Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  Miss Annie taught us Virgil. She was mightily displeased with Deedoe’s behavior with Eye-neas, though she did say right out what went on in that cave, as some couldn’t make out the text and were puzzled. We all thought Miss Annie looked like Juno.

  Our “sophomore lit,” a traditional survey course in English literature, began with Beowulf and ended with Thomas Hardy. Newer writers were suspect and were hardly mentioned, much less taught. A certain suspicion crept rather darkly around the edges of literary study, namely, that real writing had ended with Robert Browning at the latest. Free verse was frowned on. The head of the department was an opinionated old lady with snow-white hair. She was much revered, and wrote poetry herself.

  Miss Alice Wells, who taught us the survey course, however, was young, a fine, spirited enthusiast of good things. She made us memorize! Long, difficult passages had to be written out word for word, line by line. “Whanne that Aprille with his shoures sote …” “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day …” “Of man’s first disobedience …” “Hearing often-times the still sad music of humanity …” I hated doing it, as anyone would, but loved having done it. For just as in the early days I lay awake, telling over the myths and stories my mother had read me, inventing others as I wished, so now I could find Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Keats and Spenser treading through my mind in sleepy rhythms.

  Alice Wells came from a distinguished Jackson family. She was a redhead like her father, Major Wells, who was president of the Belhaven board of trustees and would come out once a year and make a speech to us, always terminating with the same advice, “Don’t study too hard!” The Wells mansion on North State Street was a grand brick structure; a hitching post stood before it for many years—the statue of a small black boy holding out an arm for the bridle. “Old-fashioned Jackson” was what it said to all who passed.

  Jackson had been burned by the Yankees during the Civil War. General Sherman had requisitioned the governor’s mansion on Capital Street. The story went that the Yankees had stabled their horses there. It was one of the few surviving residences, as Sherman had reduced Jackson by fire until it was called Chimneyville. Jackson in my time at Belhaven had a population of only about sixty thousand. We always said that Mississippi had no cities at all, and referred to Memphis and New Orleans as the “real” cities of our state.

  For teaching our classes, Alice Wells drove into the campus from town. She came from an outside world, and I welcomed the feeling this fact gave me. Belhaven had no walls in the literal sense; anybody could walk right off the campus and be on a town street. In the daytime this was permissable, though a book was kept in the main office for signing out. At night, departures were forbidden, but rules were made to be broken, and those who dared to slip out were probably more numerous than anyone knew.

  There are walls of every kind, but the worst are the walls of the mind. The problem is, well-meaning people put them up without knowing what they are doing. Brick at a time, they wall you in. They think it is “all for the best.”

  A short time before I entered Belhaven a literary meeting for college students throughout the Southwest had been inaugurated. Member institutions were to rotate as hosts. Robert Penn Warren, the famed novelist, poet, and critic, then teaching at Southwestern in Memphis, spoke at the first meeting. Called the Southern Literary Festival, it was the first of many such gatherings. Nowadays they have broken out everywhere; since the South has discovered that living writers are of some importance, there is a regular epidemic. But then the meeting was the only one of its kind that I can recall.

  When I was a freshman, Belhaven’s turn came round. Writers, critics, and students from all the various member colleges and universities were to be upon us, along with any of the public who wished to attend.

  It was then discovered that here in 1939 the Belhaven library held not a single book by Mississippi’s best-known writer. No, there was no entry whatsoever for William Faulkner in the card catalogue. Yet an exhibit of Southern—especially Mississippi— writing was obligatory. What to do?

  Now, it is true that Dr. Gillespie had his problems with literature in general. He was heard to speculate that Shakespeare probably should not be taught to “his girls,” because he personally couldn’t tell what Shakespeare’s theology was. Milton was all right, but he had trouble with Miss Wells’s adored romantic poets. Wordsworth appeared to be a pantheist, Coleridge undoubtedly took drugs, Byron was a libertine, Shelley a declared atheist, and Keats an unabashed pagan.

  Throughout Mississippi the name of William Faulkner was well known. By the genteel readership, he was thought to be “not on the right track,” mainly, I think, because they knew little as yet about modern writing. He was also known for having written all that awful stuff about sex in Sanctuary. It was talked about in whispers, and I could never overhear exactly what had gone on. Yet word of his importance was getting through chinks in the wall. What was Belhaven to do?

  Fortunately, Faulkner himself had innocently furnished Dr. Gillespie with a solution, as some up-to-date person on our committee must have realized. He had recently published The Unvanquished, his most gentle and loving book, relating the trials of the Sartoris family during the Civil War and Reconstruction. I remember seeing this book on the display table in the library and thinking vaguely that I must someday read something by the author.

  The following year this festival was held at Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi at Oxford). I had submitted a story and so was allowed to go there. One of the speakers had an odd name: Cleanth Brooks. I was not to learn for a while yet that here stood one of the mightiest voices in the so-called New Criticism. I observed a dark-haired, small, sturdy man, who spoke in a quiet, clear way on a sonnet of Wordworth’s, “Upon Westminster Bridge.” He said that most people thought the work was “simple” or “charmingly simple.” He then proceeded to show, line by line, even word by word, that it was nothing of the kind, but was rich in philosophic meaning. It took a solid absorbing hour for all the lines in that short poem to be skillfully, patiently, turned inside out. This mild-mannered gentleman was full of hidden fire. I was hearing the New Criticism for the first time.

  Also at that meeting I heard Faulkner praised and appraised; the early perceptions of his scope and purpose were beginning to come in. Faulkner himself actually lived in Oxford, but had refused to show up. “Not my cup of tea,” he was said to have responded. I don’t think he ever came to anything of this kind. But I went back to school with a prize for my story, and my head buzzing with all I had heard, all I had before me to learn about.

  During my last two years at Belhaven two events of great significance for me occurred. One was the coming of Joseph Moody McDill as head of the English department. Dr. McDill’s credentials included his having been trained for the Presbyterian ministry before he changed course and took a doctorate in literature at Vanderbilt University.

  I remember the first time we met. He was talking to our dean, Miss Purnell Wilson, in her office, and she called me in from the hall outside to meet him. He must have been still in his thirties then, a stocky, intense man, with thinning reddish hair and blue eyes. His brow was broad and there was obviously a lot behind it. His voice was resonant. I liked him at once.

  Of course, we got along well, developed an “in step” relationship in class, in thinking, in meetings of our student writing group, which he sponsored, in talks of every sort outside class. He was eager to encourage creative students; he was excited to find some of those among us. I soon took him things I had written. He had the good sense to tell me I was mostly on the wrong track. But some of it he liked. Instead of praise, I had to get used to the word “promising.”

  Behind Dr. McDill stood the authority of Vanderbilt University, where my admired high school teacher Virginia Peacock had studied with Walter Clyde Curry. Dr. McDill was wonderful at teaching Shakespeare. He knew dramatic technique and could read lines from Hamlet, Othello, and the rest to bring out the emotion, the ring of the langua
ge, the tensions of conflict and passion. We had some exciting class sessions, over, it would seem, before they had time to begin.

  But the major thrill he brought us was one day when he came to another teacher’s class in modern poetry to introduce us to the work of T. S. Eliot. I had heard the name but inquiries had produced little enlightenment. We had been studying Vachel Lindsay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Sara Teasdale. It must have been Dr. McDill’s enthusiasm for Eliot in some social conversation that led to his being invited to old Miss Newman’s class, she with her reverence for Edgar Allan Poe (she was from Virginia and thought that Poe was too) and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

  After speaking for a time on Eliot’s life, his thinking, beliefs, and career up to the present, Dr. McDill began to read The Waste Land. It sounded like the words of a divinity speaking in an unknown tongue. Yet it was powerful; we knew that. It seemed to steamroll right over us. Finishing, he then began to talk of the poem, to go back over the lines and show us the fluidity of the technique, the syncopation of the rhythms, the wide range of allusions and shifting frames of reference. He remarked on each of the various sections, then proposed ways of seeing the whole as one poem. We had no copies of the text as yet. I made sure to go and find one. I felt I had turned a corner and found the modern era. I had been living in it all the time, but no one had told me so.

  By the time I had become a senior, Dr. McDill was talking seriously to me about where to apply for graduate study. He thought that I should go further, and he was eager to recommend me wherever I wished to go, but he strongly favored Vanderbilt. Most graduate departments in universities were not so good for a creative person, he thought; in fact, they might be deadly, burying creativity in laborious research projects. Vanderbilt still retained the creative glow from such spirits as Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, and others who had flourished there. He loved speaking of them all, describing them to me in advance. One could tell that being there had been a high point in his life and that of his wife, Margaret. She also spoke happily of their time there.

  The other significant Belhaven event was the chance to meet Eudora Welty. Her first book, A Curtain of Green, had come out in 1941. We saw it noted in reviews. Well, she had been there all the time, born in Jackson; her father had been president of a well-known insurance company. She was, in fact, living right across the street!

  Our little writing group began to squirm. The local lady poets who would come read their work to us had been generously sampled, but here was something else again, a young writer whose work was being nationally recognized. Yet we were unusually nervous about approaching her.

  I wonder now why we were so apprehensive. I think it was William Faulkner’s eccentric ways that gave us pause. Maybe all writers were like that, hostile to invitations, cold toward admirers. Often, if the tales had any truth to them, insulting.

  Yet we were going to ask her, come what may, and somehow it fell to my lot to ring her up. I remember shaking in the dormitory phone booth. I had seen her, after all, from time to time— once in her front yard in a pair of slacks, pushing a wheelbarrow full of leaves, gardening, and again, riding the same bus as we rode to town, wearing an exotic suit of pale green suede. Still, to her I would be nothing but a frail little schoolgirl voice.

  It was a very soft voice that answered my ring—her own. Somehow I got my message out. Would she come and talk to us? Well, no, she didn’t make speeches. (My heart sank.) But… could she come simply as our guest? (Gleeful response: “Oh, yes!”) The way she had put it, it seemed I was the one to grant the favor.

  She appeared for us by walking across the street on a lovely spring day. Everything was blooming, and everybody had a glow from simply seeing her appear. We brought her to the McDill apartment, where we usually met. We read some things we had written and she listened with care. It seemed an enchanted afternoon.

  Later, we walked with her across the campus toward Pinehurst Street. She seemed to have taken an interest in me from the story I had read, and we talked in an informal way about writers she had known—Katherine Anne Porter, I remember, among them—and what plans I had. I mentioned hoping to go to Van-derbilt. She told me of some friends I should meet.

  Eudora herself has written of this occasion and the afternoon she spent with us. For me it was the beginning of a long friendship, which continues to this day. A young first-book writer then, she is now in her mid-eighties, celebrated everywhere for her achievements; a Jackson library is named for her, and an impressive collection of her “papers” is the stellar attraction of the Mississippi archives. Innumerable honorary degrees and awards and unending tributes have poured down on her.

  One of the last times I was in Jackson I took a cab out to Pinehurst Street to see her. The cabdriver said, “Lady, unless you got some reason to go there, you ain’t got a prayer to get in.” To get him in motion at all, I had to tell him I was expected.

  An amazing aspect of Eudora’s life is how personal, despite her fame, she is able to keep all her relationships. It never seems to enter her mind to be anything but her own Jackson, Mississippi, self. This intimate quality enters into her writing and gives it much of its appeal; when we compare it with the work of others of considerable note, it seems all the more singular, a gift.

  The bad thing about being at Belhaven, for me, was the absence of social life. The things I had been told by then about “boys” and how to attract them, how to please them, how to hold on to them, were so many and various that to believe any of them served one purpose only: to make for silly ideas about what they were like, as though the male of the species inhabited another planet. I listened to such talk but none of it was suited to me, and growing up, as a result, began to seem a never-ending pain, not eased at all by seeing other students whose room buzzers constantly summoned them to dates and phone calls.

  I felt that where boys were concerned I must be the plainest and dullest of girls. I didn’t see then that any kind of supervision made my spirits fade away. Permission for dates, restrictions about leaving the campus, monitors who went about checking to see that everybody stayed out of the dark—who could feel that life was tracking along in a natural way?

  Following advice (so liberally dished out by my mother, my aunts, my cousins, and my ever-flirting friends), trying to be “like everybody else,” resembled trying to waltz while tap-dancing. Trip-ups and spills were right ahead every time. Did I really care to be Miss Pickle Queen of Wiggins, Mississippi? Miss Watermelon Festival of Crystal Springs? Of course not. The ways of “cute girls” and “Southern belles” were a blind alley for me. But what else did any girl in that place and time have to wish for?

  I became terribly shy. I could remind myself that in summers, in Charleston, S.C., where my brother was an intern in Roper Hospital, or off visiting friends, I had times of real blossoming. I met “cute boys,” or better still “interesting guys,” and got my share of calls and gifts and dates, like anyone else. But in school I felt hopelessly isolated from all this.

  How to explain it? To myself I became at times an intriguing mystery, but mostly I was someone I had rather not think about.

  I had to learn that becoming a self for better or worse is the only way, but sometimes yet I feel the shy streak creeping in, and wonder how anyone could possibly accept me as I am.

  Then the years had passed and I was packing for another reason: graduate school. With Dr. McDill to recommend me in glowing terms, I had gotten a scholarship, and would be coming to Vanderbilt as a favored student.

  PART THREE

  Widening

  Orbits

  19

  VANDERBILT DAYS

  IT was 1942, during World War II, an odd time to be getting a master’s degree in literature.

  Vanderbilt University, where I had been granted a scholarship, is in Nashville, Tennessee, a city in a valley surrounded by the low Cumberland Mountains. During the winter, coal smoke could not escape and made a smog so thick it was possible to see only a few feet ahead. It
soiled white blouses and shirts, and medical students reported cadavers in the labs with lungs stained black as tar. Nevertheless, the university rose proudly on what was then the city’s southern reach, and a few blocks away, Centennial Park, with its replica of the Parthenon, confirmed that here indeed was the “Athens of the South.”

  What I had come for was something less visible but in literary circles more famed. The Vanderbilt Fugitives, later known as the Agrarians, had had their beginnings here, and their word seemed nothing less than the Word. Spreading outward, it had become law in the world of modern letters. The great names— John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson—cast a shadow that had nothing in common with coal smoke. Here one entered an ambience rather like that of a sacred grove.

  It is hard to imagine now, when all sorts of literary voices are shouting together, none phenomenally heard above the rest, what centrality of judgment this group commanded. When one looks back into recent critical history, it is interesting to recall that a remark from T. S. Eliot kept a whole generation of eager young students from reading Milton. Word went out far and wide when Eliot declared that it was all right to read Kipling! The Vanderbilt group, in touch with British and French literary figures principally through Allen Tate, were accorded that same awed regard everywhere. What did they praise? One must hurry to have it in hand. What did they condemn? Admitting an admiration for Somerset Maugham, to give one instance, was a bid for scorn and censure. Just as The Waste Land was endlessly unraveled as to nuance, source, and meaning in hundreds of student papers, so the latest poem of Warren or Ransom was to be pondered and dissected, the latest critical article passed around.