Undead (3 page)

“Near Newport scores of such exhumations have been made, the purpose being to prevent the dead from preying upon the living. The belief entertained is the person who is dying of consumption is likely to rise from the grave at night and suck the blood of surviving members of his or her family, thus dooming them to a similar fate.”

Bram – Abraham – Stoker was born in Dublin in November 1847, the third of seven children. Ireland at that time had three general strata in the population. The native, mostly destitute Catholics formed about eighty-five percent; in the remaining fifteen percent, the Anglo-Irish upper class oversaw a country administered for them by their own Protestant middle class, Stoker’s people.

The name “Stoker,” probably Dutch in origin, comes down the same utilitarian road as Carpenter or Smith – some ancestor of Bram’s had once fed and tended a furnace. His father, also Abraham, was a minor public servant, and his mother, Charlotte
Thornley
, a well-known do-gooder and anti-poverty campaigner. They lived in affluent suburbs of Dublin, and educated their children diligently; three of the sons became doctors.

But not Bram.
He didn’t go to the same schools. The most important fact about Bram Stoker’s childhood is often singled out as having caused
Dracula
- he suffered a long and undefined, undiagnosed childhood illness. “In my babyhood I used, I understand, to be often at the point of death. Certainly till I was about seven years old I never knew what it was to stand upright. I was naturally thoughtful and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years.”

He emerged fighting fit – “un-dead,” if you like, the beneficiary of what seemed like a miraculous cure. Here comes the first temptation to link the life to the work. The French novelist, Mauriac, believed that the door slams shut on a writer around the age of 12 - meaning that all your raw material is in place by then. In Stoker’s case, he survived the childhood illness – and vampires don’t die. I’m further tempted to throw in the fact that the Irish doctors still used bloodletting in the nineteenth century.
Especially for mysterious ailments.

 After his recovery, Bram’s mother sent him to a small private school. From there he drifted towards college. There was energy in him, but more eagerness than genius; in the entrance contest for Trinity College, Dublin, Bram came fortieth in the fifty-one applicants who sat the examination.

Yet they noticed him at Trinity; he looked like the heroes of his romantic novels and short stories. They’re always men of fine stature, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, lean-flanked, athletic, never shorter than six feet two, inspiring in the gymnasium, heroic on the rugby field, handsomely poised, firm of neck and strong of head, sentimental over babies, and kind to old ladies. A Scottish hotel-keeper near the vast ruined castle at
Slains
remembered Mr. Stoker as a big, friendly, red-haired, red-bearded Irishman who liked walking and talking.

Talking, certainly.
They claim in Trinity that the Philosophical Society is the oldest debating group in the world. Stoker became an officer of “The Phil”, organized and chaired debates, and delivered papers. One of them was formed in the shape of things to come -
Sensationalism in Fiction and Society
. A newspaper report described his debating style as “powerful and endearing.” He had begun as he would continue – bustling, organized, and anxious to please.

He read History, Literature, Mathematics and Physics, scored low in examinations, and more or less muddled through. I wonder whether he also wrote his first major piece of fiction in Trinity - because he claimed that he’d won special merits in Pure Mathematics, yet his name is difficult to find in the college citations.

His later writing, though, might have benefitted from Trinity’s aged fabric. It’s an old college, built in 1592, by Queen Elizabeth I of England. If, on a foggy day, or at dusk, you sidestep off College Green, hurry under that
arch,
and into the grounds beyond - you’re in the past. I’ve done it many times, and I always wince with pleasure under the creepy frown of the blackened cut stone.

And if you look up - there’s a lighted rectangle, yellow through the gloom of time. “The window at which I stood,” wrote Jonathan
Harker
in his Journal, “was tall and deep, stone-mullioned, and though weatherworn, complete.” A century and a half ago, Trinity Square had gaslight – perfect, especially if your mind dwelt less on Pure Mathematics and more on Sensationalism in Fiction and Society.

However poor his academic chops, Stoker did, however, get a Bachelor of Arts degree, and, under the Trinity system, went on to be granted a Masters. He had already applied for a position in the Irish civil service, which he joined at the age of nineteen (while still a student). His official title was “Clerk, Second-Class, in the Department of Registrar of Petty Sessions Clerks.” These were the men who dealt with the procedures and the paperwork of the small courts around the country. Stoker called it a job about “low people speaking of low crimes.”

Bored out of his skull, he began writing short stories, mostly sentimental or sensational, with a sprinkling of fantasy fiction. Here’s a sample from
The Crystal
Cup, published in a London magazine from when he was 25:

“I will make a vase whose beauty will put to shame the glorious works of Greece in her golden prime! Surely a love like mine and a hope like mine must in time make some form of beauty spring to life! … Ah!
then
on the wings of the morning shall I fly beyond the sea to my home - her home - and clasp her to my arms, never more to be separated!”

Nevertheless (yes, that’s the appropriate word), magazines in Dublin and London began to publish him frequently.

There’s no doubt that he had a writing bug. With an eye to his civil service career, he even wrote a
narcotically
dull (it needed to be) manual for his own world of the lower-level courts:
The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland
. A practical book publisher took it, and his superiors praised Stoker for its clarity and usefulness.

As well as its genuine window into nineteenth-century Ireland, I find its structure interesting
,
because so much of the
Duties of Clerks
had to do with the organizing of disparate materials – the licensing of dogs; how to deal with peddlers or crazy people; the setting-up of filing systems; how to oversee the regulation of
pawnbroking
; what charges to bring against mutineers or deserters until they came into the hands of superior courts, and so on.

Twenty years later, in the structure of
Dracula,
we see journals, diaries, ships’ logs, telegrams, invoices, transcriptions of “phonograph” recordings, newspaper reports, letters, memoranda and other notes, fragments and dispatches, all directed toward the central narrative.

Others before Stoker had constructed similar books, mostly epistolary.
Wilkie
Collins, author of perhaps the first police thriller, had taken it further than mere letters between two characters. Stoker, though, wrote his novel almost like a heavy-footed screenplay – throwing in everything but the
kitchen sink
, rushing headlong after the useful impression that the book wasn’t fiction.  

One night in August 1867, when Bram wasn’t yet twenty, his life – as indeed he might have put it in one of his stories - was “evermore altered, and his star arose to flutter and then shine steady in the firmament of his dreams.” (Stoker didn’t write that: I did: but he might have done.) At the Theatre Royal, Dublin, he attended a play starring the man who would become Stoker’s hero and life leader, the already famous actor, Henry Irving.

 Irving’s performance so energized Stoker that he searched the newspapers next day for reviews.
Nothing.
A lukewarm notice appeared a week later. Stoker fumed. He knew and loved the theater. For years he had been going to auditions, testing for parts, approaching producers. Once or twice he’d even carried a spear, and shouted, “Halt!
Who goes there?” or whatever.

Three years later, in May 1871, Irving came back to Dublin, and this time Stoker, a natural fan of big performers, and already deeply stage-struck, did something about it. He went to one of Dublin’s newspaper editors and asked him to publish his, Stoker’s, own notice of the play. It worked, and Stoker then became an unpaid freelance drama critic for newspapers and magazines in Ireland and England.

There’s a sense in which we have Bram to thank for the modern excitement of opening night. Before he became a drama critic, reviews of plays often didn’t appear for days, sometimes for more than a week. Stoker so desperately wanted the world to know about Irving that he pressed to get his notice into the paper the following day. The excitement that he thus generated brought him to the attention of the London newspapers, since many of the British touring companies played Dublin. It also shaped the rest of his life – because Irving came back.

The morning after opening in Dublin as Hamlet, Irving read Stoker’s ecstatic yet astute review. He invited Stoker to dine at the
Shelbourne
Hotel and, to quote Stoker, “then began the close friendship between us which only terminated with his life – if indeed friendship, like any other form of love, can ever terminate.” Irving was thirty-eight and Stoker twenty-nine.

Over dinner, to repay the compliment of the stirring review, Irving read an epic poem for Stoker, and then gave him a photograph signed “to my dear friend Stoker.”  

Bram, believing the star as smitten as the fan, had a hot, glowing conniption. “In those moments of our mutual emotion he too had found a friend and knew it. Soul had looked into soul! From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting, as can be between two men
.“

In answer to your next question - yes, of course; biographers and commentators have indeed wondered whether Stoker was as gay as a paper hat. They’ve speculated on it time and again, in and out, hither and yon.
Conclusions?
The jury is missing.  

Irving came back to Dublin each year, and each year Bram swooned in print. The two men (according to Bram) grew closer: “We understood each other’s nature, needs and ambitions, and had a mutual confidence, each toward the other in his own way, rare among men.”

Stoker shuttled back and forth to London too, because Irving had now become the actor-manager of the great Lyceum Theatre, and he needed a publicist. Bram stepped in, and the foundations were laid. By then Irving was already the giant of the nineteenth-century theater. Nobody today compares: he was Olivier, Gielgud,
Guinness
all rolled into one - with a touch of Phineas T. Barnum.

In November of 1878, Irving clinched it. He invited Stoker, then 31, to come to London and run his business. Bram gulped, accepted, and revolutionized his life. Not only did he quit his job, he brought forward by twelve months his intended marriage to the beauty whom he had been courting for the previous two years.

Florence
Balcombe
was her name, the daughter of a British officer, and somebody else was after her too – no less a fellow than Oscar
Fingall
O’Flahertie
Wills Wilde, who was barely twenty when he fell for her. Shortly after he met her, he dashed off a note to a friend; “I am just going out to bring an exquisitely pretty girl to afternoon service in the Cathedral. She is just seventeen, with the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money.”

Oscar was in deep; she had, for him, that fatal combination – a beauty who wanted to be an actress. But Stoker won her, and they married on the 4
^th
of December 1878. Florence didn’t tell Oscar that she was getting wed, and through the cracks in his breaking heart he wrote her a poignant, and typically generous note, “Though you have not thought it worthwhile to let me know … my wish is that you may be happy whatever…”

Indeed, Oscar wasn’t the only one who didn’t know. Five days later the couple arrived in London and Stoker reported Irving as “mightily surprised that I had a wife –
the
wife – with me.” A year after that, their only child, a son named Irving Noel
Thornley
Stoker, was born.
Familially
they used the “Noel” part of his name; Bram hinted in private that one Irving in his life was as much as he could handle.

With little enough difficulty, Stoker and Irving cemented their working partnership: it worked because Irving liked to enthrall, and Stoker, the stage-struck hero-worshipper, enjoyed being in thrall.