An Unscrupulous Talent

...Perhaps the Hemingway incident was a fabrication too...

...Porter herself could be very anti-Semitic on occasion...

...Almost as significant were her Mexican experiences...

...She could cook and sew, paint and draw...

...a sketch she made of a Mexican lover, probably the caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, reproduced by Givner among the 40-odd photographs, looks like the work of Picasso...

...Givner had access to boxes and bales of papers—the endless letters to friends, unfinished manuscripts, notes, journals, "fragments" of all kinds, and Porter's often furious annotations in the margins of her books...

...Very early a cult of Katherine Anne developed among younger writers, especially Southerners like Truman Capote, Carson McCul-lers (who at the writers' colony, Yaddo, used to lie in front of her door like a yearning puppy), and Flannery O'Connor...

...Jealously and with total injustice she called Sigrid Schultz, who had been an effective critic of Nazism, "a beautiful woman?treacherous, devious, fiendishly clever and always scheming----Hitler and his sordid clique could not have hoped for a more sordid ally...

...Miserably clothed, embarrassed before her neighbors, Callie developed a lust for fine costumes, jewels, social distinction, fame...

...This now had to be filled with beds and pallets onthefloor.Itwasthe grandmother whose strength became Katherine Anne's, and whose name she took...

...The friendships tended to end painfully, as with Dorothy Day, Caroline Gordon, Josephine Herbst (one of the most devoted) and Hart Crane, who was even more dangerous than she was...

...Katherine Anne herself, on the other hand, was only too ready in interviews to tell how it all happened...

...indecent mind...

...He landed with his four children on his widowed mother, who had retired to a two-room log cabin...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" One evening, Joan Givner records, Katherine Anne Porter was in Sylvia Beach's Paris bookstore when Ernest Hemingway came in...

...I have watched her through three marriages and divorces, and the pattern in all three is identical...

...She had become a reporter on the Rocky Mountain News in Denver when she came down with the 1918 influenza...

...And she was clearly disappointed when he did not pursue her further...

...Her talents were amazingly varied...

...She was full of contradictions, yet with her sympathetic imagination she could create characters who possessed an integrity that she intended perhaps to take the place of the integrity that their author lacked, and knew she lacked, to her own sorrow...

...Still, we have the incredible life itself, and we have Porter's own words, as sensitive as Colette's, to give us her response to it...

...As she lay dying on the floor of the overcrowded hospital (her coffin already ordered), some interns came along and in a last rescue effort injected her with strychnine, which brought her back to life...

...During the marriage she made one more try at independence, teaching elocution, advertising this time as "Mrs...

...Opposite an unfavorable reference to her in a book by Leslie Fiedler she labeled him " what the Jews call a Kike," and wrote that "this nasty smug conceited smirk...

...Inconstant though she was, Porter loved places, loved food and drink, and laid herself out preparing for family parties...

...is pure Jewish...

...She worked for the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee and was arrested many times—or said she was—for illegal picketing...

...Telling of one unhappy love affair, Givner accuses Katherine Anne of "ignoring the sexual dimension to the collapse of the relationship...

...Joan Givner tries earnestly but vainly to find it as she tells about Porter's disastrous marriages, the tempestuous love affairs that distracted her from writing, the wonderful meals she cooked for friends in the houses she was always moving to, and the illnesses that brought her repeatedly close to death...

...At age 15, after a year in drama school, she advertised her services in the Victoria (Texas) Advocate to teach "music, physical culture and dramatic reading...

...Because Porter was so colorful and usually spoke well and dramatically, she was chosen to speak at the first assembly of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris by the American delegation, which included James...

...Givner is serious in her psychological and literary analysis but, as so often happens when academics write about writers of more subtle sensibility, her prose is not quite up to the task...

...Brous-sard's Grocery...

...And her recovery probably was a rebirth psychologically and literarily, although she did not publish the first story she was later willing to acknowledge until she was 34...

...When she was 22 months old her mother died, and her proud, handsome father went to pieces...

...Hemingway and I stood and gazed unwinkingly at each other with poker faces for all of ten seconds, in silence...

...She was excited by all sorts of people, was extremely intelligent if often unwise, read widely with superb taste, wrote beautifully, and grew increasingly attractive physically as she grew older...

...The index, too, is not wholly reliable...

...Sylvia announced that she wanted the two best modern American writers to know each other...

...She boasted that her name would add $10,000 to the book's sales...

...Even this, from one who knew her well, is not quite true...

...But after the nature of the Nazi regime became evident, she told varying and exaggerated stories of the way she stood up to Goering (and even Hitler himself, whom she never met) and was one of the first to warn the U.S...

...And she had the will, against nearly every obstacle, to achieve it all...

...Her students everywhere remember the devotion she gave to nurturing talent...

...Almost equally the stories are used for sources of conjecture about the events...

...That Porter triumphed over her meager beginnings to become not only a revered writer but the grande dame of the lecture circuit is a phenomenal achievement...

...of the Nazi danger...

...Adulation she relished, and once the best stories became known she received it in ample measure...

...Auden called her an "absolute crook...

...About Hemingway Carlos Baker could not give the answer, though he described for us all the bullfights watched, the big game slaughtered, the wars Hemingway had seen...

...He rarely worked In Coming Issues Leo Sauvage on "Foxfire" and "Twice Around the Park" Robert Asahina on Holiday Films thereafter, taking out his frustrations in irrational fits of cruelty...

...Her speech was rambling and disorganized...

...Koontz, Residence near F.O...

...It attracted some strange characters from the United States—politicians, writers and bums...

...Porter threw herself characteristically into the hectic life and subsequently wrote some of her best stories about it...

...At age 70 Porter wrote her nephew that she was learning new sexual tricks from her Italian lover, but he received the news skeptically because he could not believe there were any she did not know...

...She was involuntarily caught in the events that led to Hart Crane's suicide...

...It included an attack on government grants for artists as taking away their freedom, though she had eagerly accepted financial support, both private and public...

...How do the "two best American writers" become what they are...

...Some friendships—with Glenway Wes-cott and Robert Penn Warren, for instance—lasted until the end, a very late end, when she was nearly 90...

...The trouble was that her accounts were mostly lies, trite fabrications of a cultivated background on a family plantation with white pillars and loyal ex-slaves serving on as if the Civil War had never been fought, and claims of celebrated kin-folk like Daniel Boone, O. Henry, and assorted governors...

...The accompanying picture, like earlier ones, shows a plump dark-haired girl, pretty but undistinguished...

...Her politics, then and afterward, are hard to pin down...

...This was the illness that she used in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," the story that won her fame...

...Credit for this is deserved, and woefully needed to offset her ruthlessness with husbands, lovers, publishers, and admiring friends...

...In the '20's Mexico meant color, revolution, primitivism, inexpensive houses and servants...

...Joan Givner's task—entrusted to her by Katherine Anne—has been to go behind the fanciful tales to the facts, which are more fantastic than the fantasies and were often the source and strength of Porter's fiction...

...T. Far-rell, Allen Tate, Glenway Wescott, and Robert Penn Warren...

...Hemingway then turned in one wide swing and hurled himself into the rainy darkness...

...Visiting Germany in 1931, Porter was flattered and excited by the attention Hermann Goering paid her when she met him at the house of Sigrid Schultz, correspondent of the Chicago Tribune...

...She encouraged Eudora Welty's discipleship, but significantly took six months to write the 3,300 words of an introduction she had offered for Welty's first story collection...

...Porter was a popular, albeit erratic, writer-in-residence at many universities, receiving gratifying honorary degrees and ultimately being more or less adopted by the University of Maryland, which built a room to house her papers...

...pickiest envy of talent...

...To escape home Callie married, the next June, and somehow tolerated for seven years this husband whom she later would say had "slipped her mind...

...This necessitates so much skipping about in time that the book's structure—despite the chronological chapters, each with a title suggesting a phase of development—would make it difficult to use as a reference work...

...I have said little of Porter's fiction as such because Givner's book is 90 per cent life and 10 per cent work, though she has tried hard to connect the two, to find the sources of stories in both the events and Porter's feelingsabout them...

...In 1916, while recovering from tuberculosis, she organized a school for the young sanitarium patients that was "written up," as Givner puts it, in the Dallas Morning News...

...yet she would write cynically in the future about the Committee...

...Every trail was followed back to Texas and Kentucky, to small town newspapers, court records, genealogies, and the few surviving people who knew or knew about young Callie, as she was christened in 1890...

...Allen Tate wrote that Porter "has few of the ordinary human satisfactions—she can't live in the world, she can't have a deep emotional relationship with anybody, she is always moving: in fact, she is trapped in a cycle of romantic emotions that repeat themselves about every five years...