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Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) | |
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American essayist, short story writer, and journalist, whose only novel was THE SHIP OF FOOLS (1962), an allegorical story set on a passenger ship. Porter spent twenty years with the book before it was finished. It made her rich and famous. The name of the title came from an old German satire Das Narrenschiff (1494), by Sebastian Brant. However, Porter is also remembered as one of America's best short-story writers. "I don't want any promises, I won't have false hopes, I won't be romantic about myself. I can't live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don't care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance." (from 'Old Mortality', in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 1939) Porter started as a communist sympathizer but she became a friend of a Nazi leader; and she was a southerner who led a cosmopolitan life. Porter's literary production can be divided in three stages: her early writings done in Mexico, the rediscovery of her southern identity, and the last period of disillusionment. In her social life Porter's circle of acquaintances included such figures as President Obregon of Mexico, Herman Göring in Berlin, writers Eudora Welty and Allen Tate, and member of the Johnson White House. Katherine Anne Porter was born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas, but she grew up in Hays County, Texas. Part of her childhood she spent also in Louisiana. She was the fourth child of Harrison Boone Porter and Mary Alice Jones Porter; she died when Katherine Anne was two. Later she blamed her father for the death of her mother, who had gived birth to five children in eight years. Porter's father always claimed that he was a descendent of Daniel Boone, the legendary pioneer and explorer. Porter was raised by her father and paternal grandmother, Catharine Ann Skaggs Porter, a stern disciplinarian, whose reminiscences of the Civil War and tales of her family's past were Porter's first introduction to the art of storytelling. She died when Porter was eleven, but her strong character provided a model for grandmothers in her stories. Porter was educated in convent schools though her formal education was rather irregular. In 1904-05 she attended the Thomas School in San Antonio. At the age of sixteen she ran away from a New Orleans convent and married the first of her four husbands, John Koontz, whose parents were not pleased by the marriage. This marriage lasted nine years. After divorce Porter contracted tuberculosis and during her recovery she decided to became a writer. In 1926 Porter married Ernest Stock, an English interior decorator and painter. Her third husband was Eugene Dove Pressly, who worked in the Foreign Service. He became the model for the character of David Scott in Ship of Fools. In 1938 she married her fourth husband, Albert Erskine, the twenty-six years old business manager for the Southern Review. Between the years 1918 and 1921 Porter became involved in revolutionary politics in Mexico, the scene of several of her stories, and where she worked as a journalist and teacher. Mexico, Porter once said, gave her back her Texas past. Her feelings toward Mexico, however, were ambivalent. In 'Xochimilco' Porter saw Mexico as an earthly Eden where hopes for a better society could be realized. In other stories, including "The Fiesta of Guadalupe," she depicts Mexico as a place of hopeless oppression for the native peoples. In 1922 Porter published a study OUTLINE OF MEXICAN POPULAR ARTS AND CRAFTS. She travelled in the late 1920s Europe, settling in Paris during the early 1930s. During this period she became friends with the English modernist writer Ford Madox Ford. Porter also contributed to leftist journals, such as The New Republic and The Nation. Her first published story was 'María Concepción', which appeared in Century magazine in December 1922. Most of her early stories, which appeared in such magazines as New Masses, transition and Second American Caravan dealt with her experiences in Mexico. In 'Flowering Judas,' originally printed in Hound and Horn in the spring of 1930, the protagonist is a rootless woman, Laura, an American expatriate in Mexico, who refuses to commit herself to love or ideologies. Porter's first collection of short stories was FLOWERING JUDAS. The limited edition of 600 copies appeared in 1930. However, this work established her reputation as a highly original writer and earned her a Guggenheim grant. The collection was enlarged in 1935. According to an anecdote, she always wrote the last line first, claiming that if she didn't know how a story ended, she wouldn't know how to begin it. Porter's PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER (1939) received also widespread critical acclaim. It consisted of three short novels: 'Old Mortality', 'Noon Wine', a study of evil, set on a Texas farm circa 1900, and the titlepiece, which tells of a short-lived love affair between a soldier and a young Southern newspaperwoman during the influenza epidemic of World War I. The central character in the stories is Miranda, whose background is roughly parallel to Porter's-she runs away from a convent, and in the last story she is working as a reporter on a western newspaper. In THE LEARNING TOWER (1944) there are six related stories dealing with Miranda and the background of her family. 'The Old Order' gives the most complete picture of Miranda's family-the grandmother was the great-granddaughter of "Kentucky's most famous pioneer" (Daniel Boone). The unnamed narrator is Miranda. In the 1950s Porter published two volumes essays, THE DAYS BEFORE (1952) and A DEFENSE CIRCE (1954). Her COLLECTED STORIES (1965) was awarded in 1966 both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Ship of Fools, a bitterly ironic novel, appeared when Porter was 72. Its Oscar winning film version from 1966 was directed by Stanley Kramer, starring Vivien Leigh. The Ship of Fools was set in 1931 aboard a German passenger ship, a kind of a floating purgatory, returning to Germany from Mexico. "The ship was none of those specialized carriers of rare goods, much less an elegant pleasure craft coming down from New York, all fresh paint and interior decoration, bringing crowds of prosperous dressed-up tourists with money in their pockets. No, the Vera was a mixed freighter and passenger ship, very steady and broad-bottomed in her style, walloping from one remote port to another, year in year out, honest, reliable and homely as a German housewife." Mixed bag of passengers, Germans, Americans, Spaniards, Gypsies, and Mexicans represent a microcosmos of peoples, whose life are characterized by jealousy, cruelty, hatred, love, and duplicity. In the first part the reader becomes acquainted with the various characters. The second part contains the torment of the passengers in steerage, their attempts to love and their struggle for detachment. In part three a bacchanalian fiesta brings out all the hidden fears and guilts. Porter explores the origin of human evil through the allegorical use of characters, who represent various national and moral types. Captain Thiele is the embodiment of Teutonic authority, one passenger is a Basque, a Christ figure, who plunges into the sea to save an aged bulldog but drowns himself. In the 1970s Porter published COLLECTED ESSAYS AND OCCASIONAL WRITINGS (1970) and THE NEVER-ENDING WRONG (1977), an account of the infamous Sacco-Vanzetti trial and execution. Porter died in Silver Spring, Maryland on September 18, 1980. For further reading: Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist by Darlene Harbour Unrue (2005); Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations, ed. by Joan Givner (1998); Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter, ed by Darlene Harbour Unrue (1997); Katherine Anne Porter by Janis P. Stout (1995); Katherine Anne Porter. Fiction As History by Lakshmi Chandra (1993); Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development by Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr (1993); Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico by Thomas F. Walsh (1992), The Texas Legacy of Katherine Anne Porter by James T.F. Tanner (1991); Katherine Anne Porter and Texas, ed. by Clinton MacHann, William Clark (1990); Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations, ed. by Joan Givner (1987); Katherine Anne Porter: A Life by Joan Givner (1982) - FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: Katherine Anne Porter Selected works:
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