Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  The day the announcement came that he had won the prize, I was still teaching at Ole Miss, though living out in the town. I was passing at twilight by a screened-in porch where people were conversing. A woman was saying, “If William Faulkner thinks he’s so smart, let him pay that grocery bill he’s been owing me.”

  Maybe in a French village, or a Greek town, or an Italian paese, & similar thing having occurred, the same sort of thing might have been said. Vox populi… But now in Oxford the name has sacred status, so all is forgotten.

  These days a genial light is shed on the fame that Southern writers achieve. Eudora Welty’s subtle and discerning work has brought her the affection of all of Jackson, Mississippi. Yet one must not mistake her naturally gentle spirit, her constant effort to seek out sources of laughter and signs of love, as approval for what was going on. She had, in fact, a great deal to say in nonfiction about what she felt. And in a short few pages, published in The New Yorker, titled “Where Is That Voice Coming From?,” she took hold of the mind of the man who shot Medgar Evers, all this on the evening it became known, with no one to tell her the details. Yet so well did she know the killer’s mentality—“I done it for my own pure-D satisfaction”—that the piece stands today as a revelation. She even guessed the kind of car he was driving, what it looked like.

  Business ruled supreme in my father’s heart. He gave to the church, where he was an efficient Presbyterian elder. He believed in “helping people” who would “amount to something in the community.” He evidently had some benign vision of a world where good Christian feelings prevailed, where everyone worked hard and earned his way and raised a good family and was addicted to “sound thinking.” I should have said “good Protestant feelings,” for he hated the Roman Church with a passion.

  He did not want anyone to be helped to be anything at all in the arts. For one thing, as an economic base for life, art was an uncertain calling and therefore apt to be a losing proposition.

  It is this set of ideas that Allen Tate, in his important essay “The Profession of Letters in the South,” calls the “cash nexus.” It drives men into politics to hold fast to their own interests, but it cannot leave space for the arts. I think my father’s trouble with the arts came not only from their economic uncertainty but from the fact that he could not control them.

  To quote Tate regarding the fate of Edgar Allan Poe when confronting his adoptive father, John Allan, who drove him out:

  It was obvious… that here was no dabbler who would write pleasant, genteel poems and stories for magazines where other dabbling gentlemen printed their pleasant, genteel stories and poems…. If there is such a person as a Southern writer, if there could be such a profession as letters in the South, the profession would require the speaking of unpleasant words and the violation of good literary manners… . Only cranks and talents of the quiet, first order maintain themselves against fashion and prosperity.

  Are we even talking only about the South? I saw a carefully made TV documentary on the disappearance in New Guinea of Michael Rockefeller. He was seeking examples of wood carvings among the aborigines. On a trip by boat to claim some fine examples he had been promised by a remote tribe, he vanished. But his delight in the art he had found among these primitive people was evident in all he said. He said he wanted to die among them. I was forced to guess that he had escaped the “cash nexus,” the creed of the plutocrat. A Rockefeller naturally had to go a maximum distance to escape.

  There would have been plenty of reasons other than disagreements over race to get rid of a contrary, opinionated, nonconforming daughter who not only read books but wanted to write them. All these reasons and doubtless others were in my bulging family dossier; no doubt many were valid. Certainly they were operative.

  My mother, in all this unpleasant back-and-forth, did not always keep her head. Her emotional outbursts might sound like one train of thought at one time, the opposite at another. But it must be said for her that she kept her deepest feelings intact. Her love was never to be doubted. She was a fragile spirit, but the strongest among us often seem deceptively fragile. Her heart stayed in place.

  It came to me many times then and in future years that I might have found some way to go back—knowing what I knew, forearmed, as I would now be—and live within a separate peace, communing with a network of many friends and supporters in different small nooks and crannies. There was always the fact, however, that our “connection,” assembled from both sides of a long-time rooted family, seemed to make up about half the population of the state. One year alone I had eleven cousins either teaching or studying at Ole Miss.

  But the South had been my subject as a writer, my ground of operation, and my constant spur to putting things down. How could I let it be snatched away?

  Another Southern state then?

  It did not turn out that way. On that ill-fated visit, I had not even unpacked everything before I was packing up once more. And though I was to return many times as a visitor, I must have sensed I would never be coming home again. These events bring to mind, of course, Wolfe’s famous title You Can’t Go Home Again. I am sure, however, of what the trouble really is: It’s not that you can’t go home. Rather, there isn’t any home to go to.

  27

  WRITING IN NEW YORK

  IN New York, I was immediately given welcome, understanding, and moral support by David Clay and his wife, Dusty, and through them, though at a distance, by Red Warren. Dusty and I set about at once finding me an apartment I could afford, checking the Times, making phone calls, visiting possible addresses. I finally found a walk-up on East Twenty-second Street.

  A series of new one-bedroom units were being opened for rental, three floors of them above a restaurant. The rent was ninety dollars a month. The Jewish-Hungarian rental agent, who himself had “always wanted to be a writer,” agreed to let me have heat during the day, a real concession as everyone else would be out to work.

  (As I was signing the lease a young Negro woman came in and asked about the apartments. She told him she was Indian. He said they were all rented, which I knew to be untrue. Naively, I told him after she left that I had lived around Negroes all my life, and did not mind it. He said I was obviously a nice person.)

  I had to have furniture. I set aside two hundred dollars, and got together a couch that could serve as a bed, a desk and chair, a dresser, a lamp, and a dining table. I went daily to Third Avenue secondhand-furniture shops and found a fascinating conglomerate of New York souls, speaking in thick Middle European accents, quoting prices one could usually negotiate, making weirdly funny remarks, usually ready to help pick and choose and deliver. I even had enough money left to buy a rocking chair.

  Then, settling down, I finally reopened the typescript of the novel and began the slow but rewarding process of polish-and-revise, revise-and-polish.

  No one could have been more helpful in this task than David Clay. He had had considerable experience in working directly with writers, tactfully but persistently insisting on the reworking of a bad passage, the deletion of unnecessary matter. His focus on my pages was like a magnifying glass directing sunlight. Nearly all was there, the characters in place as they had always been, and no real structural change was necessary. But revision means refinement, and having a good sounding board is of measureless worth for a sometimes uncertain writer like myself.

  But on the whole the book was done already, and the work that went on steadily for about three months was mainly the writer’s normal reluctance to let something go that had all but become an organic part of her system.

  It was fun to be back in New York. I had scarcely enough money to buy a decent meal, but the Mattinglys, living up near Columbia University, where Matt had returned to lecture, extended frequent invitations. Sidney and Frances Alexander, whom I had known in Florence and Rome, were living not far away from me. Sidney’s fictional biography of Michelangelo was then in progress and finally came out in three richly detailed volumes.

  Tonn
y Vartan was there to be counted on. He was moving further uptown all the time, making his way as a financial reporter who commanded respect, and occasionally adding another Oriental carpet. By the time he died, much too soon for all who knew him, he had a steady byline in The New York Times and was living on Sutton Place. His elegant carpets were wall-to-wall, he had a fine New England wife, and his little boy, growing to manhood, was named Kirk Spencer.

  It was easy in those days to catch a bus to the theater district for a Saturday matinee. A single balcony seat could usually be had and cost only a few dollars. Here, on a rainy winter afternoon, I saw Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner in The King and I. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was also playing with Barbara Bel Geddes in the role of Maggie. She spoke her lines in a slightly hoarse voice, with a skilled up-turning “Southernness” that makes any statement sound something like a question. I can still hear her say “those no-neck monsters?”

  Sometimes on Saturdays I would take the cheapest trip of all—the subway to Brooklyn Heights and the St. George Hotel. I believe it has since been seriously damaged by fire, but then it was an enormous structure, with shops and a swimming pool in the basement. This was no ordinary pool. It was long and wide, and surrounded with glittering mirrors. Loud, it was true, with echoing voices, but it cost only about a dollar to plunge in for as long a swim as one would want. Showered and dressed, I would wander into the basement drugstore for a twenty-five-cent milkshake. I felt agreeably alone after a good week’s work, observant but pleasantly uninvolved with anything I saw. New York has offered solace to thousands by extending this sort of anonymity. Who cares? Why, nobody cares. Be yourself. Be happy.

  But then, of course, the threat is loneliness. It comes to you when you see, through the window of a smart restaurant, two friends eating together, or when you simply turn into a residential street and note flowers on a windowsill, homeward steps entering an opening door. It comes on crowded buses where everyone is looking straight ahead, lost in separate thoughts, no common ground sought for or offered. It comes after you have gone alone to the theater or a movie and want to talk about what you’ve seen. Then a small cloud settles over you—small, but in that immensity of stone and steel you also are small, and the cloud is just big enough to cover you.

  There was a church nearby—Calvary Episcopal at Twenty-first Street and Park Avenue. I went there as a regular habit and found a good spirit of welcome among the parishioners and the clergy. They also ran a very simple lunchroom where meals could be had for less than two dollars. My kitchenette was serviceable, but cooking and consuming one’s own meal is an invitation to the cloud.

  Once when Eudora Welty was in town, I invited Red Warren and his wife, Eleanor Clark, to dinner in my apartment.

  The Warrens had frequently asked me up to visit them at their interesting house in Fairfield, Connecticut, which they had converted from a lofty New England barn into a residence of considerable charm. Once, at a dinner party, I had sat on a sofa next to a small, attractive man with a flat Bostonian way of speaking, inclined to spill out words all together, giving a witty turn to whatever he said, often interrupting himself with a deprecatory laugh. He had just won the O. Henry Award for the year’s best story, but when someone complimented him on that, he said wryly that he thought the story was “slick.” The story was “The Country Husband,” and the writer was John Cheever.

  I had read his stories in The New Yorker and liked them. I asked him about a volume that brought them together, as I had not come across one. “Elizabeth,” he said, “my stories sell so few copies not even my best friends can find them. I have to go out and look for them myself to give them away.” His cheerful acceptance, the downbeat view of life in general, his love of exaggerating whatever came along—all this seemed pure Cheever.

  Voices. His pretty wife, Mary, had her own girlish way of speaking. Anywhere you saw them, you would have picked them as a pair, assured of love.

  Cleanth Brooks was there as well, and his wife, Tinkum. The fire crackled. Red seemed delighted with us all. He must have started out to dress elegantly, for he had got as far as a pair of evening pumps, but for the rest, a colored shirt, knit tie, and a green tweed jacket had to serve.

  I had met Eleanor Clark before, once in New York with Red before their marriage, again briefly in Italy when I had returned to Rome from Florence. I knew her also as the writer of Rome and a Villa, the most brilliant of all encounters with Rome one could possibly find in writing.

  She was quite beautiful, strongly and positively a New England woman. She was prone to assert her own ideas, and her judgments, which she made without apology, could be severe. But unlike Caroline Gordon, I felt, she was always in good contact with whomever she spoke to, and I had no sense of having to be on guard. I especially admired her on that evening in Connecticut. She had had to get two young children fed and settled, to ready a dinner party for at least twelve people, and to make the guest of honor, a French priest who was also a literary scholar, feel at home, in his own language. No one could have managed better. And no one could be in that house without feeling the solidity of the marriage and the great enveloping love the two shared for their children.

  The time had grown later than anyone realized, and some of us had to be put up overnight, then dragged out sleepy-eyed to catch the train to New York in the morning. The Cheevers and the Brookses lived nearby.

  On the evening of my small dinner on Twenty-second Street, I remember, Red charged in and looked about the space I had to live in with the bewildered expression of a large animal clapped into a stall. He asked for the bathroom. I pointed to it. It was tiny; only a few feet separated the bathtub from the door. Red entered at such a pace he all but fell into the tub; except for the tub, he might have smashed into the wall.

  I had cooked a lamb roast in my tiny oven, and we made a nice meal, what with wine, potatoes, salad, cheese, dessert, and the wonderful talk you might expect from those extraordinary three.

  Eudora was in New York on that trip to see the Broadway play made from The Ponder Heart. She invited me with her to one performance. Though scarcely exactly what she had written, it was a creditable, down-home treatment, with David Wayne as Uncle Daniel Ponder. He did an exceptional job of holding things together. Eudora said that the main problem in the production had been the fireball. We were both brought up on stories of fireballs, strange phenomena connected with severe thunderstorms. Once at school in Carrollton, lightning had struck close by and a ball of fire had rolled across the pupils’ desks.

  In the story, Bonnie Dee Ponder died during such a storm. She was sitting on the sofa with her husband, Uncle Daniel Ponder, when a fireball rolled through the room and scared her to death. The stagecraft crew had managed someway, for a Mississippi fireball appeared on cue to dazzle the Broadway audience, who could choose to believe it or not.

  Winter passed and the book was done.

  I had met various editors and publishers who had some interest in knowing what I was doing on a new novel, wished to see it, read it, possibly make an offer to publish it.

  David was working in some TV-related job at McGraw-Hill and through him I met the extraordinary editor Edward Aswell, who headed the trade department at that time. Aswell had been Thomas Wolfe’s editor after Wolfe had quarreled with Maxwell Perkins. He showed a marked enthusiasm for my manuscript and wanted it.

  David negotiated with him for a favorable advance—five thousand dollars. In fact, it was so favorable I could only sit down in my little apartment, holding the check on my lap and staring at it. I had lived on miserly allotments of dwindling money for so long it seemed impossible that the check would even be genuine. My father had indeed sent a small sum from the sale of stock in a fertilizer co-op, and I had gone out and bought two new dresses. To have anything new was such a rare occurrence that I still remember that gray silk with the pleated skirt and small white collar, the black linen with the low-cut neckline. But here was real money, and the book was out of my hands, and spring was
coming on.

  The Warrens went off to Italy and the Clays moved to their house in Fairfield. I was to live in the Clays’ apartment and try to sublet it for the summer. It was while I was alone there, showing it to occasional people who had seen the sublet ad in the Times, that I received a call from Dorothy Cater, a woman I had known in Rome.

  Dorothy was the granddaughter of the theatrical producer Henry Miller. Her father, Gilbert Miller, also in theater, was usually resident in London. Divorced, she had an apartment in the Parioli in Rome, a fashionable quarter, and had often invited John Rusher and me to cocktails or dinner parties.

  We had lunch together in the Miller apartment on Park Avenue, a huge flat with dustcovers draped over all the furniture, even the piano. We had to eat in the kitchen, fishing food out of one or another of the mammoth refrigerators. But why was Dorothy so intent on seeing me?

  She was really bringing me word of John Rusher. I had thought of him often during the months in New York, and felt it was mainly because I missed his steady company and affection that I found no real thrill in going out with various men who had shown interest from time to time. I said that I was missing Rome, and tried to convince myself that this was true, but it didn’t quite satisfy. We had exchanged letters, and I had even mentioned returning to Rome if I could place my novel, but I suppose both of us had naturally to wonder, What then? I had been adamant before I left Italy about seeing my life ahead in the South, though I had recently modified that to read “in the United States.”

  Over salad and cold cuts in the Miller kitchen, Dorothy told me that John seemed pretty desolate without me. It was something I needed to hear. She said he was going up to London to take a summer job, since his pupils in Rome were notoriously lax during that season. I knew, of course, of his plans, but had thought of him only in connection with Rome. It would be too late, I said, to plan anything for London now; boat travel was still the way most people went abroad, and all berths had been taken for weeks.