Adventure classics -- Is there healing in the blood?

Interview with the Vampire

by Anne Rice

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What a long strange trip Anne Rice has had. From the novel that put vampires back on the literary map after a long hiatus, through witches, erotica, Christian fiction, and werewolves. Now the undead live again, with the release this week of Rice’s Prince Lestat. And to think it all started with the story of that veritable gay married couple Louis and Lestat, in 1976’s Interview with the Vampire, written while Rice was mourning the death of her young daughter.

Decades after its appearance, Interview seems prescient. After a long life together, Louis and Lestat seem for all the world like an old married couple. They love, they squabble, they have a child of sorts, they separate, they even try, not very successfully, to kill each other. They can’t get along, but they can’t get along without each other.

I resisted the lure of Rice’s vampires for decades. What kind of repression insists on bloodletting as a metaphor for sex? The notion of a child as vampire seemed like an especially creepy form of kiddie porn. And the limited diet? No way I could sympathize with the renunciation of chocolate, even to secure immortality.

Finally, I told myself it was my duty to the readers of this blog to delve into Interview. I finished it on a suitably dark and stormy night. A freak storm had cut electrical power to my Dallas neighborhood, setting the scene for the physical darkness of the year 1791 when Louis, in despairing guilt over his brother’s suicide, meets the vampire Lestat in a dark alley.

(I’m following the story as stated in the novel, rather than in the 1994 movie version which provides the illustration for this post.)

Although Lestat drains Louis nearly to death, he stops short of physical death, changing Louis into a vampire instead, for the mundane purpose of bleeding Louis of his money. But many great love affairs have had equally prosaic beginnings.

And although Rice’s late twentieth century writing seems as full of coded homoeroticism as the previous century’s Picture of Dorian Gray discussed last Wednesday, the 1970’s were still early days for gay pride. Rice is careful to state explicitly that love between vampires can never be physical. The only physical sensuality of a vampire’s life must lie in killing.

It would take the decade of the 1980’s, with its plague of AIDS, to open more frank conversations about connections between sex and blood and death. And to turn Rice’s book from a cult classic to a media phenomenon. After languishing for years, her vampires roared back with the sequel to Interview, The Vampire Lestat. The resulting Vampire Chronicles series now numbers eleven novels.

Learning as I did that Rice modeled child vampire Claudia after her dead daughter Michele helped make the passages more palatable. Claudia in the book is only five, a good bit younger than her postulated age in the movie. She’s also the same age as Michele when she died of leukemia, significantly, a disease of the blood, shortly before Rice wrote Interview.

Did working through the effects of being eternally frozen in young childhood convince Rice that prolonging earthly life isn’t always the best solution? Maybe I should address that question to her Facebook page, where she’s written candidly about many aspects of her life.

For more about Rice and her writing (including the progress of the latest vampire incarnation), see her on Facebook or at
www.annerice.com/.

(Next Wednesday Adventure classics begins a November of fantasy with Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “The Aleph.”)

Adventure classics -- The monster outside, the monster inside

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

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Monsters are real ¼ they live inside us, and sometimes, they win.¾ Stephen King

Who doesn’t know the story of the good Dr. Jekyll and the bad Mr. Hyde? It’s become such a taken for granted part of our culture since its publication in 1886 that I was startled when I actually read it recently. Why did Robert Louis Stevenson entrust the narration of this strange tale to such a dry, dour, but strangely loveable narrator as the lawyer, Mr. Utterson?

Was the character Utterson retaliation for the legal career Stevenson had undertaken (but never practiced) to please his father? Was he the staid, just the facts, sir, narrator chosen to given some semblance of verisimilitude to Stevenson’s bizarre story of the repressed doctor driven to free himself from what he feels to be his baser instincts by inventing another character to carry his moral load?

Although Stevenson is reputed to have written the book in a burst of feverish activity (literally feverish¾ he was confined to bed at the time from a serious illness) the idea of the story was not a new one. “I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at ties come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature,” Stevenson would explain.

At first glance, the tale appears to be a relatively simple morality fable. Dr. Henry Jekyll, “a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness” is known for his kindness and philanthropy. Unknown even to his dearest friends, he harbors a dark secret. In his chemical experiments, he has found a way to free this public side of his nature from the constraints of its baser instincts. (Or is it that he has learned to free his more instinctual side from his reasoning side?) In doing so, he creates a younger, stronger, “freer” version of himself, Edward Hyde.

But the more Jekyll yields to the desire to be Hyde, the more dominant Hyde becomes. At last, Jekyll finds himself trapped permanently in Hyde’s body, which after all, is his own. Jekyll has met his monster, and he is him.

Preachers on both sides of the Atlantic seized on the story of Dr. Jekyll for its apparent illustration of the dangers of yielding to wicked impulses. But wicked though Hyde is, it’s obvious that he’s the one having fun. Poor Dr. Jekyll remains to the end the sexless member of this pact terrified of joy, who only truly lives through the deeds of his alter ego, Hyde.

Despite the enthusiastic sermons, there were readers even in the dim Victorian era who saw the tale as a story of sexual repression, an aspect emphasized even more in the movie versions a few decades later, such as the 1920 film whose poster illustrates this post.

Stevenson at first protested such readings, writing to the New York Sun that Hyde was not “a mere voluptuary ¼ but people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, that they can think of nothing but sexuality.”

Privately, Stevenson, like Jekyll, told a different story. His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, reported that Stevenson railed about the conventions that kept English writers, in contrast to their French counterparts “muzzled like dogs ¼ What books Dickens could have written had he been permitted! Think of Thackeray as unfettered as Flaubert or Balzac! What books I might have written myself!”

(Is it possible Stevenson took notice of what this unfettering would entail when, four years after his story, a writer dared to speak more openly about the many-spangled world of sexuality? I’m referring, of course, to Oscar Wilde, whose own story of duality and its consequences, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is the focus of next Wednesday’s post in an October of Halloween horror.)