Giant Country: Essays on Texas

Katherine the Great

Katherine the Great he third annual Texas Writers Month celebration in May 1997 featured William Sidney Porter (0. Henry) as its poster boy. Male writers had also been honored the two previous years, Horton Foote in 1995, John Graves in 1996. One could argue that the 1997 poster pictured the wrong Porter and that, indeed, if any Texas writer of the past deserved such homage it should be Katherine Anne Porter, the best writer the Lone Star State has produced. But being ignored in her native state is nothing new for Katherine Anne. Indeed, at the splashy first Texas Book Festival, held in November 1996, a panel of semi-distinguished commentators sang the praises of the familiar founding-fathers trinity of Texas letters, J. Frank Dobie, Walter P. Webb, and Roy Bedichek, but nary a word was proffered for Porter. Back in 1939, Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 87 Giant Country 88 perhaps the greatest work of fiction produced by a Texas-born author, lost out in the Texas Institute of Letter's annual competition for best book of the year award to a collection of treasureseeking tales by local culture hero Dobie titled Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver. Of course, Porter didn't write about cowboys, longhorns , rattlesnakes, mockingbirds, or buried bullion. And the fact that she had left Texas more or less for good when she was twentyeight probably didn't help either. Although Porter's 1962 novel, Ship of Fools, won the Texas Institute of Letters award for fiction, her standing in her home state remained shaky at best. As recently as 1981, a year after her death, Texas' leading novelist, Larry McMurtry, dissed her in an oft-quoted essay in the Texas Observer. In remarks that were hopelessly off-base, McMurtry wrote Porter off the Texas literary macho map, accusing her of being "genteel to the core," of having created too pure a style-of being, in short, all plumage. On the national scene Porter fared much better, winning both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1966 for her Collected Stories. Today her stories are the only ones by a Texas author that are routinely included in anthologies of American literature. In the nineties signs of a growing recognition of Porter's Texas roots have begun to appear, thanks to the efforts of academics exploring Porter's life and art and to a general reawakening of interest in Texas culture in the years following the sesquicentennial . There is, for example, a statue of Porter at San Antonio's Sea World, a somewhat surprising site, perhaps, until you realize that Harcourt-Brace, her publisher, used to own this aquatic amusement park. More significantly, her home-town of Kyle, a little one-exit-ramp burg on 1-35, twenty miles south of Austin, now boasts both a historical marker summarizing Porter's life and a little museum located in the modest frame house where she lived from 1892 till 1901. Callie Russell Porter was born on May 15, 1890, in a small frontier community named Indian Creek, Texas, near Brownwood, about 150 miles northwest of Austin. Her mother Katherine the Great died when Callie was not quite two years old, and the father, Harrison Boone Porter, handsome, emotionally fragile, and utterly grief-stricken, moved back home with his four small children to his own mother's house at 508 W. Center Street in Kyle. Callie's grandfather Asbury D. Porter had died long before she was born. It was from her grandmother Catherine Ann Skaggs Porter, austere, loving, and authoritarian, that Porter eventually took her public name. According to "Notes on the Texas I Remember," written for the Atlantic Monthly when she was eighty-five, the six-room house "of a style known as Queen Anne, who knows why?" was one with "no features at all except for two long galleries, front and back galleries-mind you, not porches or verandahs...." These, she wrote, were covered with honeysuckle and roses and provided a wonderful venue for repose and conversation and iced tea and "tall frosted beakers of mint julep, for the gentlemen, of course." Gentlemen consuming mint julep on flower-embowered galleries is straight out of southern plantation mythology, and Porter, here and in her fiction about her family, ratchets up the social level several notches to attain a grander personal myth along the lines of Porter as the last of the southern...