Folk Ballads

By Melvin Maddocks

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

by Joan Givner

Simon & Schuster; 572 pages; $19.95

The poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren summed up the legend of his friend Katherine Anne Porter just before her death in 1980 at the age of 90. Once upon a time there was "a beautiful woman, wanderer in many lands, witty, restless, fanatically devoted to her art, a charming and accomplished conversationalist, and in the end, after all sorts of poverty, rich and famous."

It made a marvelous story, as Porter knew all too well. For the woman who became rich and famous for her 1962 novel, Ship of Fools, and who will be remembered for such flawless short stories as "Flowering Judas" and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," invented herself as her first work of art. As usual, the truth is more intriguing than the legend. Joan Givner, a patient rather than a flashy biographer, has set the record straight. It is not a record that allows much grandeur to its high-toned subject.

"Katherine Anne" was born Gallic Russell Porter in a two-room log cabin in Indian Creek, Texas. Before she was two, her mother died. She was brought up in a desolate little town of 500 souls, a whistle-stop for cattle trains between San Antonio and Austin, by her ferocious, puritanical grandmother Catherine.

As quickly as she indecently could, Katherine Anne shook the dust of Texas from her feet and became the woman her grandmother had warned her against. She married at 16, shed her husband nine years later, then drifted into journalism, writing a chatty column for $20 a week for Denver's Rocky Mountain News. She migrated to Greenwich Village in 1919, later reviewed books for Malcolm Cowley at the New Republic.

When Katherine Anne first turned to fiction, she believed that stories should feature high-born characters in exotic settings. She was a slow bloomer, but how she hopped about--to Bermuda; Mexico; Paris; Berlin; Salem. Mass.; Washington, D.C.; California. She was 40 when her first collection of short stories, Flowering Judas, was published, establishing her reputation at once.

By then Katherine Anne had disposed of two husbands and, she claimed, 37 lovers. Two more husbands and uncounted lovers were still to come. Wherever she traveled, she seemed to attract admirers from the streets and from the ivory towers. Every literary encounter was charged with sexual significance. Poet Karl Shapiro commemorated her brief meeting with a colleague: "And when Dylan Thomas was introduced/ To Katherine Anne Porter in a room full of people,/ He stopped and picked her up below the thighs/ And raised her to the ceiling like a drink,/ And held her straight in the slack-jawed smoke-blue air/ Two minutes, five minutes, seven minutes,/ While everybody wondered what it meant/ To toast the lady with her own body/ Or to hold her to the light like a plucked flower." Yet nothing--not her hectic love life, or a screenwriting stint in Hollywood at the end of World War II, or a subcareer as visiting professor at Stanford--quite explains the paucity of her output (one novel and fewer than 30 stories). All her life Katherine Anne fought a mysterious writer's block. Jailed for protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, she failed to convert that experience into literature in 1927, and failed again for the 25th anniversary. It was not until 1977 that a small book emerged; The Never-Ending Wrong was her last publication. The Nazis she met in Berlin in 1931 materialized in Ship of Fools, a project that took more than two decades to finish.

In this, her only novel, Porter overreached herself. She possessed neither the scholarship nor the profundity to write a fable of the decline of the Western world. But as a short-story writer, she achieved the violent grace of a folk ballad. Something atavistic, something frontier-Texan came out in her. The sentences cut, like the wife's knife stabbing her husband's lover in "Maria Concepcion," like the farmer's ax splitting the head of his tormentor in "Noon Wine."

In her last year, when Katherine Anne went senile, she went mean. Circumstances would have been even more intolerable if she had gone soft. In her life, in her writing, she took no prisoners and gave no quarter. This made things hard for herself and everybody else. But what else, she would have been the first to ask, is life? What else is literature?

--By Melvin Maddocks

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