Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  Summer opera in Rome is held under the skies in the gigantic ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. Acoustics are terrible, the singers shriek to carry their top notes outward to the stars, the mosquitoes bite, but the thrill of the scene, the dramatic lighting, the mass of the crowd, all carry enchantment. That night the production was Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust. How impressive was the solemnity of the final scene, torchlit, with gravely mounting staircases and choral effects of great majesty.

  The applause faded. The crowd separated, scattered, murmuring, voices spreading out far among the towering ruins. We decided to walk home. The way was the Via Appia, and it was certainly long and lingering. Like so much else, it lingers yet.

  Time to go? Oh, NO!!!

  Back I went to Paris, where the former bases were waiting to be touched. Adventures to tell, friends from Le Vis-cō-sī appearing, evenings at the Deux Magots. On one such night with the Bellows, an American girl they all knew, who worked in Paris, came by. Everyone called to her and when she turned Saul leaped to his feet and ran toward her. It was impetuous, a momentary impulse, but I was caught by the out-going, on-going look of the way he did it, not so much toward that girl herself, but a look of moving on, on … so eagerly, so charmingly, so dashingly … on.

  Germany was almost forgotten except for the countryside, fairylike, with some shadowy magic about it that seemed not to have heard of the war. Italy was not forgotten, nor would be.

  My Mississippi travel agent had booked my return on the Îie de France. The marchesa and her son were also returning to the United States on that passage, and so were the Nashville woman, Mrs. Nixon, and her boys. We reached Cherbourg by boat train, and had to face the stunning sight of that giant liner, arcing up lofty above us at dock, dwarfing all memory of Le Vis-cō-sī, waiting to draw the whole summer into its wake.

  The song of the year—and everyone who visited Europe that summer will remember it—was “La Vie en Rose.” Edith Piaf’s throaty voice blared from the loudspeakers. We stood at the railings and listened, thinking our private thoughts, and saw the land receding, slipping from our grasp. Everybody had fallen in love. Everybody was leaving a time, along with whoever or whatever had caused it to happen. I thought of France and Italy and felt that I had fallen in love with the whole of it—every person, every thing.

  22

  THE GULF COAST

  IF I could have one part of the world back the way it used to be, I would not choose Dresden before the firebombing, Rome before Nero, or London before the Blitz. I would not resurrect Babylon, Carthage, or San Francisco. Let the Leaning Tower lean and the Hanging Gardens hang. I want the Mississippi Gulf Coast back as it was before Hurricane Camille, that wicked killer which struck in August 1969.

  All through my childhood and youth, north of Jackson, up in the hills, one happy phrase comes down intact: “the coast.” They’ve just been to the coast… They’re going to the coast next week … They’re fishing at the coast… They own a house at the coast… Let’s go to the coast… When? For spring holidays? Next week? … Now!

  What was magical about it? In the days I speak of, it did not have a decent beach. Strictly speaking, it was not even a sea-coast. The islands that stood out in the Gulf of Mexico—Horn Island, Ship Island, Cat Island, and the rest—took the Gulf surf on their sandy shores; what we called the coast was left with a tide you could measure in inches, and a gradual silted, sloping sea bottom, shallow enough to wade out in for half a mile without getting wet above the waist. A concrete seawall extended for miles along the beach drive, shielding the road and houses and towns it ran past from high water that storms might bring, also keeping the shoreline regular.

  Compared with the real beaches of Southern California or Florida or the Caribbean islands, all this might seem not much to brag about: what was there beside the seawall, the drive along it, the palms and old lighthouses, the spacious mansions looking out on the water, with their deep porches and outdoor stairways, their green latticework, their moss-hung oaks and sheltered gardens, the crunch of oyster shells graveling side roads and parking lots … why was this so grand?

  Well, it wasn’t “grand,” let that be admitted. Natchez was grand. New Orleans had its seductive charms securely placed in a rich Creole history. Still, nothing gave Mississippians quite the same feeling as our own Gulf Coast.

  We would come down to it driving through plain little towns, some pretty, some not, south of Jackson through Hattiesburg. The names come back: Mendenhall, Magee, Mount Olive, Collins, Wiggins, Perkinston. Somewhere along the way was D’Lo, curiously pronounced Dee-Lo. In all of these, people of an Anglo-Saxon sameness in admirable (and not so admirable) qualities were pursuing life patterns thought out so long ago they could never be questioned. A day or two to piece the relationships together, learn a few names of Scottish or English origin, discover a cousin or two, and anyone from Carrollton or Winona or Pickens or Vaiden could pick up the same routine of life there as in the ancestral home.

  But soon the thrilling smell of salt was on the breeze, increasing until suddenly we were in Gulfport and straight ahead lay the harbor with its big ships at rest, and to either side the long arms of the beach drive stretching east to Biloxi, west to Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis. Here were people with names foreign to our ears; and the mystery of these almost foreign places, easy in their openness, leaning toward the flat blue water, seemed serene beneath the huge floating clouds. That first thin breath of sea air had spread to a whole atmosphere.

  What to do in a car crowded with friends on holiday from school but drive straight to the water’s edge and sit breathless, not knowing which way to go first, but ready to discover.

  I must have come first with girls from around home, or friends from college in Jackson. Someone would have borrowed the family car. Occasions blur into one long sighing memory of live oaks green the year round, and the pillared white houses the trees sheltered, set along the sweep of beach drive, boxes of saltwater taffy to chew on, and little screened restaurants advertising SHRIMP! ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR $1. Gumbo, too, “made fresh every day.” Jax beer.

  Prohibition lingered for a long time inland, but the coast never paid it much attention. Names alone would tell you they wouldn’t. French and Spanish were here from the first, but Poles and Yugoslavs and Czechs had come long ago to work in the fishing industries, while the French traded and the Spanish built ships. But we wouldn’t have thought of looking up their history. It was the feeling those names breathed that stirred us: Ladnier, Saucier, Legendre, Christovich, Benachi, Lameuse, Lopez, Toledano.

  Religion here was foreign to us too: churches like Our Lady of the Gulf stood proclaiming it, with a statue of the Virgin in the wide paved entrance court, and a bare but graceful facade, facing boldly out to sea. Those who ran the restaurants, and went out in the shrimp boats, worshiped here, as did no doubt the men who waded the shallow water at night with flambeaux blazing, spears ready for flounder, and the women, too, who sat talking through the long afternoons on latticed porches.

  We learned that annually at Biloxi, before the shrimp boats go out to their deep-sea fishing grounds, an outdoor mass is held to bless the fleet. It is a fine occasion and one of general rejoicing. These were ancient ways. Above, the white clouds mounted high, the gulls on broad white wings soared and tacked, tilting into the wind. The pelicans stroked toward land in flawless formation. Midafternoon in spring. Intense heat had not yet taken over, but a stillness came on, a sense of absolute suspension. The camellias were long finished, the azaleas, lingering, but past their height. Magnolia blooms starred green branches. Jasmine breathed in the back gardens. The moss hung breezeless. Time stood still.

  We were used to staying at the Edgewater Gulf, a wonderful hotel between Gulfport and Biloxi. Its grounds were ample. I remember a cool lobby of gently turning ceiling fans, plants in white recesses, and rooms designed each facing on the sea but with a long entrance passage to draw a constant breeze through latticed doors.

  P
arting admonitions—“Don’t talk to strangers,” “Be careful where you swim,” “Be sure to call Sally the minute you get there”—may have sounded in our girlish ears for a while on the way down, but vanished after Gulfport. Yet I cannot recall any serious mischief we ever got ourselves into.

  Grown beyond all that and long out of school I was to return to the coast many times over. A nagging sense began to persist that the coast was withholding something; I’d something yet to solve. Then I took the boat one summer and went out to Ship Island.

  Ship Island is the largest and best known of the coastal islands, and the only one that excursion boats go out to. It takes these little tourist ferries well over an hour to make the twelve miles or so to the island. But who is in a hurry? Someone in the pilothouse will be playing a harmonica. Cold drinks and snacks are sold in the galley. The island is low and white, like a sandbar with dunes. Once we are ashore, the dunes seem higher: they mount up before the visitor, low hills fringed with sea oats, which blow in the steady breeze. Wooden walkways climb among them. There are signs to an old fort to the west, dating from Civil War days. History will be related on the dutiful markers. An old weathered lighthouse, wooden, four-sided, gray, stands guard.

  The first visit I made to this spot was during the summer of 1951. Already it seemed part of my own personal geography. Everyone had been to Ship Island. Picnics were talked of, summer days recalled.

  On that first time for me, I walked ahead of friends (a man I went with, two friends of his) straight south, taking the walk through the dunes. Then, cresting, I saw before me what I’d come for without knowing it: the true Gulf, no horizon to curb its expanse, spread out infinite and free, restless with tossing whitecaps, rushing in to foam up the beach, retreating, returning, roaring. Out there, I thought, astonished, is Mexico, the Caribbean, South America. We are leaning outward to them. Everybody back on land, all along the coast, feels this presence, whether they consciously know it or not. What was it but distance, the leaning outward, the opening toward far-off, unlikely worlds? The beyond.

  Here at the Mississippian’s southernmost point of native soil, one had to recall what inland Mississippi was like, how people in its small towns (or even in larger towns like Meridian and Jackson and Columbus) related inward, to family life, kinfolks, old friendships and hatreds. How hospitably newcomers were welcomed, but how slowly accepted. Once I heard this remark: “The H—s haven’t lived here but thirty years, but look how everybody likes them!” In talk of the outside world, not much was to be accepted, nothing could be trusted to be “like us.” There were Yankees “up there,” we said to ourselves, looking north; the other Southern states, like neighboring counties, offered names that could be traced in and out among one’s connection and might prove acceptable.

  In such towns people lived on stories of one another’s sayings and doings, repeating and checking for the facts, speculating and measuring and fitting together the present to the past, the known to the suspected, weaving numberless patterns. It was a complex and at times beautiful society; much fine literature has been created to do it justice; but the smell of salt air did not reach it, and none can deny that it was confined and confining.

  So one from those places comes to stand, in memory fixed forever like a monument or a snapshot, on a Ship Island dune staring out to sea.

  I wrote a story named for the island. In it a young girl comes to it with her summer lover, and in the sight and feel of the sea discovers her own true nature—good or bad, she finds it there, like a wonderful shell dug out of the sand. In Walker Percy’s book The Moviegoer, we read: “You come over the hillock and your heart lifts up; your old sad music comes into the major.” That’s another way of saying it. But it may be that the only way of knowing it is to go there.

  The year that I speak of now was 1951-52. I had taken a break from teaching in order to write, and had chosen to live in an old town named Pass Christian. It was during that year that the long affair that started in Nashville reached a point of no return.

  How do they come about, these primal feelings of love and future promise? Everybody has different story. Call him what you will—Bob or Will or Ted. There is no use now in disinterring either the feelings or the man. When we first met it was in a postwar glow of every sort of possibility. He was back from the war, having made a good enough record, and was resuming study for a doctorate in Vanderbilt. In prewar days he had studied at LSU with the distinguished faculty there, Warren, Brooks, and others. We were first drawn into talking about them as they seemed to him, and to comparing notes on Vanderbilt; soon we began to discuss my own hopes for finishing a novel. He said at first he thought I was too young to consider writing a novel, but when I ventured to show him samples, he had a change of heart. Meetings grew more frequent and attraction grew stronger. Before long we were being thought of as a couple. Beyond the radiance of falling in love, I sensed, in knowing him, a continuance I had always looked for—continuing in Southern terms all that I had experienced of literature and life so far.

  But a strange sort of emotional distance began to make mysterious breaks in our fine good times. How to explain this? Sudden alienations, a complete change of mood, followed by heavy drinking, absence, self-reproach. Then, like the sun after a rainy day, he would return, all lively fun and good times again, as though nothing had happened.

  But the breaks had grown longer and more severe, and at times irrational. When I finished my novel and returned home to Carrollton, contract in hand, and some hopes at least fulfillable, I came to the tearful but necessary decision to let go.

  If I had a daughter, I would certainly tell her this: Once a love relationship has slipped and slid, gone wrong, never try to mend it. Don’t look back, don’t go back. I doubt if she would pay any attention, but this is what I would say.

  Through the years that followed, he kept returning. Only let me make a fine healthy start with someone new, and here he would appear, bringing his wit, his fine intelligence, his undoubted intellectual scope, his good times. Where had I ever found better?

  The time I had set for working at the coast, there he was, teaching at a college not far away, showing up every weekend. Once again, I was beguiled and heartened. But the shadow was waiting, and throughout that year it was to grow, disappearing only to get stronger. By the time I learned that the name of the shadow was schizophrenia—rather like learning about the “massacre” in Carrollton—I had firsthand experience of it, and had lived through all its opening stages. I must say for him that he did not learn the name of it either until it had gathered such speed and power that no amount of loving response or good hopes or goodwill could do more than distract it for a short while.

  One last good time had passed, and I was in Carrollton for a visit, when the letter came that finished everything. It was full of blackness and gloom, a diatribe of despair. Friends of both of us told me that this too would pass, as other moods had done, but I sensed this time that the trend was not reversible, and I knew I would never try again.

  I went back to clear up my possessions in Pass Christian. I remember burning love letters in the back yard of the house where I lived. I put the stack in a wire frame that the landlady used for burning her own trash, and set them afire, remarking to myself, with the sort of bitter irony the writer of them was especially good at, that the smoke was at least good for keeping the mosquitoes off.

  What to do now? I resolved to preserve carefully my memories of “the coast.” What it meant to all of us in general, to me particularly, was an opening to the sea, and so it stays with me long after the emotional upheaval of a broken relationship has burned itself out.

  Concurrently with all the above, life was proceeding on another level.

  In fact, the summer of 1951 had started well enough. I had come to make a new start in writing, but how I wrote anything I don’t really understand, for it was a time of many visits.

  Not the least were two blessed descents of Eudora Welty from Jackson, bringing with
her each time a friend she wanted me to meet. The first was Katherine Anne Porter, who had given a lecture in Jackson as part of a series featuring Southern writers. (I had myself been asked to participate, but was unbearably shy on a platform in those days and had declined.) Miss Porter was, as so often described, beautiful, with snow-white hair. Her small figure seemed delicate without being fragile. Her features were remarkable for showing no trace of slack skin; I was reminded of the trim, spare, expressive faces that Florentine sculptors knew so well how to mold.

  I had the two of them over to my little apartment one evening. We sat and sipped drinks and talked. I will always be glad that Katherine Anne (as she insisted I call her) talked so much about herself. She felt like doing this, and she did it. Where else could I have heard her precise but soft voice say, “I would have been able to do much more, except for the many interruptions—by that I mean the time I’ve given to men.” I think this is reasonably exact. It was honest and certainly not coy; she was anything but that. Another observation I recall: “I don’t understand people who complain about art for art’s sake. If we don’t love her for her own sake, why else do we love her?”

  She and Eudora were staying at the Miramar Hotel, just west of Pass Christian. It was a comfortably rundown old place; I used a made-up version of it in my novel The Salt Line. My feeling was that people who had made a habit of coming to the coast through the years had grown used to staying there and nowhere else. I remember sitting on the floor of a large room Katherine Anne had—I think she was propped up on pillows and trying to nurse away a cold or headache—and listening to her and Eudora talk.

  A short time after this the novelist Elizabeth Bowen also visited Eudora. The two of them came by to see me before proceeding to New Orleans, where Miss Bowen was to lecture. We planned to meet for lunch at Friendship House, an attractive sprawled-out restaurant on the beach drive between Gulfport and Biloxi. The day was mild and the broad windows looked out on the sound and on the beach drive lined with oaks. The water lay placid and blue beyond.