Who Is Dracula's Father?

by John Sutherland

  After months of hype, the picture had its lavish premiere at the Marble Hall of the Berlin Zoological Gardens on 4 March 1922. So lavish was the event that it is reckoned to have virtually ruined Prana-Film financially.

  The film was directed by a master of the silent film craft, F.W. Murnau, in German expressionist style. The film is imbued with the fluent pessimisms (and arrant secularism) of Schopenhauer, whom Murnau admired extravagantly. The narrative is relocated to early 19th-century Lubeck. Castle scenes were shot in Slovakia.

  Count Dracula becomes Graf Orlok. He is cat-clawed, longtoothed, bat-eared and extravagantly slovenly in dress. Tuxes are many planets away.

  Lucy and Van Helsing are removed (exit, dear old windshovel) without perceptible narrative loss. A number of hanging threads in the novel are tidied up for the tight economy of a 90-minute film. But there is no question that what we are watching on screen is anything but a faithful adaptation of Stoker’s story. It’s difference is that it is not ‘Englished’, as Hamilton Deane’s authorised version was, two years later.†

  Murnau’s vampire was played by the wonderfully named Max Schreck (German for ‘Max Terror’). The film is in the public domain nowadays and easily available on YouTube. A useful adjunct is Shadow of the Vampire (2000), whose plot investigates the complex relationship of Murnau (played by John Malkovich) and Schreck (played by Willem Dafoe).

  Nosferatu is an acknowledged masterpiece of silent film and a high point of Murnau’s achievement. Many of its scenic effects – the shadow on the stairs, for example – are iconic. Other stills are as eye-catching, and blood-curdling, as Munch’s ‘The Scream’.‡

  It was Nosferatu which pioneered – in contradiction to Stoker’s text, and traditional lore – the myth that vampires are mortally vulnerable to sunlight. In film versions the destruction by sunlight makes for a horrific climax. The 1958 Hammer film version could not get past the BBFC censor of the time, and had to be trimmed. I remember nonetheless shivering to the sight of Christopher Lee melting in Colchester’s Playhouse. I’m not sure I did not have to lie about my age to get into the cinema. I recall sitting through two showings, afternoon and evening.

  There was another bootleg film version of Stoker’s novel in 1922 called Dracula’s Death. No record of it remains, other than one ‘still’. It does not suggest posterity has suffered any great loss.

  Nosferatu was lucky not to suffer the same oblivion as Dracula’s Death, which would indeed have been a great loss. A month after the lavish Berlin launch, someone anonymously sent Florence Stoker a programme in which the self-incriminating words ‘freely adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ were printed.

  The 62-year-old Florence had not been aware of the film’s conception, production or release. She mustered all the institutional forces at her disposal to protect the property which provided her living. She sued in Germany on clear grounds of copyright infringement (the novel was protected by international copyright law for 28 years, except in the US). The case dragged on for three years, over which period Florence sanctioned the Hamilton Deane production of Dracula for the London stage. It was hugely successful.

  Prana-Film was bankrupted having embarked on a string of bad business decisions – not the least of which were the marketing campaign for its first film, and its legal defence. Not a single mark of damages was in prospect for the injured Stoker estate. Undeterred, Florence went on to demand all copies of the film be destroyed. A German court, in 1925, duly ordered every surviving copy be burned. It was an extraordinary sentence. One can see it as a harbinger of how the National Socialist authorities, under Goebbels, would deal with films which offended the Party.

  A single copy in France, legend has it, escaped the flames and made its way to the US in 1929 where Dracula was not protected by copyright law. As Mark Mancini records:

  Thus, the undead picture haunted Florence Stoker until the end of her days. Before she died in 1937, a handful of screenings took place – usually in the United States. Stoker relentlessly tracked down wayward copies of the movie and incinerated those that she got her hands on. But despite her best efforts, Nosferatu lived on in the form of pirated bootlegs.

  In 1984 a pristine uncut copy was discovered. It was relaunched, coloured, in Berlin, with great pomp and ceremony. It can currently be found on YouTube.

  * The editors of Dracula’s notes suggest it is a garbled version of nosophoros, Greek for ‘plague carrier’, or the Romanian necuratul, meaning ‘devil’.

  † I am indebted here and later in this entry to Mark Mancini, http://mentalfloss.com/article/84080/11-nightmarish-facts-about-nosferatu

  ‡ Munch did a striking picture of ‘The Vampire’ in 1902. The predator is female.

  Why does Dracula take risks?

  (Dr Freud explains)

  It makes for an interesting novel, of course, but the motivation is curious. Why, when he arrives ‘discreetly’ at Whitby, evading the major ports’ customs officials, does Dracula come in a vessel, all of whose crew he kills, including the captain, leaving the ship to wash up wrecked on Whitby sands, accompanied over the next few days by a stream of bloodless corpses? This is discreet? It is the biggest thing to happen in Whitby since the Vikings destroyed the Abbey.

  Did Dracula not foresee arrival amid mystery and watery holocaust might raise some public notice? At the very least a headline or two in the local Northumbrian press?

  When he buys up dozens of properties in London and a large estate in Purfleet, he does so under the name ‘Count De Ville’. He might as well call himself ‘His Satanic Majesty’.

  Renfield, his ‘servant’, knows that his ‘Master’ is a few thousand yards away. Dracula knows he knows. Who, in their right mind, would entrust their safety to a certified homicidal fly-eating maniac? Renfield does, of course, eventually, betray Dracula and his location. Judas Renfield.

  What a security-conscious Dracula would do is lie low, just making the occasional night excursion to keep the blood flowing. Then, in ten years, strike – like his ancestor, the Scourge of God. If he plays his cards right he will, like Attila, conquer the world.

  Tourism in London is never as easy for the foreigner as the advertisements promise. Attempting it with 50 pieces of baggage, each weighing several hundredweight of Romanian dirt (‘Anything to declare, sir?’) would, one would think, necessitate extreme caution. The fact is, Dracula is hugely vulnerable. As Van Helsing points out, all you have to do is put a wild rose on his coffin while he enjoys his daytime snooze, and he’s coffined for eternity. And a very nasty eternity it will be. Or, if roses are out of season, a blast from Quincey’s Winchester into the coffin will do the trick (if decapitation and the wooden stake seem too messy).

  Dracula can’t enter houses unless invited. It will be difficult to have any kind of social life in Britain with that restriction. Is the no-entry-unless-invited bar the same with railway compartments, public lavatories, the British Museum reading room? Dracula is simply not wired for London. He is asocial.

  Why, then, does Dracula imperil himself? He’s got a lot to lose by coming to England. Eternal life is top of the list of things he can lose. But risk himself he does. It is clearly a motivated and long-planned thing, not mere recklessness. But it is hard to put one’s finger on what his underlying motive and plan are. Van Helsing would, in his irritatingly know-all way, explain that Dracula is what he calls a ‘man-child’. He hasn’t grown up and realised the dangers every adult is wary of. He is cunning but stupid. An odd mixture.

  Dr Freud was practising in Vienna at the time of Dracula. He solved the rat-man enigma. Could he do the same for the bat-man? Let us imagine the sage’s analysis of the Count on his couch (I have foreborne writing it in the German the two of them would speak, apart from key terminology):

  The subject Dracula manifests, floridly, all the symptoms of the narcissist (Narzissmus) – despite the fact that he will never see his own imago (selbstild). Mirrors, reflective surfaces (such as water, burnished metal), paint
and canvas, the most modern camera technik, all throw back nothing. Leonardo could not picture him. He himself does not know what he looks like. This creates an acute identity crisis (Identitätskrise). That crisis forces him, irresistibly, to protestive assertiveness (Protestive Durchsetzbarkeit) even at the risk of self-destruction. Man sans imago is torment Lucifer himself might have reserved for the damned most deserving of psychic pain. Count Dracula will be in that pain for as long as he lives.

  What could be clearer?

  What do Stoker’s notes tell us?

  Who knows where and when Dracula was conceived? Possibly, some have speculated, after reading Carmilla, when Le Fanu’s novel came out in 1872. Possibly while watching, from the wings, Henry Irving shivering the audience’s timbers with his famed performance of Mephisto. Irving seems somewhere in the novel’s DNA; many critics have noted that. Perhaps Stoker’s first reading of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde planted another seed.

  The usual (highly dubious) explanation where Gothic fiction is concerned is a dream. Sure enough, Bram’s son, Noel Stoker, said that inspiration had come to his father ‘in a nightmarish dream after eating too much dressed crab’. All writers of horror stories should dine on it.

  The first layer of Stoker’s surviving notes were dashed down in early summer 1890. We know that because Stoker dated some of his earliest memoranda. They were scrawled in his notoriously illegible handwriting on whatever piece of paper came to hand. There were certainly many more jottings than have survived.

  Two things are established by the following first page of surviving memoranda: (1) that it was a novel of ideas, not a mere ‘shilling shocker’; and (2) that it could have developed from its starting point in interestingly different ways. This is what we find on the first page:

  Lawyer – Aaronson purchase

  [ditto] – (Sortes Virgilianae) conveyance of body

  [ditto] – purchase old house town

  Lawyer’s clerk – goes to Ge [sic] Styria

  Mad doctor – loves girl

  Mad patient – theory of perpetual life

  Philosophic historian

  Undertaker

  Undertaker’s man

  Girl – dies

  Lawyer’s shrewd sceptical sister

  Crank

  German professor of history

  Maid engaged undertaker’s man

  Silent man & dumb woman – Count’s servants

  London in power of Count some terrible fear – man knows secret

  Detective inspector

  It is clear from the outset Stoker foresaw major outlines – but not, at this primal stage, the vampire’s name. If the novel had a title in his mind it was probably ‘The Un-Dead’ or ‘The Dead Un-Dead’. Lawyer’s business opens the novel as it does in the published text – but Jonathan Harker and his employer, Mr Hawkins of Exeter, are not, like Aaronson, Jewish. And why Dracula should have chosen these countrified solicitors is never explained to the reader. Exeter does not figure in the action. It is not even one of the places Dracula deposits his 50 boxes of earth. Stoker may have held it in reserve as a possible bolthole for his villain-hero late in the action, and then never used it.

  ‘Sortes Virgilianae’ is a fortune-telling phrase. It denotes opening the works of Virgil to receive instruction or foresee the future (there are variations including other major works, e.g. the Iliad, the Bible). What Stoker means by it here is elusive.

  ‘Conveyance of the body’ is, recognisably, a main element in the story. Plausibly getting Dracula’s (in)human remains and his impedimenta from the Carpathian wilderness to Carfax Abbey without official frontier obstruction proves a narrative challenge.

  One notes that Stoker’s first intention was that Dracula should establish his HQ in an appropriately old London house. In the event it is rural Carfax, in Purfleet, Essex, with as many as 49 boxes of soil potentially distributed around inner London (is Dracula using multiple solicitors?). Carfax, a dilapidated country house with a ruined chapel attached, adjoins the thriving private lunatic asylum managed by John (‘Jack’) Seward. The asylum contains the Count’s ‘index’, Renfield, who throbs violently when his Master is in the vicinity: a kind of vampiric tuning fork.

  The ‘philosophic historian’ never made it into the novel – his part was swallowed up by the omniscient Van Helsing, a thinker of many more parts than mere philosophy. As he is only too willing to demonstrate. Continuously. The ‘crank’ and Harker’s sister also fall by the narrative wayside. But at this early stage Stoker was clear about the centrality of girls’ deaths to his novel. He wanted female readers, as well as male. He got them.

  In a flash, Stoker has also seen how the novel will begin: with a jump-start – a lawyer’s clerk en route to Transylvania. The crossed out ‘Ge’ records the intention – elaborated in later notes – for a long episode in Munich, with its ‘house of the dead’ (city mortuary), and complicated doings with a dead or undead body (see below, page 108, for more on this dropped sub-plot).

  ‘Styria’ indicated Stoker’s indebtedness to Le Fanu’s Carmilla, which is set there. Stoker changed the setting to make his debt less obvious. Styria was and is in Austria. It, and its capital Graz, was, in the 1890s, hooked into modern transport systems and European life. Had he stuck with Styria Stoker would have had to antedate his narrative, as did Le Fanu, to the early 19th century. Dracula, viz typewriters, telephones, voice recorders, and Kodak cameras, is very firmly set in the period in which Stoker was writing and publishing. 1893 is the putative date of Dracula’s great raid on England.

  It is not stated whether the ‘undertaker’ and his girl are in Munich or London; but deducibly it is the latter. In the novel as written Dracula has no servants – merely hired help. Servants would have been useful: particularly if deaf and dumb. But it might have been a touch too Gothic for London, 1893. One can hardly see how the post would be advertised. ‘Wanted: Two Entirely Useless House Servants.’

  One perceives in the last clutch of notes on this page the outline of a novel that never happened. Let us, fancifully, construct that novel from the fragments Stoker has left us.

  In London the newly arrived Dracula employs the services of an undertaker to move his body. The undertaker’s assistant’s fiancée is victimised by the Count. The Count’s servants divulge things. They are frightened. So is London. There have been a spate of killings in the capital – it is Jack the Ripper all over again. The police are called in, a crack Scotland Yard detective sets out to solve the case – hopefully brighter than Conan Doyle’s Inspector Lestrade.

  One should remember that the period Stoker was writing – 1890 to 1895 – was the high point of Sherlock mania. Detectives, amateur or professional, were the rage. Oddly, however, no policeman sets foot in Dracula. Why? Stoker, I suspect, made the honest analysis that it was not his métier. He had not the cleverness as a writer. Leave crime and detection to the much cleverer Conan Doyle. A writer should know his limitations.

  The first page of notes is scrappy, but it discloses a mind fizzing with ideas, carving the novel that became Dracula out of raw material. The insight into the author’s creative process is a privilege.

  How much German does Jonathan speak?

  In the first pages of the novel, the point is made that Jonathan has only a ‘smattering’ of the language at his command. The extent of this is vague. The uncertainty, though, fulfils a useful function, allowing as it does a variable level of comprehension/non-comprehension in the German exchanges.

  The matter of Jonathan’s linguistic ability – or lack thereof – was in fact in Stoker’s mind going back to his earliest thinking about ‘The Un-Dead’, the story which later became Dracula.

  He was, at its primeval stage, years before publication, mulling over versions of the novel with different plots (call them Ur-Draculas). Stoker never got round to drafting them in full. But he played with them in his head over a number of years.

  Stoker’s first surviving note (scrawled, one can guess, in March 1890)
is: ‘Aaronson purchase’. The Jewish lawyer, Abraham Aaronson, returns later in the unlovely depiction of the lawyer Emanuel Hildesheim. Stoker, via Mina’s journal, describes him as ‘a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep, and a fez’.*

  Following scant jottings we can put together a narrative line which never quite made it into printed existence. Dracula is negotiating – by mail, the notes record – for ‘purchase old house town’ [sic]. Something appropriately ancient in London. It appears, from a later note, the Count chose the property himself by stabbing a copy of the law directory, selecting from it the property where the point of his dagger lands.

  This unusual purchase method was dropped in the printed text. Dracula ends up buying not an ancient town house but a rural estate, with consecrated ground around its ruined church. It is located near Purfleet, Essex, and next to the private lunatic asylum in which Renfield is confined (sometimes in a straitjacket). Carfax’s features are strictly laid down by Dracula. He demands the ruined property should border a river. Since vampires have great difficulty with running water this may seem strange. As Van Helsing says, ‘The Count, even if he takes the form of a bat, cannot cross the running water of his own volition’. This oddity is not, I think, explained.

  In this primal layer of the novel, it is the Count himself, not the junior lawyer and his mysteriously unwell senior, Mr Hawkins, who locates the site from which he will launch his great attack on London – using, presumably, other of his properties as ‘safe houses’ in central London as the campaign requires. The Martian vampire attack fantasised by H.G. Wells and published in the same year as Dracula, 1897, will be nothing in comparison to what the vampire plans.