Bitten by the Spirit of the Vampire

Can there be any doubt that novelists are possessed by their subjects? We know Jim Shepard, author of “Battling Against Castro,” “Kiss of the Wolf,” “Lights Out in the Reptile House” and others, to be a mild-mannered, precise writer. Indeed, “Nosferatu” has many of these stylistic attributes, but all too close to the surface burns the hypnotic, viral spirit of the vampire.

This novel is out of control, completely infected by that spirit. The plot glides and shudders. It is the life, as Shepard imagines it, of F.W. Murnau, the German director, born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe in 1888. The son of a textile merchant, Murnau went to the University of Heidelberg, ostensibly to study philology but abandoned the subject to study acting and directing in Berlin. He was a combat pilot in World War I, strayed off course one night and landed in Switzerland, where he spent the remainder of the war directing a play. Afterward, he became a film director in Germany, adapting in 1922 Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” into “Nosferatu--Eine Symphonie des Grauens.” In 1927, Fox invited him to Hollywood. He worked on “Tabu,” a film shot in the South Seas, and a week before it premiered in 1931, he was killed at age 42 in a car crash between Los Angeles and Monterey.

Shepard begins his story in 1907. Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe, is 18, on his way to the university when he meets Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, who shows him the night life in Berlin. Hans dreams of becoming a poet. In Hans’ presence, Murnau articulates his interest in theater. They discuss Expressionism, the “Anabasis” and Goethe’s “Faust.” At Christmas they travel to Murnau, a spa village in Bavaria, where they finally make love. It is here, in Shepard’s telling, that Wilhelm changes his name from Plumpe to Murnau. In Berlin, they join the Society of Free Spirits, a group of homosexuals, but Murnau is not faithful to Hans. After finding out, Hans goes to war, volunteering with the fusiliers in Russia. In a trench in Verdun in 1917, Murnau learns of his death and spends the rest of his life feeling responsible.

In the novel, many people around Murnau are stricken. After Hans’ death, he moves through his life as a director with an odd weightlessness. “After six years,” Shepard writes of the time Murnau began to work on the film, “Nosferatu,” “Murnau was still a house in which the largest room was sealed.” Shepard’s novel becomes a journal of Murnau’s work, and from these journal entries a man without qualities emerges, a man who moves through life with his eyes fixed on certain prey, primarily young men, tormented by his guilt over Hans. “Vampirism,” he thinks, “was something private and hooded, beyond the individual’s will to control.”

No flight attendants lead us to our seats in this novel, but clearly Murnau was bitten. And Shepard has been bitten by Murnau. He gives a voice to the director’s childhood: “I am both my father and Something Else, and remain mute before the ongoing miracle of the coexistence of the two.” Carl Mayer, Murnau’s real-life writing partner, and his cameraman Karl Freund appear as minor characters in the book, but Murnau increasingly loses his hold on reality. “I no longer have the certainty of being understood and answered,” he writes in his journal.

Murnau takes a Malaysian houseboy, for a lover, grist for his displaced spirit. In Bora Bora, filming “Tabu,” he takes for a lover a young Tahitian, but again, all other characters in this novel are paper dolls. We do not see Murnau through anyone else’s eyes except his and Shepard’s.

Since Shepard has been bitten in the course of writing “Nosferatu,” he and Murnau are inseparable. The result is brilliantly cinematic--a figure looming in the corner of each scene, with an even larger shadow behind him on the wall. It will take days to shake this one off.