Who Was Dracula? (19 page)

The Prince of Wales maneuvered behind the scenes to keep his son's name out of the case. Lord Somerset was warned of his imminent arrest and he fled the country. Henry Labouchère stood in the House of Commons and accused the prince's associates of tipping him off and urging him to flee.

Prince Eddy was never actually implicated in the case. For several months the sordid newspaper stories—and then the sudden newspaper silence—focused attention on the notorious London “rent boys,” the young male prostitutes who made money by accommodating their older customers and, thanks to the Labouchère Amendment, made even more money by blackmailing those customers.

The Cleveland Street scandal might have served as a mad, immoral postscript to Victorian history but instead seems to be the first domino to tip over, clattering against a row of precarious dominoes.

—

In the July 1889 issue of
Blackwood's
Magazine
, Oscar Wilde published his imaginative work of fiction, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” Wilde's work was often unexpected and impetuous, but here his timing was especially unfortunate. “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” sat on the same smoking-room ottomans and was read at the same breakfast tables as the Cleveland Street newspaper headlines.

“The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” is a dazzling high-wire fantasy inspired by a real literary mystery. Shakespeare's sonnets were dedicated to a mysterious “Mr. W.H.” That much is fact. In the eighteenth century, a writer named Thomas Tyrwhitt theorized that W.H. may have been a boy actor who appeared in Shakespeare's plays, Willie Hughes. Tyrwhitt believed he found the name “Hughes” punned within the sonnets. Otherwise the theory was complete conjecture.

Wilde wove the theory into a plot, together with Robbie Ross, a young friend who may have provided Wilde's first homosexual affair several years earlier. Wilde's finished tale ended up as a scandalous romance—not fact, but the sort of convincing storytelling at which he was adept. By conflating W.H. with the “fair youth” of the sonnets, Wilde constructed a wonderful homosexual fantasy of the Bard's love for a seventeen-year-old boy: “The master-mistress of Shakespeare's passion, the lord of his love to whom he was bound in vassalage, the delicate minion of pleasure, the rose of the whole world . . . the lovely boy whom it was sweet music to hear, and whose beauty was the very raiment of Shakespeare's heart, as it was the keynote of his dramatic power.”

In the story, Wilde's narrator professed not to “pry into the mystery of his sin [Willie's sin, that is], or the sin, if such it was, of the great poet who had so dearly loved him.” But the plot was ingeniously constructed in nested frames: The unnamed narrator tells the story of the modern (fictional) researcher Cyril and his friend Erskine; they have stumbled on the evidence of Shakespeare and Willie Hughes. Wilde is ingenious and relentless. As storytellers pledge themselves to Willie Hughes, each of these frames resolves with another revelation of homosexual desire—even from the narrator who has been telling us the story.

Oscar Wilde knew that it would shock. That was his intention. He predicted, “Our English homes will totter to their base when [Mr. W.H.] appears.” The story is literate and ingenious, but at its root Wilde had managed to cast England's great bard as a hopeless pederast—or, to be topical, the sort of man who might have visited Cleveland Street. “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” presented Wilde with “incalculable injury,” according to his friend, the author and editor Frank Harris. “It gave his enemies for the first time the very weapon they wanted, and they used it unscrupulously and untiringly with the fierce delight of hatred. Oscar seemed to revel in the storm of conflicting opinions which the paper called forth.”

Harris was the editor of the
Fortnightly Review
, and a friend of both Wilde and Labouchère. But Harris's publication had rejected the manuscript. Similarly, Wilde's friends, the politicians Arthur Balfour and H. H. Asquith (who both later served as prime minister) had listened to the story and discouraged his effort, pointing out the potential harm to his reputation. Wilde ignored them and submitted the article to
Blackwood's
,
where it was finally published.

Of course, Wilde's novel theory on Shakespeare must have caused a great deal of consternation within the walls of the Lyceum, where Shakespeare had been enshrined as a god: Henry Irving was the high priest, and Bram Stoker had been preoccupied with stoking the altar flames. If they were surprised by Wilde's recklessness, they were about to realize that there was nothing surprising about it.

—

Clyde Fitch was a twenty-three-year-old American playwright and poet. He had first met Oscar and Constance Wilde in 1888, during a vacation to England. He returned in the summer of 1889—at the time of Cleveland Street and “Mr. W. H.” Fitch was in London when Oscar was alone and Constance was away from Tite Street, spending that summer in the country with a friend.

Fitch was a small, handsome young man with a sweep of black hair and a waxed mustache. He was described by a good friend as “whimsical as a child, loving, loveable,” with “many of the more charming qualities that we used to call feminine, without being effeminate.” He bubbled with excitable energy, giggles, and nervous, impulsive gestures. He dressed in fussy, sartorially perfect clothing of distinctive bright colors. He was remarkably honest to his friends and schoolmates about his passions. He was certainly homosexual and almost certainly had a relationship with Oscar Wilde that summer.

Part of Oscar's seduction was now “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” When Fitch arrived, Wilde presented him with the issue of
Blackwood's
. Fitch found himself transfixed by the story. He wrote to Wilde: “‘I will just look at it,' I thought. But I could not leave it. I read, unconscious of the uncomfortability of my position and of the fact that one arm and two legs were asleep, fast. Oh, Oscar! The story is
great
—and—fine!
I
believe in Willie Hughes. I don't care if the whole thing is out of your amazing, beautiful brain. I don't care for the laughter, I only know I am convinced and I
will
, I
will
believe in Willie H.”

Fitch's letters to Wilde are pleading, flirtatious, desperate: “
Nobody
loves you as
I
do. When you are here I dream. I and the chiming clocks we have our secrets.” In another letter, he wrote, “Your love is the fragrance of a rose—the sky of a summer—the wing of an angel. The cymbal of a cherubim [
sic
]. You are always with me. . . . I have not seen you since time—it stopped when you left.”

Wilde was made uncomfortable by the heat of Fitch's attention. He seems to have deliberately avoided some of their scheduled assignations, which only generated more simmering correspondence from Fitch: “It is 3. And you are not coming. I've looked out of the window many, many times. . . . I have not slept. I have only dreamt, and thought. I don't know where I stand, nor why. . . . I will only wonder and love. Passionately yours, am I, Clyde.”

Fitch's enthusiasm was also manifested in his theater career. Fitch had been promoting himself as a playwright, and the previous year had brought selections from his new manuscript,
Frederick Lemaitre
, attempting to interest London producers. He sold himself by exaggerating his efforts and then stringing together associations, using names carelessly to get through the door—the typical salesman's trick. Fitch visited the acting couple William H. and Madge Kendal and began an association with Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Henry Irving. He was later invited to dinner with Irving. The problem for Wilde was Fitch's presence at parties or the offices of London producers. There, his enthusiastic, giddy discussion of Wilde would have raised eyebrows. Within the insular world of the theater, it was impossible to keep Oscar Wilde's latest infatuation a secret.

—

An example of Fitch's galumphing enthusiasm—his carelessness when he tried to impress—became a controversy just months later.

Clyde Fitch had been approached to serve as a playwright for Richard Mansfield. Mansfield, of course, was the impatient, argumentative American actor who had premiered
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
at the Lyceum in 1888 and generated suspicion in the Jack the Ripper case. Mansfield's friend, the newspaper critic William Winter, had suggested that Mansfield develop a play based on Beau Brummell. It was a clever idea, capitalizing on Mansfield's vanity and his ability to play pathos. Winter sketched out an outline, noting the settings and key scenes that should be included by Mansfield, but he was unable to devote time to writing the play.

Richard Mansfield didn't want to take on the task himself; many of his plays were produced with cowriters. Clyde Fitch was recommended to him, and Mansfield was impressed by the young, enthusiastic playwright. He gave Fitch Winter's outline and talked through his ideas for each scene. He generously promised Fitch a salary and royalties, as well as credit as playwright—this would be Fitch's first credit, an important step in his career.

Fitch wrote the show in the autumn of 1889, just after leaving Oscar Wilde and returning to New York. Correspondence shows that Mansfield was depending on Fitch's creativity, and he hurried him through the process, anxious for the new play.

When
Beau Brummell
was a hit in 1890, Fitch naturally claimed it as his own and began to exaggerate his part in its planning. Mansfield noted that Fitch “convinced himself that he was creator of
Beau Brummell
.” Mansfield, characteristically, took offense. Much like Fitch, he seemed to exaggerate the process to his own advantage, deciding (despite their contract) that he'd dictated almost all of the play and that Fitch had been little more than a stenographer.

Fitch's worst mistake was the indiscreet way he used the play to promote himself, reading it to Herbert Beerbohm Tree before it had been produced and even boasting that the project was something he'd developed for Henry Irving. This tight little knot of names—Fitch, Wilde, Mansfield, Irving, and Tree—demonstrated how gossip and controversy would spread through the theatrical community.

Today the dispute over
Beau Brummell
is impossible to settle. William Winter and Richard Mansfield decided that Fitch had not authored the play “except with his pen,” but this seems a ridiculous exaggeration. It was, no doubt, a collaboration. Fitch went on to prove himself as a talented playwright. He originated a number of successful American plays before his untimely death in 1909.

—

With the publication of “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” and then his affair with this flamboyant American playwright, it was obvious to Oscar Wilde's associates that he had abandoned any pretense about his sexuality. Wilde was incapable of the “reticence” that, Stoker would later write, was required of self-censorship. He'd dragged the scandalous behavior of Cleveland Street into the London theatrical world.

To a number of Oscar Wilde's supporters, like the Stokers, his offense was a personal insult: They had been lied to and their friendship misused. Bram Stoker's theatrical connections allowed him to realize the situation years before the rest of London society—five years before Wilde's indiscretions erupted into the famous court case.

Bram Stoker was probably feeling embarrassed by Wilde's indiscretions, and the reason was Florence. It would have been humiliating to see Wilde being dishonest with Constance, his wife—the whispers of his immorality behind her back. But it was a personal humiliation when the Stokers realized that Wilde had once wooed and promised, tempted and then pledged his soul to Florence during their engagement. He had almost betrayed Florence Balcombe.

—

The pestilence of Cleveland Street seemed to be tied to Oscar Wilde's behavior. It was the corrupting influence that polite society would not discuss: the perversion that was carelessly, lustfully passed from an old man to a young man.

And perhaps this was the inspiration behind one of Bram Stoker's most original inventions. In
Dracula
, he created the convention that a vampire's bloody, sexual bite begins the gradual process by which the victim will be forever corrupted, turning into another vampire. As Van Helsing explains, “It is out of the lore and experience of the ancients and of all those who have studied the powers of the Un-dead. . . . All that die from the preying of the Un-dead become themselves Un-dead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like the ripples from a stone thrown into the water.”

When Van Helsing first applies the rule to Lucy, the analogy is even clearer. “In a trance [Dracula could] best come to take more blood. In a trance she died, and in a trance she is Un-dead, too.” In other words, the vampire's victim dies while under a trance, which allows them to participate in immoral crimes.

This is not only the vampire as temptation but the vampire as a spreading moral pestilence. It's the danger of initiation, the intrigue, the seduction, and the trap: a widening threat of immoral sex.

It deepens the story and provides a lurking danger around every turn. The vampire's infection is what transforms
Dracula
from a supernatural murder mystery into a supernatural morality play. It threatens the good with things far worse than death; it inspires the hunters to find more than a solution. They must find redemption.

When Jonathan Harker sees Dracula in his coffin in Transylvania, he simultaneously sees the danger to society: “This was the being I was helping to transfer to London where . . . he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood and create a new and ever–widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless. The very thought drove me mad.”

Seven months after Cleveland Street, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” and Oscar Wilde's careless affair with Clyde Fitch, Bram Stoker began taking notes for his new novel,
Dracula
. In those earliest notes, the pestilence was already identified and may have been haunting his nightmares: “This man belongs to me. I want him.”