Tapestry of Words

Did she know it was a sin to sleep with the village priest? And another sin, adultery, to sleep with him while she was married? And a third sin, incest, because he was her blood relation?

No, the young woman told the Inquisitor, a bishop.

“I did not think I was sinning. It gave us both great joy.... Our joy was shared,” she said naively, as if the mutuality would absolve them.

This snippet of real dialogue from the Inquisition of 1320 came hurtling through time like a Hail Mary pass--to be caught by Charmaine Craig of Santa Monica. She was an aspiring actress and a Harvard undergraduate in 1991, when she discovered the true story of the woman and the priest, the rural mountain village where they lived, and the roving band of heretics called the Good Men, who sought to convert them from Catholicism.

What could 14th century life have been like for this young wife and mother, named Grazida Lizier? And for the sex-obsessed priest, Pierre Clergue, who lusted after three generations of her family’s women? And who could possibly care?

Even if you know nothing of medieval times beyond the theme restaurant of that name, you may be intrigued by Craig’s stunning first novel. “The Good Men: A Novel of Heresy” (Riverhead Books) is redolent with time and place: soggy dung floors beneath bare feet, wind whistling through walls and pane-less windows. Surgery with no anesthesia, except wine. Chamber pots instead of plumbing, zipper-less pants, the magic of fire--the only source of light and heat.

It is an absorbing tale, and a short course on rural life in the Middle Ages--a subject few have the luxury or desire to spend much time on. But there is some relevance for the millennium. Just turn off your PC, lean back and regress a few hundred years to Montaillou, France, where life revolves around the little church whose priest cannot keep his pants on. This was not so unusual for the era, Craig learned in her research. Rural priests often had concubines who lived with them, had affairs with married women, did all sorts of unholy things--like appropriating tithes from parishioners for the priests’ personal uses. In the case of Clergue, all the above applied.

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Good Men Posed Threat to the Catholic Church

Still, there was peace in the village until the Cathars, or Good Men, appeared. They preached that heaven was God’s domain, Earth was the realm of Satan, and all earthly pleasure must be denied. They said men must stop eating anything that pleases the palate, must stop touching their wives. Even a pat on the hand was forbidden, let alone more intimate contact. They believed humans must enter heaven in order to know true pleasure--and so they couldn’t wait to die. They were not so different, in that respect, from the zealots of Sept. 11.

The Catholic church, which ruled the region, was understandably appalled. It saw the potential of mass self-imposed starvation, a plummeting birthrate, and many lost human souls if the Good Men took hold. And so the Inquisition came to town, with its own brand of extremism, including torture racks and burnings at the stake. This was not a particularly good time in which to live.

Craig, 30, on the other hand, grew up in the sunny sophistication of Santa Monica, blessed with interesting parents and an abundance of assets. She was a smart, pretty child, and by her admission, a pious one. In her Protestant, church-going family, she was the only one of three siblings who was deeply attracted to spiritual concerns, to questions of good and evil, she says.

She has no idea why, but she also “focused more than the others on learning about Christ and trying to be Christ-like and pure.” And she was “overly thoughtful” about issues of how to comport herself. Her parents were pretty easygoing about all this, she says.

Perhaps they thought it was a passing phase, because Craig was equally determined, as a child, to become a great actress. She begged for acting lessons after school and on weekends--and they obliged. By the time she was a teenager, at the Marlborough School for girls in Los Angeles, Craig recalls being “filled with questions of spirit versus flesh, and frequently subject to great feelings of shame.” She says she often sought moral guidance from elders on issues that most young people her age were able to sift out for themselves.

In the English honors program at Harvard, she majored in medieval literature, which is when she came across the deposition of Grazida Lizier, the woman who’d loved the priest. “I felt as if a real soul was floating up from the pages, I could almost hear a real voice speaking the words.”

Originally inscribed in pen on parchment in 1320, Grazida’s words had not only survived and lodged in Craig’s consciousness; they imprinted themselves and echoed there. She thinks that’s because Grazida was so confident about the choices she’d made in life. “Even with Inquisitors telling her she should be ashamed of her love for the priest, that what she did was wrong and sinful--she did not, could not, think of it that way. Her free spirit and independence seemed so modern and admirable to me.”

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Looking for a More Fulfilling Career

In the midst of Craig’s studies, Hollywood called. A casting director she’d met years before gave her the lead in Disney’s 1994 film, “White Fang II.” She spent the summer before her senior year making the movie, and was advised by her agent to stay in Hollywood and “ride the wave.” Craig rejected the advice, returned to school, and after graduation came back to seek more work. She soon won the TV role of Ed Chigliak’s girlfriend on “Northern Exposure”--and says she got a look at what life would be like if she pursued an acting career. Unsatisfying.

It was tough going out for roles, she says, because of “my ethnic mix.” Her father is a blue-eyed blond of English, Scottish and French descent. Her mother, twice named Miss Burma, and a former film actress herself, is half-Karen (which is the largest ethnic minority in Burma), and half-Sephardic Jew. Craig says that for Asian roles, she was frequently told she didn’t look Asian enough. For European roles, she often heard she looked too Asian.

But it wasn’t just about race, she says. In Hollywood, she was always worried about “whether I was thin enough, whether I wore sexy enough clothes. It just wasn’t me. I am too cerebral. And too shy.” She increasingly wanted to find something “more intellectual and creative” to fulfill her life. So she enrolled in writing courses at UCLA’s extension school in her spare time. She soon amassed a portfolio of short stories and a group of encouraging teachers, who urged her to apply to graduate school. The perfectionist in her surfaced again. She applied to the one place she knew was “almost impossible” to get into. The graduate program in fiction writing at UC Irvine accepts six students from about 300 applicants each year. Craig was one of three women accepted in 1996.

That’s when her preoccupation with Grazida’s deposition re-surfaced, and became the starting point for a fictionalized account of her life and the lives of those in Montaillou.

After two years of research and writing in the UCI program, and two trips to Montaillou, high in the Pyrenees mountains, Craig threw out her first draft and spent two more years rewriting the book “in one long exhale, from start to finish.”

Cindy Spiegel, a founder and editorial director at Riverhead, says she almost didn’t look at the book. “I hate historical novels. I’d have turned it down cold, but the agent’s pitch was unusually enthusiastic.” After reading the manuscript, she says she “pre-empted the book.” This means she offered “an amount so high that the agent would take it off the bidding table and give it right to us. I just felt it was fresh and current. And after Sept. 11, the book’s view of fanaticism is even more relevant.”

“The Good Men” has received unusual critical notice for a first novel. Time magazine’s review calls Craig and her book “the real deal” and said her “prose blends mysteries both religious and erotic with the scratchy, stinky realities of peasant life.” Newsday calls it “an intriguing work of historical fiction.” The Sunday New York Times Book Review called it “ambitious” and “deft.” Craig’s publishers sent her on a 15-city promotional tour, an unusual expenditure for first novelists these days. And it has been sold for translation into five languages.

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Morality, Sexuality and Tension Between the Two

Sitting in her whitewashed, one-room cottage in Laguna Beach recently, Craig wears jeans, a print blouse, long hair and no makeup. She is liberated now from those early concerns, a free spirit at last, she says.

Part of that came from the gradual process of growing up, she says. Part came from her studies, through which she realized that since time began, humans have faced issues of morality versus sexuality--and a tension between the two.

Actually, much of what she wrote about 14th century human relations and behavior hasn’t changed all that much to this day.

She also learned about herself. “In a nutshell, I guess I’d say I

She pauses. “The reason this resonated so much with me is that I was always trying to be so good, that I wasn’t free to ... “ She stops short. She probably shouldn’t reveal these innermost thoughts in the local paper, she says with a laugh.

Yet, she says, she’s finally learned things that others seemed to know automatically, but that she used to question. That the messiness of life, and all the imperfections of relationships--it’s all worthwhile if it’s for the sake of love. One of three men accepted in the Irvine graduate fiction program the same year as Craig, Andrew Winer, has asked her to marry him. She said yes.