AUTHOR Q&A

A discussion with Charmaine Craig

Author of
THE GOOD MEN
A Novel of Heresy

You were a student at Harvard when you first started researching this book. What drew your attention to medieval French literature and history?

I was raised in a fairly liberal Christian context. Much to my parents' bewilderment, I became focused on issues of purity as a child and wanted to be a benevolent, Christ-like model of compassion. I had the fantasy of becoming a nun, which led-not unexpectedly-to me being alienated from my sensual self. As an adolescent, I didn't have the easiest time inhabiting my own body. In high school and college, I became more and more aware that these issues of shame really stemmed from the dualism in Western culture between spirit and flesh-a dualism in which flesh is always inferior.

I began college as a religion major, because I knew I wanted to study works that responded to metaphysical questions, such as: Why are we here? How are we meant to comport ourselves in this life? How are we to live a life at once carnal and spiritual? I had also adored literature all my life. By chance, I was introduced to medieval literature in France while studying there. I fell in love with it because the realms of literature and religion constantly intersect. It was a natural fit, and became my focus in college.

You read the testimony of a young woman named Grazida Lizier, who was actually tried by the inquisition in France, and based one of your main characters on her. What was it about her that captured your imagination?

I read her deposition in a book about medieval women. In it she speaks of her affair with a village priest, Pierre Clergue, who also became a major character in the novel. When she's asked whether or not she feels shame about the affair, she says that she can't conceive of her love-making with the priest as sinful, because it gave them both great pleasure. She goes on to say that she doesn't imagine God would find anything wrong with the affair, either, since it was one of mutual affection and brought them such joy. I was amazed by Grazida's freedom from shame. Her worldview didn't seem medieval, but contemporary. In the novel, I wanted to explore how a village woman living in her times could have arrived at such a philosophy of love and pleasure.

How closely was your story based on real historical figures and events?

When I first began to write the book, I didn't think it would be closely based on real events at all. I thought it would be a highly imagined, poetic, small book about Grazida. I conceived of her as a sort of mystic in the making, because I'd been reading quite a bit of writing by medieval mystics. But as I read more and more of the depositions of other villagers, and more about life in Montaillou in medieval times, I began to feel increasingly under the power of the real story, and duty-bound to evoke the world that Grazida would have inhabited as authentically as possible. I've tried to make the major events historically accurate. Because I was writing more of a literary novel than a historical novel, though, my priority was to follow the characters. The characters came to life for me, and I let them dominate the narrative-even when they strayed from the lives of the real people of medieval Montaillou.

How did your family background influence this book?

I'm sure it infiltrated the whole novel. My mother is from Burma and her people, a minority group called the Karen, have been struggling since the 1940s for equal rights. In fact, they've been fighting even to exist, and resisting the military regime's massive assault against them. My mother's family has long been a part of this struggle and my mother herself has been a very important figure in the pro-democracy movement in Burma. There's a legend that she's still traveling around the hills on a white horse there, although she's living in the States now. Having lived with her almost mythical story has certainly influenced me.

Also, my mother comes from a village people, and I was brought up, to an extent, with village ways-not unlike those of Grazida's village. I know that the animist roots of the Karen people, who see spirituality in all of nature, influenced the book. Some of the most ecstatic moments in the book are animist in spirit.

On the other side of the family, there has been a long history of struggle for religious tolerance. My father's grandfather many generations back, William Bradford, was the governor of Plymouth colony, and the family has been quite proud of his efforts on behalf of the ideal of religious liberty.

One of Governor Bradford's descendants-and my ancestors-is said to have married a Huguenot, a French Protestant who had fled France because of religious persecution. So there is a real spirit of religious independence in the family.

Who were the Cathars and what did they believe?

The Cathars were a heretical Christian group - heretical because they were cosmic dualists. Unlike traditional Christians, they didn't believe in one God who created both flesh and spirit. Rather, they believed in two principles: the principle of God and goodness and light and spirit, and the principle of Satan and evil and darkness and matter. In their creation story, Satan tricked spirits from God's heavenly realm into inhabiting bodies on earth. The spirits became prisoners of the flesh, to be eternally reincarnated into Satan's earthly domain. The purest of the Cathars, called Good Men, preached that Jesus had come to earth with a message of how to escape this cycle of reincarnation. What really threatened the Catholic Church was the Good Men's belief that Jesus could not have been incarnated as a human being, because the concept of divinity for them was anathema to that of corporeality: the son of God, they believed, could not have existed in something as fundamentally base and evil as the body.

What was the historical legacy of the Cathars and the medieval Inquisition?

By challenging the authority of the Catholic Church, the Cathars helped pave the way for the Protestant Reformation. They believed they could have an unmediated relationship with God and didn't need members of the clergy to baptize them and save them.

The medieval Inquisition, which preceded the more infamous Spanish Inquisition, wasn't just against the Cathar heresy. It was also against Jews who had converted to Christianity and then relapsed, lepers, homosexuals, and others. There are a lot of resonances with the Holocaust, and with discriminatory movements happening today-movements which attempt to single out religious minorities. The Cathars had to wear yellow crosses on their clothes if they were found guilty of heresy. In 1215, Pope Innocent III-who launched the Albigensian Crusade-ordered Jews to wear a badge of shame. Today, Afghanistan's Taliban requires Hindus to wear yellow cloth on their pockets to distinguish them from the Muslim majority.

Do any of the Cathars' ideas persist today?

The troubadours proliferated at the same time and in the same area as the Cathars. Their ideas about romantic love - particularly their fascination with the passionate nature of adulterous love and unattainable love - continue to influence our ideas about love today. I have no doubt that the troubadours were affected to some extent by the Cathars' belief that bodily urges were to be repressed, and their idea that carnal love was immoral.

You've had an extremely varied life. You've gone to Harvard, starred in a Disney movie and played a recurring role on the television series "Northern Exposure." How did you make the transition from acting to writing? Do you have any plans to continue acting?

I've acted since I was young and originally planned on making that my life's work. But from the moment I began acting professionally in high school, I became disillusioned, because I was constantly being judged by my physical appearance. As a person of mixed race, I didn't fit into any neat category. I'd come from a background where I didn't have to think very much about race, and suddenly every single audition was about that. It was the dominant issue - what type am I, where do I fit?

It got to the point where I wanted to disappear physically, to be able to play the roles that I wanted to play, and I could do that in writing. I had always been passionate about writing. It was something I had done, to a greater or lesser extent, throughout my life. Writing kept me going and was, ultimately, much more fulfilling for me. I was actually filming a television pilot in Florida when I got into the graduate writing program at the University of California at Irvine, and I didn't hesitate for a second to accept.

I miss acting, but I don't miss being typecast. I love being engaged totally in the life of the mind. I do remain open to acting if the right kind of opportunity comes along. I have a tremendous interest in film, which I also pursued in college. But I'm not seeking acting jobs now. I'm pretty focused on writing my next book, which is inspired by my mother's family's story.

What do you think contemporary readers will take away from this novel?

I wanted to raise the kind of questions I touched on before: how to live a life that is both carnal and moral, how to live with our divided natures. I never meant for these questions to be resolved, because I think they're unresolvable, but I hope they come up for readers as well.

Another major theme I was thinking about when writing the book was the power of literacy and reading. In the case of Grazida, who I'm almost sure couldn't read in real life, this affects how she negotiates being a sensual being and an intellectual being. She's a character who's mute for much of the book, and she's also the most sensual and free in her body. When she learns to read and write, her experience is mediated by language, which is shot through with dualisms and structures of categorization and judgment. She is cast out of her paradise of innocence, but then her life becomes sweeter for the darkness she sees in it.

In writing the book, I didn't want to turn away from the darknesses of which we don't speak. Compassion was also central for me. There's a trend I sense now in literature that goes hand in hand with political correctness, in which the only characters deserving of compassion are those who behave well, or who redeem bad behavior with good behavior. I was interested in portraying characters who weren't as clearly deserving of compassion, like the sinful priest. I was very influenced by Chekhov, who is undyingly compassionate toward characters not obviously deserving of empathy.

In a preface to Lewis Mumford's book, The Conduct of Life, Mumford writes that the gods gave man a gift to survive every disaster, natural and human in origin. And the gift is hope. He wrote the preface soon after the tragedies of World War II, and he says that even if the decades to come were to bring continued devastation, it was still time to prepare for the renewal of life. That sentiment is threaded through my novel, I think. There is the awfulness of the Inquisition, which takes lives and dashes dreams and discriminates, but there is also the hope and beauty of continued life, fragile as it might be.