Life Sentences (23 page)

Beauty did not make Porter proud; it made her vain; and these repeated romantic misadventures sapped her emotional energy. Perhaps they were the reason she was a frequent procrastinator and stingy with her work. Daily life can be taxing; running around on the road can give any head and heart the dizzies, and the dizzies can cause you to sink onto strange sofas. Inconsistencies are bad investments and Porter had her share: she was at once cold and promiscuous, romantic and calculating; she sought both solitude and society, thus the emotional space necessary for composition, and the excuses to avoid it. Though very aware of pregnancy’s dangers to her health, to her way of life as well as the prospective child’s, Porter longed to be a mother. In consequence, she suffered miscarriages, required abortions, and “lost children in all the ways one could.”

Porter knew what it was to be poor, but she nevertheless regularly lived beyond her means. She flirted with religion but was too intelligent to commit. She deplored her humble origins, said she disliked the South, yet she longed to put down roots, and was fascinated by the myths that glorified her region. In spite of that she fled every place that offered itself in order to live like a Gypsy. In her day Marxists were the most relentless of the political bores, and I feel it is to her considerable credit that no -ism, -ist, or -ology could tempt her, no fashionable jargon lead her into obfuscation, or fad of intellect seduce. Porter supported liberal causes, both in print and on the street, and was vigorous in her denunciation of fascism while demonstrating a mistrust of minorities that was thoroughly Southern and deeper than a streak.

F. O. Matthiessen observed, as early as 1945, that Miss Porter (as she was then addressed) had a “high reputation among nearly all schools of critics” and was regarded as “a writer’s writer,” which he assumed meant that other authors could learn much from her consummate craftsmanship. Although Porter was thirty-two when she published her first story, “Maria Concepción,” her signature style was in place and more assured in its use than she had come
to be in her life. Her sensuous yet hard-eyed prose would never need improvement and would be flexible enough in tone (ranging from the famous impersonality of “Maria” to the witty sarcasm of “The Wooden Umbrella” or the revulsion of “The Leaning Tower”) to accomplish whatever effect she required.

Matthiessen feared such praise might mean to readers that her work was arty and esoteric. (I would add to those adjectives the words
fancy
and
frilly, mannered
and
difficult
.) When reviewers take the trouble to compliment a writer on her style, it is usually because she has made it easy for them to slide from one sentence to another like an otter down a slope, since they are presumably eager to find out what happens next or what fresh disclosure will yield surprise. So they are happily immersed in the account, lose all touch with mere words, and feel as if they were present when D’Arcy does this or Miranda that, or when the mangy dog chases the cat. Porter herself, who sometimes knew better, compliments Hardy on his ability to put her in his chosen place and let her “see.” She should have said “and let her read.”

In the same year and season that Matthiessen published his little piece in
Accent
, Gertrude Buckman wrote this about “The Leaning Tower” for the
Partisan Review
: “It has for a long time been apparent that Katherine Anne Porter consistently writes a luminous prose, of an exactness of choice and suggestiveness of phrasing, which is altogether extraordinary. Miss Porter’s work has probably been subjected to the kind of scrutiny that most writers hardly dare to hope for, rarely achieve, and can almost never withstand. That Miss Porter can bear such careful reading proves her much more than simply an excellent stylist.” This praise is well meant but it is also withdrawn as quickly as it is offered. For most critics, the presence of “style” requires assurance that there is also “substance.” Style is wrapping paper and ribbon, scented tag and loving inscription. If you are careful, the tissue can be reused for a birthday or another Christmas. My aunt ironed such paper as she fancied, and stored it like linen napkins in folded flat stacks beneath her bed.

Style, I should like to protest, is the result of that “exactness of
choice” that Porter exhibits. Whether unconsciously or by intent, as Poe was purported to, the writer chooses subjects, adopts a tone, considers an order for the release of meaning, arrives at the rhythm, selects a series of appropriate sounds, determines the diction and measures the pace, turns the referents of certain words into symbols, establishes connections with companionable paragraphs, sizes up each sentence’s intended significance, and, if granted good fortune, because each decision might have been otherwise, achieves not just this or that bit of luminosity or suggestiveness, but her own unique lines of language, lines that produce the desired restitution of the self.

You cannot miss the rhetorical beat of passages such as this one from “The Leaning Tower” of 1941 that buries the reader under shovelfuls of scorn. Charles Upton, the principal character, is taking a walk, looking for a lodging, on his sixth day as a newcomer to Berlin.

It might seem sad enough to be so described, but the feeling is still, though dismayed, detached. The next paragraph plays rough. These depicted people are window-shopping but the windows are both mocking and reflecting them.

The expelling puffs required to cross the page over all those disgusting
p
s, the alternation among the vowels the
p
s accompany, the word
pig
itself, made of
piss
and
gag
, the feel of the tongue against the teeth while performing the doubled
t
s of
spotted cotton
, the marvelous march of the metaphor as it moves from examples of the real thing through sugary still eatable samples to reproductions in plush, then wood, and finally metal, and the mingled reflection in and through the glass of pig parts, piglike imitations, and pig-acquired forms and faces: they play together to create her style in this passage and prove her worth.

Any resonance beyond rhetoric to this passage? You bet. It takes the toil of butchers, bakers, gimcrack makers to provide the fare, shopkeepers’ time and money to acquire and arrange the space, an entire culture—for this is Nazi Germany—to collect the crowd, and Porter to imagine a lonely American looking for his lodging in this coarse and gluttonous community. The scene is a construction, as all literary descriptions are, because an actual eye would sweep its subject in one look, then send attention here and there in a flick or three. Instead, we are given a summary in the guise of a moment, a habit in an instance, and a judgment meant for forever.

The sight of fat people apparently sharpened her pen. These two sentences from “Noon Wine” are famous: “He wasn’t exactly a fat man. He was more like a man who had been fat recently.”

A moment ago I wrote: “to create her style and prove her worth” as if I were sure that proving her worth was at least one function for perfection to perform. I suspect Porter’s art had to be a form of salvation
for her, but perhaps I am allowing my own attitudes to intrude the way my pack ratty aunt scuffled into this text seven paragraphs ago. In the careful practice of the arts of prose, Porter could avoid mistakes, when, in life, she was invariably putting the wrong ring on the wrong finger. On the page she could wait until she and her skills were a match. In time she would learn her art from the kind of reading that teaches writing, and choose according to her lights, picking her mentors wisely—internationals such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, because Southern writers were treacherous guides and might lead you to the most dangerous monster of all: Faulkner’s all-swallowing world. The perfection of the work would hide the imperfections of the life. Then she could look at the past without either shame or guilt. There she would discover problems worthy of her and conquer them. Her life’s journey was in the company of a load of fools as well as the freight of friends, but she would board no friends and embark the fools to Bremen from Veracruz.

Although its author might have been characterized, at one time, as a loose baseborn woman, her much admired style bore every mark of the aristocracy, and had taken her to the White House of John F. Kennedy, where she had dined more than once. That style was neither very inventive nor exploratory, but it was precise about perception, adept at dialogue and scrupulous about dialect, rich in recollection, careful with abstractions, sensuous and frank while never coarse, otherwise always high-toned, never casual or breathless as if her vowels had been running.

Porter relaxed her standards somewhat when writing essays or doing reviews (which occupy a good half of her Library of America volume), but Katherine Anne in an apron is still a wonderful cook. Her pieces on Edith Sitwell, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield are observant and generous pleasures; she roughs up a pompous T. S. Eliot in defense of Thomas Hardy, takes Lady Chatterley for a thoroughly deserved walk in the woods, and in “The Wooden Umbrella,” one of three pieces on Gertrude Stein, vents her spleen with wit and accuracy. Who but Gertrude and Alice wouldn’t
enjoy the following characterization? “Considering her tepid, sluggish nature, really sluggish like something eating its way through a leaf, Miss Stein could grow quite animated on the subject of her early family life, and some of her stories are as pretty and innocent as lizards running over tombstones on a hot day in Maryland.” Porter attacks Stein with admirable wit and considerable understanding. The essay is masterful. The difficulty for Porter is that her being somewhat right about Stein simply doesn’t matter. At the end, Gertrude sits amid the wreckage of her furniture like a Roman senator undisturbed by his city’s scrumbled marble.

Porter is a discriminating and passionate critic, but she deals mostly with a work’s general effects and does not venture to bore her reader with the many small strokes which, when so many are completed, create the ultimate result. Unless she is reminiscing about an experience of her own. Then the lines are drawn like bowstrings. For instance, when Eliot reads in front of Joyce (and Porter) at Shakespeare and Company: “The poet before us had a face as severe as Dante’s, the eyes fiercely defensive, the mouth bitter, the nose grander and much higher bridged than his photographs then showed; the whole profile looked like a bird of prey of some sort. He might have been alone, reading to himself aloud, not once did he glance at his listeners.”

Her own commentary can be eloquent—though executed with a bit of the shapelessness she is prepared to risk in an essay—when she remembers an anecdote about Tolstoy which alleges the old man said, as mad as Lear, that he would tell the real story about women only from his coffin and only when he felt the shovelfuls falling on his face. “It’s a marvelous picture. Tolstoy was merely roaring in the frenzy roused in him in face of his wife’s terrible, relentless adorations; her shameless fertility, her unbearable fidelity, the shocking series of jealous revenges she took upon him for his hardness of heart and wickedness to her, the whole mystery of her oppressive femaleness. He did not know the truth about women, not even that one who was the curse of his life. He did not know the truth about
himself. This is not surprising, for no one does know the truth, either about himself or about anyone else, and all recorded human acts and words are open testimony to our endless efforts to know each other, and our failure to do so.”

Our ignorance is reassuring to Porter because the self she fears she has, she hopes will remain unknowable to others, while the self she wishes she were takes its public place. Yet the self she regretted and the self she desired are actually states of the populous nation a self is: cowgirl, coquette, cook, queen, artist, the disillusioned well-used lady, and the girl with a dream—a roaring, riotous, shrewd, and foolish community of loving and quarreling equals.

During a notable moment of scrutiny as she entered her thirty-eighth year, Katherine Anne Porter confessed, “When I was quite young I decided to set my limitations moderately. Maybe this was my mistake. For by setting my bounds, I find they are real things and have a way of closing upon me without my (conscious) consent.” Although O’Connor, Welty, and Porter obliged us by writing novels, it’s as short story writers they are generally remembered, where more polish for small surfaces is routinely expected, whereas writers like Tolstoy and Faulkner—well, they are moving mountains, and it doesn’t matter if they leave a small mess here and there like great chefs in their kitchens. Does it?

Once the only Knut Americans knew was Knute Rockne. Although the less-known Knut was born a generation before the celebrated one, and obtained a Nobel Prize in literature, our better-known Knute won a record number of football games for the University of Notre Dame. A Catholic God gave his team these victories in spite of their Lutheran leadership. The famous coach-to-be picked up the additional -e when he was only five and his family emigrated from Norway to Chicago. Only Ireland sent a greater proportion of its impoverished population to the United States, and these Norsemen naturally headed toward areas with familiar climates, similar ores. Michigan had iron, Minnesota lakes, North Dakota snow, but none had mountains. This absence had to be suffered.