Who Was Dracula? (17 page)

A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and after all, how few days go to make up a century. I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may be amongst the common dead. I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and the sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young; and my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. . . . I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may.

Even the Count's snarling speech to the vampire hunters sounds like verse.

You think to baffle me, you, with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher's. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you. You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine—my creatures to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!

Bram Stoker finally met Walt Whitman in 1884, when he and Henry Irving brought the Lyceum company to Philadelphia, and he found himself instantly enchanted with the poet. This was the meeting when Whitman surprised him by recognizing the name Abraham Stoker. Whitman was instantly open, friendly, and curious in an ingratiating way. He was especially receptive to Stoker's opinions and impressions of friends from Ireland. The poet spoke with a rich voice—his own rich, baritone Long Island accent was a treat for Stoker, who had become fascinated with the various American twangs that he encountered from city to city.

—

Stoker had first seen a portrait of Whitman in
Leaves of Grass
, but as he entered the room in Philadelphia, he took note of the old poet's distinctive appearance. Whitman resembled a sort of mythological creature, a powerful beast who exhibited only sensitive traits. He was over six feet tall and thickly built, but only gentle, inviting, and habitually kind. During one of Stoker's visits, he noticed the poet sitting in a special rocking chair that had been constructed for his large, heavy frame. Whitman's clothing, similarly, had been hand-stitched to perfectly fit his body and his tastes: it was coarsely woven and simply cut, in simple shades of gray. The old woman who cared for him had adorned his collar and cuffs with lace or fabric decorations. These bits of lace were “clumsily sewn on and . . . pathetic to see,” according to Stoker, but signs of the woman's devotion and Whitman's honored status. Whitman had become a sort of Christmas tree, to be celebrated and decorated. He seemed oblivious to this attention. His jacket cuffs bristled with straight pins, which he habitually pulled out to use to attach manuscript pages in his work.

Bram Stoker recalled the poet as

an old man of leonine appearance. He was burly, with a large head and high forehead slightly bald. Great shaggy masses of grey-white hair fell over his collar. His moustache was large and thick and fell over his mouth so as to mingle with the top of the mass of the bushy flowing beard.

When Stoker visited him years later, he found Whitman's appearance only slightly altered.

He looked like King Lear in Ford Madox Brown's picture. . . . His hair seemed longer and wilder and shaggier and whiter than when I had seen him two years before.

The tall, powerful, animal-like Whitman forms a nearly perfect parallel to Count Dracula, as Jonathan Harker first encounters him.

Clean-shaven save for a long white mustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of color about him anywhere. . . . His face was a strong—a very strong—aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely everywhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with busy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy mustache, was fixed and rather cruel looking. . . .

The 1902 Doubleday edition of the novel included a portrait of the vampire on the cover. The illustration shows Dracula alongside a wolf; he has dark hair instead of white, but his wild, natural appearance bears a striking resemblance to Walt Whitman.

A number of Stoker's acquaintances may have suggested the physical traits of Dracula. Henry Irving was tall and angular; Henry Stanley had a dark, haunted look; Jacques Damala (actress Sarah Bernhardt's husband) gave the appearance of a dead man. Sir Richard Burton's canine teeth and Franz Liszt's white hair have also been cited for their inspirations. But of all Stoker's friends, or the Lyceum's visiting celebrities, Whitman presents the best match. Although he had a full beard and was more solidly built than the Count, his natural height, strength, wild white hair, and mustache suggest the vampire's physical appearance. Dracula's tomb-like obsessions, dark poetry, and ambiguous sexuality further suggest that Bram Stoker used the famous American poet, his self-proclaimed “master,” as a model for literature's most famous vampire.

Stoker began writing his notes for
Dracula
in 1890, less than three years after he last saw Whitman, and the poet died in 1892, before Stoker's next visit to America. Walt Whitman never read
Dracula
.

—

One of the most fascinating chapters in
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
, Bram Stoker's book about his associate, is the chapter devoted to Walt Whitman. It is one of the few autobiographical sections of the book, for the Whitman story is Stoker's story. He recounted his discovery of Whitman's poems at Trinity and his having written letters to the author—without quoting them (perhaps he didn't have copies, or perhaps he understood how desperate they sounded so many years later). He reproduced Whitman's response to him and recorded his later visits to Whitman in America.

Stoker was honest enough to address Whitman's reputation for indecent prose.

In 1868 [the British edition,
Selected Poems of Walt Whitman
] raised a regular storm in British literary circles. . . . Those who did not or could not understand the broad spirit of the group of poems took samples of details which were at least deterrent. . . . From these excerpts it would seem that the book was as offensive to morals as to taste. They did not scruple to give the
ipsissima verba
[that is, the very words] of the most repugnant passages.

Stoker believed that Whitman's words were being taken out of context.

In my own University the book was received with Homeric laughter, and more than a few of the students sent over to Trubner's [the U.S. publisher] for copies of the complete
Leaves of Grass. . . .
Needless to say that amongst young men the objectionable passages were searched for and more noxious ones expected. For days we all talked of Walt Whitman and the new poetry with scorn—especially those of us who had not seen the book.

Stoker, however, was given a copy by a student who was tired of it.

I took the book with me into the park and in the shade of an elm tree began to read it. Very shortly my own opinion began to form; it was diametrically opposed to that which I had been hearing. From that hour I became a lover of Walt Whitman.

On Stoker's third visit to Whitman, in 1887, he brought up a conversation he'd had with Talcott Williams, an editor at the
Philadelphia Press
. Stoker found Whitman looking “hale and well” at his Mickle Street house. When there was a pause in their conversation, Stoker leaned over, looking into Whitman's clear blue eyes, and offered his plan.

I ventured to speak to him what was in my mind as to certain excisions in his work. “If you will only allow your friends to do this—they will only want to cut about a hundred lines in all—your books will go into every house in America. Is not that worth the sacrifice?” He answered at once, as though his mind had long ago been made up and he did not want any special thinking.

Neither Stoker nor Williams really knew Whitman, and neither suspected that Whitman had already had this conversation hundreds of times—with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Boston district attorney. Whitman told him:

“It would not be any sacrifice. So far as I am concerned they might cut a thousand. It is not that—it is quite another matter.” Here both his face and voice grew rather solemn. “When I wrote as I did I thought I was doing right and right makes for good. I think so still. I think that all that God made is for good—that the work of His hands is clean in all ways if used as He intended! If I was wrong I have done harm. And for that I deserve to be punished by being forgotten! It has been and cannot not-be. No, I shall never cut a line as long as I live!”

This account attests to Stoker's skills as a reporter, for it sounds exactly like Whitman. In his book, Stoker concluded, “One had to respect a decision thus made and on such grounds. I said no more.”

—

Could Bram Stoker have failed to recognize the indecent elements in his own book?

When he sent a copy of
Dracula
to Prime Minister Gladstone, he added a note: “The book is necessarily full of horrors and terrors but I trust that these are calculated to ‘cleanse the mind by pity and terror.' At any rate there is nothing base in the book and though superstition is brought in, with the weapons superstition, I hope it is not irrelevant.”

The notion of cleansing the mind through “pity and fear” is from Aristotle's
Poetics
. The implication is that Stoker recognized the value of thrills—providing a new perspective or morality through the experience. By “base,” Stoker refers to the crudities of superstition and folklore. Presumably, like many of his reviewers, he overlooked any sexual content.

In 1908, two years after the publication of
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
, Stoker contributed a long essay on “The Censorship of Fiction” to
The
Nineteenth Century and After
, a monthly publication. Stoker was in a unique position to address this issue—as a writer recognized for his sensational horror, as a man of the theater who had consistently dealt with the Lord Chamberlain's office, and as a solicitor. He seems to have turned his back on Whitman's lesson and, indeed, on Dracula's appeal.

Not surprisingly, Stoker first championed simple restraint in the creation of artistic works. “The measure of the ethics of the artist is expressed in the reticence shown in his work; and where such self-restraint exists there is no need for external compelling force.”

Censorship was necessary as a result of a gradual winnowing-away of values: an audience that thrills to increasing “weaknesses” and a writer or producer who profits through increasing “avarice.”

This goes on till a comparison between what was and what is shows to any eye, even an unskilled one, a startling fact of decadence. Then, as is too often observable in public matters, official guardianship of ethical values wakes up and acts—when it is too late for any practical effect. To prevent this, censorship must be continuous and rigid. There must be no beginnings of evil, no flaws in the mason work of the dam. . . . It is not sufficient to make a stand, however great, here and there; the whole frontier must be protected.

This is, of course, a remarkably harsh theory and is only muddled by the vagaries. Stoker must have been mindful of Walt Whitman, for he quoted him in the essay. Whitman had popularized the term “en masse,” meaning a sort of public mentality. Stoker pointed out that imagination doesn't apply to Whitman's “en masse” but is the result of an individual. The author cautioned against the worst “evils of imagination.”

It is through the corruption of individuals that the harm is done. A close analysis will show that the only emotions which in the long run harm are those arising from sex impulses, and when we have realized this we have put a finger on the actual point of danger.

To a modern reader, Stoker's essay borders on dumbfounding. Could the author really overlook the sex impulses that provided the magical frisson in
Dracula
's pages? Could he have written those scenes and not understood the literary high-wire act he had just negotiated? Or did he consider himself too clever for his own values?

There is a hint that Stoker was drawing a line between suggestive literature and obscene literature. He pointedly distinguished between “natural misdoing based on human weakness, frailty, or passions of the senses,” and books with “vices so flagitious . . . that the poignancy of moral disgust is lost in horror.” As he refused to name the books of his examples “and give the writers the advertisements which they crave,” we can only guess at his targets.

Presumably
Dracula
's issues of “human weakness” and Whitman's “passions of the senses” fell outside of his criticism. Unfortunately, the essay ended with the heavy thud of a legislator, not the feathery distinctions of an artist.

This article is no mere protest against academic faults or breaches of good taste. It is a deliberate indictment of a class of literature so vile that it is actually corrupting a nation.

Stoker must have been aware of Whitman's sensuality and, by extension, the eroticism that could be encoded in literature. He addressed exactly this issue with Whitman. But when Stoker wrote about censorship, he refused to take into account the sensuality he had encountered in his American master's poems. He made no effort to include Whitman's rule that “right makes for good” or the “broad spirit” of the poems that had caused him to once swoon over verses as a young man—the spirit that had allowed him to overlook crudities and appreciate the genius of the poet.

—

Bram Stoker's conversation with Whitman took a place of pride in his book and provides an especially honest and noble tribute to the American poet.

By contrast, the indecencies of Oscar Wilde, Stoker's childhood friend—Wilde was convicted and sentenced to jail for immorality—earned him no such respect, nor any consideration. Stoker completely omitted his name from
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
. It is a remarkable effort, in itself, spectacularly single-minded. Wilde was a good friend of Stoker, Irving, and Ellen Terry. He was often in the audience at the Lyceum, a guest at special dinners, reciting poetry, or in the Beefsteak Room leading bright conversation. Wilde deserved a place on Stoker's list of visiting celebrities.