Something in the Blood

Seven years after his death, Oscar Wilde was resurrected as a fictional vampire by an obsessive admirer.

FOR HE WHO LIVES MORE LIVES THAN ONE, MORE DEATHS THAN ONE MUST DIE.

— Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

On May 18, 1897, no one noticed that the fictional monster Count Dracula had been formally released into the world at almost the precise moment the public monster Oscar Wilde had been officially returned to the world. By an eerie coincidence, Wilde was released from Reading Gaol within hours of Bram Stoker’s marathon copyright reading of Dracula at the Lyceum Theatre. Not that the event would have interested him. The Picture of Dorian Gray, of course, was the superior meditation on the theme of supernatural energy transference and moral corruption. As far as Wilde was concerned, the theme would never need to be revisited. Besides, he had no time for theatre now. He would never again set foot in the West End, never write another play or even a work of fiction.

The epigrams he had left would be few, and mordant.

A few hours after the Lyceum actor Wallace Widdecombe read the dying words of the American vampire slayer Quincey Morris, which closed Stoker’s play—“Now God be thanked that all has been not in vain. . . . The curse has passed away”—Wilde was given new street clothes, along with the precious manuscript on which he had labored for months (with the warden’s hard-earned approval) that would ultimately be known as De Profundis. Under police escort, he was taken by train to Pentonville Prison, where he would spend the night. The stop at Pentonville spared him any chance of being recognized while waiting on a connecting train platform, as he had been at Clapham Junction on his initial transfer to Reading. Then, a crowd had jeered at him, as if he were a chained sideshow ape.

Arriving by train in London the morning of May 19, he was whisked by cab to a friend’s house in Bloomsbury to change clothes and have his hair waved, and to taste coffee for the first time since his imprisonment. But he also received a major disappointment in the form of a letter his friends were holding for him. Wilde had hoped, perhaps, to spend a year in religious contemplation, but his last-minute application to a Catholic monastery had been denied on the basis of timeliness. He wept at the news. The Catholic Church had not only failed him—it was, in effect, barring his entry onto sacred ground, like some foul creature from Stoker’s fevered imagination.

There was no question of Wilde’s remaining in London. Personally, socially, and professionally, he was ruined. His exile and new identity had been prearranged as a rough Victorian equivalent of a witness protection program. He would take the night boat across the channel to Dieppe, France, to be met by his friends Robbie Ross and Reggie Turner. He was provided bags bearing the monogram initials “S. M.”; at Robbie’s suggestion he assumed the ironic cover name of “Sebastian Melmoth.” St. Sebastian was a classic icon of male beauty and stoic martyrdom, as well as Wilde’s favorite saint; the surname came from the title character of the Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer, written by his great-uncle Charles Robert Maturin in 1820. Maturin’s Melmoth was an ambitious hybrid creation, part Faust and part Mephistopheles, his soul in a strange limbo that anticipated Dorian Gray’s, and a traveler through the centuries in the manner of the Wandering Jew, Cagliostro, and Dracula.

It was only natural for Wilde to assume the aspect of a Gothic revenant. He already had a deeply ingrained belief in the supernatural. Like so many other Irish (including Bram Stoker’s mother), he was convinced he had heard the wail of the banshee as a child, although at the time he believed it was the howl of a dog being beaten. He cried at the sound, wanting the terrible cruelty to stop. In 1893, at an opening night party for A Woman of No Importance, he was given a reading by the famous palmist Cheiro.* Guests presented their hands through a curtain, lest knowledge of their identity influence the reading. Cheiro claimed to have not recognized Wilde’s particularly plump hands, although his identity ought to have been obvious, given the purpose of the gathering. Nonetheless, Cheiro was prescient. The lines of the hands diverged portentously. “The left hand is the hand of a king, but the right is that of a king who will send himself into exile.” When was this to happen? In about two years, the seer replied. In other words, the exact year of his downfall. Wilde was shaken and left the party abruptly. He approached another fortune-teller the following year, a society Sybil called Mrs. Robinson. “I see a very brilliant life for you, up to a certain point,” she told him. “Then I see a wall. Beyond the wall I see nothing.”

Both Wilde and his mother were attracted to palmistry, divination, and the occult. According to Oscar, in 1896, the night before she died, a vision of Lady Wilde appeared in his jail cell, and he knew that she was dead even before his wife, Constance, arrived at Reading with the news. After his release, when Constance herself unexpectedly died—in European exile with her children under the assumed name “Holland”—her own ghost was said to have manifested before him. Wilde begged it to leave him alone.

The title character of Melmoth the Wanderer also wanted to be left alone by the supernatural entities with whom he had made a Faustian bargain. Melmoth, like Dracula, had been published by the venerable firm of Constable. The publisher assigned Maturin the title when he couldn’t decide on one, just as the firm may have suggested Dracula as a title to Stoker in place of his generic (and somewhat perplexing) first choice, The Un-Dead. Both titles were the kind of simple solution—using the name of a central, supernatural character—that is sometimes obvious to everyone but the author. Melmoth is a complicated structure of stories within stories, a bit like The Arabian Nights, beginning with the efforts of John Melmoth, a student at Trinity College (Maturin, like Stoker and Wilde, was Trinity educated) to solve the mystery of a namesake forbear who has apparently survived for more than a century after his last recorded appearance. It is ultimately revealed that the first Melmoth made a deal with the devil for a life extension of 150 years, the return of his soul predicated on his finding a successor who would accept the same terms. But, wander as he might, Melmoth is unable to find such a person, and suffers the hellish consequences.†

“Sebastian Melmoth”: Oscar Wilde in exile. Photograph possibly taken by Lord Alfred Douglas.

The book contains many horrific prison scenes that echo in Wilde’s final work, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” written shortly after his release. One of the poem’s most famous lines, “Each man kills the thing he loves,” has a chilling cannibal/vampire elaboration in Maturin as he describes the sights and sounds of a man and woman dehumanized in their cruel confinement: “The shriek of the wretched female—her lover, in the agony of hunger, had fastened his teeth in her shoulder;—that bosom on which he had so often luxuriated, became a meal to him now.”

Wilde didn’t witness the eating of flesh in prison—cannibalism would have been a nourishing luxury—but he did see and experience the degradation of the human body every day. The strictly enforced official policy of “hard labour, hard fare, and a hard bed,” combined with the unofficial but nonetheless omnipresent reality of dysentery and other intractable diseases, created an environment calculated to break the body and soul, and if it happened to prove fatal . . . well, it must have been God’s will. Prison officials knew that a man of Wilde’s background, completely unaccustomed to inadequate nutrition and punishing work, might not live long even if he survived his term. No doubt this truth informed the judge’s decision to inflict the maximum sentence.

The first part of Wilde’s sentence was served at the facility in Pentonville, where, weakened by the poor food, he collapsed in the prison chapel, striking the side of his head. He developed a severe ear infection and spent two months in the prison infirmary. Without the benefits of antibiotics, yet to be developed, the injury never completely healed. Upon his transfer to Reading Gaol, the full reality of the conditions of his incarceration became clear. Prisoners lived in solitary confinement, slept on bare planks, were forbidden to talk, and were subjected to endless rounds of hard labor with no useful purpose. Climbing the steps of a creaking treadwheel, he made a daily virtual ascent of more than a mile. Endless hours were spent marching in circles, turning heavy cranks that themselves turned nothing, or shredding rope fiber with one’s bare, bleeding fingers. Food was edible in only the narrowest physical sense.

In a post-imprisonment letter to the Daily Chronicle, Wilde deplored the conditions of the British penal system, which “seems almost to have for its aim the wrecking and the destruction of the mental faculties. . . . Deprived of books, of all human intercourse, isolated from every humane and humanising influence, condemned to eternal silence, robbed of all intercourse with the external world, treated like an unintelligent animal, brutalised below the level of any of the brute-creation, the wretched man who is confined in an English prison can hardly escape becoming insane.” In other words, the British criminal code was designed to create the very conditions of degeneration and evolutionary regression Victorian society pretended to fear and abhor, but found fascinating as cathartic entertainment in books like The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Dracula.

An unverifiable yet fascinating story passed down through the Stoker family is that Bram and/or his wife assisted Wilde financially, either in prison or in exile. In Children of the Night, an inventive 2011 chamber musical about Stoker and Henry Irving, the composer and lyricist Scott Martin includes a scene in which Stoker visits the imprisoned Wilde, who encourages his longtime acquaintance to finally admit the actual nature of his slavish devotion to the charismatic actor. In reality, Wilde in 1897 was so thoroughly broken by his experiences “feasting with panthers” and the punishment that followed that he would be the last person to encourage others to flaunt unconventional passions. In retrospect, Wilde is indeed a great martyr to the cause of modern gay liberation, but he was hardly a crusader in his own time. In the musical, Wilde also ponders another point of similarity between Stoker and himself. Commenting on the imminent publication of Dracula, and in silent reference to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde wonders, “What is it about the macabre that comes so naturally to us? Was there something tainted in the Dublin water supply when we were children?”

While it is next to impossible for either of the Stokers to have made such a prison visit—audiences with inmates were doled out quite sparingly, following a formal application process that would have left some record—the idea of some contact with Wilde in France, or a clandestine gift to him there, is not so farfetched, especially if instigated by Florence, who never quite relinquished a what-if fantasy about her near-marriage to one of the most brilliant celebrities of the age. And, of course, she was never at a loss in finding ways to dispose of her husband’s money.

But had the Stokers given any cash to Wilde, it would have undoubtedly been squandered, if not on boys then most assuredly on drink. Paris, where he had settled, was known as the City of Light but had an omnipresent and liquid dark side. The liquor that flowed during the Belle Epoque was enough to flood the celebrated subterranean catacombs that underpinned the aboveground Parisian glamour. Like Dracula, Wilde in Paris was a creature in a self-imposed exile, driven by a terrible thirst. But unlike Dracula, the thirst was never limited to the night. Innumerable accounts of his final years describe him making ceaseless rounds of Left Bank bars and cafés, even when he had no money at all, leading to sad, humiliating scenes. Alcohol had always been a family weakness. In just a few years it would kill his brother, Willie, and even now was doing its part to gnaw away the precarious health Oscar had left. In sufficient quantities, alcohol will not only “create all the effects of inebriation,” as per Wilde’s famously flippant quip; ultimately, it can negatively impact every system and organ in the body. Nonetheless, he continued to engorge himself with prodigious quantities of champagne, as well as a bubbling greenish mixture of champagne and absinthe, long after he was warned of the medical dangers, even when he was told outright that he was killing himself. He threw away even more money on a series of boulevard boys, many of them rough and with criminal backgrounds. “I cannot bear being alone . . . ,” he said. “My companions are such as I can get, and of course I have to pay for such friendships.”

With Maurice Gilbert, a less mercenary but nonetheless very popular new adoration (who shared himself with Robbie, Reggie, and even Bosie at one point), he managed to visit Auguste Rodin’s studio, where the master sculptor personally showed him his monumental bronze doorway, The Gates of Hell. Since he had already been to hell, or at least its earthly approximation, one can imagine him complimenting Rodin with some darkly insightful observations on damnation. But there was little humor in one of his actual comments: “I will never outlive the century; the English people would not stand for it.” He spent his last year doing everything he could to guarantee they wouldn’t have to.

In November 1900, just weeks before the twentieth century officially began on January 1, 1901, he developed an infection of his prison-injured ear, resulting in a painful abscess requiring surgery. The operation did not relieve the underlying infection, which escalated into bacterial meningitis, as untreatable as syphilis was in the pre-antibiotic age. The question of syphilis and its role in Wilde’s death continues to be controversial, though at this late date it shouldn’t. As in arguments about the purported syphilitic deaths of many famous people, the questions “Did he die of syphilis?” and “Did he have syphilis?” are too often ignorantly conflated. As Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, told a BBC interviewer, “Around twenty-five percent of Victorian men had syphilis, and he may have had it, too—we’ll never know—but one thing that’s almost certain is that he didn’t die of it.”

Like all medical conditions, syphilis can coexist with, complicate, and even mimic a myriad of other diseases. In a significant number of cases, the condition does not even progress to its terminal, tertiary stage but instead remains dormant, deep in the body. Further complicating detection and assessment is the fact that subsequent, additional infections of Treponema pallidum can confer a partial immunity that suppresses primary symptoms. For individuals like Wilde, an active member of a highly promiscuous subculture in which untreated (and untreatable) sexually transmitted diseases were already rife, superinfection was not only possible but almost inevitable. He could well have been harboring a dormant case contracted at Oxford, and a later case when he began straying from his marriage.

In any case, Wilde believed he had syphilis and likely assumed it was taking his life, and his friends believed this, too. He may also have been secretly convinced it had killed Constance Wilde. The medical historian Deborah Hayden makes a strong case that the creeping spinal paralysis that took Constance Wilde’s life may itself have been an expression of tertiary syphilis. Wilde learned of her spinal problems shortly after being released from prison, exactly the period in which he wrote “Each man kills the thing he loves.” Robert Sherard remembered seeing a letter from Constance in which she wrote, “And you know that you made me ill.”

As his own health worsened, his dream life followed suit. “I dreamt I was supping with the dead,” he told Reggie Turner and Robbie Ross. Turner replied, “My dear Oscar, you were probably the life and soul of the party.” It was the last laugh the three men would have together.

The story that Wilde made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism has been repeated so often it is usually taken as gospel, but a close reading of the supporting documents yields far less certainty. In Paris, Oscar talked about his desire to convert, more or less in the dilettantish way he had talked about it for most of his life. Robbie Ross, himself a lapsed Catholic, told Oscar he couldn’t support him in the matter if he wasn’t completely serious. But when Oscar began slipping away, Robbie—probably guilt stricken over not having given his friend more encouragement while he was still able to make such decisions—managed to find an Irish Passionist priest, Father Cuthbert Dunn, willing to come to the hotel. While Father Dunn was convinced that the delirious, semiconscious patient finally accepted the Church, Ross would on at least one occasion admit that he didn’t truly know what had happened. Officially speaking, the sacrament was “conditional” and not subject to earthly verification.

Wilde lingered overnight, but the coming of dawn was the beginning of the end. “After 5:30 in the morning a complete change came over him,” Ross wrote, “the lines of the face altered, and I believe what is called the death rattle began, but I had never heard anything like it before; it sounded like the horrible turning of a crank, and it never ceased until the end.” Death, like a demanding, uncontrollable, and monstrous child, would be seen as well as heard. “Foam and blood came from his mouth, and had to be wiped away by someone standing by him all the time. . . . The painful noise from the throat became louder and louder.” The end came in the early afternoon. Ross noticed that “the time of his breathing altered. I went to the bedside and held his hand, his pulse began to flutter. He heaved a deep sigh, the only natural one I had heard since I arrived, the limbs seemed to stretch involuntarily, the breathing became fainter; he passed at 10 minutes to 2 p.m. exactly.”

Unpleasant though it was, the account was sanitized. Wilde’s actual moment of death might have been imagined by Poe—something akin to the shocking conclusion of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Ross and Turner told friends privately what really transpired, as reported by Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellman: “He had scarcely breathed his last when the body exploded with fluids from the ear, nose, mouth, and other orifices. The debris was appalling.”

The bedding had to be burned. The body was washed, bound, and dressed in a clean nightshirt. Father Dunn placed palm fronds on the corpse. Ross hung a rosary around the neck. According to one account, the proprietor of the hotel removed Wilde’s dentures; the gold fittings would partially offset a sizable sum still owed the establishment.

By registering at the Hotel d’Alsace under a false name, Wilde had broken French law, raising the possibility that he would be taken as an ordinary unidentified corpse to the morgue. In operation since 1865 just behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Paris Morgue was a ghastly tourist attraction where unidentified bodies (or body parts), many pulled from the Seine, were put on ammonia-refrigerated public display, ostensibly to be identified and claimed by loved ones, although in reality only a very small percentage of visitors—the daily attendance record was forty thousand—came on missions of care. Most were there to be morbidly entertained. Wilde had visited the carnivalesque charnel house himself, and near his death wrote, “The Morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc bed there.” Bram Stoker’s working notes for Dracula refer to the even more grisly Munich “Dead House” for an unrealized scene wherein the Count, experimenting with travel beyond Transylvania, hides in plain sight among the openly displayed German dead. But a notorious dead celebrity like Oscar Wilde could expect no such anonymity.

When the district doctor, or medical examiner, arrived at the Hotel d’Alsace, he wanted to know whether the dead man had committed suicide or had been murdered. According to Ross, “After examining the body, and, indeed, everybody in the hotel, and after a series of drinks and unseasonable jests, and a liberal fee,” the official signed the papers necessary for Wilde’s burial.

Oscar Wilde in death, Paris, 1900.

Wilde and Ross had discussed Oscar’s wish to be buried at Père Lachaise, the largest cemetery within Paris and the resting place of choice for prominent Parisians, including creative giants like Molière and Chopin. But the arrangement was impossible on short notice. As a temporary concession, Ross took out a five-year renewable lease on a cemetery plot in the commune (or township) of Bagneux, about eight miles south of central Paris. A more appropriate site, and fitting monument, would have to wait. Ross’s own finances were depleted, and he would spend several years settling Wilde’s estate and paying off accumulated debt.

“When preparing the body for the grave,” Harris wrote in his Wilde biography, “Ross had taken medical advice as to what should be done to make his purpose [eventual reinterment] possible. The doctors told him to put Wilde’s body in quicklime.” According to Harris, the doctors offered assurance that quicklime “would consume the flesh and leave the white bones—the skeleton—intact, which could then be moved easily.” This was not scientifically accurate, but Ross may well have been additionally persuaded by Wilde’s own writing. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” described the quicklime interment of the executed prisoner Trooper Charles Woodridge:

And all the while the burning lime

Eats flesh and bone away,

It eats the brittle bone by night,

And the soft flesh by the day,

It eats the flesh and bones by turns,

But it eats the heart away.

Another purpose of the powder was simply to mask stench, for which it had a proven efficacy, both in funerary matters and in latrines. Ross was urged to seal the body in its coffin quickly, before decomposition began.

Bosie had been contacted, but not in time for him to reach Paris before Wilde’s coffin had been screwed shut. The two men had made a disastrous attempt at reconciliation in Naples after Oscar’s release from Reading, and their relationship had continued for the most part at a prickly distance. Bosie sent Wilde small gifts of money, grudgingly, but after he came into a substantial inheritance upon the death of the Marquess of Queensberry in early 1900 and Wilde asked if some regular allowance might be arranged to supplement the not-lavish income from his wife’s estate, Bosie responded with the reflexive instinct of an adder. Wilde was “like an old fat prostitute” for even asking. “I can’t afford to spend money on anything but myself,” Bosie claimed. These expenses included a race stable in Chantilly, gambling, and many other extravagant pursuits. “He has left me bleeding,” Wilde told Frank Harris.

On the cold, rainy morning of December 2, the coffin was drawn by horses to a funeral mass at the ancient Left Bank church of St. Germain de Prés. The service was austere, unaccompanied by music, and attended by a small number of friends and acquaintances. After the long muddy journey to Bagneux, the burial ceremony, by one account, was marred by a heated argument over who, exactly, would officiate as chief mourner: Robbie Ross or Lord Alfred Douglas? Bosie had paid for the funeral, conducted very noticeably on the cheap. In the ugly confrontation, it was said, he was very nearly knocked into the open grave. Or perhaps he just slipped in the mud. But on one level he truly did fall into a pit, where he would spend the rest of his life wrestling with his revenant lover, who would drain his energies and sap his soul.

Wilde’s first grave, at Bagneux, outside Paris.

While Wilde still rested in his temporary grave in Bagneux, a young German American devotee in New York was determined to resurrect him by any means necessary.

Even if that meant turning him into a vampire.

But first, in a strange and breathless 1905 letter to the American literary journal The Critic—it had been turned down elsewhere—the twenty-year-old poet and essayist George Sylvester Viereck, still a student at the City University of New York, reported a “rumor afloat so sensational that I hardly dare express it, namely, that the author of ‘De Profundis’ is not dead at all, but that he either lives the life of a recluse in the bosom of the all-embracing Church, or, according to another version, that he is at this very moment in the city of New York.” Viereck admitted that “what I shall say has the thrill of the melodrama, and for that reason will be doubted by many who do not know the truth of the old platitude that truth is stranger than fiction and that, though it may imitate art, it often surpasses the latter.”

During intermission at a fashionable New York theatre, Viereck reported, the conversation had “for some reason” turned to the topic of Wilde. “A very charming and clever woman, well known in the circles of the Sunrise Club, spoke to me softly: ‘and have you not heard . . . they whisper . . . among those who know . . . that Oscar Wilde is not dead at all . . . that the monks in a Spanish cloister have taken him under their shelter . . . that he is dead to the world only . . . but . . . ’ and she raised her finger to her lips . . . ‘they whisper. . . .’ I was speechless.”

Was such a thing possible? Not long after, while in conversation with a Manhattan bookseller, he couldn’t resist broaching the subject. “I said significantly, as it were in italics: ‘. . . It is said that Wilde has not died at all. . . .’ When I had said these words the young man looked at me curiously. Then he said, as if confident that I was one of the partakers of a great secret: ‘I know, for I saw him only two weeks ago.’ ‘Is it possible? But where?’ ‘Right here in New York.’ ‘On the street?’ ‘No, not on the street.’ ‘Did you try to speak to him?’ ‘I did, for ten minutes. And I have hardly ever heard a talker more brilliant, or one more sparkling with wit.’ ‘Are you sure that it was he?’ ‘It could have been no other, but I asked no questions. . . . ’ My curiosity seemed to arouse his suspicions. ‘You want to establish the facts in the case, I see.’ And from that moment it was impossible to draw another word from him.”

Viereck claimed to have discovered, in a truncated German edition of De Profundis, recently published, a passage in which Wilde described himself “as a revenant, in the French phrase, as one whose face has become gray and distorted with pain. Terrible as are the dead when they rise from the graves, the living that come back from the grave are far more terrible.” Though convincingly Wildean in cadence, these lines appear nowhere in the original manuscript. Fortunately for Viereck, no one at the time questioned the hoax. “There would have to be accomplices, of course,” he admitted, then posited a conspiracy, for “we know that only a few friends attended his funeral. His family took no part in it. And so it is possible that under that grave in Paris . . . sleeps some poor beggar or honest bourgeois who never dreamed that he should rest in a poet’s tomb.” Viereck closed his missive with an apotheosis formed as a rhetorical question:

Was not this brilliant lover of the paradoxical capable of making his very life and death a paradox, and in the phrase of a Greek poet, “to be and not to be, not being to be.”‡ And was not the Unexpected, the Sensational, the element in which he loved to move in life and art? And would it not be quite in accordance with his character to carry to the last point of consistency the Christ pose, blasphemous perhaps, which he adopted especially in his last book, . . . and from his tomb to roll the stone and rise from the dead?

Readers were puzzled, to say the least. Who on earth was this George Sylvester Viereck person, and where did he get such crazy ideas?

Born in Munich to a cultured family on the last day of 1884, Viereck was already recognized as a literary wunderkind when his family moved to New York in the late 1890s. Like Bram Stoker, he possessed extraordinary verbal gifts and expressed them early, even alarmingly. Like Stoker, he relished befriending famous, powerful people. Where Stoker cultivated favor with the artistic likes of Walt Whitman, Henry Irving, Hall Caine, and Mark Twain, and could drop the names of countless others, Viereck sought out a broader trophy list: George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Theodore Roosevelt, and, most improbably, Sigmund Freud.

Also in common with Stoker, he had significant early anxieties about death—like both Stoker and Stoker’s mother, Charlotte, he was fascinated by Poe—and as a child became fantastically obsessed with discovering a formula for immortality. Eventually, he must have realized that a highly eccentric, self-consciously cultivated literary reputation was the closest approximation he was going to achieve. The word “prodigy” was originally used to describe sideshow monsters, and the freakish talents of young Viereck established him as an enfant terrible, a formidable monster of the literary midway. Barely out of grammar school, he espoused outlandish opinions, wild even by adult standards, and was writing and translating poetry with ease, even before puberty. His first published verses, in German, appeared in New York newspapers when he was thirteen.

George Sylvester Viereck, German American prodigy of the perverse.

American edition of House of the Vampire (1907).

Viereck was also sexually precocious. His friend and biographer Elmer Gertz noted (with cushioned understatement) that “his amorous tastes were dubious, and troubled a few of his peers and elders.” These predilections revolved around a “too rabid admiration for Wilde” and for “the roses and raptures of Swinburnian vice.” One of his youthful, unpublished opuses was a massive manuscript in German called Elinor: The Autobiography of a Degenerate. He reveled in the works of Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, and Sade. Eventually he would declare himself a “sexual relativist,” an erotic omnivore who would proclaim, “There is no such thing as a perversion,” defining the concept as “what the other fellow does and we don’t like,” a statement roughly in the style of (though not quite so memorable as) Wilde’s epigrammatic definition of wickedness: “a word invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.”

“Wilde is splendid,” Viereck wrote. “I admire, nay I love him. He is so deliciously unhealthy, so beautifully morbid. I love all things evil! I love the splendor of decay, the foul beauty of corruption.” As if in preparation for his own foray into Wilde-related vampirism, he hated “the freezing rays of the sun. Day is nausea, day is prose. Night, Beauty, love, splendor, poetry, wine, scarlet, rape, vice and bliss! I love the night—und Meschugge ist Trump! [Craziness trumps all!]”

Little more than a year after Wilde’s death, the seventeen-year-old Viereck was startled and excited to learn Lord Alfred Douglas himself was in New York (ostensibly to find a suitable heiress with whom to settle down, as Wilde’s dust did the same.) After virtually stalking Douglas, leaving feverish notes and missing him three times at his hotel, Viereck was rewarded with a luncheon date with Bosie himself. Viereck’s biographer encapsulated the boy’s reaction as the “glorious feeling” of meeting “one who had clasped the hand of god and known and loved him in the flesh!” A more neutral observer might detect something more akin to necrophilia by proxy.

Since lunch would be a blind date, Viereck told Douglas he could be recognized by his fur coat and clean-shaven face. What fully transpired between the boy and Wilde’s now thirty-one-year-old angel of destruction isn’t known, but Viereck was adventurous, and Bosie was still the person whose own insatiable appetite for men went miraculously unmentioned in the Wilde trials. The upshot of their meeting was an apparently affectionate friendship, and they would remain off-and-on correspondents until the older man’s death in 1946. He wrote to Viereck before leaving New York, without an heiress. As he told Olive Custance, the boyish and lesbian-leaning woman with whom he would enter an ultimately unsuccessful marriage, “It might have been different if I had met a nice heir. But apparently there are none.” Had he, perhaps, met some less-than-nice ones? He wrote to Viereck, “I have met many charming people here and seen many interesting and wonderful things in this country and not the least of my pleasures was meeting you.” He concluded wistfully: “You are too clever not to make your mark some time or other. I hope you will have more luck and make a better business of your life than I have done with mine.”

Douglas was no doubt unusually surprised to make the acquaintance of anyone who viewed his relationship with Wilde in a positive, much less an overtly worshipful, light. Viereck met him just as the full consequences of the scandal—and it was the scandal of the age—had begun making themselves clear. While visiting Washington, DC, during this very trip, he had been unceremoniously asked to leave his guest lodgings at the Metropolitan Club after it received a complaint about his connection to “objectionable persons.” He responded with a withering sonnet dedicated to, or aimed at, the club, printed prominently in the New York Herald.

Viereck may have intuited Bosie’s burgeoning resentment and sense of victimization over the Wilde affair, which would only increase. This was supremely ironic, since he had emerged legally unscathed by Oscar’s trials. When he met Viereck at the end of 1901, he still was unaware of the explosive contents of De Profundis, in which Wilde excoriates his former lover unmercifully, with accusations that both his finances and his creativity had been drained away by their relationship.§ Not all of Wilde’s indictments are deserved, and Douglas was not quite the soulless, predatory monster described in the letter. But there was enough truth to really sting. As delineated by Wilde, Douglas is a spoiled parasite who exerts an irresistible and nearly preternatural hold on his victim. A century later, he could have provided (and possibly did provide) a template for one of Anne Rice’s beautiful, golden-haired bloodsuckers, and it is easy enough to imagine a Dorian Gray–like story in which both men are condemned to a querulous undead eternity, where the bitchy recriminations never stop. The strong supernatural potential of Douglas’s personality was pointedly raised in the London Evening Standard review of the 1960 Hammer film The Brides of Dracula, in which the blond and well-preserved vampire Baron Meinster (David Peel) is likened to “Bosie with fangs.”

Was there something about Wilde and Douglas that might be suitable for a fictional treatment in the decadent mode of which Viereck was so fond? Something weird and unworldly? Perhaps even . . . vampiric? Nothing in that line had yet been done in the United States. The best-selling novelist Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, announced his intention to write an American epic of the undead in 1902. Philip Burne-Jones, painter of The Vampire, expressed his willingness to illustrate it. Neither Stoker’s nor Wister’s book materialized, which was a shame, because a vampire novel set firmly in the robber-baron era would have had enormous thematic possibilities. However, a good deal of short vampire fiction blossomed in Dracula’s transatlantic penumbra at the turn of the century. Much of it is still worth reading, including the New England tale “Luella Miller” (1901) by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, and “Count Magnus” (1904) by the British ghost story master M. R. James.

Scene from Edgar Allan Woolf’s The Vampire, the 1909 stage adaptation of Viereck’s novel.

But no one since Stoker had ventured to essay another vampire novel. George Sylvester Viereck believed he was fated to the task. The result of his efforts was a short novel, The House of the Vampire, published in 1905. The book was issued simultaneously in English and German, the latter edition stamped with an unmistakable cover image: the livid face of Oscar Wilde.

The novel introduces Reginald Clarke, a charismatic American luminary of literature and the arts with the power to absorb the talent and creativity of others—a psychic vampire capable of entering minds to steal intellectual property, even before the original owner has put pen to paper. He lives in imposing, sumptuously appointed rooms that frown down upon Riverside Drive as if it were the Borgo Pass, and offers hospitality to a series of unsuspecting, talented young men, sacrificial protégés who will never, of course, realize their own artistic dreams. After he has drained the seminal source of their talent, they believe they are going mad. Early in the story, Reginald summarily dismisses Abel Felton, his latest, exhausted conquest who mourns his bled-away inspiration. “It will come again, in a month, in a year, two years,” Reginald assures him.

“No, no! It is all gone!” sobbed the boy.

“Nonsense. You are merely nervous. But that is why we must part. There is no room in one house for two nervous people.”

“I was not such a nervous wreck before I met you.”

“Am I to blame for it—for your morbid fancies, your extravagance, the slow tread of a nervous disease, perhaps?”

“Who can tell? But I am all confused. I don’t know what I am saying, Everything is so puzzling—life, friendship, you. I fancied you cared for my career, and now you end our friendship without a thought!”

Following a round of epicene fireworks, Abel is quickly replaced by Ernest Fielding, another young man with the requisite amount of aesthetic baggage, notably an androgynous friend named Jack, an inseparable soulmate with long eyelashes who, alas, is now gone away to Harvard, leaving open a vampiric approach. (The names Jack and Ernest, of course, are a somewhat less than subtle evocation of John “Jack” Worthing and his alter ego in The Importance of Being Earnest.) Ernest has in mind a strange but monumental drama, a compelling admixture of Hamlet and Salome, which the vampire can read in his mind and decides to take as his own. When Ernest sees Abel leaving the house, he remembers that the boy is an aspiring writer and inquires about the progress of his latest work. “I am not writing it,” Abel says, smiling sadly. “Not writing it?” Ernest asks. “Reginald is,” Abel says. “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Ernest replies. “Never mind,” Abel says in parting. “Some day you will.”

When Ernest realizes that the readings Reginald begins giving during his elegant evening salons are based on the play he is still only in the process of imagining, he consults a former disciple, Ethel Brandenbourg, who, the reader can assume, escaped Reginald’s thrall largely because she was a woman; men are the monster’s preferred tidbits and toys. Ethel succeeds in making him realize Reginald’s full demonic power. Ernest believes he is falling in love with Ethel, but it is only Reginald’s invading mind, seeking to possess her once again. Ethel firmly resists, and encourages him to seek additional support from his trusted friend Jack, to whom he immediately writes. But it is too late. Reginald has already summoned him and selected him as Ernest’s replacement. Following a tense confrontation between vampire and victim, Reginald declares his triumph and mentally sucks out the contents of Ernest’s brain, like marrow from a bone. Ethel arrives at the house and sees “something that resembled Ernest Fielding” emerge from the door, gibbering like an idiot, “a dull and brutish thing, hideously transformed, without a vestige of mind.”

Although Viereck had envisioned Wilde while writing The House of the Vampire, another great writer lent some inspiration as well. Clarke describes Honoré de Balzac’s genius at “absorbing from life the elements essential to his artistic completion.” Evil attracted Balzac especially, the vampire explains. “He absorbed it as a sponge absorbs water; perhaps because there was so little of it in his own make-up. He must have purified the atmosphere around him for miles, by bringing all the evil that was floating in the air or slumbering in men’s souls to the point of his pen.”

With his first piece of book-length fiction, Viereck took aim not just at Stoker but at the looming white whale of literary accomplishment as well. “You’ve heard of the ‘great American novel’? Well, I’ve written it,” he proclaimed to an interviewer with characteristic immodesty. “The hero is a vampire. In every age there have been great men—and they became great by absorbing the work of other men.” Napoleon appropriated power. Shakespeare ransacked lesser, earlier works for his own, transcendent glory. John D. Rockefeller, “by his great genius, has acquired material wealth by absorbing smaller capitalists. . . . My vampire is the Overman of Nietzsche. He is justified in the pilfering of other men’s brains.”

If such an overwrought love letter to the privilege and entitlement of great men sounds like a horror novel imagined by Ayn Rand, it is only because Viereck beat her to the punch. In his swooning surrender to authoritarian energies, he echoes Stoker’s weakness for the domineering likes of Henry Irving. But where Dracula exorcised—or at least bargained with—Darwinian anxieties about the survival of the fittest, The House of the Vampire gave them all a big, hearty welcome. Not surprisingly, Viereck’s passion for Great Men and All Things German led inevitably to his idolization of Kaiser Wilhelm, and later Adolf Hitler. Viereck’s work as an obsessive propagandist for Germany would be understandably controversial during World War I, and would actually land him in prison during World War II for violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Critics of The House of the Vampire were relentlessly skeptical, refusing to concede the birth of a new Melville. “Except in the final scene, where its extravagances are in keeping with the subject,” opined the New York Times, “the style of the book is quite impossible. ‘The House of the Vampire’ may be described as a tale of horror, keyed from the first word to the last in the highest pitch of tragic emotion.” The Nation concurred. “The difficulty with Mr. Viereck’s treatment lies in purely melodramatic conception of character, an utter lack of subtlety in dealing with the whole situation, and a distressing congestion of large words.”

Nonetheless, the novel contains some genuinely chilling moments, as when Clarke, slumming at a downscale variety show, detects the one trace of real talent in an otherwise mediocre singer—a distinctive tremolo, her only grace—and casually snatches its expressive quality for his own. Her livelihood evaporated, she has no choice except to become one of the prostitutes glancingly encountered by Ernest and Jack, and described as pathetic “creatures who had once been women.” A particularly inventive note is that Clarke’s vampirism is omnivorous, making no distinction between the art forms upon which it feeds. The literary can feed the visual, and vice versa. “But what on earth could you find in my poor art to attract you? What were my pictures to you?” asks Ethel, whose talent as a painter waned under his malignant influence. “I needed them, I needed you,” he replies. “It was a certain something, a rich colour effect, perhaps. And then, under your very eyes, the colour that vanished from your canvases reappeared in my prose.”

But reviewers were right in taking the author to task for campy overkill in his treatment of Reginald’s final triumph over Ernest. “He stood up at full length, the personification of grandeur and power. A tremendous force trembled in his very fingertips. He was like a gigantic dynamo, charged with the might of ten thousand magnetic storms that shake the earth in its orbit and lash myriads of planets through infinities of space.” The vampire, whose powers Viereck likened favorably to the monopoly might of Standard Oil, gloats over his puny victim, who should be grateful that his meager talent is being absorbed into a greater, glorious power. “Look at me, boy! As I stand before you I am Homer, I am Shakespeare. . . . I am every cosmic manifestation in art. Men have doubted in each incarnation of my existence. Historians have more to tell of the meanest Athenian scribbler or Elizabethan poetaster than of me. The radiance of my work obscured my very self. I care not. I have a mission. I am a servant of the Lord. I am the vessel that bears the Host!”

If it is difficult to see any of Oscar Wilde in this monomaniacal portrait of Nietzsche’s Übermensch morphed into a Christian-inflected black hole, it’s because there really isn’t much to see. Wilde may have been egotistic, but he didn’t believe in eating his inferiors. He was the compassionate author of “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” and a crusader for prison reform in the deeply empathic “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” works that would surely repel any self-respecting sociocultural vampire like Clarke as effectively as a brandished Bible. As Lord Alfred Douglas would much later (and very gently) tell Viereck, apropos of some of the young writer’s other excited musings, they didn’t necessarily see eye to eye on the subject of Oscar. In The House of the Vampire Viereck takes both sides—admiring Clarke/Wilde and justifying the terrible trouble he causes a young man, yet sympathizing with Ernest/Bosie for getting involved with him in the first place.

Viereck obviously couldn’t have written The House of the Vampire without the prior existence of Dracula. The American edition had been in print for five years, and a steady seller, crystalizing vampires in the public imagination like nothing before or since. The idea was sufficiently familiar for Viereck to float his own imaginative variation on an already imaginative theme. Ethel’s explanation for Reginald’s existence is a virtual précis of Van Helsing’s argument that vampires could be understood in the context of revealed modern science. “Our scientists have proved true the wildest theories of modern scholars. The transmutation of metals seems to-day no longer an idle speculation. . . . Life was become once more wonderful and very mysterious. But it also seems that, with the miracles of the old days, their terrors, their nightmares and their monsters have come back in a modern guise.”

The concept of psychic vampirism had been essayed even before Dracula, in stories like Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite (1894), playing to the fascination with psychic phenomena and spiritualism as expression of a new kind of science, if one not yet completely comprehended. The broad renown of Dracula made Viereck’s variant premise understandable to general readers. Also available to Viereck were some of the same sources that preceded and informed Stoker, especially the German sources, including von Wachsmann’s “The Mysterious Stranger” and the libretto of Heinrich Marschner’s opera Der Vampyr (1828), a standard work in the German repertoire for most of the nineteenth century.

Actor John Kellerd, cast in The Vampire because of his striking resemblance to Oscar Wilde.

In 1909 Viereck allowed, or presumably allowed, the playwright Edgar Allan Woolf (best known today for his contributions to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz) to adapt The House of the Vampire for the New York stage, with a number of significant alterations. First, and for no discernible reason, the names of the characters were all changed: Reginald Clarke became Paul Hartleigh, Ernest Fielding transmogrified into Caryl Fielding, and Ethel Brandenbourg was alliterated into Allene Arden. Unlike Ethel, Allene was the vampire’s ward and unrequited love interest, not his brain candy. Strangest of all was the play’s climax, in which Allene and Caryl play a bit of psychic jujitsu, confronting the vampire and forcing him to relinquish his powers. While this confusingly contradicted Viereck’s whole triumphal concept of the Übermensch, it provided a more or less “happy” ending, a concession likely demanded by the commercial producers.

A concerted effort must have been made to find the actor in New York most resembling Oscar Wilde, and success came in the person of the veteran performer John E. Kellerd, who couldn’t have looked more like Wilde in his prime. The role of the first, discarded victim was considerably expanded and played by the young Warner Oland (later Charlie Chan of movie fame),¶ whose Neronian bangs made him also appear like Wilde, in his early aesthetic period. Oddly, none of the New York reviewers talked about Wilde at all. He may still have been a subject that prompted reticence. When the New York Times reviewed the first American revival of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1902, its notice had the most lugubrious preamble imaginable for a comedy, lamenting that the play was “inextricably associated with the saddest and most revolting scandal in the history of the English drama—perhaps of all drama,” and that it was “impossible to forget the broken and almost abandoned man of genius who crept away to a by-street in the Latin Quarter, to die like a rat with a broken back in an alley.” One reviewer of The Vampire described Kellerd simply as “a clean shaven Svengali,” leaving it to the editorial cartoonist to capture the essences of both Wilde and Dracula, adding to the villain’s Noël Cowardish dressing gown a pair of flapping bat wings.

It was only appropriate that a play about supernatural plagiarism faced charges of copyright infringement itself from a number of parties. Arthur Stringer, author of the 1903 novel The Silver Poppy, claimed that The Vampire stole its theme and filed suit. Stringer’s book was a story about a very different kind of literary imposture, and contained a metaphorical passage about a pterodactyl-like creature from the Amazon who perishes with its biologist captor. The strange fusion of human bones and what appear to be gigantic bat wings is taken as evidence of a Dracula-like vampire’s existence. Viereck happily told the press, “I am really sorry the charge is not true, because in that case it would be conclusive proof that my theory of thought absorption is true.” He continued, more or less adopting the Reginald Clarke persona, “Even if I had absorbed ideas from works ojf an inferior quality I still would feel justified in using them, but, unfortunately, I have not done anything of the kind.” Two other complainants said they had registered The Vampire title with the Copyright Office, even though a title alone was never subject to legal protection.

In the fascinating analysis by Paul K. Saint-Amour in The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination, the whole issue of copyright is examined from the “hauntological” perspective of an author’s legal ability to survive death and keep feeding, at least monetarily. “Without ever mentioning the word ‘copyright,’ ” Saint-Amour writes, “Viereck’s novel and play had tapped into a vein of contemporary discourse about both the power and the limits of intellectual property law.” An opponent to expanded author protections, he notes, “could interpret The Vampire as a cautionary tale about the appropriations and erasures licensed by a law that treated ideas and experiences like objects.” Similar issues (and metaphors) were raised in the landmark legal case Lugosi v. Universal Pictures, argued from 1972 to 1979, which set important precedents in the areas of celebrity likeness and trademark, all stemming from the question of whether or not Bela Lugosi’s famous Dracula persona could survive Lugosi’s actual death in the realm of living commerce. Informal, metaphorical references to blood and bloodsucking are also quite common in issues of property law generally, as well as in innumerable crass jokes about lawyers.

A newspaper cartoon of The Vampire employed bat imagery found nowhere in the play.

After providing some publicity, presumably gratifying for both sides, the lawsuit hoopla over the Woolf and Viereck play evaporated when the New York production, presented at Hackett’s Theatre on Forty-second Street, closed after only a few weeks. Then, after rematerializing for a handful of touring engagements in New England, The Vampire itself vanished. No copy of the script or promptbook has ever been unearthed. While hardly commercial successes, both the novel and stage adaptation were harbingers of a greater interest in vampires to come. The year 1909 also marked the appearance of A Fool There Was, a runaway success onstage based on a best-selling novel, both inspired by the 1897 Philip Burne-Jones painting The Vampire and its accompanying Rudyard Kipling poem. The debut of the painting and poem shared a publicity sphere with Dracula, and A Fool There Was crystallized the image of the femme fatale vampire, or “vamp,” which launched the career of the silent movie actress Theda Bara when the story was filmed in 1910.

Viereck’s psychic vampire feeds on his victims’ creativity instead of their blood.

Dracula had set in motion a variety of derivative metaphors, rippling outward over an ever-widening pool of blood that would captivate the twentieth century, and in which Dracula himself would continue to thrive. Viereck’s Reginald Clarke in particular provided an important bridge between the secretive, reclusive, crepuscular Count and the evolving conceit of vampires as creatures of taste, refinement, and conspicuous consumption—an appetite extending beyond the mere consumption of human blood. Stoker’s Dracula stuffed gold into his clothing as if into a miser’s mattress and maintained a lair in London devoid of objets d’art, with little more than a bloodstained water basin for furniture. Commenting on the showier, emboldened decadence of the undead in the Edwardian era, Nina Auerbach, in Our Vampires, Ourselves, observes that “homosexuality clung to them in the sickeningly sinister form it assumed after the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. Dracula was one particularly debased incarnation of the fallen Wilde, a monster of silence and exile, vulnerable to a legalistic series of arcane rules.” The new century, however, opened the coffin-closet more than a crack. “As Dracula, Wilde could be isolated by diagnoses and paralyzed by rules, but as the psychic vampire Reginald Clarke, Wilde’s image, ungovernable and cosmic, rules the world.”

Once upon a time in Dublin there lived a wondrous child named Hester Dowden. She had dark hair and large, intelligent eyes that could absorb printed words that her mind understood magically, as if she were already an adult. At the age of four, she astonished grown-ups with her ability to read and comprehend Goethe’s Faust, in German as well as English. While other children still languished with fairy tales, she could read Grimm in the original language if she wanted to, but instead was drawn to more challenging supernatural tales. Faust was about a most attractive devil who could bestow uncanny gifts upon mortals, including the power to perceive the spirit world and all the fantastic beings that lived there.

Hester lived in a fine house filled with books. The books belonged to her father, Edward Dowden, a very wise man who wrote books himself about the famous playwright Shakespeare and taught literature at the great university around which all the people and activities of Dublin revolved.

As a child, her affection for her father was real and reciprocal. When she was only eight years old he wrote letters to her while on literary business in London telling her about his pleasure at viewing Sir Isaac Newton’s manuscripts and death mask, explaining what the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey was, or describing to her amazing drawings by William Blake he couldn’t wait to tell her more about. All in all, he seemed eager to encourage her precocious interest in the world of arts and letters. But almost simultaneously he could drop into an essay for the Contemporary Review his casually misogynistic disdain for women’s efforts to express themselves like men. He deplored the “crew of disorderly persons, often of the fair sex, each of whom, more perhaps through weakness than wickedness, has been guilty of bringing into the world a novel in three volumes.” He called upon critics to “administer justice of the rough and ready kind,” because “the female novelist, having once erred, is lost to all sense of shame.”

According to her biographer Edmund Bentley, “The great quad of Trinity College, with its grey stone buildings and magnificent oaks, impressed Hester up to a point. But she felt that it contained a world of men . . . beyond her orbit or province.” Bram Stoker was one of those men who regularly visited the Dowdens’ suburban home, probably since the time of her birth. He was a favorite of her father’s, and would have seen her grow from infancy into the attractive young girl memorably captured on canvas by John Butler Yeats, the artist brother of William Butler Yeats. Local celebrities like Lady Wilde or the occasional visiting actress like Ellen Terry or Genevieve Ward were only exceptions that proved the rule. Men were the people who really mattered, to her father and to the world.

Edward Dowden was a failed poet, who, despite his many achievements and accolades, harbored a gnawing resentment for the academic life and privately conceded that he didn’t really consider it an honor to have been named Trinity’s first professor of English literature. He thought he deserved another life entirely. His ambivalence about his daughter increased as she got older, and when she fell in love with a young poet, one seriously considered poet laureate material, he refused the marriage proposal. The reason, supposedly, was the difference in their ages (only ten years, and a rather common arrangement). The men had a difference of political opinion over the Boer War, which provided another pretext. But the real reason was that the poet was competition—a reminder of the life Dowden couldn’t have for himself, and his daughter would not have without him.

When Hester’s mother, Mary Clerke Dowden, died in 1892, Hester gave up music studies she had begun in London and returned to Dublin to care for her father and siblings. One of her “great friends” during 1891 and 1892 was Bram Stoker, who had been a natural contact for her in London, since he and her father had remained on close terms ever since their Trinity days. No correspondence between them has survived, but it was precisely the same time he was researching Dracula in earnest. It can be reasonably assumed that Hester would have been invited to the Stokers’ Sunday at-homes, and there met a fairly amazing cross-section of cultural London, including one of Florence Stoker’s regular and favorite guests, Oscar Wilde. The initial storm of public outrage over The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890 had all but subsided. Wilde seemed to have drawn power from all the negative attention and turned it to his advantage, honing the trademark outrageous public persona that made its effective debut with the notorious “green carnation” premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan.

When the Wilde scandal broke in 1895, Hester had been back in Dublin nearly three years. The story exerted the same lurid front-page fascination there as it did in London, and all throughout the world. The vicarious drama came within Hester’s close purview when her father refused W. B. Yeats’s plea that he add Dowden’s name to a petition of support from Irish literary men for one of Dublin’s most illustrious sons. Dowden wanted nothing to do with it. The Wilde affair also coincided with Dowden’s remarriage, hardly a happy occasion for Hester, who felt that both she and her mother were being summarily replaced. She clashed with the new wife, who resurrected some of the fairy tale coloration of her childhood—only this time more darkly, as a classically wicked stepmother.

Hester left her father’s house to marry Dr. Richard Travers Smith, to all accounts a rather unromantic catch who at least offered money and stability. He was a dermatologist specializing in eczema and varicose veins and had a large, established practice. There were no grounds, invented or otherwise, for her father’s opposition. She settled into a pampered bourgeois lifestyle, dutifully had two children, and for the next twenty years gave up all her creative dreams, which, following the aborted music career, included an interest in writing and criticism. These literary pursuits withered as well.

Edward Dowden died in 1913. Hester believed she had an uncanny premonition of the event. Of course she did, but it was nothing uncanny. Dowden had been in steadily failing health for years, and there was no need for a crystal ball, much less a banshee’s wail. But the thought remained with her: Was it possible that she actually did have unusual powers? Was there actually something beyond the earthly plane? Beings? Forces? Possibilities? Like many other middle-class women of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, when traditional notions and practices of spirituality were at a low ebb, Hester felt increasingly that she was buried by materialism and money. The Travers Smiths spent, entertained, and traveled lavishly, but their marriage was passionless. Her husband’s nationalist politics irritated her. Her boredom was almost unbearable. Even at the height of the Easter Rebellion in 1916, partly in rebuke to her husband, she decided to go shopping. There had to be something beyond this life. A life that was being drained out of her by forces she could not control.

Hester Dowden, the spirit medium daughter of Stoker’s Trinity College mentor Edward Dowden.

The Irish rebellion coincided with World War I, and her son was joining the army. The threatening spectre of death that overshadowed Europe had reached Hester’s Dublin. Sometime during the conflict, she came to the belief that dead soldiers were speaking to her. It wasn’t a particularly strange idea in a time when spiritualism enjoyed a large middle-class following, on both sides of the Atlantic. Everywhere, people were experimenting with divination boards and conducting séances. Hester met a number of people—many from the prestigious Society for Psychical Research—who encouraged her to hone her skills. And finally she realized that not only was there another side, there was another life—for her. The fairy folk could have spirited her away as a child but chose not to. But as an adult she could rely on a different kind of supernatural entity for rescue. Spirits that tended on mortal thoughts could unsex her—or at least release her from the constrained sex role that had made her life intolerable.

While her husband was away working as a field doctor, she filed her petition for separation. A few years later a divorce would be finalized. In the meantime she moved to London and set up practice in Chelsea Gardens. As concisely described by Helen Sword in Ghostwriting Modernism, spirit mediumship was “one of the relatively few means by which women of virtually any social or educational background could earn money, engage in high-profile careers, lay claim to otherworldly insight and subvert male authority, all while conforming to normative ideals of feminine passivity and receptivity.” Denied a voice of her own, the medium could take on the voices of others. After all, weren’t women supposed to live selflessly, for and through other people?

It is not clear exactly why Hester decided to contact the ghost of Oscar Wilde. If she met him in London in 1868, had he made an especially favorable impression? Had she objected to her father’s turning his back on him during the trials? Around the same time as the Viereck hoax, in 1905, an after-dinner séance was conducted in the home of André Gide by “an intellectual lady who acted as writing medium,” according to Robert Sherard in The Real Oscar Wilde. Indeed, Hester knew of this event, just as she knew about Viereck’s strange claims in the Critic, published at nearly the same time as the séance chez Gide. “Wilde’s wraith was evoked from the Yonder-Land,” wrote Sherard, “and the first thing he commented [to an Italian guest] was: ‘Doriano mi ha tradito’ (Dorian has betrayed me). Gide asked him his opinion about his trial, and Wilde said: ‘It was typically English. Perjurers. Hypocrites. Puritans.’ ” When asked to describe life beyond the grave, Wilde called it “A chaotic confusion of fluid nebulosities. A cloaque [sewer] of souls and the essences of organic life.” To Gide’s query about the existence of God, the ghost replied, “That is still for us the great mystery.”

At least one account maintains, without documentation, that Hester’s first attempt to contact Wilde’s ghost after World War I was at his family’s request, but there was practically no one left in Wilde’s family to ask. His mother, brother, and wife were long dead; his older son, Cyril, had been killed in the war; and his younger son, Vyvyan, had distanced himself utterly from anything regarding his father. The only conceivable relation who might have been interested in the otherworldly Wilde was his lesbian niece, Dorothy “Dolly” Wilde, who bore such an amazing resemblance to her uncle that people actually wondered aloud about reincarnation. According to her biographer Joan Schenkar, “Wherever Dolly went, whatever social performance she was giving, someone in the charmed circle of her listeners was certain to be watching for traces of Oscar Wilde; trying to see the uncle through the niece, trying to see the uncle in the niece, trying to see the uncle somewhere near the niece.”

Dolly’s life could be described as a marathon séance. She divided her time between London and Paris in the 1920s, taking the shadow of Oscar Wilde with her. At one otherwise listless party, her arrival was said to electrify the room as she quipped, “You all look as if you were waiting for the coffin to be brought in.” One only wishes she had been wearing some bat-winged gown, designed in gold lamé, by Erté.

Dolly was as well known on the Left Bank as she was in Hester’s Chelsea. Dolly’s world, especially in Paris, was openly lesbian, while the world of mediumship was tacitly. Hester met another Irish medium, Geraldine Cummins, who introduced her to the ways of Ouija on a visit to Paris. They would live together in Chelsea for several years, until Cummins moved in with a wealthy female patron.

Radclyffe Hall, the British author of the 1928 lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness, became an acolyte of mediumship following the death of her lover, Mabel “Ladye” Batten. A new lover, Una Troubridge, became her partner in a séance-obsessed folie à deux, in which the approval and advice of the dead woman came to control and dominate their lives. Radclyffe was also a devoted Catholic, and spiritualism brought her to loggerheads with the father confessor of the Brompton Oratory. But since she was independently wealthy and donated generously to the church, her eccentricity was tolerated. Her wealth also allowed her to dress and behave with aggressive mannishness. Who would stop her? She was active in the Society for Psychical Research, but her appointment to its governing board was blocked on the basis of her lack of moral fitness. She sued for libel and, in a complete reversal of the Wilde trial dynamic, won for damages, though she was never able to collect; since lesbianism wasn’t illegal in Britain, the society could not defend its discrimination against her in any way that would stand up in court. Radclyffe Hall achieved a permanent postmortem connection to Bram Stoker when she was interred in Highgate Cemetery, the atmospheric inspiration for the cemetery called Kingstead in Dracula, where the vampire Lucy Westenra wandered nightly from her tomb.

The war years opened up extraordinary opportunities for mediumship. Mass death always did. The postwar artistic ferment in Europe fueled expressionism, especially in Germany, where strange images of living death fascinated the audiences of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau’s famously unauthorized adaptation of Dracula that benefited significantly from spiritualist interest and financing. The public couldn’t get enough of the Other Side, and Hester Travis Smith had become a shrewd and independent businesswoman. Her 1919 book Voices from the Void had greatly increased her reputation and demand for her services. Wherever the idea came from, reaching out to Oscar Wilde was another inspired business plan.

Hester made her first contact with Wilde through the Ouija board, comprising an alphabet covered with plate glass and a pointing device—known alternately as a traveler or planchette—on which she rested her fingers. Various spirit guides would act as intermediaries with individual discarnate entities, and guide the medium’s hands from letter to letter, which an assistant transcribed. Later, as the messages became longer and more complex, she would collaborate with a transcribing “automatist,” to whom she could relay messages directly, simply by resting one of her hands on his or hers. After a few rusty initial tries, and some purgatorial complaining from the dead man, his familiar voice, witty and flippant as it had ever been in life, spoke confidently in cursive script.

Being dead is the most boring experience in life. That is, if one excepts being married or dining with a schoolmaster. Do you doubt my identity? I am not surprised, since sometimes I doubt it myself. I might retaliate by doubting yours. I have always admired the Society for Psychical Research. They are the most magnificent doubters in the world. They are never happy until they have explained away their spectres. And one suspects a genuine ghost would make them exquisitely uncomfortable. I have sometimes thought of founding an academy of celestial doubters . . . which might be a sort of Society for Psychical Research among the living. No one under sixty would be admitted, and we should call ourselves the Society of Superannuated Shades.

His evocation of the afterlife was quite a bit more colorful and specific than when he spoke to André Gide. His boredom was palpable. “I am doing what is little better than picking oakum in gaol. There, after all, my mind could detach itself from my body. Here, I have no body to leave off. It is not by any means agreeable to be a mere mind without a body. That was a very decorous garment, that made us seem very attractive to each other; or, perhaps, supremely the opposite. Over here that amusement is quite out of the question, and we know far too much about the interiors of each others’ ideas.” In no way could the spirit plane be called blissful. Instead it entailed “the dimming of the senses and the stultifying of the brain from lack of light and colour.”

Radclyffe Hall, pioneering lesbian novelist, who may have taken some inspiration for The Well of Loneliness from Stoker’s novel The Man.

The tombs of the Lebanon Circle, Highgate Cemetery, Hall’s final resting place. Highgate was Stoker’s model for Kingstead Cemetery in Dracula, the site of Lucy Westenra’s horrific destruction. (Photograph by the author)

Asked for some verifiable biographical details, he recalled his dreary days at Trinity College Dublin, before Oxford opened his eyes to the world. “I almost forget that time when I was chained within the walls of the university. I was a carrier pigeon who had flown by mistake into a nest of sparrows. These Dublin students could see such a short distance. I was a giant among pigmies.” Pressed to explain the appeal of George Sylvester Viereck’s survival hoax, he had a quick answer. “Men are ever interested, dear lady, in the remains of those who have had the audacity to be distinguished, and when, added to this, the corpse has the flavor of crime, the carrion birds are eager to light on it.” He found it “delightful to think that after the carcass has been conveyed to its modest hole a legend is woven round its decaying particles. You, I am sure, give me credit for the fact that I really accomplished the feat of dying when I was supposed to die. I did not fly from the world a second time in order to create fiction.”

With the assistance of Geraldine Cummins, Hester also claimed to have downloaded from Wilde a new play completely composed in the otherworld, a comedy of manners she first called The Extraordinary Play but later (and perhaps more realistically) referred to as Is It a Forgery? The script was never produced or published, and no copy has ever been found. Hester claimed to have sent it to the prominent actor Gerald du Maurier, who rejected it for unstated reasons.

Hester’s second book, Oscar Wilde from Purgatory, appeared in 1924 and generated interest throughout the world. It also generated imitators. In 1928, the New York publishing house Covici-Friede brought out The Ghost Epigrams of Oscar Wilde, channeled by a medium known only as “Lazar.” The slim volume featured some convincing approximations of Wilde’s ironic wit, including such examples as “Charity begins at home and generally dies from lack of out-of-door exercise” and “Woman begins by resisting man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.” But the book’s entertainment value is marred by a relentless streak of mean-spirited misogyny: “Woman spoils her first lover and practically ruins the rest,” “Only an idiot doubts the sincerity of a stupid woman,” and “Woman has never created anything as beautiful as she has destroyed” are just a few examples.

In contrast, Hester’s conversations with Wilde yielded many positive estimations of the fair sex. He admitted, however, that women of the flapper age were not to his taste. “The women of my time were beautiful, from the outward side at least. They had a mellifluous flow of language, and they added much to the brilliant pattern of society. Now woman is an excresence, she protrudes from social life as a wart does from the nose of an inebriate.” Nonetheless, and in contrast to his well-known passion for beautiful young men, he assured Hester, and her readers, that his “sensations were so varied with regard to your sex, dear lady, that you would find painted on my heart—that internal organ so often quoted by the vulgar—you would find every shade of desire there—and even more.” Women, in fact, were the wellspring of his creativity; just forget all those golden-haired Ganymedes. “Woman was to me a colour, a sound. She gave me all. She gave me first desire, desire gave birth to that mysterious essence which was within me, and from that deeply distilled and perfumed drug my thoughts were born; and from my thoughts words sprang. Each word I used became a child to me. . . . I nurtured them, and in their fullness brought them forth as symbols of the woman.”

To Hester, he made a bold and parasitic proposition. He wanted to “crawl into your mind like a sick worm and try to bore a hole above the earth that I may once more look at the sun.” Would she allow him to enter her mind, body, and brain and experience London once more? It was a strangely exciting idea. An erotic idea, though a curiously disembodied one. Like being possessed by an incubus, but without the sex. Like being penetrated by a man without being touched. They went to the theatre, where Oscar saw and heard, through Hester’s physical senses, a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest. Back in the Ouija room, he offered a detailed critique, and even gave notes to the actors. He critiqued recent literature as well, and was especially caustic about James Joyce’s Ulysses and the controversy it stirred. “It is a singular matter that a countryman of mine should have produced this great bulk of filth. . . . In ‘Ulysses’ I find a monster who cannot contain the monstrosities of his own brain. The creatures he gives birth to leap from him in shapeless masses of hideousness, as dragons might, which in their foulsome birth contaminate their parent. . . . It gives me the impression of having been written in a severe fit of nausea. Surely there is a nausea fever. The physicians may not have diagnosed it. But here we have the heated vomit.”

To put things politely, since it is somewhat less than likely that Hester actually conversed and interacted with the sentient ethereal residue of Oscar Wilde, much less went with him on a theatre date in the West End, the question immediately arises: Was she a conscious fraud? Even today, people are just as willing to believe “six impossible things before breakfast” as they were in the days of Lewis Carroll. And, while it’s easy to conclude that mediums were nothing more than cynical charlatans, offering a cruelly phony kind of amateur grief counseling for profit, the reality is more complicated. Many practitioners were convinced, if only through multiple veils of delusion, that their powers were real. They received constant reinforcement in their belief from prominent, educated people. Some were genuinely empathic and highly intuitive, and learned to read their clients’ almost subliminal expressions and body language to prompt seemingly uncanny responses (in carnival parlance, this skill is called “cold reading”). And some, like Hester, had already demonstrated extraordinary verbal gifts early on, which found an unexpectedly viable outlet in automatic writing. Her friend Bram Stoker might well have made an outstanding spirit medium himself. He wrote fiction and nonfiction with such breathtaking speed he might as well have been taking dictation from the void. Both, in their own ways, were word freaks. But Bram was a man, permitted to move freely in the world, attend Trinity College, and publish books as he wished.

After early success, a medium might begin to cheat in various ways, rationalizing that the gift was not always reliable, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t real. There were appearances to be kept up, and bills to be paid. William Butler Yeats, himself an ardent spiritualist, took a rather jaundiced view of Hester in his 1934 play Words upon the Window-Pane, perhaps after reading the transcript of her Wilde conversations, in which the dead man described Yeats as “a fantastical mind, but so full of inflated joy in himself that his little cruse of poetry was emptied early in his career.” In the play, Mrs. Henderson (a barely disguised Hester Dowden), a famous Irish medium based in London, returns to Dublin for a séance in which the personal questions of those attending (who have been admonished not to expect much) are simply ignored. Instead, Henderson/Hester becomes the mouthpiece of a great Irish author—not Wilde but Ireland’s other great wit, Jonathan Swift—for a highly detailed dialogue with the woman who yearns to marry him about his overwhelming fear of passing on hereditary madness. It is quite a performance. As the other guests file out, they leave tributes of money, despite their individual disappointment and over the medium’s protestations. Yet she makes furtive glances to see exactly the amount they have left. Yeats’s skeptical alter ego approaches her. “I have been deeply moved by what I have heard,” he says. “This is my contribution to prove I am satisfied, completely satisfied.” He places a note on the table. She is stunned: “A pound note—nobody ever gives me more than ten shillings, and yet the séance was a failure.” The young man explains himself further. “When I say I am satisfied I do not mean I am convinced it was the work of spirits. I prefer to think you created it all, that you are an accomplished actress and a scholar.” She claims never to have heard of Jonathan Swift. At the end Yeats adds a note of humorous ambiguity. After the last visitor leaves, she is once more suddenly possessed by Swift’s voice, then wakes, seemingly unaware of what has happened.

Whatever Yeats thought of her, Hester was by then a well-established social figure in Chelsea. She had achieved for herself more than she would have thought possible as an unhappy housewife in Dublin. The time had finally come for her to settle a special score with the man who discouraged her music, her writing, any kind of expression or real existence. The man who had betrayed her mother, and betrayed her.

As a Shakespearean scholar, Edward Dowden was particularly irritated and bedeviled by the “authorship question,” which, since the mid-nineteenth century, had encompassed a constellation of theories alleging that the Bard of Avon was not the true author of the plays attributed to him. Shakespeare was considered too rustic and uneducated to have written such fine language, even if he had produced the plays, one fact that seemed incontrovertible. Alternate candidates included Sir Francis Bacon; Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford; Christopher Marlowe; Sir Walter Raleigh; Thomas Kyd; and, in one particularly ludicrous concoction, Queen Elizabeth herself, evidently in her spare time. All the theories turned on complicated conspiracies and implausibilities, including hidden ciphers in the texts of the plays themselves that could reveal the truth to the world, if anyone would only listen. The doubters were driven and obsessive—as many of them are to the present day. They rankled Dowden because much of his reputation rested on his “personalist” interpretation of Shakespeare; that is, the idea that the plays were best interpreted as products of distinct stages of William Shakespeare’s own life.

Hester remembered well how much her father hated these people. Therefore, when the chance finally presented itself, she took sides with the enemy. And never looked back.

Her first client in the campaign against her father was a man named Alfred Dodd, who was visited in a dream by Shakespeare’s ghost, which led him to believe there was a vast Rosicrucian plot to hide the truth of authorship. For Dodd, unraveling the plot became a cause and a creed. He passionately believed that the real author was Francis Bacon, and Hester obliged him via a spirit guide named Johannes who provided Dodd with clues and keys to the Baconian conclusions he sought. For another seeker, Percy Allen, a proponent of the Edward de Vere theory, Johannes explained that “Bill Shakspere had a lot to do with the gist of [the plays], but did no finished work.” Johannes told Allen de Vere did the bulk of the writing, sometimes employing other writers, including Bacon from time to time. Hester made no apologies for such yawning discrepancies. Offering assistance to anyone who wanted to undermine her father’s authority was what really mattered.

In the last years of her life, Hester dropped her married name and was known again as Hester Dowden . . . the Dowden, more famous than her father. Edward Dowden, literary mentor of the man who wrote Dracula, had now been in his grave for thirty years. But at long last she had managed to have her revenge, eclipse his legacy, challenge and delegitimize his life’s work—and drive a pointed Ouija planchette through his moldering and hideous heart.

There were so many ways for Oscar Wilde to join the ranks of the walking dead that it was almost inevitable that he would. Like Wilde, vampires traditionally inhabited the borderlines of social and sexual propriety. Suicides were the classic candidates, and Wilde’s actively self-destructive final years certainly qualified him. Folklore also worried about people who had unfinished business with the living, especially their surviving lovers. Heresy was a surefire ticket to Transylvania, and Wilde was a master heretic in secular matters and manners. In certain Slavic traditions, alcoholics and homosexuals also made the cut, along with the marginalized and miscreant, and anyone generally despised. Outsiders among the living became excellent outsiders postmortem. It was only natural for Wilde’s memory to merge with that of the unnatural Count Dracula, and all the hungry revenants who had fed before him.

And nine years after his burial at Bagneux, Oscar Wilde actually did come out of his grave.

In 1909, after settling Wilde’s estate and paying his debts, Robbie Ross finally secured a fitting final burial place at the prestigious Père Lachaise cemetery, and the necessary disinterment of Wilde’s body was arranged in Bagneux. As Frank Harris described the scene, “To his horror, when the grave was opened, Ross found that the quicklime, instead of destroying the flesh, had preserved it. Oscar’s face was recognizable, only his hair and beard had grown long.”

The idea that quicklime would reliably reduce a corpse to bones had little basis but was widely believed. In fact, quicklime could have quite the opposite effect, drying and preserving tissue instead of destroying it. But Harris exaggerates when he talks about Wilde’s hair and beard. The belief that hair keeps growing after death is an old wives’ tale, biologically impossible, yet kept alive in fiction like Bram Stoker’s “The Secret of the Growing Gold,” and the legendary account of Elizabeth Siddall’s exhumation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The postmortem shrinking of skin, however, easily creates the appearance of fresh stubble. Teeth can appear lengthened as the gums recede. And for unfortunate cataleptic persons buried alive—a widespread fear in the nineteenth century—hair and nails did keep growing. The frightful appearance of these suffocated souls, discovered when their graves were disturbed, along with the signs of their final thrashing moments, seemed to prove the existence of the living dead and contributed to the amply documented waves of vampire panic that swept Europe in the eighteenth century.

Upon seeing the disturbing condition of the body, Ross immediately shielded the sight from Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland, whom he had brought to Paris for the ceremony. “At once Ross sent the son away,” Harris wrote, “and when the sextons were about to use their shovels [to lift the corpse], he ordered them to desist and, descending into the grave, moved the body with his own hands into the new coffin in loving reverence.”

Ross may have had deep regard for Wilde, but not for this particular coffin. He had personally ordered a sumptuous tribute casket, only to be rebuffed by cemetery officials who insisted that any container used for exhumation and reburial had to be crafted by Bagneux workers, a regulation “doubtless invented as a perquisite for someone,” according to Holland. To add insult, the box they cobbled for the purpose had a silver plate misspelling Wilde’s name as OSCARD. “This was the last straw and I thought Ross was going to explode,” Holland wrote. The undertaker used a chisel to make a crude correction.

Jacob Epstein, sculptor of the Wilde monument at Père Lachaise, in his studio with the finished work in 1910.

Ross had obtained funds from a wealthy benefactor to commission a young sculptor, Jacob Epstein, to create a fitting monument. The design was controversial from the outset. Epstein sculpted an angular, stylized angel in a style that echoed the art of Egypt and Assyria and at the same time anticipated the machine-tooled lines of Art Moderne. The angel was male, evidenced by a stone penis and pendulous testicles, which raised eyebrows and for a time prompted the addition of a fig leaf. Ultimately the sex organs were broken off by vandals and never recovered or replaced. From a Freudian perspective, the unconscious mind makes no distinction between acts of castration and decapitation. The defacing of a tombstone’s genitals to insult or exorcise the grave’s occupant was the symbolic equivalent of cutting off the head of a vampire, that time-honored remedy so vividly commemorated by Bram Stoker.

Wilde personally disliked his new home. He told Hester Dowden, via the Ouija board, that the Epstein monument didn’t contain “an atom of that power which came to me direct from my great ancestors” and that “the monstrous creature shaped by Mr. Epstein does not express the soul of Oscar Wilde. . . . My wings were spread, ready to carry me away into the heavens, not lying slack and lifeless.”

Even in death he misunderstood the real purpose of funerary sculpture. It was never meant to set him free. One of the oldest, most primitive purposes of placing a heavy stone on a grave was not only to mark the place of burial but to keep the restless dead underground. Weighed down by Jacob Epstein’s massive block of marble, Oscar Wilde never emerged from his grave again. But by the end of the century he knew he could never inhabit, an uncountable number of adoring visitors from all over the world would make a ritual pilgrimage to Père Lachaise, there to leave indelible stains of their voracious red mouths, male and female alike, on the body of an emasculated angel.

Oscar Wilde’s association with the undead persists to the present day, as evidenced by Gyles Brandreth’s mystery novel Oscar Wilde and the Vampire Murders (2011), depicting Wilde as an amateur detective in the Agatha Christie mold. (Touchstone Books)

* The adopted professional name—from the old term “cheiromancy,” meaning palmistry—of the Dublin-born occultist William John Warner, who also used the pseudonym Count Louis Hamon.

^† Balzac wrote a parody of Maturin’s novel, and suggested that if Melmoth was really serious about finding people willing to pawn their souls, he should have simply come to Paris.

^‡ The “Greek poet” is the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides, whose work both anticipated and influenced Heidegger’s phenomenology.

^§ De Profundis was first published by Robert Ross in 1905 in a shortened version with all references to Lord Alfred Douglas redacted. This material would have continued to be suppressed, under the threat of a libel action, until it was forced into evidence in another suit Douglas unwisely instigated in 1912, and thereby made public.

^¶ Oland also appeared in Universal’s Werewolf of London (1935) as Dr. Yogami, an Asian (and rather Wildean) lycanthrope who warns another shapeshifter that “each man must kill the thing he loves.”