Some literary historians have contended that this “novel” burst upon the world without an acknowledged author because Mrs Shelley feared either that reviewers would never believe a woman her age the originator of such a brutal and abhorrent tale or that her notoriety as a wanton and unorthodox, even anarchic, female would poison its reception and sales. I offer a simpler reason for the absence of the author’s name from the title page: Mrs Shelley, though she introduced certain clarifying changes into the manuscript, neither conceived the story nor wrote it. The text of Frankenstein indisputably reveals its author to be the late Robert Walton. On the other hand, because that text consists largely of my creator’s partisan recitation of his own biography, even Walton deserves little credit beyond that due any conscientious scribe or amanuensis. In a sense, the book’s title simultaneously reveals its author. Why, then, would a person of Mrs Shelley’s talent and probity wish to recommend herself as the fountainhead of this monstrous story?
Initially, of course, she did not. Later, however, when the book created a nationwide stir, prompting a writer in Blackwood’s to put forward his sincere wishes for the putative author’s “future happiness,” thereby forgiving Mrs Shelley her unconventional past, it became harder to insist upon her role as an editor and ever more tempting to embrace the work as wholly the product of her own philosophical musings and storytelling proclivities. In 1831, this temptation led her to elaborate upon her husband’s mood-setting fiction of the ghost-story-writing competition at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816. Further, she irrevocably acknowledged authorship of Frankenstein by allowing the publishers of the revised edition of 1832 to feature prominently on its title page her name. Perhaps the fact that in the fourteen years between the two editions she had published three novels of her own, along with many accomplished incidental writings, effectively obscured for her the actual genesis of the work. Mrs Shelley suffered much in her heroic life, from the high-minded betrayals of her most cherished loved ones as well as from the untimely deaths of her husband and all but one of her children. Thus, I do not anathematise her for claiming unassisted creatorship of the one title-The Last Man, fine as it is, does not qualify-that enrolled her among the immortals.
Quitting Janalach, I blessedly had no foreknowledge of the events that would carry my distorted biography to the world. I wished only to atone for the crimes of my past life and to discover in my second incarnation a place of at least marginal acceptance. The necessity to hide, to make certain salubrious changes in myself as well as discreet contacts among the tribespeople of the ice coasts and the taiga, required discipline and fortitude. I hiked east, sustaining myself on lichens, bog moss, and the leaves and spring fruit of several different kinds of stunted shrubs. I made skis of larchwood and built myself a movable blind of mammoth bones and evergreen foliage. The blind enabled me to skirt the encampments of nomads, and the fluid edges of reindeer herds, without betraying to either man or beast my presence in or near their environs.
After several months’ travel and the overmastering of many hardships, however, two Chukchi hunters caught me traversing a barren expanse of tundra and let fly at me from their compound bows a barrage of arrows. That I dragged a travois and attired myself as a human being enraged rather than conciliated them. I had trespassed their demense, and my size convicted me as a likely scourge of their hunting grounds.
Two arrows struck home, their walrus-ivory points embedding themselves in my flesh, one above my hip and the other in my calf. I roared bitterly. I menaced the bowmen with broad semaphoring gestures. Uncowed, they muttered unintelligibly, perhaps disappointedly, before retreating out of sight beyond a fluted sastruga.
Thus abandoned, I sought to minister to my wounds. I snapped off the arrow shafts and removed my leggings to expose the embedded points. In this half-naked state, I would have presented a prodigiously vulnerable target, had my Chukchi tormentors returned with reinforcements. I made haste, then, to dislodge the ivory barbs with the tip of a skinning knife. The pain was slight, but a copious oozing of pale blood accompanied this surgery. With spruce resin and rags I dressed my wounds. Then, lame and sore, I drew on my leggings and retreated several miles to an orphaned copse of cedars. Therein I erected a hut of branches and sailcloth in which to mull my outcast state and to recoup my vigour.
This recoupment, although at the time I hardly knew it, protracted into a hibernation akin to my death sleep in the ice cavern far to the west. A blizzard stormed and departed. The twilit autumn turned to night. I may have had some imperfect consciousness of time’s passage, but in my womblike shelter, the lashing of the sleet, the lamentations of the wind, and the brink starlight strewn above the grove chimed in me as inward rather than outer phenomena. In my stupefaction I reposed much as a salmon, stunned by the cuff of a bear and twitching on a rock, would nonetheless intuit its fate.
Eventually, I awoke to ice, snow, and uncouth Aeolian music. My wounds had healed. Revitalised, I fought clear of my wintry entombment and journeyed again towards the Utopia of my innocent fancy…
At dinner, Curriden griped Kizzy’d put baking soda instead of baking powder into her biscuits. (Or vice versa.) They looked like “baby cow flops” and tasted like “carbon-paper ashes.”
“Mrs Lorrows has had an off day,” Jumbo defended her.
“Uh-uh,” Kizzy said. “But I sometimes has a tumble day when the likes of yall jabbers yo ugly spite.”
“Mr Curriden has had an off day too,” Jumbo said.
“These biscuits could drop an ox,” Curriden said. “From the inside or out, eaten or thrown.”
“From here on out, Mister Reese,” Kizzy said, pointing a witchy finger at him, “pray God I don’t pyson yo tea.”
I scrambled back upstairs to find my place in Jumbo’s log, and the argument in the kitchen-the feud-got louder. Soon, though, I was hip-deep in Jumbo’s autobiography, and the noisy dipsy-do downstairs might as well’ve originated in Zanzibar. I no longer heard it.
31
My Second Life (Continued)
Initially without aim or plan, I wandered the coldest and least-known wildernesses of Siberia, from its northernmost bays to the sparse taiga forests of the Kolyma Mountains, and many other remote locales besides. Why did I live?
At length I found reasons: to atone for the murders I had committed as Frankenstein’s outcast get; to discover a suitable resting place for my late progenitor; to enter human society as a worthy and productive citizen.
Vain hopes!
The cold agreed with me, as I have said, and I had little trouble sustaining myself even on thin soups of such despised vegetable matter as lichens, bark, evergreen needles, moss, and the tubercules and roots of many an unprepossessing shrub. As one item in my continuing penance, I had resolved never to eat flesh again, and had perfectly heeded this self-commandment. Other opportunities for atonement seldom arose, however, and I began to sink into a lonely despondency inimical to my most basic goals.
The body of my creator ever posed a difficulty, acting as an impediment to my travels, aimless though they were. By now, it had suffered much from exposure to the elements and from fluctuations of temperature. Frankenstein’s once handsome face, albeit pallid from inward struggle and his final illness, now resembled that of a tortoise. His nose suggested a beak, his mouth a V-shaped scar, his throat a desiccated wattle. During a brief period of inattention, I had allowed a magpie to pluck out one of his frozen eyeballs; the other had oozed away over days of blinding-nor do I use the word in jest-sunshine.