Katherine Anne Porter:
Green, Martin
Of lies, luxuries, & literature KATHERINE ANNE PORTER A LIFE Joan Givner Simon & Schuster, $15.95, 456 pp. Martin Green JOAN GIVNER'S excellent biography of Katherine Anne Porter raises a...
...It was in a special Beauty issue of Mademoiselle that Porter wrote her defense of Circe, which' expresses her kind of feminism...
...Typically monologues in an assumed voice, their interest lies in provoking our guesses at what the writer thinks of the speaker...
...apparently pretending even to her lovers that she still menstruated regularly, long after she had stopped...
...Tolstoy, it may be recalled, said artists were people who added new flavors to life, as do jockeys, whores, chefs, and modistes...
...George Orwell also changed his name, deserted his social class, cut off old connections, as he became a writer - in a sense re-invented himself...
...But in Orwell's case these maneuvers were all in the service of serious values, amongst which truth was preeminent...
...And his recent biographer, Professor Crick, spends as much time as Dr...
...Porter believed in self-assertion - not in dominance over others, but in freedom to play...
...Circe was in fact a queen of life, who only revealed to the Greek heroes what pigs they really were...
...When Porter tried to deal with a complex and substantial reality, whose interest was independent of her reactions to it, she failed...
...Most of us find that in, say, War and Peace, there is substance as well as flavor, because so much truth is reflected in the fiction...
...There is nevertheless the likeness between them and the personality, that both set a very high value on the imagination - especially the artist's imagination - as opposed to reality...
...She associated passivity with "virtue," which she also condemned...
...The stories themselves have a strong moral message, as Dr...
...There are comparable groups of men, but that would take us too far afield...
...And this is so interesting because they were so intelligent, were in fact leaders of literary taste in America for a generation...
...Even in her beauty one saw a contrast between the almost conventional prettiness and the marked pallor...
...Most of the biographer's work has been to discover the truth that lay hidden behind Porter's stories about herself, her family origins, her marriages, her life in general...
...But more interesting than moral diagnoses is the way her character as self-inventor recommended her to, and sustained her with, her literary friends...
...It is appropriate that in the 1950s Porter's most steadfast admirer was the managing editor of Mademoiselle, who steadily wooed her with flowers, perfume, purses, etc...
...She first glimpsed the sort of career she would in fact pursue in 1917 when she met Jane Anderson, a beautiful newspaperwoman who traveled in Europe, had many affairs and wrote artistic short stories...
...Givner says...
...Lawrence's story "The Lovely Lady," even though at that point she only suggested that story's denouement...
...Her triumph over reality was part of what made her seem to them America's supreme artist - in the 1950s and 1960s she had that reputation with quite a few opinion-makers...
...A principal target of her scorn and resentment was her ex-friend, Dorothy Day, after the latter chose a life of self-sacrifice...
...She went to extraordinary lengths...
...I'm not now talking of her stories' themes or theses, but of their artistic character...
...at the very least, Orwell claims to be telling the truth everywhere, and his account could be condemned if he were -found to be lying...
...In later life Porter spent a lot of money on jewelry (especially emeralds) and furs and liquor...
...Isn't a writer supposed to be dedicated to the truth...
...Indeed, there was more to the connection than that, for her self-invention gave her personality that sparkle and charm which played a part in her extraordinary literary success as well as her short stories...
...It was personal friends like Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Malcolm Cow-ley, Edmund Wilson, who recommended her for fellowships and publication, and it was her stage performance at conferences and readings which won her many of her readers...
...Holly has invented herself, and all her friends know that - it is her charm as well as her sin - even before they discover the truth about her...
...Her taste inclined somewhat to the gaudy, but it was a very fine taste, and she was able and ready to work at her luxuries (she was a notable cook, for instance) as well as at her art...
...She wanted to be an artist because artists are liars...
...The Porter we can recognize came into existence in Greenwich Village in the 1920s - after she was thirty, therefore...
...a case which is all the more different for having superficial points in common...
...Moreover, these lies are not irrelevant to Porter's work, for it is clear that she chose above all things to be a writer, and that this meant so much to her - that work brought "Katherine Anne Porter" into being - because it legitimized her self-invention...
...And surely Porter is a case that shows how that threat could come true.threat could come true...
...and rebellion means going away, starting afresh, re-inventing oneself, asserting oneself...
...It was of course her work her friends recommended to magazines and publishing houses, and that work was in some ways unlike her glittering social personality...
...indeed, both biographers come up with similar formulae - they say their subjects invented nothing but re-arranged everything...
...Her first aspirations within the world of art were to the theater...
...It happens that I read, alongside this biography, another writer's which brings out literature's devotion to the truth...
...A decade or so later, however, Porter became entirely entangled in her own fantasies and self-projections, and a rancorous egotism disrupted her psychic economy, poisoned her relations with others and defaced her charm...
...Porter, however, is an example of the kind of artist to whom Tolstoy's remark applies in a commonsense way...
...But still she was eminently a connoisseur of luxury, and herself one of life's luxuries, from a Tolstoyan point of view...
...Porter's own writing then was a column about social events, theatrical performances, and shops, in a Denver paper...
...That was where she made her literary friends, that was where she heard about Mexico, that was where she began to write the stories we know...
...such submission means complicity in their evil...
...This phenomenon of course relates to the idea, so important to the post-1918 literary generation, that art is a transcendental game, an alternative to reality...
...One must not submit to circumstances, or to other people's wills...
...He intended, of course, to condemn the greatest works of art as well as the smallest - to include War and Peace in that condemnation...
...The account she gave of herself - even her name, her age, her family situation, the house she was born in, the class she belonged to - she radically falsified, both to friends and in her "autobiographical" stories...
...It was an idea which always threatened to de-substantialize literature...
...Her art was a specially intense form of that larger play, her life...
...They work by suggestion and ellipsis, by evocative resonance, by what they leave unsaid...
...There is also a striking diagnosis of Porter by a writer who did not know her, when I was her student, in Ann Arbor in 1953, I was strongly reminded of D.H...
...The challenge lies in the extraordinary lies Porter habitually told...
...as in her account of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, or her attempted biography of Cotton Mather...
...Her stories bear the stamp of melancholy and hypersensitive solitude...
...Martin Green JOAN GIVNER'S excellent biography of Katherine Anne Porter raises a familiar challenge to lovers of literature in unusually clear form...
...Porter's stories are always innocent, because she served the imagination...
...She married at sixteen, a marriage which lasted nine years, and only at the end of that time did she become aware of"modern" literature, and think of becoming a writer (a journalist) herself...
...She ended terribly, like Lawrence's character...
...Obviously Porter was an extreme case, and cannot be said to represent writers in any average way, in the close interconnection between her literature and her lying (and her luxury...
...Fictions are extensions of freedom, constructs of play, within which the flavors of experience can be multiplied...
...Her sophisticated literary friends knew that she "served the imagination," even if they did not know the facts she was departing from...
...Givner in checking the accuracy of Orwell's "autobiographical" writing...
...always innocent and largely empty...
...which is a condemnation of passivity...
...The form is controlled by the interplay of two sensibilities, the speaker's and the author's...
...Other examples are Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Colette - all, incidentally, women who went on the stage briefly...
...Born in 1890 on a dirt farm in Texas, Porter was raised without social or educational advantages...
...Truman Capote wrote one story that is acknowledged to be about Porter, and I have always found his Holly Golightly (in Breakfast at Tiffany's) a suggestive allegory...
Vol. 110 • March 1983 • No. 6
