Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

Josephine Herbst

11 / Josephine herbst Josephine Herbst (1892–1969), novelist, essayist, and political activist, met Katherine Anne Porter in Greenwich village in the early 1920s. she and Porter became fast friends sympathetic to one another’s struggles to be self-supporting writers, but their friendship eventually disintegrated over differences of opinion about the relationship between art and politics and about Gertrude stein, whom Porter attacked in reviews and Herbst defended.13 in Paris in 1924 Herbst formed a relationship with John Herrmann, another writer and a communist activist, whom she married in the fall of 1926. source: Josephine Herbst, “A year of disgrace,” Noble Savage 3 (1961): 128–60; reprinted in her The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs (boston: northeastern UP, 1991), 53–98. in late spring [of 1926] some connecticut rivers flooded, backed up into inland brooks, and then ebbed, leaving huddles of sticks, old leaves, and the owlish glitter of a tin can. A trickle of young people drifted into the countryside. you could have an abandoned farmhouse for the asking, with little more required than “to fix things up” or to paint a few walls. some of the land had been taken over by Polish farmers, whose coarse vitality could better cope with the smitten soil than the tremulous hands of an old new england bachelor, now content with collecting wormy apples for a barrel of hard cider. Katherine Anne Porter rattled around in a stone house in a maple grove [. . .]. And often during the summer, when our house opened from two rooms to six and our garden could have fed a huge family,14 it seemed to me that each of us in the valley called merry-all relived some personal adventure as it might have been related in fiction. for surrounded by a company devoted to the art of fiction either as writers or as readers, you felt the source of material of one’s own existence stir and come to life, be burnished and glisten, if only for the moment when the faces turned toward you ready to laugh or become bemused. you might be encouraged to ribaldry in recounting some old love affair or in an attempt to be “honest” rob yourself of a subtler truth. One narrator might unconsciously dis- Part 2. new york, connecticut, and mexico / 43 tort for the sake of the paradox, while another might painfully try to trace in the most dissimilar adventures the threads that implied an inner harmony. i might remember the Pears soap of childhood, its color as translucent as clear quince jelly. Katherine Anne could recall being bathed by the nuns and how the long gown considered appropriate for “modesty’s sake” floated out on the bathwater like the pad of a water lily. Or the english painter ernest stock15 might spring a quotation: When antelopes surmount eagles in flight, And swans be swifter than hawks of the tower, then put women in trust and confidence . . .16 thus tempting us to take note of a graver wound than the exterior scars of the shrapnel in his leg, earned in the war when he had been shot down in a plane. As he ran around in shorts, we were not sure he was not trying to expose the one scar in token of the other, but he won no more than a comment from a Polish farmwife , who scoffed, “Look at him now, running around in underpants, showing off them bony knees!” He might drop on the grass to sketch our corncrib, empty except for a mouse, or come suddenly as night fell, pale as an Orestes pursued down the coast of calabria by the furies, to beg to spend the night. [. . .] it was an interlude of time as clear and uncertain as a drop of water. it hung, trembling and iridescent, like a fresh green grape. to eat it made a fever in the blood. should the fever be fed or starved? Where were the sources of energy: in work, in love, in the ground itself? We could try them all, reaching into the bin that seemed to have no bottom. sometimes the hands alone held restorative powers and one wished only to be rid of paper. to get close to the sky, skin, taste. to refurnish with a walk at night, or with a wild Polish dance where the shy country women danced, pinching up their stiff skirts in delicate scarred hands. to get up in the morning when the dew frosted...