Lord Byron's Doctor

by Paul West

The fictional memoirs of Polidori, the travelling companion, doctor & "half-mad play-thing" of that singular poet & infamous rake, Lord Byron. It recounts Byron's days at the Villa Diodati in Geneva, where Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein" took shape in an atmosphere of depravity.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Novels

277 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Paul West (February 23, 1930) was an English-born novelist, literary historian and poet, the author of 24 novels, who lived in America since the early 1960s. He resided in upstate New York with his wife, the writer, poet and well-known naturalist Diane Ackerman, until his death in 2015. Paul, still remembered with affection by his old colleagues and friends in England as a big, jolly man, was born in Eckington, which is near (and now considered a part of) Sheffield in South Yorkshire, but was during West’s childhood a Derbyshire village associated with the famous literary Sitwells of Renishaw.
Paul was honoured with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (1985), the Lannan Prize for Fiction (1993), the Grand Prix Halperine-Kaminsky Award (1993), and three Pushcart Prizes (1987, 1991, 2003). He was also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Literary Lion (1987), and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters 1996, France).
His parents, Alfred and Mildred, really cared for books, and created an environment which ensured that young Paul inherited a great passion for literature, which was enhanced when he went from his native village to study first at Oxford University in England and later at Columbia University in America. He never lived in England again after going to Columbia, and in later years Paul was involved with other US universities in teaching roles, notably Pennsylvania State University.
Paul West’s novels have included: ‘A Quality of Mercy’ (1961); ‘Tenement of Clay’ (1965); ‘Alley Jaggers’ (1966); ‘I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon’ (1970); ‘Bela Lugosi's White Christmas’ (1972); ‘The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg’ (1980); ‘Rat Man of Paris’ (1986); ‘The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper’ (1991); and ‘OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday’ (2000).
His non-fiction has included the autobiographical ‘I, Said the Sparrow’, a delightful essay on his Eckington childhood; ‘The Growth of the Novel’ (1959), ‘The Modern Novel’ (in 2 vols, 1963); ‘Robert Penn Warren’ (1964); ‘Words for a Deaf Daughter’ (1969); ‘A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-discovery’ (1995); and the remarkable ‘The Shadow Factory’ (2008), the aphasic memoir he dictated with such struggle and resolve –it brings tears to the eyes and admiration to the heart, as we are reminded in reading it of the courage of this man. It is a ‘must-read’ in the context of the terrible stroke he suffered in 2003. Paul’s wife, Diane, also wrote about that stroke and its consequences in her book ‘One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage and the Language of Healing’. Paul’s poetry collections include ‘Poems’ (1952), ‘The Spellbound Horses’ (1960), and ‘The Snow Leopard’ (1964).


Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Largely constellated around death and toxic pride, LORD BYRON’S DOCTOR is, if inherently tragicomic, tending generally toward the mirthless, a joke or a chortle caught in the throat. The word humour is one we associate with merry feeling and the mindset of carnival, but the word once carried anatomical implication as well, pertaining to elemental fluids upon which our general health was once believed to rest: blood, the biles, phlegm. When the body’s humours become fowled or corrupted, it may sap one's ability to laugh and carry on. A pall might well descend on the fun and freewheeling days of yore. Paul West’s novel is written in the first person, from the perspective and in the ventriloquized voice of Doctor John Polidori, real and noted historical personage, who, at the ripe age of twenty, was to become travelling companion and personal physician to legendary Romantic brute Lord Byron, a man of title, fame, and distinction…as well as about as capricious a friend as friends come. Since it is entirely a matter of the historical record, I do not think it insupportable of me to reveal that Polidori dies at his own hand, poisoned, in August of 1821, shortly before he is to turn twenty-six. Of the notables included in the primary Byron entourage circa 1816/1817—timeframe in which the bulk of LORD BYRON’S DOCTOR is set—Polidori is hardly the sole individual to have perished relatively early. Percy Shelley, the great Romantic poet, serially reckless on water and only three years Polidori’s senior, drowns the year before the doctor commits suicide, age twenty-nine. George Gordon Byron, libertine Baron, dies in Greece in 1824, age thirty-six. Allegra, the illegitimate daughter Byron sired with Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister, dies at the age of five, in April of 1822. Mary Shelley’s mother, legendary feminist campaigner Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after giving birth to her daughter, and Mary Shelley will herself lose three children before giving birth to Percy Florence Shelley. Percy Shelley’s first wife commits suicide, as does Fanny Imlay, Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter, who had been extremely close—one might say the girls were inseparable until all-too-separable—to Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont throughout their childhoods. Mary Shelley lives to see fifty-three, Claire Clairmont, ever the odd woman out, an impressive eighty. That final statistic aside, it is not unthinkable that if you had yourself been around to witness all this, you might not be the sort of person disposed to laugh quite so heartily as you once had done. Paul West’s novel follows the young Polidori as he wrestles with pride, his relationship to the mortal human body and its foreordained terminus, following him as far as as his own terminus. We end on another of those curt jokes of the sort that will tend to stick in the throat. Muses Byron, who should surely know it to be so: “It seems that disappointment was the cause of this rash act.” Understatement of the (19th) century. Polidori, the twenty-year-old kid of 1816, “not a virgin,” but with a “mind […] full of curtseys and bows,” looked upon by fate in a manner he cannot help but appear to largely misread, becomes the “demonic apothecary” tasked with medical oversight, along for the ride but never quite a proper agent to the ruckus. “In the beginning I was possessed, and he knew it, although he did not seem to mind. He minded only later, perhaps because I was too good, too keen, an audience for him, too young.” Descended from an Italian family of minor distinction in the fields of literature and medical science, Polidori distinguished himself in Edinburgh as a student in the latter more properly professional field. Thinking quite highly of himself in the manner of certain young men of skill, Polidori is not prepared for the kindnesses and hostilities of Byron—the man’s “gleaming and arrogant effrontery.” The young doctor wishes to believe himself of sober mind and none-too-easily ruffled disposition, but how much this green youth has invested is clear early on, even if not entirely to himself. “It was the year 1816. My life began then, and all else.” In the conducting of what could only have been a handsome amount of research pursuant to the composition of both LORD BYRON’S DOCTOR and his earlier nonfiction BYRON AND THE SPOILER’S ART, Paul West doubtlessly read and studied the various contexts of Edward John Trelawny’s RECORDS OF SHELLEY, BYRON, AND THE AUTHOR, a work less of reportage than an implicit itemization of grievances. In a recent edition of Trelawny’s book made available to us by New York Review Books, an Introduction by Anne Barton argues that if Trelawny doesn’t treat Byron all that fairly it is quite likely because the author of DON JUAN had once been widely quoted to the effect that the slightly younger Trelawny couldn’t tell the truth any more than he could spell or wash his hands. Such slights may tend to sting, and they will doubtlessly sting a particular kind of egoist especially. Trelawny went to Italy to meet Byron in 1821, and by the time of the 1878 second edition of RECORDS OF SHELLEY, BYRON, AND THE AUTHOR, the author has more or less turned on his old idol, saving most of his praise for Shelley, who is by 1878 the more revered poet. LORD BYRON’S DOCTOR is like Trelawny’s account narrated to us by an only partially reliable voice that may not be totally aware of the depths of its own resentment, jealousy, and wounded pride. Both books linger on Byron’s self-consciousness concerning both his deformed leg and weight issues, as if pleased to have this recourse available. Time and again, West’s novel finds Polidori lamenting his relationships with individuals with whom he longs to be close, only to rebuke these people anon in the strongest possible terms when they have mocked, neglected, or been insensitive to him. The tragedy of Dr. Polidori is that he aspires to be honest with himself and with the world presented before him, but simply finds himself inadequate to the task, as if his bad faith is happening to him, effect of some other will, rather than being produced of him. We can detect evidence of the way in which the doctor tries to convince himself of things in which he cannot ultimately establish an unwavering belief respective of certain formulations he makes (and then appears the break) on the subject of death. Notably, for Byron, the matter would appear to be relatively simple. Early in West’s novel, Byron and Polidori en route to Bruges (or maybe the reflection makes a momentary temporal leap), Byron asserts the following to his companion: “I don’t give a damn for death, but I do dread its sting. I am not among those who dote deliciously on pain—not my own, at least.” It checks out. Later Claire Claremont, habitually ill-used by Byron, avers that the man prefers ever to be on the giving end of hurt and anguish, never the receiving, this the crux of his modus operandi. The suffering of others is impersonal for Byron, as is death. Byron himself states: “God is positive. Universes make themselves not by hanging back. Their essence is to bulge forth and carry all else with them.” Much of the Romantic ethos is communicated here. In consideration of the above proposition, Polidori reflects of Byron: “In those or similar words he lofted his theology in the dead of night, soothed into an apostasy that belonged in Dante.” If this malevolent apostasy is meant to shield the vanity of the ego, it remains stably situated as such, at least as concerns Byron. In his own reflection on death early in the novel, Polidori seeks to achieve a rather blasé big picture perspective: “Heaven, I thought, was like Ampleforth, my old school, where you died a little every day, and we were taught by all those devout old Catholic dominies that the end of life is death. Such is life’s aim, its fruition. I half believed it, sensing even in my early years of school that, once you accepted death, the rest of life was one sustained lying-back, head against the antimacassar for ever. No need to try.” This is the perspective of what the scholar Gayatri Spivak calls “planetarity,” a position that looks at human existence from the perspective of the biggest of big pictures, reducing it to a matter of minimal cosmic import. One almost never remains at this level of scale, if only because one generally wishes to accomplish things with the limited time one has on this earth. Another way of conceptualizing death enters the picture later in the novel, the repeatedly-vexed and systematically humiliated Polidori recounting having nearly died after a prolonged laudanum binge, composition of his famous THE VAMPYRE already underway. “For now, for the nonce, an author I would be, appeasing the scald of love with Arabian dreams, pipe-dreams all of them, as I developed the lingering thought that life was entitled to be a work of bravado, when one considered the enormous amount of stillness that followed it, all the irremediable non-movingness of the body and its parts. Perhaps I had postmortems on the brain, having recently done two; the inertness and apparent serenity of the cadavers made me wonder, Had they screamed or wept enough, had they spent enough, had they had their fill of toast and lamb chops, ox tongue and sherry trifle? All had stopped, but surely they had comported themselves in life as if they were already partly dead, the stress having been on decorum and poise. Why, I wondered, did we harp on the deathly during life? The dead seemed not to harp on livingness during death.” This is a Romantic conceptualization of life and death opposed to that of “planetarity,” and it also happens to be a convenient one for somebody intent, however unconsciously, on consummating his own ruin, believing that he has ultimately failed to truly live, that his life has been wasted, that those precious months as a man of twenty and twenty-one were his one shot, resolutely fumbled. An epigraph for the fifth and final section of LORD BYRON’S DOCTOR, that which culminates in our narrator’s suicide, presents a final articulation with regard to death, pulled from Polidori’s 1816 treatise ON THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH. “Man can wind himself up so as to suffer death as he would the amputation of a finger. We have seen three boys, none of whom were above 18, walk with a foot so firm and a countenance so little changed to death, that we ask ourselves, is this the dread of all?” What the cited passage signifies, naturally, is the ultimate concretion of fate in the form of terminal resignation. What is of death is, for the doctor, first of the fleshly and the earthy. LORD BYRON’S DOCTOR opens with a bawdy tour de force, paragraph after paragraph treating us to chambermaids felled upon as though by thunderbolts, the “wrenching off” of “millinery,” et cetera. It is immediately established that Lord Byron demands that his erogenous member be inspected by his resident physician with great regularity. “His fondness for his own sex had not escaped me, of course (to think so were tantamount to missing the mountainous quality of an Everest), so I held back, I shrank from inspecting too closely, as from inhaling too deep that odd aroma of his lower body: mothballs and cowshed admixed with a soupçon of leather.” Later in the novel, after many a similar inspection has been granted, Polidori makes a show of disparaging the distended belly of the congenitally girth-disposed Byron, “past which he could not see down to the thing that fired him and took him beneath dog-sprayed bridges in the depths of night, there to kill the stone-ache or the itch with no matter whom or what.” A homosexual dimension is engaged in a relatively forthright manner, as Byron and Shelley are very much open to the libertine transvaluation of values well in advance of Nietzsche. Shame and desire figure in Polidori’s visit to a Turkish bath as well as the receipt of curiously intimate kisses from Byron when Byron believes Polidori is unconscious (in the aftermath of that opium binge). The good doctor believes himself blasé about such matters, above the “deinosis” that was the subject of his “Edinburgh treatise on nightmares” (“meaning to see things in their very worst aspect—or, even likelier, the disease of doing so without pause”); he may try to convince himself of whatever he wants, but surely it is the shame and indignity he experiences habitually but goes to considerable pains to avoid confessing that assure deinosis will be every bit as much his cause of death as will be Prussic acid. Deinosis is the shame smuggled into Romanticsm from the 18th century Gothic, and in certain respects LORD BYRON’S DOCTOR is directly engaged with Gothic literature, as was Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN. West's novel, before its bawdy onslaught and even before the introductory epigraphs, commences with a brief history lesson, reminding us that the events of 1816 coincide with the eruption of Tambora, an Indonesian volcano, “largest eruption in recorded history,” resulting in an unusually cool European summer the year Byron, the Shelleys, Claire Clarmont, and Polidori tell their famous ghost stories to one another in Switzerland, as depicted in Ken Russell’s outrageously baroque 1986 film GOTHIC. The fleshly and earthy come to bear first through the almost comically salacious details regarding copulatory acts and Byron’s obsession with his sex organ. Soon the elements that will feature in FRANKENSTEIN are circulating in a general way. “If life had once been created, as Shelley argued, could it not be created again?” Polidori is increasingly obsessed with disincorporated human parts and aberrant configurations, some of this practically the stuff of THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE. If as an early boy Romantic he had placed flowers into the chest cavities of cadavers, he is toward the end of his life collecting organs in preservative. The young doctor’s tragedy is the deinosis he would prefer to disavow, such that it must come out sideways. It can be traced back through telling vacillations. There is the prostitute Gaby, whom he reveres absurdly, until his participation in a sordid threeway disabuses him of any sense of her purity. It is only too late that he becomes convinced he loves Claire Clairmont, their first sexual congress having been preceded by his peeling leeches from her body. The contradictions in his nature and the flimsiness of self-decipt are what drive Polidori to laudanum and its quelling of “the appetitive side.” In telling himself that he, tadpole next to a whale, despises Byron and “Percy Bitch,” the doctor seeks only to further suppress the self-knowledge he cannot face directly. His vampyre tale already tells something closer to the truth vis-a-vis “the evil power instinct in a companion.” Of course, the ultimate final insult is that it was for a time commonly believed that Byron must have written THE VAMPYRE. Not the tadpole, surely.

[Ungelic_is_us · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's only so much whinging about Lord Byron's "tackle" that I can take.

I really wanted to enjoy this book a bit more, but the self-indulgent intellectual wankery (of the characters) eventually sapped all interest. Not terribly surprising, since that's how I generally feel about Percy Shelley and Byron anyway.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul West was a deft and versatile writer, able to employ a variety of voices and styles in treating a wide range of subjects. None of the six novels I’ve read have been remotely similar in subject, but all of them (The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests; The Fifth of November; O.K.—The Corral, the Earps, and Doc Holliday; Cheops—A Cupboard for the Sun; and Terrestrials) have been similar in the way they eschew plot/action for milieu, rumination, and nuance. Lord Byron’s Doctor is no different. West voices the real-life Dr. John William Polidori in a suitably florid early 19th century style, and Polidori relates events around his time spent with Lord Byron in Switzerland in 1816, when they resided together at the Villa Diodati with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Claire Clairmont (Mary’s stepsister).

Polidori acknowledges early on that he has none of the acumen of a Boswell to recount character or event, and the novel becomes a long suicide note. The novel begins brightly enough with promise and ambition, Polidori plucked from the hoi polloi to accompany Lord Byron on his tour of the continent, to tend to his club foot, his diet, and his venereal health. Polidori presumes that he has entered the realm of genius on equal footing, but he can gain no purchase, and he feels himself continually ignored, scorned, and humiliated in the company of Byron and Shelley. Polidori fawns and grovels, snarls and jousts, but all his maneuvers to win and retain Byron’s affection and respect are second-rate, mediocre, lacking sufficient wit. The tragedy, however, is that Polidori cannot rise by his own genius, and once banished from Byron's company, he finds himself unwilling to abide convention as a house-calling doctor in provincial Norwich.

It is both uncomfortably painful and comic to observe Polidori’s contortions and his self-deceptions. What pleasure Polidori does offer the reader, however—even as he spirals downward, his vision/emotion tainted by resentment—are revealing glimpses into the idiosyncracies of Byron, Shelley, et al., meant to tarnish but which instead liven personalities that have faded to monumental blandness.

[Thomas Sorokti · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.8/5 There are moments. Scholarly and imaginative. In the first 15 pages I am laughing at the debauchery, and then it keeps going, and I wonder when it will stop. West's fidelity to historical accuracy makes for a drowsy second act through the Alps. The most fascinating section is Poli's relationship with Claire, where she becomes a surrogate for Byron, well timed turn of the screw in the last section. Besides that, the style is clever, not necessarily good. Polidori is only occasionally a sympathetic narrator, but when it counts, West can really write with feeling (Poli's suicide is appropriately momentous). At the end of the day, I am glad to have read it.

[Jen Peach · Rating 1 out of 5]

An absolute waste of time. I don't know why I bothered to finish it. I expected something profound, or at least interesting, to happen. Instead, all it had was a bunch of whinging. If you enjoy Part One, you may enjoy the rest of the book. If you found Part One obnoxious and unnecessarily vulgar, I recommend putting it down in favor of another novel.

[Panagiotis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Τι να πει κανείς για; αυτό το βιβλίο. Από μόνο του είναι ένα κατόρθωμα. Μερικώς non - fiction αφού βασίζεται στα σπαράγματα του ημερολογίου που κρατούσε ο Πολιντόρι και κληρονόμησε στην αδελφή του, η οποία φρόντισε να το καταστρέψει σχεδόν ολοσχερώς, ο συγγραφέας σαν άλλος αρχαιολόγος και μετά απο πολύ κοπιαστική υποθέτω έρευνα μας δίνει το σπάραγμα της ψυχής ενός νέου που έχει πιαστεί στα δύχτια της γοητείας του λόρδου Βύρωνα. Η αποτύπωση της καθαρά ρομαντικής ψυχής των νέων, ο τρόπος σκέψης που σήμερα μας φαίνεται εντελώς ξένος. Η γέννηση του Φρανκεστάιν, η ιδιωτική ζωή των διάσημων πρωταγωνιστών όλα έρχονται στο φως μέσα από ένα πρίσμα που τους δίνει περίεργες διαστάσεις.Ο πρωταγωνιστής στοιχειωμένος από τους προσωπικούς του δαίμονες χάνεται κάτω από την συντριπτική μεγαλοπρέπεια της ιδιοφυίας. Η γλώσσα αρχαϊκή, στριφνή, πομπώδης όπως η εποχή δεν βοηθά τον αναγνώστη. Αυστηρά μόνο για αναγνώστες λάτρεις του Βύρωνα και της εποχής.

[Alan Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent...

[B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whether Polidori is simply a victim of his era or attempting friendship with a narcissist with a superiority complex, I find that Paul West, with STUNNING language might I add, nailed what it means for a soul to be deconstructed or built by the people they surround themselves with, but empathy is important for these people as well. It is no one's fault, blameless in conviction, as we live in the every day of our designated eras that have never particularly changed since the 1700s and that's OK, it's the science of existence. Have I mentioned the language? I adored this.