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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
The resurfaced manuscript of Bram Stoker's legendary vampire novel reminds us that even a hack can create an immortal tale.
Apr 17, 2002 | Bram Stoker is famous for writing "Dracula" much as John the Baptist is celebrated for anticipating the coming of Jesus Christ. Each can be said to have held a role crucial, albeit peripheral, to the greater play of history.
There the resemblance ends. While John's revelation was reputedly divine, Stoker's inspiration came, as his son would later explain, "in a nightmarish dream after eating too much dressed crab." Following that gastrointestinally uncomfortable evening, the potboiler writer -- author of such forgettable titles as "The Shoulder of Shasta" and "The Watter's Mou'" -- would spend seven years pouring several millennia of vampire lore into arguably the most familiar fictional character of the 19th century, a figure who in the 20th would become the most frequently filmed as well.
There would never be another hit for the author after that. While Dracula is not Stoker in either appearance or character, Stoker is pretty much "Dracula" to his readers, and little else. And so the recent reemergence into public view of the original 1897 manuscript -- more than 100 years after the book was sent to the printer -- affords an unusual opportunity to meet the long-dead author. For many decades, the manuscript was presumed lost, thrown away by the publisher as you'd expect would happen with the work of a hack. (Is anybody out there actually archiving the Jackie Collins oeuvre?)
Just where the 530-page document was found remains a carefully guarded secret, but it is known to have passed from the hands of an unnamed Dickens scholar to somebody living in California, in whose hold it remained for four years before spending 18 more in the possession of another anonymous collector. Then, a couple of months ago, the elusive manuscript, all four black boxes of it, appeared in Rockefeller Plaza at the door of Christie's New York.
Even the one-time auctioneer of Princess Diana's dresses can be expected to notice the arrival of such an imposing artifact. A glossy color catalog has been prepared, and an estimate of $1 million to $1.5 million has been set on a sale scheduled for April 17. The expected price will likely put the manuscript again in the hands of an anonymous investor, another locked vault. Our acquaintance may be brief, yet at least long enough to ask: How did a man with less literary talent than the average linotype operator create a book that has never been out of print, and continues to surpass every work written in the genre it inspired?
The standard answer is that Stoker had more talent than generally he gave himself the time to use, that he wrote most of his books over a month's holiday from his job as acting manager of London's legendary Lyceum Theatre and that he sent his publisher first drafts he'd scarcely read over for punctuation and grammar. That would explain one reviewer's criticism that the work lacked "constructive art in the higher literary sense" -- except for the fact that the critic, writing for the respected Athenaeum, was referring to "Dracula" itself.
The reviewer was right. "Dracula" is at least as turgid as the procedural manual for law clerks Stoker wrote before turning to the novel. In fact, the only thing remarkable about the care he allegedly took to perfect his book is that his occasional revisions ruin even inadvertent poetry: Initially he wrote of "when the falling sunset threw into strange relief the phantom haunted clouds," which, he said, wound "ceaselessly like ghostly armies." By the time the manuscript reached the typesetter, the clouds had become just "ghost like," with references to their armies routed altogether.
