Elizabeth Spencer (1)Rezensionen

Upon reflection, I changed my rating to four stars, because this is one HELL of a perfect psychological study of parenting. And it's short, at just over 100 pages. AND it takes place in lovely, picturesque Florence.

Your child has suffered brain damage, of which she is unaware -- but you are fully aware of her truncated chance for a happy, fulfilled life. When she falls in love with a boy who clearly loves her in return, what do you do? To what lengths will you go to secure her happiness? And to what lengths will you go to relieve your own burdens?

An amazing little book that packs a punch.

I wanted to love this book, written in the early 1950s. Unanimously chosen by the Pulitzer Prize jurors as the best novel published in 1956, it wasn't awarded the prize by the Columbia University Trustees, who have the final say. They said nothing. While I know nothing of the trustees in 1956-7, it suits me to picture them as all white men, the generals of business, banking, and industry, Masters of the Universe (though Tom Wolfe was decades from coining that phrase). But still reluctant to endorse this indictment of Southern Culture, this roiling of...mmm…"the race issue". This...erm...exposé was not to be condoned.

Elizabeth Spencer's third novel depicts a dry Mississippi county whose voters must elect a sheriff because the office-holder has died. He departed this life in a grocery store in the town of Lacey, where he'd gone—knowing his life was expiring—to endorse its proprietor as his successor. That man, Duncan Harper, is a local, a low-key man who was, nonetheless, the greatest running back in Mississippi football history.

The sheriff expects Harper will maintain his policies, but Harper is intent on enforcing the county's ban on liquor sales and is supportive of rights for Blacks. As interim sheriff, Harper personally busts a bootlegger. The bootlegger is a life-long friend who has always loved the woman Harper is married to. With the help of a local Black, Harper is set up so his views on race will be publicized in the county and beyond. Then the bootlegger is shot, and rumor quickly spreads that the shooter was Black, that Harper knows who he is and where he is, but that he's covering for him. The victim won't say who shot him. In only a few weeks, Harper's electoral support evaporates. Still, he remains interim sheriff and he continues to investigate the shooting.

As the story unfolds, Lacey society reveals itself as implacably segregationist. The mob rules, but it's easily manipulated. Familiar ring, isn't it?

What is shocking to contemporary readers is the endless, casual use of the n-word. You have to understand that in 1953, not only in the South, but throughout the country, it was a commonly used word. To really appreciate how oppressive the racial climate was, you have to immerse yourself in the conversation of the time. I think it's an essential element of the history, the culture, the story.

Spencer grew up in Mississippi, a member of a socially elite family, living on a plantation with an army of Black servants. It was after receiving a Guggenheim grant that allowed her to retreat to Italy that she was able to confront her own upbringing and write her novel of repudiation. Thereafter, she lived and worked in Italy, London, and Montreal, returning to the South (to Durham, NC) only in 1986.

So did I love [The Voice at the Back Door]? Not really. But I do like it and I admire it. I think it deserved the Pulitzer. I view it as an accurate reflection of an unsavory culture in the 1950s.

Three novellas set in Italy which deal with how Italy, its weather and its architecture, its general beauty affects the relationships of the people who visit it.

The title story was absolutely captivating, presenting a moral dilemma of a holiday romance complicated by innocent secrets and ulterior motives. The other two I found unfocused and unwieldy.½

time/life books
I wanted to like this. it was interesting to see how southern men thought their wives should keep house, look good, cook well, look after kids but they were really stupid. I found the book really hard to follow and there were too many characters for me. I think she might have told the story in her own order but I think she should tell her readers. I resent being expected to read the book twice to figure it out.

I wish I could give this an extra half-star because the stories that were good were SO good. That said, it was only after I put the book down once and picked it up again that it really began to work it's quiet magic.

I've read some E. Spencer short stories and "The Light in the Piazza", which I thought was just about perfect. This memoir is just packed with life and with loud regrets and quiet triumphs. Spencer grew up in an old Southern slave owning family, yet the weight of the Civil War and living with segregation seems to weigh way too lightly on her privileged childhood. She tells one hideous anecdote about a woman who worked for the family who was beaten with a stick pierced through with nails. Her father put the woman on a train, just sent her away, and nothing was ever said. Unbelievable, or more sadly, too believable. She later wrote a novel called "The Voice at the Back Door" which alienated both sides of her Mississippi family.

She lived in Rome, Paris, Canada, and finally tried returning to the South but was not welcomed and could not hack Southern life as an adult. She learned and grew. One glorious part of the book is her strong friendship with Eudora Welty. Truly an author to love and a woman to admire. Excellent memoir, and she writes on!

I'll admit it: I am on an Elizabeth Spencer jag. One of the most pleasure a reader can have is to find an author who has fallen from favor or from print and discover a trove of amazing books and stories. Spencer was first published in 1948 and she's still writing. This is probably her most famous work, as it was made into a very popular Broadway musical. It's a simple story of a complicated circumstance: a mother and her daughter travel to Florence, where young Clara and a man fall in love. So what's the problem? Clara is not in any way mentally mature due to a childhood accident; yet she gives the physical appearance of a typical young woman abroad. The story is told by Clara's mother, an incredible woman who is able to puzzle through the awkward situation and make the impossible decisions. The reader must judge right or wrong. At only 110 pages, it is the slenderest of tales packing the greatest of wallops. Highest recommendation.

These are quiet but forceful stories that remind me of Eudora Welty's. Spencer writes from the South and from the heart of families we all know. She delves deeply into what from the surface looks like everyday household tragedies. Of the nine stories, my favorite is "Blackie", in which a remarried woman with three stepsons, a stepfather, a dog, and a loving husband, is pulled back towards her first husband and son. Her second family senses her ambiguity and tries to make sure she never leaves them. "You're in a cage of wild animals", says her husband. And yet in her placid bridge club, she considers herself the luckiest of the players. Spencer also writes novels, the most well known being "The Light in the Piazza", which was adapted very successfully for Broadway. That's what I'll be reading next. I love Southern writers and don't know how I came so late to Elizabeth Spencer's bountiful table.

It says something when an author can boast that they have been writing for seven decades. Seven, folks. Elizabeth Spencer creates a nearly perfect set of short stories with Starting Over: Stories. Some of these stories broke my heart, moved me to tears, and made me put the book down out of sheer self-preservation. I'm a fairly recent convert to the power of the short story (by recent, I mean within the last few years) so for a collection to move me as deeply as some of these stories moved me...well, let me just say that it doesn't happen as often as I like. Had I read a collection like this during my years of "not-a-fan of short stories," I think I may have had a come to Jesus moment a little sooner.

Read the rest of this review at The Lost Entwife on Dec. 20, 2013.

A short story, rather than a novel, I think. During a prolonged visit in Florence, the prospect of love and a fuller life is offered to brain-damaged, but beautifully child-like Clara. Her mother becomes aware of the possibility and finally decides to allow and encourage it. Late twist towards the end concerning the young man's father's intentions. Ends quite abruptly and unsatisfactorily. Seems there was more that could have been concluded.

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Report: Travis Brevard is dying, and he knows it. For years, he's kept the lid on his county, the sheriff without rivals or challengers, turning a blind eye to what suits him not to see and zooming in like an owl on a mouse if he's a mind to; but this 1949 day, his life is over and he knows it. Not convenient with a tax list in his pocket, doom for them that hasn't paid and salvation for the elect on the list, and an election before too long. Looks like Travis needs to make sure there's an anointed successor.

He chooses Duncan Harper, town grocer, husband of Tinker and still in love with Marcia Mae Hunt, socially far above a mere shopkeeper and son of a shopkeeper; now returned to her hometown, a war widow, and a source of anxiety for Tinker...and Duncan.

So is set in motion the plot of Antigone...the power change is coming, huzzah huzzah, but not without deaths and secrets exploding in the faces of all and sundry. King Creon's role is assumed by Jimmy Tallant (formerly the swain of Tinker), a bootlegger who advocates for the power of the state and the adherence to the law, albeit as the law is actually practiced if not written. Antigone, mourning love lost or died, is Duncan's role, the advocate for the right of the actual people, as opposed to the state-constituted We-the-People, to assemble and thereby agree on and cause change.

The structure of the argument between the two forces is the campaign for sheriff, eating up that entire summer. At the end of the book, a crime is resolved, the new sheriff is baptized in the deep and cold pool of race and politics as practiced in the Southern States since the end of Reconstruction exactly as in ancient Athens during its civil unrest and social change during Sophocles' time, and a tangle of old feelings, old hurts, and old bonds reformed...all the same strands that drama has always woven into cloth, whether whole and bright enough of color to last for centuries or not, since catharsis was invented by the priestly healers and crying in reflected rage and pain was recognized as more medicinal than the finest potions or pills could ever be.

My Review: Spencer's well-mannered Southern-lady language, with its stateliness and its rather deliberate pace, will likely jangle in modern ears. Her liberal (!) use of the n-word (I loathe political correctness, but I was raised by a mama who thumped me if I uttered that word because it was disrespectful of people I'd never met, and that was Not Allowed, so I just can't type it...I flinch too hard, waiting for the blow) is not of today, not done in coolness. (I go on record here as thinking that behavior is not cool, no matter who does it. I also don't like constant swearing for the same reason: It's not cool. It's just ill-mannered.)

Well, anyway, this novel won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, at least according to the jury, but the board declined to award the novel the prize. Rather like 2012, the board felt the jury chose an inadequate exemplar of the year's American fiction crop. Happen I agree, in this case, as I agreed with the board's 2012 decision not to award a prize to any of the literary chaff nominated by the 2012 jury. Only I can't find a list of the other books the judges considered, so I can't say I the board was simply being conservative (in 1957, remember, the Little Rock riots happened and LBJ got the first-ever civil rights legislation through a very very very scared and divided Congress, so there's some logic to this) or if the field consisted of microbooks like it did this year (srsly, Swamplandia! for a still-major literary prize?! Sheesh).

This isn't High Literature, and it's nowhere near as good as Spencer's short fiction. It's just fine. It's a middlin'-good story, it's got nicely drawn characters that I've already gone hazy on, and it's got a few lovely turns of phrase that are so typically Southern that I felt no need to note them down.

I'd put it in the Better Beach Reads category of my own private bookstore. More meat than shudder Dan Brown. A book for Rehoboth Beach, not Venice Beach.

A very odd subject. A young woman (blond and very pretty) was kicked in the head by a colt when she (the young woman) was just a colt herself. Her mother has, naturally, been very protective of her developmentally challenged daughter. So they go to Italy for a vacation, where the young woman behaves like all the other Italian women, fits right in and lands a rich husband. What this implies about the IQ of the Italian people, I'd rather not explore.

More years ago than I care to remember, I saw the movie based on Spencer's story, The Light in the Piazza, with Olivia de Havilland, Yvette Mimieux, Rossano Brazzi and George Hamilton. A few years ago, I saw the Craig Lucas/Adam Guettel musical. I have now, finally!, read the book.

In the title story, a well-to-do American woman, Margaret Johnson, is traveling in Italy with her daughter, Clara. They make the acquaintance of a young Italian, Fabrizio Naccarelli, who falls in love with Clara. But Clara, due to an accident, is still mentally a child, and Mrs. Johnson had resigned herself to Clara's never being in a position to marry. Now she sees the possibility. Her struggle between her desire to see Clara settled and happy, and her concerns that her disability will prevent that, form the conflict. In Margaret Johnson, Spencer has created an interesting and strong woman, one who will do what she has to for her child's well-being. She is rational, practical, not seduced by the romanticism of Florence's light.

Spencer's women deal. In one of my favorite stories, The White Azalea, the protagonist is a southern spinster traveling in Italy following the death of her father, whom she had nursed through his final illness, as she had nursed her mother and an aunt. She had spent those years reading the classics, dreaming of Europe, and has followed that dream. But now a letter from her brother George ("the only boy, the family darling") arrives, urging her return home to live with and look after an elderly cousin. She literally buries the letter. Three cheers!

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1229059.html

Short stories mostly set in twentieth-century Mississippi but some also in Rome. Didn't grab me and I stopped reading at the half-way mark.

2741 The Voice at the Back Door, by Elizabeth Spencer (read 7 May 1995) This book was written in Italy in 1953 and published in 1956. It is a story laid in Spencer's native Mississippi and the author, when she returned to Mississippi, after Brown v. Board of Education, believed a character who believed in fairness for Negroes and ran for sheriff would then be impossible. Now the book tells of another age, with blacks being regularly elected in Mississippi. This is an excellent book, and while it does not have a happy ending, I found the ending moving and satisfactory--it is a powerful indictment of most Mississippi whites the way they were. This is a great book and Spencer is an able writer.

change cover - my copy is published by Heinemann 1960 - found image online but could not upload

Lost Horizon, The Red Pony, The Third Man, A Single Pebble, The Light in the Piazza, Seize the Day, Breakfast at Tiffany's

Ive seen the movie it was poignant(and a bit controversial) so maybe I should read the book too?