Christine's terror of the Phantom was "love of the most exquisite kind, the kind which people do not admit even to themselves"?
One of the most interesting characters I came across in Leroux was the mysterious Persian, for he, too, posed a number of interesting questions. Why did he risk his own neck to save the life of a man he knew to be a shameless murderer? Again, Leroux's explanation, that "Erik had shown him some slight services and procured him many a hearty laugh," hardly seems an adequate explanation for putting one's own life at risk. The pity and tolerance of the Persian seemed to me to hint at a deep and abiding friendship, a friendship that Leroux, constrained by the genre of his "mystery/thriller," did not have the opportunity to explore.
The little black book began to live on my bedside table and I returned again and again to those passages which intrigued and puzzled me. Increasingly I found my attention drawn to the final three pages, to the brief historical outline in which Leroux accounts for the Phantom's earlier existence. The main bulk of his novel—indeed all screen and stage versions—had dealt only with the last six months or so in the life of a man who must have been about fifty. 1 began to feel that the tale we had come to know as
The Phantom of the Opera
was perhaps only the magnificent tip of the iceberg, and that somewhere beneath a huge, human story lay waiting to be told—the story of a man who was driven to many terrible vices and yet still retained, in Leroux's own words, "a heart that could have held the empire of the world." The eventful and exciting past at which Leroux had hinted must surely have been filled with a number of significant relationships… perhaps even an earlier love affair. This was the story I wanted to read, and eventually I began to understand that it was also the story 1 wanted to write.
I embarked on the project with many deep reservations.
No author can tamper with a well-known classic tale—and particularly one which has been so successful in different mediums—without an uneasy feeling of presumption. And I was well aware that to set the Phantom in the historical background which Leroux had envisaged for him would require research on a very wide scale… a knowledge of music, voice training, ventriloquism, magic, Gypsy lore, architecture, and stonemasonry, not to mention the historical and cultural background of four different countries.
Eighteen months later the book was finished. It had taken me to Rome and America in the quest for material, but after the early days of initial frustration the research resolved itself in a number of remarkably lucky finds. Munro Butler Johnson's
A Trip up the Volga to the Fair of Nijni-Novgorod
provided valuable details for Erik's life in Russia. Curzon's
Persia and the Persian Question
and Lady Sheil's eyewitness account of Persian court life in the mid-nineteenth century enabled me to slide Erik into the affairs of the existing shah and his grand vazir, Mirza Taqui Khan. Christopher Mead's thesis on Charles Garnier and the building of the Paris Opera was eventually located in America—the only definitive English-language work which presently exists on the architect and his remarkable building.
The Phantom who has emerged in the course of this book owes something to all the many different interpretations of the character that have been made during the last few decades, and a vast amount, of course, to his original creator; but inevitably he has been altered and molded to fit the contours of my own imagination. There is a curious, timeless fascination to this legendary character and I have no doubt that the process of reinterpretation will continue over decades to come.
Susan Kay
November