Katherine Anne Porter remains chiefly a writer's writer. Such a circumstance is a pity, for in her short stories and novelle she has a great deal to say to all intelligent readers; and she says it with clarity and beauty. She is by no means difficult to read; and, though her overzealous critics have made a few of her short stories seem overwrought with symbolism, there is actually little of the occult in her work. She has always lacked patience with the literary faddists—those people who affect newness of manner when they are actually destitute of matter. She writes in the main stream of English prose style and of English fiction without being imitative: a great achievement in itself. Her difficulty is an ironic one, though it involves no irony peculiar to her own time. In brief, she is a perfectionist, and perfectionists have rarely enjoyed popular success in any age. (p. 386)

Throughout her critical essays [in The Days Before] Miss Porter writes with such precision, compactness, and fine fluency that no perceptive reader can fail to be charmed by what she has to say. Whether everyone will want to accept her rigidly pure concept of the art of writing is another matter. Certainly, it will be easy to conclude that art is the nearest thing to a be-all and end-all in her existence. The bases of her position she has clearly marked out—so clearly, in fact, that the whole position may seem to approach rationalization. In short, one may be led to feel that her own peculiar experience has developed in her such a profound distrust of institutional religion and of human relationships that she has felt compelled to seek certainties elsewhere and that, consequently, her theory of art, beautiful and praiseworthy though it is, arises out of a peculiar personal necessity rather than out of a completely universal one. (pp. 386-87)

Miss Porter's pervading dislike of dogma and authoritarianism effectually prevents her acceptance of anything like neoclassical ideals in literature. Yet it leads her neither into a form of nineteenth-century Romanticism nor into sympathy with any of the various "revolutionary" schools of literature that have flourished so profusely in the twentieth century. The plain fact is that she wishes to be a classicist in the Greek tradition both in her practice and in her theory….

For the floodtide of experimentalism that came in the twenties, Miss Porter has patent contempt. "Every day in the arts," she writes, "as in schemes of government and organized crime, there was, there had to be something new," a principle that operated in crass failure to recognize that in reality there is nothing new except that which conforms to the true classical ideal of being "outside of time and beyond the reach of change." (p. 388)

Naturally, it would be erroneous to feel that Miss Porter's fundamental quarrel has been with the spirit of experimentalism itself. Rather is it, indeed, with what she considers to be the superficiality and unreason of most innovators and with the use of "tricky techniques and disordered syntax" to disguise "poverty of feeling and idea." For the innovations of an artist like Edith Sitwell the matter is quite different. In Miss Sitwell's early work, for example, Miss Porter finds a "challenging note of natural arrogance" that is completely admirable, because it was "boldly experimental" and "inventive from a sense of adventure" rather than from a paucity of ideas.

But even in Miss Sitwell it is rather a classical quality than her experimentalism qua experimentalism that Miss Porter genuinely admires…. [It is the] classical quality of "realism" that Miss Porter seeks in both poetry and prose and that provides reason for her praise of the "objectivity" of Henry James or Willa Cather or Katherine Mansfield or Eudora Welty. It is always the concrete detail and the exact statement that matters. (p. 389)

Miss Porter's serene consistency in her philosophy and her tolerance of nothing less than the highest standards of performance for herself as well as for others deserve the highest admiration. It is true, however, that, beneath the almost perfect poise of her manner, her rigid purism and her championship of art as effectually comprehending both morality and religion may at times seem less like a confession of faith than an act of desperation. Moreover, like the brave generalization about truth and beauty made by Keats in the presence of physical disintegration, her solution has never been a universally satisfactory one. Though this philosophy, however explicitly stated in the critical essays, may appear only implicitly in Miss Porter's fiction, its limitation curiously suggests a possible restriction of her total appeal. "All the conscious and recollected years of my life," she writes in the 1940 Preface to Flowering Judas, "have been lived to this day under the heavy threat of world catastrophe, and most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of these threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of life in the Western World." But these efforts to understand the failure of life in the Western world, however important they may be in her heart and mind, could hardly be said to be the major subject of her art. Indeed, her writing—imaginative and critical—seems more nearly an attempt to escape from the central problem. Perhaps the reason that her work, for all its beauty, does not etch itself indelibly on our consciousness is that it ultimately does not illuminate the supreme tragedy of which she speaks. Thus, whatever may be the acuity, the vitality, and even the nicely calculated violence of some of her stories, and whatever may be the strength of her utterance in other fields, she may continue to be regarded essentially as a lovely, white-robed priestess of the shrine of Apollo—a role that she seems deliberately and expertly to have written for herself. (pp. 390-91)