SEX AND DEATH IN TRANSYLVANIA

Sex and death in Transylvania - 'Dracula' author Bram Stoker

by Rex Roberts

Dracula turns 100 in 1997 - Bram Stoker's Dracula, as Francis Ford Coppola titled his fetid version of the off-filmed horror classic. The immortal count was not always as popular as he is on the eve of his centennial. Victorian critics halfheartedly praised Stoker, mostly admiring the author's "imaginative faculty, and many ingenious and gruesome details." Friends such as Arthur Conan Doyle congratulated him in measured phrases: "I think it is the very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years." The public was surprisingly indifferent. "Readers found nothing sexually unsettling about Dracula," writes Barbara Belford in Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (Knopf, 396 pp). "No moralistic letters of outrage were published in the London Times, for who would admit to understanding its hidden messages?"

Belford postulates that Dracula is a kind of autobiography, "bristling with repression and apprehension of homosexuality, devouring women, and rejecting mothers." The famous scene in which the book's hero, Jonathan Harker, is seduced by three vampirettes - only to have the count interrupt the ersatz orgy with the cry, "This man belongs to me!" - dramatizes Victorian men's fear of sexually aggressive women as well as their abysmal urge for manly love. But Belford doesn't stop there.

"Stoker's realization that his mother was indeed a sexual being who belonged to his father finds an outlet in his fiction when he intermingles Oedipal conflicts with sibling rivalry, patricide and infanticide," she writes. She also suggests that Stoker's fascination with blood may flow from his mother's tales of a cholera epidemic (survivors fended off starvation by drinking blood from the family cow) or even a traumatic glimpse of afterbirth (he was one of seven children).

Thankfully, Belford dispenses with such musings when she begins her narrative proper and, all in all, Bram Stoker is a good read - no small accomplishment since her subject was unusually self-effacing for a gregarious Irishman. "Stoker dispersed memories as selfishly as an old crone ladling soup," writes Belford. She knows the era and its inimitable cast of characters, however, having written a biography of Violet Hunt, novelist and paramour to H.G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford.

Stoker was stingly with memories but saved all sorts of scraps and jottings related to his job as business manager of London's premier theater, the Lyceum, and devoted secretary to England's first knighted actor, Henry Irving. He was mesmerized by Irving from the first time he saw him on stage in 1872 in a now-forgotten comedy that nevertheless inspired Stoker to seek out a job as drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. Four years, later, Stoker reviewed Irving's performance as Hamlet, which in turn impressed the actor. They dined together and talked until dawn, the first of countless all-night conversations.

Stoker was born just outside Dublin in 1847, one year after the great potato famine that killed 1.5 million Irish and sent another 1.5 million abroad. The son of an ambitionless but conscientious bureaucrat, young Abraham was bedridden from an unrecorded malady until age 7. "All my early recollection is of being carried in people's arms and of being laid down somewhere or other on a bed or a sofa." he wrote, later excising the passage before publishing a memoir titled Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving Belford notes that fears of death and abandonment haunt Dracula, an observation that needs no psychoanalytic support.

Despite these lost years, Stoker grew into a strapping youth, gaining renown as an athlete and a debater during his years at Trinity College. He was invited to join The Phil and The Hist, two prestigious societies. "Tall and ruggedly handsome, with gingercolored hair and an enthusiasm to belong, he was soon known around the green as a `clubbable man,'" writes Belford. He also was inclined toward hero worship and became an ardent fan of Walt Whitman, who was enjoying a vogue across the Atlantic in the early 1870s. Stoker corresponded with and later met the aging poet while touring the states with the theater company. "Whitman's influence on Dracula was profound," according to Belford, who notes similarities between poet and vampire. "Each has long white hair, a heavy moustache, great height and strength, and a leonine bearing."

The more important model for Dracula was Irving, a darkly charismatic egoist who excelled at playing villains, including Mephistopheles. From the time he signed on in 1878 to manage the fledgling Lyceum through the heady days of triumph when invitations to theater dinners were the most coveted in London, Stoker was Irving's shadow and servant. "When Stoker made his Faustian pact with Irving to be acting manager ... he knew Irving was his master," argues Belford. "That Stoker found this companionship endlessly rewarding in itself was obvious, but that he was not rewarded in kind was the disappointment of his life."

Certainly Stocker basked in Irving's glory and enjoyed socializing with the likes of William Gladstone, Richard Francis Burton and Ellen Terry, the Lyceum's leading lady. But Irving expropriated and exploited his manager's talents. Stoker not only developed the Lyceum into a first-rate theater, he attended to the actor's every need - writing his speeches, ordering his lunches, fending off favor-seekers. Once Irving insisted Stoker hire an old woman looking for work, suggesting she look after the theater cats. "We have three women taking care of the cats," pleaded Stoker. "Well, let her look after the three women that are looking after the cats," replied Irving.

Needing an outlet for his own creativity, Stoker turned to novel writing. He was something of a hack - his books were retyped first drafts - and all of them have sunk into oblivion. Except, of course, Dracula, which took him six years to plot and write. He may have been motivated by unconscious or conscious feelings of revenge, taking satisfaction in beheading Irving on the printed page while Irving belittled him in life. And like many Victorians, Stoker was interested in the occult and was rumored to belong to a fashionable secret society that practiced magic, all of which informed his masterpiece.


Because Stoker himself was not nearly as eccentric as others drawn to seance society, Belford enlivens her story with cameo appearances by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, and other amusing ghosts from the past. Fellow Dubliners George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde loom large in the book - Wilde once having wooed the same woman Stoker married. Irving and Ellen Terry continue to steal Stoker's limelight even in his own biography.

Still, the author of Dracula rises transcendent in our imaginations. Like Lewis Carroll, whose place in history is assured by the phenomenal success of one unique work, Brain Stoker always will be of interest to the world. Unless, alas, we psychoanalyze the poor devil to death. Free to be titillated by the eroticism of Dracula we moderns have turned the vampire into the vamp. Exposing illicit pleasures to the light of day drives a stake through the heart of desire.

COPYRIGHT 1996 News World Communications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group