[In the following essay, Howell evaluates Porter as a Southern writer.]

Although the body of Katherine Anne Porter's work has little regional implication and though Miss Porter has spent most of her adult life away from her native Texas, she has always acknowledged the importance of the regional in art and expressed satisfaction in her own provincial origin. In 1965, in an article in Harper's she declared the writers of the South and West are at the center of the American literary tradition—not those from the Eastern seaboard, who pour from their pens “unbelievable abominations” that no longer look like English but some dreadful perversion of it. They have fallen into “a curious kind of argot,” she says, “more or less originating in New York, a deadly mixture of academic, guttersnipe, gangster, fake-Yiddish, and dull old worn-out dirty words—an appalling bankruptcy in language, as if they hate English and are trying to destroy it along with all other living things they touch.”¹

Her defense of the provinces belies Miss Porter's own position as a Southern writer. Though she praises the “unclobbered heads” from the South and West that keep rising up, in her own fiction she has been shy about using regional material. She broke away early from her Texas moorings, joined a revolution in Mexico, and then not finding revolution very attractive moved on to Europe to join the other expatriates on the Left Bank. Consequently, her writing is international in scope, while at the same time she holds on to her Southern heritage as some deep reserve that gives ballast to surface floundering. Though very much at home with the smart gadabouts between the wars, she was never really one of them. For them, nothing worked, she said, “except sex and alcohol and pulling apart their lamentable Midwestern upbringings and scattering the pieces.”² Her sympathy was all with those writers who stayed at home and built on home material, like Willa Cather and Eudora Welty. She has written a few stories herself about home; but with a memory as long as Faulkner's and a background as opulent and with something of the same bardic impulse to prompt her, the surprising thing is the meager use of the regional in Miss Porter's art.

Her main effort in this direction is autobiographical, in the Miranda stories, which deal with the history of her family beginning with ante-bellum days in Kentucky. After the death of her husband in the Civil War, the grandmother Sophia Jane moved her family of nine children, along with Negro servants, first to Louisiana and eventually to a South Texas ranch, where the girl Miranda was brought up. The grandmother is a matriarch, embodying in virile form the finest qualities of the old days, and Aunt Nanny and Uncle Jimbilly are almost parodies of the old-time Southern darkies. Miss Porter writes with deep affection of these people, who correspond to the Sartoris menage of Faulkner's fiction. Like Faulkner, she was a product of the planter class, with bitter memories of the aftermath of war. “I am a grandchild of a lost War,” she once said, “and I have blood-knowledge of what life can be like in a defeated country on the bare bones of privation.”³ The moral significance of this knowledge finds no expression in her art, however; she was satisfied with an occasional vignette, drawn for the most part from her own aristocratic background. The small farmers, with no pretension to wealth and fine manners, make up the dominant element of Yoknapatawpha County, but Miss Porter is not comfortable with the yeoman element. Her short novel Noon Wine is her most sustained effort to deal with the plain people of the South.

Royal Earle Thompson is one of those well-intentioned but ineffectual farmers of the backcountry who barely manage to pull through, although in his bluff, hearty way he is a manly man, with the pride of his sex and a little thrown in not warranted by circumstance. In his part of the country, every white man has some lordly ideas about the distribution of labor. During his wife's illness he resents having to feed the hogs, a task which belongs to colored help, and to look after the chickens and cows, clearly in the female province. Cows worry him, “coming up regularly twice a day to be milked, standing there reproaching him with their smug female faces.”⁴ And so when Mr. Helton, a white laborer from the North, shows up to work for him, Mr. Thompson feels contempt for a white man who can give his full attention to the trivialities of a household. But Mr. Helton takes over and turns the farm into a money-making business, so that the Thompsons thrive where formerly they had barely made ends meet. Mr. Helton is queer. He won't go to church, won't laugh, and won't talk; but the family come to accept him on his own terms and they all settle down to a period of quiet prosperity. Then comes Mr. Hatch, on a hot summer afternoon, with the information that Mr. Helton is a lunatic and a murderer and that he is going to take him off to “justice.” Hatch is in every way a disagreeable person. He tries Mr. Thompson's patience, but Thompson holds back until he thinks Hatch is going to murder Mr. Helton with a bowie knife, whereupon he knocks Hatch in the head with an ax, “as if he were stunning a beef.” (p. 256) Although freed by a court, Mr. Thompson is uncertain about his degree of guilt. Everybody accuses him, he feels, including his wife and children, and so he eventually kills himself.

Noon Wine is characteristic of Miss Porter's fiction in that it draws from a regional way of life while presenting an intellectual problem couched in the sort of ambiguity which appeals to modern readers. Not much has been said, in print at least, about the Thompsons as representatives of a class and region, but a great deal about the psychology of a man who settles a ticklish matter of guilt and innocence by shooting himself. Miss Porter obviously enjoyed the critical furor and added to it by writing an account of how she came to write Noon Wine, half as long as the story itself. “‘Noon Wine’: The Sources” is an illuminating and appealing essay, but it does not bring much meaning into her narrative that was not already there. It tells a great deal about the author—in a pleasant, informal manner she assumes when not exercising her careful narrative art—and above all of her attachment to the land of her birth; but it also demonstrates the failure of Noon Wine and casts some light on a central weakness in all her fiction.

Miss Porter calls Noon Wine a story of “the most painful and moral and emotional confusions.” She says that every one of the characters, “yes, in his crooked way, even Mr. Hatch,” is trying to do right;⁵ but no one succeeds, and all in some degree at least are involved in doing wrong. The confusion she speaks of has been explored by Robert Penn Warren, who approves of the “skeptical and ironical bias,” which keeps the reader from an easy assessment of guilt and innocence. The story affirms, he says, “the constant need for exercising discrimination, the arduous obligation of the intellect in the face of conflicting dogmas.”⁶ This intellectualized approach stands in contrast to that of Eudora Welty, who says that she likes Noon Wine best of Miss Porter's fiction “because it is the most beautifully objective work she has done.”⁷ Miss Welty, according to Miss Porter, has never studied the craft of fiction at any university and has never gone in for the efficacy of the writers' conference—“Nothing else that I know about her could be more satisfactory to me than this”⁸—and so without the vocabulary of the academicians and the preciosity of their insights, Eudora Welty sounds a little naive when she says that on the whole she has trouble understanding Miss Porter's fiction. “I have the most common type of mind,” she says, which wants to see what is happening, and Miss Porter “shows surface” only enough to illuminate the interior problem, which is her first concern.⁹ Here she puts a finger on an essential weakness in Miss Porter's fiction, its thinness and lack of body. Even in Noon Wine with a richer surface texture she has failed to correlate the inner and outer worlds, to make the intellectual content contingent on the flesh-and-blood reality of the Thompson farm. With a cultural storehouse as ample as Miss Welty's to draw from, her first instinct was to paint merely what she saw. But she could not leave it at that. Mr. Thompson must be updated, arbitrarily lifted out of time and place and confronted with a psychological problem that his generation in his part of the world would have had little patience with. The confusion which results is artistic, as well as “moral and emotional.”

Surely the origin of few stories has been so well documented as that of Noon Wine. It was written almost as it stands “in just seven days of trance-like absorption in a small room in an inn in rural Pennsylvania, from the early evening of November 7 to November 14, 1936.” But its beginnings go back to the author's childhood in South Texas when a number of impressions, four to be exact, were registered in the memory, “with their separate life and reality, meeting and parting and mingling in my thoughts until they established their relationship.”¹⁰ First, there was gunshot at sundown one day and a young girl's apprehension of murder. In an entirely distinct experience, there was the recollection of a man who came with his wife to her grandmother's house to protest his innocence in killing a man. Then there was the proud, black-whiskered man on horseback, “sitting so straight his chin was level with his Adam's apple,” whose greeting was so lordly that even a child saw something absurd in his pride and affectation. Finally, there was the image of a Swedish hired hand sitting in a kitchen chair against the wall of his shack blowing on his harmonica, “the living image of loneliness.” Using these scattered images which had been floating in her mind since childhood, the artist went to work to combine them to “give a meaning to the whole that the individual parts had lacked.”¹¹

“‘Noon Wine’: The Sources” is a valuable document, not only because it illustrates an artist's method but because here more than anywhere else Miss Porter revels in the richness of her South Texas background. The details are sparsely applied to her fiction, as she admits, but they lay in the background of her mind, particularly during the long period when she was away from her country and apparently cut off from cultural ties. “All the time, I was making notes on stories—stories of my own place, my South—for my part of Texas was peopled almost entirely by Southerners from Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Kentucky—and I was almost instinctively living in a sustained state of mind and feeling.”¹² That childhood world had become a sort of sensuous idyll in her mind.

… the sound of mourning doves in the live-oaks, the childish voices of parrots chattering on every back porch in the little town, the hovering of buzzards in the high blue air—all the life of that soft blackland farming country, full of fruits and flowers and birds … the smells and flavors of roses and melons, and peach bloom and ripe peaches, of cape jessamine in hedges blooming like popcorn … heavy tomatoes dead ripe and warm with the midday sun, eaten there, at the vine; the delicious milky green corn, and savory hot corn bread eaten with still-warm sweet milk; and the clingish brackish smell of muddy little ponds where we caught, and boiled crawfish—in a discarded lard can—and ate them, then and there, we children, in the company of an old Negro who had once been my grandparents' slave.¹³

This “native land of my heart” was no democracy nor pretended to be, for men moved with difficulty from their position in the hierarchy where birth had placed them. But on the whole it was “a civilized order,” and if everybody had his place, “at least he knew where it was, and so did everybody else.” The higher laws of morality and religion were also carefully defined. “If a man offended against the one, or sinned against the other, he knew it, and so did his neighbors and they called everything by its right name.”¹⁴

Out of this generous appreciation of a region and its culture, Miss Porter tells her story about Mr. Thompson, who, unlike the Miranda of her Southern fiction, comes from “the Plain People.” She seldom writes about these people and shows some nervousness in stepping beneath a line she has so carefully drawn. That she intended to make something of their oafishness is clear from the initial scene of Mr. Thompson at the churn, looking forlornly across his idle farm and soiling the steps with tobacco spittle. She meant to make him ridiculous in his notions about work, but here she made a false step. Mr. Thompson's view is the frontier approximation of an aristocratic concept, to which in a different context Miss Porter herself gives assent.

By and large, however, the Thompsons are favorably presented, in spite of conscious niggling, since the author herself came to admire them. They represent a rare instance of family affection in her work. She sets out, without knowing precisely her own mind, by making Mr. Thompson a bumbling, absurd fellow—a sort of Anse Bundren from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. As such, he is a familiar figure in the rural South. “I mislike undecision as much as ere a man,” says Anse, “but I just can't seem to get no heart into it.”¹⁵ Like the Bundrens, the Thompsons are a part of the backwash of Southern history. From their meager hill farms they look out placidly and a bit stupidly on a world which long ago left them behind; they fumble, fret, and put off, and wait for the weather to change and something to turn up. It is a cultural phenomenon peculiar to a defeated and impoverished South in the generation following the Civil War, which Miss Porter knew from experience.

The regional bias of Noon Wine is emphasized by making both Helton and Hatch outsiders from the North. In spite of Mr. Helton's queerness, Mr. Thompson respects and loves him, and not through selfish motives as Robert Penn Warren suggests. Open-natured and incapable of deceit, Mr. Thompson presents in ragged outline the qualities of manhood that command respect. From the first he dislikes Hatch, a different sort of man with a brand of impertinence he is not used to. He brings an attitude of mind and rule of play alien to the simple farmer, whose line of conduct is courtesy to the stranger, however unwelcome; and Mr. Thompson finds himself impotent before Hatch's bad manners, his cynical wit and a strange way of giving an offensive turn to an innocent remark. No Texan of his acquaintance would take liberties in this way. And when Hatch persists in his threat to the hired man, Mr. Thompson begins to feel “a slow muffled resentment climbing from somewhere deep down in him, climbing and spreading all through him.” (p. 250) Although no bully, he is no coward either, and he makes up his mind that if this man refuses to be off after due warning he will kick him off the place. “I want to give you a good piece of advice. You just drop the idea that you're going to come here and make trouble for Mr. Helton, and the quicker you drive that hired rig away from my front gate the better I'll be satisfied.” (p. 254)

This is the most satisfactory point of the story. Mr. Thompson's outrage is completely in keeping with his character and the situation he finds himself in; and a few minutes later when he kills Hatch, his act is the victory of principle over malicious meddling and self-interest. The court accepts his account of the slaying, and there the story should have ended. The torment over guilt and innocence is another story for another character in another place. In her effort to fashion something new from the scattered recollections of childhood experience, Miss Porter fails to achieve a unity of effect. Her aims are divided. The regional coloring comes to naught. Mr. Thompson's finest moment is robbed of all significances, and the story peters out in the meaningless acts of trivial and unimportant people, none of whom, she says, is large enough to work out any sort of redemption.

The South is Katherine Anne Porter's earth, says Daniel Curley, “and she strays from it at her peril.”¹⁶ None of her stories is better evidence of the truth of this observation than Noon Wine, where she gives a generous picture of the plain people of her region, only to be caught up short by what she considered the necessities of her art and a particular view of life to which she subscribed. “Life is one bloody, horrible confusion,” she once said, “and the business of the artist is to know it, admit it.”¹⁷ The Thompsons must not be admired after all, and so she picks at them until they become, in the words of one critic, “as squalid in their day-to-day purposes as savages.”¹⁸ Here Miss Porter is following the Chekhovian formula that the artist, instead of looking for pearls among the refuse, must conquer his squeamishness and “soil his imagination with the dirt of life.”¹⁹ When Mr. Thompson rises up in defense of Mr. Helton, Miss Porter gives way to a deep impulse in her nature to admire, sponsored by the tradition which formed her. But the old ringing values of the past will not do. With the intrusion of the conscious artist, the heroic fades away, in a moral wasteland where all values are confused.

William Faulkner says that the writer's duty is help man endure by “lifting up his heart.” Miss Porter's use of the Southern material, slight though it is, is as vigorously honest as Faulkner's and, in spite of her aloofness, as instinct with sympathy for the same old “verities” that Faulkner espoused. Both writers are products of the generation that followed the Civil War, but Miss Porter allowed herself to be adopted into another generation, the one following a later war that gave itself up to negation and Spenglerian gloom. She was never able to make up her mind where she belonged nor what she was trying to say. “I never knew what I was,” she once said; “I'm just Ole Woman River, I just keep rollin' along!”²⁰ She loved the home country as much as Faulkner, who gave himself up freely to his “demon,” as he called it, without much concern for the rules of his craft. Always the artist, Miss Porter refused to let herself go. Her vignettes of Southern life are sharply etched and remain in the memory, but they form no basis for a larger view of experience.

Notes

1. Katherine Anne Porter, “A Country and Some People I Love,” Harper's Magazine, CCXXXI (September, 1965), 68.

2. Katherine Anne Porter, The Days Before (New York, 1952), p. 44.

3. Ibid., p. 155.

4. Katherine Anne Porter, Collected Stories (New York, 1965), p. 233. (Subsequent references to this work will appear in the text in parentheses.)

5. Katherine Anne Porter, “‘Noon Wine’: The Sources,” Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, eds. (New York, 1959), p. 618.

6. Robert Penn Warren, Selected Essays (New York, 1958), p. 155.

7. Eudora Welty, “The Eye of the Story,” Yale Review, LV (December, 1965), 266.

8. Katherine Anne Porter, The Days Before (New York, 1952), p. 103.

9. Welty, p. 265.

10. “‘Noon Wine’: The Sources,” p. 611.

11. Ibid., pp. 615–618.

12. Ibid., p. 611.

13. Ibid., p. 612.

14. Ibid., p. 613.

15. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Modern Library edition of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, pp. 348, 365.

16. Daniel Curley, “Katherine Anne Porter: The Larger Plan,” Kenyon Review, XXV (Autumn, 1963), 673.

17. Donald Sutherland, “Ole Woman River: A Correspondence With Katherine Anne Porter,” Sewanee Review, LXXIV (Summer, 1966), 761.

18. Howard Baker, “The Upward Path: Notes on the Work of Katherine Anne Porter,” Southern Review, IV (Winter, 1968), 13.

19. Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends, ed. Constance Garnett (New York, 1920), p. 57.

20. Donald Sutherland, p. 767.