On Bram Stoker (1847-1912)
Dracula (1897) is a seminal cultural text - brilliantly written. There is little more to say
other than to advise that you read it and enjoy its dark pleasures - but what of the later Bram Stoker? The Lady of the Shroud (1909) is a truly dreadful book in so many ways - theatrical, sentimental,
nonsensical, militaristic, imperialist, patronising (to women and to the
peoples of the Balkans) and often leaden. Beyond being one for
Bram Stoker completists - and the early failed promise of creepy thrills - it is
nothing but a fraud designed to inveigle the reader of the 1900s into a
conservative political tract. So why bother reading it?
Two reasons make this
worth it (although only for the dedicated): the psychological
insight into the fantasy world of an aging Edwardian male; and its insight into the mentality behind Edwardian imperialism. Neither
make particularly pleasant reading although the former is harmless
enough, simply not engaging enough to justify publication
rather than as a private notebook. But the latter is quite startling
and disturbing and makes one realise how much of what is good and true
can differ over a hundred years - and how much may change again in
another century. On the other hand, try watching the 1956 science fiction film World Without End then you will realise that equally vicious imperialist and 'sexist' tropes were still around in a American popular culture nearly half a century later.
This is a conservative
Anglo-Irishman's opinion about the Balkan Question and presumably
indirectly the Irish Question. Apparently, less developed peasant countries
just needed a wealthy Anglo-Celt Briton as King, one who can invest in
industrialisation and air power and create a reliable ally to check the
Germans for the British Empire. These 'free' nations are to be
federated (depressingly like the current European Union) and buttressed
by the Church, an obsequious Germanic democracy and strong women who
serve their men. For students of British Imperial culture, there
is a lot of great material here on snobbery, white superiority, class,
nobility, the role of women and the industrialised arms race of the
period.
But the weirdest aspect of the plot is the determinedly
creepy (and not in the best sense) plot line that switches us from
failed Gothic tale to dull novel (or rather assertion) of politics. Imagine
someone creating a pastiche of Sheridan Le Fanu in order to segue into
one of the duller works of the late polemic and bombastic political HG
Wells and you are on the right track. To tell more of what the
Lady of the Shroud represents would be a spoiler but do not buy or read
this book expecting a sequel to the great Dracula - it is nothing of
the kind. When Stoker is minded to and is not dragged into
conventional theatrics, idiotic character development and political
tract, he can actually write. The moments when he does keeps one
going. But it is depressing to think that his imaginative
abilities had reached this low level by 1909. It is a book only for social, cultural
and literary historians and students of elderly male frustration.
As to The Midnight Tales, do not bother to read this book until you have read both of Bram
Stoker's horror masterpieces, Dracula and wonderful tale of Ancient Egyptian horror The Jewel of the Seven
Stars (1903 rev. 1912). The Lair of the White Worm (1911, posth. abridgement in 1925) is also worth a read. To an extent, it is the literary equivalent to the 'special
features and deleted scenes' disc that burdens purchases of favourite
films but which are only ever watched by true nerds, film students or
people who have far too much time on their hands. Count me as one of the
first two (for 'film' read 'genre literature') but I certainly do not
fall into the last category and so those added treats generally remain untasted by me.
Having said that, the book remains
in the library for two reasons. It is a good reference collection of
Stoker ephemera including 'alternate cuts' from the 'Jewel' and Dracula and it tells, in stages, a worthwhile story of the
relationship between Stoker and the great actor Henry Irving, one in
which there is a clear dialectic between Stoker's literary imagination
and his role as general manager for the highly talented narcissist actor and
his coterie of friends and acquaintances. However, the small-scale
works are rarely great. Perhaps excepting the atmospheric The
Dream in the Dead House (first published in 1914 which is the Dracula episode and also known as Dracula's Guest), they are of
limited interest except as curiosities of their time and place. The
Dream might have been written for a Terence Fisher Hammer movie ....
One
story stands out as something quite unique - an early work The Dualitists (1887), written
in a pastiche of that verbose Victorian style that so puts off modern
readers (or at least we hope it is a pastiche). This is probably one of
the sickest stories about psychopathic children that I have ever read,
one with no redemption at the end. It is particularly disturbing to read
in at a time when the British Press is reminded of the
Bulger case and other horrors perpetrated by sociopathic and feral kids.
It shows how no imaginative horror might not come true in some form.
If
one thing comes out of this book, it is that Stoker certainly had a
very violent and morbid imagination which if publishers had had more of a
free hand in their day might have made him the literary Sam Raimi of
the turn of the last century. In fact, his more brutal work (such as the
extremely violent and racist The Red Stockade (1894)) had no problems getting published. If anyone ever wants
direct evidence, far beyond Kipling's high purpose, that the British
Empire was an utterly bloody affair then this vicious sadistic story of
imperial conquest might stand as evidence for the prosecution. The
bloody racist imperialism might be seen as particularly odd insofar as
Stoker was an Irishman with a keen sense of the oppression of his own
peasantry (if The Gombeen Man (1889/1890) is anything to go by) but you get the
impression that he was not a political man in general despite The Lady in the Shroud. He wanted to write and to be
appreciated for his writing and if the audience wanted blood, horror
and thrills then, by gad, that's what he would give them.
If not
great, there is still some good stuff in the collection - the three preceding
stories show great skill and have distinctive elements but a life might
profitably be lived without having read them. Some stories are dreadful -
the hackneyed A Deed of Vengeance (1892) and the twee The Spectre of Doom (a children's tale of 1882 that might happily have been left as manuscripts to light a fire. Some are
just extended black humour (The Man from Shorrox (1894)) or perhaps not so
extended, mere anecdotes for a book that never got written - The
Midnight Tales of the title. A word of warning here. Peter Haining, the Editor, embellished the last three to make them fit for publication from Stoker's reminiscences of Henry Irving. Other stories have had their titles changed on what appears to be editorial whim. In fact, Haining is rather unreliable on several matters and facts can be checked best through http://www.bramstoker.org where you can generally get these stories to download independently.
Putting aside the deleted scenes
and the macabre oddities, three stories stand out. The much anthologised
horror, The Squaw (1893), which sees a cat revenge itself on a callous man
in a most brutal manner during a tourist trip to see the Iron Maiden in
Nuremburg. Death in the Wings (1908) is a tale of revenge that makes great
use of the theatrical milieu in which Stoker spent the most productive
period of his life. Then there is the Criminal Star (1908) which
should be placed with those stories which are just extended black jokes
but which rises above that level with a rather cruel portrayal of a
great actor, Wolseley Gartside, and provides one of the earliest
representations of a cynical Press agent that I have come across. That
the 'great actor' was Irving writ more fantastic is scarcely to be
doubted. It is testament to their friendship and either Irving's
sense of humour or thick skin that Stoker, as his General Manager, got
away with it. This was, however, after some 26 years of close
association when liberties might perhaps be taken.
This brings us back to
the relationship between Stoker and Irving. In his main Introduction
and in the short but informative (if, as we say, occasionally unreliable) introduction to each story, Peter
Haining, shows us how this relationship and the stories and
anecdotes shared in the after performance Beefsteak Room informed
Stoker's literary imagination at every stage. Without Irving and his
table, we are unlikely to have been given Dracula. Touring also
played its role with strong dollops of Irish and American local culture
derived from Stoker's patrimony in the first case and theatrical tours
to the East Coast cities and the hinterland in the second. Stoker enjoys
writing for an American popular audience even if his portrayal of
cowboys discussing Shakespeare in one of the Midnight Tales seems
distinctly fantastic.
Despite the criticisms, word should be put in for the scholarship of the late Haining who was a one person literary industry, producing popular and cheap anthologies about the highways and byways of English horror and fantasy for many years that probably did more to keep these literary traditions alive for later generations than any number of tenured academics. Perhaps only S.T.Joshi's sustained work on Lovecraft and on 'high literary' horror and fantasy and arguably Glen Cavaliero's 'The Supernatural & English Fiction' have done so much for its survival in the back lists of paperback publishers today. Even if Haining may have since been superseded, his role was in general highly positive. Haining met reasonably high standards of editorship for the specialist publishers Peter Owen in 1990 when this collection appeared. He died in 2007 at the age of 67, having produced or edited a prodigious 170 books in his lifetime. Of course, he could be controversial and was not always 'right' by any means - he was a journalist rather than an academic - but his achievement was formidable.
Jon Sutherland's Who Was Dracula's Father? is an entertaining but ultimately a rather slight and even, at times,
disappointing commentary on Bram Stoker's Dracula. Nevertheless, it
will please fans of the original. It contains a lot of insights and
clues to further research and reading although there is no index to help
check facts later. Sutherland has produced similar books on
Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and related novels. These all
explore puzzling textual questions that may or may not show writers to
have been lazy, deliberately ambiguous or cunning in giving clues to the
implied reality beneath the surface. I should be grateful for
the many insights but there is a lack of imagination at times. There is a
reliance on internet search that gives us a sense of an expert knocking
off a bit of a potboiler designed to entertain and inform but not
really to give us a great deal of coherence.
If that is good
enough for you, then enjoy the book and try others in the series.
Sutherland certainly writes clearly. The book is not burdensome to read.
However, I have to give at least one example of possible laziness that
made me feel I was not entirely getting my money's worth. Having
reasonably argued for a link between crossroads, death and the cross in
folklore, he then expresses puzzlement that Dracula is so averse to the
cross as a symbol. In some places he has no problem with it and in
others, it is implied to be terminal to him. "Does Dracula love or hate the cross? I would be grateful for answers", he writes, having pointed out how many locations chosen by Dracula are linked to crossroads and crosses. Surely
it would have been reasonable to suggest straightaway that the cross
that Dracula fears is the cross on which Jesus died which has been
sanctified as Christ's symbolic act in overcoming death, turning an
instrument of execution into a liberatory salvation.
Dracula is
doomed (like the Eternal Jew) to near-immortal life on earth (assuming
he does not come up against a vampire hunter like Van Helsing) but not
to salvation, meaning life in Heaven. He is at home with the folkloric
cross (death) but not with the sanctified cross (life everlasting). An
implication, perhaps unconscious, might be that Stoker was plugging
into his own Church of Ireland background and the Christian
presuppositions of his readers by making his creation carefully
calibrated as 'evil' because he had competed with Christ as 'mysterium
tremendum'. Dracula is 'wholly other' in a very different way
from the experience of Christ's love being 'wholly other' to material
life. Christ promises one form of eternal life. The Anti-Christ that is
Dracula lives another form of it that parodies eternal salvation.
We
may go further. Christ gives his blood to us for our salvation in the
mythos (we drink his body and blood in communion) whereas Dracula takes
our blood to ensure his own selfish 'salvation' (mere earthly survival). It could even be argued that Bram Stoker's anti-hero is a
popular misreading of the troublesome figure of Nietzsche, critic of
Christianity who argued for a god-like will to power. Is Dracula simply
the Anti-Christ operating in Stoker's world as sociopathic
psycho-terrorist? Sutherland also argues persuasively that
Dracula is a non-material being and is possibly descended from the
demonic (pushing aside the Vlad the Impaler hypothesis). He has risen
above ordinary death but that does not mean he is alive as we are alive
or is anything but unsalvageable.
Hammer may get it wrong in
allowing natural crosses to contain and harm Christopher Lee - such
crosses must be specifically sanctified representations of the
overcoming of death by Christ to have an effect. Crossroads and natural
crosses actually seem to attract the Count. If not obvious, this
still strikes me as something Sutherland should have noted and argued
for or against. He should have picked up that rather idea and
knocked it down on the literary evidence if that was what was required.
Instead, the matter is lazily batted back to us. However, the
many small insights are there. Sutherland knows his original, its
history and the literary criticism surrounding it. He writes clearly,
not in post-modern gobbledygook for which we must all be grateful. So,
buy it as an entertainment and you should not be entirely disappointed.