Last week, Benjamin Markovits dropped in on the Salmagundi Club to speak to the Byron Society about his new novel, Imposture, which features John Polidori, whose most famous literary work, The Vampyre, was attributed to Byron by 19th-century readers—and so Polidori, taking advantage of a slight physical resemblance, passes himself off as Byron both on and off the written page. Before the reading, I spoke with Markovits in a library on the second floor of the club’s Fifth Avenue digs. “I’d wanted to write about Byron for a while,” he said of the story’s origins, “but I worried that he was a very hard character to do because he writes himself so very well.” Hence the strategy of writing about Byron through the perspective of one of his inner circle; Markovits has already completed a sequel of sorts which centers around Byron’s wife, Annabella, after which he’ll work on a contemporary project before finally tackling Byron directly.
“I had a lot of sympathy for Polidori from the beginning,” Markovits says of writing Imposture. “I’m interested in the moments in people’s lives where the question whether the place they’ve made for themselves in the world best expresses who they are, and the fact that, in spite of his vanities and foolishness, Polidori could see himself objectively endeared him to me.”