SOURCE: “Systems and Patterns,” in Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction, The University of Georgia Press, 1985, pp. 60–105.

[In the following essay, Unrue explores Porter's attitude toward art, religion, politics, and philosophy as evinced in her short fiction.]

Katherine Anne Porter portrays persons who never look within and confront dark truths but look instead to external forms for affirmation of life's meaning. External forms, however, are made up of attractive deceptions, among which are codified aesthetic theories, philosophical and religious structures, political and revolutionary doctrines, social codes, and visible patterns. In pure form, art, religion, political and revolutionary ideas, and some philosophical tenets can point the way to truth by offering a sense of order that is a walkway to understanding. The problem lies in the systematizing of such sets of ideas, in their becoming ends unto themselves.

Porter believed that art and religion often were misused and became obstacles in the search for truth. She speaks of art's having the potential for making order out of this chaos that is the world, and she describes the artist's mission as that of the artificer of such order, but in her fiction she rarely depicts artists who have fulfilled the calling. She gives us “the martyr” Rubén, the shallow poets of “Flowering Judas,” the would-be poet of “That Tree,” “Hacienda”'s systematic Betancourt and ineffectual Carlos, and the struggling artists of “The Leaning Tower.” In the same way, saintly religieuses are scarce in Porter's fiction. Instead she has created many characters who illustrate perverted religion or impotent religion that has become merely a hollow shell, providing, as she said, only “orthodox answers” to “the oldest, most terrifying questions.”¹ She first develops the theme in “María Concepción,” where all the rituals and outward acknowledgments of the alien faith fall away under the blind force of primitive instinct.

When Porter wrote “María Concepción” in the early 1920s, she was seeing the effects of many centuries-long forces in Mexico. When Hernando Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519, he found a teeming Indian society with its own distinctive religions and with sophisticated scientific and artistic modes. But in spite of an admirable cultural level of the Aztecs and Mayans, the European conquerors were not content to let them exist unmolested; within a decade Pope Clement VII had sent twelve Franciscan friars to Mexico to convert the Indians to Christianity, and Augustinians and Dominicans soon followed. For the remainder of the sixteenth century the three orders built extensively, and the Roman Catholic Church imposed on the conquered Indians a new language and a new sociopolitical organization along with the new religion. In the three colonial centuries that followed, a rich and complex culture evolved that was characterized by racial blending and regional diversity. Over it all lay Hispanic customs, including worship practices, that were maintained by the aristocracy and its aspiring followers.²

It was not until the revolution of 1910 that the folk culture which had lain in the background for many years was brought forward and became a part of the larger movement that culminated in the reforms of 1917, when the authority of the church was reduced further. Tannenbaum explains the revolution of 1910 as simply “an attempt to liquidate finally the consequence of the Spanish Conquest.”³ This amalgam of cultures, one deeply rooted in the pre-Hispanic past and the other a transplanted one, is dramatically presented by Porter in “María Concepción.” When the two cultures are in conflict, as they are in the characters of María Concepción and Juan, the older culture, with its ties to primordial antiquity, is victorious. The natural, mythic religion is stronger than the religion that has been imposed from without.

It was not Catholicism in itself to which Porter was objecting. Having been baptized into Catholicism when she was twenty, she remained sensitive throughout her life to the beauties of the faith. Although her own religious views are more difficult to categorize, there was much in the ritual that appealed to her aesthetic sense, and some of the church's history satisfied her appreciation for spiritual vigor.⁴ In a letter to Caroline Gordon she said, in the stance of Henry Adams, that “a living practising born Catholic may be very healthy, is not nearly all art and literature of Western Europe Catholic, until the eighteenth century? And what health it has!”⁵ Rather she was objecting to what she once referred to as the “moral blackmail” of dogma, the codification of religion or the perversion of it, abuses she had seen so dramatically in Mexico that she came to use Catholicism as the primary representative of hollow religion.⁶

In her essay “The Mexican Trinity” she lists among the church's abuses, in collusion with the other two powers in the triumvirate, Land and Oil, an attempt to subjugate the Indian to get his land and an exercise of unholy power “in an intricate game of international politics” (CE, 403), activities she labeled “sinister.”⁷ Years later, in notes for an unpublished review of James Magner's Men of Mexico, she castigates the author for defending the Catholic church in Mexico, saying that “act for act, nothing the Mexican revolutionaries ever did could match in cold blooded wickedness the methodical oppression of the Indian by the Church and the throne of Spain.” She concludes that “in Mr. Magner's hands, truth becomes the most relative thing in the world. His impartial history is a piece of special pleading, an attempt to justify the unprincipled use of power by whatever means, and that Mr. Magner believes this power is divinely invested in the Catholic church is an added embarrassment to the reader.”⁸

Porter, however, saw the spirit of stymie in religion outside of Mexican Catholicism. For example, in her unfinished biography of Cotton Mather she illustrates the negative elements of religion that inversely feeds on itself, and Puritanical self-righteousness is observed in the poet's wife Miriam in “That Tree,” in the American Kennerly in “Hacienda,” in Rosaleen O'Toole's neighbors in “The Cracked Looking-Glass,” and in Mrs. Thompson in Noon Wine.⁹ In some stories it is simply the ineffectuality of dry religion that Porter treats, and whether the religion is Catholicism or Protestantism or a peculiar form of backwoods Fundamentalism is insignificant. In addition to its depiction in “Flowering Judas” as Laura's discarded faith, dry Catholicism is examined also in Porter's Irish Catholics and in Granny Weatherall. In “A Day's Work” Mr. and Mrs. Halloran rely on the church for form in their lives, but neither they nor the others in their particular Irish Catholic society appear to have an inner light of true understanding and contentment. Rosaleen O'Toole, another of Porter's Irish Catholics, finds no solace in the religion of her upbringing but seeks escape from reality in her fantasies; trying to recall only the ecstasies of the feast days, she ignores the less romantic but more elemental truths in her childhood faith.

Porter's darkest discourse on ineffectual religion occurs in “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Granny's religion could be any other religion, but Catholicism served Porter's theme best because of its refined and elaborate structure. Structure is inherently important to Granny, who has spent her life looking for truth through systems and patterns, and it is the failure of systematic religion that is terrifyingly dramatized in her dying hour. In her muddled thoughts she confuses her jilting with her dying, remembering that she had to face the priest on that long ago day without her bridegroom. Now, at the hour of her death, she is facing the priest again, without a bridegroom. “For the second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house” (CS, 89). In the final instance, the bridegroom is unmistakably Christ—and she has not found the meaning focused through His life that her religion has promised and which she expected to have before she died. “This grief” wipes everything else away, and she dies in “endless darkness” that curls “around the light and … [swallows] it up,” images that delineate her unenlightened state at her death.¹⁰

Although the theme of dry religion does not occupy a primary position in Noon Wine, it nevertheless is important in understanding the character of Mrs. Thompson. She had been a “popular Sunday School Teacher in the Mountain City First Baptist Church” before she married Mr. Thompson.¹¹ She continues all the rules of propriety within her religion, offering a “Christian invitation” to Mr. Helton to attend church with the family on Sunday, and worrying over Helton's soul when he refuses. But after her husband's killing of Hatch, the uselessness of her religion is seen in her inability to find in it solace for her suffering and courage to face social ostracization. Her religion fails to lead her to a higher truth, as the light's hurting her eyes symbolizes. She, in fact, wears shaded glasses to guard against it. Porter uses light here as she does in “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” to symbolize understanding, for Granny's blowing out the light symbolizes her relinquishment of the search for truth as much as it does her relinquishment of life.¹²

Porter viewed black magic, or spiritualism, as a form of religious perversion, dangerous rather than merely stifling or useless. When her sister Gay's child Mary Alice died, Porter's letters to her sister are full of sympathy and expressions of her own grief over this favorite little girl; occasionally she offered advice to Gay, who was struggling to accept the tragedy, and once she warns Gay about “keeping on with spiritualism.” She says, “I have gone about a bit here, and have seen one or two of the best—and spiritualism is a superstition for darkened minds. It is the same as a belief in witchcraft, and a personal devil. … It is not for enlightened people, or thinkers. And I tell you, emotion without intelligence is not worth anything.”¹³ She elaborates on this idea of witchcraft in her essay “The Flower of Flowers,” in which she writes, “Evil is dull, that is the worst of it, and black magic is the dullest of all evils” (CE, 153).

“Magic” is a little story about witchcraft, written about the same time as “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.”¹⁴ It is a Jamesian dialogue that subtly tells the reader something, however slight, about Madame Blanchard and her Creole maid, who tells her employer the story of the maid Ninette to entertain her while she dresses her hair.¹⁵ Ninette, according to the story, once worked in a New Orleans brothel where she saw many things Madame Blanchard “wouldn't believe” and the maid “wouldn't think of telling,” but she justifies the story she presents by saying, “Maybe it will rest you while I brush your hair” (CS, 39).

It is a story of extraordinary seaminess and cruelty, and it is told as a diversion for Madame, whose name coincidentally suggests her purity or her whiteness and thus her opposition to her dark-skinned maid and the characters in the narrative.¹⁶ The story turns upon a witchcraft charm in which the maid and apparently all the characters in her story put stock, even the cruel madam of the brothel. After the madam beat Ninette and threw her out for insubordination, men who had favored Ninette kept asking for her, and the madam saw that she had made a bad economic decision. Because Ninette had gone altogether out of Basin Street and thus out of the jurisdiction of the corrupt policemen who protected the brothel, the madam turned to the cook, who “lived among people who worked spells” and whom the madam trusted “above everything.” The charm which the cook used and which was said to work in New Orleans required their taking “the chamber pot of this girl from under her bed, and in it … [mixing] with water and milk all the relics of her they found there: the hair from her brush, and the face powder from the puff, and even little bits of her nails they found about the edges of the carpet where she sat by habit to cut her finger- and toe-nails; and they dipped the sheets with her blood into the water, and all the time the cook said something over it in a low voice” (41). The girl Ninette came back in seven nights and “after that she lived there quietly.” The irony in the story is provided in the sordidness and cruelty of the setting. The “magic” of the charm, like the “magic” of systematic religion, is shown to be an illusion. Ninette returns only because the loveless world that created her made it impossible for her to go anywhere else.

If the black magic underscores the loveless, mechanistic world of the brothel and the evil of the seamy world that surrounds it, its opposite is not seen in the character of Madame Blanchard, who interrupts the narrative to say only, “You are pulling a little here” or to close her perfume bottle “with a thin click” (40–41). She shows her interest in the story by saying, “And then what?” or “Yes, and then?” There are obvious contrasts between the two pairs, Madame Blanchard and her Creole maid and the brothel's madam and Ninette. But the ironic parallels are even more significant. Madame Blanchard by her lack of compassion nourishes the social evil, and none of the characters in the story reveals an understanding of life.

“Theft” is a story that has received considerable critical attention because of its complexity and puzzling conclusion. Although it is a study of the modern wasteland and of empty human relationships, it is also an ironic study in a systematic way of living. The system here is not atheism, an active disbelief in God, but rather is a code based on the absence of dynamic belief in anything. The protagonist of “Theft” has not replaced the missing or lost religion with anything so elaborately structured as Laura's revolutionary ideal, or even a philosophical stoicism, but she has replaced it with a stasis and what she boasts of as a “faith” in the honesty of others. A careful look at the passages which illuminate her static existence and her “faith,” however, reveals that the stasis is not the stability of reconciled opposing forces but is the paralysis of emotional apathy. And her faith that leads her to leave her doors unlocked is borne not out of a belief in the essential goodness of fellow human beings but is an indifference that grows out of her discomfort in “the ownership of things.” In short, she leaves her doors unlocked because she has no possessions she cares about protecting, and her faith is “a certain fixed, otherwise baseless and general faith which ordered the movements of her life without regard to her will in the matter” (64).

That Porter intended the reader to see the protagonist's set of actions as a replacement for a religion is supported in the numerous biblical allusions and in the religious structure of the story. Like the Christian imagery in “Flowering Judas,” the allusions and the structure of “Theft” act as an ironic standard to show the disparity between the active life of religious fervor and the static existence of irreligious dispassion.¹⁷ The three men in the protagonist's immediate past represent different versions of the same stasis or irreligion. Camilo, with whom she has just left a party at Thora's house, lives by a “set of smaller courtesies” that ignores “the larger and more troublesome ones” (59). His code of behavior is grounded on chivalric principles derived from his Latin heritage (like those principles that motivate the male characters in “Flowering Judas”); he walks the lady to the subway in the rain, risking her health and his own hat. She indulges his sentimentality as far as the foot of the platform and makes his remaining at the foot of the stairs a favor to herself, which he must honor. Only out of sight, or so he thinks, can he take off his new hat and hide it under his raincoat for protection.

She next meets Roger, who lives by no such romantic code. He already has his hat carefully buttoned inside his raincoat, his face consequently streaming with water. In the taxi she and Roger witness two scenes, one with three boys and one with two girls. In the first instance, two of the boys are razzing the other about his declaration that he will marry for love. They represent the opposition of sacred and profane love, and Roger's comment on the scene is “Nuts … pure nuts.” Neither extreme has any appeal to him because each represents a position or a belief. In the other scene the monologue of one of the girls apparently is a rejoinder to something the other has said, and it is filled with self-concern. “Yes, I know all about that. But what about me? You're always so sorry for him” (61). The full significance of the scene emerges later in the story. As the ride continues, Roger reveals that Stella, whoever she is, will be home, that “she's made up her mind and it's all settled.” The protagonist's comment that she thinks “it is time for you and Stella to do something definite” is ironic because Roger is not doing anything definite, only Stella is. Roger is like the protagonist. They are the passive recipients of other people's actions, exercising no will of their own. The narrator's rhetorical observation about Roger's show (“It's a matter of holding out, isn't it?”) represents both their habits of insulating themselves against involvement and protecting themselves against the exercising of will. It is significant that she and Roger have had “long amiable associations.”

The least admirable of the protagonist's male friends is Bill, who lives in her apartment building and exhibits the worst traits of all the characters in the story. He has no sense of chivalry, like Camilo, or even mild concern for the protagonist, as does Roger, who has told her to take aspirin and a hot bath to keep from getting a cold. Bill observes, “You're perfectly sopping,” when on his invitation she goes into his apartment for a drink, but he shows no concern for her health. He becomes the mirror of the adolescent girl's self-pity and self-indulgence as he complains about his wife's “ruinous” insistence on child support payments in the face of his own expenses (for costly luxuries). His distance from the Christian standard of charity is underscored ironically first when he calls to the protagonist, “For Christ's sake, come in and have a drink with me. I've had some bad news,” and later in his response to the protagonist's request that he pay her the fifty dollars he promised for some writing she had done for him. He says, “Weeping Jesus … you, too?” (62). Jesus wept out of pity but not self-pity. Bill's words are reminiscent of Juan Villegas's “Oh, Jesus! What bad luck overtakes a man” and look ahead to Braggioni's self-pitying sobbing while his wife washes his feet.

Alcohol is the catalyst for Bill's “feeling”—inverted as it is, and alcohol is the sacrament of all the main characters in the story. The protagonist and Camilo have left Thora's house “nicely set up on Thora's cocktails,” and Roger laments in the careening taxi, “I could do with a cocktail this minute.” The protagonist already has said, “I really must be drunk,” but she nevertheless has two more drinks with Bill before she goes to her apartment on the floor above. In the bohemian world in which the protagonist and her friends move, alcohol provides both the ecstasy and the insulation against feeling and commitment, making their apathy possible in the same way that pulque numbs the will of the Indians in “Hacienda.”

The rain motif in the story supports the biblical irony and points again to the wasteland theme of impiety. As the protagonist begins the reminiscence that is the major part of the story, she recalls that it was raining when she and Camilo left Thora's house. It was rain that triggered their actions: Camilo walks her to the elevated in order to share the inconvenience of the rain, but he will protect his new biscuit-colored hat from it when he can do so without losing face; Roger hastens the protagonist to a taxi in order to avoid the rain from which he already has protected his hat; the protagonist and Roger view the scenes with the boys and girls through the rain that distorts their sense of reality and causes the taxi to slide dangerously through the streets. Once in her apartment building, she goes toward her apartment after Roger has urged her to take a hot shower and aspirin to ward off the effects of the rain; and Bill, who wants company for his misery, looks at her soppiness with disgust. The point is that rain, the fructifying symbol, is avoided by these dry, impotent, unfeeling inhabitants of the twentieth-century wasteland. The religious meaning of water as cleansing or redemptive agent is lost on them. They want only to avoid it, and thus they avoid life itself.¹⁸

The structure of “Theft” is that of a religious myth, but ironically it does not lead to the high place of fulfillment. In the subway the protagonist is led away from “the elevated” by Roger, who says, “Come on let's take a taxi” (60). In her apartment the next morning, having realized that the janitress has taken her gold purse, she descends to the basement furnace room to confront the thief. The scene is filled with images of hell. The janitress, whose face is “streaked with coal dust,” is “shaking up the furnace,” the red light from which is reflected in her “hot flickering eyes” (63–64). The pattern is not completed, for following the symbolic descent into hell, the protagonist never ascends to true understanding. She does have a small insight, however, which in Porter's fiction is a significant accomplishment. She understands her losses, both “material and intangible,” that are brought together in the symbol of the purse. The losses have occurred because of her own failure of will and not because of active agents of adversity. There is no suggestion that the protagonist has had the kind of epiphany that will change her life, but by a trick of reversal she has been made to see a small truth about herself. The janitress who stole the purse from the protagonist tells her that in asking for its return she is stealing it from the niece who was intended to receive it. In momentarily seeing herself as thief, however, she is continuing her refusal to claim her possessions, whether the love of the absent Eddie, the love of either Camilo or Roger, the money Bill owes her, or the stolen purse. Despite the irrationality of the janitress's charge, through it the protagonist is able to see herself as thief in addition to victim and is able then to recognize the truth that through failure of will she is responsible for the things she has lost.

The religious structure of “Theft” is like that of other Porter stories, “María Concepción,” “Virgin Violeta,” “The Martyr,” “Magic,” “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” “Flowering Judas,” Noon Wine, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and “Holiday.” To some degree, in each of these there is a descent to the underworld. In most instances there is no real ascension. This pattern can be directly linked to writers like St. Augustine, Dante, and Spenser, whose works were continuing inspiration for Porter.¹⁹ The so-called Pauline pattern, central to The Faerie Queen and The Divine Comedy, is described by St. Augustine: “The fact is that every individual springs from a condemned stock and, because of Adam, must be first cankered and carnal, only later to become sound and spiritual by the process of rebirth in Christ.”²⁰ When Porter was describing her early plans for Old Mortality, she identified the working title of the middle part, “Midway of this Mortal Life,” as a translation of the first line from Dante's Inferno. She went on to explain that it referred to “the season in hell which any being who can think or feel must pass through at least once,” presumably before the pattern could be complete.²¹

That which makes the pattern incomplete is the missing self-sacrifice, the Adam or the Christ. The persons depicted in the world of the protagonist of “Theft” are either vain and shallow, like Camilo, kindly apathetic like Roger, self-indulgent like Bill, or unwilling to suffer like the missing Eddie, who writes that whatever they once had is no longer “worth all this abominable …” For the moment, she is simply looking on the emptiness of her rootless, fragmented existence and acknowledging, in however small a way, her responsibility for it.

Apathy particularly terrified Porter because she had seen the same kind of motiveless existence not only in her generation but in her own father. Near what would have been her father's one-hundredth birthday, had he lived, she wrote her nephew Paul that she had “never seen a more terrible example of apathy” or “an almost unconscious refusal to live” than in her father's life. “Let me tell you,” she says, “I have turned in hope to other strains in my ancestry, for I have sometimes felt myself under a curse with such a father; I had to find in other sources the courage to outlive and outgrow him.”²² She was even more explicit about the dangers of apathy when she discussed with friends Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, which Albert Erskine apparently had sent her. Referring to the hero of the novel, Geoffrey Firmin, she declared that it was his inability to believe in anything—his moral, psychic, and spiritual impotence—that led him to assist evil.²³ It is the theme that she develops fully in Ship of Fools.

According to Porter, mere sets of ideas fail to lead to truth. It was a failure she once summarized in a reference to “the mean sick little souls on a high falutin search for God via Kirkegaardism.”²⁴ In “Flowering Judas” she shows one failure of philosophy in Laura's “system” that is an alternative to the dying idealism. It is necessarily a philosophical one rather than religious because it is consciously adopted and mindfelt rather than heartfelt. Laura “persuades herself that her negation of all external events as they occur is a sign that she is gradually perfecting herself in the stoicism she strives to cultivate” (97).

“Holiday” also reveals the inability of philosophical systems to provide either balm for suffering or answers to crucial questions. The Müller family governs itself by a system of positivism, atheism, and Marxism, and they dredge up their Lutheran heritage for a ceremony at Mother Müller's death. All their systems fail, however, and the bewildered family cannot understand or articulate their grief. They scream and call and implore in “a tumult utterly beyond control” (431). None of Father Müller's philosophies brings him understanding or acceptance of his wife's death, and he is further unable to draw any conclusions about the meaninglessness of his own. Although he handles Das Kapital as if it were a Bible, the truth is that he no more adheres to Das Kapital than he does to the Christian Bible; it is only a superficial symbol of doctrinal obedience because he in fact uses his wealth to exploit poorer neighbors who disapprove of his atheism but are so dependent on him economically that they do his bidding. In the one instance he cites, despite their fear and dislike of him, they elect his son-in-law sheriff. More than any others among Porter's fictional characters, with the exception of Granny Weatherall, the Müllers symbolize the uselessness of patterned thoughts and philosophical systems in the face of life's mysteries.

Philosophical and religious systems often are tied to political and social systems in such a way that it is difficult to separate one from the other. Porter has warned of the dangers the artist faces if he or she links the aesthetic vision to a political end, and she likewise has warned of the dangers and evils of political religions and religious politics. All are perversions of the two primary possibilities for finding order in life's chaos. However, political systems, whether tied to religion or not, in time become corrupt shadows of their original intents, as Porter discovered firsthand in the Mexican cultural revolution.

When she first arrived in Mexico City in 1920, she was full of enthusiasm for the revolution that was going on there; no doubt her enthusiasm had been set into motion in Greenwich Village by Best-Maugard and other Mexican artists and idealists she had met there. Her letters to her family and friends during the early months after her arrival are heady with the excitement of the cultural and political climate and reveal the level of her idealism. In an early letter to her family, she says, “There are a thousand delicious things to tell you—of amazing contrasts and amusing situations.” And she continues by describing her exciting social schedule:

How one goes to a party at Chapultepec Castle one afternoon and drinks tea and champagne with the President—a former marauding General—and in no time at all attends the Lottery ticket sellers ball in company with the greatest Labor leader in Mexico—and many others—and dances until two o'clock with one-eyed men, and marvelous carbon colored Indians in scarlet blankets, who dance divinely—and one staggers home in the gray of the morning with vine leaves and confetti in one's hair. And goes that afternoon to a bull fight, and the next day to have tea.

In the same long letter she reiterates her excitement. “Life here is a continual marvel to the eye, and to the emotions,” she says. “Politically, Mexico is amazingly primitive. I meet all the holders of the government reins, and the process of governing is naively literal. … Later, I expect to be connected by a small thread to the affair, and now I dabble a bit at times, for it is very amusing.”²⁵ She later would describe her thread-connection to the amusing affair as a part of “that wild escapade to Mexico, where I attended, you might say, and assisted at, in my own modest way, a revolution.”²⁶

Her Leftist sympathies are apparent during these times in the activities and scenes she describes and in her references to her new acquaintances. She tells her family of her plans to teach dancing in the new Institute of Social Sciences, headed by “a socialist connected with the National University.” And she says that she is “to write a revolutionary text book of English for use in our Institute.” “Nobody,” she says, “seems to realize elsewhere that a full fledged revolutionary government is in full swing here, with everybody from the President down a seething radical.”²⁷

Her disdain for capitalists is as apparent as her admiration for some of the revolutionaries. She recreates for Gay a conversation she had with a representative of the Hearst papers before she left for Mexico. “I wouldn't work for Hearst, not for any price,” she declares, but says she returned the Hearst editor's call “to hear what was up.” She then says, “Here is the conversation exactly as I remember it—I mean the important parts:

Editor—“We want you to interview Pancho Villa for us. What is he really doing now that he has a ranch of his own under government protection? Has he reformed?”

I—“He didn't need to reform. He always was a perfectly good revolutionist working for the peons. But he is making interesting experiments on his ranch, I think—I mean such experiments as paying his workers a living wage, and establishing schools for their children.”

Ed—“Yes, I know that is what they are trying to tell us. I find it hard to swallow. Well, you can get help from the Mexican government in this, can't you?”

I—“What makes you think so?”

Ed—“I was told that you could. Why don't you manage it, and get us a corking story with pictures—you know what we want. Villa in all his glory, whiskers and guns if any, running his new show.”

I—“What else do you want?”

Ed—“How do you mean?”

I—“Do you mean to tell me you will pay all my expenses to get just a simple color story for your Sunday magazine?”

Ed—“O, we'll syndicate it, and make a lot of money out of it. But naturally, the more sensational your story is, the better we would like it—Listen to me! If you get us a good story with pictures, we will pay you twenty five hundred dollars and expenses. If you get kidnapped, we'll raise it to three thousand … and of course, any price if you make an international affair of it!!!!”

Ah, ha! Well, I declined with thanks, and got out, and am going to write a book on bandits, but not for Hearst. And I am going to put that story in the very beginning of the book. Wait and see.²⁸

By the same token, she speaks admiringly of the Habermans, Lincoln Steffens (“a charming teller of stories, a cynic, a follower of revolutions”), and others in the movement designed to correct long-standing social injustices in Mexico.²⁹

Before long, however, she was beginning to understand the complexity of events in Mexico, and although she had not lost her sympathy for the aims of the movement, she appears to have begun to lose some of her idealism. Among her notes and papers is the recording of some random thoughts about the “impossibility of writing a story at short notice on Mexico.” She says, “It may be five years before I can really write about Mexico. I am not one of those amazing folk who can learn people or countries in a fortnight. They come dashing in here, stay two weeks, gather endless notes and dash out again. In two more weeks their stories are in the weekly reviews. While here am I, not yet able to say for sure that the things I see are the true state of affairs. Or that my present impressions of Mexico are rightly proportioned. Or that if I write profoundly of events here at the moment I shall not be making a profound idiot of myself.” She summarizes the difficulty as the thing's “being too complex and scattered and tremendous. I want first of all to discover for myself what this country is. Everybody I meet tells me a different story. Nothing is for me but to wait, and gather my own account.”³⁰ She says more or less the same in “The Mexican Trinity,” published in July 1921: “I have been here for seven months, and for quite six of these I have not been sure of what the excitement is all about. Indeed, I am not yet able to say whether my accumulated impression of Mexico is justly proportioned; or that if I write with profound conviction of what is going on I shall not be making a profoundly comical mistake. The true story of a people is not to be had exclusively from official documents, or from guarded talks with diplomats. Nor is it to be gathered entirely from the people themselves.” And perhaps her most telling statement in the essay concludes the second paragraph: “The life of a great nation is too widely scattered and complex and vast; too many opposing forces are at work, each with its own intensity of self-seeking” (CE, 399–400).

The essay continues to explore the forces within Mexico that are at cross-purposes, primarily the big three: Land, Oil, and the Church. Her loss of idealistic expectations and her disillusion with the government were apparent in a letter she had written to Paul Hanna some two months earlier: “Things happen so quickly here, I have not been able to record them. From one day to the next, events were monstrously out of proportion. I gave false values to everything. Now that they are finished, or nearly so, they are all dwindled to the true measures of their triviality. I can write of them now.” She describes to Hanna the troubles there: “We are having deportations, riots, arrests; an elaborately prepared comedy of respectability is being staged by the Mexican government with the American high politicians as directors.”³¹

When Porter was planning “María Concepción,” she wrote that “the revolution has not yet entered into the souls of the Mexican people,” and she contrasted the Mexican revolution to the Russian revolution, the difference being that the Russian revolution had been “made” by the Russian writers. Mexican writers, Porter declared, were concerned with nothing more important than “the pain of unrequited love” (CE, 401–402). The problem, however, went beyond the absence of serious writers, for as she observed, the Indian could not read. “What good would a literature of revolt do them?” she asks.

But if the Indian could not read, he nevertheless could see, and Porter credits the muralists for providing the revolutionary spark that the writers had failed to offer. The painters made it possible for the Indians to “read” their history on the walls. Porter in fact said that the Mexican renaissance began with Diego Rivera's entry into Mexico in 1922 and “kept up nicely for about four years. Riots, manifestos, and manifestations, syndicates, shows, a fine warm hullabaloo, all mixed up with politics on the one hand and personal animosities on the other. … And some damned fine work came out of it.”³²

When, in her interview with Barbara Thompson, Porter was remembering early experiences in Mexico, she said of the Revolution that “it was a terribly exciting time. It was alive, but death was in it.”³³ That hindsight is not reflected in her early letters from Mexico, even after she had begun to see some of the problems within the movement. But by the end of the twenties, when she was writing “Flowering Judas” and “Hacienda,” she was able to trace astutely the failure of the revolution through fictional characterization. In 1941 she wrote that “there exist documents of political and social theory which belong, if not to poetry, certainly to the department of humane letters. They are reassuring statements of the great hopes and dearest faiths of mankind and they are acts of high imagination. But all working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate.”³⁴

In “Flowering Judas” Porter shows the vestiges of great hopes and dearest faiths that have nearly run out. When she described to Thompson the genesis of the story, she told, as she does elsewhere, of walking past a window and seeing her friend Mary sitting with a big fat man. She says that Mary was not able “to face her own nature” then but that she herself was “more skeptical.”³⁵ Laura represents the alien who came to Mexico “uninvited” to participate in the revolution. In so doing she ostensibly had to abandon her own Catholicism and take on the “religion” of revolution because the church was an enemy of the revolution in Mexico. One supposes that Laura has joined the revolution with the kind of fervor that shows in Porter's own early remarks about it. But now Laura has become disillusioned with the hypocrisy of the movement, even with her own participation. She goes to union meetings, takes food, cigarettes, messages, and a little money to prisoners, “smuggles letters from headquarters to men hiding from firing squads in the back streets in mildewed houses,” borrows money from one agitator to give to another, and teaches English to Indian children. But Laura feels betrayed. Her idealistic view of the revolution has not been borne out. “Sometimes she wishes to run away, but she stays” because “she has promised herself to this place; she can no longer imagine herself as living in another country, and there is no pleasure in remembering her life before she came here.” She cannot define “the nature of this devotion, its true motives, … its obligations” (CS, 93). Like many other outsiders who came to aid in the revolution, she feels obligated to stay through to some conclusion, even in the face of disillusionment.

Braggioni is the symbol of Laura's disillusions, for she had thought of a revolutionist as “lean, animated by heroic faith, a vessel of abstract virtues,” essentially a Christ figure. Braggioni's distance from this standard is implied in all the descriptions of him. The irony is established early in the story when “the Indian maid meets Laura at the door and says with a flicker of a glance towards the upper room, ‘He waits’” (90). He who is waiting has already been described as “sitting there with a surly, waiting expression, pulling at his kinky yellow hair, … snarling a tune under his breath,” surely not the description of a “vessel of abstract virtues.” The reference to the upper room is an allusion to the place of the Last Supper, and the maid's warning, “He waits,” is an allusion to Christ.³⁶ The story thus is framed by symbolic, if ironic, allusions to the sacred supper at which Christ and his disciples celebrate the Passover, significantly a celebration of one people's escape from bondage. It is at the Last Supper that Jesus instructs his disciples in the meaning of feet washing, that the Sacrament of Holy Communion is observed, and that Jesus predicts Judas's betrayal. Later in the story Mrs. Braggioni washes her husband's feet, Laura symbolically betrays herself, and in her dream she participates in a parody of Holy Communion.

Braggioni once had been closer to Laura's revolutionary ideal; he once at least had been “lean,” if not animated by heroic faith. Indeed, “once he was called Delgadito by all the girls and married women who ran after him; he was so scrawny all his bones showed under his thin cotton clothing, and he could squeeze his emptiness to the very backbone with his two hands. He was a poet and the revolution was only a dream then” (98). He has forgotten his hunger, however, and in spite of his incompetent singing is a symbolic figurehead of the poets who write “about romance and the stars, and roses and the shadowy eyes of ladies, touching no sorrow of the human heart other than the pain of unrequited love.” In fact, it was unrequited love that animated Braggioni. “When he was fifteen, he tried to drown himself because he loved a girl, his first love, and she laughed at him. ‘A thousand women have paid for that.’” And so he indulges himself with food and women and nourishes his self-love. “Too many women loved him and sapped away his youth, and he could never find enough to eat anywhere, anywhere!” He has good food and abundant drink … and enjoys plenty of sleep in a soft bed beside a wife who dares not disturb him; and he sits pampering his bones in easy billows of fat. He tells Laura, “One woman is really as good as another for me, in the dark. I prefer them all” (99). He perfumes his hair with imported Jockey Club.

The same ideal motivates others in the story who mirror Braggioni's misplaced fervor. For example, the “shock-haired youth” who serenades Laura is “one of the organizers of the Typographers Union,” and yet he spends hours on consecutive nights singing to Laura “like a lost soul” and following her by day “at a certain fixed distance around the Merced market, through the Zócolo, up Francisco I. Madero Avenue, and so along the Paseo de la Reforma to Chapultepec Park, and into the Philosopher's Footpath.”³⁷ His movement is a superficial pattern only, however, because he has not the zeal or vision of the leaders whose names adorn the streets and parks of the city, monuments to the true revolutionary spirit. He begins also to write poems to Laura which he prints on a wooden press (why else but for wider distribution?), and Laura knows that his “unhurried” and watchful black eyes “will in time turn easily towards another subject” (96). Another version of the same chivalric lover is seen in the attentions of the young captain who once had been a soldier in Zapata's army and who now channels his fervor into “amusing” ardor for Laura. He writes to Laura: “I am a very foolish, wasteful, impulsive man. I should have first said I love you, and then you would not have run away. But you shall see me again” (96). The ideal they are expressing is neither tragic nor graceful but is the “most trivial” version of romantic love which Porter described as “the pretty trifling of shepherd and shepherdess” (CE, 185).

Braggioni is the professional revolutionist. He wages war for gain and not for idealistic commitment. But he acts the part of the idealist well. When “crafty men” whisper in his ear, “hungry men … wait for hours outside his office for a word with him,” or “emaciated men with wild faces waylay … him at the street gate with a timid, ‘Comrade, let me tell you …,’” he is always sympathetic (CS, 98). He gives them handfuls of small coins from his own pocket, he promises them work, he tells them “there will be demonstrations, they must join the unions and attend the meetings, above all they must be on the watch for spies. They are closer to him than his own brothers, without them he can do nothing—until tomorrow, comrade!” Tomorrow of course will never come, for Braggioni is in fact cruel and unsympathetic and says to Laura, “They are stupid, they are lazy, they are treacherous, they would cut my throat for nothing.” He says of Eugenio who has taken all the drugs that Laura brought him because he was bored, “He is a fool, and his death is his own business. … We are well rid of him” (100–101). He also tells her that he himself is rich, “not in money … but in power, and this power brings with it the blameless ownership of things and the right to indulge his love of small luxuries” (93). Braggioni is so far removed from the original revolutionary zeal that he cannot understand why Laura is involved in the revolution at all, “unless she loves some man who is in it” (100).

This, then, is the death that was in the revolution. The heroic faith is not present in the “revolutionaries” who are left to carry on the fight. In this sense Braggioni and the shock-haired youth and Eugenio and Laura and the Zapatista captain have betrayed the revolution. They simply go through the motions of being revolutionaries but without idealistic commitment. The failure of the revolution, however, is centered in the Braggionis, who consistently have been interpreted in a particular light. Bad as Braggioni is, he has been regarded by most critics to be salvageable in that he after all is moved to contrition and tears by his sad-eyed wife's washing his feet. Mrs. Braggioni, by the same token, has been regarded as a foil to Laura and as one whose capacity for love and forgiveness enables her husband to transcend his human weakness. Laura's view of Mrs. Braggioni as one “whose sense of reality is beyond criticism” has been interpreted to mean that Mrs. Braggioni is an ideal in the story. However, a more careful look at Mrs. Braggioni and at the feet-washing scene reveals that both she and her husband have misplaced values. Feminism was an important part of the revolution, and Mrs. Braggioni is active in the feminist movement. She “organizes unions among the girls in the cigarette factories, and walks in picket lines, and even speaks at meetings in the evening.” The narrative voice adds, “But she cannot be brought to acknowledge the benefits of true liberty” (99). The irony lies in the two meanings of “liberty,” neither of which she accepts. She does not free herself from male domination and yet will not concede to Braggioni's freedom from fidelity. “I tell her I must have my freedom, net. She does not understand my point of view,” Braggioni says. Mrs. Braggioni may be a feminist leader, but she is not a true feminist. It is significant that we never know her given name; she is known only as an extension, or a possession, of her husband. She is not dedicated to an idea but to a man.

As tempting as it is to see Braggioni's tears as a sign of his redemption, the tears clearly are tears of only self-love and self-pity. Braggioni's vanity is his most obvious trait from the outset; Laura listens to him “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” (90–91). “The excess of self-love” has flowed out, “inconveniently for her, over Laura.” And it is evident again when Braggioni enters his own house and sees his wife weeping, as she has done every night since he left. He is filled with tenderness at seeing her love for him. That love he can understand. She asks him whether he is tired, and it is then that he bursts into tears. “Ah, yes, I am hungry, I am tired …” (101). Tired? Braggioni can be tired only from “the labor of song.” And hungry? Braggioni has not been hungry for years. Mrs. Braggioni, cast in the image of Mary Magdalen, has placed a poor substitute in a god's role.

In addition to her betrayal of the female principle, Laura also has betrayed the revolutionary ideal because she has refused to admit to the absence of proper zeal among the leaders like Braggioni. She has protected herself against the reality of the revolution by protecting herself against feeling. Eugenio's total negation of feeling is the extreme of Laura's repression of feeling. It is that to which she is destined, if she continues her course. And therein lies an additional horror.

Among Porter's papers is a sketch hand-dated 1921, preliminary to the story that undoubtedly became “Flowering Judas.” It is not inconsistent with her description of the genesis of the story in her interview with Thompson and in Whit Burnett's This Is My Best, and it does help illuminate the character of Laura.³⁸ It is worth examining carefully:

Yudico cam[e] tonight bringing his guitar, and spent the eve[ning] singing for Mary.

Mary sat in a deep chair at the end of the table, under the light, a little preoccupied, infallible and kindly attentive. She is a modern secular nun. Her mind is chaste and wise, she knows a great deal about life at twenty three, and is a virgin but faintly interested in love. She wears a rigid little uniform of dark blue cloth, with immaculate collars and cuffs of narrow lace made by hand. There is something dishonest, she thinks in lace contrived by machinery. She is very poor, but she pays a handsome price for her good, honest lace, her one extravagance.

Being born Catholic and Irish, her romantic sense of adventure has guided her very surely to the lower strata of revolution. Backed by a course of economics at the Rand School, she keeps her head cool in the midst of opera bouffe plots, the submerged international intrigue of her melodramatic associates.

She had meant to organise the working women of Mexico into labour unions. It would all have worked beautifully if there had been any one else in the whole country as clear and straight minded as Mary. But there wasn't, and she has got a little new pucker of trouble between her wide set grey eyes, within four weeks of her arrival. She doesn't in the least comprehend that revolution is also a career to the half dozen or so initiates who are managing it, and finding herself subtly blocked and hindered at every turn, she set it down to her own lack of understanding of the special problems of labour in Mexico. … She has been bludgeoned into a certain watchful acquiescence by that phrase. So that now she has the look of one who expects shortly to find a simple and honest solution to a very complicated problem. She is never to find it.³⁹

When the notes were made Porter would have been in Mexico probably less than a year, but according to published essays and her letters to Paul Hanna, she already had lost many of her illusions. The story “Flowering Judas,” completed some years later, relies upon the essential elements of the sketch, but Mary has become Laura, Yúdico has become Braggioni, and it is Mrs. Braggioni who organizes the working women. In the note Mary has been jolted into the realization that no one else in the revolution is “as clear and straight minded” as she is. And so she “has got a little new pucker of trouble between her wide set grey eyes.” But she nevertheless “has the look of one who expects shortly to find a simple and honest solution to a very complicated problem. The Laura of the published story, however, is a step beyond the Mary of the sketch. She no longer expects to find a simple solution. She has glimpsed the reality and the dangers and has avoided both by withdrawing to a state of deadened feeling while simply carrying out the ritual of the revolution. “Like a good child,” she “understands the rules of behavior” (92).

Revolution that aims at correcting authoritarian abuses originates the left of the political spectrum, and the left in theory was attractive to Porter in the twenties and thirties as it was to many intellectuals and artists of the times. Porter flirted with Communism for a while because she saw it as offering the best hope for solving the world's social injustices, and like many of her contemporaries, she was particularly sympathetic to the Russian revolution. She told an interviewer that “there was a time, almost, when if I hadn't been in Mexico I might really have gone left.” She says, “But I was inoculated against communism down there. I saw the way they worked, the way they behaved to each other, to say nothing of the way they behaved to me!”⁴⁰ Nevertheless, in 1933 in a letter to Peggy Cowley, she says flatly, “I was a Communist twelve years ago.”⁴¹ That would have placed her “membership”—we can only speculate whether it was formal—in the party in 1921, when she wrote to Paul Hanna about Morones, whom she described as “a Bolshevik, a perfectly good one”—and added, “It is not a defamation of character to call a man that in this country.”⁴²

Whatever idealistic faith she might have had in the idea of Communism must have evaporated before she passed much time in Mexico. Long before she finished “Flowering Judas” or made her statement about “all working practical political systems,” she had come to see Communism as a once good idea that had become codified. As early as 1926 she was voicing criticism of systematic Communism. Commenting on the second issue of the Marxist organ New Masses, she says it is “better than the first maybe, but yet none so good.” She asks, “What makes them all so glassy-sharp, and ill-humored, and why do they write so very badly about everything?” And then laments, “I still hope for something sound, simple, intelligent and warm from some of them. But they are radical in the manner of the petty bourgeoisie convicted of … the commonplace. That's only one way of being progressive, and I believe the least effective.”⁴³

Thereafter, sprinkled through her letters and essays are statements about the dangers of political systems. In a letter to the editor of the Nation, 11 May 1947, Porter discusses the relative dangers of Communists and Fascists and advocates a moderate position unpopular with liberals at the time.⁴⁴ But her position moved again left in the same year when she attended a “Town Meeting of the Air” debate and was appalled at the tactics of the Anti-American Activities Committee. She was offended by the committee's supporter, California State Senator Jack Tenney, who relied, according to Porter, on “intuition and rumor” and “seized every opportunity to shout ‘Red, Communists’ into the microphone, whether in turn or out of it.” She said it seemed to her “that there were a great number of people in that house who don't like Communism, and who will fight it, but not in the Senator's company.” She concluded, “I still don't know how many Communists there are in Hollywood, nor where they are; but I will trust Mr. Dekker and Mr. Lavery and that audience to fight them more effectively than any number of Anti-American Activities Committees, whose activities have seemed to me from the beginning the most un-American thing I know.”⁴⁵

A few years later, in a review of E. M. Forster's Two Cheers for Democracy, she had occasion to comment about her and Forster's participation in the International Congress of Writers in 1935 in Paris. She says that she “distrusted the whole thing for good reasons and attended only on the one evening when Mr. Forster was to speak. At that time, the Communists were busy dividing the whole world into two kinds of people: Fascist and Communist. They said you could tell Fascists by their abhorrence of culture, their racial prejudices, and their general inhumanity. This was true. But they said also that Communists were animated solely by a love of culture and the general good of their fellow man. Alas, this was not true.”⁴⁶

If Porter's hand-dating of the sketch that became “Flowering Judas” is accurate, then she must have planned and thought about the story long before she actually wrote it or published it. That would help explain the difference in theme between it and “Hacienda,” which appeared only two years after “Flowering Judas.” If “María Concepción” pointed out some of the great difficulties facing the revolution, and if “Flowering Judas” depicted the played-out revolution with only shallow leaders left, then “Hacienda” shows the aftermath of the failure. Harry Mooney, Jr., in The Fiction and Criticism of Katherine Anne Porter, complains that the narrator of “Hacienda” “makes no effort to go beyond the surface of any given situation” and “has no integral function in the story itself.”⁴⁷ The disappointment many reviewers expressed in “Hacienda” had to do in part with the story's viewpoint and the seeming lack of plot. However, if “Hacienda” is considered an extension of “Flowering Judas,” the narrator and the story become more logical. The narrator of “Hacienda” is present at the postmortem of the revolution, but she has succeeded in detaching herself from the pain of it—precisely what Laura in “Flowering Judas” was in the process of doing.

In a letter to Ernestine Evans, notes to which survive among Porter's papers, Porter recorded a number of impressions that are relevant to an understanding of “Hacienda.” She begins by saying, “I always travel on walloping little tubs and sleep in a berth, and the pen refuses to stick between my fingers,” a scene which anticipates the train ride in the story. She describes her disillusionment with the revolution and with her part in it. “Mexico is a curious place,” she says, “a very strange place, but not surprising, for it is rather the place a great many persons—myself a little included—have helped to make in the past ten years. God knows I was not working towards this end consciously, but my short-sightedness is to blame.” Some of the evidence of the revolution's failure lies in the poverty of the Indians, she implies, as she says, “The Indian is poorer than ever, his heels are cracked as deeply, his face as despairing.” And then she names the hypocrisies that are further indicators of the failure of the aims of the revolution. She speaks of the primitives who come to paint the poor Indian and see him as “a more paintable object,” but they are “make-believe primitives.” Like others, she believes that Diego Rivera has become corrupt; she says with high irony, “But the Mexican Renascence is in full swing, with Diego getting … twenty-two thousand dollar[s] … from Morrow—the Good Will Ambassador—to spoil Cortes palace with his dummies—and is paying his assistant, a talented Russian painter, with three children, five pesos a day.” The Avenida Madero, named for the 1910 revolutionist, has been taken over with “lousy … Arty Shoppes where you pay a peso for a blue goblet that used to cost ten centavos.” She continues the catalog of corruption:

Bill Spratling sleeps with his mozo, and encourages the laquerware industry, and the Sonora News is stacked up with raw, crude and frightful objects in this craft. An American woman went to Tonala—which was a town famous for its fine pottery when the Spaniard came to show the Tonala potters how to “refine” their product and make it more acceptable to the market. I've forgotten the animal's name, but I have seen enough of the bastard stuff she turns out. The much advertised Fresh Air Schools mostly take it out in publicity, there are no funds for their support. One of the Esculeas de Bellas Artes gets its main revenue by making and painting fancy beds—with American canned paints—and carving imitation Aztec statues for the house and garden of one of our more homosexual politicians. The major opus is a squat female figure with a hose attachment running under the seat, through the vagina, and arranged to spout water from one of the breasts. The country is stuffy with Hubert Herrings holding seminars, and desiccated females looking for romance and attaching themselves to such nice, such charming inverts, and good old Frank Tannenbaum still busily “writing up” in his faithful wooden way, everything he sees, with statistics to back him up, and a thesis to begin with. He can't move a leg without a thesis as a crutch.⁴⁸

She also writes about the Crane Foundation (“the fancy plumbing fixtures company”) which “has a representative here taking surveys of this and that, acting on the official, but secret, dream of gaining moral power by boring into the country, like a worm, and establishing himself as the Mexican member of a little group of the Elect, such as Pythagoras and Plato dreamed of. They're going to achieve this by helping establish Big Business Firms in the different countries, preaching the gospel of higher standards of living—which will of course include fancy plumbing, and aiding the government they live under so effectively that they will become men to be reckoned with.”

One can imagine Porter's sitting down with the notes to this letter to Evans as she is reconstructing “Hacienda” for the second version and finding in them the inspiration for the long train ride that begins the story and the train and automobile rides that conclude it. The letter in fact contains a great many important clues to the story's meaning. In addition to the evidence of decay and perversion she cites, throughout much of the letter Porter's own bitterness, resignation, and self-blame are apparent and are a believable sequence to Laura's sense of being betrayed and her attempt to escape the force of the horror by withdrawing from feeling, appropriate reactions that are a prelude to the complete moral objectivity of the narrator of “Hacienda,” who simply looks on and records the events and the scene without participating in them. The hypocrisies and perversions Porter treats somewhat obliquely in “Flowering Judas” are described in lurid detail in the letter and presented artistically in the second version of “Hacienda.”

The train and the automobile are more than a framing device for the story; they become important symbols in the narrative, extensions of Braggioni's Sunday morning automobile ride down the Reforma and his own identification with machine imagery. Whereas in “Flowering Judas” machines symbolize antilife forces, in “Hacienda” they serve as reminders of the revolution's failure. Machines were to free the peons from servitude to the land and were to raise their standard of living. After a decade, however, the lives of the peons have been transformed in only one way by the machine. Now a train's engine, “mysteriously and powerfully animated, draws them lightly over the miles they have so often counted step by step” (136). But it is a mere illusion of movement, a journey to nowhere, because the plight of the Indian remains unchanged.

Both the illusion of change and the inevitability of change are especially important elements in the revised version of “Hacienda.”⁴⁹ Shortly before the first version was published, when Porter already may have started thinking about the revised version that would appear two years later, she discussed at length her philosophy of change in a letter to William Hale, whose recent study of nineteenth-century romanticism she had read. She calls his work “a bill of particulars against our present times,” but she cautions him against advocating change without specifying what the change should be, implying that change for change's sake is dangerous. She goes on to explain her theory of immutability. She says that trying to recover something of the past (Goethe's philosophy is the example she cites) is “fatal, because, since all life is a change and a becoming, all definite rules are inevitably outdated certainly within two generations and sometimes earlier, unless they are modified by the minds that accept them, and gradually become something else.”⁵⁰

The theme of change versus immutability is advanced in the very first paragraph of “Hacienda” II when a mildly bitter narrative voice says, “Now that the true revolution of blessed memory has come and gone in Mexico, the names of many things are changed, nearly always with a view to an appearance of heightened well-being for all creatures” (135). Growing out of that thematic germ, several truths become apparent in the developing story: change sometimes is an illusion; mere motion is sometimes confused with change; immutability is impossible; and change itself does not ensure melioration. The appearance of change is mistaken for true change, as in the case of the young Indian who boards the train to tell Andreyev of the shooting at the hacienda. Because he is playing the leading role in the film, he is followed by “several of his hero-worshipers, underfed, shabby youths, living happily in reflected glory” (146–47). He has double fame because he also is a pugilist, and with “a brilliant air of self-confidence” he approaches Andreyev's group “with the easy self-possession of a man of the world accustomed to boarding trains and meeting his friends” (147). But the change is an acquired one, and “the pose would not hold. His face, from high cheekbones to square chin, from the full wide-lipped mouth to the low forehead, which had ordinarily the expression of professional-boxer histrionic ferocity, now broke up into a charming open look of simple, smiling excitement.” Assigning new names to people and things does not change their essential natures or basic truths; and sometimes a change in a truth makes a name no longer accurate. Velarde, for example, may once have been a true revolutionist. But now, although he is called “the most powerful and successful revolutionist in Mexico,” the truth is that he is the opposite, an entrepreneur and an oppressor.

Those who mistake motion, the medium of change, for change itself, consider speed to be still better. Like the Indians, don Genaro prefers speed, but he favors high-powered automobiles rather than trains and is “thinking of an airplane to cut the distance between the hacienda and the capital.” The narrative voice says flatly that “speed and lightness at great expense was his ideal” (151). The illusoriness of his ideal is revealed in the fact that he is always late. As Betancourt observes, “Always going at top speed, … 70 kilometers an hour at least, and never on time anywhere” (154).

For others it is the seemingly unchanged nature of the hacienda that has an appeal. Andreyev explains to the narrator why the hacienda was chosen for the filming:

“It was really an old-fashioned feudal estate with the right kind of architecture, no modern improvements to speak of, and with the purest type of peons. Naturally a pulque hacienda would be just such a place. Pulque-making had not changed from the beginning, since the time the first Indian set up a rawhide vat to ferment the liquor and pierced and hollowed the first gourd to draw with his mouth the juice from the heart of the maguey. Nothing had happened since, nothing could happen. Apparently there was no better way to make pulque. The whole thing,” he said, “was almost too good to be true. An old Spanish gentleman had revisited the hacienda after an absence of fifty years, and had gone about looking at everything with delight. ‘Nothing has changed,’ he said, ‘nothing at all!’”

(CS, 142).

Andreyev and the old Spanish gentleman are wrong, of course, for even if the architecture and the method of making the pulque have remained the same, other things have changed. Moreover, stasis itself is death, which paradoxically is also change; the pervasive smell of decaying maguey underscores the “change” at the hacienda, which is a microcosm of postrevolutionary Mexican society.⁵¹

The story of don Genaro and doña Julia illustrates particularly well the social death that the revolution has caused. Don Genaro has claimed his right to philandering, as was customary within the aristocratic conventions of the past. But doña Julia is not a part of the old tradition, and she does not behave in a traditional way. She is “modern … very modern,” she says, with “no old-fashioned ideas at all” (143). It is this modernity that offends don Genaro's grandfather, “a gentleman of the very oldest school,” who thinks of this woman his grandson marries as only fit for a “gentleman's education” but totally inappropriate to marry. When doña Julia becomes the lesbian lover of her husband's mistress, don Genaro does not know what to do. “He had borne with his wife's scenes because he really respected her rights and privileges as a wife. A wife's first right is to be jealous and threaten to kill her husband's mistress” (144). The Julia-Lolita affair is one more example of the breakdown of the patriarchal system of the past, but it has been replaced with unnaturalness, perversions, and hypocrisies. Integrity, pride, and strength have decayed, showing what happens when aristocrats lose place, as in Chekhov's plays and Faulkner's fiction. Little doña Julia, who represents decay and unnaturalness, is more in control of events than is her husband, “who had no precedent whatever for a husband's conduct in such a situation.” He “made a terrible scene, and pretended he was jealous of Betancourt” (145).

Decay and pretense are pervasive. The actress Lolita dresses for the film in costumes circa 1898, and yet in reality she is as far removed from being an aristocratic lady as possible. Doña Julia, likewise, loves “Chinese dress made by a Hollywood costumer” and walks “softly on her tiny feet in embroidered shoes like a Chinese woman's.” Her eyes are painted “in the waxed semblance of her face,” and she appears “to be an exotic speaking doll” (152). The baby image, a perversion of womanhood that found its greatest expression in the American songs and female attire of the twenties, is carried still further. Doña Julia, in her husband's frequent absences—it is his wont to roar away in one of his powerful automobiles when troubles start—sits at the head of the table, “a figure from a Hollywood comedy, in black satin pajamas adorned with rainbow-colored bands of silk, loose sleeves falling over her babyish hands” (154). Like a child, she does not want to go to bed at night. “Let's go on with the music,” she says to the narrator. “I love sitting up all night. I never go to bed if I can possibly sit up” (161). Her room, which is “puffy with silk and down, glossy with bright new polished wood and wide mirrors,” is made “restless with small ornaments, boxes of sweets, French dolls in ruffled skirts and white wigs.” The narrator observes that the air in doña Julia's room is “thick with perfume which fought with another heavier smell” (161). The heavier smell is literally the smell of fermenting pulque, but it is figuratively the smell of death: the death of the old feminine ideals of gentility, procreation, and patience, and the old male ideals of strength and honor […].

Stepanov is more enigmatic than Andreyev. He is a champion at tennis, polo, and billiards, an expert pilot, and, one presumes, an expert photographer; in fact, “he excelled in every activity that don Genaro respected.” He captures reality with the camera in ways that don Genaro, doña Julia, Kennerly, and others cannot understand. When Kennerly accusingly asks why he missed the opportunity to film the murder as it really happened, Stepanov responds, “Light no good, probably.” Then “his eyes flickered open, clicked shut in Kennerly's direction, as if they had taken a snapshot of something and that episode was finished” (163). Kennerly continues to complain, and Stepanov says to the narrator, “The light, … it is always our enemy” (163). As she does in other stories, Porter is pointing out that truth is the enemy of some people, in this instance Kennerly.

One other character is worth noting. The last night at the hacienda the narrator is “learning a new card game with a thin dark youth who was some sort of assistant to Betancourt. He was very sleek and slimwaisted and devoted, he said, to fresco painting, ‘only modern, … like Rivera's, the method, but not old-fashioned style like his’” (168–69). He goes on to tell the narrator that he is decorating a house in Cuernavaca and invites her to come look at it. He may be partially modeled on Juan O'Gorman and partially on David Siqueiros, and he represents change within change. In 1922 Rivera had been the radical destroyer of the old aesthetic standards, and now a decade later there is a need to revolutionize Rivera himself. This is change that is inevitable, growing out of the staleness of any movement. Rivera in time has become old-fashioned.⁵²

The revolutionary background to “Hacienda” is always evident. Although the picture of Porfirio Díaz in the background is intended by the filmmakers to date the events depicted in the film, it assumes an ironic meaning in Porter's story. When Díaz became president in 1866, succeeding the Juárez regime, he instituted some reforms and programs that led to greater prosperity for Mexico. He was a dictator, however, and as the years passed he became more and more autocratic and more and more entrenched in his ways. By 1910 there was strong sentiment against him, even much hostility, and the country was ripe for his overthrow by Madero. He symbolized the change that in the beginning was fresh and good but in time became ossified, even corrupt, and antagonistic to human needs. He represented what the revolution had become for Porter, for Laura in “Flowering Judas,” and for the narrator of “Hacienda.”⁵³

“Hacienda” is a story woven of many threads. It is on one hand an account of some of the conflicting interests involved in the filming of Que Viva Mexico, and it is about the Mexican revolution that Porter “ran smack into” and which failed to fulfill the aims she and other revolutionary sympathizers of the twenties idealistically hoped it would fulfill. On a universal level, it is about a changing of orders and how change itself is not necessarily better than that which is yielding place, and about revolutions that become systems, which seem to hold the answers to life's questions but yield only disillusion.⁵⁴

Throughout Porter's fiction are not only characters who embrace religious, philosophical, or political systems but also characters who are literal-minded in their belief that visible, outward, or concrete order provides a satisfying pattern for life. Social decorum is a set of implicit laws by which people live in order to ensure their own virtue and to find truth.⁵⁵ They believe that being “proper” is the same as being virtuous; the appearance of virtue in turn is proof to themselves and others that they have found life's meaning.

It is a belief with which Porter would have been intimately familiar. She grew up in a region of the country that was more stringently structured socially than others and that placed much value on the appearance of things. Although it was reinforced by the nationally pervasive colonial Puritanism, the background of Southern stratification was also aristocratic, even European, and it was self-fulfilling. Poor whites and blacks were kept in their places for so long in a belief in white supremacy, in God-ordained class stratification that included noblesse oblige, that they had little opportunity to change the appearance of the things that gauged a person's worth: where he lived, the way he dressed or spoke, his deportment, and his material possessions.⁵⁶ Regardless of the immorality of the system, it has been deeply ingrained in Southern life, and one doubts that Porter ever emotionally escaped the notions of how a lady behaved and how “trash” behaved. She complained about the play Dylan, which dramatized on stage a meeting between the poet and Porter. “The worst thing,” she said, “was that they had me sitting alone at a bar, which is something I've never done and never would. That made me most annoyed.”⁵⁷ One of Porter's landladies confirmed this trait. Señora Soledad Guzmán recalls that Porter was always very charming, always wore hats, worked long hours at her typewriter, and never attempted to entertain men in her room.⁵⁸ There has been a tendency to see Porter as a free spirit, roaming from one marriage to another, and perhaps living a bohemian life that was antagonistic to her upbringing. There is truth in both views, but throughout her life Porter gave the appearance of genteel upbringing and ladylike deportment.

In “‘Noon Wine’: The Sources” Porter comments directly about the social structure of south Texas towns. She provides what she calls “a rather generalized view of the society of that time and place [the setting of Noon Wine] as I remember it, and as talks with my elders since confirm it” (CE, 471). She says that her elders “all talked and behaved as if the final word had gone out long ago on manners, morality, religion, even politics,” and the rulers of the daily life were the grandparents and their generation. “They showed plainly in acts, words, and even looks … the presence of good society, very well based on traditional Christian beliefs.”

After the Civil War, which she calls the “fatal dividing change in the country,” it was the upward-bound lower class or the middle class that was most class-conscious and struggled so hard to maintain a sense of propriety and to follow rules of decorum that would give them the appearance of “place” and link them to the upper class and thus by implication to “divine rights.” It is these people about whom Porter writes in “He” and Noon Wine. She describes them as “the petty middle class of fundamentalists who saw no difference between wine-drinking, dancing, card-playing, and adultery.” She once chided Malcolm Cowley for speaking of “the middle-class virtues.” “Middle class virtue,” she wrote him, “is a kind of code of behavior based on fear of consequences, an artificial line set up, but to [be] sneaked over if one can manage it with secrecy.”⁵⁹

Class consciousness and a sense of social decorum cause Mrs. Whipple to present a false face to her neighbors. Because “she couldn't stand to be pitied,” she tells her husband, “Don't ever let a soul hear us complain.” She says, “Nobody's going to get a chance to look down on us” (CS, 49). It is this pride, this desire to be thought grateful for the Lord's blessings, that causes Mrs. Whipple to declare that she loves her retarded son more than she loves her other children. And although she worries constantly about “people coming around saying things all the time,” she is not aware of the comments that are indeed made behind their backs. She does not really fool the neighbors in spite of her vociferous declarations of piety and conscientious mothering of Him. It is class consciousness also that forces Mrs. Whipple to kill the suckling pig when her brother, “his plump healthy wife, and two great roaring hungry boys” come to dinner; she wants to give the appearance of prosperity lest her relatives think she is lower class than they.⁶⁰ Although she wants to appear better off than her brother, the opposite is implied in their rosy plumpness and hearty good humor.

Class consciousness is even more of a force in Noon Wine, for it is Mr. and Mrs. Thompson's fear of what their neighbors think that finally forces the concluding tragedy of the story. “All his carefully limited fields of activity were related somehow to Mr. Thompson's feeling for the appearance of things, his own appearance in the sight of God and man. ‘It don't look right,’ was his final reason for not doing anything he did not wish to do” (233). Because it is “his dignity and his reputation” that he cares about, Mr. Thompson, in spite of the fact that he has been “going steadily down hill,” finds solace in the fact that he is “a prompt payer of taxes, yearly subscriber to the preacher's salary, land owner and father of a family, employer, a hearty good fellow among men” (234).

Because of Thompson's desire to give a good appearance, the events that follow his killing Hatch are predictable. Although Thompson was exonerated at the trial and neighbors keep saying, “yes they know it was a clear case and fair trial,” they look “like they don't really take sides with him” (258). Obsessed with having society's approval, his “eyes hollowed out and dead-looking” and “his thick hands gray white and seamed from washing them clean every day before he started out,” Thompson goes from place to place and family to family, telling his story of self-defense over and over again. He becomes more and more desperate, and his decline is mirrored in the class of the people he stoops to convince. The last memorable visit is at the McClellans'. When McClellan comes “out in his sock feet, with one gallus up, the other broken and dangling” and Mrs. McClellan joins him “bare-footed, in a calico wrapper,” Mr. Thompson begins his liturgy: “Well, as I reckon you happen to know, I've had some strange troubles lately, and, as the feller says, it's not the kind of trouble that happens to a man every day in the year, and there's some things I don't want no misunderstanding about in the neighbors' minds, so—.” When he pauses and stumbles forward, “the two listening faces took on a mean look, a greedy, despising look, a look that said plain as day, ‘My, you must be a purty sorry feller to come round worrying about what we think, we know you wouldn't be here if you had anybody else to turn to—my, I wouldn't lower myself that much, myself’” (263). Thompson is ashamed of his lowering himself, and enraged, he suddenly knows that “he'd like to knock their dirty skunk heads together, the low-down white trash—but he held himself down and went on to the end.” In their own way, even the McClellans refuse Thompson. Mr. McClellan says, “I kaint see no good reason for us to git mixed up in these murder matters, I shore kaint,” and his wife adds, “Now we don't hold with killin'; the Bible says—” (264). It is subsequent to this final social degradation, compounded by his wife's refusal to offer her own form of forgiveness, that Thompson, who already is symbolically a dead man, shoots himself with his double-barreled shotgun.

The Thompsons and the Whipples, in their efforts to ascend the social ladder, are so caught up in what people think and so fearful of breaking, or of having broken, the social code that they are blinded to truths that lie all around and within. In other stories are people who also are daunted by rules of social decorum, for they too understand that in their society they are going to be evaluated by the degree to which they adhere to the rules or flout them. Rosaleen O'Toole in “The Cracked Looking-Glass” is the victim of the social code because she keeps young boys in her house, goes on trips away from her husband, and dyes her hair. Rosaleen is able to escape into her fantasy world and avoid the agony of ostracization, but when the native boy's mother castigates her (“A pretty specimen you are, Misses O'Toole, with your old husband and the young boys in your house and the traveling salesmen and the drunkards lolling on your doorstep all hours”), Rosaleen, after stopping in her tracks and listening, levels a barrage of Irish curses at the stringy-haired woman and wishes, just for a moment, that she had the strength to strangle “all at once” the people who have been telling lies about her. One of the ironies in the story is that while Rosaleen is judged by her mean-spirited neighbors according to the appearance of things, she, too, does the same. She puts great emphasis on labels, often judging a person by the part of Ireland from which he comes. Dennis recalls that the night he met Rosaleen she had told him that the only thing against him was that he came from Bristol, “and the outland Irish had the name of people you couldn't trust. She couldn't say why—it was just a name they had, worse than Dublin people itself. No decent Sligo girl would marry a Dublin man if he was the last man on earth” (106). Rosaleen in turn is identified by the slant-eyed youth in Boston as a County Sligo woman, apparently by her brogue, and he uses that knowledge to gain Rosaleen's confidence, which leads to the free meal. “I'm County Sligo, myself,” he says. After the misunderstanding and altercation, however, he taunts Rosaleen with “Farewell to ye, County Sligo woman. … I'm from County Cork myself!” (129).

A similar kind of stringent adherence to social decorum is seen in Lacey Halloran in “A Day's Work.”⁶¹ She is so concerned with giving the appearance of propriety that she distorts the truth to others and to herself. When Halloran crows out the window, “What's a father these days and who would heed his advice?” Lacey comments, “You needn't tell the neighbors, there's disgrace enough already” (390). Later in the story, when Halloran in a drunken delirium tries to kill “the ghost of Lacey Mahaffy,” she is too proud and too conscious of social condemnation to admit to Officer Maginnis that her husband hit her with an iron. She says, “I fell and hit my head on the ironing board. … It comes of overwork and worry, day and night. A dead faint, Officer Maginnis” (405). She is merely doing her “duty,” for according to the rules of her social class, a good wife must be patient and “do right first.” She admires most the persons who have fulfilled the rules of decorum, which, as Porter pointed out, included rules of religion and morality. The Connollys are her standard of achievement and success because they are “good practical Catholics” who go to mass every day. She is judging by outward appearances, as she always has been inclined to do. When Mr. Halloran learns that Connolly is being pursued by the G-men for being mixed up in the numbers racket, his response is ambivalent. Unoffended by the immorality or of the breaking of the law, he at first is sympathetic to Connolly, who is “a great fellow,” but his sympathy turns to joy as he thinks, “Wait till I give Lacey Mahaffy the news about Connolly, I'll like seeing her face the first time in twenty years.” Connolly's predicament is proof that appearance belies reality and that social respectability is no guarantee of virtue; the message will be lost on Mrs. Halloran.

Other kinds of visible ordering set up even more explicit illusions of truth. Granny Weatherall has thought she found answers to life's mysteries in the rules of her religion. But she goes beyond religion to structure her life and relies also on visible patterns. As she lies and drowses and loses her sense of time, she thinks, “Tomorrow was far away and there was nothing to trouble about. Things were finished somehow when the time came; thank God there was always a little margin over for peace; then a person could spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly. It was good to have everything clean and folded away, with the hair brushes and tonic bottles sitting straight on the white embroidered linen: the day started without fuss and the pantry shelves laid out with rows of jelly glasses and brown jugs and white stone-china jars with blue whirligigs and words painted on them: coffee, tea, sugar, ginger, cinnamon, all-spice” (81).

Everything labeled and arranged neatly in rows. The irony is that Granny's mind at her dying hour is not orderly at all. The past is getting confused with the present, and her tired mind is rambling freely from one memory to another, through the years that are metaphored as “the bright field where everything was planted so carefully in orderly rows” (84). Moreover, “she had her secret comfortable understanding with a few favorite saints who cleared a straight road to God for her” (86).

Reinforcing the image of orderliness is the image of light. Order should have brought with it its own light, its own truth. But the order that has characterized Granny's life has been a deceptive order, no meaning at all. Light first appears in her memories as an association with the fog that is creeping in at the edges of her dying consciousness. She translates it symbolically as a memory: “A fog rose over the valley, she saw it marching across the creek swallowing the trees and moving up the hill like an army of ghosts. Soon it would be at the near edge of the orchard, and then it was time to go in and light the lamps. Come in, children, don't stay out in the night air” (83–84).

Throughout the rest of the story, light, as symbol of truth or of understanding, dominates the story. Its opposite, fog or smoke, represents the breakdown of order or meaning. The important symbols in the story, the jilting sixty years ago, the orderly rows, light, and fog, come together in a crucial passage near the end of the story. On that long-ago wedding day everything had seemed right: “Such a fresh breeze blowing and such a green day with no threats in it.” But the groom fails to show up. “What does a woman do when she has put on the white veil and set out the white cake for a man and he doesn't come?” (84). That was the day that chaos, doubt, confusion, and disillusion entered her soul, when “a whirl of dark smoke rose and covered it, crept up and over into the bright field where everything was planted so carefully in orderly rows.” That was hell itself, and for sixty years Granny Weatherall has repressed the thought of the missing bridegroom (the thought of him was “a smoky cloak from hell”), but now at her dying the smoke is threatening to surface. The light seems to hurt her eyes, just as the old grief wounds her anew. But she allows the memory of the first bridegroom to surface: “Yes, she had changed her mind after sixty years and she would like to see George. I want you to find George. Find him and be sure to tell him I forgot him. I want him to know I had my husband just the same and my children and my house like any other woman. A good house too and a good husband that I loved and fine children out of him. Better than I hoped for even. Tell him I was given back everything he took away and more. Oh, no, oh, God, no, there was something else besides the house and the man and the children. Oh, surely they were not all? What was it? Something not given back” (86). That which was not given back was her faith, but instead of living out her days in bitter resignation she suppresses the trauma and searches for meaning in orderly rows, one of which is a path to God, or truth.

Among Granny's dying memories is that of hunting for matches to get light when one of the children screamed in nightmare; throughout her life she continued to hunt for a truth that would alleviate her fears of the darkness. She recalls that lighting the lamps had been beautiful: “The children huddled up to her and breathed like little calves waiting at the bars in the twilight. Their eyes followed the match and watched the flame rise and settle in a blue curve, then they moved away from her. The lamp was lit, they didn't have to be scared” (84).

As Granny's death approaches, the room is “like a picture she had seen somewhere” in “dark colors with the shadows rising towards the ceiling in long angles.” Black is beginning to dominate. “The tall black dresser gleamed,” and in the picture on the dresser her husband's eyes were “very black” when “they should have been blue.” The light beside the bed is blue, however, because the bulb is covered by Cornelia's blue lampshade, and the blue light becomes first the replacement for the blue eyes and then it becomes Granny herself. “The blue light from Cornelia's lampshade drew into a tiny point in the center of her brain, it flickered and winked like an eye, quietly it fluttered and dwindled. Granny lay curled down within herself, amazed and watchful, staring at the point of light that was herself” (89).

Granny is not able to find the meaning that should have been approachable through her life with the “good husband” whom she loved. All three—truth, John, and she herself—are brought together in the blue light and submerged in the renewed agony of there not being a “visible” sign from God. When Granny blows out the light, she is acknowledging a wasted life led by the promise of meaning through her religion or intuitively sought in the ordering of her life and her rows of preserves and crops. She has identified the absent George with Christ and feels abandoned by both. “There's nothing more cruel than this—I'll never forgive it” is her final thought (89). It is the ultimate agony that is created when one pins one's faith on formal systems or on an external order that is not natural to one's spirit. It is a theme of betrayal like that of “Flowering Judas,” and it is underscored by the Hapsy story that is only hinted at within the larger story of Granny's dying. She waits for Hapsy, too, who does not return, and we can only speculate about the details. In the dream vision Granny sees Hapsy with a baby that is Hapsy's child, Hapsy herself, and Granny all at once; in another dream memory, the birth of this child is suggested in Granny's recalling having announced to John that Hapsy's “time has come.” Hapsy is the love child, the only one Granny truly wanted, and she, like George sixty years ago and Christ now, fails to appear. Perhaps she is dead, or perhaps away, perhaps sent away. The details are unimportant. It is only significant that this story within the story underscores the theme of betrayed faith that permeates “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Cornelia is the faithful and weeping child who is there throughout, and her name suggests the Cordelia-Lear tragedy, without Lear's uplifting vision at the tragedy's end. The story ends at Lear's “Never, never, never, never, never” speech.

“Holiday” is also set in central Texas, and like Granny, the Müllers are orderly. As German immigrants who have retained and transplanted the customs and family structure of the old country, they live in an order that is exotic to the Southwestern American soil […].

The Müllers' very lives symbolize order. That which does not fit into their patterned lives must reside beyond them, for they can “understand” only that which seems to have a visible logic. Nature's cycles surround them, and yet they learn no lessons from them; they continue to cling to surface patterns as a way of life. The narrator thinks that in spite of the great tumult of their grief when Mother Müller dies, life for them will eventually “arrange itself again in another order” and yet it will be the same (432–33).

The narrator of “Holiday” makes the obvious mistake of trying to understand Ottilie Müller in terms of her own experiences and by what she wrongly perceives to be the laws of human nature. At the same time that the story illustrates the insufficiency of patterns and systems to lead to truth and life's meaning, it also shows the separateness of humans and the inability of one person to completely understand another. As Porter said, “There are only a few bits of absolute knowledge in the world, people can learn only one or two fundamental facts about each other, the rest is decoration and prejudice” (CE, 254).

The Müllers' visible order is like that of Granny Weatherall. The order of the Thompsons and the Whipples is the order of social decorum, and yet it is visible order as well. Porter reveals that none of these people learns that clinging to a superficial order is useless and that a natural order is to be found within the spirit and cannot be measured by grids or charts. Neither can it be found in methodized religion, art, or politics. She summarized her philosophy when she told Thompson, “The thing is not to follow a pattern. … The thing is, to accept your own life and not try to live someone else's life.”⁶²

Notes

1. “On a Criticism of Thomas Hardy,” CE, 6.

2. See Gunn, American and British Writers in Mexico: 33, 39, 50, 78–79, 90, 105, 146, 171, 182, 199.

3. Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution: An Interpretation of Mexico. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933).

4. In undated notes (McKeldin) she describes her virgin birth as evidence of his agnoticism, which may account in part for her resistance to religious dogma. Late in life she explained her concept of God as “some measureless absolute merciless Power” and insisted she was not an atheist. She said, “I believe totally in something I have never heard or read or thought in words.” KAP to Robert Penn Warren, 15 September 1975, Beinecke.

5. 13 August 1930, McKeldin.

6. See KAP to Robert Penn Warren, 16 October 1953, Beinecke.

7. See KAP to Paul Hanna, 29 May 1921, McKeldin. In explaining to Archer Winston why she would not have become a Trotsky sympathizer, she asks, “Why … should I have rebelled against my early training in Jesuit Catholicism only to take another yoke now?” See “The Portrait of an Artist,” New York Post, 6 May 1937, p. 17.

8. McKeldin.

9. Extending the abuses of religious power to other religions, she pointed out in a review of George F. Willison's Saints and Strangers that “we are descended from the Puritans, who nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedom, where they could not only enjoy their own religion but prevent everybody else from enjoying his.” See CE, 141.

10. When she was eighty-six Porter used imagery reminiscent of that in this story when she wrote to Warren that she believed in something. She said, “I don't fight, or weep. I just wait, hoping to see [underlined twice]—someday.” KAP to Warren, 15 September 1975, Beinecke.

11. Givner points out that Porter's father was superintendent of the Indian Creek Methodist Church Sunday school when he was married to Alice. See Life, 68. Perhaps her father's pattern provided some of the inspiration for the characters of the Thompsons and for the theme of ineffectual religion.

12. As she often did, Porter could have drawn the essential idea from biblical passages, for example, “When I waited for light, there came dark” (Job 30:20); “Mine eyes fail while I wait for my God” (Psalms 69:3); and “We wait for light but behold obscurity” (I Samuel 51:59). That Porter equated light with truth and life is reinforced in her book-length essay The Never-Ending Wrong in which she describes the tower light that failed at the moment of Sacco's and Vanzetti's electrocution. “At midnight, this light winked off, winked on and off again,” corresponding “to the number of charges of electricity sent through the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti” (p. 44). Porter also uses the image in Pale Horse, Pale Rider (CS, 311).

13. KAP to Gay Porter Holloway, 1 April 1920, McKeldin.

14. Givner says that Porter got the story from a maid who once worked in New Orleans (Life, 197).

15. Porter's landlady at 75 Washington Place in Greenwich Village was Madame Katrina Blanchard. See Givner, Life, 160.

16. Porter referred to this story as “a nice dirty story.” KAP to Gay Porter Holloway, St. Valentines, 1942, McKeldin.

17. Porter explained her heavy use of religious symbolism as having come out of her “deep sense of religion” and her “religious training.” See “Recent Southern Fiction: A Panel Discussion,” 12.

18. Leonard Prager points out the wasteland and inferno images in the story. See “Getting and Spending: Porter's ‘Theft,’” Perspective 11 (1960): 230–34. For additional supporting interpretations of “Theft,” see Joan Givner, “A Re-reading of Katherine Anne Porter's ‘Theft,’” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (Summer 1969): 463–65; William Bysshe Stein, “‘Theft’: Porter's Politics of Modern Love,” Perspective 11 (Winter 1960): 223–28; Carol Simpson Stern, “‘A Flaw in Katherine Anne Porter's “Theft”: The Teacher Taught’—A Reply,” CEA Critic 39 (May 1977): 4–8; and Joseph Wiesenfarth, “The Structure of Katherine Anne Porter's ‘Theft,’” Cithara 10 (May 1971): 65–71.

19. In the Thompson interview Porter said that she read “all at one blow, all of Dante” soon after she was thirteen. See Thompson, 89. Givner quotes Erna Schlemmer Johns as saying that Porter read Dante when she was eleven or twelve at their house (Life, 61). In an interview with Newquist, Porter tells of reading Saint Augustine's Confessions when her superiors would have her read Saint Thomas Aquinas (p. 89); she wrote to Genevieve Taggard in 1926, asking for books she could not get in Mexico. She includes the Confessions of Saint Augustine, saying she lost her copy which she had had for ten years (KAP to Taggard, 3 June 1926, McKeldin).

    Porter mentions Dante in a letter to Eugene Pressly, 18 November 1932 (McKeldin); and she praises the nobility of Dante, Sir Thomas More, St. Francis, Erasmus, and the Prince in War and Peace in a letter to Robert Penn Warren and Cinina Warren, 22 December 1946, Beinecke.

20. City of God (xv. 1), trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950).

21. KAP to Eugene Pressly, 18 November 1932, McKeldin.

22. KAP to Paul Porter, 20 June 1957, McKeldin.

23. KAP to Cinina Warren, 22 December 1946, Beinecke; KAP to Albert Erskine, 4 January 1947, McKeldin.

24. KAP to Josephine Herbst, 23 January 1946, Beinecke.

25. KAP to family, 31 December 1920, McKeldin.

26. Thompson, 97.

27. KAP to family, 31 December 1920, McKeldin.

28. KAP to family, 31 December 1920, McKeldin.

29. Notes, dated 1920, McKeldin.

30. McKeldin.

31. KAP to Paul Hanna, 29 May 1921, McKeldin.

32. KAP to Robert McAlmon, 5 February 1934, McKeldin.

33. Thompson, 97.

34. “Eudora Welty and ‘A Curtain of Green,’” CE, 287.

35. Thompson, 104.

36. See Mark 14:15 and Luke 22:12.

37. Laura's movements through the city traverse the greater Mexico City area. All the landmarks and streets have revolutionary significance and stand as a reminder of how far from the ideal Braggioni and the current revolutionaries have fallen. The Zócolo means “foundation,” and is at the center of the old city and surrounded by the National Palace. Here once stood the halls of Montezuma. It also is the center of the independence celebration every year on September 15. Chapultepec Park also has a long history in the social evolution of the city. See Leopold Batres, A Historic Guide to Mexico City (Mexico: Imprenta Mundial, 1935). Porter may have been referring to the Chapultepec Park footpath known as the Avenida de los Poetas rather than the Philosopher's Footpath.

38. See Thompson, 104; and “Why She Selected ‘Flowering Judas’,” in Whit Burnett's This Is My Best, 539.

39. Notes at McKeldin. Mary is Porter's friend Mary Doherty, who is mentioned in Gunn, p. 171. See also Carleton Beals, Glass Houses: Ten Years of Free-Lancing (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938), 243; Beals, The Great Circle: Further Adventures in Free-Lancing (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1940), 324; and Peggy Baird, “The Last Days of Hart Crane,” Venture, 4 (1961): 36–38. Yúdico was Samuel Yúdico, a minor revolutionist.

40. See Dorsey, 19–20.

41. KAP to Peggy Cowley, 30 January 1933, McKeldin.

42. KAP to Paul Hanna, 19 April 1921, McKeldin.

43. KAP to Genevieve Taggard, 3 June 1926, McKeldin. Porter also complained about New Masses and “literature as social criticism” (KAP to William Harlan Hale, 3 September 1932, McKeldin), and she lamented to Pressly about Josephine Herbst's “going for Communism” (5 August 1935, McKeldin). In a letter to Robert Penn Warren and Cinina Warren she suggests America do some clearing out of Nazis and Fascist organizations (20 June 1940, Beinecke). Many years later she wrote to Warren that she had never been sympathetic to the literary politics of the Partisan Review. She says that she “cannot learn to trust the judgment in any matter of any one who was ever a Trotskyist” (KAP to Warren, 22 July 1963, Beinecke). In the same year she wrote to Mary Doherty about the effective Communist sabotage of exploiting honest grievances for their own causes (30 August 1963, McKeldin). It was the point upon which she attacked Rosa Baron and others in The Never-Ending Wrong.

44. See CE, 203–204.

45. “On Communism in Hollywood,” CE, 208.

46. See “E. M. Forster,” CE, 72.

47. (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1957; rev. 1962), 98.

48. KAP to Ernestine Evans, 3 October 1930, McKeldin.

49. See Perry, “Porter's ‘Hacienda’ and the Theme of Change.”

50. See KAP to William Harlan Hale, 8 July 1932, photocopy in the Beinecke, transcription in the possession of the author.

51. One of the corridos mentioned in the story illustrates the theme of the inevitability of change. Andreyev sings “La Sandunga” “in his big gay Russian voice,” and the Indians shout “with joy and delight at the new thing his strange tongue made of the words.” Andreyev cannot preserve “La Sandunga” because it is indigenous to the Mexican people; it changes to something else when he tries to claim it.

52. Porter described a group of Rivera's disciples who eventually turned on him, “each one battling to create and put over his own personality.” She names the “Good ones” in the group: David Siqueiros (later she retracts the praise), Xavier Guerrero, and Abraham Angel. KAP to Robert McAlmon, 5 February 1934, McKeldin.

53. Porter's earliest memory of being in Mexico included the awareness of Díaz' power. See Newquist, 140.

54. In the same year her revised version of “Hacienda” appeared, Porter described the state of the revolution when she left Mexico in 1931 as having “exploded” and being “empty of initiative,” phrases that capture the tone of resignation in the story. KAP to Robert McAlmon, 5 February 1934, McKeldin.

55. Joseph Wiesenfarth addresses the themes of social approval and order in “Negatives of Hope: A Reading of Katherine Anne Porter,” Renascence, 25 (1973): 85–94.

56. Porter said that Calvin put into action the idea “that God somehow rewarded spiritual virtue with material things.” See “Recent Southern Fiction: A Panel Discussion,” 16.

57. Dorsey, 25.

58. Interview with Señora Soledad Guzmán, 20 August 1981, Mexico City.

59. KAP to Malcolm Cowley, 5 November 1931, Newberry.

60. Porter's description of Mrs. Whipple's brother and his family is like her memory of her own relatives as “a mean selfish lot who descended on Sunday and ate up all the fried chicken.” See KAP to Gay Porter Holloway, 13 November 1961, McKeldin.

61. According to Givner, the story was based on a family's quarrels Porter heard through the air ducts at her apartment on Perry Street in New York. See Life, 303.

62. Thompson, 98.