Nosferatu

By John Skow

THE ANNOTATED DRACULA by BRAM STOKER

With an introduction, notes and bibliography by LEONARD WOLF Art by SATTY

362 pages. Potter. $14.95.

Seventy-eight years have passed since Bram Stoker dredged him from the velvet underground of Victorian sexual repression. The authentic apocalypse of war, the real specter of deprivation, should have exorcised this titled vampire long ago. Instead, Count Dracula has become the Western world's most durable ghoul. There are Dracula dolls, songs, comic books and histories--proving the existence of a 15th century tyrant dubbed Dracul (dragon). Vampire movies have been made almost since the dawn of cinema and, according to Editor Leonard Wolf, there are now more than 200 Draculoid film titles, ranging from the silent Nosferatu to the ethnic exploitation flick Blackula.

Nevertheless, not many of the Count's constituents have ever bothered to read Stoker's epistolary novel. They are missing an authentic, if somewhat creaky treat. The story of the elegant old party, traveling from Transylvania to London in search of fresh plasma, was silly when it was written and is silly still.

"On the other hand," writes Editor Wolf, a professor of English who once taught a course on Dracula at San Francisco State University, "from its pages there rise images so dreamlike and yet so imperative that we experience them as ancient allegories. Everywhere one looks, there flicker the shadows of primordial struggles; the perpetual tension between the dark and the light; the wrestling match between Christ and Satan; and finally, the complex allegories of sex: sex in all its unimaginable innocence, or sex reeking with the full perfume of the swamp. And all these urgencies are seen or sensed through a hot wash of blood which, deny it though we will, fascinates us nearly to the point of shame."

Full perfume of the swamp, indeed. Whether a scholar who writes in so deep a shade of purple can even comprehend shame is uncertain. Yet Wolfs conclusion has some merit. Stoker, who was secretary to the actor Sir Henry Irving, shrewdly swotted Transylvanian geography and vampire lore at the British Museum reading room. His gleanings provided a European psychohistory before the term was coined, covering half-remembered terrors with gothic cobwebs. Stoker wrote several other romances of no particular power, but in Dracula he managed to create a classic, forever stalking his readers when their moral and rational defenses are down.

His corrupt aristocrat moves painfully by day. At night, of course, he is able to change from man to bat to wolf to fog. The human characters who have been hunting Dracula in the light now lie abed, weak with doubt, receptive to phantoms. A winged shape flutters at the casement--ludicrous as a plot device, but classically suggestive as an embodiment of dread.

Undone Bodice. In Dracula's castle, where the innocent solicitor's clerk Jonathan Harker has traveled to conclude a real estate deal, vampire women swirl in the air around his bed. "I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips," the victim confesses to his diary. The present decade is less giddy at the glimpse of an undone bodice than Stoker's 1890s. But it is no less susceptible to the small-hour fantods: as F. Scott Fitzgerald noted, in the dark night of the soul it is always 4 in the morning.

A great part of the pleasure of this singular Dracula edition lies in its lush design. Satty, a Rolling Stone illustrator, provides wicked amalgams of Gustave Dore and Krafft-Ebing. The text of Stoker's first edition has been photocopied, and Wolf adds his ineffable bits in the wide margins. He is an obsessed pedant, annotating everything but the page numbers. We are given the recipe for Paprika Hendel, a chicken dish eaten by Harker; we see how to ventilate a fevered brain with a trephining operation; we find that nosferatu is a Hungarian word meaning non-dead; we learn to make blood pills of cloves, resin, aloes and more occult items. It is all absurd, irrelevant--and diverting.

Best of all, we have the words of the immortal monster himself. At one point, Mina, Jonathan's young wife, recalls: "With a mocking smile, he placed one hand upon my shoulder and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying as he did so: 'First a little refreshment to reward my exertions. You may as well be quiet; it is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst!' I was bewildered, and, strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him."

Nor do the millions who have since succumbed to the Count's irresistible blandishments. He began as a villain, but eight decades later, happily, the fables are turned.

John Skow

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