Who Is Dracula's Father?

by John Sutherland

  Faust. Where are you damn’d?

  Meph. In hell.

  Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

  Meph. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

  The whole corpus of modern ‘absurd’ drama pivots on that Marlovian observation: that hell is located within our human frame. It is not outside us, somewhere else. It is us, here: not a place but a condition. Samuel Beckett in ten words.

  Why, to ask again, is Dracula’s final expression, before he dissolves into wind-borne dust, one of ‘peace’? Because he is, at long last, released from being Dracula. The contract he made on his graduation from the Scholasticon is terminated. He is free.

  * Emily Gerard, ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’, Nineteenth Century (1885). Gerard repeated and elaborated on the subject in a number of subsequent publications. Stoker drew on her heavily.

  † http://www.jasoncolavito.com/scholomance-the-devils-school.html

  Bram Stoker (1847–1912),

  a short biography

  Little of interest is to be found in the first 30 years of Bram Stoker’s life. He was born the middle child of seven in Dublin. His father was a civil servant at the ‘Castle’ – the HQ of Irish colonial administration. Bram’s birth coincided with the ‘Great Hunger’ and mass emigration from Ireland – themes which ingenious critics have woven into Dracula. The Stokers, though, were among the Protestant middle classes, for whom the potato was a side dish, and were insulated from the peasants’ suffering.

  Bram’s father was twenty years older than his wife Charlotte, and it was she who sowed the seed of literature in her son. She had ample time to do so. Little ‘Bram’ (Abraham in full but nicknamed thus to distinguish him from his namesake father) was bedridden with a mysterious ailment for the first seven years of his life. Thereafter, he grew strong, shining at Trinity College, Dublin, in the debating hall, classroom, and on the sports field. On graduation, Bram followed his father into the Castle. His career there was rapid: by 1877 young Stoker had risen to the post of Inspector of Petty Sessions. Abraham Stoker Snr complacently noted that he could think of no young man who had risen so fast.

  Photographs confirm Bram to have been strikingly handsome – the epitome of the manly ‘red Irishman’. Two events transformed his life in 1878. He married the wispily beautiful Florence Balcombe in that year, winning her hand from a mortified Oscar Wilde. It may be that Bram had the more winning smile: his rival had what Florence saw as ‘curly teeth’. The other event involved the theatre. From childhood, Bram had been stage-struck. Henry Irving’s touring company played Dublin regularly in the mid-1870s. Stoker, a confirmed Irvingite, wrote an admiring review of the actor’s Hamlet. It was well received. The young civil servant was summoned to Irving’s suite at the Shelbourne where the two men talked until daybreak. The next evening, Stoker was informed that the great man had a ‘special gift’ for him. It turned out to be a recitation of Thomas Hood’s melodramatic poem ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’. At the end of his performance, Irving tore off his necktie and collapsed in a swoon. ‘The recitation was different, both in kind and degree, from anything I ever heard,’ Stoker recalled. His own response he described as ‘hysterical’.

  Irving impulsively invited Stoker to be his ‘stage manager’. Bram’s father was horrified. Was there, commentators have wondered, physical seduction? Stoker was a confessed Whitmanite. On American theatrical tours, he made a point of throwing himself at the feet of the great poet. Whitman’s ‘inversion’ was an open secret. We may ask but we shall never know: Stoker’s private life is a locked cabinet.

  One biographer, Daniel Farson, a remote descendant, plausibly deduces that after the birth of one child, Irving Noel, Florence withdrew conjugal access, protecting the Dresden-china looks which, even ten years later, led the Punch cartoonist George du Maurier to rank her as one of the three most beautiful women in London. Farson believes, as does the latest biographer, David J. Skal, that Stoker resorted to actresses and prostitutes and contracted syphilis – something that speculation can link with the infectious vampiric kiss.

  The fact is, there is a tantalising blankness in the twenty years of Stoker’s manly (but what kind of manly?) prime. Either the cabinet is empty, or, as a trained keeper of documents, he expertly covered his tracks. What does survive is the record of his efficient factotum service to Irving. The Lyceum would never have dominated the London theatrical world as it did without Stoker behind the scenes. As Irving’s particular friend, Stoker dined and hobnobbed with the age’s celebrities: Wilde (who forgave him Florence), Ellen Terry, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arthur Conan Doyle and Hall Caine (the beloved ‘Hommy-Beg’, to whom Dracula would be dedicated). And for six years in the 1890s, he worked and researched a work provisionally entitled ‘The Un-Dead’. Eventually he came round to the Wallachian word for ‘devil’, dracul, thence Dracula (the ‘-a’ suffix meaning ‘son of’).

  Stoker boned up on Transylvania in the British Museum and while on holiday in Whitby. Other sources of the novel were nearer to hand, notably fellow Irishman Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). What Stoker brought to vampirology was the frisson of his ‘master’ Irving’s hypnotic stage presence, most spectacularly displayed in his performance as Mephistopheles in Faust. George du Maurier’s sinister Svengali, from his novel Trilby, is also there somewhere. Stoker himself nodded towards Jack the Ripper as a topical inspiration. The fact is, so opaque are Dracula’s symbolisms that one can read virtually anything into them – and critics have.

  Two events combined to alter the course of Stoker’s life in 1897. One was the completion of Dracula; the other the burning down of the Lyceum warehouse, with all the company’s props and wardrobe. Irving refused to stage, or even read, the dramatic adaptation of Dracula which Stoker had prepared (for copyright reasons). He affected to think poorly of his protégé’s novel. It was wounding. The novel was, in the event, not an overwhelming sales success and would not take off as an international bestseller until a succession of screen versions made it a gold mine – though not for Irving, nor for Stoker’s widow, Florence, who survived Bram by 25 years, most of them tormented by Dracula copyright squabbles.

  Stoker was no longer necessary to Irving after the Lyceum closed in 1902. The actor, disabled by a series of strokes, died three years later. Whether it was syphilis or not, Stoker’s last ten years were difficult. He too suffered strokes and chronic poor health but nonetheless forced himself to turn out six ‘shockers’, none of them in the same class as Dracula. Everyone, it is said, has one novel inside them. Would they were all as good as Stoker’s.

  What colour is Dracula’s moustache?

  It depends when and where you look at him. The driver who picks up Jonathan Harker on the eve of Saint George’s Day – when wolves go crazy and the earth combusts randomly into blue flame – is not immediately identified.

  But Dracula has no servants or household staff (an interesting detail – see ‘Who Washes Dracula’s Pinafore?’, page 37). No stable hands, grooms, or muckers-out. It is hard to picture the master doing it, but do it somebody must.

  The whip-lashing driver who hurries Jonathan Harker off to his doom in a hearse-like vehicle, drawn by four black horses, possesses ‘prodigious’ strength. Wolves cringe and whimper in his presence. We can, from the first, make a good guess at whom the alpha wolfish driver must be. Harker later confirms it was the Count himself. This is how the (un)man is described by Harker, in his diary:

  They [his four black horses] were driven by a tall man, with a long brown beard and a great black hat, which seemed to hide his face from us. I could only see the gleam of a pair of very bright eyes, which seemed red in the lamplight, as he turned to us.

  NB the long brown beard.

  The extravagantly hirsute driver speaks no English, but excellent German. The coach goes round and round: killing time, we apprehend, until midnight on the Eve of St George, when Dracula (midnights and middays are good for him) draws a sustaining lease of und
eadly strength.

  When they finally arrive at Castle Dracula Harker is kept waiting outside forever in the cold (Dracula has welcomed his guest with a microclimate of early summer snow). Stable business, one supposes, is detaining his host. Finally the door, after much unbolting and creaking, swings open on its century-old rusty hinges and:

  Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door.

  He now speaks ‘excellent’ English. And he must, after stabling the horses, have been busy with the razor and the hair dye.

  No beard. And his moustache is now white. There are various references by witnesses in the course of the novel describing Dracula which confirm an occasionally white moustache and thin beard streaked with white. The labourer who humped his large, earth-filled boxes on their way to Carfax recalls that:

  ‘There was the old party what engaged me a-waitin’ in the ’ouse at Purfleet. He ’elped me to lift the boxes and put them in the dray. Curse me, but he was the strongest chap I ever struck, an’ him a old feller with a white moustache, one that thin you would think he couldn’t throw a shadder.’

  Nor can any vampire, as it happens, cast a ‘shadder’.

  On another occasion, a terrified Jonathan and mystified Jack catch sight of the count, incognito, in London, sporting radically different facial hair:

  [Jonathan] was very pale, and his eyes seemed bulging out as, half in terror and half in amazement, he gazed at a tall, thin man, with a beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard, who was also observing the pretty girl. He was looking at her so hard that he did not see either of us, and so I had a good view of him. His face was not a good face; it was hard, and cruel, and sensual, and his big white teeth that looked all the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like an animal’s. Jonathan kept staring at him, till I was afraid he would notice. I feared he might take it ill, he looked so fierce and nasty. I asked Jonathan why he was disturbed, and he answered, evidently thinking that I knew as much about it as he did: ‘Do you see who it is?’

  He is now facially embellished with a black moustache and goatee.

  In the most blood-curdling image of him, in one of his boxes, there is yet another mutation of facial hair:

  I knew I must reach the body for the key, so I raised the lid, and laid it back against the wall; and then I saw something which filled my very soul with horror. There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood. He lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.

  A very hirsute leech – a species unknown outside Transylvania, one suspects.

  So, to chart the changes – the novel’s pogonotrophy, to use the biggest word available to moustache scholarship – we have Dracula with enough brown beard and moustache to stuff a pillow; a Dracula with a white moustache and thin beard, sometimes white-streaked: a Dracula with a pitch-black moustache and goatee; a Dracula clean-shaven but for an iron-grey Hindenburg moustache; and some variations of the above.

  Clearly Dracula’s intake of blood has something to do with the profusion, hue and age-fade of his facial hair. But the ease with which his ancient, scrawny, white-haired self can lift huge boxes with the ease of a Schwarzenegger suggests it is not the whole story.

  The truth – which requires a long stretch of the imagination – is that Dracula has no physical existence whatsoever. In a note Stoker recorded that his weight was a few ounces. Hence he throws no shadow and has no mirror image. There is nothing there to reflect. He can be a bat, a rat, a wolf, a mist, or a Romanian aristocrat. All without solidity. He is a shape-changer at will. And his moustache too is an ever-mutating detail.

  It is not easy to transfer this literally dissolute condition to the screen. Bela Lugosi’s chin, we recall, is as hairless as a snooker ball and meaty enough to advertise the 1930s Gillette blue razor. Lugosi’s Dracula is physical. Gary Oldman is clean shaven, but amazingly coiffed in his homely castle (where he has nothing to do by day, over the many centuries, but fuss with his hair). He is modishly hairy on the London streets. In Piccadilly he looks like just another dandy. One could go on. It remains not a puzzle, but a source of puzzles. And, like so many things in this inexhaustible novel, the more you explore, the more puzzling it becomes.

  Quincey P. Morris: vampire?

  Who is Quincey P. Morris? He pops up in the narrative like a genie from a bottle. One rub, and Quincey P. is suddenly there. Ready to serve. How and where it was he fell in love with Lucy Westenra, and she not quite in love with Quincey P. Morris, lies never to be known in the dark hinterland of the un-narrated.

  The kind of outdoorsy fellow he is would have been readily recognisable to any wide-awake 1890s reader. Buffalo Bill [Cody] was, in the 1890s, a Yank much better known in England than whoever the current US President was in 1895 (Grover S. Cleveland – which probably doesn’t tell the average reader much).

  Quincey P. Morris is, manifestly, inspired by Buffalo Bill. The legendary showman cowboy, with his ‘Wild West Show’, made a sensational first visit to the UK in 1887, entrancing the population with his exploits with horse, lasso, and six-shooter. Britain was crazy for Bill’s Wild West Show. Victoria ordered a ‘command performance’ at Windsor Castle. We were amused.*

  Bram Stoker and Henry Irving were pals with Cody at the time of his 1887 English tour, having first met him on Irving’s own US tours. Immortalised in dime novels, one can imagine Cody reading Dracula by the old fire, having had his evening chow (buffalo fritters).

  As Stoker portrays him Quincey is a buck-skinned Texan, formidably armed. He carries a rhino-handled bowie knife (named after the legendary knife-fighter, Jim Bowie, who died at the Alamo, taking a goodly number of Mexicans with him). In his notes for the novel Stoker equipped Brutus M. Marix, as Quincey was originally called, with a Maxim machine gun. In the published text, a repeater-action Winchester rifle was preferred. Doubtless Quincey has a couple of handier miniature derringers stashed in his high boots.†

  A big-game hunter who has slaughtered innocent wildlife across the globe from frozen Siberia to the scorching tropics, Quincey is vastly rich. There is in him more than a touch of Teddy Roosevelt, the only American President to have shot five African elephants and called the ‘cowboy candidate’.

  Quincey and his inseparable buddy ‘Art’ (i.e. Arthur, Lord Holmwood) have hunted and slept under canvas together in wild places. It’s the kind of thing which bonds men.

  As Quincey reminisces about their transatlantic friendship:

  We’ve told yarns by the camp-fire in the prairies; and dressed one another’s wounds after trying a landing at the Marquesas; and drunk healths on the shore of Titicaca.

  As Wikipedia‡ informs us, ‘Lake Titicaca is a large, deep lake in the Andes on the border of Peru and Bolivia. By volume of water and by surface area, it is the largest lake in South America.’ Nothing small for Quincey P. Morris. The blood connection (‘dressed one another’s wounds’) between Art and Quince is, I suggest, worth noting.

  Under his cowboy guise Quincey P. Morris is a highly civilised WASP (as was Theodore Roosevelt Jr) but, for English people, he plays up to their cretinous image of the homespun, rootin’, tootin’, tobacco-chewin’, gun-totin’ American. As Lucy says:

  Mr. Morris doesn’t always speak slang – that is to say, he never does so to strangers or before th
em, for he is really well educated and has exquisite manners – but he found out that it amused me to hear him talk American slang, and whenever I was present, and there was no one to be shocked, he said such funny things.

  His proposal of marriage to her is appropriately slangy:

  ‘Won’t you just hitch up alongside of me and let us go down the long road together, driving in double harness?’

  A ‘Yippee-ai-eh!’ would have been in order, had the young gal given him the old ‘yessiree’. She did not.

  One registers the fact that Quincey is deuced clever at pretending to be what, manifestly, he is not. Some have been inspired to speculate whether Mr Morris is in fact an inductee into Dracula’s army of the un-dead. The idea has been played with by various writers in various ways. Perhaps Quincey has been recruited into the deadly crew before appearing on the novel’s scene (Franco Moretti’s theory, discussed below). Another angle is whether Quincey might rise after killing the Count – his master – as Dracula redivivus (as in P.N. Elrod’s series of stories beginning with ‘The Wind Breathes Cold’). Let’s examine the charge sheet.

  Significantly he’s the last man to have intimate contact with Lucy. He donates his ‘manly’ blood. Little good it does. But his bodily fluid is inside Lucy on the last morning of her (live) life.

  Then there is Quincey’s inexplicable behaviour after Mina, in her turn, is found sucked dry by Dracula. Here is Seward recording events in his diary:

  I raised the blind, and looked out of the window. There was much moonshine; and as I looked I could see Quincey Morris run across the lawn and hide himself in the shadow of a great yew-tree. It puzzled me to think why he was doing this … [my emphasis]