The Books That Mattered

by Frye Gaillard

  In Ahab’s Wife Naslund put her young protagonist Una in that same bloody boat, one of three survivors in her tale. The other two are Giles and Kit, the two young men whom Una has loved, unable to decide which of them to marry. They are compelled as friends to live with the terrible memory of their deed, their descent into cannibalism to survive. The burden proves too much for the men, one of whom dies, the other of whom is driven into madness, beyond the ability of Una to reach him. But Una moves on, and in the course of this rich and satisfying story—this most majestic of American novels—she finds not only solace, but spiritual redemption. Part of it comes in her marriage to Ahab, the captain who helped to rescue her at sea. She is surprised at first that this would be so, for he is a man much older than she. But she finds him tender and passionate and wise, and she grieves for his wounds at the jaws of Moby Dick; grieves for his physical torment and pain, and grieves also for his obsession with revenge.

  Finally, of course, she grieves for his death, but even then she will not give in to the lure of despair. She finds new meaning in the company of friends, who introduce her to perhaps the greatest moral cause of her time, the abolition of slavery, and to the burgeoning worlds of literature and science. Late in the book Una stands alone on a night in Nantucket and gazes up at the star-filled sky, asking the questions that haunt the human mind.

  Where is my place before this swirling ball of star mass, edgeless and expansive, without horizon? Where is my place, when I know that this is but one of ten billion? Here the categories crack. Beauty—that gilt frame—burns at its edges and falls to ash. Love? It’s no more than a blade of grass. Perhaps there is music here, for in all that swirling perhaps harmony fixes the giants in their turning, marches them always outward in their fiery parade.

  II

  As I was reading this novel for the first time, with all its grandeur and all its multiple layers of meaning, I thought of another book from the late twentieth century that owes a certain debt to Moby Dick. In Peter Benchley’s Jaws, the villainous fish is not a whale, but a great white shark. But there is a character reminiscent of Ahab—a professional shark hunter named Quint, played in the movie by the great Robert Shaw, who develops his own Shakespearean obsession. (Who can forget the scene in the film where Quint, like Ahab, is killed by his prey?) But whatever its moments of literary pretension, it is clear from the start that the ultimate purpose of Benchley’s work is page-turning terror, for it is, without apology or shame, a frankly commercial piece of good writing.

  Ahab’s Wife, of course, is not. But like Jaws it became a runaway best seller, and there is hope and inspiration in that. I can think of few other books which explore the human condition at greater depth, or offer more clearly the reassuring notion that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Naslund came naturally to such understandings. Certainly, in Birmingham, as a young adult in the civil rights years, she saw the ambiguity of the human heart, our ability to embrace both good and evil, and sometimes both at once. Like many of us in those years, Naslund vowed to write about what she had seen, particularly after the Birmingham church bombing, perhaps the most horrible tragedy of the time.

  In 2003, she published Four Spirits, a civil rights novel both passionate and vast, but I remember wondering when I first heard about the book what a novelist could do with this subject matter that a historian with the right sensibilities could not. Diane McWhorter, another Birmingham writer, had just won a Pulitzer Prize for her historical memoir Carry Me Home, and as it happened I was completing a civil rights book of my own which was set for publication the following spring. I didn’t begrudge Sena Naslund her novel; far from it, for I already knew and respected her work. Still, I wondered how any writer would manage to improve on the literal truth.

  I had recently been to Birmingham and interviewed the Reverend John Cross, minister of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the target of the Sunday morning bomb. It was a day, Cross said, that began with such promise: September 15, 1963, full of bright sunshine and the singing of birds, a morning when the older children in the church would serve as ushers and sing in the choir at the main Sunday service. But at 10:29 the bomb exploded. When Cross first felt the building shake, he thought momentarily of the water heater. They had been having trouble with it, and he wondered if the pipes had finally blown. But he heard people screaming and rushed outside and saw a gaping hole in the wall. He quickly joined those digging through the rubble and uncovered a patent leather shoe.

  “That’s Denise’s shoe,” said M. W. Pippin, a church layman who was frantically digging beside him. Pippin knew his granddaughter, Denise McNair, often wore the same kind of shoe, and almost as soon as he had spoken the words he and Cross came upon the bodies—first Denise and then her friends, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins. As tears of rage streamed down Pippin’s face, he screamed aloud what many people felt: “I’d like to blow the whole town up.”

  Then came the most astonishing part. Three days later Martin Luther King Jr. preached the eulogy for the children, and this is what he said:

  History has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. . . . So in spite of the darkness of this hour we must not despair. We must not become bitter, nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. We must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that even the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and worth of all human personalities.

  I had always wondered how the sermon was received. How could the people in the church that day, including the shattered families of the children, possibly have listened to such noble words? On a magazine assignment a few years later, I came to Birmingham to interview Claude Wesley, father of Cynthia. Mr. Wesley was a principal in the Birmingham schools, a thin and wispy, gray-haired man who wanted his students to understand black history, the taproots of freedom going back a hundred years. We took our seats in his living room, and he explained that he saw the bombing that way, as a terrible, heartbreaking, personal loss that was nevertheless part of a much bigger story. As he talked, he glanced at a portrait on the wall, a radiant smile on the round, pretty face.

  “Such a beautiful girl,” I said.

  “Yes,” he replied, “she was a very happy child. She always liked to be in the forefront. Her teachers used to say if they could get Cynthia on their side, they could get the whole class.”

  We talked for a while about the Birmingham movement and the changes he had seen in the city. “Birmingham is now a good town,” he said. “It wanted to be a good town then, but there were some forces standing in the way.”

  Finally, I came to the question I had driven all the way to Birmingham to ask. What about the eulogy? How did it feel to be called to forgiveness when bitterness and rage were the natural inclinations?

  Wesley’s answer was quick and emphatic. “We never felt bitter,” he said. “That would not have been fair to Cynthia. We try to deal with her memory the same way we dealt with her presence, and bitterness had no place in that. And there was something else we never did. We never said, ‘Why us?’ because that would be the same thing as asking, ‘Why not somebody else?’”

  When I heard Claude Wesley speak those words I thought I had never encountered a faith so profound, a Christian understanding that ran any deeper, and it offered such a startling contrast to the hideous act that put it to the test. The bomb that exploded in 1963 may have blown the face of Jesus from the stained-glass window on the side of the church. But the hearts of the faithful had survived the wound, and in their survival had offered a redemption such as our country had rarely ever seen. So, at least, it seemed to me and how could a novelist improve on that?

  The answer, of course, was much simpler than the question. Sena Naslund came at the movement indirectly. In her novel, Four Spirits, she wrote with the fundamental understanding that even as history was being made—and of course everybody knew that it was—the
people of Birmingham, particularly the white people, continued to pursue their daily lives, mundane in the shadow of the civil rights story. Among her many other advantages, a novelist can grasp the irony of that fact far better than a journalist or a historian, without losing touch with the larger truth.

  I thought Naslund succeeded superbly, and after I finished reading Four Spirits I moved on to her other books. One was Abundance, a novel about Marie Antoinette, the frequently vilified Queen of France whom many remember for saying, “Let them eat cake.” Naslund rediscovered that story on a trip to Georgia. She found a book in the bed-and-breakfast lobby, a biography of Marie published in 1932 by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Naslund was offended by the book.

  “The Zweig biography suggested that Marie Antoinette led a compelling and exciting life,” she recalled, “but I felt he treated her in an unfair and condescending manner. The subtitle of the biography was The Portrait of an Average Woman, and it was clear that Zweig considered the average woman to be none too bright, selfish and egotistical, materialistic and extravagant.”

  With her feminist juices stirred, as well as her sense of elemental fairness, Naslund began to study the contemporary scholarship on Marie. Already, she was fascinated by the history—the violent days of the French Revolution when the notion of democracy ran amok and ultimately led, among other things, to the beheading of both the King and the Queen. On multiple occasions, Sena had read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, such a vivid evocation of the times, and as she learned more and more about Marie she decided to write her story as a novel.

  Naslund discovered in the course of her research that Marie had never said, “Let them eat cake.” On the contrary, this woman who became a queen as a girl—the daughter of royalty born to that realm—felt a sense of compassion for the poor, as did her husband, King Louis XVI. But as the French Revolution spun out of control, the King and the Queen became the scapegoats of a national desperation, giving their story, as Naslund understood it, the elements of a Shakespearean tragedy. She structured her novel in precisely that way—five acts leading to a deadly conclusion, but with a touch of redemption at the end. Even the most critical biographers agree that Marie Antoinette faced death on the newly invented guillotine with extraordinary courage. Thus, Naslund ended her story this way:

  All my body feels full of air. I seem to weigh nothing, and I move with great ease, almost as though I were dancing. I step down the little stair placed at the end of the cart. My balance is sure, and I forget that my hands are bound. I do not need them. Weightless, I mount the scaffold stairs. But on the platform, I tread upon a fleshy lump. I have stepped on the toe of Sanson, the executioner. Quickly, I beg pardon.

  “I did not do it on purpose,” I say with simple sincerity.

  As I savored the grace of this extraordinary novel, only one other writer came to mind—only one author in the twenty-first century who aims as high or finds her stories in a similar way. Like Sena Naslund, Geraldine Brooks has plumbed the depths of classic literature and history to find a meaning for our time. In 2005 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, March, in which she developed the character of “Mr. March,” the absent father in Little Women.

  My favorite among Brooks’s novels is Year of Wonders, a remarkable story set in 1666. The heart of it is literally true. In that year, the bubonic plague descended on the English village of Eyam, where the residents made a remarkable choice. They decided not to flee the disease, but to quarantine themselves, thus preventing a spread to other towns. They were guided in that extraordinary act by a young and charismatic minister named William Montpesson, who lost his own wife to the ravage of the plague.

  All of this was a matter of history—a story that Geraldine Brooks discovered while she was living in London, covering the world’s trouble spots for the Wall Street Journal. Interspersed among her trips to Gaza, Somalia, Bosnia, or Baghdad, she often made jaunts to the English countryside, seeking rest and renewal in those rugged mountains. In the summer of 1990, on a recreational visit to Derbyshire, she came upon a roadside sign pointing the way to the plague village. Transfixed by the history, she vowed to write about it some day, choosing as a form the historical novel.

  Her narrator is a woman she calls Anna Frith, a maid to the village minister and his family. Anna is a young and attractive widow, a mother of two, in this Puritanical lead-mining town. In the spring that follows her husband’s death she takes in a boarder, George Viccars, a journeyman tailor, who slowly but surely becomes her suitor. I thought God had sent him. Later, there were those who would say it had been the devil. Before their love can be consummated, Viccars is stricken by the bubonic plague, having been the one to introduce it to the village. In a matter of hours, his fever surges and his body is covered with boils and sores—those horrible symptoms that, in later centuries, physicians would discover are necrotic lymph nodes.

  As Viccars dies and the epidemic spreads, the village minister preaches to the people. (The author has called him Michael Montpellion, a name that connotes his similarity to William Montpesson, the actual figure in history, but leaves maneuvering room for fiction.) As Brooks understands him, the minister is idealistic and strong, a man of courage and a man of faith as he looks from the pulpit of his church and declares:

  Beloved, I hear you in your hearts, saying that we already fear. We fear this disease and the death it brings. But you will not leave this fear behind you. It will travel with you wheresoever you fly. And on your way, it will gather to itself a host of greater fears. For if you sicken in a stranger’s house, they may turn you out, they may abandon you, they may lock you up to die in dreadful solitude. You will thirst, and none shall quench you. You will cry out, and your cries will fade into empty air. For in that stranger’s house, all you will receive is blame. For surely they will blame you, for bringing this thing to them. And they will blame you justly! And they will heap their hatred upon you, in the hour when your greatest need is love.

  In the village of Eyam, the people are deeply moved by the words, but in the end the suffering is simply too much. More than two-thirds of the villagers die, and among the survivors the terror mutates from a fear of sickness to a fear of each other. Even the young minister, before it is through, is dragged from his faith to the depths of despair. Only Anna is left unshattered, able to cling, if not to her faith then at least to her hope.

  In fashioning such a strong central character, Brooks draws on some of her work as a journalist, remembering the women she has met in other places:

  Anna’s character and the changes it undergoes were suggested to me by the lives of women I had met during my years as a reporter in the Middle East and Africa—women who had lived lives that were highly circumscribed and restricted, until thrown into sudden turmoil by a crisis such as war or famine . . . I saw women who had traveled enormous personal distances—traditional village women in Eritrea who became platoon leaders in the country’s independence war; Kurdish women who led their families to safety over mined mountain passes after the failure of their uprising against Saddam Hussein. If those women could change and grow so remarkably, I reasoned that Anna could, too.

  But there was another, more disturbing similarity between the time Brooks was writing about in her novel and the time she has written about as a journalist. Year of Wonders appeared in 2001, the year of the 9-11 attacks, and she was struck by the initial acts of heroism—the firefighters rushing up the steps of the towers, the passengers on United Flight 93—and how all of that, as well as our national sense of unity, slowly, inexorably gave way to our fear.

  One thing I believe completely is that the human heart remains the human heart, no matter how our material circumstances change as we move together through time.

  III

  As I finished reading Year of Wonders it occurred to me that it may well be—perhaps along with Ahab’s Wife—one of the first classics of the twenty-first century. Certainly, the artistry a
nd ambition are there, for these two novelists, it seems to me, are aiming as high and reaching as deep as any I’ve read. Nor are they finished. In Sena Naslund’s most recent novel, Adam & Eve, published in 2010, she lifts her gaze from the human heart to the immensity of creation itself. She always loved The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy’s novel that opened with a scene on the British heath. The people are lighting bonfires in the night—“little lights answering the lights in the vastness,” as Naslund put it. It made her think of a contemporary poem, one she used as an epigraph for Ahab’s Wife.

  One must take off her fear like clothing;

  One must travel at night;

  This is the seeking after God.

  Those words written by Maureen Morehead are, in a sense, the philosophical framework for Adam & Eve, a book that begins where Ahab ended—not in the literal sense of the story, but in terms of its larger theme and contemplations. Naslund believes, and so do I (our friendship started with these fascinations), that we are living in a revolutionary time, akin almost to the day when Copernicus proposed the notion that Earth circles the sun, and not the other way around.

  Today, we’re trying to comprehend the images from the Hubble telescope, overwhelming us since the early 1990s with photographs of faraway galaxies, and stars being born, and a comet colliding with the planet Jupiter. At first, we took it as a dazzling slide show, a kind of beauty we could not have imagined. Soon, however, another idea began to dawn, and as it slowly took an unwanted shape, we could feel a tearing at the edges of our minds. Hubble gave a face to the glory of the heavens, gave us a kaleidoscope of images suggesting what we had secretly feared, that we are, in fact, a flyspeck in the vastness. For suddenly we were seeing back into time, seeing galaxies a billion light-years away, which meant that the images themselves were a billion years old. And then the numbers began to seem real—real and impossible all at once, for in our galaxy the Sun is one of a hundred billion stars, and our Milky Way is a single galaxy among untold billions.