The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales

The Light in the Piazza
and Other Italian Tales

B
OOKS BY
E
LIZABETH
S
PENCER

Fire in the Morning
This Crooked Way
The Voice at the Back Door
The Light in the Piazza
Knights and Dragons
No Place for an Angel
Ship Island and Other Stories
The Snare
The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer
Marilee
The Salt Line
Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories
On the Gulf
The Night Travellers

The Light in the Piazza

and Other Italian Tales

by

Elizabeth Spencer

with an introduction by
Robert Phillips

The stories included were first published as follows: “The Light in the Piazza” in
The New Yorker
, “The White Azalea” in
Texas Quarterly
; “The Visit” in
Prairie Schooner
, “The Pincian Gate” in
The New Yorker
, “Wisteria” in
Ship Island and Other Stories
, McGraw-Hill Book Co.; “Knights and Dragons” in
Redbook
(in abridged form); “The Cousins” in
Southern Review
.

Copyright © 1996 by the University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging—in—Publication Data

Spencer, Elizabeth.

The light in the Piazza and other Italian tales / by Elizabeth Spencer ; with an introduction by Robert Phillips.

p. cm. —(Banner books)

ISBN 0-87805-836-2 (cloth : alk. paper). —
   ISBN 0-87805-837-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Italy—Social life and customs—Fiction.
   I. Title. II. Series: Banner books (Jackson, Miss.)
   PS3537.P4454L54 1996
   813’. 54—dc20

95-39929
CIP

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data available

T
O
J
OHN

C
ONTENTS

Introduction

The Light in the Piazza

The White Azalea

The Visit

The Pincian Gate

Wisteria

Knights and Dragons

The Cousins

I
NTRODUCTION

Many of our best writers, capable of writing well about more than one terrain, have set stories both in the land of their upbringing and in places they embraced in later life. Herman Melville was born in New York, but he claimed a whaling ship was his Yale College and his Harvard. His sea voyages enabled him to write about Liverpool, the South Seas, Tahiti and Hawaii. Though he finally returned to dry land, in his imagination he never left the storms and calms of the seas. Henry James too was born in New York, and a considerable amount of his work was set in that city, but he also wrote vividly in novels, tales and travel books about life in England, France, and Italy. Though Ernest Hemingway had Horton Bay, Michigan, firmly in mind when he wrote his first Nick Adams stories, he went on to use settings in Italy, France, Spain, Africa and Cuba. These writers’ lives and works bear testimony to what Elizabeth Spencer describes in the Preface to her 1981 collection,
The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer
, as “how you take up residence in the world.” Though Spencer will always be a Mississippian, her second country is Italy.

Born in Carrollton, Mississippi, Spencer first saw Italy in August of 1949, when she was twenty-eight. At that time she was the author of one novel,
Fire in the Morning
(1948), which involved four generations of hill-country Mississippians. (It was to be followed by two more Mississippi novels,
This Crooked Way
in 1952 and
The Voice at the Back Door
in 1956.) Having received an invitation to visit a
friend in Germany, she went abroad on the proceeds of that first novel. Apparently, Germany did not capture her imagination; she admits she has no feeling for the Rhine. But when she moved on to Milan, Verona, Venice, Florence, Siena, and Rome, she fell under a spell, and she resolved to return whenever she could.

The occasion arose in 1953, when she was presented a Guggenheim Fellowship. Having thought she would remain a year, she stayed for five, except for brief returns to Mississippi and New York City. She met her husband, John A. B. Rusher there, and she wrote her third novel. Ironically, Spencers most famous work set in Italy,
The Light in the Piazza
, was not written until she had moved to Montreal in 1958, for reasons having to do with her husband’s career. That novella, so full of Italian light, was written in one month, under great compulsion, during a snowstorm her first winter in Montreal. It was partially inspired by Spencer’s memories of the light in Italy during that long dark Canadian winter.

It was more than Italy’s light which affected Spencer’s work; the focus of her writing changed while she was there. Her first three novels had featured male protagonists, grappling with their fates in Mississippi, but in writing about Italy, Spencer began to place female protagonists at the forefront. Italy also challenged her to rethink what it meant to be “southern.” In a 1988 interview with
Publishers Weekly
, Spencer said:

Before I went to Italy I thought I would always be encased in the southern social patterns and lineage and tradition, and if the South changed, then I wanted to be part of that change. I didn’t see myself as separate from it. Then, especially after I married, I had to come to terms with a life that was going to be quite separated from that. I got to thinking that the Southerner has a certain mentality, especially Southern women—you can no more change a Southern woman than you can a French woman; they’re always going to be French no matter what you do. So I thought that really nothing was going to happen to me
as far as my essential personality was concerned, that I could broaden and include more scope and maybe get richer material. I looked at it from the standpoint of my characters, that the Southern approach was going to be valued no matter where they found themselves. It seemed to me that there wasn’t any need in sitting at home in the cottonfield just to be Southern, that you could be Southern elsewhere, in Florence, or Paris, or anywhere you found yourself.

The publication of
The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales
makes available in one volume seven pieces of fiction that are among Spencer’s best. With the exception of a portion of the novel
No Place for an Angel
(1967), which is difficult to excerpt, this book includes all her Italian works. This rich collection puts on display her range and diversity, artistry and complexity.

It is instructive to compare
The Light in the Piazza
with the novella Spencer wrote as a companion piece,
Knights and Dragons
. The heroine of
Piazza
, Margaret Johnson, is a woman so rational and practical she could never have her reason overthrown, while in
Knights
the character Martha Ingram is demon-haunted and on the cusp of madness.
Piazza
is a comedy and a work of linear fiction, whereas
Knights
, a tragedy, is a poetic allegory, with Martha representing the maiden in distress, her ex-husband Gordon the dragon who would devour her, and Jim Wilbourne the knight capable of rescuing her, if he only would. (Ironically, Wilbourne turns out to be a dragon, too, telling habitual lies and turning away Martha’s nephew.)

Though both novellas are set in Italy—the former largely in Florence, the latter in Rome—and both deal with Americans abroad, the landscapes are totally different. Landscape might be considered “psychescape” as well, since each city at the time is a projection of the heroine’s mental condition. While
Piazza
is suffused with summer light (Margaret’s daughter’s name, Clara, is itself a play on light), and with romance, charm, and humor,
Knights
takes place in
Rome in winter, when the rain outside turns interiors dark and cold. People get colds or worse illnesses; sunny Italy has become a dungeon. Cellini’s statue of Perseus holding aloft the head of Medusa in the sunlit piazza is symbolic of Margaret Johnson’s personal triumph in managing her daughter’s future—at least for the present. (This Cellini statue is a parallel to “the statue of some heroic classical woman whose dagger dripped with stony blood,” which Theresa Stubblefield imagines in her own moment of liberation in Spencer’s story “The White Azalea.”) On the other hand, Martha Ingram’s apartment, with all its “devious stairways, corridors, and
cortili
that led to it,” is a labyrinth or maze into and out of which Martha must make her way. Margaret Johnson’s story revolves about her fullness of character, her determination in facing moral dilemmas, while Martha Ingram is a woman whose personal choices seem to diminish, until she is rendered almost one-dimensional, a doll “clipped-out with scissors.” Yet both illustrate an important Spencer theme: the female’s pursuit of self-possession in a male-dominated world.

The third major piece in this collection, “The Cousins,” which is almost novella length, has found as sympathetic a readership as
Piazza
. Perhaps this is because everyone believes there are family secrets that remain hidden. “The Cousins” was partially inspired by the site where it was written, the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, where Spencer was a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation. It concerns Ella Mason, an Alabama widow just turned fifty, and her recollections of the events of a summer thirty years before, when she was enamored of two male cousins, Eric and Ben. Regarding this complex relationship, Spencer said in an interview:

It seems to me that real relationships don’t ever perish. My object is to bring people to a certain point—usually a spiritual point, an awareness of all the elements involved. It’s like focussing a camera.

The story begins with this triangle, Ben and Ella Mason and Eric. The narrator appears to love both cousins equally:

Wouldn’t it be nice, I used to think, if one were my brother and the other my brother s best friend, and then I could just quietly and without so much thinking about it find myself marrying the friend (and which would I choose for which?) and so we could go on forever?

But fantasies must give way to moral responsibilities, and the potentially incestuous feelings are replaced by a sense of family, with Ella Mason becoming a sort of sister to the cousins. After abandoning her love for Ben and Eric, Ella Mason goes on to a pair of marriages, one with a cattle rancher who is prematurely killed, and the other, which lasts six months, with a younger boy who is described as wild.

It is the relationship between Ella Mason and Eric which remains to be worked out, and which forms the crux of the story. My theory is that despite a long affair with an Italian woman and their brief marriage—a marriage of convenience for financial reasons—Eric’s real inclination was toward homosexuality, and that Paolo, whose enlarged photo hangs over Eric’s bookshelf, was his one real love. Perhaps Spencer would take issue with this reading; it is based upon little internal textual evidence. But it is the ambiguity of all the relationships in this tale that makes it so rewarding to reread, the secrets within families remaining secrets. This story is rare in southern literature in that it portrays educated southern men, the intellectual southerner as opposed to the redneck or the good old boy. (Other exceptions include, for instance, the attorney figures in Faulkner and Harper Lee.)

“The White Azalea,” “Wisteria,” “The Pincian Gate,” and “The Visit” are the four remaining tales. “The White Azalea” concerns Miss Theresa Stubblefield, whose first and last names are clues to her background. Like the sixteenth-century nun St. Theresa, Miss Stubblefield has led a life of strict discipline and renunciation of earthly
pleasures, nursing first her aunt, then her mother, and finally her father through lengthy illnesses. Her surname signifies her bucolic roots and the fallowness of her life. After her father’s death, she feels free at last to travel to Italy; however, she is barely there when the family calls her back. Now it is Cousin Emmas needs that must be attended to. But instead of cutting short her long-awaited European holiday, Miss Stubblefield tears up the summoning letters and buries them in an azalea pot on the Spanish Steps, meanwhile recalling an heroic statue of a classical woman who has severed the enemy’s head. The white azalea, as Peggy Whitman Prenshaw—one of Spencer’s most astute critics—has said, symbolizes “a lush vitality and innocence”; it is also a southern plant. Symbolically burying her family and her southern roots, Miss Stubblefield bravely remains in Italy to pursue her own life, satisfying her private needs rather than public expectations.