It’s been an eclectic month of reading. I want to start with Sonnez Les Matines, a one-act verse play by Jane Clark Scharl just published by Wiseblood Books.
On Mardi Gras night in 16th-century Paris, three young friends who are soon to be giants–protestant reformer John Calvin, Jesuit founder St. Ignatius of Loyola, and ribald French novelist Francois Rabelais–are confronted with a dead body. I have to admit that when I first heard about this piece, I asked myself: who writes a verse play in this day and age? And more importantly, why? But the answer, I find, is because it had to be written–because a wonderful poet conceived of a beautiful thing. The text is lively and refreshing–like Shakespeare, but with fewer arcane words and more stage directions. Rabelais sets the tone: “And since the Lenten fast is not yet quite upon us,/though her smothering breasts dangle above, and since/the tale I have to tell is better with profane ale than sacramental wine,” the three friends set out for an alehouse to discuss their problem. For reasons of his own, it is a place John Calvin dreads visiting, and at first, he waits outside. “Alone again,” he says. “My body flaps around me like a loose jerkin.” He envies his two friends their boldness: “These two! These rebel angels, these blessed devils that inflame my soul! One makes action seem so simple; the other, guilt so trivial. How magnificent they joust with error! They grasp the tempter’s blade with their bare hands and draw it laughing towards them. Do they not know the edge is poison?” Meanwhile, Ignatius has lost his dagger, a precious family heirloom; and to his horror, the three friends find it with the dead body. The dagger, Ignatius says, “reveals God’s gleaming nature, poured/quick as light into the earth and left/for us to find. It flinches not before/any blade; but springs up from beneath/a blow like snowdrops through the ice of winter! …Do we leave no device of God unstained?”
Wiseblood publishes a whole host of things, from reissued classics to philosophical treatises to fantasy novels in verse; and it is just this eclecticism, this freedom, that makes it a fitting home for Scharl’s beautiful work. I’m only sorry I didn’t get to see the play performed in New York over Mardi Gras.
From here, I moved to a much darker piece. The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier (translated by Daniel Levin Becker, Fitzcarraldo Editions) is part psychological study, part thriller. Set in a remote hamlet in France with only three houses–a farmhouse passed down through generations of the Bergogne family, a studio occupied by an artist disillusioned with Paris, and a vacant house for sale–The Birthday Party is about love: broken, imperfect, perhaps even largely undiscovered in its most intimate connections. Most of the action takes place on a single day, Marion Bergogne’s fortieth birthday. Marion’s husband and young daughter have planned a dinner and invited two of her co-workers, along with their friend and neighbor, the artist Christine.
But before the party can start, three dangerous brothers appear without warning and take everyone hostage. Their insidious intrusion, their pretension of graciousness and hospitality, their gratuitous violence–all of it points to Marion’s hidden past, which is about to emerge whether she likes it or not. The writing proceeds by an almost painful, repetitive accretion that ultimately proves to be incredibly moving. Christine, imprisoned in her own house and only partially privy to what is going on next door, muses on the way Marion’s carefully-curated story resembles her own painting: “you can layer over your life to call it into being, superimpose coats of realities, different lives so that at last only one is visible, nourished by the previous ones and surpassing all of them … recording the strata and marking the coats that don’t let themselves dissolve completely and that rise again, resounding as they fade, nourishing the new image with the depth of their matter and ultimately bowing to it, leaving it all the space, in all the splendor of its appearance.” The tension persists until the bitter end, where the sweetest truths of the Bergogne family finally emerge. The hardest thing to bear about reading this book is that much of the violence and terror impacts Marion’s young child, Ida. A brutal attack on Christine’s beloved dog is a close second.
Finally, this month’s installment of the “Afternoon Shorts” series from ELJ Editions is Good Catholic Girl by Michael Cooney, set in the Bronx in what feels like the early sixties. Don’t let the title fool you: while young Hanlon’s father excoriates the brothers who run Catholic boys’ schools as “sick perverts” who couldn’t make it to the priesthood, this is not a “girls gone wild” story. Hanlon fondly remembers his education at the hands of “the sweet-faced sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet” at co-educational St. Finnbarr’s in an Irish neighborhood of the Bronx: “despite what people always said, the nuns did not say “Leave room for the Holy Ghost” when couples were dancing too close. … They were romantics, those nuns. They believed in love.”
Despite Hanlon’s many red-blooded romantic forays, the story is infused with a sort of bygone innocence and filled with wonderfully vivid details about life in New York. But soon, Hanlon is entangled in the problems of Kathleen Mazzetti, the only other student who is not from the neighborhood. Kathleen has come to escape a mafia-connected stalker, Johnny Rovazzi, and the Monsignor in charge of the school enlists Hanlon’s help as a sort of “character reference,” assuming Kathleen is a “chaste girl.” At this point, a story of friendship descends into a nefarious plan to extract Kathleen, who may or may not be who Hanlon thinks she is. Check it out!
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 