Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and
Writings
(Library of America, 1093 pages, $40)
“SHE SIGHED WITH A HUMUROUS BITTERNESS. The humor seemed
momentary, but the bitterness was a constant state of mind.” So
Cousin Eva, a Texas schoolmistress, suffragette, and old maid, ca.
1912—her never having married evidently attributable to a
recessive chin—reveals her spiritual morbidity to a young
relative, Miranda, who has happened to sit across from her on a
train that is taking them to a family funeral. By the time
Katherine Anne Porter’s story “Old Mortality” is over, Miranda has
vowed to part ways forever with her blood relations and with her
recently acquired husband. “I hate love, she thought, as if this
were the answer, I hate loving and being loved, I hate it.” She can
no longer abide the legendary romantic past—frontiersmen who
risked everything, splendid belles who loved them—that her family
has inflicted upon her, and she is determined to go at the rest of
her life clear-eyed, free of illusions, free of attachments, indeed
free pure and simple. The closing sentence indicates that she is in
for a rougher time than she expects: “At least I can know the truth
about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a
promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.”
Youthful hopes are a fine thing, especially when they have some
experience and acquired wisdom to back them up, but constant
bitterness has a way of engulfing hope in Katherine Anne Porter’s
world. The Library of America’s new volume of her stories, essays,
and reviews—her most famous work, the novel Ship of Fools
(1962), is omitted—is almost too pungent in its despondency to
bear in high doses. Renouncing love in one’s youth suggests the
fantastic desperation of a bargain with the devil, and the devotee
of solitude who abides by the terms of the bargain will likely find
himself, or herself, more bitter than the inveterate lover whose
heart is broken time and again. The world will leave those who hope
for an agreeable passage through it, or at least a painless one,
begging for a quick end, with a blindfold. Begging, however, will
not help. Whether you hate life or try to love it, it will gore you
and stand there watching you bleed out real slow.
If you’ve just noticed rhythm getting the better of grammar for
rhetorical effect, that’s Texas talking; for Callie Russell Porter
was born in Indian Creek, Texas, in 1890, the fourth child of
native Texans. She grew up on farms and in small towns, her
sensibilities abraded by prairie winds, even as she was reading all
of Shakespeare by the age of 12. There seemed never to have been a
time when she didn’t know life was hard. Her mother died when she
was two. Her beloved grandmother Cat Porter, who took the bereaved
children in hand, died when she was 11. At 14 Callie asked to be
called Katherine in honor of her grandmother. By then the young
girl was writing stories, acting in summer stock, reading Gibbon,
Voltaire, and William James. At 16 she married a hard-drinking
yahoo who beat her into unconsciousness and threw her down the
stairs. She stuck out the marriage for nine years, which was at
least nine years too long. After getting her divorce in 1915, she
married and rid herself of two more men in rapid succession. She
contracted tuberculosis and did time in a Dallas charity hospital.
A few years as a journalist, in Fort Worth and Denver, followed. In
1918 the Spanish influenza nearly numbered her among the millions
it killed; she claimed to have been vouchsafed on the verge of
death “what the Christians call the ‘beatific vision,’ and the
Greeks called the ‘happy day.’” Something less than happy about the
near-death experience turned her hair permanently white. She was
still an attractive woman, however, especially vain about her
breasts and legs, and she took to dyeing her hair black.
Coming close to death did seem to make her bolder. She headed to
Greenwich Village, bent on writing stories and poems. When what she
wound up doing was ghostwriting and cranking out publicity releases
for movies, she took off for Mexico to write articles on politics
and culture.
One wonders how she found time to write a thing. Never one to
pass up sexual adventure, she had successive affairs with the
governor of Yucatan, a Polish diplomat, and a Nicaraguan poet,
whose baby she aborted. For several years she would bounce between
New York and Mexico and carom among an assortment of men, resulting
in stillbirth, gonorrhea, removal of her ovaries. In 1933 she tried
marriage again, to a man 14 years younger than she; it would last
four years. Ten days after that divorce, she married another man,
21 years younger than she; this marriage too would last four years,
and would be her final one. The sexologist Alfred Kinsey hoped to
find her a trove of recondite erotica, but in certain respects she
proved quite conventional; when he asked her in an interview
whether she had ever made love with a dog, she replied, “Why, no,
Dr. Kinsey. Have you?”
THE 1920s AND 1930s SAW PORTER come blazing into her own as a
writer of stories and essays. Texas, Mexico, and Europe, where she
spent the years 1931 to 1935 (most of that time in Paris, which she
loved) became her prime imaginative terrain. Stark landscapes bred
hard people who knew a thing or two about heartbreak and perhaps
something about violence. In the story “He,” Porter depicts the
travails of possum-eating poverty, the pride of those who have
nothing and refuse to be pitied, which is to say looked down upon.
The title character is a severely retarded boy; that the he is
never referred to by name but only by the capitalized pronoun
bespeaks both his degraded status and his exalted one as the child
most beloved by his mother. When He suffers a seizure and becomes
bed-ridden, his parents decide they must put him in the county
home, and his mother thinks on the journey over, “there was nothing
she could do to make up to Him for His life. Oh, what a mortal pity
He was ever born.” Unrelieved, unjustified, unredeemed, the pain of
one nameless defective swells to fill the human world. It is not
compassion that Porter evokes here so much as horror. This poor
boy’s existence is gratuitous cruelty for which there shall be no
consolation. Wisdom comes from suffering, it is said, but the only
wisdom here is wrung from the mother, who learns that even her love
for Him counts for nothing in the end.
This withering nihilism is at the bitter heart of “The Jilting
of Granny Weatherall”—the woman whose name suggests that she has
seen and endured everything. Left at the altar in her youth, on her
deathbed she regards her misery then as so much silliness. She
married and buried another good man, and had no choice but to take
over his work when he died. “Why, he couldn’t possibly recognize
her. She had fenced in a hundred acres once, digging the post holes
herself and clamping the wires with just a negro boy to help. That
changed a woman.” All that behind her, preparing to die yet
clinging to life, she prays that God send her a sign, but she is
jilted once more. “Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house.
She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped
them all away. Oh, no, there’s nothing more cruel than this—I’ll
never forgive it. She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew
out the light.”
Put out the light, and then put out the light: in stories that
take a turn toward the macabre, such as “Maria Concepcion” and
“Noon Wine,” people whom you would never suspect of having it in
them commit murder. Death by violence and by pestilence crushes the
love of life in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” the story to which Porter
earned the rights when she nearly died of the flu. As the illness
takes hold, Miranda—Porter’s alter ego in several stories—has a
delirious intimation of the world’s frightfulness:
Back of the ship was jungle, and even as it appeared before her,
she knew it was all she had ever read or had been told or felt or
thought about jungles; a writhing terribly alive and secret place
of death, creeping with tangles of spotted serpents,
rainbow-colored birds with malign eyes, leopards with humanly wise
faces and extravagantly crested lions; screaming long-armed monkeys
tumbling among broad fleshy leaves that glowed with sulphur-colored
light and exuded the ichor of death, and rotting trunks of
unfamiliar trees sprawled in crawling slime.
Nature’s malevolence, and man’s — witness the erotic, racial,
and political poisons expressed in Ship of Fools, Porter’s
yarn about a sea voyage from Mexico to Germany in 1931 — overwhelm
the felicities of art and intellect and love that Porter attempted
to live by. Porter was not a born hellion but a person whose
energies were turned demonic and who was unable to love life; the
experience of and sensitivity to natural and moral evil that warped
her as a woman also guided her as an artist. Her art is one of
fearlessness and consummate skill, like those required in milking a
rattlesnake, and the spectacle fascinates for a time. But her
bitterness is a constant state of mind, and in the end, she makes
one long for the writers who give the angels their share of the
melody.
