The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales:

Introduction

I N T R O D U C T I O N 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 Stonesof 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 x INTRODUCTION 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 INTRODUCTION X1 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 foundyourself. The...