![]() For his young son, rife as he was with artistic gifts and a robust, unerring self-confidence in those gifts, Louis was a distant and feckless father. He organized German Americans in support of the presidential candidates William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, wrote a forgotten monograph on German-language instruction in American schools, and gave the occasional lecture on German culture and society. Sylvester’s father never found much success in the New World. He landed in New York, but not exactly on his feet. This tale seems a tad on the nose, in the Oedipal sense, but it is true that Louis was run out of Berlin and then Munich and then all of Germany, on account of his Marxist proclivities. ![]() Royalty or not, Louis ended up a Marxist, joining the anti-monarch Socialist Party in Germany, and possibly getting involved in a plot to assassinate the kaiser. He is justified in the pilfering of other men’s brains.” “In every age there have been great men - and they became great by absorbing the work of other men,” Viereck wrote of his first novel. By the novel’s close, everybody is drained but vampire Reginald. He squeezes from his prey every drop of literary, musical, and aesthetic juice they possess, “absorbing from life the elements essential to artistic completion,” as the hero explains. “He was like a gigantic dynamo, charged with the might of ten thousand magnetic storms.” In Viereck’s voluptuous, pretentious, deeply stupid romp, Reginald is seeking not blood - like Bram Stoker’s original vampire - but something more rarefied. “A tremendous force trembled in his very fingertips,” Viereck wrote of Reginald. Viereck’s hero vampire, Reginald, swaggers through the book seducing younger men, gently tugging them away from the unerringly difficult or hag-like women who otherwise seek their attentions. ![]() The House of the Vampire is seen today by precisely no one as the world’s greatest gay vampireįiction, but it does have the distinction of being the world’s first known publication in that now ample oeuvre. Young Viereck also loved to show off the framed violet he said he had plucked from Wilde’s grave. I love all things evil! I love the splendor of decay, the foul beauty of corruption.” Sylvester, at age seventeen, had struck up an apparently romantic friendship with Wilde’s most notorious paramour, Lord Alfred Douglas. He is so deliciously unhealthy, so beautifully morbid. The book’s twenty-two-year-old author, George Sylvester Viereck (he went by Sylvester, which sounded more continental), was himself a pillow-lipped and self-professed sensualist who said he worshipped Wilde as one of his three life models, alongside Napoleon and Christ. Clarke is also a magnet for impressionable and gifted young males, often ones with fetchingly long eyelashes, and always with “subtler, more sympathetic, more feminine” ways than the general run of men. In The House of the Vampire, the hero, Reginald Clarke, is a handsome middle-aged boulevardier, bon vivant, and night prowler. Two of the novella’s main characters, Jack and Ernest, were named after the split-personality lead character in Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest. The House of the Vampire arrived in 1907, with a pinch of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a dash of Swinburne, and a major crush on Oscar Wilde. And he’s sketching this out as the grounds on which he wants to be running for the Republican nomination, and for the presidency. It’s as inflammatory as anything he’s ever said in the past. He wants, according to ‘Washington Post’ reporting, to invoke the Insurrection Act to be able to use the military against civilians on Day One. He’s saying my political opponents are ‘vermin.’ He’s saying, I want my critics in the media and the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff put on trial for treason - the punishment for which he then reminds us, explicitly, is death. As Maddow recently told “Rolling Stone”: “Trump is saying immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood’ of America. The book is essential reading in our perilous political moment. Picking up the story from her hit podcast “Ultra,” Maddow explores the forgotten history of what amounted to a fifth column on the home front. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow‘s new book, “Prequel,” delves into the dangerous rise of fascism here in the United States in the Thirties and Forties.
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