Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  Our house was on one of the older streets, with large lawns and friendly neighbors. A well-kept bowling green was only a block away, and cricket matches were still played in a park just to the east. The movie house in Lachine was named The Royal Alexandra after the wife of Edward VII, and just as in England, “God Save the Queen” was played after each showing, with film clips of the lady herself, “trooping the color.” The prevailing emphasis was still on Empire.

  As for the French-Canadians, they were scattered all among us. The highest concentration of spoken French, however, was definitely centered in the eastern part of the city.

  After much hassling with furniture and mortgage contract and all the familiar problems of ownership, old stuff to most couples our age but new to us, we moved into our house. Our bohemian wanderings had left us far behind in the home-ownership game; it was like learning a foreign language to deal with fixed-term and adjustable-rate mortgages, surveying lines between properties, and township rights of way. But once all this was cleared and we were actually at home for the first time, exhausted but enclosed in our own four walls, I had not slept so soundly since I was a girl.

  Our back yard was a deep one, and since we soon acquired a beagle, all the neighborhood children, mostly forbidden to have pets, were constantly coming over to play. Their mothers called me in alarm. “Diane walked right into your house without knocking.” “It’s okay,” I would reply. “She’s just come to see Rascal.”

  Fall lingered long the first year. It was early December and roses were still blooming on the Fairchilds’ lawn across the street. I could look over and see Diane among them, posing in a frail fancy frock she was to wear in a wedding. Who said this was a cold country?

  But the fatal night would come; I somehow knew it in my bones. Sure enough, one calm evening there came a moaning sound from away to the north, seeming to die away, then reviving and coming each time nearer. Hours later we felt for the first time the majestic force of Canadian winter. It seemed an enormous hand had been laid to the side of our house; the walls shuddered. Outside, the black night was riddled with white streaks, coming first at a slant, then shooting in horizontally, an inexhaustible supply. The moan turned into a howl, not just from the north, but from everywhere. We woke to a strange country, which wore a shroud of white. Shovels, storm windows, snow tires, and furnace heat, in addition to bundles of clothing, boots, and fur-lined gloves, were now part of daily life. The dog, still a puppy, ran out in the yard and refused to believe what he saw. He barked at it. Wouldn’t it go away? No, it wouldn’t.

  Before a year had passed, John’s grandmother had died; soon his mother’s death followed. He was left a small legacy by each and decided to open his own school again, this time offering a full slate of languages. French was becoming more and more a necessity for doing any sort of business in Montreal. There were many also who needed English for the same reason, and others certainly would appear who had needs for other, more remote, languages. After considerable planning, he located vacant offices on Sherbrooke Street, near the center of the city, and soon had turned them into a rabbit warren of small classrooms clustered around a central reception area. So was born the Cambridge Language Centre, which continued for many years as a fixture of the Montreal scene.

  All the time, there was my own work, too, proceeding along with the early days of our settling in.

  When we were still in Rome, an editor at The New Yorker had written to know if I had any short stories I might want to submit to the magazine. I hadn’t written any short fiction in years, but I dusted off one that the magazine had rejected back in the 1940s. It was accepted, so I wrote another, also accepted.

  In the face of so much change, I was reluctant to undertake another novel. How could I get at an increasingly scattered-out experience better than by writing stories? Memory was sharpening what I knew about the South, lifting up some subjects and kinds of people as possibilities for stories, letting others slip away. But did I have to cling to writing just about the South? Would the same process not happen with respect to my Italian experience? It, too, was becoming memory as the days got gloomier and shorter and thoughts of Italy made images of brilliant light and sharp shadow come thronging to my inward eye.

  Daily, I used to leave the apartment and go down to a public library on nearby Atwater Street. There were long tables there and no one bothered a visitor who wanted to sit for hours writing on a ruled legal pad. It was thus that I started my first story set in Italy—with the thought of light.

  It began in a favorite piazza—where back in 1949 I had been struck with Italy’s glory—and with a favorite work, Cellini’s Perseo. But there had to be a who also. I felt more at home writing about Southerners, wherever they might show up. So here came the two who were central to the story, a girl named Clara Johnson and her mother, Margaret, from Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

  The Light in the Piazza came close to writing itself, with little interference from the author. I had envisioned a thirty- or forty-page short story, but traveling on its own momentum, it grew to a longer work, well over a hundred pages. I had wanted the episode of the exploding cannon that Allen Tate and I had witnessed at the soccer game to take a central place as unforeseen accident; instead it became a pivotal moment, and later volunteered to serve as metaphor.

  I would write through some hours at the library, then come back to the apartment and type up the day’s scribbling. I would read the results to John in the evening. His one comment was “Keep going.” The original typescript took about three or four weeks to complete. What I thought of it was that it was a freakish sort of story with some nice moments, though the plot was such an odd one, nobody could possibly want to publish it. I sent it to David Clay with a note, “A crazy story, but you might find it fun.”

  Within days he was on the phone, extolling what I had done. In his enthusiasm he rushed into making a premature submission to The New Yorker, where it was turned down with a long letter of apology and regret.

  I was ready to put the manuscript in a drawer with other beginnings and tries that never worked. But David stuck with his belief that here was something good. He urged a few revisions on me, a little smoothing out here, an expansion there. Did I think this scene was a little long, this one sketchy? Most of these suggestions I simply never took. But one or two were telling in their effect. Just a touch of the lens and a focus came about, rendering the whole as sharp and clear as what I had in mind.

  To my dismay, for I dislike inviting anyone who says no once to say it again, David resubmitted it to The New Yorker. In days, I had received an enthusiastic letter from my editor. The story was published in a single issue in the following year. It had “a happy reception,” which Red Warren, when he saw the galleys, predicted, and a long and happy life thereafter, which still continues. First came the magazine; then, with a little expansion (mainly reinstating bits I had taken out to speed the narrative as a story), publication by McGraw-Hill as a separate novella. After that came a book-club selection, paperback and translation rights, and a movie.

  Olivia De Havilland became Margaret Johnson, Yvette Mimieux her daughter, Clara. Rossano Brazzi was wily Signor Naccarelli and a youthful George Hamilton the eager Fabrizio. The producer was Arthur Freed. Florence appeared in Cinemascope in all its beauty. Perhaps the movie was not quite what I had written—it lacked the irony that a writer’s voice is able to give and glowed with a little too much picture-postcard prettiness—but on the whole one had to be pleased with such a faithful effort.

  Proceeding as a writer after such an unexpected success should have been easy as falling off a log. Instead, I felt faced with dilemmas. Did I write more about Italy? Should I go back to earlier things? I now had a larger number of readers, this being the only very good thing, besides a welcome flow of cash, that a writer’s success can mean. Yet it carries its own dangers: If one is expected to say “something important,” what can come out might not be important after all. Asking myself questions, I listened
for answers but heard nothing at all.

  I finally let nature take its course and stuck to what I felt best at doing—storytelling. My stories, laid either in the South or in Italy or wherever they might happen, kept being welcomed by The New Yorker and other magazines. And what I had to say seemed to manage to unfold its own importance out of its own nature. And this was what I wanted.

  A novel evolves naturally out of time, out of lived experience, preferably in one place. As Jane Austen wrote to her niece back in 1814:

  You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life;—3 or 4 Families in a Country village is the very thing to work on— & I hope you will write a good deal more, & make full use of them while they are so very favourably arranged.

  All true, as long as one lives in one place, going by the settled rules of a stable world. But ways are different now; throngs of people wander about like terrapins, wearing their culture shells on their backs.

  A native is one not by choice but by birthright. This is especially true of a women. Habits of cooking, of home decor, of manners and hospitality, of reckoning up friends and foes, all stem from a way of life that sets in early. Any Frenchwoman, for instance, living no matter how many years in Brazil, or Turkey, or the United States, will be certain to maintain a style of cooking, a way of dressing, an innovative touch with local fabrics and art.

  So much, too, for “Southernness.” It would be there, whether thought about or not. I could no more become one of the expatriate tribe than I could turn into an Aztec.

  The next novella I wrote, Knights & Dragons, was also set in Italy. The attempt was to internalize the experience of one woman, who set out on a psychic voyage of some peril. I had seen life bounce along on charming surfaces and proceed to a happy ending in The Light in the Piazza, Now the effort was to find a darker side of what could happen abroad. Many who expected me to write another version of the first story did not care for the second. But somehow this story has found its enthusiasts and keeps a hold on those it speaks to.

  The characters in Knights & Dragons were not from any especial ground in the States. In the next novel, No Place for an Angel, the wanderers in Italy and elsewhere were mainly displaced people from the South—Texas, Mississippi, Maryland. Their lack of fixity in life gave them need of angelic messengers, but none came to their aid, and spiritual strength seemed hard to come by. Their varied experience did not lack vitality, or so I believe, but the theme was pessimistic, and may have reflected some of the personal difficulties I felt besieged by at that time.

  Most important of these was the slow deterioration in my relationship with David Clay and his wife, Dusty. Their obsessive devotion to Christian Science made it increasingly difficult to speak with them on any subject. To the Clays, no one was ever born, hence age did not exist; no one ever got sick, sickness was unreal and not to be mentioned; no one ever died; one divine mind was all that everyone was part of.

  At times our conversations became ludicrous. When John Kennedy was assassinated, Dusty told me by phone that none of it had “happened.” To the Clays I knew nothing about something called “divine intelligence,” so how could I know what was true? Communication slowly faded into a sense of unreality, of stumbling through an unlit room to seek persons much esteemed but hard to locate. Then, in one burst of total misunderstanding, it was over. Over, that is, except for my unceasing gratitude for kindnesses innumerable, cumulative from the past.

  What do people with fanatical religious belief see that others do not? Some will exile, torture, or kill anyone who disagrees, all the while professing the utmost faith in Christian principles. Others simply set out to correct any casual utterance, to warp and bend every conversation to suit their own conclusions. All fanatics must be seeing things in a way opaque to the everyday world and the common vision. It was such a complete absence of a common point of view that doomed an important relationship.

  With President Kennedy’s death and other deaths occurring during the sixties, other unforeseen transitions, abrupt and harsh, came tramping over the spirit.

  One day in Lachine when I was returning from the grocery, a neighbor came out of her side door and asked if there wasn’t some writer named Faulkner from my part of the world. She thought she had heard on the radio that he had died. She was right.

  The assassination in Dallas occurred when Tonny Vartan and his wife, Cynthia, were visiting us for Thanksgiving. We were returning from lunch in the city on the second day after they arrived, when that same neighbor came out the door once again and called to us: “Turn on the TV, I think something’s happened to your president.” We did turn it on and stayed there transfixed for the entire weekend, compelled by terrible images forming from moment to moment, by now indelible in our history.

  As we were driving through some verdant Vermont woods in summer, the radio let us know that Ernest Hemingway was dead, an apparent suicide. “Stop the car,” I said to John. I walked into the woods, finding no path, and sat down at some distance beside a brook. The cold water itself could not have made me feel more numb than this announcement. But how beautiful those trees were, and in the clear water there might have been trout, lurking deep but visible, their tails poised against the current.

  As a writer from somewhere else, I always felt welcome in Canada. Many Canadian writers come from somewhere else— Michael Ondaatje from Sri Lanka; Joseph Skorevky from Czechoslovakia; and even earlier, the strong and vital poet Irving Layton, so identified with the Canadian scene, had emigrated from Romania as a babe in arms. I was quickly accorded a place among the English-speaking writers and never felt especial rejection by the French.

  Yet Canadian writers during the sixties and seventies were doing a very natural thing in which I never found any part to play. They were building a Canadian literature, an identity for that literature and for themselves distinctly different from that of the elephant of a neighbor to the south or the British and French across the ocean. Books like Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and her work of Canadian criticism aptly named Surviving were breaking open new paths for others to follow. Groundwork had already been laid by such writers as Hugh MacLennan and Margaret Laurence. I could reflect that in the South writers had done much the same thing, making a literary identity so viable it became a living tradition that shows no sign of waning. Yet one writer I met and became friendly with, Alice Munro, defined herself as “a Southern writer from Canada.” She read exhaustively in Southern books, and the small-town Ontario she often describes show their influence.

  My own writing, with some few exceptions, was never grounded in Canada. The 1991 novel The Night Travellers dealt with characters from the United States who had found refuge there as a result of the Vietnam conflict. They experienced much of the sense of distance that I myself felt during the first years.

  Working pretty much on my own, I began to see fiction, and especially the novel, in new ways. Leaving aside the mysterious question of why one is compelled to write anything, or for that matter why one is drawn to one character or story rather than any number of others, I took the choices that came my way—did they, as Willa Cather once remarked, choose the writer, rather than the other way around?—and began to explore from their vital center outward, through the phenomena of place and time and circumstance. So how does one know this “vital center”? For me it is usually a person, someone who matters, who can best carry the whole considerable weight of an unfolding plot. Like a magnet, this person will draw me to tell about it, how it all was.

  I began to try this method out in various short stories, many of which have found a lasting place in collections. The editor I had for a time at McGraw-Hill was a most singular writer called William Goyen. A Texan, he had known many of the same people as I, and we found common lines of experience to form a base for work and discussion. Bill’s constant helpfulness furnished a spirit to lean on in the years after I lost the Clays. He was there to be counted on. What can one say of his wo
rk? He built a solid following, and many of his books are still with us. His House of Breath is a fine novel. His quirky, elusive stories read like no one else’s.

  Bill’s powerful fantasy life made it possible for him to live on two tracks at once. Sometimes the two ran together, and like puzzling crossovers of rails on a railroad line, they would reverse positions. With Bill, the act of fiction could take place in midsentence. Most writers have this tendency. It was hard to know when John Cheever was recounting an event or building a fantasy version of it. Plain old fact became the pinhead the angels danced on. Red Warren could never resist “making a good story.” It was built into his spirit, his exuberant idea that life is fun.

  But once I could see how Bill’s thoughts worked—electrical charges skip-hopping through connective wiring—we got on well through many sessions. His attractive wife, the actress Doris Roberts, was good at keeping us down to earth.

  A regular job could hardly be held by a less suitable person than William Goyen. He soon left his editorial work, but not before he had made an important friendship for me with the poet and critic Robert Phillips. Then working in advertising and living up the Harlem River line in Katonah, Robert delighted in moving in New York literary circles. He also was an avid reader of his friends’ work. Whether poetry or prose had been published, there Bob would be at the party, cheerfully ready for comment and serious discussion. If there was a PEN gathering when I happened to be in New York, Bob would see that I got to it. A reading at the “Y”? A need for a cheering letter? A phone call? A suggestion for sending something to a new magazine? He was on the editorial staff of many. His own poetry, wry and engaging, full of sassy modern reference twined with serious meaning, came to me regularly, as it still does.