SOURCE: “Katherine Anne Porter, Politics, and Another Reading of ‘Theft,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 119–26.

[In the following essay, Unrue provides a close reading of Porter's “Theft” in order to reveal “the extent to which politics was interwoven into Porter's concept and practice of art.”]

When Katherine Anne Porter accepted the National Book Award in 1966 for her Collected Stories, she characterized herself as a “disappointed idealist.” Porter's habit of mind in assessing her life or in creating her art was to look through a lens of memory and see a harmonious whole,¹ and that phrase, as well as any, summarizes Porter's political stances. At the age of 76, Porter was looking back on a life that had included numerous attachments to political movements, but attachments inevitably followed by disillusionment and rejection of the movements while still cherishing the underlying ideals. The phrase also points to an important theme in her fiction and thus underscores the link between Porter's politics and her art. In order to understand fully the place that politics has in Porter's fiction, we have to examine her political activities and statements in their social and historical context, her concept of the relationship between politics and art, and finally the political themes in the fiction itself.

Porter's earliest political activities were feminist and socialist. She reportedly told Malcolm Cowley that she published a defense of woman suffrage when she was 14, converted to socialism at the age of 15, and took on all social and political problems when she was 18. Her brother, Paul, confirmed her suffragist sympathies in a letter he wrote to her in 1909, but she declared in a 1925 review of W. L. George's book The Story of Women that she had been a suffragist since adolescence (“Mr. George on the Woman Problem,” Unrue 35). If Porter also had early socialist leanings, she would not have been all that unusual in her time and place, for there was a healthy socialist movement in the upper and border South during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The social and political problems she claims to have taken on by 1908 were probably reflected in small charitable gestures and states of mind, but she did reveal an early interest in social causes that aimed to alleviate human suffering and promote individual freedom. There is ample evidence that by the time she arrived in New York in 1919, by way of Chicago and Denver, having finally fled Texas and her first husband, she had substantial leftist leanings.

Porter's political views found encouragement and nourishment in the Bohemianism of Greenwich Village, where she briefly settled in 1919. Soon among her friends and acquaintances were many left-wing writers and intellectuals, including Kenneth Durant, who was editor of ROSTA (later TASS). In The Never-Ending Wrong, Porter says she was Durant's assistant for a time and later wrote propagandistic news releases for him (22). Porter also met at this time Mexican artists who were in the United States hoping to get support for the cultural and social revolution gaining intensity in Mexico. Through such friends Porter secured a magazine assignment that took her to Mexico and the revolution she described to Barbara Thompson as having run “smack into” (97). Although she would say that her participation in the revolution was “modest,” it is relatively safe to assume that most of Laura's revolutionary activity described in “Flowering Judas” was comparable to Porter's own experiences. She became friends with many of the revolutionaries, Mexican and expatriate, and was enough of a threat to the aristocratic establishment to be put on a deportation list in 1921. She in fact claimed on several occasions to have been a communist in the early twenties.²

Whatever Porter was—however idealistic she was—in 1920 and 1921 when she arrived in Mexico from New York, she remarkably soon became disappointed in the revolution and its leaders. By the spring of 1921 she was able to write an incisive article for the Freeman on the complicated forces at work and often at cross-purposes in the likely doomed Mexican revolution. Letters to friends reveal the same spirit of encroaching disillusionment (e.g., KAP to Paul Hanna).

During the twenties, however, Porter participated in political causes other than the Mexican revolution. The other cause that held her attention most strongly from 1920 to 1927 and fired her political indignation forever after was the Sacco-Vanzetti affair. Her involvement began in writing letters and signing petitions demanding a fair trial for the two anarchists accused of robbery and murder in 1920. It did not truly end until 1977 when she published her account of the organized protest in which she participated in Boston in August of 1927.

Ultimately, the failed Mexican revolution and the Sacco-Vanzetti affair coalesced in Porter's mind as the annihilation of her idealistic faith in organized political movements. Porter's skepticism is increasingly apparent in essays and letters, and while she dabbled in politics over the years—supporting one political candidate or another, attending some political meetings, occasionally marching in a political parade—one senses that these actions were half-hearted; more often than not her strongest public statements were attacks on political movements and ideologies. She might characterize herself as a “pacifist” or as a “democratic idealist”—labels that were safely separate from organized movements—but she was more likely to say she was “anti-Communist,” “anti-Nazi,” “anti-socialist,” “anti-Fascist,” “anti-Stalinist,” and “anti-Anti-American Activities Committee.”³ In the case of communism and socialism, it was a rejection of the formalization of the ideal, for it was in the organization created and led by people with ignoble motives that she found the flaw. In the case of fascism and Nazism, she had ingrained distaste for any doctrine dependent on a rigid and stifling order, an attitude that can be tied to her formative years in the social environment of the American South and, according to her, reinforced by her later experiences in the Northeast and Midwest (KAP to Caroline Gordon and “Letters to a Nephew,” Collected Essays 112).

Porter's political opinions were formed not only by exposure to political movements and her direct involvement in political activities. She also knew political theory. She was well-read—she was able to discuss with clarity the theories of Marx, Engels, and Nietzsche, for example—and she had been schooled in various political doctrines by friends and acquaintances in New York and Mexico. But she was always an independent thinker, and even in the twenties when she was perhaps her most idealistic, she stood apart from other left-wing writers by insisting on the separation of art and politics. It became the cornerstone of much of her political and critical commentary over the years, and her own fiction illustrates how firmly she held to her standard.

She made many statements about—and pleas for—the separation, but perhaps none more eloquent than in a letter to Pablo O'Higgins, a leftist painter and friend from Mexico who was in Moscow in 1931 when Porter was newly arrived in Berlin. She tells him:

I look forward to a world in which the artist has his place as a useful being, not for political purposes, but in his true function, which is that of a finder, a bringer, a giver of new forms of expression based on life, but seen with imagination and creativeness.

Speaking of the beauty of the bronze sculptures around the portals of the Sainte-Chapelle, she continues:

Anyone who would destroy them for the sake of a political faith would be an enemy to the whole human race, no matter what hypothetical good he might bring to replace them. So I hope your [Soviet] government while it is melting down the silver from the churches, is at the same time preserving carefully the true works of art, quite as we preserve the archaic Greeks and the ancient Egyptian things, all made in honor of gods that no one any longer believes in; but their value is no less for all that. I think we must keep in mind that some day our now so new and exciting political faiths and mechanical devices will be out of date, and our descendants will be forced to reject them because they can no longer use them … but our architecture and our sculpture and our painting and literature and all our testimony of what life was for us, will be matters of great importance to them. We have no right whatever to try to mortgage the future.

The book reviews Porter wrote throughout the decades of the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties also reveal a consistent application of the standard. She took to task those writers who muddied the waters, and if she was kinder to friends who were writing various degrees of propagandistic fiction—that is, fiction that carried an overt political message—she nevertheless refused to give such works her unqualified praise. An example of such a position is found in her review of Glenway Wescott's Apartment in Athens, written shortly after the second World War and in large part a diatribe against the Germans. Porter, who personally held an unsympathetic view of Germany and what she perceived to be the German personality, tried to salvage Wescott's propagandistic work by declaring he had done humanity a service by revealing the “Germanism” in all of us (“They Lived with an Enemy in the House,” Unrue 125).

The same objectivity is apparent in her feminist reviews, for she drew a line between mythic feminism, which enriches her fiction, and political feminism, which she associated with the term feminist. In her review of Our Changing Morality: A Symposium (ed. Freda Kirchwey) Porter stepped away from a feminist position by arguing that women should not be indicted as slave-minded when in fact the human race is by nature slavish. Moreover, in a review of a collection of poems by her friend Genevieve Taggard, Porter's insistence on the separation of art and politics is apparent in her objection to the term feminist's being used to describe Taggard; Porter offered modern as an alternative, saying feminist was quite meaningless to describe a poet (“Sex and Civilization,” Unrue 41–44).

Although Porter's fiction is free from explicit political messages, at the same time it provides a dramatic illustration of the role that politics played in her artistic vision. The truth is that many of her works contain political themes. Of the 26 stories, “María Concepción,” “The Martyr,” “Virgin Violeta,” “Flowering Judas,” “Hacienda,” “That Tree,” “A Day's Work,” “Holiday,” Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and “The Leaning Tower” contain surface political themes, as does Ship of Fools. And yet, no one can mistake the political theme for political message, or propaganda. The universal theme is always the controlling theme. I would suggest, also, however, that among the so-called non-political works, that is, Old Mortality, “He,” Noon Wine, “Rope,” “Theft,” “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” “The Cracked Looking-Glass,” “The Downward Path to Wisdom” and the seven pieces that make up The Old Order, there are some stories that contain deeply embedded political themes, which emerge only in light of Porter's personal history and the social context of their writing. Such an examination not only offers still another angle on the stories' meanings but also reveals the extent to which politics was interwoven into Porter's concept and practice of art. “Theft” provides an especially good example.

The plot of “Theft” hinges on a frozen moment in which the protagonist, who is “uncomfortable in the ownership of things,” recalls the events that led up to her discovery of the theft of her purse, a beautiful purse that is not only her property and the container of her money, but is also traditionally even a metonym for money. Like Porter, who looked through the lens of memory and found the truth within experience, the protagonist becomes detached, looks at her immediate past, and discovers meaning. Money is a central motif in “Theft.” All the other characters in the story are associated with the protagonist by money. She remembers that Camilo, who is poorer than she, often pays her fare on the train. She has to contribute a dime to the fare for a taxi she and Roger share. And Bill owes her money for work she has done on his play. By taking the purse, the janitress is demanding that the protagonist share her wealth. Up to the conclusion the protagonist has failed to claim or reclaim what is rightfully hers. A part of her discovery—not unlike Gabriel Conroy's epiphany at the end of Joyce's “The Dead”—is that her apathy has contributed to her losses, the moral and spiritual implications of which are illuminated in the religious structure and imagery throughout the story.

Published in 1929 after Porter had become disillusioned with revolution, communism, and socialism, after she had participated in the collapsing Mexican revolution and the failed Sacco-Vanzetti protest, the story reflects Porter's political state of mind. The small microcosmic society of “Theft,” with the protagonist at the center, explores the societal organization that has been determined by its economic struggle and values. The materialism, symbolized by the purse, which is also—ironically—aesthetically pleasing, is in contrast to the possible spirituality hinted at in the references to love: love lost, by the narrator and Eddie; love unclaimed, by Roger and Stella; and love misunderstood, by Bill and his wife and the three boys and two girls who walk in front of the taxi. If the protagonist has grasped the necessity of rising against her exploiters, she also will understand the importance of claiming love, the only deterrent against the spiritual vacuum of materialism. Read in this light, “Theft” can be seen as an exploration of economic theory, particularly capitalism and historical materialism, or Marxism, with an additional comment about the importance of will: not Nietzsche's will to power, but a spiritual will that refuses to collude with evil.

A small but significant point to support such a political interpretation is found in the fact that Porter associated hats with politics. Hats are a dominant symbol in the story. In 1935 Porter wrote to Barbara Wescott from Paris:

There is nothing like a political or a social-moral problem to date a period, unless it would be hats. … Hats and politics look pretty trivial next season when the fashion has changed. … It is better to stick to more durable things if you have a taste for permanence.

“I do have,” she asserts, and she names particular painters and paintings she admires, again coming down, as she did in her letter to O'Higgins, on the side of enduring art over transient things (Bayley 134).

In “Theft” each of the men except Bill is identified by his hat. Camilo is wearing a pretty new biscuit-colored hat he cannot afford but lets the rain spoil. Roger protects his hat against the rain by buttoning it up inside his overcoat. The absent Eddie always wears shabby hats precisely seven years old. Each man's attitude toward his hat reflects his attitude toward material possessions and life. Camilo sacrifices his hat for a chivalric ideal; Porter regarded the historical obedience to this ideal as one of the weaknesses in the Mexican revolution. The apathetic Roger, also like Joyce's Gabriel Conroy, and, to large extent, the protagonist in the past, takes no risks. Eddie, seen only in the protagonist's memory, does not value the material object beyond its usefulness. The seven-year age of each of Eddie's hats symbolically suggests the mystical and religious. The protagonist recalls that Eddie's hat always seemed “right,” pointing to his view of life and politics as a correct one.

Bill, not associated with a hat, is the least enigmatic or sympathetic of all the characters. Even though he has received money for his play, he refuses to pay the narrator what he owes her and instead complains about his wife's alimony, which interferes with his purchase of luxuries. He stands apart from the other characters, whose concern with money is centered on what Marx labeled the necessities, paying the rent and having food. He is the completely self-centered, self-indulgent materialist created by capitalism and its values. Implied in this interpretation of “Theft” is Porter's appreciation for some of the ideals she associated with Marxism and socialism, as well as an ultimate rejection of the totalitarianism and absence of spirituality they spawned. Such an interpretation in no way is intended to replace other interpretations but rather should be regarded as complementary. I would go so far as to say, however, that without the delineation of the story's political themes, the story's meaning is incomplete.

Porter's politics, her view of art, her creative process, and her fictional themes are surely interrelated. Her political life shows a pattern of taking up idealistic causes, becoming disillusioned with and rejecting their organized movements, and retreating to a position of abstract repudiation, what some have called Porter's “apolitical aesthetics” (Hendrick and Hendrick 14). This pattern, consistent with Porter's demand that art remain uncontaminated by “message,” finally is present in the themes of her fiction.

Notes

1. See “Three Statements about Writing: 1939: The Situation in American Writing,” Collected Essays 451. Porter writes: “All my past is ‘usable,’ in the sense that my material consists of memory, legend, personal experience, and acquired knowledge. They combine in a constant process of re-creation. I am quite unable to separate the influence of literature or the history of literary figures from influences of background, upbringing, ancestry.”

2. Undated notes in the Porter Archives describe her fear of deportation. See also KAP to Peggy Cowley, 30 January 1933.

3. See pieces in The Collected Essays. “Act of Faith: 4 July 1942,” 193–196; “The Future Is Now,” 197–202; “A Letter to the Editor of The Nation,” 203–204; “On Communism in Hollywood,” 205–208; “A Letter to the Editor of The Saturday Review of Literature,” 209–215; “Opening Speech at Paris Conference, 1952,” 216–219; “A Letter to the Editor of The Yale Review,” 224–225. See also KAP to Peggy Cowley, 1 October 1931 and 30 January 1933; KAP to Albert Erskine, 25 January 1938 and 26 August 1940; KAP to Caroline Gordon, 30 September 1964; KAP to Barbara Wescott, 23 November 1935, (Bayley 134); KAP to Tania and James Stern, 5 July 1936 (Bayley 137); and KAP to James F. Powers, 5 November 1947 (Bayley 350).

Works Cited

Bayley, Isabel, ed. Letters of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Atlantic Monthly P, 1990.

Hendrick, Willene, and George Hendrick. Katherine Anne Porter. Twayne's United States Authors Series 90. Rev. ed. of George Hendrick, Katherine Anne Porter. Boston: Hall, 1988.

“N[ational] B[ook] A[ward] Ceremony: The Mayor and the Winning Authors.” Publishers Weekly 189 (28 Mar. 1966): 34–35.

Porter, Katherine Anne. The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings. 1970. Boston: Houghton, 1990.

———. The Collected Stories. New York: Harcourt, 1965.

———. Letter to Albert Erskine. 25 Jan. 1938. Katherine Anne Porter Archives. University of Maryland, College Park.

———. Letter to Albert Erskine. 26 Aug. 1940. Porter Archives.

———. Letter to Barbara Wescott. 23 Nov. 1935. Bayley 134.

———. Letter to Caroline Gordon. 6 Jan. 1931. Caroline Gordon Archives. Princeton University.

———. Letter to Caroline Gordon. 30 Sept. 1964. Gordon Archives.

———. Letter to James F. Powers. 5 Nov. 1947. Bayley 350.

———. Letter to Malcolm Cowley. 1940s. Porter Archives.

———. Letter to Pablo O'Higgins. Winter 1931. Bayley 66–67.

———. Letter to Paul Hanna. 29 May 1921. Porter Archives.

———. Letter to Peggy Cowley. 1 Oct. 1931. Porter Archives.

———. Letter to Peggy Cowley. 30 Jan. 1933. Porter Archives.

———. Letter to Tania and James Stern. 5 July 1936. Bayley 137.

———. “Letters to a Nephew: Observations on—Pets, Poets, Sex, Love, Hate, Fame, Treason.” Mademoiselle 62 (April 1966): 189, 244–50. “Letters to a Nephew,” Collected Essays 109–122.

———. “The Mexican Trinity.” Freeman 3 (3 Aug. 1921): 493–495. Collected Essays 399–403.

———. “Mr. George on the Woman Problem.” Rev. of The Story of Women, by W. L. George. New York Herald Tribune Books. 29 Nov. 1925: 11. Unrue 35–36.

———. The Never-Ending Wrong. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1977.

———. “Sex and Civilization.” Rev. of Our Changing Morality: A Symposium, ed. Freda Kirchwey. New York Herald Tribune Books. 5 July 1925: 3–4. Unrue 20–25.

———. “A Singing Woman.” Rev. of Words for the Chisel, by Genevieve Taggard. New York Herald Tribune Books. 18 Apr. 1926: 6. Unrue 41–44.

———. “They Lived with the Enemy in the House.” Rev. of Apartment in Athens, by Glenway Wescott. New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review. 4 Mar. 1945: 1. Unrue 124–128.

Porter, Paul. Letter to Katherine Anne Porter. 1909. Porter Archives.

Thompson, Barbara. “The Art of Fiction XXIX—Katherine Anne Porter: An Interview.” Paris Review No. 29 (1963): 87–114.

Unrue, Darlene Harbour, ed. “This Strange, Old World” and Other Book Reviews by Katherine Anne Porter. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991.