Letters of Katherine Anne Porter
Hosmer, Robert E. Jr.
ONE FIXED DESIRE LETTERS OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER Selected and Edited by Isabel Bayley Atlantic Monthly Press, $29.95, 642 pp. Robert E. Hosmes', Jr. H. Auden was "an unusually stinking and...
...In January President George Bush went to war with Iraq...
...Porter's letters are studded with ref- erences to her false starts, delays, postpone- ments, and disappointments in the process...
...In a letter to Glenway Wescott, written in 1941, she declares what has always been her "one fixed desire: to be a good artist, responsible to the last comma for what I write...
...Life was a struggle for Porter--against so many forces, but particularly against ill health (she was plagued by respiratory and pulmonary problems), a serf-acknowledged tendency to melancholia, and a deeply unsettled personal life...
...In 1982, another friend of the U.S., Israel, invaded Lebanon...
...it is not a commod- ity you have earned, or shall ever earn...
...embassy in West Beirut and the killing by a suicide bomber of 241 ser- vicemen...
...May the publication of these Letters renew and refresh Katherine Anne Porter's presence among us as a writer of substance and very considerable grace...
...Yet so many other letters illuminate a sweet, gentle, and compassionate woman for whom life was not easy...
...This marked the first confrontation between the United States and the forces of Islamic revivalism...
...most impressive is her generous encouragement to younger writers like Eudora Welty, and the palpable affection manifest in her extended corre- spondence with her nephew Paul...
...Certainly, some of Porter's letters reveal her as harsh, intolerant, and unforgiving, particularly toward Catholics (they are "Fascists" and "we are in danger of being taken over by Catholics"), homosexuals ("this whole city [New York] now simply swarms with every little pervert...they are really taking the place, speaking of ter- mites...the most depraved and tiresome set of half-humans I ever saw"), and writers of whom she disapproved, not only McCullers but others like "poor Malcolm Cowley [who] never was anything but cold oatmeal from the neck up" and Hemingway, "such a bore of a man really and such an incomplete artist...so com- pletely uninteresting and insignificant...
...Fisk takes us across Lebanon...
...GEORGE EMILE IRANI is an Arab-American who teaches political science at Franklin College in Indiana...
...Whose mind...
...Thirty years' labor on a work that many critics scorned...
...He depicts in poignant words the relationship between the United Nations (UNIFIL) forces stationed in South Lebanon and the various militias and armies roaming the area...
...In the summer of 1982 the forces of Ariel Sharon laid siege to the Lebanese capital and cut off water and electricity from the population...
...When I came through I was clean winnowed...
...Katherine Anne Porter's...
...Fisk is outraged at the unjust and bloody fate facing the innocent civilians--Lebanese and Pales- tinians--in West Beirut...
...her chronology, "who's who" list, introduction, and index provide con- sistently accurate and helpful information...
...His most powerful chapters are those dealing with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its aftermath...
...George Emile Irani he 1980s were a decade of disaster for U.S...
...Fisk is a sharp and balanced observer of a country, Lebanon, which in the last sixteen years has been in the throes of a ruthless and bloody civil war...
...The consequences for the region are still in doubt...
...Here he is at his best trying to present the facts objectively without falling victim to the propaganda of the Christian Phalanges, the PLO, Syria, or the Israeli occupation troops...
...servicemen lost their lives...
...The Middle East has been for most Americans a kind of distant but constant nuisance, a place deliberately cut off from the "Judaeo- Christian" lenses through which we are trained to understand and manage the world in which we live...
...Throughout, these letters show that Porter stuck to that intention, declared in a letter to Albert Erskine, her fourth husband: "my job now is to keep on my feet and keep working...
...Edmund Wilson "a mere goon...
...I would slit the throat of a six-months- old infant who got in my way...
...19 April 1991:267...
...And despite a pervasive loathing for homosexuals, she brought herseff to praise Auden: "I know of no gifted human being of whose morals, manners, whole way of life and conduct of life, I disapprove of more entirely than I do of Auden's--I think he is perfectly awful...
...And so it goes in this six-hundred- page collection, a mere selection from the letters of an important American writer: in her editor's note, Isabel Bayley, Porter's literary executor since 1974, informs us that there were "thousands" of letters from the period of 1930 to 1963, the writer's major working years...
...Fisk's reporting created trouble not only from the Israelis...
...And I feel pretty ferocious about it...
...These letters record a labor decades-long, for what was begun as a twelve-page ship's journal written as a letter en route from Mexico to Germany in 1931 did not find f'mal, published form as Ship of Fools until 1962...
...As a result of that inva- sion, Marines were dispatched to Lebanon and 241 U.S...
...To read her correspon- dence is to live some of that life...
...The novel's million-dollar success failed to make up for its being judged something far less in literary terms...
...Nowhere does Porter's solitary dedica- tion to her art come across more strongly than in the story of her writing her onl~ novel, the long-awaited Ship of Fools...
...and as for Carson McCullers, well, her first book was the product of "a peculiarly corrupt mind, a small stunted talent incapable of growth, and her further work has borne this out in my mind...
...Nonetheless, a difficult, dislocated life did not embitter her...
...foreign policy in the Middle East...
...the Soviet Union...
...Fisk has a moving chapter on the kidnap- ping of his colleague and friend, Terry Anderson, the Associated Press bureau chief who has been in captivity in Lebanon for six years...
...In 1979, the Shah of Iran, a staunch friend and ally of the U.S., was overthrown and replaced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini...
...Between June 4 and the end of September 1982 alone, the Israeli inva- sion left 17,825 dead...
...Fisk, unlike many other Western journalists, has an intimate knowledge of Lebanon...
...ROBERT E. HOSMER, YR., teaches in the department of English language and literature at Smith College...
...From these various places she maintained a steady stream of correspondence with a who's who of American literary life and legend: Glenway Wescott, Ezra Pound, Josephine Herbst, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon...
...The result of such a folly was the blowing up of the U.S...
...The letters Isabel Bayley has chosen with such care and resonant precision chronicle the wanderings of Porter's person and spirit during her most c?eative phase, for it was this time period that saw the pub- lication of her major fiction from Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930) to Ship of Fools (1963), with Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944) appearing along the way...
...Charlie Chaplin "an odi- ous little beast...
...The predicament of the Maronites of Lebanon and the Arab Christians in general is another incentive to work for the peace which is more than ever needed in the land where Christ was born...
...H. Auden was "an unusually stinking and opinionated sodomite...
...marriage for me has meant pure disaster, and a strange cruel starvation of the heart...
...Robert Fisk's book is a welcome con- tribution and an excellent reminder of what type of neighborhood Lebanon and the Middle East is today...
...In her dealings with the latter, Porter is ruthless, driving a hard bargain with every contract signed...
...He tells us that the Iraqis had complained about his reporting of how the wives of men who opposed Saddam Hussein were "gang-raped in front of their husbands...
...ONE FIXED DESIRE LETTERS OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER Selected and Edited by Isabel Bayley Atlantic Monthly Press, $29.95, 642 pp...
...Eudora Welty, "very seriously gift- ed, very imaginative and bold and com- plex...
...Basically, he disagreed with the official Israeli line that the purpose of "Operation Peace for Galilee" was to mop up Palestinian "ter- rorists" from Lebanon...
...What Porter disliked, she disliked with ferocious intensity...
...For American Catholics, this book is a reminder of how Christianity can be used merely to shield an ethnic identification...
...This book is must reading for the lessons it contains for all those who are concerned with that vital region of the world...
...And nothing will stand in her way--no divorce suit, no critic, no editor, no publisher...
...LESSONS FROM LEBANON PITY THE NATION The Abduction of Lebanon Robert Fisk Atheneum, $24.95, 678 pp...
...Marianne Moore, "my favorite living poet and one of the most delicious persons alive...
...It is a by-product of brave living, and it never comes in the form we expect, or at the sea- son we hoped for, or as a result of our plan- ning for it...
...In the South he encounters Shiites, Palestinians, Israelies, and their Christian Lebanese proxies...
...A heavy price to pay for a country that had signed an armistice with Israel in 1949 and did not participate in any war between Arab armies and Israel after 1948...
...Bayley's work is exemplary, not only in her choices, but in her scholarly attention to detail and textual apparatus...
...It is the artistic dimension of Katherine Anne Porter that emerges with an expected fullness in this collection, for she has always been known as a woman so dedi- cated to her art as to consider it as a monas- tic vocation...
...what she liked, she embraced with unqualified enthusiasm: Henry James was "the very greatest artist and novelist this country ever produced...
...T. S. Eliot "a dry damned soul who packs an awful wallop...
...WILSON CAREY McWILLIAMS teaches political science at Rutgers University...
...In addition to the internal contradictions between the various warlords and thugs, Lebanon since 1975 has become an arena of confrontation for regional (Syria, Israel, Iran, the PLO) and global powers (U.S., Soviet Union, France...
...And how I love 266: Commonweal his poetry...
...in a letter to her nephew, she opined that, "all life worth riving is difficult, nobody promised us happiness...
...Another consequence of the U.S...
...Middle East cor- respondent for the Independent in Britain, Fisk wrote for the Times of London from 1976 to 1987 as their Middle East corre- spondent...
...This peace-- shalom, salaam---cannot occur if we allow the "abduction" of Lebanon to become that of the whole Middle East...
...Numerous love affairs and four broken marriages littered REVIEWERS EDWARD T. WHF~LER is chairman of the English Department at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut...
...The Syrians, too, did their best to have me removed from Beirut, not just because I had reported from Hama (where more than 10,000 people were murdered by the Syrian regime) but because in the words of the Syrian ambassador in London--I had shown contempt for Arabs in general...
...Sixty-three Americans were taken hostage at the American embassy in Teheran...
...The story of how America was dragged into the Lebanese quagmire is another interesting chapter...
...her life, and she assessed it all: "love, for me, has been rather more as if I were a bun- dle of wheat going through the threshing machine than anything else...
...As can be expected, Fisk came under fire for his vivid description of Israeli soldiers' behavior in Lebanon...
...blunder in Lebanon was the taking of American and other Western hostages...
...For Reagan and his staff Lebanon had become the staging ground for an all-out war against the evil empire, i.e...
...We follow Porter's restless odyssey from home to Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, Belgium, and back home again...
...At forty-four, he is today the only foreign correspondent still based in Beirut...
Vol. 118 • April 1991 • No. 8
