Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

Paul Crume

5 / Paul Crume Paul crume (1912–75) was an editor and reporter for many years at the Dallas Morning News, where his column “big d” was featured on the front page. He was the author of A Texan at Bay (1961). When he reviewed Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels in 1940, in an effort to fill in the blanks in her biographical record, he sought out persons who had known her in texas in the years between 1915 and 1918 and beyond. those whose reminiscences he wove into his review included Kitty barry crawford, Lon tinkle (book editor of the Dallas Morning News), and cora Posey, an old friend of the Porter family who was living at the time in Arlington,texas. because Porter was still living, all three asked that they not be named. crume digested and summarized their memories and left the source of direct quotations unidentified. Paul crume. rev. of Pale Horse, Pale Rider:Three Short Novels, by Katherine Anne Porter. Southwest Review 25 (January 1940): 213–18. it has been nine years since the reviewers discovered in Flowering Judas “a new master of American prose,” but Katherine Anne Porter remains more a literary reputation than a person. Almost nothing is in print about her. she seemed to have sprung full-grown as a writer into the nation’s literary sight with one book. Actually, she had been writing for a long time, and her work even as a cub reporter on the Dallas Morning News in 1915–1916 never was ordinary.23 Her new book has in it three novelettes, “Old mortality,” “noon Wine,” and “Pale Horse, Pale rider,” all deft and insidiously subtle in their effects, all concerned with the curious human juxtapositions that develop out of the shuffle of time. in it her life begins faintly to show. And one begins to associate the impersonality of our information about her with her own spiritual isolation in the present tense—the tendency to live in and for the moment. this is ingrained in the temperament of almost all who create. they are cast in the picaresque pattern of character; that is, they are furiously interested in moments and incidents, are impulsively swept along from momentary experience to momentary experience without much attention to the direction of life. this Part 1. texas and colorado / 23 trait is associated with the power to experience deeply, to discriminate and savor the quality of experience, to observe wholly. A person possessed of this naïveté of the senses may find more to marvel at in the wind-bent sweep of a mesquite’s branches than the average newspaper reporter finds in the routine murder of the night. the trait is even more deeply associated with the talent for expressing experience , with that power of fusing memories of the past and dreams unrealized into something that intensifies and deepens the present. to a remarkable degree, miss Porter seems to have been cast in that pattern. “she doesn’t wait for death to effect transmigration,” one of her friends said recently. “every now and then she stops being what she is and becomes something else. in some secluded corner of the world, she spins a cocoon, and presently comes out more brilliantly colored, with longer and swifter wings. she leaves her old life there in a tree, dry and forgotten and dead, something she has put forever behind her.”24 she was born in the little village of indian creek near brownwood. by the time she came to the News, she seems to have been much like the miranda she so beautifully delineates in Pale Horse, Pale Rider: a pretty girl, as friends remember her, with a round face and violet eyes and curly dark hair, hard and slim of body from much dancing and swimming, impulsively generous, friendly. A few years later she had moved to a newspaper in denver and had decided to become a world-roving newspaper correspondent. she had already started saving all the nickels, dimes and odd bills she could spare in an old white-kid evening glove.25 she was going to new york and take a boat to the new irish free state. she had little money, but she had a passionate conviction that mr. eamon de valera was right.26 but by the time she reached new york, that moment had passed. there were other things to engage her profound attention. she took over the top floor of an...