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There is, to jump ahead a bit, a pleasant irony in this situation. Irving is considered the greatest English actor of the late 19th century. (Perhaps I should say greatest male actor. Ellen Terry, his longtime partner in drama, was equally acclaimed, but Irving dominated her too.) Few today would recognize Irving's name, but virtually every schoolboy knows (as we used to say when we could be reasonably sure that any schoolboy knew anything) that Bram Stoker is the author of Dracula. It virtually runs together: Bramstokersdracula.
That, of course, is now. Then is another story, and it's well told in this biography by Belford, a professor of journalism at Columbia University. It is basically the story of Stoker's struggling in the shadow and service of Irving, and of how that vain struggle is linked to the creation of Dracula, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year.
Stoker's life, while in outward aspects a mundane middle-class one, was most peculiar. He was born Abraham Stoker, the third of seven children of an Anglo-Irish family, in Clontarf, Ireland, in 1847. Yet it could fairly be said that his life really didn't begin until he first met Irving in 1876. And from then on it was never his own.
Stoker became Irving's manager, on the road (including several American tours) and in their home theater, London's famed Lyceum. Stoker took care of every little detail. And anything else Irving might ask, Stoker did that too.
This sycophancy, this slavish devotion to Irving, was so absolute that Stoker spent virtually all of his time in Irving's company. Stoker's wife, Florence, resented it fiercely. Their only child, Irving Noel Stoker, grew so bitter over the lost attention that he dropped his first name.
The reasons for his subservience are extremely complex, but the important thing is that most of them are inextricably caught up in the creation of his most famous novel. Stoker's life is the story of the creation of DraculaÑwhich is lucky for Belford, for otherwise his story would be as dull as accountancy. He wrote several other novels, none of them memorable (with the possible exception of The Lair of the White Worm), but, "he dumped the signposts of his life into a supernatural cauldron and called it Dracula."
The book is his most autobiographical novel, and he projected himself into all of its major characters. The night that Stoker met Irving, Belford says, he met Count Dracula. While others (including Terry) also succumbed to the actor's mesmeric powers, "Stoker indentured himself to Irving in the same way as Renfield [one of his fictional characters] bound himself to Dracula."
Far more was involved than Irving's commanding personality. For one thing, there was Stoker's personality, which was something less than commanding. For another, there was, well, sex-never overt, always hidden, but silently shouting its head off in Dracula, which Belford rightly calls "a veritable sexual lexicon of Victorian taboos (seduction, rape, gang rape, group sex, necrophilia, pedophilia, incest, adultery, oral sex, menstruation, venereal disease, and voyeurism)."
In other words, something for every unspoken Victorian taste, including homosexuality and homoeroticism-or the fear of them. Belford never suggests there is proof that anything physical took place in the many early-morning male-bonding sessions between Irving and Stoker, or when a bunch of the boys would whoop it up in a smoke-filled room in the back of the Lyceum. But sometimes a cigar is more than just a cigar.
Stoker's self-imposed subjugation did not end with the actor's death in 1905. Belford says he was never able to forge a life after Irving, and remained loyal to him until his own death seven years later. The novel that is so justly celebrated today made neither his reputation nor his fortune during his lifetime, though Florence lived long enough (until 1937) for its growing fame to earn her some money.
The life of Dracula, the Undead, goes on forever, as do so many "lives" in this Age of Biographical Bloat. Belford, however, manages to rein her subject in to the reasonable length of 334 pages of carefully thought-out text, a rare achievement for which she is to be commended.
Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Grafton, Wisconsin. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com
©1996, ProMotion, inc.