Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  Tonny was Armenian by descent, and his family story would make an encouraging American legend, the kind we all like to think possible. During the Turkish massacre of Armenians, his father was protected by a friendly Turk, who concealed him (according to Tonny, who loved good stories) in quarters reserved to the Turk’s harem. He later was given passage to the United States. Helped by still others, he found his way into the Oriental carpet business. His clients were well-to-do people in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. Most houses of any repute seemed to have at least one of Mr. Vartan’s beautiful rugs. His only son, bright as a new coin, had a lifelong taste for good living that compared with the father’s taste for rugs.

  Tonny had a middle-European face that at first seemed blank, but was simply a good poker face, that of the listening first-rate reporter, inscrutable behind his familar Lucite-rimmed glasses. His beautifully rounded, totally bare head (I think he shaved it) held a scrolled-up wealth of everything he’d ever encountered, all processed and ready to hand. He could be sharply dismissive of whatever he judged not worth his time. He could be hilariously funny.

  During that summer he was going to parties in the Village at Joan Williams’s, she being at that time a special interest of William Faulkner’s, and Faulkner himself was often there, though Tonny never mentioned this until many years later.

  All of us were novelists, come to think of it. Joan Williams was writing her own, and Tonny lived to write two novels, SO Wall Street and The Dinosaur Fund, which clarify that opaque aspect of American life more than anything else I’ve read.

  I think back to Tonny and myself now and see two young people sitting at twilight on a friendly, uncrowded New York street—there were such things back then. How tiny, how speck-of-dust-size we are in that huge all-accepting, all-engulfing pile of steel and cement, tunneled perpetually by anonymous crowds! Yet it scarcely worried us. Life was before us, and we did not question what good things it could bring. We were often laughing.

  One phone call away was Allen Tate’s invitation to come for a weekend at Princeton with his daughter Nancy and her husband. I thus took part in one of the long-running, heavy-drinking parties the Tates were famous for giving. A guest would start out in the house, an old residence on a Princeton street, hearing talk of how Princeton was the “Harvard of the South,” how those wonderful black waiters who turned up at the inn were descendants of the faithful body servants young Southern students would bring with them from home.

  All this was lore and gave one a lovely glow of feeling to be on the right side of everything, among those who understood a Southern heritage and “how it all was.”

  Then as more liquor was consumed and food partaken, the party would drift out on the lawn. Consciousness began to come in luminous segments. Conversing in the hammock with Nancy’s husband, Percy. Dancing to records in the living room. Reminiscing over one’s Southern childhood with Allen on the sofa in the library. Inspired by some thought we had exchanged, he suddenly sprang toward the bookshelves, seized a copy of his novel The Fathers, and impulsively autographed it to me. I have it still and find the inscription: “To Elizabeth Spencer on the occasion of her 1st visit to P’ton, where Tenn-Miss prevails … with great admiration of her and her 2 books Allen Tate August 1, 1952.”

  My feeling toward Tate and my final rejection of his friendship, which was no doubt meant sincerely, is something of a mystery to me to this date. For one thing, I did not find him an attractive man. He obviously wished women to find him so. There is nothing wrong with that wish, and by all accounts many women did. He could be genuinely charming and quietly considerate in conversation. His major appeal to me was that he sought out and supported talent. He had no regard at all for “success.” In fact, to him a popular success was suspect. His critical judgment both in his writing and his talk still seems awe-inspiring. He could pierce at once to the very heart of any matter.

  The thing, I believe, that put me off most about him was his tendency to gossip. He started out with genuine interest, but as details about a person amassed, he would suddenly turn destructive and derisive, even about his friends. Later, he might counter a harsh observation with something redeeming, but the damage had been done. One had to be careful of a chance remark that might be quoted. It was not comfortable to be around him.

  The extraordinary influence that Tate had on the entire American literary world seemed to come as much from his wide acquaintance as from his brilliance as a critic. I was never swept away by his poetry, though I suspect the best of it rises very high on the scale, but to read his criticism is to be in the real presence of his mind—and what a presence that is! One could read through a whole library of comment on Dante, for instance, and never find anything so penetrating as what Allen Tate was able to say in a few pages.

  Tate’s wide connections were not exclusive to the South, or even to the United States. He was in friendly correspondence with Eliot, could quote remarks dropped by Hemingway in Paris, had almost come to blows with Scott Fitzgerald, had known leading figures on the French scene, and could find points of welcome anywhere in the world he chose to be. The poet Karl Shapiro once remarked to me, “When people ask about your standing as a poet, it’s enough to say you know Allen Tate.”

  I returned to teaching at Ole Miss in the fall of 1952. Following that memorable summer in New York, I seemed to myself to be set for better days ahead. I had projected a new novel, the one that finally became The Voice at the Back Door. I had submitted the project in my application for a Guggenheim Fellowship. I had never stopped longing to return to Italy, and with sponsors like Red Warren, Stark Young, and Hodding Carter, the well-known editor of the Delta Democrat Times at Greenville, I felt I might even succeed in getting the grant and striking off on my own.

  In the spring of 1953, however, a massive misfortune overtook the whole family. My uncle Joe, he who through the years had been surrogate father, trusted confidant, charming lover of tolerant living and fine good times, died suddenly in a gun accident.

  The fact that no one knew if the death was accidental gave an unbearable twist to this tragic event. His first wife, Aunt Esther, had died slowly and painfully of cancer—a home death, grievous to contemplate. He himself had been tormented by an illness to which this dread diagnosis had not been given, so far as we ever knew. But we knew he was depressed and unwell, having expressed a degree of blank despair in living, or so I was told later, that hardly seemed to be possible for him, of all people, to feel.

  However, the accident may certainly have been just that—a nervous state, a lack of caution, a fall with a loaded gun.

  All of us were struck numb. How much we had all depended on his wit, his caring, his good faith! And not only the family itself, but a wide circuit of friends everywhere. I attended the home funeral at Teoc, and saw the faces crowding the yard beneath the great live oaks, a mass of black ones among them, many streaked with tears.

  I returned to teach, but found that one wound tears open another, and life was becoming a source of despair for me as well. I had gone suddenly from light to darkness. I experienced a daily blank feeling I had never known before.

  My decision was to work, and work I did, harder, harder and harder, but nothing seemed to go well, and for some reason related to my despair, I stopped eating. If able to force a few bites down for each meal, I felt I had enough. Colors and sounds grew vague and hard to separate. I seemed to expend an enormous amount of energy simply meeting a one-hour class. When walking, I seemed not to touch ground. I think I was becoming gravely ill without caring to recognize it.

  Something had to give. Shortly after receiving the letter from the Guggenheim Foundation, congratulating me on my appointment as a fellow, I became altogether unable to carry on, and bad times had struck in earnest. I had to delay acceptance of the fellowship until the fall, and go through a long spell in hospital.

  But at last, in October rather than June, with mind and body stuck together once more but feeling they might still come apar
t, reduced to ninety-eight pounds and lacking in daily energy, laden with the multiple anxieties and total disapproval of my parents, I went to New York and boarded an Italian liner to go to Italy. At sea I used to lean on the rail and reflect that if I fell in, I was so frail I might not even sink.

  We landed at Naples.

  I came up to Rome by train and found lodging, quite by chance, at the same hotel—the Inghilterra on Via Bocca di Leone— where I had spent my last night in Italy in the summer of 1949.

  I took the coincidence as a good omen for great days and better health, and hope was floating all around that room on happy little wings as I fell asleep, exhausted.

  24

  RETURN TO ITALY

  KARL Shapiro and his family of that time were in Rome in 1953. I had met Karl at a literary meeting he had come to Mississippi from Chicago to attend. He was at that time editor of Poetry Magazine. I had liked him and liked his lecture, and we had discussed meeting in Rome.

  I made contact with him and his wife, Evalyn, almost at once, and along with the hustle of finding cheap quarters, packing up, and moving in, I was also running out to meet them for lunch and for the evening gatherings they began immediately to have.

  I settled at the Dinesen, a hotel/pensione on Via di Porta Pin-ciana, near the Veneto, well known in those days. It was run by a Danish woman who had come as a beautiful young tourist to Rome well before World War II. She had immediately been scooped up by an Italian, married him, had sons by him, and survived in some way during the Fascist era.

  At the time of my stay she was still beautiful, an old woman wearing plain, flowing gray, who appeared infrequently in the parlors and dining room. Her sons were running the hotel. A good many Scandinavians stayed there for their Roman holidays; also the English and Americans seemed to know of it. It was a former monastery, belonging to an order of Lebanese monks, who took over the dining room once a year to dine together, and who could be heard at times, chanting in booming, bell-like tones in the building next door.

  The food there was extremely good, and before many days had passed the Shapiros had come there to eat with me. Also, by chance, at the foot of an elevator shaft in another building entirely, where I had found a temporary lodging, I had heard a voice rising up that I felt I should know. It was speaking French, but where else could “mah bah-gaage” come from but straight from Mississippi? I was right. The speaker was Frank Lyell, whom I had heard about but never met, though I knew his brother, Louis. He was from Jackson and was a close friend of Eudora Welty’s. He also began eating at the Dinesen.

  Frank lured me into sightseeing with him, during the few days he spent in Rome. He was simply lightning when it came to getting places. Here was the Colosseum, there the Forum, out here the Lateran Palace, and now we could go and lunch in Piazza Navona at the Tre Scalini and watch the Bernini fountains play before the church of Sant’Agnese (facade by Borromini). I felt I had not a chance to remember all that he was telling me. He lectured in literature in Texas and seemed to be infinitely well-informed about everything.

  Many movies were being shot at that period in Rome. It was the era of Gina Lollabrigida (“La Gina”), Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, and numerous other beauties. The Italian craze was on, and many of the movies that Italian directors like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini were making turned out to be enduring classics.

  But Hollywood had caught it, too, and during those days that fall the talk was all of The Barefoot Contessa (La Contessa Scalza). In one day Frank reported sightings of Humphrey Bog-art, Ava Gardner, and Gina Lollabrigida. All these could be easily seen on the Via Veneto, with its fashionable Doney’s and other sidewalk bars. I was getting dizzy with Frank’s whirlwind of discoveries. At the lunch table one day he told me the entire story of Eudora’s novel in progress, The Ponder Heart, later published in The New Yorker.

  Not only the Shapiros, Frank Lyell, and multiple movie names were attracted to Rome, but swarms of cognoscenti were gathering from everywhere. I had no notion that this would be the case. Robert Penn Warren had kindly written letters to Laurance and Isabel Roberts, the gracious couple who ran the American Academy in Rome, out on the Gianicolo.

  Their residence was the beautiful eighteenth-century Villa Aurelia. I almost immediately received an invitation to dinner or lunch, I forget which, as I was so lavishly favored by their hospitality that the occasions run together, like bright, dazzling colors.

  But at the same time, the Shapiros, having settled with three young children in an apartment not far from the Dinesen, were having in their list of guests. It was through them that I once more encountered Peggy Erskine, last seen on the beach at West-port. Her marriage to Albert Erskine was ended, and she was then living in an apartment on the Via Margutta, an address somewhat the equivalent of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.

  Peggy gave a good many parties, beginning before dinner. The guests sat crowded together on sofas in a medium-sized salotto, looking out on rooftops. She frequently passed an iced pitcher of martinis. Everybody drank a lot, and groups were formed, who later trekked off to dinner at some nearby trattoria.

  At the first of these occasions, who should appear but Allen Tate and his wife of that time, Caroline Gordon. They had unerringly been given a fine apartment connected with the American Academy, a terrace overlooking the city from the Gianicolo, and a cook who was a former chef at Ranieri’s, the famous Roman restaurant. Lovers of all social occasions, they often invited me to lunch and to dinner.

  Caroline Gordon, an enthusiastic convert to Roman Catholicism, thought vastly little of anyone who was “outside the Church.” She seemed to me hospitable, as was Allen, but rather more opinionated and quarrelsome than he. She liked contradicting any passing opinion she did not choose to honor. She spoke continually of books and writers one could or could not like. Moby Dick was “not a novel,” Huckleberry Finn was “not a novel.” Graham Greene was nothing but a “gifted amateur.” When young writers like myself, she went on, told her they liked Graham Greene, she despaired of the future of literature. Henry James was a “real novelist.” I mentioned admiring Turgenev; she said I should read Chekhov.

  I used to ask her questions at first out of interest, but later to draw her into what I considered absurd statements. To me it was a form of teasing, as I dislike authority. But I doubt she caught on. I was a Protestant and hardly worth her notice. She’d never read “any of my stuff” but told me at length what I had to value and what rules I must observe.

  Both the Tates grew almost hysterical in their praise of Flannery O’Connor. Caroline told me that Flannery was doing something that had “never been done before.” She was examining the South from a Roman Catholic viewpoint. Since the entire culture of the South is basically Protestant, I wondered then what I wonder still: What right does anyone have to do this? To examine Catholic Ireland from a Protestant viewpoint would seem presumptuous in the extreme. (It may be that O’Connor was not really doing what Caroline Gordon spoke of her as doing. Her stories frequently puzzle me, and solutions as to what they are saying are not easy to find.) At any rate, the Tate gospel, being proclaimed everywhere, was that O’Connor was all that mattered among present-day American writers.

  I learned later that Caroline and Allen were at that time on the verge of a second divorce. They had gone through one, but remarried. However, in those days in the fifties they generously gave halcyon times to all they invited.

  One such guest was the Principessa Caetani, founder and editor of the prestigious magazine Botteghe Oscure. It was hard to believe in appearance-conscious Rome that here was indeed a real princess. To lunch she wore a plain cotton print dress and low-heeled “sensible” summer shoes. Her face was distinguished, intelligent, and self-assured in a pleasant way. One learned without surprise that she was a New England woman who had brought considerable wealth into a noble family. When I was introduced to her, she said vaguely, “Oh, yes, someone has spoken to me about you.” All the chatter of a Tate gatheri
ng swirled about her, and for that matter about me also. Allen complimented her: “Marguerite has one standard of judgment for the manuscripts she wants to publish: ‘I like it.’ “

  Hidden under all the exchanges with which the Tates’ lunches and dinners abounded, there were doubtless reservoirs of genuine worth. I still reproach myself for the adverse state of mind they used to plunge me into.

  Meanwhile back at the Dinesen, things were not bad at all. One evening early in my stay, an American couple walked in for dinner, the husband looking vaguely familiar. The name Mattingly rang a bell. Wasn’t he … ? He was. A book of my aunt’s that I had read with great interest in Carrollton was Garrett Mattingly’s Catherine of Aragon. I was delighted to meet him. There immediately returned to my mind a letter Catherine, exiled and abandoned, had written to Henry VIII. “Above all things mine eyes have most desired to see thy face.” Maybe I was into some schoolgirl crush, but the words had stuck, and gave me an excellent start on conversing with the remarkable pair, “Matt” and “Gert” (Gertrude), who were to become my fast friends.

  We often ate together at the Dinesen, went to parties together, visited sites together. Matt, like me, was on a Guggenheim, engaged in research for his fine book of two years later, The Armada. On the strength of this book and Catherine, I remain convinced he, though an American, is among the most noteworthy European historians.

  There was other company: Charles and Darr Klappert, an antique dealer and his wife from La Jolla, California; and a charming old character named Martha Wright, a widow from Chicago via Texas, recently in Guatemala, whose whiskey-deepened tones could liven any conversation. There also appeared a pair of annual visitors from England, Daniel Cory and his wife, Margot. Daniel had been the philosopher George Santayana’s private secretary for many years before his death, and still spoke affectionately of the old gentleman. He was an engaging man, perpetually smiling, his neat hair white above a youthful face. He was American by birth but had lived abroad so many years he seemed Anglicized, and his voice, with its slight attractive stutter, would keep pleasingly on in one’s head after he departed.