The Elf and the Inferno
I was, as usual these evenings, washing dishes. The sponge ran its pleasing rounds across the dark face of the pan, leaving in the glistening onyx surface momentary Pollocks and Miros. And then, as always, Dante appeared to me. This time, he came in the form of Santa Claus, who, as my children watched Elf, reminded the titular Buddy that some people, in this case Buddy’s father, Walter, “just lose sight of what’s important in life.” At those words, I was there again, “nel mezzo del cammin,” in the wood so savage and harsh and strange that to dwell in the memory of it renews the fear.
Walter Hobbs is, of course, like practically all men at one time or another in middle age, and certainly like all those who inhabit the film reels of Hollywood, a Dantean figure. He is a storyteller, albeit the usurious one we first meet as he repossesses a set of books from a habited sister, replete with Mother Teresian wrinkles, who has fallen behind on her payments. He has badly lost his way, and Buddy the Elf, like Vergil, descends from the Limbo of Santa’s North Pole to lead his father back to the straight way.
As we know, though, Walter’s descent into the infernal throes of middle age prompts swift rejection of his hitherto unknown son. This man is, however Dantesque, no Dante, primed by adulation and long study to follow in the footsteps of his Roman master. The Walter Hobbs who strummed a cool guitar beside a river as the lovely Susan of his youth gazed rapturously on can but little descry himself in the cracked and tarnished mirror of his present self. Nor can he bear to think that the smiling, elf-suited, high-bouncing manboy before him could possibly have issued from his staid and decorous loins. The storybook worlds of youth have long fled, banished, from the mammon-publishing heart of Hobbs.
In a crucial inversion, then, the task of the journey is transferred from father to son, so that it is in watching his rejected child journey through the self-imposed hell of his own life that Walter finally experiences conversion. Thus it is Buddy who passes through the wood, where he meets not a lion, a wolf, and a leopard, but a hug-resistant raccoon. It is Buddy who cowers through the Lincoln Tunnel, filled with its stenches and its shrieking horns. In the gum-stuck rails of the subway entrances and the lingerie racks of Gimbels and the ruthless band of snowball-hurling youth, in the Empire State Building mail room and the jiu jitsu-inflicted punishment of the board room and the cold, lonely walk of a father’s rejection, Buddy meets gluttony and lust and anger, sloth and wrath and despair.
And so Buddy wanders once more into the wood, into the gloom of Central Park, where a sign has come to him. It is the sign of Santa, Father Christmas, who, descending in mechanical breakdown into the midst of the darkness, will restore Buddy to himself. Now Walter, too, primed at last by a sense of his own guilt and incited by the witness of his second son, enters the wood. He dons the coat and hat of Santa Claus, making himself momentarily ridiculous in his kenotic conversion, and seeks to lead away the pursuant band of Central Park Rangers on their hellish steeds. And, at the last, he lifts his voice with his wife and younger son in song, joining the Christmas chorus that sends Santa’s sleigh aloft again, into flight against the Manhattan skyline and, farther off, the stars moved by divine love.
Walter learns to tell stories again, beginning, under the aegis of his newly founded imprint, with the story of his son. He learns to sing again, playing a velvety piano as he daughter-in-law sings sinuously along. His first son, born to Susan Wells so long ago, becomes for him a restorative spring. At last he can be prodigal.
Specious as these parallels, facetious as these musings, they are to me glad tidings as the dishes mount again in the sink and the dust settles again atop my Comedies and the cooking and the bathing and the bedtime-story-telling come round and round again to hand. The round of the day becomes, according to the spirit of the pilgrim, either a descent into bedlam or a steady climb up the purgative slopes from which, made ready at last for sidereal flight, we spring as surely to the heavens as streams glide to the sea. And Buddy the Elf, in his yellow tights and his green cap, can be to us the Fool, recalling us to the Folly that runs through the cross to salvation.
