SHE WAS spoken of simply as “Katherine Anne,” whether one was actually acquainted with her or not. But this should not be seen to indicate any folksiness in her image. Quite the contrary was true of this fastidious writer. From the time of the appearance of her very first stories, she occupied a high place in our literature. Everyone who cared about writing knew and admired her work. In the years before paperback publishing, I can remember searching the secondhand stalls for Flowering Judas, her first collection, and seeing it as a prize equal to a copy of Doctor Martino and Other Stories by Faulkner and In Our Time by Hemingway.
She was first and last a short story writer and even in that form not one to flood the market with this and that. Short stories, as a practical matter, are, along with poetry, a small business, and as such they are the object of a certain sentimental honor—a little like the honor a big and prosperous dress designer may accord the coat-lining and button manufacturers who hold on in the back streets of the enterprise. It is not felt one can really survive this way. And, in addition, most of Katherine Anne Porter’s stories appeared in small literary magazines, among them Hound & Horn, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Southern Review. Indeed, The Southern Review was the main publisher of her work, right up through the stories in her third collection, The Leaning Tower.
Faulkner and Fitzgerald could put their financial, if not their artistic, hopes in the possibility of acceptance by a mass magazine such as The Saturday Evening Post. Of course, a lot of aggressive tinkering went on in those offices, and there the serious writer had to face a most puzzling question: Who reads the story after it’s finally in print? Everyone who counted read The Southern Review, and if at the height of her fame and for her longest story, “The Leaning Tower,” Miss Porter came out with $300—well, that was her career.
During these years her publishers, Harcourt, Brace, helped her along because it was decided she should write a novel. That was it. And this became a sort of comedy, a comedy with a very long run. The novel, Ship of Fools, was published when its author was seventy-two years old, and by that time Mr. Harcourt and Mr. Brace had gone on to their reward and a subsequent publisher had had some years of worry about his investment. But in the end, Katherine Anne got hers—a million dollars. Late, no doubt about that, but quite a lot of fun nevertheless.
Katherine Anne Porter was born in 1890 and lived until 1980—that is, she lived to be ninety years old. The attainment of this great age still does not seem quite suitable to this beautiful, blown-about woman who was unsettled the whole time, not hardy and not self-preserving in the matter of health. She smoked for as long as her breath held out, drank when she felt like it, and when she could afford it planned to live, as they say in Texas, “high on the hog.” She practiced all her life the many diversions thought of as feminine: clothes, cooking, spend-thrift sprees, pretty houses, four marriages, more lovers, and certain airs of the flirt.
All of this was a sort of improvisation. She did not have the lucky, sedentary fortitude of Colette or, on the other hand, the cascading nervous energy of Virginia Woolf. Yet she was an artist, a word I remember her using often. I think it meant a kind of waiting, not properly, or at least not always, to be understood in her case as procrastination. The perfection of her stories, the extraordinary simplicity and freshness, was hard work, but I am not sure she had the idea of summoning them by hard work. They were, for the most part, begun, put aside; and when they were taken up again, I imagine she felt a surprise that there was something already there, and so in a rush of inspiration each was finished.
For the rest, for the day-to-day, there was the charm of her blue-gray eyes and her striking white hair. There was her somewhat overdressed fluffiness and the almost hallucinated attraction she felt for the expensive. It was like a gambler’s compulsion. I remember 1952 in Paris, at the conferences and performances arranged by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In her hotel room she showed me a purse—or rather a “pocketbook,” as both of us spoke of it—that had cost hundreds of dollars, hundreds of the old dollars. She said: Would you like it if it were cheaper? And I said yes. Then she said: But you see I wouldn’t. Then I’d have to think twice.
Also at that time we sat together for a performance in a concert hall. Just across from us was a very old lady, a well-known American expatriate, who was a fright to behold. Katherine Anne looked at her and said: If I looked like that, I’d kill myself. She herself was then past sixty, and I did not feel she meant any soulless contempt for the unsightly old woman. Horribly, I believed she was stating a plain truth.
None of this struck me as unworthy of the greatly gifted writer, no more unworthy than jogging or playing squash to keep in trim. It was her idea of the preservation of the flesh. And little could be held against her since nothing worked: not the husbands, not the lovers, not the often disappointing houses. I cannot think of anyone more truly independent. If there was egotism involved, independence is no less real for being something you’re left with after you’ve sloughed off” every protection.
There was never anyone except herself. When husbands got in the way, she ran off, ran off literally. Her life, for all her passion for the Vermont marble dining table and at last the greatly longed-for emerald ring itself, by way of the success of Ship of Fools, was one risk after another. Always on the frontier; always, it seemed to me, very American, an American traveler with a wide range of experience. Not one of her stories is provincial. She was from the first unaccountably sophisticated. The hardscrabble hill of her youth did not leave its mark on the line, on the paragraph, or on the purity and fineness of intention.
She was born in Indian Creek, Texas, on a failing farm and into a family disrupted by the death of her mother when Katherine Anne was not yet two years old. The house on the farm was a two-room log cabin, and while this is a historic frontier structure—bringing to mind another gifted prose stylist, Abraham Lincoln—its challenging presence in Joan Givner’s recent biography acts as a stick of dynamite on Miss Porter’s later substitution of a more promising setting for herself and family. For instance, she created as her childhood and past the idea of plantation beginnings, all ravaged of course by the Civil War, but filled with precious memories and the persistence of style, the style of the old agricultural aristocracy.
Her father was a feckless and apparently troubled man, but far from being a backcountry illiterate. It appears that he was not quite rural enough by temperament to hold on to his land, and he seems if anything a failed cavalier. The children were raised by their grandmother, and when the old lady died, Katherine Anne was sent to live with an aunt in Buda, Texas.
Buda, Texas, was dull and dispiriting, but the experience of life on a poor farm was greatly useful to her work and served her in the Mexican stories as well as in others. In her first published story, “María Concepción,” the living fowl slung over a young girl’s shoulder “wriggled their benumbed and swollen legs against her neck, they twisted their stupefied eyes and peered into her face inquiringly.”
In “Noon Wine,” the brilliance of the conception is enhanced by imagery of a perfect assurance. “The churn rumbled and swished like the belly of a trotting horse.” She knows that “slopping hogs” was a hired man’s work, killing hogs was a job for the boss, and “woman’s proper work was dressing meat, smoking, pickling, and making lard and sausage.”
The human landscape of Texas, before the discovery of oil, was a rather unstable social mixture that gave it a special complexity and richness. There was a Southernness in the dying cotton farms and a westernness in the ranches. Protestants and Catholics, Germans and Mexicans, tough, hard-drinking men, and a bourgeoisie wondering about a suitable presentation of its daughters. Katherine Anne’s father, if not a prosperous or even a sensible guide, somehow sent her and her sister to be day students at a sort of finishing school in San Antonio. Here they were given singing lessons, practice in dramatic readings, among them Shakespeare recitations, and instructed in some of the lighter refinements of deportment.
But at sixteen Katherine Anne was on her own, entirely responsible for herself, and we see her setting out with the marginal, genteel hope of making a living by giving lessons in elocution and the like. There is a special sadness in this since the frills were meant to decorate a daddy’s girl from the ranches and not a young woman in real poverty and desperation. And the pitiful superfluity of the training for Katherine Anne, who was not a cow-eyed shuffling girl of the earth but, for better or worse, a belle from the cradle. Of that one is certain.
So she married right away and into a large German-American ranching family. This was unsuitable, the most unsuitable part of it being the “perfectly nice” young husband, John Koontz. She stayed seven years, the longest she ever managed and the length certainly to be laid at the door of her youth. Then she fled, penniless. And her real life began. And hard, uncertain it was.
She went to Chicago and hoped to get into the movies and had only the smallest success. After that there are wanderings back to Dallas, work as a reporter on the Fort Worth Critic, then on to Denver and the Rocky Mountain News and near death in the influenza epidemic of 1918, a pestilence that claimed both of Mary McCarthy’s young parents. This death threat is the source of her extraordinarily moving “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” Ultimately she came to New York, went to Paris and Germany, knew all the writers of her time: the typical frame of a between-the-wars American author.
“Hacienda” came out of a sixteen months’ stay in Mexico, although it was not completed until after she had set sail by way of Veracruz for Germany with the man who was to be her third husband, later divorced. The journey became the setting for her novel, Ship of Fools, written much later. The gap between experience and creative use was typical of her life, but that is not unusual even if there is something unsettling about being in Europe while catching up with Mexico and, for that matter, Colorado; she took up “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” once more because Switzerland brought the scene back to her. One of the distresses of a writer’s life is that he or she is always behind—overdrawn at the bank, you might say.
“Hacienda” is the most ambitious of her Mexican stories. It is a daring conception, perfectly realized. Mexico after the revolution, the landowners, the peons, actresses, songwriters, middlemen, the cameraman, the director, based on Eisenstein (offstage with a sore throat most of the time), are captured in an atmosphere at once feudal, backward, and sleazily modern. It is a film set, not constructed but found waiting in a broken-down estate where the horrendous liquor pulque, the drink of the Mexican poor, is made. The sickening smell, the peons at dawn loading the casks on the backs of their donkeys, the boredom of waiting for the light or for the actors, the complaints, the slow, sluggish life the revolution has failed to enliven, the guns and horses, the crowded railway train: all of this descends like a poisonous vapor on the tragic landscape. It is a large story with a large cast and unfolds without hesitation.
Reading over the Mexican stories, I see in them the old impulse to find oneself and one’s country by being an American someplace else—the South Seas, Italy, England, Spain. “Flowering Judas” and “Hacienda” and “That Tree” are, I notice, also in some manner impersonal. The author is not a heroine in search of herself, in search of love, or in flight from love. Instead she is in Mexico, and sometimes in Mexico with other Americans, looking on with a calm, unhurried eye, observing and abstracting from the flow in a masterly way.
Braggioni in “Flowering Judas” is seen as a corrupt, florid revolutionary a bit past his prime as a leader and as a man. He strums his guitar, scatters coins in the streets, puts on his ammunition belt, tries to seduce; and then he turns native, Mexican, a local, not a foreigner. That is, he goes home occasionally to fall asleep beside his wife. He is a small-time figure of radical upsurge, a spot in the history of the moment, and still recognizable fifty years later.
A young woman, Miranda, appears in a number of the American stories. The pages have the accent and rhythm of the autobiographical, of the remembered, and we feel Miranda is an “I”—no less so in spite of the transformations of fiction. Since the author’s family circumstances were uncertain and troubling in a manner not quite that of the southern “old order,” we see that the fictions draw upon a more traditional, romantic atmosphere than the facts, the autobiographical facts, would warrant. But what is truthful and saving in the southern scene is the modern sensibility that determines Miranda’s resolutions: the need for flight, the recognition of the decline into shabbiness of the once dashing Uncle Gabriel, the pervasive sense that family memories are themselves by nature idealized and that by the passage of time the unacceptable is dramatically shaped and softened or heightened into the acceptable. Funerals and photographs, graves and anecdotes transform, and common memory is itself a form of fictional creation. The stories end on a dying fall. “Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don’t care.”
“The Leaning Tower” is a pension tale, the setting of travelers. The time is 1931, Berlin. Katherine Anne Porter was in Berlin that year, staying on alone in what her biography shows to have been a setting very much like that of the story. The major transformation of experience is that she has made the central character a young man, Charles, a painter from Texas. This is in no sense a creative strain. The brilliant, powerful “Noon Wine” is the story of three men as harsh, tormented, and driven as we can imagine. A hard knowledge of the world in extreme, masculine dilemmas was part of the knowledge she brought to fiction. So it was her good luck after all not to be quite as she would have wished—a southern lady. Instead she was a homeless wanderer, bereft in spite of the satin pillows she thought suitable for the resting of her head. She had a bitter, strong understanding of desperate happenings.
The style throughout her writing is truly a triumph. She seemed from the beginning to be in possession of a magical assurance of tone and image. She is clear and exact; fresh, never mechanical. Nothing is insisted upon, nothing is jarringly decorative, and yet nothing is journalistic. Her fluency is always there to be called upon: that is the way the pages read. Language, landscape, and sudden image fall into place. The psychology is acute, undogmatic, and enduring and under the protection of an aesthetic intelligence unusually discreet and wise.
So, after the stories upon which her splendid claim was founded, she published her long novel, Ship of Fools. It was a success—or was it, really? The book sold enormously, was bought for the films, the first reviews were serious and extremely favorable, and the novel is ambitious, extraordinarily well written and interesting. It is 1931 again, and the scene is a ship going from Veracruz to Bremerhaven and, of course, moving toward all that we know from history was to be the Germany of Hitler. A ship is a structure designed to hold human variety for the fixed time of its passage. The fixed scene is both felicitous and threatening to the passage of novel-time, and so there is something claustrophobic in the conception of characters who cannot, unless they fall overboard, do much more than repeat their gestures. On a ship there will, of course, be a long list of characters who will need to be varied enough to daunt the most experienced novelist. This “ship of fools” is no exception. It floats on with a large cast, among them a lone Jew, a charmless person who does not command our sympathy. He is vulgar and, worse, he makes his living selling Christian religious objects, such as rosaries.
Criticism followed the initial enthusiastic reception. It was felt that the book was not up to the historical challenge it posed. The portrait of the Jew was naturally resented—the ship was, after all, making its way to horrors ahead. Thus, by the appearance of a number of vehement objections, the pleasure the success brought her was quite seriously flawed.
Katherine Anne’s great age, achieved as it was after a youth of tuberculosis and a life of bronchial troubles, astonished all of us. But live on she did and live to find time for follies, indiscretions, and misbegotten chatterings. Her first two marriages seemed to have gone by like the wind, but she did not suggest that the winds had been useful and it is hard to believe they were. She brushed them away, a bit of ruffling on her coat sleeve. Allen Tate used to say: “Who knows, there might have been yet another husband dropped off somewhere.” And this was a kind of admiration, and certainly fascination.
Still, still she never lost her inclination to romance or showed hesitation about fanciful enthusiasms for younger writers, assistants, and companions. In this she brings to mind an ancient belle époque figure who, when asked at what age a woman was finished with love, replied, “Ask someone older than I am.”
As I look back over the late attachments I knew about from gossip or otherwise, I see in them a conscious and careful make-believe. And certainly a rich and confusing mixture of intentions. Katherine Anne knew the impossible when she met it; and if she was a rather beseeching nest builder, it would have been a naive, foolhardy person, imagining himself at an advantage by age or other perquisites, who thought she was ready in fact to offer a snug accommodation. Thus there was a noticeable resilience after an amorous failure, if failure is the proper word. Someone always turned up.
Her stories are not large in number, but there are quite enough of them to honor her just reputation. A confidence of structure, an unpretentious, unstrained gift for language combined in her talent with a worldly eye for the shape of things rural, native, and foreign. As a fiction writer she gained from going here and there and never quite wanting to stay. Her superb stories are the happy legacy of a hard life that spanned almost the whole of the century.
1984