Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

Introduction

introduction [. . .] to give a true testimony it is necessary to know and remember what i was, what i felt, and what i knew then, and not confuse it with what i know or think i know now. —Katherine Anne Porter, Collected Essays in 1940, when Katherine Anne Porter was fifty years old, Paul crume published a review of her Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels and remarked on the extraordinary fact that despite Porter’s having been named “a new master of American prose” nine years earlier, with the publication of Flowering Judas (her first collection of stories), almost nothing was in print about her. she “remains more a literary reputation than a person,” he wrote.1 crume probably knew that three years after the publication of Flowering Judas, Porter had supplied stanley Kunitz with a brief autobiographical entry for Authors Today and Yesterday. However, it included only a few factual details (such as the year she received her first Guggenheim fellowship). crume probably would not have identified the lie about her birth year (she added four years) or the half-truth about her relationship to daniel boone (her ancestor was Jonathan boone, brother to daniel). but crume was correct that Katherine Anne Porter the person was not to be found at that time in any published account of her life. He began what was to be a long process of filling in details and correcting the record. He looked up persons in dallas, fort Worth, and Arlington who had known Porter as early as 1916 and asked them to recollect her from those years, their reminiscences to be woven into his review. for years, crume’s review and the entry in AuthorsToday and Yesterday were the starting point for biographical studies of Porter.2 When donald stalling was writing a master’s thesis on Porter and her work in the early 1950s, he retraced crume’s ground and added the recollections of other persons who had known the Porter family still earlier, in indian creek and Kyle. George Hendrick in his Katherine Anne Porter (1965), with the help of his wife, Willene, added more to the gradually increasing body of knowledge about Porter, which by then included the denver research of Kathryn Adams sexton. nevertheless, as late as the 1970s there remained many gaps, especially from 1905 to 1930, despite Porter’s offering se- 2 / introduction lected details about herself and correcting some of the errors, including that of her age. since Porter’s death in 1980, her life has been taking shape publicly. As archives at yale, stanford, the University of california, Los Angeles, and the University of texas at Austin, and especially the massive Porter archive at the University of maryland, college Park, have been steadily perused and enhanced by the addition of other persons’ papers, and as public documents and records have been increasingly accessible, Porter has come more and more into focus. in Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (1982), the first full biography of Porter, Joan Givner supplied valuable details about Porter’s hospitalization with tuberculosis and her mysterious first marriage. After extensive research for his Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico: The Illusion of Eden (1992), thomas f. Walsh constructed a thorough chronicle of Porter’s experiences in mexico from 1920 to 1931. my own research for Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist (2005) filled in yet more gaps, and i was able also to correct some of the errors in her biographical record that were the result not only of Porter’s own dissembling and misdirection but also of hasty or wrong conclusions reached and perpetuated by other scholars and journalists. in some respects, because biographical entries in encyclopedias and literary dictionaries and online continue to recycle old errors, an accurate account of Porter’s life has yet to become fixed in the general domain. Katherine Anne Porter was born on 15 may 1890 in indian creek, texas, a small farming community in brown county. she was the fourth child of Harrison boone Porter and mary Alice Jones Porter, who christened her “callie russell” in honor of the twelve-year-old daughter of their neighbors and friends William and marinda russell. Harrison and Alice’s three older children were Anna Gay, Harry ray (later “Harrison Paul”), and Johnny, who died at about one year of age.their fifth child, a daughter, eventually named mary Alice but always called baby, was born in January 1892, and Alice Porter died two months later...