Undead (5 page)

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.

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 inscribed 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.