Who Was Dracula? (4 page)

Carmilla
is a magnificent vampire story. In many ways, it set the standard for the genre:
Carmilla
drips with Gothic atmosphere and fascinates with vampire lore and repressed sexuality. As with many of Le Fanu's novels, the narrative is carefully framed as part of the casebook of an occult scientist and then told, in first person, by the story's protagonist, Laura. She explains how she was befriended by a mysterious girl, Carmilla, the victim of a carriage accident, who came to live with Laura and her father. She comes to haunt Laura's dreams with fearsome, late-night visits. Laura discovers that Carmilla is a vampire, an ancient countess named Karnstein. By the end of the story, the spell is broken when a vampire expert arranges to exterminate Carmilla, according to tradition, with a stake through her heart and a bloody beheading.

As a story,
Carmilla
is purely Gothic: suggestive and haunting rather than bold and sensational. The sexuality is apparent but coolly restrained. Le Fanu's twist on older vampire tales was his unmistakable lesbian theme, as the female vampire bites only other females, then seduces them as a lover.

It seems an astonishing missed opportunity, but there's no evidence that Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu ever met. When Stoker worked as a theater reviewer for the
Dublin
Evening Mail
, Le Fanu was technically one of his employers—the newspaper's editor—but he was famously reclusive, avoiding most contact with strangers. After his wife's death in the 1860s, Le Fanu suffered guilt feelings regarding her mental breakdown, withdrew completely from his friends, and stopped writing. His Dublin neighbors named him the Invisible Prince, a man who waited until nighttime to stealthily enter or leave his dark mansion, avoiding any contact with society. He virtually became a haunted character from one of his own novels. After several years of grieving in solitude, he returned to writing and editing; he was editor of
Dublin University Magazine
.
Carmilla
was the author's last great hurrah. Le Fanu died the following year in Dublin at the age of fifty-eight.

Stoker followed Le Fanu's lead in a number of his later supernatural stories.
Carmilla
—the novella about a vampire created in Stoker's hometown, by Stoker's employer, in a house next to Stoker's friends, the Wildes—provided important
inspirations for
Dracula
.

—

As a theater reviewer, Stoker would also have been familiar with the vampires that found success on the stage.

The Vampyre
was the first piece of English-language vampire fiction. John Polidori's 1818 short novel was about Lord Ruthven, an aristocratic vampire who follows an acquaintance, Aubrey, across Europe, leaving in his wake a series of personal tragedies and mysterious deaths. At the end of the story, Lord Ruthven manages to wed Aubrey's sister and then quickly murders her by draining her blood and disappearing mysteriously into the night.

The book wasn't very good, but it had a famous genesis. Polidori, Lord Byron's friend, traveling companion, and physician, accompanied Byron to the Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, for a summer holiday in 1816. They were joined there by a group of friends, including Percy Shelley and his fiancée, Mary Godwin.

The story of that literary group is well known: The guests were all inspired to try their hands at writing ghost stories. Authors Byron and Shelley failed with their efforts. But Mary Godwin began work on a weird story that was later published as
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
, under her married name Mary Shelley. Polidori took some notes abandoned by Byron and turned them into
The Vampyre
. The story achieved its initial fame when the credits were jumbled and it was mistakenly attributed to Byron.

Polidori's novel may have been forgotten completely had it not been turned into a popular French melodrama by Charles Nodier in 1818. Then a translation of the play made it back across the Channel, opening in London in 1820. The English version introduced the famous “vampire trap,” a special piece of stage hardware allowing Ruthven to disappear in a flash when he was struck by lightning at the climax of the play. The vampire trap consisted of an opening in the stage floor, closed not with a large door, but by overlapping small rubber flaps. The actor playing Ruthven would dive headfirst through the stage, seemingly swallowed up by the earth as a blast of red flame indicated his hellish fate. The effect drew gasps from audiences and the “vampire trap” became a standard theatrical effect for a century.

The popularity of the melodrama led to a minor vampire craze through the mid-1800s, including
The Vampire Bride
, produced in New York at P. T. Barnum's American Museum, and another French play,
Le Vampire
,
by Alexandre Dumas
père
. Dion Boucicault's version, produced in 1851, was also called
The Vampire
. In it, Boucicault included a sensational scene in which the victims of the vampire, pictured in full-length portraits, seem to come to life. They step from the paintings and warn the heroine of her fate.

Boucicault was a famous Dublin playwright and actor who had a long string of successful melodramatic plays. In his script, the vampire was a Welshman named Alan Raby; when Boucicault played the role, the vampire spoke with a thick Irish brogue. Boucicault was a charismatic, quirky Irish sprite on the stage, and it's difficult to imagine him as a monster. But Queen Victoria was a fan of the actor, saw the play, and praised Boucicault's haunting portrayal. When she returned to see the play a week later she changed her opinion, realizing that it was all “rather trashy.”
The Vampire
was one of Boucicault's few flops.

Stoker met Boucicault at the Theatre Royal in Dublin, where the Irish playwright was a local celebrity. In the 1870s, Bram Stoker would have recognized a vampire as a creature primarily associated with the theater, since that's where the most popular vampires had managed to gorge themselves on box office receipts.

—

During his years at Trinity, Stoker had first encountered the poetry of Walt Whitman. More than likely, it was Edward Dowden, the noted Trinity professor and Stoker's mentor, who first recommended Whitman; Dowden was both a friend and a fan of the poet. Whitman's works were being avidly sought by the Trinity men for their controversial passages hinting about “robust love.” The daringly homosexual passages were found in the “Calamus” group of poems in
Leaves of Grass
: “To tell the secret of my nights and days / To celebrate the needs of comrades.” These verses earned praise as well as scorn from the students. In fact, most of Whitman's British readers had found only the 1868 William Michael Rossetti edition
The Poems of Walt Whitman
, which had omitted Whitman's poems that Rossetti deemed salacious.

Stoker, like Dowden, admired Whitman's bold, plain, manly phrases, imbued with honest sentiment. And both Stoker and Dowden were unafraid of the suggestive verses. Stoker later was given a copy of
Leaves of Grass
and was able to read the uncensored Whitman. Dowden defended the poet as having “never degenerated into anything lewd,” but he also seemed to acknowledge the controversy by insisting that “no writer of eminence [has] not done injury.”

Feeling a kindred spirit, Stoker impulsively wrote a long letter to the poet in 1872 but then thought better of his effort, locking the letter in a desk drawer. Perhaps the exercise of writing accomplished his immediate goal. Stoker had identified an artistic champion and then addressed Whitman as a confessor. Using his best Whitmanesque prose, he poured out his ideals (“How sweet a thing it is for a strong, healthy man [to address the] father, and brother, and wife to his soul”); his goals (“I would like to . . . talk to you as men who are not poets do not often talk”); and his shortcomings (“I am ugly but strong . . . naturally secretive to the world”). Stoker was well aware of the controversy generated by Whitman's poems (“I heard two men in College talking of you . . . reading aloud some passages at which they both laughed”) but enthusiastically babbled his appreciation.

If the letter seemed untoward or desperate, it was particularly odd that, after reconsidering and tossing it aside, Stoker actually mailed it four years later. The original letter, coming from a recent Trinity graduate, may have seemed sweetly naive and idealistic. Years later, could Stoker really summon the same worshipful dreams?

The occasion for finally mailing the letter was a club event in 1876 at which Whitman's poetry was discussed. Stoker neatly defended him and, flushed with the success of his arguments, returned to his apartment to write Whitman, sending the original letter as well as a cover letter with even more confessions: “It is as truly what I wanted to say as that light is light. The four years which have elapsed have made me love your work four-fold. . . .”

Whitman was tickled by young Abraham Stoker's impertinence and responded with praise for the letter, “so fresh, so manly.” Whitman also inspired Stoker's long fascination with America; his poetry was often associated with American democracy and represented an idealized, unadorned American culture.

It was Stoker's first experience with hero worship, and he succeeded in that Whitman definitely remembered the name of his young correspondent. Whitman's poetry—later his friendship—would provide important inspirations.

—

Fortunately, another of Stoker's heroes returned to town.

In 1876, Henry Irving starred in
Hamlet
. As an important role reinterpreted by every great actor of his generation, Hamlet was perfectly suited to Irving's psychological touches. Stoker was working in the civil service and still writing reviews. Now he was in a position not only to admire the performance but to offer, in a Dublin newspaper, the praise that Irving had deserved. Stoker's review, and a later article when he returned to see the show again, rhapsodized over Irving's modern characterization. The actor expressed an interest in meeting the critic (Stoker's reviews were not credited), so the theater manager arranged an introduction and a dinner.

“Thus it was on this particular night my host's heart was from the beginning something toward me, as mine had been toward him. He had learned that I could appreciate high effort. . . .” As a way of saying thank you to Stoker, Irving offered to recite “The Dream of Eugene Aram,” Thomas Hood's dramatic poem of a murder and the murderer's conscience. It was typically a schoolboy's exercise, but Irving knew that he could take this simple work and twist it around his histrionic talents.

So wills the fierce avenging Sprite,

Till blood for blood atones!

Aye, though he's buried in a cave,

And trodden down with stones,

And years have rotted off his flesh—

The world shall see his bones.

Oh, God! That horrid, horrid dream

Besets me now awake!

Again—again, with a dizzy brain,

The human life I take;

And my red right hand grows raging hot,

Like Cranmer's at the stake.

By the conclusion, Stoker's reaction to “The Dream of Eugene Aram”—“something like hysterics”—must have provided the compliment Henry Irving was soliciting. When he theatrically regained his own composure, Irving went to his room and returned with a signed photo. The inscription betrayed how thrilled he was by Stoker's reaction, an actor gushing over his audience's good taste: “My dear friend Stoker. God bless you! God bless you!! Henry Irving, Dublin, December 3, 1876.”

Thus began their relationship. Stoker craved Irving's attention, pleasing his artistic champion by crudely flattering. Irving would be needy, greedily gobbling the praise, and then, when feeling proud, carelessly ignoring his sycophant. Many years later, Stoker wrote of this meeting, concluding, “And the sight of his picture before me, with those loving words, the record of a time of deep emotion and full understanding of us both, each for the other, unmans me once again as I write.”

With “unman,” Stoker had found a neat Victorian euphemism, rather than writing that Irving's photo still summoned tears.

THE LEADING LADIES, “ONLY REAL FLOWERS”

A
great actor can rehearse spontaneity and act happenstance. “The Dream of Eugene Aram” had been Henry Irving's showstopper for a long time. He had used it in 1870 to secure his job with Colonel Bateman, years before Stoker saw Irving's recitation in Dublin, and his little fainting act was something Irving had gradually refined over the years. Every performance needs a finale.

As a young actor, Henry Irving's first love was an actress named Nellie Moore, to whom he'd pledged his life. A series of jealousies resulted in Nellie leaving Henry for another actor; before they were reconciled she died of scarlet fever—backstage gossip reported that her death was the result of an abortion.

Heartbroken, Irving married Florence O'Callaghan in 1869. Florence was not an actress but the daughter of a respected military man. She initially pursued the young star, but after their marriage she felt impatient with his work and neglected at home.

Irving had been appearing in
Two Roses
at the Vaudeville Theatre in London but offered “Eugene Aram” on his benefit night—when the proceeds for a particular performance were offered to an actor as payment. In the audience was Colonel Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman, an American actor and theater manager who had taken over the lease of London's Lyceum Theatre in order to promote the acting career of his daughter, Isabel. He was impressed by Henry Irving's work and realized that the tall, young actor would make a wonderful leading man to show off Isabel's skills.

At the time, Henry and Florence had one son, with Florence expecting their second child, so the Lyceum offer was welcome, stable employment. But Irving and Bateman had trouble finding an immediate success, and Irving stumbled in several roles. Finally the young actor urged the manager to purchase Leopold Lewis's translation of a French melodrama,
Le Juif Polonais
(
The
Polish Jew
). The English version had been named
The
Bells
, after the sound of the mysterious sleigh bells that play on the mind of the murderer.
The Bells
was a taut, fascinating mix of psychology and melodrama, as if Alfred Hitchcock had stumbled back in time and landed on a dusty Victorian stage. The suspense built as the audience watched a murderer's mind unravel, much like Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or indeed, Hood's “Dream of Eugene Aram.” Irving tinkered with the story, building up the psychological tension of the lead character Mathias, the role on which he'd set his sights.

Ironically,
The Bells
did not have a part for Isabel Bateman.

The show opened on November 25, 1871, with virtually no help from the colonel; the costumes were borrowed and the scenery was assembled from old, badly painted backdrops in storage. The play is set at the home of an Alsatian burgomaster, Mathias. His daughter is about to be married, and the neighbors arrive to prepare for the wedding and watch a wild snowstorm outside the window. They begin discussing the mysterious murder of a Polish Jew. Fifteen years earlier, the Jew had been murdered as he traveled through their village in his sleigh.

Mathias is troubled by the talk of the murder and seemingly haunted by the recurring sound of sleigh bells, a sound unnoticed by any of the other characters. The burgomaster has a vision of himself, from many years before—he held an ax as he crept up to the Jew in his sleigh, intent on killing him for his money.

Steeling his courage, Mathias arranges the wedding and congratulates himself for overcoming his guilt, but that night he is struck by a terrifying dream. He finds himself before a court, questioned by a mesmerist who forces him to reenact the murder. When Mathias awakes, his family is astonished to see him stagger into the room, wide-eyed, pulling at an imaginary noose. “Take the rope . . . from my . . . neck!” He struggles and dies.

The audience listened to
The Bells
quietly. The first scenes inspired little interest. The supernatural vision of the crime surprised, inspiring murmurs. By the time the curtain dropped on the third act—by the time they'd seen Mathias self-destruct from his gnawing secret and enact his own execution—they were dazed. Then gradually, slowly, they began to applaud, louder and louder, cheering, and calling Irving before the curtain. Pale and haggard, he took his bows with a wan smile that was ingeniously part Mathias and part Henry Irving, as if he were still awakening from the powerful narcotic of the role.

It was Irving's greatest night, the three acts that made his career. Many hours later, filled with congratulatory champagne and with the praise of his colleagues ringing in his ears—like Mathias's mysterious sleigh bells—Irving stepped into a brougham with his wife, Florence, to return home. That's when he noticed that Florence had watched the show without comment. When they were alone in the cab, she finally spoke. “Are you going on making a fool of yourself like this all your life?”

At that moment, the carriage was at Hyde Park Corner. Irving tapped on the door, signaling for the driver to stop. Without saying a word, he stepped from the cab, allowing his wife to continue alone. Irving strode into the darkness, never returned home, and never spoke to her again.

Indeed, Henry Irving did not have a part for Florence Irving.

—

It was a different Florence, a Dublin beauty, who attracted Bram Stoker.

Florence Balcombe had auburn hair, pale eyes, and a classical profile. Like Irving's Florence, she was the daughter of a military man, and a resident of Clontarf, Stoker's birthplace.

Her first serious suitor was Oscar Wilde. They met in 1876; Wilde was twenty, back in Dublin after two years at Oxford. He was probably describing Florence when he wrote to a friend, “She is just seventeen with the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money.” They shared a romance for almost two years. He made a pretty pencil sketch of Florence—he called her Florrie—and grandly presented it to her; for Christmas he gave her a gold cross engraved with both their names. The couple seriously discussed marriage.

Gradually their relationship cooled during Wilde's time at Oxford. His biographer Richard Ellmann suggested that Wilde may have been following the advice of his mother, Speranza, seeking to marry a wealthy heiress. Or he was following the advice of his doctor, if friends' reports are correct, and he was then being treated for syphilis. In 1878, Florence met Bram Stoker, and a quick courtship followed. By the middle of that year they'd announced their engagement.

There's a strong possibility that Bram and Florence first met through the Wilde family, whom Stoker knew at this time. If so, Oscar may have felt an understandable sense of betrayal. Uncomfortably, when Oscar and Florence discussed a final meeting to settle the end of their relationship, she suggested the home of Thornley Stoker, Bram's older brother. Neither Stoker nor Florence explained the details of their courtship, and more than likely Oscar Wilde romantically exaggerated his relationship with Florence, especially after it dissolved—his lost love seems to have inspired several poems. Wilde was genuinely dismayed to hear of her engagement and wrote to Florence suggesting that she return the gold cross, since she wouldn't be wearing it and he could be reminded of “the sweetest years of my youth.”

Bram Stoker had always been something of a ladies' man: tall and handsome with a warm laugh and quiet, courtly manners. He was adept at the waltz. His career in the civil service represented a respectable salary for a new bride. Stoker was also pursuing his writing career, boasting of his aspirations and sending short stories to periodicals. In 1878 he was just finishing his first book, which was not a work of literature but a sort of technical manual for his job,
The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland
.

Stoker saw Henry Irving at least once a year, when Irving's tours brought him to Dublin, and at the end of 1877 he reminded Stoker of his plans to manage his own theater; he hoped that Stoker would consider giving up the civil service to work for him.

—

Henry Labouchère was an English journalist, diplomat, liberal politician, and member of Parliament. He also edited an influential weekly journal,
Truth
, and managed the Queen's Theatre in London. One of the leading actors there, Henrietta Hodson, became his mistress and later his wife.

Labouchère was an unabashed admirer of Irving and courted him for his Queen's Theatre. Labby (as his friends called him) realized that the Batemans of the Lyceum Theatre were holding Irving back, and he would produce better work without them. Labby wrote to Irving in 1878, first praising and then condemning his latest play,
Louis XI
: “Your acting is perfect. I never saw a more complete realization of an historical personage as set forth in a play. . . . The play has not taken because it is one of the worst and most undramatic plays ever written and because your company is below criticism. . . . Depend on it, no actor in the world can carry a bad play and a bad company. The better you act, all the worse do the duffers appear—there is a perpetual jarring contrast all through.”

Irving resisted Labby's offer, but his fame presented an opportunity later that year. Irving had starred in a number of roles with Isabel Bateman, including Hamlet to her Ophelia, and Othello to her Desdemona. But, like Labouchère, he realized her limitations as a leading lady. After Colonel Bateman's death, Bateman's wife, Sidney, assumed management of the Lyceum. Irving petitioned for changes, including a new leading lady. Mrs. Bateman and her daughter, frustrated by Irving as well as their changed finances, finally gave up the lease on the theater in 1878 and moved their operations to Drury Lane.

Irving's instincts about Isabel Bateman were right. Although she had grown up in a theatrical family, she had very little taste for acting and later became a nun. Henry Irving secured the lease on the Lyceum Theatre and wired Bram Stoker to join him. Although Stoker suggested that he left Dublin to serve Irving's work at the Lyceum, his recent biographer, Paul Murray, has pointed out evidence of Stoker's ambition. Contemplating a writing career, Stoker had already been calculating a move to London.

Stoker and Irving began their furious preparations when they met in Dublin during Irving's next tour, and Stoker even moved up his marriage date so that he could bring his wife when he moved to London. He hadn't told Irving about his fiancée. When he arrived in Birmingham five days after the wedding, to meet Irving and return with his touring company to London, Stoker surprised his new boss by introducing a wife.

—

Florence Irving, Henry's wife, never discussed divorce. For many years, the couple communicated through chilly, restrained letters. She accepted money for her lifestyle, support for their sons, and tickets for Lyceum premieres, where she made polite appearances, seated in Irving's box, and then sneered about her husband's career to her friends. When he took those opening-night bows, he glanced up to see her, but they never met again. Henry Irving solved both of his problems—Isabel Bateman and Florence Irving—when he hired the respected Ellen Terry as his Lyceum leading lady.

Terry was an experienced theater professional, having been born into a theatrical family. She appeared with Charles Kean in Shakespeare when she was a child star in the 1850s. Like Irving, she had been unlucky in love, but it was not for a lack of trying. When she was seventeen she left the stage and married George Frederic Watts, a much older portrait artist who celebrated her beauty on canvas. They separated after only months. She then had a long affair with the architect and designer Edwin Godwin, which produced two children—Edith Craig, who became an actress, and Edward Gordon Craig, who became famous as a theatrical producer and designer.

These relationships inspired London gossip, but the public loved her too much to truly scorn her. After her affair with Godwin ended, she returned to the stage triumphantly as Portia in
The Merchant of Venice
and Olivia in
The Vicar of Wakefield
. She received a divorce from Watts and quickly married a character actor, Charles Kelly, but they soon separated.

Irving never went to see her Olivia; he didn't need to. He heard that she was wonderful. As a young actress, she had interpreted her parts with a tomboy swagger, but after her return to the stage she played her roles as a woman. Terry had a lovely voice, perfect profile, and luminous gray eyes. She was always magnificent in Shakespeare or with sentimental parts. She filled her scripts with scribbled notes, explaining reaction or emotion that she wanted to convey with individual lines, or the quicksilver changes of focus that she discerned in her characters.

Irving visited Ellen Terry at her home to discuss her engagement at the Lyceum, but that first discussion was so amiable, Terry so innocent, and Irving so politely indistinct that she didn't understand she was being offered a job until he followed up with a letter. By the time he introduced her to Bram Stoker, the deal had been arranged. Stoker always remembered that first meeting, in the winter of 1878, as Irving brought her through the dark passageway that led to the Lyceum offices. “Not even the darkness of that December day could shut out the radiant beauty,” Stoker wrote. “Her face was full of color and animation, either of which would have made her beautiful. In addition was the fine form, the easy rhythmic swing, the large, graceful, goddess-like way in which she moved. . . . She moved through the world of the theatre like embodied sunshine. Her personal triumphs were a source of joy to all; of envy to none.”

Stoker and Terry became like a big brother and sister (he was just a year older), laughing and teasing each other. She relied on him for advice about every element of the shows and her career, devotedly calling him “Mama.” The Lyceum company adored her and indulged her at every opportunity. In
Hamlet
, the first Lyceum production to feature her with Irving, she played Ophelia and created a dazzling image when she entered in the fourth act cradling an armful of white lilies. Stoker recalled: