From Hopelessness to Hope: A Reflection on Ash Wednesday

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888.   He was raised in the Unitarian sect in which his grandfather, a member of the wealthy and elite Eliot family of New England, had been a minister.   After receiving a classical education in elite private academies as a boy he went on to study literature at Harvard and philosophy at the Sorbonne before winning a scholarship to Merton College in Oxford at the outbreak of the First World War.  Oxford failed to win a place in his heart, however, and he quickly relocated to London, where he was taken under the wing of fellow American ex-patriot Ezra Pound.

 

Ezra Loomis Pound had met Eliot when the latter was still a student at Oxford.  Conrad Aikin, whom Eliot had known at Harvard, had arranged for them to meet so that Eliot could show Pound, who had just married Dorothy Shakespear, his “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.   Pound was impressed, and the following year, on his recommendation, Harriet Monroe published the poem in Poetry.   It was Eliot’s first poem to be published outside of academe.    Pound and Eliot struck up an instant friendship and the former, whose reputation as a poet had already been established, would continue to help further Eliot’s literary career, most notably as editor of “The Waste Land”, published in Eliot’s own The Criterion in 1922.

 

There were a number of similarities between the two poets that undoubtedly strengthened and sealed their friendship in these early years.   Both had been born and raised in the United States and had fled across the Atlantic to the Old World.   Both had been steeped in the literature and philosophy of ancient and medieval civilization and had come, as a consequence, to reject the attitude of progressive optimism towards the future of Western civilization that was prevalent and ubiquitous in their formative years.   Their trans-oceanic flight can be seen as a symbolic representation of this rejection.  They preferred to live in what they saw as the decay and ruin of the older civilization in its last days – the “waste land” of Eliot’s poem – than in the epicentre of the optimistic liberalism that was ushering in a new barbarism.   Three years after the publication of “The Waste Land”, Eliot returned to this vision of Western Civilization as a ruined wasteland in “The Hollow Men”.   The first stanza of this poem depicts the inhabitants of the wasteland as stuffed strawmen, like the effigies burned on Guy Fawkes Day, who are beyond the envy even of those inhabiting the shadowy realms of death, through which Eliot takes his readers in Dantesque fashion in the four remaining stanzas, until they arrive on the beach of the “tumid river”  (presumably Styx), where the denizens of this dismal place dance around a “prickly pear” singing a dark parody of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” that concludes with “This is the way the world ends/not with a bang but a whimper”, undoubtedly the best known words of the poet except for those set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

 

It was shortly after the publication of “The Hollow Men” that Eliot took the step that would take him and Pound down different paths from their common beginnings.   The following year, on a trip to Rome, he fell to his knees in front of Michelangelo’s Pieta, much to the discomfort of his kin who were travelling with him.   This was out of aesthetic admiration but it signaled a spiritual awakening.    In 1927, to the horror of Virginia Woolf who declared him “dead to us all from this day forward”, he converted to orthodox Christianity, and was baptized into the Church of England (Unitarianism, as its name indicates, rejects the Trinity, and so this was an exception to the general rule of the Anglican Church accepting the validity of the baptism of other denominations) and confirmed the following day.   Later that year he became a citizen of the United Kingdom.   Having first rejected the false optimism of liberal progress which had made a wasteland out of Western civilization, he had now turned his back on the hopelessness and despair of his earlier poems by embracing the faith that liberalism had rejected.   Pound, the restless pagan, was for whatever reasons, unable lay anchor on such rock himself, and consequently found himself adrift in dangerous waters.

 

A couple of months after his baptism, T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” was published as part of the Ariel Poems, the first of his poems to be written from his new perspective of faith.   Three years later he would publish a much longer poem expressing the experience of his conversion.    He gave that poem the title “Ash Wednesday” from the day on which the penitential period of Lent begins.

 

The first of the poem’s six sections begins with a return to the sense of hopelessness from “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men” in the words:

 

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn.

 

The final section begins by repeating these lines with the word “although” substituted for “because” and concludes with the prayer “And let my cry come unto thee” taken from the first line of the 102^nd Psalm.

 

From the opening expression of despair to the concluding expression of faith we have the poet’s journey from the former to the latter expressed in his own familiar manner of metaphor and allusion.    I have no intention of providing an extended commentary here, but the following is worthy of noting.

 

In the opening lines, which paraphrase the title line of Guido Cavalcanti’s “Per ch’io non spero” we can see Ezra Pound’s influence again.   Cavalcanti was a favourite of Pound’s.   Almost twenty years before “Ash Wednesday” was published, Pound had published a translation of the Florentine poet’s works.  In the period in which Eliot wrote and published “Ash Wednesday” Pound was working on the section of his Cantos that included his translation of Cavalcanti’s magnus opus “Donna me prega”, although this was not published until four years after “Ash Wednesday”.   “Per ch’io non spero” was written in the last year of Cavalcanti’s life, during his brief exile in Sarzana.   The line which Eliot borrowed had originally expressed Cavalcanti’s despair of ever seeing his native city again – Eliot changed the original’s “return” to “turn” to fit the context of his own poem – thus laying the foundation for the poem as a whole being charged with the task of going where he could not, back to his Lady, to speak to her as his messenger.

 

Eliot began the second section of his poem by addressing a Lady.   This very briefly creates the impression that he was continuing the allusion to Cavalcanti, but this impression quickly disappears as the Lady is spoken of by his bleached bones – he presents himself as having been eaten by leopards with God pronouncing over his bones the question from the Book of Ezekiel “shall these bones live” – in intercessory tones.   This would seem to suggest a reference to the Blessed Virgin – especially since the first section had ended with the petition “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death” from the Sancte Maria – except that it is stated of her that “She honours the Virgin in meditation” and thus must be somebody other than Mary.   There is no mystery, however, as to who this is, because it is clear that Eliot has switched allusions from Cavalcanti to his best friend – Dante Alighieri.  This is exactly the way Beatrice is depicted in Divina Commedia – as the faithful member of Mary’s retinue who sends Virgil to rescue Dante from the beasts at the beginning of the Inferno and guide him through hell and purgatory, before she takes over as his guide at the end of the Purgatorio and throughout the Paradiso.   Eliot’s previous long poems had been full of allusions to Dante.   Having passed through his own Inferno and Purgatorio in “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men” he had finally arrived at his Paradiso in “Ash Wednesday”.

 

Perhaps there is also a message to his friend Ezra Pound implied here, a message to the effect that while the latter was still restlessly following his pagan star Cavalcanti, he had finally found peace in the faith of his Christian guide Dante.  

 

Today is Ash Wednesday on the liturgical calendar of Western Christianity and on this particular Ash Wednesday, more than ever before we need to follow T. S. Eliot on the path from “Because I do not hope” to “let my cry come unto thee”.   It has been almost a year since our rights, freedoms, and social lives were stolen from us by politicians, bureaucrats, and the medical profession who are clearly determined to keep these from us for as long as they possibly can, which, given the history of how long Communist oppression lasted in the Soviet Union, could be a very long time indeed.   We must not let this become grounds for hopelessness and despair for these involve the denial of faith that God is a gracious and merciful God Who hears our prayer.

 

It is customary on Ash Wednesday to begin a fast in which we give something up for the forty days (excluding Sundays) of Lent.  In recent years some of our ecclesiastical leaders have recommended that we consider “social media fasts” for this period.   As good of a suggestion as this would ordinarily be, it hardly seems advisable this year in which social media  is the only thing resembling contact, fake though it be, that the tyrannical and totalitarian politicians and doctors allow us to have with our friends and extended family.   Indeed, since so much has been forcibly taken from us over the last year, I would suggest that if we give anything up today, it be our voluntary acquiescence in the theft of our own and our neighbours’ rights, freedoms, and social lives.   If we were all to give up masks, social distancing, and all of these other stupid and idiotic rules and restrictions and regulations, that would be a start to bringing the light of hope back into this dark world.  

 

 

 

 

 

A Lesson From Leroux

 

Gaston Leroux, after pursuing a career in journalism, which involved everything from theatrical criticism to international correspondence, turned to writing fiction in the early 1900s. In his native France, he is remembered as an author of detective fiction, as being more-or-less the French equivalent of his English contemporary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. His first detective novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908), featured his amateur sleuth Joseph Rouletabille, who, as is often the case with fictional detectives, had a number of biographical similarities to his creator. In this novel, Rouletabille solved the mystery of how a scientist’s daughter ended up beaten unconscious in a room in her father’s castle that was locked from the inside. (1) 

Outside of France, however, he is best known as the author of one of the classics of Gothic horror, ranking right up there with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Drawing upon the many rumours surrounding the Palais Garnier opera house that had been completed in his childhood, an actual incident featuring a falling chandelier that took place there in 1896, and the entire spectrum of his journalistic experiences, he created the famous story that features a deformed and criminally insane polymath with the mononym Erik, who lives on the lake in the basement of the opera house – this lake actually exists – pretending to be a ghost to terrorize the cast of the opera and extort money from its managers, and an angel in order to transform a chorus girl into a diva. The Phantom of the Opera was, as was customary at that time, originally serialized, before being bound and published in French in 1910. The first English translation appeared the following year. 

The story has been re-told many times ever since. The first movie version – and by far the most faithful to Leroux’s novel – was a silent film that appeared in 1925, featuring Lon Chaney Sr., the legendary “Man of a Thousand Faces”, as Erik. There have been many more. It has also been adapted for stage more than once, the most well-known version being, of course, the musical that debuted in 1986, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, originally starring Michael Crawford as the Phantom and Lloyd Webber’s wife-at-the-time, Sarah Brightman as Christine Daaé, the chorus girl turned diva soprano, and is now the longest running musical on Broadway, and the second longest in London’s West End. (2) It was in this version that I first became familiar with the story when a production of the musical came to Winnipeg’s Centennial Concert Hall in 1993 and I went to see it with my high school friends Cynthia and Tamara, although I read Leroux’s novel shortly thereafter. 

My title may, in fact, be slightly misleading, as the lesson I wish to draw from the story is, in fact, best illustrated in Lloyd Webber’s adaptation, which presents the most sympathetic version of Leroux’s Erik.

Unlike motion picture adaptations other than the 1925 original, Lloyd Webber followed Leroux in making Erik’s hideously deformed face something he was born with, rather than the result of acid being thrown in his face, as in the 1943 remake starring Claude Rains and many subsequent versions or a deal with the devil, as in the unfortunate 1989 version starring Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund. Consequently, he has had to wear a mask for any social interaction all of his life. Even more so in the musical than in Leroux’s novel, although it can be found there as well, this is offered as a partial explanation of his cruel and sadistic behaviour. Granted, the mask requirement was only one part of the whole situation of society having rejected him in disgust at his appearance, but consider how he is made to express it in one notable scene towards the end of the musical. He has just abducted Christine from the stage of the opera in the middle of a production of his own “Don Juan Triumphant”. Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny and his rival for Christine’s affections, is hot on his trail, but for a brief time he has Christine alone with him again in his lair. The following interaction takes place. 

Christine: Have you gorged yourself at last in your lust for blood? Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh? 

The Phantom: That fate that condemned me to wallow in blood, has also denied me the joys of the flesh. This face, the infection, which poisons our love. This face which earned a mother’s fear and loathing, a mask my first unfeeling scrap of clothing. 

The words which Lloyd Webber et al., place in the mouth of the Phantom here, echo those which Leroux had placed in the mouth of Erik at a much earlier point in the story in his novel. In chapter XII,  Christine and Raoul have escaped to the roof of the opera, where Christine tells Raoul about her experiences with Erik in his subterranean home the first time he had spirited her away.  After she had snatched away his mask, Erik had entered into a spiel of self-pity, which ended with: 

Why did you want to see me? Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me! ... When my own father never saw me and when my mother, so as not to see me, made me a present of my first mask! 

Returning to Lloyd Webber’s version, Christine at this point treats his self-pity with scorn, informing him that “this haunted face holds no horror for me now, it’s in your soul that the true distortion lies”, at which point the scene shifts gears with the arrival of Raoul. What I wish to draw your attention to, however, is the sharp contrast between the way Erik talks about his fated and trademark mask in the above quoted lines, and the way all of the other characters talk about their masks in an earlier scene in which everyone appears masked. 

The scene is the first in the second Act, and is based upon chapter IX in Leroux’s novel. In the musical it is set six months after the events of the first Act. The Phantom has not been heard from in the meantime, and the Opera is hosting a gala event in the form of a masquerade ball to kick off their return to production. The entire cast joins in on a number entitled “Masquerade”, the chorus of which goes:

Masquerade! Paper faces on parade. 

Masquerade! Hide your face so the world will never find you. 

Masquerade! Every face a different shade. 

Masquerade! Look around, there’s another mask behind you. 

Everybody at this ball is having a grand old time and enjoying the fun of their self-chosen masks. At least until Erik shows up dressed as Edgar Allan Poe’s Red Death. (3) 

Now let us consider what lesson we might draw from this striking contrast. Masks can be a source of great fun and enjoyment when they are voluntarily put on in circumstances like that of a masquerade ball. Yet they can be a source of incredible trauma if they are forced upon a person, especially in childhood. 

There are a lot of people today who are in need of this lesson. This month will end, as October always ends, on the eve of All Saints Day, for which reason the last day of October is known as All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween for short. It is traditionally a day in which people voluntarily put on costumes, including masks, for purposes of fun. Kids traditionally dress up in their costumes and go from house to house, ringing the doorbell or knocking, and saying “trick or treat” when the door opens. The person in the house then either gives them candy – or, if they are a health nut, something more nutritious – or risks having a trick pulled on him. This year, a bunch of adult party-poopers, who have been acting like paranoid lunatics since March, all because a virus that poses next to no threat to anybody under sixty-five and without multiple pre-existing medical conditions, has been spreading around the world, have demanded that Halloween and trick-or-treating be cancelled for this year. It is not “safe” they say. 

These same people, who give every impression of having had their brains sucked out by a zombie, are responsible for the fact that the kids who are being forbidden the fun mask-wearing experience of Halloween this year, have been forced to wear masks every day in school since it resumed last month. They are often required to wear them even when outside at recess – assuming the school allows them out at recess. 

 As Christian fantasy novelist and Chalcedon Foundation editor Lee Duigon put it a few weeks ago, “Good grief, they’ve made school even worse than it has always been.” 

Am I saying that all of these kids forced to wear masks all day, every day, are going to end up hiding out in the basements of theatres, dropping chandeliers on people, abducting beautiful singers, murdering people with nooses, and threatening to blow up their cities (4)? 

Perhaps not, but they are likely to be incredibly traumatized by it. This mandatory mask policy at schools amounts to one gigantic case of child abuse. 

Everybody who is in favour of it deserves to be horsewhipped. 

(1) There is an entire subgenre of mystery fiction featuring just this sort of dilemma. It is called the “locked-room mystery” subgenre. Edgar Allan Poe is usually regarded as the founder of the subgenre. The acknowledged master of it, John Dickson Carr, considered Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room to be his favourite. An early and excellent example, and my personal favourite, is Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas. 

(2) Lloyd Webber also composed a sequel musical entitled Love Never Dies which opened in 2010. He had started working on it years earlier with journalist-novelist Frederick Forsyth. Forsyth had developed their ideas into The Phantom of Manhattan, a 1999 novel which, like Love Never Dies, is a sequel, not so much to Leroux’s novel, the ending of which hardly leaves room for a follow up, as to Lloyd Webber’s adaptation. While Love Never Dies and The Phantom of Manhattan are versions of the same story, the genesis of both is such that it would be a gross oversimplification to say the former is an adaptation of the latter. 

(3) The Red Death is a character from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842). The parallel Leroux originally intended by having Erik show up in this costume is that in both stories the character was a very unwanted party-crasher at a similar event. Considering the nature of the lesson I have been drawing from Leroux’s story, it will be worth our while to briefly summarize Poe’s story here. The Red Death, in Poe’s story, is a plague which Prince Prospero, the main character, attempts to avoid, by putting himself and all of his friends in lockdown behind the castle walls of his abbey. After six months – the ironic parallels just continue to pile up – he throws a masquerade ball, much like the one in Leroux’s novel. He takes his guests through seven rooms, each decorated in a different colour, the final room of which is all in black, with blood-red illumination. When the spooky clock in the room chimes midnight, Prospero and his guests notice someone dressed in a blood red shroud, with a skull for a face. Angry that someone would show up dressed as the very plague he had been hiding from, he corners the man with a dagger but drops dead when the man turns to look at him. When all of his guests then mob the Red Death and force him to remove his mask, there is nothing beneath, for it was the actual plague personified. Their attempts to lock themselves away from him had failed completely. 

(4) This part of the story was really watered down by Lloyd Webber. In his version, the Phantom offers Christine the choice of staying with him or seeing Raoul, whom he had trapped in his Punjab lasso, die. In Leroux’s novel, Raoul and his guide the Persian, a character eliminated from most adaptations except the first, get themselves trapped in Erik’s torture chamber. Christine is a given a choice – signal that she is willing to live with him forever by turning a switch shaped like a scorpion on his mantelpiece, or signal her rejecting him by turning the switch shaped like a grasshopper The grasshopper switch would have detonated a cache of gunpowder beneath the torture chamber large enough to blow up the opera house and much of the surrounding section of Paris.