Katherine Anne Porter (150 page)

1971

“The Spivvleton Mystery,” a comic story written in 1926, published in
The Ladies’ Home Journal
. Undergoes cataract surgery. Delivers keynote speech at “The Year of the Woman,” a seminar at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland.

1972

Receives Creative Arts Award for lifetime achievement in literature from Brandeis University. Returns Emerson-Thoreau Medal to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences when she learns that the Academy, for political reasons, has refused to consider Ezra Pound for the same award. Heart condition worsens. On assignment from
Playboy
, takes cruise ship to Florida to write eyewitness account of Apollo 17 moon shot; the launch is “glorious” but the article never completed. Gives inaugural lecture at the newly opened Katherine Anne Porter Room of McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland.

1973

Sister Baby dies, May 21. Dissolves The Katherine Anne Porter Foundation.

1974

Names Isabel Bayley her literary trustee. In private ceremony at home, receives honorary degree from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. Revises “The Land That Is Nowhere,” a fragment of autobiography written decades earlier, for publication in
Vogue
.

1975

“Notes on the Texas I Remember” appears in
The Atlantic Monthly
. Receives a rubbing of mother’s Indian Creek gravestone from Roger Brooks, president of Howard Payne University, in her native Brown County, Texas. Hires retired naval commander William R. Wilkins as personal assistant.

1976

Delivers Frances Steloff lecture at Skidmore College. In May, travels to Brownwood, Texas, to receive honorary degree from Howard Payne University and attend county-wide 86th-birthday celebration. Visits mother’s grave at Indian Creek. Gives final public reading, at the 92nd Street Y. Feeling unwell at year’s end, enters Johns Hopkins Medical Center for comprehensive tests.

1977

While in hospital suffers two major strokes. Returns home in early spring to round-the-clock nursing care. “The Never-Ending Wrong,” a memoir of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, published in
The Atlantic Monthly
and then as a short book by Atlantic–Little, Brown. Mental abilities deteriorate. When judged incompetent by psychiatrist, court appoints nephew Paul Porter her legal guardian.

1978

Experiences severe seizure in December. Graduate student Jane DeMouy becomes her friend and visits her regularly.

1979

Meets Ted Wojtasik, a young college graduate who helps organize her letters for eventual publication, a project later realized by Isabel Bayley. Receives visitors Monroe Wheeler, Robert Penn Warren, and Eleanor Clark, and calls, cards, and gifts from Isabel Bayley, Eudora Welty, Barbara Thompson, and other devoted friends.

1980

Moves to Carriage Hill Nursing Home in Silver Spring, Maryland. Friends gather for 90th birthday party. Sister Maura Eichner and Sister Kathleen Feeley visit regularly, accompanied by Father Joseph Gallagher, who hears confession and administers Eucharist (“I’m busy dying. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done”). Dies September 18, with Jane DeMouy by her side. Ashes buried the following spring in a plot adjacent to her mother’s grave in Indian Creek Cemetery.

This volume contains
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
, prepared by the author and published in 1965, together with an extensive selection of the essays, book reviews, and other short nonfiction prose that Katherine Anne Porter published in books and periodicals between 1920 and 1977.

The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in September 1965. It comprises the contents of three earlier collections—
Flowering Judas and Other Stories
(1935),
Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels
(1939),
The Leaning Tower and Other Stories
(1944)—and four previously uncollected stories, “Virgin Violeta,” “The Martyr,” “The Fig Tree,” and “Holiday,” together with a foreword, “Go, Little Book. . . ,” written specially for the volume. The text printed here is taken from the first printing of
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
.

Prior to being given the order they have in
The Collected Stories
, these stories were collected in various groupings. Porter’s first collection,
Flowering Judas
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1930), was printed in an edition limited to 600 copies and contained six stories: “María Concepción,” “Magic,” “Rope,” “He,” “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” and “Flowering Judas.” “Hacienda” appeared as a small book (New York: Harrison of Paris, 1934) printed in an edition limited to 895 copies.
Flowering Judas and Other Stories
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935) collected the contents of the two earlier publications as well as three additional stories, arranged in the following sequence: “María Concepción,” “Magic,” “Rope,” “He,” “Theft,” “That Tree,” “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” “Flowering Judas,” “The Cracked Looking-Glass,” and “Hacienda.” The Modern Library edition of
Flowering Judas and Other Stories
(1940) reprinted the contents of the 1935 edition, with a new introduction by Porter (the introduction is printed on
pages 716–18
of the present volume).

Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels
was published by Harcourt, Brace & Co. in 1939. It contained “Old Mortality,” “Noon Wine,” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” Porter dedicated the collection to her father, Harrison Boone Porter.

The Leaning Tower and Other Stories
was published by Harcourt,
Brace & Company in 1944. It contained nine stories: “The Source,” “The Witness,” “The Circus,” “The Journey” (as “The Old Order”), “The Last Leaf,” “The Grave,” “The Downward Path to Wisdom,” “A Day’s Work,” and “The Leaning Tower.” Porter dedicated the collection to her nephew, Corporal Harrison Paul Porter, Jr.

The Old Order: Stories of the South
was published by Harvest Books, the paperback imprint of Harcourt, Brace & Co., in 1955. It reprinted previously collected material in the following sequence: “The Old Order,” a cycle of six stories comprising “The Source,” “The Journey” (as “The Old Order”), “The Witness,” “The Circus,” “The Last Leaf,” and “The Grave,” followed by “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” “He,” “Magic,” and “Old Mortality.”

The contents of
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
first appeared in books and periodicals as follows:

Flowering Judas and Other Stories:
“María Concepción,”
The Century Magazine
(December 1922); “Virgin Violeta,”
The Century Magazine
(December 1924); “The Martyr,”
The Century Magazine
(July 1923); “Magic,”
transition
(Summer 1928); “Rope,”
The Second American Caravan
, edited by Alfred Kreymborg and others (New York: The Macaulay Co., 1928); “He,”
New Masses
(October 1927); “Theft,”
The Gyroscope
(November 1929); “That Tree,”
Virginia Quarterly Review
(July 1934); “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,”
transition
(February 1929); “Flowering Judas,”
Hound & Horn
(Spring 1930); “The Cracked Looking-Glass,”
Scribner’s Magazine
(May 1932); “Hacienda” (New York: Harrison of Paris, 1934).

Pale Horse, Pale Rider
: “Old Mortality,”
The Southern Review
(Spring 1937); “Noon Wine,”
Signatures
(as a work-in-progress, Spring 1936) and
Story
(in completed form, June 1937); “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,”
The Southern Review
(Winter 1938).

The Leaning Tower and Other Stories:
“The Source,”
Accent
(Spring 1941); “The Journey” (as “The Old Order”),
The Southern Review
(Winter 1936); “The Witness” (as “Uncle Jimbilly,” the first item under the heading “Two Plantation Portraits”),
Virginia Quarterly Review
(January 1935); “The Circus,”
The Southern Review
(July 1935); “The Last Leaf” (the second item under the heading “Two Plantation Portraits”),
Virginia Quarterly Review
(January 1935); “The Fig Tree,”
Harper’s Magazine
(June 1960); “The Grave,”
Virginia Quarterly Review
(April 1935); “The Downward Path of Wisdom,”
Harper’s Bazaar
(December 1939); “A Day’s Work,”
The Nation
(February 10, 1940); “Holiday,”
The Atlantic Monthly
(December 1960); “The Leaning Tower,”
The Southern Review
(Autumn 1941).

The section of this volume titled “Essays, Reviews, and Other Writings” presents a selection of short nonfiction pieces published by
Katherine Anne Porter between 1920 and 1977. It includes versions of all the pieces that Porter reprinted in her collection
The Days Before
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1952) as well as part of Porter’s foreword to that collection. (A list of acknowledgments and credits for previously published material that appeared as part of the foreword has been omitted.) It also adopts the three rubrics under which Porter organized the pieces collected in
The Days Before
—“Critical,” “Personal and Particular,” and “Mexican”—adding to them a fourth, “Autobiographical.” The table of contents of
The Days Before
appears in the Notes to the present volume, on
page 1062
.

The pieces collected in
The Days Before
were reprinted, many in versions slightly revised by the author, in
The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter
(New York: A Seymour Lawrence Book/Delacorte Press, 1970). Porter began preparing her
Collected Essays
in the late 1960s, but illness prevented her from making the final selection unassisted. Her work was completed by a “committee of friends” chaired by her editor and publisher, Seymour Lawrence, and including Robert A. Beach Jr., George Core, William Humphrey, Rhea Johnson, and Glenway Wescott. The contents included many essays and reviews published after
The Days Before
and several uncollected earlier pieces, as well as much material outside the scope of the present selection, including poems, public letters, and three chapters of an uncompleted biography of Cotton Mather. The present selection reprints 51 items from
Collected Essays
, including the 34 pieces that previously appeared in
The Days Before
.

Of the remaining 25 items, two, “A Christmas Story” and “The Never-Ending Wrong,” were published as small books during Porter’s lifetime. Seventeen items are taken from posthumous collections: nine from
“This Strange, Old World” and Other Book Reviews by Katherine Anne Porter
, edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), and eight from
Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter
, edited by Ruth M. Alvarez and Thomas F. Walsh (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). Six items—“A Note on
The Troll Garden,”
“No Masters or Teachers,” “On ‘Flowering Judas,’” “Notes on the Texas I Remember,” “About the Author,” and “The Land That Is Nowhere”—are reprinted here for the first time since their original appearances.

The following list presents a publication history of the items selected for inclusion here, with the texts chosen for the present volume noted.

“I needed both. . .” first appeared as part of the foreword to
The Days Before
(1952); the remainder of the foreword, as mentioned above, is not reprinted here. The text from
The Days Before
is used here, under a title supplied by the editor.

C
RITICAL
: “The Days Before” first appeared in
The Kenyon Review
(Autumn 1943); it was revised for inclusion in
The Days Before
(1952) and reprinted in
Collected Essays
(1970). The text from
Collected Essays
is used here.

“Reflections on Willa Cather” first appeared, in much different form, as “The Calm, Pure Art of Willa Cather,” a review of
Willa Cather on Writing
(1949) in
The New York Times Book Review
(September 25, 1949). It later appeared, in an expanded version and under its present title, in
Mademoiselle
(July 1952); it was collected in
The Days Before
(1952) and reprinted in
Collected Essays
(1970). The text from
Collected Essays
is used here. “A Note on
The Troll Garden”
first appeared as the afterword to the Signet paperback reprint edition of
The Troll Garden
by Willa Cather (New York: New American Library, 1961). The text from the Signet edition is used here.

“Gertrude Stein: Three Views” is a set of three items that first appeared in
The Days Before
(1952). “‘Everybody Is a Real One’” first appeared in
New York Herald Tribune Books
(January 16, 1927); “Second Wind” first appeared in
New York Herald Tribune Books
(September 23, 1928); and “The Wooden Umbrella” first appeared, as “Gertrude Stein: A Self-Portrait,” in
Harper’s Magazine
(December 1947). All three items were revised for inclusion, under the heading “Gertrude Stein: Three Views,” in
The Days Before
(1952) and reprinted, under the same heading, in
Collected Essays
(1970). The text from
Collected Essays
is used here.

“‘It Is Hard to Stand in the Middle’” first appeared, as “Yours, Ezra Pound,” in
The New York Times Book Review
(October 29, 1950); it was revised for inclusion, under its present title, in
The Days Before
(1952) and reprinted in
Collected Essays
(1970). The text from
Collected Essays
is used here.

“Eudora Welty and
A Curtain of Green”
first appeared as the introduction to
A Curtain of Green: A Book of Stories
by Eudora Welty (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1943); it was revised for inclusion, under its present title, in
The Days Before
(1952) and reprinted in
Collected Essays
(1970). The text from
Collected Essays
is used here.

“The Wingèd Skull” first appeared in
The Nation
(July 17, 1943) and was revised for inclusion in
Collected Essays
(1970). The text from
Collected Essays
is used here.