Where do the characters, the stories—and the ideas—of the Vampire Chronicles come from? I’ve been asked that question for some forty years. Was the series—which now includes more than thirteen books—planned from the beginning? Do I outline the novels? Do I have an overall thematic plan? Did I foresee the direction my hero would take when I wrote the first book?
As I look at this vampire “alphabettery”—at this impressive and enormous work that Becket has created to describe and define a multitude of my interconnected characters, locations, and themes, I face these questions once again. I’m humbled and honored by this new guide to the Vampire Chronicles. It suggests vast complexity and organization, the maturity of characters over the passage of decades, and the development of a hero whose journey was inevitable from the start.
But did the Vampire Chronicles really unfold in an organized way?
My answers about process and progress have always reflected confusion more than anything else. But the challenge of the Alphabettery is a good challenge. Because something did organize this series. Something did build this alternative reality. Something did create this high fantasy—the vampire realm with its roots in ancient history—but it may not have been the conscious mind of the author. It may have been an irrepressible gift for world building that only revealed itself slowly and sometimes painfully to the author herself over many years.
Why do only some authors create long and intricate series? Is it a skill that a writer can acquire? Or is fantasy world building a spontaneous outpouring of the imagination that only certain writers discover in themselves—as they struggle to control it or direct it year after year?
All writing for me—truly all writing—begins with a character. It begins with my seeing the character, naming the character, and then putting the character in motion, allowing him (or her) to reflect on or tell a story. It is through the story that the crucial ideas in the writing reveal themselves and become part of its effect on the reader.
I didn’t know this when I started writing. I simply imagined characters and let them lead me into a plot as I followed along faithfully, testing every development for the feeling of authenticity. I suppose I thought all writers worked in this way. It didn’t occur to me to outline, or to even try to predict where a story might lead me.
I had a deep instinctive faith in this process. To outline would have been to undercut my faith and remove from the process the intensity of the writing experience and its potential for inevitable truth. I’m not saying I was right in believing this. But it was something so much a part of me that I never questioned it.
So, no, I never as a writer envisioned for a moment that I would be the author of more than thirty books involving vampiric characters and their many personal stories. In fact, I never contemplated writing a series of any kind.
I never dreamed of a book such as the Alphabettery. And when I look back on the first years of my published career, I can’t remember reading any high-fantasy series which had spawned guides or companions. Though I was a deep lover of science fiction and horror stories, treasuring the greats in those fields, and most especially the old British masters such as Algernon Blackwood, Sheridan Le Fanu, and M. R. James, I hadn’t tackled the Tolkien universe of Lord of the Rings yet. However, there was one short-story writer whose boldness in creating a unified cosmology did eventually inspire me to value my own vampire cosmology and not hesitate to develop it in a complex way. This writer was H. P. Lovecraft. I think he is much more widely known and read today. But I can’t say Lovecraft was my favorite writer, or that I read enough of him to understand his world. I liked some of his stories some of the time.
What was on my mind in the beginning was simply writing novels that mattered to people.
I wanted my novels to be popular as well as literary. I was frightened of being labeled either a popular writer or a literary writer, and I sought for something spectacular and original and above all “true.” I wanted my novels to mean something. And I wanted them to entertain.
I began the journey towards my first novel with a vampire named Louis in a room in San Francisco telling his personal story to a young reporter, who two books later acquired the name of Daniel. A vampire named Lestat was born early on in Louis’s story as Louis described how he’d been seduced into vampirism by a “maker” he regarded as evil and shallow and unworthy of the gift of immortality he’d given Louis. Louis’s deep resentment of Lestat colored all of Interview with the Vampire. Yet there were plenty of hints in the novel that Lestat himself might have a very different version of events to reveal, if he were ever allowed to speak. Indeed Lestat’s vitality and glamour came to elicit an enormous response from readers, for which I wasn’t at all prepared.
Shortly after Interview with the Vampire was published, one of my good friends had a fierce argument with me in which she told me Lestat was the hero of my novel—not the melancholy and ever-complaining Louis, but Lestat, Lestat who loved life and embraced life. Another friend, listening quietly all the while, said, “You drew Louis in ink. You painted Lestat in oils.”
Surprising as this was, I wasn’t disappointed. I was delighted that the novel had evoked passionate reactions. And I went right on writing as I had before—without a plan, creating a character and then fully expecting that character to reveal a story, a plot, and a moral overview—to me and to others.
I wrote two novels before I even considered a sequel to Interview with the Vampire. Neither involved a supernatural element. And neither involved a first-person element. And I was the last one to realize, I think, that all three of my published works involved a central theme: the struggle of outsiders—vampires, people of color before the Civil War in the South, and the great castrati opera singers of the eighteenth century—to survive in a world that would not let them in. Once again, it was a friend who pointed out that the vampires, the gens de couleur de libre, and the castrati all had something else in common, other than being outcasts. They had a group or world of their own.
When I decided to write a second vampire novel, I knew I wanted it to be Lestat’s book. But it was not easy at first for me to hear his voice. I had to court Lestat. I had to invite him in. It was a bit like holding a séance every time I sat down at the computer keyboard. And I read a bizarre mix of fiction to “loosen up” and discover an intimate confessional voice for him that felt exactly right.
At some undefined point, that voice started to talk, or I started to hear it, and the story began to roll. As before, I had no real plan. And the book became a totally fresh story of vampiric awakening and discovery—so vastly different, in fact—that I had to wrap the book around the events of Interview with the Vampire with the briefest remarks on the part of my hero to the effect that Louis had not always told the truth.
The Vampire Lestat was likely my worst plotted novel, the meandering confessions of my hero as he was inducted into vampirism, and fought for his freedom against those who would destroy or enslave him, embarking on a quest for meaning and for love that led him finally to becoming a rock superstar of the 1980s, a book meant not so much to counter the “lies” of Louis but ultimately to provide all the answers to Louis’s old questions—questions that Lestat had been unable to answer when he made Louis a vampire.
The finished novel was in fact a prequel, a story of Lestat’s existence before he ever encountered Louis—with only a short cliff-hanger plot development at the end bringing the reader up to the present moment. I had followed Lestat back some two thousand years in his struggle to discover the origin of the vampires, and I had done it through tale-telling, as Lestat sought the truth from other immortals, prompting them to tell him what they knew, but ending up with a trove of secrets he could not share with his later fledglings Louis and Claudia, who hated him for his silence, his refusal to answer their questions, and ultimately turned against him, as Interview with the Vampire revealed.
I had no idea where I would go from there, none whatsoever.
But slowly a wholly different approach to writing came to me.
As I sat down to write a third vampire novel, I faced the impact that Lestat, now a rock singer in 1985, and the author of his own autobiography, had made upon the vampire world.
I began to see a large third-person novel in my imagination, involving a number of characters coming together as the result of Lestat’s startling revelations—an autobiography, a series of rock videos—and I dimly envisioned a grand climax, though I was not entirely sure what it would be. There was no outline, no clear plan, no writing of a last chapter before any other. But I did see some marvelous patterns, almost like designs.
Ideas and characters exploded in my mind as I developed the ideas of the novel in terms of patterns. But once again, the characters had to give it substance and form; they had to write it. An ancient vampire emerged from obscurity or hiding to tell a tale of war and tragedy that revealed even more of the origins of the immortals, and a spirit world came into being along with ancient wrongs and ancient curses as elder blood drinkers came together to do battle against a menace awakened by Lestat.
The fact was, Lestat had opened up a limitless and glittering vampire world for me. His “autobiography” had been wholly unlike Louis’s tragic story. Whereas Louis had never found the answers to his painful moral and philosophical questions, Lestat in my second vampire novel had found quite remarkable answers, but only because he had found remarkable beings who gave him those answers. And it was the characters once more in the third vampire novel, The Queen of the Damned, who revealed their history—either in tale-telling or in their thoughts—to Lestat, the scribe who could read minds and who became the author of the finished saga, which essentially closed the calamitous events set into motion by Lestat’s brashness in the second vampire book.
As I immersed myself in The Queen of the Damned, I felt this vampiric world around me, saw it, knew it to be immense and solid, a realm that was delicious to move about in, a phantom land full of new and surprising personalities, and filled with marvelous opportunities to bring my ancient characters in contact with the dazzling innovations of the late twentieth century in ways that were as risky as they were bold.
So that was how The Queen of the Damned was written, with a series of characters experiencing their responses to Lestat’s revolutions. What I didn’t think about was the obvious: the Vampire Chronicles had truly been born with Lestat’s story—not Louis’s story—and Lestat was the hero of the Vampire Chronicles.
The fourth and fifth vampire books that followed were adventures of Lestat—perilous journeys during which he risked his physical and mental safety to discover more and greater truths about this world and about himself and the other members of his tribe. He was my hero, all right, shining far brighter than anyone else on the shadowy landscape, but a rebellious hero, an outsider and an outcast not only among human beings but also in his own vampiric tribe. And his exploits always left him with partial victories and deepening alienation. But there was a sense always that he could not be defeated, that somehow, no matter what happened to him, he would eventually rise and take on the entire world again when he chose. His personality grew larger and more cohesive for me. I felt I knew him as I knew no other character I’d ever inhabited. I walked through life looking through his eyes, invoking him in some places that seemed particularly perfect for him, deliberately envisioning him at times, and even arguing fiercely with others about what he would do or not do, what he would like, what he might hate. The vampire world remained as solid as he was to me, no matter how large it became. Marius, Pandora, Armand, David Talbot, Louis, Gabrielle, other pillars of this universe, were effortlessly and consistently real. I might not love them quite in the way I loved Lestat, but they were vital and vivid and at times irrepressible as I wrote more vampire books.
For decades I explored these other characters, coloring in vast regions of vampire history, treating Pandora, Armand, and Marius to a kind of interrogation as I uncovered their personal stories, and they confided to me what they had learned from the Dark Blood, how they had survived the agony and immense power of immortality. And all the while the geography of the vampire realm was being mapped, with myriad locations and dwellings being erected, furnished, and sustained and even more immortal characters coming to life.
But how could all this happen without a plan? How could so many characters discuss so many ideas—about human existence, about God and the Devil, about right and wrong, and the destiny of humanity—in these novels if the author gave little or no thought to anything but “listening” to her characters?
If the author had no plan, how could the Alphabettery, with its innumerable entries, reveal such a scaffolding for a series of books and such a hierarchy of beings, each with his or her role, great or small, in a history that seemed at times without end? In the more recent books, even the spirit world has been partially illuminated. And other immortals, also described in the Alphabettery, have joined the blood drinkers as ageless witnesses to the passage of time.
The trust I had in the 1970s—that if I created a character and followed that character, a story would open up to me—has never faltered. Even when I’d ventured into the multiple points of view of The Queen of the Damned, I’d had faith that the characters would lead me to the key dramatic moments of its plot, and to an immense catharsis at the end, and indeed that had happened.
Of course there are no rules where authors are concerned; no one method works for all authors; in fact, there are likely as many ways to be a writer as there are writers. Try to measure Hemingway by the same rules critics use to measure Emily Brontë. Try to explain the power of Tolstoy by a set of rules that also works for Jack Kerouac. The novel—being the great enduring expression of the romantic era in that it is the outpouring of the individual of sensibility—has to be allowed as many forms as there are novelists. Otherwise we have no literature that can include David Copperfield and Last Exit to Brooklyn and War and Peace. The novel is an invitation to innovation and experiment and to tell tales of such magnitude that no one even cares about their form. How else can we explain the seminal power of Jane Eyre and the remarkable appeal of Sherlock and Watson in The Sign of Four or the impact of Sir Walter Scott upon an entire generation, and perhaps on an entire century, and the haunting effect of the immortal Frankenstein? The proper Victorians said novels should contain nothing that could not be read aloud to ladies in a drawing room. Imagine trying to measure The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by that standard, or The Brothers Karamazov. People have been trying to make rules for the novel forever; but the very wildest of experiments with the form were conducted in the early decades of novel writing by Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne. Then the Russians came along and wrote great tragedies in the form of the novel. Somebody is always shattering all our conceptions about novels as James Joyce did or James M. Cain.
No one has to know what others have done with the novel to write one’s own novel, really. But if you feel a set of rules being imposed on you, either because someone is trying to tell you how you must write, or you yourself are the victim of too many inhibitions, it is always good to discover just how many different kinds of novels there are. Pick up Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Take a look at The Member of the Wedding. And then there is always Moby-Dick. And never discount the popular novels, which are often crackling with genius, The Maltese Falcon being of course an outstanding example, but then there is The Godfather and, a remarkable book of immense scope, Henry Bellamann’s Kings Row. When I recently discovered Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Sojourner, I was stunned.
My way—being led by characters into their stories—became my way because my mind preferred this way. In fact, my mind didn’t seem capable of approaching fiction in any other way. And that this instinctive method—of following a character into his own world, his own story—would open up a complex vampiric realm is simply a fact.
I have no capacity to understand why this is my approach to the exclusion of all others. It certainly does not involve a choice. But I think I might be able to shed some light on why it became successful for me—and why the vampiric realm became so immense, embracing time and space, as it has.
But to do this I have to go back to my earliest childhood memory.
I’m talking now about being perhaps five years old and growing up in New Orleans on a beautiful tree-shaded street corner on the edge of the fabled neighborhood called the Garden District, with hours and hours of time on my hands to think and dream. I’ve described New Orleans and the Garden District in vibrant detail in several of my novels, and I’ve sought to evoke the sheer breathtaking loveliness of the place as it revealed itself to me from that early time. Giant black-barked evergreen oaks, purple flagstone sidewalks, black cast-iron-lace balconies and fences, gardens bursting with fragrant jasmine and roses and gardenias, great old Greek Revival houses with Corinthian columns along the front porches and leaded-glass doors sparkling in the evening with the light from within, haunted houses, old churches filled with painted saints and stained glass—all of this and more was my New Orleans.
But I want to put all that aside for a moment.
It was 1941 when I was born, and for the first five years of my life, my world always included my older sister, Alice. Only two years and two days separated our October birthdays. There are no memories of the earliest years without Alice—without her amazing vocabulary, her wild far-flung romantic ideas, her fantasies and confabulations, her inexhaustible energy.
I could write an essay on the way in which this older sister (now dead) fostered my curiosity and my imagination. That she was a genius I have no doubt now, and even in those very early years, the word attached to her. She could read immense books before she was nine years old, and I have a vivid memory of her reading Shakespeare for pleasure when she was sixteen and laughing out loud at something amusing in Hamlet.
But what I most vividly remember about Alice is that little separated her imagination from the concrete world in which we found ourselves.
I remember digging a hole in the backyard with her in order to create a tunnel through the earth that would take us to China. There was no doubt whatsoever that the project would succeed. But work stopped on the tunnel when Alice discovered what were almost certainly dinosaur teeth in the moist earth, which had to be studied and examined. A little later she informed me that our house stood over a pirate graveyard, and it was the remains of these pirates that now sidetracked our work on the tunnel. On another occasion, after a heavy rain, I remember Alice intently recording the “Morse code” she was receiving through the sounds of water dripping in the drainpipes.
Alice at the age of five and six was also very much involved in World War II, climbing to the top of a yew tree in our yard every day to keep a lookout for enemy soldiers and to practice signals with whoops and calls that she would give when she spotted them. She also practiced shooting them with invisible guns. I suppose it was through this that I learned a war was going on, and who was fighting it. I knew my father, whom I’d never met, was away somewhere due to this war, but I didn’t know much else about it.
Alice’s achievements frustrated me. I couldn’t get up to the first branch of that tree she climbed and never did succeed in climbing it or any other tree. I was down on the ground looking up at Alice from the time I was born.
And before I continue here, allow me to say Alice went on to be a mentor all through my childhood. When I think of the topics she introduced to our family, the science fiction writers she brought home, the books on ballet, and the books on science, I have to ask myself, What would my life have been without her? Alice turned to novel writing late in life and published six novels before she died in 2007. I hear from her readers often. Her own life would make a very interesting story. But I doubt I could ever do it justice, and I don’t know that anyone ever will.
As I was saying, my world had included my big sister, Alice, ever since I’d been born.
Until, that is, when I was five years old and Alice was taken off to school, at the age of seven, leaving me alone to play outside for long hours in the sunshine by myself, bitterly lonely and missing her terribly.
Sometime in that year when seven-year-old Alice was gone for hours every day, my personal dreamworld was born, the detailed and complex paracosm in which I started to live the major portion of every day with my own secretly imagined characters. I know for certain that the dreamworld was in full swing by the time I was eight, and had been with me “forever.” And several of the characters who peopled that dreamworld then in 1949 are still with me today in a vivid cast of thousands.
From time to time over the years, I’ve tried to write down the names and stories of my dreamworld people. I’ve felt a need to record the immensity and complexity of the dreamworld with the thought that somehow a history of this realm might be of value to someone.
But such attempts soon become utterly exhausting. With every passing year—excepting a period of about fourteen years between 1991 and 2005—the dreamworld has grown in size, and more characters related to the original characters have come into being. The family trees are huge and endlessly complicated. And the day-to-day goings-on are as important to me now—as vivid and intense—as they were in those early years. The dreamworld’s geography and inhabitants—its landscape, its cities, towns, buildings, and people—have followed a coherent evolution since those early days, resulting in the overwhelming realm that it is today. It involves a country with a government, a constitutional monarchy, and innumerable people of all classes. The neighborhood with which it began, the families with which it began, are still the focus.
For a very long time—at least since 1965—I have enjoyed another wholly separate dreamworld, set in ancient Rome, but it is ancient Rome in another dimension, involving my emperor, my senators, my Greece, and my Egypt and my Asia Minor, my slaves, my poets, and my armies and my generals. Now and then I abandon the ancient dreamworld. But I have never since 2005 abandoned the primal dreamworld, the most important one, the one born to me when I was a little girl, the one that existed from the 1940s up through the early 1990s without interruption, and that is with me now every day.
I myself am not in this dreamworld. There is no place in it for someone like me. I’ve had fantasies of actually discovering it, or being somehow transported to it, but I play no role in it whatsoever. I watch and listen and inhabit its various characters individually, just as I do characters in my books.
The main protagonists are men and women of means, born in and living in this imaginary country with its own recent history of feudal serfdom and class conflict between an entirely invented “German” aristocracy (and upper and middle class) and a rising class of invented “Irish” people. There is no coherent origin story except that, early on, titled and moneyed Germans and Russians migrated to this invented country, and they brought Irish immigrants with them as bond servants. The German and the Irish intermix today, dramatically.
My heroes and heroines are involved not just in being writers, motion-picture actors, painters, and inventors, but they are also scientists who make amazing breakthroughs in curing disease and great philanthropic bankers who engage in immense projects for the good of the citizens, building universities, planned neighborhoods, and even new cathedrals of staggering size. (I can spend days envisioning the newest national cathedral and its many side chapels.) A boy named Richard, who was the central and most important character for me when I was a little girl, is now approaching seventy (seven years younger than me, though up till recently he was my age), but he is an active filmmaker and television producer. His father, Lawrence, who has also been with me since 1949, is still living, and he is the great philanthropic genius behind the immense projects I described. This world also includes an entire cast of fabulous gangsters, “Irish” thugs who managed heroically to rise from oppression and bring order and justice to the abandoned “German” neighborhoods in which they lived after fleeing the rural areas where they’d long been held as serfs, and these thugs are now fully integrated into the social world of my main characters. There are many police families and firefighter families on the rise in the dreamworld. There are many virtuoso musicians and opera singers.
This imaginary country in which they live has finally been located by me on the planet somewhere on the northern Pacific coast, between British Columbia and the land above it. It has always been a cold country of short summers, in which the men wore velvet clothes and lots of fancy lace, and the houses were Tudor-Gothic affairs with a great deal of wood paneling, marble fireplaces, and leaded-glass windows. I’ve been filling in the various neighborhoods of the main city, Rosenwood, for decades.
The country now involves not only this capital city, but a number of fully developed towns. My focus shifts from one group of characters to another often, and indeed it has become so frustrating to me to remember the names of all the new characters that I now write down every week or so who has just been “born” into the dreamworld, who has had what child, who has married whom, and so on. This helps a lot. When I can’t think of a character’s name, I go crazy. And of course there is no one to ask: because nobody else knows the names of these characters or what is happening to them. Only a very few people have ever known this dreamworld exists.
I don’t recall ever confiding the existence of this dreamworld to my close friends over the years. I did finally tell my husband, Stan, about the dreamworld, but never really disclosed many details about it. In fact, most of my life, I’ve guarded the secret of the dreamworld as something others must never find out.
Before I draw the obvious comparison between this dreamworld and the world of the Vampire Chronicles, I want to make several specific points about the dreamworld.
The first is that, though I don’t believe in reincarnation and never have, there is one place and one era in the real world which felt extraordinarily like this dreamworld when I encountered it. This is the world of czarist Russia in the 1800s. I first came upon this world reading the history of the Romanovs, with whom I became obsessed for no apparent reason. But while reading War and Peace, which I do over and over and over again, I really became aware of disconcertingly powerful and distracting feelings that this place was somehow too like my dreamworld.
To repeat, I don’t believe in reincarnation. But I have to confess that I can’t shake the feeling that my dreamworld cannot coincidentally be like the world of Tolstoy’s War and Peace without some supernatural link. And please do note that this has nothing to do with the style or depth of Tolstoy’s incomparable novels. I’m simply talking about the social and physical background here.
My fictive velvet- and lace-wearing men and women in their huge houses, with their roaring fires, glittering glasses of wine, and endless discussions of feeling and philosophy—and what matters in life—seem powerfully linked to the Russians of Tolstoy’s great saga.
Now, as a child of course I knew nothing of Russia or Russian literature. I don’t recall ever seeing a movie set in czarist Russia until well into adulthood. And I certainly never read any Russian literature until my thirties. But the “feeling” is there, the eerie, haunted sense that somehow my dreamworld and the nineteenth-century Petersburg-Moscow world are separated only by a thin membrane. Even the fact that my dreamworld has always been a place of bitter cold winters strikes me as a remarkable coincidence. The dreamworld after all was developed for over ten years while I was growing up in subtropical New Orleans, famous for its purgatorial heat and short mild winters.
Though I cannot recall any early Russian historical influence on my dreamworld, my interests do invade and shape the dreamworld. When I took up collecting antique dolls, for instance, one or more characters in the dreamworld were doing the same thing. When I visited major museums in Europe, some of my dreamworld characters were likely traveling as well. And recently—due to my collecting antique sterling flatware and china tableware, a major old-guard character in my dreamworld has created a company to manufacture new sterling-silver table patterns and new bone china. This character, born decades ago, who is the mentor and backbone of a great jewelry store in my dreamworld—a vast place inspired by Adler’s in New Orleans and Gump’s in San Francisco—has come in contact in his old age with young people uniquely gifted to create entirely new ornate sterling-silver patterns. And I’ve spent hours creating those silver patterns myself, incorporating motifs and elements into them that I don’t believe have ever been used in sterling silver before. I have done the decorating, gilding, and enameling of the china plates as well, and imagined the newspaper advertisements heralding the New Romantic Renaissance offered to the public by this venerable character. When he first appeared in the dreamworld, I don’t know, but I know he was active in the 1960s. He is ninety-six now, as is my mother-in-law. He is vigorous and imaginative, and the new lines of sterling and china have given him new vitality.
So yes, there is this bleed-through of my personal obsessions into the dreamworld, and films I’ve seen and loved often inspire films to be made in my dreamworld, about the dreamworld’s history and heroes, films written, directed, and starred in by dreamworld characters, films that I write and produce for hours.
In fact the sheer variety of the dreamworld characters is directly reflective of my enormous interests in many fields, and I’ve spent hours with the firefighters and cops in the dreamworld just as I have with priests and cardinals. Indeed an archbishop cardinal is one of the main characters who has been active for at least thirty years. This character from time to time has visions and receives the five bleeding wounds of Christ, a physical response to deep contemplation, known as the Stigmata.
But aside from a free flow of obsessions and interests, I know nothing of the meaning—the symbolic or psychological meaning—of the many biographies, plot developments, arguments, fights, murders, tragedies, love affairs, marriages, that make up the eternal flow of the dreamworld.
However, I’ve long suspected that if the day-to-day conflicts, adventures, disasters, heartbreaks of the dreamworld were recorded in detail (an impossible task; I would have to write one hundred pages a day of the dreamworld and nothing else), they would no doubt provide a mirror of crucial events in my own life. But as it is, I never analyze the dreamworld in that way, any more than I would or could analyze the Vampire Chronicles while writing them. I leave my detached faculties of analysis at the door when I slip into the dreamworld; and it is not a place where anyone can find me.
Through much of my childhood, this vivid universe was a great escape from crushing boredom—the tedium of long afternoons in overcrowded classrooms, the waits in doctors’ or dentists’ offices, the tiresome running of errands, the long bus and streetcar rides to myriad destinations.
But I remember thinking the dreamworld was a sin when I was a teenager, that it came between me and God, and I discussed the endless pull and pressure of the dreamworld with a priest who pointed out that the conflicts I described amongst my characters reflected “sadism.” This cast a dark shadow over the dreamworld. I wasn’t all that impressed by the idea really, but I remember the discussion with the priest as an indicator of how much the dreamworld had become a problem for me, a distraction, a threat to concentration or my ability to focus on school or prayer or the world around me. In the Catholic world in which I grew up, nothing was really neutral. The dreamworld seemed a terrible thing at times, a curse, a dark handicap, a harmful indulgence to be ashamed of, and something that had to be destructive in general. I remember trying to fight the dreamworld. I kept a little diary of my efforts. I found it years later. It had only a few entries, which ran something like: “Didn’t think too much about them today.” Or “Them not too bad today.” During the brief time that I wanted to be a nun and a saint, the dreamworld seemed a formidable obstacle.
The bottom line is this: the dreamworld made me feel like a crazy person. When I did discover that two of my sisters had active dreamworlds, I felt a little better about the whole thing, but even then, I felt like a madwoman. The dreamworld was too vast, too detailed, too intricate and seductive to be anything but a symptom of insanity. And I find myself wondering what will happen to all of these many people I love when I die.
In college, I remember fighting the dreamworld to stay focused on lectures and on books I couldn’t read, though no attempt to starve the dreamworld ever really worked. Sometimes I had no control over the dreamworld whatsoever. The dreamworld took over as I trudged down long corridors and up and down staircases, and through winter snow on the long walks between classroom buildings and back to the dormitory. I wasn’t there. I was in the dreamworld. When I worked long hours in a little coffee shop near the campus of Texas Woman’s University in 1960, alone in the tiny dark kitchen waiting for students to come in and order a cup of coffee or a small meal, I was in the dreamworld.
When I look back on it now, it is clear to me that the dreamworld could only be overcome by something inherently more interesting than the dreamworld.
The fact was, most movies I saw could not compete, so I would often lapse into the dreamworld while watching them. And if conversation lagged, I fell into the dreamworld. And I lay in bed for hours sometimes, finishing important developments in the dreamworld. Novels I read often could not compete. No written material could compete. Yet fragments of films and novels sparked entirely new activities in the dreamworld.
Soon, my college years became devoted to seeking out professors who were brilliant and passionate lecturers, because only in their classes could I hope to resist the dreamworld. I couldn’t read for long periods at all, and so most of the knowledge which inspired me in those years came from stimulating and surprising and impressive lectures.
But there was one thing which most certainly was more interesting than the dreamworld: and that was writing.
Writing was inherently more interesting, exciting, and rewarding than the dreamworld. When I sat down at a typewriter with a blank page in front of me, I was powerfully excited to explore seriously a fictive realm that might result in a finished and valuable piece of writing. And even before I finished my undergraduate years, I was attempting “serious” fiction.
A strange novella poured out of me around 1964, called “Nicolas and Jean,” about a love affair between a male photographer and an enchanting and beautiful boy hustler.
The photographer, Nicolas, has been given the keys to a vast Gothic castle–like structure on the Pacific coast by a rich friend; and when Nicolas goes there one dark and cold night, he finds the beautiful boy Jean—pronounced like Gene—a child prostitute with violet eyes and black hair, living amid rags and debris, having been cast off by the rich man.
Nicolas takes Jean back to San Francisco, caring for him, buying him clothes, seeing to it that he eats, sleeping with him, and falling deeper and deeper in love with him. For Jean, Nicolas even rigs up in his high-ceilinged photo studio a great red velvet swing, with long red-velvet-covered ropes and a padded red velvet seat, in which the boy can be pushed like a child on a playground.
The boy loves the swing, loves being pushed, and laughs with delight, his seeming innocence astounding Nicolas.
The swing, of course, I’d seen in the famous Ray Milland–Joan Collins film about the famous architect Stanford White and his romance with the Gibson girl. The movie was entitled The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, and indeed Stanford White had such a swing hanging from the ceiling of a great glass conservatory (at least in the movie), and Evelyn Nesbit loved the swing as if she were a child.
That lavish, vividly red velvet swing was exactly the kind of image that went right to my heart when I was a kid, causing me a kind of anguish and hinting to me of some vast romantic and intense domain that I was desperate to find and enter, some intoxicating place that seemed impossibly far from my dreary struggling daily life—yet real and peopled with beings like Stanford White, Evelyn Nesbit, and even Harry Thaw, who after marrying Evelyn Nesbit became so jealous of her past lover that he shot and killed Stanford White in the roof-garden theater atop Madison Square Garden.
As so often happened with me, images and ambience meant infinitely more than anything else. I could find no words to analyze how I felt about this or how the magnificent red velvet swing could be so very important.
The film ended with Evelyn Nesbit debased and lost, playing to crowds of lecherous men in raucous theaters and swinging in a great red velvet swing—hung from the rafters of the theater—that carried her out from the stage and over a crowd of coarse and vulgar drunken spectators.
I was a sixteen-year-old when I saw that film at the old neighborhood “picture show” in New Orleans. I was with my father. And I remember still the pain, the anguish, the frustration that I could not confide to anyone about what the swing meant to me. I was almost ashamed of how much it meant.
Digression: Two other films I saw in my teenage years filled me with the same anguish and longing and feelings of utter helplessness to escape the world in which I lived. They were Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes and his Tales of Hoffmann. Once more, I beheld an exalted world that filled me with anguished longing and a near-desperate helplessness and fear.
If someone had asked me what I so loved about the exalted world of the two Powell films, I would have said immediately, “The beauty, the sheer beauty of it.” That had been true for the world of The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. But it was also a world in which people spoke from their hearts about vital questions with immense intensity: they talked about the making of art, the importance of art, the increasing of beauty through dancing and music. They talked about love. Perhaps it was only love that mattered to the tragic Evelyn Nesbit. But she was an outsider in the exalted world of Stanford White and Harry Thaw, seeking a secure place. And all three films reflected a tragedy, a dreadful loss! They were great drama, and I believed that I was living in my heart a great drama, wrestling with questions about what I wanted in this world, and I wanted to connect with others who felt these same things.
Remember, this was a long time before our archival culture in which you can stream just about any film on earth, study it, move back and forth in it, and pin down the elements that fascinate you as you gain a deeper understanding of them. Films like The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing or The Red Shoes came and went from neighborhood or little art-house theaters. You watched for them in the papers and ran to see them when you could. They vanished for years on end.
And so it was with another film I saw only once in those years, a film about Frédéric Chopin and his lover, the female novelist who dressed as a man, George Sand, A Song to Remember.
My desperate efforts as a teenager to learn music, to be a violinist, to find some entrance through music into that exalted world, came to naught. I had no talent, no gift, no ability at all. But the desire had been born in those films, and it hurt me to hear magnificent music, though I listened to it all the time.
I don’t recall ever incorporating that red velvet swing into my dreamworld. I’m not sure I knew how to do it and make it work for myself.
But the “red velvet swing” did surface in that first complete novella, “Nicolas and Jean.”
The photographer, Nicolas, is completely faithful to his boy-lover Jean, but they have a falling-out, and Jean disappears.
One day a small-boned, delicate young female model appears at Nicolas’s studio, painted, coiffed, and fashionably dressed, eager to be photographed. Nicolas allows the lovely young creature to climb into the red velvet swing. He pushes her in the swing. And he grows more and more erotically aroused as he pushes her, watching the swing fly out and back again.
At the crucial moment when Nicolas is about to kiss the young girl, on the very brink of surrendering to her charms, she speaks to him in the familiar voice of his lover, Jean. She is Jean dressed as a woman, come to put his lover to the test—and alienated forever when his lover fails it.
The end is bitter. Nicolas and Jean cannot be reconciled. Then Nicolas sends Jean away to a fine boarding school. Time passes. Nicolas cannot forgive Jean for deceiving and seducing him in female attire, and Jean can’t forgive Nicolas for giving in to his female alter ego. At the very end of the story, snow came with winter to the boarding school, and Jean’s last letter to Nicolas is filled with his loneliness as he plays the part of a “normal boy” there, staying behind alone as all the others go home for the holidays.
Now why did the blazing image of that red velvet swing never make its way to the dreamworld, yet turn up in an intense piece of fiction, the meaning of which I did not even want to explore? “Nicolas and Jean” was told from the first-person point of view of Nicolas, the man. Why was that so? Why did I become obsessed in writing it with the beauty of this young boy, with his violet eyes and black hair? I didn’t analyze. I kept writing.
Around 1969, in spite of the pressures of graduate school, I was writing a great deal, especially late at night after my daughter was asleep, and that is when I wrote the first draft of a short story called “Interview with the Vampire.” I banged out some thirty pages of that story in a matter of hours, and I don’t recall, even for a minute, being distracted by the dreamworld. Over the years, I returned to the story and revised it at least twice. It was different from my other short stories, which were attempts to write some sort of realistic fiction, which frankly didn’t work.
Three years passed before the novel Interview with the Vampire was born.
During that time my daughter had died, a brutal loss for me and my husband, Stan. Stan dealt with this in his poetry. I didn’t consciously deal with it at all in my writing, not as far as I knew.
Meanwhile I happened to see a unique miniseries on television. It was entitled Frankenstein: The True Story, written by Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy and directed by Jack Smight. I didn’t notice the credits at all at the time.
But the miniseries captivated me with the same intensity as The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing or The Red Shoes.
I’d never seen anything remotely like this on television. It was not of course faithful to Shelley’s novel, but the title didn’t matter. It was lush, sensuous, exquisitely filmed in historical period, with an incredible cast. I had never seen any “horror” story done in film like this, with the dignity of a classic. And once again, it was not the plot or the writing that swept me off my feet in a dream of pain and excitement; the images moved me, the vision of two handsome male figures in evening finery attending an opera, one the ill-fated doctor and the other the monster he’d created, played by Michael Sarrazin, a remarkably handsome actor with vivid blue eyes. When the “beautiful” monster starts to fall apart, the doctor makes another creation, a dazzling female, played by Jane Seymour, to which the cast-off male monster reacts with fatal rage.
I don’t know enough about the history of dramatic or film presentations of Shelley’s story to know whether this was the first to use that theme—that of a cast-off monster infuriated by a new monster—but I have seen it again recently, as if it is now part of the Frankenstein legend.
This 1973 production included vintage British actors James Mason, Ralph Richardson, and John Gielgud, and the American actress Agnes Moorehead, adding their dignified voices and presence to the unfolding story. In sum, it was a Masterpiece Theatre treatment of a horror story. And Masterpiece Theatre itself had only been with us for about two years.
When I again took out the old short story of “Interview with the Vampire” to rewrite it, it grew into a novel as visions of Frankenstein: The True Story swam in my head. I wanted a cast of magnificent immortals in a gilded milieu, wrestling with the questions of life and death, and the meaning of life, which were always tormenting me and obsessing me. As soon as my vampire had the name of Louis, a novel had taken on life. When Louis’s maker appeared with the name of Lestat, the novel really took off. All my love of New Orleans and my historical research into the city paid off. What better place could there be for my deeply romantic characters but antebellum New Orleans with its famous opera house, gilded gambling dens, legendary brothels, disgusting slave marts (one of which was in the lobby of its most famous hotel), Spanish colonial architecture, and magnificent Greek Revival homes—and its reputation for corruption and European elegance? Once again, a milieu, an atmosphere, a dazzlingly lovely filmic realm—these elements were driving me. Not rational plans, not an outline of where a story might go, but a great desire to capture the pure intensity of what I’d seen in Frankenstein: The True Story and to take it as far as I could without the slightest compromise, producing an original book that, as far as I knew, did not resemble any other treatment of the vampire in fiction or film. Of course, I never governed the creation with a goal of being unique. The governing desire was fidelity to what I was feeling as I “dreamed” the novel, and my courage to go to extremes with something that might be unclassifiable as I listened to Louis tell me of his personal tragedy and suffering, as I found myself ultimately incapable of putting an end to the wicked and enigmatic Lestat.
There was no red velvet swing in Interview with the Vampire. But it was my vision of a fictive realm expressing my love for that icon, and when The Vampire Lestat spilled out of me some eight years later, my hero—and Lestat did become a hero from the very first page—was soon wearing a gorgeous cloak of red velvet lined with the fur of wolves. As Lestat went on to Paris (in the late 1700s), out of my memory came perhaps another film seen in childhood, which I’d forgotten, Scaramouche. That, too, had been painfully exquisite and deeply romantic for the eleven- or twelve-year-old girl I’d been when I saw it, with a dashing Stewart Granger, a seductive Mel Ferrer, and a lustrous, porcelain Janet Leigh. I did not even make the connection between Lestat’s boulevard stage triumph and that old movie until a friend wrote a letter explaining how the book had made her think of Scaramouche. Of course. Absolutely. Yes.
An irrational longing fueled my writing. I sought to embrace what I could not fully understand. I sought to make it mine and sustain it and explore it and live in it as surely as I had ever lived in the dreamworld.
And without my realizing it, I was drawing on years of experience in daydreaming, years of experience in imaginative world building, years of experience in spinning off characters, and families, and places, and situations and tragedy and loss in the secret dreamworld of which almost no one else really knew.
So this is how the Vampire Chronicles came about. It was created as an alternative reality in much the same way as my secret paracosm had been created and always with trust in the characters to create the story, and to elevate in their speech the painful themes I could never escape: Why are we here? What is the meaning of all this? How can we conceive of immortality so easily while facing the horrible fact of our own inevitable death? Can art save us if religion can’t? Does art—in its most splendid and transcendent forms—prove that God exists? Are dancers and singers and actors and writers like Mary Shelley really saints of a new secular faith that can make heaven on earth in magnificent ballets, and operas, and films, and novels?
I never lost sight of those themes.
My characters would never allow it.
Those themes—themes that had preoccupied me all my young life—emerged in all my novels over the years whether I ever consciously thought about them or not. After all, the agony behind those fundamental questions had underwritten my infatuation with the red velvet swing, my heartache as I watched The Red Shoes. And so my narratives became a dance between exalted realms and inescapable pain; between bold heroes like Lestat and desperate suffering souls like Louis or the vampire Pandora.
That’s about it. That’s all I’ve got, as people say it today in the vernacular.
However…
There is a famous poem by William Butler Yeats, called “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” My husband, Stan, read it to me in the 1960s. I’ve read it many times since. In the poem, I believe Yeats speaks of the very type of writing I’ve been describing, as he recounts his infatuation with mythic figures and their tales—Oisin, “The Countess Cathleen,” Cuchulain, and so forth and so on, saying,
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love
And not those things that they were emblems of.
The poet rejects these “players and painted stage,” asserting that
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
He must get to the root of those images, he says, finally concluding:
Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
It is a magnificent and unforgettable poem.
I think about it often.
But there is no separating for me the “players and painted stage” from the “rag and bone shop of the heart.” I can only go to that “rag and bone shop of the heart” through enchantment, through complete creative surrender. That is the way I fall deeper and deeper into pain and darkness—listening to Lestat, following him as he smiles and winks and beckons. That is the way I construct a sustained response to the life I’ve lived that invites the reader to the very same surrender.
—Anne Rice
MARCH 2018