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Review by Laurie Parker
Elizabeth Spencer is one of the first figures of American letters, with more than a dozen novels, short story collections, and plays to her credit and a host of honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Dos Passos Award for Literature, the Rosenthal Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit for the Short Story. Her books have addressed some of the major issues of our time, from race relations to the Vietnam War, with a graceful understanding and are read all over the world.
It is obvious that Elizabeth Spencer has stories to tell. What her memoir makes quite apparent, however, is that Spencer's own life is itself a fascinating tale. She has been a keen observer of the people and events which have surrounded her and has now set her observations down in a compelling memoir that is as exciting to read as her remarkable fiction.
"Landscapes of the Heart" is divided into three sections, the first two focusing on Spencer's youth and how it prepared her for her eventual foray into what she calls in the latter "widening orbits." Spencer was born into an upper-middle- class white family in Carrollton, Mississippi, in a time before the age of Wal-Marts, when the Civil War was a mere generation or two away. Spencer's girlhood was of a sort that no longer exists, undergirded as it was by a simpler way of life and by the strange symbiosis that existed between white and black after the War but before the civil rights movement. Spencer recalls with blunt honesty both the sweetness of the time and its unpleasantness, that same unpleasantness which William Faulkner, living in nearby Oxford, was then being reviled for exposing and which Spencer herself later addressed in works such as "The Voice at the Back Door."
After a conventional, respectable youth and matriculation, Spencer's small-town world began to open up with her enrollment in graduate school at Vanderbilt University. There she encountered literary giants Allen Tate and Donald Davidson, who encouraged Spencer in her writing and helped her land her first book contract. The income from that first novel enabled Spencer to take a trip to Italy, a country which has had a great effect on her work ever since.
It is this third section of the book which details Spencer's growth as a young woman and her emergence as a writer, and which is full of the excitement of literary parties in New York, of traveling throughout Europe, of falling in love, of friendships and conversations with many of the members of the twentieth century's literary pantheon. Spencer recalls firsthand her encounters with many of those who have shaped modern writing, including Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter, with both reverence and insight.
Unlike some memoirs which reveal every intimate detail of a writer's life, "Landscapes of the Heart" focuses less on Spencer herself than on the times and places in which she has lived. Spencer gracefully walks the tightrope between personal revelation and a larger viewpoint. By doing this so ably, she points our attention away from herself as storyteller and to the stories she is telling. This outer-directed style is ultimately more intimate, giving the reader the feeling that he or she has shared with Spencer some of her fascinating and varied experiences.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.