Tag: Katherine Anne Porter

Read Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Flowering Judas”

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“Flowering Judas”

by

Katherine Anne Porter

Braggioni sits heaped upon the edge of a straight-backed chair much too small for him, and sings to Laura in a furry, mournful voice. Laura has begun to find reasons for avoiding her own house until the latest possible moment, for Braggioni is there almost every night. No matter how late she is, he will be sitting there with a surly, waiting expression, pulling at his kinky yellow hair, thumbing the strings of his guitar, snarling a tune under his breath. Lupe the Indian maid meets Laura at the door, and says with a flicker of a glance towards the upper room, ‘He waits.’

Laura wishes to lie down, she is tired of her hairpins and the feel of her long tight sleeves, but she says to him, ‘Have you a new song for me this evening?’ If he says yes, she asks him to sing it. If he says no, she remembers his favorite one, and asks him to sing it again. Lupe brings her a cup of chocolate and a plate of rice, and Laura eats at the small table under the lamp, first inviting Braggioni, whose answer is always the same: ‘I have eaten, and besides, chocolate thickens the voice.’

Laura says, ‘Sing, then,’ and Braggioni heaves himself into song. He scratches the guitar familiarly as though it were a pet animal, and sings passionately off key, taking the high notes in a prolonged painful squeal. Laura, who haunts the markets listening to the ballad singers, and stops every day to hear the blind boy playing his reed-flute in Sixteenth of September Street, listens to Braggioni with pitiless courtesy, because she dares not smile at his miserable performance. Nobody dares to smile at him. Braggioni is cruel to everyone, with a kind of specialized insolence, but he is so vain of his talents, and so sensitive to slights, it would require a cruelty and vanity greater than his own to lay a finger on the vast cureless wound of his self-esteem. It would require courage, too, for it is dangerous to offend him, and nobody has this courage. Continue reading “Read Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Flowering Judas”” →

“Magic” — Katherine Anne Porter

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“Magic”

by

Katherine Anne Porter

And, Madame Blanchard, believe that I am happy to be here with you and your family because it is so serene, everything, and before this I worked for a long time in a fancy house—maybe you don’t know what is a fancy house? Naturally … everyone must have heard sometime or other. Well, Madame, I work always where there is work to be had, and so in this place I worked very hard all hours, and saw too many things, things you wouldn’t believe, and I wouldn’t think of telling you, only maybe it will rest you while I brush your hair. You’ll excuse me too but I could not help hearing you say to the laundress maybe someone had bewitched your linens, they fall away so fast in the wash. Well, there was a girl there in that house, a poor thing, thin, but well-liked by all the men who called, and you understand she could not get along with the woman who ran the house. They quarreled, the madam cheated her on her checks: you know, the girl got a check, a brass one, every time, and at the week’s end she gave those back to the madam, yes, that was the way, and got her percentage, a very small little of her earnings: it is a business, you see, like any other

—and the madam used to pretend the girl had given back only so many checks, you see, and really she had given many more, but after they were out of her hands, what could she do? So she would say, I will get out of this place, and curse and cry. Then the madam would hit her over the head. She always hit people over the head with bottles, it was the way she fought. My good heavens, Madame Blanchard, what confusion there would be sometimes with a girl running raving downstairs, and the madam pulling her back by the hair and smashing a bottle on her forehead. Continue reading ““Magic” — Katherine Anne Porter” →

Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty at Yaddo in 1941

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“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” — Katherine Anne Porter

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“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”

by

Katherine Anne Porter

She flicked her wrist neatly out of Doctor Harry’s pudgy careful fingers and pulled the sheet up to her chin. The brat ought to be in knee breeches. Doctoring around the country with spectacles on his nose! “Get along now. Take your schoolbooks and go. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

Doctor Harry spread a warm paw like a cushion on her forehead where the forked green vein danced and made her eyelids twitch. “Now, now, be a good girl, and we’ll have you up in no time.”

“That’s no way to speak to a woman nearly eighty years old just because she’s down. I’d have you respect your elders, young man.”

“Well, Missy, excuse me.” Doctor Harry patted her cheek. “But I’ve got to warn you, haven’t I? You’re a marvel, but you must be careful or you’re going to be good and sorry.”

“Don’t tell me what I’m going to be. I’m on my feet now, morally speaking. It’s Cornelia. I had to go to bed to get rid of her.”

Her bones felt loose, and floated around in her skin, and Doctor Harry floated like a balloon around the foot of the bed. He floated and pulled down his waistcoat, and swung his glasses on a cord. “Well, stay where you are, it certainly can’t hurt you.”

“Get along and doctor your sick,” said Granny Weatherall. “Leave a well woman alone. I’ll call for you when I want you…Where were you forty years ago when I pulled through milk-leg and double pneumonia? You weren’t even born. Don’t let Cornelia lead you on,” she shouted, because Doctor Harry appeared to float up to the ceiling and out. “I pay my own bills, and I don’t throw my money away on nonsense!” Continue reading ““The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” — Katherine Anne Porter” →

“The Grave” — Katherine Anne Porter

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“The Grave” by Katherine Anne Porter

The grandfather, dead for more than thirty years, had been twice disturbed in his long repose by the constancy and possessiveness of his widow. She removed his bones first to Louisiana and then to Texas, as if she had set out to find her own burial place, knowing well she would never return to the places she had left. In Texas she set up a small cemetery in a corner of her first farm, and as the family connection grew, and oddments of relations came over from Kentucky to settle, it contained at last about twenty graves. After the grandmother’s death, part of her land was to be sold for the benefit of certain of her children, and the cemetery happened to lie in the part set aside for sale. It was necessary to take up the bodies and bury them again in the family plot in the big new public cemetery, where Grandmother had been recently buried. At long last her husband was to lie beside her for eternity, as she had planned.

The family cemetery had been a pleasant small neglected garden of tangled rose bushes and ragged cedar trees and cypress, the simple flat stones rising out of uncropped sweet-smelling wild grass. The graves were lying open and empty one burning day when Miranda and her brother Paul, who often went together to hunt rabbits and doves, propped their twenty-two Winchester rifles carefully against the rail fence, climbed over and explored among the graves. She was nine years old and he was twelve.

They peered into the pits all shaped alike with such purposeful accuracy, and looking at each other with pleased adventurous eyes, they said in solemn tones: “These were graves!” trying by words to shape a special, suitable emotion in their minds, but they felt nothing except an agreeable thrill of wonder: they were seeing a new sight, doing something they had not done before. In them both there was also a small disappointment at the entire commonplaceness of the actual spectacle. Even if it had once contained a coffin for years upon years, when the coffin was gone a grave was just a hole in the ground. Miranda leaped into the pit that had held her grandfather’s bones. Scratching around aimlessly and pleasurably, as any young animal, she scooped up a lump of earth and weighed it in her palm. It had a pleasantly sweet, corrupt smell, being mixed with cedar needles and small leaves, and as the crumbs fell apart, she saw a silver dove no larger than a hazel nut, with spread wings and a neat fan-shaped tail. The breast had a deep round hollow in it. Turning it up to the fierce sunlight, she saw that the inside of the hollow was cut in little whorls. She scrambled out, over the pile of loose earth that had fallen back into one end of the grave, calling to Paul that she had found something, he must guess what. . . . His head appeared smiling over the rim of another grave. He waved a closed hand at her: “I’ve got something too!” They ran to compare treasures, making a game of it, so many guesses each, all wrong, and a final show-down with opened palms. Paul had found a thin wide gold ring carved with intricate flowers and leaves. Miranda was smitten at sight of the ring and wished to have it. Paul seemed more impressed by the dove. They made a trade, with some little bickering. After he had got the dove in his hand, Paul said, “Don’t you know what this is? This is a screw head for a coffin! . . . I’ll bet nobody else in the world has one like this!” Continue reading ““The Grave” — Katherine Anne Porter” →

Katherine Anne Porter on Being a Southern Writer (And Eloping)

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Katherine Anne Porter in her Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER

But it seems to me that your work suggests someone who was searching for new—perhaps broader—meanings . . . that while you’ve retained the South of your childhood as a point of reference, you’ve ranged far from that environment itself. You seem to have felt little of the peculiarly Southern preoccupation with racial guilt and the death of the old agrarian life.

PORTER

I’m a Southerner by tradition and inheritance, and I have a very profound feeling for the South. And, of course, I belong to the guilt-ridden white-pillar crowd myself, but it just didn’t rub off on me. Maybe I’m just not Jewish enough, or Puritan enough, to feel that the sins of the father are visited on the third and fourth generations. Or maybe it’s because of my European influences—in Texas and Louisiana. The Europeans didn’t have slaves themselves as late as my family did, but they still thought slavery was quite natural. . . . But, you know, I was always restless, always a roving spirit. When I was a little child I was always running away. I never got very far, but they were always having to come and fetch me. Once when I was about six, my father came to get me somewhere I’d gone, and he told me later he’d asked me, “Why are you so restless? Why can’t you stay here with us?” and I said to him, “I want to go and see the world. I want to know the world like the palm of my hand.”

INTERVIEWER

And at sixteen you made it final.

PORTER

At sixteen I ran away from New Orleans and got married. And at twenty-one I bolted again, went to Chicago, got a newspaper job, and went into the movies.

INTERVIEWER

The movies?

PORTER

The newspaper sent me over to the old S. and A. movie studio to do a story. But I got into the wrong line, and then was too timid to get out. “Right over this way, Little Boy Blue,” the man said, and I found myself in a courtroom scene with Francis X. Bushman. I was horrified by what had happened to me, but they paid me five dollars for that first day’s work, so I stayed on. It was about a week before I remembered what I had been sent to do; and when I went back to the newspaper they gave me eighteen dollars for my week’s nonwork and fired me!

I stayed on for six months—I finally got to nearly ten dollars a day—until one day they came in and said, “We’re moving to the coast.” “Well, I’m not,” I said. “Don’t you want to be a movie actress?” “Oh, no!” I said. “Well, be a fool!” they said, and they left. That was 1914 and world war had broken out, so in September I went home.

 

Katherine Anne Porter on F. Scott Fitzgerald (She Wasn’t a Fan)

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Katherine Anne Porter in her Paris Review interview:

PORTER

I’ve never belonged to any group or huddle of any kind. You cannot be an artist and work collectively. Even the fact that I went to Mexico when everybody else was going to Europe—I went to Mexico because I felt I had business there. And there I found friends and ideas that were sympathetic to me. That was my entire milieu. I don’t think anyone even knew I was a writer. I didn’t show my work to anybody or talk about it, because—well, no one was particularly interested in that. It was a time of revolution, and I was running with almost pure revolutionaries!

INTERVIEWER

And you think that was a more wholesome environment for a writer than, say, the milieu of the expatriated artist in Europe at the same time?

PORTER

Well, I know it was good for me. I would have been completely smothered—completely disgusted and revolted—by the goings-on in Europe. Even now when I think of the twenties and the legend that has grown up about them, I think it was a horrible time: shallow and trivial and silly. The remarkable thing is that anybody survived in such an atmosphere—in a place where they could call F. Scott Fitzgerald a great writer!

INTERVIEWER

You don’t agree?

PORTER

Of course I don’t agree. I couldn’t read him then and I can’t read him now. There was just one passage in a book called Tender Is the Night—I read that and thought, “Now I will read this again,” because I couldn’t be sure. Not only didn’t I like his writing, but I didn’t like the people he wrote about. I thought they weren’t worth thinking about, and I still think so. It seems to me that your human beings have to have some kind of meaning. I just can’t be interested in those perfectly stupid meaningless lives. And I don’t like the same thing going on now—the way the artist simply will not face up to the final reckoning of things.

The Vintage Book of American Women Writers

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In her introduction to The Vintage Book of American Women Writers, editor Elaine Showalter suggests that “the main reason women do not figure in American literary history is because they have not been the ones to write it.” Showalter sought to amend the fact that women writers, even those who were praised in their own era, “tended to disappear from literary history and national memory” in her earlier volume A Jury of Her Peers, a comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000. History though is not enough — Showalter continues in her introduction: “Finally, we need a canon of outstanding women writers over the past four centuries both to organize their history and to begin the arguments that keep literary discussion alive.” The Vintage Book of American Women Writers aims to be that canon, or at least to be a volume of that canon, collecting writing by American women from the past 360 years. And while Showalter admits that “it cannot claim to be comprehensive,” the trade paperback is impressively hefty at over 800 pages, showcasing the work of 79 authors.

Many of these authors will be familiar (hopefully) to anyone who didn’t sleep through his or her American lit class in high school. The volume begins with several selections from the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet; there’s also Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, and Margaret Fuller. A tidy chunk of the early part of the book comes from writers we might associate with the transcendentalist movement — Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe, Louisa May Alcott, and Emily Dickinson, just to name a few of the more famous writers. There’s an abundance of riches near the turn of the twentieth century, with tales from Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton, writers who set the stage for the modernism of Gertrude Stein, Katherine Anne Porter, and H.D. And then: Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zora Neale Hurston (the collection won my heart simply by including her incomparable short story “Sweat”), Gwendolyn Brooks, Cynthia Ozick, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Ursula K. LeGuin, Flannery O’Connor (but not, for some reason, Carson McCullers), Amy Tan, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

I realize I’m just listing names now, but hopefully you know these names, are familiar with them, have read their works (if not, The Vintage Book of American Women Writers is clearly a great starting place). As an experiment — and perhaps an implicit challenge to Showalter’s contention that these writers continue to be neglected — I counted the authors I’d read at least once before this collection: 33, or 42%. Granted, I teach English for a living, and many of these authors are represented in every literature anthology I’ve ever used. But that might be my point, I suppose, that the canon has opened up, been re-examined and reformed. I can’t think of a literature course I’ve ever taught that hasn’t included Hurston or O’Connor or Katherine Anne Porter.

For me then, the greater joy in The Vintage Book of American Women Writers is in reading the writers that I haven’t seen anthologized before. I’m almost ashamed to admit I hadn’t yet read (okay, never even heard of) the abolitionist poet Frances E. W. Harper; Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s poem “Indian Names,” written in 1849, seems more poignant (and troubling) than ever; Rose Terry Cooke’s “Blue-beard’s Closet” (1861) resonates strongly, in that it connects to the latest piece in the collection, Annie Proulx’s “55 Miles to the Nearest Gas Pump.” The story of Bluebeard of course metaphorizes the history that Showalter wishes to reverse, what with its discarded bodies, locked in a secret room, awaiting discorvery. Okay, maybe that’s a stretch (or at least a hyperbole). In any case, these stories, poems, essays, fables, and tales are hardly lifeless. Great stuff.

The Vintage Book of American Women Writers is new in trade paperback from Vintage.