Issue 111, Summer 1989
Elizabeth Spencer has published a large body of work, yet she became famous for a novella she wrote in a month. The irony does not escape her. At the time of the interview, she lived in a modern high-rise apartment overlooking downtown Montreal. A Southerner who still loves the rural South, this irony did not escape her, either.
Hers was an apartment full of light and books, many of the latter inscribed to Ms. Spencer by author-friends, for the most part American writers in the Southern tradition. It is to this Southern tradition that by most critical accounts Spencer is said to belong, despite her years spent living in Italy and Canada and the subsequent works of fiction she has set in both locales. The apartment had no separate den or study; her writing was done in the corner of the dining room, the typewriter being put away every evening. She lives with her husband, John Rusher, formerly of Cornwall, England. They have recently moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Spencer is the author of eight novels: Fire in the Morning (1948), This Crooked Way(1952), The Voice at the Back Door (1956), The Light in the Piazza (1960) (unquestionably her best-known work, having been made both a major book-club selection and a popular film), Knights and Dragons (1965), No Place for an Angel (1967), The Snare (1972), and The Salt Line (1984). Her subtle tales and novellas have appeared with frequency in The New Yorker. A short-story collection, Ship Island and Other Stories, appeared in 1968. In 1980 Doubleday published her collected stories under the title The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer; a new collection, Jack of Diamonds, appeared in 1988. Four of her stories have won O. Henry awards. Others have been included in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.
She has led a life adorned by prizes: a citation from the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters for her first two novels in 1952; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953; the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Kenyon Review Fellowship, both in 1957; the McGraw-Hill Fiction Award in 1960; the Lucy Donnelly Memorial Fellowship in 1983; and the Bellamann Award as well as honorary doctorate degrees from Southwestern University, in 1968, and Concordia University, in 1988. She received the Award of Merit Medal for the Short Story from the American Academy in 1983, and was elected to membership in the Department of Literature of the American Institute in 1985. In 1988, she received a Senior Arts Award Grant in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has been twice nominated for the National Book Award.
Ms. Spencer is a fashionable figure. She possesses a shy smile and a soft voice, which still carries traces of her Mississippi roots. She was interviewed twice in Montreal and then during a subsequent visit to her publisher in Manhattan. Other questions were answered by correspondence, a practice of which she was wary. Both in person and on paper, her replies were generous.
INTERVIEWER
How do you work, and at what hours?
ELIZABETH SPENCER
I’m a morning worker. The minute my husband is out the door to work, out comes the paper, the typewriter, the manuscript I’m working on. I knock off at about two, eat and take a nap if possible, then I’m out for groceries, socializing, whatever.
INTERVIEWER
You didn’t teach until recently. Has that been a good experience?
SPENCER
Oh, but I did! I taught early on, at a girls’ school, and later I taught creative writing at the University of Mississippi. Then I went abroad, met John, and I wasn’t teaching after that. It’s something I got back into in 1976, on the request of a writer, Clark Blaise, who was then at Concordia University here in Montreal. He was due for a sabbatical. I did one course for him that year and liked it, liked the students, was amazed at the variety of their backgrounds. The next year the department invited me back as writer in residence. And the next year they were stuck for someone to do two advanced workshops, so I did those. This year I’m only doing one. I’ve found the work stimulating. I always complain about anything that takes time from writing, of course. But it is equally true that one can’t write all the time. On balance, so far, it’s been worth it. A five-day-a-week job saps up all the time. Teaching has many advantages this way, in that time is more spaced out.
INTERVIEWER
Can writing be taught?
SPENCER
Was it Jean Stafford who had the best word on that? Writing can’t be taught but it can be learned? I think so.
INTERVIEWER
You were a reporter on the Nashville Tennessean as a young woman.
SPENCER
The year I spent as a reporter was marvelous for me! It took me out of a genteel world, gave me enlightening glimpses into how things went on. I wouldn’t have wanted it permanently; it got to be drudgery like any job, only without much uplift. Some who got to the more interesting top positions maybe felt differently, but I didn’t aspire to those.
INTERVIEWER
Unlike your first two novels, The Voice at the Back Door seems drawn from headlines rather than personal history. Was this book influenced by your newspaper work?
SPENCER
There’s some truth in that, though I never thought of it. It was, at least in part, “topical.” I was under some sort of pressure within myself to clarify my own thinking about racial matters; many of my attitudes had been simply inherited, taken on good faith from those of good faith whom I loved. It seemed like blasphemy to question them, so I had to question myself. I could do that out of materials—incidents, people—which I already knew about. It was just in the melodramatic arrangement of the novel that I may have stepped things up a bit.
INTERVIEWER
I’ve wondered how that novel was received in the South, particularly in your home region. Is that why you ran off to Italy?
SPENCER
Oh, I’m sure a lot of people in my hometown and elsewhere objected. Some of the objections I heard about: I hadn’t been “fair to the South,” and so forth. But, no, nobody wanted to run me out of Mississippi. At least, nobody I know of wanted to. I don’t mean to make too light of this; it is doubtless still known that I went against the white supremacy thing. The people who think like that will use anything against you that comes their way. They’ve nothing against you except that, but it happens to be everything. It’s the same thinking as that of the Inquisition.
INTERVIEWER
There’s a passage in that novel I marked—here it is: “In the South, it’s nothing but family, family. We couldn’t breathe, even, until we left.” Was this your feeling, and is that perhaps why you no longer live in the South?
SPENCER
Oh, Lord. Okay—while family is interesting for the range of character it offers a writer, and for the stability it may, at best, offer to the individual, it is in many, many cases stifling and destructive. There is always bound to be, at the least, suppressed conflict. The price is high. Someone much wiser than I once told me that Southern families were cannibals. He was an enthusiastic Southerner himself, so I felt even more the weight of that judgment. The family assigns unfair roles, and never forgives the one who does not fulfill them. Of course, a sense of freedom is a large part of my own nature. I can’t be straitjacketed. Maybe they ask no more than all traditional societies do, one way or another.