PORTER, Katherine Anne

Born 15 May 1890, Indian Creek, Texas; died 18 September 1980, Silver Spring, Maryland

Daughter of Harrison B. and Mary Jones Porter; married 1906; Eugene D. Pressly, 1933; Albert R. Erskine, Jr., 1938

Katherine Anne Porter was the fourth of five children, a descendant of pioneers. Her mother died as a young woman, and Porter was raised by her father and paternal grandmother.

Although Porter is generally acknowledged to be a master stylist, she rarely earned her living directly through her writing. Instead, she supported herself through a variety of related activities: as a reporter, writer of screenplays in Hollywood, translator, hack writer, and most often, as a lecturer, writer-in-residence, and guest speaker. Porter has received a number of honorary degrees and an impressive range of prestigious literary awards, including Guggenheim fellowships in 1931 and 1938, Fulbright and Ford Foundation grants in the 1950s, an O. Henry Award in 1962, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for her Collected Stories (1965).

Porter traveled extensively, lived often in Europe and Mexico, been married three times, and involved herself in political events. Yet these activities are only peripherally reflected in her stories. She makes a clear distinction between adventure, something you do to find an "illusion of being more alive than ordinarily," and experience, which is "what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you." The latter is the subject of Porter's prose. She delights in revealing through microcosmic events truths about human nature.

"The Downward Path to Wisdom" (The Leaning Tower, and Other Stories, 1944) is a pivotal story in understanding the etiology of disillusionment in Porter's work. The protagonist, a child named Stephen, is shuffled from adult to adult in an awkward and futile attempt to keep him unaware of his parents' quarreling. Porter emphasizes Stephen's genuineness by continually alluding to his sensual awareness of being warm, bare, embraced, sticky, scrubbed roughly, etc. In contrast, Porter shows us, through the overheard dialogue of the parents, that they experience him simply as a reminder of their growing antipathy. She deftly controls the emergence of Stephen's final decision to set himself emotionally apart from these people who "love" him by juxtaposing the child's motives with the adults' harsh judgements of him. Stephen's final rejection of them seems healthy, yet Porter manages to convey that the act of rejection forecasts Stephen's own inability to love as an adult.

Some of Porter's best stories reflect the deterioration of relationships, especially of marriages, which are corrupted by the bitterness and anger accompanying dependence. Porter has said that one's spouse is a "necessary enemy," for whom we cannot help but feel both love and hate because we resent our need for him or her. Porter characterizes one such marriage in "Rope" (Flowering Judas, and Other Stories, 1930). The husband and wife quarrel over his purchase of some unneeded rope, and their discussion evolves into a destructive verbal battle about the entire relationship and their disappointments in one another. Porter conveys the tediously repetitive nature of these complaints by quoting them obliquely: "She had her notion of what had kept him in town. Considerably more than a notion, if he wanted to know. So, she was going to bring all that up again, was she? Well, she could just think what she pleased." Porter's use of this intriguing narrative technique shows us the depth of sarcasm, bitterness, and emotional stinginess underlying this marriage and belies the appearance of reconciliation at the end of the story. In Porter's carefully crafted stories, narrative technique fuses with meaning in an almost perfect merging of form and content.

Porter's portraits of relationships ring true because she has a perfect eye for the tiny, telling domestic detail. Time and again, a single incident conveys the character of an entire relationship. In "Noon Wine" (Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 1939), Mr. Thompson affectionately yet cruelly pinches his wife Ellie, and we are introduced to those notions about himself, his intense, masculine pride, that will make Mr. Thompson capable of killing a man later in the story. "Noon Wine" is a study of sources of violence and self-betrayal in essentially good people.

The disappointments that grow between people are evident in both men and women in Porter's stories, but perhaps because her own awareness is based so firmly in feminine realities, Porter is especially effective in depicting the limitations in relationships as women experience them, or rather, the limiting relationships that she saw as the only ones allowed to women. In stores based around the experiences of Miranda (the character who seems most similar to Porter), Miranda's grandmother (based on Porter's grandmother), and others, Porter implies that for a woman the rejection of close and demanding relationships is virtually the only means of finding autonomy.

In the three sections of "Old Mortality," we see Miranda (raised with her sister by a likeable, average father and a strong-willed grandmother) withdraw successively further from the family myths which have comprised her whole understanding of reality as a young child. Miranda cannot reconcile what adults tell her about the beautiful, romantic, exciting, and perfect past (especially Aunt Amy, around whom an entire legend has been built) with the shabby remnants of the past she finds around her. At eighteen, Miranda realizes that the unequivocally negative memories of Cousin Eva, a poor defeated relative of Amy, are just as distorted as the romantic, tragic account the family has always given her and, drawing back from this massive collusion of lies, tells herself, in "her hopefulness, her ignorance," that whatever else, she will live her life without illusions. Porter knows this is naive and that there are no easy answers.

For all of Porter's thoughtful characters, life involves introspection, disappointment, and moral dilemmas. If her characters (like her married couples) stay in their oppressive relationships, resentment eats away at them. If they break free, they are terribly alone. It is not surprising Porter projects onto her primitive characters—such as the eponymous Mexican in the story "María Concepción" (Flowering Judas) and the Spanish dancers in Ship of Fools (1962)—the very strengths which she believes introspective people cannot achieve: a passionate, unselfconscious, unquestioning spontaneity that carries with it no moral complications.

Ship of Fools, Porter's long-awaited novel, appeared in 1962. Porter was deeply shaken by the two world wars and by world events that for decades threatened the human race with catastrophe. She tells us much of her energy in those years was given to an attempt "to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world." Porter's allegorical novel became an exploration into the possible sources of human evil and particularly into the states of mind which could account for such horrors as the Holocaust.

The story takes place on a German freighter-passenger ship traveling from Veracruz, Mexico, to Bremerhaven, Germany, in late summer of 1931, with a passenger list representing various nationalities. To the degree that the characters become stereotypes for particular countries, the novel seems a failure, for its ironies are heavyhanded and the notes of prophecy seem contrived, written as they were long after World War II. But on the level of individual human encounters, Porter's portrayals are meticulous, vivid, and often engrossing. In depicting a range of individuals preoccupied with their narrow personal concerns, she shows acute perception of how we tend to blind ourselves to external realities and become culpable in evil events.

Ultimately, the pleasures we find in reading Porter's stories prove to be subtle ones: the frequent perfection of her choice of words and details and commentary on a character's behavior; the telling scenes; the recognitions about human nature; the ironic narrative; and her understanding of the pleasures of childhood (always being crushed by somber adult realities), of the stories we tell ourselves to make our lives make sense, of the self-delusions, self-betrayals, and ultimate isolation of each of us. Her perceptions are acute, and her prose is often superb. Porter severely limited the number of stories she would allow to be published, yet her choices seem to have been wise ones, for they offer us a surprisingly consistent vitality in their revelation of human truths.

Other Works:

Outline of Mexican Popular Arts and Crafts (1922). Katherine Anne Porter's French Song Book (1933). Hacienda: A Story of Mexico (1934). Noon Wine (1937). The Itching Parrot (1942). The Old Order: Stories of the South (1944). The Days Before (1952). A Defense of Circe (1955). Holiday (1962). A Christmas Story (1967). The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (1970).

Bibliography:

Arima, H., The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty (dissertation 1998). Auchincloss, L., Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Writers (1965). Bayley, I., ed., Letters of Katherine Anne Porter (1990). Bennett, M., Twenty-Two Texas Women: Strong, Tough, and Independent (1996). Bloom, H., ed., American Women Fiction Writers, Volume Three 1900-1960 (1998). Bredeson, C., American Writers of the 20th Century (1996). Curry, K. C., The Art of a Genteel Rebel: The Craft of Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction (dissertation 1996). DeMouy, J. K., Katherine Anne Porter's Women (1983). Emmons, W. S., Katherine Anne Porter: The Regional Stories (1967). Gardner, J., The Conflicts of Life in the Works of Katherine Anne Porter (thesis 1994). Givner, J., Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (1982, 1991). Hardy, J. E., Katherine Anne Porter (1973). Hartley, L., and G. Core, eds., Katherine Anne Porter: A Critical Symposium (1969). Hendrick, G., Katherine Anne Porter (1965). Horn, T., To Grandmother's House We Go: Modern Grandmother Archetypes in Works by Porter, Hurston, McCarthy, O'Connor, and Olsen (dissertation 1997). Kiernan, R. F., Katherine Anne Porter and Carson McCullers: A Reference Guide (1976). Krishnamurthi, M. G., Katherine Anne Porter: A Study (1971). Liberman, M. M., Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction (1971). Magill, F. N., ed., Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World's Most Important Women Writers, From Antiquity to the Present (1994). Mooney, H. J., Jr., The Fiction and Criticism of Katherine Anne Porter (1962). Nance, W. L., Katherine Anne Porter and the Art of Rejection (1964). Nesbitt, A. S., ed., Short Story Criticism: Excerpts From Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers (1999). Plimpton, G., ed., Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1998). Stout, J. P., Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times (1995). Unrue, D. H., ed., Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter (1997). Unrue, D. H., ed., This Strange Old World and Other Book Reviews by Katherine Anne Porter (1991). Waldrip, L., and S. A. Bauer, eds., A Bibliography of the Works of Katherine Anne Porter, and A Bibliography of the Criticism of the Works of Katherine Anne Porter (1969). Wescott, G., "Katherine Anne Porter, Personally," in Images of Truth: Remembrances and Criticism (1962). West, R. B., Jr., Katherine Anne Porter (1963).

Reference works:

CA (1999). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

Other references:

America (Nov. 1990). American Literature (1996). Book World (Aug. 1995). Literature and Medicine (Fall 1998). NYTBR (Apr. 1995). Southwest Review (Winter 1996). Twentieth Century Literature (1998).

—GAIL MORTIMER