The Essential Southern Writer You Don’t Know
Elizabeth Spencer, Finally
Followers of Finally will know that I don’t often write about fiction authors who are of our own time. Elizabeth Spencer, who died just a few years ago at the age of 98, is something of an exception. She is rightly celebrated as an American writer, of course, and especially as a Southern writer, a fair successor to Peter Taylor, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty, though I think she surpassed at least two of them. She also belongs, in my view, in the long tradition of American innocents abroad (think Mark Twain, of course, and Henry James), and I believe her work to be, so far, the last chapter of that line, though at least some of my readers will have different views on this interesting question.
Elizabeth Spencer was born in 1921 in small-town Mississippi, stood out as a student first locally and then at Vanderbilt, won a Guggenheim Fellowship in the early 1950s and then departed for Italy, as, I suppose, one did at the time. Truth is I bet a lot of people would love to sojourn in Italy now if they could, though they’d be seeing a country in rapid decline rather than in rapid recovery. She wrote there for a while then married and hung around Canada and then came back to the United States, to North Carolina, where she became an important writing teacher at Chapel Hill. In the second half of her life, her work was championed by her fellow Mississippian Eudora Welty, who probably single-handedly rescued her from a kind of third-order literary oblivion, as Spencer had been less spectacularly productive in the latter decade or two, and her reputation had been slipping into polite critical and public indifference.
The Light in the Piazza is probably Spencer’s most famous book, published in 1960 and delightfully informed by her time in Tuscany. Margaret, a Southern woman rich enough to tour Europe with her mild and attractive daughter Clara, harbors an uncomfortable secret: due to an accident, Clara’s intellectual development is stunted in childhood. One day, in Florence, a young Italian named Fabrizio, the son of a shopkeeper, introduces himself to Clara, and they become enamored. For reasons of translation or culture – we don’t ever really learn which – Clara’s limitations are overlooked, and Margaret sets about agreeing to the proposal of marriage and hastening along the nuptials before her overbearing businessman husband can bring effect to his objections. The book is light, airy, and just a little sad, and at its core is a suddenly enlivened flower of a lady with a steel backbone, animated by temporary family freedom and the serendipitous arrival of a chance at unlikely happiness for her child, each element of which and all of it together of which make the book a perfect Southern American transplant to the central Italian City of Lilies. But Piazza is much more famous as a kind of light evening entertainment. It certainly isn’t that, but that’s what became of the book in adaptation, both as a film starting Olivia de Havilland and as a Broadway musical that continues to get revived around the United States. Suffice it to say that the plot points about Clara’s incapacities and some more dislikable sharp character edges (for example, about her otherwise off-stage father) are softened until they, too, disappear behind the dulcet tones of Tuscan sunsets.
Five years later, Spencer delivered her other Italian book, Knights and Dragons, more of a novella, set this time mostly in Rome. Martha, our protagonist, is an employee in the American cultural office in the Eternal City, and she used to be married to a man in New York who wrote well and dreamed beautifully but doesn’t seem to have lived much. She has come to Rome to, well, as it turns out, something like Eat, Pray, and Love, though far more intelligently than Julia Roberts’s character, pace the author Elizabeth Gilbert whose name I confess having had to Google just now. She falls in with two groups of American visitors to Italy, one headed up by an opera buff who is affiliated with the cultural office on temporary assignment and the other by an economist named Wilbourne. She has an affair with the married Wilbourne, and it is all a bit of a mess. Not much happens except we all realize that Martha is living the kind of wild and big life that her old husband inspired her to want.
Knights and Dragons could have been great. I kept waiting for it to make a turn that might have committed the action to its setting. There is no real reason it had to take place in Rome, and it takes precious little notice either of the city or of the unique political milieu that Italy was in postwar Europe. Italy was a nearly open warfare battleground between East and West. After World War II, the capitalist Allies, led by the United States, left a sprawling semi-secret stay-behind army to fight the powerful forces of communism that grew somewhat organically from the Italian public and more prosperously through the heavy surreptitious investment of the Soviet Union. The country was bankrupt and crawling its way out of Mussolini’s gutter. It was ripe for intrusion. More than Austria or Switzerland and nearly as much as the city of Berlin, Italy was the essential situs of the Cold War in exactly this period. None of that would have to matter to any novelist, but Spencer tees it up perfectly by placing her heroine in the American cultural embassy of Rome and making her other major characters compatriots with briefs for Western culture, the American government, and capitalism. It would have been grand to see a spy, a hint of tradecraft, a complot, an implied high-stakes gambit, a shadow of a parallel story, or nearly any form of intrigue at all in these pages. Spencer’s excellent artistry would have elevated such a suggestion from James Bond thriller to highly dexterous literature. But nothing doing. I almost get the impression Spencer would have considered it déclassé to condescend to include any form of plot in her meandering plot-let. Knights and Dragons contains no knights or dragons. Though this book is still celebrated by her admirers, I think it actually marked the beginning of her literary decline, from which, finally, she never really recovered.
But none of that actually matters. Elizabeth Spencer’s entire reputation could and can rest on The Voice at the Back Door. This novel, first published in 1956 and set in her native Mississippi, smashes the door open on race relations, crime, politics, and the private entangled lives of white and black Southerners. I think it should be a contender to replace To Kill a Mockingbird, which it predates by four years, in the American imagination, though it never will, because Harper Lee’s book is more vividly dramatic and because Spencer couldn’t produce a character as durable and exemplary as Atticus Finch. The hero of The Voice at the Back Door, Duncan Harper (yes, really, that’s his last name), appears at first blush to be a classic American hero, a man apart, a man from the future, big enough to be generous to his often hostile neighbors when he makes a public stand against the lynch mob, even at unthinkable cost.
The action begins when the local sheriff, who is white, in case that’s not obvious, leaves his black mistress’s house for the store run by Duncan Harper, who is something of a town favorite, and then dies on its floorboards. Duncan is swiftly appointed interim sheriff and finds himself in an election race against a bootlegger who has unenlightened views about African-Americans.
One of Harper’s first acts as sheriff is to lock up a black World War II veteran named Beck Dozer. Dozer has found himself in the midst of some trouble, allegedly responsible for slashing one of the bootlegger’s pals with a knife, and Harper wants Dozer safely ensconced away from the mob. As is always the case in Southern literature, there is important pre-history: decades earlier, Beck Dozer’s father had been shot in broad daylight at the local courthouse by a white man determined to suppress the local black population. The man who shot him was the bootlegger’s father. Now that Beck Dozer is in jail for an act of violence, everyone is rightly worried that the bootlegger will perpetuate the cycle, and Harper is determined to stop it. Sure enough, the bootlegger shows up at the jailhouse with a small gang. But not everything is as it seems, and the only thing these menacing men do is take a photograph of Harper defending his black inmate. The book unfolds and explains what has actually been happening in the murky world of midcentury Southern county politics, and we are, at the very least, surprised and edified.
The Voice at the Back Door is a story and empathetic explanation of the South, and it pulls no punches about any of the townspeople. Spencer is so good at revealing truthful nuance about protagonists and adversaries alike that she makes you wish Henrik Ibsen could have done the same.
But the most important, fabulous, and arresting part of The Voice at the Back Door is right bang in its opening pages. They fairly shout the arrival of a hugely important and new speaker of American English and literature. They are so good, so pitch perfect, that I will give them to you here. (Stop reading if you can’t countenance some distasteful language.)
On a winter afternoon, unseasonably warm, a car was racing over country roads toward town. Dust, gushing from the back wheels, ran together behind in a dense whirl. On the headlands, the sun cast its thin glare above the sagebrush; it shot through the little trees, the pin oaks and the new reedy pines, and its touch pained the eye.
A large rock of gravel leaped from the wheels and whanged a mailbox. A terrapin, off on a hundred years’ journey, missed death by half an inch. The car stitched a shallow curve and plunged downward, shivering: the descent was steep as a broom handle. But though the back wheels swayed, the car held the safe track, the ridges between the ruts, no broader than the edge of a nickel.
The hill emptied into a red road, quiet with sand and clay. Red clay gullies towered around, or fell away from the roadsides. No growth was on them, and some were deep enough to throw the church in. This was where the old-timers said the world was held together. Through this scarlet silence the car darted small and flat; then it ripped over a wooden bridge and was instantly swallowed in the trees of a Negro settlement.
Dogs leaped silent out of nowhere at the flying wheels and raced in pack for a way, yelping. They were mongrel hound and feist, the kind called “nigger dogs.” Before the road curved, the oldest dog sat down to scratch his flea, and a young Negro woman, barefoot, stepped out on the front porch, set her hands on her hips, and stared, her eyes, like the road, growing emptier every minute.
One thing about the car: it knew the road. A country car, after a few months of driving have loosened every joint and axle and worn the shock absorbers tender and given every part a special cry of its own, pushes very fine the barrier that divides it from horses and mules. The road it knows, it navigates: dodges the washouts, straddles the ruts, nicks the bumps on the easy corner, and strikes, just at the point of balance, the loose plank in the bridge.
What exceptional lines. Notice how she manages to represent, capture, explain, critically observe, and nonjudgmentally present the place, its value system, and its daily rhythms, all at once. I fell in love with Elizabeth Spencer immediately upon encountering these paragraphs, and I think any person interested in American literature must read them personally. The Voice at the Back Door is an essential piece of the country’s canon, and its first pages are among our best.
Now a personal aside: I serve on the National Advisory Board of the Eudora Welty Foundation. Some time after first reading Spencer’s work, I learned that she had served on the same board before her passing. This means nothing in particular. But it is, finally, awesome.