Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times by Janis P. Stout (review)

Book Reviews97 If there is a weakness in this book, it lies in precisely the methodology that makes the study effective. Readers resistant to designating one common motif as the core of Modernism will shy away from Smith's thematically "centered" argument. Those engaged by poststructuralist debates will want a more post-Nietzschean emphasis on discontinuity and less concerted effort to trace a distinguishable—and distinguishing—pattern of thought in the amorphous movement called "Modernism." Certainly, Smith could have done more to bring out the inconclusiveness of the "revelations" offered in virtually all Modernist texts. Since resistance to closure is not his subject, he has allowed his subject matter, the consistency of the modernist mythic pattern, to leave an impression of finality that does not draw attention to the open-endedness of modernist mythicism. Nevertheless, for my own part I value the insight into the relations, certainly valid, between the four major archetypes and appreciate the clarity and certitude of the author's argument . I suspect that this book will be consulted by teachers and scholars alike in their search for insight into the mystery called Modernism. SUSAN VON ROHR SCAFF The Pennsylvania State University JANIS P. STOUT. Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times. Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia, 1995. In its series "Minds of the New South," the University Press ofVirginia offers us Janis Stout's intellectual biography ofKatherine Anne Porter, subtitled "A Sense of the Times." In this volume, Professor Stout undertakes to measure "the quality of Porter's mind" (14). The enterprise succeeds almost flawlessly. While her book takes into account all of Porter's published work, evinces solid knowledge of her unpublished papers, and builds on the growing body of sophisticated Porter criticism, Professor Stout raises and answers important new questions at a level of abstraction not often encountered in discussions of supposedly "lesser" artists. In a powerful emblem of Porter's peripatetic lifestyle, the book's dustcover features a grainy picture of the author on board the steamer Werra, en route from Mexico to Germany in 1931. As she undertook this journey, Porter was in the midst of finding both her voice and lasting material from which to craft fiction and criticism. Janis Stout chronicles this self-formation with diligence, tact, and a clear eye for her subject's personal and political limitations, such as her Eurocentric focus and some of her lifelong prejudices. Among the shifting pronouncements about herselfwhich Porter was fond of broadcasting throughout her life both by her writings and her public postures , Stout identifies the notion of artistic autonomy as Porter's bedrock belief. Against the varying political settings of Mexico, Germany, and postwar America, through a steady but erratic succession of lovers and 98Rocky Mountain Review husbands, artistic autonomy remains Porter's yardstick for integrity. As she associates herself in turn with Communists and Agrarians, flirts with Catholicism and an imagined genteel family background, she is, of course, a child of her times and copies in some ways the intellectual associations of her artistic and literary contemporaries. Yet in characteristic departures from party lines and popular movements, she continually leads a life Stout happily terms "artful" (266) in all senses of that word. "Artful," indeed, distills our image of Porter by alluding both to her deliberate stylistic fashioning of her prose and her fashionable style of affecting the life of the grande dame. The issue of gender proves particularly rich to the intellectual biographer and this chapter will, I suspect, elicit future criticism. Women in Porter's fiction have been the subject of exhaustive study, but the woman herself is deeply contradictory. As the author of a previous study on women writer's voices and silences, Stout is particularly well situated to examine this aspect of her subject. Porter's life and art intersect on the question of her femininity. Her accomplished female characters have a sense of coherence which Porter herself, in her troubled love life, may never have achieved. In a chapter entitled "Porter as Reader and Critic" Stout delivers some of her best observations. She is the first critic to make sensible use of Porter's personal library. Other scholars will doubtless take further advantage of...