Evan S. Connell's heroes ride in from the Crusades

Author Evan S. Connell uses a 1950s typewriter to produce works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Last month, Connell won the $100,000 Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Acheivement

October 30, 2000
Web posted at: 12:53 p.m. EST (1753 GMT)

In this story: Writing with a sharp eye Not driven by money The 'Bridge' novels RELATED SITES

SANTA FE, New Mexico (AP) -- In the bookend novels "Mrs. Bridge" and "Mr. Bridge," the hero rides out a Kansas City tornado while dining, calmly asking his wife to pass the butter.

In "Son of the Morning Star," about George Armstrong Custer, he rides out in a blaze of vainglory against the Sioux.

Now in "Deus Lo Volt!" Evan S. Connell's vivid and microscopically detailed account of the Crusades, readers see from where the bullheaded heroes rode in.

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These four Connell works reflect a pattern that the internationally known author may not have envisioned when he set out writing in the 1940s. They are part of a body of work that last month won Connell the $100,000 Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement.

As Connell's narrator, Jean de Joinville, writes of the Crusades: "How often we approve the beginning of things but do not guess their end."

Connell admits modern parallels were on his mind.

"Vietnam was the most obvious thing," he says in an interview at his hillside home overlooking Santa Fe.

As for Custer, he says the cavalryman would have been a quintessential Crusader: "He'd have been right out in front waving a saber."

Connell's immersion in the medieval blood bath began about five years ago in a Tucson, Arizona, bookstore, when he picked up paperback chronicles of the Crusades by Joinville and Geoffrey de Villehardouin. Joinville, who participated in the Seventh Crusade with Louis IX in the 1200s, wrote with such a sharp eye that Connell decided to use him as narrator for the whole sweep of the Crusades from 1095 to 1272.

"He remembered graphic moments, details, the sort of thing that I like very much," Connell says.

For example, Joinville, advising Louis not to abandon the Holy Land, argues with a fellow nobleman who counseled a return to France. Joinville goes to cool off at a window. Louis follows him and rests his hands gently on Joinville's head from behind. Joinville gives a start but then realizes it's the king, not the other nobleman, because of the monarch's emerald ring.

"This moment brought these people back to life for me," Connell says. "Things like that the academic historians ignore because it's a detail that's irrelevant to the social climate of the day and the economic motives, etc., etc. But Joinville's account of those days was filled with this sort of thing."

Connell spent four years digging for every firsthand or secondhand account of the Crusades he could find. Every detail in his book came from those accounts, and the only fictional device was using Joinville as first-person narrator, he says.

Of the sacking of Jerusalem, July 15, 1099, Joinville says: "God's army searched Jerusalem for gold, jewelry, donkeys, horses. They looked for Saracens to kill, looked under beds, opened closets, dragged infidels out of obscurity into public where all might watch them expiate the sin."

After they carted off the bodies for common burial, each head was struck from behind in case coins were hidden in their mouths, and each body was cut open in case treasure was swallowed.

"This day will endure to future ages since it marks the justification of Christianity," Joinville says.

Despite many references to gold, it seemed lucre was not what drove them, Connell says.

"I think modern scholars place somewhat more emphasis on economic motives, but none of that comes through the old documents," he says, which show the pope calling upon the people to liberate Jerusalem. There was a "religious frenzy, fury at the tales of atrocities that got back to Europe about the way Christian pilgrims were being treated."

In 1095, Pope Urban addressed Frankish barons at Clermont, describing Turkish atrocities and urging a Crusade. An outcry is heard: "Deus lo volt! Deus lo volt!" -- God wills it.

Connell, 76, did not go abroad to research "Deus Lo Volt!" But he had lived in France in the early 1950s, writing for the Paris Review and other publications after leaving the Naval Air Corps following World War II.

Before the war he majored in English at Dartmouth College.

Two of Connell's novels were combined to form the 1990 film "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge," starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

Connell was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, the son and grandson of physicians. Becoming a writer went against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to be a doctor and inherit the family practice.

"He was concerned that I would never be able to make a living at this kind of thing -- it was a justifiable concern, I think," he says. "I grew up in a home where there was no music, no interest in any of the arts."

His first successful novel, "Mrs. Bridge," in 1959, and "Mr. Bridge" 10 years later, are "semi" autobiographical, he says.

"Mrs. Bridge" and "Mr. Bridge" tell the same story through the very different eyes of each title character. The two books were combined into a movie in 1990, "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge," starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

Walter Bridge is "will" made manifest, India Bridge so dependent on him that even her fear of tornadoes is neutralized if he reassures her. Dining at the country club, with all other guests hiding in the cellar, she goes to an abandoned table nearby to fetch Walter an extra pat of butter. Fleeing without him never occurred to her.

She refuses to trade in a car he gave her years earlier, even when it grows unpredictable. When it dies leaving the garage one snowy day, she's stranded, the car half in, half out, its doors blocked shut by the garage entry jamb.

None of that ever happened to Connell's mother.

"No, I invented that," he says, "and several years later the same thing happened to some woman in Florida -- I remember coming across that in the newspaper."

Not counting odd jobs in San Francisco in the 1950s, Connell has been a full-time writer nearly all his adult life, producing fiction, nonfiction and poetry. He works 12-hour days when all goes well.

His books have been translated into nine languages, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Dutch, Japanese and Italian.

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