Notes of a Survivor

THE COLLECTED ESSAYS AND OCCASIONAL WRITINGS OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER. 496 pages. Lawrence-Delacorte. $12.50.

They live still with morning freshness in my memory, their clearness, warmth of feeling, calmness of intelligence; in short the sense of an artist at work in whom one could have complete confidence.

Katherine Anne Porter is praising the short stories of Willa Gather, but the lines could be used without revision to describe some of her own small classics. Noon Wine (1937), a short novel, recounts a stark frontier tragedy of murder and remorse as muted and inevitable as anything by Thomas Hardy. Another flawless short novel, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), describes the descent of a consciousness toward death--and its reluctant return to life --with mesmeric power.

These two are the basis of a diamond-hard reputation. Yet, the lady would rather be compared to an emerald. An emerald as big as a boardroom conference table adorns her right hand. On her left is a tear-shaped stone that could have originated only in the eye of a crocodile. She will be 80 on May 15, and the jewels she wears to parties in her honor are the recently won trophies of a long campaign. The stories, many of them set in her native Texas, brought honors, fellowships, sabbaticals in Hollywood and the rest of the grants-in-aid that serious critics indirectly confer upon writers by writing favorable opinions.

Texas Belle. The emeralds come from Ship of Fools, a long, messy novel published in her 73rd year. A major bestseller, later made into a blockbuster movie, it took her more than 20 years to write. She says it would have been easier if she could have written it two columns to the page, like Julia Child's recipe book.

Ship of Fools not only lacked the perfect form of the earlier stories, but their objectivity as well. The story of an Atlantic crossing between Vera Cruz and Bremerhaven in the 1930s, it is a parable of the growth of Nazism and a chilling view of human nature. The wayward characters are so often compared to animals that they seem to comprise a floating zoo. Miss Porter has often said, "I am a passenger on that ship," and it is understandable that when the book's heroine finally leaves the ship by launch, she turns her back to it and never once looks over her shoulder.

It is the caustic, illusionless side of Miss Porter that pervades much of this collection of essays, reviews, asides and letters. Only a few well-made literary essays--on Thomas Hardy, Eudora Welty, Willa Gather--reflect morning freshness and intelligence at high noon.

The dominant tone is that of a survivor, a woman who has gone it alone despite three brief marriages, who has lived for art despite her beauty and her background as a Texas belle. "There is no one I would call for in the hour of my death, she wrote her nephew in 1963. "That I think is the final test of whether you are really alone or not." Realism, bordering on misanthropy, shows to best advantage in three chapters from an unpublished biography of the 17th century Boston Puritan, Cotton Mather. Stroked by irony, the prose moves swiftly, and the enormities committed in the name of God by a self-righteous and self-aggrandizing society are dramatized in Mather's own feverish delusions. Though the segment published here does not cover the Salem trials, there are few if any clearer explanations of why they occurred.

Bloody World. Elsewhere, anger overwhelms cooler assessments. Her judgment of Gertrude Stein is a comic masterpiece of unfettered malice. The duenna of the Lost Generation, according to Miss Porter, was a stupid, vulgar self-promoter. As an executioner, Porter is swift: "She and her brother drifted apart, but gradually, like one of Miss Stein's paragraphs." Of Eugene Tolas, Joyce's patient sponsor and the editor of the famed avant-garde magazine transition, she writes: "He issued frantic manifestoes demanding that language be reduced to something he could master."

Scraps and oddments follow. There are a couple of atrocious women's magazine pieces, one on marriage, about which the lady seems to know nothing, and another showing a mawkish addiction to Jacqueline Kennedy. But thanks to the Porter style--which Novelist-Critic Glenway Wescott once said covers the subject the way grass covers a lawn--it is all superior reading. "My natural, incurable tendency," she writes, "is to try to wangle the sprawling mess of our existence in this bloody world into some kind of shape: almost any shape will do, just so it is recognizably made with human hands." She adds what could be the book's subtitle: "And no back talk."

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