Life Sentences (22 page)

Moreover, when you falsify your own life, you can later be open and generous in your account of it, draw upon it for any fiction you may write, confident that your real self’s safety will be assured. You can even second Madame Du Berry’s challenging brag, as Porter did: “My life has been incredible. I don’t believe a word of it.” Eventually, however, the curious, and any others who care, will grow skeptical, believe only the worst because they assume only the worst would be concealed, and—the unfortunate consequence often is—they will not mind, after so much misleading, if they mistake a truth for a lie the next time, or even every time.

Through photographs and other evidence, Joan Givner, Katherine Anne Porter’s 1982 biographer, demonstrates that most of the settings for Porter’s reenactment of her life’s rites of passage in “The Old Order” were actually supplied by memories of a sojourn in Bermuda (when Porter was thirty-nine), despite the author’s claim that they were captured from her childhood.
How it ought to have been
quietly overtook
how it was
. Thomas F. Walsh, in his essay “The Making of ‘Flowering Judas,’ ” unweaves the many threads that have gone into this masterful story’s composition, disproving Porter’s claim that “my fiction is reportage, only I do something to it; I arrange it and it is fiction, but it happened.” Normally, what happens in the composition of fiction is that scenes, characters, and settings for the story are lifted from different places and times in the experience of the author to create a new cast and an altered environment; but it is not, I think, customary for the writer to maintain that all of them were derived, in the order lived, from one place and one time in one life. We have to keep in mind, too, how many of the events that matter most to a young writer take place in books, those vessels of imagination that have so often rescued us from every day’s disappointments, and give us pages which, never settled, sift through our unconscious still.

So, though Katherine Anne Porter’s fiction is notably lucid, her life history is a biographer’s nightmare, full of false connections and alleged events, and blank about substantial passages of time, as if they had happened during intermission and were never a part of the play.

After her mother’s death, Porter was raised by weak men and many women in the household of her fraternal grandmother, whom everyone called Cat, not because of any special grace or caution but because it shortened “Catharine” by two-thirds and cauterized its odd spelling. She was a dominating figure, by her granddaughter’s account, and ruled her household with a Calvinist’s morally severe self-righteous hand. In 1892 it was more than a brief toddle from Indian Creek to Cat’s farm near the Texas town of Kyle, one hundred miles away, but in terms of a child’s escape from the short street that a small town can seem to be, the move widened the world by at least two roads.

The five hundred people there, with their close local Protestant ways, were Katherine Anne Porter’s first teachers, and supported a school where she received, from age six to twelve, the little formal education her circumstances allowed. Townsfolk went about their business in full view of her wide eyes. They also regularly read from the Good Book, where one could be warned of serious threats to the safety of one’s soul, enjoy instructive allegorical stories, and encounter great prose. School primers taught virtue and obedience; nearly every page gleamed with moral varnish, while figures like Joan of Arc and Cotton Mather provided stirring examples of the prowess possible for a woman, and the merciless hatred some men had for them. From her grandmother she learned manners and had the fear of God “systematically ground into her tender bones.” Loose family ties and impoverishment compelled Cat to offer room and board, in the guise of governesses, to a Miss Babb and Miss Mudd, from whom Katherine learned spanking and calisthenics.

According to Darlene Harbour Unrue’s 2005 biography,
Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist
(Jackson, Miss.: University Press
of Mississippi, 2005), grandmother and her dependents provided Porter with a loving, watchful, closely guarded yet colorful environment, stocked with what would later prove to be a useful cast of characters: a former slave, Masella Daney, who remained a household helper; Daney’s husband (an ironically named Squire Bunton), who lived near and rode by regularly on a mule named Aunt Fanny; as well as a couple of hired hands, one of whom was a morphine addict, while the other (Old Man Ronk) became the model for Olaf Helton in
Noon Wine
(a destiny no doubt unfelt). Cat finally completed this list with

Young ears must have been captivated by the ubiquitous voices of Southern storytellers, leaning back in stiff chairs against the hardware store’s porch wall, shaded, certainly, from the sun, a length of straw caught like a savory cliché between tongue and teeth, droning on of Bull Run or Lee at this ford or that railhead, Jackson charging through a stand of trees, repeating the feats and foibles of relatives whose odd mien and strange ways were usually instructive and always engrossing. These figures were connected by a verbal chain of recollection that reached at least to the moment when some fabulous ancestor’s feet had first hit the turf in the New World.

To sustain interest in its story, every family had to have an ancestral secret that was kept as zealously as a shrine for Mother Mary; and we should add, to all the customary local wash, the buckets of bravado and romance that kept white the Southern dream, each tale’s tallness teaching how the laws that govern the truth might be repealed. Typically, these were the sort of stories that Porter’s grandmother maneuvered with considerable style through occasions
of former opulence and ease—gowns and balls and beaux and canapés—that made Porter “hunger for fine clothes and other comforts of wealth.” In 1962, after
Ship of Fools
became a best seller, she bought herself a “huge square-cut emerald set all around with diamonds,” a ring larger than the one she had invented for La Condessa to wear in the novel and an imprudent purchase at twenty thousand bucks. It is Givner’s opinion that “It was the idea of the ring, rather than the actual object, that she cherished; it became the symbol of her success and the subject of numerous anecdotes.”

It has always seemed to me that the storyteller’s social assignment, which furnished the origins and directed the development of narrative, was to glorify the past and its daring deeds, protect the family tree, justify male ownership of land, women, and personal property, direct and legitimize the passing of power from father to rightful heir, one generation to the next. Oral histories helped unite communities, extol their chiefs, and define the various rites and ceremonies pertaining. No wonder their tales tended to be about male gods and their heroic human counterparts. Nowadays this history is a weakening string of memories, but at one time the bard’s recital was the main conduit of authority, making sense of the past, fostering acceptance, and focusing pride—whether true or false or fabled mattered only to outsiders. Old anecdotes gave present circumstances heft, scope, interest, and instruction. In so many ways you were your forebears, and the storyteller taught you whom to hate or emulate, what to aspire to, and, like the Bible, what to believe, how to behave.

Every society, every religion, every nation-state and ethnic enclave appears eager to employ such historical myths, or first fictions, in their manipulation of the masses. Certainly narratives need not take the novel’s form to be effective. In fact, serious novels now seem more likely to undermine them.

For many Southern writers these romantic sagas were acceptable, and they were eager to protect the honor, habits, and basic creeds of their culture, although a lacquer of criticism contributed to the glow
of objectivity. Katherine Anne Porter was sawn in two, and not by a magician. She despised the actual family system and its methods of operation: its smugly narrow stupid views with which it infected its children; its monarchy of men, their posturing and pomposity; its stifling so-called moral grip; its hypocrisy concerning women—courting them like queens, breeding them like sows. If a man were not the ruler of a kingdom, even not the owner of all he could survey, at least he was the master of his own household, made the main decisions, chastised deviation, doled out the dough, did the deep thinking, got all the mail. Katherine Anne Porter knew this system was based on a lot of poisonous pish tosh: she had seen how weak her father was; how his mother ran the house; yet all the essential perks were still his. Daughters were to be taught householdry and well married if possible; if not, as old maids they could sew in a corner and care for the sick.

Porter passed much of her adolescent years in a series of convent schools that were so eager to snatch a young Protestant from Luther’s hands they would waive tuition, a generosity that her father found irresistible. Such schooling also made her more acceptable to a nineteen-year-old suitor with wealthy parents named John Koontz, whose Catholicism could not dampen his desire for drink or lessen his pleasure in abuse. Porter’s marriage to this stalwart lasted nine invisible years, most of them miserable, though it removed her from her relatives, gave her a noticeable social upgrade, and took her to a somewhat larger, mildly industrial town named Lufkin. This new location often allowed her to ride on the family’s ranch nearby and feel how it was to have a mighty force between her knees.

According to Darlene Harbour Unrue, the couple’s eventual divorce yielded this deposition from the husband: “Nine years after the wedding he admitted that from the beginning of their union he was frequently guilty of adultery, extreme intoxication, vile name-calling, and physical attacks that resulted in Katherine Anne Porter’s broken bones and lacerations.” The charges may have been rather starved for substance, but Porter enjoyed a harvest of grievances all
the same. The pair moved often but packed their problems with their pajamas. On one occasion, husband threw wife down a flight of stairs, “breaking her right ankle and severely injuring her knee.” On another, he beat her unconscious with a hairbrush. The view one has of men and marriage from the foot of such a fall, or from an instrument that in another hand should pursue only fashion or caresses, tends to be as permanent as Adam’s; nevertheless, Porter tried to save her marriage by converting to Catholicism, a move I find mystifying, though I was never consulted. Largely, what it meant was a redirection in her reading habits and the discovery of new authors—always a plus—while the Church’s rituals encouraged her to ponder the impact of belief upon behavior and appreciate the role of symbols in the imagination. She also learned, as she began to write, how things grow more real when they are put into words, because without storytelling the past would pale beyond even the pale of paper. The fattest, most familiar story of all is the one we tell ourselves about ourselves, repeatedly, as if before bed, as a daily comfort or admonition, throughout our lives.

When Joan Givner wrote her
Katherine Anne Porter: A Life
in 1982, her subject had four husbands (Porter customarily claimed there were three), but when the editor of the Library of America collection (
Collected Stories and Other Writings
), Darlene Harbour Unrue, published her
Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist
in 2005, the marriage list had swollen to five, none of them one of Givner’s early candidates, Ernest Stock, the handsome former member of the British Royal Flying Corps, with whom—it turns out—Porter had only “a relationship.” I suspect that, for appearances, affairs might have been called marriages sometimes, and, for convenience, marriages said to be affairs, until who knew what the situation was, and who would any longer care?

Unrue discovered that after Porter’s marriage to Koontz ended in 1915 she wed H. Otto Taskett, a handsome Englishman who lasted the length of a sentence, though, as a fiction, he received many more in
Ship of Fools
, as did all of her husbands. Despite appearances
she did not marry Stock in 1926, simply spent a summer with him in a rented house. Now and then a year would have more than one summer. After this one Porter had gonorrhea. Subsequently, in 1917, someone named Carl von Pless blew through Porter’s life like a prairie wind. Then, from 1933 to 1938, following a lengthy and rocky liaison, she was married to someone as short as she was. This was Eugene Pressly, a young fellow from the Institute of Current World Affairs in Mexico City and later of the U.S. Foreign Office. He was her devoted companion on the sea voyage from Veracruz to Bremen that became the setting for
Ship of Fools
, and he would travel with her, over the next seven years, to Berlin, Paris, and New York before disappearing over the horizon en route to Venezuela.

Porter’s final bet for wedded bless was Albert Erskine, a young graduate student who had followed Robert Penn Warren from Memphis to Louisiana State University’s English department. He was another “handsome young man,” this time of twenty-seven, who was bewitched by her beauty, sophistication, and charm, with a background in literature that enabled him to appreciate fully the corresponding charm, sophistication, and beauty of her work. As the brief life of this marriage wore on, the charm was perhaps the first to go. Porter’s sophistication was admitted to be forty-eight years of maturity instead, and her beauty quite a bad habit. To get rid of her husband, and as a favor, since he was eager to marry another woman, she established a residence in Reno.

The trouble with the men Porter married was that they were still men. She was beautiful, had fabulous legs suitors would insist she be proud of, the voice of a seductress, a figure that drew looks, so that men, their private part plump, would fawn and favor her and, what was more important, inadvertently make possible a fuller, freer realization of her talents and her dreams; but you often had to marry them to take the next step up, to enjoy the security their money and station could confer, or enjoy the acceptance society gave to such arrangements; except that when tread upon these “partners” grew sullen and unruly, wanted the pleasures of her body without giving
any pleasure in exchange, so that, when refused, their passions grew petulant, their entreaties tiresome, their presence wearying.