Katherine Anne Porter by George Hendrick (review)

136 Western American Literature exaggeration or bombast. His selection of materials is good. He manages to be objective most of the time; a notable exception is his account of the Johnson County War. Canton, who fought on the side of the big cattlemen, quite naturally defends all of the cattle­ men’s actions in that disturbance. One question the book raises is left unanswered. Professor Dale tells us that Canton’s real name was Joe Horner and states that he had lived for some years in Texas as a fugitive. He also says that Canton later worked in Texas for the Texas and South­ western Cattle Association and as a deputy United States marshal. Of course, the accuracy of both these statements is possible, but it would be interesting to examine further the reasons for the name change. This account of an active life during a significant era in Amer­ ican history is good reading. It would be a pleasant and valuable addition to anyone’s library. Orla n Sa w ey, Pan American College Katherine Anne Porter. By George Hendrick. (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1965. 176 pages. $3.50.) Katherine Anne Porter once referred in a letter to me to what it was like to be a “serious worker in the art of literature.” The key word here is art. As George Hendrick observes in his Katherine Anne Porter, the ninetieth volume in the TUSAS, “Miss Porter considers herself an artist.” Hendrick concurs in Miss Porter’s self-estimation. “For over forty years now,” insists Hendrick, Miss Porter “has gone her own artistic way, and in her writing she has continually told a ‘straight story.’ ” The result has been “a mastery of technique,” including an “often and justly praised style,” and an exploration of “the human heart and mind and society itself, without lapsing into popular clichés.” Miss Porter’s rank as a major short story writer “is not in question.” Her stories should be compared “with those of Joyce, Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson.” And if her essays and book reviews, “because of the press of time, are gen­ erally not so carefully fashioned as the short stories,” her novel Ship of Fools “is one of the major achievements of our time.” In leading to these conclusions, Hendrick first examines briefly the dis­ cernible facts in Miss Porter’s life and then turns to a study of the short stories. Some stories show that Miss Porter’s artistic use of the Mexican scene Reviews 137 changed over the decades from seeing Mexican culture “from the inside” (for example, “Maria Concepcion” ) to the “later stories of alienation” (“Flow­ ering Judas”). Other stories (notably the Miranda ones) are “fictionalized autobiography.” A chapter on Ship of Fools touches on the Hart Crane inci­ dent, treats the critical controversy over the novel, and likens it to works of Brant, Joyce, and James. Examined in still another chapter are Miss Porter’s essays, especially the collected writings in The Days Before, and her still uncompleted study of Cotton Mather. Following James William Johnson, Hendrick elaborates five major themes in Miss Porter’s works: (1) the individual within his heritage, (2) cultural displacement, (3) unhappy marriage and accompanying self-delusion (Miss Porter’s own three marriages have failed), (4) the death of love, and (5) man’s slavery to his own nature and subjugation to a human fate which dooms him to suffering and disappointment. Hendrick’s Katherine Anne Porter appears after monographs by Harry John Mooney (in the Pittsburgh series) and Ray B. West, Jr. (in the Min­ nesota series), and the book-length study by William L. Nance (University of North Carolina Press). Nance’s book, explains Hendrick in a bibliograph­ ical annotation, “arrived too late for incluson in my text.” But to Mooney’s and West’s works, as well as to articles by Charles A. Allen, James William Johnson, and Robert Penn Warren— to these sources especially Hendrick refers often. That he ordinarily agrees with the judgments of his secondary sources underscores the synthetic quality of Hendrick’s book. Although rather deftly synthesizing the Porter scholarship, Hendrick falters in failing to enlarge upon biographical detail. The difficulty...