In 1972 historians Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally of Boston College published In Search of Dracula: A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends, a book that propelled them from the obscure world of academe to second careers as media stars. The book, researched via Fulbright grants in Romania, became an international best-seller and was reissued in 1994 with a cover design by Edward Gorey. The two authors—both together and separately —went on to write further books about Dracula and such other figures as Frankenstein’s monster and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but none had the success of the first Dracula book. The present volume returns to the Dracula theme as background for the “saga” of the Romanian family into which Florescu was born with its indirect ties to Vlad III, the fifteenth-century prince of Wallachia who was known as “the Impaler.” While Vlad’s cruelty was legendary, he only became a “vampire” in the classic horror novel Dracula published by Bram Stoker in 1897. Most Romanians, Radu Florescu included, did not associate Vlad with vampirism until they read the English novel.
In Search of Dracula, despite its popular success, was either ignored or disparaged by folklorists. The “legends” part of the research was randomly done without adequate sources or methodology. Bacil F. Kirtley, reviewing the book in the Journal of American Folklore (86:342, 400-401), described it as “not really a scholarly work … nor a candid one.” He characterized it as portraying fieldwork and library research in an overly dramatic style by scholars who “disdain footnotes and give no exact sources for much of their information.” Kirtley charged that the authors “blandly and without credit” had incorporated earlier research into their writing, including a 1956 article of his own that had already connected the fictional Dracula to Vlad via monastic chronicles and Slavic folklore that were easily found documented in published sources.
Dracula’s Bloodline trades on the success of Florescu and McNally’s best-seller, expanding on the long historical background of the Florescus leading up to the twentieth-century emergence of the “Dracula professor” and his life afterwards, sometimes being pursued by what he calls the “Dracula freaks” (229). McNally passed away in 2002; the Romanian born historian Matei Cazacu is listed as co-author, although the “voice” throughout this book is Florescu’s, and it is unclear which portions were researched or written by Cazacu. In any case, this “saga” of a very old Romanian family is fascinating material and would be so even without a connection to the notorious Vlad.
Of his method, Florescu writes, “I have positioned myself primarily as a historian of the family who tried here and there, to lighten the material for the reader by becoming a ‘memorialist’” (110). The historical material is indeed “heavy” and complex, with an abundance of different Vlads, Radus, Michaels, Marias, Alexandras, and Alexandrus moving in and out of the long and turbulent history of Romania. Radu Florescu (the author) whose father and one of his own sons, as well as a sixteenth-century ancestor, are also named Radu, does an admirable job keeping the cast of characters straight and sorting out their relationships. A genealogical chart helps, although it is printed in such small type with elaborate artistic embellishments and spread over two pages, that it requires a magnifying glass to consult it. The illustrations of many characters mentioned in the history also help to keep them straight.
Florescu’s “memorialist” side is where the “science of folklore” (vi) mentioned in the preface enters, in the form of family traditions which may, he admits, sometimes be “just plain wrong” (94). Many of these tidbits come from his father’s and his uncle George’s unpublished writings. Anecdotes from the author himself sometimes border on the silly, as when he mentions that a beautiful monastery he visited had no postcards for sale showing the site (54). The turning point in his life came when, at McNally’s urging, he finally read Bram Stoker’s Dracula at age 43 and saw the potential for a popular book.
Although Florescu received his PhD at Indiana University where he met Thomas Sebeok, and he also spent a time at the University of Texas where he socialized with J. Frank Dobie (misspelled as “Dobbie”), he never seemed to have received any advice, let alone formal training in folklore. As a result, neither the family anecdotes nor the legendary background of Vlad or of Romanian vampirism are explored through comparison of variant versions or other folkloristic techniques. Dracula’s Bloodline continues with shortcomings similar to those in the first Dracula book. Citation of historical materials is never done systematically. Instead there are simply references to sources, along the lines of “well described in Runcinam’s ‘The Fall of Constantinople’ 1965” (14) or “according to a German document” (29). This casual approach coupled with faulty memory can lead to real gaffes (for a historian), such as referring to Gibbon’s The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (39) which, of course, should be The History of the Decline and Fall . . . .
Actually, the chatty tone of the narrative makes it a pleasure to read, if only the manuscript had been more carefully vetted for errors! These mistakes range from simple misprints like “ocassion” (8), “occured” (15), “struct” (for “struck” 16), “loose” (for “lose” 169) etc., up to serious errors like misprinting the date of Ceausescu’s downfall (1989) as “1898” (116), or referring to Indiana University on the same page both correctly and as “University of Indiana” (173). There are many similar slips, including the incredible mistake of titling a chapter as referring to the seventh century when in fact it is about the seventeenth. (The date is correct in the table of contents, but wrong in the chapter title itself and in all the running heads.) After Florescu happened to meet jazzman Dizzy Gillespie while both were performing on a cruise ship, he recalled him as “the famous jazz saxophonist.” Who could forget that famous trumpet with the bent-up bell, unlike any other instrument in the world?
Much of this book may have been dictated, as it has an oral style, punctuated by such expressions—even when writing about the Middle Ages—as “Hobson’s Choice” (19), “out of a clear blue sky” (20), “paper tiger” (29), “presto chango” (96), “picked up the tab” (120), “surprise surprise” (205), and many others. Indeed, Florescu often writes things like “time to say a few words about” (79) and “in case the reader has been wondering” (130). Even if not dictated, the book has a random style shown in such details as declaring on one page that it is dedicated to two players in the modern stage of the saga, Senator Edward Kennedy and Johnny Carson (vii), but then mentioning twice that the book is dedicated to his uncle George (vi, 1). Actually, there is no formal dedication page at all.
It would be easy, but misleading, to go on listing many other such gaps and goofs in the book—well, maybe just one more. Having identified himself as “an old fashioned historian who resisted the computer age and relied on old fashion typewriters” (viii), and having declaring that “knowledge by way of Google is a dangerous thing” (246), what does Florescu do when he wants to define “backsheesh” but turn to the Internet. Hardly necessary, as the word appears in most dictionaries.
The misleading aspect of these criticisms is that, despite everything, the book is lively and engaging. The Dracula Professor has had a full and interesting life, bracketed by his colorful Romanian ancestors and by his successful children, some of whom returned to post-Communist Romania as entrepreneurs. Dracula’s Bloodline is a good read, even if one’s sensibilities sometimes recoil at sentences like “the price of oil virtually became gold” (114). The cliché he seems to be reaching for here is “black gold.” At least he didn’t say “literally.”
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[Review length: 1309 words • Review posted on January 29, 2014]