Letters of Katherine A. Porter

By Katherine Anne Porter

Book Overview

Novelist, short-story writer, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Katherine Anne Porter is one of America's most respected and enduring literary figures. Upon her death in 1980 at the age of ninety, she left behind thousands of letters, from which Isabel Bayley, Porter's close friend for over twenty-five years and her literary archivist, selected the best. "The book was conceived as a whole," Bayley explains. "The letters will carry you, if you wish to read in sequence, from point to point during her major working years, 1930 to 1963. Little bridges form from idea to idea, from theme to theme." One of Porter's themes was an outrage born of unfair politics, and her words are as fresh today as when they were written: "What has discouraged me," she writes in 1957, "is simply the fact that from Mussolini on--Franco, Hitler, Tito, Peron, Batista, Trujillo, in a rapidly descending scale to Nasser, our government has without fail backed and supported, in completely criminal collusion, every foul and stinking political dictator in turn as they rise, with the hypocritical excuse that these are all 'anti-Communist.'" And in 1947 she asks the kind of question that underlies the finest of her writing: "Man cannot--oh why can he not? This to me is the riddle of the universe--face the truth of his own motives." The list of Porter's correspondents reads like a Who's Who of twentieth-century letters: Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Eleanor Clark, James Stern, Cleanth Brooks, Malcolm Cowley, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Josephine Herbst, Hart Crane, Monroe Wheeler, Glenway Wescott, Eudora Welty, John Malcolm Brinnin. She tells Edith Sitwel she treasures her anthology of poetry as "something to take to Heaven with me if I ever get there; or maybe to bootleg into Hell to soften the penalty of having to read the Beat Generation." In a 1935 letter to Robert Penn Warren, one of her closest friends, she writes, "I have on hand, trying to finish it, a fairly long story which I call 'Pale Horse and Pale Rider' though I may find another title. What are your limits as to space for a short story?" For Porter her letters--to friends, family, publishers, editors, lovers--were vital links between the past and the present, a validation of time spent and an inspiration for the future: her twelve-page ship's journal, written in the form of a letter on a voyage from Mexico to Germany in 1931, became the basis for Ship of Fools, completed thirty years later. Katherine Anne Porter saw letters as continuity, a story that no longer belonged to the teller: ." . . mss. and notes and journals and letters arrived from Saratoga Springs the other day, and reading some of it over I find the past much more continuous, which I had begun to doubt. . . . Things just accumulated, and behold, it had become history . . . to be sorted and used as part of a story. I don't know that story any more than you do, especially not the end, and we will never see it, and I think it not very important whether we do or don't. . . . It doesn't belong to us anyway."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871134535
• ISBN13: 9780871134530
• Release Date: February 1994
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 642 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 5.5" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Supplement to A Fine Writer's Fiction

Too often we know a literary artist only by the name between the title and first line of a work. The more the imaginative, the more the compelling the work, the more we are curious about the person behind the name. Some locales such as Stratford-on- Avon earn an income by displaying the residence and belongings of a famous writer. Now if only we had Shakespeare's letters . . . . Katherine Anne Porter was an inveterate letter writer, fortunately for admirers of her fiction and essays. The foreword to THE LETTERS OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER states the content of this 629 page collection is a small portion of the thousands she wrote. Part are gleaned from recipients who prized her correspondence enough to preserve them. For others we may thank the friend who advised her to keep carbon copies of letters she typed. As is usual with such books the letters are arranged in order of date. Beginning in 1930 they end in 1963, "her major working years." They are further grouped according to sections based on key events in her life. A chronology list from birth to death precedes the letters as well as brief biographical notes on the persons the letters were written to. Isabel Bayley a long time confidant of Ms. Porter selected and edited the book's content. She has written an illuminating and appreciative introduction. There is in fiction an inevitable degree of formality that journals, diaries, and letters escape. The person behind the art speaks to us with a spontaneity, a honesty that makes her individuality loom large. Personality can be regarded as an aggregate of roles. Katherine Anne Porter philosopher, radical, teacher, wife, homemaker, gardener, critic, doting aunt, fond grandmother, friend, comforter, cynic, defender, and of course, writer-are all well met in these pages. If we loose a little of the awe Ms. Porter's well crafted stories inspire, we gain a lot of admiration for this gifted lady. Good writers have a knack for felicitous phrases. This is what makes their letters a treat to read. Ms. Porter is no exception. ". . . Sometimes I am amazed to find how many years have passed, how long we have been good friends, because in that steady climate without seasons which is the nature of my love, time seems to have stood still." Her prose is elegant, which is to say it expresses complex matters in simple words. To own such a book as this is to have bought virtue at a bargain price.