The only known photograph of Bram Stoker writing.
The only known photograph of Bram Stoker writing.
BRAM STOKER: THE FINAL CURTAIN?
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
There are no photographs of Bram Stoker smiling.
The real Bram Stoker—at least the human being verifiably documented, dozens of times, by a succession of curious cameras over a period of six decades, from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth—is serious, studious, at times stuffy, and very often startled-looking. He doesn’t enjoy being scrutinized. The image is completely at odds with a lifetime of people describing a warm and genial man brimming with Irish good humor. In his working notes for Dracula, he imagines that his vampire king also has an image problem, namely that photography has the power to penetrate his flesh, starkly revealing his skeletal core. Painters can’t see the skeleton, or capture Dracula’s likeness at all. The finished canvas always looks like someone else.
Stoker’s earliest photographic portrait, and the only one that survives his childhood, shows an uncomfortable-looking boy of eight in a suit of “breeching” clothes staring directly at the camera, as if wondering what is expected of him. It is a characteristically haunted expression, one that would be repeated many times in his life, whenever a camera closed in. “Haunted” is a particularly good word for a youngster whose memories prior to the age of eight revolved around disease and hovering death, and whose legacy would center on a fantastic revenant impervious to both.
A previous biographer complained that “Stoker dispersed memories as selfishly as an old crone ladling soup.” And it’s true. He left behind no real accounting of his life, almost no candid or personal writings. As a result, much of what has been written about Stoker has focused on the amply documented minutiae of his long employment as business manager for the great Victorian actor-manager Sir Henry Irving, which only deflects attention from the question that has always interested readers most: What, exactly, was going on inside the head of the man who wrote Dracula?
Stoker’s prodigious capacity for work (for instance, writing as many as fifty letters a day for Irving’s signature) and the extra reserves of energy that fueled the furious production of potboiler novels in his supposed “spare” time have mostly been treated with awestruck admiration. The modern concept of workaholism was unnamed and unacknowledged in Stoker’s time, but he was the very Victorian model of overcompensation and insecurity. The Protestant work ethic has always had a problematic dark side, and it was a realm Stoker inhabited with a frightening force.
Stoker chronicles have also suffered from a dismaying echo-chamber effect, as certain assumptions and factoids have been repeated so frequently they are accepted as gospel. For instance, to what degree did Stoker take inspiration from the legend of the Wallachian warlord Vlad the Impaler, aside from borrowing his historical sobriquet “Dracula”? The answer is really not much—even if the idea has given birth to self-sustaining cottage industries of commentary, criticism, and filmmaking. And what about the widely accepted notion that Irving himself was the direct model for Dracula? Here, the truth is more nuanced. Certainly, Irving’s celebrated impersonation of Mephistopheles in Faust bears a family resemblance to the master vampire, or at least to the sardonic, charming Draculas that evolved in the twentieth century, owing very little to Bram Stoker’s character. Dracula indeed has theatrical origins, but the Count’s essential roots are better traced to the demon kings of the Christmas pantomimes that first ignited Stoker’s imagination as a boy. His rapturous and only recently rediscovered writings on these traditional theatrical wonder tales are revelations, and you can read them in this book for the first time since he put them to paper. Just as Dracula would become a frightening fairy tale for adults, Irving’s Faust, with more than a little help from Stoker, found success as a kind of grown-up pantomime from hell.
Of course, everything about Dracula leads us inexorably to sex. Did he have a sexless marriage? Did syphilis contribute to his death? Was he gay or bisexual? There were no such categories for most of his lifetime, no concept of sexual orientation as a fixed condition, and it is doubtful Stoker would have even understood such labels. But a number of his closest friends—novelist Hall Caine, actress Genevieve Ward, and playwright W. G. Wills—had fascinatingly veiled personal lives that were hardly scrutinized in an age that revered “romantic friendships” between men and men or women and women. Stoker thrived in a male-dominated world in which a pervasive homosociability allowed more intimate male connections to hide in plain sight—at least until the scandal and downfall of Oscar Wilde, when (to paraphrase cultural critic Mark Dery) the perimeters of male sexuality became culturally electrified. In the late Victorian era, the perimeters were both electrically charged and quietly gaslit.
Both Dubliners, Wilde and Stoker were familiar if not completely friendly acquaintances from the 1870s until Oscar’s trial and imprisonment in 1895. As I wrote nearly a quarter century ago, “Wilde and Stoker present a fascinating set of Victorian bookends, shadow-mirrors in uneasy reciprocal orbits.” Intervening decades of research and study have only reinforced my observation. Both were deeply influenced by intelligent and assertive mothers (of diametrically opposed temperaments); both attended Trinity College; both were drawn to the theatre, were fascinated by folklore and fairy tales, admired Walt Whitman and Henry Irving, and gravitated romantically to a beautiful Dublin girl, Florence Balcombe. Oscar, perhaps, courted his “Florrie” out of an aesthetic ardor; Stoker actually married her, though their marriage would be called passionless. Both men wrote masterpieces of macabre fiction about Victorian monsters that drain and destroy. And both expressed an enduring fascination with the conundrums of sex and gender—Bram in his writings, and Oscar, far more messily, in his life. It is also fascinating that Stoker was drawn to Wilde’s parents as flamboyant surrogates to his own conventional, straitlaced family. While one of Dracula’s most famous lines—“Children of the night—what music they make!”—immediately brings to mind the vocal stylings of Bela Lugosi, it was the flamboyantly theatrical mother of Oscar Wilde who provided the original inspiration. Lady Wilde’s son, like a character from a classic Gothic novel, was a hovering doppelgänger throughout Stoker’s life, both creatively and psychosexually—in the same way The Picture of Dorian Gray shadows and illuminates Dracula. It is no coincidence that Wilde was persecuted as a sexual threat to Victorian London at the same cultural moment Stoker created the greatest sex monster of all time.
This book addresses questions about sexual identity and anxiety in the larger context of existential nineteenth-century upheavals over science, religion, and personhood. Stoker’s passionate youthful correspondence with Walt Whitman and his declaration of same-sex camaraderie are presented here in unprecedented detail (the full texts of their letters have never been included in any book on Stoker), as are his hitherto unknown authorial hand in an embattled 1875 Dublin production of Sappho, his newly discovered, sexually ambiguous poetry, and, finally, a fragment of a never-finished and subtly homoerotic novel, The Russian Professor, only recently unearthed.
Stoker’s reflexive instinct for privacy—his automatic reluctance to reveal too much, about himself or about Henry Irving—served both men well. Irving and his leading lady Ellen Terry were revered as the benevolent wizard king and fairy godmother of the British stage, but their private lives were checkered, and it’s doubtful Irving ever would have been so lionized, or even knighted, had the public known that he had impulsively abandoned his wife and two sons, or that Terry had a pair of children born out of wedlock. Stoker’s duties included discreetly managing their travel arrangements and accommodations, and generally deflecting attention from an adulterous relationship carried on in plain sight. It is supremely ironic that Irving and Terry extraordinarily elevated the reputation of the theatre, since they could have been so easily charged with the stereotypical traits of moral turpitude that had dogged actors since Shakespeare’s time. Due to Stoker’s vigilant discretion in public relations, this never happened.
Stoker’s managerial acumen, brilliantly deployed by Irving, radically transformed the Victorian stage. But Stoker, working for himself, transformed the future of popular culture by creating the most mediagenic superstar of all time, a creature born in the oral traditions of folklore, gestated in the written word, and made immortal in the age of the moving image. Despite his talent, Irving simply didn’t have the range, or the reach. Dracula did.
The working title of this book was Bram Stoker: The Final Curtain, the “curtain” intended to rise and fall on three levels. First, it is an apt reference to a master of macabre literature who was also a consummate man of the theatre. Second, while this will certainly not be the last book written on Stoker (the volume of published material, for both academic and popular audiences, continues to grow exponentially), the discovery of new documents shedding light on Stoker the man is most unlikely. On a third and far more personal level, the original title described what will be my own final book-length excursion into the land of Bram Stoker and the enduring fascination of Dracula.
But in the end I realized that there is nothing final about Dracula at all, nor can there be. Dracula never ends. Not in my life, or in yours. His immortality and cultural omnipresence have everything to do with the magic of blood, the oldest and deepest and most paradoxical human symbol. As shapeshifting as Dracula himself, with the uncanny power to assume endless metaphorical forms, blood is the all-enveloping essence and measure of everything: life and death, sickness and health, anger, passion, and lust—all are blood driven and blood conceptualized. Blood ties bind us to our families. Bloodlines provide a link to our atavistic past, while serving as our primary connection to the future. The sight of blood terrifies some, is eroticized by others, and never fails to draw attention. We are thinking about blood all the time, whether or not we think we are.
Stoker understood all these dimensions and meanings of blood, or at least intuited them powerfully, especially as they pertained to questions of sex, masculinity, and gnawing Victorian fears about blood corruption, contagion, and the strange blood-borne doctrine of evolutionary “degeneration.” He wrestled with them all in Dracula just as he wrestled with them in his life. In the end, Stoker seems to tell us, ultimate meanings inevitably revolve around something in the blood. Secrets in the blood. Revelations in the blood. Mysteries in the blood.
To borrow the words of avowed Dracula admirer Sir Winston Churchill on the mystifying nature of Russia (historically and coincidentally a great source of undead lore), Bram Stoker himself amounts to “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”
I hope that Something in the Blood finally provides a missing set of keys to Stoker’s inner vampire castle, or at least unprecedented entry to some of its previously inaccessible rooms.
DAVID J. SKAL
Los Angeles, 2016