PENROSE, Valentine
(Alexander Trocchi, trans.), The Bloody
Countess, Calder & Boyars Ltd., London, 1970.
Octavo;
paperback; 192pp., with 4pp. of monochrome plates. Covers rubbed; top joint
cracked; very faint toning to the text block and page edges; text block top
edge spotted. Very good.
I’ve
had a bit of a history with Elisabeth Bathory. Back in 1972-ish, at the age of
seven, my parents took my sister and I to a drive-in movie theatre to see “Countess Dracula”, the Hammer Horror
production starring Ingrid Pitt. Now, you might well regard this act as an
instance of poor parenting, but in fact, we kids were more interested in the
playground at the theatre and the junk food at the take-away joint than the
film: during most of these screenings we were asleep on the backseat of the car
anyway. Regardless, it was at this movie that my father discovered that I
couldn’t even see the screen and that I needed spectacles. My inability to see
Ingrid Pitt bathing in blood was a revelation to all involved.
Many,
many years later, I found a copy of the DVD “Countess
Dracula” in the shop I was working at and I borrowed it for the evening to
see what the fuss was all about. I chucked the disc on my computer and it
irrevocably switched my machine to Region 1 coding; then, as the disc was
faulty, I saw only about 20 minutes of the show before everything came to a
screeching halt. Elisabeth Bathory strikes again!
In
the meantime I’ve encountered her in the works of Mike Mignola; one of my Call of Cthulhu players wanted to play a
character descended from her (which went in interesting places); and I picked
up a book once called (rather luridly) Dracula
was a Woman! which turned out to be all about her. And so, hardly
surprising that I should see this book and take it under my wing.
Firstly,
I was completely unaware that the Hammer Horror movie was based on a book at
all – I thought it had been cobbled together from general histories by some
erstwhile screen writer riffing on some meagre concepts lobbed at them by a
producer. Kind of like the way that Val Lewton put movies together. Instead,
here is a sweeping overview of the life of Erzsébet Báthory (to give her
un-Anglicised name) in all her sanguine glory, translated from its moody French
patois into even murkier English.
The
first thing I noticed jumping in, was that the translation is a bit ham-fisted.
There are some dodgy expressions and turns of phrase that jar as the reading
progresses. In some places, the writing is very unfocussed and wanders a bit,
hovering over the intent of the paragraph without actually pinning it down. I’m
unsure how much of this is down to the translator and how much is the source
material, but it lends a dreamlike quality to the narrative. Too, M. Penrose is
prone to wandering off-piste as far
as the history is concerned, and this would be an issue if not for the
fascinating nuggets that he dispenses in the execution of these little asides.
At one point he lists the “Top Ten” magical stones of the European Renaissance;
in another he provides a fairly detailed overview of the layout of Vienna in
the day. These meanderings would be quite distracting anywhere else, but here,
they serve to build up a solid sense of the society of the period.
One
quibble I have with the text is that Penrose deliberately obfuscates what was
going on in the gloomy apartments of the Countess. In describing her wicked
acts, he starts by outlining the beginning of one of her depraved bloodletting
sessions, then moves on to suggestion, and then, at the climax, falls back upon
inference. In only a few cases does he explicitly discuss what Báthory is
actually doing to these poor peasant
girls. Not that I want a blow-by-blow description of each jab and thrust in all
their gory detail, but I would like to have some
notion of what’s going on. Perhaps he was just writing to the sensibilities of
the time (given that it was originally penned in 1957), or that he felt that
obscuring the horror would heighten its impact; but this is not a novel and
purports to be history, so perhaps the strategy is a little at fault.
Penrose
is able to sketch the chilling sociopathy of Báthory to a high degree and she
emerges from the text as a formidable and thoroughly unnerving individual.
Springboarding from the sole remaining portrait of the Countess, he at first describes
the image and then builds upon this to reveal the hidden depths of depravity to
which her beautiful exterior was the key. Along the way he makes a few sweeping
generalisations that nowadays ring somewhat hollow, but the portrait that
emerges is utterly compelling. Try this:
“Her
looks would not have made one think of love, although she was very beautiful,
with an excellent figure and no blemishes; for one sensed she was ripped out of
time just as mandragora was plucked from the earth; and the seed from which she
was fashioned was as malignant as that of a man hanged.”
Such
references to occult notions and beliefs litter the descriptions and show M.
Penrose to be well-versed in arcane lore. At all times, it is possible to hear
the Devil tripping along behind the typeface.
Penrose
paints a picture of the Hungarian wilderness as a lugubrious, wolf-haunted
hotbed of witchcraft, feudalism and savagery. The country’s cruel leaders are
depicted as being awash with cynicism and couched in luxury and entitlement,
and the ghoulish, dreamlike figure of Erzsébet Báthory dominates them all. This
book captures everything that Bram Stoker tried to bring to life in his novel Dracula (1897), and, since it is based
upon fact, is all the more terrifying for it.
It’s
not a commonly-found item, but I would encourage anyone interested in vampires
– real vampires, not the glittery, ersatz Meyer variety and their
contemporaries – to locate a copy and investigate. I’m giving it
three-and-a-half tentacled horrors.
*****