KATHERINE Anne Porter died at the age of ninety. She had one of those very long lives the sickly, with their bronchial troubles and early threats of tuberculosis, achieve as a surprise to us and perhaps to themselves. It was just two years ago, in September 1980, that she died and now we have a biography devoted to this long life.
Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of the right leg fitted together. They also make a consistent fiction, the fiction being the arrangement, artful or clumsy, of the documents. Biography casts a chill over the late years of some writers and, perhaps from their reading the lives of those they had known in the too solid flesh, has often provoked the insistent wish that no life be written. Among those who wished for no life after life were W. H. Auden, George Orwell, and T. S. Eliot. The result has been two lives already of Auden and Orwell, and Eliot’s life is in the making, waiting to be lived again by way of the flowing bloodstream of documentation.
Sometimes very fine writers and scholars undertake biographies, and their productions have at least some claim to equity between the subject and the person putting on the shoes. Others hope to establish credentials previously lacking by hard work on the abounding materials left by a creative life. In any case, a biography appears to be thought of as a good project, one that can at the very least be accomplished by industry. And if there is a lot of busywork in it—many visits to the libraries, a store of taped interviews, and, of course, the “evidence” of the writer’s work itself (the last rather a difficulty since it is not precisely to be understood by research)—the book gets written, and the “life of” is, so to speak, born.
In her eighty-sixth year, Katherine Anne Porter appointed Joan Givner to undertake the re-creation of her many decades. The biographer might be thought to be in luck since Miss Porter advised her to “get at the truth,” an always murky command when ordered on one’s own behalf. The real luck about the truth turned out to be that the distinguished writer was unusually inclined to fabrication about her past. These fabrications, dashing often and scarcely news and only mildly discrediting, seem to be the driving engine behind Joan Givner’s accumulation of the facts of life.
How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one’s life; every life is rich in material. By the nature of the enterprise, the contemporary biographer with his surf of Xerox papers is doing something smaller and yet strikingly more detailed than the great Victorian laborers in the form. Our power of documentation has a monstrous life of its own, a greater vivacity than any lived existence. It makes form out of particles and finds attitude in a remembered drunken remark as easily as in a long contemplation of experience—more easily in fact. It creates out of paper a heavy, obdurate permanency. Threats to its permanency will come only by way of other bits of paper, a footnote coup d’état. No matter—a territory once colonized in this way has had its indigenous landscape and culture put to the heel.
In Joan Givner’s book, the root biographical facts have the effect of a crushing army. Everything is underfoot. Each character and each scene of Miss Porter’s fiction is looked upon as a factuality honored by its provenance as autobiography. And separate fictions are mashed together as bits of the life recur or are suggested in different works. Miss Porter, in a manner impertinently thought of as dilatory, did not often translate experience in a sequential fashion. So she is writing “Hacienda” while she is “living” “The Leaning Tower.” She is boarding the ship of fools before the Mexican stories have been accomplished. It is something of a tangle to get this particular life and its laggard production into time slots, and the result is an incoherence in regard to the work. Information about when each story was actually completed, when published and where, is lost in the anecdote of days and nights. No doubt the information is somewhere among the pages, but it is a slogging task to dig it out.
The life—some scandal and a considerable amount of folly: Katherine Anne Porter was born in a log cabin in Texas and grew up in hardship without a really good education. She knew a genuine struggle to provide for herself and slowly to define herself. Gradually, along the way, after her stories became known, she slipped into being a Southern belle and into being to some extent a Southern writer after “Flowering Judas.” The role was there for the choosing since to be a belle and to be a Southern writer is a decision, not a fate. (Poe, for instance, was a Southerner but not a Southern writer.) Perhaps under the influence of the very talented Southern Agrarians—Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and others—she began to appropriate a rather frantic genealogy of Daniel Boone and certain Southern statesmen; in addition, she developed some soothing memories of plantation dining rooms, “several Negro servants, among them two aged former slaves,” and so on. In this way, she filled in the gap between what she was and what she felt like.
She was handy, too, in disposing of the traces of her various mismatings, the first a marriage at sixteen. “I have no hidden husbands,” she once said. “They just slipped my mind.” She was beautiful, a spendthrift, an alert coquette, and, since she lived long, a good many of her lovers and three of her husbands were younger than she was. She lopped off a few years here and there. The book goes into a determined sorting out, and the husbands are lined up, the years restored.
Her serious work was slow in coming about because of a scratchy, hard life after she literally ran away from her first husband—just ran off, as they say. She tried acting, did very provincial newspaper work and finally got a job on The Denver Post. Everything was hard, poorly paid, hand-to-mouth. During this period, she seems quite Western or Middle Western, like someone in a Willa Cather story trying to find the way out. Her story “Maria Concepción” was published when she was thirty-four, and her first book, Flowering Judas, appeared when she was forty. Fortunately for her future work, she went to Mexico as a reporter; she was in and out of Greenwich Village, where she met writers and no doubt increased her sophistication about literature and the act of writing.
At this point, the shape of her life falls into a sort of twenties pattern. She went to France and to Germany with her third husband, Eugene Pressly—her second husband, a person named Ernest Stock, “deadly Ernest,” as she called him, having been run away from while he was sleeping. In Mexico, she met the Russian film director Eisenstein; in Germany in 1932 she met Göring; in Paris, she met Hemingway. Eisenstein became Uspensky in “Hacienda,” the ship upon which she traveled from Mexico to Germany became the Vera in Ship of Fools. In Berlin, she stayed on alone, having encouraged Pressly to return to America for a holiday without her. She never liked the constant presence of her husbands or lovers and did not like, she soon found out, to be alone—a dilemma in one shape or another common to most of mankind. The pension where she stayed in Germany went, with little need for renovation, into “The Leaning Tower.”
Research finds that in Germany, Katherine Anne Porter did not always conduct herself with generosity or moral refinement. She had a young friend, Herb Klein, a newspaper reporter, who tells years later of her leaving a seamstress without paying for a dress she had ordered—leaving the dress, too—and in this way embarrassing Klein’s mother, who had brought the two together. He also discredits her claim to have met Hitler and feels strongly that she did not move widely or knowledgeably about the Germany of the time. So, a little more unstitching of the embroidery here.
Also, and again many decades later, she made in an interview slanderous, nasty remarks about Sigrid Schultz, a reporter in Berlin in the thirties for The Chicago Tribune. All of this, no doubt rightly, brings on a fit of temper by the biographer, who finds that the German experience, as the chapter is called, “forms a dismal record of cheating, lying, slander and malice.” She sees ruthlessness, alienation (?), and brutality at the “beginning of her fifth decade.” Garrulousness and a certain untidiness in 1932 are excavated and rebuked in 1982, showing at least one of the dangers of living. The celebrated do not understand that they are chatting away in a bugged universe.
The few times in the biography that a particular work comes under Joan Givner’s critical scrutiny—divorced for the moment from her main concern, which is the presumed umbilical attachment of life and fiction—the same inclination to outrage flares up. She finds Braggioni, the revolutionary in “Flowering Judas,” to be a “complete caricature.” She adds that he “looms in the story like a grotesque Easter egg in shades of purple and yellow.”
Katherine Anne Porter wrote:
He bulges marvelously in his expensive garments. Over his lavender collar, crushed under a purple necktie, held by a diamond hoop; over his ammunition belt of tooled leather worked in silver, buckled crudely around his gasping middle; over the tops of glossy yellow shoes Braggioni swells with ominous ripeness.
So, the animadversion of the biographer is not quite to the descriptive point. And to be a revolutionary is in some sense to assume a pose. Costume, gesture, personal style, slogan, poster become personification of idea, especially in Latin America.
Perhaps in this remarkable early story, the pure, tasteful, puritan elegance of the American girl, Laura, is somewhat extended beyond credibility. Yet this girl, who has been born a Catholic and is now living among the Mexican revolutionaries, provides an outstanding instance of the magical detail that gives the stories their preeminence.
Laura sometimes slips into church, but no suitable emotions come to her. “It is no good and she ends by examining the altar with its tinsel flowers and ragged brocades, and feels tender about the battered doll-shape of some male saint whose white, lace-trimmed drawers hang limply around his ankles below the hieratic dignity of his velvet robe.” It is not always clear that the biographer understands the elegance of the prose. Instead, she knows from her file cabinet that it was Mary Doherty, an interesting radical living in Mexico, who was probably the model for Laura.
On the subject of Adam, the young soldier in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Mrs. Givner is also casually dismissive: “An insubstantial figure, completely lacking in vivid details and turns of phrase that usually animate the characters based on people whom Porter knew.” “Completely” implies the self-evident in what is a sketchy opinion. The young soldier who is to die of influenza after looking after and being enchanted by the infected Miranda—who does not die but recovers—is necessary to the structure of the story. He serves it well by the charm of his dialogue; the irony of the romantic, accommodating American gives a tragic force to this thoughtful creation about a moment in history, the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918.
The influenza epidemic, Mexico in the days of the Revolution and after, the feeling of World War I, Berlin in the thirties, the Irish in America: The situations in Katherine Anne Porter’s stories show the unexpected felicities of “homelessness.” Afterward, she came to disown the log cabin that sent her out to the highway, and she fell back, still with her stylistic gracefulness, on nostalgia and memory, or the aura of it, of a more traditional kind.
In what are called the “Miranda” stories, Miranda seems to stand for the author’s sensibility, if not for the actual author. These stories often combine scenes contemporary with Miranda’s (Porter’s) life mixed with family anecdotes about dead relations—the “old order.” The old order is a cavalier landscape of powerful grandmothers; a former slave, Old Nannie; the scandalous, bewitching Aunt Amy; the little girls, Miranda and her sister; their attractive father who reads from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Dante and brightens their childhood with prints from Dürer and Holbein—all the pleasant baggage, supposedly, of the old Southern aristocracy. It does not seem to the point that this was not the author’s life, that it is a burial of the detested log cabin in which she was born. The eye that looks across the track might be dangerous to Southern presumption, but what we have so often in the “old order” work is an eye that is too readily assimilating. Miranda’s present is nearly always more vivid and original than her past. The present is harder, more shaded with sadness and uneasy defiance, and in the long run more genuinely dramatic. “Old Mortality” is elevated as a conception by the bitter alcoholic collapse of Uncle Gabriel, his decline into a brilliantly observed social seediness by way of his hysterical, misplaced hopes at the racetrack.
“Noon Wine” is a success indeed, a story of plot, a sort of realistic tale, tightly composed in the manner of Ethan Frome. In this story, felt to be odd because of the backwoods setting, there is no doubt that Porter knows where she is. She knows in transfiguring detail what a dairy farm is like. “The churn rumbling and swished like a belly of a trotting horse.” And hens “dying of croup and wry-neck and getting plagues of chicken lice; laying eggs all over God’s creation so that half of them were spoiled before a man could find them, in spite of a rack of nests.” If this knowledge came from the time she lived on a relative’s farm outside Buda, Texas, and from certain characteristics in the dairy farmer, Mr. Thompson, that can be traced to her own father—“ambivalence” toward whom figures gravely in the biographer’s grave quilt of patches—that is only the beginning. The story has its roots in pioneer and rural American fiction and even in Faulkner. The ancestry of literature is, of course, another story of kinfolk.
Katherine Anne Porter, from the first appearance of her stories, made her mark and impressed other writers by the way she wrote. It is not easy to define her purity of style. The writing is not plain, and yet it is not especially decorative either; instead, it is clear, fluent, almost untroubled. Everything necessary seems at hand: language and scenery, psychology and memory, and a bright aesthetic intelligence that shapes the whole. Sometimes she claimed to have written certain stories at one sitting, but it is known that many were started and abandoned, taken up again and made into something new. She was dilatory perhaps, but the completed work as we now have it does not reveal any deformation of character, and indeed is expansive enough in theme and achievement to satisfy the claims of her high reputation. She was very vain as a beauty and just as vain as a writer, and this latter vanity perhaps accounted for a good deal of the waiting and stalling, a stalling filled with romantic diversions.
Joan Givner, throughout, sees what are often creative problems as problems of life, usually linked to an unsteady childhood that weeps its lacks and resentments right up to the age of ninety. In the case of a complicated egoist like Katherine Anne Porter, the biographer is altogether too insistent upon the writer’s “longing for love.” A typical passage reads: “It should be remembered, however, that Porter’s need for love was far beyond the ordinary, a desperate, compulsive need inspired by the nagging, ever present sense of her deficiencies.” The biographer’s rather smug provincialism distorts the worldly and amusing mishaps of a woman who was not made for marriage and thus married four times. It is agreeable to come upon the writer’s sniffs in the midst of the biographer’s rampaging “longings” and doubts of “self-worth.” When she happened to remember the fiftieth anniversary of her first marriage, Miss Porter observed that the fiftieth was a lot more pleasant than the first.
Ship of Fools was a long novel and long in the making: from 1941 to 1961. The book made over a million dollars and, of course, for poor Miranda that made a difference. Its reception was very favorable at the beginning, but thereafter followed some fierce reservations. The setting of the book is 1931, a ship going from Vera Cruz to Bremen with a passenger list very long and outlandishly challenging. A fixed arena in which persons who would not ordinarily meet can be realistically gathered together would seem to be a gift of structure, in the manner of large hotels or prison camps or hospitals. But the gift of this natural and ordained diversity is claustrophobic, like a sea journey itself. Characters are given their traits, their tics of manner, their past histories. But then they are trapped in them in the dining room, on the deck, in the bar. Diversions of distress or comedy are offered with great skill, but the sea rolls on and the characters roll on, clutching their gestures.
The significant promise of the novel lies in the date and destination: It is 1931, and the boat is on the way to Germany, carrying with it Germans who must somehow prefigure what is to come by way of German arrogance and moral limitation, what is to come for the poorly conceived solitary Jew—an unattractive man who makes his living selling Christian religious objects—and what is to come for the German whose wife is Jewish but scarcely knows it, an assimilated person answering to the name of Mary. The historical promise is too pressing for the imagination in the novel. All is too static, and the implied parable is never quite achieved. There is something a little musty, like old yellowing notes. The flawless execution of the single scenes impresses, and yet the novel remains too snug and shipshape for the waters of history.
With the publication of Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter was past seventy, but since she was to live twenty more years, there was time for a daunting accretion of foolishness. She can fight with faithful friends and relatives, she can spend, she can fall in love, she can drink too much, she can buy a large emerald ring, a “longing” from which she did not run away. She also has time for her increasing anti-Semitism: “Everybody except the Jews knows the Jews are not chosen but are a lot of noisy, arrogant, stupid, pretentious people and then what?” She pronounced on desegregation, leading her close friend Glenway Wescott to declare that “her poor brain is just simply one seething smoking mass of molten lava.”
Biographies inevitably record the demeaning moments of malice and decline and have the effect of imprinting them upon the ninety years. In the biographies of today, all things are equal except that the ill winds tend in interest to be—well, more interesting.
Katherine Anne Porter did not have a happy life. She was better at sloughing off love than retaining it. She was often lonely in between her rushes to attachments. Her egotism was disabling. Throughout her life, the most useful condition for her work and for her sense of things came from the part of her that was an audacious, immensely gifted, independent Sister Carrie who knew about poverty and rooming houses and bad marriages and standing alone. The folly of the claim to represent somehow an aristocratic example of taste and moral excellence was not wisdom but just the downward path.
The ending of the biography, a flourish, is an unhappy image of the limitations of the method of composition. It reads: “At the very end she lay, like La Condesa on the Vera, drugged and demented, bereft of her home and jewels, but defiant until the last moment when on September 18, 1980, the little point of light flickered and failed.” The truth is that Katherine Anne Porter was drugged and demented from strokes and the ghastly illnesses of extreme old age. It is not a useful summarizing sentiment to think of her as a fiction, just as it has not been altogether wise to think of her fiction as her life, or for that matter “the life of” as precisely her life.
1982