Katherine Anne Porter and the Southwest
FOR MOST OF HER LIFE (1890–1980) Katherine Anne Porter's relationship with her native state was a complex and strained one, characterized by mistrust and suspicion on both sides. She felt that she was a prophet without honor in her own country, and her own country in turn felt that by living abroad and finding the stuff of her fiction elsewhere she had failed to do it honor. 1
When Texans did make gestures of homage towards her, she was
delighted. Often, however, the gestures were not carried through.
Thus, when she thought in 1939 that her book Pale Horse, Pale
Rider (which comprised, besides the title story, "Old
Mortality" and "Noon Wine") might win the award given by
the Texas Institute of Letters for the best book by a Texas writer,
she was bitterly disappointed. The prize went instead to a favorite
son, J. Frank Dobie, because of the "indigenous nature"
of his subject matter. Her anger at that time was reactivated
years later when her expectation that the University of Texas
in Austin was going to name a library for her proved unfounded.
The pattern of hope and disappointment created by such incidents
increased Porter's tendency to swing between alienation and reconciliation
in her attitude towards her birth-state. She often turned against
it in disgust, but she always yearned for a final reconciliation.
Such an eventuality seemed likely when, in her eighty-sixth year,
Porter received an invitation from Howard Payne University to
accept an honorary doctor's degree and to be the guest speaker
at a banquet in her honor. Porter's satisfaction in this invitation
was very great because Howard Payne University is situated in
Brownwood near the now-defunct town of Indian Creek where she
was born. The visit was a joyous homecoming, the high point of
which for Porter was her visit to her mother's grave in the
Indian Creek cemetery. 2
After her own death, three years
later, Porter's physical remains were brought back, according
to her wishes, and placed in her mother's grave. It seemed that
she had really come home at last. Her large and important literary
archive, however, was willed to the Katherine Anne Porter Room
at the University of Maryland's McKeldin Library, and it is there
that Porter scholars must do their research. This twofold disposition
of her remains correctly indicates that the ambivalences of a
lifetime were never finally resolved.
To a large extent, the source of her dissatisfaction with her native place lay in the complex
personal problems of her early life. Her childhood was a time
of great unhappiness, blighted by material and emotional deprivation
after the death of her mother when she was two, with her sufferings
aggravated by her extreme sensitivity. When she reviewed her
early life she found it impossible to accept the circumstances
of her childhood–that she was Callie Porter, one of five
children, born in a log house to an impoverished dirt farmer
and raised in a fundamentalist religious atmosphere.
She was impelled by a strange necessity to recreate her childhood
and fabricate a heritage more suited to her personality and her
talents. In both her fictional and autobiographical accounts
she described herself as the descendant of a line of distinguished
American statesmen. She did not claim affluence but chose to
indicate that she was raised in the decayed splendor of an earlier
age. She described family mansions falling into disrepair, libraries
well stocked with fusty books, and former slaves bound to the
family by ties of loyalty and affection rather than by material
rewards.
Students of her work had trouble locating the scenes of her early
life. When she spoke of herself as a member of the guilt-ridden
white pillar crowd, they wondered if the white pillars, more
common in the eastern states of the South than in Texas, were
those of Austin, San Marcos, and San Antonio. They were not.
When Porter described the stately homes of her childhood in fiction
and in autobiography, she transferred to the small towns of the
blackland farming country the ample homes she knew during a five-month
period of retreat on the islands of Bermuda. The Porters' small
house in Kyle was replaced in her accounts by Hilgrove, the ancestral
home of the Hollis family of Bailey's Bay. The Porters' shack
in the country between Buda and Mountain City was replaced by
the Hollises' house, Cedar
Grove.
From time to time, Porter did write
in a realistic vein about the Texas she really knew. Austere
towns like Salem, Massachusetts and Basle, Switzerland for some
reason evoked the mood of the hard life of the Texas farmer,
and in these places she wrote "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,"
"He," and "Noon Wine."
Critics were quick to note the vividness of these fictions and
they praised Porter for her ability to make the imaginative leap
from her own aristocratic background to the humbler world of
the Plain People.
It is a measure of her inability to reconcile herself to her
own background that she has no fictional representative in her
stories of the Plain People and no character with whom she closely
identifies. The characters of "Noon Wine" were based on
members of her own family, and they were so
easily recognizable (their names were barely
changed) that there was talk in the family of a lawsuit. In spite
of this closeness to actuality, Porter is careful in her commentary
on the story to disclaim kinship with the characters. She writes
in "Noon Wine: The Sources":
Let me give you a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Thompson, not as they were in their real lives, for I never knew them, but as they have become in my story.
The woman I have called Mrs. Thompson–I never knew her name–
So great was her discomfort with
this whole area of her experience that she compared the job of
explaining the sources of "Noon Wine" to the gruesome process
of having one's spinal fluid tapped. 6
Porter's attitude, then, to her
postage stamp of native soil was shot through with ambivalence.
Yet for all that, there was one part of her birthright about
which she was perfectly straight and uncomplicated in her mind.
She loved and cherished her native tongue, and the language she
claimed was not the English language in general, nor American
English in particular, but very specifically the language which
was spoken in central Texas during the last part of the nineteenth
and the first part of the twentieth century. She told of returning
to that part of the state when she was in her middle years and
of listening to the speech with a joyful shock of recognition:
And did I not tell you about standing at the edge of a field
and listening to an old man, leaning on a plow, a childhood friend
of my father's, talking, and how I said to myself, Why, that
is my own speech, that is what I was born to; oh, I might have
lost it if I had waited much longer to hear it again! For it
was the oldest and most beautiful speech of the south, stately,
literate, idiomatic, aristocratic; dignity and gentleness itself,
strong without emphasis, pleasant, human. The speech of my own
people, from England and Ireland to Kentucky to Texas: and it
was spoken by a man in ragged blue jeans, toothless and old,
tired and solitary, who had come to it was [sic] his fate, and
he knew it without thinking about it. . . . 7
In 1978, when R. G. Vliet accepted
a prize from the Texas Institute of Letters for his novel, Solitudes,
he used the occasion to discuss the characteristics of a
literature of the Southwest. Quite naturally, he spoke of the
language in which such a literature would be written and also
quite naturally he devoted part of his address to a description
of Porter's language. He correctly discerned the difference in
tone which exists between Porter's stories "Old Mortality" and "Noon
Wine," but he ascribed that cleavage to the geographical and
linguistic divide on which Porter spent her formative years after
she left Indian Creek:
As you drive toward Austin through, for
instance, Kyle, the town where Katherine Anne Porter was raised
by an archetypal grandmother and where much of her early fiction
is set, the boundary is palpable. On your right is the rich,
black, softly rolling cottonfarmland of the South, on your left
the leading edge of the rocky, cedar and post-oak, ranch-section
Hill Country. There is very nearly a clean division in idiom
there too: toward the right the soft, drawling pronunciation
general to the South, to the left the brusque, consonantal harshness
understood as "western" that so reflects the harsher landscape.
This accounts for the difficulty we sometimes have in deciding
whether Katherine Anne Porter in her early fiction is in fact
writing about the South or the Southwest. In her
great short novel, Noon Wine, she is writing about the
Southwest. In Old Mortality and in the series of sketches
in The Old Order, she is writing about the South. South
and Southwest ran simultaneously through her childhood, right
there in Kyle. 8
While conceding the accuracy of
Vliet's description of the distinction between the speech of
the South and that of the Southwest, I would like to take issue
with his extension of that distinction to the language of Porter.
It is true that the difference of subject matter and social setting
that separates "Old Mortality" from "Noon Wine" calls
forth some different linguistic usages. But it is my contention
that the linguistic differences between the two stories are slight
and that the strength of Porter's distinctive idiom in all her
work derives from her combining and harmonizing of the qualities
of the speech of both the South and the Southwest, as Vliet has
defined those qualities.
It seems to me, moreover, that the unique combination of soft
lyricism with harsh brusqueness is a marked feature not only
of Porter's writing but of her own physical voice and of her
conversation. Porter's voice, immortalized in numerous recordings,
has always taxed the descriptive powers of commentators. It has
been described as breathy, velvety and drawling and at the same
time as having a certain hoarseness. The hoarseness has sometimes
been attributed to the recurrent bouts of bronchitis from which
she suffered. But is it not possible that these health problems
simply aggravated a regional trait?
During her lifetime, Porter was
valued not only as a writer and reader of her own stories but
among her friends as a peerless conversationalist. Lady Bird
Johnson said that her conversation was as flawless as her writing,
After she had cut a slice or two and served the stuffing with
a lovely silver spoon, she noted that the closer she got to the
center of the critter, the rawer it looked. She quietly put down
the silver spoon, looked around her . . . and said "Well
babies, we got store bought bread, and we ain't got but half
enough wine and now this here bird seems to have come out half
done and I just pray," as she reached into the innards of the
bird, grabbed a handful of the stuffing and splatted it onto
a plate, "that the Good Lord, or whoever is running this
God Damned show will shortly put an end to it." All of this had
been delivered by that lovely show piece who was dressed to the
nines, was perfectly coiffed and made up and garnished with several
yards of pearls and the Porter emeralds.11
The contrasting styles evidenced
in this incident informed all her speech and also her writing.
In formal addresses she often introduced lively images and expressions
with the phrases, "as we say in Texas" and "where I
come from they would say. . . ."
"Noon Wine: The Sources" contains extremely lyrical passages
and also many colloquialisms that give the flavor of the region
she is describing. But these opposites are present in equal measure
in Ship of Fools as well as in the regional stories. Mr.
Hatch is seen in "Noon Wine"
shifting his plug and squirting tobacco juice at a dry-looking little rose bush that was having
a hard enough time as it was, standing all day in the blazing sun. 12
Very close to that style is the
description in Ship of Fools of David Scott waking up
with a crashing hangover:
He slept at last, for an hour, and woke in
the horrors of headache fit to crack his skull, a leaping gorge,
blazing thirst, and a stomach so estranged it refused to harbor
its only friends, aspirin and cold water.
Robert Penn Warren tried to describe
this really flexible style for all seasons by contrasting Porter
with Machiavelli in his rural retreat at San Casciano when he
spent his days with the rustics and at night changed into
curial robes before he communed with literature:
The other type of writer is, on the contrary,
peculiarly of a piece, less ritualistic if not less devoted.
His work is a mere extension, in a direct and fairly innocent
way, of his being. . . . This is the sort of writer Katherine
Anne Porter is. She has no curial robes, and without bothering
to change her muddy shoes, she may speak quite wittily or wisely
to the rustics.
It is the mark of a significant
artist that he uses his medium in a highly individualistic fashion.
Porter's language, accordingly, is her own distinct possession,
quite unlike that of any other writer. Nevertheless, she uses
the regional speech to which she was born as the basis of her
own individual style. In doing so, she not only exploits the
virtues of that speech for her own purpose, but in turn extends
it for others. Later writers using the same speech find it richer
for her having used it. And indeed, Porter's influence on other
Texas writers has been great and has been acknowledged by them.
William Humphrey in paying homage to her influence has mentioned
particularly that he learned something about language from her.
When he sent her a copy of his novel, Home from the Hill,
he wrote in it that she taught him the most important thing
that one writer could teach another, that for a writer the place
and the life and the speech to which he was born were his place
and his subject and his speech. He had told her earlier that
her being from Texas was the important thing for him.
In spite, then, of her tortured relationships with Texas, Porter
remains an important part of the literary tradition of Texas
and of the Southwest. Porter herself saw her position as that
of a pioneer, and she wrote of it boastfully to the President
of Howard Payne University. It is somehow characteristic that
she could not let slip the opportunity while she was on the subject
to make a dig at her longtime rival, J. Frank Dobie, who she
felt had often (and unjustly) usurped the prominent place she
deserved in the state's estimation:
I happen to be the first native of Texas in
its whole history to be a professional writer. That is to say,
one who had the vocation and practiced only that and lived by
and for it all my life. We have had a good many lately in the last quarter
of the century perhaps and we have had many people who wrote
memoirs and saved many valuable stories and have written immensely
interesting and valuable things about Texas: and they are to
be valued and understood. But I am very pleased that I am the
first who ever was born to the practice of literature. . . .
JOAN GIVNER, University of Regina
1. Joan Givner, "Katherine
Anne Porter's Texas," Vision: The Magazine of the Public Communications
Foundation for North Texas 2 (September 1979): 18–22.
This article gives a fuller account of Porter's relationship
with Texas.
2. Joan Givner, "A Fine Day of Homage to Porter,"
The Dallas Morning News,
Sunday, May 23rd, 1976, p. 5G. This article describes Porter's
visit to Howard Payne University in Brownwood.
3. Joan Givner, "`The Plantation
of This Isle': Katherine Anne Porter's Bermuda Base," Southwest Review 62 (Autumn 1978): 339–51.
4. Mark Schorer, "Afterword" in Katherine
Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (New York: Signet, 1967), pp. 167–75.
5. Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Essays and Occasional
Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Dell, 1973),
pp. 478, 481.
6. The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings, p. 468.
7. Letter from Katherine Anne Porter to William Goyen, May 28,
1951.
8. R. G. Vliet, "On a Literature of the Southwest:
An Address," The Texas Observer, April 28, 1978, p. 19.
9. Letter from Lady Bird Johnson to Joan Givner, December 7,
1977.
10. Letter from Reverend Raymond Roseliep to Joan Givner,
November 19, 1978.
11. Letter from Lt. Commander William R. Wilkins
to Joan Givner, July 10, 1980.
12. Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected
Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (New
York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965), p. 249.
13. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship
of Fools (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), p. 475.
14. Robert Penn Warren, "Introduction"
to Edward Schwartz, "Katherine Anne
Porter: A Critical Bibliography," Bulletin of the New York
Public Library 57 (May
1953).
15. Letter from Katherine Anne
Porter to President Roger Brooks of Howard
Payne University, October 7, 1975.
Primary Sources
Porter, Katherine Anne. Ship of Fools. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962,
Secondary Sources
Core, George, and Lodwick Hartley, eds. Katherine Anne Porter:
A Critical Symposium. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia
Press, 1970. This collection contains many of the best critical
essays on Katherine Anne Porter, and also includes the important
"Katherine Anne Porter: An Interview" by Barbara
Thompson, reprinted from Paris Review 24 (Winter-Spring
1963).
Demouy, Jane Krause. Katherine Anne Porter's Women:
The Eye of Her Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1982. A reappraisal of Porter's work and reinterpretation of
many of her stories by focusing on the women characters.
Givner, Joan. Katherine Anne Porter: A Life. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1982. The definitive biography.
Hardy, John Edward. Katherine
Anne Porter. New York: Ungar, 1978. A balanced and useful full-length study of Porter's works.
Hendrick, George. Katherine
Anne Porter. New York: Twayne, 1965. The earliest full-length
study of Porter's work, this remains a useful tool with sensible
readings of her stories and of Ship of Fools.
Kieran, Robert F. Katherine
Anne Porter and Carson McCullers: A Reference Guide.
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976. The most comprehensive listing of Porter's
collected and uncollected works, this is an indispensable book
for students of Porter's work.
Warren, Robert Penn, ed. Katherine
Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979. It is unfortunate
that this handbook in a series on which students depend contains
so much material that is not useful. The biographical introduction
is totally misleading and seven of the essays appear in Katherine
Anne Porter: A Critical Symposium. The remaining selections
are valuable–a sampling of the early reviews of Ship
of Fools and a reprinting of the important interview, "A
County and Some People I Love" by Hank Lopez from Harper's, September, 1965.
5
13
14
15
. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965.
. The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter. New
York: Delacorte Press, 1970.
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