SOURCE: Winchell, Mark Royden. “A Golden Ball of Thread: The Achievement of Elizabeth Spencer.” Sewanee Review 97, no. 4 (October 1989): 580-86.

[In the following essay, Winchell offers an overview of Spencer's works.]

Running away from home may be the great theme of American literature. As Leslie Fiedler has been telling us for the past forty years, the novels we most honor embody the boy's dream of escaping what Irving called “petticoat government” for the freedom of an idealized masculine wilderness—whether it be the gothic forests of Cooper, the mythic oceans of Melville, the pastoral river of Twain, or the therapeutic fishing holes of Hemingway. When the praises of home are sung, it is likely to occur in the sentimental romances bought in supermarket checkout lines and viewed on television soap operas. If we allow for obvious exceptions and qualifications, this dichotomy holds for most regions and periods of American literature. For the modern South, however, it falls completely apart.

To leave home in a traditional southern community is to turn one's back on a patriarchal culture. This is a dream that such females as Caddy and Quentin Compson in the South are perfectly capable of sharing with their male counterparts. But, once the physical break has been made, enormous spiritual baggage remains. The expatriated southerner is haunted and shaped by what he or she has left behind. In Elizabeth Spencer's The Voice at the Back Door Marcia Mae Hunt returns after ten years' absence to the constraints and complexities of life in her Mississippi hometown. During a tryst that she has with her boyfriend Duncan at the abandoned shack of a family gone to work in the defense plants of Detroit, a dog appears. The animal has come home. “They say they don't forget,” Duncan observes. “It's the hound's blood.” Elizabeth Spencer has spent most of her literary career (now in its fifth decade) away from the South and, indeed, the United States itself. But even at her most deracinated, the sense of home has never left her blood.

Miss Spencer's first novel, Fire in the Morning (1948), is the work of a superior craftsman with a derivative vision. She had originally intended this to be the story of Ruth Shaffer Armstrong, a young woman who had known no permanent home before marrying into the insular community of Tarsus, Mississippi. When she got into the novel, however, Spencer shifted her focus to Ruth's husband Kinloch Armstrong and his attempts to come to terms with the burden of his family history. As the plot unfolds, we discover—along with Kinloch—that the source of his enmity for the Snopes-like Gerrard family goes back several generations.

As many critics have noted, this novel owes much of its plot, language, and characterization to the influence of Faulkner. It also reminds one of the emphasis on complicity, reconciliation, and forgiveness in the fiction of Robert Penn Warren. Spencer also gives us such stock southern figures as the spinster driven eccentric by the loss of her beloved and the barroom philosopher whose rhetoric rises with his level of intoxication. Even the suggestion of family ties in the name Kinloch and our anticipation of epiphany for a protagonist from Tarsus are a bit obvious. Had Spencer been able to stick with her initial plan and filter this story through Ruth's sensibility, she might have breathed new life into conventions that are never far from parody. Rather than being the Shreve McCannon of this novel, Ruth is a bewildered stranger who has stumbled into a southern melodrama.

By the time she wrote her third novel, The Voice at the Back Door (1956), Spencer had shed the more obvious influences of her southern predecessors. Although we can still recognize certain character types (the earnest southern liberal, the proud black man, the mammy loved by all, and assorted middle-class cowards and white-trash bigots), they seem to come as much from life as from literature. As a treatment of race relations the novel was timely without being preachy. Unfortunately it also expressed an optimism that seemed dated by the time the book was published. Nothing in Spencer's background had prepared her for the intensity with which the 1954 Brown decision would be greeted in the South. Her hopes for racial harmony in her native region would not be realized for another twenty years.

The basis for Spencer's hope was that even in antagonism the races have always been closer in the South than anywhere else in America. The two men bound inextricably to each other in this novel are the black Beck Dozer and the white Jimmy Tallant. Because Tallant's father had led a group of white men who killed a group of black men led by Dozer's father, the sons share the burden of each other's history. This gives Beck a surer sense of identity than any abstract promise of civil rights. As he tells the liberal sheriff, Duncan Harper, “You can climb the status quo like a step ladder with two feet on the floor, but trying to trail along behind a white man of good will is like following behind somebody on a tightrope. As he gets toward the middle his problems are likely to increase, and soon he gots to turn loose of me to help himself.” But Dozer abandons this pragmatic strategy when the plot demands that he risk his life to assert his human dignity. Too often the movement of character and events in this novel is determined by the structural and thematic requirements of the story. Authorial control has produced an elegant design from which too much of the recalcitrance of life has been edited out.

Spencer's next fiction, The Light in the Piazza (1960), is a novella originally published in the New Yorker. Earning both popular and critical praise, it won the McGraw-Hill Fiction Book Award and was eventually made into a successful motion picture. The first of Spencer's works to be set outside her native Mississippi, this tale presents us with the Jamesian situation of an innocent American confronting the old-world sophistication of Europe. In a stroke of metaphorical brilliance Spencer makes that innocent American sweet, beautiful, and mentally retarded.

The novel's third-person limited point of view focuses on the retarded girl's mother, Margaret Johnson, a housewife from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her quixotic mission is to enable her daughter to live a normal life. When a handsome young Italian falls in love with the girl, it seems the realization of Margaret's dreams. Throughout much of this story Mrs. Johnson ponders whether she should encourage her daughter's romance even if it means concealing Clara's true condition from her prospective husband and in-laws and disobeying her own husband, who has been detained on business in the States. Because she summons the courage and wit to do so, The Light in the Piazza ends with the fairytale marriage of Clara and Fabrizio.

We know that the “international” fable we are reading is supposed to end not in triumph but in irony. An unreliable center of consciousness, Margaret has not seriously questioned the notion that for Clara marriage will be a “happily ever after” proposition. The strains in Margaret's own marriage should be enough to suggest that the institution is fraught with peril. To think that her daughter's situation is more promising is to imply that marriage is best when the husband rules a wife whose mental development has been arrested some time before the onset of puberty. Because we know that a woman of Elizabeth Spencer's intellect does not believe such things, we await the denouement that will expose Margaret's success as a pyrrhic victory. But that denouement never comes.

After the enormous success of The Light in the Piazza, Spencer's work fell out of critical favor for over twenty years. A second Italian novella, Knights and Dragons (1965), was panned by a majority of reviewers, as were the novels No Place for an Angel (1967) and The Snare (1972). During this time, however, Spencer continued to produce excellent short fiction, a fact that was finally recognized when a collected edition of her stories appeared to much critical acclaim in 1981. Her most recent novel, The Salt Line (1984), was widely hailed as her best full-length fiction since The Light in the Piazza. Since 1985 we have seen paperback reissues of five of her eight novels, a Twayne study of Spencer by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, and Jack of Diamonds, a collection of five Spencer stories originally published in literary reviews between 1983 and 1988. Not only has Spencer acquired a greater technical maturity in recent years, but she has also resumed writing about the people and places of her native region.

The Salt Line is the first Spencer novel since The Voice at the Back Door to be set in Mississippi. There is a considerable difference, however, between the backwoods Mississippi of the early novels and the imaginary Gulf Coast town of Notchaki. Known affectionately as the Redneck Riviera, the Gulf Coast has always represented a freer and more exotic way of life to those living inland. But the region is also subject to hurricanes and other vicissitudes of nature. Spencer's novel is set in the aftermath of Hurricane Camille, as two refugees from the English faculty of Southern Pines University in Hartsville, Mississippi, try to reconstruct their individual dreams from the debris left by the hurricane.

The central character, Arnie Carrington, is a Byron scholar who left academia when his political activism began creating more problems for him than it was worth. Now permanently established on the coast, he is joined by arch-rival Lex Graham, an eighteenth-century specialist who has recently come into enough inheritance to invest in real estate. Of only slightly less importance are Mavis Henley, a rootless young woman who has been consistently unlucky in love, and her gangster boyfriend Frank Matteo. Because of its setting, imagery, and upbeat life-affirming ending, Peggy Prenshaw compares this novel to Shakespeare's Tempest. The sensuousness of many of Spencer's descriptions casts a spell on the reader, but the novel finally requires too large a suspension of moral judgment.

Spencer obviously wants us to sympathize with the byronic Carrington and the values he represents. Perhaps his past as a dissident professor is meant to convey a kind of sainthood on him, but that past (at a thinly disguised University of Southern Mississippi) is not fully enough developed to make him distinguishable from the typical postmenopausal hippie of the sixties. He loved his dead wife so much that he helped put her out of her misery when she was dying of cancer and now communes at length with her ghost. But that love was not strong enough to keep him from cheating on her when she was alive or even to make him feel guilty now that she is dead.

Poor Lex lacks Arnie's potency and charisma, and he finally seems more a victim than a villain. His inability to satisfy an insane and promiscuous wife is hardly a vice, and Arnie's willingness to do so for him is scarcely a virtue. Not content with a single conquest, our byronic hero manages to service his cleaning lady Barbara K. while her unsuspecting husband is working on an offshore oil rig and seduce Lex's teenage daughter while Lex is lying delirious in the hospital with a strange insect bite. In the end even the gangster Matteo proves a softy by making an honest woman of Mavis and preferring the perils of fatherhood to the joys of drug-running.

By the time The Salt Line appeared, Elizabeth Spencer had earned an important, if minor, place in contemporary American fiction. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw's fine book on Spencer stands as evidence of this fact. Although there is some danger in assessing the career of a still active writer, books such as Prenshaw's should be written. Let traditional scholars pick over the bones of dead writers safely enshrined in the literary canon. It is the function of the critic to help form and correct taste. That cannot be done if criticism ignores those living writers whose final reputations have yet to be made. By choosing to write on Spencer, Prenshaw makes an implicit case for her subject's importance. The book itself tells us what we need to know about Spencer's life and career and helps us understand the major themes of her fiction. It also makes the discriminating judgments that distinguish criticism from mere interpretation. Prenshaw is one feminist more concerned with literary values than with sexual politics.

Although there is much to admire in the books that Spencer published through 1985, her most recent collection of short fiction suggests that her best work is just beginning to be written. Each of the five stories in Jack of Diamonds speaks with an authentic and compelling voice. The plots are skillfully constructed without seeming contrived, and enough happens offcenter to give the stories the density of life without detracting from the principal narrative line. Two of these tales are set in Montreal, one in the Lake George region of New York, another in various parts of the South, England, and the European continent, and one in a small town in Mississippi. The situation common to all is the need to confront disillusionment and to go on living. That can mean coming to terms with an unsatisfactory marriage (“Jean Pierre” and “The Skater”), learning too late the depth of an unfulfilled childhood infatuation (The Cousins), or discovering that the marriage of one's parents was more complicated than it seemed (“Jack of Diamonds”). Although such a bald statement of theme sounds reductionist, each story is unique, richly textured, and various. “The Business Venture,” which returns us to the small-town Mississippi where Spencer's fiction began, may be the most revealing of the five.

The commercial enterprise that gives the story its title is a dry-cleaning establishment jointly owned by a white woman and a black man. The town's hostile reaction could easily have provided the basis for a trite civil-rights sermon or a “daring” exploration of interracial love. Instead Spencer presents this public scandal as simply the most visible change in the life of the community. The story's narrator, Eileen Waybridge, is far enough removed from the business venture itself not to know whether there is also a romance between the partners, Nelle Townshend and Robin Byers; and she hardly seems to care. Her concern is that Nelle's business is removing her socially from the group of young people of which they both had always been a part. As old friends and lovers drift away from each other and new alliances are formed, those who are left behind find increasingly less stability in their daily lives. At one point Eileen says that her husband's philandering is about the only thing she can be sure of any more.

The plot takes an ironic turn when we learn that Nelle's feisty mother is glad that her daughter is no longer part of what she has long considered a bad crowd, although she does make an exception in the case of Eileen. Eileen's husband Charlie is another matter. Mrs. Townshend goes so far as to shoot at Charlie when he takes a shortcut through her field one day. Like everyone else in the town, Eileen had dismissed this as the eccentric behavior of a nearsighted old woman. But after she becomes convinced that Nelle is the new object of Charlie's lust, she is no longer sure. The story ends when Eileen picks up the telephone in her house and hears Charlie talking on the extension. “Listen, Nelle,” he says. “If you really are fooling around with that black bastard, he's answering to me.”

Elizabeth Spencer has never been less than a superb craftsman. Moreover her awareness of moral complexity saves even her most timely work from the pitfalls of didacticism. Even if such complexity makes moral action more difficult, she refuses to use it as an excuse for inaction. For Spencer all moral problems are essentially personal. In the stories collected in Jack of Diamonds, we see that an acceptance of the limitations and imperfections of everyday life can itself be a form of heroism. This acceptance is never merely passive but is an earned vision. As such it is the opposite of all escape literature. When Eileen Waybridge hangs up the phone after overhearing her husband at the end of “The Business Venture,” she notes that all their lives are hanging on a golden thread. Still, in the labyrinth in which she and Spencer's other characters are lost, the sojourner's thread is more likely than the explorer's compass to take them where they want to go.

Works Cited

Elizabeth Spencer: Fire in the Morning (1948). Avon, 1987. 276 pages.

Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories. Viking, 1988. 184 pages. Penguin, 1989.

The Light in the Piazza (1960). Penguin, 1986. 214 pages.

The Salt Line (1984). Penguin, 1985. 302 pages.

The Voice at the Back Door (1956). Avon, 1986. 326 pages.

Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, Elizabeth Spencer. Twayne, 1985. 182 pages.