Who Was Dracula? (24 page)

This was the novel that made H. P. Lovecraft shake his head over Stoker more than a decade later, questioning if he could have written
Dracula
. “
The Lair of the White Worm
is absolutely the most amorphous and infantile mess I've ever seen between cloth covers,” Lovecraft wrote. “Stoker was absolutely devoid of a sense of form, and could not write a coherent tale to save his life.”

Daniel Farson concluded that the book might have been the result of medication. In the last years of his life, Bram Stoker was suffering from Bright's disease and gout, which may have required a treatment for the pain.

—

In his petition to the Royal Literary Fund, Stoker pointed out that he'd earned only 166 pounds ($830) from his writing in 1910 and that he'd been incapacitated since his later stroke, a difficult position for “one who has to depend on his brain and his hands.” The fund awarded him 100 pounds. The Stokers economized, moving from their Chelsea house to a flat in Belgravia. Florence helped in collecting her husband's magazine short stories, in an effort to produce another book.

On April 20, 1912, just five days after the
Titanic
sank on its maiden voyage from England to New York, Bram Stoker died, with his wife and son at his bedside. The event was relegated to the inside pages of the newspapers, hidden in the swirl of
Titanic
headlines and accusations about the “unsinkable” ocean liner.

Bram Stoker's obituary in the London
Times
noted that he had been ill for the last six years. The newspaper paid tribute to his “lurid and creepy kind of fiction” that was found in
Dracula.
But, the
Times
was convinced, “his chief literary memorial will be his
Reminiscences of Irving
, a book which with all its extravagances and shortcomings, cannot but remain a valuable record . . . [by] his devoted associate and admirer.”

Of course, they got it wrong.

Bram Stoker's old friend Hall Caine put his life in perspective.

We who were very close to him realized . . . that with Irving's life poor Bram's had really ended. It was too late to begin afresh. The threads that had been broken thirty years before could not be pieced together. There could be no second flowing of the tide. . . . Though Bram made a brave fight for a new life, he knew well, and we knew well, that his chances were over.

He took no vain view of his efforts as an author. Frankly, he wrote his books to sell, and except in the case of one of them (his book on Irving), he had no higher aims. . . .

In one thing our poor Bram, who had many limitations, was truly great. He was indeed the genius of friendship. . . . I can think of nothing—absolutely nothing—that I could have asked Bram Stoker to do for me that he would not have done. It is only once in a man's life that such a friendship comes to him, and when the grave is closed on the big heart which we are to bury today, I shall feel that I have lost it.

Stoker's brilliant friendship, like Irving's acting, left no memorials behind, except the evanescent recollections of those who shared the experience. Unlike Irving, Stoker had forged a legacy that would not only survive him, but flourish.

Bram Stoker was cremated and interred at Golders Green Crematorium in London on April 24, 1912.

—

With the 1975 biography of his great-uncle, Daniel Farson offered a revelation. Bram Stoker's death certificate listed the causes as:

Locomotor Ataxy, 6 months.

Granular contracted Kidney.

Exhaustion.

The kidney ailment was Bright's disease. But “Locomotor Ataxy” suggested, to Farson's doctor, General Paralysis of the Insane—these were the terms that signaled death caused by syphilis.

Farson was now able to interpret other significant symptoms, including Stoker's failing eyesight, instability, and mental deterioration. Then, counting backward (syphilis usually took ten to fifteen years before it became fatal), Farson saw how the medical condition began to inform his final years.

Irresistibly, this provided an explanation for
The Lair of the White Worm
—Stoker's last book was composed when he was delirious. It explained that his marriage to Florence had failed—her frigidity inspired the themes of his novels and his snarling censorship of sexual content. And it suggested another tie to Oscar Wilde—Stoker may have become infected from a French prostitute on the trip to Paris when he visited Wilde.

Such speculation isn't unexpected; everyone wanted to find some lurid, grinning skeleton in Bram Stoker's closet. Unfortunately, the death certificate was not conclusive. Author Leslie Shepard has pointed out that “Locomotor Ataxy” is not always associated with syphilis, especially if Stoker had been suffering for only six months. During the last years of his life, he was alert and busy with literary work until the time of his death. His family remembered him as a “rather dotty” old man, but this behavior wouldn't have been indicative of the illness. It seems unlikely that he suffered from the gradual paralysis or mental deterioration that would have been expected from syphilis.

Stoker's later biographer, Paul Murray, consulted with medical experts who were more decisive: Syphilis could have affected his reflexes or eyesight, but not his intellect. (In other words, there was no medical excuse for
The Lair of the White Worm
.) Murray's experts felt that the death certificate suggested a diagnosis of syphilis, although this may not have advanced to the point of a fatal disease. Bram Stoker probably died of kidney disease.

—

After all his concerns for money at the end of his life, Stoker left an estate worth over 4,600 pounds ($23,000), a respectable amount, to Florence. Thornley Stoker, his brother, died just weeks later, and an additional 1,000-pound bequest was also inherited by Florence. She earned additional money with the sale of Bram's library the following year.

In 1914, Florence Stoker published the collection of Stoker's short stories that he had been preparing before his death. In her preface, she explained that her husband had planned “three series of short stories.” But with this collection of stories, she had added “a hitherto unpublished episode from
Dracula
. It was originally excised owing to the length of the book, and may prove of interest to the many readers.” This anthology was titled
Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories.

“Dracula's Guest” tells the story of an English traveler passing through Munich on Walpurgisnacht. When the carriage abandons him and he walks through a grove of trees, he encounters the tomb of Countess Dolingen; scrawled on the door are the words, “The dead travel fast.” Taking refuge from a snowstorm, he watches as the inner tomb opens and he sees a beautiful woman, with round cheeks and red lips, apparently asleep on the bier.

Lightning strikes the tomb, destroying it and hurtling the traveler into the snow. He wakes to discover that an enormous wolf is lapping at his throat. A troop of horsemen approach and scare the wolf away. The mysterious wolf has been warming him and keeping him alive through the night. When the traveler arrives at his hotel in Munich, the innkeeper shows him a telegram that he received from Bistritz. The telegram warns the innkeeper to guard the English traveler from the “dangers of snow and wolves and night,” as “his safety is most precious to me.” The telegram is signed by Dracula.

Certain clues in the story—the English visitor in Munich, who we presume is Jonathan Harker, Walpurgisnacht, the vampire-like Countess, and the traveler's plan to visit Dracula—seemed to support Florence Stoker's introduction, that this was part of the first chapter of the novel.

Authors Elizabeth Miller and Clive Leatherdale have disagreed. Stoker's early notes for
Dracula
did include a line, “adventure snowstorm and wolf,” that suggests that “Dracula's Guest” was derived from his earliest plot. But the short story is written in third person instead of first person. The unnamed character of the traveler is more aggressive and knows less German than the Jonathan Harker of the novel. Finally, the dates of this short story indicate that it could not have been simply pulled out of the novel. Leatherdale suggests that it might have been part of the earliest draft of the novel, and then removed and reworked as a separate story—sometime around 1890 or 1892. Or, perhaps, it was written as a short story, but “Stoker realized its potential and returned to construct a novel upon it.”

The most illuminating phrase in Florence Stoker's introduction is the observation that
Dracula
was “my husband's most remarkable work.” It was remarkable enough to market his posthumous book as
Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories
.

Like the mysterious wolf who appeared unexpectedly to offer warmth,
Dracula
would provide for Florence. In exchange, she would encourage Dracula's most startling metamorphosis—not into a bat or a wolf, but into a handsome leading man worthy of the twentieth century.

THE LEGEND, “SPREAD OVER CENTURIES”

T
he Little Theatre was just that, the West End's tiniest showplace: a simple, functional auditorium on John Street in the Strand, with a flat ceiling, a stage at one end, and some decorative paintings hung in the lobby. It accommodated just over three hundred people.

On Valentine's Day in 1927, Florence Stoker and her daughter-in-law arrived. They'd been offered prestigious seats, two on the aisle. The house manager had been alerted to watch for the tiny, pretty little lady, to escort her through the crowd, make conversation, then just smile and nod if she became difficult in any way. After all, the only reason everyone was there that night, the only reason there was a play, was Mrs. Stoker. Please be polite to her.

Bram Stoker had once been in charge of just such custodial duties at the Lyceum, escorting royalty to the smoking lounge, passing along invitations to the Beefsteak Room, engaging in small talk or providing refreshments to Henry Irving's guests. Florence was, by extension, an expert at just how such pleasantries were conducted and just how a grand theater should be operated. The manager at the Little Theatre was clearly an amateur, she decided. Scuffed shoes, dirty fingernails. Bram wouldn't have had him for an usher.

She knew. She had attended most of the Lyceum's opening nights and been proudly introduced to the finest of London society. She had been at the opening of
Lady Windermere's Fan
, having been invited by the playwright himself. That was the night that she was complimented on her striking brocade wrap, and Oscar appeared onstage, holding a cigarette, his lapel adorned with the infamous green carnation.

At the Little Theatre there was none of that old grandeur. The theater's decor was ghastly and ordinary, just whitewashed walls and uncomfortable seats. Henry Irving would never have set foot in such a place. The audience shuffled in around her; they mumbled, rattled their programs, pulled at their coats, and sat down. This was not a Lyceum crowd. That night at the Little Theatre was a reminder of just how far she'd fallen.

Florence gazed at the program, which her cataracts prevented her from reading; her daughter-in-law whispered what was printed on the front: “Hamilton Deane and H. L. Warburton present The Vampire Play,
Dracula
, by Hamilton Deane. Adapted from Bram Stoker's famous novel.” It was the opening night of
Dracula
in London. Florence sighed and shook her head. She'd hated the script from the first moment she read it, three years before. But she'd also been cashing checks, the seemingly endless royalties from the play's provincial tours. Once Count Dracula asserted his mysterious power over the box office, it was inevitable that he would invade London, just as he had in the novel.

Perhaps Florence had remembered the play as her husband's onetime dream, but most likely Bram's plans had been long forgotten. She now analyzed
Dracula
as a simple, necessary source of income. It was the best thing she had.

The electric lights flashed and then were extinguished. A piano at the edge of the stage offered a quick overture, a Slovak melody that echoed in hard notes off the plaster walls. The curtain raised on a perfectly ordinary study—painted bookcases, overstuffed chairs, a chesterfield, a fireplace. An older man in a cutaway coat walked briskly onstage and stood at the fireplace. He looked at his watch. He drummed his fingers on the mantel. Florence Stoker leaned forward, into the wash of pale yellow light from the stage, waiting for something to happen. The seats around her creaked, like those in a schoolroom.

Onstage, a young man entered through a door, which slammed and wobbled with the telltale sign of cheap scenery. “Well, how is she?” the older man asked, pushing every word through his teeth without any special emphasis. “No change, pale and listless, but doing her best to keep up a show of brightness,” the young man answered.

It was definitely poor acting.

“Well, this thing has beaten me. . . . In all of my experience as a medical man I've never seen anything like it. . . .”

The widow felt her heart sink. She had been there for Booth in
Othello
, and Ellen Terry in
Macbeth
. She'd heard the bubbling laughter generated by Wilde's unexpected bons mots. She'd acted in a play by Tennyson; what an opening night that had been! There was no doubt about it. She was now listening to some of the stupidest lines she'd ever heard in a professional theater. The amateurish enunciation made each word stab like a knife.

The young man paused a moment, then turned on his heel. “My God, if only your friend the scientist would come!”

What was it that Irving had said? Yes,
Dracula
was truly dreadful.

—

Author and Dracula expert David Skal has chronicled the twists and turns by which Stoker's Victorian vampire entered the Jazz Age. According to Skal, “Dracula became Florence's guardian angel, of sorts, providing a steady, if meager sustenance. She was determined to make money from stage and motion picture rights, but interlopers vexed her.”

After her husband's death, Florence Stoker lived comfortably but not extravagantly. She moved to Knightsbridge, was the center of a social circle, attended the theater and opera, and indulged in cruises and holidays with her son, Noel, and his family. She attracted a cult of Oscar Wilde fans; she referred to her onetime beau as “Poor O” and proudly showed off a small watercolor landscape that he had painted for her.

Always a head-turning beauty, she remained pretty and vain in old age. Her family called her Granny Moo and remembered her as “elegant, aloof,” and “an ornament, not a woman of passion.” Coincidentally, she was once visited by a young American student from the Courtauld Institute of Art, named Vincent Price. This was before he became interested in acting and, of course, years before he became famous for his horror roles. Price remembered Mrs. Stoker as “frail and small . . . holding court, surrounded by portraits from her youth.”

She was also single-minded. In 1922 she sent 1 pound, 10 shillings to join the Society of Authors, which was her right as her husband's literary executor. When she was welcomed to the society, she instantly responded to G. Herbert Thring, its secretary, with a complaint. She'd been sent an advertisement for a screening of a new film in Berlin, titled
Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror
, directed by F. W. Murnau.

It was the best pound and 10 shillings Florence Stoker ever spent. For the next fifteen years she bombarded Mr. Thring with a hectoring list of offenses and urged him forward in defense of her rights.
Nosferatu
was a special curse to her; she chased it from country to country, prevented it from being shown in Great Britain for many years, and pursued it to America, attempting to stop screenings. When she received a judgment in a German court, she almost managed to have prints of the film destroyed. Her legal maneuvers were especially complicated because the studio that produced it, Prana Film, quickly went bankrupt and Florence relentlessly pursued the receivers.

Mrs. Stoker never saw
Nosferatu
. She didn't want to see it. But fortunately this masterpiece has survived, one of the most famous examples of German Expressionist silent film. Of course, the plot is based heavily on
Dracula
(and in America, it was first billed as
Dracula
). In many ways,
Nosferatu
is more
Dracula
than
Dracula
. Producer and designer Albin Grau rejected the modern London setting—typewriters and phonographs—and set the story in Germany of 1838. It's creaky and foreign, the world of Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
. Similarly, Count Orlok (the Dracula character) is tall and cadaver-like, a horrific monster with bat-like ears and rodent-like teeth. In
Nosferatu
, the analogy of pestilence is clear; when the ship with the vampire nears the harbor, a mysterious plague overtakes the city. Count Orlok reaching with his claws, or rising from his coffin aboard the ship, are some of the most nightmarish images in the history of the cinema.

In his novel, Bram Stoker's rule was that sunlight reduces the power of the vampire, but Grau and Murnau were the first to exaggerate this, suggesting that sunlight would prove deadly. It is a plot twist perfectly suited to special effects. At the end of
Nosferatu
, Count Orlok dissolves, becoming transparent and then disappearing completely. Hollywood later adopted this rule as a handy tool for the assortment of
Dracula
sequels that drew audiences through the 1930s and 1940s.

—

During her campaign against the German film, an Irish actor named Hamilton Deane approached Florence Stoker with a proposition. Deane had long obsessed over the idea of
Dracula
on the stage. His family had known the Stokers in Dublin, and when he had toured with Henry Irving's company in 1899, he had a chance to meet Bram Stoker—although he'd been too shy to discuss
Dracula
with its author.

For years he had attempted to interest playwrights in the idea, but they thought the novel couldn't be adapted. The diary style was impossible; the cast was enormous; the effects were prohibitive; the censor would never allow it. Finally, Deane's wife urged him to write it himself. In 1923 he was laid up with a cold and found himself instinctively composing the play he had been describing for almost twenty years.

Deane had his own repertory company that toured England, so he wrote a play that was modest enough for his own needs. He stripped away the most thrilling opening chapters in Transylvania. He confined the action to three acts in a London parlor, Mina's bedroom, and a brief finale in a dark crypt. Quincy (not Quincey) Morris was now a pistol-packing American woman. Lucy was eliminated completely. And Dracula was a tall, continental gentleman in a satin opera cape, with white streaks of hair that suggested devilish horns. There was no chase back to Eastern Europe. Instead, the vampire hunters shuffled over to the house next door, found the coffin, and pounded in a stake.

The result was unexpectedly tame and cheap, a drawing-room thriller that would look more like
Lady Windermere's Fan
than a Lyceum production. He sought Mrs. Stoker's permission. She didn't like it. She could read that Deane had taken a simple way out. But she also realized that it would be a quick opportunity for income during her battle against
Nosferatu
. Deane's play was put in front of an audience—snuck in the middle of some repertory favorites—in June 1924, in Derby.

And from that first night,
Dracula
was an ironclad hit. Audiences weren't expecting a good play; they were willing to forgive the faults because it scared them. It made them scream; it made them giggle nervously. If the thrills were cheap—screams, bats, smoke, and exploding flash pots—there was a refreshing honesty about it.

More than likely, part of
Dracula
's success was owed to the Grand Guignol productions just two years earlier. In 1920, the famous French theater of horrors had first premiered an English version of their peculiar plays at the Little Theatre in London—the same whitewashed room that later hosted
Dracula
's premiere. Grand Guignol attracted considerable comment for its bloody and psychological horrors. It was always an acquired taste, a foreign-feeling revue that was designed to leave audiences with the sensation of experiencing jolting extremes, “hot and cold showers.” Once the public had been introduced to the fashion of Grand Guignol,
Dracula
appeared. The play was convincingly English, reassuringly clunky, and maddeningly familiar. But then it surprised with the latest thing: jolts of Grand Guignol stylishness.

Hamilton Deane chose to take the role of Van Helsing. His wife, Dora Mary Patrick, played Mina. Joining the cast later was a twenty-two-year-old actor, Raymond Huntley, who went on to portray the Count thousands of times. Hamilton Deane quickly excised the other twenty-two plays from his repertory. They weren't needed. The public wanted
Dracula
. He toured it for over two years in provincial theaters. “We never had a poor house with
Dracula
,” he reported. “By that time I was simply coining money with play. I could not go wrong with it, anywhere.”

When it premiered on Valentine's Day in 1927, Deane expected the worst from the London critics, and he got it.

The
Times
thought there was “very little of Bram Stoker,” and although the surprises were crude, mostly loud noises, “most of us jumped out of our seats at least once in every act.” The acting was amateurish. Deane's accent as Van Helsing was singled out, especially because it had disappeared during the interval. The
Morning Post
insisted that Mr. Deane simply could not write dialogue. Dora Mary Patrick, as Mina, was cited as one of the “life-long victims of elocutionists.” The newspaper quoted her as complaining about the “Leth Are Gee” that affected her “Leems.” (This was a nice twist on Henry Irving's sloppy pronunciation, which had long fascinated his audiences.)
Punch
ended its review with a weary conundrum, wondering “sadly why this sort of thing should be supposed to be adequate entertainment for adults.”

Deane's pride was wounded, until he was shown the box office receipts. The audiences couldn't stay away. The play moved to a larger theater, the Duke of York's, to accommodate audiences, and Deane bolstered the play with publicity stunts. “A nurse will be in attendance at all performances,” the advertising comforted. The nurse stood nervously at the edge of the stage, presumably watching for fainting spectators, and of course, some did faint. A similar gimmick had been used at the Grand Guignol shows at the Little Theatre, and then again in 1921, when music hall magician P. T. Selbit presented his new creation, “Sawing a Woman in Half.”

At the first night in London, Mrs. Stoker didn't even come backstage to meet the cast. She was disappointed in the show and deeply resented sharing the profits with Deane. As the owner of the story, she promptly commissioned her own version of the script, by the playwright Charles Morrell. This
Dracula
was even stodgier and chattier, incorporating more incidents from the novel. It premiered in Warrington in September 1927 and quickly flopped.