No exploration of Katherine Anne Porter's "personality" … can explain the success of her art: the scrupulous and expressive intricacy of structure, the combination of a precision of language, the revealing shock of precise observation and organic metaphor, a vital rhythmic felicity of style, and a significant penetration of a governing idea into the remotest details of a work. If, as V. S. Pritchett has put it, the writer of short stories is concerned with "one thing that implies many"—or much—then we have here a most impressive artist.

How did Katherine Anne Porter transmute life finally into art? In her journal of 1936, she herself provided a most succinct, simple, and precise answer to the question. All her experience, she writes, seems to be simply in memory, with continuity, marginal notes, constant revision and comparison of one thing with another. But now comes the last phase, that of ultimate transmutation: "Now and again, thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story."

The author here speaks as though each story were an isolated creation, called into being by the initial intuition of a theme. That, indeed, may have been her immediate perception of the process of composition. The work of any serious writer, however, is not a grab bag, but a struggle, conscious or unconscious, for a meaningful unity, a unity that can be recorded in terms of temperament or theme. In my view, the final importance of Katherine Anne Porter is not merely that she has written a number of fictions remarkable for both grace and strength, a number of fictions which have enlarged and deepened the nature of the story, both short and long, in our time, but that she has created an oeuvre—a body of work including fiction, essays, letters, and journals—that bears the stamp of a personality distinctive, delicately perceptive, keenly aware of the depth and darkness of human experience, delighted by the beauty of the world and the triumphs of human kindness and warmth, and thoroughly committed to a quest for meaning in the midst of the ironic complexities of man's lot.

Beyond generalizations, about her method of composition Katherine Anne Porter has given some more specific hints of the concerns underlying her work. In connection with the novel Ship of Fools, she once said all her literary life she had been obsessed with the attempt to "understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western World." This comment seems, at first glance, more cryptic than helpful, and may even evoke the suspicion that it springs from an unconscious need to establish the relation between the critically controversial novel and the earlier body of work seemingly so different. A review of her oeuvre reveals that, in spite of its sharp impression of immediacy, it is drenched in historical awareness.

Most obviously, we have the story of Miranda—a sharply defined person, but also a sort of alter ego of the author. In "Old Mortality," Miranda, first as a child, then as a young woman with a broken marriage returning to a family funeral, grows into an awareness of the meaning of myth and time. (pp. 10-11)

Later, in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, we see Miranda again, she and her lover set against the hysteria of war, the lover dying, she herself dying into a new order of life—the life of the great ruthless machine of the modern world. We can regard Pale Horse, Pale Rider as a thematic prologue to Ship of Fools, in which we see all entrapped in their own complicity with this infernal machine.

This question is always present in the work of Katherine Anne Porter: What does our history—of the individual or in the mass—mean? World War II is only one episode in that long question, with the horror of Nazism only an anguishing footnote to a great process in which we are all involved. In the face of the great, pitiless, and dehumanizing mechanism of the modern world, what her work celebrates is the toughness and integrity of the individual. And the great virtue is to recognize complicity with evil in the self. (p. 11)