THIS collection of stories has been floating around the world in many editions, countries and languages, in three small volumes, for many years. There are four stories added which have never been collected before, and it is by mere hazard they are here at all. “The Fig Tree,” now in its right place in the sequence called The Old Order, simply disappeared at the time The Leaning Tower was published, in 1944, and reappeared again from a box of otherwise unfinished manuscripts in another house, another city and a different state, in 1961. “Holiday” represents one of my prolonged struggles, not with questions of form or style, but my own moral and emotional collision with a human situation I was too young to cope with at the time it occurred; yet the story haunted me for years and I made three separate versions, with a certain spot in all three where the thing went off track. So I put it away and it disappeared also, and I forgot it. It rose from one of my boxes of papers, after a quarter of a century, and I sat down in great excitement to read all three versions. I saw at once that the first was the right one, and as for the vexing question which had stopped me short long ago, it had in the course of living settled itself so slowly and deeply and secretly I wondered why I had ever been distressed by it. I changed one short paragraph and a line or two at the end and it was done. “María Concepción” was my first published story. It was followed by “Virgin Violeta” and “The Martyr,” all stories of Mexico, my much-loved second country, and they were each in turn accepted and published in the old Century Magazine, now vanished, by good generous sympathetic Carl Van Doren. He was the first editor—indeed, the first person—to read a story of mine, and I remember how unhesitatingly and warmly he said, “I believe you are a writer!” This was in 1923.
Several writers or persons connected with literature in some way or another, from time to time in published reminiscences, have done me the honor to mention that they had, so to speak, “discovered” me.
There is no reason to name them, but I shall only say here and now, to have the business straight, it was Carl Van Doren, gifted writer, editor and resourceful friend to young writers, who just lightly tossed my stories into print and started me on my long career, with such an air of it being all in the day’s work, which it was, I went away in a dazzle of joy, not in the least thinking of myself as “discovered”—I had known where I was all along—nor looking towards the future as a “career.” What unpleasant words they are in this context. “Virgin Violeta” and “The Martyr” were left out of the first edition, I forget why, possibly oversight. A friend fished them out of the ancient Century files, got them re-published, after forty-odd years, and so they join their fellows. Every story I ever finished and published is here. I beg of the reader one gentle favor for which he may be sure of my perpetual gratitude: please do not call my short novels Novelettes, or even worse, Novellas. Novelette is classical usage for a trivial, dime-novel sort of thing; Novella is a slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything. Please call my works by their right names: we have four that cover every division: short stories, long stories, short novels, novels. I now have examples of all four kinds under these headings, and they seem very clear, sufficient, and plain English.
To part is to die a little, it is said (in every language I can read), but my farewell to these stories is a happy one, a renewal of their life, a prolonging of their time under the sun, which is what any artist most longs for—to be read, and remembered.
Go little book. . . .
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
14 June 1965