"Pale Horse, Pale Writer"

...The colors and tastes all had their smells, as the sounds now have their echoes: the bitter whiff of air over a sprawl of animal skeleton after the buzzards were gone...

...Thompson, the fi ctional poor Texas farmers at the center of the tale, but in fact they were entirely based upon her cousins—she did not even change their name, or that of Mr...

...Is she underrated now...

...Was Porter overrated during her lifetime...

...Porter’s short fiction originally appeared in three collections: Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930), Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (1939), and The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), and were brought together in Harcourt’s 1965 The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter...

...Which are the best of them...

...But even though she had made the decision to explore this subject, Porter still was unable to approach the truth head-on, making, instead, a series of feints in a futile attempt to catch hold of some inner truth that would ground the story in a way she found acceptable...

...she reinvented herself and her past as she went along, having, as one of her biographers said, an absolute “inability to accept the disunion between what life is and what it should be...

...In a novel, characters need to develop...

...she worked her experiences there into a number of her fi ctional pieces, including “Flowering Judas,” “That Tree,” “Hacienda” (which was based on her observations of Sergei Eisenstein and his crew fi lming ?Que Viva Mexico...

...Since inclusion in the Library of America effectively imparts classic status, it is fascinating to see which authors the series’ editors have decided to anoint...

...Her years as a young reporter in Denver are quite faithfully recreated in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider...

...She lived in Mexico in the early 1920s and the country became a beloved second homeland...

...heavy tomatoes dead ripe and warm with the midday sun, eaten there, at the vine...

...Few authors’ works have illustrated this fact more dramatically than Porter’s...

...a long essay on Henry James is dutifully reverent but lifeless...

...Her maternal grandmother was institutionalized and Porter never lost her fear of succumbing to the “melancholia” that plagued the family...

...Brooke Allen is the author, most recently, of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers...

...in a short story, they have only to be...

...BY BROOKE ALLEN Having by now published the best work of all the major writers in United States history, the Library of America has moved on to the B-list, with authors like Philip K. Dick, A.J...

...Their farm, to which she was sent on visits during her adolescence, seems to have been exactly as she describes it in the story...

...She moved to Greenwich Village a bit later, living there during the glory years of the ’20s and befriending fellow writers such as Hart Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Malcolm Cowley, and Allen Tate...

...of honeysuckle in great swags on a trellised gallery...

...This is too bad, for she was one of the most original artists of her epoch, and one of the most surprising, too...

...Bestseller though it was, Ship of Fools (1962) showed that Porter found it hard to make her characters change organically, and from the moment of its publication, her reputation began to decline...

...I have not much interest in anyone’s personal history after the tenth year, not even my own,” she wrote...

...the smells and fl avors of roses and melons, and peach bloom and ripe peaches, of cape jessamine in hedges blooming like popcorn, and the sickly sweetness of chinaberry fl orets...

...was this decision justifi ed...

...Nearly all fi ction contains autobiographical elements, but such factors played an even greater role in Porter’s work than is usually the case...

...In 1956, two decades after she completed the piece, she wrote an essay called “‘Noon Wine’: The Sources” for the Yale Review...

...Predictably (for Porter is the most subjective and personal of fi ction writers), it is the authors with whom she personally identifi es—Cather, Katherine Mansfi eld, Colette, Eudora Welty—who inspire the most deeply felt criticism...

...Commenting on her methods, Porter said, “my fi ction is reportage, only I do something to it...

...Married fi ve times, she usually acknowledged only three husbands (“I have no hidden marriages,” she once said, “they just sort of slip my mind...

...A journey to Germany in 1931 inspired the long story “The Leaning Tower...

...Take Porter, for instance: Do her works deserve to be called “classics...

...To read them all together is to be forcibly impressed with the author’s imaginative power and descriptive gifts...

...This neighborhood did not work its way into much of her fi ction, but she set one of her most brilliant and blackest tales, “A Day’s Work,” in a nearby Irish neighborhood...

...What’s more, she got away with it, for she wrote about the false background as exquisitely and with as deeply felt conviction (in “Old Mortality” and “The Old Order,” for instance) as she recreated her actual milieu (“Noon Wine,” “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” “He...

...The tale is dated “1931” in this edition but was actually written a decade later, with Hitler’s war providing all-too-ironic hindsight...

...She herself was aware of the contradictions, and attempted to explain herself—never very successfully...

...Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings has been edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue, a scholar who has built her career on Porter’s work, with several books on the subject, including a 2005 biography that has more or less supplanted Givner’s 1982 one...

...As Porter wrote, “I do not believe that childhood is a happy time, it is a time of desperate cureless bitter griefs and pains, of shattering disillusionments, when everything good and evil alike is happening for the fi rst time, and there is no answer to any question...

...One of the two biographies, either Unrue’s or Givner’s (they are both good), will make an invaluable supplement to this Library of America volume, for the life and work of this strange, gifted woman are connected in unusually complicated and contradictory ways...

...she was “a piece of work,” everyone affi rmed...

...I arrange it and it is fi ction but it happened...

...The essay became famous and was much anthologized, especially in writing textbooks...

...She was a consummate short story writer, and the strengths she brought to this craft—the ability to convey instant visual and sensual impressions, the verbal adroitness that allowed her to sketch the essence of a character with precision—proved something of a liability when she turned to the novel form...

...Eventually her stories, once widely anthologized and held up as models of the genre by countless critics and educators, were almost forgotten...

...When we deliberately ignore too much we make a fatal mistake...

...The fact that she came so close and yet could still not acknowledge her relationship to her own place and her own people suggests her fatal ambivalence on the subject...

...Helton, the Swedish hired man...

...Porter’s transformation from plucky provincial career girl to literary grande dame was observed with amusement by those who knew her over the long haul...

...He recalled her various acolytes, mostly homosexual men, “sitting at her feet as if she were a bronze monument, deferent, reverent, genufl ective...

...The imaginary life, then, is as true as the actual one, and vice versa...

...Characteristically, Porter laid claim to having sent letters to American newspapers back in 1931, warning them of the danger of the nascent Nazi party, but this appears to have been an exaggeration at best...

...After her departure from Texas, Porter led a peripatetic, cosmopolitan life, and her fi ction refl ects her travels...

...Liebling, and Katherine Anne Porter—all signifi cant artists, but not on the level of Mark Twain or Nathaniel Hawthorne—represented in its Fall 2008 catalogue...

...My own mother originated not far from Porter’s birthplace of Indian Creek, and during my childhood in the 1960s and ’70s the author was still widely remembered in Brown County, not so much for her world-class fi ction as for her world-class genius for self-invention and pretense...

...and Mrs...

...parts of Ship of Fools, and Mar?a Concepc?on, her fi rst published story—or at any rate, the fi rst she cared to acknowledge...

...the sound of mourning doves in the live oaks, the childish voices of parrots chattering on every back porch in the little towns, the hoverings of buzzards in the high blue air—all the life of that soft blackland farming country, full of fruits and fl owers and birds...

...here, in the Library of America edition, they appear in their entirety...

...Whatever one was going to be was all prepared for before that, the rest is merely confi rmation, extension, development...

...Refusing to accept the demeaning reality of her impoverished childhood in rural Texas, she concocted a romantic background of faded southern aristocracy...

...Finally, will inclusion in the Library of America bring renewed attention and popularity to her short stories, which were once so highly thought of but have now fallen rather out of fashion...

...the delicious milky green corn, savory hot corn bread eaten with still-warm milk...

...and of these stories the best is “Noon Wine...

...Porter laid claim to being the fi rst artist of international stature to emerge from Texas, and she always kept up with her local connections although she left the state in 1914, at the age of 23, and returned there only a few times during the remaining 60-odd years of her life...

...Childhood has a privileged place in Porter’s short fi ction...

...As Porter’s biographer Joan Givner has written: That Porter wrote the story at all refl ects her desire to recreate her familial background, and that she chose from all her stories to probe the sources of this one shows her need to understand her relationship to her early environment...

...a sympathetic essay on Willa Cather is a model of critical empathy...

...I believe we exist on half a dozen planes in at least six dimensions,” she commented, “and inhabit all periods of time at once, by way of memory, racial experience, dreams that are another channel of memory, fantasy that is also reality, and I believe that a fi rst rate work of art somehow succeeds in pulling all these things together and reconciling them...

...Childhood is the fi ery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good...

...She was squired around town by Hermann G?ring, which she seems to have enjoyed, and took in the sights and sounds of bitter, povertystricken interwar Berlin...

...A virulent attack on Gertrude Stein (“The Wooden Umbrella,” 1947) is hilarious and still well worth reading...

...Her alter ego in this fi ction is Miranda Gay, second daughter of a Texas family which, in many aspects, reflects the actual Porter family and in others draws from her more genteel fantasyfamily...

...and the clinging brackish smell of the muddy little ponds...

...Her fi ction tended to be drawn directly from her own experiences (“Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” for example, is a quite faithful account of the author’s near death during the infl uenza epidemic of 1918), but some of these experiences were imaginary rather than literal...

...Yet nothing she wrote is more beautiful, or more passionate, than the sensual, rapt, retrospective descriptions of the Texas she then inhabited—heartbreaking passages when one considers the malls and car dealerships that now blanket that fruitful land...

...Porter’s own childhood was marked by poverty, dislocation, and trauma: She lost her mother when she was not yet two years old, and her grandmother, the formidable matriarch she described and elaborated upon so brilliantly in “The Old Order,” died nine years later...

...She claimed never to have known Mr...

...the rest is given over to essays, which are fascinating, and reviews, which are only intermittently so...

...In the days of her fame,” wrote one former lover, writer Matthew Josephson, “. . . I found she had changed and was playing a role suited to what she conceived to be her public image...

...Only about half of her Library of America 1,100-page collection is taken up with Porter’s fi ction...

...Her father was feckless and unreliable...

...Like the author, Miranda is an observer (“Miranda” means “looking,” after all), sometimes a ruthless one, and her refl ections can be dark...

...The editors have omitted Ship of Fools, her only novel...

...Porter’s greatest achievements are the stories that most faithfully refl ect the childhood world that she hated and loved, that she left so early and never forgot...