Arts and Letters

Katherine Anne Porter was born on May 15, 1890, at Indian Creek, Texas—a new, half-wild land to which her family, good Confederates, had fled to rebuild their fortunes after the collapse of their world. And here, in my mind, I always linger to think on one of the strangest paradoxes in this life of paradoxes: Daniel Boone's brother Jonathan was Katherine Anne Porter's great-great grandfather. The tough bloodstream did not run dry in her delicate veins. For the graceful, witty, sensitive, charming, gifted, not quite diminutive lady was tough. She was tough enough to survive all sorts of poverty, misfortune, ill judgement, distress, risk for causes that she happened to deem worthy, pain, self-denial, and a grim self-imposed discipline to follow what she took to be her star. But she always seemed to rise above the most dire circumstances. As a friend of hers once remarked: "Katherine Anne could move into a pig-sty, and set up a salon." Courage and gaiety survived all.

To many who knew Katherine Anne in later life, Indian Creek often seemed a strange oddity in her biography, a trick fate had played on her. But it may have been a heaven-sent oddity. Where else on earth could she have learned certain things she knew? Manners and decorum mixed with the habit of a man's wearing a pistol in his belt to church? Ritual mixed with violence? How to identify the report of any type of firearm at any distance? It was a world where the sensitive little girl who appears in "The Grave" can be the same who scandalizes the countryside by riding astride like a boy. A world where a little girl could spend motherless hours in a shadowy-room called the "li-berry," full of fascinating grown-up books never meant for a child, or might begin a "nobbel" about the "hermit of Halifax Cave," or have long empty hours to become herself and dream her own kind of dreams. Or have a particularly marvelous grandmother to cast a long shadow of the past over the "precocious, nervous, rebellious, unteachable child"—as she was later to describe herself—who years later was to become the Miranda of Old Mortality—who came to know that the world hath such strange creatures in it.

Indian Creek did, indeed, come to seem anomalous, for she early fled from that world—fled from it to the romance of Mexico, revolutionary ardor, art, journalism, and even movie-acting. But as it turned out, for her a "fleeing" was only a way of possessing more deeply the thing fled from, and after years during which the Mexican experience had entered the stories of the first volume Flower Judas, the Old Order began to bloom in her imagination. Even so, in the first work to spring from this impulse, Old Mortality, one of her most magnificent fictions, the repossession dealt not only with nostalgia (nostalgia seen through humor) and sympathy, but with a deeply paradoxical account of characteristic good and evil of that period, a subtle parable of history, and the human being's perennial problem of placing oneself in history. By this time, however, the author herself had long since been confirmed in her wanderings in the New Order, a wandering prefigured in the last sentence of Old Mortality, in the innocent and ignorant promise that Miranda makes to herself in repudiating the past.

By the time of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which in subject matter deals with Miranda's discovery of the horror of the New Order, Katherine Anne had long since discovered that promises, especially promises one makes oneself—are undependable.

By this time she had indeed become a wanderer. Wandering from what? one may ask. Wandering, we may guess, to seek the Nowhere of Truth and Justice, but never wandering without gleams of hope, and rarely without a touch of humor and self-irony, and often not without nostalgia for values left behind. But on the verge of a moment at last realized, even as she set foot on the Perfect Place, some sharp edge of actuality might be poised ready to puncture the descending foot. When, after years in Europe, she came back South, she once remarked to me: "How much I love I find here in New Orleans and Louisiana. But I find some other things, too—some things sometimes scarcely visible—and I don't know that I could live here always."

In a sense, I suppose, there was no place where she could have happily remained. Even so, she had a passion to know place after place. But she wanted to know more than places. As she once put it, she wanted to know, to understand, "the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western World." The passion to know—to know inwardly, in the way of the artist—possessed her. If there is grimness here, that grimness was not unalloyed by a perennial naiveté of hopefulness, by wit, irony, even self-irony, and gaiety.

It is very easy to say that our subject lacked a sense of reality, that she could never accept the actualities of place and time and human nature—the sense that the world, and life, are a mixed bag. This—even if such mixture is the subject of her own great fictional achievement. Yes, there were outrage and anger. These are the words that Eudora Welty has applied as fundamental to Katherine Anne Porter's fiction. Outrage and anger at betrayals; at self-delusion; at hate passing as love and love as hate; at both misnamed. But the effect, Eudora Welty goes on to say, is "exhilarating." And adds: "What we do is respond to it." This because we "are aware of the compassion that guides it." For only "compassion could look where she looks, could have seen and probed." For compassion, she adds, "must make itself part of knowing." We might add, in fact, that we know others, in fact, only in so far as we are potential mirrors to them.

* * * * *

Splendid cookery, laughter in comradeship, generosity to the young, an almost childish love of such embellishments of life as velvet and emeralds, flirtation alternating with a most fierce set of chin—these things we remember. My wife reminds me that a woman as attractive as Katherine Anne Porter to men, and as pleased to be so, does not often look kindly on other women, especially younger ones. But Katherine Anne's style was grander than that. She kept her heart and eyes open for friendship wherever it might be found.

This was part of her unvanquishable zest for life. It is this quality that could make her laughter so infectious, so vital, so unforgettable. It was most rarely a laughter of malice. I think that we might call it a laughter of the absurd—rooted in comradeship, love of human qualities worthy to be admired, or works of art that claimed her devotion, and in a courage to face all ironies. As an artist, it seems that the most obvious word to describe her, if one word will serve, is dedication. As a human being she was an unparalleled combination of fun and fury.

She died at ninety. And until close to the end she could turn on the old spark and sparkle, and make the word energy seem pale and wan.

* * * * *

I feel like adding that it was through Katherine Anne that Eleanor and I first met.