On a recent trip to Washington, I zoomed through the National Gallery of Art at about Mach 5. wasn’t my idea to do it that way. Left to my own devices, I might have spent long days soaking in the masters and swiping packages of crackers from the pricey cafe. However, I’d hitched myself to a pair of impatient 13-year-olds and a tired husband, and, well, Degas is just a blur to me now even more than usual.
Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America #186)
Library of America
1100 pages
$44.61
I have a little of the same feeling after few days spent with the Library of America’s new Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Short Stories and Other Writings, a hefty expansion of Porter’s Collected Stories from 1965. That volume won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and now editor Darlene Harbour Unrue has enhanced it with 500 pages of Porter’s journalism, autobiography, letters, literary criticism, and essays on various subjects, from marriage to Texas to the hard-learned craft of writing. All that, plus a detailed chronology, notes, and (blessedly) an index.
In fact, there’s so much here, and so many changes of direction within the collection (from story to story, essay to autobiography), that one reading, even a fairly careful reading, feels like a dash. This is especially true with the short fiction, since a story is, after all, so much like a painting —a narrow window into a far-off place, a sheer curtain between the author’s imagined country and the imagination and experience of the reader. With some authors, you barely sense those vast spaces, but Porter’s universal themes—love, death, ostracism, guilt, punishment—stretch far beyond the surface of her events and characters. You could sit in front of one of her literary paintings for a few hours, read one of her essays on writing (“The Author on her Work” or “The Situation of the Writer”), close the book and sleep on it, and come back several more times without reaching anything like an end.
Porter describes her approach to writing in an essay called “No Plot, No Story” (the title is ironic, based on an anecdote about a magazine that only wanted hack work). First have faith in your theme,” she says, “then get so well acquainted with your characters that they live and grow in your magination exactly as if you saw them in the flesh; and finally, tell their story with all the truth and tenderness and severity you are capable of.” This is more than the usual defense of the misunderstood visionary, uncorrupted and unpublished. This is a defense of the vision itself. A story, Porter believed, isn’t just a narrative arc hung with a handful of plot elements that a writer can learn from reading O. Henry. A story has its own will and direction. It is unpredictable except to itself. The writer must follow the story’s lead, allow truth to emerge in its own time. And, oh yes—let the public taste be damned!
All right, I say, but happy the writer whose champions work at Harcourt, Brace, & Co. (Which, now that I think of it, doesn’t exist any more as an independent entity.)
This is a completely modern idea, and it’s only surprising in Katherine Anne Porter’s case because she was such a product of the 19th century—by birth (she was born in Texas in 1890) and, more important, by culture. She grew up among larger- than-life relatives who clung to the mythology of the Old South; her ducation, when it occurred, was spotty and parochial. She didn’t go to college, but she fed her powerful literary instincts on the family library and visits to the theater. Having married a local boy who turned out to be a vicious drunk, she spent the first decade of her adulthood simply surviving, advertising herself as a teacher of “Elocution, Physical Culture, and English” while reading literally everything she could get her hands on. She claims to have been an awful writer at first, and her fledgling efforts were mostly imitative: “stories in the style of Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne, and sonnets in the styles of Petrarch and Shakespeare.” Eventually, though, whether through the discovery of modern writers or just through sheer hard work, Porter found her own voice to match her own times.
Her first published story, “Maria Concepcion” (1923), is an unsentimental tale about a Mexican man who takes back his wife after she kills his lover and steals the woman’s child. Porter’s descriptions are painterly and sharp; nature and human nature run together, with the harsh, beautiful landscape reflecting the inner turmoil of the characters. As Porter became a more confident writer, she continued to anchor her stories in particular, often exotic places.Her writing is physical and immediate, qualities which make it still so readable today. Yet whether writing about Mexico, Berlin, or Texas, Porter’s deeper landscape is the unpredictable, unchartable human heart. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” a heavily autobiographical piece from 1939, she starts to tell a simple love story about a man and woman dealing with World War I and the Spanish influenza; then she abruptly turns and follows the young woman into death, into an afterlife, and back into a kind of half life, where death itself is a lost lover. “The human faces around her seemed dull and tired, with no radiance of skin and eyes as Miranda remembered radiance.”
Another theme she visits often is guilt and absolution and the human desire to defend our own innocence. In “Noon Wine,” a farmer drags his haggard wife from house to house as he tries to convince his neighbors that he’s not guilty of murder. “Sometimes the air around him was so thick with their blame he fought and pushed with his fists, and the sweat broke out all over him, he shouted his story in a dust-choked voice, he would fairly bellow at last: ‘My wife, here, you know her, she was there, she saw and heard it all, if you don’t believe me, ask her, she won’t lie!’and Mrs. Thompson with her hands knotted together, aching, her chin trembling, would never fail to say: ‘Yes, that’s right, that’s the truth—'”
People have often compared Porter to Faulkner. Obvious differences notwithstanding (no man could have written “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”), it’s easy to see why. Though she left the South once and forever, lived around the world, married multiple times unhappily, championed Socialist causes, lasted long enough to see man on the moon and (almost) to see Ronald Reagan in the White House, Porter remained a 19th-century southerner in so many ways. “I am the grandchild of a lost War,” she writes in “Portrait: Old South.” “I have blood-knowledge of what life can be in adefeated country on the bare bones of privation.” This birthright—a sense of vanquished glory, of hard times always around the next corner—gives her work a legendary quality that a more prosperous age can’t match. Another subject for another scholarly essay, perhaps.
Many such essays are sure to follow the publication of this exhaustingly large book. When you read it, as you should, don’t hurry. Linger for a while. You’ll definitely want to come again.
Betty Smartt Carter writes fiction and teaches Latin in Alabama.
Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
