however, that if you write so that people understand what you’re trying to express, they’ve somehow failed in erudition.  I love higher education.  I’d go back to the professorate in a wink.  I’d be considered somewhat more ancient than protoplasm, I expect.  I went to school to learn how to communicate effectively and to express my findings so that they could be understood.  Today I’m wiping my brow, glad to learn that this isn’t a stroke after all.

Life Underground

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Having really enjoyed Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, I was looking forward to The Starless Sea, despite its nearly 600 pages.  I don’t mind getting lost in a book; in fact it’s one of life’s true and simple joys.  The Starless Sea came to my attention as a dark academia book.  The story is a good one, but in my uninformed opinion, a bit too long.  The fault is my own, I’m sure.  My sensitivity to high fantasy has reached a point where swords tend to put me off.  And some bits, particularly in book V were a bit confusing.  Still, Morgenstern’s writing is beautiful, and at some points sublime.  If it’d been a bit shorter I’d probably be gushing.  Instead I’m reflectively admiring.  As a sometime writer myself, I know that you write what you write and others may not get it.  That’s life.

The story generally follows grad student Zachary Ezra Rawlins as he finds a book from a library of a world that’s beneath the ground.  A world that includes a harbor on the Starless Sea.  That world is inhabited by the surviving members of a decaying society made up of stories.  Most members of this world (and it’s difficult not to see this as an allegory) have left for the world above (this world).  Access between the two worlds is through doors.  Sometimes real doors, other times doors painted on a wall.  Zachary finally goes through one, having not tried one outside his house when he was just a boy.  He’s not sure if he wants to stay in the Starless Sea world or not, but he gets roped into the story.

Many other characters, at varying levels of the story within a story get involved, of course.  He meets his true love, and one of the undergrads he taught gets interested in his fate, and the denizens of the world below are intriguing characters in their own right.  Despite the length of the book, there are still plenty of gaps left for the readers to fill in for themselves.  Again, my own limitations prefer to have not too many gaps because I get confused.  The story tips a hat to several of its influences explicitly, and in many ways reminded me of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.  With its grad school protagonist, lots of libraries, and even a secret society, this fantasy is a card-carrying dark academia novel.  The genre encompasses may differing books and styles.  And I’m glad to have read this one as part of my own quest in that genre.  It was a sustained escape from life in the upper world.

Let Me Explain

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One of the reasons, I believe, that people said I was such a good teacher is that I explain things.  Clearly and thoroughly.  Living in a nation that has never really valued teachers, I have come to understand just how rare clear and thorough explanations are.  In April, within one week, we had two urgent household repairs that both required financing.  Even though I experienced sticker shock both times, I listened carefully as this was explained.  Both times it was explained poorly and I had to put multiple calls in to each of the lenders after the fact.  I can’t tell you what this does to my blood pressure, but I can say I’m glad I had Cheerios for breakfast.  One of the services wasn’t even performed in the way that it was explained.  In any case, I wrote all the more detailed explanations down.  I learned that companies don’t send you any verification that you’ve paid off a loan anymore.  At least we haven’t received one.

I was doing okay with this.  Blood pressure back to normal.  Then I received a letter from the IRS.  This always raises blood pressure, even before opening the envelope.  In my experience, it’s never good news.  In this case it was an identity verification request.  Okay, that I can handle.  But then I found something unexpected on our 1040.  You never want to find something unexpected there!  We’d paid a professional to do our taxes for us, and all we had to do was sign on the dotted line (actually, sign the screen with your finger).  I ticked taxes off my to do list back in March.  Here it was May and I was finding an irregularity on my professionally filed taxes.  I called the vendor.  I soon learned that how this was being handled simply hadn’t been clearly explained in the office.

I hope that I’m a reasonably intelligent Homo sapiens; I can tie my own shoes and I can figure out how to get to Manhattan on fairly short notice, from two states away.  What is obvious to me is that many people of my species are not good at explaining things clearly and thoroughly.  I’ve worked for employers who’d rather see costly inefficiencies remain in place for years rather than hire a trainer who can explain things clearly.  I’ve left more than one HR office more confused than I walked in.  Why is it that we eschew good explanations about things like financing and taxing?  Last year I was scammed by a guy who, despite his moral deficiencies, explained things clearly and thoroughly.  He was lying through his teeth, but he could and did explain things.  What I’m wondering is why legitimate businesses can’t do the same, only with the truth.

Bad Start

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I’m not too proud to admit to reading books for young readers.  On a recent family night we watched the 2004 film, A Series of Unfortunate Events (not for the first time), and I realized that my memory of the books by Lemony Snicket was hazy.  Since we bought and read all the books for my daughter, I pulled The Bad Beginning from the shelf and read it in a couple of hours.  Although it was published over a quarter century ago, it is still fresh and it stands as one of those books (and series) that defied convention and presented stories that were potentially disturbing for children.  I have to admit that another of my motivations in re-reading this was the suggestion that perhaps on another family night we might start watching the Netflix adaptation, which, as I understand it, is better than the theatrical movie.

The movie, of course faced a dilemma.  There are thirteen books in the series—too many to comfortably fit into one film.  Each individual book, however, is too slim to fill out a feature-length presentation.  The decision was made to blend the first three books together, beginning and ending the show with the events from The Bad Beginning.  If you’re not familiar with the series, even if you don’t have children, the books are an entertaining read.  Snicket, who was later revealed to be Daniel Handler, is quite a clever author and there were a couple of points that had me, well, snickering out loud.  In any case, I’m given to understand that the Netflix series tackles this conundrum of too much/little material by being, ahem, a series.

A brief summary of The Bad Beginning may help if you’re still undecided about reading it as an adult.  The three Baudelaire children, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, are orphaned in a fire.  Adopted by their scheming uncle, Count Olaf, they are immediately put in peril as he tries various ways to get at their parents’ fortune.  Since Olaf is a thespian, he devises a plot to hold a wedding between himself and fourteen-year-old Violet in disguise as a play.  The plot is foiled, of course, by the children.  The book ends by letting the reader know that the orphans are still in danger because Olaf has escaped and remains at large.  That would take quite a lot of padding to get a feature-length film out of it.  It works quite well as a brief book for young readers.  I was impressed at both the set-up and execution when I first read this many years ago.  And I liked it again the second time through.

Things Seen

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I disagree with the critics on this one.  Things Heard & Seen is a remarkable horror film.  That’s not to say it’s without its flaws, but it is quite engrossing for the right kind of viewer.  It has elements of dark academia, as well as ghosts and a respectful treatment of Swedenborg.  And it takes place in the Hudson Valley (the headless horseman is even mentioned once).  The Bible appears both visually and is quoted.  In short, it encapsulates many of my personal interests.  And it’s not badly made.  There will be spoilers here, but it’s difficult to discuss religion and horror without them.  George Claire married Catherine because he got her pregnant.  He has, however, finished his doctorate and been offered a post at Saginaw College, in the Hudson Valley.  It quickly becomes clear that George is an entitled, self-centered liar (sounds familiar).

As the story unfolds, both Catherine and their daughter Franny see ghosts.  George dismisses them but even at the college the head of his department is a Swedenborgian and tells him not to dismiss the spiritual world.  George’s true character starts showing through.  He cheats on his wife.  He forged his letter of support from his Columbia doctoral advisor because his work was substandard.  When a fellow faculty member finds out, he runs her off the road, putting her into a coma.  He drowns his department head while boating on the Hudson because he also learned the truth.  He even claims to have painted pictures done by his brother.  In other words, he’s a real piece of work.  The ghosts aren’t able to save his wife when he murders her, but his colleague comes out of her coma and spills the beans.

In the end, George sails away into a Thomas Cole painting where a Swendenborgian ending overtakes him.  The use of Swedenborg adds an etherial element to the film, figuring thoughtfulness to what otherwise might be just another story about an unhinged academic.  The department head’s advice about seeing death in a Swedenborgian way was also strangely affecting.  In other words, this is thoughtful horror.  And once again it demonstrates that religion can be crucial to understanding what we really fear.  I suppose some critics dislike the unambiguous use of ghosts and the supernatural breaking into “reality,” but that seems to be precisely the point.  I only learned of this movie because Netflix recommended it, but they hit on several major themes in my work over the past several years.  I would watch this one again.

Access Denied

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We like to pride ourselves on our levels of knowledge obtained.  But access to it is limited to the club.  I’ve run into this several times since being booted from academia.  I still research and write books.  They sell like academic books (not well), but I am blocked from academic resources.  I was attempting to access an article in a book from an academic press, named here nevermore, only to find every path blocked.  I had to verify that I was human a time or two, but being human isn’t enough.  You need to be a wealthy human.  I went to Academia.edu.  The author hadn’t posted the chapter.  It was posted on Research Gate, but to request a PDF I had to have an institutional email, which I do not.  I tried Internet Archive, which has saved me many times.  They didn’t have a full view and the link to the book told me I could purchase for a mere $150.

I know other academic presses that do this.  Limit the knowledge to those in institutions that can pay such high fees.  Academia is becoming more and more privileged all the time.  I get it.  You can’t just give the stuff away.  Whenever possible I post my articles for free on Academia.  I wrote them to be read, not to be tucked away and inaccessible as the world made love to the electronic revolution.  Not all scholars think that way.  And academic presses charge prices that can only be described as exploitative.  It’s as if they think we’re all paid like professors are.  Privileged.  And this pains me.  As a former professor I know that not all academics are paid well.  We’re in it for the knowledge.  But once you lose that academic email, it’s access denied for you.

Sadly, I’m not the only one in this category.  There’s an entire generation of us who’ve been thrown from the ivory tower.  Here’s the thing: your curiosity doesn’t die just because you’re not called “Professor” any more.  Maybe this is why I enjoy dark academia so much.  The truth is that there is something very wrong with our higher educational system.  University presses, stressed to make money when everyone just asks some AI that was never human and has no knowledge for an answer to a difficult question.  There used to be a way to find that answer through the hard work of research.  And when you were done you had the pride of accomplishment.  Now all that we have is access denied.

Missed Movie

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It has been years since I read H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.”  I’d never seen this original movie made from it, often cited as being a reasonable adaptation of a Lovecraft story to film.  The visuals are sometimes impressive, but it is a slow moving, plodding movie.  It does, as far as I can recall, follow Lovecraft in general terms.  This is one of those movies that would’ve fit into Holy Horror for two basic reasons: it begins with a quote from the Bible and it has its own alternative sacred book, the Necronomicon.  In one scene the latter is explicitly compared to the Good Book.  Since religion didn’t enter horror in any kind of direct way until about 1968, this movie is an early example of how the two interact.  It came before The Exorcist.

The point is made at several junctures that the religion of the Whateleys is the antithesis of Christianity.  Indeed, the point of all Wilbur Whateley’s shenanigans is to raise the old gods.  Lovecraft, famously an atheist, used gods to set up his cosmic horror.  He’s also notoriously difficult to capture in movie form.  While Roger Corman was the executive producer he was not the director, and that may answer for the pacing.  Daniel Haller, the director, had worked with Corman before on some of his Poe Cycle films and had directed Die, Monster, Die, also a Lovecraft adaptation.  Lovecraft wasn’t a terribly cinematic writer.  His stories contain ideas that feel like they might fit on film, but executing them well is difficult.

For this movie, the house used for the Whateley residence is fitting.  It helps create a sense of dread.  The basic idea of the flick is that Wilbur needs a virginal victim to help summon the old gods.  He lures Nancy Wagner to his house where she falls under the influence of drugged tea.  There’s an intriguing glass sculpture that is never fully explained.  As Nancy begins to lose her will, her friends come to find her, and one of them is killed by Wilbur’s inhuman twin that had also killed their mother during birth.  Once released, this monstrous progeny begins killing locals (the locals hate the Whateleys) and is poised to take Nancy until a guest lecturer at Miskatonic University bests Wilbur in spells recited from the Necronomicon, saving the girl and dooming the last Whateley.  The family line ends.  Until it is rather heavy-handedly shown that Nancy is pregnant by Wilbur, so the unwholesome Whateley genealogy continues.  The visuals aren’t bad, but the story is lacking.  Still, it’s part of the canon, so I needed to see it and it used religion to intrigue me.

Field Hockey

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Friends recommended We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry.  I’m glad they did.  A woman-empowering novel, it ties together so many important things: what it’s like to grow up as a girl, what it means to trust other people, and the importance of believing in yourself.  My experience of reading it as a man at times made me want to apologize for my sex.  So many guys have trouble reining it in and that leads many women to feeling uncomfortable, or even threatened.  The book’s also a great story of awakening to who you really are.  Set in Danvers, Massachusetts in the late 1980s, it’s the tale of the girl’s field hockey team and their “deal with the devil” to win the state championship after being a team having a reputation for losing.  The eleven players on the team are sketched so wonderfully that you get a good idea of that many distinct protagonists.

There is a tie-in with the Salem Witch Trials—much of which actually played out in Danvers.  Although the assumed implication is that the girls begin winning because they’ve made a pact with the darkness, the story doesn’t give it up that easily.  There’s a subtlety at play here and even if you’ve never been on a sports team, the sense of camaraderie is palpable.  The real magic comes in believing in yourself.  Barry is eloquent about such life and how it can change you during the difficult period of adolescence.  I’m always impressed with adult writers who can capture so well what coming-of-age feels like.  For many of us, I expect, there is a trauma associated with it.  Cultural expectations on young women are burdensome in so many ways.  At the same time this story is so well written that you hesitate to put it down.

While I never participated in high school or collegiate sports—I have no particular gifts in that regard—regular readers may find it difficult to believe that I played on the Nashotah House football team for a couple of years.  Lest you get the wrong idea, the seminary played one annual game of flag football against Seabury-Western Seminary in Chicago, styled as conservative vs. liberals.  I was younger, and in better physical shape than many of my students, so I made a team effort for a couple of years.  Still, the team spirit demonstrated in We Ride Upon Sticks is of an altogether different sort.  Fun and thoughtful at the same time.  It’s the kind of book I’m glad to have pointed out to me.

Books Left out

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I’m still working on my bibliography of this blog.  It’s going to take some time yet to finish it.  One of the things that has surprised me already, though, is the number of books I read but didn’t discuss here.  In the first five-plus years of this blog I tried to tie every post in to religion.  A friend had told me that staying on topic would get me more readers and I think he was right.  I now discuss many subjects and my readership has fallen off.  But my writing in general has moved away from all religion all the time.  The real loss, however, is that many very interesting books didn’t get discussed here.  Were I to want to do so I’d have to go back and re-read them.  And I don’t have time for the reading of the books required for my current book project.

Books have defined my life since I got past that stage of eating candy and running around to burn off the energy.  I began early with the Bible but started reading seriously when I was a tween.  And I haven’t stopped.  My bibliography, and this is just a guess, has about 600 books on it so far.  These are books that I’ve discussed on this blog.  Goodreads shows me I read far more than that since 2013 (this blog began four years earlier than that).  I don’t regret being a bookworm.  The neighbors might be out mowing the grass, but I’m behind a book living in a different world.  Maybe for a future project I’ll take the books from Goodreads that didn’t make it to the blog and give them their own post.  It might cause red cheeks because I remember that some of them I didn’t post on because I was embarrassed for having read them.

You see, to publish fiction you’re often told to read books from the independent publishing houses to which you’re pitching.  That accounts for several of the no shows.  Early in my blogging life I avoided posting on the paranormal (I like weird things—they help with writing), those books didn’t show up here either.  Others simply weren’t religiony enough.  Or I couldn’t think of anything to say about them.  Still, it might be interesting sometime.  Goodreads has my list at over 1,100 books at the moment.  I’ll be curious to see how many have shown up here.  I was in my late forties in 2009, when this blog began.  I’d been reading for some three decades before that.  How many books?  Well, the bibliography won’t be half the story.

An Education

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The point of education is to improve life for people.  Reading and studying and listening, we learn.  Travel is often an educational experience.  We gain knowledge, but it does no good if we hoard it.  That’s why some become teachers.  In a society that undervalues education, a self-fulfilling prophecy sets in.  Just look around you.  The usual path into becoming a teacher is education in education.  You can major in it.  You don’t have to be wise necessarily, since, like all things capitalistic, choice of career is economic.  You pick something for which you feel suited.  If you’re lucky, you get a job doing it.  For “higher education” it’s a bit different.  First of all, you need not study education at all.  You choose a field in which to become a specialist and, if you’re lucky, get a job teaching it.  And those jobs are dependent on, of course, the dismal science.

This is one of the main reasons I write.  When your intention is to be a lifelong learner, you know that if you don’t share what you’ve picked up over the years, it will simply be lost.  As a society, we really don’t encourage sages.  The motivation is to make money, to look out for yourself.  Education becomes a means for self-promotion rather than for sharing what you’ve learned.  In my case, I sometimes feel guilty for writing about horror.  Is it really helping anyone?  I have to believe that it might be.  A certain segment of the population finds horror therapeutic.  Psychologists are starting to explore how it’s actually good for your mentality.  I can only hope that if it means something to me, it will mean something to some others.  And I want to share it.

Religion, at least among the non-cynical, is meant to improve people’s lives.  There is a reason that I wanted to be a religion professor, as I was for a few short years.  My circumstances steered me toward horror as a form of self-care, and I think there’s something much deeper here that has to be mined.  Writing the books I do is more like speculating or prospecting rather than staking a claim and digging tunnels.  If they were causing more harm than good I wouldn’t publish them (or try to).  Life is an educational opportunity.  And if we learn from those who care for other people we might have a chance of improving the lot of many.  Look around you.  Is that where we are today?

Dr. 2 P 2

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Before reading Lord Byron’s Doctor by Paul West, I started reading John William Polidori’s diary.   This is freely available online, but I need a book in my hands to truly read.  A little backstory: before his trip to Switzerland in 1816 with Lord Byron, the poet’s publisher paid Polidori to write this diary.  After Polidori died by suicide, his sister edited out what she thought reflected badly on the family, and destroyed the original.  The diary was published in 1911, edited by Polidori’s nephew William Michael Rossetti.  The edition I read was a reprint by Forgotten Books, containing the University of Toronto’s Library’s edition for scanning.  While not the most exciting reading, it is revealing.  Polidori appreciated the finer things in life (he qualified as a medical doctor), but he sometimes missed the point.  For example, being paid to write about Byron’s travels, his mentions of Bryon are relatively few.

You get the real sense that Polidori was jealous of the Lord with whom he traveled.  Then, when Percy Bysshe Shelley and his party arrived in the neighborhood, it becomes clear that Polidori was jealous of Byron’s attention to Shelley.  I sympathize with the author; both Byron and Shelley were already famous and infamous for their writing and lifestyles.  Both were from aristocratic families and had no profession other than writing and traveling.  For Polidori this was a working trip.  His mood seems to be reflected in that, just after the famous ghost story contest, entries begin to focus mostly outside the gathered writers until they stop altogether.  Much of the summer is left blank.  In September Byron sent Polidori packing, and the remainder of the diary is about his, often penurious, travels through his ancestral Italy.

Polidori is now known as the author of “The Vampyre,” which he wrote during the period covered in the diary.  He doesn’t talk about it much.  For me, Polidori is a sympathetic figure.  A lonely man, he was intimate with the most famous English poet of his day.  He often, however, in his own accounts, wasn’t in control of his emotions, particularly when he felt he’d been slighted.  Jealousy can be a very difficult monster with which to wrestle.  But reading this diary does lead to the uncanny sense that the most interesting parts were the things he didn’t discuss.  The diary has been used as the basis of more than one fictional treatment of the events of the summer of 1816.  And since some of the juicy bits are left out, free rein is given to the imagination.

Dr. P.

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My recent fascination with the meeting of Lord Byron with Percy Shelley’s party in 1816 led me to read Paul West’s novel Lord Byron’s Doctor.  In case this meeting isn’t familiar to you, it involved five English travelers gathering for a few months outside Geneva.  Those present, beyond the two already named, were Mary Godwin, soon to be Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont (her step-sister), and John William Polidori, who was, well, Lord Byron’s doctor.  Polidori, when not being completely overlooked, is a bit of an enigma.  He aspired to literary renown and produced a few works.  His most notable piece, “The Vampyre,” was initially attributed to Byron.  He wrote at least two plays and a novella, as well as some nonfiction.  He had been hired by Byron’s publisher to keep a diary of their travels, which, it turns out, leaves Byron out most of the time.

It’s clear from the historical sources that Polidori was quite jealous, both of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley.  They were both aristocratic and had achieved fame through their writing, but Polidori not so much.  He also seems to have been jealous that Shelley received Byron’s attention unstintingly.  Byron was a lord and Shelley the scion of an aristocratic family.  Polidori, while not exactly what we’d call “middle class” today, did not have nobility in his family and, perhaps worse  among the English in the period, he was half Italian.  Paul West takes the story of Polidori and tries to flesh it out.  I haven’t read any other of West’s works, but given this novel I’m unlikely to.  He does do a good job of probing the inner feelings of being left out and excluded from what one really wants to do with one’s life.  (Some of us know this firsthand.)  He overdraws, however, just about everything.

For anyone with an idea of what happened among the English party that summer, and the fact that Byron dismissed Polidori when the summer was over, the basic shape of this narrative will be familiar.  As an extended character study it seems to do passably well.  Some of us, however, find trying to think like someone else might have a bit of a fatuous fictional folly.  My mental image of Polidori, apart from the feeling left out part, is quite different.  In other words, attempting this kind of novel is sure to put some readers off from the start.  I gave it a good faith effort.  Some parts of it I enjoyed.  The whole, however, felt tedious and too long.  It may, however, give some readers a sense of who Polidori might have been.