Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  I got some hard knocks, but on the whole the experience was a good one. For one thing, newspaper writing gets right to the point, with no frills, no browsing about for descriptive glimpses or eloquent meditation. We reporters who worked in the city room had as boss a growling city editor who seemed right out of plays or movies about a city room with a growling city editor. Maybe he had seen some. He was said to sometimes have fist-fights out on the pavement with rebellious reporters. He volubly resented having so many women around; he lived for the day when the “real” reporters would come home.

  It was while I was at work in the city room one day that news came through of Germany’s surrender. It seemed we had lived so long with war—war feared, war coming, war not coming, war come anyway, piles of censored mail, news of killing and dying, soldiers everywhere, headlines and radio announcements, speeches and disasters, more speeches and tides turning—that war was part of the air we breathed, that life without it would not even be life. The European theater was to be silenced. But the war with Japan went fiercely on. My uncle Sidney, now Admiral McCain, was in the thick of it, commanding an aircraft carrier in a group under Admiral Halsey. I followed the intense action in the Pacific.

  I was again in the city room, checking rewrites, when the news about Hiroshima broke. The European war’s ending had been breathtaking—dizziness, wonder, and general rejoicing were part of everybody’s shared feelings. But this was different. We looked at the great black headlines pouring from the Teletype machines, heard their relentless clashing from the Associated Press rooms, read news so shocking the print, which kept pouring out a flood of detail, seemed to rise up off the page.

  A strange thing occurred. Two of the young women who worked as reporters—especially well-dressed, chic, and knowledgeable types—became charged-up, elated, voluble. You would have thought some bacchanal was in progress, mounting to heights of sexual excitement. They thought it was wonderful, that nothing so marvelous had ever occurred, it was the world’s greatest event! One might say, of course, that they rejoiced at the war’s ending, soon to follow. But, no, that was not what it meant. It meant something else: the consummation of power.

  This little scene being near, before my eyes, continuing through the stunned feelings of the afternoon, frightened me almost as much as the news of the bomb. You needed no imagination to see them as mad revelers, dancing around a blood-drenched god of war.

  Come home from work to my rooming house, I found Melba Sherman, a Vanderbilt graduate student from Mississippi, who had a room down the hall from me. She was in a state like mine, benumbed with awe, and we sat down together with the Bible and read chapter after chapter from Revelation. Were “vials of wrath” being poured out upon the earth? We agreed that the world would be different now, and that a frightening era had dawned. Having been brought up in religion-centered homes, we both had fearful thoughts. The Second Coming might really be at hand.

  In those days my lodgings were in a widow’s house near Vanderbilt, owned by Mrs. Susan Souby, who taught at Ward-Belmont. It was on Dixie Place, a street long since swallowed up by the massive extensions of Vanderbilt Hospital. The long bus ride from the newspaper office home was trying, as I had to work until midnight. But two days off a week left me time to write. I was writing more and more. Stories I could finally begin to believe in had begun to form around characters much like those I had grown up with in the small towns of Mississippi. The distance from Tennessee to Mississippi helped me frame scenes I had lived among, to make whatever was extraneous drop away and leave important outlines clear to view and thus able to be described.

  I kept up acquaintance by one means or another with students at Vanderbilt. I went in to see Donald Davidson and others there from time to time. The important threads in life are the major veins in experience, and must have the bloodstream flowing through them to be kept active and alive. Losing contact is like losing life. I felt Vanderbilt as a source for me and I did what I could to maintain its power. My stories, which went out to magazines such as Accent, Story, Kenyon Review, and others, did not place but often stirred editors to return them with personal notes. I began to find a recurrent phrase in these notes. It said, “Have you ever tried a novel?” “Why not try a novel?” “You should try a novel.” Finally I thought, Well, why not?

  Specific encouragement to break loose from jobs entirely and concentrate solely on writing came from a young Alabama man, just back from the war. This was Edward McGehee (pronounced McGhee). He was aiming for a writing future himself, having done a good many poems in the modern complex manner, and was now deep into a novel. He had been given the Vanderbilt writing fellowship under Donald Davidson’s supervision.

  This coveted residency paid only five hundred dollars a year, and it is amazing to note that at that long-ago time a single person could live a year on such a meager sum. You could not, of course, own and run a car, take taxis, afford the best seats at the theater, have your own bathroom and telephone, or eat many good dinners at downtown restaurants. But you could go drink beer at Butch Petrone’s, or walk with your date over to Al’s Tavern out near Centennial Park. You could go to the picture show. I reflected that I had, because of a tightfisted Scottish streak, or perhaps because of being brought up during the Depression, saved up a bank account of about five hundred dollars. It wasn’t much, I had to measure and weigh, but I decided to risk it.

  My father objected strenuously to my decision. His view was that I had held three good jobs and given them up one after another, that the road ahead for writing was too chancy and difficult, that I would have immense trouble getting anyone to hire me should I fail. I couldn’t think like that. I knew he had wanted me to accept the first marriage proposal that had come my way, at age seventeen or thereabouts. I thought for a long time that he was considering my happiness when he favored the match, though both Mimi and I told him I was not in love with that eager young man. “What does he want to do?” Dad demanded. “He wants to write,” I said. “That boy’s got too much sense to write.” Dad’s judgments were always ready.

  I was still at Mrs. Souby’s when he telephoned one evening. The denunciation was long and severe. Melba Sherman overheard some of this dialogue. Confidences we had shared let her guess what had transpired. She heard me crying. Melba searched out a passage in Julius Caesar and came in to read it to me. “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune …” She said she believed I had come to that point. I always thanked her for that encouragement—two Mississippi girls, clinging at crucial moments to the King James Bible and William Shakespeare.

  I moved from Mrs. Souby’s to an apartment in a shabby rundown rooming house on neighboring Highland Avenue. Someone I knew had lived in this family home and recommended me as a lodger. The apartment consisted of a large bedroom with one window and no view at all. There was a bed, a dresser, and a wardrobe for hanging up clothes. Part of the plastered ceiling was dislodged and hung dangerously over the bed. The bath was shared by three other apartments. A rickety outside stairway led up from the back yard into a small back porch, private for myself, where I had an old-fashioned wooden icebox. Twice a week the iceman came and left a large cube of ice fitted into its zinc-lined top compartment. I kept a small trunk out there, and what with chairs from the kitchen, where I worked each day at a table, I could seat whoever came by to call.

  I had some considerable acquaintance by now among the students at Vanderbilt. There was not only Edward, who since I had met him had been cheering me on, but others, who were finishing up degrees and were in touch with the events and characters in and around the department.

  I found now more than ever the real joy of a writing life.

  The formula is simple: Get up. Eat breakfast. Sit down to write. Spend a long morning writing. Feel the stops and starts, the flow, which often will be meager and hesitant but on some magical days will run freely, never wanting to stop. Pause and look up to realize the clock says three o’clock and you are
hungry. But now you are something else: You are happy.

  I also had guys calling up for dates. Mostly the interest was friendly, not intense, though one was special enough to feel strongly about for many years. Except for the first few wonderful months, it was an unfortunate relationship with a man doomed by recurrent neurosis and other unhappy symptoms I was ill equipped to judge. What with meetings and partings, it came and went through the years, as we each strove to recapture something of that first marvelous time.

  But nothing could really cancel or weaken the delight I found when writing is emptying itself out, onto the waiting page. This is the way to live, I thought, glad to be aware of it.

  So I continued through the summer of 1946. One day I got a call from Donald Davidson.

  He knew of my decision to write. Previously, before I left the paper, I had come over to his office to speak to him about it. He was like a second father, one I feared but also by now felt I could talk to, as I could never talk with my own. He knew that through the years of my studies and my return to Nashville, I had kept on trying to write fiction. But other than a draft of an early novel I had started at Belhaven and then abandoned, I had not showed him my efforts. When I confided my plans, he thought things over in his own way. “You would do better to get married,” he said sternly. But then he smiled. “I’m glad you’re taking the plunge.” It was enough of a blessing, and what I had come for.

  The morning he telephoned and said someone was in his office he wanted me to meet, I dropped everything without question and hastened there. The man in Davidson’s office, waiting to meet me, was David Clay.

  David Clay was exceptionally handsome, a brown-haired, solidly built, youthful-looking man. He was exceedingly polite, wonderfully attentive to every chance remark. He had studied at Vanderbilt and was now an editor at Dodd, Mead, a New York publishing house. After introducing us, Davidson picked up some books and left for class.

  “Don says you are working on a novel,” Clay said. “May I see it?” I said I hadn’t brought it with me, and anyway it wasn’t finished. He persisted, so we walked together back to Highland Avenue and I handed over to him about two hundred typed pages. I felt nervous about doing this. I had planned the novel carefully, and thought I had foreseen everything that was going to go into it, but as the characters had taken hold, unplanned events had occurred, while others might as well have fallen in the creek. At that point I had only the sketchiest idea about how the book would end. Suppose I couldn’t bring it off at all? Still, a New York editor was waiting down in Miss Gerring’s shabby parlor, so after taking a long breath at the head of the stairs, I descended with my typescript and gave it to him.

  Then he was gone, brown envelope tucked beneath his arm. It seemed he was walking away, an all but total stranger, with a good part of my life. I am now astonished to remember that it was my only copy! I disliked using carbon paper, and worked from drafts, each typed out with revisions to make it better than the previous one. I did have the version just preceding the one I gave up, but photocopying in those days was not easy, and would have caused delay. Something told me the moment was now, and I gave him the copy.

  Before a month was out, I had good news. Dodd, Mead would offer a contract. I was invited to New York, to talk over the manuscript and discuss the closing chapters.

  NEW YORK??!!

  I telephoned home. The news did not excite them. They had thought I might be engaged.

  In those days travel by Pullman was the way to go, and friends came down to put me on the train. We were a seedy bunch, having sat up till late hours on my tiny back porch, drinking beer and celebrating, but I had got myself a new dress and suit, and hoped to revive on the train. Raymond Goldman had reserved a room for me at a hotel he knew. An appointment at the publisher’s offices had been set up. Good wishes were flying over me like flags.

  I reached old Pennsylvania Station, and immediately one thing I had never thought about occurred: Nobody in New York could understand a word I said. I think that now, in the media age, television has ironed many oddments out of Deep South accents. But in those days, mine was so thick I couldn’t even make the hotel clerk understand that I was reserved there. Sometimes I had to write down what I was saying. Some made a joke of it; others, brusque and hurried, were merely annoyed. “What kinda lankidge is that!” Strangers teased: “Don’t tell me where you came from!”

  At the publishing offices on what was then Fourth Avenue I was presented to the head of the firm, a pleasant man named Edward Dodd, and a few of his assistants. It seemed they liked the book and thought that I could finish it ably. David Clay was to be my helpful editor. I little foresaw that I was beginning a relationship that would take primal importance in my life.

  David was from Athens, Alabama, a town I have never seen, but that he spoke of as being much like my hometown; and actually towns in the Deep South are remarkably similar, especially in architecture, in attitudes toward family and relatives, and in the predominantly Anglo-Saxon origin of the white population. He had moved to New York some years before, and I often thought that I was calling back to his memory how life was in the place he had left. He was, of course, for that reason an excellent sounding board for my own characters and impressions as they surfaced in my writing. What might have been mysterious or wildly eccentric to a Yankee editor was clear as day to him.

  David’s important relationship at that time, and throughout his life, was with Robert Penn Warren. They had become friends as students at Vanderbilt, and since Warren now lived out of the South and was frequently in New York, their friendship continued. They were part of an inner circle, mainly Southern, who were fully conscious of the great effect of Vanderbilt on American writing, and who were involved in writing and publishing.

  David had worked with Warren on his most successful novel, All the King’s Men. This triumphant book, always to be regarded as a classic of our literature, had come blazing out a year or so earlier, just as I had begun to write my own novel. Everyone talked of it; everyone bought it and read it. Warren’s name was golden everywhere. Blessed were they who could talk about “Red.”

  The novel had been dedicated to David and his wife, Justine. He had had an important part in its editing.

  Though David looked the part of the sophisticated New York editor, his character was so excessively upright he seemed an anomaly. Even back then I found him puzzling. Many of his remarks struck me as deriving from ideas that seemed far afield from anything familiar. I had to learn later that he and his wife and mother-in-law were devout Christian Scientists, the mother-in-law being a practitioner in that faith.

  However, at the time I didn’t know this. New York in itself was exciting, new, untried. It filled me with eagerness to know more about it. If David was trying to change many of my attitudes, I judged he was only giving helpful hints to someone who must obviously seem like a country girl, awkward and unsure of what was right to do and say. The novel was the main thing for me anyway, and he gave me to understand this was true of him as well.

  I returned to Nashville and finished the manuscript without too much difficulty, meeting my contract deadline and taking my modest five-hundred-dollar advance with pride. There was a publication date ahead, there was the check in hand (the kind of proof my father would recognize), and there was beautiful old Carrollton, always the same, waiting. I returned home with the sense of a job done, and thought of myself as having worked hard and now wanting a much needed break.

  Little did I dream what I would encounter.

  I had always been able to discuss favored books or movies with my mother, at least, and so without much trepidation I showed her my manuscript. It was not to my total surprise, but certainly I was disappointed when both my parents became terribly upset. Before I knew it I was the center of a major family crisis.

  The book was called Fire in the Morning. The title now seems to me a very youthful choice, overblown and poetic, but back then I thought it was fine. It dealt with a conflict between t
wo families in a small Southern town. Who would think, I argued, that anyone we knew was actually in it? But, they asked, didn’t everyone in it resemble somebody we knew? Who in Carrollton, I inquired, would even bother to read it? Well, of course, they said, everyone would.

  Furthermore, how did a well-brought-up girl from a strict Presbyterian household get to know words like “damn” and “hell,” and others even less proper, including dreadful phrases like “God damn” and “Go to hell”? And how did this same proper girl learn anything at all about sex? To my parents my small triumph was ashes of shame poured on their heads. Years later, my cousin Jamie said that my father stayed at home from work for weeks, ashamed to show his face in public. (Jamie exaggerates.)

  My brother and his wife were supportive, and my uncle Joe did his usual work for tolerance and open-mindedness, admirably mixed in with understanding of different attitudes and affection for all concerned. Still, I believe the book made a rift in my parents’ thinking about me that was never entirely mended, though what with the encouraging talk of those close enough to her to speak about it, my mother gradually got her equilibrium back; and that was about all, I saw, that I could hope for.

  My parents’ reaction showed me for the first time in what ideal terms they had viewed me. It was true that teachers and friends had spoken well of me, perhaps with an aim of pleasing them; that I did go to church; that I had made a good record at Belhaven and had done fairly well at Vanderbilt. But I had never seemed to myself such a marvel. Shouldn’t parents’ view of their children be based on what the children are actually like?