IN SUNLIGHT, IN A BEAUTIFUL GARDEN
By Kathleen Cambor
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 258 pages, $23
FIRE IN BEULAH
By Rilla Askew
Viking, 376 pages, $25.95
Throughout much of the world — in Latin America, in Africa, in China, in Eastern Europe — fiction writers continue to produce in abundance novels whose primary aim is an exploration of what might be called the politics of power. Who are the strong and wealthy, and to what end is their power wielded? Who are the vulnerable and impoverished, and what is it like to struggle from one day to the next?
Here in America, despite the general breadth and depth of wealth, despite the significant political and social freedoms we enjoy, the issue of power remains a potent one. Few discussions of race, education, taxes, wages, health care, or even the environment can progress far without addressing, either implicitly or explicitly, the politics of power. Yet only a small minority of our fiction writers seem intent upon exploring this issue, as though such overt political or social engagement places the grimy fingerprint of conviction on an otherwise unsullied artistic canvas.
Or perhaps the absence of extreme social unrest or of officially sanctioned inequality in this country deprives the fiction writer of a key ingredient in the creation of compelling literature: drama. When there is war or famine or widespread torture or grotesque and unabated political corruption, the issue of power isn’t merely present; it achieves the awful grandeur and gripping intensity of the epic, of art itself.
Though such grandly dramatic circumstances may not exist today on such a scale in this country, they do, of course, in the annals of American history. History can burnish small, even apparently random or anomalous events until they reveal their rightful place in reflecting and shaping our character. Two such historical events are at the heart of new novels by Kathleen Cambor and Rilla Askew. Cambor’s “In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden” has as its central dramatic event the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pa., a flood that took more than 2,000 lives, while Askew’s “Fire in Beulah” reaches its climax in the Tulsa race riot of 1921, which resulted in the destruction of the city’s thriving black neighborhood. Both novels are works of great historical and artistic imagination, and both focus on how not only self-determination but also the politics of power circumscribe the course of a life.
Each chapter of “In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden” begins with an epigraph from the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.” The first of these epigraphs reads, “Nature’s law is that all things change and turn, and pass away,” and with these words Cambor seems to ask that we resign ourselves to the inevitability of the awful events she will chronicle: The day after Memorial Day in 1889, as a torrential rain falls, a dam at the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club bursts, and the entire contents of the club’s grand and placid and well-stocked lake race down the mountainside toward the small steel town that rests in the valley below.
“Ten minutes past three,” Cambor writes. “It was the last moment that the lake was only water, roaring with a force equivalent to that of the Niagara River as it reaches Niagara Falls. Then it combined with everything that lay in its path, hurling into the narrow valley, churning, flinging, and scouring a high wide path, now narrowing, now broadening, depending on the landscape it encountered, growing black, huge, monstrous, and fetid with debris. A black mist, a Odeath mist,’ as it was later called, hovered over it as it collected barbed wire, locomotives, railroad tracks, pulverized frame houses, keys and hobbyhorses, window glass, factory boilers, fuel.”
Cambor perfectly captures with her exquisite prose the horror of nature’s wrath as the flood reaches Johnstown. “Death was arbitrary, ravenous, irresistible,” she writes, an echo of that chapter’s epigraph: “Time is a violent torrent.” But this flood occurs near the end of the novel, and by then we have come to understand that it is not nature’s power but the power men have over their own and others’ lives that is the true subject of this novel. The South Fork Dam bursts because the wealthy men of the hunting and fishing club-men like Andrew Mellon and Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick-ignore all suggestions that the dam needs to be repaired. These are men who then make only a modest contribution to aid those whose lives were ruined in the flood, those who have worked in the factories that have provided these men such wealth.
A further element of Cambor’s novel is its examination of the developing relationship between Nora Talbot, a young woman who goes to the club each summer with her father, and Daniel Fallon, a young man who is torn between his allegiance to his working-class Johnstown heritage and his intellectual aspirations. It is in this love story, in fact, and in the lives of those surrounding Nora and Daniel, where Cambor most adroitly and movingly explores human frailty and fortitude, the ways we can and cannot control our own destiny. “In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden” is a novel both lovely and grim, a novel that both decries and celebrates human frailty.
Here, for example, is Cambor’s description of how Nora’s father treats her:
“He cared for her elaborately, but carefully, knowing, as he did, how much is risked with too much loving. Because of that he was demonstrative in a hundred superficial ways. She was praised for her decorum at the table, applauded for her forced and amateurish efforts at piano. He took unseemly pride in her when she avoided the colds that were so common in winter, as if good health were an art, a thing perfectible if practiced. . . . But he kept himself from the depth of her.”
This is not merely elegantly descriptive prose; it is a wonderfully succinct account of a father navigating complex emotional terrain, and there are dozens of equally wise and artful passages in this eloquent and captivating novel.
The tragedy that hovers over Rilla Askew’s “Fire in Beulah” is, unlike the flood in Cambor’s novel, wholly a human one. During the Oklahoma oil rush of the 1920s, the whites of Tulsa scurry for the riches that flow from the earth while the city’s black inhabitants still live in fear of white vengeance and wrath. The novel moves back and forth between the worlds of its two central characters, one white and one black, in order to explore the often-devastating consequences of the powerful let loose upon the powerless, a circumstance that finds its most perverse and horrifying incarnation in the act of lynching.
Althea Whiteside is the wife of an oil wildcatter, a woman who has hidden from her husband the truth of her impoverished and often-brutal childhood. Emotionally fragile and blinded by prejudice and fear, she is nevertheless forced by circumstance to become intimately involved in the life of her young black maid, Graceful. Both women’s lives are irrevocably altered by the sudden appearance of Althea’s younger brother Japheth, a character so convincingly contemptuous and downright evil that his every word seems to spew forth like fire from his mouth.
In the course of the novel, Althea and Graceful are forced to confront their responsibility to each other and the power they hold over one another’s lives. When a distraught and bewildered Althea crosses the railroad tracks in her search for Graceful and winds up in the offices of the local black newspaper editor, the bleeding blisters on her feet bandaged by a black physician, she is dumbstruck by the realization that she has entered so foreign a world:
“She’d never in her life been at a loss for how to behave in the presence of gentlemen, and yet . . . these were colored men. Weren’t they? She couldn’t look up. The very sight of them tossed her instincts into turmoil, tilted her mind and her will completely askew.”
One of Askew’s great accomplishments in this intense and frightening novel is her ability to portray Althea as a terribly flawed, reprehensible character and yet a woman who can be transformed by the horrors and the acts of courage and defiance she witnesses. And Graceful is no less complex a character: She is proud, angry, frightened, submissive and brave. As the story rushes toward its awful conclusion, when the city’s black residents arm themselves, enraged that another black man is to be lynched, Graceful and Althea set off together not in an intentional display of unity but in a desperate effort to preserve the shards of dignity they possess.
As with “In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden,” “Fire in Beulah” recalls and re-creates a devastating if largely forgotten historical event in order to explore the awful consequences of human failure. Both of these compelling novels assert the simple but endlessly elusive truth that power must be matched by an equal measure of compassion and empathy if we are to avoid the terrible descent into chaos and ruin.
