Night Music (48 page)

A word about the Bram Stoker Society: when I was studying at Trinity, which was from 1988 to 1992, the Bram Stoker Society was quite notorious for the depth of its devotion to the great man, to the extent that if you were taking the college air, and inadvertently confessed to a modest affection for Stoker's work, there was a genuine fear that members of the Bram Stoker Society would descend like birds of prey and spirit you away to some dark room where you would be forced to watch endless Hammer reruns until you clawed your eyes from your head. Even to mention in passing that your grandfather was a stoker on a ship raised the possibility of having a symposium spontaneously organized around you.

In their defense, the members of the Bram Stoker Society were engaged in a fairly thankless task. At that time, Trinity College—and possibly Dublin city as a whole—was happy to trumpet its connections to former alumni such as Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett, whose work could safely be regarded as literature. (Actually, the university's English Department wasn't even very keen on allowing students to study writers who weren't already dead and buried, and therefore unlikely to tarnish their legacy by producing a late period work promoting pederasty or white supremacy.) Stoker, by contrast, was a whole different kettle of slightly wrong-smelling fish. If Trinity College had an attic, his legacy would have been stored there. It is to the credit of the Bram Stoker Society that its members persevered in the face of a general lack of enthusiasm for the promotion of Stoker's literary works, even if they did make some folk a bit nervous in the process.

Stoker's writing career is problematical, though. To borrow a baseball metaphor, he knocked the ball out of the park with his fifth novel,
Dracula
(1897). Unfortunately, to extend the metaphor, it was his only ball, and he never really managed to find it again. He subsequently tried to capitalize on the boom in Egyptology with
The Jewel of Seven Stars
(1902) and, um, the boom in stories about women who are secretly giant serpents with
The Lair of the White Worm
(1911), but I recall both as being fairly joyless reading experiences, although
The Lair of the White Worm
at least has the merit of being completely bonkers whereas
The Jewel of Seven Stars
is just dull. As for
The Lady of the Shroud
(1909), in which the titular heroine feigns vampirism for reasons which were not entirely clear to me when I read the novel, and probably weren't entirely clear to Stoker either, the less said the better.

This is not to say that Stoker's post-
Dracula
career is entirely without interest. Nineteen fourteen saw the posthumous publication of
Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories
, which collected a number of Stoker's best works of short fiction, including “The Judge's House” (1891), “The Squaw” (1893), and “Dracula's Guest” itself, which was deleted from an early draft of
Dracula
, and was probably originally written as the novel's opening chapter.

But Stoker can be forgiven a lot simply for the creation of
Dracula
, and the book has aged well. It uses the structure of the epistolary novel—a form that somehow managed to survive the exquisite tedium of Samuel Richardson's
Pamela
(1740) and his later
Clarissa
(1748), a book so long that even starting it is to laugh in the face of one's own inevitable mortality, but adapts it to include newspaper cuttings, and Dr. Seward's recordings to his phonograph, which, even now, give it a curious modernity, and suggest a fragmentary approach that resonates with some of the literary experiments of the next century.

Francis Ford Coppola, in his unfairly maligned 1992 film version of the novel, captures this sense of technological development by referencing the early days of cinema. Unfortunately, no amount of innovation or directorial experimentation can save Coppola's
Dracula
from two deeply awful acting performances. The second-worst comes from Keanu Reeves, who has never more justified the generally unfair epithet “Canoe Reeves,” and less inhabits the role than has it whittled out of him. But he is put in the ha'penny place by Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing who, over the space of two hours, produces more ham than a slaughterhouse, and appears to be preparing for his bewildering effort in
Legends of the Fall
two years later, in which, as Colonel William Ludlow, he gives the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just cause to come around to his house and reclaim the Oscar that he previously won for
The Silence of the Lambs
.
⁵

If we were to pinpoint a flaw in Stoker's novel, it would be that the early chapters are so wonderful that the middle and later sections pale somewhat by comparison. The novel is at its best when dealing with Jonathan Harker's arrival in Transylvania, and his early experiences in Dracula's castle, including his first meeting with the Count, and his later glimpse of Dracula crawling headfirst down the sheer wall of his castle as he sets off to hunt. There then follows Harker's seduction by three female vampires, which is interrupted by the return of Dracula, who throws them an infant in a sack upon which to feed. Finally, with Chapter 7, we have the high point of the novel: the wreck of the
Demeter
, the Russian vessel carrying Dracula to England.

The searchlight followed her, and a shudder ran through all who saw her, for lashed to the helm was a corpse, with drooping head, which swung horribly to and fro at each motion of the ship.
⁶

Stoker then decides to push Dracula largely into the wings for much of what follows, leaving us for company the lunatic entomophage Renfield; Harker's distressed fiancée, Mina Murray; the faux Europeanisms of Van Helsing, and an increasingly peaked Lucy Westenra.
Dracula
without Dracula is a lot less fun than
Dracula
with Dracula, and these sections drag a bit, before a race back to Transylvania for the grand finale, which Stoker had originally intended to conclude with Dracula falling into a volcano, although sanity subsequently prevailed.

Interestingly, a similar problem exists in Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
, or
The Modern Prometheus
(1818), but since Shelley was only nineteen when she commenced writing it, and it was her first attempt at a novel, a little leeway should be permitted. (In 2014, I was fortunate enough to see Shelley's original manuscript of
Frankenstein
as part of a British Library exhibition entitled
Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination
, and what was most striking about it was that it seemed to have been written in a school jotter, and resembled a student's English essay homework.)

To read Shelley's novel, even two centuries later, is to be amazed at the depths of this young woman's imagination. Contemporary critics had never encountered anything like it before, and struggled to put it in perspective. The reviewer in
The British Critic
acknowledged that the writing had power “but this power is so abused and perverted, that we should almost prefer imbecility . . . we must protest against the waking dreams of horror excited by the unnatural stimulants of this later school; and we feel ourselves as much harassed, after rising from the perusal of these three spirit-wearying volumes, as if we had been over-dosed with laudanum, or hag-ridden by the night-mare.”
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
was kinder, being impressed with “the author's original genius and happy power of expression,” although the reviewer remained under the misapprehension that the author was male, since the book was first published anonymously.

Frankenstein
opens brilliantly, as the Walton expedition sails farther and farther north until it becomes trapped in ice, whereupon Victor Frankenstein is discovered on an ice floe, and begins to tell Robert Walton his tale, which Walton in turn recounts to his sister in England.
Frankenstein
, like
Dracula
, is mostly written in epistolary form—a hallmark of English gothic fiction is its use of letters, documents, or fake historical records as a means of encouraging readers to suspend disbelief—but what is most striking is how little of the book is familiar to first-time readers. So much of the imagery associated with Frankenstein and his creation comes to us not from Mary Shelley, but from cinema. Shelley doesn't even inform us of how Victor Frankenstein animates the creature. We're led to assume that electricity plays some part, if only because Frankenstein tells of seeing an oak tree destroyed by lightning when he was a boy and the impression made upon him by the demonstration of such power, but that's all we get. There is no great creation scene, no lightning striking a rod and coursing through the monster's frame, no cries of “It's alive!” All of that comes from James Whale's 1931 film. Shelley, instead, gives us this, from Chapter II:

It was on a dreary night in November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

It's dramatic in its way, but far more understated than its cinematic equivalents—and there have been many screen efforts to depict the monster's birth. We don't even learn how Frankenstein came by the necessary body parts to form his creature, and its appearance is very different from the iconic form of Boris Karloff, complete with flattened head and bolts through the neck. Shelley's monster is eight feet tall, but:

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath: his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.

He is also, as we soon learn, superhuman, gifted not only with incredible strength but great speed and agility, too, which enable him to flee after he has been rejected by his creator. Then there is his intelligence, which is where the novel takes a bit of an odd turn in its second volume. Frankenstein travels to the Swiss Alps, where he meets his creation again. We learn that the creature has spent many months hidden in a lean-to adjoining a cottage, and through listening to its inhabitants, and reading stolen books, has learned how to speak.

Leaving aside the fact that nobody appears to have spotted the eight-foot-tall monster living in the shed, the creature's linguistic advances are pretty remarkable. Unfortunately, he turns out to be a Chatty Cathy, and once he gets started there's no shutting him up as he tells Frankenstein of his many happy hours of shed-dwelling. The novel itself also veers into more conventional territory, as the monster regales his creator with a tale of star-crossed lovers and perfidious Turks, before at last getting down to the main business of the evening, his desire that Frankenstein should create a mate for him, at which point the novel gets interesting all over again in a sexually peculiar way, and reminds us that, yes, it is being written by a precociously gifted teenage girl—a teenage girl, what's more, who was already pregnant with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's first child at the age of sixteen or seventeen, Shelley having left his own pregnant wife, Harriet, for Mary and fled with her to France.

Although that child died shortly after birth, Mary quickly conceived another, despite Shelley's attempts to pimp her to his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Then, still unmarried but calling herself Mrs. Shelley instead of Mary Godwin, she ended up at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland in the company of Shelley, Lord Byron—who himself had fled England to avoid an array of financial and sexual scandals, including an affair with his half sister, Augusta Leigh, leaving behind a wife and at least one child—and Byron's personal physician, John Polidori, who would later write “The Vampyre.” With each invited by Byron to create a ghost story, Mary, unable to sleep one night, and desperate to meet the poet's challenge, came up with the idea for
Frankenstein
in the course of a “waking dream,” even if the manuscript clearly shows that her lover made editorial suggestions and changes further along the path to publication.

Percy Shelley drowned in 1822—although by then his attentions had progressed from Mary to Jane Williams: he and Byron were fickle in their affections, to say the least—and his remains were burned on the beach at Viareggio with Byron in attendance. A year after Mary Shelley's death in 1851, her box-desk was found to contain, among other items, a silk parcel containing some of Shelley's ashes and the remains of his heart.

Frankenstein
connects with a later piece of English gothic, Robert Louis Stevenson's
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886), through science and dreams. Like Shelley's novel, Stevenson's “shilling shocker,” or “crawler,” was at least partly conceived as the consequence of a nightmare. One night in 1885, Stevenson's wife, Fanny,
⁷
was startled by her husband's cries, and woke him, as a dutiful wife would. Stevenson was none too happy at his dream being interrupted, as she had just pulled him out of the story's first scene of transformation. Stevenson, though, was made of stern stuff, and the first draft of the tale is reputed to have taken him no longer than three days to write.