Undead Page 3

From that moment, Whitby itself became a powerful ingredient in Stoker’s text. He drew on the place so extensively for research, imagery, fact and atmosphere that the Whitby segments pull back the covers on the novel’s genesis.

  For example: Harker has a fiancée back in England, Mina Murray, good Irish name. We first meet Mina through a series of letters exchanged between her and her friend Lucy Westenra, who is entertaining marriage proposals from not one, not two but three gentlemen. Mina climbs on a train and travels to see Lucy – in Whitby.

  When Count Dracula (for reasons that I won’t give away) flees Transylvania in a ship named Demeter with fifty caskets full of earth, the ship, under full sail, but with all the crew dead, runs into Whitby and founders on the shore. Stoker, on his vacation, heard a story from the north Yorkshire coastguard about a Russian ship five years earlier that ran into Whitby with no crew visible; they were all below decks praying for salvation from the storm The ship’s name? Dmitry.

  Whitby has a legend about Saint Hilda, the seventh-century abbess from the great ruin on the hill above the town. Dressed in white, she appears in her gaping windows at night. Here comes Stoker’s Chapter 15: “Suddenly, as I turned round, I thought I saw something like a white streak, moving between two dark yew trees at the side of the churchyard farthest from the tomb…. A little ways off, beyond a line of scattered juniper trees, which marked the pathway to the church, a white dim figure flitted in the direction of the tomb…”

  The connections abound (as Stoker might say). From the gravestones in Whitby churchyard, he took names and gave them to people whom Mina encounters. Bram talked to old fishermen; Mina talks to old fishermen. He made entries in his own diary and used them word for word in Dracula – weather observations, descriptions of houses and roofs, a funeral. And he surely climbed the one hundred and ninety-nine steps to the Abbey that so exhausted Mina: ”The time and distance seemed endless, and my knees trembled and my breath came labored, as I toiled up the endless steps.”

  If that’s how he used real life for a location, then we’re licensed to look at Stoker’s own mythology again and ask, well, who was Dracula? Was Sir Henry Irving the real-life model, as so many have hinted? In June, 1878, twelve years before Whitby, Stoker recorded a telling moment in his London associations with Irving and stored it away.

  A shrewd impresario thought that Wagner’s opera, already a success in London, The Flying Dutchman should have a play version. Irving starred, and, as Stoker reported, “gave one a wonderful impression of a dead man fictitiously alive. I think his first appearance was the most striking and startling thing I ever saw on the stage… It was marvelous that any living man should show such eyes. They really seemed to shine like cinders of glowing red out of the marble face.”

  Fast forward to the last paragraphs of Dracula: “He was deathly pale just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictiveness I knew so well.”

  It’s safer, though, to look for the roots of Dracula in the general context of the immense nineteenth century. By 1897 (the book, bound in yellow, was published in May), Gothic had long been in vogue. In England, the Industrial Revolution had now created mighty images – great machinery in vast gloomy halls of labor, but from his life in Dublin, Stoker already had access to Irish Gothic visions. Traveling to courthouses around the country, he saw plenty of Irish ruins. And I can tell that he mined Irish mythology; it’s full of shape-shifting, and Dracula appears as a dog or a bat.

  It’s a rich seam; people spirited away by the Little People; princes disguised as butterflies; warrior feats and warring monarchs; vast feasts; stirring chess games; wise men; maidens and heroic lovers; Le Fanu and his opium-fuelled fantasies – these were all jewels in the crown of a man with a dramatic turn of mind.

  He had also seen a great new cultural movement - death. When Bram was a schoolboy, Prince Albert, the consort and beloved husband of England’s Queen Victoria died. The royal widow then made mourning a vogue. According to her mythology, Victoria had a marble cast made of her pretty little feet, and she herself placed it in his tomb. Then she had another made of Albert’s right hand, which was eventually laid to rest on her own body (when dead). She wore mourning jewelry made of Whitby jet.

  The Pre-Raphaelites had been up and running too. Vibrant (if a touch sickly) in art and literature, they stirred romance into their grief. Some of it became legend (maybe it started out that way too). When the beautiful Lizzie Siddall, beloved wife of the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, died prematurely, her stricken husband placed some of his poems that hadn’t yet been published in her grave. A year later, when he came back to reclaim them for publishing, Lizzie’s abundant red hair hadn’t stopped growing and now filled the tomb.

  And in any case, Bram Stoker had had the classic nascence of many writers - so much literature has been birthed in childhood illness. Confined to bed for long stretches, you read and then you daydream. Walking in ancient places, their ghosts move into your spirit and hide there, waiting to come out. Passing every day the house of a man who, amid technicolored hazes of exotic drugs, was creating strange, strange fictions - how could you not want to build your own tales of mystery and suspense? You could even become your own hero. In which spirit Bram did not lack; he once made a famous dive into the river Thames to try and save a man. The fellow drowned but the world applauded Stoker.

  VI: How Do You Like Your Stake?

  One morning in May 1897, eight days before Dracula was published, Stoker supervised a four-hour reading at the Lyceum Theater. He had a dual intention – to nail down the rights to all performances, and to persuade Irving to act in a play based on the book. They needed the money. The Lyceum was teetering.

  Although more than a dozen serious actors took part, nobody came. Two friends bought tickets. Stage-hands and other staff watched it. The empty theater rang with the thud of failure.

  Irving thudded loudest. Deliberately. He read the part of Dracula like a vampire who hated blood. Stoker’s son, Noel, used to tell the story of the exchange in the dressing-room afterward, when Bram asked Irving, “How did you like it?”

  Irving replied, “Dreadful.”

  The play, then, never happened, and hence came the myth, I think, that Stoker based the Count on Sir Henry, who lived by night.

  Few agreed with Irving’s downer. The Times of London “would not recommend it to nervous persons for evening reading.” Its neighbor, The Daily News, said that Stoker had drawn on the “handy old-world legend of the werewolf or vampire, with all the weird and exciting associations of blood sucking and human flesh devouring, and interweaving of the threads of a long story with an earnestness.” The Daily Mail said “the first thrill of horrible sensation came with the discovery that the driver and Count Dracula were one and the same person.”

  Two years later, the United States received the book multifariously. The San Francisco Chronicle called it “one of the most powerful novels of the day, and one set apart by its originality of plot and treatment.” Somebody at The Detroit Free Press obviously knew Stoker, and marveled that he had written it: “A great shambling, good-natured, overgrown boy… with a red beard, untrimmed, and a ruddy complexion, tempered somewhat by the wide open, full blue eyes… but he has done it, and done it well…”

  Read at random, the reviews undulate. “Too direct and uncompromising… It reads at times like a mere series of grotesquely incredible events but there are better moments… Mr. Stoker almost succeeds in creating the sense of possibility in impossibility – his object, assuming it to be ghastliness, is fairly well fulfilled… Isolated scenes and touches are probably quite uncanny enough to please those for whom they are designed… The narrative is remarkably exciting – altogether quite the best book Mr. Stoker has yet written… does great credit alike to his imagination and his descriptive power… Mr. Stoker has shown considerable ability in the use that he has made of all the available traditions of vampirology…”

  Individual admirers of proven repute came forwar
d, notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes: “My dear Bram Stoker… It is really wonderful how with so much exciting interest over so long a book there is never an anticlimax. It holds you from the very start and grows more and more engrossing until it is quite painfully vivid.”

  An early reviewer in the London Daily Telegraph called it “one of the most weird and spirit-quelling romances which have appeared for years,” yet went on to say “no part of the book is so good as the opening section.”

  He had fifty percent of a point. As a novel, Dracula lives strongest in those opening sequences. Judge their power by how familiar they’ve remained after more than a century. Gauge their impact by how much vampire stuff still descends from that first fifty pages.

  At the Borgo Pass, Jonathan Harker transfers from one coach to another. He grabs no more than a glimpse of the coachman; “The lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory.”

  To help him from coach to coach, this driver takes his arm “in a grip of steel.” They drive into the remote fastnesses of Transylvania, where the driver, as if by magic, faces down a pack of baying wolves. He delivers Harker to a castle with a front door that is “old and studded with large iron nails,” and the driver departs into the gloom with the coach and horses.

  When, at length, chains are rattled and bolts drawn back, the pale, gaunt nobleman who greets Harker has the same iron grip as the coachman. Though puzzled, Harker passes a pleasant enough evening with the Count, and later observes in his Journal that Count Dracula has pointed ears and pointed nails, and his halitosis that could strip the wallpaper – if there had been any. Down in the valley the wolves howl.

  Next morning, the shenanigans break out as Jonathan is shaving. “Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the Count’s voice saying to me, ‘Good morning.’ I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me… I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken. This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror!”

  Not only that – when he jumped at the Count’s stealthy and unseen entrance, Jonathan “had cut myself slightly.” Gentlemen, start your engines.

  “The cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin. I laid down the razor, turning as I did so half round to look for some sticking plaster. When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew away and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there.

  ‘Take care,’ he said, ‘take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous that you think in this country’.”

  As the day wears on, Harker begins to discover that he can’t move very far inside the castle. Every door is locked. Not only that, Count Dracula warns him that he must not sleep anywhere but the chamber allocated to him. To break his sense of being imprisoned, Harker disobeys the Count, and finds a room whose door at last yields. Inside, he drags out a couch and lies on it, gazing through the curtainless window at the moonlight.

  What happens next could have come straight from one of today’s soap-operas-with-fangs. Harker becomes aware that he’s not alone. “In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time I must be dreaming when I saw them, they threw no shadow on the floor.” A blonde, and two brunettes, “all three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear.”

  The girls move in: Harker thinks it’s his birthday; “I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation.” The blonde has first dibs: “The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and the chin and seemed to fasten on my throat.”

  Now read on.

  Millions and millions did, and still do. Although it didn’t make Stoker a fortune, and was slow out of the gate, Dracula has never been out of print. It has been called “the bestselling novel of all time,” and if that would be hard to hold up today, consider the international translations: Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, French (multiple editions), Gaelic (no, not “garlic”), German (even more multiple editions), Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Malaysian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish (many, many multiple editions), and Swedish.

  VII: Finis

  I ate the worst meal of my life in Whitby. The cauliflower had been soaked in brine, and smelled of nail polish remover. To this day I have not identified the meat. When I stabbed at a potato, it shot off my plate and scooted across the floor like a stone skidding on a pond of ice.

  The chef bounded out to ask if I had enjoyed the meal. I told him that it lacked blood, but that was probably because Dracula had been there, and we laughed like the best of friends. I have never seen him since – because I won’t.

  But I did track Bram Stoker some more, and saw the views that he saw, and looked out over the roofs that he and Mina Murray admired, “all red-roofed and… piled up one over the other anyhow.” It rained, and strong winds blew, yet I stayed out in the bad weather, because somewhere inside me I was waiting to see if a ship would run in under full sail.

  Dracula is the most famous book that Bram Stoker wrote. In general his stories were either too fantastic - or not fantastic enough - in the strict sense of the word “fantasy.” His romances send you straight to the podiatrist to have your toes uncurled. And he was a terrible poet.

  One or two of the other novels work in part. The Lady of the Shroud kept me awake when I was twelve; The Jewel of Seven Stars could be cut into shape for Indiana Jones. But The Lair of the White Worm, a novel written more than a decade after Dracula, feels like something Sheridan le Fanu might have written – on a bad load of opium.

  None of Stoker’s dozen other novels has the depth of Dracula. Although deep down it’s shallow, it has proved to have enough in it to keep the Freudians and literary detectives busy for years. Part of the attraction comes from the way he tapped into an atavistic blood-root; the world has vampires in its race memory, and that, by and large, is that; Dracula is an essential way-station on the journey into that terrain.

  And part of the interest in Stoker, no doubt, hangs over his career. Could he have been so unselfish as to have so dedicated his life to Irving? I believe it. We may snicker at his judgment in giving so much to such an arrogant and ungrateful man, but we can’t fault his commitment.

  Irving’s career faded and he fell on hard times. So, therefore, did Stoker. In fact – wonderful psychological freight here - shortly after Irving died (he was 67), Stoker had a stroke that pressed him gradually down into a kind of forced semiretirement independence. In time, charity had to come by; and Bram died in London in 1912 at the age of 65, leaving not a lot of net value.

  The legends, however, grew, and the worst of them didn’t surface until long after his death. Dublin thrilled to it; this is how it went. After the birth of their son, Noel, Florence became frigid. Stoker, in classic Victorian fashion, took his business elsewhere. The gossip, much supported by medical evidence, and much challenged by the same evidence, said that he endured a long, slow decline into death by syphilis.

  A year after his death, Florence sold his library through Sotheby’s in London. Among the 370 items were books i
nscribed by Walt Whitman “To Bram Stoker from his friend,” and a death mask of the face and hands of Abraham Lincoln.

  The Times obituary said that he was “a master of a particularly florid and creepy kind of fiction represented by Dracula and other models.” True, but he was more than that – he was a diligent and good-natured man in love with what he did, and he created something, however uneven, that gets copied and adapted to this day.

  I once heard the Irish author, Brian Moore, say that there are two kinds of writers: those who love writing, and those who love the idea of being a writer. Stoker, I believe, answers to both. In his lifetime he sought – and found - the company of literary giants: Walt Whitman, Longfellow, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Teddy Roosevelt. For admittedly different reasons he has lasted as long as they have.

  As to the legends: Castle Dracula didn’t look like Slains, which is too modern – but the “broken battlements” at Slains do show one hell of a “jagged line” against the sky, and that’s the sight that makes your flesh shrink.

  And Bram never visited Transyvania; he went to the library in Whitby. He did, however, start the Jack the Ripper legend himself, when he wrote a Preface to an Icelandic edition of Dracula in 1901, and referred to the Ripper murders as “a series of crimes which appear to have originated from the same source.”

  And in those flitters of hinted veracity we see his core intent. However flushed and passable the writing, he had a sincere understanding of the novelist’s task – to suspend our disbelief and make us believe that this was all true.

  As to the most persistent of the Stoker legends, that he based it on Irving – most major characters in fiction come as composites from the author’s private gallery of names and faces. Bram Stoker took the name Harker from a painter of stage scenery who worked sometimes at the Lyceum. Walt Whitman’s white hair, Franz Lizst’s beard, the peculiarly long teeth of the Araby explorer, Sir Richard Burton – they all came in useful. Oh, and Sir Henry Irving’s nose.