April 1961
The writing of a successful novella requires an idea so simple that most novelists - when blessed with such a thing - dismiss it as a mere short story notion. Publishers have claimed for years that they cannot sell a novella (unless by Turgenev, etc.), and so it is not surprising that we see very few of them. The facts are, however, that this is a particular form with demands and possibilities which do not occur either in the short story or the novel, and it is extremely pleasant to settle down in a hundred pages at one sitting, which is, incidentally, from the writer’s point of view, the best way of being read.
Miss Spencer’s idea has the right simplicity, and this story has the charm of a good watercolour - there is no room in a novella to overpaint.
Mrs. Johnson is American, and has brought her daughter, Clara, on a trip to Italy. Clara, pretty, innocent, and radiantly charming, has the mental age of a child of ten, due to an accident when she was very young. Mrs. Johnson knows that in America Clara will never to able to lead a normal life - she had been through all the heartbreaking experiments and experiences that prove this. When, therefore, a young Italian, Fabrizio, who meets Clara outside his shop in Florence, falls instantly in love with her, her mother, who loves her with the kind of intelligent devotion which enables her to see more than one side of the situation, is faced with the choice of stopping him, or of letting it run its curiously childlike course. It is through Mrs. Johnson that we follow the affair - the meetings with Fabrizio’s family when it is clear that Clara’s simplicity matches something in Fabrizio’s Neapolitan mother: Mrs. Johnson’s attempt to explain Clara to the family, and the family to Clara’s father in America - the escape from the situation and the return to it. The whole idea has been perfectly explored and resolved: I should have liked more of Clara, but since the book is more or less an exercise in accident and fate, and it is Mrs. Johnson who is given the power to discriminate between the two, this is probably an idle wish.