SOURCE: "The Angel of Malignity: The Cold Beauty of Katherine Anne Porter," in The New York Times Book Review, April 16, 1995, pp. 17-9.

A writer pressing the case of the neglected hero gone before has a difficult role: part night nurse, part hit man. Tenderly we protect the wounded one, aggressively we search for someone we can blame. We are, of course, thinking about ourselves. The neglected writer of the past is our own feared specter, our double, thrust into the darkness of the future, the ghost of what we tell ourselves will never happen but know is to come.

A kind of love grows up between these writers, one living, one dead. This can be trying if the writer you love is probably not a person you would have liked. I am in the situation of thinking that Katherine Anne Porter wrote like an angel, but is someone I'm glad I didn't have to know.

She was almost certainly not a nice person. She was a great beauty, but all her young photographs have a self-conscious, self-dramatizing quality that makes them difficult to approach. She lied brilliantly on a variety of subjects, from her place of birth to her age. She was born in West Texas in 1890, but often suggested she was a daughter of the Old South, and a younger one at that. She lied about rather crucial things to two of her four husbands, neglecting to tell one she had had a hysterectomy and revealing her true age to another only on their wedding day. She was slippery in business dealings; one of her favorite words—"shady"—could not inaptly be applied to her. She also loved the word "bitter," and both shadows and bitterness contributed to her difficulties in working and to the vexed nature of her relationships.

She was an anti-Semite, although she produced devastating portraits of anti-Semites, and she was a racist who believed that darkies were happy on the old plantation, although she wrote a story full of understanding of the buried longings of former slaves. She dated Hermann Göring at least once, and was disappointed when he didn't call back, but later said she was the first among her friends to grasp the horrors of Nazism. She betrayed one of her best friends, Josephine Herbst, to the F.B.I., which suspected Herbst of being a Communist. It was done casually, alcoholically, on a "date" with an agent set up to get her drunk and make her talk. Porter forgot having "talked," then resented Herbst for her political recklessness, which she saw as a danger to herself.

But none of this has to do, really, with why Katherine Anne Porter is not more widely read. Being read has not, thank God, rested on good behavior, loyalty to friends, sobriety or straight dealings with publishers. Think of the case of Ernest Hemingway, like Porter a beauty, a poseur, a betrayer and a drunk—but certainly not unread.

The image of Hemingway inevitably comes to my mind when I think of Porter. They were the reverse sides of each other—one so traditionally masculine, one so traditionally feminine. Both were deeply American yet ill at ease in America, both wrote with a passionate eye and a reckless insistence on getting things said. But it was Porter's bad luck to be a near-contemporary of Hemingway's. His spare, stripped-down style set a tone for what it was to write as an American. The problem was that it set the tone, so that others were drowned out or considered deficient, improper, overdone.

Now I must admit here that I enjoy blaming Hemingway for things. On a bad day, I lay at his feet overpopulation, air pollution and harmful additives in foods. On a good day, I admire his descriptive powers and the integrity of his plain style. But let us, however reluctantly, put blame aside and consider that Hemingway was surrounded or enveloped or covered by a historical cultural accident outside his control. He precisely fit the bill of American fantasy after World War I. Partly it was his war record, partly it was his looks—what Edmund Wilson is said to have called his Clark Gable smile. And then there was the athleticism, the sexual adventurism and being in Paris at the right time.

Certainly, he added to American prose a needed and on the whole healthful styptic touch. There was, beginning in the age of Victoria, a kind of sickly overabundance that affected everything from furniture to the poetic line. It was also an age of increased female power and feminization of culture. Perhaps for that reason, the choking fustiness that characterized the taste of the age became associated with the female—the maternal, unsexual female, that is. And she was the one who, in the provincial towns of America, ran culture. How exhilarating Hemingway's sentences must have seemed to a claque of young men who feared death by antimacassar.

The novel—all prose fiction for that matter—is the love child of two deeply incompatible parents. It has journalism for a father, poetry for a mother. For Hemingway and all his sons, the goal was to make of prose an Athena: sprung full blown from the head of the father, the mother swallowed up and kept from sight. "Good" prose was to have the sharp, telegraphic punch of newspaper language; "bad" prose was ornamented, gilded as the Gilded Age. This determination became the boot that flattened the face of American prose. It had many victims, including, perhaps most notably, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who died virtually unread, most of his books out of print. Later, other voices, particularly William Faulkner's, swelled the American chorus. But Porter's combination of cold realism and an unmistakably female point of view made her an uncomfortable passenger on what Flannery O'Connor called Faulkner's "Dixie Express" at the same time that she was marginalized as a "Southern writer."

Added to these accidents affecting Porter's status is the formal prejudice that insists that the novel is the real thing and shorter forms only pathetic country cousins. So for many years, Porter took her place as a writer of perfect short stories, admirable but somehow outside the big picture. She had no traceable ancestors and spawned no followers. Her stories resisted easy categorization. Their finished shape belied their originality. They combined ferocity and tenderness, opulence and precision, voluptuousness and chastity. It was easier to treat her as a curiosity, a fragile and perhaps overwrought china doll, than to acknowledge the importance of what she had produced. And she produced very little—three collections of stories, Flowering Judas (1930), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) and The Leaning Tower (1944). Her collected stories, published in 1965, are only 495 pages long: in a career of nearly 50 years, that's 10 pages a year.

Publishers kept asking for the novel, and she put her mind to it, adopting a course that was both personally and formally a torment to her. She began Ship of Fools in 1941, and worked over it, seized by reluctance and boredom and self-hatred, for more than 20 years. When it finally appeared, in 1962, it brought her a fame and a financial success her stories had never achieved, it became, for younger readers, the way that they knew Katherine Anne Porter. Which meant they did not know her at her best, as a writer of stories. And if they knew her only as the author of the book a much-hyped movie was based on, they would wonder what any shouting had ever been about.

Ship of Fools has a kind of greatness, but it is not the kind associated with the traditional greatness of the novel. We expect that in a novel characters will move and grow, and the characters of Ship of Fools appear in a series of static snapshots. There is an overlay of melodrama: a drug-addicted "Condesa," a saintly doctor, an alcoholic aging belle, a dwarf. But the novel is fearless in its facing of the possibility that the true nature of human beings is malign. To act with malignity would seem, in Porter's mind, to be as natural to humans as drawing breath. There is the thick malignity of the Germans, the careless, coarse malignity of the Americans. But most frightening of all is the troupe of Spanish dancers who are utterly outside the web of moral consideration. They will do anything for profit, to get their way or to experience the joy of humiliating. There are two children in the troupe, twins from hell called Ric and Rac after two dogs in a comic strip, who live only to cause harm, and one night they throw the beloved white bulldog of a childless German couple overboard, simply out of boredom.

We see over and over again in Ship of Fools a technique of which Porter is a master: the ability to describe gesture and manners, to use them as a nest in which to enclose a statement of general, even metaphysical, significance. This is evident in her description of a scene in which a drunken husband beats his wife in the same room in which their child is supposedly asleep. Then in a fit of morose mutual lust, the parents make love in the bunk above their son's head. In the morning, another passenger sees them bowing and holding the door for each other and remarks:

That sad, dull display of high manners after they had behaved no doubt disgracefully to each other and their child was intended no doubt to prove that they were not so base as they had caused each other to seem. That dreadful little door-holding bowing scene had meant to say, You can see, can't you, that in another time or place, or another society, I might have been very different, much better than you have ever seen me…. What they were saying to each other was only, Love me, love me in spite of all! Whether or not I love you, whether I am fit to love, whether you are able to love, even if there is so such thing as love, love me!

Lost in the bitterness and cynicism with which Porter wrote Ship of Fools is the joy in nature and in simple living that marks her greatest short stories. This pleasure suffused the breathtaking "Holiday" (1960), which took her more than 30 years to write. It is the story of a suffering young woman's vacation with a family of German immigrant farmers. The center of the story is a hideously afflicted young serving girl, who the narrator only gradually realizes is one of the children of the family. She sees that the forgetful ness, the brutal using of this girl is not a cruelty but a down-to-earth understanding that a dreadful tragedy has occurred, that something must be done with it and life must go on. Ottilie, the damaged girl, is portrayed in all her grotesqueness, surrounded by her family's intensely healthful and fecund business. But around these two aspects, like a shimmering envelope, is the narrator's enchantment with the land and the coming of spring. She describes one of her first rides across the property:

There was nothing beautiful in those woods now except the promise of spring, for I detested bleakness, but it gave me pleasure to think that beyond this there might be something else beautiful in its own being, a river shaped and contained by its banks, or a field stripped down to its true meaning, plowed and ready for the seed…. The leaves were budding in tiny cones of watery green.

After a disastrous thunderstorm, in which everybody in the family works to the utmost to try to save what is being ruined by the overwhelming waters, the mother (whom Porter has described, with one of her delicious aphorisms, as a "matriarch in men's shoes") simply takes to her bed and dies. The family goes off in a caravan of wagons for the funeral; only the narrator and Ottilie are left at home. Ottilie begins to weep, to howl with weeping. The narrator assumes that she is grieving because she hasn't been included in the funeral procession, and she takes her in a rickety wagon to try to catch up with the others. She discovers that what Ottilie wants is not to join the others but just to go for a ride. What she wants is a holiday. In her realization, the narrator is shocked into a deep understanding:

Ottilie, now silent, was doubled upon herself, slipping loosely on the edge of the seat. I caught hold of her stout belt with my free hand, and my fingers slipped between her clothes and bare flesh, ribbed and gaunt and dry against my knuckles. My sense of her realness, her humanity, this shattered being that was a woman, was so shocking to me that a howl as doglike and despairing as her own rose in me unuttered and died again, to be a perpetual ghost. Ottilie slanted her eyes and peered at me, and I gazed back. The knotted wrinkles of her face were grotesquely changed, she gave a choked little whimper, and suddenly she laughed out, a kind of yelp but unmistakably laughter…. The feel of the hot sun on her back, the bright air, the jolly senseless staggering of the wheels, the peacock green of the heavens: something of these had reached her. She was happy and gay, and she gurgled and rocked in her seat, leaning upon me and waving loosely around her as if to show me what wonders she saw.

Porter earns her right to speak about humanity, about life and death, because she has so firmly rooted her perceptions in the soil of the particular. The mention of Ottilie's stout belt, the touch of the narrator's fingers on her dry flesh, makes us understand that the voice of the narrator is entirely trustworthy; if she says this is the nature of life, we will believe it.

And we believe Porter when she takes us in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" into the territory not only of death, but of dying. The strength of our belief is connected to the fact that we are not reading just a story about dying. We learn, as well, about sexual love, the war at home, pleasure in weather and clothing and animal aliveness, the manners of people who work at a minor newspaper in a minor American town, the precarious position of a woman who must earn her way with no one behind her to break her fall.

The lovers in the story are named Adam and Miranda: the first man, the untainted daughter of Prospero. He is a soldier about to leave for World War I. Adam expects not to return, so the few days he has with Miranda have a great preciousness. But she can't take time off from work on the newspaper to spend the day with him. So we see her in her rather cheerful office, with the colleagues who sit on her desk and let their feet dangle. There is a brilliant set piece about a hoofer to whom Miranda has given a bad review. He insists on confronting her and insists that she tell him why she doesn't think he's any good. "I've been called the best in the business and I wanta know what you think is wrong with me," he says in an agonizing display of bravado that ends in tears.

In the course of Miranda's daily rounds, we meet types who are caught on the exhilarating hook of Porter's aphoristic wit. A thuggish Liberty Bond salesman is introduced: "He might be anything at all … advance agent for a road show, promoter of a wildcat oil company, a former saloon keeper announcing the opening of a new cabaret, an automobile salesman—any follower of any one of the crafty, haphazard callings." Another patriotic fund raiser is said to have a face "in which nothing could be read save the inept sensual record of 50 years."

Miranda's attraction for Adam is recorded in a prose that is oddly arousing in spite of its formal strictness. His uniform, his shoes, his watch, his hands are all the locus of a tremendous masculine force. And yet, when Miranda falls sick, he nurses her with the tenderness of the mother she still yearns for. It is not, after all, the war that cuts into their time together: it is the influenza epidemic, which brings Miranda to the brink of death.

And it is at this moment that Katherine Anne Porter performs one of the riskiest feats in American literature. She dares to use the language of transcendence and of dream to describe what is supposed to be indescribable: the experience of dying. She approaches it breakneck, on the back of a horse that is always on the verge of bolting. But it does not, even for a moment, resist her control. Then, the heart-stopping fence is taken, with the inevitable arc of perfect flight:

There it is at last, it is very simple…. Granite walls, whirlpools, stars are things…. None of them is death, nor the image of it. Death is death … and for the dead it has no attributes. Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live.

Grammatically, this last sentence is a matchless piece of virtuosity: 12 clauses that rise, fall, meander, rise again, then crash. The sentence is followed by a much quieter diction: we learn that Miranda will live but that Adam has died—not of a German bullet but of the influenza he caught from her. Reluctantly, Miranda understands that she must go on living. She plans her resurrection in a traditionally feminine way: she makes a shopping list. "One lipstick, medium, one ounce flask Bois d'Hiver perfume, one pair of gray suede gauntlets without straps, two pairs gray sheer stockings without clocks…. A jar of cold cream…. No one need pity this corpse if we look properly to the art of the thing."

Katherine Anne Porter was heroic in her commitment to looking properly to the art of the thing. This commitment allowed her to look in the face of such unimaginables as evil, death, the irreparable blows of fate, and force them to turn themselves beautiful. It was an exhausting and perilous enterprise, one that made it almost impossible to live. She reached 90, but for many of the years of her long life she produced no writing. What she did produce has the clarity and inclusiveness of the art we have proclaimed great. She once sent a message to a high school class in Oklahoma: "Practice an art for love and the happiness of your life—you will find it outlasts almost everything but breath."