October 23, 2020 • 15 mins
Holly and Tracy talk about the work and life of Bram Stoker, including a brief talk about his mother. And then talk turns to Tracy's new interview with Kate Landdeck, and the glamour of Jackie Cochran.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. This week we talked
about Bram Stoker. Finally we did and thought we had
done it before, which we didn't. Before we did not, because,
(00:24):
let me tell you, I sure would have remembered that
Walt Whitman stuff. Yeah, it's pretty great. Is there like
a compilation of these letters? Like? Are the letters easy
to find and read? Because I'm fascinated. I found excerpts
of them printed in various books, and different authors have
used different ones, but I wanted to include. There was
(00:46):
literally part of me that was like, can I piece
together all of these letters? And maybe this episode is
just a staged reading of his strange letter and then
we'll do a top and a tale on it. But
that seemed weird. I love this idea. I want to
read a little bit of one so you understand how
sort of odd they were, because he did go on
(01:07):
and on about how amazing Walt Whitman was. But then
like at one point he includes the following passage, I
am six ft two inches high and twelve stone weight,
naked and used to be forty one or forty two
inches around the chest. I am ugly but strong and
determined and have a large bump over my eyebrows. I
have a heavy jaw and a big mouth and thick lips,
(01:30):
sensitive nostrils, a snub nose, and straight hair. This is
odd to include in a letter in my opinion, and
I here's the thing. I don't It's funny to me,
but I also don't want to make fun of it,
because there is an earnestness to it and an openness
that is kind of refreshing. It's very stream of consciousness.
(01:52):
It's just so arresting in tone to have someone's speak
of himself this way. It's very I don't, I don't know.
It's a strange thing, and it's it's one of those
things that a lot of people use as analysis when
they talk about whether or not they believe that he
(02:14):
was possibly a latent homosexual or not. That gets into
such a tricky area because I feel like I completely
understand the desire for representations and to identify people in
the l g B, t q I spectrum throughout history
to recognize that they have always been part of the
world and part of the things we talked about. And
(02:37):
but in the case of bram Stoker, I always feel
a little odd about it, only because I feel like
he didn't know what was going on with himself. So
it it always feels a little bit this is not
what it is. But in my heart, the thing that
makes me trepidacious about it is it almost feels like
when you label a child is like gifted or you
(02:59):
know what I mean, And then a kid doesn't have
any say, but that label gets put on them and
becomes part of their identity that they have to live
up to or or reckon with. And in bram Stoker's case,
it really does seem like he was not coping with
a lot of things going on subconscious. So there's also
a difference between interpreting someone's written body of work and
(03:22):
like having things they wrote about their own internal life. Right,
There's are two different things, yes, and people can definitely
read work and come to profoundly different conclusions then the
author intended than when they wrote something like that. Yeah,
(03:44):
So like that that's one of the ways that it
gets tricky when somebody's when somebody doesn't have like a
lot of introspection left behind for us to read well
and I think um. And that is to say, I
absolutely don't want to sund like I am denouncing anybody
who looks at Stoker's work with the critical lens of
(04:06):
if this is, you know, in some ways informed by
his sexual orientation being one way or the other, and
then kind of looking at the text and what that
could mean in that way. It's just the I I
always feel a little bit strange when people make declarative
statements and go, he was this, and I'm like, yeah,
(04:26):
he might have been, but even he didn't know. Ye well,
And also one of the things that's really important is
to like not assign people identities that they they did
not have access to in their own lives. Like that
gets really tricky. Oh yeah, it comes up on the
show all the time. Yeah, yeah, I don't know why
I had like this almost motherly thing with Bram Stoker
(04:46):
where I'm like, no, no, he didn't, he didn't know.
He's like this giant man. I'm the subject of Dracula.
I have a similar response to Dracula as I do
to the work of HP Lovecraft in general, which is
that I enjoy adaptations of the thing quite a lot,
(05:11):
and much more than I enjoy reading the thing directly.
And a big reason for that with Dracula specifically is
that bram Stoker would do this thing where he would
just have these extended passages that were like a common
person in quotation marks speaking in some kind of accented dialect. Oh,
(05:32):
he loves he loves to do it so much, and
for me personally, it is painful to try to read
it um like in some cases it's barely comprehensible. And
I remember I read Dracula. I might have actually read
it in two different classes in college, but for sure
one class in college, and I just remember slogging through
(05:53):
these passages that were like sort of how bram Stoker
thought this, like you know, uneducated doc worker talked, and
I was just like, I cannot deal with you why.
That is a valid But that's not a one for
one comparison to Lovecraft. But just the fact of like
(06:14):
enjoying adaptations more than enjoying reading the thing itself is
is still true. Now have you read any of the
supplemental work that his I believe it is his great
grand nephew Daker Stoker has written I don't think so. Um.
He has written some stuff in recent years that's like
a um uh, some sequel action and some other supplemental stuff.
(06:37):
The actual text of Dracula is also a whole other
thing that can be discussed in terms of its own
history and what got edited out versus got included again
versus you know, republished in a slightly different way. There
is um the original version, and I haven't done a
comparative analysis on any of this, but I was reading
(06:59):
something that talked about how in the original version, despite
Stoker having been so meticulous about these timetables, there are
timelines that don't add up and that may have been
an editor kind of being like no, no, no, but not.
And then in subsequent versions where it was um re
edited and perhaps some of that added back in, it
(07:19):
makes a little more sense on the timeline um. But
like I said, I haven't done a comparative on that,
but it's an interesting thing to consider. Um as well
as that whole madness with the Icelandic version, Powers of
(07:40):
Darkness is very enjoyable thing and great for this time
of year. So yes, Bram Stoker. The other thing I
wanted to mention that is interesting about him. That doesn't
get talked about a lot, and I didn't go very
far down this particular rabbit hole. Is that as he
and his siblings aged his mother Charlotte way ahead of
the suffrage move it kind of became a women's rights activist,
(08:04):
which is pretty interesting. The kids she had mostly like
homeschooled the kids up until they got to a certain point,
and was clearly really really interested in in making sure
that you know, they were not a super wealthy family.
They got by and they were fine, But even with
her daughter, she was like, education is more important than dowry,
(08:25):
Like I, this is what I value. Um. Yeah, she's
very interesting and I would love for somebody to do
a really deep dig in on her and and do
like a very lengthy annotated biography. I don't know that
it will ever happen. Maybe it exists and I just
never found it possible. That is our Bram Stoker discussion
(08:45):
for the week. Uh, and hopefully it was a fun
addition to the October Lord that we tend to cover
this week. We have an interview that I did with
Dr Catherine Sharp Landic which was so long in the works.
I alluded to this a little bit in the episode
UM way way back when she came onto the show
(09:05):
to talk about the Women Air Force Service Pilots, which
that is still in the archive. Um, we are not
bringing it back as a Saturday Classic this month because
this it's October, and I feel like we're just we're
doubling down on the October a little bit this year
for the most part, because I know for a lot
of people that's their favorite episodes of the year, not
(09:26):
just Holly. Definitely Holly's favorite episodes of the year, but
every October we get so many emails from people that
are like, I love the October episode so much that like,
we're we're focusing the Saturday's on Halloween e stuff too.
So you can definitely go find those Women Air Force
Service Pilots uh interviews in the archive. They are still there.
(09:47):
But Yeah, she had mentioned Jackie Cochrane shortly after that,
and I was really reluctant because I was just afraid
it was gonna cover too much territory that had already
been covered. And Number One, in the earlier episode that
Jackie Cochrane appears, and she's not in there for that long,
it's not that much about her at all. But then
number two, she was just such a character in so
(10:08):
many ways. Like I don't think this came up in
the interview, but there are accounts of you know, some
of the people who were flying with the Wasp, and
they would be at the airfield training and this car
would drive up and Jackie cochrane would step out of
it just looking so glamorous and like she was in
a uniform but still somehow looking so incredibly glamorous. I
(10:31):
don't know, I just I was captivated by her whole story.
With all of that, the listener mail that you read
in that episode about some sickness made me laugh and
I didn't want it to rail the episode. But we
haven't done in the last several years. But I used
to Every Father's Day, my dad and I would go
deep sea fishing. But I have talked about my dad before.
(10:53):
He's a very no nonsense man and his rule. I
have mercifully never gotten sea sick on one of those trips,
even though uh, thanks have gotten dicey for a lot
of people on board. But the thing that my dad
will always say is I don't care if you puke
a puke off the side, because if you puke in
the back, it gets churned up in the wake and
(11:14):
then um, it just makes me laugh so much thinking
about it. Yeah, I don't I've never been on a cruise,
so I want to go on one just to see
if I get seasick or not well. And we were
gonna but it got canceled because it. Um my grandfather
on my mom's side, Um, who is sadly no longer
(11:36):
with us, loved to deep sea fish so much, but
he also had such terrible seasickness that he would literally
set his line and then just lie there on the
deck until until he needed to do something to attend
to it. Yeah, you really can. I mean, I love
deep sea fishing. For me, it's kind of one of
the few times you will ever ever see me truly relax.
(12:00):
Oh really yeah, And it's just because one, I mean
I like being on the water. But two, when we go,
you know, it's a little charter boat and it's like
there's no internet, No one can email me or call me,
no no connection to anything, so all you can do
is just hang out. Yeah, and it's like my brain
(12:22):
just goes all right, I got no recourse. I may
as well just chill right out. So on the when
I have been on cruises, often the cruise ship you
can get an internet package. It's usually pretty expensive and
very very slow internet. And the first one that I
ever went on, I paid for an internet package to
be able to check in with work and that I
don't know what nothing I was doing was that important. Uh,
(12:46):
And it took me so long to connect any every
time I try to check in with work that I
was like, I wasted too much of this trip. So
it's like, I'm not going to do it that way anymore. Um.
And there were a couple of them where I really
did totally discon like there were people who knew how
to contact the ship in case of an actual emergency,
but I was not having any kind of email or
(13:09):
anything like that while I was there, and it was
really nice to just be like, people cannot get to
me right now, and I'm gonna not think about this
at all. Um. And then the most recent cruise that
I took was the opposite of that, because a pandemic
was declared in the middle of it, and uh it
(13:29):
I was like, well, I'm just gonna so much for relaxing. Yeah,
I had gotten a cell phone package from my my
cell phone provider. I had gotten a package for use
on the cruise ship so that our pet sitter could
update us every day, and I was like, well, I'm
going to use all of these minutes finding out what's
happening with this pandemic and being worried about whether we're
(13:50):
going to be able to disembark from this ship, which
we were indeed able to do anyway. We had we
talked about that whole story on that that whole earlier
episode where we talked about the fact that we're living
through a pandemic. Still. It's October. That was in March.
I'm only laughing because I don't know what else to do. Yeah, yeah, Um.
(14:15):
Folks who have emailed us recently have asked whether we
are still doing okay. We are still doing okay. Um.
You and I are both very fortunate to be able
to do our jobs from home and have minimal contact
with other people still, and like I have the double
fortunateness of having already been set up to do that
before we even had to because of the pandemic. So
(14:37):
we hope our listeners are doing as well as possible. Yes, indeed,
So if you would like to email us about a
certainty of their podcast were History podcast that I heart
radio dot com. We're all over social media admission History
which we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. You
can subscribe to our show on appum podcast and I
heart radio app and anywhere else get your podcast m
(15:04):
Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. This week we talked
about Bram Stoker. Finally we did and thought we had
done it before, which we didn't. Before we did not, because,
(00:24):
let me tell you, I sure would have remembered that
Walt Whitman stuff. Yeah, it's pretty great. Is there like
a compilation of these letters? Like? Are the letters easy
to find and read? Because I'm fascinated. I found excerpts
of them printed in various books, and different authors have
used different ones, but I wanted to include. There was
(00:46):
literally part of me that was like, can I piece
together all of these letters? And maybe this episode is
just a staged reading of his strange letter and then
we'll do a top and a tale on it. But
that seemed weird. I love this idea. I want to
read a little bit of one so you understand how
sort of odd they were, because he did go on
(01:07):
and on about how amazing Walt Whitman was. But then
like at one point he includes the following passage, I
am six ft two inches high and twelve stone weight,
naked and used to be forty one or forty two
inches around the chest. I am ugly but strong and
determined and have a large bump over my eyebrows. I
have a heavy jaw and a big mouth and thick lips,
(01:30):
sensitive nostrils, a snub nose, and straight hair. This is
odd to include in a letter in my opinion, and
I here's the thing. I don't It's funny to me,
but I also don't want to make fun of it,
because there is an earnestness to it and an openness
that is kind of refreshing. It's very stream of consciousness.
(01:52):
It's just so arresting in tone to have someone's speak
of himself this way. It's very I don't, I don't know.
It's a strange thing, and it's it's one of those
things that a lot of people use as analysis when
they talk about whether or not they believe that he
(02:14):
was possibly a latent homosexual or not. That gets into
such a tricky area because I feel like I completely
understand the desire for representations and to identify people in
the l g B, t q I spectrum throughout history
to recognize that they have always been part of the
world and part of the things we talked about. And
(02:37):
but in the case of bram Stoker, I always feel
a little odd about it, only because I feel like
he didn't know what was going on with himself. So
it it always feels a little bit this is not
what it is. But in my heart, the thing that
makes me trepidacious about it is it almost feels like
when you label a child is like gifted or you
(02:59):
know what I mean, And then a kid doesn't have
any say, but that label gets put on them and
becomes part of their identity that they have to live
up to or or reckon with. And in bram Stoker's case,
it really does seem like he was not coping with
a lot of things going on subconscious. So there's also
a difference between interpreting someone's written body of work and
(03:22):
like having things they wrote about their own internal life. Right,
There's are two different things, yes, and people can definitely
read work and come to profoundly different conclusions then the
author intended than when they wrote something like that. Yeah,
(03:44):
So like that that's one of the ways that it
gets tricky when somebody's when somebody doesn't have like a
lot of introspection left behind for us to read well
and I think um. And that is to say, I
absolutely don't want to sund like I am denouncing anybody
who looks at Stoker's work with the critical lens of
(04:06):
if this is, you know, in some ways informed by
his sexual orientation being one way or the other, and
then kind of looking at the text and what that
could mean in that way. It's just the I I
always feel a little bit strange when people make declarative
statements and go, he was this, and I'm like, yeah,
(04:26):
he might have been, but even he didn't know. Ye well,
And also one of the things that's really important is
to like not assign people identities that they they did
not have access to in their own lives. Like that
gets really tricky. Oh yeah, it comes up on the
show all the time. Yeah, yeah, I don't know why
I had like this almost motherly thing with Bram Stoker
(04:46):
where I'm like, no, no, he didn't, he didn't know.
He's like this giant man. I'm the subject of Dracula.
I have a similar response to Dracula as I do
to the work of HP Lovecraft in general, which is
that I enjoy adaptations of the thing quite a lot,
(05:11):
and much more than I enjoy reading the thing directly.
And a big reason for that with Dracula specifically is
that bram Stoker would do this thing where he would
just have these extended passages that were like a common
person in quotation marks speaking in some kind of accented dialect. Oh,
(05:32):
he loves he loves to do it so much, and
for me personally, it is painful to try to read
it um like in some cases it's barely comprehensible. And
I remember I read Dracula. I might have actually read
it in two different classes in college, but for sure
one class in college, and I just remember slogging through
(05:53):
these passages that were like sort of how bram Stoker
thought this, like you know, uneducated doc worker talked, and
I was just like, I cannot deal with you why.
That is a valid But that's not a one for
one comparison to Lovecraft. But just the fact of like
(06:14):
enjoying adaptations more than enjoying reading the thing itself is
is still true. Now have you read any of the
supplemental work that his I believe it is his great
grand nephew Daker Stoker has written I don't think so. Um.
He has written some stuff in recent years that's like
a um uh, some sequel action and some other supplemental stuff.
(06:37):
The actual text of Dracula is also a whole other
thing that can be discussed in terms of its own
history and what got edited out versus got included again
versus you know, republished in a slightly different way. There
is um the original version, and I haven't done a
comparative analysis on any of this, but I was reading
(06:59):
something that talked about how in the original version, despite
Stoker having been so meticulous about these timetables, there are
timelines that don't add up and that may have been
an editor kind of being like no, no, no, but not.
And then in subsequent versions where it was um re
edited and perhaps some of that added back in, it
(07:19):
makes a little more sense on the timeline um. But
like I said, I haven't done a comparative on that,
but it's an interesting thing to consider. Um as well
as that whole madness with the Icelandic version, Powers of
(07:40):
Darkness is very enjoyable thing and great for this time
of year. So yes, Bram Stoker. The other thing I
wanted to mention that is interesting about him. That doesn't
get talked about a lot, and I didn't go very
far down this particular rabbit hole. Is that as he
and his siblings aged his mother Charlotte way ahead of
the suffrage move it kind of became a women's rights activist,
(08:04):
which is pretty interesting. The kids she had mostly like
homeschooled the kids up until they got to a certain point,
and was clearly really really interested in in making sure
that you know, they were not a super wealthy family.
They got by and they were fine, But even with
her daughter, she was like, education is more important than dowry,
(08:25):
Like I, this is what I value. Um. Yeah, she's
very interesting and I would love for somebody to do
a really deep dig in on her and and do
like a very lengthy annotated biography. I don't know that
it will ever happen. Maybe it exists and I just
never found it possible. That is our Bram Stoker discussion
(08:45):
for the week. Uh, and hopefully it was a fun
addition to the October Lord that we tend to cover
this week. We have an interview that I did with
Dr Catherine Sharp Landic which was so long in the works.
I alluded to this a little bit in the episode
UM way way back when she came onto the show
(09:05):
to talk about the Women Air Force Service Pilots, which
that is still in the archive. Um, we are not
bringing it back as a Saturday Classic this month because
this it's October, and I feel like we're just we're
doubling down on the October a little bit this year
for the most part, because I know for a lot
of people that's their favorite episodes of the year, not
(09:26):
just Holly. Definitely Holly's favorite episodes of the year, but
every October we get so many emails from people that
are like, I love the October episode so much that like,
we're we're focusing the Saturday's on Halloween e stuff too.
So you can definitely go find those Women Air Force
Service Pilots uh interviews in the archive. They are still there.
(09:47):
But Yeah, she had mentioned Jackie Cochrane shortly after that,
and I was really reluctant because I was just afraid
it was gonna cover too much territory that had already
been covered. And Number One, in the earlier episode that
Jackie Cochrane appears, and she's not in there for that long,
it's not that much about her at all. But then
number two, she was just such a character in so
(10:08):
many ways. Like I don't think this came up in
the interview, but there are accounts of you know, some
of the people who were flying with the Wasp, and
they would be at the airfield training and this car
would drive up and Jackie cochrane would step out of
it just looking so glamorous and like she was in
a uniform but still somehow looking so incredibly glamorous. I
(10:31):
don't know, I just I was captivated by her whole story.
With all of that, the listener mail that you read
in that episode about some sickness made me laugh and
I didn't want it to rail the episode. But we
haven't done in the last several years. But I used
to Every Father's Day, my dad and I would go
deep sea fishing. But I have talked about my dad before.
(10:53):
He's a very no nonsense man and his rule. I
have mercifully never gotten sea sick on one of those trips,
even though uh, thanks have gotten dicey for a lot
of people on board. But the thing that my dad
will always say is I don't care if you puke
a puke off the side, because if you puke in
the back, it gets churned up in the wake and
(11:14):
then um, it just makes me laugh so much thinking
about it. Yeah, I don't I've never been on a cruise,
so I want to go on one just to see
if I get seasick or not well. And we were
gonna but it got canceled because it. Um my grandfather
on my mom's side, Um, who is sadly no longer
(11:36):
with us, loved to deep sea fish so much, but
he also had such terrible seasickness that he would literally
set his line and then just lie there on the
deck until until he needed to do something to attend
to it. Yeah, you really can. I mean, I love
deep sea fishing. For me, it's kind of one of
the few times you will ever ever see me truly relax.
(12:00):
Oh really yeah, And it's just because one, I mean
I like being on the water. But two, when we go,
you know, it's a little charter boat and it's like
there's no internet, No one can email me or call me,
no no connection to anything, so all you can do
is just hang out. Yeah, and it's like my brain
(12:22):
just goes all right, I got no recourse. I may
as well just chill right out. So on the when
I have been on cruises, often the cruise ship you
can get an internet package. It's usually pretty expensive and
very very slow internet. And the first one that I
ever went on, I paid for an internet package to
be able to check in with work and that I
don't know what nothing I was doing was that important. Uh,
(12:46):
And it took me so long to connect any every
time I try to check in with work that I
was like, I wasted too much of this trip. So
it's like, I'm not going to do it that way anymore. Um.
And there were a couple of them where I really
did totally discon like there were people who knew how
to contact the ship in case of an actual emergency,
but I was not having any kind of email or
(13:09):
anything like that while I was there, and it was
really nice to just be like, people cannot get to
me right now, and I'm gonna not think about this
at all. Um. And then the most recent cruise that
I took was the opposite of that, because a pandemic
was declared in the middle of it, and uh it
(13:29):
I was like, well, I'm just gonna so much for relaxing. Yeah,
I had gotten a cell phone package from my my
cell phone provider. I had gotten a package for use
on the cruise ship so that our pet sitter could
update us every day, and I was like, well, I'm
going to use all of these minutes finding out what's
happening with this pandemic and being worried about whether we're
(13:50):
going to be able to disembark from this ship, which
we were indeed able to do anyway. We had we
talked about that whole story on that that whole earlier
episode where we talked about the fact that we're living
through a pandemic. Still. It's October. That was in March.
I'm only laughing because I don't know what else to do. Yeah, yeah, Um.
(14:15):
Folks who have emailed us recently have asked whether we
are still doing okay. We are still doing okay. Um.
You and I are both very fortunate to be able
to do our jobs from home and have minimal contact
with other people still, and like I have the double
fortunateness of having already been set up to do that
before we even had to because of the pandemic. So
(14:37):
we hope our listeners are doing as well as possible. Yes, indeed,
So if you would like to email us about a
certainty of their podcast were History podcast that I heart
radio dot com. We're all over social media admission History
which we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. You
can subscribe to our show on appum podcast and I
heart radio app and anywhere else get your podcast m
(15:04):
Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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