The word for yellow in French is jaune.

Mission #2: Castle of Chillon

There are seven pillars of Gothic mould, / In Chillon's dungeons deep and old, / There are seven columns, massy and grey, / Dim with a dull imprison'd ray, / A sunbeam which hath lost its way

 The Prisoner of Chillon, Lord Byron 1816

Found Byron's sunbeam.

While Mary was writing Frankenstein, Shelley & Byron took off on a boat tour of Lake Geneva, on their own writer's quest to follow Rousseau's footsteps, which took them to the other end of the crescent-shaped Lac Leman, to the far town of Montreux, where the two poets visited the Chateau de Chillon, where I spent Thursday afternoon; a splendid day in the sun with rocks and lake and tulips tumbling over the lake and the Alps all around and the castle always in sight. On the journey, a storm caught them in the middle of the lake, nearly wrecking the two of them in their little boat, and Shelley wrote horribly prescient things in his journal about his brush with death on the water - but that wouldn't happen till six years later - this trip, he came out of it okay and so they went a'touring the old castle, which is famous now for the pillar where Byron engraved his name, but the truth might be that a castle guard carved the poet's name shortly after his visit, to capitalize on the Byron's fame in order to encourage Swiss tourism. What none of the guidebooks says on this point is how pockmarked every pillar is with graffiti from a thousand visitors before and after Byron, hieroglyphs carved so thick, the stones could very well be tree bark. So Byron was hardly the first to deface the castle - if it was even him. Everyone wants his name in stone. I sat in the seven-pillared room for a good long while (did not deface it) and thought about the days when two poets could pull right up to the castle in their boat and kick around having lord knows what conversations while looking at stones, stones, and more stones, with no souvenir shops and hardly any English around, avoiding the ladies in their lives, thinking about freedom and history how to change the world via poetry. The funny thing about these places and these visits is that you go half-wishing a ghost would step out of the wall, and even though you know this cannot happen, the thought of it, the proximity of the past, of memory, even just the 200-year-old silhouette of a building, takes hold of your whole life for the few moments you're there, and those other eras become more true, all of a sudden, because of the way the light falls in that other place.

 I am stationed down the lakeshore from the castle at a hotel about seventy-five years out of date, with a church next door, a casino across the street, and a 1911 elevator with plush red carpet. Montreux could not be more enchanting. This morning, Dimanche, the lord's day, I woke to the sound of a coughing European in the next room mixed with the floating harmonies of the choir coming out of the church. Mary wrote in her journal about the songs of the vintagers that surrounded Maison Chapuis, how the women had masculine voices that were rough but still pleasant. (MWS was daintier than you picture her, and often catty and overcritical, even when complimenting; sharp-tongued and that's why I like her.) Still, I know what she means, about local music, that raw sound, homegrown. It was lovely, and not terrifically characteristic of Montreux, which is otherwise not at all raw. I'd try to tell you what Montreux is like except that I think it may not be like any other place there is. I suppose in American comparisons, you could cross Miami, Aspen, and, say, Savannah, and you'd have something like Montreux. Freddie Mercury lived here, and now his statue rocks forever on the edge of the lake. The microclimate keeps it warm, so we have palmetto trees and Arizona cypresses and a flower-lined promenade on the lake, while the white-capped alps roar up around us at all angles, keeping the cold out. The light collects blue on the lake all afternoon, then burns out at sunset with a glow I'm going to remember when I'm ninety. Tonight there was exactly one half moon in the sky. The first theme of this trip is literary, that's true, but the second theme, is to look at nothing but beautiful things for two solid weeks. Everywhere I turn is another eye-full of glassy lake, serene hillside, dramatic mountain, crumbling villa, marvelous tulip, cascading willow, you name it, any combination thereof. A visual detox to extend my life span by two years, at least.

Mission #1: Villa Diodati

Wednesday, I got up and marched myself to the exact opposite shore of Lake Geneva from my hotel to visit Byron's 1816 house in Cologny, Villa Diodati, which he named. Public transit goes everywhere, and could have taken me there easily, but I walked the whole way. You get to know a place better on foot. There's room for surprise on foot. You feel lost, then you find your way, and there's that pioneer sense of accomplishment from getting there without help. Anyway, I had the time, and Mary and Percy did not have busses, so it seemed worth it to walk the six kilometers from my red light district to the manicured residential district of Cologny at their speed.

Cologny is a hamlet of tasteful old and new houses hidden behind perfect foliage or shoulder-high stone walls. It sits diagonally on a slope above the lake. Some of the gates to driveways have gilded shields with the flags of foreign countries, like Qatar. You get there by a windy road that's too narrow for today's traffic, and people are driving fast, country club types speeding from one beautiful destination to the next. Eventually, the terrible but lovely road puts you out in a town square with an ancient church, a tea-room, a restaurant, and an old stone fountain marked "potable," as though expecting people on foot to wander in on their literary pilgrimages thirsty & weary & etc. Kids on the playground chatter away in English and French, and there's a boutique "American foods" grocery store next to the epicerie. Even the pedestrian crosswalk sign is charming and anglophilic. The silhouetted man has on a tiny bowler hat, so I pretended he was Eliot's Prufrock. (Bit too modern to be a Byron.)  I poked my head into the American foods store, but purchased picnic items from the epicerie. Filled canteen at sacred ancient but potable water fountain. Studied map. Onward through the windy roads and the hidden homes of the Genevois, with their stone walls and lovely hedges. Villa Diodati comes out of nowhere, at a perfectly ordinary (or Geneva-ordinary, which is terminally picturesque) bend in a road. You're just walking along spying on the roofs of houses, when the house behind the wall in front of you has a plaque at eye level commemorating it in French as the residence of Lord Byron, poete Anglais. I did a little double take, gawked, expected a soundtrack to kick in, and when it did not, I stepped backwards, then forwards, to do the arrival over again with appropriate reverence. I spied on every single observable detail of the not-very-observable lawn and garden of the Villa Diodati, which is now private apartments. They're very good at gardening to put off spies, these Genevois.

There's a lemon tree poking over the wall, and a greenhouse full of delicious looking things, and I had to stop spying when the gardener came out to do things with the lemon tree. You can't visit the house itself, but there's a public park next door, and they've set a stone bench in the exact spot where one can best view the mansion. I almost turned my ankle in the knotty grass, and thought of the stories of Percy turning his ankle that summer, which I have always ascribed to his ridiculous enthusiasm, but listen, the ground is bumpy there! (Or was he jumping out of a window heroically? I left my research back in New York, determined to do this all from memory.) Mary and Percy lived just below, in Montalegre (literally a stone's throw away), in a house that isn't there anymore called Maison Chapuis. But she got the dare to write Frankenstein in Diodati, so I am making my Byron monuments into Mary monuments. At the bottom of the lawn, there's a footpath worn into the ground. It would go down to the lake if there weren't other houses there now, and I pictured Mary & step-sister Claire cutting delicately through the grass in difficult shoes and long skirts. It is a storybook place, every inch. Next to the footpath, an electrical box bore the only jagged imagery I could find all day: a caution sign with a sketch of a skull, and I thought maybe Mary would've approved of the imagery, as well as the day, which was gorgeous and blue, with the clouds changing every ten minutes, the very opposite of her gloomy thunderous 1816 summer. I spent a few hours trawling the neighborhood. Studied the horizon she would have studied, the gleaming mountains. A couple of kids came rocketing down the park with cigarettes and one of them unzipped his fly and took a piss, grinning back at his friend. Some construction men sat on a bench and had their lunch. The clouds changed. Nothing whatsoever happened. I thought a little bit about Act 2, and then packed up my picnic and made my way back to the city, mission #1, check.

Geneva

The way the plane lands in Geneva, you come sweeping in over Lac Leman and the farms and the vineyards just like a camera panning over the countryside at the beginning of a film. I got here on a drizzly day, which made that descent even more gorgeous, with all the colors of the green fields and the red rooftops and yellow squares of flowered meadows showing up solid without the sun to blind you. It is beautiful, like they say, "enchanting." Also: tidy, quiet, on occasion, quirky. Feels like proper time travel, coming into a new country that way, through a curtain of cloud. I'm staying in the "red light district" of Geneva, which is really kind of a diet version of red light, if I ever saw one. On one block, there are some skeevy-looking cabarets, which I didn't visit (but maybe should have, in the spirit of getting writerly experience etc, if I were Hemmingway, I would have, you know what I do instead? I go to chocolate shops), but otherwise it just looks overall about an inch less elegant than the rest of Geneva. Like, the Swiss version of "red light" just means "not exactly beautiful."

So, Day 1 is spent sleeplessly trudging through gorgeous Geneva to fight off jet lag, I walk one million footsteps up and down the cobblestones of Vielle Ville, grasping at French, saying the couple words I remember from Belgian childhood repeatedly as though I could assemble my three easiest phrases into a whole language "je veux, je veux" "merci" "avez-vous" "avez-vous je veux merci, oui, oui, n'est-ce pas," and did have an entire halting conversation with a museum security guard about "la lune dans une [whatever the word is for painting, peinture?]" the moon in a painting that looks at you no matter what angle you stand at, like the Mona Lisa's eyes. Security Guard asks where I am from, "Brooklyn, New York," and he says "ah!" and lights up and says things in French that I don't remember, something about having been to Miami, New York, Chicago, and, wait for it, Iowa City. "Ah!" I say, and fumble en francais, "J'ai... attende.... universite.... en Iowa City!" He says else something in French I can't recall, so I just say, "Oui, c'est tres belle, Iowa City," like a kindergartner. That's all my French.

Apparently I look French enough, or urban enough, or something, (it's the trench coat) because people in the city keep asking me for directions. "Vous etes de Geneve?" I throw my hands in the air, "um, uh, Americaine! Je suis desolee."

Museum, monuments, chocolat chaud, one full hour spent among a crowd of French tourists in a tiny belfry, where some leader amongst them plays a tiny piano wired up to the massive network of bells in the top of St. Peter's Cathedral. I say nothing, they think I am French and part of their group. He seems to be asking the group if they want to play, and people take turns plunking out scraps of Freres Jacques, etc, on the keyboard that rings the bells, and I wish that Katie Hathaway or Adam Gwon was with me to play one of our musical theater songs all over Geneva from the bells of St. Peter, maybe one of the waltzes? (We have waltzes in both shows. Adam's waltz is about the triumph of love, Katie's waltz is about the lie of it.) But if I have only a fraction of French, I have even less piano, so I content myself to watch the other tourists play the little keyboard that turns the gears that pull the wires that move the bells big enough for God.

Two hours of sleep around sunset, then I'm up all night, and the next day it's off to Rive Gauche for Mission 1 of the Mary Shelley tour: Villa Diodati.

To be continued.

Geek travel.

A little over a year ago, I met Katie Hathaway in a song-writing workshop, and we were going to write a musical together about wrecking a car. About a month after that, I got a travel prize from New Dramatists for a Mary-Shelley-themed adventure in Europe. After the travel prize came through, I said to Katie, "You know what? What if we did a Mary Shelley musical instead of wrecking the car?" She said yes. So we started writing songs. I booked plane tickets and forgot to learn any languages and time kind of got away from me, and now it's a year later and here we have seven songs, three scenes and a sketch of the whole show (thanks to residencies at New Dramatists, Overturn Ensemble, and the MacDowell Colony) and it's time for me to go on that trip. So far, the bulk of our work has been on Act One, which is Mary's childhood & teen years in England - scribbling by mother's grave, courtship with Percy, and imagined Creatures in the Skinner Street attic. I said I wouldn't think about Act Two until I'd been to Europe and back again. My plane takes off in a week, but I have been packed for two days. (Except books, I can't decide which books to take.) My good ten-year-old suitcase has been sitting by the laundry closet all weekend. Old suitcase. This may be its last trip.

Rough plan:
A) See the spot in Geneva where MWS wrote the novel.
B) See the spot in Rome where Percy is buried.
C) Learn to make pasta and hunt truffles during culinary tour of Abruzzo, Italy.
D) Think real hard about Act Two of The Romancers, our musical.


Granted, item C is a bit off-topic. I do think it's in the spirit of the Shelleys to trek off into wilder, older Italy with a bunch of strangers and learn how to harvest saffron and whatnot. It will certainly improve my vocabulary. New Dramatists' Executive Director Joel Ruark says I am allowed to have a good time and learn to cook as long as I get material out of it for future plays and fulfill the "New Frontier" subtitle of the Lippman Family Award that made this trip possible.* So, going truffle-hunting in Abruzzo counts, even if there's no literary footnote.** In fact, it might count better than looking at old places where dead people once were, since a lot of those old places have since been turned into suburbs.

Playwriting is pretty weird a lot of the time, and then every once in a while there's a gorgeous moment when it does feel like the movies and you go "oh, that's why I'm here." This month's one of those months.

*Lippman Family "New Frontier" Award. Created as a memorial to the late John Lippmann, a much-loved and respected New Dramatists board member, the Lippmann Family "New Frontier" Award seeks to assist playwrights in opening up new frontiers of the imagination, through travel and adventure.

**Well except there is one footnote. The last stop on the culinary tour is Sulmona, birthplace of Ovid, for a honey-tasting and lunch. Thusly, Ovid:

My soul would sing of metamorphoses.

But since, o gods, you were the source of these

bodies becoming other bodies, breathe

your breath into my book of changes: may

the song I sing be seamless as its way

weaves from the world's beginning to our day.

Why Geneva?

Historians with the benefit of hindsight call 1816 the Year Without Summer, a little ice age precipitated by the eruption of a volcano in Indonesia the year before. Crops failed, rivers froze, populations died, sunsets went wild (see JMW Turner's paintings), and the storms over Lake Geneva broke with particular violence, inspiring Mary Shelley to dream her dark dreams. Imagine her, sitting in a chilly villa with depressed hypochondriac poets, watching lighting carve up the sky, caught by a preternatural impulse to investigate man's connection to the primal forces of the earth, and she's right. She anticipates, presciently, the longings of her readership and the forward momentum of science in society. Full of awe and dread, there's Mary, soothsayer, knowing nothing of plate tectonics, channeling the frisson of Mount Tambora into her “story” as she called it in her journal. “Write my story,” she wrote to herself, in the shadow of the greatest poets of her day. Then she wrote Frankenstein. She was 19.