ALTHOUGH Abraham ("Bram") Stoker wrote many novels, some of which have been ineptly filmed, he seems condemned to be known forever only as the man who wrote Dracula. In a well-researched, lively and generally attractive book, Barbara Belford tries to rescue him from this literary anathema into which he has been cast. Alas, all in vain. The only really significant thing Stoker ever did was to write this classic vampire tale. In the end Belford virtually concedes this but, as well as providing formidable readings of the work that sustained Hammer Films for a generation, she provides many incidental pleasures.
Belford is extremely well-read in both the primary and secondary literature of the Victorian fin de siecle, and it is her scholarship, lightly worn, which lifts her book a dimension. She provides a very convincing Freudian reading of Dracula, argues most persuasively for the influence on it of Macbeth, and ably links the work with the vogue in the 1890s for the occult, spiritualism, psychic research, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. She emphasises the Irishness of Stoker and the Irish roots of so many of his motifs, ideas and archetypes: Dion Boucicault dabbled in this field, while Le Fanu's Carmilla is the first proper tale of vampirism.
The Stoker family had close connections with the Wildes, and Oscar was at one time a rival for the hand of Florence Balcombe, who married Stoker. The marriage was unhappy, to say the least, with Florence hysterical if faced with any obstacle in the physical world, such as a North Atlantic storm, and refusing to have sexual relations with Bram after the birth-of their only child. Stoker's earlier biographer, Daniel Farson, argued that Stoker died at 65 after contracting syphilis from the prostitutes with whom he was forced to consort when his wife imposed her lifelong embargo on sexual intercourse. Belford contests this thesis, but her rebuttal of Farson is one of the least convincing things in the book.
The problem about a life of Stoker is that he did so little, apart from managing the Lyceum Theatre for twenty years during Henry Irving's heyday. The consequence is that the book sometimes reads more like a life of Irving than of Stoker; at one point, Stoker disappears altogether while we are treated to a detailed four-page exposition of the Irving-GBS feud. Just as in Flann O'Brien's work the cod scholarship in the footnotes threatens to overwhelm the main text altogether, so in this biography the life of Irving threatens to engulf that of the author's ostensible subject. But it is true that Stoker was obsessed by Irving and he may even unconsciously have opted for an unsatisfactory wife named Florence simply because Irving married a Florence - also, ironically, a disastrous decision.
It would be foolish to deny that there is much to enjoy in this volume. There are good lightning sketches of the Wilde family, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, W.S. Gilbert, Sir Frank Benson and many others. I was intrigued to learn that Stoker worked the physical characteristics of the explorers Sir Richard Burton and Sir H.M. Stanley into the description of Dracula, and that Stoker never bothered to visit Romania or Transylvania. Maybe the praise for Stoker as a champion of bisexuality and emancipated women is pushing things a bit, but Belford is usually judicious and balanced and has undoubtedly written the best biography of Stoker to date.