“To part is to die a little, it is said (in every language I can read), but my farewell to these stories is a happy one, a renewal of their life, a prolonging of their time under the sun, which is what any artist most longs for –to be read, and remembered. Go little book…”
Previously published in three separate collections (with the addition of four new stories), Katherine Anne Porter’s Collected Stories won her the Pulitzer Prize at the age of seventy-five in 1966. These twenty-six short stories, long stories, and novels (but not “novelettes” or “novellas” as Porter makes clear in her preface entitled “Go little book…”) jointly compose an altogether superb accumulation of her previously published works. These are deeply psychological, slightly melancholic tales with all the qualities of dark fables, filled with flawless prose and existential examinations of the complexities of human life. These stories remind us of life’s brevity, the experience of regret, the fear of loss, and the ever-impending reminder of death.
From the lively, ponderous pen of Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories offers a series of explorations that mine the depths of the puzzling, mysterious nature of the human condition. The first group of stories were originally published in Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1935) and it features a complex mosaic of characters and situations in Mexico, often against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). Porter had traveled to Mexico in 1920 shortly after recovering from a life-threatening bout of the Spanish Influenza in 1919 during the global Spanish Flu pandemic (1918-1920). She arrived in Mexico during the new Alvaro Obregon administration which came to power in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. However, the country was still unstable (which comes across in many of the stories) and a year later in 1921, she was accused of being a Bolshevik which forced her to flee from Mexico. With the help of Carl Van Doren and Century Magazine, these early stories gained a newfound readership.
“Maria Concepcion” presents us with a characteristically lively, impressive, independent woman in a Porter story –Maria Concepcion catches her husband Juan Villegas in an adulterous fling before he leaves for war with Maria Rosa, his mistress. “She burned all over now, as if a layer of tiny fig-cactus bristles, as cruel as spun glass, had crawled under skin. She wished to sit down quietly and wait for her death, but not until she had cut the throats of her man and that girl who were laughing and kissing under the cornstalks.” When he eventually returns, Maria Rosa is mysteriously found brutally murdered and Maria Concepcion is implicated, but the local community steps in to defend her. In the end, Maria Concepcion and Juan return to their home and Maria adopts the late Maria Rosa’s child. I offer this terse summary of the first short story in this collection because it contains many of the recurring themes found throughout Porter’s works –here, we see a troubled marriage as it struggles to find its order, balance, and harmony but which loses its veneer of youth and innocence in the process. Porter also betrays a proclivity for strong-willed female protagonists striving for domestic happiness as well as the search for ideal womanhood and wifeliness (not as a repressive traditionalist injunction, but rather as an ongoing struggle to define an enduring virtue for women like Maria Concepcion). Porter, herself, was married and divorced no less than four times.
The remainder of the Mexican stories continue to expand upon some of these themes. For example, in “Virgin Violeta,” Violeta has a secret crush on her cousin which leads to her being taken advantage of, gaslighted, encouraged to be silent about it. In “The Martyr,” Ruben is the most illustrious painter in Mexico. He is deeply in love with a model named Isabel who is in love with a rival artist “whose name is of no importance.” One day, she leaves Ruben and he steadily grows distraught, refusing to touch the nineteen portraits he made of her, while he grows fat and sad, before dying of a heart attack at a small restaurant. “Magic” presents a uniquely modernist monologue –almost as if a Henry Jamesian letter– which details troubled experiences inside Madame Blanchard’s New Orleans bordello told from the perspective of a black maid about a girl named Ninette who escapes and then returns. In “Rope” a man walks back to his country home from the grocery store, he has strangely brought some rope home but has forgot to purchase coffee, and this exposes the complex intricacies of a marriage as the rope serves as a fixed, constant image in the turmoil of their relationship. Among the other stories in this section, I was struck by “That Tree” which is about a dreamy artist who yearns for leisure time sitting beneath “that tree” –“He had wanted to be a cheerful bum lying under a tree in a good climate, writing poetry”– which leads him to be abruptly abandoned by his first wife, Miriam. Later, amidst the backdrop of revolutionary activities in Mexico, he turns to a career in journalism. Two wives later, he eventually takes Miriam back as a mistress. “Somehow he had never got to that tree he meant to lie down under.” Another story of note is “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” which conveys a modernist stream-of-consciousness string of half-conscious thoughts by an elderly, dying lady named Ellen Weatherall. Surrounded by her family, Weatherall’s life is like a little blue light that is disappearing. She asks God two times for a sign, but when no divine sign comes, she cries “there’s nothing more cruel than this –I’ll never forgive it.”
Arguably the most celebrated story in this collection is “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” one of the many to feature a character named Miranda, who serves as Porter’s alter ego of sorts (albeit a fantasy alter ego who is described as having been raised in a far more aristocratic household than Porter ever had been). In the story, Miranda is pressured to buy liberty bonds during the war –“Suppose I were not a coward, but said what I really thought? Suppose I said to hell with this filthy war?” She is in love with her war-bound boyfriend of ten days, Adam, but she soon falls gravely with the flu. She is placed in a dark, silent, sunless room –“The body is a curious monster, no place to live in, how could anyone feel at home there?”—in this case, the jingoistic home-front is compared to the rising threat of a global pandemic, both widespread crises serve as diseases of a kind. Tragically, Adam dies but Miranda recovers in a quarantine house in this dark, somber tale of lost love in the age of war –“At once he was there beside her, invisible but urgently present, a ghost but more alive than she was, the last intolerable cheat of her heart…” As is the case with all of Porter’s tales, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” is semi-autobiographical. Porter was twenty-eight years old when the 1918 pandemic struck and rapidly killed hundreds of thousands of people in the midst of World War I. Working for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, like Miranda, Porter was dating a young soldier, who was readying for deployment overseas, when she suddenly fell sick, and her editor pulled strings to get her admitted to an overcrowded hospital where Porter was left on a bed in the hallway for nine days, running a fever of 105. When she finally recovered, she learned that her lover had died of the flu. It was an utterly tragic situation not all-too dissimilar to others of the era, and today this also serves as a timely short story for those of us who lived through the recent COVID-19 pandemic (which struck about a century after the Spanish Flu pandemic).
At any rate, this collection of short stories contains numerous other worthy tales like “The Leaning Tower” which is about an idealistic painter who moves to Berlin between the world wars only to steadily experience disillusionment, or “A Day’s Work” which examines an embittered marriage encumbered by religious piety, or the perspective of a four-year-old boy who quickly grows up amidst his parent’s tense, unhappy marriage in “The Downward Path of Wisdom,” or the creeping death of an ideal experienced by a young woman during the Mexican Revolution in “Flowering Judas.” These and others are worthwhile for even the casual reader to digest. This collection remains a remarkable group of short stories from a lauded American writer, praised by the likes of Eudora Welty and Robert Penn Warren, and I might not have otherwise encountered were it not for this expansive journey through the Pulitzer Prize-winners.
On the 1966 Pulitzer Prize Decision
“It was, on the whole, an undistinguished year for fiction, a complaint we fear is becoming recurrent,” wrote John Barkham and Maxwell Geismar in their Fiction Jury report for 1966 (the fiftieth year of the Pulitzer Prizes). While looking for a single work that “stood out as a discovery or beacon,” they found the next winner in the Collected Stories of 75-year-old Katherine Anne Porter for her “chaste and controlled style, her subtle sensibilities, and the power of her moments of revelation.” The Advisory Board agreed. However, as John Hohenberg noted, “it was also a commentary on the state of the American novel when a book of short stories was selected for the fiction award in the fiftieth year of the prizes.” Other books mentioned in the Jury Report included: John Hersey’s White Lotus, Hortense Calisher’s Journal from Ellipsis, Peter de Vries’s Let Me Count the Ways, Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling, Vardish Fisher’s Mountain Man, and George P. Elliott’s In The World.
The 1966 Pulitzer fiction jury consisted of two familiar names from decades past:
- John Barkham (1908-1998) was originally born in South Africa on an ostrich farm, before later migrating to the United States where he became a historical book reviewer, focusing primarily on books about Africa. According to his obituary in The New York Times, in his heyday, Mr. Barkham could deliver a stream of 4-6 book reviews per week. He would typically sit back in his Eames leather reading chair at 3pm, and once finished reading, he would handwrite his review of the book before typing it up again on his typewriter. His writing appeared in numerous publications including TIME, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Post and others. Mr. Barkham served on many Pulitzer juries in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Biography over a period of approximately 20 years.
- Maxwell S. Geismar (1910-1979) was a Columbia University alumnus and teacher at Harvard who became a famous literary critic for a variety of publications including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Herald Tribune, The Nation, The American Scholar, The Saturday Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Compton’s Encyclopedia (he also penned a notoriously belligerent critique of Henry James).
Katherine Anne Porter was previously considered for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Ship of Fools which lost to William Faulkner’s The Reivers in 1963.
Who is Katherine Anne Porter?
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) was born “Callie Russell Porter” in Indian Creek, Texas (located in west-central Texas). Her father was Harrison Boone Porter and mother was Mary Alice (Jones) Porter. Her family lineage is somewhat opaque as her father claimed maternal descent from American frontiersman Daniel Boone, and Porter, herself, also apparently told some embellished tales about genealogical connections linking back to the age of companion of William the Conqueror, as well as the writer O. Henry (or William Sydney Porter) whom she claimed was her father’s second cousin, and even President Lyndon B. Johnson but later research apparently dispelled these fabrications.
For those truly interested in Katherine Anne Porter’s life, there was an illuminating interview she gave to Barbara Thompson Davis of The Paris Review (Issue 29 in the Winter-Spring edition in 1963). Porter lived a long life but she published somewhat sparingly (a total of twenty-seven stories and one novel) and much of her writing owed a considerable debt of gratitude to Henry James, Willa Cather and James Joyce, as well as fellow southerners like Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers. The Saturday Review (in publication from 1940-1971) once noted that Porter swam in the same waters as Hawthorne, Flaubert, and Henry James.
In 1892, when Porter was a mere two years old, her mother died just two months after giving birth, so Porter was taken with her four surviving siblings (an older brother had died in infancy) to live with their grandmother until she too died less than a decade later (Porter later changed her name from Callie Russell Porter to Katherine Anne Porter in honor of her grandmother who was named Catharine Ann Porter). The only formal education Porter ever received aside from grammar school was a year in 1904 in which she attended the Thomas School, a private Methodist School. In 1906, at the age of sixteen she left home and eloped with John Henry Koontz, a physically abusive Roman Catholic who drunkenly threw her down a flight of stairs, breaking her ankle and ending the marriage (they officially divorced in 1915 and she officially changed her name to Katherine Anne Porter). In 1914, she spent time working in Chicago as an extra in silent movies before returning to Texas to work in the entertainment industry. However, she was soon diagnosed with tuberculosis which forced her to spend two years in a sanatorium where she decided to become a writer.
In 1918, she became a writer for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado but was soon forced to quit when she contracted the flu during the global Spanish Flu pandemic. After an extensive recovery, she emerged frail and completely bald (she was left with white hair for the rest of her life). As described above, her experience was reflected in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939)” which earned her the first annual gold medal for literature in 1940 from the Society of Libraries of New York University, among other accolades. It was actually Carl Van Doren, husband of Irita Van Doren and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Benjamin Franklin, who first opened doors for Porter into the publishing world. Upon reading her early stories in 1923, he reportedly exclaimed “I believe you are a writer!”
In 1919, Porter moved to Greenwich Village to work as a ghost writer, and here she became ensconced in a somewhat radical strain of left politics. The following year she moved to Mexico to work for a magazine publisher but she became swept up with progressive Mexican revolutionaries before having to flee the country and eventually growing disenchanted with the leftist brand of politics. From this point onward, she became an ardent critic of religion for most of her life until she rediscovered Roman Catholicism in the final decade of her life.
Amidst four failed marriages and several affairs, Porter suffered miscarriages and abortions and contracted gonorrhea from her one-time husband Ernest Stock which forced her to undergo a hysterectomy, thus ending any plans she might have had to conceive a child in the future. She moved to Europe in the 1930s and married a writer, Eugene Pressly, only to divorce him and marry a graduate student, Albert Russel Erskine, Jr., only for him to file for divorce upon learning of her true age (she was about twenty years his senior).
While she published infrequently, Porter essentially survived off advancements and grants (including a $26,000 payment from the Ford Foundation to complete her novel Ship of Fools which wouldn’t be published for decades until 1962 when she was 72), and her prestige in the field of American letters only continued to grow. She was an elected member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1943, and a writer-in-residence at several colleges and universities, including the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and the University of Virginia. She received a $2,000 Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931 which allowed her to travel on a steamer from Mexico to Europe where she bought her dream home “South Hill” in Malta, which became her residence during World War II and where she hosted parties for the likes of Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and others. She later returned to the United States taught at Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Washington and Lee University, and the University of Texas.
Many of Porter’s stories were adapted as radio and television programs. Her only novel, Ship of Fools, was published in 1962 –it was based on a 1931 ocean cruise she had taken from Vera Cruz, Mexico to Germany. The novel’s success finally granted her financial security –it was adapted into an Oscar-winning Stanley Kramer film in 1956 featured Vivien Leigh in her final film performance. Her Collected Stories won both the Pulitzer and also the National Book Award. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature five times between 1964 and 1968. Her writing after this period tapered off. She donated her literary papers to the University of Maryland, and in 1977 she published an account of the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti (she had protested it some 50 years earlier during her era of progressive politics). Porter suffered a severe stroke that same year. She was deemed incompetent, and the court appointed her nephew Paul Porter as her guardian.
Porter died in Silver Spring, Maryland on September 18, 1980, at the age of 90. Her ashes were buried next to her mother at Indian Creek Cemetery in Texas.
Film Adaptation:
- There have been various television and radio adaptations of Porter’s stories found in this collection.
Further Reading:
- Ship of Fools (1962) by Katherine Anne Porter
- Katherine Anne Porter, A Life (1991) by Joan Givner
Literary Context in 1965-1966:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1965): awarded to Russian author Mikhail Sholokhov “for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he has given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people.”
- National Book Award (1966): also awarded to The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter along with the Pulitzer Prize.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the #1 bestseller in 1965 was The Source by James A. Michener (a fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning author). Other notable books on the list that year included: Herzog by Saul Bellow, The Looking Glass War by John le Carré, The Green Berets by Robin Moore, The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming, and Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk.
- Soviet fiction writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky were sentenced to five and seven years, respectively, for publishing supposedly “anti-Soviet” writings. Meanwhile, Soviet author and translator Valery Tarsis traveled abroad only to find that the Soviet Union negated his citizenship.
- The world debut of A High Wind in Jamaica, a film based on Richard Hughes’s 1929 novel, featured the future novelist Martin Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, as a teenage actor.
- Chinese critic Yao Wenyuan published a review of a Beijing Opera production, claiming it was counter-revolutionary, which became a starting point for the Cultural Revolution in China.
- The Nebula Award was first conceived by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. The first award would be issued the following year to Frank Herbert’s Dune.
- Agatha Christie published At Bertram’s Hotel.
- Ian Fleming published The Man with the Golden Gun.
- Frank Herbert published Dune.
- John le Carré published The Looking-Glass War.
- H. P. Lovecraft published Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.
- Norman Mailer published An American Dream.
- James A. Michener published The Source.
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published.
- Ariel by Sylvia Plath was published.
- The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter continues to stand apart from the crowd as an outstanding selection by the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 in my view (the book was also the winner of the National Book Award that same year), however today Katherine Anne Porter rarely seems to be mentioned in the same breath as other great American short story writers, like Flannery O’Connor, which is a shame.
Porter, Katherine Anne. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. A Harvest/HBJ Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1979 (originally published as a collection in 1964).