South by Southwest: Katherine Anne Porter and the Burden of Texas History

11. Never Reconciled

11 Never Reconciled I suffered a lapse of faith in Texas. —Stephen Harrigan, “What Texas Means to Me” With Saint Francis let us praise our sweet sister Death, who sometimes comes late but never fails us. —Katherine Anne Porter to Glenway Wescott, January 5, 1960 One of the two happiest events of Porter’s last few years was her return to the Catholic Church. She had developed friendships among the nuns of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, in Baltimore, and they gently led her back. As long as she was able, she went to special services in the college chapel and received communion. The other happiest event was a final return to Texas, two decades after her lecture at the University of Texas that launched the misunderstanding over the supposed Porter Library. In May 1976, Howard Payne University in Brownwood held a symposium in her honor. Roger Brooks, the president of Howard Payne and the host of the conference , later stated that the surge of emotion she felt there constituted “a reconciliation that brought happiness and peace to what was a really tumultuous career ” (111). My purposes in this concluding chapter are to explain why I do not believe Brooks’s statement is correct and, having approached vari­ ous aspects of Porter’s ambivalence toward Texas in the preceding chapters, to address the question directly, by way of summary. It is of­ ten noted that an impetus toward estrangement from Texas may have come from losses and conflicts within Porter’s family and the discouraging environment in which she conceived an ambition to become a writer. Don Graham speaks of “family dynamics” driving her “wish to escape” and explains that “when Porter began writing in the early 1920s there was no advantage attached to being a ‘Texas’ writer” (“Katherine Anne Porter’s Journey” 4, 7–11; “A South­ ern Writer” 59–60). Mark Busby, in an essay subtitled “Ambivalence Deep as the Bone,” points to several factors that have been discussed here: family, an urge toward independence, the social geography of Texas (citing Pilkington on rims and borders), and offenses given by the Texas Institute of Letters and the University of Texas. He also posits the somewhat less convincing theory that Texans in general are inherently ambivalent (135). Willene Hendrick, who visited In- Never Reconciled / 203 dian Creek when her husband was writing his 1965 biography and coauthored the revised version, cites Porter’s “sense of rejection in Indian Creek and in Texas by ‘her people’” (12). Except for the fact that she could not have felt rejected at the time she left Indian Creek, it is a persuasive answer. Such a sense of rejection would—and did—naturally launch a pattern of response and re-­ response that, like crazing in a windshield, keeps proliferating. A process of that kind can be seen, for example, in Porter’s having “turned that rejection, with its intense emotions and insights, into remarkable artistry” (W. Hendrick 12). Another, less positive example of proliferation relates to the Texas Institute of Letters prize in 1939, when the selection of J. Frank Dobie’s book over hers apparently reinforced and compounded her earlier resentments. The problem I see with all these assessments except Graham’s sketch of the literary context in the 1920s is the narrowness of their focus on biography. Their attention to historic and cultural dimensions contributing to Porter’s ambivalence is, in general, scant and inadequately detailed. I have proposed here that these pub­ lic dimensions (which I sometimes designate by the broad term “history”) are essential to any explanation of the dynamic at play and that the violence of Texas’s past as well as of Porter’s early adult years spent there had a particularly strong bearing on her disaffection. In seeking to establish my own version of the vari­ ous dimensions of Porter’s ambivalence toward Texas, let me begin with the words of another successful Texas writer noted for both fiction and nonfiction. At the opening of his essay “What Texas Means to Me,” Stephen Harrigan identifies a tension within himself that is strikingly parallel with hers: Lying in a feather bed, in the guest room of a friend’s two-­ hundred-­ year-­ old house in west­ ern Massachusetts, I suffered a lapse of faith in Texas. I’m not sure what brought this crisis on. Perhaps it was simply the act of waking up, looking out the window at the syrup buckets hanging from the maple...