Katherine Anne Porter (145 page)

He never fails, you know always where to find him. It must be nearly twenty years since he went to Mexico, and if he lives a hundred more he could never write all he has seen and heard and learned about the life in that most complicated and confused country. But no doubt he means to try, and if anyone of our time can get all the essentials on record, he can.

He might have been a fine novelist if he had had time to stop and learn. He could have been a frightfully overpaid newspaperman if a sensational career had been his aim. He is neither, as it happens; when he writes facts, he really sticks to the facts, and that capacity is beyond praise. But when he turns to the art of
the novel, he does not stick to art, and that is a pity. He is still a first-rate reporter writing his memories, telling good stories, explaining the predicament of the Indian and rousing sympathy and indignation for him, kidnaping his characters whole and sound out of real life and setting them in the midst of real events, so that instead of marveling at their reality, you would think it odd if they didn’t seem real. Of course they are real. That is why, in his scenes of absolutely private lives and relationships, Mr. Beals suffers from a failure of imagination. He cannot follow his characters into the locked doors of their hearts and minds because he did not create them. With one exception. He knows Esperanza, the Indian village girl born in peonage. She is one of the most natural, breathing, appealing women in American fiction. No doubt he has worked faithfully from a model, for knowing his methods any other assumption would be fantastic, but he knows, for once, more about a certain kind of woman than she could be apt to know about herself. And he presents her, carries her through, develops her character and mind and personality, shows her growing up, growing older, arriving at a logical point of experience, in the end, which is merely a point of departure for another cycle of experience, and she really does live on quite tangibly after the book is closed.

This is a feat; how it happens I do not know, in the jungle of episode, the confusion of political crime and constant revolution, the crowds of characters and changes of scene. You will learn a great deal about Mexico from any one of Mr. Beals’s books, whether novel or chronicle of that country. But you can know Esperanza only by reading
The Stones Awake
. She is worth knowing.

In Cuernavaca there is a pavement with the celebrated commemorative motto, “It is more honorable to die standing than to live kneeling.” The great beauty of this saying, the reason no doubt why it rings with such confident reassurance in the mind, is that the Mexican revolutionists always knew it was true and acted upon it long before any one thought of making the phrase. They have not only died standing, but attacking, weapons in hand, their spiritual boots on. I say spiritual boots because many of them in fact were barefooted. Mexico is comparatively a small country, yet by conservative estimate a million men have died for this cause: that is to say, for the most primary and rudimentary things of life for a man, a scrap of land to grow his food, and official legal recognition of his mere humanity by government and society. Mexico is potentially a vastly rich country, so seven-tenths, perhaps, of her enemies have come from without; the other three-tenths, as happens in all countries, we know more clearly than ever now, are among her own people. For more than thirty long, bitter years the Mexican revolutionists have fought for the minimum of human rights against a mostly ungodly united force consisting of their own proto-Quislings, the Church, the oil and metal-mining companies of the United States and Great Britain, the trading interests of Germany and the stubborn reactionary hold of Spanish influence. There were besides the internal quarrels between the various schools of revolution, the personal rivalries, individual struggles for mere power, all the most dreary and average history of human weakness and failure. Yet for all of this the Mexican revolutionists have made a good showing; they exhibited high qualities of tenaciousness, personal courage, incorrigible love of country, a fixed determination not to live kneeling, besides a gradually developing sense of method,
of political strategy, and a pretty fair understanding of just what they were up against in a world sense. The whole story of the relations of that country with the United States alone is ugly, grim, bitter beyond words, and so scandalous I suppose the whole truth, or even the greater part of the simple facts, can never be published: it might blow the roof off this continent.

Keeping these things well in mind, Miss Brenner has written a rather light sketch of the whole period, hitting the high spots only but choosing the spots so tactfully that the plot is never lost; and though I have known the story, and for many years, so well it is possible I fill in the gaps as I go, yet I like to feel that the reader who knows little can find here a clear statement, a logical exposition, that will serve safely as a starting point if he wishes to pursue this history further. The facts are straight so far as they go, the deep, underlying motives of the whole restless and aspiring period are understood and explained, but I think Miss Brenner yields again to her old temptation to give too pretty and simple a picture—for, mind you, this terrible little story she tells is a mere bedtime lullaby beside the reality—and in general, to treat individual villains, whom she really knows to be such, too gently. A few scorching lines it seems to me might have been devoted to, for example, Alberto Pani’s career as Foreign Minister. I think the deeds of some of the oil companies could have been exposed with somewhat more vigor. The betrayal of Felipe Carillo-Puerto might have been clarified to the great benefit of the story. Yet, within the limitations of space—the story is only 100 pages long—the author has performed prodigies of condensation, and within the more multiple and complicated limitations of the present international political situation, she has perhaps ventured as far as she might and still have her book published at all.

The best thing is, she realizes the importance of easy relations between Mexico and the United States just now, and the dangers, too; for, as she says frankly, this being the point of the book, that as the diplomatic and other understandings between the United States and the Mexican governments grow amiable, the Mexican people grow uneasy for their own prospects of freedom; and they may well do so, for Lavals and Pétains do not grow only in France. The Mexican people have been handed over to the invaders by their own leaders before, and
they are not so childish as to think it cannot happen again. Invasion takes many forms, and they have experienced most of them.

Mr. Leighton’s collection of pictures is distinguished, realistic; with extracts from Miss Brenner’s texts, they could stand as a book by themselves. . . . They tell the story all over again and in some ways more boldly, of a whole race disinherited in its own country and fighting against desperate odds. Besides being superior photography, chosen with a fine sense of form and progression, these pictures lack entirely the slickness, the made-to-order look, of too much of the photography in this present war, which gives the impression that the man with the camera has instructions to shoot from only certain angles and no others: “A little,” wrote a friend not long ago, “as if this war were something being produced by M.G.M.” Happily, these Mexican pictures were made before that period set in. They have a wonderfully casual air; the man with the camera took what he saw before him, whatever it happened to be, not thinking, apparently, whether it would be good propaganda or not. . . . It turns out that he made the most convincing, most moving kind of straight narrative; and, oh, the faces. . . . It seems to me one need not be partisan; one need only to be human in the most average way, not to see what was bound to happen, comparing, let’s say, just the face of Zapata (in Tina Modotti’s masterly working out of an old negative) with that of Archbishop Pascual Diaz; or of Hearst with that of Obregon, taken when his shattered arm was healing, and not to be able to know at once which side one is on, now and forever. . . .

I
WAS
born May 15, 1894, at Indian Creek, Texas, brought up in Texas and Louisiana, and educated in small southern schools for girls. I was precocious, nervous, rebellious, unteachable, and made life very uncomfortable for myself, and I suppose for those around me. In fact, simply a certain type of child. As soon as I learned to form letters on paper, at about three years, I began to write stories, and this has been the basic and absorbing occupation, the intact line of my life which directs my actions, determines my point of view, profoundly affects my character and personality, my social beliefs and economic status, and the kind of friendships I form. I did not choose this vocation, and if I had had any say in the matter, I would not have chosen it. I made no attempt to publish anything until about ten years ago, but I have written and destroyed manuscripts quite literally by the trunkful. I say trunkful because I have spent fifteen years wandering about, weighted horribly with masses of paper and little else. Yet for this vocation I was and am willing to live and die, and I consider very few other things of the slightest importance.

All my intense growing years were lived completely outside of literary centers; I knew no other writers and had no one to consult with on the single vital issue of my life. This self-imposed isolation, which seems to have been almost unconscious on my part, a natural way of living, prolonged and made more difficult my discipline as artist. But it saved me from discipleship, personal influences, and membership in groups. I began to read at about five years and have read ever since, but my reading until my twenty-fifth year was the most important, being a grand sweep of all English and translated classics from the beginning up to about 1800. And then I began with the newcomers, and found new incitements.

Within the past dozen years I have lived in New Orleans, Chicago, Denver, Mexico City, New York, Bermuda, Berlin, Basel, and now live in Paris, and in all these places I have done book-reviewing, political articles, hack writing of all kinds for newspapers, editing, re-writing other people’s manuscripts, by way of earning a living, and a sorry living it was, too. Without the help of devoted friends I should have perished many times over.

My short stories have been published by
Century
,
transition
, the
New Masses
, the
Second American Caravan
, the
Gyroscope, Scribner’s
, and the
Hound and Horn
; poems in
Measure
and
Pagany
. A small collection of short stories was published in 1930 under the title of
Flowering Judas
. In 1931 I received a Guggenheim Fellowship for writing abroad and as this is written I am still working on my novel
Many Redeemers
which I began in Mexico years ago. A book of old French songs which I translated last year will be published in Paris this summer. I have also resumed work on a study of Cotton Mather, which I began in 1927, got half way thru, and had to give up for other work.

Politically my bent is to the Left. As for esthetic bias, my one aim is to tell a straight story and to give true testimony. My personal life has been the jumbled and apparently irrelevant mass of experiences which can only happen, I think, to a woman who goes with her mind permanently absent from the place where she is. My physical eye is unnaturally far-sighted, and I have no doubt this affects my temperament in some way. I have very little time sense and almost no sense of distance. I have no sense of direction and have seen a great deal of the world by getting completely lost and simply taking in the scenery as I roamed about getting my bearings. I lack entirely a respect for money values, and for caste of any kind, social or intellectual or whatever. I have a personal and instant interest in every human being that comes within ten feet of me, and I have never seen any two alike, but I discover the most marvelous differences. It is the same with furred animals. I love best remembered landscapes two or three countries away. I should like to settle to live in a place where I might swim in the sea, sail a cat boat, and ride horseback. These are the only recreations I
really care for, and they all take a good deal of elbow room. Not for nothing am I the great-great-great-grand daughter of Daniel Boone.

This spring in Paris I married Eugene Pressly, originally from Pennsylvania, and we plan to live here for several years.

Fall 1933

F
INALLY
, after some meditation, I have made up my mind to be a good Christian for once and forgive a certain critic with whom I have had a friendly if somewhat random acquaintance for, as the Mexicans say, “A ball of years” (
una bola de años
).

Let me begin again. This is difficult. I forgive that critic here and now, and forever, for calling me a “newspaper woman,” in the public prints. I consider it actionable libel, but, as is too often the case in these incidents, he has a small patch of solid ground under him, which I am going to make a cheerful roundabout attempt to cut away. Fifty-odd years ago, for eight short months of my ever-lengthening (or shortening?) life, I did have a kind of job on a newspaper, the
Rocky Mountain News
, in Denver, Colorado. On the advice of a doctor, I had gone there as to a climate suitable for my lungs, which had been misdiagnosed as tubercular. Naturally while taking the cure and doing my apprentice writing I had also to find a job of some sort; the city editor recklessly hired me, and though he was much too good-tempered a man to say so, it is fairly certain he lived to regret it. I too regret it, if the fame of it is to stick to me for the rest of my days. It was the first of quite dozens of temporary low-salaried breathing spaces between one crisis and another. But never a second newspaper job. For though now I recollect in what, for me, is comparative tranquillity, life, on the whole, has consisted mostly of crises, never two alike, resolved by whatever means were handiest, which led inevitably to another crisis which was resolved, which led. . . .