For those of us on the American Chesterton Society pilgrimage to Rome, we never experienced that night between the Papal debut and the next morning. We were in the Atlanta airport on Wednesday afternoon, watching CNN’s abysmal coverage in anticipation of the new Pope. I was trying to pray, herd pilgrims onto a plane, and field several phone calls from my banker about, well, stuff. Then the plane took off, and when it landed, we were in Rome and it was time for breakfast. The only thing missing was the night in between those two events.

We arrived, however, at the most amazing guest house in Rome, over-looking St. Peter’s Square, offering a perfect view of that very same balcony where Pope Francis had just appeared only ten hours earlier. This set the tone of the pilgrimage. It seems that almost everywhere we went, we were in the footsteps of our new Pope. A couple of times we managed to converge with him, but for the most part, it was a case of just missing him. This is not a complaint. In fact, it lent a certain excitement to every step we took and every place we visited.

For example, we attended a special Mass, arranged just for us, that happened to be at the small Vatican church of St. Anne’s, just after the Pope had said his first public Mass there. And of course, we visited the place where Pope had said his first private Mass, the Sistine Chapel.

We also visited the other Sistine Chapel just after Pope Francis. (“What?” you ask.) Yes, the other Sistine Chapel. The first day after he was elected, the Pope went to St. Mary Major, one of the four great basilicas of Rome, to pray at a side chapel in front of an image of The Blessed Virgin Mary. The ancient painting is purported to be by St. Luke himself, who, even if he was not the one who left the record of her image, certainly left the record of her Magnificat. The church also has a chapel beneath the altar containing wood from Christ’s manger. But there is another chapel that the Pope visited. The other Sistine Chapel. Not the somewhat more famous one built by Pope Sixtus IV, where Popes are now elected (and where Michelangelo did so much of the interior decorating). Pope Sixtus V built a different Sistine chapel in St. Mary Major. And there Pope Frances knelt and prayed before the tomb of Pope St. Pius V. The chapel has been closed for two years because of some needed repairs to the ceiling and roof. When we arrived a few days later it was locked up again. But Deacon Spencer Howe, our invaluable man-on-the-ground-in-Rome, who worked so hard to set everything up for us, went and had a few words with the Franciscan friar who serves as rector for the Basilica. The friar said to him, “Well, if we can open it up a few minutes for the Pope, we can open it up a few minutes for you.” So we had the unique opportunity of being the first people to enter the Sistine Chapel after Pope Francis.

“And why is St. Pius V so important?” you also ask. He was a reformer. He introduced the simple white cassock that all popes since him have worn, symbolizing his taking the Papacy and the Church in a new direction, away from his luxurious predecessors who had watched Christendom come apart beneath them. He convened the Council of Trent and officially launched the Counter-Reformation. And out of a very divided Europe he managed to put together a coalition of kingdoms to take up arms against the Ottoman Empire that was about to attack, and certainly conquer, Rome. The Muslim forces were decisively defeated in the Battle of Lepanto. (And G.K. Chesterton wrote a poem about it.)

We did manage to meet our new Holy Father face-to-face when he said his first public Angelus. And when I say face-to-face, I mean we were looking at him eye level, albeit from across the St. Peter’s Square, from our privileged perch. Then we got much closer. Two days later, most of our brave pilgrims rose at 4 am to stand in line at the gates of the Square (which of course is round). When the gates opened at 6:30, they then made a mad dash to get to a good position for the Initiation Mass, which would not start for several more hours. The only people who outran them, of course, were nuns. Thousands of them. More evidence that the mightiest people in the Catholic Church are the women religious. But our Chesterton Academy students were thrilled to see the Holy Father at close range, as he processed through the crowd, on his way to receive the Papal ring and pallium.

On the latter part of our pilgrimage, we continued to walk in the footsteps of Pope Francis, but there was a marked difference. Instead of arriving just after him, we arrived just before him.

We visited the Basilica of St. John Lateran, which is the actual Cathedral Basilica of Rome. This is where he will officially take the chair of the Bishop of Rome. We had as our guide that day, the incomparable Dr. Elizabeth Lev, who explained that while St. Peter’s is where the Church puts on its “game face” and shows itself off rather well to the world, St. John Lateran, which is the first legally built church in history (which makes it rather old), is where the whole complicated story of the Church is on display in a collision of artistic styles. But what a story. Perhaps it is epitomized in the pillars of the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, which are the very pillars that once held up the most important temple in Rome: the temple of Jupiter. Christ has triumphed in every respect.

We then went to Assisi, where Pope Francis will most certainly visit to pray before the tomb of the great saint whose name he has chosen. One of our pilgrims, Father Bob McElwee, a convert from Kansas said Mass for us in the Basilica of St. Francis, and exhorted the Chesterton Academy students to be leaders in rebuilding our civilization. Then we prayed for Pope Francis beside the tomb of St. Francis. One of the Franciscan friars there told the story of sitting by that tomb all day long and watching visitors come and go, and noting the change in their countenance from the mere curiosity of a traveler to the joy and peace of someone who has been touched by God. Assisi is quite simply one of the most beautiful and serene places on earth; it is easy to understand why St. Francis would have heard the voice of God in such a place.

Back in Rome, several of us visited The Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, also known as The Gesu, the mother church of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, the order which has for the first time in history, given the world a Pope. He will of course visit this Church, even though we beat him to it. He will no doubt kneel before the tomb of St. Ignatius of Loyola, surrounded by its stunning statuary depicting the Church’s grappling with heretics of various sorts. And then he will cross to the opposite chapel, where above the altar is a glass case holding the arm of St. Francis Xavier, the arm that baptized hundreds of thousands. Deacon Spencer said that if the case were opened, the arm would still try to baptize passersby.

There were a few more places I visited after the other pilgrims left, and one must be mentioned. I did not go to Palm Sunday Mass at St. Peter’s, where I would have again seen the Pope. Instead I found myself in a small town in the mountains east of Rome. We began in a subterranean room, holding olive branches instead of palm leaves, which is the tradition in Italy. We then processed up a stairs into the street and entered the church, which was packed, and where there was a beautiful Mass. The town was Norcia. The underground room was the boyhood home of St. Benedict (and his sister St. Scholastica), and the church was built over his birthplace. This was the saint from whom our Pope Emeritus took his name, the Patron Saint of all Europe. More footsteps in which to follow.

And on this pilgrimage, we also followed the footsteps of G.K. Chesterton, who visited Rome and wrote about it eloquently. But we’ll save that part of the story for next time.

Note: This report of the Chesterton Rome Pilgrimage was published in the latest issue of Gilbert Magazine.
Click here to view photos of the Chesterton Rome Pilgrimage

They were: (L to R) Lord Howard de Walden, William Archer, J.M. Barrie, GKC, and Bernard Shaw.

Vincent Price was born in St. Louis. His father was like G.K. Chesterton’s father: a successful businessman who really wanted to be an artist. And Vincent Price and G.K. Chesterton both wanted to become artists themselves, but instead found very successful careers as something else. After graduating from Yale, Vincent went to study art at the University of London, the same place where Chesterton studied art. But like Chesterton, he never finished. His studies were cut short when he was cast as Prince Albert in Victoria Regina in London, and then invited to play the same role on Broadway opposite the legendary Lillian Gish.

From New York, Vincent eventually went on to Hollywood, where he had some early successes in films such as The Song of Bernadette and Laura. He also lent his great voice to several radio productions, such as Simon Templar in The Saint, but by the late 1950s he found himself typecast mostly as villains and monsters in horror movies, or as he preferred to call them, “Gothic tales.” This would be his lot for the next three decades. In addition to his multiple celluloid renderings of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations were his gorgeous, if gory, signature pieces, The Abominable Dr. Phibes and The Theater of Blood. Variety magazine called him “the rock generation’s Boris Karloff.” Marcello Mastroianni, the great Italian leading man, once said that his favorite American actor was Vincent Price. “I know he does these genre films, but I think he is so good. He can do so much with his words. He is serious but funny… he is always so good because the tongue is in the cheek.”

Vincent enjoyed horror movies because they are paradoxical. They are meant to be an intense experience, but also not to be taken seriously. Horror movies fail when they are taken seriously. When his career stalled in horror films, however, he felt he did not have the respect of other actors. But in the late 1970s, he did a one-man stage show of Oscar Wilde that played to packed houses all across the country and to rave reviews. By the end of his life, Vincent had achieved legendary status of his own, and his final film appearance was a fitting exclamation point to his career, playing the inventor of the “monster” Edward Scissorhands.

Although his stage and film career brought Price fame and some fortune, it was only his career. His true love was always art, and began at a young age, lasting his whole life. He bought his first work of art from a local dealer in St. Louis when he was twelve and paid for it in installments. But it was a good buy: a Rembrandt etching.

During his Hollywood days, Price ran an art gallery and eventually donated his collection to East Los Angeles College, which is now home to the Vincent Price Gallery. He dedicated himself to promoting a wider popular appreciation of art. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s he traveled all around the country giving lectures on art, wrote a syndicated column on art, and worked with Sears-Roebuck to acquire original art for purchase by the common men and women who shopped for power tools and washing machines.

He was utterly unpretentious about a subject that is usually prone to pretentiousness. (“I never could afford to buy what other people said I should like.”) He looked at art “wide-eyed and openmouthed,” but his observations were astute. He said, for instance, that a sketch can capture what the camera cannot. Both are immediate, but the sketch “has so much more humanity” because “life is quicker than the eye.”

He was an avid collector and promoter of native and folk art, and defended these artists against their highbrow critics with a line worthy of Chesterton: “At least they haven’t lost the ability to see directly in their own directions.”

When he looked at the work of great artists, he realized that God-given talent was one of the things that make it easy to believe in God. “I had always felt that art and religion were inextricably tied together.”

He traveled all over the world, hunting down art and going to extra lengths to appreciate it more fully: getting mayors to let him into locked museums, or getting priests to let him into locked churches, climbing the scaffolding on a cathedral under renovation in order to see the exterior sculpture up close, gaining access to Mayan ruins after the grounds were closed so he could climb the pyramid under the full moon.

Vincent Price was a good actor because he was a good audience. He was a good audience because he had made a decision early on to become “the most receptive human being I could become,” and discovered many of the characters that he would play by seeing them in paintings. “I became an audience for the drama of the eye. And once you accept that fact, it is almost impossible ever again to be bored with life.”

Vincent had “an enormous relish for life.” He epitomized the Chestertonian trait of always being jolly. Like Chesterton, he was serious but funny. And he shared something else with Chesterton: he was a Catholic convert.

So did I find the Chesterton-Price connection? Well, first of all, even though I still can’t prove it, I am absolutely convinced they met in person. It would have been January of 1931. Chesterton was giving a lecture at Yale; Vincent was a sophomore there. He certainly would have attended the lecture because he was smitten with celebrity. He also may have attended the debate between Clarence Darrow and Chesterton that took place in New Haven, a warm-up for the main event that occurred a few nights later in New York City. But they also might have met in London in 1935, when Vincent was studying there, as Chesterton returned to the Slade School of Art at the University of London to hand out awards. In any case, Vincent would have been familiar with Chesterton as a writer. But where was the proof? Where was the actual citation?

After reading a delightful biography of Vincent Price (by his daughter) and an even more delightful autobiography (which focused on art and barely mentioned acting), I still had nothing. Finally, I decided to return to the Internet. And there it was, the thing I was looking for: a recording of Vincent Price talking about G.K. Chesterton.


To listen to Vincent Price’s talk about Chesterton, click here.

The clerihew is a humorous, biographical four-line poem with an irregular structure (AABB). Clerihews begin with a biographical subject in the first line and end with the name of the poem. For example,

Sir Christopher Wren Said,
“I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”

Karl Keating
Was not just tweeting
When he said, “I dare you-
To write a Clerihew.”

The very first clerihew was written by and is named after, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a good friend of G.K. Chesterton’s. Born in London, and educated at St Paul’s School and Merton College, Clerihew was a journalist and author. From 1936 until 1949 Clerihew was president of the Detection Club and Chesterton dedicated his popular detective novel The Man Who Was Thursday to him.

Submit your clerihew using the form below by March 11th, 5pm (CT) to enter the 1st International Clerihew Contest! The winning clerihew will be read at the International Chesterton Conference in Rome on March 16 and during the April Virtual Society Meeting. The winner will also receive a Chesterton beer mug. Join in the fun!

The 1st International Clerihew Competition is now closed … details to be announced soon on the winning entry and runners up!

The Bridge Builders

In the world’s whitest morning
As hoary with hope,
The Builder of Bridges
Was priest and was pope:
And the mitre of mystery
And the canopy his,
Who darkened the chasms
And doomed the abyss.

To eastward and westward
Spread wings at his word
The arch with the key-stone
That stoops like a bird;
That rides the wild air
And the daylight cast under;
The highway of danger,
The gateway of wonder.

Of his throne were the thunders
That rivet and fix
Wild weddings of strangers,
That meet and not mix;
The town and the cornland;
The bride and the groom;
In the breaking of bridges
Is treason and doom.

But he bade us, who fashion
The road that can fly,
That we build not too heavy
And build not too high:
Seeing alway that under
The dark arch’s bend
Shine death and white daylight
Unchanged to the end.

Who walk on his mercy
Walk light, as he saith,
Seeing that our life
Is a bridge above death;
And the world and its gardens
And hills, as ye heard,
Are born above space
On the wings of a bird.

Not high and not heavy
Is building of his:
When ye seal up the flood
And forget the abyss,
When your towers are uplifted,
Your banners unfurled,
In the breaking of bridges
Is the end of the world.

If we desire at all to catch the strange colours of the sunset of the Middle Ages, to see what had changed yet not wholly killed chivalry there is no better study than the riddle of Richard III. Of course, scarcely a line of him was like the caricature with which his much meaner successor placarded the world when he was dead. He was not even a hunchback; he had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, probably the effect of his furious swordsmanship on a naturally slender and sensitive frame. Yet his soul, if not his body, haunts us somehow as the crooked shadow of a straight knight of better days. He was not an ogre shedding rivers of blood; some of the men he executed deserved it as much as any men of that wicked time; and even the tale of his murdered nephews is not certain, as it is told by those who also tell us he was born with tusks and was originally covered with hair.

Yet a crimson cloud cannot be dispelled from his memory and, so tainted is the very air of that time with carnage, that we cannot say he was incapable even of the things of which he may have been innocent. Whether or no he was a good man, he was apparently a good king and even a popular one; yet we think of him vaguely, and not, I fancy, untruly, as on sufferance. He anticipated the Renascence in an abnormal enthusiasm for art and music, and he seems to have held to the old path of religion and charity. He did not pluck perpetually at his sword and dagger because his only pleasure was in cutting throats; he probably did it because he was nervous. It was the age of our first portrait-painting, and a fine contemporary portrait of him throws a more plausible light on this particular detail. For it shows him touching, and probably twisting, a ring on his finger, the very act of a high-strung personality who would also fidget with a dagger.

And in his face, as there painted, we can study all that has made it worthwhile to pause so long upon his name; an atmosphere very different from everything before and after. The face was a remarkable intellectual beauty; but there is something else on the face that is hardly in itself either good or evil, and that thing is death; the death of an epoch, the death of a great civilization, the death of something which once sang to the sun in the canticle of St. Francis and sailed to the ends of the earth in the ships of the First Crusade, but which in peace wearied and turned its weapons inwards, wounded its own brethren, broke its own loyalties, gambled for the crown, and grew feverish even about the creed, and has this one grace among its dying virtues, that its valour is the last to die.

But whatever else may have been bad or good about Richard of Gloucester, there was a touch about him which makes him truly the last of the mediaeval kings. It is expressed in the one word which he cried aloud as he struck down foe after foe in the last charge at Bosworth—treason. For him, as for the first Norman kings, treason was the same as treachery; and in this case at least it was the same as treachery. When his nobles deserted him before the battle, he did not regard it as a new political combination, but as the sin of false friends and faithless servants. Using his own voice like the trumpet of a herald, he challenged his rival to a fight as personal as that of two paladins of Charlemagne. His rival did not reply, and was not likely to reply. The modern world had begun. The call echoed unanswered down the ages; for since that day no English king has fought after that fashion. Having slain many, he was himself slain and his diminished force destroyed. So ended the war of the usurpers; and the last and most doubtful of all the usurpers, a wanderer from the Welsh marches, a knight from nowhere, found the crown of England under a bush of thorn.

–From A Short History of England

The social trends have steadily moved in the opposite direction from this ideal in the last century. It is no longer a matter of a few loud critics getting a little testy at our quaint ideas of morality; we have gone past being attacked to being brazenly ignored. But if the society at large does not understand the moral arguments for the family, perhaps it will gain some appreciation for the practical arguments. And the recent bad news has been good news in this regard. Our arguments have been given a huge boost with the collapse of the world financial markets and the continuing economic fallout.

An economy built on massive lending and spending cannot be sustained. But the reason it cannot be sustained is not merely economic, it is moral. It regards material wealth as the ultimate goal, and people as merely a commodity to achieve that goal. It is selfish and therefore self-destructive.

An economy based on the family is self-sustaining. Its focus is on the nurturing and training of children and not on the mere acquisition of goods. The family ideal as defended by Chesterton is something quite different than the industrialized consumer family, where the family members leave the house each morning by the clock and on a strict schedule to pursue work and recreation and the majority of life outside the home. Chesterton’s ideal was the productive home with its creative kitchen, its busy workshop, its fruitful garden, and its central role in entertainment, education, and livelihood. Unlike the industrial home, life in a productive household is not amenable to scheduling and anything but predictable.

The only thing surprising about this ideal is that it was once shared by almost everyone. Children used to be considered an asset; at some point they began to be seen as a liability.

Chesterton saw the beginning of this problem when he noticed people preferring to buy amusements for themselves rather than to have children. He pointed out prophetically that children are a far better form of entertainment than electrical gadgets. The irony today is that the retailers that sell the electronic amusements are going out of business because there are not enough people to buy this merchandise.

But there is another worse problem why children are now considered a liability. They don’t merely make other material desires cost-prohibitive, they are cost-prohibitive themselves. They must be educated. The cost of educating them is obscene. A college education is the most overpriced product on the planet, and over-rated as well. Parents have the privilege of sacrificing nearly everything to send their children to college, only to have them get their heads filled with doubts and destructive ideas, undermining everything their parents have taught them.

But there are fewer parents because there are fewer children.

When social security was instituted, each retiree was supported by 15 workers. Now each retiree is supported by only three workers. Those of us who are still working spend 15% of our income to support those who aren’t working.

Our lack of domestic life is reflected in the fact that we don’t have a domestic economy. We don’t produce anything. We are suddenly watching massive layoffs, but the people being laying off (no offense to them) were not producing anything. They were either selling things, or sitting at desks and computer terminals, being paid with borrowed money, so that they could also go into debt. Now the financial center of the country has moved from New York to Washington, DC, as Gudge has passed the baton to Hudge, who has promised that all the problems that were caused by too much borrowing will all be solved by even more borrowing.

But the younger generation cannot pay the older generation because we have committed demographic suicide. We are paying a high price not only for slaughtering our unborn children but for contracepting them. In fact, we have demonstrated that we cannot afford the high price.

We have seen the natural consequences of unnatural acts. We have witnessed a monumental economic disaster that is not the result of inflation or recession but of the devaluation of children.

Chesterton says that every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things. The obvious things are the ordinary things, and we have forgotten them. The modern world that we have created has brought with it great strain and stress so that even the things that normal men have normally desired are no longer desirable: “marriage and fair ownership and worship and the mysterious worth of man.” Those are the normal and ordinary things. Those are the things we have lost, and we need to recover them.

“The disintegration of rational society,” says Chesterton, “started in the drift from the hearth and the family; the solution must be a drift back.”

To download a PDF of this essay, click here.

Have you seen Les Misérables yet? You probably don’t know that in 1902, G.K. Chesterton wrote an essay on a nearly-forgotten writer named Victor Hugo, predicting that he would become very popular again. Chesterton wrote,

“…Hugo is a vague and remote figure, a doubtful and little discussed author. Yet he was, beyond question, one of the greatest men of letters that Europe has seen, and the day of his return into intellectual triumph is remote indeed, but certain.”

“Every one of his great novels was in itself a small French Revolution. In Notre Dame de Paris he revealed to the modern world all the beauties and terrors of the old medieval order, and showed how pitilessly the individual was sacrificed to such an order. In Les Misérables he showed, with a far more sensational illumination, how our own modern order of law and judgment and criminal procedure was, as far as the sacrifice of individuals was concerned, as cruel as any medieval order. In Ninety-Three he showed that such a sacrifice of individuals became necessary, and in a strange, bitter manner, attractive, even in the modern age.”

* * *

Victor Hugo
by G.K. Chesterton

From Pall Mall Magazine, 1902

The Centenary of Victor Hugo, which has just been celebrated in Paris, arouses some of the deepest thoughts which are possible in the human mind. Hugo represents the culmination of a revolution which almost in our own time shook the foundations of humanity, and already that revolution is old, and Hugo is a vague and remote figure, a doubtful and little discussed author. Yet he was, beyond question, one of the greatest men of letters that Europe has seen, and the day of his return into intellectual triumph is remote indeed, but certain. There can be little doubt that we are divided from the generations that immediately precede us by a gulf far more unfathomable than that which divides us from the darkest ages and the most distant lands. There are art-critics who maintain that the most archaic and Byzantine beginnings of Christian art are superior to everything that goes by the name of an Italian master. There are art-critics who maintain that a portion of a Persian carpet contains and eclipses everything that can be found in the National Galleries of Europe. It is, upon the whole, exceedingly probable that there are art-critics who maintain that the two idols from the Fiji Islands which used to stand outside the British Museum are artistically superior to all the Greek gods and goddesses which are to be found inside. But there is a limit to this modern liberality: there are certain forms of art which are most recent and most effective upon the minds of our immediate forbears. No one declares that the Regency style of dress, or style of poetry, or style of architecture, was the most perfect in the world. No one says that Opie was the first painter, or Flaxman the first sculptor, or George IV the first gentleman of Europe.

The time is no doubt coming when a languid and aesthetic collector will exhibit, as treasures dating from the true time of art’s supremacy, the furniture and costume of the Early Victorian Era. He will boast of possessing a real case of wax flowers under glass, an authentic sampler, and a real lustre chandelier from a real Brighton landlady. But that time is not yet. For the present we are doomed to misunderstand the time which produced us. We can comprehend the most immoral outbursts of ancient Israel; but our immediate progenitors are strangers to us. We worship our remotest ancestor, but we teach our grandmother.

I have dwelt upon this particular aspect of the matter because it is supremely necessary to understand it if we wish properly to understand Victor Hugo. He represented two great revolutions, the first artistic and the second political. The artistic revolution was that connected with the word romanticism: the political revolution was that connected with the word democracy. And the great difficulty involved in properly appreciating him lies in this, that both romanticism and democracy have conquered and therefore become commonplace. They have been so triumphant as to become invisible; just as existence itself is triumphant and invisible. And like existence itself they have become truisms: and while it is fatally easy to turn a truth into a truism, it is fatally difficult to turn a truism back into a truth. We may sympathise with a dead faith, but it is difficult to sympathise with an apparently dead scepticism. In history even a molehill is more expressive than an extinct volcano. Those who may be called, with all respect, the eternal tootlers of the ages, Horace and Catullus and Villon and Tom Moore, are always sure of sympathy. But those who have blown the trumpet to a veritable charge, like Luther and Victor Hugo, are doomed to exhibit themselves to history as making a gigantic fuss about nothing.  The great achievements of Hugo are sufficiently obvious even if we consider only his novels, which are probably the most popular, though certainly not the most important of his works. Every one of his great novels was in itself a small French Revolution. In Notre Dame de Paris he revealed to the modern world all the beauties and terrors of the old medieval order, and showed how pitilessly the individual was sacrificed to such an order. In Les Misérables he showed, with a far more sensational illumination, how our own modern order of law and judgment and criminal procedure was, as far as the sacrifice of individuals was concerned, as cruel as any medieval order. In Ninety-Three he showed that such a sacrifice of individuals became necessary, and in a strange, bitter manner, attractive, even in the modern age. In all his works alike there are two common characteristics. The first is a tendency to what is called sensationalism; the second is a tendency to what is called democracy. It is necessary to realise his feeling upon both these points before we do anything like justice to him.

It is the custom among certain literary men of this era to sneer at the novels of Hugo, chiefly on the ground that they are sensational; as if all art were not sensationalism and the whole artistic temperament best definable as the temperament which is sensational or receptive of sensations. But the novels of Victor Hugo have one very actual and direct claim upon the attention of everybody. They are, in one sense, the most interesting of all novels. The reason is that Hugo is typically a mystic, a man who finds a meaning in everything. We all know what are the uninteresting, the inevitably uninteresting parts of fiction; we all know what parts of a novel to skip. We skip the long description of the country where the hero was born, with its flat sandy wastes, made ragged with fir trees and tumbling towards the West into low discoloured hills. We skip the long account of the heroine’s room, with its quaint old carved furniture and the portraits on the wale dim with age but gorgeous with ancient colour. We skip the account of the hero’s great-grandfather, who was so manly and honourable a lawyer in a country town.

Now the greatest and boldest tribute that can be paid to Hugo, the greatest and boldest, perhaps, that can be paid to any novelist, may be stated in the form that it is not safe to skip these passages in a novel by Victor Hugo. In other novelists all these details are dead; in Hugo they are all alive. In Hugo we may be certain that the sandy waste will be made typical, in some wild way, of the type and tribe of characters to which it gives birth; we may be certain that the furniture in the room will be packed with symbolism like an antique chapel. There will be something human and horrible about the tree, something significant and psychological about the three-legged stool. This is no exaggeration; in this sense it is literally true that there is not a dull line in Hugo.

The description of the wooded Breton country in Quatre-Vingt-Treize is really a string of primeval epigrams about the effect of the forest-darkness upon the soul of man. The description of the room of the Duchess in L’Homme Qui Rit is really a riot of a kind of bestial mysticism and of evil sanctities, such as might have filled some forgotten Phallic temple. This is the first and most admirable thing about Hugo as a novelist – that he is always interesting, and interesting for the best and most impressive reason, that in everything, however small, he is interested. Those parts of a novel, scenery, minutia’, explanations, which in most novelists are the most tedious, in him are almost the most fascinating. He takes the details which the best authors alive are forced to make too tame and too long, and at the end our complaint against him is that they are too brilliant and too overstrained. Where none else can be tolerably vivacious, he contrives to be intolerably eloquent. For to him there is neither a large thing nor a small one; he has abolished the meanest and most absurd of all human words, the word ” insignificant”: he knows that it is impossible for anything to signify nothing.

Thus in what is, as a work of art, perhaps his most successful novel, Notre Dame de Paris, the sumptuous and fantastic details of Gothic architecture are practically almost as alive as the people that pass underneath them. In the presence of the mazy background of pious sculpture that runs like a pattern through the tale, we have something of the same sensation which we have sometimes in looking at such a facade as that of Rouen Cathedral; the network of stone is so rich and changing that we can almost believe it to be continually in motion, rippling underneath like a sea, with writhing serpents and fluttering birds. Hugo’s backgrounds are never “setpieces”. So again in Quatre-Vingt-Treize the background to the two or three central figures is the most appalling of all possible backgrounds – a sea of faces. Cimourdain and Lantenac and the young Republican soldier have to act as stern and simple a drama as any old Greeks in a glade or wood; but instead of acting it in the midst of a wood they act it in the midst of a mob. “A two-legged forest” Hugo would probably have said. But his subordinate features are always thus terrific if our eye falls upon them; he will slaughter millions to make an accessory. In Les Misérables, as in Notre Dame, Paris is almost the chief character of the novel. In L’Homme Qui Rit the best description is that of two very weird and fierce and inscrutable things – the sea, and the English aristocracy according to Victor Hugo. In Les Travailleurs de la Mer he spends a vast deal of trouble on the reality of the cuttle-fish, and very little on the possibility or probability of the gentleman who fights with him. Hugo is not a successful novelist according to the conception that a novelist must understand human nature. He does not even pretend to understand human nature; he is a poet, and boasts of understanding nothing; he glories in an astounded and uplifted ignorance. Human nature to Hugo was a spontaneous and unbegotten and thrilling thing, a thing like the lightning and the burst of song among the birds. He did not profess to have vivisected man in the modern manner. Man was to him an awful thing, a thing to fly from, as he must have been to the animals in Eden.

The manifest theatricality and vanity of Victor Hugo have undoubtedly interfered with his appreciation by English readers, for we English people have thoroughly embedded in our minds the idea that vanity is a morbid and fantastic thing, developed by a high degree of hyper-civilization. We think this although every one of us has constantly noticed vanity in a child of three. We think this although every one of us knows that savages are vainer than civilized men, and that even the bonnets of Bond Street are not more elaborately feathered than the head-dresses of the Cannibal Islands. The truth is that Hugo represents all the ultimate and fundamental things – love, fury, pity, worship, hatred, and consequently, among other things, vanity. Vanity is not only not the same thing as self-consciousness, it is very often the opposite of it. When a man becomes self-conscious he very often becomes painfully and abominably humble. But so long as a man is healthily unconscious he is almost certain to be healthily vain. He will take a delight, without a moment’s arriere pensee, in any of his own powers or characteristics. Hugo had, more than any other great man of modern times, this self-enjoying faculty. To him delight in himself was the first condition of all optimism, and faith in himself the first condition of all faith. If a man does not enjoy himself whom  he has seen, how shall he enjoy God whom he has not seen; To the great poet, as to the child, there is no hard-and-fast line drawn between the Ego and the Cosmos.

Anyone who has ever watched a child for the first five years of its life will know that when the human soul first awakens to the immensities of mere existence, the first thing it does is to begin to act a part. In that first movement of the child we see the great part of the literary and political history of Victor Hugo. He had in all things an innocent arrogance; he had, if a paradoxical but accurate phrase may be employed, an utterly unconscious self-consciousness. And this quality fitted him supremely to be the expression of France in the nineteenth century; for France, having renewed her youth in that century, was really young. She had not only the fire and anger and hope of youth, she had also that more obvious and more painful characteristic of youth, its cleverness. Quatre-Vingt-Treize, the great novel of the Revolution, was not the most successful, perhaps; it was possibly the most Hugo-esque of the works of Hugo; for Hugo was supremely at one with the spirit of the Revolution, and his novel, like the Revolution itself, was one mass of epigrams. The story of the Revolution, indeed, gives an exceedingly good example of how misleading are many of the narrow English notions about sincerity and affectation, and how artificial is their idea of artificiality. If an Englishman read in a novel by Victor Hugo that a man about to be beheaded asked permission to take leave of a friend, and when forbidden exclaimed in a resonant voice, ” Our two heads will seek each other in the sack,” he would say that it was a monstrous example of Hugo’s exaggeration. In the best style of the latter-day realist and psychologist he would point out how impossible it would be for a man paralysed with the last proximity of death to have his wits polished for such neat and fantastic discourse. If he read it in a novel of Hugo’s, in short, he would say that it showed all the weakness of Hugo; but as a matter of fact it does not occur in a novel of Hugo’s, but in the actual history of the French Revolution. The words were the precise words, attested by numerous witnesses, used on this prosaic earth of ours by a living man, Georges Jacques Danton, within ten minutes of becoming a dead one. Until we have realised this fact about the Revolution, all criticism of Hugo must remain vain and superficial.

Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent: thus the Hebrew songs appeared turgid to Voltaire and the critics of the eighteenth century; thus the epigrams of the French Revolution appear turgid to ourselves. The reason is not that the Hebrew psalmists or the French Revolutionists were affected, but that we are not so interested in religion as the Hebrew psalmists, nor so interested in democracy as the French Revolutionists. The great demagogues of the Terror were so filled with the unifying convictions, that their life became a poetical unity, a work of art like the legend of a medieval saint. The extravagant appropriateness of Hugo’s conversations are thoroughly in harmony with the extravagant appropriateness of the actual incidents of that period of French history. If Hugo does not honestly copy the Revolution, the only possible alternative is the somewhat improbable one that the Revolution honestly copied Hugo.

The second of the misunderstandings which interfere with the general appreciation of Victor Hugo is the misunderstanding of his idea of Republicanism or democracy. He appears at the first glance, from our point of view, a furious poet and an ineffectual politician, who was exiled from his country by the decision of a Bonapartist majority of his countrymen. He never ceased from calling down curses on the majority which was the basis of his own political creed, he never ceased from clamouring and praying for the rule of the very people whose decision had set him upon a lonely rock in the Channel. To the ordinary eye of these days nothing can be more pitiable than the position of the unpopular democrat. There is nothing more contemptible, at the first glance, than the man who has appealed, as Hugo appealed, from the people to a tyrant, and who finds immediately that the people and the tyrant are indissolubly allied against him. But to misunderstand Hugo on this point is to misunderstand the whole idea of democracy as Hugo understood it.

If there be one thing more than another which is true of genuine democracy, it is that genuine democracy is opposed to the rule of the mob. For genuine democracy is based fundamentally on the existence of the citizen, and the best definition of a mob is a body of a thousand men in which there is no citizen.

Hugo stood for the fact that democracy isolated the citizen fully as much as the ancient religions isolated the soul. He resisted the rule of the Third Napoleon because he saw that it had the supreme and final mark of the rule of the tyrant, the fact that it relied on the masses. As if a million of the images of God could by any possibility become a mass. He made his appeal to the individual, as every poet must do, and asked the solitary citizen to act as if he were really not only the only human being on the earth, but the only sentient being in the universe. He realised the obvious and simple truth, so often neglected, that if the individual is nothing, then the race is nothing – for the plain mathematical reason that a hundred times nought is nought. Therefore his sublimes” figure, his type of humanity, was not either a king or a republican, but a man on a desert island.

Richard Aleman is a contributing editor to Gilbert Magazine and the founder of the Distributist Review. His column on Distributism appears in every issue of Gilbert Magazine.

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GM Please tell us about your background. You are a native of Spain, but you are not Spanish. And you also spent some of your upbringing in New York. And how does a non-Spaniard from Spain get into the Marines?

RA Yes, I am Catalonian, from a town founded by the Romans in the third century B.C. (Badalona). The Catalan culture developed during the Middle Ages and our language grew from the Provençal language. Catalonia eventually formed part of the Crown of Aragon and today we are an autonomous region of Spain with our own Parliament and president.

Most of my early life was spent between Barcelona and New York City. After I became a naturalized citizen, I joined the best outfit in the world— the United States Marine Corps.

GM When and where did you first encounter G.K. Chesterton—in America or Spain? And did you first read him in English or Spanish (or Catalan)?

RA In Spain. A friend of mine shipped a copy of Orthodoxy to my home in Barcelona, and reading the book was life-changing. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is just what a growing boy needs, especially one struggling with family life and with an insatiable curiosity about the world and all that lies beyond. If you recall, Chesterton dedicated this book to his mother, which is apropos because during this period of in my life my mother was distancing herself from organized religion. I was beginning to see it as the only possible course that makes any sense.

GM You have pretty much dedicated your whole life to spreading the Church’s teaching on social justice, as articulated by Chesterton and his contemporaries. What did you first find so gripping about Distributism? About what Chesterton has to say about it?

RA Your question takes me back to a quote in Orthodoxy: “Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within,” reminds me of what Chesterton wrote in The Catholic Church and Conversion, “We do not really need a religion that is right where we are right. What we need is a religion that is right where we are wrong.” Whatever area of the faith, my goal is to think with the mind of the Church. We cannot embrace Christianity without dying to ourselves.

When I sunk my teeth into Distributism I found myself wrong about all that is right, and right about some things I intuitively knew were wrong. Something seemed wrong with the political Left and the Right. Socialism was counter-intuitive to me, a misplaced faith in government action. Capitalists were over-confident in the free market as the solution. Self-criticism led me to realize I suffered from tribalism and Distributism woke me up.

Archbishop Chaput recently said it best: we are Catholics before Democrats or Republicans, and even before we are Americans. And the Church has been saying this all along. So have Chesterton and Belloc.

GM What is the most common objection you get from people when you try to explain Distributism to them?

RA Well, most Distributists are accused of being capitalists, socialists, or some combination of the two. Part of the reason is because most people have overly broad definitions of capitalism and socialism. Trade equals capitalism. Government intervention equals socialism. Chesterton once wrote that if capitalism means to earn a profit, then the communist is a capitalist. He also joked that in the minds of some people a “social drink” sounds like suspicious socialist behavior. To say “unbridled competition is wrong” means you are a socialist. To say “private property is good” is to be a capitalist.

We’ve sown the seeds, bore the fruit, and it is time to admit neither tastes very well.

All things considered, the economic and political crises have opened up the door to commonality among those who would otherwise disagree. More people are realizing that when cooperative businesses like Mondragon are succeeding in a nation (Spain) with twenty-five percent unemployment, maybe those Distributists are on to something. So let’s sit down with progressives and conservatives and start a discussion about what we agree on, where we are, and where we ought to be in the future.

Both will tell you they prefer Main Street to Wall Street. They want capital and labor to be treated fairly. They are starting to realize the problem is the collusion of Big Business and Big Government. Progressives and conservatives like local, organic food production, mom and pop businesses, community banking, accountable and accessible government, and so on. They care about their families and worry what the future is going to look like for their kids. The “hands off—it’s my body” or “hands off—it’s my wallet” approach to life is unsustainable and they know it.

There’s more, but I think this is a great start.

GM Your patience is extraordinary. How do you keep from beating them over the head with a club?

RA Ha, ha. Distributists are for a bottom-up approach to our social and economic problems…this would be top-down, now wouldn’t it?

GM For the past ten or so months, you have worked with the Minnesota Catholic Conference to promote an amendment to the Minnesota Constitution to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Tell us about that experience.

RA The Minnesota Catholic Conference is the public policy arm of the bishops of Minnesota. The bishops supported a coalition of faith-based and non-faith based groups, advocating for the Minnesota Marriage Amendment, which would have amended the state constitution and defined marriage as between one man and one woman.

Although Minnesota statute already defines marriage this way, statutes are vulnerable to judicial and/or political activism. Given that five bills were introduced in the state legislature to redefine marriage, and as a pending case sought to overturn the current statute, we felt it was important to allow Minnesotans the opportunity to have a stake in the conversation.

My role was to build a grassroots volunteer network, plug them into the campaign, and deliver marriage presentations in parishes across the state to educate the Catholic faithful about the civil institution of marriage, the amendment, and the consequences parents and citizens will face once marriage is redefined.

Basically, there are two competing definitions of marriage in our society: a conjugal definition and a revisionist one.

The conjugal definition acknowledges that government issues marriage licenses because marriage serves a public purpose. We know that when men and women come together they have sex, and sex makes babies. This has tremendous consequences for the common welfare. Government, then, wants to unite men and women and tie them to any children born of their union. Marriage is an exclusive, presumptively procreative and permanent contract between a man and a woman, which regenerates society and provides enormous benefits for the common good. Marriage is not, from a civil perspective, the public affirmation of love. If this were the case, government would issue love licenses, not marriage licenses, and this is obvious, as friendships or courtships are not issued licenses. So marriage’s public purpose is to unite a relationship that is potentially life giving, legally binding parents to the children they create.

The revisionist definition views government’s role in marriage as the public affirmation of love and commitment, and that any marriage should be limited to two consenting adults, regardless of gender. From their perspective, marriage between one man and one woman is too exclusive and discriminatory.

The problem is, if marriage is simply the public affirmation of love and commitment, there is no logical reason why marriage should be (arbitrarily, at that) limited to two consenting adults. On what grounds should marriage exclude polyamorous relationships, polygamy, bigamy or any other arrangement? The reason why marriage is between two adults is obvious: it takes one man and one woman to procreate. So while other relationships may be valuable, they are not marriage.

Our second argument is that marriage is a child-centered institution. All things being equal, the best life chances for a child is in a home raised by his or her mom and dad. Moreover, because children are born to a mother and a father, they have a right to both, above the interests and desires of adults. Because children are the weakest and most vulnerable in society, it is government’s job to ensure they are protected and treated justly.

The development of children impacts the community and family flourishing in a variety of ways. So, marriage is also a social justice issue. When we examine the outcomes of children raised in a home without a mother and a father, those outcomes are not generally positive. Although some will argue from personal experience, personal experience cannot trump the experience of our society as a whole when determining public policy. Forty percent of our nation’s children are raised without a father. That’s a tragedy, not an alternative family. So, no, “The kids are [not] alright.”

However in an effort to avoid this evidence, our opposition chose to rely on shoddy gender theories, making the case that, for children raised in loving homes, regardless of gender, outcomes are nominally the same. Gender differences, from their perspective, are social constructs. In other words, males and females—we made them up out of thin air as part of our patriarchal attempt to manipulate the sexes. Our children are receiving this indoctrination in our schools. Men used to be from Mars and women used to be from Venus but thanks to some “deep thinkers” with the latest insights—albeit not scientific proof, we now know better. Why choose to disregard differences in gender? Strategically, it follows that if your claim is that children are best raised in a home with two loving adults regardless of gender, you have to discard the differences between mothers and fathers and how those differences shape child development.

Mothers cannot father and fathers cannot mother. In fact, a recent New York University study concluded that fathers impact teenage sexual behavior. Another study, conducted by Mark Regnerus, compared adults who were raised by parents in same-sex relationships with traditional ones, and we see that children fare better, both materially and emotionally, when raised in a home with their mom and dad.

GM What are the consequences of redefining marriage?

RA For starters, we should treat people fairly, but not equally. Treating an apple and orange differently is not discrimination. But when marriage is redefined, acting or speaking as if same-sex “marriage” and traditional marriage are different will become legal discrimination.

Our opposition tossed around the red herring that if marriage is redefined, provisions in law would remain to ensure religious organizations were exempt from marrying same-sex couples. What they omitted is how anti-discrimination laws are used against those who oppose same-sex “marriage” and refuse to support its moral equivalency with traditional marriage. They tiptoed around how public resources are regularly used to promote this new legal fiction through our educational system, and the results in store for those who stand against it.

They also lied to the people, saying our statute defining marriage as between one man and one woman was sufficient and no amendment was necessary because marriage would not be redefined. What they did not say is that five bills in the Minnesota legislature—and one pending court case in Hennepin County—were introduced to declare marriage between one man and one woman unconstitutional, thus redefining marriage. They also didn’t tell the public that a few legislators are publicly committed to redefining marriage at the first possible opportunity.

In Massachusetts, where marriage was redefined, parents are unable to opt their children out of classes promoting “alternative” families. For example, in kindergarten children are subjected to literature like “Who’s in a Family?” Our opposition disingenuously responded that children are not forced to read any books of the sort. That’s correct, because in kindergarten books are not read by children, they are read to children. What about Canada, where marriage was redefined years ago? The Toronto District School Board’s Love Has No Gender programs include gender identity and sexual lifestyle classes from kindergarten to high school where “there are no rules for being a boy or a girl.” Children as young as eight years of age are asked to pick same-sex friends and get “married” in mock wedding ceremonies.

The consequences to our economic liberties, free speech, and religious rights are staggering, as they are ubiquitous, wherever marriage is redefined.

GM Give us your reaction to the outcome. Did you expect the vote to go this way?

RA We did fairly well. Forty-seven percent voted for, fifty-one percent against. Most counties voted for the amendment and those against, as we expected, came from metro areas. We knew the state was divided on this issue and the results were going to be close.

The opposition led a successful campaign of disinformation and instilled fear, calling supporters bigots, fascists, and crusaders, stealing yard signs, throwing objects at Church windows, spray painting “Jesus Was Gay,” spitting and yelling expletives at us, and publicly accusing our Archbishop of making the amendment his campaign rather than the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage.

Of course the “Vote No” crowd were the “white-as-snow” innocents, “victims” of a Church that is on “the wrong side of history.” And guess what? Immediately after the vote, the process has already started to redefine marriage, and some are starting to realize this was a movement that has one goal in mind: to abolish marriage altogether. But it’s too late now. When marriage means everything, it will mean nothing.

Groups like “Catholics Voting No,” who probably have never heard of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, relied on a false Jesus who “loves everyone.” We responded that yes, Jesus loves everyone, but not every idea. The Church is clear that we are all born in the image of God, deserving respect, love and human dignity. But when we selectively read the Gospel, we fail to distinguish between judging concepts and judging souls.

The campaign couldn’t undo the decades of spiritual and cultural erosion, poor education, and poor catechesis. No political campaign can fix the problems embedded in our culture. It isn’t the role of politics to achieve this anyway. From the beginning, the Minnesota Catholic Conference saw this campaign as an opportunity to discuss the importance of marriage in our civil society and to have the conversation in the hopes we could protect the institution of marriage and allow the framework we’ve created to tackle those bigger issues.

The state of Minnesota owes a debt to the heroes at Minnesota Catholic Conference for their incredible leadership. Protestants and Catholics have the warmest admiration for the bishops in Minnesota, especially Archbishop Nienstedt, whom I thanked personally for his courage in standing up for the truth, and for leading a fight in the name of children who, like me, grew up without a father.

GM What else do you do to promote Distributism?

RA You can’t change the law first and culture second. But sometimes—as is the case with the marriage amendment— proposing legislation is a vehicle for dialogue and conversations which otherwise wouldn’t take place. Besides writing and public speaking, shaping local public policy will be my next project. We will continue to remind Distributists about first principles, examine the best methods for revitalizing an economy of participation, and bring Distributism to the public square.

Lastly, I hope readers are now more aware of the nationwide efforts of Distributists who took part in marriage campaigns. We believe firmly that the family is the cornerstone of society. It must be defended. To place numbers and figures above human beings would miss the point of our existence, our responsibilities toward and our love of neighbor, and the almighty God to whom we all kneel. There may be many challenges ahead of us in the upcoming years. You can rest assured that we will continue to defend the rights of the unborn and the living, be a voice for our predecessors, and stand up for real marriage.

“Aeolus is the volatile element,” Legion said, staring across the table. “He still doesn’t even know who’s really responsible for his fame.”

“He knows he made a pact with you,” Marcus, the band manager, remarked.

“Yes,” the devil agreed. “But he’s chosen to forget parts of his past, and he’s even convinced himself that his success is somehow based on his own merit.”

The demon snorted out a laugh then picked his nose. The gesture unsettled Jacob Marcus. He would’ve expected a devil to act rudely, but this demon liked to appear as a very attractive and well-manicured middle-aged man in a sports coat, jeans, and snakeskin boots. The type of men who dressed like that—who actually got their nails done, Marcus noticed—didn’t pick their noses in public.

“I can’t force him to do anything,” Marcus pointed out, trying to ignore the fact that the devil sat there sucking his little finger like a child.

Legion pulled his pinky free of his lips with a loud pop. “Of course you can’t force him,” the demon admitted. “Just remind him of his promise. I’m calling in a favor, that’s all. It’s not much; just a few words sung at the right time by the right amount of people. Why should he care, anyway?”

“I’ll do my best,” Marcus said.

“Make sure that you do,” Legion answered, leaning forward across the table. “You’ve got important things at stake here, too, you know.”

The devil’s breath reeked of sour milk and stale flesh, and at close range his blue forked tongue showed through his white teeth. Marcus tried not to flinch back, but the sight of that blue-black tongue terrified him.

“I’ll talk to him,” Marcus promised, his voice breaking.

“Yes, do that,” Legion hissed, without leaning back. “Or I’ll see you in hell sooner rather than later.”

*

Frank Moriani sat in front of his backstage mirror and slicked his dirty blond hair back, ’50s greaser style. Then he laughed at his reflection and spiked up the gold-tipped tufts until his head resembled a porcupine’s pelt.

Where most singers might be nervous before they went on stage, Frank—or Aeolus, as his public knew him—didn’t feel a single butterfly in his stomach. Hadn’t he sung flawlessly all over the country for three years now? His voice hadn’t cracked once since his first hit single, “Fire on the Fence,” had made it to the top five in less than a month after its release. He couldn’t go wrong. He didn’t even need to warm up.

Someone knocked on the dressing room door.

“Yeah?” Frank said, not looking away from the mirror.

“Hey,” Marcus slid through the door and shut it after himself. “Listen, you know that song?”

“Dude, I know all the songs!” Frank laughed.

“I know you do,” Marcus fumbled. “But I mean that song. You know—the one about Christian blood and all that stuff?”

“Fire on the Fence?” Frank looked at his manager’s reflection in the mirror. “Hell, yeah! That was the song that started it all.”

“Yeah, well,” Marcus cleared his throat. “I noticed that at the last two concerts you didn’t have the crowd sing the refrain with you. You know—holding out the mic for them and everything.”

“Yeah, so what?” Frank went back to his hair. “I do what I want on stage, man. You know that.”

“I know. But do you think you could have them sing tonight? The refrain, I mean. It would be nice if—”

“Nice?” Frank turned. “I’m not playing a nursing home charity show, Marcus. I don’t care about nice!”

“Well, I talked to our boss and—”

“Our boss? What the hell, Marcus? I am your boss!”

“You know who I mean.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t even think I believe that hocus pocus anymore. I was probably on drugs or something anyway.”

“I don’t think you were.”

“And how would you know? You never tried anything unless I gave it to you, and I never even gave you the good stuff.”

Marcus stepped in close to Frank, leaning over to partially cover the mirror. Frank looked up at him, surprised.

“All I know is that you were nothing until we did all that stuff with that book,” Marcus said, suddenly intense. “Before that, everyone knew you weren’t any good. I knew it. Hell, you knew it! You wouldn’t be anywhere right now if it weren’t for—”

Frank stood up and pushed Marcus hard in the chest. “You keep that crap to yourself,” he whispered, fiercely. “I don’t believe in that anymore!”

Marcus started laughing hysterically. “It believes in you,” he gasped out through giggles.

Frank stood rigid, panting and flexing his fists again and again. Marcus continued to laugh for a few insane minutes. Then he slowly conquered his hysteria.

“Just make sure they sing the chorus tonight,” Marcus wheezed. “We’ll play the song at midnight. Just make sure they sing it, okay?” He left the room.

Frank sat down with his back to the mirror and crossed his arms. He was trying not to think about that winter night when he and his college roommate, Jake Marcus, had stolen an old book from the university library (it was a non-circulating volume of The History and Practice of Devil Worship), not thinking it would actually work, and set up a sort of séance in their dorm room. Jake and Frank had made deals that night. The devil had actually suggested the name “Aeolus” as a stage name for Frank.

It had all seemed like fun and games then, but the demon was getting more and more demanding lately. It never came to Frank anymore; just to Marcus. And it insisted on the oddest things. Sometimes, it would suggest the lyrics for a song, or sometimes a chord structure. Recently, it often asked them to sing certain songs at precise times and in out-of-the-way places. Frank didn’t like this. The band had toured the east coast last spring, and the demon made them miss New York City altogether in order to sing a concert in Rochester. This wasn’t the big-time fun Frank had dreamed of before he became Aeolus. He felt like a second-rate performer, playing the small bars instead of raising the big crowds.

But even more disturbing was what would happen in the town just after the band left. He sang in Columbus, and an old church burned down the next day, just two blocks away from the concert hall. When he did a gig in Colorado Springs last November, a sudden blizzard hit the town and killed two dozen people. The Rochester concert proved a prelude to a horrendous flash flood. That time had made Frank angry. The band had almost been caught on the road in that flood, and Marcus said they would’ve died if they hadn’t been held up in the hotel an extra hour.

And now they were in LA. Finally! A big town and a sold-out concert, and Frank was supposed to bow down and play puppet again. He spat right onto the lushly carpeted floor of the dressing room. To hell with it, he thought.

*

The stage lights sent waves of heat down on The Elementals, Aeolus’ band. The smell of sweat and marijuana wafted up from the seething mosh pit. Aeolus sucked in the stench, eagerly. He lived for this! He screamed into the spit-covered microphone; the writhing masses screamed back. They knew the words that constituted his soul because he gave them those words. And he gave them more than his words. His music floated out over their heads, distorted and discontented. They understood his song.

He’d been singing for two hours. Midnight was coming. Marcus gave the band a signal from his post out of the circle of limelight. The Elementals crashed into “Fire on the Fence.”

Aeolus wailed the first verse to his fans. The song was high and melancholy; a lament of discarded youth. Aeolus liked this song because it was one of the few that his band played that actually featured the vocals without a lot of distracting distortion. He sang his black heart out to the crowd. They wanted to answer, he knew it. He held out the mic, the signal for them to take over the chorus.

But then, he pulled the mic away. A few people started in on the chorus, but they left off when Aeolus took over again. Aeolus looked down. Some of his fans seemed confused. It was only then that he realized that he was changing the words; making them up as he went. They sounded strange. They sounded almost…hopeful.

From off stage, Aeolus could see Marcus off-stage, tearing his hair. But Aeolus didn’t care. He suddenly remembered that his name was not Aeolus; it was Francis. And he was writing poetry. And it was good poetry.

*

From the back of the theater, a good-looking, middle-aged man in snakeskin boots leant against the doorframe leading out into the parking lot, his eyes blazing. He had wanted that earthquake so badly! This place positively wreaked of unrepentant souls that had almost been his. But that kid stood up on stage, changing those perfect, demonic lyrics into something utterly human and creative and even buoyant. A blue forked tongue hissed out and in again from between the well-dressed man’s pearly teeth.

Another man, not so slickly dressed and utterly ordinary-looking, stepped through the door and leaned against the opposite wall. Both men stared at the stage.

“Did you suggest those lyrics to him?” the first man asked.

“No,” the second man answered. “He came up with those all on his own.”

“You won’t win next time.”

“Maybe not. But that’s really up to him, isn’t it?”

The ordinary-looking man smiled and, with a nod to the fuming demon, slipped out through the doorway and disappeared into the night.

Originally published in the November/December, 2012, issue of Gilbert Magazine