Who Is Dracula's Father? Page 4

  A string of cases Hesselius has solved are reeled off. We are further informed that Hesselius has a close friend, learned, like him, in very strange places – places that science dare not go. This friend is Dutch, Professor Van Loo of Leyden.

  The Dutch professor is not, Like Dr Hesselius and the narrator, a physician (primarily) but a theoretical chemist and a man who has an expert grasp of history, metaphysics and biology. A little bit of everything. Hesselius corresponds with Van Loo in English and French but mainly German.

  Stoker seeded Van Helsing’s portrait with details not found in Le Fanu, all parenthetic, all poignant, none dwelt on. Van Helsing is aged, he is married, his son died, his wife went mad. Catholicism means he cannot divorce her. He doubts his faith and may even hate God. It is an understatedly tragic life whose defeats he can now redeem by defeating the arch-enemy of man. With hammer and stake in hand. His last words (the last words of the novel) resonate: ‘We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us!’ To have done it is enough. Van Helsing’s great victory will be private.

  Bram Stoker initially thought to create a German Hesselius semblance – Windshoeffel – then decided not to make it too obvious and to give it, fleetingly, unusual depths. Van Loo the Dutchman was a handy alternative. Hence Van Helsing.

  Alle verstanden gnädige professoren.

  * Christopher Frayling, in Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Byron (1992), makes the persuasive suggestion that Van Helsing is based on Professor Max Müller, the famous German scholar resident in England.

  † James himself wrote a fine vampire tale, ‘Count Magnus’ (1904).

  J.S. Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872)

  J.S. Le Fanu’s pioneer vampire story, published in 1872, is set in Styria, where motherless Laura (who tells most of the story) has been brought up in the stately, empty castle owned by her English father. Not an everyday upbringing. Laura is prey to dreams in which her neck is punctured by a beautiful (female) lover. Her loneliness is relieved by the arrival of the captivating Carmilla, who mysteriously resembles Laura’s dream lover. The physical relationship which ensues is described in the most overtly lesbian terms to be found outside Victorian pornography:

  She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, ‘Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die – die, sweetly die – into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.’

  And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.

  Laura withers and an old family friend diagnoses vampirism and identifies Carmilla as the culprit. A series of clues reveals her to be ‘Mircalla’, Countess Karnstein, dead (or rather undead) for a century and a half. ‘Depart from this accursed ground, my poor child, as quickly as you can,’ Laura is advised. ‘Drive to the clergyman’s house.’ The necessary exhumation and exorcism by a stake through the heart is performed by the Baron Vordenburg at the Karnstein tomb:

  The grave of the Countess Mircalla was opened; and the General and my father recognised each his perfidious and beautiful guest, in the face now disclosed to view. The features, though a hundred and fifty years had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life. Her eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin.

  The two medical men, one officially present, the other on the part of the promoter of the inquiry, attested the marvellous fact that there was a faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding action of the heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed.

  I would advise the serious reader of Dracula (as would Stoker, I suspect) to whet their appetite with Le Fanu’s shorter masterpiece. It adds relish. And of the multitudinous other writers of vampiric fantasia? Take your pick.

  Why does the bloofer lady target children?

  The ‘bloofer lady’ episode is introduced thus:

  ‘The Westminster Gazette’, 25 September.

  A HAMPSTEAD MYSTERY.

  The neighbourhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines as ‘The Kensington Horror’, or ‘The Stabbing Woman’, or ‘The Woman in Black’. During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a ‘bloofer lady’. It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighbourhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a ‘bloofer lady’ had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favourite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the ‘bloofer lady’ is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the ‘bloofer lady’ should be the popular role at these al fresco performances. Our correspondent naively says that even Ellen Terry could not be so winningly attractive as some of these grubby-faced little children pretend – and even imagine themselves – to be.

  Superficially the passage has a number of points of interest for Dracula nit-pickers. The Westminster Gazette was launched in January 1893, with considerable fanfare and complaint about its sensationalism. Stoker spoofs it smartly. The proprietor was George Newnes. He is remembered principally as the founder of Tit Bits, a weekly which broke ‘entertaining’ stories of the day into fragments for mass consumption.* This is one of the few substantive date markers we have for the 1893 action of Dracula. A very interesting nit.

  Another interesting detail is Bram Stoker’s revealing his theatrical self, as manager of the Lyceum, via the reference to the company’s renowned star actress, Ellen Terry. She was also Henry Irving’s mistress, and in the 1880s gossip about the couple’s immorality had obstructed Irving’s getting a knighthood (it eventually came his way in 1895).

  What, though, about Lucy’s vampiric interest in the very young? One can start by looking at one of the more awkward scenes in the novel, Mina embracing the bereaved Arthur, the affianced of her best friend, in what would, to the uninformed eye, look like a romantic embrace.

  Victorian gentleman did not routinely dive into ladies’ bosoms. But Arthur’s tears, as Mina explains, wash away conventional decorum. Her breast is his:

  In an instant the poor dear fellow was overwhelmed with grief. It seemed to me that all that he had of late been suffering in silence found a vent at once. He grew quite hysterical, and raising his open hands, beat his palms together in a perfect agony of grief. He stood up and then sat down again, and the tears rained down his cheeks. I felt an infinite pity for him, and opened my arms unthinkingly. With a sob he laid his head on my shoulder and cried like a wearied child, whilst he shook with emotion.

  We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when the mother-spirit is invoked; I felt this big sorrowing man’s head resting on me, as though it were that of the baby that some day may lie on my bosom, and I stroked his
hair as though he were my own child. I never thought at the time how strange it all was.

  ‘Baby’? ‘As if he were my own child’? ‘Mother-spirit’? One recalls the weird sisters, guzzling the half-smothered baby in a sack Dracula has good-naturedly thrown them by way of supper. Not much mother spirit in Castle Dracula’s vaults that night.

  ‘Shoulder’, one notes, becomes ‘bosom’ in the course of Mina’s description of her succouring Arthur. What next, by way of consolation? How far would this ‘new woman’ go? Dracula is one of those novels in which one is always pressing hard on the imagination’s brake pedal.

  Meanwhile, as Mina gives Arthur her breast, the not yet quite dead Lucy has converted her mother spirit into sucking the blood out of a gang of Hampstead children. It is a kind of reverse nursing – not giving suck but taking it. One wonders, of course, why these urchins are roaming Hampstead Heath by night for any vampire to have a go at them. It is odd. Then, as now, the heath’s unfenced, unlit, largely unpathed wilderness was, by night, a place where daylight morals of London were relaxed.

  Dracula, we must conclude, is a novel in which the fairer sex’s ‘mother spirit’ morphs in strange ways. What is in vampire-Lucy’s mind in the Hampstead scene? We know from her deathbed scene that she aspires to kiss Arthur and render him her mate; thereafter, they can enjoy family life with their ‘children’ on the heath. Forever.

  * The Westminster took a more sober turn under J.A. Spender a few years later, becoming a major political force in Britain.

  Why did Henry Irving not bite?

  Discussion of Henry Irving’s influence on Bram Stoker, and on the character of the Count (see page 12 and elsewhere), raises thoughts about the great actor’s involvement with Dracula. More precisely, his brutally curt refusal to get at all involved and help his long-serving manager, then in serious financial difficulty.*

  Irving was Stoker’s god. Bram dedicated his life to him – for £22 a week. Irving gave nothing emotional in return to his manager and, as a terminal slap, left him nothing in his will when he died in 1905. Irving could have helped the author of Dracula and did not. Stoker devoted much of his later life to a two-volume hagiography of Irving. Irving’s refusal to help with Dracula does not appear in it, nor the slightest criticism.

  At some difficulty Stoker had rushed on to paper a readthrough acting version of his novel. It was performed at the Lyceum, by the theatre’s actors, a week before the novel’s publication, on 26 May 1897. This constituted ‘performance’, even though it was to an audience of two people. Performance duly ensured copyright protection. Since 1894, it was international copyright protection.

  Irving declined to take part in the performance, or to consider a Lyceum production. He is plausibly supposed to have explained with one word, after a brief glance at the text: ‘Dreadful’.† Reportedly said to his face, it must have been one of the lower moments in Stoker’s life. A stake through the heart, one might say.

  Dreadful or not, the sham performance was the sensible thing to do in order to prevent stage (and imminently film) piracy. That protection would prove useful, in later years, to the widowed Florence.

  Had he taken the lead part and put the play on Irving could have done wonderful things. Among his specialisms were sinister villainy (his Mephisto, famously) and great stage effects. As Hilary Spurling muses:

  [Irving] thought nothing of constructing an entire Gothic cathedral on stage at the Lyceum Theatre, installing a bluebell wood or hiring the Brigade of Guards to fight his mock battles. For Goethe’s Faust, he had 400 ropes backstage, each with its own name and function, to raise devils, spirits and apparitions. He obliterated his actors under sumptuous costumes, obstructed them with cumbersome scenery and blinded them with bolts of lightning.‡

  What Stoker had done with Dracula was tailor-made for Irving. Irving wanted no part of it.

  It was an egotistic and, in the event, foolish act on the great man’s part. There were factors. His reputation and health were failing. His operatic style of acting was out of style. The witty chatter of Wilde and Shaw was what audiences wanted. He was 59 years old and had nearly crippled himself in December 1896, slipping down some steps. He was perhaps fearful that Dracula might be too physical for him. Climbing like a ‘lizard’ up and down castle walls could not have appealed.

  Stoker’s own situation, following disastrous investments, was similarly parlous in 1897. Both men would have received a late-career boost from a full-blooded performance of Dracula. As it was, when their theatre burned down in 1898 their professional lives went with it. Irving had a stroke and died shortly afterwards; Stoker faded, under the debilitating influence of tertiary syphilis, it is suggested, writing ever worse fiction.

  Why would Irving not even give a second look at Dracula? Irving’s biographers portray a man of narcissism and froideur – something inseparable from his self-control on stage. He would yield no credit, proffer no generosity (even verbally) to those who served him – even a man who had served him so devotedly as Bram Stoker. No wonder Irving’s performance of Richard III was so admired. Like Shakespeare’s villain king, Henry Irving was never in the ‘giving vein’.

  What, then was Bram Stoker? Irving’s Renfield, it has been suggested. And, like Renfield, broken by his master. But loyal to the end.

  * The dedication of the novel is to ‘my dear friend Hommy-Beg’ – a nickname of the novelist and dramatist Hall Caine, who loaned the distressed Stoker a much-needed £1,000.

  † See https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/bram-stokers-stage-adaptation-of-dracula#sthash.JEr4SDGW.dpuf

  ‡ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/07/history.theatre.books

  Nosferatu? What does that mean?

  The word ‘nosferatu’ is mentioned twice in Dracula. The first time is by Van Helsing talking, garrulously as ever, to Holmwood:

  Friend Arthur, if you had met that kiss which you know of before poor Lucy die; or again, last night when you open your arms to her, you would in time, when you had died, have become nosferatu, as they call it in Eastern Europe, and would all time make more of those Un-Deads that so have fill us with horror.

  The second time the word ‘nosferatu’ crops up is again by the gabby Dutch professor:

  The nosferatu do not die like the bee when he sting once. He is only stronger; and being stronger, have yet more power to work evil.

  Stoker himself did no research himself on the N-word. He picked it up from Emily Gerard, who waxes eloquently on it, in her articles and books – motherlode for Stoker:

  More decidedly evil, however, is the vampire, or nosferatu, in whom every Roumenian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell.

  There are two sorts of vampires – living and dead. The living vampire is in general the illegitimate offspring of two illegitimate persons, but even a flawless pedigree will not ensure anyone against the intrusion of a vampire into his family vault, since every person killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will continue to suck the blood of other innocent people till the spirit has been exorcised, either by opening the grave of the person suspected and driving a stake through the corpse, or firing a pistol shot into the coffin. In very obstinate cases it is further recommended to cut off the head and replace it in the coffin with the mouth filled with garlic, or to extract the heart and burn it, strewing the ashes over the grave. That such remedies are often resorted to, even in our enlightened days, is a well-attested fact, and there are probably few Roumenian villages where such has not taken place within the memory of the inhabitants.

  This was rich pickings for Bram Stoker. But as regards the word ‘nosferatu’ Gerard (and, following faithfully in her wake, Stoker) got it entirely wrong. Bluntly, the word does not exist in Romanian or any other language known to etymology. Whatever ‘every’ Transylvanian peasant, in their ineffable ignorance believes, ‘nosferatu’ is not the word they apply to it.*

  The once non-existent word is now world famous.
Thereby hangs a tale and some instructive cultural history. Despite its publisher’s advertising claim that there were nine editions in its first ten years Dracula was not, for its first decade, a runaway international bestseller. It would, of course, have helped its take-off if Henry Irving had done something for the stage adaptation Stoker humbly offered him.

  Florence Stoker, who would survive Bram by a quarter of a century, was dogged in the financially hard-pressed years of her widowhood in the safeguarding of the copyright of Dracula. She forbade all stage and film adaptation, aided by the copyright protection Bram had ensured by his prophylactic, pre-publication performance in May 1897.

  It was a mistake. Performance, particularly to the silent film world’s audiences, would have raised Dracula if not from the grave then from its second-division obscurity in the Edwardian period.

  What injected new life into Dracula was a literary crime. Intellectual property theft, the lawyers call it. The theft was perpetrated by a German film director, Albin Grau, who decided to film the novel. He had a personal reason. Serving in the First World War, with blood everywhere, he met a Serbian who claimed to be the son of a vampire. It stuck in Grau’s mind. One does not meet such a person every day.

  After the war Grau co-founded a German movie company called Prana-Film. The firm’s launch venture was Dracula, under a different name. Grau may honestly have felt free to help himself. The novel’s publication was two decades in the past; there had been no German-language edition until 1908. Or perhaps he carelessly neglected to enquire about getting the rights from the estate’s holder, Florence Stoker. He was too busy making the film. Either way, he clearly had some apprehension. To throw any legal hounds off his tracks he renamed the story Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (‘Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens’).