[In a speech given to a group of University of Maryland students in 1972, Katherine Anne Porter] said that all her fiction is reportage, it really happened, but she arranges it and it becomes fiction.

Her most ambitious attempt to explain her creative process was made at the invitation of Robert Penn Warren and appeared as "'Noon Wine': The Sources" in Yale Review in 1954. In this essay she related the separate anecdotes which formed the basis of "Noon Wine," saying that the story was "true" in the way that a work of fiction should be true, created out of all the scattered particles of life she was able to absorb and shape into a living new being. (p. 217)

A comparison of the epistolary and fictional versions shows omissions which are as significant as the events either reported exactly or transmuted. The letters show that Porter was very interested in the political situation around her. (p. 220)

Porter's omissions do not indicate indifference, since both the letters and personal reminiscences of friends testify to her intense political and social awareness…. They show rather her ability to hold taut the thread of her theme. Porter was very sure of her theme's scope and ruthless about excluding all details, no matter how interesting, which did not bear on that theme.

In "The Leaning Tower" the political atmosphere was useful in providing texture, but subsidiary in its importance to theme. Closer to "Old Mortality" than to Ship of Fools, the story turns on the contrast between the imagined dream of paradise and the hellish reality of the present. Finding themselves stranded in Berlin, all the characters in "The Leaning Tower" dream of paradises past and future. For the barber it is Spain. For Hans, Paris, and for Rosa, the unreal Italy of her honeymoon. Tadeusz Mey wishes to go to London, but he dreams also of his childhood in Cracow, remembering the place as something between a cemetery and a lost paradise, with an immense sound of bells. Only Charles has actually attained his imagined paradise, and the story records his disillusionment as he discovers that Berlin does not merely fail to measure up to his dream of paradise, but is, in fact, a hell on earth.

When she described the genesis of "Noon Wine" Porter spoke of drawing heavily upon childhood memories. She draws equally heavily on them in "The Leaning Tower," filling out Charles Upton's past from her own childhood experiences. She describes Charles as growing up on a small farm, dreaming of Germany as his earthly paradise. Katherine Anne Porter likewise grew up in a small farming community, and her dream of paradise was also Germany. (pp. 222-23)

Throughout ["The Leaning Tower"] the horror of the time is balanced against the earlier point of view. The standard of comparison for every detail of life in Berlin is the Texas of Charles Upton's youth, evoked both in his memories and in his speech. When he sees Hans's Mensur scar he muses that people in San Antonio would think he had been involved in a cutting scrape with a Mexican. He thinks that Texas is full of boys like Otto and that Hans reminds him of Kuno. In the cold winter he thinks that in Texas he has seen northern travelers turn upon the southern weather with the ferocity of exhaustion. In his speech he uses American slang, especially later in the story, as if fulfilling Tadeusz's expectations of American speech. He thinks that his dancing companion in the cabaret is a "knock out," tells her that she's a "whizz," and says, "What say we give up the technique and let nature take its course."

Thus Porter juxtaposes past memories and present impressions; the laying bare of the sources of "The Leaning Tower" is as instructive as her own explanations of the sources of "Noon Wine" and "Flowering Judas." It shows the range and variety of experiences which she telescopes together, the immense compression and care which go into her selection of details, and the sure sense of the time necessary for the ideas to mature and assume their final perspective. (pp. 224-25)

On the subject of her symbolism Porter has been reticent, perhaps almost embarrassed. Possibly her attitude is the result of having seen her symbols overexplained and even on occasion reduced to a series of geometric diagrams. She has quoted more than once, each time registering horror, Mary McCarthy's story about a student advised by her creative writing teacher to finish her story by adding some symbols. Porter has said that she never in her life consciously took or adopted a symbol. What she means is that she never imposed a symbol upon a story but rather used the symbolic implications of actual objects.

"Flowering Judas" is an example of her method, for she has said that it was only on looking back over the finished story that the whole symbolic plan became visible. She did not invent the Judas tree or write it into the story, but saw it there in the Mexican patio she was describing. As she worked on the story over a period of ten years, the biblical and literary associations of the tree came into her mind. The final version gains its texture from the associations with the story of Judas Iscariot, with The Education of Henry Adams, and with Eliot's Gerontion. The Leaning Tower of Pisa functions in a similar way.

On the simplest level the replica is a cheap tourist souvenir, as fragile and insubstantial as the dreams of paradise of all the characters, particularly of Rosa for whom it represents a brief period of honeymoon happiness. (p. 225)

The Leaning Tower of Pisa … has sinister overtones from its association with Canto XXXIII of The Inferno, where Dante meets the traitors to their own country. The central figure here is Ugolino of Pisa who conspired with an enemy party of that city in order to defeat a rival faction within his own Guelph party. His treachery merely served to weaken his own party so that he found himself at the mercy of the very enemy with whom he had conspired. Imprisoned with his children and grandchildren in a tower (not the Leaning Tower, although the story is closely connected with Pisa through Ugolino's imprecation against that city), the keys thrown away, he was forced to watch them all die of hunger before he himself starved to death….

The account of the chance-gathered occupants of Rosa Reichl's pension, all wanderers or defectors from their own native lands, is full of images emanating from Ugolino's story. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the pension in which they are all shut up, waiting for disaster and with no means of escape (only for Charles Upton is a ship coming from America), is conveyed in images of imprisonment, starvation, cannibalism, death, and hell. (p. 226)

Hell is the frequent expletive on many lips, the infernal references culminating in the smoky subterranean nightclub. Charles thinks that the pension is a "hell of a place really," and thinks of himself: "Hell, maybe I'm a caricaturist." When he feels hatred for Hans he thinks, "Hell, what of it?" Tadeusz hears him and gives back the echo: "I think so too, I think, hell, what of it?"

Like Ugolino, Charles experiences a series of warnings of danger, persecution, and death. Sometimes they are actual dreams, as when the groans of Hans evoke a terrible nightmare that the house is a blazing, towering inferno. Sometimes they are mere premonitions that surface in his waking consciousness. (p. 227)

For Charles Upton, no less than for those who must remain in Germany, the problem of what action a man of vision should take is a real one. In the Walpurgisnacht scene in the nightclub he becomes fully aware of the corruption around him. He sees clearly that Hans is the real villain, full of hostility and vengeance, and he is not deceived by Hans's statement—made as he lovingly fingers his scar—that he is not bloodthirsty. As Charles watches him turning into a visibly Satanic being, he is well on the way to recognizing the monstrous evil everywhere around him….

At the end of the story there is no course of action immediately clear for Charles, and Porter does not force a resolution where she does not see one. There is no sudden departure as there is at the conclusion of "Hacienda," where the first-person narrator takes flight from the deathly situation. Nor, on the other hand, is there a sense of the character's bewilderment, as there is at the end of "Old Mortality," when Miranda asks, "What is truth?" and determines naïvely to find it. What Charles achieves is clarity of vision, the ability to face up to the situation unflinchingly and not take flight in any of the ways available—drunkenness, daydreams, self-pity—or in occupations good in themselves but bad if used as refuges from reality, such as work, art, or academic studies. Perhaps this is what Porter meant when she said once that the first responsibility of the artist in time of war was not to go mad. At the end of the story Charles's lost innocence and newly gained wisdom are summed up and conveyed in his speculations on the mended tower:

It was mended pretty obviously, it would never be the same. But for Rosa, poor old woman, he supposed it was better than nothing. It stood for something she had, or thought she had, once. Even all patched up as it was, and worthless to begin with, it meant something to her, and he was still ashamed of having broken it; it made him feel like a heel.

                                        (p. 229)

The recognition of the significance of the tower with all its literary and legendary associations is as crucial to an understanding of the meaning and the technique of the story as it is to Charles Upton. It is the center around which all the themes, moral implications, and images converge, harmonize, and arrange themselves into a coherent whole; once its position is recognized the entire pattern of the story is revealed and completed. (p. 230)