
Moonfleet
“And more than once I have stood rope in hand in that same awful place, and tried to save a
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Dec
02
Dec
09
Now in the thirty-fifth year of its theatrical run on
both sides of the Atlantic and showing no sign of stopping, Andrew Lloyd
Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera has completely assimilated Gaston
Leroux’s original character. Official accounts of the musical’s creation
therefore downplay the cultural significance of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910)
as if it were a dead text waiting for the megamusical to breathe life into its
corpse. In The Phantom of the Opera Companion (2007) by Lloyd Webber and
Martin Knowlden, the composer describes picking up a ‘second-hand’ copy of the
book, to which the corresponding Wikipedia entry adds ‘long out-of-print’. (The
1976 musical by Ken Hill, which Lloyd Webber and his producer Cameron
Mackintosh knew well, is similarly reduced to a cursory reference.) In the 1991
Virgin edition of the novel – with Michael Crawford on the cover – sold at Her
Majesty’s Theatre alongside the Companion, the posters, the mask, the
rose, and the music box, the word Peter Haining uses repeatedly to describe
Leroux’s novel in his introduction is ‘forgotten’. He also erroneously claims that
the book was not particularly well received by critics or readers on
publication, describing Leroux himself as ‘a somewhat shadowy figure’ known
only to the ‘keenest students of supernatural fiction’. This is an odd claim given
that the author was made a Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur in 1909. Leroux,
in fact, was a prolific and jobbing novelist, having retired from a colourful –
and sometimes dangerous – career in journalism just before he turned forty. He
wrote thirty-nine novels, many of which have been forgotten, especially
outside France; Le Fantôme de l’Opéra is not one of them. The novel was
serialised in France, Britain, and America to considerable acclaim, and had
already been filmed twice by the time Leroux died in 1927, with a steady run of
cinematic and TV adaptations continuing ever since. It has never been out of
print either in French or English. Leroux’s ‘Phantom’ was a gothic icon long
before the West End and Broadway got hold of him.
That said, it is to the original novel that Lloyd
Webber describes returning in the Companion, having tried but failed to
find a way to plot the story on stage after studying the two Universal film
adaptations, starring Lon Chaney (1925) and Claude Rains (1943). Both films had
deviated from the original plot of the novel. The 1925 version added a more
emphatic climax with Chaney pursued through Paris by an angry mob, while the
1943 film portrayed the Phantom as a struggling musician whose life’s work is
stolen. He is then horribly scarred in the ensuing fight with the plagiarist
and presumed dead, plotting his revenge from the vast network of cellars
beneath the Palais Garnier and obsessing over the young soprano Christine Daaé.
Relocated to London, this plot was recycled by Hammer in 1962 – Herbert Lom taking
the title role – the character’s revival initiated by the ‘Phantom’ episode in
the 1957 Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces starring James Cagney,
reminding everyone how good the original silent movie had been. The device was
then used again by Brian De Palma in his surreal 1974 rock opera Phantom of
the Paradise, in which the eponymous antihero has his face destroyed by a
record press. To make the story work as a musical production, Lloyd Webber
wisely stripped out the revenge tragedy of the film interpretations and focused
instead as what he perceived as the original ‘love triangle’ between the
innocent singer Christine, her aristocratic suitor and childhood friend Viscount
Raoul de Chagny, and Erik, the ‘Phantom’. In doing this, the Phantom is
rewritten again, this time as a brooding romantic hero whose dangerous and
undoubtedly sexual magnetism make him considerably more attractive to most of
the audience than the rather frilly Raoul, a conventional melodramatic ‘hero’
to Christine’s ‘damsel in distress’ and a hangover from the fairy-tale
simplicity of the film narratives. While remaining broadly melodramatic, as
popular musicals must be, Christine is now given a more difficult choice. This
transition from villain to hero was completed in Lloyd Webber’s sequel, Love
Never Dies (2010), in which the Phantom is revealed to be the real father
of Christine’s son ‘Gustave’, while Raoul becomes a drunken gambler. (Meg Giry
turns nasty as well.) Based on Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Phantom of Manhattan
(1999), which concludes with millionaire Erik helping scarred First World War
soldiers, this was clearly an attempt at full rehabilitation that went too far
for fans of the original musical, and the mawkish Love Never Dies was a
rare failure for Lloyd Webber. Bad boys cease to be appealing when they clean
up too much. Continuing the trend to diminish the original text, Forsyth in his
introduction describes Leroux’s novel as quickly ‘falling into virtual
oblivion’.
Leroux is one of those writers whose life was as
interesting as his novels, and many of his own adventures as a foreign
correspondent ended up in his fiction. Leroux’s family came from Normandy,
though he was born in Paris after his mother went into labour on a train. His
father – who claimed to be a direct descendant of William the Conqueror – sent
his son to Paris to study law in 1889. This was an occupation that held little
interest for Leroux, and he spent much of his time writing poems and short stories.
He managed to pass the bar but then his father died suddenly leaving him an
estate worth close to a million Francs. He breezed through the lot in under a
year. Facing bankruptcy, he took a job as a court reporter and theatre critic
for L’Écho de Paris. Combining both roles to make the court reporting
less boring, Leroux started trying to solve the cases in advance of the
verdicts, interviewing prisoners and in one case finding evidence exonerating
the accused, humiliating the Prefect of Police, and getting a prison governor
fired. ‘Curiously,’ he later noted in an interview, ‘it was my newspaper
colleagues who were the most annoyed.’ Despite breaking the unwritten rule of
journalism and becoming the story himself, Leroux’s reputation was now ensured,
and he built on this through a talent for getting exclusive interviews with
prominent public figures at home and abroad. And if he couldn’t get the
interview – which happened when he blagged his way into the office of the
British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, during the
Second Boer War – he wrote a column on how he didn’t get the interview. This
popular notoriety led to a post on Le Matin as an international
correspondent, and assignments in Scandinavia, Russia (he was present during
the 1905 Revolution), Morocco and Egypt (where he travelled disguised as an
Arab), Africa, and across Western Europe.
By 1907, Leroux had become exhausted by travel. He
abandoned journalism for fiction and achieved notable success with his first
serial novel, Le mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the
Yellow Room, 1907), which introduced the brilliant young reporter turned
amateur sleuth ‘Joseph Rouletabille’. (Roule ta bille or ‘Roll your
marble’ was French slang for ‘Globetrotter’, an obvious alter ego of the
author). Leroux greatly admired Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and
the influence of both can be seen in his seven Rouletabille novels. Like
Sherlock Holmes, Rouletabille is fiercely intelligent and does not suffer fools
gladly, especially policemen. He even has a ‘Dr Watson’ in the form of
‘Sainclair’, his companion and chronicler. Following Poe, The Mystery of the
Yellow Room is an intense ‘locked-room’ murder mystery, and Leroux’s
literary reputation in France is that of one of the fathers of modern detective
fiction. Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, originally serialised in the daily
newspaper Le Gaulois from September 1909 to January 1910, was his
seventh novel.
Leroux was a big, ebullient man, larger than life in
every regard. When he finished a novel, he would fire a pistol into the air and
encourage his wife and children to join the celebration by throwing crockery
out the window. What he would have made of the different incarnations of his ‘Phantom’
is anyone’s guess, but my instinct is that they would have caught him funny. Though
there is a modicum of sympathy for ‘poor Erik’ towards the end of the novel,
Leroux’s original character is a grotesque and megalomaniacal criminal lunatic,
much closer to H.G. Wells’ ‘Invisible Man’ or George Du Maurier’s ‘Svengali’ than
the tragic genius of Lloyd Webber’s musical. He is a monster inside and out,
and while Gerard Butler’s scarring in Joel Schumacher’s overblown 2004
adaptation of the musical is so minimal he still looks better than most guys
his age on a normal day, Leroux’s Erik is a ‘living corpse’ whose ‘hands smelt
like death’:
‘He is extraordinarily thin and his
dress-coat hangs on a skeleton frame. His eyes are so deep that you can hardly see
the fixed pupils. You just see two big black holes, as in a dead man’s skull.
His skin, which is stretched across his bones like a drumhead, is not white,
but a nasty yellow. His nose is so little worth talking about that you can’t
see it side-face; and the absence of that nose is a horrible thing to
look at. All the hair he has is three or four long dark locks on his
forehead and behind his ears.’
It is this look that Lon Chaney memorably captured in
the 1925 film. By this time, Leroux had founded the film company Société des
Cinéromans with the actor René Navarre and the playwright Arthur Bernède.
This bought him into contact with Carl Laemmle, the co-founder and owner of
Universal Pictures when the latter visited Paris in 1922. Legend has it that Laemmle
had just been to the Palais Garnier and gushed to Leroux about the famous opera
house. Never one to miss a chance, Leroux made a gift of his novel, which
Laemmle read in a night. Already on the lookout for another vehicle for Lon
Chaney to follow The Hunchback of Notre Dame (then under production), Laemmle
snapped up the rights to The Phantom of the Opera. Universal went on to
create a soundstage replica of the opera house and its vast cellars so
elaborate and solid that it remained active until 2014 when it was finally
dismantled, having been used in hundreds of movies and TV shows, including,
unsurprisingly, the 1943 remake. As the producer who brought the European
gothic to Hollywood, Laemmle had immediately understood the potential of the novel,
and Chaney’s silent masterpieces inaugurated the ‘Universal Monster Cycle’ of
movies that included Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The
Wolf-Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Phantom of
the Opera is therefore at the start of the cinematic gothic, just as it is
at the end of the literary tradition.
As cinema was rapidly becoming the dominant art form
of the twentieth century, the gothic discourse transferred from page to
soundstage, subverting the realist film narrative just as it had the literary in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Phantom of the Opera is on
the cusp of both forms. Written before the First World War, there is still a
hint of the fin de siècle about Leroux’s original novel, while its
setting is nineteenth century, about ten years into the French Third Republic,
around 1880. This makes the story broadly contemporaneous with late-Victorian
English gothic fiction, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde having
been published in 1886, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891, and Dracula
and The Invisible Man in 1897. George Du Maurier’s bestselling novel
Trilby, meanwhile, in which a young woman falls under the influence of
the sinister mesmerist ‘Svengali’ in Paris, becoming a great but ultimately
doomed singer, had been serialised in 1894. The following year, Freud published
his Studies in Hysteria, and as Nina Auerbach has written a ‘key tableau
of the nineties’ involved older men ‘leaning over female bodies: Svengali,
Dracula, and Freud.’ The 1890s also saw literary fiction exploring similar
themes of appropriation and fetishism of the model by the artist, the performer
by the mentor, in The Tragic Muse by Henry James (1890), and ‘The Muse’s
Tragedy’ by Edith Wharton (1899); the common feature running between gothic fantasy
and literary realism being the erotic relationship between the dominant figure
and the submissive. (George Bernard Shaw would follow Leroux in 1913 with
another spin on this dynamic in Pygmalion.) Leroux is certainly tapping
this vein in The Phantom of the Opera and pushing it to the extremes of
sadomasochism with an almost ghoulish delight. His novel is both emotionally
and physically violent, the horror then frequently offset by gallows humour.
The author, meanwhile, presents himself as a ‘historian’ although his gleefully
morbid delivery foreshadows the campy American ‘horror hosts’ of the 1940s and
50s, such as ‘Raymond’ in the Inner Sanctum Mysteries radio show and the
‘Crypt Keeper’ in EC’s infamous Tales from the Crypt comics. Like these
characters, there is a touch of the sideshow barker about Leroux’s narrative
voice, which perfectly suits the carnivalesque mood of his novel.
And, like Lon Chaney, Leroux is also following Hugo’s Notre-Dame
de Paris (1831), both novels taking the fairy-tale premise of de Villeneuve’s
La Belle et la Bête (1740) to fatal extremes. (Christine at one point
introduces Raoul as ‘Prince Charming’.) There are also mythic undertones, and Orpheus
and Eurydice are obvious symbols. Erik is a Hades figure, if not Satan himself;
as Christine tells Raoul, ‘everything that is underground belongs to him!’
It is also notable that the operas performed during the story are Verdi’s Otello,
foregrounding murderous sexual jealousy, and Charles Gounod’s Roméo et
Juliette – the ‘star crossed lovers’ –and Faust. Christine has made
a devil’s bargain with her secret mentor, first the ‘Angel of Music’, later the
‘demon’, and he has come to claim his due…
The novel is framed by a prologue ‘In which the author
of this singular work informs the reader how he acquired the certainty that the
Opera Ghost really existed.’ This is a wonderful fictional ‘hook’ on which to
snag the reader’s attention and hold it: he pretends it’s all real. And this is
not such a leap for his readers, the labyrinthine cellars – built to house huge
painted backdrops, props, costumes, and even a stable (there really is a lake
under there as well) – having by then inspired a couple of generations of
superstitious opera-goers and employees to circulate ghost stories. Leroux the
journalist – the ‘historian’ – then documents his research process, beginning at
the ‘archives of the National Academy of music’ and supplemented by The
Memoirs of a Manager by ‘Armand Moncharmin’ (who along with ‘Firmin Richard’
take over management of the theatre at the start of the story). On reading
various accounts of the ‘Opera Ghost’ from thirty years before, the
straight-faced Leroux claims to have become convinced this legendary figure
must have been connected in some way with the mysterious death of Comte Philippe
de Chagny and the disappearance of his brother Raoul along with the singer Christine Daaé. It was assumed by investigators at the
time, we are told, that the brothers quarrelled over the girl and that Raoul
murdered Philipe. A friend of the family urges Leroux to keep digging, assuring
him that the brothers would never hurt each other. The plot thickens when a
body is discovered in the bowels of the opera. This is dismissed by authorities
as ‘a victim of the Commune’ (the opera house, then still under construction,
had been used as a garrison and then prison during the Siege of Paris and the
Paris Commune of 1870). Leroux, however, is sure this is his ‘Phantom’. He tracks
down the examining magistrate in the ‘Chagny Case’, and through him finds an
elderly Arab known only as ‘The Persian’ who furnishes him with various
documents, including the letters of Christine Daaé, which Leroux authenticates
by comparing the handwriting with papers held in the archives. ‘The Persian’
also offers his own statement, dismissed at the time as a fantasy, and
‘reprinted’ in full as ‘The Persian’s Narrative’, which takes over the novel
entirely from Chapter XXI to Chapter XXV. (Artfully covering his tracks, Leroux
notes that ‘The Persian’ died shortly after their interview.) The author also
cites various other sources of information, including retired police officers,
architects, historians, and former opera employees, several of whom are quoted
in the main body of the narrative. The novel proper then begins, with the murder
of the chief scene shifter. After seeing the ‘ghost’ and giving an account of
his appearance, Joseph Buquet is found hanging in the third cellar ‘between a
farm-house and a scene from the Roi de Lahore’, an ill omen that
prefaces the tragedy to follow and the first of many references to the artifice
of the opera and Erik’s subterranean ‘empire’. A balancing epilogue concludes
the novel with a biography of Erik, pieced together from Leroux’s ‘research’. The
fake veracity of the story is further enhanced by an appended ‘Publisher’s
Note’ on the history of the Paris opera house in relation to Leroux’s story. As
with the operatic intertexts, and the opera house itself, the prologue is
another aspect of performance in the novel.
As Leroux was first and foremost an author of detective
fiction, The Phantom of the Opera is introduced as a mystery to be
solved, an answer to the questions:
1.
What really happened to Christine and the
Chagny brothers – who really killed Philipe, and why?
2.
What is the true story behind the ‘Opera
Ghost’, the bones unearthed in the cellar?
3.
How are these two sets of people related?
The reader knows the end before they begin; two people
are dead, two are missing. What is not known is how and why this happened. Because
this is such an iconic text, we already have a good idea of the answers, even
if we’ve never read the original novel. The same is true of Frankenstein,
Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which are similarly fragmented narratives
made up of different accounts and pieces of quoted evidence that are so
culturally endemic it’s impossible not to know the stories. But in 1910, nobody
knew these answers. In reading, we must try to recapture this contemporary
innocence and enjoy the revelation of the narrative. And when returning to the
source of familiar literary characters like these, one will always be surprised
and delighted by what one finds there. The movies are never the same.
The other form of narrative that deploys the
fragmented text is the Gothic. The gothic anti-novel thrives on multiple points
of view and conflicting ‘evidence’ to undermine the set interpretation of the
realist text and thus add another dimension of unease to the reading
experience, rendering it, like the story itself, uncanny. Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, for example, is framed by Captain Walton’s letters to his
sister, while the main body of the text is Victor Frankenstein’s confession,
which is, in turn, annexed mid-point by the first-person narrative of his
creature. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, meanwhile, offers
a third person frame plus ‘Dr Lanyon’s Narrative’ and ‘Henry Jekyll’s Full
Statement of the Case’. Bram Stoker’s Dracula – which in theme and
construction The Phantom of the Opera most closely resembles – is the
most eclectic gothic narrative of all, comprising:
·
Jonathan Harker’s Journal.
·
Letters from Lucy Westenra to Mina Harker.
·
Mina Harker’s Journal.
·
Newspaper cuttings.
·
A long letter from Dr. Seward to Arthur
Holmwood.
·
Lucy Westernra’s Diary.
·
Dr Seward’s Diary.
·
Professor Van Helsing’s notes, recorded on
a phonograph.
This level of narrative disintegration functions as a
series of competing frames of explanation, creating a tension between natural
and supernatural possibilities, like a series of witness testimonies in a
complicated murder trial. Multiple points of view are also a feature of postmodern
narratives, in which the unstable nature of the Self is reflected in the
instability of the text, key examples being Franz Kafka’s The Trial, the
early novels of Thomas Pynchon, and Samuel Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’. It could be
argued that Leroux is doing something similar with The Phantom of the Opera.
Although inspired by the English Gothic, the French romans noir is less
interested in monsters and tends more towards psychological depth in the
tradition of Poe, using the relationships between characters – and themselves –
to show the fears and contradictions at the heart of the human experience. The
Phantom of the Opera is therefore a tale of love and obsession, as well as an
exploration of gender, identity, race, and social class. Raoul and Phillipe are
aristocrats, Erik is almost comically bourgeois in his marital ambitions, while
part of his otherness stems from an oriental past; Christine is
proletarian and bohemian, the daughter of a failed Scandinavian musician who is
spied on as much in the story by Raoul as she is the Phantom. There is also a
Freudian subtext about a girl who loves the ‘Angel of Music’ she believes has
been sent by her dead father, and a broken boy who lives in an underground
house full of his mother’s possessions… Jung’s theory of archetypes is equally in
play: the relationship between the Self (‘the totality of the psyche’), the
Persona (‘a kind of mask’), and the Shadow (the ‘instinctive and irrational’).
And not just Erik wears a mask; as Leroux writes in Chapter III: ‘In Paris, our
lives are one masked ball.’ ‘Poor Erik’ is Persona trying to achieve unified
Selfhood through love but instead becoming only a Shadow, a description used
repeatedly by Leroux to emphasise his ‘ghostly’ comings and goings. As to
whether he finally achieves any sort of redemption, as suggested by the
musical, you’ll just have to read the book for yourself.
After the Phantom, we must look to cinema for our
gothic icons. This is not to say that the gothic novel ceased to exist, only
that with Leroux’s creation the archetypal pantheon had been filled. He stands
with the other giants of the genre, most of whom remain linked through those
early Universal pictures. (Only Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde belonged to Paramount.)
At 110-years-old and a global brand, the old ‘trapdoor lover’ is oddly looking
pretty good for his age. Like Dorian Gray, he remains forever young, his story
endlessly retold, re-invented, and re-imagined across media, while the actors
who play him on stage periodically change like Dr Who. But that’s not his real
story. That still resides in this remarkable French novel by an equally
remarkable French author. The Phantom of the Opera is truly the last
gothic novel and should be read and respected as such.
Main image: Lon Chaney in the 1925 Universal Pictures film version. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Image in text: Poster for the same film. Credit: Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo