Pale Horse, Pale Writer

Since inclusion in the Library of America effectively imparts classic status, it is fascinating to see which authors the series’ editors have decided to anoint. Take Porter, for instance: Do her works deserve to be called “classics”? Which are the best of them? The editors have omitted Ship of Fools, her only novel; was this decision justified? Was Porter overrated during her lifetime? Is she underrated now? Finally, will inclusion in the Library of America bring renewed attention and popularity to her short stories, which were once so highly thought of but have now fallen rather out of fashion?

Porter’s short fiction originally appeared in three collections: Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930), Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (1939), and The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), and were brought together in Harcourt’s 1965 The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter; here, in the Library of America edition, they appear in their entirety. To read them all together is to be forcibly impressed with the author’s imaginative power and descriptive gifts. She was a consummate short story writer, and the strengths she brought to this craft–the ability to convey instant visual and sensual impressions, the verbal adroitness that allowed her to sketch the essence of a character with precision–proved something of a liability when she turned to the novel form. In a novel, characters need to develop; in a short story, they have only to be. Bestseller though it was, Ship of Fools (1962) showed that Porter found it hard to make her characters change organically, and from the moment of its publication, her reputation began to decline. Eventually her stories, once widely anthologized and held up as models of the genre by countless critics and educators, were almost forgotten. This is too bad, for she was one of the most original artists of her epoch, and one of the most surprising, too.

Nearly all fiction contains autobiographical elements, but such factors played an even greater role in Porter’s work than is usually the case. Her fiction tended to be drawn directly from her own experiences (“Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” for example, is a quite faithful account of the author’s near death during the influenza epidemic of 1918), but some of these experiences were imaginary rather than literal; she reinvented herself and her past as she went along, having, as one of her biographers said, an absolute “inability to accept the disunion between what life is and what it should be.” Refusing to accept the demeaning reality of her impoverished childhood in rural Texas, she concocted a romantic background of faded southern aristocracy. What’s more, she got away with it, for she wrote about the false background as exquisitely and with as deeply felt conviction (in “Old Mortality” and “The Old Order,” for instance) as she recreated her actual milieu (“Noon Wine,” “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” “He”).

Commenting on her methods, Porter said, “my fiction is reportage, only I do something to it. I arrange it and it is fiction but it happened.”

Porter laid claim to being the first artist of international stature to emerge from Texas, and she always kept up with her local connections although she left the state in 1914, at the age of 23, and returned there only a few times during the remaining 60-odd years of her life. My own mother originated not far from Porter’s birthplace of Indian Creek, and during my childhood in the 1960s and ’70s the author was still widely remembered in Brown County, not so much for her world-class fiction as for her world-class genius for self-invention and pretense; she was “a piece of work,” everyone affirmed. Married five times, she usually acknowledged only three husbands (“I have no hidden marriages,” she once said, “they just sort of slip my mind”). Porter’s transformation from plucky provincial career girl to literary grande dame was observed with amusement by those who knew her over the long haul.

“In the days of her fame,” wrote one former lover, writer Matthew Josephson, “.  .  . I found she had changed and was playing a role suited to what she conceived to be her public image.” He recalled her various acolytes, mostly homosexual men, “sitting at her feet as if she were a bronze monument, deferent, reverent, genuflective.”

Childhood has a privileged place in Porter’s short fiction. “I have not much interest in anyone’s personal history after the tenth year, not even my own,” she wrote. “Whatever one was going to be was all prepared for before that, the rest is merely confirmation, extension, development. Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.”

Her alter ego in this fiction is Miranda Gay, second daughter of a Texas family which, in many aspects, reflects the actual Porter family and in others draws from her more genteel fantasy-family. Like the author, Miranda is an observer (“Miranda” means “looking,” after all), sometimes a ruthless one, and her reflections can be dark. As Porter wrote, “I do not believe that childhood is a happy time, it is a time of desperate cureless bitter griefs and pains, of shattering disillusionments, when everything good and evil alike is happening for the first time, and there is no answer to any question.”

Porter’s own childhood was marked by poverty, dislocation, and trauma: She lost her mother when she was not yet two years old, and her grandmother, the formidable matriarch she described and elaborated upon so brilliantly in “The Old Order,” died nine years later. Her father was feckless and unreliable. Her maternal grandmother was institutionalized and Porter never lost her fear of succumbing to the “melancholia” that plagued the family. Yet nothing she wrote is more beautiful, or more passionate, than the sensual, rapt, retrospective descriptions of the Texas she then inhabited–heartbreaking passages when one considers the malls and car dealerships that now blanket that fruitful land.

Porter’s greatest achievements are the stories that most faithfully reflect the childhood world that she hated and loved, that she left so early and never forgot; and of these stories the best is “Noon Wine.” In 1956, two decades after she completed the piece, she wrote an essay called “‘Noon Wine’: The Sources” for the Yale Review. The essay became famous and was much anthologized, especially in writing textbooks. But even though she had made the decision to explore this subject, Porter still was unable to approach the truth head-on, making, instead, a series of feints in a futile attempt to catch hold of some inner truth that would ground the story in a way she found acceptable. She claimed never to have known Mr. and Mrs. Thompson, the fictional poor Texas farmers at the center of the tale, but in fact they were entirely based upon her cousins–she did not even change their name, or that of Mr. Helton, the Swedish hired man. Their farm, to which she was sent on visits during her adolescence, seems to have been exactly as she describes it in the story.

As Porter’s biographer Joan Givner has written:

After her departure from Texas, Porter led a peripatetic, cosmopolitan life, and her fiction reflects her travels. Her years as a young reporter in Denver are quite faithfully recreated in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” She lived in Mexico in the early 1920s and the country became a beloved second homeland; she worked her experiences there into a number of her fictional pieces, including “Flowering Judas,” “That Tree,” “Hacienda” (which was based on her observations of Sergei Eisenstein and his crew filming Que Viva Mexico!), parts of Ship of Fools, and María Concepcíon, her first published story–or at any rate, the first she cared to acknowledge. She moved to Greenwich Village a bit later, living there during the glory years of the ’20s and befriending fellow writers such as Hart Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Malcolm Cowley, and Allen Tate. This neighborhood did not work its way into much of her fiction, but she set one of her most brilliant and blackest tales, “A Day’s Work,” in a nearby Irish neighborhood.

A journey to Germany in 1931 inspired the long story “The Leaning Tower.” (The tale is dated “1931” in this edition but was actually written a decade later, with Hitler’s war providing all-too-ironic hindsight.) Characteristically, Porter laid claim to having sent letters to American newspapers back in 1931, warning them of the danger of the nascent Nazi party, but this appears to have been an exaggeration at best. She was squired around town by Hermann Göring, which she seems to have enjoyed, and took in the sights and sounds of bitter, poverty-stricken interwar Berlin. Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings has been edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue, a scholar who has built her career on Porter’s work, with several books on the subject, including a 2005 biography that has more or less supplanted Givner’s 1982 one. Only about half of her Library of America 1,100-page collection is taken up with Porter’s fiction; the rest is given over to essays, which are fascinating, and reviews, which are only intermittently so. A virulent attack on Gertrude Stein (“The Wooden Umbrella,” 1947) is hilarious and still well worth reading; a sympathetic essay on Willa Cather is a model of critical empathy. Predictably (for Porter is the most subjective and personal of fiction writers), it is the authors with whom she personally identifies–Cather, Katherine Mansfield, Colette, Eudora Welty–who inspire the most deeply felt criticism; a long essay on Henry James is dutifully reverent but lifeless.

One of the two biographies, either Unrue’s or Givner’s (they are both good), will make an invaluable supplement to this Library of America volume, for the life and work of this strange, gifted woman are connected in unusually complicated and contradictory ways. She herself was aware of the contradictions, and attempted to explain herself–never very successfully.

“I believe we exist on half a dozen planes in at least six dimensions,” she commented, “and inhabit all periods of time at once, by way of memory, racial experience, dreams that are another channel of memory, fantasy that is also reality, and I believe that a first rate work of art somehow succeeds in pulling all these things together and reconciling them. When we deliberately ignore too much we make a fatal mistake.”

The imaginary life, then, is as true as the actual one, and vice versa. Few authors’ works have illustrated this fact more dramatically than Porter’s.

Brooke Allen is the author, most recently, of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.