Children-Of-The-Breath.Pdf

1 CHILDREN OF THE BREATH A Dialogue in the Desert by Martin Chervin (scanned in version of the book originally published by CMJ, Marian Publishers.) 2 PREFACE Friends of Martin Chervin's magnum opus, a version of which is before you, have often felt more than a little like the young Christopher Tolkien. Watching his aging father, British fantasy writer, J. R. R. Tolkien, draft yet another subplot to the sprawling epic The Silmarillion, the junior Tolkien had the sinking feeling that: a) 'his inventive parent was having far too much fun going off in new directions; b) the likelihood of the elder writer's finishing, polishing and shaping this lifetime's worth of material was growing more remote by the day; and c) that mammoth, daunting task had already been, however unconsciously, bequeathed to him. Tolkien, of course, was right on all counts. When Martin Chervin died of heart failure in 1993, the work-in-progress, which he called Chiaroscuro, lay about his work room and on computer disks, in dozens of drafts, some as fresh as the day of his death, some dating back more than twenty years. Large sequential sections of the novel were virtually complete; other, more recent additions, were in various stages of completion. In between were older, finished pieces which the author had yet to smooth into the whole structure. The task of putting this small library into publishable form fell, fortunately, into the very best of hands — those of Chervin's daughters, Carla and Diana, who had, quite literally, grown up listening to their father's nightly readings of a work which was always in progress. (I remember seeing childhood crayon drawings of the Chervin's three children, Charles, Carla and Diana, on the family's refrigerator door, featuring scenes from their father's tale.) Like Christopher Tolkien — and with similarly happy results — the editors took the approach of separating out from this multilayered mass — with its parable and variations, modern overlays, and character digressions — the narrative core, the seed out of which the whole work originally grew: in this case, an epic meditation on the New Testament scene of the confrontation between Christ and Satan in the wilderness. This is how Matthew's Gospel records the event: "Then Jesus was led up by the Sprit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him…" (Mt. 4:1-3). This is the messianic "testing" in the desert that, according to the synoptic Gospels, heralded the years of Jesus's active ministry, and, more importantly, his final meeting with his "adversary" on the cross. While the Gospel accounts highlight the three temptations to which Jesus was subjected by Satan during his desert ordeal, Chervin's work poses the sort of child's question that lay at the root of all good literature: "What did the two of them, Christ and Satan, talk about for forty days?" Children of the Breath: A Dialogue in the Desert is an attempt to describe the vast contours of history's single greatest, and most consequential, conversation. Of course, someone familiar with the whole work, as I was privileged to be, regrets the absence of one or another of the work's complex "layers," particularly Chervin's wickedly insightful Parable of 3 the Wolf and the Lamb, with its twenty-one variations. But the editorial choices for this "performing version" of the novel are as sound as they are unsentimental. There is fine material that, one hopes, can find its way into print some day; but what the reader has in front of him is the essence of a book that traces not only the dramatic battle between Christ and Satan over the meaning of human history, but a vivid account of the lifelong preoccupations of a remarkable writer as well. Abraham Martin Chervin was born into a poor Orthodox Jewish family on New York's lower Eastside on November 12, 1918. As a boy, he hawked wares on the streets and pressed flowers in a factory. Eager to explore life beyond the confines of an immigrant ghetto, Chervin haunted the New York Public Library, methodically emptying the shelves in alphabetical order. When he got to the New Testament - the ultimate `forbidden' book for a boy from an Orthodox home — he expected the worst, but, instead, discovered Christ. "Long before I believed anything," he once said, "I loved Him." Perhaps even more characteristically, he once granted that the New Testament might be divinely inspired because the words of Jesus were the only thing he'd come across that he couldn't edit. After a stint in the service, he went into the first of a dozen entrepreneurial business enterprises he pioneered over the years. From owner of a coffee house in Greenwich Village in the heyday of the New York poets and the Beats, to sales representative for the Nelson and Sons' Revised Standard Version of the bible, to importer of art books, to editor of an employment journal for minorities, Martin was the inspiration for businesses he yielded to others, the developer of others' winning sales strategies, the agent of brilliant campaigns of which he soon tired. In the late Fifties, Martin courted the young philosophy student and fervent Catholic convert, Ronda De Sola, also from a Jewish background, and in 1962, they were married in Rome. For nearly 15 years, until Martin's baptism in 1978, he admired, resisted, fought, dismissed, debated with and adored his wife's all-consuming commitment to Christ and the Church. It was during these years — the years of his marriage to Ronda, the richest of Martin's life — that he began to force his struggles into words. It came tumbling out of a box one evening in the early 1970's onto the dining room table in the Chervin house in Los Angeles: the plot that Martin had sketched for a great work of fiction, notes he'd compiled since his days as a seaman, a big, bold, sprawling work, worthy of a lifetime, on the Temptations of Christ. What I heard, then, on that evening, was a jumble of ideas. Before long, however, it was a great deal more than that, as Martin, year by year, settled down into the disciplines of a writer's life. Not that the author of Children of the Breath was particularly prolific. A fine one-woman play, Myself, Alma Mahler, on the relationship between Alma Schindler and the Jewish-Christian symphonist Gustav Mahler — not surprisingly, Martin's favorite composer — played counterpoint with the Christ and Satan novel during the 1970's. Premiered in New York and championed in more recent years by actress Pamela Fields, the play puts genius in the "dock," with Alma Mahler in the role- of prosecuting 4 attorney. Multi-dimensional, as all Chervin's best work is, it appears as a kind of theatrical echo to the Christ-Satan saga. Here the terrible mystery of art ultimately confounds, and silences, the savvy objections of "talent," as the silence of Christ ultimately confounds, but fails to cancel, the devil’s brilliant observations on the even more mysterious reality of holiness. The anti-abortion play Born/Unborn occupied Chervin, along with his perennial re-workings of the magnum opus, during the 1980's. Literarily outclassed by his other works, even this "tendentious" drama set in an abortion clinic, has Chervin's characteristic virtue: his "villains," however misguided, are never allowed to be anything less than sympathetic, and they are always given the best lines. Readers of Children of the Breath will doubtless be reminded of other writers who tackled the great scriptural themes. The formidable Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost and the silent, loving Christ of Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor come easily to mind. But if there are literary antecedents for the bold, unflinching questions this novel poses, they are not the Western classics, but, rather, the unsparing and wide-ranging homiletic inquiries of the tradition of Jewish midrash. A scholar once called the midrashic mind "the wild West of the intellect." The midrashic writers of the early Christian centuries delved into the Scriptural narratives in search, not of moral or philosophical principles, but of the rich and complex human dramas they contain. Full of faith, they never allowed their convictions to place boundaries on the scope of their questions. Not content with easy answers, midrash explores the dark corners of the Bible, the dilemmas it poses, but does not solve - short, that is, of the luminous silence of God. W. H. Auden once posited that people become writers because they're trying to address an intractable dilemma in their lives. Martin ultimately "solved" the "problem" that informs the pages of his novel: he came to believe in the Christ he had always loved. Thankfully, however, like his Jewish forebearers who wrote the Scriptures, he had the good sense not to hide the wounds, or evade the wisdom inflicted by the struggle. There's a reason that Martin could not finish this book: It was, in effect, the vehicle through which he recorded seventy years of wrestling with the One he called "The radiant figure of Christ" —an enterprise on which he was engaged to the very end. — Gabriel Meyer 5 CONTENTS Chapter One: CREATION MINUS ONE .................. 7 Chapter Two: CREATION ACCORDING TO SATAN ........ 18 Chapter Three: FALLING STARS ......................... 32 Chapter Four: DIASPORA .............................. 52 Chapter Five: FIRST BLOOD .......................... 78 Chapter Six: THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT......... 94 Chapter Seven: THE UN-CREATION ...................

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