Who Was Dracula? (23 page)

Stoker also saves the very best lines for Dracula, and, as previously noted, gives him the only literate or poetic voice in the novel.

Bram Stoker as Dracula? It's an interesting picture. He was a boy from Dublin who toiled away as a civil servant, set his sights on a literary or theatrical career, and aspired to life in London. Once there, he had success and acceptance in some areas—primarily as the Lyceum's Acting Manager. In London, he also discovered disappointing limitations: personally, as an Irish immigrant, and professionally, as a writer. In fact, this was apparent when he visited America, where he seemed more interesting to the press than he was in England.

If Stoker could imagine himself as a Byronic hero, it was a sign of the successes of the men around him, Wilde and Irving. Stoker's own career left him feeling unappreciated and out of place. The best clue about his building resentment is his confession to Frederick Donaghey, the Chicago newspaperman: “If I am able to afford to have my name on [
Dracula
] the Governor certainly can afford, with business bad, to have his name on the play. But he laughs at me whenever I talk about it.” Beyond that, Stoker's view of himself in the novel must be left to speculation. The careful, stoic author never explained.

—

During his long, protracted process of writing
Dracula
, Stoker had published another book,
The Shoulder of Shasta
, in 1895. The book was a return to Stoker's typical adventure stories, here set in the California west; Stoker had visited San Francisco with the Lyceum tour. The story concerns Esse Elstree, a young English heiress, who falls in love with Grizzly Dick, a rough-around-the-edges trapper and guide. The
Athenaeum
didn't like it: “The want of maturity and sense of humor may be due to haste, for the book bears the stamp of being roughly and carelessly put together. Mr. Stoker can probably do much better work than this.”

Of course, he did better work two years later, with his famous vampire. But his next novel,
Miss Betty
, provided another sharp contrast.
Miss Betty
was written in 1890, when he began his notes for
Dracula
, but it wasn't published until March 1898. The book was dedicated to Florence and was an eighteenth-century romance about a pretty heiress and a highwayman. Critics found it charming and sweet and, of course, they couldn't resist the contrast with
Dracula
. “We had a most unpleasant recollection of a
nuit blanche
which followed the reading of
Dracula
,” the
Bookman
reviewer wrote. “But Mr. Bram Stoker had prepared a delightful surprise. . . . It is almost impossible to believe that both novels came from the same pen.”
Miss Betty
was given a copyright performance at the Lyceum in January 1898 but must have been another disappointment for Stoker; it never resurfaced as a play.

—

Henry Irving's famous Lyceum found itself in an unfortunate downhill slide—the scenery fire, the failed productions, and chronic overspending conspired against the actor. In 1898, Irving was struck with pleurisy and pneumonia in Glasgow during a tour. Stoker realized how sick he'd been; he claimed that Irving went through hundreds of pocket handkerchiefs each week, coughing into them and then deftly tucking the handkerchiefs into his pocket or in a corner of his dressing table before reaching for another. The theater was temporarily closed and Irving went to Bournemouth to recover.

Ellen Terry saw him there, “twiddling his poor thumbs and thinking out the best way to get to work again. He is ruined in pocket, heavily in debt.” During his convalescence, he was visited by representatives of the Lyceum company. They outlined a proposition to purchase his interest in the theater. Irving saw the cash offer as a quick solution to his financial straits, and he desperately agreed to the terms. He was to stay on as actor-manager and transfer his interests to the company; in exchange, he would commit to performances at the Lyceum and tours of England and America.

The agreement was made without consulting Stoker, who was then on a ship for America to arrange the next tour. When Irving told him the details of the arrangement, Stoker was horrified. “I protested to Irving against the scheme.” In working through the figures, Stoker saw that Irving would turn over everything, then relinquish a percentage of his salary and share the costs of future productions. “The contract which Irving made,” Stoker later reported, “was not in any way a beneficial one for him, but an excellent one for them.”

The arrangement may have been a sign of Irving's gradual withdrawal from his associates and perhaps a growing mistrust of Stoker. When he became especially secretive, he made foolish decisions. “Quiet, patient, tolerant, impersonal, gentle,” Ellen Terry noted his traits at this time, “close, crafty. Crafty sounds unkind, but it is H.I.”

Much of Stoker's work had been done quietly, behind Irving's back—a continual scramble to accede to the boss's elaborate wishes and still balance the books without him noticing the effort. When the theater was successful, Stoker's delicate dance went unnoticed. When the business failed, his dancing looked futile, especially to Henry Irving.

Years later, Laurence Irving, the actor's grandson and biographer, criticized Stoker for his business failings. “Stoker, inflated with literary and athletic pretensions, worshipped Irving, reveling . . . in the opportunities to rub shoulders with the great.” Stoker's inclination to please the boss and flatter him left Stoker “handicapped . . . in dealing with Irving's business affairs in a forthright and sensible manner. . . . Irving got the service he deserved, but at a cost which was no less fatal because it was not immediately apparent.”

The record demonstrates that Stoker was more right than he was wrong. Those who had known Irving and Stoker realized Stoker's importance to the Lyceum. “Had it not been for his old friend Bram Stoker,” Henry Labouchère said, “Irving would have been eaten out of home and theatre very speedily.”

In 1903, when the Lyceum company completely collapsed, the board debated turning it into a music hall. Stoker attended the meeting, expecting that he would be assigned the blame, with Irving, for the poor receipts.

Instead, Stoker prepared a careful report, filled with facts and figures, demonstrating how Irving had precisely fulfilled his obligations. When called upon, he stood and surprised everyone with a methodical list of facts, the profits, losses, and the receipts from Henry Irving's tours. Actually, Stoker told the board, Irving's contracted performances had swelled the company's bank account. Irving had done his part perfectly. It was the company's own mismanagement that had ruined the business.

To the shareholders, of course, this was all bad news. But they couldn't resist Stoker's rousing speech and his revelation that the great actor, suspected of being the villain, suddenly emerged as the hero. That shareholder's meeting was the perfect counterpoint to Irving's performance for Bram Stoker, “The Dream of Eugene Aram,” which had inspired their relationship almost thirty years before. Now Bram Stoker's recitation paid tribute to the great, noble Henry Irving.

The shareholders stopped the meeting with loud, continuous cheers for Irving's efforts. They were, Stoker reported, “the only cheers I ever heard at a meeting of the Company.”

The Lyceum was reorganized as a music hall.

—

Bram Stoker was engaged to manage Henry Irving's 1903 tour—now it was simply Henry Irving and a supporting cast, not the Lyceum company. Ellen Terry, his popular leading lady, remained in London.

On one of Ellen Terry's visits with Irving, at the end of his career, she found her old lover frail, majestic, and unexpectedly reflective. “What a wonderful life you've had, haven't you?” she found herself saying. He looked up and mumbled a response. “Oh, yes, a wonderful life . . . of work.”

“What have we got out of it all?” she asked. “You and I are getting on, as they say. Henry, do you ever think as I do sometimes, what you have got out of life?”

Irving was intrigued with the conversation, and he repeated her question in a whisper before answering. “Let me see. . . . A good cigar, a good glass of wine, good friends.” He smiled and kissed her hand gently.

“That's not a bad summing up,” she said. “And the end . . . How would you like that to come?”

Irving mumbled the question back at her, lost in thought. “How would I like that to come?” He was silent, staring into space, for a long time: thirty seconds, Terry later recalled. She was hypnotized by the image of the noble Irving, perfectly still and completely lost in thought. Then he found his answer. He quickly caught her eyes. He lifted his hand in a dramatic gesture and snapped his fingers.

“Like that!”

THE FRIENDS, “INTO THY HANDS, O LORD”

H
enry Irving decided he would retire after fifty years on the stage. This was announced in 1904, to give him another two years for a leisurely farewell tour of the United States, Canada, London, and the provinces.

But in 1905, during the tour, Irving's energy began to falter. Stoker rescheduled dates and postponed appearances to accommodate his health. In October, when Irving played Bradford, he seemed especially feeble offstage. Bram Stoker dreaded the night that he would play
The Bells
. “Every time [Irving] heard the sound of the bells, the throbbing of his heart must have nearly killed him,” Ellen Terry later recalled of this role. “He used always to turn quite white—there was no trick about it. It was imagination acting physically on the body. His death as Mathias—the death of a strong, robust man—was different from all his other stage deaths. He did really almost die—he imagined death with such horrible intensity. His eyes would disappear upwards, his face grow gray, his limbs cold.”

When he arrived at the theater in Bradford on October 12, 1905, Irving seemed especially tired. Stoker was shocked to see him sitting in his dressing room “in a listless way.” Fortunately, as he put on his costume the old actor found his energy, and he played Mathias with the expected fire and pathos. The audience hadn't been aware of any problem. But Bram Stoker watched Irving leave the stage and shuffle to his dressing room. His shoulders drooped; he seemed to collapse, a sad old man once again.

Stoker went backstage to tell his master machinist to send the scenery for
The Bells
back to London the next morning. He knew that Irving should never play it again. When he went to Irving in his dressing room that night and told him his decision, Irving just nodded quietly. Stoker felt that Henry Irving had been testing himself in the role and now seemed relieved that someone had made the decision for him.

The next morning, October 13, Irving seemed to have recovered, but he told Stoker to abandon plans for the American tour. “We can see to it later,” he said. “A kindly continent to me, but I will not leave my bones there if I can help it.”

That night, Irving played
Becket
, an old favorite with his public. In the final scene, during Becket's murder, Irving's last lines were “Into thy hands, O Lord, into thy hands!” Then, according to the script, he collapsed onto the stage.

Stoker went backstage to find Irving in his dressing room and offered words of encouragement: “Now you have got into your stride again, and work will be easy.” Irving thought for a moment, nodded, and said, “I really think that is so.” Stoker was off with the advance man from Birmingham to discuss the schedule for the following week, so he said good-bye to Irving at the theater. “Muffle up your throat, old chap!” Irving told him with a wink. “It is bitterly cold tonight and you have a cold. Take care of yourself. Good night. God bless you!”

—

Minutes later a carriage drove up to Stoker's hotel, where he was settling down to a late dinner. The driver rushed inside and told Stoker that Sir Henry was ill. He had felt weak and then fainted just after he arrived at his hotel.

Stoker rushed into the Midland Hotel and found a cluster of men standing silently in the hall, near the lobby. As he pushed his way in, the men parted. Stretched out on the floor was Henry Irving. A doctor had been summoned, and he was crouched at the actor's side.

As the doctor stood up and caught Stoker's eye, the Acting Manager felt instinctively what had just happened. He drew in his breath. The doctor shook his head and offered his condolences. Henry Irving had died just two minutes before.

Bram Stoker bent down, placing his hand against the actor's chest. For some reason he felt an absolute need to check, to know for sure, for himself. There was no heartbeat. He reached up and closed Irving's eyelids.

—

Bram Stoker had spent the last twenty-nine years of his life in service to the vital force that personified the London theater. Lawrence Barrett, an American actor who had worked with Edwin Booth, once lamented, “An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.” Every Henry Irving performance became obsolete the moment the curtain fell. There was only the promise of a next performance. With Irving's death, the memories of those magnificent sculptures began melting away forever.

In the hotel room, where Henry Irving had been moved, Stoker contemplated the actor's body, now slowly illuminated by the cold, gray dawn. “It was all so desolate and lonely, as so much of his life had been,” Stoker later wrote. He turned his attention to the imminent whirl of events. This is what he did best, and he owed Irving one final tour back to London. Telegrams needed to be sent to Irving's sons. Theaters needed to be informed. The press would be notified. Undertakers arranged. Train schedules changed and the company sent home. Associates informed, in widening waves, according to the immediate business need or their personal relationship to the actor.

Stoker supervised the undertaker's duties and then arranged a visitation service at the hotel for the members of the acting company, who would now be free to return home. He planned a carriage for the coffin, so Irving's remains would be carried to the Market Street Station, where the Great Northern Railway would return Stoker and Irving to London.

Stoker's small procession passed through streets packed with people, “a sea of faces,” he recalled, who stood, hats removed, in complete silence: “street after street of silent humanity.” Bram Stoker was stunned with the mysterious, respectful attitude of the Bradford crowd. Apparently the entire city had assembled to pay tribute to the actor, and Stoker's view from the carriage was “poignant, harrowing, overwhelming.” At each intersection, the crowd took their direction from the hearse and silently parted. As the hearse passed, the crowd closed rank again and followed. The tribute—perfect respect, perfect silence—was a heartbreaking contrast to the roars of applause that Irving had inspired through his lifetime. It was a magical, theatrical bit of choreography that was worthy of a Lyceum production.

A day of steady, necessary work had left Stoker no time to grieve. But during the sad carriage journey the dam broke, and he found himself unexpectedly shaking with emotion. He later wrote, “It moves me strangely to think of it yet.”

Irving's ashes were buried in the Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, near Garrick's monument. England heralded him as a hero, but George Bernard Shaw would not relent. The playwright and critic refused to attend the funeral, noting, “Literature had no place at Irving's graveside.” He summed up Irving's career with a typically frank assessment. “Irving had splendidly maintained the social status of the theatre, and greatly raised that of the actor; but he had done nothing for contemporary dramatic literature.” Ellen Terry was disappointed by Shaw's lack of grace. Well aware of his publicized mania for healthy eating, she wrote to him, “I can't understand how one without gross food in him, who takes no wine to befuddle his wits, can have been so indelicate.”

—

Bram Stoker's
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
was published in 1906. With the memory of Irving still fresh, reviewers found much to praise: its insider's view of the great actor, his rehearsals and techniques, his painstaking detail and devotion to his craft. But the
Spectator
also thought that the book was the work of “a worshipper,” under a sort of “hypnotic spell.” The
Drama
sniffed that there was too much of Stoker and that he offered “little that is new or valuable.” Similarly, the
Bookman
noticed that Stoker's story was tirelessly told as “we,” or “Irving and I.” Hence the only real revelations were those that Stoker shared, the finances or the management of the theater.

Blackwood's
Magazine
offered a long, insightful review that criticized the two friends simultaneously: Irving for his old-fashioned, stagy love of spectacle, and Stoker for his overwrought prose that attempted to make Irving's career seem artistic. In this, the reviewer implied that the rarefied air of the Lyceum made Stoker's biography curiously old-fashioned and uninformed, just like Irving's performances.

The review was brutally honest about the actor's legacy: “Irving did more than any man of his time to foster and indulge the depraved taste of the British public for ‘realism' and spectacle. . . . He probably did more to expel the Shakespearean drama from the British stage by his gorgeous revivals than he did to prolong or renew it. . . . The appetite for a senseless show, once pampered, grows like others. . . . That [Irving] ‘helped the audience to think,' may or may not be true. Certain is it that he would leave nothing to their imagination.”

—

Shortly after the publication of his book on Irving, Bram Stoker suffered a stroke and was unconscious for a full day. When he recovered, his walking was uneven and his eyesight had been permanently affected—he needed a magnifying glass to write.

Bram Stoker's social contacts gradually waned. Failed investments in the 1890s, just when the Lyceum was collapsing, meant that Stoker's finances were uncertain. His royalties—even from
Dracula
—amounted to very little. He depended on a steady output of writing to earn his living: magazine articles, short stories, and books.

The Mystery of the Sea
,
The Jewel of Seven Stars
, and
The Man
were all written before Irving's death in 1905. Of these,
The Jewel of Seven Stars
, from 1903, is the most interesting, and one of Stoker's most successful books. It is the story of an Egyptologist, Abel Trelawney, who has fallen under the spell of Tera, an ancient Egyptian queen. Queen Tera has begun to possess the soul of Margaret, a modern woman. In an attempt to completely reincarnate the queen, Trelawney conducts a mysterious, Frankenstein-like experiment in a Cornish castle.

A fierce storm, “animated with the wrath of the quick,” rages outside. “All at once the eager faces round the sarcophagus were bent forward. The look of speechless wonder in the eyes . . . had a more than mortal brilliance.” But the sudden wind blasts through the shutters and destroys the experiment. The queen is resurrected but killed in the process. The other observers, including Margaret, have died “with fixed eyes of unspeakable horror.” Only the narrator survives to tell the grisly tale.

In its review of the novel, the
New York Herald
marveled at Stoker's dual life. These wonderful horrors must have been a product of his theatrical work. “How does Mr. Stoker come by this quality?” the reviewer wondered. “His is the heartiest of material existences. To see him active in the role of theatrical manager is to be aware of a vital, virile personality. . . . It must be that the geist [spirit] of Sir Henry Irving enters into him, compounded of Hamlet, Mathias, Macbeth. . . .”

Stoker's story was evidently too spooky for its publisher, Rider, who asked for a happier ending for the 1912 edition. Stoker rewrote it so that Margaret survives and offers solace for the queen: “Do not grieve for her. . . . She dreamed her dream, and that is all that any of us can ask!”
The Jewel of Seven Stars
was a clear inspiration for a long tradition of later Hollywood mummy films.

The Lady of the Shroud
, from 1909, was a fascinating parallel to
Dracula
. Stoker returned to the Balkans, where the lady of the title, Teuta Vissarion, is a princess who pretends to be a vampire. The story included a distinctly modern touch, an airplane rescue.

Stoker's 1910 book
Famous Impostors
was an unexpected bit of journalism. In his chapters on historical impostors, he included the necromancer Cagliostro and the Victorian swindler, the Tichborne Claimant. But Stoker earned headlines with the elaborate, shaky theory that Queen Elizabeth had actually died when she was a young girl and was then impersonated by a boy. Stoker's chapter was a bit of racy historical speculation; perhaps he was reminded of Oscar Wilde's Elizabethan fantasy, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.”

—

The Lair of the White Worm
, published in 1911, was Bram Stoker's last, and most contentious, work. Reviewers hated it from the moment it was published. The
Times Literary
Supplement
felt Stoker was “attempting to exceed the supernatural horrors of Dracula” but had ended up with “something very like nonsense. . . . Coherence is a necessity . . . the book is disjointed and, in fact, very silly.”

The novel tells the story of Lady Arabella March, a mysterious femme fatale who not only is serpentine in her appearance and vileness but reveals her natural form as a gigantic, foul white worm, two hundred feet long, that lives in a pit a thousand feet deep and drags victims down into this “noxious . . . poisonous” lair. An upright young man, Adam, and his learned adviser, Sir Nathaniel, decide to destroy the monster: “Being feminine, she will probably over-reach herself. . . . Our strong game will be to play our masculine against her feminine.”

She is a daunting enemy, but Adam succeeds with multiple dynamite charges dropped into the deep, disgusting pit. The dynamite produces a lurid scene in which her “agonized shrieks” are heard, and the “seething contents of the hole . . . part of the thin form of Lady Arabella, [are] forced up to the top amid a mass of slime.”

Stoker's great-nephew and biographer, Daniel Farson, found the book “so bizarre, almost ludicrous,” that it could not be taken seriously. But he was fascinated by the blend of Gothic horror and surreal hallucinations: “Without a vestige of humor, it is immensely funny.” Dracula expert Leonard Wolf suggested that such a story might be dismissed from a young man, as “whatever the author's misery, it would surely pass; but Stoker was sixty-four years old. . . . There is no way to ignore the signs of confusion and loneliness.” Harry Ludlam, another biographer of Stoker, felt “some deep mystery between the lines—the mystery of the mind of the man who wrote it.” The weird—and brutally apparent—sexual images seem especially odd just three years after Stoker's excoriating essays on censorship. Literary critics have fixated on
The Lair of the White Worm
's sexuality and its streak of misogyny. The next step, of course, has been to send those judgments ricocheting back through
Dracula
—and those judgments are there, in decades of literary criticism.