|
Winter
Books In
the territory of saints
ETERNITY, MY
BELOVED By Jean Sulivan Translated by Sr. Francis Ellen
Riordan River Boat Books, 146 pages, $15 paper To order:
phone # |
By TIM McCARTHY
Jerome Strozzi is a renegade priest who roams the seamier side of
Paris resurrecting the dead. No wonder he barges in and takes over Jean
Sulivans novel, Eternity, My Beloved, which was supposed to be
about a retired whore called Elizabeth. But Elizabeth talked about Strozzi -- a
character apparently based upon an older priest the author knew -- so much that
Sulivan became determined, even obsessed, to find out what made such a man
tick.
Strozzi and Sulivan had some things in common. Sulivan was himself
something of a renegade. His third novel, The Sea Remains, created such
a splash in 1964 that his bishop released him from pastoral duties so he could
devote himself to writing. Would that the church had more bishops like that,
because Sulivan did not by any means turn out to be a dutiful son of the
institution. Yet he went on writing and publishing prolifically until he died
in a car crash in 1980.
So what was Strozzis secret? He performed his resurrections
among the living dead, of course, in Paris bawdy Pigalle precinct,
knowing all along that most of us are among the living dead and that sometimes
only a brush with eternity can reignite lifes spark. But how did he do
it? Part of the answer is simple, even obvious: with love. Tough love. Not the
kind of tough love that we use nowadays to bash someone into
submission, but the kind of love that is unconditional. You want tough? Try
that sometime.
That kind of love is the territory of saints. Is Strozzi a saint,
pastoring his makeshift parish of whores and pimps, thieves and thugs, taking
his beatings when they come? Or is he merely a nutcase, or a fool? Such
questions gnaw at the narrator, Sulivan, as he searches Strozzi out, admitting
more than once that the mans serenity -- an inner peace invulnerable, it
seems, to war, betrayal, lust, loss -- gets on his nerves. Its not
normal. Human love has conditions. Period. It takes a burst of eternity to make
it something else. So maybe eternity is what Strozzi is faking. If he is
faking. To live in eternity before you die. Is that what freedom really is?
That is hard to believe, even harder to do. So the narrator tracks his quarry,
exploring every footprint for the feel of clay.
Blood, tears, love and religion. Oh what a melodrama
it might have made. The narrator knows: I could have made up scenes,
livened everything up; it would have filled hundreds of pages. My publisher
would have been delighted -- a sure bestseller. Strozzi, we could have made
something out of all that craziness.
But no. The war, the Nazi occupation, lust, conversions, a scene
here, a scene there, nothing developed much, all of it zigzagging through time,
everything compressed in the hope of cracking eternity and slipping the border
into the beyond. We are broken beings, and so our stories must be broken.
Sulivan is after bigger game. He is Ahab without a ship. What he hopes to
harpoon is the ineffable -- a tough task for any writer.
Strozzi leads. For the most part his ministry among the whores is
simply to be there. Strozzi is. He tells them he loves them. Thats all.
And sometimes they believe him because of what he is. Why among prostitutes?
Because we are all prostitutes. Those who take it to the streets are simply
more honest about it, wretched in their way of life and therefore more capable
of humility: On the other hand, theres no end to the prostitution
of the highly placed; they go on pretending, issuing statements, organizing
justice, charity, morality, even the love of God, for their own
profit.
Sulivan: burster of balloons.
Strozzi wants to rent an apartment. But he has no salary, no
Social Security, nothing. Monsieur, the court clerk pronounces,
in the eyes of the law you dont exist.
Back on the street, Strozzi is overjoyed: I have nothing. I
am nothing. I hardly exist. Im free.
Free from what? Possessions, to be sure. But that is the easy
part. Far harder to shed are the mental yokes -- calcified values, principles,
virtues or vices, religious convictions. All are idols. And they must be
smashed if we are ever to feel that spirit, that ineffable beyond, burning like
a sun at the heart of life.
Sulivan writes it. Strozzi lives what Sulivan writes. Saint or no
saint, that can get on your nerves. Sulivan is, as they say, only human. That
said, is Eternity, My Beloved a good read? Not in any conventional
sense. It ends up more a meditation than a novel. But it stabs at the deepest
stuff of life and it might, if only in those flashes when eternity cracks and
you slip the border into that buried beyond, let you see again that it is all
possible, all right here waiting to be lived. Because Strozzi is. Because
Strozzi bears witness that eternity is now and resurrections can happen on any
corner.
Tim McCarthy is a fiction writer and journalist living in
Littleton, N.H.
National Catholic Reporter, November 5,
1999
|
|