Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  At a certain point we all looked up as a stunning black-haired girl entered. She joined us at the table. She had not been present at the reception. This was Jean Stein, Faulkner’s companion at that time. He chose a moment after introductions to remark, “The two most beautiful words in the English language are ‘pretty girl.’ “ One had to think of Henry James’s similar comment, his choice phrase being “summer afternoon.” The parallel seemed a good summing-up of both men, and a courtly compliment in this case to the girl who had joined us.

  So far so good. But at a luncheon given by Clare Boothe Luce, the American ambassador, in Faulkner’s honor, he behaved badly, Moravia said, driving his hostess to despair by his stubborn refusal to say anything at all. Alberto left feeling awful, and asked me later why this man would behave as he did. I had no ready answer.

  However, in the interviews that appeared, Faulkner seemed to have been cooperative enough, showing a wide knowledge of European literatures. A French woman who met him told me that his French was excellent.

  During the summer of 1954 in Italy I went up to pass some months in Florence. I thought I needed to be around Italians, and hoped to progress further in the language than I had been able to do in Rome, with its ceaseless round of invitations to occasions where English was spoken.

  I had hardly settled in when Allen Tate showed up. He was attending a Roman Catholic conference, and called to ask me to various social events. The poet John Frederick Nims and his family were living in a palazzo famous for its connection with James’s Portrait of a Lady. (It did seem that everything Allen had to do with was famous for something.) Caroline was not with him.

  Allen invited me to spend some time with the Nims family, also in company with Father D’Arcy, the well-known English Jesuit, who had come to the conference and lent a memorable presence to the evenings. He was very thin, with thick hair turning gray, a face strongly accented with high cheekbones and heavy brows. I thought of those Gothic saints on the walls of French cathedrals, upright, skeletal, steadfast. He spoke not at all of the names associated with him as Catholic counselor— Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, among others—but I felt drawn to his humanity and fine quality, his awareness of every person in his presence as an individual. Later, I sought out some of his writings and had a continuing impression of him as someone to whom Christianity had the meanings it was meant to have. His ideas on grace as a sign of God’s love are central to those meanings.

  An annual event in Florence is the celebration of La Festa di San Giovanni, the patron saint of the city. There is an opening parade of the nobles, with the descendants of distinguished families dressed in medieval costume and mounted on horseback. Pages in Renaissance tights wave pennants and all converge on the Piazza della Signoria in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, where bleachers have been set up and the surrounding buildings decked out in banners displaying all the local devices.

  The major event, a game of calcio (soccer), also began with ceremony. The players dress in medieval suits but otherwise are as fiercely intent as in any other match. I had tentatively been invited to go with an Italian sculptor I had been seeing, but he had not telephoned to set the time of meeting. When Allen Tate called to ask me, I declined at first, but when he insisted, I consented. (I had to refuse the sculptor who called soon after.)

  Allen and I had good seats, and it was from there I observed a strange accident. The little medieval cannon that had fired to signal the opening of the game took a notion to fire again. Everyone stopped in astonishment, and a man who had been leaning on the cannon fell to the ground. He did not succeed in getting up, and two men soon approached with a stretcher and took him away.

  At the apartment where I was staying, I asked a few days later what had happened to him. He was still in the hospital, I was told. Later they told me he had died of blood poisoning. There was some mention of neglect; no penicillin had been given him. However, one heard strange stories about Italian medicine and the details passed on to me may not have been true.

  Long after, when I came to write a story set in Florence, called The Light in the Piazza, I made use of the event almost as it had happened. I am convinced that unforeseen accidents determine life. A chance meeting, a missed appointment, a gunshot…

  Living in Fiesole above Florence was Elisabeth Mann Borgese, daughter of Thomas Mann, and widow of the remarkable scholar Antonio Borgese, who had lectured for many years at the University of Chicago. I met Elisabeth through a mutual friend at the cultural office in Rome, who had given me a ride to Florence when I came. She was a hospitable, friendly person, with hair bobbed short and a world of energy.

  I was happy to be invited to her home a number of times. She was trying then to write fiction and I think finally published a volume of stories, but did not seem able to give much sense of reality to her material. She said little about her father and her family, and I did not try to draw her out about them. I knew too little about German literature to carry a conversation forward. She mentioned some writers that her father had encouraged— Hermann Hesse was, I believe, among them. One felt her family attachment, and her devotion to her two little girls—nicknamed Nikki and Gogol—was obvious. One Sunday noon this inventive pair were holding a birthday party for their cats.

  New acquaintances also were a whole family named Scaravelli. The family had a beautiful villa at some remove from Florence, in the surrounding hills. Professore Scaravelli was a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Pisa. His houseguest for what seemed an indefinite stay was the Indian philosopher of later fame, Krishnamurti. He was a frail Indian with a refined, sensitive face, who was struggling with the language as industriously as I. He was a vegetarian, so we generally dined on omelets. Signora Scaravelli liked to entertain young people resident in Florence for study or work. After dinner we spent evenings before a huge fireplace exchanging talk mainly in English, as most of her discoveries were Americans abroad. Much later that year, back in Rome, I learned with a shock that the professore had committed suicide. On reflection I began to see the signora’s invitations in a new light; her eagerness to bring in a lively crowd must have been related to her anxiety for him.

  Friends from the Dinesen were also in Florence for a stay, and we had some happy evenings. It was cool; a late spring was trying unsuccessfully to come. I shivered each morning and worked wearing a heavy sweater. It was a good break at day’s end to meet the Mattinglys or the Klapperts at the Excelsior Hotel bar for warmth and drinks.

  Allen Tate went up to England after his time in Florence. He knew that I was going there to see an English publisher, Victor Gollancz, who was bringing out my writing with some enthusiasm. He had asked me to be in touch and said he would like to introduce me to T. S. Eliot and whomever else in London I cared to meet. He no doubt meant this offer kindly, but I did not take it up. A chance to meet the great poet passed me by.

  By good luck, Eudora Welty happened to be in London at that time, and advised of each other’s presence by the faithful Diar-muid Russell, we found each other and often met for the theater, tea, and shopping. Eudora loved English ways and took a childlike delight in such things as having tea served during the interval at the theater.

  I felt disappointed in London, having got used to Italian food and the sun. It was at times unpleasantly cold. In July I once saw snowflakes in a gust of wind. Victor Gollancz, the publisher, favored me with affectionate regard, and invitations to his country house at Brimpton were welcome. But the seeming aimlessness of Italian life, like a sort of eternity entered into in advance, had taken hold of my personal rhythms. I worked well in Italy because nothing seemed to pressure me to do so. My feeling was that nobody really cared. I was left to find my own way, and if that included writing a novel, I could go right ahead with it.

  So I fretted through the days in London. I had met an Englishman I at first liked, but what seemed the promise of a relationship turned as cold as the weather. My self-esteem dropped along with the mercury.

  When I returned
to Florence, I fell back to writing diligently again on the novel that became The Voice at the Back Door. I spent each day alone at the typewriter in a spacious apartment out near Piazza Beccheria. The contessa whose residence it was worked in public relations for the Italian fashion industry. She went off to work on a bicycle rather early and was never present during the day. Much of the novel had already been written during the past winter in Rome, and I could see the road ahead. But I still believe the portions of the novel written in Florence were the best part of the book. Perhaps my personal discouragement of the moment made concentration an escape I needed.

  The odd thing about writing this novel, so totally centered in Mississippi small-town life, filled exclusively with home voices, home manners, characters whose thoughts and lives were all centered there and nowhere else, was that these various things came clearer to me from a distance than they might have done at home. I was surrounded by a language I was barely learning to comprehend, but I could catch in my inner ear the precise intonation of someone saying all the phrases I was brought up hearing. Whole conversations flowed easily onto the page. Much of the talk in this book, centered on local Mississippi politics, is among men, and I wonder to this day how I seemed to have got it pretty nearly right. The only source must have been my habit, as a little girl, entirely unnoticeable, of trailing along behind my uncle or my father in all their many contacts with people from every walk of life. In the rural South, you never have to say “Here comes everybody,” when “everybody” is around all the time, high and low, rich and poor and all the in-betweens. A society like this gives the fiction writer a wonderfully broad base; the wide net is already spread.

  Each afternoon after lunch I would walk down to the Arno. I met a Florentine there who was temporarily out of work as a typesetter. He and I would walk out on some rocks and sit with our feet in the river and talk for an hour or two. It was a pleasant time, warm and full of light. My Italian improved. My self-image revived a little and began to give off a feeble glow which got brighter as the summer passed.

  But ahead, as Ferragosto, the August holiday, passed, lay another winter. I began to have longings for Rome. Through the autumn of 1953 and on through the winter it had lost its strangeness and become a second home. I was never to feel this for Florence, which I loved in a different way. Not that I can ever see works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, or Della Robbia without feeling the sheer thrill of them. One glimpse of Cellini’s Perseus is still enough to cause me to feel what Stendhal talked about as “the illness of beauty.”

  But the enclosure of the city and the round of seeing the same faces at the same sorts of occasions made me feel that I was growing into a routine in a place not even native to me.

  So at the first bite of cold weather, I said goodbye to the con-tessa in much better Italian than when I came. Also to the typesetter, who had gone back to work and to being a husband.

  There was another cause of restlessness. I knew that I was lonely in a basic way, that I needed a real relationship. I had enjoyed pleasant flirtations and brief encounters with enough men of different nationalities to form a sizable committee for the United Nations. Scandinavians passing through Rome stayed at the Dinesen; smooth-talking Englishmen emerged out of nowhere; some transient American had been given my name to look up. There was a lawyer in Rome and a sculptor in Florence. But after a few outings, nothing of real rapport seemed to develop between myself and these guys, and many in any case were on their way elsewhere. More fascinating company were those intelligent men like Garrett Mattingly, Charles Klappert, and Daniel Cory, who had their charming wives firmly attached.

  I tried to shake off my sometime depression by enjoying friendships, by seeing more art and learning more Italian. But could I seriously believe all this would work?

  Only a week ago I came across a box of letters my mother had saved. They were full of accounts of my time in Rome and Florence. In a letter dated September 1954, I note the first mention of a man from Cornwall I had met in Rome, who was teaching English to Italians. He had begun to stop by my pensione for a visit or to telephone me in the afternoons. I said that John Rusher was not so well off, didn’t have a car, but was good company and interesting to talk to.

  Dinesen friends of the year before had flown away home. My literary socializing dwindled. I moved into a room in a large flat. Work on the novel, after a few crankings and sputterings, began to move again. I had a terrace to myself, a desk for my typewriter, a shelf for books, and hanging space for clothes. Each afternoon the phone rang. It would be John, telling me news, arranging to see me.

  Before I knew quite how it happened, I had entered one of my happiest years.

  John had already been in Italy for a year or more. By teaching English to foreigners in London, he had devised a way to get to Italy for the same purpose. He had worked for a time with the Berlitz school of languages in Rome; then, finding a core group of enthusiastic pupils eager to continue studies with him, he broke away from the school to teach them on his own. His hours were eccentric, but he could often take time in the afternoon for tea or a walk. The English, I soon learned, adore both tea and walking. I felt myself growing stronger on the sound of his encouraging voice: “Oh, now you know you can walk a little further. Come on. Try.”

  On some warm afternoons in the fall we would sit in the park on the Pincio, watching people pass, and recounting how life had treated us. One day we fell to quoting from Alice in Wonderland, first the Mad Hatter’s tea party, discovering we remembered whole chunks of it verbatim. The Humpty Dumpty passages from Through the Looking-Glass most delighted him.

  “… There’s glory for you!”

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ “ Alice said.

  Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course, you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ “

  “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’ “ Alice objected.

  “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said … , “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

  “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

  “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

  We found we knew many of the nonsense songs by heart:

  In winter, when the fields are white

  I sing this song for your delight—

  In spring, when woods are getting green,

  I’ll try and tell you what I mean….

  John said he often pointed out Lewis Carroll to his students. I said he might utterly confuse them with such nonsense, but he said people should be confused occasionally.

  Our best times were at night when he had finished his work, usually rather late, and would call me to meet him in Piazza San Silvestro, a busy downtown square near the post office, where a good trattoria gave three courses for six hundred lire—about a dollar in those days.

  Many of John’s pupils were interesting to meet. The variety was astounding: a principessa, a count, a member of Parliament, a policeman, a waiter in a restaurant. All needed English for their daily toil. And being English and always going about Rome, it seems he met all the other wanderers and sojourners from England whose various pilgrimages led them through or to that ancient city. The English, I was learning, through their long acquaintance with wars and work in foreign lands, can fit easily into any society. They never seem to lose their own culture—tea and Alice would only start the list of their typical preferences— but neither do they insist that others become like them.

  John related how life in London, where he had held a clerical job after the war, was dreary and depressing. Like many another, he had longed for sun and fogless air. So far his scheme was flourishing, and my fellowship funds, carefully measured, were holding out. We paid our rent—I for my room and terrace near Piazza Buenos Aires; he in his neat little quarters on Vi
a Meru-lana. We did our work and had fun.

  Via Merulana itself was made for experiencing a poor but lively section of Rome. Once in a nearby park, we saw a stunt-man riding a motorcycle high up the perpendicular walls of an enormous sunken cylinder. Another time, looking out the window, John had seen the whole Roman zoo—elephants, lions, tigers, and giraffes—parading past. They were en route to the Baths of Caracalla for a performance of Aida.

  On late evenings we sometimes went to find a French or English movie at a distance from the center. We would take the tram that circled the city, the circolare, and come to some tucked-away spot, where we sat on hard benches. Since everybody smoked in the cinema, at intervals they would open up the roof and let the smoke out. Late night in Rome in those days was tranquil and silent. One could feel safe then in almost any quarter. Once, out late on a winter night, we walked through a silent fall of snow. So few were abroad, it was not even noted in the press, though it was most unusual.

  Times when we caught the train from Stazione Termini to some nearby town like Orvieto still lift my spirits to remember. There was a sense of discovery and exciting departure, even though we would be buying the cheapest tickets to ride along with peasants, their sacks of produce, crying babies, and sometimes live chickens. Once we rode facing an ample woman dressed in black with a face so kindly it seemed nothing could defeat it. We conversed a little; then she leaned back and looked at us both as though we were her own children: “ Una bella cbp-pia,” she said. “A handsome couple.” I had fully registered that John was extraordinary for his good looks—“testa d’aquila” (eagle’s head), as an Italian friend had said—but I was glad to be associated with him in her compliment.

  I finished a draft of the novel in the spring. My problem then was how to stay on for the summer. My Guggenheim funds, never so ample to begin with, were all but exhausted. The foundation sent a small extra sum. I put my plight to my parents and my father consented to a meager allowance. However, the “plight” was really nothing more than a desire to enjoy Rome, life, and leisure. After a long stretch of hard work, and the slow recovery of my health, I thought I had it coming.