Nosferatu

A Novel

Jim Shepard

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781504026666
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A New York Times Notable Book: The richly imagined fictional life of one of cinema's founding fathers from National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard In 1907, while waiting for a train that would take him from his quiet rural hometown to university in cosmopolitan Berlin, Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe met Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, the great passion of his life. Hans was the catalyst for Plumpe's transformation into F. W. Murnau, the filmmaker best known for directing Nosferatu —the iconic silent film adaption of Bram Stoker's Dracula —as well as The Last Laugh, Sunrise, and Tabu. As we follow Murnau from the airfields of the Great War to the cafés and clubs of Weimar Berlin to the virtual invention of filmmaking, and from there to the South Seas, we chart the progress of a man desperate to open himself to others but nonetheless continually "at home in no house and in no country." While devoted to those he loved, Murnau remained hamstrung by self-loathing and, like his vampiric creation, afraid of his own "terrible inhumanness." In his fascinating fictionalized biography of Murnau, Jim Shepard, author of the critically acclaimed The Book of Aron, brings both Weimar-era Germany and the early days of film to life in roaring, irresistible detail, delving into the heart and mind of a troubled genius and uncovering the inner turmoil of a reclusive and enigmatic cinema pioneer.

TABU

****14/15 June 1929 (Midnight). No sleep. All afternoon, the trace odor of land, unmistakable after eight weeks of open sea. Toward sunset we began to notice the scent of flowers. Cassi, David informed us: a low, bushlike plant that carpets the Marquesas.

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, filmmaker in the Republic of Germany from 1919 to 1925, and in the United States of America from 1926 to 1929, was spending May and June of 1929 in a ketch halfway between Mexico and New Zealand. For three straight nights he had slept only one or two hours. He was writing on deck. The cockpit bench was rigged like a divan with throw-pillows. Pal was curled at his feet. The dog’s tongue lolled about. The sea air made the poor animal endlessly thirsty.

The moon went all the way down. Before he lit the lamp, he could see his hand in the starlight.

They had traveled southwest by west from Mazatlán to Nukahiva, in the Marquesas. It was one of the few long traverses in the Pacific where the direct course was also the fastest.

Sometime the next day he would get his first view of the South Seas. Sitting there on the deck, every so often he would write: The South Seas! He had constructed a little column of such exclamations. From there to Papeete, some 400 miles, would be about four days.

Anxiety piled up behind his excitement the way a wake surge overtook smaller waves. All those lives transformed to suit his purposes: seventeen intelligent men who’d never been far from pavement were about to be marooned across those isolated islands. Their average age was twenty-three.

He fretted constantly that this project, in ways none of the group could fully understand, was bigger than any studio-made film. With a studio, the world was built to suit the filmmaker. But here! Eighteen thousand dollars had already been forwarded not for sets and mysterious union “overheads,” but to natives for food, transport, shelter, carpenters, carriers, divers, fishermen, and brush-clearers. This was the first time he’d seen brush-clearing listed as an expense.

And to all that he had to add the for-him-unprecedented difficulties of collaboration. One of the world’s great geniuses of romantic illusion, at least if his American press clippings were to be believed, had thrown in with the pre-eminent cinematic practitioner of the real. NOSFERATU MEETS NANOOK, Variety had teased. In this case, both maestros were wary. Murnau had never worked with a partner, however collaborative his early experience in Germany had been; and Robert Flaherty’s only partner had been his wife. Occasionally he’d take a suggestion from his long-suffering cameraman.

They had agreed on the concept of an epic shot in spectacular natural locations, which was, after all, the Grail of nearly every national cinema. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, they further agreed, was the closest anyone had come to date. So they wanted to transport their audience, and involve it in an exotic and endangered way of life. But after that?

After That, they’d decided to put off until their arrival in Tahiti.

Flaherty’s younger brother, David, was traveling with Murnau. Eight weeks out of Mazatlán, they were reveling in the good weather after a week of uninterrupted rain. That week they had all been insomniacs. Their hands had turned white and wrinkled; their feet, when they undressed, looked like dead sea creatures. Only the caviar, preserved on ice, had raised their spirits. Each evening they’d huddled around warm tea and cold caviar, giving thanks for the French consulate in Mazatlán.

Murnau and Flaherty were both unhappy refugees from FOX. Flaherty’s film on Mexican Indians had collapsed when Fox himself had taken it over. Murnau’s Four Devils and Our Daily Bread had the same sorry history. David had joked that they should’ve pooled their catastrophes and cut the release prints together to make Indian Bread.

For three straight weeks, Murnau had watched despondently while the undercooked meat was pulled from the bones of his picture. He met with Fox and his Brain Trust in their private screening room, where they indulged in a ritual of mutilation and humiliation. He was unable to eat and suffered spells of dizziness. Faces he’d never seen before offered advice and made insulting remarks about his work. He held his tongue. What was wrong with it? Everything was wrong. He was doing the same old thing again; the film was too long; the peasants weren’t American; the story had no “zing.” The whole thing was too ponderous, Fox himself said; it was as though everyone was walking around in heavy boots.

Murnau’s responses were not appreciated. He and Fox each took a turn with some invective. Then Fox suggested that his overworked artiste take a break and let the boys fiddle with a few things. Murnau remarked that he’d seen enough of the boys’ fiddling. He was banned from the screening room.

Once more the gagmen had been set to work. Fox sent conciliatory memos. Murnau terminated his contract. The film was taken over by an honest man with no imagination and reissued under a different title. When Murnau wrote him with seven pages of modifications he thought might save the picture, he never received an answer.

The day it had been taken out of his hands, he sought refuge by himself in a Mexican restaurant. The one other patron in the place—seeming to have a notion that the tall, freckled, miserable man occupying the opposite booth was distraught—had a pink-colored drink with a miniature paper hat sent over. The teetotaling Murnau removed the hat and lifted the drink every so often, in order to indicate his appreciation without sipping.

Since the collapse of the film, his kidneys had resumed causing him great distress and any time in the sun made him feel faint.

Then Berthold Viertel had come in with a familiar-looking blond boy in tow, whom he introduced. David had Hans’s mouth and hair, as well as a similar way of standing, like an adolescent wishing to seem barrel-chested. They chatted about Murnau’s work, which caused Murnau to perk up a little.

He perked up a little more when he realized that David’s brother was that Flaherty. The patron who’d sent over the drink seemed discouraged, as though he’d missed his opportunity.

Murnau had long admired Flaherty’s work. He asked an hour’s worth of questions, all of which David answered straightforwardly. Flaherty was still working on the Mexican film. For the first time, David was assisting.

After leaving the restaurant, they walked to a deserted triangle of park and settled on a bench beneath a eucalyptus tree. The smell seemed to revive the discussion. Viertel sat quietly alongside the two new friends, content to listen. Sap on the seat slats ruined Murnau’s trousers.

Flaherty turned out to be four years older than Murnau. Did the brothers have any new plans, for after the Mexican project? They did: David had been preparing to go away that very week to Tahiti, to assess the possibilities of filming a feature there.

Murnau at that moment felt as if he’d become aware of great gears above them swinging together, the teeth sliding inexorably into place. Once he recovered, he described in a low voice how he’d dreamed of doing the same thing. This did not seem to impress his audience. He added that he’d read about the South Seas since discovering Stevenson as a boy. They smiled. His dizziness had returned. He’d had to call for his car.

David left for Tahiti two days later, and Murnau hadn’t seen him again for three months. During that interval, he worked listlessly on new projects. Fox sent over scripts that had been defaced and rejected by other contract directors.

The day after David returned, they ate alone in Murnau’s newest place in the Hollywood hills. The domestic staff had been instructed to prepare the meal and leave. The two men served themselves from a banquette. Pal sat in his wingbacked chair and kept an eye on both of them.

The dining table had a view of Los Angeles. They reviewed the charts and drawings David had brought back. They laughed about his inability to eat for all of Murnau’s questions. For stretches Murnau just stared at the navigational map of the Tuamotus. He reminded himself of the Nosferatu peering over Hutter’s papers while his guest apprehensively dined.

He told David about the yacht he’d bought, which he’d renamed the Bali. Other than that, he said, he’d spent the last few months making the round of kidney specialists. Hollywood, he concluded, was wearing him out. He was getting too old for this, now nearly forty-one, and had no heart left for battling the studio.

Commiserating, David looked as if he recognized forty-one to be Methuselan.

That look prompted Murnau to announce that he was going to the South Seas. There was a pause. He asked if David would accompany him.

David, dumbfounded, answered that he was obliged to rejoin his brother in Mexico. Murnau had swung into action as his old persuasive self. That Flaherty’s film was at the point of being suspended was an open secret around the Fox lot; even Murnau had been privy to that news. So why shouldn’t they all join forces, then, and make a film after their own hearts, in Tahiti?

David had had certain hesitations. Murnau asked: Shouldn’t brothers seize every opportunity to work together? He stayed at it, selling his enthusiasm far into the night. He himself, of course, had neglected his connections with his own brothers for years.

The next day, they set off in his new red Packard to convince Flaherty, whose funding was stalled in Tucson. The doctors had been unanimous that the trip would be disastrous for Murnau’s kidneys. They proved correct. The pain became difficult before they’d left the city limits, and they had to make frequent stops. Murnau spent the night of their arrival in a clinic. In between, there’d been three days of the sort of good talk he hadn’t had in years, and excited planning. He told David about Hans: about his poetry, the intensity of their relationship, their estrangement, and Hans’s death in the war before that estrangement could be addressed. David knew some of the poetry in translation, from an old compendium of verses from the war dead entitled The Flower of German Youth.

Flaherty had seized upon their idea. He visited Murnau that first night in the clinic and described with precision his idea of the most memorable images from Nosferatu and Faust, which he’d just seen. He’d particularly admired the vampire’s ship gliding into Bremen harbor, and the Devil’s pestilential cloak spreading over Faust’s little medieval hamlet.

From his bed of pain, Murnau reciprocated by describing how exalted he’d been upon seeing Nanook.

Flaherty was much impressed that Murnau had driven all that way in such trying circumstances to work with him. In seven days they’d worked up a proposal for a joint project and negotiated and signed a contract with a new company, Colorart, that had approached Flaherty. The new contract, in terms of freedom, was a dream; it stipulated no company presence on location, and the whole picture would be made on location! By the 18th of April, a budget of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars had been approved. Murnau and David would sail from San Pedro at the end of the month. Flaherty would leave a month later by steamship with the crew and supplies.

Spiess was still out there, somewhere near where they were going. Murnau had proof. Recently he’d been getting a series of “gifts” through the mails: badly wrapped seashells, carved bits of bone (one labeled “Sea-Monster!”), and lumpen charms and amulets. They’d been sent to Murnau’s original Los Angeles address. The last package featured a rough squatting figure with a head split in two, on the back of which was carved H.E.-D: Hans’s initials. It had been wrapped in a handbill advertising a showing of Dernier des Hommes: Der Letzte Mann, on which someone had scribbled in German How’s this for worldwide success—your name now known in Bali. Heading east. Hecate. Murnau had been pained by the reference to their schoolboy recitations: Hans as Medea, himself as Jason.

In eight years he had made no progress on the question of Hans’s suicide. He fought the notion that no progress was possible. Lasker-Schüler had passed along a few letters Hans had written to her, and then she had refused any further help. In the letters, Hans mentioned neither suicide nor Murnau. Other old friends and acquaintances were less helpful still. Hans’s commanding officer had been killed in the Spartacists’ uprising after the war. Only Spiess remained.

While Murnau had been waiting for David to return from Tahiti, a boy he’d hired to monitor Pacific shipping transactions had sent word that an “E. J. Spies” had been one of three partners at Papeari, east of Samoa, who’d been hoping to barter copra for a thirty-foot yawl. The other two partners had been listed as “Robert Dean Frisbie, writer” and “Ropati, speculator.”

Spiess was his last hope of proving Lasker-Schüler wrong. It had come down to that. In one of the letters, Hans had mentioned writing Spiess. This was the last lead Murnau had. In any event, securing the proper cast and locations would mean travel among the islands. His plan was to comb the groups east to west for Europeans fitting Spiess’s description, and then to keep an ear out once shooting began.

The Bali was long and slim, sixty-five feet by sixteen feet, drawing eight and half feet of water. She belonged to the Gloucester Fisherman class, with two sails and a fifty-horsepower engine. Below, beside the galley and the crew’s quarters, there was a dining room, a stateroom, a lavatory, and a pantry. She flew both the American and the German flags. On her stern Murnau had painted a blood-red heart.

The Mainsail luffed and billowed above him in the darkness. The helmsman, Bill Bambridge, had one leg encased in plaster and leaned on his crutch like Long John Silver. He hadn’t spoken in hours.

When Pal needed to defecate, he climbed up on the back deck and did his business off the taffrail in calm seas. In rough seas he sat around whining. At such times, David murmured his general disbelief at the dog’s presence.

For Murnau the whole trip had been a blessed relief from physical infirmities. He’d rigged a collapsible silken canopy for the cockpit, and for long stretches he would close his eyes and relax his body and listen to the hissing rush of water along the hull. In his journal he copied a verse from the American Emerson: And the lone seaman all the night / Sails astonished among stars. When he dozed, he dreamt of their departure from San Pedro, and the California mud on the anchor flukes as it came up. When he woke, there always seemed to be an extra stillness in the air. The only sound was the musical liquid noise of their wake. In the east over the stern, the lower quadr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Charlottenburg, 1907
• Berlin, 1910
• Verdun, 1917
• Berlin, 1921
• Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens
• Der Letzte Mann
• Tabu
• Riga, 1915
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright Page