Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  Bob’s problem in those days was commuting. In mid-dinner, mid-party, mid-sentence, you would find yourself addressing the place he had vanished from. He had to catch the last train from Grand Central to a waiting family.

  It was Bob who encouraged me to collect my stories in one large grouping and submit them as a volume. I had little belief in this. Publishers seemed to dislike doing short-story collections; the theory was that they did not sell. However, when an editor at Doubleday was attracted to a story in The Southern Review and wished to see others, I sent them. The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer came out in 1981. It made the front page of The New York Times Book Review with a welcome review from Reynolds Price, and was widely praised. It earned the Award of Merit Medal of the American Academy. The dedication was to Robert Phillips.

  Writers object to labels: “Southern writer,” “Jewish novelist,” “historical novelist,” “one of The New England poets.” Now I had got known as a “short-story writer.” But what about novels?

  New Orleans as a place came vividly to mind, out of many visits there as a schoolgirl and later. A murky crime that had occurred during the fifties was still accessible to me from a stack of old newspaper clippings I had saved. They dated from the year I had lived on the Gulf Coast and had followed these curious events daily in the Times-Picayune. A few extended visits to that unique and wonderful city, long talks with friends there who knew the place much better than I, numerous books of fact and fiction, and I was well away into The Snare, which appeared in 1972.

  Once while working in New Orleans, living out on St. Charles Avenue in a rooming house called The Columns, really an enormous, old-time mansion that had seen better days, I chanced to meet a New Orleans lawyer prominent in political circles. This was Ben C. Toledano. Ben was an avid devotee of Southern literature and writers. He invited me to dinner at his home and later with his wife, Roulhac, and daughter, Gabrielle, we went for a visit to his weekend house in the bayou country.

  The first evening Ben C. asked me if I had ever met Walker Percy. I said no, but I expressed admiration for his work. Before I knew it, or could stop him, he had impulsively picked up the phone and called Walker. Walker expressed a similar desire to meet me. He and his wife, “Bunt,” drove down to New Orleans from Covington the very next day. We spent the first of several happy meetings at lunch together, running over familiar ground and mutual friends. I had known his closest friend, Shelby Foote, for years; he lived in Greenville, across the Delta from Carrollton, and I had also seen him once during my summer in New York.

  Walker invited me to stop off at his house in Covington on my return north to Carrollton. It was there he suddenly, to my surprise, remarked, “I am not a Southern writer.” No one could have looked and behaved more like a courtly Southern gentleman than Walker Percy. The Last Gentleman, title of one of his novels, could have been written as a logo under his signature.

  I later thought of what he had said and began to understand that his problem in writing had been similar to my own, that we both knew new ground had to be broken. His own direction was philosophic, an existential exploration of modern life in terms of Christian belief. This, so far I know, was new in Southern fiction. And Walker’s achievement, in the long run, took him far beyond a label like “Southern novelist,” though to say why that should be thought a limitation for him, as for me, is difficult, and would require a good many pages.

  Briefly, I think of the South as no longer an entity, although it is a region certainly still unique for its history, its weather, its natural beauty, pronounced sense of family, variety of characters, and so on ad infinitum. But interests and manners and all other aspects of daily life are now thoroughly encoded by the whole of American experience, and points of reference that were once so “different” as to be thought of as ours exclusively no longer really exist. If Southerners insist upon them anyway, it all becomes a sort of put-on. The Southern belle pretense, for one thing, has not only lost its charm, it is all too easy to see through and dislike.

  What then of Southern literature, which still goes on in book after book? Great ones may still come our way, and many good ones are written. But to me the last distinctly and thoroughly Southern novels were Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles and William Faulkner’s The Reivers. In both, it is important to note, the writer went back to a time remote from the present, when the South was still there, confidently its own self and nothing else.

  The same approach as I had taken with The Snare also led me through The Salt Line, its central feelings at first springing out of my grief at the damage hurricane Camille had done to a much-loved place, then centering on a character who embodied that place and time.

  In both The Snare and The Salt Line, I felt free to draw on traditional Southern sources of family and history without being tied to them. What then is their centrality? A spinning center that builds its own force is not sufficient to meet the human need for meaning, and just as it was a necessity for me to vanish into the story of each work, so it was also needful to know what human values were at stake to be lost or found. This centralizing knowledge makes a demand as strong as gravity, or a work can grow as meaningless to the reader as some distant beautiful star or as talk about a “black hole,” heard about on good authority but never seen. I sought for the human and the humane, the decency that struggles against the indecent, the values of love, fairness, and justice that cannot live unless they are lived.

  29

  THE ROAD BACK

  IN 1970 we reluctantly sold our house at Lachine. We already kept a pied-à-terre in central Montreal. John’s work was centered there, and most of our friends were living in or near the center or in Westmount, just to the west. We took a spacious apartment on rue St. Mathieu, and what with new writing income constantly arriving, I was able to rent a small studio for myself over on rue Prince Arthur, east of McGill University.

  It was during the sixties and seventies I began to return South quite often in response to invitations to meetings and conferences and short campus residencies. I was also wanted for frequent visits to Carrollton, always there and constantly revealed in letters from my mother as a place where people got born, married, and died. Houses changed hands; some people moved away; the church had a new minister. Cousin Wanda’s roof got blown off in a storm; the town turned out to help. The fish were biting. The cotton needed rain.

  People got sick. Most of my summonses were for sitting around in hospital rooms or taking over the house in Carrollton when there was no one else to do it. I once was asked to fly all the way to Mississippi because the cook had got sick and my mother could not cope. My brother had returned to Navy service during the Korean War and was now with the medical contingent in Vietnam. My nephew was a Navy pilot, stationed on aircraft carriers, sent on frequent missions to bomb the enemy.

  In Carrollton I stumbled on an unexpected friend. Will Neill, the local banker, had for years been a familiar landmark, a gruff-spoken, old-fashioned, confident gentleman, a little frightening to a small girl he had no reason to remark. But he had been my uncle Joe’s best friend, and together, as single men between marriages, they had gone about discovering wondrously happy times together.

  Now, my uncle gone, Will seemed intent on discovering me. He said that seeing me brought back old times. He must have noticed me more than I had thought. A traditional Southerner, he surprised me by praising The Voice at the Back Door. “You got this country down pat, Lizzie” was how he put it. He was well read and kept up with many of the Southern writers I admired. He and William Faulkner had exchanged letters.

  Will and his wife, Mary Dora, took me frequently to Lusco’s, a favored eating place and one of my uncle’s haunts, in Greenwood. Their back yard in summer was a place to sit with a drink while the light slowly faded and the trees turned to black silhouettes against a pearly sky. After a few drinks, however, Will would come forth with a curious idea. He believed, he said, that in the whole country there would be armed conflict with the blacks. “It will b
e a shooting war,” he said. “Now,” his wife chided, “you know Benny would never shoot at us.” (Benny, aged, jet-black, and kindly, was the family cook.) “The hell she wouldn’t,” he would say.

  Nevertheless, with Will I felt accepted. The gift astounded, but that made it all the sweeter. He understood much without being told. He dated back to a past I could know only by hearing about it. He was an active spirit in the present.

  Another discovery was cousins. One was the son of my first cousin Louie Spencer, who was in turn the son of my father’s brother Uncle Louie. Louie the Third started coming to Montreal in the interest of an international business project. He told me later that he had “dared” to ring me up. What tales he had possibly been told, I never knew. He came one summer afternoon with a friend. I gave them strawberry shortcake. To hear him speak of it later, he must have thought a “writer” had to be a wild woman in purple tights, swilling martinis.

  After a few minutes, we were talking easily, and on subsequent trips he came to know John as well. His father was a respected businessman in Greenwood. Through Louie, I found the way open to renewing his father’s acquaintance. Uncle Louie had died some years before. Louie Jr.’s help and support during my father’s last difficult years were all one could wish for. Through such contacts as these we became friends. When he died of a fast-moving cancer in the early eighties, I felt I had lost someone more a brother than a cousin.

  Many doors were suddenly opening. Cousins who had been in the South all through the years of stress, trial, and confrontation were graduating into a saner, freer, easier world. Especially after my parents’ deaths in the mid-seventies, I needed them in a practical way. I also delighted in finding them accessible to friendship.

  May, of long remembrance, was as bright an intelligence as ever. My cousin Jamie, practicing law in Jackson, a respected city judge for many years, was his funny old self, ready for a talk, a laugh, or serious family advice.

  In 1969 one of my literary invitations was to the University of North Carolina, where I got to know such figures as Doris Betts, Max Steele, and Daphne Athas, fine writers and formidable creative-writing teachers, also Louis Rubin, the eminent Southern critic, novelist, essayist, and teacher. Through the years that followed Louis became a prime mover in seeing me invited to various gatherings of Southern writers, in Mississippi, Louisiana, and North Carolina. But it was not until the eighties, after a good many years so unexpectedly but for the most part happily passed in the land of ice and snow, that we felt it was time to move.

  One reason was the deteriorating political scene in Canada, a constant English-French conflict that turned a beautifully welcoming international city into a battleground of name-calling and demands for change. One referendum followed another. Many of the oldest English-speaking residents moved elsewhere; the FLQ (Federation Liberation de Quebec) became known as “Folks Leaving Quebec”; the food in Toronto improved from the influx of French chefs. Quebec, it was loudly said, must be “liberated.” Coming to visit a world’s fair, “Expo,” in the late sixties, Charles de Gaulle cried out “ Vive le Quebec libre!” The French applause was thunderous. Ottawa rescinded its invitation to the general. But he had struck a match to tinder.

  Quebec has never separated from the rest of Canada, but the festering grievances go on to this day; concessions are voted in, negotiations proposed and compromises rejected. The outsider, once so happy to be part of an open-minded, evolving country, one delighting in the arts and building new centers for performance and exhibition, now had a box seat on a conflict in which he felt no visceral interest. Did it really matter if a clerk in a store spoke in English rather than French? It mattered to the clerk, who could be reported and fired.

  Yet the conflict was bound to be of interest to a writer. The source of it, it seemed to me, was the Quebecois fear of losing their language. Already in a multiracial city like Montreal, English was slowly prevailing. “Joual,” a kind of street argot, was spoken all the time in poor areas. Lists of odd expressions could be drawn up. A car was repaired? “Out, madame, ca runera.” A room is dark? “Switchez la lumiere.” It is fearful, like losing a part of the mind or the body, to think that your language is being taken away. The violent assertion of French identity seemed motivated by this fear of loss.

  But it was a long struggle, which would take more than one lifetime to reach resolution. Canadians doubtless have the good sense eventually to move beyond, but for us the struggle had no special personal significance. About this time my dormant health problems flared up. In a specialist’s judgment, the Canadian climate was not the best place for me to be. John, with his usual generosity, said my turn had come. We would seek a place in the United States, farther to the south.

  In 1985 I had been with Louis Rubin at two conferences, one in Baton Rouge to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of The Southern Review, the other an international literary conference in Miami.

  The Southern Review conference, hosted by Louisiana State University, was of especial nostalgic interest. Red Warren, who along with Cleanth Brooks had started the publication in 1934, was present, though his health was obviously deteriorating. His throat ailment made it impossible for him to finish his scheduled reading. He gamely struggled through one poem, then asked for someone else to read. At our applause, he waved cheerfully from his silent seat in the background. I listened through tears. It was the last time I saw him.

  Cleanth Brooks was present also, with Tinkum, his beloved wife, so soon after to die of cancer. Eudora Welty was there to read stories that The Southern Review, edited by these discerning two, had published when she was a beginning writer. Walker Percy and Bunt were present, Walker under heavy siege by autograph hunters.

  But I myself felt hardly present at times, for I was running a constant fever and had to survive on liberal doses of codeine and cough syrup. The same ailment, a sort of “walking pneumonia,” had cropped up again when I went to the conference in Miami. Louis Rubin remarked all this with a worried frown and we talked of a possible move. Not long after, I received an offer to come to a part-time teaching job at the University of North Carolina.

  After thirty-three years of displacement, the long road had turned a wanderer southward. I rejoiced to see that road was no longer mined and booby-trapped, but broad, smooth, and welcoming.

  In 1986 we came to Chapel Hill. It was midsummer. The weather was scalding hot. Two mornings before we had wakened in the cool mists of Gananoque, a border point on the St. Lawrence River near the Thousand Islands. There were huge gray boulders along the highway. Trees, vines, and grass were a rich green. Beneath the bridge, one of the world’s great rivers ran blue and quietly powerful on its way to the sea.

  At the border, the customs declared our car not to have proper smog control by U.S. standards. The officials examined John’s many papers of immigration, so tediously amassed out of interviews, photographs, medical examinations, and records of health and employment. They must also have read our faces. Searching hard, they read fine print and found a “one-time only” exception to the regulation. Then with handshakes and smiles, they wished us good luck and waved us through.

  Our passage over the high arch of the Thousand Islands Bridge marked more than the start of a new chapter. It would require a whole new volume, and will have to await another time for telling.

  INDEX

  Accent, 193

  Adventures of Augie March, The (Bellow), 216

  Agrarians, 173–74, 182, 184, 186

  Aleck Maury, Sportsman (Gordon), 274

  Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 281

  Allan, John, 296

  All the King’s Men (Warren), 198, 251

  Ambassadors, The (James), 178

  American Academy (Rome), 254, 263, 311–12

  American Academy of Arts and Letters, 252, 312, 325

  Amos and Andy, 93

  Anderson, Walter, 240–41, 243–44

  Angell, Roger, 313–14, 319

  Armada, The (
Mattingly), 265

  Arrington, Elizabeth, 122–23

  Aswell, Edward, 304

  Athas, Daphne, 330

  Atwood, Margaret, 322

  Austen, Jane, 34, 320

  Award of Merit Medal, 325

  Bad Nauheim, 218–20, 222

  Ball, Lucy Wollard, 5

  Barefoot Contessa, The (La Contessa Scalza), 262

  Baton Rouge, La., 183, 206

  Baugh, Miss, 70, 103, 105

  Bay St. Louis, Miss., 231, 239–42

  Bean, Ida, 157–58

  Beard, Mary, see Spencer, Mary Beard

  Beauregard, Pierre Gustave Toutant, 79, 88

  Bel Geddes, Barbara, 301

  Belhaven College, 160–69, 174, 176, 190, 196, 200, 202, 205–6, 232, 293

  Bellow, Anita, 216–18, 228, 254

  Bellow, Saul, 183, 216–17, 228, 251, 254

  Bergman, Ingrid, 269

  Berlioz, Hector, 228

  Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 262

  Betts, Doris, 330

  Bible, 19, 34, 61–64, 74, 84, 91, 110, 117, 121, 193, 195

  Big Sand Creek, 3, 64, 127

  Biloxi, Miss., 231, 232–33, 237, 242

  Bingham family, 125

  Blissard family, 205

  Bogart, Humphrey, 262

  Boone, Milt, 143–44

  Borgese, Antonio, 276

  Borgese, Elisabeth Mann, 276–77

  Borromini, 262

  Bostonians, The (James), 14, 178

  Botteghe Oscure, 264

  Botticelli, Sandro, 226, 279

  Bowen, Elizabeth, 237–38, 253

  Bowen’s Court, 238

  Brahms, Johannes, 208, 219

  Branson, Mo., 65, 67

  Brazzi, Rossano, 319

  Bread Loaf writers’ conference, 246–49, 250

  Breckinridge, Lucy, 147–48

  Brooks, Cleanth, 165, 183, 235, 302–3, 332

  Brooks, Tinkum, 302–3, 332