Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

M. M. Liberman

47 / M. M. liberman myron mandell Liberman (1921–95) earned a b.A. from Lafayette college in 1943 and an m.A. from new york University in 1946. both a fiction writer and a critic, he was an instructor at the state University of new york at buffalo when he began studying Katherine Anne Porter’s fiction. His book Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction (1971) followed his A Preface to Literary Analysis (1964, with James Kisane and s. P. Zitner), The Practice of Criticism (1966), and Maggot and Worm and Eight Other Stories (1969). His article on Porter’s Ship of Fools (“Ship of Fools and the responsibility of the novelist”) brought him to the attention of Porter, who was grateful for his defense of her novel and turned to him when she needed a trustee for her literary estate after several others had declined.54 for many years he was a professor in the english department at Grinnell college, in Grinnell, iowa. source: m. m. Liberman, “meeting miss Porter,” Georgia Review 41 (1987): 299–303. On my office wall is a picture of Katherine Anne Porter looking, because of her garb, strikingly nun-like, and bringing to mind the disloyal young woman in “flowering Judas.” it is identified in miss Porter’s hand as Photograph by Manuel Bravo, Mexico 1931.the inscription reads: For Mike Liberman in College Park, October 1973—memento of a happy meeting and many hopes and plans—Katherine Anne. the “meeting” to which miss Porter refers is the weekend i spent with her at her urgent invitation following a phone call from her young Washington attorney , who asked me to become her literary executor. to write of this experience is no labor of love and i would as soon forego it, but one day someone will write a decent biography of miss Porter. that scholar will have scoured miss Porter’s personal library and taken note of her marginalia in my 1971 book, Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction.55 He or she may well wonder about these comments and, in this connection, her motives for inviting and dismissing 224 / Katherine Anne Porter remembered a rather long string of literary, as she smilingly put it to me, “executioners.” What follows here is my explanatory footnote to that as-yet-unwritten biography. in 1969, early in the course of my research on miss Porter’s fiction, i got into some unsettling business. i had written to the mcKeldin Library at the University of maryland, where i understood that the bulk of miss Porter’s papers were housed, asking for a general description of these holdings. in response i received word from some librarian that my request was out of order since no one was to look at this material. some days later i received a call from a mr. e. barrett Prettyman , who identified himself as Katherine Anne Porter’s lawyer, telling me that miss Porter was extremely upset because she had heard that i was poking around in her letters and was going to publish them. He demanded to know the truth. i assured him that i had not seen nor had i any interest in her letters, that i was not writing a biography, and that miss Porter was getting some very suspect misinformation . this seemed to satisfy mr. Prettyman, who sometime later agreed to meet me in Washington, where i told him of my difficulties with the maryland people. He found this difficult to believe, for after all miss Porter had stipulated quite clearly that “reputable scholars” would have access to her papers. He finally agreed to speak to miss Porter about this, which he evidently did, for i was later to hear from him that she had set the maryland librarians straight. to hear from mr. Prettyman again in 1973, after years without contact, was unexpected enough, but his invitation to be miss Porter’s literary executor took me very much by surprise.56 i had been years before encouraged to write my book on miss Porter’s work for several reasons, not the least of which was a letter i had once received from her addressed to “dear miss [sic] Liberman,” telling me that a piece i had published on Ship of Fools was the best she had seen and much appreciated by her since the novel had been so unfairly maligned and grossly misunderstood . but, as i told mr. Prettyman, she had never acknowledged my book, a copy of which i...