Undead (4 page)

“For 27 years I worked with Henry Irving helping him in all honest ways in which one man may aid another, and there were no ways with Irving other than honorable,” wrote Bram in the memoir,
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
.  

Outsiders who met them took a less elevated view. When they toured the United States one reporter said that Stoker “seems to occupy some anomalous position between secretary and valet whose manifest duties are to see that there is mustard in the sandwiches and take the dogs out for a run.”

The rain lifted; the skin on my face sighed and relaxed; I shoved back my
sherpa’s
hood. Fences surrounded
Slains
Castle, with turbulent messages: “These ruins are unsafe.”
Yes, but for very different, much older reasons - right?

To get to the ruins, I had to traverse a slender, nerve-wracking causeway; the sea below curves around in a huge deep gash. With, at most, half an hour of daylight left, I crossed the neck of land, climbed the fence and walked into the ruins.

The inside of the castle was as stark and white as a scraped-out skull. In the widening shadows I could just see where the interior walls had been. When I followed their traces, I could map the castle’s design, and at one end there must have been a great drawing-room with huge windows.
What a view! On a clear day can you see Norway?

The freezing sea out there boiled with ice that afternoon. I went to the edge of the cliff, and thought about shouting at the waves, as Stoker liked to do, but a new squall came in, and this one had knives in it.

Time to go.
I hauled up my hood again. Two hundred miles due south, hacked at by the same wild, cold sea, I’d find Stoker again, under another gaunt and skeletal ruin standing high against the winter sky.

Whitby
perches on the coast of north Yorkshire, in the east of England. Black cliffs rise like mausoleums, compressed
aeons
of dead wood. Two hundred million years ago, the forests here decayed and sank, forming the semi-precious gem called jet. Every little shop in
Whitby
offers souvenirs made of jet. The town is built on jet. You can’t get anything blacker than jet – except perhaps the evil in the black heart of a vampire.

In the summer of 1890, seven years before
Dracula
was published, Bram Stoker took his wife and son to
Whitby
for three weeks of vacation by the sea. With time on his hands, Stoker browsed
Library Call Number 0.1097,
with the title
An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and
Carpathia
by William Wilkinson.

Wallachia today forms part of Rumania.
Carpathia
doesn’t exist (except for Marilyn Monroe in
The Prince and the Showgirl
); but there are the Carpathian Mountains, shared by Hungary, Ukraine, Serbia and Romania. In among the principalities, Bram Stoker found a footnote on page 19; “
Dracula
in the
Wallachian
language means
Devil
.
Wallachians
were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning.”

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.

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 forward, 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.”