Letters of Katherine Anne Porter

by Katherine Anne Porter, Isabel Bayley (Editor)

Novelist, short-story writer, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Katherine Anne Porter is one of America’s most respected and enduring literary figures. Upon her death in 1980 at the age of ninety, she left behind thousands of letters, from which Isabel Bayley, Porter’s close friend for over twenty-five years and her literary archivist, selected the best. “The book was conceived as a whole,” Bayley explains. “The letters will carry you, if you wish to read in sequence, from point to point during her major working years, 1930 to 1963. Little bridges form from idea to idea, from theme to theme.” One of Porter’s themes was an outrage born of unfair politics, and her words are as fresh today as when they were written: “What has discouraged me,” she writes in 1957, “is simply the fact that from Mussolini on—Franco, Hitler, Tito, Peron, Batista, Trujillo, in a rapidly descending scale to Nasser, our government has without fail backed and supported, in completely criminal collusion, every foul and stinking political dictator in turn as they rise, with the hypocritical excuse that these are all ‘anti-Communist.’” And in 1947 she asks the kind of question that underlies the finest of her writing: “Man cannot—oh why can he not? This to me is the riddle of the universe—face the truth of his own motives.”

The list of Porter’s correspondents reads like a Who’s Who of twentieth-century letters: Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Eleanor Clark, James Stern, Cleanth Brooks, Malcolm Cowley, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Josephine Herbst, Hart Crane, Monroe Wheeler, Glenway Wescott, Eudora Welty, John Malcolm Brinnin. She tells Edith Sitwel she treasures her anthology of poetry as “something to take to Heaven with me if I ever get there; or maybe to bootleg into Hell to soften the penalty of having to read the Beat Generation.” In a 1935 letter to Robert Penn Warren, one of her closest friends, she writes, “I have on hand, trying to finish it, a fairly long story which I call ‘Pale Horse and Pale Rider’ though I may find another title. What are your limits as to space for a short story?” For Porter her letters—to friends, family, publishers, editors, lovers—were vital links between the past and the present, a validation of time spent and an inspiration for the future: her twelve-page ship’s journal, written in the form of a letter on a voyage from Mexico to Germany in 1931, became the basis for Ship of Fools, completed thirty years later.

Katherine Anne Porter saw letters as continuity, a story that no longer belonged to the teller: “. . . mss. and notes and journals and letters arrived from Saratoga Springs the other day, and reading some of it over I find the past much more continuous, which I had begun to doubt. . . . Things just accumulated, and behold, it had become history . . . to be sorted and used as part of a story. I don’t know that story any more than you do, especially not the end, and we will never see it, and I think it not very important whether we do or don’t. . . . It doesn’t belong to us anyway.”

Genres: Nonfiction

642 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Katherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She is known for her penetrating insight; her works deal with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherin...

Reviews

[NC · Rating 4 out of 5]

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there have been many times when i have been so entirely sickened of life it was very hard to work to keep on, a half dozen times i have been tempted to suicide, but i am glad i did not give way, for i have always felt that the last half of my life would somehow atone for the first half, and i still think it may. it is not possible to live in this world without suffering unless one is a born stone. but is also possible to have a great deal of happiness in spite of the suffering. — 1933, to her father

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paris has fallen since you wrote your blessed letter . . . it is no good saying we have known for a month that it was almost bound to happen; i am stunned quite literally in a way that never happened to me before. i can’t sleep, i can’t work, certainly i don’t think except intermittently, and some things i know well are very important seem for the moment not worth even remembering. . . our lifetime will not see the end of the disaster. but it is a majestic and terrible nemesis, we know that the furies do not come uninvited. — 1940, to another writer

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older persons quite often feel timid about expressing their ideas to the younger ones, for fear of seeming to be giving advice, or being a bore. but you seemed so interested in those things that seem more real than any other things to me, music and literature, and painting. . .

when i was your age and younger, it seemed to me i was on a desert island quite literally. no one to talk to about the things that interested me, and not only indifference, but an active hostility to the way my mind was growing, and the direction my life had to take. . . i hungered for music and all the arts as if they were bread, and they were bread: for their sake for years i had very little of the material food, and i do not regret one day of it. . .

all the young are lonely: or we can say, all the young who are thoughtful human beings. . . you have to find your own place and your own people, find your friends and your enemies, for yourself; and if you really read great poets and listen to great music and associate in that way with the best people in the world, you will get a set of values that will assure you that both your friends and your enemies will be the right kind for you; and you will be, in a deep sense, independent of both. — 1940, to her nephew

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dear darling, you know i love you, but you mustn’t worry or think about not having written. little by little the occasion to write will lessen, for us both; that is what separation is, even what it should be. the distance and time between us will almost imperceptibly be filled with other things, separate interests, new events, and this is very right. don’t trouble about it. don’t be afraid of hurting me, i am almost at ease. i don’t suffer any more except when i see you, and just for that very little time i have the same illusion i had before, of real nearness and almost a oneness, but i do know it is illusion; still it is so extraordinary, i can only call it love, and perhaps it even was that.

when all that has disappeared, there will still be something left, for you are very dear to me now without any expectations whatever of any further change except such as will take us away from each other; and my disappointment which was so bitter and deep in that love which after all, wasn’t up to the real things of life at all, couldn’t, after all, help us make anything together, is now in its place, a part of the natural sufferings of living; i can see it rather clearly now at a fair distance, and hope one day to do better. . . so goodbye for the present, my dear darling, i love you always, too, really always, though that is a big word. — 1941, to her then separated husband, later divorced

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i have known in life so many strange, wild lost people, some of them very gifted, so many beings trembling a life time between madness and a kind of twilight sanity, such suffering and such cruelty and confusion, i have a good while ago come to the point where i love goodness and simplicity and the desire of the human heart to believe and to love. these are all very rare, and they are not accidents. — 1942, to her nephew

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to think that when we are young—we look forward to some kind of fruition, a field of repose and quiet, some gathering of strength, some harvest for the long effort we make: so at least i did. what an illusion. the road is uphill all the way, isn’t it? but no one ever tells you that when you are young, and perhaps it is just as well. — 1943, to a friend

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’mood’ is a perfectly good word, my dear: not ‘arty’ at all. it has a real meaning, and nothing else can take its place. perfectly good words can, if we don’t mind, be spoiled for us by careless or wrong usage. be respectful of words. they mean something. — 1943, to her nephew

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unfortunately there was also some lost cause-ism and the like to wade through to reach the better stuff. for example:

the news this morning is that france does not accept the peace terms. that is good, that is right. southerners who are after three generations still paying the oblique and heavy indemnity of total surrender, should be able to sympathize with the french point of view. i don’t know at this distance what else we could have done, but france still has resources. — 1940, to another writer

[Bev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Katherine Anne Porter is one of my favorite and the letters give terrific insight into who she was as a writer