Who Was Dracula? (3 page)

—

Bram Stoker finally saw a partial rehearsal of the Brocken scene. Although it centered around Mephistopheles, Irving—as was his style—imperiously gave directions as he sat in the theater, leaving himself out of the action. He was never concerned with his own performance; he felt rehearsals were necessary to ensure everyone else's positions.

Stoker watched ten minutes of organized chaos. Set atop the moonlit mountaintop, the hundreds of extras screamed, cavorted, ran from side to side, jabbered, or shrieked on cue. “[With] all the supers and ballet and most of the characters being in dress,” Stoker later wrote, “[it was] a wonderful scene of imagination, of grouping, of lighting, of action, and all the rush and whirl and triumphant cataclysm of unfettered demonical possession. But,” he concluded with cautious understatement, “it all looked cold and unreal.”

As the sun was coming up and rehearsals stopped, Stoker and Irving walked to Irving's dressing room and shared a meal of sandwiches. Stoker carefully explained his reservations, his deep baritone confined to a whisper. “After all, it might not catch on with the public as firmly as we had all along expected—almost taken for granted. Could we not be quietly getting something else ready, so . . . we should be able to retrieve ourselves?”

Irving listened carefully. It must have been a shock for him to hear his Acting Manager offer these concerns. He slowly shook his head.

Tonight, I think you have not been able to judge accurately. You are forming an opinion largely from the effect of the Brocken. As far as tonight goes you are quite right; but you have not seen my dress. I do not want to wear it till I get all the rest correct. Then you will see. I have studiously kept as yet all the color to that of grey-green. When my dress of flaming scarlet appears amongst it—and remember that the color will be intensified by that very light—it will bring the whole picture together in a way you cannot dream of.

By now, Irving had pushed himself out his chair, his theatrical bearing giving force to his words, his widening eyes dramatizing the anticipated wonder.

Indeed, I can hardly realize it myself yet, though I know it will be right. You shall see too how Ellen Terry's white dress and even that red scar across her throat will stand out in the midst of that turmoil of lightning!

The Brocken scene was an astonishingly bold, even reckless, interpolation in
Faust
. The scene was completely unnecessary for the play. It contained no dialogue and did not further the story. It was pure, gratuitous spectacle, the demon's power made manifest in a theatrical fantasy. It was genius, it was madness, but it perfectly represented Irving's talents and tastes, playing directly to his public.

And Irving was completely right. His all-scarlet Mephistopheles costume was the first time that the demon had ever been pictured that way: Before 1885, the devil was usually dressed in black and red. Irving's Mephistopheles established this cliché, which was then adopted by popular culture.

Several nights later, on December 19, 1885, Stoker was standing at the back of the auditorium, watching with the opening-night audience.

The third act had just ended, wherein Mephistopheles' confrontation with Margaret in the cathedral reminded her that she was now a fallen woman, responsible for the death of her mother and brother. As Margaret cowered beneath the vaulted arches, the demon snarled a suggestion that she murder her child. Suddenly, the lights onstage shifted. The audience was no longer looking at the interior of the cathedral, but the exterior, and the dark figure of Mephistopheles was creeping down the steps, then loping and limping alone across the city square. The music reached a crescendo and the curtain fell to a burst of sustained applause.

After a brief intermission, the fourth act began when the curtain opened on the Brocken, Irving's artistic, snow-covered mountaintop. The stage was empty. A tall outcropping of rock, the mountain's summit, was on the audience's left, with shadowed pine trees in the background. A clouded moon glowed over the scene.

The orchestra began with a lush, dramatic score, anticipating the entrance of the characters. The audience heard a mysterious hubbub of voices and groans, a sort of supernatural chorus to accompany the music. Irving used an offstage chorus of more than forty singers. Suddenly, at a cleft in the rocks, Mephistopheles appeared in red, dragging Faust, in dark robes, to the top of the mountain. Lightning flashed. This was the work of bright chemical flames, ignited in the wings, to cast garish shadows on the rocks.

As the two main characters reached the rocky summit, a flock of witches flew over the stage. This was followed by a parliament of owls, whose darkened wings cast silhouettes across the pale moon. As the scene proceeded, “strange nameless beings and goblin specters, half men, half beasts, chattering imps, and winged fiends swarm out of the mountain sides with unearthly shrieks and cries and deep grave chants and songs.”

Mephistopheles took a seat on the rock, as if resting on a desolate throne, as electric sparks surrounded him. Now dozens of witches, hundreds of witches, rushed onto the stage, surrounding the demon and filling the air with moans and shrieks. Mephistopheles watched the proceedings as a king would supervise his revels. The scene quickly turned into a chaotic celebration of loud howling and surreal dancing, the witches' filmy, gray-green garments swirling in the air. As Mephistopheles jumped to his feet, joining the celebration, red flames and mist began to surround the supernatural beings, as if the mountaintop were licked by fire.

Suddenly the dance stopped—the hundreds of supernatural figures froze, then melted into darkness at the edges of the stage. Faust turned away, appalled. He lifted his eyes to the background and saw a mystical vision of Margaret, dressed in a pure white robe, with a suggestive, bloody gash across her neck. The limelights illuminated her in a brilliant, shadowless glow at the edge of the roiling sky. Mephistopheles made a quick gesture, and the vision of Margaret disappeared. He was alone on the mountain with Faust.

The stillness drew a collective gasp from the audience. The demon took several steps forward in the dull, cold light, until he was standing at the highest point of the barren rock. He raised his hand dramatically. The thunder rumbled and roared, the orchestra screeched, and the mountain was transformed by shafts of fiery red light. The hundreds of witches and demons were returned to the mountaintop, twisting, gyrating, and then swarming to form a dense circle around the demon king. They fell to their knees in tribute. A rain of glowing sparks began to fall on the scene—Irving used baskets of gold tinsel, sprinkled from above, which showed flashes of red limelight—seemingly consuming the hellish characters in fire, as the curtain slowly descended.

After another brief interval the play resumed with the scene of Margaret in prison, having gone mad from her travails.

Author Michael R. Booth summed up the influence of Irving's Brocken:

Thus ended a scene, which in its combination of spectacle, mass force and power, grandeur, and nightmare, many reviewers said had never been equaled on the stage. The Brocken scene was one of the great spectacles of the nineteenth-century theatre, and probably the most extraordinary scene of its kind ever performed on the English stage.

But not every reviewer was charmed. Many noticed the extravagant, superfluous nature of the scene and were annoyed that it reminded them of an English pantomime. Henry James, the American author, who was then a sometime theater critic and a regular Lyceum first-nighter, found it all silly and coarse. “A mere bald hubbub of capering, screeching and banging, irradiated by the irrepressible blue fire, and without the smallest articulation of Goethe's text. The scenic effect is the ugliest we have ever contemplated. . . . It is a horror cheaply conceived and executed with more zeal than discretion.”

Britain's greatest magician, David Devant, was just starting his career when
Faust
opened; he watched the “awesome” Brocken scene from the front, swooning at the perfect theatrical illusions. “A few nights afterwards, [I] was taken behind the scenes. I remember the awful shock of disillusion I got when I saw the labyrinth of canvas scenery and ropes, and the men in shirtsleeves working the lights.”

Was it genius or was it madness? There's little question that Bram Stoker saw something more than the glow of Henry Irving's scarlet robes on December 19, 1885. The visualization of Walpurgisnacht; the image of the virginal victim in white, violated with a bloody wound on her neck; the powerful, hypnotic, devilish ruler of the underworld—all of this would be later played out in a thick manuscript. Five years after
Faust
's premiere, Bram Stoker began plotting a novel that was published in 1897 under the title
Dracula
.

—

Who inspired the character of Dracula?

It's too simple to point at the antecedents in literature or history. It's deceptively easy to speculate that Dracula was inspired by an evil Transylvanian prince, or even by Stoker's magisterial boss, Henry Irving. The actual story is more complicated than that, and much more intriguing. Dracula is a pastiche of living historical characters—men who were surrounded by scandals and controversies, larger-than-life personalities who seemed to step from the mists of the nineteenth century and exert their influence, just as Stoker's vampire later seemed to materialize from the shadows of a Transylvanian castle and cast his spell.

As clues,
Dracula
left a bloody trickle, a trail leading backstage at the Lyceum and through the drawing rooms of Victorian London. There was even a distinctive splatter of crimson on American shores.

THE BOY, “NATURALLY SECRETIVE TO THE WORLD”

B
ram Stoker's autobiographical prose suggests that the most insightful stories are the ones he has omitted. The picture of himself that he has painted, in rough, hesitant brushstrokes, seems to be one of a plodder, measuring his own life in terms of Henry Irving's. His most significant meeting was with Irving; his finest achievements were in service to the actor; his most treasured associations were the professional friendships formed backstage at the Lyceum, entertaining Irving's royal guests over cigars in a lounge, or at dinner after a sparkling performance. Somehow Stoker's family, marriage, son, and even the publication of his greatest work,
Dracula
, register as no more than shrugs in his brief autobiographical accounts.

After Irving's death, Stoker filled two volumes with his sincere recollections,
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
, filled with his accounts of the great man: “When a man with his full share of ambition is willing to yield it up to work with a friend whom he loves and honors, it is perhaps as well that in due season he may set out his reasons for so doing.”

At this point, a reader hopes to interpret the sentence ambiguously. Our estimation of Bram Stoker would rise if we could believe that their sacrifice, their teamwork and devotion, were mutual. But no, his point is clear. Stoker gave up everything out of love and honor for Henry Irving.

Such is but just; and I now place it on record for the sake of Irving as well as myself, and for the friends of us both. For twenty-seven years I worked with Henry Irving, helping him in all honest ways in which one man may aid another—and there were no ways with Irving other than honorable. Looking back I cannot honestly find any moment in my life when I failed him, or when I put myself forward in any way when the most scrupulous good taste could have enjoined or even suggested a larger measure of reticence. By my dealing with him I am quite content to be judged, now and hereafter. In my own speaking to the dead man I can find an analog in the words of heartbreaking sincerity:

Stand up on the jasper sea,

And be witness I have given

All the gifts required of me!

Despite Stoker's contention, these lines are not particularly heartbreaking. The verses are from “Bertha in the Lane” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a poem of a dying maiden's loneliness. Although Stoker omitted them, Browning's verses continued:

Hope that blessed me, bliss that crowned,

Love that left me with a wound,

Life itself that turneth round!

Personal Reminiscences
presents a grand portrait of Irving, and a painful portrait of the author eternally in service, reticent in his own views, and apologetic to use ink and paper for anything but praise for the great actor. For example, when Stoker recounts their first meeting—Irving gave a dramatic recitation of a poem in a hotel drawing room—the performance so drained the actor that he concluded and “collapsed, half-fainting.” Witnessing the performance so moved Stoker that he confessed, “I burst into something like hysterics.” Presumably, this was a fit of uncontrollable tears.

And then, in his account, Stoker included a brief note of autobiography.

Let me say, not in my own vindication, but to bring new tribute to Irving's splendid power, that I was no hysterical subject. I was no green youth; no weak individual, yielding to a superior emotional force. . . . I was a very strong man. It is true that I had known weakness. 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. . . . This early weakness, however, passed in time and I grew into a strong boy and in time enlarged to the biggest member of my family.

Stoker's point was not to share personal recollections of his childhood but simply to endorse the actor one more time, proving to the reader that his “hysterics” were no mere triviality. Bram Stoker was habitually in service to Irving.

—

Stoker's early illness is a mystery, but those years of invalidism did not seem to burden his later childhood. If he was coddled and pampered, he may have had extra time to hear his mother and father's recitations by his bedside. His mother recounted rich Irish folk myths—delicious horror stories—and his father detailed the latest theatrical productions.

He was born Abraham Stoker, named after his father, in Clontarf, a quiet seaside town on the outskirts of Dublin. Little Abraham, later shortened to Bram, was the third of seven children.

His namesake, Abraham Senior, was twenty years older than his wife, a civil servant who worked a monotonous job in the parliamentary section of Dublin Castle. Charlotte Thornley, his wife, was from Sligo, on the northwest coast of Ireland. She remembered the colorful stories of her Irish forbears, lived through the horrors of the cholera epidemic that swept her hometown when she was fourteen, and heard the scream of the Banshee when her mother died.

The Stokers were a comfortably middle-class Church of Ireland family—Protestant—living in Clontarf during the Irish potato blight of 1845. Abraham Stoker's civil service job meant that the family avoided the horrors of this famine, even if they shared the economic calamity of the country.

After he regained his strength, Bram was a good student if not an inspired one. His brothers were all achievers, and three became physicians. His mother was devoted to their education, and she became a reformer, campaigning for government-supported schools for the deaf and the education of women in workhouses. His father spent frugally, but regularly indulged in pit seats at the Theatre Royal and watched star performers whenever he traveled. For his son, he replayed the great Edmund Kean's amazing performance in
A New Way to Pay Old Debts
and described the French magician Robert-Houdin's masterful “eye,” taking in everything at a glance.

—

In 1863, following in his older brothers' footsteps, Bram entered Trinity College, at the time Dublin's renowned Protestant university. He had overcome and overcompensated for his early physical ailments. He was six feet, two inches tall, weighed 175 pounds, and excelled at sports: rowing, walking, running, swimming, and weight lifting. He also played on the rugby team.

His academic pursuits took a backseat, but he was invited to join The Phil (The Philosophical Society) and The Hist (or Historical Society, a parliamentary debate group). Stoker was an inspired debater, with an ability to think quickly on his feet. He was naturally shy, but he had learned to mix easily in university groups.

Abraham Senior retired from the civil service in 1865, which made the family finances shaky, especially with two sons at Trinity. Bram took a year off from school and worked for a year at Dublin Castle, where his father had worked. He later returned to school and graduated in 1871. He went on to earn a master's degree in mathematics. His mother and father decided that their pensions would carry them further if they lived abroad in France or Switzerland. They departed in 1872, leaving their five sons behind in Dublin. Bram moved in with his older brother Thornley, who was a physician.

Bram Stoker had inherited his father's interest in the theater and even appeared in some Dublin plays—his acting roles seem to have been inspired by his fine, deep, assertive voice, which he found during debates at Trinity. He first saw Henry Irving perform at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, in 1867, when Stoker was nineteen and Irving was twenty-nine. Irving was touring with the St. James Company and played Captain Absolute in
The Rivals
, by the Dublin-born playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. As Stoker had seen other actors in this popular role, he was able to carefully assay Irving's “business,” the clever little pauses or gestures that an actor would use to individualize a part.

Irving was already becoming known for his intelligent interpretations. Rather than bluster through a role, he imbued the part with subtleties, giving the impression that one could see the character thinking, reacting, changing intent, or avoiding a difficulty. It was a revelation to Stoker, a Captain Absolute “full of dash and fine irony, whose ridicule seemed to bite, an inoffensive egotist even in his love-making.” After marveling at Irving's layered interpretation, Stoker was stunned that the newspapers failed to single out his hero for praise.

Four years later Irving returned to Dublin in a play called
Two Roses
. Again, Stoker was thrilled by his quirky Digby Grand and disappointed by the Dublin newspaper reviews. He volunteered to write criticism for the
Dublin Evening
Mail
. It was an unpaid position, but his reviews gave him access to opening nights, put him at the center of theatrical news and gossip, and offered some prestige. He was writing, and readers were noticing what he wrote.

—

Bram Stoker checked the invitation in his hand, paused to remove his derby and button his coat, and then walked through the door at 1 Merrion Square in Dublin. It was among Dublin's largest residences, and the Saturday “at home” soirees were arranged grandly by the Wildes, with rooms lit by candle and tables of food prominently displayed. Stoker was guided from room to room by the sound of laughter and murmured conversation. Classical piano music reverberated from somewhere in the back of the house. The assortment of guests—artists, poets, professors, scientists, authors—were randomly scattered into tiny groups, but the hostess, Lady Jane Wilde, called Speranza by her friends, seemed to tie every conversation together by swanning from room to room, effortlessly offering clever introductions, witty and vaguely insulting bon mots, and an assortment of tea cakes and sandwiches. She was a tall, ungainly figure swathed in a Gypsy-inspired skirt and festooned with long sashes and dangling brooches.

Stoker was then working part-time as a reviewer and full-time as a clerk in the Petty Sessions, following his father's lead in civil service. The job was hardly the drudgery that the title might have suggested. Stoker did a good amount of traveling through Ireland and was highly regarded for his efficiency, earning regular promotions. But he had aspirations to a literary or theatrical career, writing short stories and submitting them to periodicals, and auditioning for theatrical roles in Dublin. At the Wildes' home in Merrion Square, he was able to rub elbows with the Dublin literati and any number of eccentrics who appealed to Speranza.

The Wildes were a famous, and famously odd, Dublin family. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who knew the family around this same time, remembered the Wildes as “dirty, untidy, daring . . . very imaginative and learned.” Speranza was her nom de plume; she had become infamous for writing inflammatory poetry, as well as articles espousing Irish nationalism and damning the British throne. Her husband, Sir William Wilde, was a small, angular man with a full gray beard. He was prone to monopolizing dinner conversations on myriad fascinating topics. He had been knighted for his services as an eye doctor to Queen Victoria; he was an expert in eye diseases, a student of Irish history and superstition, and an early, amateur Egyptologist.

The family had known its share of controversy. Lady Jane had given dramatic testimony in a treason trial. Before their marriage, her husband had fathered several illegitimate children, and after his knighthood he was accused of rape by one of his patients. These scandals were open secrets, bothering everyone in Dublin except, seemingly, the Wildes themselves.

Sir William and Lady Jane had two sons (a daughter had died in childhood). William Charles Kingsbury Wilde, known as Willie, was five years younger than Bram, and was a good student at Trinity who was talented beyond his aspirations. Their younger son, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, was seven years younger than Bram. In 1871, he had just entered Trinity during Stoker's last year there.

Oscar Wilde inherited his father's penchant for conversation and his mother's tastes for humor and poetry—then bested both of them. He was tall, like his mother, with coarse features and a full face. His famous wit was being honed at the Merrion Square salon and his taste for stylish clothes and literary skills were being defined at Trinity, but he was not much longer for Dublin. In 1874 he won a scholarship to Oxford and, from there, went on to conquer London.

The Wildes became friends of Bram Stoker—who lingered longer in Dublin than their precocious son. Bram liked Willie and his father, and Lady Wilde took an interest in his government career (even if she condemned the Irish government), becoming a sort of surrogate mother. Stoker spent Christmas 1875 with the family. Sir William died the following year.

Oscar was too young, too flippant and mysteriously esoteric, to have ever been a close friend of Stoker in Dublin. But Oscar exhibited many of the achievements that Stoker had wished for himself, particularly his facile literary skills.

Over the course of his life, Stoker labored as a reviewer, a novelist, a poet and playwright, often with only middling success. He circled the periphery when famous, sparkling personalities met. Oscar Wilde, his bright young friend from Ireland, demonstrated brilliance in all of those fields. For many years, Wilde was the toast of London, always the very center of attention, even among the brightest luminaries.

—

Next to the Wildes' home was 18 Merrion Square, the tall brick residence of Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu.

Le Fanu was a celebrity in Dublin, a popular, prolific author who produced dozens of stories rich in Irish history, popular dramatic novels, and evocative, supernatural mysteries. He was a graduate of Trinity, having studied for the bar before becoming a journalist. One of his most successful novels,
Uncle Silas
, was published in 1864. Le Fanu's most remembered story,
Carmilla
, was first published in a periodical in 1872 and then in a collection of tales,
In a
Glass Darkly
, which means it was being read and discussed in Dublin just shortly after Stoker left Trinity. Coincidentally, Stoker's first work of fiction, “The Crystal Cup,” a fairy tale about a king's devotion to beauty, was published in a London periodical that same year.