Frankissstein. Jeanette Winterson

endeavouring to hide from each other our disappointment. This was the land of liberty. This was where my mother had come to find freedom. Where she had written The Rights of Woman. We thought to find like minds and open hearts. In reality, the cottagers overcharged us for every little thing. The farms were dirty and broken. The laundresses stole buttons and braids. Our guides were surly, and the donkey Shelley hired – that we might take it in turns to ride – that donkey was lame.

      Does something ail you? asked Shelley, disturbed by my silences, and I did not say, yes, the sour milk the sweating cheese the rank sheets the fleas the rainstorms the rot the beds stuffed with straw stuffed with mites. The soft vegetables the gristly meat the lice-teemed fish the weevil loaves. The distress of my father. Thoughts of my mother. The state of my underclothes.

      Only the heat, my love, I replied.

      He asked me to bathe naked with him in the river. I was too shy. Instead I watched his body, white and slender and sculpted. There is something unworldly about his form. An approximation – as though his body has been put on hastily, so that his spirit might walk in the world.

      We read Wordsworth out loud to distract the hours, but France was not poetry; it was peasants.

      At last, knowing my distress, Shelley secured us places on a barge that floated out of France and down the Rhine.

      Was it better? Smug Switzerland. Drunken Germany. More wine, I said. And so we passed our days, underfed, over-drunk, longing for the soul and not knowing where to find it.

       What I want does exist if I dare to find it.

      One day, not far from Mannheim, we saw the towers of a castle rising out of the mist like a warning. Shelley adores towers, woods, ruins, graveyards, any part of Man or Nature that broods.

      And so we followed the track, tortuous, towards it, ignoring the staring looks of peasants at their forks and hoes.

      At the foot of the castle at last we stopped and shivered. Even in the hot afternoon sun it felt cold.

      What is this place? asked Shelley of a man on a cart.

      Castle Frankenstein, he said.

      Desolate place of brooding.

      There is a story, said the man, requiring money to tell it, and Shelley paid twice over, not disappointed by what he heard.

      The castle had belonged to an alchemist named Conrad Dippel. Too early his beloved wife died and, unable to bear his loss, he refused to bury her, determined to discover the secret of life.

      One by one, his servants abandoned him. He lived alone, and was seen at dawn and dusk wandering amidst the graveyards and charnel houses, dragging home what fetid bodies he could find, grinding the bones of corpses to mix with fresh blood. He believed he could administer this tincture to the newly deceased and revive them.

      The villagers grew to fear and hate him. Alike they must guard their dead, and alike listen for his footsteps, or the bridle bells of his horse. Many a time he burst into a house of grief. In a bottle he carried his filthy mixture, stuffing it into the slack mouth of the empty body as a goose is stuffed for liver pâté.

      There was no resurrection.

      At length, everyone in the surrounding villages came together and burned him alive in his castle.

      The very walls reek of dismemberment and death.

      I looked at the ruined place. An outside staircase, dark and tumbling, like a Piranesi nightmare, collapsed and grown through with weeds, leading spiral by spiral, step by step, down to where? What cellar of horror?

      I pulled my shawl close. The air itself has the cold of the grave.

      Come! I said to Shelley. We must leave this place.

      He put his arm around me and together we walked swiftly away. As we walked, he instructed me in the art of alchemy.

      The alchemists sought three things, said Shelley: the secret of turning lead into gold, the secret of the Elixir of Eternal Life, the homunculus.

      What is an homunculus? I asked.

      A creature not born of woman, he answered. A made thing, unholy and malign. A kind of goblin, misshapen and sly, infused with dark power.

      In the oppressive twilight of our winding walk back to the inn I thought of that thing; that fully-formed being not born of woman.

      And now that form has returned.

      And it is not small. No goblin.

      I feel as though my mind is a screen and on the other side of the screen there is a being seeking life. I have seen fish in an aquarium pushing their faces against the glass. I sense what I cannot say, except in the form of a story.

      I will call my hero (is he a hero?) Victor – for he seeks victory over life and over death. He will strive to penetrate the recesses of Nature. He will not be an alchemist – I want no hocus-pocus here – he will be a doctor, like Polidori, like Doctor Lawrence. He will discern the course of the blood, know the knot of muscle, the density of bone, the delicacy of tissue, how the heart pumps. Airways, liquids, mass, jelly, the cauliflower mystery of the brain.

      He will compose a man, larger than life, and make him live. I will use electricity. Storm, Spark, Lightning. I will rod him with fire like Prometheus. He will steal life from the gods.

      At what cost?

      His creature will have the strength of ten men. The speed of a galloping horse. The creature will be more than human. But he will not be human.

      Yet he suffers. Suffering, I do believe, is something of the mark of the soul.

      Machines do not suffer.

      My creator will not be a madman. He will be a visionary. A man with family and friends. Dedicated to his work. I will take him to the brink and make him leap. I will show his glory as well as his horror.

      I will call him Victor Frankenstein.

      This mind is the matrix of all matter.

      Max Planck

       Reality cannot bear very much of humankind.

      Your name?

      Ry Shelley.

      Press?

      Guest. I am a guest of Professor Stein.