written sinceKnights and Dragons: No Place for an Angel,The Snare,The Salt Line, and The Night Travellers. All four of these novels are more immediately accessible than Knights and Dragons because in each Spencer establishes a viable plot as an external correlative to the internal evolution of her characters. Before she could write any of these later books, however, she had to take the technical risks of Knights and Dragons. She had to make the artistic leap of faith from the more traditional, well-lighted world of The Light in the Piazza to the “devious stairways, corridors, and cortili” of Knights and Dragons.² Unfortunately, contemporary reviewers did not take kindly to Spencer's artistic experiments. Orville Prescott (who had praised The Light in the Piazza) and Stanley Kauffmann (New Republic) strongly challenged Spencer's shift in emphasis.³

To have elicited such disparate responses, the story lines of the two novellas are actually quite similar. In The Light in the Piazza, Margaret Johnson and her daughter Clara are traveling in Italy. Because of a childhood accident, Clara has in many ways the mental age of eight or ten. Realizing in Italy that Clara is capable of a traditional Italian marriage, a role that will require nothing more of her than innocence, devotion, and fertility, Mrs. Johnson decides to arrange it for her. In so doing, she overcomes two difficulties: the doubts of the groom's father and her own husband's potential objections. After both managing Clara's intricate marriage negotiations and mentally answering her internalized image of her husband, Margaret Johnson emerges from her time in Italy with a new confidence both in her intelligence and her sexuality.

The plot of Knights and Dragons is less compelling, however. Because Martha Ingram, Spencer's protagonist, is a dangerously wounded sensibility, the view of Italy the reader receives through her is distorted. Physical details are often vague or altogether absent, but it is clear that Martha Ingram has come to Italy to escape. She was married for a number of years to Gordon Ingram, an older man and famous scholar, but their marriage devolved into an emotional nightmare, and she fled the States for Italy. In seeking to escape her own psychological dragon, her husband, she turns to two potential knights: Jim Wilbourne, a traveling American economist who becomes her lover, and George Hartwell, her sympathetic boss and confidant. Ultimately, however, neither man can help her, and she must rely on her own instincts to create for herself an emotional independence.

But these two novellas share more than just surface characteristics. Both portray American women who face an emotional crisis while isolated from their native communities. Both women must overcome their reluctance to think, feel, and act counter to the wishes of male authority figures who, though they remain physically in America, live vividly in the protagonists' minds. Both women fight the internalized influence of these “dragons” to gain self-possession and self-direction, and both do so by forming relationships with men in Italy. In neither book does the absent father-husband figure actually appear; in each case his influence is entirely internalized. Neither of the two protagonists, Margaret Johnson or Martha Ingram, win permanent self-control in a healthy sense. Spencer herself has said that in her writing during this period, she “searched for women who could sustain a weight of experience, both intellectual and emotional. I think that often the women characters I found did not do this. For example Margaret Johnson's triumph was … a fantasy that could explode five minutes after the book was over. Then Martha Ingram … had a weakness in her nature that kept her from throwing off her obsession [with her former husband].”⁴

Despite their failures, however, each of these women does manage to manipulate the alien world around her to promote her own emotional healing and eventual self-expression. Each, as Spencer wrote of Margaret Johnson, “played single-handed and unadvised a tricky game in a foreign country” and won for herself the ability to live more freely.⁵

In addition to these similarities in character and situation, Spencer also chose to narrate the stories in much the same way. She manipulates her limited omniscient point of view to emphasize the inner development first of Margaret Johnson and then of Martha Ingram. She shifts the center of consciousness away from the protagonist only briefly in each and then only late in the piece when the general focus is well established. Part of the reason for this consistency in point of view is the primary of each woman's fantasy life. As Margaret Johnson realizes halfway through The Light in the Piazza: “Nobody with a dream should come to Italy. No matter how dead and buried the dream is thought to be, in Italy it will rise and walk again” (61). Margaret Johnson's dream is to find for her retarded daughter a normal life, and to do so she must overcome the internalized skepticism of her husband. Martha Ingram's dream is to sever herself completely from her former husband, not only to forget her life with him, but also “to be forgotten” by him and his friends (88). Both women have within them images of male authority figures—husbands who have shaped and trained them, figurative fathers to whom they feel they must answer—and they both dream of breaking free of the male dominance they have internalized. In order to dramatize these two internal struggles for psychic freedom, Spencer found it necessary to place the reader's point of view close to the action—largely within the women themselves.

The similarity in narrative technique is compounded by further similarities in psychology. In deciding finally to promote a young Italian's courtship of her daughter Clara, Margaret Johnson departs on a dangerous inner quest as well as a tricky marriage negotiation. When, several years earlier, she had tried—with disastrous results—to arrange a normal school life for Clara, both she and her husband decided she had gone temporarily “out of [her] mind, insane” (64). When the social and cultural rituals leading up to Clara's engagement reach a critical level, Mrs. Johnson draws into herself in order to try to vanquish the nagging doubts buried there by her husband's eminently businesslike manner. “Never before had it seemed so crucial that she see him clearly. What was the truth about him?” (80). She imagines his first stunned reaction after their transatlantic phone conversation, then his relief when his thoughts would turn to the question of the dowry, something to fasten his business acumen to. “She could tell almost to a T, no crystal-ball gazing required,” the process he would follow in accepting the bits of information she carefully fed him (82). But she does not face this internalized vision of her husband alone. She has, to distract and inspire her, a complex relationship with Signor Naccarelli, the father of Clara's fiancé and an attractive blend of cynical romanticism. They engage in a season of flirtation mixed inextricably with negotiation, “all an affair for juggling, circling, balancing, very much to his liking,” and to Mrs. Johnson's surprise, hers as well (65). While they never quite approach “middle-aged adultery” (“It was a relief [to her] to know that sin was not expected of them” [69]), they are each attracted to the other, and each seeks to use the attraction to gain an advantage in deciding Clara's dowry. Titillated by her own Italian romance, Mrs. Johnson turns back toward her husband after Clara's marriage, wondering “what sort of life, what degree of delight in it, they might … discover … together” (109). She has grown while in Italy to a new psychological independence that frees her to regard her husband from an affectionate emotional distance.

Like Margaret Johnson, Martha Ingram is also engaged in a dangerous inner battle. And like Mrs. Johnson, she approaches insanity. Sure that she has seen her former husband, a well-known scholar, in Venice, she reports the sighting matter-of-factly to her confidant.

“Venice! Your husband was not in Venice,” Hartwell corrected her, with a slightly chilly feeling. …

“You see how crazy I am,” she pointed out.

After some time, Hartwell said, “Intentionally crazy, I take it?”

“It's necessary,” she finally replied.

(74)

It is necessary because everyone else who knows her former husband thinks him a charming man, universally kind and caring. Only Martha knows what a tyranny his benevolence had become within their home. His image, as well as his constant letters and messengers, haunt her even after several years in Rome: “Sometimes the large figure with the shaggy head left her alone and she would be fine, and then she would get a letter from a lawyer she'd never heard of … or an envelope addressed in a black scrawl … [or] some admirer of his would come to Rome and say … would she please consider. … Then she would be unsteady for a week or two” (5-6).

In trying to escape the fear and hatred that remain from her marriage, she takes an unlikely lover, a taciturn American economist. Following almost the same pattern as Margaret Johnson, she uses this relationship to cleanse herself of the psychic dependence and fear she has internalized during her ten-year marriage to Gordon Ingram. When her friend Hartwell questions her about Wilbourne after the affair has ended, she admits that “he only existed in relation to Gordon,” thinking to herself that “there had always been the three of them … stuck in the same frame” (126). She has used Wilbourne to erase the afterimage of Gordon Ingram, leaving her “not [caring] very deeply about anything, the emotional target she had once plainly furnished [having] disappeared” (168). Like Margaret Johnson, she gains a new independence; however, unlike Margaret, she frees herself of the need for any human contact.

Despite these similarities in setting, characterization, and point of view, The Light in the Piazza and Knights and Dragons are radically different works. The Light in the Piazza is a social comedy, a send-up of often inept American tourists adrift in a comic opera culture—or, as Spencer puts it, “a little tall talk to satirize Florence.”⁶ Although there are ominous notes sounded throughout that remind the reader of the potential dangers of Mrs. Johnson's hopes for Clara, Spencer spins her novella largely out of light-soaked landscapes and social irony. Knights and Dragons, on the other hand, is a darkly psychological tale, full of twists and turns that can leave the reader as confused as Martha Ingram herself. Despite some comic moments, Spencer chillingly renders Martha's brush with madness, and her triumph over her former husband is one of desperate abdication rather than victorious manipulation. Whereas The Light in the Piazza is consistently realistic, Knights and Dragons is often quite surreal. The world as Spencer describes it is as fractured, clouded, and distorted as Martha Ingram's awareness of it. Spencer often has the other characters in the novel do and say what they do for allegorical reasons rather than to advance the plot. Rather than suspenseful action, Knights and Dragons offers surreal imagery and seemingly disconnected, evocative dialogue.⁷ The differences between the two are so profound that the formula that brought The Light in the Piazza instantaneous critical success and popularity failed almost as completely in Knights and Dragons. As Prenshaw notes, the novella “was widely reviewed and, with a few … exceptions … panned by the critics.”⁸

Clearly what disappointed the reviewers was the lack of what Orville Prescott in the New York Times termed “flesh and blood.”⁹ The heroine of The Light in the Piazza struggles to create unity and order, to bring people together in a realistic “flesh and blood” world. There is a clearly plotted external line of action to complement Margaret's internal struggles to free herself. Martha Ingram, on the other hand, seeks to extricate herself from human relations, using Wilbourne's physical presence only to exorcise Gordon Ingram's psychological one. Even though Spencer does shift the point of view briefly to follow Wilbourne or George Hartwell, neither of the two men becomes more than a friendly pawn in Martha's mental struggles. A more detailed survey of the subtle contrasts between the two novellas reveals just how profound an artistic change of direction these two texts represent.

The first and perhaps most obvious contrast between the two is the relationship each protagonist has with her distant husband. Margaret Johnson's imagined negotiations with her husband suggest that he has taken on the role more of an authoritarian father to his wife than of an agreeable lover and companion. As a businessman and self-made authority, Noel Johnson has ruled their lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but away from his direct influence, Margaret Johnson is free to dream. And in dreaming for Clara, she is caught up in a delightfully ambiguous flirtation with the worldly Signor Naccarelli. Her confidence in her sexual allure and social intelligence grows as she juggles her delicate relations with the Naccarellis. When she finally decides that she can manage quite well without her husband, Spencer describes the moment in terms of a self-revelation: “What is it, to reach a decision? It is like walking down a long Florentine street where, at the very end, a dim shape is waiting until you get there. When Mrs. Johnson finally reached this street and saw what was ahead, she moved steadily forward to see it at long last up close. What was it? Well, nothing monstrous, it seemed; but human, with a face much like her own, that of a woman who loved her daughter and longed for her happiness” (86). She undergoes a personal rejuvenation as a result of her independent action. Flushed with her new strength, she begins to look forward to her reunion with her husband, whereas before she had dreaded it.

Unlike Margaret Johnson, Martha Ingram's dream is to withdraw from a world whose primary emotional figure has victimized her. What had seemed an idyllic marriage to an intriguing older man had turned into an emotional nightmare, the aftereffects of which she could not escape: “She was intellectually as well as emotionally tenacious and she had, furthermore, her question to address to the sky: how can love, in the first place, turn into hate, and how can I, so trapped in hatred, not suffer for it?” (9). She, unlike Margaret Johnson, has no interest in reestablishing relations with her former husband; she wishes, on the contrary, to obliterate him from her mind. In the middle of an emotional encounter with Jim Wilbourne, she blurts out for no apparent reason that “hatred is too much for me. I can't face it; you have to believe that” (59). She is capable neither of bearing her ex-husband's hatred—whether real or imagined—nor of hating him enough to eradicate him from her psyche. She dreams of somehow forgetting the ten years she spent with him or, conversely, as she tells one of his lawyers, wants “only … to be forgotten” (88). She has slipped easily into Italian society, taking on the new language and culture like a cloak, and has become a valued employee of the American consul in Rome. She accepts the supportive friendship of her boss, George Hartwell, and takes as a lover a married American economist on cultural exchange, all in an effort to rid herself of her psychological dragon. She is like Margaret Johnson in that she, too, succeeds in her quest; however, she is most unlike her in that the result is emotional “dissolution” (169).

The second and subtler difference between the two Italian novellas has to do with the degree to which each is structured by an accessible plot. Undoubtedly what generated such immediate success for The Light in the Piazza was Spencer's skillful interweaving of external action with Mrs. Johnson's internal development. The plot is engaging and suspenseful, and the setting's exotic depth colorfully rendered. After Mrs. Johnson has let the romance develop for several indecisive weeks, she and Clara receive together a box of “remarkable flowers … a species of lily apparently highly regarded” in Italy (53-54). The card reads only NACCARELLI, leaving some doubt as to whether father or son or both have sent them. Mrs. Johnson notices immediately “their enormous naked stamens, based in a backcurling, waxen petal, [and] they struck her as being rather blatantly phallic” (54). This hint of the sexuality lurking between the Naccarellis and Clara and herself sends Mrs. Johnson reeling into uncharacteristic desperation. She lies “wildly” to Clara about an imaginary illness and rushes her away to Rome. In the several weeks of their enforced absence, however, Mrs. Johnson reconsiders, facing in her mind the image of her husband. By the time of their return, she has grown considerably in self-confidence: “As the train drew into the station [at Florence], she felt her blood race, her whole being straighten and poise, to the fine alertness of a drawn bow. Whether Florence knew it or not, she invaded it” (64). In this way Spencer weaves together attitude and action, private mediation and sensibility, with social, even sexual behavior.

The world of Knights and Dragons, on the other hand, is not nearly so accessible. While Spencer's study of an evolving personality is even more detailed and sophisticated, the external world that we view through that personality is not as compelling. Because Martha Ingram, Spencer's protagonist, is a dangerously wounded sensibility, the view of Italy the reader receives through her is distorted. Physical details are often vague or altogether absent; factual information that is verified by Spencer's omniscient authority in The Light in the Piazza proves slippery in Knights and Dragons. As Spencer moves the center of the narrative consciousness deeper into her protagonist's personality, the external world becomes both less significant and less clear.

Yet ultimately, Knights and Dragons is a fiction of architectural as well as emotional interiors. For it is in this book that Spencer first experiments with what will become one of the trademarks of her fiction—the use of architectural interiors (and later landscapes) to suggest emotional states. In Knights and Dragons, even the cityscape is subsumed within the primary focus on Martha Ingram's internal development. For example, her life as Gordon Ingram's wife is suggested by his apartment: “In … the expensive, oak-panelled, high-ceilinged place in New York's upper Seventies, crusted with books and littered with ash trays, she had lived out a life of corners, and tiny chores had lengthened before her like shadows drawn out into a sunslant; … there had been the long rainy afternoons, the kindness of the porter, the illness of the dog, the thin slashing of the brass elevator doors, the walks in the park. She still felt small in doorways” (9).

From an existence as one of Gordon Ingram's disciples/house plants she has escaped to Italy, where she again buries herself deep in an apartment building, this time in Rome, where she hides from her previously public life. “She entered her … apartment through all the devious stairways, corridors, and cortili that led to it. ‘Sequestered,’ George Hartwell called her” (8). Embarking on an all but silent affair with the ubiquitous Wilbourne, she meets him secretly at a series of mysterious addresses.

There were streets she'd never heard of, areas she did not know existed, bare-swept rooms at the tops of narrow stairs, the murmur of apartment life from some other floor or some distance back of this one, the sounds of the street. The wires of small electric stoves glowed across the dim twilights of these rooms, and if she reached them first, she would sit quietly waiting for him to come, drawing the heater close to warm her damp feet … but when the door opened she would scarcely look up, if at all, and he on his part gave her scarcely more than a passing glance, turning almost at once to put his coat up.

(104)

Although their meetings are passionate, “absolute and profound” (104), they are incapable of normal communication: “Reflecting, she was not long in coming upon the truth the little rooms made plain: that they had struck a bargain that lay deeply below the level of ordinary speech” (108). Unlike the aptly named Light in the Piazza, what action there is in Knights and Dragons takes place almost exclusively indoors, figuratively suggesting the psychological nature of the tale.

Even simple human interaction in this novella takes place at a level below that of normal conversation. When Jim Wilbourne refers mistakenly to her husband early in the book, it rocks Martha Ingram to her core. She tried “to grow gentle once more after the turmoil, the anguish, which his outlandish mental leap at her had, like a depth charge, brought boiling up inside her” (29). Martha's emotional vulnerability stems from her impossible desire to escape a figure that exists solely inside her. After she and Wilbourne become lovers, he tells her that when they first met, she had “seemed … enclosed” (56). She is enclosed by her preoccupations with her inner struggles. The passionate bargain that she eventually strikes with Wilbourne can succeed only if it lies “deeply below the level of ordinary speech” because it is there that she needs to be healed.

In portraying Martha Ingram's psychological quest in all its intensity and complexity, Spencer sacrifices what suspense and drama she might have generated with a more externalized plot. There is ample proof that she is aware of the gamble she is taking in the way she intentionally refuses to verify a single version of external events. When they first meet, Wilbourne mistakenly assumes Martha is the former wife of an acquaintance and tells her that her ex-husband was wounded in a hunting accident. Seriously shaken even though she immediately discovers his error, she hardly hears him ask her to arrange a rendezvous with another American for him. Later Wilbourne tells several different versions of these events, giving different motives for having asked her the favor. As the novella progresses, the truth behind his statements grows less and less certain. Martha decides at one point that he may even be a chronic liar, incapable of recognizing the truth. What does emerge out of this episode and others like it is that in Martha's world, there are no external certainties. Her loosening grip on reality finally proves so contagious that it infects others. After she describes to George Hartwell her dreams and near-hallucinations, he gets a telephoned request for a meeting from “Gordon Ingram,” newly arrived in Rome. He rushes off frantically only to discover Robert Inman, an old college classmate. He suffers the explosion of his own emotional depth charge at that point, realizing just how sensitive he has become to Martha's dilemma and just how unsure his own sense of the factual world has become as a result.

The third major difference between the two novellas is the most basic of all: Whereas The Light in the Piazza is fundamentally realistic, Knights and Dragons has significant allegorical elements. This difference is clearly illustrated by the relationship of each protagonist to the men she meets in Italy. Margaret Johnson's flirtation with Signor Naccarelli is appropriately light and airy. He is admittedly attracted by her: “He could not really say she had made a conquest of him: American women were too confident and brisk; but he could not deny that encounters with her had a certain flavor” (65). She in turn responds to his mature romanticism, and the result, though shy of outright adultery, re-creates in her a sense of her own independent intelligence as well as her mature sexuality. Spencer renders her flirtation with Signor Naccarelli in a traditionally realistic manner; both are fully realized, engagingly comic characters.

In contrast, both Martha's dragon, Gordon Ingram, and her apparent knights, Wilbourne and Hartwell, injure her emotionally while serving as allegorical elements of the novella. “The characters,” Spencer has said, “represent elements in a psychic struggle; … not all of them and not at every point, but in general. … The story becomes a study in evil influences over one woman.”¹⁰ The shadowy Gordon Ingram is obviously a demon in Martha's inner world. Even if the reader allows for the subjectivity of her viewpoint, Spencer makes it clear that her former husband dominated and manipulated her. The “evil” in Jim Wilbourne's influence is harder to discover because Martha Ingram is less emotionally involved with him than their physical passion would suggest. However, it is apparent that he uses her physically without ever, so far as the reader knows, committing much time or emotional depth to their relationship. His apparent inability to tell the truth or even lie consistently rocks her already unstable sense of reality. Even Hartwell, who, as his name suggests, is stability personified, views Martha as the object of his chivalry, a wayward damsel whom he may rescue. His first name, George, obviously suggests the myth of St. George and the dragon. But only Martha can save herself, and to do so she must fight off Hartwell's benevolence as well as Ingram's ghost and Wilbourne's indifference. The closing of the novel echoes this governing image of “knights and dragons.” Having finally escaped human attachment, Martha Ingram, Spencer emphasizes, “was one of those whom life had held a captive and in freeing herself she had met dissolution” (169). She has paid a desperate price for a desperate freedom.

Spencer's fundamental interest in the ability of these two women to strike a balance between private and communal life is evidence of her continued interest in the dynamics of community. Margaret Johnson rediscovers her sexual and intellectual powers in a new social context, the birthplace of the great European Renaissance. Martha Ingram, crippled by a community of figurative knights and dragons, fights free of their influence into a rarified, acommunal atmosphere in which she responds equally to all people and all environments. By this point in her career, Spencer's characteristic thematic concerns have obviously begun to shape her evolving technical prowess. With Knights and Dragons, she first attempts many of the techniques—radical shifts in time, allegorical use of setting and character, highly suggestive imagery—that will characterize much of her later fiction. She developed these techniques as she became increasingly interested in the psychology of her characters, specifically the impact of community on their inner lives.

Coming roughly in the middle of Spencer's career to this point, The Light in the Piazza and Knights and Dragons illustrate her development clearly. Although she had launched her career as a strict realist, Spencer begins with Knights and Dragons to use elements of psychological surrealism. Rather than emphasizing the external development of a traditional plot, as she had in earlier works, she was focusing more on the inner lives of her characters, dramatizing their emotional and psychological development with allegory and imagery. Although Knights and Dragons is flawed by the lack of any external correlative to the internal life of Martha Ingram, it foreshadows in technique the larger, more accessible novels that follow.

Notes

1. Orville Prescott, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, November 21, 1960, p. 27; Susan M. Black, “A Dream in Italy,” New Republic, December 5, 1960, p. 20; Phoebe Adams, Review of Elizabeth Spencer's The Light in the Piazza in Atlantic Monthly, CCVII (February, 1961), 113; all cited in Prenshaw, Elizabeth Spencer, 76.

2. Elizabeth Spencer, Knights and Dragons (New York, 1965), 8. Hereinafter cited by page number in the text.

3. Orville Prescott, “Books of the Times: All Aggravation and Ambiguity,” New York Times, June 30, 1965, p. 35; Stanley Kauffmann, “Sense and Sensibility,” New Republic, June 26, 1965, pp. 27-28.

4. Broadwell and Hoag, “Conversation,” in Conversations with Elizabeth Spencer, ed. Prenshaw, 75.

5. Elizabeth Spencer, The Light in the Piazza (New York, 1960), 107. Hereinafter cited by page number in the text.

6. Broadwell and Hoag, “Conversation,” in Conversations with Elizabeth Spencer, ed. Prenshaw, 67.

7. This may explain why Spencer continues to think of Knights and Dragons as a long story rather than a short novel. Although the original edition is fifty-nine pages longer than that of The Light in the Piazza, she included it but not the shorter piece in her 1981 volume of collected stories.

8. Prenshaw, Elizabeth Spencer, 87.

9. Prescott, “All Aggravation and Ambiguity,” 35.

10. Broadwell and Hoag, “Conversation,” in Conversations with Elizabeth Spencer, ed. Prenshaw, 69.

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