Who Was Dracula?

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

USA
•
Canada
•
UK
•
Ireland
•
Australia
•
New Zealand
•
India
•
South Africa
•
China

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

Copyright © 2013 by Jim Steinmeyer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Steinmeyer, Jim, date.

Who was Dracula? : Bram Stoker's trail of blood / Jim Steinmeyer.

p. cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-60277-5

1. Stoker, Bram, 1847–1912. Dracula. 2. Dracula, Count (Fictitious character) 3. Vampires in literature. 4. Horror tales, English—History and criticism. I. Title.

PR6037.T617D788 2013 2012047834

823'.8—dc23

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Remembering Orson Welles, who first told me, “You know, it was Irving!”

He would have enjoyed the whole story.

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Prologue: “Blood of My Blood”

One
| THE DEMON, “IN A WAY YOU CANNOT DREAM OF”

Two
| THE BOY, “NATURALLY SECRETIVE TO THE WORLD”

Three
| THE LEADING LADIES, “ONLY REAL FLOWERS”

Four
| THE ACTING MANAGER, “DISAGREEABLE THINGS”

Five
| THE VAMPIRE, “I AM DRACULA”

Six
| THE VOIVODE, “RAGE AND FURY DIABOLICAL”

Seven
| THE NOVELIST, “DREADFUL”

Eight
| THE MURDERER, “MORBIDLY FASCINATING”

Nine
| THE SUSPECT, “DISTINGUISHED PEOPLE”

Ten
| THE ACTOR, “ABJECT TERROR, GRIM HUMOR”

Eleven
| THE POET, “PERENNIAL SWEET DEATH”

Twelve
| THE PLAYWRIGHT, “THE MYSTERY OF HIS SIN”

Thirteen
| THE ACCUSED, “MONSTROUS AND UNLAWFUL”

Fourteen
| THE STRANGER, “HERE I AM NOBLE”

Fifteen
| THE FRIENDS, “INTO THY HANDS, O LORD”

Sixteen
| THE LEGEND, “SPREAD OVER CENTURIES”

 

Photographs

Acknowledgments and Sources

Index

Illustration Credits

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

—Orson Welles

Pity Bram Stoker.

He was one of the lucky authors who managed to create a character more mysterious and more interesting than he was. And he paid for it. He suffered careful dissection and analysis by generations of literary sleuths, biographers, and psychologists, attempting to find the man behind the vampire. Bram Stoker was a proper Irishman and a careful Victorian. For almost thirty years, his job was to keep his head at the Lyceum Theatre in London, and then to remain perfectly unobtrusive in service to Henry Irving, London's leading actor. Bram Stoker performed that job well.

Late in his career, he wrote a thick novel called
Dracula
, which garnered surprised reactions from his business acquaintances and mild praise from the critics. Stoker may have suspected that it was his best book. He had no way of calculating that it would become a phenomenon. As his great-grandnephew the novelist Dacre Stoker has written, “Bram would surely be surprised at the great number of works, books, movies, television shows, comics, et cetera, apparently inspired by . . . the vampire figure he created.” In the middle of the twentieth century, the character seemed to have become a patron saint for every desperate filmmaker on a budget. But amazingly, Dracula's reputation has remained untarnished, continually inspiring some of entertainment's leading lights, like Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Francis Ford Coppola. Dracula is one of fiction's greatest, most recognizable, and most popular characters. He has glided through every type of medium with a seemingly supernatural power, commanding respect and always attracting audiences.

In the intervening years, Dracula proved too interesting, and Stoker apparently proved too dull, to perfectly satisfy critics, who re-created Dracula in their own image or dressed him in the fashions of their own age. Bram Stoker was burdened with suspicions and speculations—psychological motivations, physical ailments, and literary revenge—in an effort to properly explain his vampire. Annoyingly, Dracula has done his best to resist explanation. A psychological understanding of the novel seemed to elude even Bram Stoker.

—

Dracula
was the very first adult novel I ever read—that is, a big, thick book from the adult section of the public library that didn't have any pictures in it. When I was eight years old, a classmate named Aiden gushed over the novel, recalling the frightening events in the castle and the dramatic execution of Dracula. “They cut off his head!” At that time, the classic horror movies made only occasional late-night appearances on television, and the novel was a revelation. I checked the book out of the library and slogged through it, almost four hundred pages of daunting gray text, glimpses of Victorian Whitby and London that became personal challenges for a fourth-grader. When I finally closed the back cover, Bram Stoker's abject horror was mixed with my own personal sanctimony. I tried to indulge in a conversation about the book with Aiden, but he just wrinkled his nose. “What? I didn't see that part,” he said. “I just read the very beginning and the very end.”

I later learned that most of us have been reading just “the very beginning and the very end.”
Dracula
has survived for over a century, despite the shortcuts—or maybe because of the shortcuts. We know about the castle in Transylvania, we know about the stake through the heart, and we can all fill in the rest. Generally, we've depended upon the theater producers and motion picture screenwriters to reconfigure and redefine
Dracula
for us.

The West End, Broadway, and Hollywood quickly came to the rescue, and seem to have concurred that there were too many strange settings and incidents in the story—Dracula's castle where he makes dinner and does the dishes; his exit out the window and down the wall; the attack of the sensual vampire brides; Dracula's multiple houses in London; the vampire hunters sharing quarters in an insane asylum; the vampire's dapper daytime outfit, complete with a straw hat; and the part–Wild West, part–Gypsy caravan chase at the conclusion.

So they omitted them.

They also determined that there were too many characters and plot twists—a beautiful young vampire victim who becomes a vampire seductress in miniature, terrorizing children; Stoker's familial band of vampire hunters, which included a stuffy British lord and a good old Texas cowboy; a return to Transylvania to murder Dracula's three brides and purify his imminent bride.

They pushed them out of the story, focusing on a handful of characters.

For most of the twentieth century, the result had been a de-fanged vampire story, quite literally. In most of
Dracula
's
reincarnations, men in 1930s tuxedos stand around a sofa or morosely consult at a bedside, adjusting wreaths of garlic as the heroine dozes. The French doors offer the necessary threat. There's an occasional flapping bat. The vampire looks like a Latin lover in a long cape.

—

For Bram Stoker, his story was probably also about “the very beginning and the very end.” We now know that he assembled the novel in a gradual, meticulous fashion, between the years 1890 and 1897, when it was published. In 1890, when he first began taking notes on his vampire story, Stoker worked at London's Lyceum Theatre; the theater was at the height of its popularity and Stoker was at the height of his powers. A glittering array of guests came to see Henry Irving's remarkable shows, and many stayed to be hosted by Irving and Stoker at elaborate dinners in the Beefsteak Room—the Lyceum's prestigious private dining club. There the mysterious journalist Henry Stanley purred of imperialism in Africa; the idealistic traveler Arminius Vambery described the strange, wonderful people of the Balkans; the adventurer and translator Richard Burton wove fanciful images from his visits to the Mideast. These were rich pickings for Bram Stoker, and his imagination was fired. The tales were wonderful; the storytellers were even more interesting. The theatricality of Irving and the guests at those dinners formed an important influence on Stoker's fiction, and various characteristics, bits of history and personal traits, worked their way directly into his vampire story. When he created Dracula in his Transylvanian lair—haughty, controlling, surrounded by lascivious lovers, and desperate for blood—it was a new twist on an old Gothic formula.

By the time
Dracula
was nearing completion in 1896, the fortune of the Lyceum had begun a slow decline. Bram Stoker's array of friends had been cursed with failure and surrounded by scandal. The story of the vampire in retreat—a frightening and powerful man now chased from London and hunted like an animal—seems to have fictionalized the desperate straits of many of Stoker's professional friends and dramatized the loss of their own mysterious, daunting influence over society.

—

At some point as he assembled notes for his novel, Bram Stoker recorded a name that he found in a book on Eastern Europe, a fifteenth-century Wallachian voivode named Dracula. It was the right name at the right time—he wove it into his outline (he'd been using the name “Wampyr”) and even gave
Dracula
pride of place as the title of his book (he'd been using
The Un-Dead
).

Vlad Tepes, also known as Dracula, has since become one of literature's greatest red herrings—a genuine mystery behind the horror. For decades it seemed logical that Bram Stoker had carefully researched this murderous voivode and concealed his source, a fantastic inside joke for fans of European history. The truth is even more surprising. Dracula's name was virtually picked out of a hat by Stoker: an incredible bit of luck and good fortune. It is now apparent that the real history of Vlad Tepes would have surprised Bram Stoker—he knew virtually nothing about him.

—

A simple explanation is that Stoker's novel is so interesting because it was compiled at a fascinating time in his life, when he was surrounded by amazing people. It calls for very little speculation to see Stoker's inspirations, from the people and events that surrounded him in Victorian London, and the colorful characters that befriended him in America. I believe that the most important elements of
Dracula
were inspired by four people: poet Walt Whitman's bold carnality; author Oscar Wilde's corrupting immorality; actor Henry Irving's haunted characters; and murderer Jack the Ripper's mysterious horrors.

The real surprise is that Stoker knew these men—maybe even the mysterious Jack! They played important roles in his professional life. They weighed heavily on his personal life. For decades, scholars and critics have speculated whether these personalities had elbowed their way into the world's greatest vampire novel.

It would have been remarkable if they hadn't.

—Jim Steinmeyer
Los Angeles