Excerpts from an Interview with Elizabeth Spencer

winter 2003 vol. 55, no. 1

The author of nine novels, including The Salt Line (1984), The Snare (1972), and The Night Travellers (1991), the memoir Landscapes of the Heart (1998), the play For Lease or Sale (1989), and four story collections, including most recently The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction (2001), Elizabeth Spencer is a charter member and honoree of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  This October, she received the Thomas Wolfe Prize from UNC-Chapel Hill, where she has taught creative writing. Her sharp wit and lively humor make any conversation with her a delight, and any interview a real conversation.  Visiting with her, you may be treated to not only observations on craft, the South, and her own distinguished body of work, but also an introduction to her dignified black cat (she loves black cats) and charming anecdotes about other writers she has known (including “Eudora” and “Walker.”)  Although she gently rejects the label of literary “grande dame,” she has richly earned the status it confers and the praise she has received from not only her readers but her fellow writers. “What [her] stories do wonderfully, for me,” remarks Alice Munro, “is explore the ties that bind—in families, friendships, communities, marriages—how mysterious, twisted, chafing, inescapable, and life-supporting such ties are.” Praising Ms. Spencer’s “prankish gaiety of spirit,” Eudora Welty commented that “Elizabeth Spencer knows the small, Southern, backwoods hilltown down to the bone.” She knows her characters down to the bone as well, speaking of them as if they were people that she and her interviewer know – as, in fact, they are.

This interview took place on Friday, August 16, 2002 at Ms. Spencer’s home.

Amy Weldon:  I know you’ve been asked about your upbringing in rural Mississippi many times, but in reading your work I was struck all over again by place and by the power of place in it, the way the use of place saturates everything, very thorough and real yet never showy or obvious. Could you talk about growing up in Mississippi, in that society?

Elizabeth Spencer:  I was brought up in one of the old towns – I don’t think it’s ever grown, it’s shrunk instead of grown.  They found out when they were doing a book of Faulkner’s, The Reivers, that Oxford, Mississippi had grown, so they came to Carrollton to get the right atmosphere. I suppose you couldn’t be brought into a little town like that.  It’s really very pretty, the houses date way back and there’s an old courthouse square.  It saturates your imagination at an early age. I suppose that got into my work, and one has to be grateful for it, but I’ve often wondered how I would feel if I had been brought up in some anonymous city. I don’t know where my writing influence would have come from. However, most of my novels are laid in places, of course, but I don’t know if the places, except for those in my first novel, Fire in the Morning,  and in The Voice at the Back Door, contain so much in the nature of [a specific feeling of place.] Maybe some of the stories…

AW:  I was thinking about the Marilee stories.

ES:  Yes – well, that’s south Mississippi, and Carrolton is north Mississippi, north of Jackson.  Marilee lives south of Jackson in a town readily recognizable as Port Gibson, which I have seen many times but never knew all that well, so I just left her to cope with that (laugh).  She lives out in the country too, and it means something different to live out in the country as opposed to living in town.

AW:  So north Mississippi is really different from other parts of the state?

ES:  Well, I guess anybody visiting [the state] wouldn’t think it was very different, but we thought it was different. Down below Jackson you’re getting to the coast, and into the piney woods country, and a lot of those towns are river towns. The river is very important.  And of course, Natchez is there.  That area is dominated by the Natchez atmosphere.  The ruins of Windsor, pictured on the cover of the special edition of the Marilee stories, give a feeling of the atmosphere of the country down there [where the stories are set.] So we thought of it as different, but then the Delta is also different from everything else. People always think I’m from the Delta because I’m from Mississippi, but I’m not.  The Delta wasn’t even settled when Carrolton was established, because the Delta was all swamp.

AW:  How about your family? Did you receive encouragement to be a writer from them?

ES:  My mother and my mother’s family thought it was wonderful. My father thought it was a very uncertain living to go into the arts, which he didn’t much believe in anyway.  He became a hampering influence.  I think my writing embarrassed him.  He didn’t think women should try to do too much anyway (laugh).

AW:  I wanted to ask too about family in regard to the Marilee stories.  I keep coming back to them, but I really like them.

ES:  Do you like her? I like her too.

AW:  The family relationships in “Indian Summer” – Uncle Andrew and the two different wings of the family struggling against each other…

ES:  I should have gone on and written some more stories about them. They were three brothers – Marilee’s uncles were Rex, Hernan, and Andrew.  Andrew had left and gone North, but there was a little scandal about Andrew and some girl there that hampered his desire to leave, and he went up to Chicago.  They went up to see him once.  It’s an extended family, as you notice.  There was Marilee and her mother and father, who lived next to Uncle Hernan, who was living in the old family house, and then Rex married people who had a good deal of money but not much knowledge of how to farm.  I think Marilee’s affection for her family and her understanding of them is one of the nicest things.  She regarded them with humor and affection, don’t you think?  I like that.  I don’t know if they’re like my family so much.  I think the mother may be a little bit like my mother.

AW:  I was wondering about that, because those stories seemed as if they could only have been written by someone very steeped in family and extended families and familiar with the way families operate and work on each other.

ES:  I think [Marilee’s] saving grace is that she had a sense of humor about everything.  I wanted to write on about that, but it never struck me that I had a full story to tell, the way I did with the other three.  They almost left “Indian Summer” out of the collection; my editor read it over again and said he hadn’t realized what a good story it was, and that settled that.

AW:  I really like it because it seems that a lot of Southerners in particular, I think, who are very steeped in family have a secret desire to do what Uncle Rex did, which is to light out for the territory and have their own lives somewhere else.

ES:  (Laugh.)  A lot of people said it wasn’t a very happy ending, and of course it wasn’t, with what he had to contend with, but I think in a way he got things on balance again, don’t you? He was not a very forcible person who could just demand to be free of what was restricting him.

AW:  Speaking of the idea of traveling, I was reading your introduction to On the Gulf [a special edition of six previously published short stories] and I found this interesting juxtaposition.  You write,
           “What was it but the distance, the leaning outward, the opening toward far-off, unlikely worlds?  The beyond.
           Here at the Mississippian’s southernmost point of native soil, one had to recall what inland Mississippi was like…
            I felt in those two paragraphs, the motion from the end of one to the beginning of the other, this tension between freedom and being rooted.

ES:  That’s all in my work, don’t you think? Of course, you’ve just been through it all too (laugh.)

AW:  And the contrast between the coast and even on out into the ocean, onto the island that features in The Salt Line, the desire to keep going farther and farther out, as opposed to back in, toward “inland Mississippi,” as you write about it on the very next page of the introduction: “In such towns people lived on stories of each other’s saying and doings…The smell of salt air did not reach [that society] and no one can deny that it was confined and confining.” There is a fascinating tension in your work, back and forth, between the idea of home and the idea of traveling and leaving home.  It shows up in a lot of different forms.

ES:  I do think that’s there in my work.  If the tension becomes too great, you have to have the courage to leave home, to break away.  There is a kind of suction that pulls you in, a sort of centrifugal force, but I don’t see any need to decide unless things get too unbearable in one place.  Robert Frost had a great line: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”  That was “The Death of the Hired Man,” wasn’t it? There’s a lot of Southern feeling in Frost’s poems.  Maybe that’s because, together with the South, New England has the strongest sense of roots, being rooted in one particular place, in the United States.

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 © 2003 The Carolina Quarterly