Quote of the Day (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Offering the First Glimpse of Her Monster)

“Last Monday (July 31st) we were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea-room in which she floated. Our situation was somewhat dangerous, especially as we were compassed round by a very thick fog. We accordingly lay to, hoping that some change would take place in the atmosphere and weather.

“About two o’clock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end. Some of my comrades groaned, and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious thoughts, when a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention and diverted our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveller with our telescopes until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice.” — English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

A few weeks ago I attended a lecture on Frankenstein that highlighted the opening section of the novel, from which this passage is taken—a set of letters from the explorer Robert Walton to his sister. His epic ambition—to discover the North Pole, in an age when ice and extreme cold posed mortal danger—anticipates that of Victor Frankenstein, a nearly frozen scientist he picks up in these barren arctic wastes.

In the grip of “the dark tyranny of despair,” Frankenstein warns against this quest for the glory accruing to scientific discovery: “You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.”

The “shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature” is the rejected creation who has brought Frankenstein untold misery. The glimpse that Walton’s crew has of him here is elusive, to be filled in by the extended account that Frankenstein is about to offer the explorer.

Walton’s “frame story” (or, to use a term from one of my college English classes some years ago about Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw,” an “envelope story”) was not included in the classic 1931 adaptation of the novel starring Boris Karloff as the monster. Despite its many faults, the 1994 remake (from which the accompanying image was taken), starring Robert DeNiro as the Creature and Kenneth Branagh as Victor, did include this narrative device.

It will be interesting to see if Guillermo del Toro’s version (in limited release next week) will do likewise. I hope so, because it reinforces a lesson relevant to our time: that heedless pursuit of scientific knowledge might produce unexpected and unwelcome consequences.

Quote of the Day (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, on How Invention Occurs)

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.”—English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

The wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley—and creator of the paradigmatic sci-fi/horror novel Frankenstein—was born 225 years ago today.

While staying at a villa by Lake Geneva in Switzerland with her husband, the teenage Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley engaged in a contest with him and his friends (including Lord Byron) for the best ghost story by relating her tale of a scientist and the creature he made in a lab. Obviously, posterity regards her as the winner of the contest.

But the “materials …[to] be afforded” to create her novel did not come from a “void,” but from her own intellectual research into what was happening in the world of science, including Sir Humphrey Davy’s experiments with electricity, according to this article from Mental Floss Magazine.

For a fascinating discussion of the circumstances behind this dramatic creation, I urge you to read Australian artist-writer Kirsten Mills’ blog post from four years ago.

Quote of the Day (Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’ on Falsehood and the Abyss)

"When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness? I feel as if I were walking on the edge of a precipice, towards which thousands are crowding and endeavouring to plunge me into the abyss.” —English novelist Mary Shelley (1797-1851), Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)

A Wall Street Journal article by Ed Finn and David H. Guston reminded me that 200 years ago this month, Frankenstein made an inauspicious beginning—released anonymously by a little-known British publishing house that, when sales languished, discounted the title.

That wasn’t the only indignity faced by 21-year-old author Mary Shelley, who, when sales finally began to climb and gossip soon spread about its possible author, had to endure sexist speculation that a mere woman couldn’t have produced such an original work without high-powered help—from husband Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In their provocative essay, Finn and Guston observe that, only now, through genetic engineering, has the central premise of the novel—the unintended, horrifying consequences of scientific creation of life—finally come to the fore.

For all its vast, often take-for-granted, influence on science-fiction and horror literature (and, after the 1931 big-screen adaptation starring Boris Karloff, cinema), Frankenstein still has the capacity to jolt and shock, much like Victor’s obsessive electromagnetic experimentation. 

Today’s “Quote” is one example. It’s placed in the middle of dialogue by Elizabeth, Victor’s fiancée, a character, in her sweet innocence, often regarded as a drip.

But her statement, shot through with irony (she has no idea that Victor is responsible for creating the monster now marauding through the countryside), made me sit up and take notice when I first encountered the words.

In the petri dish of politics, American voters conducted their own mad experiment: electing to the Oval Office—heck, entrusting responsibility for the fate of mankind—not only someone with neither political nor national-security experience, but a man who, throughout his adult life, has never evinced the slightest regard for the truth.

After walking away, for an extended period, from observing politics, commentator Andrew Sullivan emerged to gasp at Donald Trump’s emergence as a Presidential candidate. “I was happy doing that and was hoping to continue, when this Grendel started stirring in the forest,” he explained in an interview with The New York Times. “You could almost see the coffee vibrate on the table, as this creature came out of the swamp.”

That analogy is close, but not quite comparable to what we see now. Grendel, you see, implies the existence of a Beowulf, a solitary hero who will slay him. No such personage appears remotely on the horizon for us.

In the first third of the last century, most of Europe fell under the sway of a liar of staggering proportions who did indeed lead the continent into an abyss of violence and shame. Nobody ever dreamed that such a monster could emerge on our shores. But why should we think we are so different from everyone else?

Quote of the Day (Peter Ackroyd, on Poetry’s Shelley at Oxford)

“Bysshe was openly contemptuous of the regimen of the university, and attended no lectures. I was unsure, in fact, what studies he was meant to be pursuing. To him they did not matter in the slightest. There was one task that we were assigned by rote, that of translating each week an essay from the Spectator into Latin. This he accomplished with the greatest ease, and indeed he could write Latin with as much facility and fluency as he wrote English. He told me that the secret was to imagine himself a Roman orator in the first years of the Republic. This inspired him with such fervour that the words came naturally to him in their proper order. I did not doubt it. His imagination was like the voltaic battery from which lightning issued forth.”— Peter Ackroyd, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein: A Novel (2008)

Today’s 225^th anniversary of the birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley near Horsham, Sussex, England not only gives me the chance to comment on the short, stormy life of this Romantic poet but to extol the many virtues of The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein. 

The main character of this marvelous historical novel and horror fiction is, as the title indicates, the obsessed creator of a monster who embodies the worst fears of science gone horribly wrong. 

But Peter Ackroyd, an astonishingly prolific and astute novelist, biographer and critic, pairs the scientist with a real-life character with a power every bit as compelling as the work he left beyond: the husband of Mary Shelley, who wrote the 1818 novel to which the novelist pays tribute. 

In more than one of his novels, Ackroyd engages in meta-fiction, or the self-referential practice of parodying or alluding to another work—and this marvelous work (which I wish would be adapted to film or television) is no exception. 

At one point, Dr. Frankenstein accompanies the Shelleys and their friends Lord Byron and Dr. John Polidori to Switzerland, the site of the late-night 1816 fireside contest where the group related horror stories they had written. (Frankenstein was, of course, the product of that villa game.) 

Earlier, Ackroyd has the scientist reanimate the corpse of an acquaintance, a gentle young consumptive medical student named “Jack Keat”—an unmistakable reference to Shelley and Byron’s equally star-crossed friend John Keats. 

But the paragraph above is a nice microcosm not only of the themes of this novel and even of the life of Shelley, but also of what has compelled Ackroyd’s attention across a career devoted to limning the glories of the English language. 

Befriending the conventionally religious student Frankenstein at Oxford, the charismatic Shelley almost literally throws off sparks. The last sentence’s simile of “the voltaic battery” gives the atheistic Bysshe the dubious co-credit of inventing the monster by means of electrical experimentation.

His Oxford experience is very part and parcel of how Bysshe will flout convention not only within the confines of the university but in the world at large. His rebellion begins before the tract, The Necessity of Atheism, that results in his expulsion from the school. Even the practice of attending classes is anathema to him. 

Indeed, his brilliance is such that he’s beyond all that, in the same way that he will persuade Frankenstein that the scientist, as part of a larger movement toward “our principles of truth and freedom,” is beyond the bounds of convention. 

Translating effortlessly is the means by which Shelley suggests his immense literary talent. That trait illustrates a theme that Ackroyd analyzed in intriguing depth in his broad-based literary canvass Albion, about the wellsprings of the English language and imagination. 

In that work, he underscores translation as a crucial formative influence on the writings of Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and William Wordsworth. Translation enabled those writers as well as Shelley to range across and blend cultures. 

Not content with religious skepticism, Shelley became sharply critical of the old political order. In having him imagining himself as “a Roman orator in the first years of the Republic,” Ackroyd is alluding to Shelley’s well-known claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Shelley’s method was examining, like a medical student, the diseases of the body politic, as in this famous conclusion to his poem “England in 1819”: 

“Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;

A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—

Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.”

I don't think even he could ever have realized how unintentionally frightening that word "Phantom" would become because of the literary monster created by his wife.

Finally, perhaps the crucial word of this paragraph, slipped in casually, is “secret.” It implies more than just the major running theme of Shelley’s reckless youth—secrets that, when brought to life, resulted in scandal (e.g., the discovery that he was the author of that notorious essay on atheism, or the clandestine affair conducted with the teenaged Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin that led to the suicide of the poet’s first wife). 

It also hints at the solitary pursuit that will bring Victor Frankenstein even more inner division and torment here than in Mary Shelley’s landmark horror novel: the quest for the ungodly “secret springs of life.”

One last point I can’t help but recall about Shelley, given a central preoccupation of this blog: In the mid-1930s, while having a short affair with a North Carolina nurse, F. Scott Fitzgerald provided her with “required reading.” 

Among the more than 20 items on this list, alongside Dreiser, Chekhov, Maupassant, Hammett, and Proust, was John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete Poetical Works—something that had transfixed him and his friends at Princeton, in the same way that Shelley had absorbed past masters effortlessly at Oxford.

This Day in Film History (‘Frankenstein’ Scares Up Great Box Office)

Dec. 4, 1931—Universal Studios consolidated its growing fame as a creator and marketer of a new film genre with Frankenstein. Though its grand opening had taken place in Santa Barbara, Calif., in late November, its New York premiere on this date presaged an enthusiastic embrace of its hideous monster by a public living through a different kind of horror: the Great Depression. More than 76,000 watched the show at the Mayfair Theatre that first week before it opened to wider release.

Most interesting to the studio, of course, was the film’s profit margin. Universal couldn’t compete with major studios such as MGM in lavish spectacle, but it hoped to keep going with movies produced cheaply but distinctively. Frankenstein represented the triumph of that strategy: made for only $250,000, the film returned $12 million upon its release.

Frankenstein took even more liberties with its source material than the Universal release that opened up the talking-picture horror film in earnest earlier that year, Dracula. Unlike the monster in the 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the unloved creature onscreen compounded his ugliness with a pathetic inability to communicate, a virtually nonstop series of grunts and growls.

That vision of the character did not please the actor who had just achieved a career-making triumph with Dracula and who now stood to play another fearsome creature: Bela Lugosi. The former European matinee idol appeared in a 20-minute test reel for the part while still on the set of Dracula, but he was not happy about playing a non-talking role, complaining that he did not come to America to “play a scarecrow.” 

He much preferred the real Frankenstein—not the product of reanimated life, but the obsessed (and verbose) scientist who created him. It didn’t help that his proposed makeup design for the monster was rejected by Universal.

Universal, then, decided to look elsewhere for an actor to play the monster. It didn’t have to look far—a 44-year-old Briton spotted in the studio commissary by director James Whale, and offered a screen test on the spot. 

The actor, Boris Karloff, already in Hollywood for a decade, with roughly 80 films to his credit, still hadn’t made his mark with the wider public, so he jumped at the role. It only made his career, so much so that he called his character “My Dear Friend.”

That’s not to say, though, that it was easy to play. To start with, there were heavy boots (13 pounds each) he had to clomp around in, attached to steel struts that gave the movie monster his distinct lurch (as opposed to Shelley’s creature, whose frightening speed allows him to effortlessly elude captors). His dark, poorly-fitting suit was a nightmare to wear in the August heat. 

And Whale demanded take after take of Karloff lugging Colin Clive’s Dr. Henry Frankenstein up the hill toward the windmill for the movie’s climax, leaving Karloff with back problems so severe for the rest of his life that he would require three major operations.

Above all, there was all that make-up—3½ hours to put on, an equivalent time to take off.  The makeup Lugosi wanted for the role—a mass of dark hair, clay-like skin—would have been simpler to endure by comparison. 

Most of what is seen onscreen—the template for the popular image for the monster since then—came from Jack P. Pierce, the Universal makeup whiz who later came up with similarly indelible designs for the title characters in The Mummy and The Wolf Man. Even before working on Karloff, Pierce researched anatomy, surgery, medicine, criminal history, criminology, burial customs and electrodynamics. 

From that point on, he used grayish-green greasepaint on the skin, contrasting with the gray tones of the normal characters; electrodes protruding from the neck; and for the forehead, cotton and collodion (a foul-smelling liquid plastic). (See this post from nine years ago from the blog "Frankensteinia" on the marvels this makeup magician came up with.)

While often insistent on getting his way, Pierce accepted two suggestions by Karloff. First, the actor took out his dental bridge, giving one cheek a sunken look; second, upon Karloff’s remark that wide-open eyes created a stronger (erroneous) suggestion of human life, Pierce crafted droopy eyelids to underscore the impression of reanimated flesh. 

The second innovation made all the more remarkable Karloff’s performance, as he had to suggest the monster’s alternating pathos and malevolence without wide-open eyes that could express his feelings.

But the movie’s impact may have owed as much to its scenic and sound design as its extraordinary makeup. Frankenstein could only have been made several years into the talkie era, when Hollywood not only had enough time to absorb the style of German Expressionist films but also to experiment with sound.

The shadows and unusual angularity characteristic of directors Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu) figure prominently in Frankenstein’s graveyard and castle scenes—environments that became commonplace in later horror cinema. These scenes also form a huge part of the movie's vertical orientation, climaxed by the monster reaching for the sun.

To heighten the ghoulish proceedings, a microphone in the coffin amplified the sound of the grave dirt hitting the lid; the “Castle Thunder” sound effect was used here for the first time; and the reanimated monster was introduced in full earnest to the audience when they could hear his heavy footsteps but not see his body.

Quote of the Day (Mary Shelley, on the Shock of ‘Sudden Change’)

"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change."―Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

I just thought I’d get you in the mood for Halloween with this quote from the novel Frankenstein and this image from the classic 1931 film—with Boris Karloff, of course, as the monster who makes a “great and sudden change” and brings terror to his creator.

Also on my mind these days, chiefly because I’ve finally gotten around to reading it, seven years after publication: The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, by the astonishingly prolific British man of letters Peter Ackroyd.

Movie Quote of the Day (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein’s Monster)

[Trying to evade the monster, Wilbur puts on a black cloak over his face]
Wilbur Grey (played by Lou Costello): [imitating Dracula] “Back! Back!”
The Monster (played by Glenn Strange): “Yes, master.”
Wilbur: [takes off cloak and turns to Chuck, played by Bud Abbott] “He thinks I'm Dracula!”—Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), written by Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo and John Grant, directed by Charles Barton

It’s fitting that this “Quote of the Day” features Victor Frankenstein’s monster and (implicitly) Dracula, for the two greatest monsters of the silver screen made their first appearances before film audiences in 1931. (I’m not counting F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent Nosferatu, which used the Bram Stoker tale without permission.) Earlier this year, I wrote about the anniversary of Dracula; today marks the 80^th anniversary of the wildly successful transfer to the screen of Mary Shelley’s 1818 shocker about the unintended consequences of scientific exploration.

Dyed-in-the-wool horror fans were probably disappointed that Lugosi and Karloff didn’t appear together in the Abbott and Costello comedy (Karloff had departed Universal Studios a few years before, feeling that the Frankenstein franchise was played out). But the two actors had, in any case, already appeared in eight films, with one of their best saved for last: The Body Snatcher (1945), Val Lewton’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic short story.

Though Karloff won enduring fame as the Frankenstein monster (a role that came to him, incidentally, only when Lugosi turned it down), his performance in The Body Snatcher is likely to linger longer in the minds of viewers. When we first see him, he appears to be a folksy, kindly Scottish coachman; by the end of the film, we know him as a grave robber and murderer whose smile is all the more sinister because he knows the worst secrets of the respectable medical establishment that pays him to do its dirty work.

By the way, I had a bit of a hard time coming up with this post. I wanted something that blended comedy and Frankenstein without resorting to the inevitable Young Frankenstein. Easier said than done.

Something about Dracula (Lugosi’s accent? The bloodthirsty count’s undisguised desire for wenches?) has made it a richer field for parody than Frankenstein. In fact, the only decent comedies that mine Frankenstein for laughs (a skit on The Carol Burnett Show, the Moonlighting episode “The Bride of Tupperman,” and even Young Frankenstein) end up looking for additional inspiration to its 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein. Maybe it’s the prospect of a female mate with such an unusual hairstyle that brings out the antic muse.