Focus 580; In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden

In this hour of the show we'll be talking with novelist Kathleen Kamber and we will be talking about her most recent and second novel. It's titled in sunlight in a beautiful garden. The book is published by Farrar Straus. She Wrote and has been getting some good notices. It is a book that uses as its backdrop. One of the more legendary natural disasters in American history and that is the Johnstown Flood as occurred on Memorial Day 1889 when the South Fork dam burst and more than 2000 people were killed. The above the dam was a hunting and fishing club where some of the day's wealthiest people spent some of their summer and below was the town of Johnstown where people there just live their daily lives. It's a story that gives an opportunity to say some things about how difficult it is to reach across lines of class. And also it says a lot about the role that disaster plays in

people's lives. Kathleen Kamber will be talking with us this morning and of course as we do that anyone who's listening is welcome to call in addition to being the author of the book in sunlight in a beautiful garden she's written another novel. The book of mercy that was published in 1906 that was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner prize. She is now or did at one time from 1997 till the end of last year she directed the creative writing program at the University of Houston and makes her home in Houston Texas. She's talking with us this morning by telephone. And as we do questions of course are welcome the number here in Champaign Urbana is 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us and that is 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 0 asking callers is that people just try to be brief so that we can accommodate as many different people as possible but of course Anyone's welcome. Again three three three W while and a toll free 800 to 2 2. While I'm in his camp.

Hello hello. Thanks for talking with us. I'm very happy to talk with you. The very first line of the book of the prologue is to understand the geography was to understand the place. So maybe we could talk a little bit about the geography of this area. What's what's the place the area around Johnstown like John is about an hour and a half from Pittsburgh and it's in the Allegheny Mountains and it's at the bottom of a level playing in a very valley. So it is surrounded by very steep hills. Having read about the geographic location I was really scary when I went to visit to understand how much of this kind of in the fog it's caused by the body. And of course when the floods finally come to John people or.

People had a bit of warning because of the sound that was a terrible this 70 foot wall of water descended upon the city and actually being in Johnstown and imagining people trying to get off these extraordinary pills was a very moving experience for me. The South Fork fishing and hunting lay at a level of two hundred and forty feet down about 15 miles away and there was a narrow valley coming from the place and the thing and the water as it burst out of the dam concentrated itself in the valley and. Gain force and gain momentum and gained accumulated in itself an enormous amount of rubble. It was also the case that the Pennsylvania Railroad had a direct

line to Johns from Pittsburgh so that the wealthy members of the South for fishing and hunting could go directly to the south for fishing hunting and early 1:05 and in that way Keith and notion of life in the valley kind of out of the range of their conscious. I think in many cases the reason there was a kind of political knowledge is that the members of the club didn't ever really imagine or seeing life in John's life. John was not simply impoverished. Place it had a very lively steel mill. It had a lot of industry. There were there was a great sense of hope in John's time people were working. It was John's town itself and several boroughs and a number of

towns in the valley leading toward the south for fishing and hunting. So it was a place of extraordinary liveliness and hope and the man who ran the steel mill there Daniel shaman around a very forward thinking Quaker condition. There were a much more humane and one thought in the relation to the conditions in that particular time in history. So any distance between the South for fishing and hunting and John the fact that train travel made it possible to almost imagine that John didn't exist. All those kinds of things things to me to produce a kind of geographical equation that contributed to what happened. So you had this this large body of water. Evaded this trough natural sort of trough that it could run in and this earthen dam that held

it back. Yeah the. Apparently if you tell the story in the book some some time before the club was established there had been this idea in Pennsylvania of building a system of canals that would connect Pittsburgh and Johnstown and that's why this idea of damming putting the dam there so that you could get the water for the canals came about. That plan never went anywhere. But then they ended up with this lake and apparently then they're there with there were some wealthy folks who were looking for a place to establish a kind of a resort Kolob and someone said Well here we got this lake why not here. Well the interesting thing was that they actually did the Pennsylvania that would actually build the portage railroad so that there were some of the. A portage railroad where railroad cars were taken by rope

and hauled over the mountain. This is the way to try to get transportation and products from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and Charles Dickens road on the portage railroad and visit it John. So it actually was in working order and used as usually impractical. And if you can imagine. Canals getting these large flat boat canal boats with train cars on them and getting them to a certain point and then having them hauled with ropes over a mountain and down the other side to get access again to waterways to get the Philadelphia. It is an incredibly complicated ordeal that they did actually build it and it was actually in existence for some time and Charles Dickens did write about it. And rode on it when he came to

America and there is actually a quote in the book of what he had to say about that. But the minute and not the minutes mean within months the portage railroad being built and successful the Pennsylvania Railroad had built an all rail line across the mountains and so the portage railroad became obsolete and the dam that had been built by the Pennsylvania Railroad to make the way that made the water possible for the canal became obsolete and the and the Pennsylvania Railroad allowed the Earth to fall into disrepair. Earth dam as it turns out are extremely. If they're built properly and in my research I learned things that were required to have an Earth Dam remains the top of the dam could never.

Being breached there at the level of the water in the lake that was held by the dam needed to be many feet below the top of the dam. There need to be discharge pipe filled in the base of the dam with a system of levers that could open them and release the water into the valley that controlled way. If the water in the lake rose too much and there was the spillway on there should be still land one side of a dam so that the water can fill over the spillway should water rise to dangerously high levels and way when the Pennsylvania Railroad allowed the dam to fall into disrepair the safety precautions began to be breached. And then when the members of the South for fishing and hunting club bought the property with the idea of having a lake and a clubhouse and stables and sailboats and so forth they bought it from a man who had removed the charge ties for for the cost of the scrap

metal. When the dam when the club members seeing the dam they lowered the surface of the dam in order to widen it so a road could be built across so that the carriages could with with the. Which of the summer people could go across the top and they stocked that thing right with a very expensive black bath for the fishing pleasure. The members of the club and in order to keep it in the lake and not fall over the spillway and go down into the valley where the valley residents could fish for them they built a very elaborate set of fish springs that could clogged with debris and really interfere with the overflow over the spillway. So those kinds of things. I mean if they had stayed on the property in the way and rebuilt the dam properly and then to what were or were known as the engineering principles is keep an Earth

safely constructed that there may not have banned any kind of tragedy. But somehow those things were ignored. Let me introduce Again our guest with us our focus 580 We're speaking with novelist Kathleen Kamber and she has written to her first the book of Murphy a mercy published nineteen ninety six and her newest It's titled in sunlight in a beautiful garden and it does indeed involve the Johnstown flood of 1889 event. We've been talking about and questions are also welcome 3 3 3 3 8 hundred 1:58 W.. You know one review that I read of the book made. Observation that one of the things that keeps people turning pages and when they're when they're reading a novel is that they want to know what happens. And in this particular story at least as far as the main event goes from the beginning the reader knows what's going to happen.

Was that for you as a writer a particular challenge to try and maintain the interest of readers when they knew perfectly well the dam was going to break and there were going to be blood and a couple thousand people are going to be killed in the town was really going to be devastated. You know it's interesting I have a number of letters from readers who began the book thinking well what about that and have said that they found the book and read the full body producing because what is not. As the readers are reading. Who is which of these characters are going to survive this and which are not. And what I'm saying when leading up to the flood what human stories were transpiring that allowed the reader to feel highly invested in all of the terrorists or one

hopes all of the characters in such a way that the reader then would care deeply about the flood was coming. What would be the human cost in terms of the people that the readers come to know during the course of reading the book. Obviously that's something that I hoped would happen and I did realize the dangers of this when I began an early draft of the book I actually began with the description of. And then of course I had to make decisions about how much to be minute to minute drama was going to be central to the book and I realized I wanted to write. I didn't I didn't want to write a quote unquote disaster novel. I really wanted to look at and live the life of all of these people the people who were in Johnstown and

beginning to find some happiness and some prosperity. And then Andrew Mellon Andrew Carnegie Henley Clay Frick other people through the men who were responsible for the building of the club and the main maintenance of the dam what they were like what it was about that point in their careers and frikken Mellon were relatively young. Carnegie point was oh a good 15 to 20 years older than the two of them. But I really wanted to so that the public in existence for nine years and I made a very conscious decision to focus on the lives of these people and the kinds of things that contributed to who they were and what attention they were able to pay to something that ought to have been very frightening to everyone.

So one cared even more deeply about the flood when it did come was everyone. The characters as well as I hope they came to know them during the course of the four. I don't know if this is too pedestrian an observation but it would certainly seem that this is a rather potent metaphor for where. Everything that in in life you try to hold back and eventually what happens is the dam breaks and there's an you know that we go we go about repressing an awful lot of stuff we. There are things that we really should deal with that we don't and eventually it just becomes too much. You know it is one of the great lessons of history I mean you could also say which I think you're saying is also one of the great lessons of psychology. You know it is so easy and people become preoccupied with whatever their preoccupation in the

business world for example to not paying attention to the simple things that need to be attended to in relation to making industry a caring deeply for the men and women who whose responsibility is yours. If you are an employer. So I think it in a store the level of it's important to. And when we have the great discrepancy between which we still do in this country and many countries between. Very well-paid employers and captains of industry there are less well-paid workers. I think there is really a valuable lesson to be learned. What can happen if you don't pay the simplest kind of attention. I mean

$17000. Flynn and the repair of these I mean Mellon Fred Carnegie were only three of many wealthy members of this club. Clearly $17000 and one of them with nothing. I mean it wasn't a question that was simply too complicated a problem to solve. They couldn't possibly do it. It was a question of not caring. To pay the kind of attention to tend to a problem that was easily solved. If I did not want to write at didactic law for a novel let me beat you over the head with this kind of story. And I began to write the novel because I was just so curious about the time and the people and how this kind of thing happens in the world. But I did realize as I was writing it that there were for me and so I send her readers many lessons of the lessons of history and as you say

the psychological last we can ignore and ignore and ignore all kinds of thing. Those kinds of things too often catch up with us sooner or later in any case. And there's a lot to be said for having a nagging sense that there's a problem and turning your attention to that problem and trying to do something about it for something horrible happened. You know one character that that was some of the names in the book like Carnegie Mellon were familiar to me at. I had heard of them I don't know how much I could have told you about them but one name that was that was really not familiar was Henry Clay Frick and perhaps it should have been at least in the sense that he was a very important art collector and left behind him what I think some people think was one of the greatest private art collections ever kept together. He was a partner of of Carnegie

and the fact he was the guy that made the Carnegie brothers. The biggest deal maker in the world and then went on to play a very important role in the formation of United States Steel. Yeah so he was an important guy and I guess I'm I'm sort of surprised that really his name didn't much register with me. Well the problem is that the Frick family has never won a biography to be written about him. It is my understanding that the lawsuits were filed long and people who who did it right by the family. A family friend to write a biography not long after Henry Clay Frick and that biography is very laudatory. It really portrays a man

who is a saint. Certainly we are all very complicated people and none of us are saying and certainly Henry Clay Frick was not a saint and the wealth of the Franks and also actually the melon have made it possible for them to allow a very fun biography to be written about these men and I was amazed at how little I could find of Andrew Mellon for example. I was really stunned by that. Now there are many biographies of Carnegie. He was very affable. He was always writing. Paper is about labor papers about all kinds of things being published that Fred was very private during his life time and the family on it and the picture painted a man who had done nothing wrong. Who had the terrible burden of

these workers to contend with and to happy and prosperous and happy in it are collapsing. There is an interesting story that it could be apocryphal but it is certainly repeated often enough. Frick and Carnegie had a terrible falling out over money. Frank wanted the Carnegie brothers enterprises and everyone who worked for Carnegie had called an iron clad agreement that made it very difficult for people with the money that was rightfully there. And so there were losses and there was great animosity between them and Rick actually kind of leaned over it at one point in the past Carnegie and towards the end of Carnegie thought Carnegie although again much older and Fritz died in the same year and Carnegie sent an emissary to correct thing.

It's been all these years don't you think. I mean we had a relationship once. Don't you think that we should bury the hatchet or whatever term they used at that and put this behind us and sent the emissary back to Carnegie with the message. How Mr. Carnegie in hell where we're going with this is hardly the message of a man who absolutely is with everything that he has done. Of course you know Fritz became the great villain in the Homestead Strike which is a very important part of labor history in this country 1892 just a few years after the times where the the strike in in Homestead was broken by Pinkerton guards and shots were fired and it was really one of the very laka moments and it's still that way in American labor history.

It was really fresh. I mean Carnegie was in Scotland and wanted to do whatever he had to do to break that strike and see it in the most ruthless way. So he obviously was a very complicated man. He left us to give this country a wonderful art collection. It's Philanthropies. He was also extremely ruthless and extremely greedy. His goal from the time he was a very very young man was to become wealthy and whatever it to do to do that he was willing to do that I was I was amazed at the dearth of information about melons and friends. Well one of the things that I wanted to ask you was that about how you treated these historical characters I'm I'm sure that you did research and found out

about them what you could not I guess I also was wondering whether you felt how constrained you felt by facts or whether you indeed felt that they were as much your characters as the characters that you created. Well I felt very constrained by facts but not constrained in a bad way. And then there were things that. I mean for example everything about the courtship of Carnegie and Louise Whitfield you say their loss of information about that and his you know letters to her how he met her and the opposition of his mother to that marriage all of that is historically documented. And I simply brought it. I hope I brought it to life as I knew about it in terms of taking fictional liberties. For example the only thing I was able to find out about Mellon and is

his courtship and his fiance he fell in love as a young woman with someone about whom he apparently felt very impassioned. She developed tuberculosis. I'd been in a long and unhappy way that people with tuberculosis died in the air and in the books that I read. There's no mention of her name is mentioned in passing. It took him many many years to recover from this and marry again and that marriage was an enormous disaster which certainly Leigh I mean reading between the lines of all of this. Dictate that this was a great passion of his life and that he never truly recovered from the loss. So I felt able to take fictional liberties and and and and and imagine what that courtship might have been like given all I had read about courtships at that

and what the progress of tuberculosis was right during like during that time and what love might have meant to Melun at that point in his life because he was an extremely shy withdrawn young man very much under the thumb of a very powerful father. And how freeing and moving it must have been to him to discover this other capacity in himself. So I felt able to say that kind of liberty based on what I know to the fact this experience actually happened to him. So that made it challenging that also very interesting. So I tried I was very scrupulous I did an enormous amount of research for this book and was as scrupulous about it hearing to what I knew to be factual and also then to. Imagine a

bit about what it was when there were not when there was not enough to still allow myself to imagine some of the detail that might taken place surrounding them the same thing around the dickens trip. Sue Johnston you actually did go through John. He had left his children at home when he was on a trip to America. Did he disembark from a boat and I know I don't know. I imagine he was a very affable traveller and very interested in people. So that is the match and the fact that he came to Johnstown in the Portage railroad is not an agent. So those are the kinds of things I did were a little bit past the midpoint here and I guess I should introduce Again our guest for this part of focus 580 Kathleen Kamber is the author of the recent novel in sunlight in a beautiful garden published by Farrar Straus Shiro. It is her second Her first was the book of mercy in

1906 between 97 and the end of last year she directed the creative writing program at the University of Houston and makes her home there in Houston Texas. And if you have questions you're certainly welcome to call the number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have a toll free line that's good anywhere the generous That's 800 to 2 to 9. 4:5 something else about the book that that really impresses me is the obvious care that you've taken to learn about. The lives and activities of the people that you write about and as as you mentioned right at the very beginning Johnstown was a very important steel making center and two of your characters one a man named Frank Fallon works in the steel mill and then his son also spent some time working in the mail and I was most impressed by your description of the state of the steel making process.

Not only was it just I thought really beautiful but it certainly seemed to heaven. An authentic ring to it now I know I would know but I was just very very struck by by that. I tend to be a great overt researcher. I feel as if I have to know everything there is to know in order to. Create the world that I'm trying to create. And I read many many books about the making of the fairy earlier. Bessemer plan. So I just read and read and read and read and tell it's central to my thinking. And I mean I joked with a friend when I was doing the research that I thought if I could not build an earth stand if anyone had one

built I would be the person to call. I began to feel the same way about the making of steel. I grew up in Pittsburgh and the mythology of filmmaking of the sea and the difficulty and also the them the magical beauty of the thing was always very striking to me and kind of and part of the mythology in Pittsburgh that I grew up in. Because of working people and Irish and German immigrants many of whom were field workers and. I really wanted to I really wanted to do that in any difficulty but also in an extraordinary puti and that the power and satisfaction that must have been had by men who

understood what an extraordinary enterprise it was very dangerous to be sure but also making the metal that was changing the entire world. One of the things that touched me enormously as I was doing my research is that in John's town a thing workers dress in their Sunday clothes to go to the pay window on Saturday to pick up their paychecks out of a sense of pride in of respect for Mr. Morales who was the owner of the Cambria in work and also of the sign of respect for themselves and the work that they were doing. And I found that extremely amusing and and and settled and it said a lot something about about that war and the meaning of that war to the people who were doing

it. So I read a great deal about that history and exactly what happened in an effort to make it. Both inspiring and and beautiful at the same time. Thank you for thinking it was you again it was a struggle to make it all that I thought it should be. Well I think you were very successful and I was just last night reading in one passage just struck me and I just said wow this is really good. And it does indeed. You know I think you get a feeling for where the the the power and the danger of the molten steel and how these people who are working with it are doing something that's almost unnatural. The idea that human beings would manipulate this this stuff this molten metal of thousands of degrees the kind of thing that of course you use if you do if you touched it that would be it. And and certainly people died

in the enterprise but it's I think it's a very very powerful stuff very good stuff. And and of course that was one of the protective equipment at the time. Right there is my mention. And the authors note at the beginning of the book the many books that I read and think of how many there are. There's a remarkable documentary about the John flood that was done by Charles Guggenheim. And there are some old photographs. And and actually very very old film probably not as old as 1889 but very old film. You know workers making steel understanding you know that they kind of are putting their hands up over their eyes like it's fun or something. No no goggles nothing. It's amazing the protections that were not available. And fact that everyone went to work every day and did this extraordinarily dangerous work with with none of the

protective gear that people have today for all kinds of work. I just last week as a matter of fact had the opportunity to talk with Peter Carey Oh yes about his new book the book about Ned Kelly. Oh yes and I had a nice conversation with him and and I think I asked the question that I've asked a couple of other people who have written historical fiction and I guess I made by making the observation that it's said and it's I think it's certainly true that historical fiction is as much about the time that it's being written as it is about the time that it's set. And having said that I am. I'm interested in hearing from you a little bit about. How you how this book in sunlight in a beautiful garden that set in before the turn of the century is in some way about. Now. Well I think I think it is very much about

I think it is about as I said I think it can be thought of as a cautionary tale about. How we treat. Other people how possible it is for all humans to become blind to the plight. People that they regard as the other in some way. It struck me during the course of writing the book that people who were young people at the time of the John would have had a father in the civil war and were at the right age if they survived to have that in the first world war. And that war of course is so much about. I mean it's about sending principles it's about many other things but it's also about

a fierce inability a fierce inability to understand the point of view of others and have to go to the terrain to really fight it out in order to the fighters help have their point of view prevail. And one of the things that struck me is that. The man at the South Fork fishing and hunting shooting were blinded in some way to the fact that there was teeming life others in there in this valley. This is not to indict them or call them completely evil but I think it occurred to me as I read about them and try to imagine them and live their lives with them. That is the danger for all of us. I think it is the story of our

time too because. I think it's very easy to lose empathetic connection to people and the universe that are not like us can be in our own community in our country. It's envy in the world you know. That lack of empathetic understanding of what it might be like to be someone else. And again I didn't think in the book so much with that in my mind that the more I researched in the law the more this is that this is an ongoing problem with human nature and it's a problem that there's there to be. And thought about it and considered. And this. Brings a few people to be thinking about that again. I would be very happy to have that be the case.

Just a little bit ago I asked you this question about dealing with historical characters and you said you certainly felt constrained by the facts when facts were available and then you did what you needed to do. Maybe if they didn't I'm just I'm curious about one aspect here of the relationship between Andrew Mellon and the woman that you talked about who died at tuberculosis this this part of the story where as she is dying and taking a long time to die she asks him to sing to her. And is that something that you invented. That is something that I completely invented. He said to the one who is the founder of the Mellon Bank Empire Andrew Milne father was a very harsh character. Everything in the book about the way he went about finding a wife a courtship of the wife the very strict way he treated it

at the auto by the ongoing autobiography he wrote and which included passages such as girl children die young should not be gravely lamented. All actual parts of his personality. It was extreme and tricky kind of life. The children could be could have been subjected to. Not with the kind of physical deprivation that very poor families in the same circumstances would be subjected to. But certainly in terms of a very busy year the year of the year thinking about the world the boys were all educated at home because they thought that people in regular children a regular school were coarse and you know women were distraction and.

Assuming as them reading what little there was about Andrew's absolute devotion to the same woman. Even after that she was dying I found myself imagining. That that there must have been parts of him that were touched that he never even knew existed in and it just came to me I guess in a way something to come to writers or artists at times that this would have been suggestive of kind of softening and some kind of connection to something in himself and also a willingness to do anything for her to advance the kind of love he felt for her. As I said it took him so many years to even attempt to get beyond the death of this young woman. And then when he did marry it was a

very hearty marriage that went very badly. And so I invented that. And I actually wanted to imagine what it would be like for someone like him to you know go into himself and find that capacity to someone who loved him asked him to do it. You in the book talk a little bit about what this place that the club was like and about the fact that some wealthy people built some rather grand houses there that that charmingly enough they refer to as cottages. Yeah. And I think there are some other famous summer places where wealthy people built huge houses and call them cottages are. Do those houses still stand Are they still there are some of the houses still stand. Unfortunately the National Registry of Historic Places didn't move as quickly as they might have to preserve them in the way they might have been preserved.

I think that may have had to do with a number of things the minute things occurred. Everyone who was a member of that wanted to disavow any association with them and so records were destroyed. The club was literally you know the club surrounded the lay and the clubhouse and the cottages and the dam broke and flooded. And I should say something more about that. It was so much more than a flood and when the lake emptied the houses were all and hacked and it was literally abandoned with tables. You know China in the china cabinets and everything just left there because every day members of class feared reprisal and fear of what would happen. And it's also the case that. They had they thought that there was no record kept one the membership of the roster of

the members was true or and that there were it would be very difficult to prove who had belonged to the club and also the club was established as a separate entity so that each of the men individually could not be sued and they certainly had the vast fortune that would have been in jeopardy had there been. And years later. I mean ever so everyone thought alright no one knows anything about this. And interestingly enough in what the biography that exists now on Carnegie Frick there is no mention of membership in the fourth machine. But there was a young man who unbeknownst I mean people must have known that the photographs he took or of young people. It was a young man a member of the village kind of interested in tinkering and inventing and knowing the new technology when he was in his teens and calf. He took many many photographs of life

at the club and a coffee stand was found somewhere in New England. I believe in the early 1960s by a woman who had bought a house and it was in her attic and she sabi to be old photographic negative and a can with marks for it and she sent them here to the Library of Congress of the Smithsonian and suddenly these photographs appeared that are very beautiful and are in the Charles Guggenheim documentary about the Johnstown Flood life at the lake. Girls and boys and sailboats and people dressed in costume to be photographed for Tablo Vivaah. And they're really haunting and quite extraordinary. So suddenly that the secrecy of all that was unknown about life at the fishing and hunting club became known to the photograph. Which I thought was

quite remarkable and wonderful and so the Guggenheim documentary gave me a very good sense of what it actually looked like the girls in that wonderful white dresses and have parents thought of them boys in their little sailing outfits and it really helped me visualize all that was going on at that particular time. We well we've come to the end of our time and I hope that we've given people some some sense of the book and yet left enough so that people will want to read it in sunlight in a beautiful garden as the title by Kathleen Kamber published by Farrar Straus and Giroux. And our guest this is her second novel her first the book of mercy as she form 1997 until end of 2000 directed the creative writing program at the University of Houston. Thank you very much for talking with us today.

Thank you so much I've enjoyed it.