The Dracula Dossier

by James Reese

  “After an invalid childhood,18 I have grown well and am, at present, six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked, and used to be forty-one or forty-two inches around the chest. I am ugly19 but strong and determined and have a large bump over my eyebrows.20 I have a heavy jaw and a big mouth and thick lips—sensitive nostrils—a snub nose and straight hair.” Oh, Caine, the shame of having described myself so! “Sensitive nostrils”? Good God! It’s a wonder Whitman ever wrote in reply.

  “I am an Athletic Champion with a dozen cups on my mantel. I have also been President of the College Philosophical Society as well as an art and theatrical critic of a daily paper…. As to my personality, mine is a secretive nature.21 I am equal in temper and cool in disposition and have a large amount of self-control…. I have a large number of acquaintances and five or six friends—all of which latter body care much for me. Now I have told you everything I know about myself,” and I suppose I had. Would that I had signed myself Abraham Stoker and set my pen down; but no:

  “It was with no small effort that I began to write and I feel reluctant to stop.” Reluctant, indeed. “I hope you will not laugh at me for writing this to you, but how sweet a thing it is for a strong and healthy man with a woman’s eyes and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother, and wife to his soul?” Oh, my.

  There I lay upon my second bed in the Brunswick, mortified at having re-met my younger self. Such a meeting is one to which most men of middle age would not gladly go, agreed? (Yes, yes: I know you would agree, Caine.)

  As the storm came on without, a second rose within. My “need.” What was the need Whitman had referenced? And how would I have shaped it into words if Fate had found me at the Master’s knee?

  “The wife and child”—he would surely have inquired—“…how are they?” And what might I have said? The truth?

  True it would have been to say, to admit, that it is Henry Irving rather than Florence Stoker to whom I am truly wed. I have long been his close associate and most intimate friend. Surely I know him as well as it is given any man to know another. Indeed, Henry and I are so much together we are each able to read the other’s thoughts. Surely you have seen, Caine, the same capacity in a husband and wife who have lived together long years and who are accustoming to working together at life, and at understanding each other? Yet it is not with Florence that I share such a bond. It is with Henry. And so it has been since first we met, nay since first I saw him upon the stage and we set off together on a path of sympathy which somehow has eventuated to…to this.

  The place was the Theatre Royal, Dublin. The St. James’s Company was on tour, and the piece chosen for the fateful night found Irving in the role of Captain Absolute.22 To this very day, Caine, I can close my eyes and see Irving upon that stage, so different was his performance, nay his very presence from anything I—or anyone else, for that matter—had ever seen. Yet days passed and no mention was made of the performance in the papers. Of praise there was none, none at all.

  You’ll recall, Caine, that some years prior I had gone round to LeFanu offering to watch the city’s stages for the Mail, though first my studies and later my work with the Civil Service precluded this becoming more than a sometime hobby.23 And so it was that when next Henry Irving played Dublin, he found his Hamlet roundly and soundly praised.

  The very day my review appeared in the Mail, word came round that Irving wished to see me. I was summoned to join his post-performance party at Corless’s, where I partook of the famous hot lobster as well as other succulents from off that justly famed establishment’s most excellent grill.24

  It was not at dinner but afterwards that I learned that my host’s heart was something towards me, as mine was towards him. He had learned that I could appreciate high effort: I could receive what he could create. This would become the basis of a relationship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men. Revisiting that hour of deep emotion, each for the other, threatens to unman me now as I write, Caine; for yes, I can only wonder: How has it devolved to this untenable situation, this nameless Need I meant to confess to Whitman?

  Alas, it was at the post-prandial party in his rooms at the Shelbourne that Henry Irving changed the course of my life; for he announced that he would recite for me Thomas Hood’s poem “The Dream of Eugene Aram.”

  The effect of this on my person was prodigious. I sat spellbound. Outwardly I was as of stone; naught was quick in me but receptivity and imagination. All thoughts of self-existence ceased. And after the recital I sat reduced to hysterics; though here I hasten to add, Caine, not in my own vindication but rather to further attest to Irving’s power—though you know it well yourself—that I was no green youth gadding about with back-stagers, looking to yield to the least emotional force. I was, as men go, strong, strong in many ways. I was then in my thirtieth year, and had been, for nearly ten of those years, a salaried clerk in the service of the Crown. Indeed, in addition to my journalism and the short, serial stories I engaged upon when able—trifles, trifles all—I was then completing that drowsy tome upon which my renown as Author seems destined to rest, rather as a crow upon carrion. I refer of course to my dry-as-dust The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions.25

  Though my tears on the night in question were a surprise to all present, less surprising would have been the news, some months later, that I’d thrown aside the Civil Service to cast my lot with Irving; for I’d accepted his offer of the Lyceum’s management, telegraphing my YES! to H.I., c/o The Plough & Harrow in Edgbaston.

  As the Lyceum, the new Lyceum, was to open with Hamlet on 30 December, I met a touring Irving on 9 December in Birmingham, having in the meantime altered my whole life: I had married; for Florence—whose father I’d had to assuage re: the present security and later pension I was abandoning—had agreed to speed by one whole year an event already arranged. Of course, Henry was mightily surprised—and I daresay none too happy—to find I’d arrived in Birmingham with a wife in tow! And so it was, Caine, that I came to swear my allegiance twice in the span of one week. Doubly-wedded. Doubly-bound. And destined for I knew not what.

  All these years later, and Florence is far away, in every way; but oh, how Henry hovers! Yes, it is Henry to whom I am truly wed, Henry to whom I am truly bound. And he is killing me, Caine! He is bleeding me dry! Oft-times I fear I can neither leave him nor live. And if I were desperate last week at the Brunswick, I am only slightly less so now due to Whitman’s admonition. To the Master I’d written asking—much as the ancients had asked the oracle at Delphos—How am I to live? How am I to survive? Not in so many words, no; but still Whitman had read my Need between the lines and replied.

  “Every man must sign God’s name to the letter of his life.”

  Yes: I shall hold to his words. Upon them I will rebuild myself, my self. For what is the opposite choice?

  Friend Caine, my heart and hand have had enough, and I must compose myself before our arrival at the Academy, which the conductor’s call tells me is imminent. I must now don the mask of goodly Uncle Bram and see to the performance, the players’ problems, &c. Need I write that already I long for curtain-fall? But I long, too, to keep your company upon these stained pages, and so I shall return to this letter as fast as Fate allows. Be sure of it.

  Till then, I am, S.

  BRAM STOKER’S JOURNAL

  20 March, 2 a.m.—No sleep now. And so: this diary I’ve too long ignored.

  We arrived back here at the Brunswick not an hour past. En route, and despite the soothing shimmy of the special, we all of us were wound too tightly to sleep, indeed were rather wild after making such a success amongst the cadets. Even H.I. came from his car to watch the lesser lights play at charades, and I fancied I saw a smile upon his lips as E.T. gently mocked his Mathias.26 Of course, he had not a word for me; but still I am forgiven. I see it. I know it. And I am thankful, for his genius holds sway with me as to-night I fell anew.

  Henry Irving
was genius at West Point, and four if not five hundred cadets were witness to it alongside myself. What a wonderful audience they were! There they sat upon their benches in the mess-room, looking like a solid mass of steel: uniforms of blue and gray, with buttons of brass; and their bright young faces clean-shaven, and their flashing eyes—all this and more lent force to the metaphor: a solid mass of steel, indeed.

  And the attention, the understanding of the audience could not, cannot be surpassed. Many of the cadets had never seen a play—so I heard it said, and often—yet not a line of The Merch.27 went amiss. There was not a single point of the plot that did not pass for its full value. They attended to the trial scene—wherein E.T. as Portia is seduction itself & H.I. as Shylock wields my kukri so disturbingly well (and how the sight of the knife chills me now!)—as if they were present at a court-martial. Such rapt attention inspires an actor, and never more so than this night. So, too, did the applause inspire us all as it rose at the end of each act.

  Of course, the in-loading earlier in the day had been a trial of another sort entirely. Already we were light, as regards costumery and stage-craft, word having come down from the Academy that no stage proper would be available to us. So it was that Irving declared that we’d mount the play as in Shakespeare’s day. To this end, notices were set upon an easel beside the stage: Venice: A Public Place; Belmont: Portia’s House; Shylock’s House by a Bridge; &c. The costumes worn would be simple. And we encountered but one problem re: props; which of course a still-angry Henry insinuated was somehow my fault. Problem was, the lights available to us in a soldiers’ mess-hall were insufficient to distinguish the lead trunk from the silver one in Act V, Scene III. “And so Portia’s suitors”—this Henry railed at me from the makeshift stage, silencing the assembled Company—“will have but one trunk of gold and two of silver to choose amongst! Where is the sense in that, Mr. Stoker?”

  “The sense, Mr. Irving,” I countered from afar, “is in the text. A child could follow the sense of the scene if only it were played as written.” This last angered him, as I’d known it would; for all present caught my allusion to Henry’s penchant for playing the Bard not as written but rather as it pleases him.28 Our little row ended when H.I. stalked off the stage, calling for both his dresser and his dog and ready to curse me roundly to whichever showed first.

  But in the end all went well. Better than well. At play’s end there was that wondrous pause—as ever there is—and then, as if acting upon a single impulse, every one of the cadets rose and, with a thunderous cheer, threw his cap up. For an instant the room was blackened as if by bats. And oh, the cheering!

  There was a significance to this cap-tossing that we understood only later, when it was explained to us, sotto voce, by an underling of the Secretary himself:

  According to the American Articles of War which govern the Military Academy, a cadet’s tossing his cap—except at the express order of his commanding officer—is an act of insubordination punishable by expulsion. To-night, however, those fine fellows were forgiven for finding this to be the means best suited to the expression of their feelings; and, strange to say, not one of their superior officers, least of all the Secretary himself, seemed to notice so dire a breach of discipline.

  Splendid, splendid it was, and every eye was brimful as Irving took to the forestage to make the speech requisite to such an occasion, the last line of which I well recall and here record:-

  “I cannot restrain a little patriotic pride just now,” said he in his most measured, most mesmeric tones, “and I will confess it. I believe the joy-bells are ringing in London to-night as, for the first time, it would appear the British have captured West Point.”

  Whereupon there rose a great Hurrah!

  Splendid indeed.

  All were in a transport of delight. For my own part—and I have been in the theatre each time Henry Irving and Ellen Terry have played The Merchant—I never, never knew it to go so well as to-night. Genius indeed.

  Of course, it fell to me to recall the company to earth—to such thankless tasks I have grown accustomed; for I had informed Mr. Macallister of the New York, Ontario & Western Line that the all Lyceum cast, crew & accoutrements would be aboard the special by midnight. By my watch we rolled at one minute past.

  Now the clock creeps unto 3. Where is sleep? I want a walk, but this cold seems contagious of death, and I am wary of wandering the streets again. And so here I sit, wearied yet wide awake. Reading up this page, I am reminded of my love of the Guv’nor, of his genius; but then here lies my blood-let, bandaged hand, testifying to…what, precisely?

  Is it too late to take up my letter to Caine? Q.: How much can I confess? To Caine? To myself? Alas, this much at least:

  Forty-odd years of a life lived, and what have I to show for it but another man’s achievements? If Henry be King, I am naught but his Shadow Prince, topped with an ever-tightening crown. Naught but a shadow. It is true. Without him I shan’t even be cast.

  Sleep. Where is sleep? I summon it with whisky. Far better now to dream than to think.

  LETTER, BRAM STOKER TO HALL CAINE (CONTINUED)

  21 March 1888

  Dear Caine,

  I resume this letter two days on, swearing to finish it now that we are returned from West Point a great success. At present, Henry has convened the designers onstage, for he asks, nay insists on their further refining the lights for Faust; and so it is that I am able to steal some minutes backstage—all but secreted amidst the fly ropes and curtain folds!—to finish this bloodless letter to a friend.29

  Thankfully, the Star is dark to-night, as to-morrow we shift from The Merchant to Faust, with which we’ll close before steaming home. And—all praise!—I find myself forgiven, and once again in the Guv’nor’s good graces; for, in Henry Irving’s world, forgiveness is comprised of two factors: the passing of both Time and Tests.

  It has been ten days since I failed him. Time enough, it would seem; and earlier to-day I passed the latest—and hopefully the last—of his Tests. Of which more anon; but first:

  How was it that I fell into disfavour? I was a half-day disappeared, as Henry puts it; for I did not “return” to the Brunswick till mid-morning of the next day, Monday, leaving the premises by a lesser exit only to re-enter by the main. From my newly-ranged room, I sent word to Irving’s suite that I was returned and well, and wished to explain my absence in person. Irving replied that he was glad of the news but could not see me at present. Neither could he refrain from scribbling at the end of his quite curt reply the prior night’s take; which, though scanty, showed his discipline favourably as compared to mine: the proverbial show had gone on. In truth, the larger part of Irving’s pique may be owing to his suspicions as to where I had disappeared to; which suspicions were not allayed when I told him, finally, of a maiden aunt resident on Staten Island to whom the favor of a visit is owed by any Stoker passing within these precincts. In the course of said visit, I had incurred the injury to my hand. So I said. So I lied.

  Henry was having none of it, of course; but there the matter lies. Let him suspect, let him stew. He cannot claim the All of Me. Were I to tell him the truth—the truth of my weakness and my worries, the truth of what I’d done to myself—he would only add it to his armory. Henry can be cruel like that, though of course now he says, oh so simply, that I was missed, that I was worried over once the storm came on and I could not be found.

  And indeed the storm did come on. Little did I suspect that Sunday morn that snow would soon fall to the height of my hip and that winds would drive it into drifts towering to twenty feet. Still, people tramp about with squares of carpet tied to their shoes, and fires yet burn in the tunnels cut through the drifts so as to do the melting work of a cloud-occluded sun. Quite a calamity it has been. Newspapers name more of the dead every day. Most of them are found frozen.30 Yes, Caine: I was lucky indeed, having set out from the Brunswick in the state of upset already described.

  So yes, I suppose I had disappeared, as
far as Henry knew: an occurrence unique in the long years of our acquaintance. He has never not known where to seek out his Stoker. But lest you sympathise with a worried Henry Irving, let me add that he was worried for himself as well: the Guv’nor is unfit to govern.

  Left to manage the Lyceum Company, his company, on his own—and on a day, no less, when all was in extremis owing to the storm—Henry Irving reverted to that discipline that has stood him in good stead for so long: He insisted that the Lyceum would play the Star that Sunday eve though all the other theatres had shuttered against the still-strengthening storm. He intimidated every member of the Lyceum Company, back-and forestage, into reaching the Star that night for an eight o/c curtain. All did. All save yours truly. And a triumphant Irving threw open the doors a mere twenty-five minutes late, cursing me all the while, to be sure; for, ever and always, at the Lyceum or elsewhere, it is I who open the theatre doors.

  Of course, I have had it from E.T. that the audience was scant and the orchestra more so: a few hardy types comprised the former, a harp & two violins the latter. Still, the show had gone on. Doubtless my absence played a part in Irving’s deciding to play: He would and could make do without me. As I suppose he did. Now he is armed all the more: He doesn’t need me. Yet still, in the Time since, I have been subjected to his Tests; and the details of the latter would be too menial to mention if I were not certain they’d amuse you.

  To-day’s first Test: I was to find a horse for Faust less “healthful seeming” than the one I hired Wednesday week. (“Swaybacked, Stoker! More mangy!” came Henry’s command.)

  And Test the second: I was to secure a bunch of roses for E.T. (as Margaret) to have at her side onstage—if a particular play does not allow for flowers, H.I. brings a bouquet to E.T. in her dressing room 1/2 hr. prior to performance, this w/out fail—though prop flowers would surely suffice for the play itself, let alone to-night’s dress rehearsal. Regardless, Henry wanted roses. And these, mind, I was to find in a city yet to thaw.