Who Was Dracula? (16 page)

One of Stoker's early notes for the novel divides it into four “books” of seven chapters each. Researchers have noticed that this corresponds to the format of a play, with four acts of seven scenes. The play construction may have been familiar to Stoker, but none of his later notes indicate that he was intending to write a play. By 1890, Stoker had written novels, and it's clear from the chapter designations that Stoker designed
Dracula
as his next novel.

Donaghey's recollection that Stoker wanted Irving “to have a play made from
Dracula
” is probably accurate. Stoker was unable to turn the novel into a play, and he realized that Irving had often found authors to carry out his idea and adapt works. Stoker had depended on convincing Irving of the story's merit, then working with Irving and other writers and designers to carry out the plan—to sculpt Dracula into a villain worthy of Henry Irving.

Stoker may have been insistent, but the idea probably came ten years too late, and his dramatized production, the copyright performance, proved only that the show could be a bore and the Count could be a dull, insignificant villain. If Stoker saw it all in his imagination, Henry Irving did not.

When Henry Irving wandered through the Lyceum, listened to the Count's scattered bits of monologue, mumbled “dreadful,” and ambled to his office, it was the final tragedy of his career. As in any great theatrical tragedy, “Pride goeth before the fall.”

THE POET, “PERENNIAL SWEET DEATH”

M
aster” is a word that appears throughout the novel. Dracula describes himself as a master of his people; he assumes, with old-world propriety, that Harker's employer in Exeter is his master; Van Helsing is introduced with particular honor as Seward's “friend and master.” But the word is most memorable from the lips of Seward's patient, Renfield. As Dracula approaches London, a mysterious energy seems to overtake Renfield, “that shifty look . . . when a madman has seized an idea.” Renfield tells his warders, “I don't want to talk to you; you don't count now; the Master is at hand.”

Later that night, when Renfield dashes from the asylum and runs to the next property, Carfax Abbey, he calls out to the man to whom he's pledged his life. Stoker gives him a speech that highlights his desperation—the master has been only a dream, only an ideal, an act of faith imagined “long and afar off.” Even Stoker's capitalization suggests Renfield's religious fervor:

I am here to do Your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped You long and afar off. Now that You are near, I await Your commands, and You will not pass me by, will You, dear Master, in Your distribution of good things?

While he was still a student at Trinity, young Abraham Stoker became obsessed with the poetry of Walt Whitman. Whitman was a cause célèbre for a young man at university. The American poet was unexpected, iconoclastic, and dangerously elemental. He required fans, but even more, he required defenders, as Whitman's subject matter could be coarsely erotic, earning sniggers from less sophisticated readers.

I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,

I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.

Press close bare-bosom'd night—press close magnetic nourishing night!

Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!

Still nodding night—mad naked summer night.

Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth!

Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!

Earth of departed sunset—earth of the mountains misty-topt!

Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!

Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!

Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!

Far-swooping elbow'd earth—rich apple-blossom'd earth!

Smile, for your lover comes.

Prodigal, you have given me love—therefore I to you give love!

O unspeakable passionate love.

In 1872, overwhelmed by Whitman's imagery and convinced that he had found a kindred soul, Stoker composed his long confessional letter to Whitman. This was the letter that he reconsidered, and then hid in his desk. Four years later, having left Trinity, he found himself in another debate about the merits of the poet. He returned to his rooms and wrote an introduction.

Dublin, February 14, 1876

I hope you will not consider this letter from an utter stranger a liberty. Indeed, I hardly feel a stranger to you, nor is this the first letter I have written to you. . . . Four years ago I wrote the enclosed draft of a letter which I intended to copy out and send you. . . . It speaks for itself and needs no comment. . . . You know what hostile criticism your work sometimes evokes here, and I wage a perpetual war with many friends on your behalf.

In the note, Stoker insisted that he was being open and honest with Whitman, as “I feel that with you one must be open.” The 1872 letter, which he enclosed, provided an amazing vision of Bram Stoker as a young man: his insecurities, his passions, and his talent for unabashed hero worship.

Dublin, February 18, 1872

I know that I would not long be ashamed to be natural before you. You are a true man, and I would like to be one myself, and so I would be towards you as a brother and as a pupil to his master. In this age, no man becomes worthy of the name without an effort.

Stoker's choice of the title “master” is significant, for it exhibits the same faithful pledge, to a far-away ideal and a dreamy aspiration, that he later wrote for the madman Renfield. “If I were before your face, I would like to shake hands with you, for I feel that I would like you,” Stoker wrote to Whitman. More important, he is convinced that Whitman would like him. As the letter continues, he attempts to naively seduce his master in any way necessary to win his approval—intellectually, artistically, and erotically. He seems confident that Whitman would appreciate all three.

I am twenty-four years old. Have been a champion at our athletic sports and have won about a dozen cups. I have also been President of the College Philosophical Society and an art and theatrical critic of a daily paper. I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked and used to be forty-one or forty-two inches round the chest. . . . I have a heavy jaw and a big mouth and thick lips—sensitive nostrils—a snub nose and straight hair. . . . I think you would like to know of the personal appearance of your correspondents.

Be assured of this, Walt Whitman—that a man of less than half your own age, reared a conservative in a conservative country, and who has always heard your name cried down by the great mass of people who mention it, here felt his heart leap towards you across the Atlantic and his soul swelling at the words, or rather the thoughts.

. . . You see, I have called you by your name. I have been more candid with you—have said more about myself to you than I have ever said to anyone before. . . . You will not laugh at me for writing this. . . . How sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman's eyes and a child's wishes to feel that he can speak so to a man who can be, if he wishes, father, and brother, and wife to his soul.

Whitman was pleased by the letters, if taken aback by Stoker's exuberance. “All of it from the inside, almost painfully so,” Whitman told his friend Horace Traubel years later when they reread the letters together. “He is youthfully self-conscious; sees things in their exaggerations!” When he responded to Stoker, the poet shared the wish to meet.

Your letters have been most welcome to me—welcome to me as a person and then as author. I don't know which most. You did well to write me so unconventional, so fresh, so manly, and so affectionately, too. I too hope (though it is not probable) that we shall one day personally meet each other.

Whitman scholar Dennis R. Perry has pointed out that “Whitman has been called one of the two greatest influences on Bram Stoker's life,” along with Henry Irving. The relationship with Irving has been memorialized in many books, including Stoker's own book in tribute to his boss. Whitman's influence—from Stoker's early years—has often been ignored. It seems to have left an indelible, suggestive mark on
Dracula
.

Walter Whitman Jr. was a first-generation resident of the United States of America, born in 1819 on Long Island, just thirty years after George Washington had been inaugurated as president in New York. The family moved to Brooklyn—Walt spent the rest of his life devoted to the wilds of Long Island and the urban bustle of Brooklyn and Manhattan. As a young man he learned the trade of a printer and worked as a journalist for local newspapers.

He became a fan of books, theater, and lectures, and also worked as a teacher in various towns on Long Island before returning to journalism. Through the 1840s he kept notebooks of poetry and quickly developed a novel, free-form style—abandoning the usual rhyme and meter and focusing on unexpected, common images combined in beautiful ways.

Leaves of Grass
, his great book of poetry, was first published in 1855. As a former printer, he oversaw the text, cover, and binding. The earliest edition was confined to 795 copies and consisted of just twelve poems. The author's name did not appear in the book, although his portrait appeared opposite the title page—Whitman was wearing workman's clothing, with a hat pushed back on his head and a hand on his hip. He didn't look like a poet. The poems didn't sound like normal poetry.

Emerson thought that Whitman's poetry was “a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Ghita and
The New York Herald
.” Later additions gradually swelled the number of poems; Whitman titled them, rearranged them, and relegated new poems to appendixes. The 1860 edition of the book included the “Calamus” poems, which celebrated homosexuality in warmly innocent terms, and the “Children of Adam” poems, which were heterosexual in content and more explicit in imagery.

—

Leaves of Grass
and its author were met with instant condemnation—many thought the poetry abominable and the suggestiveness immoral. The
Saturday Press
advised the author to commit suicide. The
Criterion
labeled it “a mass of stupid filth” and accused its author of “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians” (this critique was written in Latin to further disguise the indecency). Booksellers and publishers protested, and the city of Boston rejected a later edition, demanding the removal of specific poems, but Whitman was always steadfast, refusing to censor the book and gradually adjusting editions to add poems. The poet later believed that his only mistake had been not introducing the poems through lectures—directly to the public. “If I had gone directly to the people, read my poems, faced the crowds, got into immediate touch with Tom, Dick and Harry instead of waiting to be interpreted, I'd have had my audience at once.”

The Civil War changed him. He had been an opponent of slavery and was drawn to camps and army hospitals, nursing the injured troops, offering friendship and support to tens of thousands of soldiers—Union and Confederate prisoners as well. After the war he published
Drum-Taps
, a series of poems inspired by the war; his
Sequel to Drum-Taps
also included his famous elegies to Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” and “O Captain! My Captain!”

—

D. H. Lawrence wrote critically, “Walt's great poems are really huge fat tomb-plants, great rank graveyard growths.” Some of his work—particularly the poetry of immortality after his experiences in the Civil War—sound like the romantic poetry of the undead. This is particularly true of his famous obsessions with the tomb and the twinning of death and love. In Whitman's earthy, honest images we can imagine Dracula—his pungent breath, coarse hands, strong arms fit for physical labor. He is never far from the tomb—smudged with the dirt of his last resting place, smeared with the blood of his last meal. Dracula is not a scrubbed, perfumed aristocrat but a proud creature of the earth that might be found in Whitman's verses. From “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing”:

Absorb them well O my earth, she cried, I charge you lose not my sons, lose not an atom,

And you streams absorb them well, taking their dear blood,

And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly impalpable,

And all you essences of soil and growth, and you my rivers' depths,

And you mountain sides, and the woods where my dear children's blood trickling redden'd . . .

Exhale me them centuries hence, breathe me their breath, let not an atom be lost;

O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet!

Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence.

From Whitman's “Trickle Drops”:

Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!

O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,

Candid from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,

From wounds made to free you whence you were prison'd,

From my face, from my forehead and lips,

From my breast, from within where I was conceal'd, press forth red drops, confession drops,

Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops. . . .

Or from “Scented Herbage of My Breast”:

Tomb-leaves, body-leaves growing up above me above death . . .

Death is beautiful from you, (what indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?)

O I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers, I think it must be for death,

For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the atmosphere of lovers,

Death or life I am then indifferent, my soul declines to prefer,

(I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death most) . . .

If Stoker recalled Whitman's imagery when he was constructing
Dracula
's prose, Dennis R. Perry has found a wonderful example—a striking parallel that demonstrates Whitman's influence. “Song of Myself” is a poem that must have left a deep impression on young Bram Stoker. It was one of the author's most notorious examples of erotic (and homosexual) imagery. “Song of Myself” would have been precisely the poem that made the Trinity students giggle and made Stoker defend his master:

I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning;

How you settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turn'd over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.

In the vampire novel, the image has been perfectly inverted. It is no longer a sunny, impetuous moment of love, but a nightmarish moment of rape:

With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the [blood].

The comparison is even more convincing in the other direction. Perry writes, “Dracula is the only character [in the novel] who speaks with a sense of rhythm, parallelism, and balance that is characteristic of Whitman.” In fact, Stoker's clunky dialogue in dialect works against most of his characters, particularly Van Helsing. But somehow, Dracula's careful, clipped English is imbued with a lovely and unexpected poetry.