It was the Year Without a Summer, 1816. A year earlier had witnessed one of the most cataclysmic geological events in recorded history. A volcano on a small Indonesian island had violent erupted, sending colossal amounts of sulfurous ash into the atmosphere, where it hung like a thick London fog over much of the northern hemisphere. Combined with a few other climatological anomalies taking place at the same time, the result was a meteorological nightmare that saw devastating June snowstorms destroy crops and kill people in New England and Canada. A Europe still struggling to deal with the effects of the original Napoleonic complex had to deal with rioting over the lack of food. Rivers overflowed and flooded, national emergencies were declared in Switzerland and it is estimated that the European rate of fatality doubled its yearly average. Even the middle of summer offered no relief from the cold rain.
In July of the Year Without a Summer, two of the most infamously famous poets of the Romantic Era escaped for a holiday in Switzerland with their two fabulous babes. In my opinion, Lord Byron was the better poet, though the consensus today tends to hand that accolade to Percy Shelley. Irregardless-yes, I prefer to use that one over its prefix-challenged grammatically correct version-of his literary talents, if you recognize the name Lord Byron at all, it may have more to do with the fact that Lord Byron was to poetry what Mozart was to opera and, much later, what Elvis Presley was to pop music. Indeed, he had a magnetic personality and was good looking, but he was also plagued by a club foot and chronically ill health. No doubt Lord Byron was especially affected by the Year Without a Summer. That may explain why the four lovers were joined on their vacation by Lord Byron’s personal physician, Dr. John Polidori. And if that isn’t a name perfectly suited to what took place during that vacation, then I don’t know what is.
The weather remained frightful and prohibited the vacationers from enjoying the sumptuous grounds near Lake Geneva. Instead, they were forced to remain indoors where the fire was delightful and indulge in indoor pleasures and wayward distractions. Perhaps even sex can get boring when that’s all there is to do (in Byron’s case where there was only one woman to do), but whatever the case one fateful night Lord Byron challenged his friends to a storytelling contest to see who could come up with the most horrifying tale. And people-by whom I mean me-say that competition is overrated and counterproductive to creativity. The fruits of that contest include Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Byron’s physician even joined in on the act, producing the pre-Dracula bloodsucking classic The Vampyre. The great irony of that weekend competition-and perhaps a lesson that modern writers should learn-is that the two very famous Romantic poets produced bupkiss with which to regale their audience. Mary’s husband-to-be Percy Bysshe Shelley apparently came a cropper. Lord Byron also apparently hit a creative dry spell at first. In time, however, that literary contest-perhaps the most fecund writing competition of all time-resulted in Lord Byron’s Manfred. Manfred is a play. Or possibly a poem. Maybe it’s best described as dramatic poem. Or a poetic drama. Frankly, it is very difficult to identify exactly what kind of literary medium Manfred should be filed under, but suffice to say it is a bizarre reinvention of the Faust legend.
The titular character Manfred is absolutely one of the premier interpretations of the Byronic hero: the handsome talented, passionate, self-destructive rebel who rejects societal conformity. As you continue reading, it may help to picture Montgomery Clift in your mind when I describe Manfred. I cannot think of another actor better suited to play any Byronic hero than Montgomery Clift. Manfred is a nobleman living in a castle in the Swiss alps, an intensely melancholic man who rejects the very idea that salvation is possible because he discards the potential for religious traditions possessing that kind of supernatural power. This somewhat atheistic purview could be the genesis behind his emotional incapacity to accept and deal with the death of Astarte, his sister and partner in incest. (Just one of the many sexual deviances that Lord Byron was said have committed.) Equally true is that Manfred is not yet ready to accept the possibility of his own mortality. Manfred engages in a religious discourse with an Abbot in which he asserts that religion has no faculty to offer penitence and salvation. Manfred possesses an obsessive desire to take flight from the comforting illusions offered by Christian religion, and comprehensively rejects all the rituals involved in the pursuit of Christian salvation. Earlier I described Manfred’s belief system as atheistic, but that’s not entirely accurate. It’s not the case that Manfred rejects God or refuses to invest belief in His possibility; at one point Manfred states that it doesn’t matter what he has done in his life, good or bad, because that is a point of discourse that can exist only between him and gatekeeper of heaven. This statement indicates that Manfred accepts the possibility of the existence of an afterlife. What Manfred implicitly is asserting is a vital point that has chilled every member of the clergy who has ever existed: there is absolutely no need for any institution on earth to interfere in a human’s journey from mortality to heaven or hell. If that is the case, of course, then one would think Manfred to be akin to Camus’ Sisyphus, content in the knowledge that he is the author of his own existence. Yes, Manfred may actually be the first existential work of literature. And yet Manfred is anything but content. In fact, he is perhaps one of the most miserably unhappy figures in Romantic poetry. Or drama. Or whatever it is that Manfred is. Why isn’t Manfred as deliriously happy with his existential knowledge as Lord Byron’s other great creation, Don Juan?
Quite unlike Don Juan, Manfred has chosen the path of self-imposed exile from the world of men. He has thrown himself headlong into scientific experimentation, as well as magic, rejecting one religion for another. Yet even science and magic has not been capable of providing him with the necessary tools for getting answers to his great questions concerning the meaning of life and the potential for earthly immortality. The Romantic poets were in part engaging in a reaction against the Enlightenment’s assertion that life proceeded in a logical, rational way. Eschewing the scientific advances, they looked instead to the sublimity of nature and indulged in emotions. The failure of science to do for Manfred what he rejects as possible through religion may possibly indicate that Lord Byron was on a spiritual quest that night in Switzerland. The contest was intended not to create scary tales, but horror. Horror in its larger sense was a key emotional state that the Romantics were interested in. The Romantic concept of horror evolved into the existential concept of dread. Anyone who has actually read Frankenstein may find it perplexing that it’s not a horror novel at all, but an existential meditation on the horror of being a God that breathes life into imperfect creatures. Although Manfred dies still rejecting religion as holding the power for salvation, the fact that Manfred is a pitiful suffering creature leads one to suppose that perhaps Manfred is a philosophical meditation that considers the frightening possibility-for some, not all-that it just may be true that the only path toward mortal contentment while one awaits their own inescapable extermination is through the comfort afforded by ritualistic religious beliefs.
