Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  Frost looked exactly like his pictures; his white hair and attentive regard made him seem benevolent. (Stories went the rounds that he was anything but.) He seemed to sense that I was shy of conversing with him, but asked me some respectful questions about novel writing. He said that he would never know how to go about writing a novel but thought once, when he saw an old house being torn down, the rooms that had once been private exposed to view, that this might make a good subject: who had spent time in those rooms, what had happened there, what had happened to them.

  That was the time of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the infamous McCarthy investigations were making scare waves everywhere. Anyone who once as a young person had attended a meeting of a Communist-front organization, or knew someone who had attended such a meeting, had reason to quake in his shoes. People were indignant and jittery. Reputations and jobs were at stake, and many had friends who had suffered.

  Davidson was more than half inclined to approve of McCarthy. He said that evening, “If you read the Congressional Record, you will see what he’s really saying. The newspapers make something else out of it.”

  “But he’s somewhat extreme, don’t you think?” Frost remonstrated.

  The very evening Davidson had invited me to the dinner with Frost, a controversial figure named Owen Lattimore was to speak at Bread Loaf. He had written a book praising the Chinese revolution as a peasant uprising, not a Communist movement. I truly believe Davidson did not wish me to attend that lecture. He, of course, stayed away himself. He questioned Frost about Lattimore. Frost seemed to think Lattimore an “innocent idealist,” someone easily deceived.

  Davidson believed that a rather mild-mannered, talkative gentleman who hung around the dining room before meals was actually a government spy, commissioned to keep watch on a possibly subversive bunch. I never knew if there was any truth in this.

  Each year for the conference, Frost was called forth to give a reading. His rendering of his own poems is still a vivid memory. He told something he remembered from meeting William Butler Yeats. He had asked Yeats how long it had taken to write “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” Yeats had replied, “Seven hours of biting a pencil and sweating blood.” Again he remarked, I think before reading “Stopping by Woods,” that he wished his voice could do justice to a poem, but knew it could not. He paused and added, “But, oh, the voice that I hear in my head!”

  The Korean War was on that year. A good number of my letters in recent months to Hunter Kimball, a young man who was then in the conflict, having been called there unexpectedly from Army duty in Japan, were returned, and forwarded to me at Bread Loaf. I had reason to be anxious, for we had gone out together frequently, but reassured myself that better news would come. It never did. He was an early MIA and no search for him was ever rewarded. He simply vanished without a trace.

  Bread Loaf, more than it liked to admit, was really an extension of New York. The editors and agents who came there to teach budding writers were actually on the lookout for talent. Applicants submitted their manuscripts and, if accepted as participants, paid for their own travel and stay. An editor or agent got to look at their work. Caroline Ivey had come on such an acceptance, but had had the honor of being taken up and actually published, as few who came ever were, or such was my impression. Her book, The Family, remains in print as a strong picture of Alabama life.

  New York was in the offing, and I decided to stop a few days there. Ed Dodd at Dodd, Mead was eager to hear of progress on my second book, and David Clay was in touch. Robert Penn Warren was staying that summer with friends at Westport. Through David he sent an invitation for me to come to lunch.

  Robert Penn Warren wanted to meet me! I was breathlessly happy to be noticed in this way.

  After a restless night of anticipation, I went to Grand Central Station and asked for a ticket to Westport. I found the price extremely high and ventured to ask how far it was, how long it took. How could I possibly get there in thirty-five minutes? I had been given a ticket to Westport, New York, up near the Canadian border and nowhere near Westport, Connecticut. Well, no one had said Connecticut. One was supposed to know.

  I sometimes still have the desperate fantasy that I am on that train. The time for being met anywhere is passing, passing, past. What can I do? No one meets me in Westport… it is growing dark … I have to telephone New York. Where did I go wrong? What can I do?

  Straightened out by an unusually patient ticket agent, I did get the right ticket and the train to Westport, Connecticut.

  Warren himself was waiting at the station. He came toward me at once, and what struck me was his drive, his clearheaded forward pace, direct and charged.

  He was of medium height, and his red hair was mussed and coppery in the sun. One eye, I had been told, had been put out in a boyhood accident, but the one left was so strong an observer, I wonder if anyone could have supported two. He gave the effect of seeing simply everything. I thought of the opening description of Conrad’s Lord Jim: “He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you. …” Not that the details apply so much, but the vivid, light-footed advance of Red Warren ought to have been described by Conrad.

  I remembered John Crowe Ransom, who had been present at the memorable literary meeting in Oxford. Brushed and quiet, gray-suited, with tie and socks and all else so decently in place, he seemed the opposite type from Warren. I couldn’t imagine him in Red’s clothes—the sneakers and slacks and T-shirt only barely clean and certainly unpressed. Each suited his own choice.

  I spent an interesting day. Warren’s friend and editor Albert Erskine and Albert’s wife, Peggy, were there, and we shared an outdoor lunch. Warren was given to telling anecdotes in a rough, hasty voice, not at all unattractive, but sometimes hard to follow. It seemed his mind went faster than his speech.

  He was flattering toward Mississippi writing in general and asked how I would explain the quantity and excellence of our output. I said I thought maybe it was because we were always being “picked on”—singled out for criticism was what I meant, as he understood.

  “That doesn’t make literature,” he said.

  I replied that it might make you articulate.

  He laughed about people who would disparage regional writing. “Madame Bovary” he said. “Pretty good for a local novel. Small-town France in the nineteenth century. Should have left all that and come to Paris.” We enjoyed this sort of banter. He was good at it.

  He knew that I had seen Davidson at Bread Loaf. I reported that Davidson was very much concerned about Communist infiltration into this country’s inner workings. “I worry about them over there,” Red said. “I think we can look after the ones over here.”

  Red was staying with friends at that time, being, as I learned later, in process of separating from his first wife and not yet married to his second, the extraordinary Eleanor Clark.

  At a certain moment, as though by clockwork, everybody got up to go swimming. I hadn’t thought to bring a bathing suit, but Peggy lent me one, and we drove to the beach. Mainly we lay on the sand in the sun and exchanged random remarks at intervals.

  Red’s interest followed me through the years. I felt his to be a complex nature, whose apparently friendly, straightforward, humourous, no-nonsense approach to life, to each encounter, made him seem truly involved with anyone of interest to him in a one-to-one manner. But while not a mask, and certainly not insincere, his manner of the moment could not be entirely trusted.

  This impression carries no criticism. He meant what he seemed to mean, but hundreds of demands on his time were always coming, and everyone’s time is limited. There is also the fact that the full range of his mind and heart could no more come out at any one instant or to any one person than a lion can be a house pet.

  One can describe a gifted person as a genius much too easily. Red, I believe, was the real thing. His mind worked too fast, encompassed too much, and it was hard for him to speak it out plainly
. This complexity often hampers the flow of his novels. One always must except All the King’s Men, where for once he found a subject equal to his scope. But in his poetry and criticism he is always on track, and often superb.

  His work seems underrated now, and perhaps is not as widely read as before, but ask any of us who followed him through the years what we could have done without him. To me he was a guidepost for the gropings of mind and heart. I think that without him we all would have got lost a lot more often.

  How many of us rated his interest and attention! Welty, Porter, Bellow, Ellison. Friendships also with Peter Taylor, John Cheever, William Styron, and many others. His long connection to Yale and marriage to a New Englander led him to settle permanently in Connecticut, but so far as I can see, he never lost or scanted his Southern ties.

  He said somewhere that he could not write fiction that was not based in the South. He had tried to write about New England, which he genuinely loved. But the “aura” was lacking, was how he put it.

  So that was 1950—another brief visit to New York, which, like the two previous ones—no more than glimpses, all three—left me wanting to know more.

  My next chance at that world came in 1952. It was at the close of the Gulf Coast year, when I was tidying up mind, spirit, and possessions as well as could be expected at the end of the affair, that I received word of an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters “in recognition of the two novels” I had by then published.

  New York again! And right at the time I needed it most. Coming back from the Gulf Coast, my car stuffed with the pileup of a year, I stopped in Jackson on my way back to Carrollton. Eudora Welty welcomed me with the news that she too would be going to New York, the Academy having just elected her to membership. We could certainly meet, have lunch and dinner, go to shows, enjoy a good time.

  Eudora recommended that I stay at a hotel she favored, the Bristol, long since torn down. Its main attraction was that it was cheap. Neither of us could afford lavish living. It had a nice bar, and we used to telephone each other from floor to floor, arranging to meet for a drink before dinner.

  Once the well-known novelist and short-story writer Jean Stafford dropped by. Intense, attractive, with a wistful face, saddened by heaven knew what, she seemed conversant with all the Vanderbilt group, and others I had heard about through them. She invited us both out to Long Island, an invitation I could not accept for some reason.

  I remember Jean speaking with admiration of a new writer she admired—J. D. Salinger, who at that time was still living around New York, and was apparently accessible. She said he rode around in a beat-up convertible with an enormous dog for company.

  Eudora had a lifelong friend in New York, Rosa Wells, one of the Jackson Wellses, best known as Dolly. She worked for John Fischer, an editor at Harper’s publishing house, and knew all the Mississippi crowd who came through the city. Her apartment was on Twelfth Street, and we were often invited there for drinks first, then went out to dinner in the Village at Rocco’s or the Grand Ticino.

  I was at the time a client of Eudora’s agent and dear friend Diar-muid Russell. He had seen my second novel, This Crooked Way, well launched and had found an English publisher for it also. He stayed in touch with me throughout the summer. He invited us both for a Sunday at his house in Katonah, up the Hudson. We went by train and spent a charming day with him and his wife, Rose. The hours passed quickly, sunlit and radiant with good talk.

  Eudora was obviously Diarmuid’s pride and joy, both as client and friend. He had seen her early work into publications that would scarcely pay a week’s grocery bill, and now that recognition was increasing by leaps and bounds, it was certain to rejoice him.

  Diarmuid was a commanding sort of person, imposing to look at, his accent distinctly not of this country, more crisply English, one would say, though there was a hint of Irish in it too. I was obviously young and new to the New York scene, but he didn’t seem to mind that, and said things that fit with my thinking. He noted that it didn’t matter how long it took to write a book, advising me not to feel threatened by time and deadlines, or to seek for a change in publishers because I knew some editor who wanted me on his “list.”

  The sort of talk that went on between new writers and those who sought them, while exciting to me, was old hat to him. What he favored in a writer was the steady course, attention to work in hand, a clearheaded judgment about what really mattered. His good relationships with English publishers was a great help to Eudora especially, and to some extent to me. She had won the attention of E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, and others, however, simply by the originality and worth of her writing.

  Eudora left for home, but I stayed happily on.

  The summer was a great one. I discovered Allen Tate had been on the committee that chose me for the award. He had written, in fact, some time previously to ask if I could accept appointment for the Prix de Rome, which would have meant a year’s residence at the American Academy there. The Rome prize went instead to William Styron. My own award was a thousand dollars, and there at the Academy awards ceremonies was Saul Bellow, who had been given the same recognition as I. He and Anita invited me out, but another engagement prevented my joining them.

  One thousand dollars is no grand sum these days, but I saw myself as expert in stretching money and decided to stay on in New York until I had spent it all.

  It lasted all summer. I chanced to meet one or two young men with Southern connections who were starting careers in the big city. We made good company for one another, and I frequently got my dinners paid for. I found a room in a large apartment on Ninth Street. It was owned by a friendly widow, a Jewish lady, who wanted somebody “nice” she could leave in charge while she was on vacation. I thus had the whole airy place to myself, lots to read, a ringing telephone, and a small amount of cash, dwindling slowly.

  Allen Tate called to invite me to lunch and then on another day to dinner. He took me after dinner to call on Philip Rahv and his wife, Natalie. Rahv was then editor of Partisan Review, and a powerful intellectual presence on the New York scene. We sat and sipped whiskey and I listened while they spoke of many literary personalities and did a run-through of the latest gossip.

  I felt more than a bit out of place among these people. Though they were courteous, I felt I had entered the meeting of a highly special club, which I really had no wish to join. I found out again about myself what I had felt at Vanderbilt, that though knowing writers individually might be wonderful, literary groups were not for me. The “in” talk about poets’ and writers’ personal lives, sexual affairs, nervous breakdowns, drinking, ventures abroad, attempts at suicide or bigamy or Communism, was interesting, but I felt it was a bit like another Carrollton. I could go to North Carrollton and happily play in the band, but Carrollton had too often turned into a nest of vipers. I perceived the “literary life” as a little like that, a flowerbed where no one paid much attention to the bloom, but a swarm of other sorts of activity went on around the stems and roots beneath. (In these reflections I continued to make Eudora and Warren the exceptions, and so to this day—no vipers, they—they remain.)

  Browsing in bookshops, I discovered Wallace Stevens’s poetry; I still have the copy of Harmonium I bought that summer. I read Isherwood, whose Goodbye to Berlin was making a stir. Every other day I would come home with another treasure. Still on my shelves, these books speak to me of a glowing summer.

  I saw a considerable amount of David Clay and his wife, Justine (“Dusty”). David was in a period between jobs, having left the company that had brought out my two books. It was my first acquaintance with the many mysteries of his career. I was grateful for his help as an editor and was not inclined to judge him. His close friendship with Red, dating from their student days at Vanderbilt, was of course a valued point of reference.

  I helped him write some television scripts he was trying to sell as a series. We once sat up all night typing them in his apartment to meet a deadline. I assumed he knew
he could make the sale— television was in an infant stage in the early fifties. He had a real interest in its possibilities. However, the series was rejected, and so far as I know, nothing came of it.

  Such a story with David Clay became all too frequent through the years, but his confidence was such that no one listening to his way of speaking about some project could possibly doubt that it would materialize. Or so, to my trusting ears, it did seem. Whatever the problems, I keep a lifelong glow from that sojourn and for the Clays, as I knew them then, and for New York, as I knew it then.

  At intervals, we often dined together with a friend from Memphis, who was starting out in newspaper work in New York. He had the unlikely name of Vartanig Garabed Vartan, or “Tonny,” as we called him. He later became a leading financial reporter for The New York Times. His father was a well-known seller of Oriental carpets, who had a business in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. Mr. Vartan was known throughout the Delta as the best rug importer in the South. Tonny was a Yale graduate but had started work on a paper in McComb, Mississippi. He had been hired away from that small paper to work at the New York Herald Tribune. We had found ourselves to be neighbors on West Ninth Street, and we used to swap Mississippi anecdotes while sitting on the front doorsteps at twilight, or sometimes on a bench in Washington Square.

  Like me, he was enduring the breakup of a love gone wrong; mine had come from Vicksburg, his from Memphis. There’s nothing like bruised feelings to create new sympathies.

  There was never the need to assign a special role in my life to Tonny Vartan, but I did often think that in him I had found a brother. Except for treasured intervals, I never succeeded in making any relationship with my own brother, who remained, except for those, one of the strangest people I have ever known anywhere. A sister, a brother, a father … one continuing part of my life has been a search for all three, a search many times rewarded, sometimes ending badly. Tonny was a fine reward.