Katherine Anne Porter
Read Katherine Anne Porter Online
Authors: Katherine Anne Porter,Darlene Harbour Unrue
COLLECTED STORIES AND OTHER WRITINGS
T H E L I B R A R Y O F A M E R I C A
Volume compilation, notes, and chronology copyright © 2008 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced commercially by offset-lithographic or equivalent copying devices without the permission of the publisher.
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
copyright © 1944, 1941, 1940, 1939, 1937, 1936, 1935, 1934, 1930, renewed 1972, 1969, 1968, 1967, 1965, 1963, 1962, 1958 by Katherine Anne Porter. “Virgin Violeta” and “The Martyr” copyright © 1924, 1923 by Century Magazine, renewed 1951, 1950 by Meredith Publishing Company. “Hacienda” copyright 1934 by Harrison of Paris. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All other selections reprinted with the permission of The Katherine Anne Porter Foundation.
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2008927625
ISBN
978–1–59853–029–2 (print)
ISBN
978–1–59853–328–6 (epub)
First Printing
The Library of America—186
D
ARLENE
H
ARBOUR
U
NRUE
IS
THE
EDITOR
OF
THIS
VOLUME
THE COLLECTED STORIES OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
T
HE
L
EANING
T
OWER
AND
O
THER
S
TORIES
ESSAYS, REVIEWS, AND OTHER WRITINGS
“It Is Hard to Stand in the Middle”
Eudora Welty and
A Curtain of Green
On a Criticism of Thomas Hardy
“The Laughing Heat of the Sun”
The Art of Katherine Mansfield
“In the morning of the poet. . .”
“I must write from memory. . .”
“Writing cannot be taught. . .”
The Situation in American Writing
The International Exchange of Writers
A Note on Pierre-Joseph Redouté
St. Augustine and the Bullfight
The Funeral of General Benjamín Hill
Where Presidents Have No Friends
Sor Juana: A Portrait of the Poet
Notes on the Life and Death of a Hero
A Mexican Chronicle, 1920–1943
Blasco Ibanez on “Mexico in Revolution”
Paternalism and the Mexican Problem
Thirty Long Years of Revolution
Go Little Book. . .
T
HIS
collection of stories has been floating around the world in many editions, countries and languages, in three small volumes, for many years. There are four stories added which have never been collected before, and it is by mere hazard they are here at all. “The Fig Tree,” now in its right place in the sequence called
The Old Order
, simply disappeared at the time
The Leaning Tower
was published, in 1944, and reappeared again from a box of otherwise unfinished manuscripts in another house, another city and a different state, in 1961. “Holiday” represents one of my prolonged struggles, not with questions of form or style, but my own moral and emotional collision with a human situation I was too young to cope with at the time it occurred; yet the story haunted me for years and I made three separate versions, with a certain spot in all three where the thing went off track. So I put it away and it disappeared also, and I forgot it. It rose from one of my boxes of papers, after a quarter of a century, and I sat down in great excitement to read all three versions. I saw at once that the first was the right one, and as for the vexing question which had stopped me short long ago, it had in the course of living settled itself so slowly and deeply and secretly I wondered why I had ever been distressed by it. I changed one short paragraph and a line or two at the end and it was done. “María Concepción” was my first published story. It was followed by “Virgin Violeta” and “The Martyr,” all stories of Mexico, my much-loved second country, and they were each in turn accepted and published in the old
Century Magazine
, now vanished, by good generous sympathetic Carl Van Doren. He was the first editor—indeed, the first person—to read a story of mine, and I remember how unhesitatingly and warmly he said, “I believe you are a writer!” This was in 1923.
Several writers or persons connected with literature in some way or another, from time to time in published reminiscences, have done me the honor to mention that they had, so to speak, “discovered” me.
There is no reason to name them, but I shall only say here and now, to have the business straight, it was Carl Van Doren, gifted writer, editor and resourceful friend to young writers, who just lightly tossed my stories into print and started me on my long career, with such an air of it being all in the day’s work, which it was, I went away in a dazzle of joy, not in the least thinking of myself as “discovered”—I had known where I was all along—nor looking towards the future as a “career.” What unpleasant words they are in this context. “Virgin Violeta” and “The Martyr” were left out of the first edition, I forget why, possibly oversight. A friend fished them out of the ancient
Century
files, got them re-published, after forty-odd years, and so they join their fellows. Every story I ever finished and published is here. I beg of the reader one gentle favor for which he may be sure of my perpetual gratitude: please do not call my short novels
Novelettes
, or even worse,
Novellas
. Novelette is classical usage for a trivial, dime-novel sort of thing; Novella is a slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything. Please call my works by their right names: we have four that cover every division: short stories, long stories, short novels, novels. I now have examples of all four kinds under these headings, and they seem very clear, sufficient, and plain English.
