Interview with Tim Lucas

arton6652-1ce8dRenfield is maybe a minor character of Dracula, surely the most underestimated. Yet, since Murnau’s first cinematographic transposition, and after that in many subsequent adaptations, it takes a strategic importance. How do you explain this interest of the filmmakers about this character?

From a storytelling point of view, introducing a focus on Renfield is a way to maintain Dracula’s presence in the story (he possesses Renfield, Renfield spreads his “gospel”, you might say) while allowing Dracula himself to remain more powerfully off-screen. Renfield also offers filmmakers a way to depict more overtly horrific behavior than Dracula could be allowed to do without sacrificing some of his regality. In a sense, Renfield embodies the ugliness of vampirism while Dracula embodies the romance of it.

What you say is certainly true. However thinking of Murnau’s silent masterpiece I realize, just now, that this movie is quite an exception in the panorama of Dracula movies. In fact for the German director the vampire is an archetypal of evil and a sort of incarnation of the libido (which is always seen as monstrous by the bourgeois audience). At the same time Renfield becomes a sort of bridge conneting the civilized world with the land of phantasms, and when the vampire dies he is considered the only one to blame for the hundreds who died. So where Dracula cannot embody the romance of vampirism, Renfield becomes above all a sort of distorted mirror for the world around him. Paradoxically even if your novel has quite nothing to do with Murnau’s Nosferatu, it seems to have this in common with it: the fact that Renfield obliges us to see the context in which he lives and in which he is considered mad. This is only a potential in Stoker’s novel, but it is one the most intriguing themes of your book. Could you elaborate on how you drew the way in which the world around Renfield reflects in him and vice versa?

To be perfectly honest, the approach I took to writing the novel was only partly calculated, and the calculated aspects were introduced in the editing and rewrites. There is a fair amount of the book that was written virtually from my subconscious. There were days when I knew I had to produce a certain number of pages to remain on schedule, without any idea of what I was going to write. Some days when I hit a wall, I skipped ahead to the next chapter I could visualize and then filled in the middle area later.

What was conscious to me is that I wanted Renfield to be analogous to the Biblical descriptions of John the Baptist, a crazy-seeming, insect-eating prophet who was telling everyone around him of the coming of his Lord. (This is another reason why the 9/11 elements of the conclusion made sense to me, because the attack was motivated, or so we were told, by insane religious zealotry.) I also wanted Jack Seward to see in Renfield a baleful reflection of what would become of him, if deprived of Lucy’s love and presence. Otherwise, much of what I wrote into Renfield came from episodes of my own childhood — my father died of a congenital heart problem shortly before I was born, and my mother was mentally ill, so I had a concept of sanitorium life at a young age, and I was raised in foster homes where similar scenarios of solitude and fantasy life and physical abuse took place. There is a lot of me in Renfield.

In which way the different cinematographic versions of Renfield helped you in the definition of your book’s lead character? And which are the cinematographic versions of Stoker’s book form which you mostly drew inspiration?

Because my novel acts as a Siamese twin to Stoker’s DRACULA, feeding from it in a way, it was important for me to remain most true to Renfield as he was depicted in the original novel. Of all the Renfields you see in movies, the most faithful to the book’s version is not called Renfield at all — he’s a character called Ludwig who appears in Terence Fisher’s DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1965), played by Thorley Walters. He’s a pudgy, nervous, middle-aged, bookkeeper type of fellow who eats flies when nobody is looking. In the original English edition of THE BOOK OF RENFIELD, I acknowledged several actors who inspired me in my writing, including Dwight Frye, Klaus Kinski, Peter MacNichol (from Mel Brooks’ comedy DRACULA DEAD AND LOVING IT) and others. One I regret not mentioning is Pablo Alvarez Rubio, from the 1931 Spanish version of DRACULA; his is one of the very best portrayals, and he gets to play scenes that were cut from Dwight Frye’s performance in the American version.

In The Book of Renfield the body-soul binomial has a decisive importance. The fact that Renfield has to feed on animals creates a deep contrast with his animistic belief and he hates the idea that, to pursue his purpose, he has to betray the trust the little animals have in him. This is probably the most modern aspect of your book. While in Stoker blood is a metaphor of sex (which was not touched upon in the Victorian age), in The book of Renfield blood is a metaphor of the body’s perishability, and consequently is a representation of Death. How did you conceive this departure from Stoker’s original book?

I am a very empathetic person and often feel what some close friends of mine may be feeling though they are many miles away. I’ve always loved animals and feel a similar empathy with them; I’ve often thought that, if animals could write or share what they know of earthly experience with us, the history they would tell us would be too heartbreaking to read. THE BOOK OF RENFIELD is primarily the story of Renfield’s early life and how his childhood experiences molded him to become the ideal pawn of Count Dracula. Much of what happens to him seems a premonition of what is to come, and this is how I experience life myself. It seemed to me, in telling the story of Renfield’s lonely childhood, that if he was made to feel alone by being ostracized by other children, he would have sought and found solace among animals. So when he becomes the pawn of Dracula, who offers him a power above that of other people, it would be a greater betrayal of his own nature to be forced by Dracula to feed on the only creatures who had ever shown him kindness.

This leads us to talk about a strange and interesting difference between Dracula and Renfield when he becomes his pawn: the no sexual implications of Renfield’s path to immortality. At the end, what it is “bride” to Dracula is only “mother” to Renfield. Was this a conscious choice?

There is much about Dracula that appeals to Renfield — his cape reminds him of being enfolded by the cape of the Vicar as a child, the nighttime spectacle of the bats’ flight above the vicarage, and he also represents a rebellion against the disappointments of the Church. But it seemed to me that these things were not quite enough for Dracula to claim Renfield, body and soul. He had to give Renfield what he craved most from life, which was a mother’s love. I also believe (and have never seen this explored in other vampire fiction) that the act of vampirism itself is appealing to us as a metaphor for a return to the maternal breast — the drinking of a warm, rejuvenating fluid from another body. The metaphor is quite explicit in Stoker’s DRACULA in the scene where he uses his fingernail to slice his breast so that Mina may suck blood from it, which enslaves her. It also has a religious dimension. So I literally had Dracula metamorphose into a mother figure for Renfield — not only a mother figure, but a figure that is also part animal, because he is only able to feel the love of animals. In the scene where Milady (the female form of Dracula) first takes Renfield to her breast, I wrote it in the rapturous style of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in ULYSSES — one of the most erotic passages in literature — which I hope comes across in the Italian translation.

This vision of the body, of flesh and of body fluids in which, even if we talk of sperm, it is however dry, frees the narration of any sexual content and moves it to a different level, that of the dualism of mind and body. The fact that the madhouse and the close by ruined abbey are above all spaces of mind, brings to mind Cronenberg’s “Spider”, the fact that Renfield’s feces contain words taken from the Bible he ate recalls in some way “The naked lunch” in which words become flesh and excrements, while the fact that Renfield’s mouth is filled with blood and human milk recalls “Brood”. How many Cronenberg’s themes are in your book? And why?

These are my own themes, or an extrapolation of Stoker’s themes — the proximity of the abbey and the madhouse is the same as in DRACULA. But there is a Cronenberg connection.

When I discovered David Cronenberg’s work in the late 1970s, I took it very personally. The title of my first unpublished novel, which I wrote in 1975 at the age of 18, was called THE AUDIENCE BECOMES FLESH — which sounds very Cronenbergian, but Cronenberg’s first feature SHIVERS was being made at the same time. I met him in 1981 and we became friends; he was the first person I ever met who shared my intense interest in such disparate fields as horror movies and, for example, the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. In those days, it was highly unusual to meet anyone who simultaneously admired the work of Nabokov and someone like William S. Burroughs, because they were considered extremely different schools of writing. Meeting Cronenberg was like meeting a more worldly mirror image of myself and I frankly lost track of myself and my own ambitions for several years as a result of our meeting; in fact, I spent the next seven years writing pretty much only about Cronenberg’s films, for magazines all over the world.

I was the only journalist allowed to visit the set of VIDEODROME (I wrote a book about its making that was finally published here a couple of years ago, on its 25th anniversary), and I also visited the sets of THE DEAD ZONE and THE FLY. I have an interview tape on which you can hear me recommending to Cronenberg that he read J.G. Ballard’s CRASH — which he filmed about 15 years later. His NAKED LUNCH film also came about because of me. I was acquainted with Burroughs’ secretary, James Grauerholz, who became aware of my Cronenberg connection and asked me to inquire about his interest in directing a film of NAKED LUNCH, because Burroughs’ health was failing and he very much wanted to see a film of his work before he died. So I put them together and, because Cronenberg was then occupied with writing scripts for TOTAL RECALL (which he finally never made), I asked if he would mind if I tried my hand at writing a script for the film. I ended up writing the first two exploratory drafts of a NAKED LUNCH script, as a favor to Cronenberg. The script I wrote was too faithful to the novel to use, but it was I who conceived of the idea of interlacing episodes from the novel with episodes from Burroughs’ life, such as his accidental shooting of his wife. Cronenberg opted to write the shooting script himself, and so we parted ways. It was at this time that I began writing the comic book scripts that later culminated in my first novel, THROAT SPROCKETS, and when I began my magazine VIDEO WATCHDOG, which is now in its 21st year.

So I would argue that these elements were in me, and certainly in my creative work, before I discovered them in Cronenberg. Nevertheless, I accept that my exposure to his brilliant work helped me to articulate certain aspects of these themes to myself.

There is something that remains quite unrevealed at the end of your book and it is about the four faces of the vampire which are also the four faces of Carfax, and has something to do with the four evangelists. Where from did you draw this idea of the recurrent number four?

There are many reasons for this, some of which I realized only after completing the book. First of all, to give Dracula a sense of impending apocalyptic advantage, the vampire has four faces because God presents us with only three, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The Tarot deck, that guide to supernatural forces, is divided into four suits — as indeed our world and its makeup are divided into four elements, seasons and directions. One Tarot website describes the number Four as being “the archetectural basis of a powerful oracle.” But most of all, I wanted to show religion perverted through Renfield’s eyes — the subtitle of my novel in English is “A Gospel of Dracula” — so I wanted him to resonate numerically with the evangelists and with the other fours in the novel. If the theme is left unresolved, it is because I don’t think it is wise to explain everything in a novel. There is so much mystery in life that is never explained, some of which is genuinely mathematical.

From the aforementioned vision of death, we also infer a sense of a truly apocalyptic ending which seems to create a connection to the 11th semptember nightmare. Osama Bin Laden as a new version of the vampire? 

As I was writing the novel, I was unsure of how to end it and the 9/11 attack happened. A friend of mine, Richard Harland Smith, a writer and critic living in New York, wrote on an online message board that he and his girlfriend had been reading DRACULA aloud to each other prior to the attack and, as they continued in the wake of the attack (which had claimed the lives of at least one friend), they discovered that the moods of the characters in the novel were identical to the moods expressed by the people they were seeing on the streets of Manhattan in the days that followed. I asked Richard’s permission to include his text in my novel, and he granted it. Readers assume that he is just one more invented character, but what he wrote is absolutely true and taken from the pages of his real life as a 9/11 survivor. At the same time, I saw the US news media pointing all blame at this mythic demon of the desert, Bin Laden, and I saw another a parallel — one man, hiding by day, capable of masterminding this first step in the conquest of a great nation, which is what Dracula masterminds in the novel against England. And if that conquest had been successful, America would certainly have been the next step in his campaign. So this calamity was consistent with the notion of my novel, and I seized this opportunity to attack our contemporary tendency to befriend or incorporate things that were once considered forms of evil. So I drop references to things like Count Chocula breakfast cereal, and if I was writing the book today, I would include the TWILIGHT series, which I see as an unhealthy romanticizing of characters we would see as unhealthy if we were healthier as a society. Our sympathy for vampires and zombies in our entertainment today, I believe, is indicative of how we feel about ourselves.

Your book, in reality as well as in the fiction, was not published in time for Dracula’s centennial celebrations. How was it received by the purists of Stokers’ masterpiece? 

In fact, THE BOOK OF RENFIELD was first proposed to coincide with the DRACULA centennial… but my agent could find no publisher who had the slightest interest in doing anything to coincide with the DRACULA centennial! Ten years passed between the time I wrote the first 50 pages and outline of the novel and the time it was finally accepted for publication! When my agent finally found an interested editor, she asked me “Do you think you can still write it?” And of course I could, and I did — but I kept inventing and improving the book through my third pass of the galleys. My publisher told me they never permitted more than two passes, but I fought for one more pass and this is where the novel was most improved.

Unfortunately, the bound proofs that were sent to reviewers came from the second pass. My editor told me, “Don’t worry, if truth be told, a lot of reviewers don’t even read the whole book before they review it!” As it turned out, THE BOOK OF RENFIELD was not widely reviewed in America, and the few reviews that did appear were based on a weak early draft. It didn’t help the book to be published at the same time as Elizabeth Kostova’s THE HISTORIAN, another book about Dracula that was bought for $2,000,000 and was promoted to become the year’s #1 bestseller — how many books about Dracula are people going to want to read on the beach in one summer? The fact that I dared to introduce 9/11 as a plot point in something so “trivial” as a horror novel also offended some people who assumed that it had been my invention, when it was the true observation of someone whose life was touched simultaneously by Stoker and Bin Laden.

I am happy to say that THE BOOK OF RENFIELD got a much warmer, enthusiastic response from people who read the version I intended after the publication date. I received compliments about how well I had mimicked Stoker’s authorial voice, his writing style, while remaining true to my own vision. Someone pointed out to me that its composite structure, piecing together journal entries and phonograph cylinder transcriptions and reports, actually mirrored a jigsaw technique I had also employed in my first novel. Another person I met on a film set came up to me and said it was one of her favorite books, that it made her cry three different times.

I’m very proud of THE BOOK OF RENFIELD. I think it would make a wonderful film by someone like Guillermo del Toro (who loves icons and insects) orTim Burton. In fact, the final section of the novel — the Appendix, a conversation between Jack Seward and Lucy Westenra — is my favorite thing I’ve ever written. I wrote it one day when I knew I had to produce another chapter in order to meet my deadline, but I couldn’t move forward, so I decided to sit these two characters in a room and let them talk, without knowing where it would fit, or if it was merely an exercise. But I loved it and decided to include it as an Appendix, without telling the reader if it was something that really took place or if it was only imagined. Indeed, it might also be Jack’s attempt at writing fiction, which would cast a shadow of suspicion over the authenticity of everything that comes before!

Years after writing it, I realized that, in this chapter, I was writing to a woman from my own past, someone I had loved very much. After the book was published, we reunited and began corresponding after 36 years apart. It was only then that I realized, from our very particular kind of banter, that she was my Lucy and I was Jack. And the Appendix also turned out to be prophetic because my friend — now married, like me — revealed that she and her husband are in fact the Lord and Lady of a piece of British real estate. So when Jack calls her “Milady” at the end of the novel, he addresses her as I now sometimes address my friend. So the novel not only contains stories from my own childhood, but it seems to have known some things about my future, as well.

 

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