Russell Banks
By Cynthia Joyce
Hollywood's hottest new property is a writer with a gift for probing the dark truths of ordinary lives
(01/05/98)

320 PAGES

BY SARAH HARRISON SMITH | "It takes somebody like me who never saw them ... to come along and tell you with authority that they looked so-and-so and they shared so-and-so," explains Randall Gibson, the eccentric and often drunken narrator of Elizabeth Spencer's dramatic and adept first novel, "Fire in the Morning" (1948). Gibson can bring the past so convincingly to life, he confides, because he's not burdened with the cumbersome details of veracity. His separation from the story gives him license to exercise his imagination. It's this kind of clear and uninhibited perspective that Spencer, at her best, embodies as a novelist.

If a certain distance makes for great storytelling, then perhaps it's proximity that renders Spencer less effective in her new memoir, "Landscapes of the Heart." Spencer's nine novels and several story collections have won a bevy of prizes for their combination of earthy realism and Jamesian delicacy of observation. None contain more than a seed of autobiography, and each is more vital than this account of her own life.

"Landscapes" first chronicles Spencer's journey from genteel Carrollton, in the Mississippi Delta, to Vanderbilt University. The aspiring author became acquainted with now-famous literary "Agrarians," and her friends included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty and William Faulkner -- all of whom she only superficially portrays. Spencer then traces her path through her striving if poverty-stricken years in Manhattan, literary recognition and its attendant cocktails in Rome and productive married life in Montreal. Of these, Spencer's Carrollton childhood is the most successfully evoked, perhaps because she is recalling stories and people already rendered fictional, or darkened, as William Maxwell would say, by time.

Born in 1921, Spencer lived her early years very much like the child of a 19th century gentleman farmer. Pony rides and tea parties were elements of daily life, and "Landscapes" is most interesting when Spencer details these rituals, or pays tribute to quirky relatives and neighbors. Startling encounters with racial violence and the acute poverty brought by the Depression punctuate the routine of her ordered home life. Little of this history comes first-hand. Some was passed down by family, and much was "overheard, half-heard, not clearly understood" by Spencer's young ear. Even so, they form a vivid patchwork.

Sadly, Spencer treats her adult years with an interminable ladylike politeness that stifles all vivacity of observation. Unprotected by the label "fiction," and writing about her peers, she backs into a noncommittal corner. Of her friends Mary and John Cheever, she writes, "Anywhere you saw them, you would have picked them as a pair, assured of love." Her comment seems to forestall questions about what she might have sensed about their unusual marriage, or about how she reacted to the revelations of adultery and bisexuality in Cheever's published diaries.

Spencer appears to feel that the novelist's clairvoyance has no place in a memoir. She's so well-mannered, she seems to have closed the door on her imaginative instincts. "Landscapes of the Heart" will satisfy readers hungry for facts about Spencer's life, but her best insights remain elsewhere.
SALON | Jan. 8, 1998

Sarah Harrison Smith is on the staff of the New Yorker.