[In the following review, Enright offers a varied critique of The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer.]

Elizabeth Spencer was born in Mississippi (“‘the South’, our much perused literary land”, as Eudora Welty puts it in her amiable but brief foreword), was “indefinitely detained” in Italy, and now lives in Montreal. These are the terrains of her stories, not invented, but found or given.

The new reader of this generous selection of stories [The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer] drawn from the period 1944 to 1977—mind still virgin, apart perhaps from some vague confusion of Elizabeths: Bowen, Taylor, Bishop, Hardwick, Jennings, Jenkins—will be struck by those coolly brilliant phrases, images or aperçus which at once mark out the artist from the journeyman of letters: the more brilliant for their seeming casualness, they appear, you do not hear them coming. In Venice, German tourists move “in a slow, solemn, counter-clockwise procession … as though under tribal orders to see everything”, while the pigeons are “more mechanical still, with their wound-up motions, purple feet, and jewel-set eyes”. In Rome, when a small bell rings in a small church close by, “one actually looked about, expecting to see it, as though for a bird which had burst out singing”. In Mississippi, a white-shirted rider hugs the horse so low that you would think the animal “had run under a low line of drying laundry and caught something to an otherwise empty saddle and bare withers”.

In the second story here, “The Eclipse”, a twelve-year-old boy thinks that his music teacher, reckoned by the community to fancy herself just because she has lived in New York and knows about music, is really “no more stuck-up than a star”, but grows indignant when she deserts him for a newspaperman she knew at college. Later he worries, “How did she get home?” Elizabeth Spencer is beautifully deft in her dealings with child characters. Two little girls at Christmas, comparing presents, find it simpler to think of what they didn't get than of what they did. And especially fine is “Moon Rocket”, about a space-struck American boy and a Korean war orphan. Bill is always asking Janey what her Korean name is, because he likes to hear her reply: “something that sounded like a little mouse telling you its name”.

In “I, Maureen”, a painful account of a girl driven into—or perhaps embracing—something near insanity, the narrator recalls a winter night of driving snow, “snow everywhere, teeming, shifting, lofty as curtains in the dream of a mad opera composer, cosmic, yet intimate as a white thread caught in an eyelash”. Even here there are traces of stoic humour. Maureen is an unhappy “I” on the run from “We”, specifically from the Parthams, a wealthy Montreal family into which (astoundingly, since she is neither pretty nor “classy”) she has married. Her husband is handsome and (she can't think why) actually loves her. They have first a baby boy, the looked-for crown prince, and then a girl. “Isn't Nature great? She belongs to the Parthams.”

“The Adult Holiday”, written in the early 1960s, is a jewel, four pages long. A husband erupts in a violent, incomprehensible, unforgivable rage against his wife—short of his promptly admitting to insanity, she has no option but to pack her bags and call a lawyer. Turning herself into a maid, she gets out the silver and polishes it, without gloves: her splotched hands will no doubt annoy him, but “lamenting her hands would be like mourning the death of a kitten after the funeral of a child”. When their little girl comes home from school and asks why everyone is sad, her father tells her, because tomorrow is his forty-fifth birthday. If her mother had gone away soon after they met, then he wouldn't be here on his forty-fifth birthday, he would be somewhere else. … “Where would it be?” the child asks, “caught in a tangle of syntax almost like an enchantment”. But then, why hadn't she—or he—gone away? Because they didn't want to. There is nothing “slight” about this spare, concentrated story, to which a coarser writer would have given an unhappy ending without thinking twice.

The family there was a small one. Predominant, particularly in the Mississippi items, is the large and closely knit family: a source of comfort but also of suffocation, it gives you your place in the world but a place determined by others, from which you separate yourself perhaps by necessity but certainly at your peril. The theme is pursued in various guises, in varying degrees of comedy and of tragedy, with sentimentality always evaded nimbly. The woman who remarks that there have to be some things you can count on, for you need “a sort of permanent landscape of the heart” when so much is changing, is thinking of the boy she knew twenty years before: he drank heavily then, and it is only right that he should go on drinking heavily. Contrariwise, on her first day in Rome, at last, Miss Theresa Stubblefield, who has nursed a succession of Stubblefields through their lengthy and last illnesses, receives letters from home reporting the death of Cousin Elec and hinting that something will have to be done (by her) about Cousin Emma. She tears the letters up and buries the pieces in a pot containing a white azalea, on the Spanish Steps. “Well, it certainly is beyond a doubt the most beautiful family funeral of them all!” she thinks. Visualizing a statue of some heroic classical woman holding a dagger that drips with stony blood, she adds: “And if they should ever object to what I did to them, they've only to read a little and learn that there have been those in my position who haven't acted in half so considerate a way.”

Elsewhere a young scientist, Aline, specializing in disease-carrying parasites found in South American countries, remembers the day when she excitedly told her family that she had been promised a fellowship after graduating: “One by one she saw those faces, so like her own, turn glum, and dollar signs, as if in comic strips, appeared to grow on their eyeballs.” The story begins in a New Orleans restaurant where she is chatting with a young man met at a convention a few months previously. He comes from Chicago, where (unless perhaps they are Jewish) they don't have families like hers. “Good God”, he jokes. “Incest, suicide, insanity, cancer, murder, divorce. Is that the best, really the best, you can do? I thought every Mississippi family had at feast one idiot, two rapists, and a good criminal lawyer.” She says, “I've only described my immediate family”, adding: “Of course, I love them all.” Self-knowledge is something she believes in, although (she muses to herself) “trying to find it in the bosom of a Mississippi family was like trying to find some object lost in a gigantic attic, when you really didn't know what you were looking for”. In these stories, light-hearted passages are often less wholeheartedly light than they seem at first, just as the sombre passages stop short of utter and final darkness.

Maureen escapes from the Parthams, but at a dreadful cost, and only into a version of limbo. A much more affectionate and indeed moving account of the process is unfolded in “The Day Before”, which starts with the child's first day at school. Besides her parents and her grandfather, she has the three old Thomases, unmarried sister and bachelor brothers, who live next door, with their eccentric dogs, their valuable china (from which the dogs are fed) and the rosewood furniture which had belonged to a highly educated aunt, now dead, whose parrot could quote Shakespeare. There's family life for you—surely all the life you could ever wish for. After that first day at school, life changes: the same faces are there, at home, but somehow they are fading. “This was the big surprise, and I had no power over it.”

Life is important right down to the last crevice and corner. The tumult of a tree limb against the stormy early morning February sky will tell you forever about the poetry, the tough non-sad, non-guilty struggle of nature. It is important the way ants go one behind the other, hurrying to get there, up and down the white-painted front-porch post. The nasty flash and crack of lightning, striking a tall young tree, is something you have got to see to know about. Nothing can change it; it is just itself.

So nothing changed, nothing and nobody, and yet having once started to lose them a little, I couldn't make the stream run backward, I lost them completely in the end. Little guilt, the little sadness I felt sometimes: was it because I hadn't really wanted them enough, held on tightly enough, had not, in other words, loved them?

Now they are all dead, dogs, parrots and people, and furniture is dispersed. “Long before anybody died, or any animal, I was walking in a separate world.” Yet years later, at a friend's house, she sees a box of blue milk glass which the owners have never been able to open. It came from “the old Thomas house”, she is told. Without thinking, she moves her finger to the hidden catch and the box flies open: she must once have been shown how it worked. “Something in me was keeping an instinctive faith with what it knew. Had they never been lost then at all? I wondered.”

That is a perfect story, which means it could never be a novel. The longest piece here is the ninety-page Knights & Dragons—the author remarks that “it wound up a novel”—which concerns an American woman working at the US cultural office in Rome. This establishment is portrayed humorously but with no trace of guying; its director gets involved in a long-running rumpus, clearly of cultural implication, over the ambassador being poisoned by the ceiling paint:

Ceiling paint? No Roman ever believed this, just as no American ever doubted it. Solemn assurances eventually were rendered by a US medical staff that the thing had actually taken place. The Romans howled. You could judge how close you came to being permanent here by how much you doubted it.

Martha too is escaping—from her husband, a great and good thinker, teacher, financial expert and so forth: clearly a dragon. She doesn't find her perfect gentle knight; if she did, she would probably run away from him too. Her love affair with a visiting expert (knights shouldn't be already married) is conducted in “starved little rooms” around the city, even though she has a fine apartment. Sexual attraction, and action, are conveyed with finesse. Perhaps Knights & Dragons is too extended for the story it grew out of and too elliptic for the novel it (almost) grew into. Despite the local successes, characteristic (we now see) of this author, the tale is more elusive than even this author's delicacy of touch can justly require, and the main characters, sharply present at the outset, seem to fade as the pages turn, as if under some rather too protracted process of refinement.

Aline's picture of her family—“incest, suicide, insanity …”—bring to mind Marvin Mudrick's suggestion that the future historian wishing to get a sense of what life was like in the US between FDR and Nixon need only empty out the whole sack of [Joyce Carol] Oates “and scratch around in the true grain of America”: “Typical activities in Oates novels are arson, rape, riot, mental breakdown, murder (plain and fancy, with excursions into patricide, matricide, uxoricide, mass filicide), suicide”. Elizabeth Spencer's America, her world, is a different one—a world shared with Eudora Welty, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford, Anne Tyler and (it isn't essential to be a female but it helps to come from the South) Peter Taylor—and much closer to Henry James and Edith Wharton than to the noisy, sweating males (though females are eligible too) responsible for what is commonly thought of as the American Novel, even the Great American Novel. It may be—for it is in the nature of good writing to show up its own occasional deficiencies—that with some of Elizabeth Spencer's stories the whole is less than the sum of the parts. But the parts generally add up to a considerable amount.