Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

Eleanor Clark

24 / eleanor Clark eleanor Phelps clark (1913–96) earned a b.A. from vassar college in 1934, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s she supported leftist political causes while working as a freelance writer and an editor for German refugee scholars. in 1952 she married robert Penn Warren, to whom Porter introduced her in 1944, and with whom she had two children: rosanna (who was Porter’s goddaughter), and Gabriel. she published three novels, including Baldur’s Gate (1970), and three works of nonfiction: Rome and a Villa (1952), Eyes, etc. (1977), and The Oysters of Locmariaquer (1964; it won the national book Award in 1965). source: eleanor clark, “the friendships of a Lifetime,” Washington Post Book World 26 July 1981: 1–2, 9–10, a review of enrique Hank Lopez’s Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter: Refugee from Indian Creek (boston: Little, brown, 1981). Although much of the essay is a catalog of Lopez’s errors of fact and judgment in his book, clark amplifies her criticism with reminiscence of her long friendship with Porter. [. . . Porter’s] life was by some lights madly unconventional, which is to say, according to Hoyle, for arts circles in her time and most others; in the light of present mores it looks positively stuffy. it quite lacked the extremity of dissolution and crack-up dear to the trade, and was on the whole more grim and lonely than in any way glamorous, though lightened by fine gifts of friendship and the mark of the phoenix on the brow. down and out, though she was often close to it, Katherine Anne Porter simply did not know how to be. [. . .] she took a long time dying, a matter of several years when strokes had left her bedridden, partly paralyzed and with her beautiful head tormented by nightmarish , if oddly selective, animosities. these indignities came to a stop in september , 1980, four months after her 90th birthday. Luckily her last domicile, in a nursing home outside Washington, was as brief as many others that will reward or elude the fact-diggers. it was there in June last year, that my husband robert Penn Warren and i last heard her voice. We had known and cherished her separately first for a good 114 / Katherine Anne Porter remembered many years and together for many more, on dozens of those other perches that used to serve her as home for a while. she had always frowned on suicide, but the words that came through most clearly on that last visit were, “Oh God . . . . . oh God . . . . . let me die.” she had lately turned, or returned—this being one of the more debatable points in her biography and one not mentioned here—to the roman catholic church, but the priest who had been visiting her regularly in the next-to-last shelter, the last with her own precious belongings around her, was himself recuperating from a heart attack just then, so she was without whatever comfort he might have brought. [. . .] As [Lopez’s] book proceeds, [. . .] we are pummeled [. . .] with long illdigested parts of treatises by two or three psychologists who probably never heard of her, to explain her marital fiascos, “writer’s block,” and “mistrust of people.” [. . .] my own unscientific opinion, based on a devotion of 44 years, is that barring some preliminary cause for huff or hatred she was as trustful as a well-treated puppy, and this was part, though only part, of her romantic and some other foulups . As everything in a life relates to everything else in it, this overreadiness to trust people, especially handsome younger men as she grew older, no doubt did relate, as the opposite trait would if it had existed, to her mother’s very early death and that of her remarkable grandmother not many years later. [. . .] Lopez writes that she didn’t always tell the same version of a story. that is so. A mutual friend has remarked, “i would never say that Katherine Anne lied. she fantasized.” not about everything, far from it, though she did in fact lie about her age for quite a while in her middle years, which [Lopez] calls “justified” by her continuing “youthful appearance.” it has been suggested elsewhere, in a published piece of a biography yet to come,11 that she ascribed a false affluence to her childhood home in texas, but she never spoke of it in any such way to me or to any other friend who has happened to mention it in...