SOURCE: Evoy, Karen. “Marilee: ‘A Permanent Landscape of the Heart.’” Mississippi Quarterly 36, no. 4 (fall 1983): 569-78.

[In the following essay, Evoy analyzes the narrative voice in the stories comprising Marilee.]

Marilee, the recently published volume of three interrelated short stories by Elizabeth Spencer, centers around one of the author's most endearing and most Southern characters. Originally published in The New Yorker and The Southern Review, “A Southern Landscape” (1960), “Sharon” (1970) and “Indian Summer” (1978) were first brought together in The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, an impressive body of short fiction which has garnered both popular and critical success; not only has Penguin Canada sold the paperback rights to Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, but the collected stories won the prestigious American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters' 1983 Award of Merit Medal, with Spencer thus joining the illustrious company of such previous winners as Thomas Mann (1949), Ernest Hemingway (1954) and Vladimir Nabokov (1969).

What draws the Marilee stories together despite their wide separation in time, in terms of both their actual composition and their individual portraits of the central heroine, is their shared setting, characters and thematic concerns; hence, the appropriateness of a single volume that unites them in the chronological order of their original publication. The focal point, however, throughout this slim but densely packed volume, is the voice of Marilee herself.

In her foreword to Marilee, Spencer muses on where this “sweet, ironic girl-voice”¹ came from, and recalls that “it started talking … right when I needed to hear it” (p. 6). After her sojourn in Italy (made possible in 1953 by a Guggenheim Fellowship), Spencer, a native Mississippian, had settled in another country that was new to her, Canada, and in a city, Montreal, “that was surprising in many new ways” (p. 6). Confined by “raging blizzards the likes of which I had never imagined” (p. 6), Spencer found herself writing intensively “all about Italy … and the South: so many scenes sprang to mind they seemed to wait in line for me to get them down” (p. 6). Yet she found this work “dramatic, impersonal, observed”; she felt something was missing “and unconsciously … waited for it” (p. 6).

The wait was shortlived. One morning, when she'd been reflecting back on the small Mississippi towns of her youth, it came to her—the sunny voice of Marilee Summerall. Like Elizabeth Spencer, Marilee is a mature woman who now lives “far away” (“A Southern Landscape,” p. 24), yet, as Spencer concedes, “what ‘far away’ means to Marilee is not for me to say” (Foreword, p. 7). Marilee, Spencer insists, is a separate being. Both author and character, however, are deeply rooted in the rich soil of Mississippi regardless of the distances of their respective vantage points in the present. It is as much Elizabeth as Marilee who looks back over the landscape of her past, both its physical setting (of which she is no longer a part)² and its psychological one which, nevertheless, endures through the past's claim on her.

Despite her identification with Marilee, Spencer manages, through the use of irony, to retain “her capacity for cool detachment” which, as Eudora Welty notes, is a hallmark of her style.³ In light of Marilee's ability to blithely reduce painful or somber memories to “such doleful thoughts” (“Landscape,” p. 16), Spencer views her heroine's irony as “temperate, more used for keeping a humourous distance, a kind of playing safe, but it can really extend to a great deal. For one thing, it can make memory bearable; for another, it can ease both the passing and the passing-by of things” (Foreword, p. 8).

Marilee's return to the lost world of her youth takes her back to three distinct phases of her early development: as innocent child in “Sharon,” as earnest adolescent in “A Southern Landscape” and as remote young woman in “Indian Summer.” Yet in each story the mature Marilee, the one who lives “far away,” remains the constant that unifies the work as a whole. Her three separate journeys in time serve the same function; they allow her to renew the ties with her family and home town (Port Claiborne) in an attempted retrieval of the very past that was lost through the rites of adulthood (i.e., growing up and leaving home).

In the course of her imaginative homecoming, Marilee confronts powerful images of the South, images that, according to Spencer, “never go away; they do not even fade.”⁴ Weather and landscape, the strong sense of attachment to family and the past, the mixture of black and white blood are matters deeply embedded in the South, as reflected in its literature. But they are also crucial to Marilee's search for self, an identity locked in the time and place from which it has sprung. As Spencer further notes, it is something Marilee herself might explain by saying, “You certainly can't know where you are till you know where you were.”⁵

As Marilee returns to seek her “roots,” she brings us with her, immersing us in a wash of vibrant impressions that span the years with their strong sense of immediacy. In “A Southern Landscape” Marilee hospitably guides the reader into the world of her youth, offering detailed directions to her home that are richly evocative. In describing the “prettiest road” on State Highway No. 202, she plunges her guest (and herself) deep into the heart of the Southern landscape, as it is affected by the changing seasons:

It's just about the way it always was—worn deep down like a tunnel and thick with shade in summer. In spring, it's so full of sweet heavy odors, they make you drunk, you can't think of anything—you feel you will faint or go right out of yourself. In fall. there is the rustle of leaves under your tires and the smell of them, all sad and Indian-like. Then in the winter, there are only dust and bare limbs, and mud when it rains, and everything is like an old dirt-dauber's nest up in the corner.

(p. 10)

There is both continuity and change here, as reflected in the cycle of seasons itself from the lush sensuality of spring to the dust and mud of winter. This eternal pattern of renewal and decay comes to full force in the stark superimposition of Marilee's budding sexuality on a night “full of spring, all restlessness and sweet smells” (p. 14) against the “horror” of Windsor, a crumbling colonial mansion overrun by “the hand of Nature” (p. 15). Yet the two, sex and death, are inextricably bound in their contact with the mystery of the universe and the relentless onslaught of time. As Marilee confides to her reader, “It's an enormous world, bigger than you can imagine, but it's all connected up. What Nature does to Windsor it does to everything, including you and me—there's the horror” (p. 15).

Marilee's fear of the ravages of time is closely related to her fear of losing touch with her heritage, as seen in her terror of Windsor (a dying remnant of the Old South) and her fear that her own home will follow in Windsor's wake. “The shrubs around the porch and the privet hedge around the bay window were all grown up too high the last time I was there. They ought to be kept trimmed down” (pp. 10-11). Yet nature is far more often a vital, rather than destructive, part of Marilee's landscape, in keeping with the South's agrarian roots. We always know where we are in Marilee's world and what the weather is like. Thus, the ultimate destructive force is one which attacks these roots, as exemplified in “Indian Summer” by Cousin Andrew's plans to yield forty acres of the McClelland estate over to suburban housing, a shopping center and a motel, all of which would net a tidy profit, but which would be a blight on the landscape of the country. Although Marilee is as much to blame for exploiting the land through her real estate ventures, her lapse is not as complete as Andrew's. She suffers twinges of an uneasy conscience which eventually send her searching for the landscape of the Real South before it was (in Spencer's words) “gnawed at by prosperity and change.”⁶

Marilee finds this lost South in her rich Southern heritage: in the land of her childhood, whether a “nice flat” yard “not much for growing grass but wonderful for shooting marbles” (“Landscape,” p. 11) or “pasture land, good for playing in … handy for hunting arrowheads” (“Indian,” p. 41); in the lazy Southern atmosphere where people say “Hey” and “y'all” and where “‘Sweet’ was a big word with all of them; I guess they got it from so many flowers and from the night air in South Mississippi, almost all seasons” (“Sharon,” p. 26); and in the strong Southern traditions of literature—from Twain to Faulkner (as alluded to in “Landscape”), religion—reflected in “the gilded hand on the Presbyterian church … still pointing to Heaven and not to Outer Space” (“Landscape,” p. 24) and history—exemplified by Windsor (the pre-Civil War colonial mansion) “still right where it always was, standing pure in its decay” (“Landscape,” p. 16). And she finds it in family, a constant and vital force in both the South and its literature.

Part of what makes the family such an enduring force has to do with its being firmly lodged in place. Says Marilee of her own family: “Everybody knows us. Not that we are anybody—I don't mean that. It's just that we've been there forever” (“Landscape,” p. 10). As “Indian Summer” stresses, with time, the family becomes an integral part of its surroundings to the extent that a merging evolves, as in the case of Uncle Hernan, whose house (the old Wirth home) had “claimed” him; “he belonged to it and they were one” (p. 51). Thus, the families in Marilee's world are also known by the houses they keep, which are mirrors of their own distinctive characteristics. Uncle Hernan's house is “pre-Civil War and classical in design” (p. 51), a reflection of himself as a Southern gentleman and proud Wirth, still living the plantation life of the Old South. The Summerall home, on the other hand, is simply “a sturdy farming house” (p. 51), in keeping with Jim Summerall's being “a tough little farming man and a good squirrel shot” (p. 50). These are contrasted with the McClelland house which, due to its “citified” mien, is alien to both the Wirths and the Summeralls who, despite their differences, are firmly steeped in Southern rural traditions. “The McClelland house was a country place, but it had high, white important sides with not enough windows, like a house on a city street. The McClellands were nice people … yet the house was different from what we would have had” (pp. 41-42).

This contrast between country and city values—between reverence and disrespect for the land—is explored in “Indian Summer” where opposing sets of values are underlined by the different families that adhere to them. Families are described as living entities who share not only similar value systems, but also common traits and temperaments. On the one hand we have Uncle Rex, a proud Wirth with the Wirth tendency to live in high style, although his style (drinking and gambling) is noticeably less refined than his brother Hernan's. Still, like his brother, he is a simple country man—a good farmer—with an “almost military air of authority” (p. 37), reflecting pride in the land and history of the South. The McClellands, on the other hand, are a domesticated, pious breed of Southerner who “make mighty poor farmers” (p. 48) and hence rely on Rex to manage the family estate; yet they are always descending upon him in droves, “making silently clear the place was theirs” (p. 39). Not only do they deny Rex a stake in the place he runs (which, as Hernan notes, “he never forgot … for a minute”—p. 38), but they attempt to rob him of his very character by absorbing him into the folds of their self-righteous piety: “It was in the course of nature—that and pleasing the McClellands who were strict—that Uncle Rex had given all his meanness up; he was a regular churchgoer now, first a deacon, then an elder” (pp. 39-40). Yet, as Marilee notes, the McClellands, particularly her possessive Aunt Martha, do not own Rex Wirth any more than he owns the McClelland property, although both sides can “point to improvements” (p. 42).

What begins as seeming submission on Rex's part erupts into a full-scale “family feud” as familial ties are renewed and strengthened on both sides. While Rex and Hernan visit their brother in Illinois, Martha and her son Andrew (who resembles his mother and is “a good boy through and through, the way Aunt Martha wanted him”—p. 43) get “thicker than thieves” (p. 44) in their plot to sell forty acres of the McClelland land. Indeed, the entire McClelland clan seem to be “in” on the deal as they look up with “their large McClelland eyes, innocent as grazing deer” (p. 46). Only Uncle Rex (who feels “like a stranger at his own table”—p. 54) is outside it all, cast out from his traditional role as head of the family and alienated from their profiteering motives at the expense of the land. Hence, he dons “his oldest, most disreputable clothes” (p. 46) in defiance and storms out to find a life of his own.

It is at this point that for the first time Marilee plays an active role in the story; up to now she has been merely relating the story from the Wirth viewpoint without shaping the events themselves. The exception is her “tip” to Andrew which, as previously mentioned, suggests the start of her alienation from her landscape. She regains her foothold in her heritage, however, when she is sent, as the youngest and only available Wirth, to retrieve Uncle Rex. Uncle Rex must be brought home because he is family; he is important “because he doesn't know he is” (p. 53). What Marilee finds, though, causes her to question the very ties of blood that bind families together: Uncle Rex living an apparently idyllic existence in a trapper's house near the Mississippi River with a family of his own choosing:

There is such a thing as … family that is not blood family but a chosen family: I was seeing that. … I thought about Indian summer which isn't summer at all, but something else. There is the long hot summer, heavy and teeming, more real than life; and there is the other summer, pure as gold, as real as hope. Now … I saw the problem Rex Wirth must be solving and unsolving every day. If this was the place he belonged and the family that was—though not of blood—in a sense, his, why leave them ever? His life, like a tree drawn into the river and slipping by, must have felt the current pull and turn him every day. Wasn't this where he belonged?

(p. 60)

Uncle Rex's hope for a new life, one of his own making, turns out to be, like Indian summer, a false hope. The pull of the current toward home proves to be too strong, and so he returns during “giant upheavals of wind and hail and falling temperatures throughout the South, the breakup of Indian summer” (p. 61). The blood that calls him back, however, is only indirectly the blood of his family by marriage. It is the proud Wirth blood that demands his return, that requires he prove his worth by establishing himself in his “rightful” position as head of the household. It is a question of honor, that old Southern virtue, but although “Rex did what he had to … settled it with those McClellands, once and for all” (p. 63), his victory is not without its drawbacks. As Marilee notes, “we are back in the bosom of the real family now—the blood one—and … blood is for spilling, among other things” (p. 62). For Rex himself “it was mighty hard” (p. 63), this surrender of a personal dream to honor the family name. And for Andrew, the defeat of the McClellands means personal annihilation, the feeling that “he wasn't there anymore, that some force had moved through him and that life was not the same. … He felt (he told me later) like nothing and nobody” (p. 63).

Marilee can sympathize in her role as Andrew's confidante because she knows that identity lies deep within the family; hence, her interest in relating Uncle Rex's tale and in keeping his family together whether it means silently imploring Rex to come home or advising Andrew on how to keep him there. But Marilee also knows that family and the identity with which it is linked extend far beyond the immediate circle of related kin. She has seen one alternative as she lay on a ridge peering through binoculars at Uncle Rex's “chosen family”; she sees another as a young girl with a similary heightened perception in the story “Sharon.”

Sharon is the name of the old Wirth home run by Uncle Hernan from “his big old plantation desk … near the window” to which the “Negroes had worn a path … coming there to ask him things” (p. 28). Echoes of plantation life reverberate throughout the story, as reflected in Uncle Hernan's expensive tastes (including his choice of a wife) and in the omnipresence of blacks—the adults working in the house and yard and the children playing down by the gully. Moreover, when Marilee visits for her Thursday dinners, she is wrapped in the Southern rituals of good food and manners and in the folk culture of sharing tales with her uncle. The plantation myth is inverted, however, in the figure of Melissa, the educated and cultured black maid of Rex's dead wife who “was not like the rest of the Negroes around home” (p. 29) and in Rex's relationship with her. As Marilee later discovers, the children in the gully belong to her uncle and Melissa, but although Hernan “didn't have to count them the way Uncle Rex had to count Andrew” (“Indian,” p. 48), his apparent feelings for Melissa (glimpsed by Marilee through the parlor window) tell another story:

That motion, so much a part of him whom I loved, was for her and controlled her, as it had, I knew now, hundreds of times. She came close and they leaned together; he gathered her surely in. She gave him her strength and he drank it; they became one another.

(p. 34)

This picture of mutual love is far removed from the traditional plantation mentality of black exploitation. It further provides an effective contrast with Mrs. Summerall's racism which she attempts to transmit to her daughter, telling her if Melissa reads too long to her, she'll “get to smell like a Negro” (p. 30) and eventually forbidding her to even play with Melissa's children. Yet the day comes when Marilee “crossed over” (p. 34), bringing with her the open innocence of a child, an innocence that helps her to see things as they are—not as her mother makes them out to be—that Melissa smells good, not bad, that she is in love with Uncle Rex and he with her and that their children are more than just “perfect little devils” who “look nice on Sunday” (p. 35). In remembering the children pounding a washtub in the gully, the adult Marilee sees them as calling attention to themselves and indirectly to the condition of mixed race in the South, a condition that is both literal in itself and suggestive of the inevitability of racial integration:

I feel differently about them now. Their awful racket seemed a part of me—near and powerful, realer than itself, like their living blood. That blood was ours, mingling and twining with the other. Mama could kick like a mule, fight like a wildcat in a sack, but she would never get it out. It was there for good.

(p. 35)

This mix of black and white blood (foreshadowed by the car collision in “A Southern Landscape”—“The carnage was awful—so much blood on everybody you couldn't tell black from white” (p. 23)—is but one of the many constants of the South that are inextricably linked up with Marilee's personal identity. Along with weather, landscape, family and history, race is a force to be confronted that will not go away. The conditions surrounding these factors may change but they are “there for good.” Thus, the mature Marilee, in looking back, has a solid base on which to restore her identity: her memories of enduring forces, memories that Spencer (in an interview with Charles T. Bunting) describes as “life-giving,” “a recharging of the spirit.”⁷

Although Marilee is able, in Spencer's words, to “carry the South” with her,⁸ she can do nothing to halt the rapid change that characterizes the modern world, and it is this which frightens her: “Millions of things have happened; the war has come and gone. I live far away, and everything changes, almost every day. You can't even be sure the moon and stars are going to be the same the day after tomorrow night” (“Landscape,” p. 24). A grown woman, she still feels as she did when a child: “The world was large; I was small” (“Sharon,” p. 32). Perhaps the world is even larger for an adult, particularly a twentieth-century one who is faced with startling scientific discoveries and technological advances “almost every day.” We can only go so far in connecting ourselves with the universe, although Marilee tries by viewing the Presbyterian hand in the newspaper and the surviving columns of Windsor as extensions in space and time respectively.

In the end, though, there is one basic need which must be satisfied if we are not to be overwhelmed by the vastness of a universe which science, for all its amazing insights, cannot even begin to comprehend. We all need some sense of stability—a place to cling to—a need which the Marilee stories fulfill both for the teller of the tale and her listener. “There have got to be some things you can count on, would be an ordinary way to put it. I'd rather say that I feel the need of a land, of a sure terrain, of a sort of permanent landscape of the heart” (“Landscape,” p. 24).

Notes

1. Foreword, Marilee (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981), p. 7. Subsequent references to this work (both the foreword and the stories themselves) appear in the text.

2. As Elizabeth Spencer noted at Concordia University, Montreal (July 27, 1982), once you think of something as a “landscape,” you are no longer a part of it.

3. Welty, Foreward, The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1981), p. xviii.

4. Spencer, Preface, The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, p. xiii.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. “‘In That Time and at That Place’: The Literary World of Elizabeth Spencer,” Mississippi Quarterly, 28 (Fall 1975), 454, 453.

8. Ibid., p. 450.