Hal Crowther

Three Graces

 

In Elizabeth Spencer's short story "A Southern Landscape," an enormous antebellum ruin called Windsor is locally famous--in fictional Port Claiborne, Mississippi--because its cupola was once so high you could see it from the river, and pilot Mark Twain was reputed to have steered by it. The narrator Marilee, a practical girl, notes in characteristic fashion that she has read "Life on the Mississippi" and that in fact Twain steered by nearly anything: "crawfish mounds, old rowboats stuck in the mud, the tassels on somebody's corn patch, and every stump and stob from New Orleans to Cairo, Illinois."

To many who have never made the journey, Southern literature is like its big river--over-travelled and over-observed, and steered by landmarks of little consequence to anyone but the natives. It's true that no place on earth celebrates or scrutinizes its  writers as the South has; it's probably true that literary chauvinism and self-consciousness were accelerated by H.L. Mencken's notorious attacks on Southern culture in the 1920s.  But the great Renaissance, the one that seemed to spring from Mencken's contempt, was real. My advice to a contemporary student of Southern literature is to take a rain check on the cutting edge crowd and also on the critics, traditional or revisionist. Go back on up the river--a river of time, in this case--and take the whole trip from Cairo to the Vieux Carre.

A few of time's landmarks loom as high as Windsor's cupola, and every pilot has his favorites. One of mine is a summer evening in Pass Christian, Mississippi, in 1951, in a high-ceilinged room in the old Miramar Hotel. This is a scene from a film, though no cameras were present. The young woman in the chair is Eudora Welty, the older woman in the bed, propped up on pillows, feeling poorly, is Katherine Anne Porter. The youngest woman, sitting on the floor, is Elizabeth Spencer.

Three women literally worth a thousand stories, a whole literary tradition talking quietly in a hotel room on the Gulf Coast. It was a summer of the Korean War, of Cold War hysteria and spies--Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had just been convicted, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had just fled London for Moscow. J.D. Salinger had just published "The Catcher in the Rye." The previous December, William Faulkner had received his Nobel Prize in Stockholm and made his famous speech --"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail"--against the pervasive fear that seemed to be enveloping the world.

There's only one living witness to the meeting at the Miramar, and with typical self-effacement Spencer, in her memoir "Landscapes of the Heart," remembers herself listening to the older women talk. "Katherine Anne was lying on the bed recounting her experiences--such experiences," Spencer told me, "and Eudora and I were her audience." But when I implied that hers was the role of the little sister in this company, Spencer pushed that away.

"Katherine Anne may have seen me that way. I didn't know her. But  Eudora never treated me like a little sister or a protege, not from the moment we met. We were always friends and equals. That's the way Eudora was, the only way she'd have it."
I asked her to describe Katherine Anne Porter. Porter, who died in 1980, may be the only writer, male or female, whose "countless other painful love affairs" are part of the standard bio in academic anthologies. I used the phrase "body language," which made Spencer laugh.
"To comment on her body language you'd have to be male," she said, her voice going high as it does when she's amused. "She was impressive to look at, more than a little attractive. She told us 'I would have been able to do much more, except for the many interruptions--by that I mean the time I've given to men.'"

One remarkable thing about the three women at the Miramar is the size of their achievement--read the collected stories of all three and you've earned a master's degree in Deep South studies without ever consulting a man. And another is their overwhelming failure to match any of the venerable stereotypes of the Southern woman, least of all the ones they manipulate in their fiction.

Porter, my grandmother's age, was an unsinkable farmer's daughter from East Texas who used her way with words and men to range the world and forge a one-of-a-kind reputation. Sometime actress, artist and revolutionary, fulltime scandal, Porter set many of her stories in genteel Christian parlors where she would not have been welcome. Eudora Welty, a generation younger, relished her freedom as a special case in a closed society where every woman, married or unmarried, was supposed to be dependent on her family. Welty's image in old age, receiving worshipful pilgrims at her house in Jackson, bears little resemblance to the intrepid  traveler and continental sophisticate we encounter in memoirs like Spencer's. Welty wrote about home, but she was never a stay-at-home until time clipped her wings.

Spencer, a child in the Jazz Age South of flappers and rumble seats, faced fewer obstacles to liberation and an artist's vocation. But she found too many in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where she was related to everyone. A Guggenheim took her to Italy and the literary life, and in Rome she met an Englishman from Cornwall, John Rusher. After their marriage they lived in Montreal for 30 years. Spencer, who moved to Chapel Hill in 1986, never got more than halfway home to Mississippi.

None of these ladies led a sheltered or even a cautious life, and it's not surprising that the conversation in Pass Christian touched on men as much as books. Spencer, reticent about the specifics, recalls the tone as ironic but not unkind. I've observed firsthand how Welty and Spencer enjoyed the company of younger men. They both inspired extremes of protective chivalry. You could easily look up Spencer's age, for instance, but you couldn't get it out of me with thumbscrews. Welty with her perfect courtesy was the wise aunt, the older sister who saw and understood all male, indeed all human frailty and forgave it. Elizabeth Spencer is a shy woman with a natural reserve she can lower, when it's called for, like a set of Venetian blinds. But like the Southern belles she disparages, she seems practiced in the detection and management of testosterone. My wife once described her "Sphinx-like, almost seductive smile." I don't know that I've ever seen Elizabeth more animated, or more charming, than the night of James Dickey's wake in Columbia, when the sad part was over and the bourbon came out and she found herself at a table for six with five admiring men.

An amusing aspect of the generation gap is the way our children  choose to discount our sins and passions, how they refuse to acknowledge that we were ever young. It's funnier to me now that I'm on the elderly side of this misunderstanding--the coals are still smoldering from the hell we raised and the next generation thinks we're huddled by the fire to keep warm. These children might be astonished by the fiction of Elizabeth Spencer, which I imagine them dismissing, in their ignorance, as restrained and tepid lady literature. In fact it's full of reckless drinking, creative sin and sexual misbehavior. In her short story "The Business Venture," we find compulsive adultery within a clique of archetypal smalltown swingers; in "Ship Island," lethal male creatures, as repellent as Popeye in Faulkner's "Sanctuary," lie in wait for the girl who's looking for trouble. In her novel "The Snare," a beguiling old pervert waits in an airless upstairs room in New Orleans.

As a writer, Spencer has never been afraid to open the door to the darkness. Nothing human is censored. The difference between a Spencer story and a slice of "Rough South" from Harry Crews or Larry Brown lies in the social class of the characters, mainly, and in the language she chooses to describe their sins. Though I used to pester editors to let me use four-letter words, now I find it irresistible when Spencer, in her memoir, describes a homosexual as "not the kind, as they said in those days, to have girl friends." Faulkner's mistress, Joan Williams, is introduced as "a special interest of William Faulkner's."

"I don't know if I'm shockable by language," she told me. "I like Barry Hannah, and he's pretty rough. But there's a difference between facing up to ugly things and wallowing in them."

What most of her protagonists hold in common is an unfocused but overpowering longing. "The constant subject of Spencer's fiction is passion," wrote Lee Smith. There's always a pulse in it, and there was a strong pulse, always, in the woman who wrote it. "I think back on the many ways of falling in love," she writes in "Landscapes," "a good number of which I can report on firsthand..." On the page preceding her account of the evening at the Miramar, she reminisces about burning a tall stack of love letters in the back yard. "The smoke was at least good for keeping the mosquitoes off," she recalls, in a voice like Marilee's.

Of the distinguished trinity who convened at the Miramar, Porter and Welty achieved their greatest public success--bestsellers, films, Pulitzer Prizes--late in life. Spencer reached hers early, in 1960, when her novella "The Light in the Piazza" was a commercial and critical triumph and a major motion picture with Olivia De Havilland and Rossano Brazzi. During the years in Montreal she was a larger figure in Canadian and world literature than in the closely-guarded canon of her native South. That changed with her return. Much has changed: Spencer is a widow now and Welty, her friend of 50 years, is gone, too. The Miramar and most of her beloved Gulf Coast landmarks were destroyed by Hurricane Camille in 1969. But she's learning, as Porter and Welty learned before her, that if you live long enough your career will grow new chapters, addenda, footnotes, epilogues. Spencer's most recent collection, "The Southern Woman," (2001) will be published in paperback in the fall. In June she flew to Seattle for the premiere of a new musical based on "The Light in the Piazza," with songs by Richard Rodgers' grandson, Adam Guettel. It moves to Chicago in January, with its eye on Broadway.

"My books are all in print, all but one," Spencer told me. "And there are so many encouraging people here in North Carolina. I really can't complain." And very conspicuously she doesn't. If you read "Landscapes of the Heart" you won't find a word about aging. Published in 1998, it ends with a new beginning--leaving Canada--and promises the reader "a whole new volume" when she finds the time.

 

(postscript: Pass Christian itself was virtually obliterated by Hurricane Katrina.)