Vampirism: Polidori, Lord Byron, King
[100th Post] Anybody thirsty???
John William Polidori: The Vampyr; A Tale. London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1819.
Lord Byron: Fragment of a Novel, 1819.
Stephen King: ‘salem’s Lot. New York: Vintage, 2024 [1975].
If you’ve noticed a little vampire renaissance in popular culture these days, you’re not the only one. Robert Eggers directed a remake of Nosferatu with Bill Skarsgaard, inspiring a small dive into the gothic.
For this special 100th letter we’re looking at three texts instead of the usual one or two, but the two 19th century pieces are very short, so for all intents and purposes it’s basically one novel by Stephen King. Why King and not Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)?
Here’s the thing.
Every time I’ve started Bram Stoker I put it down before I get too many epistles in. Your host is not against epistolary fiction on principle or anything, but I do find the prose of Dracula to be a total drag, weighed down with the Victoriana of it all.
It’s not as if Stoker was the only one inventing modern vampirism either. Varney the Vampire, a penny dreadful from the 1840s, introduced many of the classic rules of vampire combat. In the 20th century, Ray Bradbury took a crack at vampire mythos with a story called “Homecoming,” and Theodore Sturgeon made a great Dracula update in the 50s with Some of Your Blood. And of course, Anne Rice probably did the most to shift the vampire from a rake to a misunderstood sad guy.
All of that material is probably worth a visit, but for this post I’ve cobbled together notes on the earlier Romantic writing of Byron and company along with a Stephen King that I picked up at the supermarket.
For me there’s a world of difference between the tawdry pastiche of the late 19th century gothic fiction and the powerful Romantic work produced in the century’s front half by the brilliant Mary Godwin and her bohemian friends. Just on a sentence structuring level Frankenstein and the rest blow out the work that came after, even if the latter is more famous.
In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted: an eruption so massive the ash spread throughout the stratosphere, effectively cancelling summer for the northern hemisphere, and lowering the global temperature by three degrees C.
In that gloomy year, Mary, Percy, Byron, and Byron’s physician Polidori were vacationing in Geneva, scavenging, collecting, and synthesizing all matter of folklore from Germany and central-eastern Europe, including the legends of vampirism. The vampire lore is best and most interestingly spelled out in Polidori’s introduction.
From as far back as ancient Greece come stories of the dead rising from their graves to drink the blood of lovely young ladies.
In the West it spread, with some slight variation, all over Hungary, Poland, Austria, and Lorraine, where the belief existed, that vampyres nightly imbibed a certain portion of the blood of their victims, who became emaciated, lost their strength, and speedily died of consumptions; whilst these human blood-suckers fattened — and their veins became distended to such a state of repletion, as to cause the blood to flow from all the passages of their bodies, and even from the very pores of their skins.
They’re like big mosquitoes! Blood-sucking parasites. You know, aristocrats and oligarchs and decayed nobility.
In the case of Polidori’s fiction it’s Lord Ruthven, a profligate, high rolling gambler, generous with his money but only for purposes of libertinage: a supernatural Don Juan. We see him through the perspective of Aubrey. It’s pretty good, but the most interesting aspect to me was the introduction combined with the “letter from Geneva,” quite an eclectic way into this Romanticist literary scene.
Lord Byron’s Fragment is very similar to Polidori’s in content — which would explain why Polidori’s text was misattributed to Byron in 1819. It would serve as a good framing device. Once again a trip to the Mediterranean, another portrait of a dark aristocratic figure.
Byron’s prose style here is similar as well. Paragraphs were very long on average in this period — readers were built different back then, able to hold their breath and lift sentences heavy with info (mentally speaking). Early on the narrator sketches out Augustus Darvell, in this, just a tiny slice of a huge block paragraph. The narrator just keeps digging and digging, at the rhetorical level:
I had 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. I had cultivated his acquaintance subsequently, and endeavored to obtain his friendship, but this last appeared to be unattainable; whatever affections he might have possessed seemed now, some to have been extinguished, and others to be concentred: that his feelings were acute, I had sufficient opportunities of observing; for, although he could control, he could not altogether disguise them: still he had a power of giving to one passion the appearance of another in such a manner that it was difficult to define the nature of what was working within him; and the expressions of his features would vary so rapidly, though slightly, that it was useless to trace them to their sources. It was evident that he was a prey to some cureless disquiet; but whether it arose from ambition, love, remorse, grief, from one or all of these, or merely from a morbid temperament akin to disease, I could not discover: there were circumstances alleged, which might have justified the application to each of these causes; but, as I have before said, these were so contradictory and contradicted, that none could be fixed upon with accuracy.
Darvell doesn’t do anything devious that we see, but has all the sickly characteristics of the vampire, a mixture of tuberculosis and skin vulnerabilities. “His habits were temperate, and he neither declined nor complained of fatigue, yet he was evidently wasting away.”
Readers may remember how iffy your host was about The Shining when we covered it for the Kubrick project. So what did I think about King’s previous book ‘salem’s Lot? Ha, ha, ha, well…I thought it was pretty good. It’s not as well-written as Shining nor is it as ambitious, but it’s simply a fun read.
If Jack Torrance’s character in Shining fused the experiences of the frustrated writer and the addict, we find these types separated in the Lot, between the hero Ben Mears, a handsome young writer, and the alcoholic Father Callahan. The latter might be the real heart of the story, which is mostly a doomed small town B-movie exercise.
He hesitated, then walked up the path. He would pray. Pray all night if necessary. Not to the new God, the God of ghettos and social conscience and free lunches, but the old God, who had proclaimed through Moses not to suffer a witch to live and who had given it unto His own son to raise from the dead. A second chance, God. All my life for penance. Only…a second chance.
There’s a structural parallel between Mears and Callahan. Both have an arc in which the worst thing that happened to them was in their childhoods, and the horrible revelation is that the new fear and the childhood fear are ultimately identical. Don’t let Mr. Flip get you….
By the end, the novel reads as a 150k-word origin story for a ‘lone wolf’ vampire hunter and his young ward, Mark Petrie, the MVP. Their relationship is the most winning part, even though little attention was given to developing and selling it in the second half — but also I didn’t care about the lack of compelling characters: the vignettes of the town are interesting, and look forward to big books like Stand and IT.
There’s a beautiful semi-Faulknerian passage about how hard it is to farm in the “granite bodied” Lot that came seemingly from nowhere.
The Lot follows all the normal rules of vampire business, and it assumes you’re familiar enough with these trappings of wooden stakes and crucifixes and garlic that they don’t need to be explained. It’s fun, but quaint. What about the blood coming out of every pore and orifice and other grotesque things in the stuff from the early 1800’s?
And the spookiest part of all? Those Romanticist friends were all marked for death shortly after publishing these works. Polidori committed suicide in 1821. Lord Byron died of a fever in Greece in 1824, age 36. Percy Shelley, Mary’s husband, died at sea in 1822.
The cause? Naturally from their experiments in collating dark European folklore. They had transcribed an ancient, obscure learning that was never meant to be written down. They immortalized the forbidden knowledge, thereby activating a final destination-like curse that pursued them (except Mary) for nearly a decade to their untimely demise [citation needed].