Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

Barbara Thompson Davis

34 / Barbara thompson davis barbarathompson davis (1933–2009) met Katherine Anne Porter while working for the Washington Post the fall after her graduation from Wellesley college. Porter was drawn to the young woman, and for the rest of her life enjoyed the friendship that bloomed from their first meeting. it was because of that friendship that davis agreed to accept the trusteeship of Porter’s literary estate upon the death of isabel bayley. barbara davis has published fiction, book reviews, and interviews, and twice has won the Pushcart Prize. source: barbarathompson davis, untitled reminiscence.this essay, written specifically for this volume, appears here for the first time. i met Katherine Anne because no one else in the city room of the Washington Post that autumn of 1956 made a peep when the editor shouted, “Anybody here ever heard of Katherine Anne Porter?” i was a copy girl in the Women’s section, as lowly a position as the editorial floor of the place possessed, but this was one of those moments an english major could be turned to profit. Katherine Anne was to be my debut as an interviewer, and i reread all her stories and, armed with the standard green steno pad, marched into the Jefferson Hotel with the heavily beating heart and the untested confidence of a mostly A-student. Katherine Anne almost foxed me: she was waiting in the lobby with a cheery, firm, “Let’s take a walk.” And as we wandered the empty streets of a darkening sunday afternoon, she chattered on at high speed in a distinctive vocabulary that i labored to note. i remember the word “pawky” because i didn’t have the least idea of its meaning. my piece was going to be as good as my memory and improvisational skills would support. We were almost immediately lost. i had been in the city for about three weeks and knew perfectly the way from my friends’ house off dupont circle to the Post building on L street, but nothing at all about the way we walked in the vague direction of the capitol. neither did she. When it grew perilously dim, a red-andtan taxi came along and got us back to the Jefferson. she was tired; i extracted Part 5. new york, europe, michigan, virginia, and Washington, dc / 155 from her only a few precise quotes and the dates of her Washington appearances, the most significant at the Library of congress.the five hundred words or so took me at least ten hours to write, mostly because i was reaching for a style as precise as hers and i didn’t have it in me. that day i saw only the persona she had created: an important writer (i thought “great”) and a beautiful woman with a compact, shapely body in a well-cut suit, perfectly careless white hair, who moved with marvelously quick grace. i knew she was at least a decade older than my mother, whom i thought lovely but indisputably marred by time; Katherine Anne seemed not so much young as ageless. i certainly didn’t see then how consciously she had invented herself, or how many childhood models she had chosen to emulate. if i thought about artifice at all i would have thought it was an outgrowth of her gift, that she had assumed a manner and appearance to match the vocation she had chosen, rather the way a novice will change her habit, her carapace, when she takes her final vows. now i think she began choosing ways of being in early childhood, to carve for herself a special place in spite of being the second daughter with a baby sister whose birth had cost their mother her life and their father any focused attention to his children. i covered two or three of her readings in the next year, but at a far remove, hovering in the back of the room in my all-purpose black cocktail dress. Katherine Anne would arrive almost late, once sweeping down the aisle in a long cloak— velvet maybe, or satin—that trailed after her like a train. And there was the night she stepped out from backstage all in black but her white kid opera gloves, which she proceeded to discard without haste, smoothing and draping them over the black podium before she began to speak. the well-mannered audience was dead still. i titled that piece “mistress of the Grand Gesture.”13 in september of ’58...