National Post (National Edition)
New novel imagines inner life of Bram Stoker
Back in 2009, Michael Holroyd brought out A Strange Eventful History, a double biography of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the greatest actor and actress of late Victorian England.
A little later, in 2016, David J. Skal produced Something in the Blood, a life of Bram Stoker, who we remember for Dracula but who earned his living as general manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre.
Skal speculated that Stoker partly modelled the Count after his boss, the volatile owner of the Lyceum, none other than Henry Irving.
As Joseph O’Connor acknowledges, these two books provide much of the background for Shadowplay, a gorgeously written historical novel about Stoker’s inner life, his never-quite-expressed love for Irving and Terry, and the gradual creation of Dracula.
In its plot Shadowplay chronicles Stoker’s lifelong loneliness, his suppressed desires, his feisty wife Florence’s recognition that Irving is her “rival.” O’Connor intersperses details that might as well bear an asterisk and the note: “See Dracula.” These include a police constable’s sharp white incisors, a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt sleeping in her coffin, actors using garlic to fend off sore throats, a visit to a madhouse where an inmate eats flies. Many fans of Dracula will doubtless be surprised the Count once wrote to Stoker, complaining about the way he was portrayed: “As the embodiment of evil blood lust, I do understand that the challenges of capturing me on the page are not inconsiderable. But ought you to have stressed the negative?
“I will have you know, sir, that being a vampire is not easy. The hours are unsociable. The clothes are old-fashioned. Opportunities to meet girls are limited.”
The actual author of this comic letter is Stoker’s friend Ellen Terry, who almost alone believes in his genius. She is also kind, no-nonsense and irresistible, stealing every scene she’s in: “You see, acting is not a matter of pretending to be someone else but of finding the other person in oneself and then putting her on view. It’s nothing mystifying ... it’s being. I learned it when I was a little girl myself, my father ran a travelling pantomime. He never told me, ‘Pretend to be a fairy.’ He’d say, “Today you’re a fairy, Len. Fly.”
Terry ends saying, “I don’t like seeing the acting, I like seeing the fairies fly.”
O’Connor’s magnificent novel does more than fly, it soars.