Literary Love Affair With Italy:
KAPP, ISA
Literary Love Affair With Italy A Light in the Piazza. By Elizabeth Spencer. McGraw-Hill 110 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by Isa Kapp Contributor, "Commentary," "Reporter," "Kenyon Review" Whether it...
...When it comes to choices and conclusions, the author is a conventionally grateful American in Italy, and lets intuition and biology enjoy an absolute triumph over the intellect...
...Johnson's fears than her natural concern for a retarded daughter...
...that undercuts the passion in its youth by substituting a sensible fraternalism, a collegiate camaraderie...
...neither is taking unreasonable advantage of the other...
...She mentions an occasional splendid old palace or a dense young American consul in seersucker coat, twisting a rubberband around his wrist, but is quiet about the innumerable small churches, narrow streets or linen shops that may have delighted her...
...She is, after all, the product of a country that would be embarrassed by a profusion of either lilies or rhetoric in its courtships...
...his close-cut cuffless gray trousers ended in new black shoes of a pebbly leather with pointed toes"), his gifts of lilies that seem to her "phallic...
...Johnson had never seen such hypocrisy...
...At home she is occasionally petulant, but the moment her suitor Fabrizio appears she sits "still and gentle, docile as a saint, beautiful as an angel...
...She is in general a highly disciplined novelist, straight-laced and simple as Turgenev, untempted by the moral superciliousness and posturing that swarms over so much current American fiction...
...She is, from the beginning, somewhat put off by Fabrizio's eagerness, his pride in his appearance ("his black hair gleamed faintly damp at the edges...
...When her daughter Clara, a girl with a pretty, serene face but the mentality of a 10-year-old child, is courted by a young Florentine, Mrs...
...In A Light in the Piazza there is no question of violence, and the mother is much more modern and self-possessed, but there is the same AngloSaxon diffidence and shock in her first encounter with a frank Italian display of feeling...
...In other ways Miss Spencer is also the most tactful of travel writers, sharing the exact feeling of being a foreigner in a remarkable city, without sharing the list of pastas and wines on the menu...
...There is more to Mrs...
...The piazza of Elizabeth Spencer's pleasant novel about an American woman and her daughter in Florence is the same one where the respectable heroine of E. M. Forster's A Room With a View saw her cherished souvenir photographs spattered with the blood of a murdered man...
...This may be why stories by Americans about Italy are usually very physical stories of capitulation to the dominion of the senses: to good looks, embraces, the fountains of Rome or piazzas of Florence...
...Arthur Laurent's play, The Time of the Cuckoo (Summertime, in the film version), made drama out of the American refusal to be taken in or be compromised by the pleasureseeking Italian temperament...
...The mother remains in all respects a hesitant tourist, but Clara easily learns to pronounce Italian, dress, and even to give the correct 10-lire coin to beggars, as the natives do...
...Mildly wooed by Fabrizio's cavalier father, she refers to his "Italian kiss," a different matter, evidently, from a Norwegian or Yankee one...
...Reviewed by Isa Kapp Contributor, "Commentary," "Reporter," "Kenyon Review" Whether it is carried on by a robust poet like Robert Browning, a chilblained London schoolmistress or an American Puritan, the love affair between the hopeful AngloSaxon imagination and the physical beauty of Italy never ends...
...Still, the equality of the two nations really pertains only to motives...
...That Europeans could take pleasure for granted may have upset Henry James enough to induce his recurrent plots about innocence corrupted...
...But in A Light in the Piazza, as in life, seducer and seduced both have something to gain, as well as some slight deception to perpetrate...
...Many Americans, who in their late teens or early twenties wholesomely marry their buddies, worry a decade later about some more stirring experience they may have missed...
...Johnson assumes, out of conscience and common sense, that she must face a disappointing outcome...
...But the girl, with no such constraints, and guided only by nature and affection, does what is needed to win a husband...
Vol. 44 • March 1961 • No. 12
