FANGS for the memories

ONE hundred and fifty years ago (on November 8th, 1847) Abraham Stoker was born at 15 Marino Crescent, Clontarf, Dublin, to middle class Protestant parents. He was the third of seven children, and was named after his father, a civil servant in Dublin Castle. Fifty years later (on May 26th, 1897), Dracula, his enduring masterpiece, was published. He had spent six years creating a book which is, in the words of one critic, not so much a classic novel as an unforgettable myth. It introduces us to the shape changing foreign predator who is both dead and alive, an embodiment of our worst fears who is capable of creating new armies for himself wherever he goes, but who is destroyed by a few ancient, simple rituals and a band of determined good guys.

Sadly, Stoker never received any significant recognition for what he had created during his lifetime (he wrote a total of 18 books, mostly on Gothic themes). In the fever of critical inquiry which Dracula has attracted since, interpretations have varied wildly. The idea of the novel as a straightforward allegory of the struggle between the forces of good and evil has been superseded by more complex theories. One critic has even claimed that the portrayal of the loathsome and promiscuous Dracula is actually Stoker's covert rendition of how the English establishment reviled Stoker's fellow Dubliner, Oscar Wilde, who was put on trial for sodomy two years before Dracula was published.

Freudians have had a field day. Maurice Richardson calls the novel a quite blatant demonstration of the Oedipal complex . . . a kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral anal sadistic all in all wrestling match." Feminists have yet another viewpoint: the novel is an attack on female sexuality as exhibited by the "voluptuous" female vampires ("both thrilling and repulsive") who pursue their male victims with insatiable appetites. What the novel meant to Stoker, we will never really know.

A sickly child, Stoker did not walk until he was seven, so he had plenty of leisure time to cultivate his imagination. Like Yeats, he loved listening to his mother telling him stories of Sligo, her birthplace. Charlotte Stoker's tales were of a particularly grisly nature, including her claim that she heard the banshee on the night of her mother's death; her memories of a premature burial during a cholera epidemic in 1837 and tales of how, during the Famine, people drank blood from the veins of cattle.

Significantly, there was a plot for burying suicides near the Stokers' house. As late as the 1850s, the bodies of these suicides "were staked to prevent their unhappy spirits from wandering", according to Stoker's most recent biographer, Barbara Belford. The practice, says A.N. Wilson in his introduction to the OUP edition of Dracula, was also widespread in England, where it was believed that a suicide would turn into a vampire unless a wooden stake was driven through the heart.

Intelligent and ambitious, Charlotte Stoker was determined to stretch her husband's modest income to its limits to send her five sons to Trinity. While he was an undergraduate there, Stoker's love of debating led him to become auditor of the Hist. He developed into a keen sportsman, winning awards for weight lifting and for five and seven mile walks.

He had an immense capacity for hero worship, notably for the American poet, Walt Whitman, and, later, for the English actor Henry Irving. Barbara Belford tells us: "Stoker was an instinctive fan, collecting idols in his youth like stones along the shore - it was a mark of continuing immaturity that lie never tempered the intensity of the emotional loyalties he felt for such men. He had a succession of ardent, if platonic, male friendships, enjoying what Kipling calls the austere love that springs up between men.

Stoker's father retired, and went with his wife and two daughters to live a rootless life on the Continent, eking out his small pension in a series of rented rooms. Left behind, Stoker followed in his father's footsteps as a civil servant in Dublin, where he published his first book, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, in 1878. His boredom with his job and his love of the theatre led him to audition for some small parts and to write unpaid theatre reviews for the Evening Mail. It was his perceptive review of Henry Irving's Hamlet at Dublin's Theatre Royal which led to Irving inviting Stoker to join him for dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel, where the two stayed up all night talking, smoking and drinking port.

STOKER subsequently accepted Irving's invitation to work as his theatre manager and secretary at the Lyceum Theatre in London (the post lasted for 27 years, until Irving's death). In 1878, just before he left for London, he married the beautiful but penniless Florence Balcombe (an early love of Oscar Wilde's) who had been his neighbour in Clontarf. They had one son, Noel.

The long hours he spent working as Irving's willing factotum meant that he saw little of his family. This regime of separate lives did not seem to bother Florence, who pursued her own social activities, but it did hurt Noel. Originally christened Irving Noel Thornley Stoker, Noel dropped his first name, saying he resented Irving for having monopolised his father.

In spite of Stoker's self effacing, unremarkable life, his authorship of Dracula has led to many theories about the "real" Stoker. "In biography and fiction," says Barbara Belford, "Stoker variously has been given a frigid wife, a penchant for prostitutes (particularly during their menstrual period), a sexually transmitted disease, and inherited insanity". In fact, notes Belford, "his reticence was monumental". He was "witty but sad, rigid but responsible, immature but loving"; "loyal, clever and incapable of intrigue". She concludes: "He took many secrets with him, but he left us Dracula, and an important message: unspeakable things can happen to ordinary people. And a warning: those who allow themselves to be subsumed by a master are intellectually diminished."

Belford believes that Irving, who was Stoker's reallife master, is an obvious model for Dracula, noting the physical similarities between the two, particularly their aquiline noses. She suggests that the "passionless" solicitor Jonathan Harker is Stoker's fictional alter ego, who finally achieves manhood when he cuts off Dracula's head. The implication is that Stoker never achieved the same freedom. He remained subject to Irving's "mesmeric control" even after Irving's death, when Stoker published his adoringly uncritical Personal Reminiscences of Hear Irving (1906).

Dennis McIntyre, director of the Bram Stoker Summer School in Clontarf, notes: "Irving slave worked Stoker. Stoker managed the Lyceum Theatre (which had 48 staff), entertained Irving's guests at the Beefsteak Club backstage, arranged tours to America, and even replied to Irving's fan mail." But Stoker was grateful to Irving, says McIntyre. "He was bored with life in Dublin. His real interest was in theatre, and he saw Irving as the king of actors. Irving offered him a new and exciting way of life. And at the Beefsteak Club, Stoker got to meet the likes of Gladstone, the British Prime Minister. That was a long way from his civil service job in Dublin"

Although it is clear that Stoker had loving feelings for Irving, there is no way of knowing whether they had a homosexual relationship. According to Dennis McIntyre: "Nowadays, we love to go for the naughty, but there is no foundation to the theory that Stoker and Irving were sexually involved." Indeed, Irving was for many years the lover of his co starring stage actress, Ellen Terry. Meanwhile Stoker exchanged charged letters with Walt Whitman, who was homosexual.

ACCORDING to Barbara Belford Stoker's homoerotic leanings are given expression in Dracula, particularly in the scene in Dracula's castle where the three female vampires come to sink their fangs into Harker's jugular, only to be stopped by Dracula's command: "This man belongs to me!"

Belford notes that the novel manages to describe, indirectly, many forms of sexual encounter which were taboo in Victorian times, including "group sex, rape, oral sex and paedophilia". She believes that Stoker identifies with all the characters in different ways, including Mina Harker (who is celebrated as having "a man's brain and a woman's heart"). This sense of Stoker's multiplicity of vision and sexuality is reinforced by a letter Stoker wrote to Walt Whitman when he was 24. "How sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman's eyes and a child's wishes to feel that he can speak so to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to his soul."

Stoker's other object of hero worship, Henry Irving, never rewarded his friend's years of hard work and devotion. One would imagine that the publication of Dracula presented Irving with an ideal opportunity: from Macbeth to Mephistopheles, Irving specialised in playing villains. But he turned down Stoker's suggestion that he take the lead role in a stage version of Dracula, and the play was never staged during Stoker's lifetime. It is unlikely that Irving ever even read the novel.