Dracula's Forgotten Brides

Withnail Books of Penrith have just announced the latest in their series of well-designed chapbooks devoted to literary rarities and other arcana. This time the booklet is devoted to a film theme. 

Dracula’s Forgotten Brides: Dorothy Tree, Geraldine Dvorak, CorneliaThaw is a celebration of three elusive characters in Tod Browning’s celebrated 1931 Universal Pictures film starring Bela Lugosi.

Adam Newell, the author of this original study, notes: ‘Their combined time on screen is barely more than a minute. They remain entirely silent. Their names do not appear in the credits. And yet, for any viewer of Tod Browning’s classic 1931 film it is impossible to deny the impact of Dorothy Tree, Geraldine Dvorak and Cornelia Thaw as the brides of Dracula.’

The study includes ‘rediscovered interview quotes, more than 60 rare photos and illustrations, and new research’ and reveals surprising aspects of the actresses’ lives and careers. 

The 40pp chapbook is in a limited edition of 250 copies, with a specially commissioned frontispiece by World Fantasy Award-winning artist Les Edwards. Each copy also comes with a signed and numbered print by Sharon Gosling.

The Centenary of 'The Counterplot' by Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlees is most known for her third novel, the fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which has its keen enthusiasts, and more recently she has been rediscovered as an early Modernist poet with her long poem Paris (1920). But her two earlier novels have not so far attracted the same attention.

These are Madeleine, One of Love’s Jansenists (1919) and The Counterplot, which was published one hundred years ago in February 1924. The latter is not in the least like Lud-in-the-Mist in setting or style and any enthusiasts of that coming to it with similar expectations might be somewhat baffled.

The author was 36 years old at the publication of the book, and she dedicated it to her tutor and companion, the much older Jane Harrison, the Cambridge classicist noted for her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and similar studies. There are allusions in the novel to the classical idea of contrasting Apollonian and Dionysian energies.

The dustwrapper to a June 1926 reprint I have says the book is ‘a study of the literary temperament. Teresa Lane, watching the slow movement of life manifesting itself in the changing inter-relations of her family, is teased by the complexity of the spectacle, and comes to realise that her mind will never know peace till, by transposing the problem into art, she has reduced it to its permanent essential factors.'

The Counterplot is set in a country house in Eastern England. Teresa Lane is the daughter of an English stockbroker father and Spanish mother. She has aesthetical and intellectual interests. Through her eyes, Mirrlees describes evocatively the setting, the garden, and the décor of the house, particularly noticing the effects of light and shadow. Teresa sees the house as like a toy ark with wooden figures inside.

The household is introduced. She has an older brother and younger sister, and helps look after a niece and nephew, children of another, deceased sister. An Old Nurse is also part of the family, and there is also a working nursemaid and other servants (barely mentioned). They are joined by various guests, mostly friends of her brother. There are the habits of this time and class: the men dress for dinner, have port together afterwards, play billiards, and talk about sport and high finance, while the women are decorative, encourage the shyer men, and have slightly more cultured conversation.

Yet there are also hints of the mystical. Teresa thinks that in the house at certain moments ‘the present and the past have become one’. A guest, David Monroe, a young business associate of Teresa’s father, talks about the war: most veterans, he avers, had ‘some queer sort of experience.' Then he adds, obscurely: ‘One sees the star’. He has become a Roman Catholic, and later decides to become a priest. But even bluff, sporty cousin Rory has an uncanny side, talking to Teresa about what scared him as a child: the clock striking midnight, or staring at his reflection in a mirror.

I was reminded to some extent of David Lindsay’s Sphinx (1923), published just a few months earlier. There is a similar social circle, with its formalities and courtship complications, the decorous, ‘proper’ life of the well-off, contrasted with hints of the otherworldly glimpsed alongside this shallow show. But whereas in Lindsay’s novel there is a specific supernatural device involved, a dream machine, Mirrlees presents instead the brief fragmentary memories and impressions of her characters. For example, Teresa recalls a moment when she looked back at the furniture of her rooms in Chelsea and saw the old worn objects transformed into pure planes and shapes, like, she thinks, a glimpse of the Beatific Vision.

Another comparison of the book might be with the highly mannered prose fantasias of Sacheverell Sitwell, celebrations of art, architecture and connoisseurship. It is not that the structure or content are similar, but there are parallels in the patrician tone and fierce, rather frosty sophistication.

The question, as with Lindsay’s Sphinx, is whether the book’s brief mystical glimpses are sufficient for the enthusiast of fantastic literature, who may find the moneyed country house milieu rather tiresome. This is, in part, the dilemma of her protagonist, Teresa, too. She finds her family, and their guests, have irksome mannerisms and moods. The men, she thinks, have no real interior life. Certainly, they have mere fancy, of what she thinks of as the Alice in Wonderland or Rider Haggard type, but they do not know how to ‘make myth’. Mirrlees clearly sees an important distinction here, but this is somewhat under-explored.

The literary work Teresa devises to express her feelings about her family is a pastiche of 14^th century Spanish religious pageants, set in Seville at the time of Pedro the Cruel. She uses it (says the dustwrapper) to ‘vent repressed irritation, to say things that she is too proud and civilised ever to have said in any other way.’ This play, ‘The Key’, becomes her main focus and in due course is given in its entirety, a bold move in a novel. 

Not all readers will share her heroine’s rather arcane interest in this era and its symbolism, and those not put off by the manners of the leisured class may now find another obstacle to sympathy. But what can certainly be said for The Counterplot is that it is highly original, a strange mix of the conventional and the baroque, and has numerous passages of descriptive finesse. 

(Mark Valentine)

The Flying Draper Centenary - A Guest Post by John Howard

 

 

Ronald Fraser (1888-1974) was a British soldier and civil servant who achieved a small and dedicated following through his more than twenty novels beginning with The Flying Draper, first published in February one hundred years ago. (His final novel, A Work of Imagination, appeared in the year of his death.)

The Flying Draper (1924) is narrated in retrospect by Sir Philip Wokingham, the fiancé and later husband of Lydia, free-spirited and unconventional daughter of the botanist Sir Thomas Holbrook. Sir Philip is the personification of a respectable establishment politician, and the relationship between him and Lydia might seem unlikely. However, their love is genuine and profound, surely meant to last. Throughout the novel, opposites abound and are kept in a lively tension.

Lydia first encounters the Flying Draper, Albert Codling, among his tanks of tropical fish and greenhouse ‘full of green light and ferns’ when she visits him in the company of her uncle, Codling’s vicar, the pompous and earth-bound Rev. Walter Arbuthnot. The two men are very different in outlook but show a guarded respect for each other’s beliefs. Arbuthnot symbolises conventional thinking; Codling, with his ability to enter states of detached reverie and self-hypnosis, putting his body under the control of his will and imagination, making Lydia think of him as one of the Rishi: ‘Mountain wizards. A sort of rarified human being that has resigned the world and attained immortality’ (38).  

Codling is able to levitate and propel himself through the air: he explains that the contemplation of the lives of his fish and plants sets his mind free for flight. Soon he is a local celebrity, and as his fame grows becomes an inspiration for the young, many of whom eagerly wish to become his ‘disciples’. But Codling is as much loathed as loved. The media stir-up disorder, and his past is subjected to scrutiny. Questions are asked in Parliament. The parallels with another charismatic figure are clear, although Fraser has no need to state them explicitly. Albert Codling is not destined to return to his shop or enter peaceful retirement; neither will he become a spiritual leader or mentor. Yet his failure and death leave their mark on those who knew him, and cherished him as much as were exasperated by him.

It is appropriate that the story begins and ends in April. Growth and renewal, freshness and openness, are recurring themes, expressed through a variety of symbols. Codling lives near Primrose Hill, in North London (which was also the setting of Fraser’s novel Rose Anstey [1930]). That high, breezy, open space overlooking the crowded city is the scene of Codling’s first public ‘miracle’ – and, months later, his lonely death while surrounded by a hostile crowd. Throughout, The Flying Draper is full of images of height, air, and light: elevated, and so better, thoughts can then abound. Transcendence can be within grasp – and it can slip away.

On the anniversary of Codling’s death Philip and Lydia return to Primrose Hill. The times they spent with the Flying Draper, the memories of his words and actions, have left them wiser, if not sadder but nevertheless more understanding of the reality of their lives together. ‘For we both know, now, of something that makes all life strange and beautiful. There is some secret, some experience . . . perhaps we shall find it’ (252).

A revised edition of The Flying Draper was published in 1931 (and was included in Cape’s Saint Giles Library, 1940), with an author’s note stating that he ‘has attempted to remove the crudities of the original version’. In his introduction to that edition Humbert Wolfe explained that ‘crudities is too harsh but is permissible in self-criticism . . . the book has been re-orchestrated and always with advantage’ (14). Wolfe had previously told us that The Flying Draper had ‘slipped quietly into the world,’ continuing: ‘But for the most part, in so far as the book was noticed at all, it was dismissed as a fantasy in the manner of Mr H.G. Wells, and an unsuccessful one at that. In fact no serious book of our time is less like the work of Mr Wells or more completely unaffected by him’ (7).

Even though Albert Codling was the owner of a thriving business and not a downtrodden draper’s apprentice or assistant, he was surely at least a small nod to both Wells himself and the sort of characters who populate his earlier novels. Despite his powers Codling is also still something of a suburban ‘little man’ – another Mr Hoopdriver or Mr Lewisham who desperately wants to think better thoughts and radically break out into a new life. In the end Albert Codling, the Flying Draper, may fail to do so – or does he? Whether The Flying Draper is a Wellsian novel or not, it is certainly a fully Fraserian one.

(John Howard)