Elizabeth Spencer's Five Favorite Southern Novels

As if by internet magic, Elizabeth Spencer appears in the Wall Street Journal a day after I write about her.* She provides a list of her Five Favorite Southern Novels.

Let's see. On Agate Hill by Lee Smith. Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman. Ernest Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men; Edward P. Jones, The Known World; Padgett Powell, Edisto. I have read, let me check my fingers, none of them. I've read other books by Percy and Gaines, so that's something.

The thing I like about this list is that it's personal. See, my own list would go like this: Huckleberry Finn, As I Lay Dying, Delta Wedding - no, I'm going to stop. My list is boring. The books are not boring. They're fantastic. But my list is boring. The usual suspects. No surprises at all. For proof, see the recent Oxofrd American Best Southern Novels of All Time poll (1-10 - I've read 8 of 10, 11+).

This is one of my doubts about Appreciationism. I worry that I'm too susceptible to received opinion. I'm told books are great, and when I read them I discover that they're great. Perhaps my judgment is less independent, my thinking less critical, than I like to imagine. Not that something like the Oxford American poll doesn't have its use, especially for people new to the topic. It's a quick way to see the lay of the land.

Maybe Spencer is actually listing her Five Favorites That Aren't on Everybody Else's List. Or maybe she's cusséd and cantankerous. Regardless, her list is pretty interesting.

Hat tip to R.T., who pointed out the list to me.

* Magic or marketing. This is obviously tied into the reissue of The Southern Woman.

They were all too graceful to be true - the serious pleasures of The Light in the Piazza

So I have a theory that I in fact had heard of Elizabeth Spencer, author of the best-selling novella The Light in the Piazza, but had relegated her to the category of "things I don't need to know about" out of some sort of middlebrow snobbery. Best-seller = a disdainful sniff and a disapproving frown. I don't remember being so snobby, but who knows. Regardless, The Light in the Piazza is the best thing in The Southern Woman, a light toned, comic, but quite serious study in the ethics of motherhood.

Margaret Johnson is on a long Italian vacation with her daughter who, well:

"Due to an accident years ago, she had the mental age of a child of ten. But anyone on earth, meeting her for the first time, would have found this incredible. Mrs. Johnson had managed in many tactful ways to explain her daughter to young men without wounding them." (260)

But Italy is different, Italy is a magical place. The daughter collides with a fine young Italian fellow:

"There went the straw hat she had bought in Fiesole. It sailed off prettily, its broad red ribbon a quick mark in the air. The young man was after it; he contrived to knock it still farther away, once and again, though the day was windless; his final success was heroic." (259)

Not that I read fiction for the punctuation, but the semicolons and commas in that last sentence cannot be improved. That is a well-paced sentence.

The rules are different in Italy, and different for tourists. Perhaps Margaret does not have to be so vigilant about scaring off the young Fabrizio Naccarelli. It's not serious. But as the love affair becomes more serious, the mother can't seem to find the opportunity to tell the truth, to end things.

Spencer deftly mixes the mother's own psychology with her love for her daughter. She is obviously (right) wrong not to tell Fabrizio and his parents about her daughter, especially when the possibility of marriage appears. But what if the rules in Italy really are different - for example, about what a marriage means?

The mother wants to assure her daughter's happiness. Is that a selfless or a selfish impulse? Does she want to get rid of her difficult daughter, or keep her for herself, forever? Spencer keeps tangling the issue, and the mother's decisions, sometimes passive, sometimes quite active, seemed completely natural to me.

The book jacket of The Southern Woman says that The Light in the Piazza has sold "more than two million copies worldwide." Good. I'd recommend it to just about anyone.

Elizabeth Spencer surprised me.

While I'm wandering outside the 19th century, how about I write a little about Elizabeth Spencer?

The story so far: A year ago, I read a story (PDF) in The Hudson Review by Mississippi writer Elizabeth Spencer. It was in the mode that short stories mostly come in now, nothing fancy, but it was sharp, insightful, good. Who is this unknown writer, I thought, this new talent? The discovery that she is 88 years old and the author of nine novels and a pile of stories fazed me a bit. And one of those novels has sold two million copies, and was made into a movie (in 1962) and a hit musical (in 2005!). Well, this is how we learn, isn't it?

The Modern Library has recently reissued its 2001 collection of 26 of her stories (plus that best selling novella). It's called The Southern Woman, narrow but accurate.* The stories are about Southern women of all ages and backgrounds, getting into trouble, wondering what to do next, worrying about their families, wandering around, settling down.

Spencer turns out to have many modes and a gently experimental side, so some of the stories have rough edges or perhaps don't quite work. On the other hand, the collection has a lot of variety, not just in the subjects of the stories, but in the ways they're told. I rarely read more than one story in a day, but a little bit in I was always eager to pick the book up again the next day - I was sure I would find something new.

"Ship Island" is a good example, subtitled "The Story of a Mermaid," about a restless young woman working out who she is, sexually, socially, intellectually. She's alive, scratchy, weird. It's not just the character, though, but Spencer's language, and the constant water and sea references, that turn the story into something out of the ordinary.

I think the best stories are as good as the best of Eudora Welty or Katharine Anne Porter or Big Bill Faulkner. Maybe not as good as the best of Flannery O'Connor. One thing Spencer has that they don't is Italy, where she lived for five years. In the stories, it becomes the alternative to the South. See "The White Azalea," about how Theresa Stubblefield's relatives in Tuxapoka, Alabama can't seem to leave her alone, even on her vacation in Rome. That best selling novella, The Light in the Piazza, is set in Italy, too, in Florence.

An Olivia de Havilland movie, a Broadway musical, two million copies, I mentioned all that? It's only about 50 pages, so it's included in The Southern Woman. I wasn't expecting much from it, certainly not that it would be the best thing in the book. I'll finish up with it tomorrow.

* Just reissued. I read the 2001 version.

Why haven't I heard of Elizabeth Spencer before? Or have I? - That was long ago when he was proud of her.

I could, and perhaps should, spend a week at Wuthering Expectations plundering The Hudson Review whenever a new issue arrives. There’s hardly a shortage of good writing in good literary journals, so I’m not sure my advocacy is especially useful, but The Hudson Review is the one I read all the way through, every time.

The last issue has (most links are PDFs), besides the Heaney essay, three (or possibly two) unpublished stories by Penelope Fitzgerald, fine poems by B. H. Fairchild and many others, and a long excerpt from Joseph Epstein’s forthcoming biography of Fred Astaire, a breezy and elegant piece. The short story by Elizabeth Spencer (“Sightings”) is unlikely to win an award for originality – it’s what one might call standard New Yorker stuff – but it ought to win one for excellence. It’s not innovative in any way, but merely has characters who seem like real people, insights into human nature, artful uses of symbolism. Ho hum.

I’m embarrassed that I had never heard of her, or had forgotten her. Look at this lovely website; look at all those books. She seems to be pegged as a Mississippi writer, and good for her.
Here’s a bit of the story. A teenage girl’s mother is going to marry an idiot; the teenager has fled to her father; the mother and new man have pursued her. The point of view is the father’s; Celie is his ex-wife, Guy is the idiot:

“Guy Bowden was a beefy fellow, large arms, thick legs, heavy feet. But wearing a nicely pressed grey suit, a satin tie. Celie was trim, she was a word he used to think about her: petite. It rhymed with neat. That was long ago when he was proud of her.”

The description is nothing special – a lot of writers can do that, or better – but that last line gets us somewhere.

Anybody else have warm feelings about Elizabeth Spencer, or particular books of hers? I’ll read more, I hope.