Who Was Dracula? (9 page)

—

In the morning, Mina has an ingenious idea. She summons Van Helsing and asks him to hypnotize her, realizing that her alliance with Dracula has imparted a sort of psychic connection. Under hypnosis, she identifies the sensation of lying in a coffin—Dracula's last remaining coffin—and the sound of a creaking sailing vessel, about to weigh anchor. Proceeding to the docks, they find that one ship, the
Czarina Catherine
, has just left for Varna and other locations up the Danube. Questioning the dockworkers, they find that a mysterious man, dressed in black and wearing a straw hat, booked passage and brought one large, coffin-shaped box with him.

His departure does not solve the problem. Van Helsing points out that Dracula must be found and destroyed, forever removing the stain—the curse—from Mina before she becomes doomed. They plan to travel overland, reaching Varna before the vampire. Mina insists on traveling with them, and she makes the men promise that they will destroy her if she becomes a vampire. Mina even insists that the men read the service for the Burial of the Dead for her—the vampire hunters take solace in this simple, beautiful ritual.

The following day they all travel by train and await the arrival of Dracula's ship. Here Mina's hypnotic trances are used to the group's advantage, for they ascertain that Dracula is still aboard the ship, still hearing lapping waves. They board a train to Galatz, but they are too late. The cargo of Dracula's box has already been consigned to a local agent, and it has disappeared.

The chase is guided by Mina's supernatural abilities as well as her logical deductions, carefully analyzing his route and the modes of travel. The group splits apart and Mina travels with Van Helsing. When they reach Dracula's castle, Mina makes a psychic connection to her three vampire “sisters,” who call to her from the castle. Van Helsing protects her by placing her within a holy circle, and then he methodically finds the graves of the three vampire brides, destroying them with stakes through their hearts.

Mina and Van Helsing leave the castle, awaiting the men. Sunset approaches, and the pair watch from the rocks, aiming their rifles, as a band of Gypsies bring the Count's coffin into the pass. Jonathan, Quincey, Godalming, and Seward ride up to the group and dash toward the cart. There is a fierce battle with the Gypsies, who defend their cargo. Quincey is stabbed, but Jonathan manages to pry open the coffin lid, exposing the vampire. Jonathan wields his knife, decapitating the vampire. Quincey Morris plunges his dagger into Dracula's heart, and as the sun sets, the vampire's body seems to crumble into dust. As Quincey Morris draws his last breath, he is relieved to see that the stain has been removed from Mina's forehead.

A short postscript from Jonathan Harker concludes the novel. He proudly writes that his and Mina's first child, named after Quincey Morris, was born just a year after Morris's death. Returning to Transylvania several years later, they recalled the terrible events. Now Dracula's castle is but a “waste of desolation.” Kindly Dr. Van Helsing suggests, “We want no proofs, we ask none to believe us!” vowing that young Quincey Harker will someday understand the bravery of his mother and the important sacrifice of the men who loved her.

—

Stoker originally included a more elaborate finish, three paragraphs in which Dracula's castle was destroyed by a sudden earthquake and crumbles in front of the heroes just after the Count is destroyed. The image would have been in keeping with the repeated claims of the novel—that, besides the written accounts, no actual evidence remains of the events. Stoker deleted these paragraphs, perhaps suspecting that they offered too unrealistic and sensational a climax.

Critics have debated a more curious inconsistency. Several of Stoker's own rules for vampires were inexplicably violated within the novel. For example, Dracula is killed according to the rules of Emily de Laszowska Gerard, not the rules of Van Helsing. Dracula's death seems confusingly inexact and has been debated since the book's publication. Some writers have suggested that Stoker anticipated the phenomenon exploited by Hollywood forty years later—leaving a loophole for a possible sequel. More than likely, Stoker had confused his own rules by the end of the book and these discrepancies were oversights of the author.

Similarly, Stoker's novel suffers from some now-famous inadequacies. The band of men, who at times seem to collapse in pathetic tears, or populate a grail romance, or ride off in a Western potboiler, become virtually indistinguishable from one another as the novel proceeds, and Mina becomes more prominent. Stoker's use of dialect is tedious and becomes especially annoying and unrealistic when set within the frame of diary entries and letters. Often the action of the novel seems to slow in order to accommodate the thick, working-class accents of the old sailor, the zookeeper, or the dockworker. Each character who offers a diary or letter seems to quote Van Helsing's broken English with the same awkward, halting phrases.

But there's no question that
Dracula
is also Stoker's finest novel. It enshrined the vampire and formalized his world of the supernatural. Perhaps Stoker's most remarkable achievement was composing a novel called
Dracula
, while writing almost nothing about Dracula. Stoker left it to everyone else—a century of readers—to fill in the mysterious characterization.

THE VOIVODE, “RAGE AND FURY DIABOLICAL”

B
ram Stoker never spoke about the origins of
Dracula
. According to Noel, his father laughingly suggested that the novel was inspired by a nightmare after a “surfeit of dressed crab.”

The joke must have saved Stoker a great deal of explanation. Remaining evidence shows an author who combined a wide variety of sources and inspirations from his research—he planned and wrote the book for at least six years.
Dracula
was not only Stoker's most famous work, but also a labor of love. Between his tours and the politics and responsibilities at the Lyceum, Irving returned to his novel again and again to adjust the story and rearrange the plot. Dracula, one of the most surprising and horrific characters in literature, must have become a comfortable old friend to Bram Stoker.

Stoker's notes—his research and outlines for the novel—were sold by his wife, Florence, after his death and are now in the collection of the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia. From these notes, the evolution of the novel is apparent.

The earliest dated page is from March 8, 1890. Henry Irving was then in London performing in
The Dead
Heart
. This was a melodrama set during the French Revolution, with an especially interesting cast, including Squire Bancroft (an old actor-manager who had appeared with Irving and officially retired from the stage four years earlier) and Edward Gordon Craig (Ellen Terry's son, in his first professional performance). Terry agreed to play the part of his mother—she couldn't resist the temptation of acting with her son—but she realized that the part was “uninteresting,” especially after her success as Lady Macbeth. Irving, of course, had a substantial role; he fought a duel and was then marched to the guillotine.

In his March 8 note, Stoker was still struggling with character names and situations. He was planning the book as a series of letters, first told with correspondence to a law society: “Letter to Aaronson from Count—[from] Styria asking to come or to send trustworthy law[yer] who does not speak German. . . . In this series of letters is told visit to Castle.”

Here Stoker later inserted the phrase “Munich dead house.” He toyed with setting an early incident, during the lawyer's travels, at a Munich mausoleum. The page continued:

People on train knowing address dissuade him. Met at station. Storm. Arrive old Castle. Left in courtyard. Driver disappears. Count appears. Describe old dead man made alive. Waxen color. Dead dark eyes. What fire in them. Not human, hell fire. Stay in castle. No one but old man but no pretence of being alone. Old man in walking trance. Young man goes out. Sees girls. One tries to kiss him not on lips but throat. Old Count interferes. Rage & fury diabolical. This man belongs to me I want him. A prisoner for a time. Looks at books. English law directory. Sortes virgilianae. Central place marked with point of knife. Instructed to buy property. Requirements consecrated church on grounds. Near river.

“Sortes virgilianae” was a term for predicting the future by choosing random words in books; perhaps this was how the Count would be plotting his move across Europe.

It's surprising how Stoker's brief phrases efficiently map out the book that we now all recognize. These are indeed the early chapters of
Dracula
. Of course, early in 1890, the author didn't have the names for Hawkins, the solicitor in England; Count Dracula, the haunting, aristocratic vampire; or Jonathan Harker, the hapless lawyer who is sent to meet the Count and becomes the protagonist in the story. Styria (later part of Austria) was the setting of Le Fanu's
Carmilla
, suggesting that Stoker had quickly, carelessly picked this locale as a home of vampire folklore.

Stoker's notes are especially fascinating for the names and places that he had not yet discovered.

—

Researchers have speculated that Stoker's knowledge of Transylvania came from Arminius Vambery, a Jewish-born adventurer from Hungary. Vambery had a precocious skill for languages and was a natural adventurer; as a young man he disguised himself as a dervish and traveled from Constantinople to Samarkand—the first Western European to report on this fabled city of the Silk Route. When he came to London, his speeches on Eastern European culture made him an instant celebrity. He defended English interests in the Middle East and criticized Russian influence; nearly a century after his death, the Russian government released files that showed he had been engaged as an agent for the British government.

Vambery would have been familiar with the traditions, languages, and landscape of Transylvania. Even more intriguing, he dined with Irving and Stoker at the Beefsteak Room, where he regaled them with stories. For example, when Stoker asked if he ever feared death during his travels through Tibet, Vambery thrilled his hosts with his daring: “Death, no. But I am afraid of torture. I protected myself against that, however. I always had a poison pill fastened here, where the lappet of my coat is now. This I could always reach with my mouth in case my hands were tied. I knew they could not torture me, and then I did not care!”

Another of Vambery's remarks, to Empress Eugenie, is more revealing. When she was surprised that he had walked so much, yet started his life lame, confined to crutches, he told her, “Ah, Madam, in Central Asia we travel not on our feet but on the tongue.” In fact, Vambery was always a fantastic self-publicist.

Coincidentally, Vambery dined with Irving and Stoker on April 30, 1890, just nine days before Stoker's first written notes for the vampire novel. Since the earliest notes mention neither Dracula nor Transylvania, it seems unlikely that Vambery whispered these magical names during his evening at the Beefsteak Room. When Stoker met Vambery again, two years later, he had already found the essential information on Transylvania.

In the finished novel, Vambery receives a tribute from the learned Abraham Van Helsing: “I have asked my friend Arminius of Buda-Pesth University to make his record; and from all the means that are, he tells me of what he has been. He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk. . . .” But even here, Stoker's account of Dracula has been cobbled together from a few books and enhanced with a great deal of fiction. The name Arminius simply lends credibility.

—

It was another visitor to the Beefsteak Room, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, whose presence seems to haunt Bram Stoker's early notes.

Stanley had been born out of wedlock in Wales in 1841. He took his father's name of Rowlands, and spent much of his childhood in a workhouse. At eighteen, he went to America to start a new life, first settling in New Orleans and adopting the name Stanley from a man who treated him as a son. There he managed to shake his British accent. He fought for both the Confederate army and then the Union army in the Civil War, finally becoming a journalist for New York newspapers and earning a reputation for his intrepid travels in search of a story. The
New York Herald
gave him the assignment to locate the long-missing David Livingstone, who had disappeared while exploring Africa. After a long, perilous adventure, Stanley found him on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871, greeting him with his famous, and probably fictitious, British understatement, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Stanley's explorations, including his later search for the source of the Congo River, were described in his books. His adventurous life was famous in Victorian London, but his heroism was accompanied by controversy: misrepresentations of his adventures, hints of a homosexual scandal, and episodes of cruelty toward African natives. Stoker noticed his unusual features when they first met at a special Garrick Club dinner with Irving in 1882 and described him as a sort of shell of a man, a mysterious presence who quickly took everything in but was careful to release only occasional, measured flashes of light.

[Stanley] had a peculiar manner, though less marked than later years. He was slow and deliberate of speech, the habit of watchful self-control seemed even then to have eaten into the very marrow of his bones. His dark face, through which the eyes seemed by contrast to shine like jewels, emphasized his slow speech and measured accents.

Stoker met him several times after that. Their last meeting, according to Stoker, was at a special lunch on June 26, 1890, about four months after he started the notes for his novel.

At that time Stanley looked dreadfully worn, and much older than when I had seen him last. . . . He was darker of skin than ever; and this was emphasized by the whitening of his hair. He was then under fifty years of age, but he looked nearer to eighty than fifty. . . . There were times when he looked more like a dead man than a living one. Truly the wilderness had revenged upon him the exposal of its mysteries.

As developed in the novel, the Count becomes a figure that virtually defies description, but Stoker's first written notes, an “old dead man made alive,” with a peculiar hell fire in his eyes, and—in the novel—a long, drooping white mustache, matched the author's description of Stanley. Before the character appeared in the novel, he had managed to acquire the traits of other influential men.

—

Stoker's notes from around the same time included a preliminary list of sixteen different characters—no names yet. Three were lawyers and one was “Lawyer's clerk” who “goes to Styria.” (Stoker actually began to write “Germany,” then crossed out the first words and wrote “Styria.”) The characters also included a “Mad Doctor,” “Mad Patient,” “Philosophic historian,” “Lawyer's shrewd, sceptical sister,” and a “Detective inspector.” The list suggested a sort of detective story or mystery.

The author followed with a series of memos with plot ideas. One memo listed characteristics of the vampire: “No looking glasses in Count's house. Never can see him reflected in one—no shadow? Never eats nor drinks. Carried or led over threshold.” Another suggestion showed that Stoker was planning on introducing modern technology, including the portable camera: “Could not codak [Kodak] him—come out black or like skeleton corpse.”

A plot point, “Doctor at Dover Custom house sees him or corpse,” suggested that Stoker originally planned for Dracula's arrival at Dover, the most logical port from continental Europe.

Another memo mentioned a “dinner party at the mad doctor's” that consisted of thirteen guests. Each guest was asked to contribute to a strange story, adding their own incidents as the story proceeded around the table. “At the end the Count comes in.”

And then, he began work on two important pieces of paper that defined the novel. The first was a list of characters, which Stoker labeled “Historiae Personae.” The page had deletions, changes, and alterations. It was obviously a page that Stoker returned to again and again as the plot developed. Here, for the first time, the names began to appear that we recognize as characters in the novel. “Doctor of madhouse . . . Seward.” “Girl engaged to him, Lucy Westenra.” “[Law] clerk, Jonathan Harker.” “Fiancee of the above, pupil, teacher Wilhemina Murray (called Mina).” The central character's name was still undecided. Here Stoker labeled him “Count Wampyr.”

Harker was a name taken from an associate at the Lyceum. Joseph Harker was a freelance scenic painter who was often brought in to work with Hawes Craven and William Teblin on backdrops for Henry Irving's shows. Harker was working at a scenic dock at Her Majesty's Theatre, he later recalled, when Stoker strode in one day, casually mentioning that he had “appropriated my surname” for a character. There was no explanation why. Harker was thirty-five years old and may have reminded Stoker of the young lawyer he had invented for his novel.

Other characters in the “Historiae Personae” were still being developed. “A German Professor, Max Windshoeffel,” later became Van Helsing. And “a Texan, Brutus M. Moris,” became Quincey Morris.

“A painter, Francis Aytown,” represented Stoker's attempt to include a sequence in which Dracula's portrait cannot be represented on canvas.

Then, a sheet initially dated March 14, 1890, transformed the structure of the novel into four separate sections or “books,” echoing the structure of a four-act play at the Lyceum. The first book, “Styria to London,” detailed the adventure at the Count's castle. “Tragedy” told the story of the Count's arrival in England and the transformation of a young lady into a vampire. With “Discovery,” the suspicion fell on Dracula, and the Texan was sent back to the Count's homeland to search for clues. “Punishment” began with a dinner of thirteen, a sort of vigilante committee who returned to Styria to find the Count.

The page showed numerous deletions and additions; it was obviously a worksheet as Stoker was adjusting the story.

—

Stoker's joke about “dressed crab” may have been more than a social expedience, simple chitchat about his book. If
Dracula
really was inspired by a single nightmare, Stoker's notes from the spring of 1890 suggest what was in that nightmare. There is a single incident at Dracula's castle that was repeated in early notes and was then readjusted by the author, even after the book's publication.

From March 8: “Young man goes out. Sees girls. One tries to kiss him not on lips but throat. Old Count interferes. Rage & fury diabolical. This man belongs to me I want him. A prisoner for a time.”

And then again, from March 14: “Arrive the Castle. Loneliness, the Kiss. ‘This man belongs to me.'”

“This man belongs to me” are the first words that Stoker “heard” from his Count, and the first words he recorded, even before the character had a name. Stoker repeated the phrase “Belongs to me,” or a variation, five more times during the course of his notes, indicating that it was a key moment in the story.

The scene with the vampire brides seemed to be unnecessary to the plot, but it was recorded in early notes and sailed through directly to the novel, complete with the Count's simple pronouncement. Jonathan Harker was threatened by the lascivious vampire brides, who approached him with their teeth bared. Then Dracula interrupted them. With his one remark, Jonathan was both saved and imperiled by Dracula, who claimed him as his own prize.