Call Me By Your Name

The main title of this episode, Call Me By Your Name, is taken from the text of a letter written to Whitman by one of Whitman’s admirers - none other than Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula.

Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!
O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,
Candid from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,
From wounds made to free you whence you were prison'd
From my face, from my forehead and lips,
From my breast, from within where I was conceal'd, press forth red drops, confession drops,
Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops…
Let them know your scarlet heat—let them glisten;
Saturate them with yourself, all ashamed and wet;
Glow upon all I have written, or shall write, bleeding drops;
Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops.

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Poe - my name is George Bartley, and this is episode 252 - Call Me By Your Name

The main title of this episode, Call Me By Your Name, is taken from the text of a letter written to Whitman by one of Whitman’s admirers - none other than Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula.

It has been said that Dracula has sold more copies than any book ever written with the exception of the King’s James Version of the Bible - tho how many people have read Dracula is questionable.

But before this podcast gets into the actual text of Dracula, I think it would be really helpful to look more at Bram Stocker and some of the circumstances surrounding the writing of Dracula. Doing this can really add to our understanding of how our culture has looked at Bram Stoker’s masterpiece.  And you might hear some ideas that challenge you, surprise you, and maybe even make you angry. Stay with me, and I’’ll show you what I mean.  And don’t worry - I will eventually get back to Walt Whitman.

First, I would like to go back to Bram Stoker’s childhood on the outskirts of Dublin, Ireland. His mother was an extremely active social reformer. Stoker was a very sickly child - we don’t exactly know why - but he was confined to his bed for much of his early life.  During that time, his mother entertained him with graphic Irish stories and legends, and that included grandiose supernatural tales and accounts of death and disease.  During his mother’s youth, much of the community suffered from cholera - remember in early episodes, I talked about cholera, as death from diarrhea.

Possibly some of those graphic stories served as a foundation for some of the graphic Gothic motifs that Stoker later used in his works.

He eventually recovered from his illnesses - no one really knows how - and apparently became quite athletic - especially in football, racing, and weightlifting.  He entered Trinity College, Dublin - one of his classmates was fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde - tho they never became very close.

Like his father, Bram Stoker worked with the Irish civil service. During this time, he also began writing short stories and theatre reviews - an activity that was to change his life. Although Bram Stoker gained a certain amount of fame as a writer when he was 24 years old, Stoker was still months away from publishing his first work.
 
But he had read some of the writings of Walt Whitman, and realized that he had found a literary idol.  In fact, when his schoolmates at Trinity College universally criticized Whitman, Bram Stoker praised his works.
 
Bram Stoker must have felt a real affinity for Whitman’s writings, because when Stoker was twenty four years old, he wrote a letter expressing his admiration and adoration to the American.  Stoker somehow felt that Whitman was a kindred spirit.
 
Now imagine - these are Victorian times when strangers just did not express their feelings to other strangers, and were very cautions and reserved in what they said - and here is young Bram Stoker expressing his inner self-doubts and adoration for a fellow artist.  He wrote about very personal and intense feelings in what amounted to a love letter to a complete stranger thousands of miles away.

And that stranger was another MAN!
 
 After he wrote it, Stoker realized that sending the letter might be highly inappropriate, and put the letter away in his desk.  But fours years later - on Valentine’s Day - of all days - he summoned up enough courage to send the letter with an explanatory note,
 
 For that explanatory note, Stoker wrote:
 
 My dear Mr. Whitman.
 
 I hope you will not consider this letter from an utter stranger a liberty. Four years ago I wrote the enclosed draft of a letter which I intended to copy out and send to you — it has lain in my desk since then. It speaks for itself and needs no comment. The four years which have elapsed have made me love your work fourfold, and I can truly say that I have ever spoken as your friend. You know what hostile criticism your work sometimes evokes here, and I wage a perpetual war with many friends on your behalf. But I am glad to say that I have been the means of making your work known to many who were scoffers at first. The years which have passed have not been uneventful to me, and I have felt and thought and suffered much in them, and I can truly say that from you I have had much pleasure and much consolation.  I write this openly because I feel that with you one must be open. Do not think me cheeky for writing this. I only hope we may sometime meet and I shall be able perhaps to say what I cannot write. I am sorry that you’re not strong. Many of us are hoping to see you in Ireland. We had arranged to have a meeting for you. I do not know if you like getting letters. If you do I shall only be too happy to send you news of how thought goes among the men I know. With truest wishes for your health and happiness believe.
 
 Your friend
 Bram Stoker.
 
 The original letter - remember Stoker had never met Walt Whitman before - was also included.
 
 If you are the man I take you to be you will like to get this letter. If you are not I don’t care whether you like it or not and only ask that you put it into the fire without reading any farther. But I believe you will like it. I don’t think there is a man living, even you who are above the prejudices of the class of small-minded men, who wouldn’t like to get a letter from a younger man, a stranger, across the world — a man living in an atmosphere prejudiced to the truths you sing and your manner of singing them. The idea that arises in my mind is whether there is a man living who would have the pluck to burn a letter in which he felt the smallest atom of interest without reading it. I believe you would and that you believe you would yourself. You can put this letter in the fire if you like — but if you do you will miss the pleasure of the next sentence which ought to be that you have conquered an unworthy impulse. A man who is certain of his own strength might try to encourage himself a piece of bravo, but a man who can write, as you have written, the most candid words that ever fell from the lips of a mortal man— can have no fear for his own strength. If you have gone this far you may read the letter and I feel in writing now that I am talking to you. If I were before your face I would like to shake hands with you, for I feel that I would like you. I would like to call YOU Comrade and to talk to you as men who are not poets do not often talk. I think that at first a man would be ashamed, for a man cannot in a moment break the habit of comparative reticence that has become second nature to him; but I know I would not long be ashamed to be natural before you. You are a true man, and I would like to be one myself, and so I would be towards you as a brother and as a pupil to his master. In this age no man becomes worthy of the name without an effort. You have shaken off the shackles and your wings are free. I have the shackles on my shoulders still — but I have no wings.   -   

Now what does Stoker mean by that - sounds like a closet cast to me.
 
 Stoker goes on to say -
 
 If you are going to read this letter any further I should tell you that I am not prepared to “give up all else” so far as words go. The only thing I am prepared to give up is prejudice, and before I knew you I had begun to throw overboard my cargo, but it is not all gone yet. I do not know how you will take this letter. I have not addressed you in any form as I hear that you dislike to a certain degree the conventional forms in letters. I am writing to you because you are different from other men. If you were the same as the mass I would not write at all. As it is I must either call you Walt Whitman or not call you at all — and I have chosen the latter course. - HUH not call you at all?
 
 I do not know whether it is unusual for you to get letters from utter strangers who have not even the claim of literary brotherhood to write you. I will only hope that sometime I may meet you face to face and perhaps shake hands with you. If I ever do it will be one of the greatest pleasures of my life …I have read your poems with my door locked late at night and I have read them on the seashore where I could look all round me and see no more sign of human life than the ships out at sea: and here I often found myself waking up with the book open before me. I love all poetry, and high generous thoughts make the tears rush to my eyes, but sometimes a word or a phrase of yours takes me away from the world around me and places me in an ideal land surrounded by realities more than any poem I ever read. Be assured of this Walt Whitman — that a man of less than half your own age, reared a conservative in a conservative country, and who has always heard your name cried down by the great mass of people who mention it, here felt his heart leap towards you across the Atlantic and his soul swelling at the words or rather the thoughts. It is vain for me to quote all instances of what thoughts of yours I like best — for I like them all and you must feel you are reading the true words of one who feels with you. You see, I have called you by your name.

WOOH - I have to stop there.  When I saw those words - I was reminded of the movie Call Me By Your Name.  I looked up the phrase call me by your name, and it means to want another person to the point of possession - or that two people or forces of energy have become so much a part of each other that the two are now one - the deepest kind of intimacy.

And from a religious standpoint - the earliest use of the phrase - I have called you by my name - is from Isaah in the Old Testament of the Bible -

Fear not, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name, you are mine.

Is Stoker somehow expressing a relationship or possible connection with Whitman that is more than physical life  - that is spiritual and will always protect him?

You know, today “Call me by your name” can mean wanting to have an intimate homosexual relationship or moment with another person of the same sex. . It has nothing to do with calling people by their names. Using the phrase to describe heterosexual relationships is incorrect.  Say, for example, if Bob Smith met another Bob Smith for the first time in a formal business situation, I doubt that it would be appropriate for one of the Bobs to say “If you forget my name, don’t worry.  Just call me by your name” - that is unless that Bob Smith has ulterior motives of the - shall we say - carnal kind.

Well, back to Stoker’s correspondence with Whitman -

I have been more candid with you — have said more about myself to you than I have said to anyone before. You will not be angry with me if you have read so far. You will not laugh at me for writing this to you. It was no small effort that I began to write and I feel reluctant to stop, but I must not tire you any more. If you would ever care to have more you can imagine, for you have a great heart, how much pleasure it would be to me to write more to you. How sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eye and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to his soul. I don’t think you will laugh, Walt Whitman, nor despise me, but at all events I thank you for all the love and sympathy you have given me in common with my kind.

Hmmm.

Now what does Stoker mean by “my kind?”  Could he be referring to MORE than artistic commonalities - those who disagree with the conventional standards of society?  - a kind of inner knowledge about himself that terrified Bram Stoker - remember Stoker was nearly 30 - an old bachelor by the standards of the time.   When he DID marry the next year, he married the beauty previously courted by Oscar Wilde.

Had Bram Stoker picked up on the homoerotic undertones of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and felt that his inner conflicts were being expressed.

Stoker received a response just three weeks later - which is saying a lot because this was 1876 - and mail had to cross the Atlantic Ocean by ship.

On March 6, Whitman wrote his young admirer:

BRAM STOKER, —
My dear young man, — Your letters have been most welcome to me — welcome to me as a Person and then as Author — I don’t know which most. You did so well to write to me so unconventionally, so fresh, so manly, and affectionately too. I, too, hope (though it is not probable) that we will some day personally meet each other. Meantime, I send my friendship and thanks.

At the time, Whitman had suffered a stroke, and was unsure about his health.

My physique is entirely shatter’d from paralysis and other ailments. But I am up and dress’d, and get out every day a little, live here quite lonesome, but hearty, and good spirits. — Write to me again.

But within a year, Whitman almost miraculously regained complete function of his body, and his poetry reached new heights. And Stoker continued writing, producing his masterpiece, Dracula.

Now according to Dracula expert Professor Elizabeth Miller, the main influence for the fictional character of Dracula was not the brutal Vlad the Impaler - as is frequently thought - but writer Walt Whitman.  According to Doctor Miller, Walt Whitman was the 19th century's most important author because he influenced important authors like Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. He was an author that was read not so much by the public, but by those great authors. Both Wilde and Stoker said he was the world's greatest writer.

And Barbara Belford has written that "Whitman's influence on Dracula was profound. Stoker wrote that, Whitman was "'father...to his soul,' In a way, this is really strange, because the vampire at times resembled Whitman. Both Whitman and the vampire during certain times had long white hair, a heavy mostache, and great height and strength.  (Walt Whitman was a really big guy.)

And later in his life, Stoker became more prominent in the world of the London stage, and during some tours actually met Walt Whitman.  Given Stoker’s hero worship of Whitman, literary scholars have looked for evidence of the poet’s influence on Dracula.  Quite a few critics spent the late 1980s and 1990s fixating on the novel’s morbid sensuality and what it suggested about homosexuality. It was on this issue that they frequently located Whitman’s emotional fingerprints. In an article by the title of about Whitman by the name of When Bram Met Walt by Meredith Henley and Barbara Belford written for the National Endowment for the Humanities, regard Whitman’s influence as “profound,” noting that the Count and Whitman even share common physical traits

Much of Whitman’s poetry celebrates the miracle of death and the deathlike quality of love - concepts that were central to much of Bram Stoker’s works.
So I’d like to conclude the main part of this episode with Walt Whitman’s poem - Tickle Drops - a poem which has been described as having everything from overtones of dripping blood to glistening semen.

Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!
O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,
Candid from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,
From wounds made to free you whence you were prison'd
From my face, from my forehead and lips,
From my breast, from within where I was conceal'd, press forth red drops, confession drops,
Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops…
Let them know your scarlet heat—let them glisten;
Saturate them with yourself, all ashamed and wet;
Glow upon all I have written, or shall write, bleeding drops;
Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops.

Join Celebrate Poe for Episode 253 - Defending the Sacredness of Love - This episode is taken from an address that was given at Walt Whitman’s funeral - and is incredibly moving.

Sources for this episode include The Vampire Book by Sally Regan, The Vampire in Legend, Fact, and Art by Basil Cooper, Dracula by Bram Stoker, and  the Complete Works of Walt Whitman.

Thank you for listening to Celebrate Poe.