SOURCE: “To Tell a Straight Story,” in Katherine Anne Porter, Twayne Publishers, 1965, pp. 83–117.

[In the following essay from his full-length study of Porter's work, Hendrick classifies Porter's short fiction into four main categories based on common thematic concerns, stylistic techniques, and settings.]

The stories which follow are divided into four sections. The stories in the first group have a Southern or Southwestern setting, and many have recognizable autobiographic details. “He” and Noon Wine have the familiar Southern setting but are concerned with poor whites instead of the aristocratic Rheas. “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” seems to have been begun as a fictional version of the death of Catherine Anne Porter, but the portrayal is quite different from the fictionalized rendering of Mrs. Porter in the Miranda stories. “Magic” is set in New Orleans, a city Miss Porter knows well, and is a brilliant Jamesian experiment in point of view. The next three stories are “Rope,” a universalized rendering of the battle of the sexes; “The Downward Path to Wisdom,” one of her most dazzlingly written stories; and “Theft,” perhaps a perfect story. These stories are not obviously autobiographical, but their personal tone calls for their inclusion after the first group.

The third group of stories includes “The Cracked Looking-Glass” and “A Day's Work,” stories about Irish immigrants in the United States. These stories are, as Professor Marjorie Ryan pointed out in “Dubliners and the Stories of Katherine Anne Porter,” “Joycean in techniques as well as in theme.” Miss Ryan notes that the stories are an “objective rendering of the situation,” that the author does not comment, and that, in general, “the meaning is implicit in the action.”

The last group of stories concerns Germany and Germans. In the recently published story “Holiday,” the reader sees German immigrants in Texas, as they are viewed by a deeply troubled young woman with characteristics much like those of Miranda. The last story is “The Leaning Tower,” written while Ship of Fools was still in embryonic form, but the subject matter is Germany of 1931, just after the fictional Vera landed in Bremerhaven. Instead of Jenny Brown, the artist, in Berlin, we see Berlin and the Berliners through the consciousness of Charles Upton, who is a sensitive observer.

I SOUTHERN, SOUTHWESTERN, AUTOBIOGRAPHIC

“HE”

“He” (1927) was Miss Porter's first attempt to deal with a hopelessly deformed or mentally incompetent person and his place in society or in the family, a theme later explored in “Holiday” and with Herr Glocken in Ship of Fools. “He” is told with objectivity, stressing the irony of the situation but ending with compassion for both mother and child.

The Whipples (the name suggests a whip) were a poor Southern family not willing to admit they were “white trash,” a family rather like the Thompsons in Noon Wine. Mr. Whipple was a realist, ready to talk to neighbors about their hard life, but his wife insisted on pretending otherwise—just as she pretended love for their simple-minded son. She announced her love for Him to everyone she saw, and the neighbors were so busy with their own analyses of the bad blood which had produced such a child that they did not have time to notice that her professed love was a cover for hatred. She constantly allowed Him to climb trees, to do more work than He should, to handle the bees because He didn't seem to notice the stings, to lead a dangerous bull, to steal a pig from its ferocious mother. She was never concerned for His safety, except to wonder what the neighbors would say if He were injured.

Mrs. Whipple and He are the chief characters of the story; Adna and Emly (as with Hinry in the Miranda stories, these spellings approximate the pronunciation), Mr. Whipple, and the neighbors are minor but necessary figures who make significant contributions to the action and the theme of the story. He never seemed to mind not having enough cover on His bed or enough warm clothes to wear on cold days, because He had no mind. He was covered with fat, more a harmless beast than a human; and, when Mrs. Whipple killed the pig for Sunday dinner, the description of the pink pig is almost the same as descriptions of Him.

Mrs. Whipple desired public approval; she wanted everybody to tell her that He was not bad off; she wanted her two normal children to be fed and dressed properly, and she wanted the approval of her brother and his family when they came to dinner.

Even had it been offered, He was beyond human help; He could work as if He were a beast of burden, taking on the chores of Emly and Adna who left the “hard times” on the farm. One winter near Christmas (the unwary are warned not to fall into the trap of identifying Him with Jesus) He fell on the ice, thrashed about in a fit, and was carried into the house. When He had had a serious illness, obviously pneumonia, some years before, the Whipples had waited two days before going for the doctor; but this time His suffering was more obvious, and though they had gone for the doctor immediately, He was beyond help. The Whipples kept Him at home for a time, but the doctor finally told them to take Him to the County Home. Was this advice given on humanitarian or mercenary grounds? The Whipples did not know; it was true that Mr. Whipple was relieved, for oppressed by his poverty, his constant concern was with the bills. He was, however, realistic enough to believe the doctor who said He would never get better.

Mrs. Whipple, who didn't want charity, was at first afraid the neighbors would look down upon them, but her true feelings were expressed when she saw her dream of life: “All at once she saw it full summer again, with the garden going fine, and new white roller shades up all over the house, and Adna and Emly home, so full of life, all of them happy together. Oh, it could happen, things would ease up on them.” He would not be there.

When a neighbor drove Him and Mrs. Whipple to the County Home, He began to cry, and Mrs. Whipple imagined He was remembering all the mistreatment and hardships of His life. Mrs. Whipple cried too, and for the first time the reader has compassion for her: “she had loved Him as much as she possibly could, there were Adna and Emly who had to be thought of too, there was nothing she could do to make up to Him for His life. Oh, what a mortal pity He was ever born.”

Cruel, foolish, vain, and hypocritical as she had been, she had instinctively fought for her normal children, covering her hatred for Him thinly with Christian piety. But her last thoughts stripped the false morality away. It would have been better had He not been born. Even the neighbor driving the carryall, driving very fast to get them to the County Home, dared not look back at the suffering Mrs. Whipple trying to soothe her son. He, beyond help, could receive but could not return love. The Whipples were too human and too poor to be able to do more than they did for Him. The Müllers in “Holiday” never are shown identifying with Ottilie for they had forgotten their kinship with her. They were, however, less outwardly cruel to her than the Whipples were to their son.

“He” is a particularly bleak story, for the corrosive effects of poverty and of a mentally defective child, combined with the bleakness of the seasons—many of the scenes are set in the fall or winter—and the constant reference to Him, spoken as if He were a deity instead of a hopeless creature, are combined into a completely pessimistic story.

NOON WINE

The setting for Noon Wine (1937) is a small South Texas farm from 1896 to 1905, roughly the same time that Miss Porter lived in that region. The story opens with a stranger's appearance at the farm of Royal Earle Thompson, a proud man engaged in the disagreeable task of churning. The stranger, seeking work, was hired, and for the next few years Olaf Helton helped make the farm prosper; he was a reticent man who played the same tune over and over on his harmonica.

Nine years after Helton arrived, another stranger came, a Homer T. Hatch looking for Mr. Helton. While Mr. Thompson was talking to Mr. Hatch, they could hear Helton playing the harmonica, playing the tune which Hatch identified as a “Scandahoovian song.” “It says,” he reported, “something about starting out in the morning feeling so good you can't hardly stand it, so you drink up all your likker before noon. All the likker, y'understand, that you was saving for the noon lay-off.” Hatch had come to return Helton to the asylum, to which he had been committed after killing his brother in a fight over a harmonica.

Perhaps thinking that Hatch was going to injure Helton, Mr. Thompson killed Hatch and, like the Ancient Mariner, kept trying to explain to his neighbors just what happened. One night after an all-day trip to explain the killing, Mr. Thompson had a nightmare, and Mrs. Thompson cried out, “Oh, oh, don't! Don't! Don't!” Mr. Thompson, like Claudius, cried “Light the lamp. …” The two sons rushed into the room, believing that Mr. Thompson (once a murderer always a murderer) had attempted to harm their mother. “You touch her again, and I'll blow your heart out,” one son said. Mr. Thompson, at this moment, felt utter defeat; he had known that his neighbors did not believe his story; now, he saw, his own sons did not believe him. He said he was going for the doctor, but instead he took his gun, went into the field, and wrote: “Before Almighty God, the great judge of all before who I am about to appear, I do hereby solemnly swear that I did not take the life of Mr. Homer T. Hatch on purpose. It was done in defense of Mr. Helton … I have told all this to the judge and the jury and they let me off but nobody believes it. This is the only way I can prove I am not a cold blooded murderer like everybody seems to think.” And then he killed himself.

In “‘Noon Wine’: The Sources” Miss Porter has attempted to show how an artist lives a story three times: “first in the series of actual events that, directly or indirectly, have combined to set up that commotion in his mind and senses that causes him to write the story; second, in memory; and third in the recreation of this chaotic stuff.”

She remembers when she was a child hearing one late summer afternoon, when the sky was “clear green-blue with long streaks of burning rose in it” and filled with swooping bats, the sound of a thundering shotgun, and a long-drawn out scream. “How did I know it was death?” she asks, and replies, “We are born knowing death.” Later she remembers watching the hearse go by and members of her family saying: “Poor Pink Hodges—old man A … got him just like he said he would.”

When she was about nine, she noticed a strange horse and buggy in the drive and saw a man and woman inside the house, talking to her grandmother, the woman “in a faded cotton print dress and a wretched little straw hat,” a woman with the marks of “life-starvation” all over her. She kept her eyes on her twisting hands as her husband in a coarse voice said, “I swear, it was in self-defense! … If you don't believe me, ask my wife here. She saw it. My wife won't lie!” And the wife answered each time, “Yes, that's right. I saw it.” Though Miss Porter never knew the facts of the killing or the outcome, she knew that the woman was made to lie; that she did it unwillingly; but that her husband, dishonest as he was, made her lie in an attempt to make his lie true. This man was not, like the man in the story, “foolishly proud” but “a great loose-faced, blabbing man full of guilt and fear.”

Not long afterwards, Miss Porter was with her father when they saw a “tall, black-whiskered man on horseback, sitting so straight his chin was level with his Adam's apple,” with a flamboyant black hat on the side of his head. Her father said, “That's Ralph Thomas, the proudest man in seven counties.” She asked what he was proud of, and her father replied, “I suppose the horse. It's a very fine horse.” And she saw then that the man was ridiculous and yet pathetic.

On another trip she saw “a bony, awkward, tired looking man, tilted in a kitchen chair against the wall of his comfortless shack, … a thatch of bleached-looking hair between his eyebrows, blowing away at a doleful tune on his harmonica … the very living image of loneliness. I was struck with pity for this stranger, his eyes closed against the alien scene, consoling himself with such poor music.” Later, she learned he was a Swedish farm worker.

Miss Porter explains the process of memory and artistic creativity which she used in the story:

I saw … a few mere flashes of a glimpse here and there, one time or another; but I do know why I remembered them, and why in my memory they slowly took on their separate lives in a story. It is because there radiated from each one of those glimpses of strangers some element, some quality that arrested my attention at a vital moment of my own growth, and caused me, a child, to stop short and look outward, away from myself; to look at another human being with that attention and wonder and speculation which ordinarily, and very naturally, I think, a child lavishes only on himself.

In Noon Wine Pink Hodges is merged with the Swedish farm worker who becomes the “eternal Victim”; the whining man, the Killer, is merged with the proudest man in seven counties; the Killer's wife, a pathetic figure, becomes the genteel Mrs. Thompson.

Mr. Thompson (even the name is significant here—he is one of Tom's sons—one of the plain people, but with the pretentious name Royal Earle) has married slightly above himself. Mrs. Thompson, in her gentility and ill-health, is typical of her time; she is ironically named Ellen—that is, Helen, Goddess of Beauty. She is bound by a moral code, dictated by a frontier religion which she finds immutable. Mr. Thompson sees himself as a murderer and makes his wife lie, hoping the lie will alter the fact; but she too, as the boys do, thinks him to be a murderer. By making her consent to lie, he has murdered her spirit; but she can never do more than publicly lie—she can never help him redeem himself by telling the final lie, by insisting that she really did see, that he did kill in self-defense.

Mr. Thompson's motives were mixed; Helton had brought a better life to the Thompsons; Mr. Thompson did not want his new prosperity damaged. Hatch was obviously an evil man, and all of society agreed that Mr. Thompson should not be punished. The courts would not convict him, but he was still a murderer.

The name Hatch, again, is particularly appropriate, since he has come to return Helton to the booby-hatch; even his given name Homer (who was blind) is significant, for Hatch is a man blindly working within the law, with no regard for the suffering of Helton. Helton, suggesting Hell tone or the sound of Hell, is a man beyond good and evil; a murderer; his own victim and the victim of others.

Miss Porter does not allow Miranda to tell the story because Miranda could be no more than an observer, and the differences in social positions removed her too far from the tragic events of the Thompson family. Noon Wine belongs to the time and place of the Miranda stories, but for artistic reasons it is not one of them.

The setting of the story is near Buda. In Texas, that name is pronounced almost as if it were Buddha, and the first half of the story is filled with Buddhistic peace and quiet; however, the town was not named for the Oriental deity but is a corruption of the Spanish word for widow. Mrs. Thompson is near widowhood from the moment Hatch arrives at the farm.

Noon Wine is concerned with one of the central problems in Miss Porter's fiction: the efforts of man to cope with evil. None of the Thompsons is fully capable of understanding or opposing the evil of Hatch and the evil he left behind or the good-evil of Helton. Mr. Thompson never understands his motives in killing Hatch and is driven to his own self-murder. Mrs. Thompson cannot tell the ultimate lie which would save her husband. The Thompson boys believe the worst of their father. Helton has largely overcome his psychic malaise, or rather his compulsion to do violence; but he lives in a private hell which no one can understand. Hatch's motivations cannot be explained away in terms of the financial rewards he received; he is the evil principle, beyond understanding. “There is nothing,” Miss Porter says, “in any of these beings tough enough to work the miracle of redemption in them.”

“THE JILTING OF GRANNY WEATHERALL”

“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (1929) may be seen as another of Miss Porter's creations utilizing her “usable” past—as a somewhat more objective, even more fictional presentation of the actual grandmother. Or, one may extend the story as a part of Miss Porter's use of “historic memory,” as Ray B. West has called it, and therefore see that the death “reflects a particular, but common, attitude toward death.” More recently, John Hagopian has found the moral “to be that the universe has no order, the proper bridegroom never comes—to expect him will inevitably lead to cruel disillusionment.”

The story is presented by an omniscient observer who reports the stream of consciousness of the dying Ellen Weatherall. During the last day of her life, old Granny Weatherall, almost eighty, moved back and forth from consciousness to unconsciousness, from the present to the past, conjuring up all her old fears and old dreams. Similar to Miss Porter's fictional Grandmother Rhea, Granny Weatherall had been a strong-willed, active woman who had buried a young husband and reared a large family. Mrs. Weatherall had for sixty years, however, been trying to forget that on the day of her proposed marriage, her first fiancé, George, had jilted her. She had married John later, borne his children, and named the first one George; but the last child, the one she wanted to have by George, she called Hapsy—quite obviously a diminutive of Happiness.

The morning of her last day of life, she could still play her role as a cantankerous old woman when the young Dr. Harry (curiously enough the name of Miranda's father) came. She could still focus her eyes, could still hear the whisperings of Dr. Harry and Cornelia, although things did seem to float, and the whisperings sometimes took on strange sounds, as if they were leaves outside. Back and forth in time she went, thinking of her orderly house, the clock with the lion on it which gathered dust (a reference to James's “The Beast in the Jungle”)—that is, the disorder which she, like Sophia Jane, constantly had to fight. She plagued dutiful Cornelia with whom she lived (the name reminds one of King Lear's Cordelia) but wanted Hapsy, the daughter now dead. She wanted to see her first fiancé, to tell him about her husband and her children: “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!”

Her thoughts extend her loss to the same loss explored in James's short story, and even her name is similar to Weatherend, the name of the house where the James story begins. Some of the descriptions are similar; May Bartram's household was described by James: “The perfection of household care, of high polish and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but they now looked most as if everything had been wound up, tucked in, put away. …” Miss Porter wrote: “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. …”

Granny tried to delude herself into believing that there was nothing wrong with her, just as she had deluded herself about being able to forget her jilting. When Hapsy appeared to her, Granny seemed to be herself and “to be Hapsy also and the baby on Hapsy's arm was Hapsy and himself and herself, all at once. …” Himself was undoubtedly George, whom she couldn't call by name. Hapsy said, “I thought you'd never come,” and they started to kiss; she was then near death, but Cornelia spoke and Granny was called back.

By night, she was barely able to speak or focus her eyes; she was unaware of the meaning of Father Connally's actions as he administered the last rites of the Church: she had a rosary in her hand “and Father Connally murmured Latin in a very solemn voice and tickled her feet. My God, will you stop this nonsense?” Only when she dropped the rosary and took instead the thumb of her son Jimmy did she realize her living children had come for her death. In a panic, she began to think of all the unfinished things she wanted done, and then Hapsy came again. She asked God for a sign, but again there was none. Again there was a priest in the house but no bridegroom—that is, in this second jilting, the absent bridegroom was the Jesus of Matthew 25: 1-13. She could not forgive being jilted again. Willful to the last, she would not be jilted again; she herself blew out the light.

The death scene has many similarities with Miranda's near death in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, for both emphasize the darkness, the pale light, the grayness. Gray was the color of the fog and smoke which crept over the bright field where everything was planted orderly, and it was the color of George, for the thought of him was “the smoky cloud of hell”; one is reminded of the “grey impalpable world” at the conclusion of The Dead. As in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the grays of death and the green of life are constantly juxtaposed, just as the images of light, the lamp, candles, matches, flame, are contrasted with those of dark, of fear, and betrayal and death. Smoke and fog hid approaching death, but orchards, fields, rows of crops and fruit trees, green rugs and polished floors represented happiness and the joy of life. Granny Weatherall's mind drifted with all of these images, just as Molly Bloom's did in the last section of Ulysses; but Molly's answer was “Yes.” Granny's affirmation was her own will to die.

As is usual with Miss Porter, the truth is bitter and pessimistic. Her ending and echo of James again, is fully as horrible as that of John Marcher, who saw the lurking beast, which rose, leaped, missed; to avoid it, Marcher “flung himself, face down, on the tomb.” Miss Porter has learned her lessons from James perfectly. Her story has all the finesse, skill, and symbolism of the master himself; but, although she echoes James, the story is uniquely her own.

“MAGIC”

“Magic” (1928), told by a Negro maid, once a servant in a bordello but now employed in the home of Madame Blanchard, is one of the best examples of Miss Porter's use of Jamesian narrative techniques. The maid was a woman who prided herself on her French blood and her good character, but she worked where work was to be found. Her narrative about a bit of magic at the house of prostitution where she once worked was told to amuse Madame Blanchard, whose hair she was brushing. Madame Blanchard had remarked to the laundress that the sheets wore out so quickly they were obviously bewitched, and the maid had her own story of magic to tell. Acutely aware of her role as an entertainer, the maid in her narrative emphasized the scenes of violence, the peculiar monetary system the Madam used, the exact details of the making of the charm to bring Ninette back. The maid had, she insisted, seen too many things, terrible events which she willingly and frivolously told to her new mistress, a Madame who had only an e to distinguish her from the Madam.

Madame Blanchard, a lady with a French name which in earlier times meant linen, the qualities of whiteness and coolness being particularly appropriate, sat at her dressing table, apparently a little bored. The maid hoped, she said, the violent, perverse story she was going to tell would rest her mistress. Madame Blanchard obviously did not object to hearing the story; in fact, at two different times she asked the maid to go on with the story. The first interruption is of special interest: Madame Blanchard complained that her hair was being pulled at the time when the maid was telling that the Madam had a complete understanding with the police and that the girls stayed with the Madam unless they were sick (an obvious euphemism for venereal disease). Later, as more violent episodes were told, one would imagine that the brushing might have become more violent, but Madame Blanchard did not protest. While it may be true that the maid did pull the hair, it is just as likely that the mistress was distressed by the implications of the story, for the institutions of middle- and upper-class life were being undermined, and she may have used the hair pulling as a rather nervous protest. Madame Blanchard, showing no compassion for the prostitutes, was as cold and expressionless as her sheets, qualities which she held in common with the Madam.

As the maid continued with her long narrative about life in the brothel, she and Madame Blanchard provide the frame for the story of a life which was, perhaps, not much different from any other life. The household was controlled by the Madam who had no human feelings, was constantly cheating the girls, arguing over money, fighting by unfair means. When Ninette, the most called-for girl, announced, independently, that she was leaving, the Madam beat her furiously and kicked her in the groin before turning her out into the street. Ninette was engaged in a profession which was, as the narrator saw it, just a business. An outcast of society, Ninette was courageous in defying the Madam, who had the police and pimps on her side; but her revolt was, from the first, doomed.

A magic brew to bring Ninette back was made by the Negro cook, a woman with much French blood, also, but a woman with bad character, the narrator insisted. After the maid had finished with the lurid details of the making of the magic brew, Madame Blanchard interrupted again, thus returning the reader to the frame; closed her perfume bottle, although all the scents of Araby would not wash away the horrible story; and asked, “Yes, and then?” Yes, the maid said, the charm worked; Ninette returned, was ordered upstairs to dress for work.

The narrator's account of the story, toned down in language but with certain of the violent scenes emphasized, is not to be considered the truth, but a dramatic version of what happened. The narrator, for instance, was never aware of the ironies involved: she referred to the bordello as a fancy house; she believed that the magic potion had brought Ninette back; she missed the significance of the man's greeting, “Welcome home,” to Ninette on her return. The story ends on a final note of irony: Ninette, who had dared to revolt, to flee the corruption of the sordid house, found no haven in a world itself corrupt and sordid; she returned therefore to the Madam, where she would again be cheated, but where she was in demand by the customers. The maid ended the story as if it were a fairy story and everyone lived happily ever after: “And after that she lived there quietly.”

This story of five pages is of great complexity, uniting Jamesian point-of-view; the frame with its characterizations of the maid and the mistress; the story with the Madam, the maid, and Ninette; subtle psychological probings; and bitter social criticism. A major achievement, this story is too little appreciated.

II UNIVERSALIZED

“ROPE”

The he and she of “Rope” (1928), never identified by name, are tied together in marriage; but, in their love-hate relationship, they are hanging each other, giving one another enough rope for hanging, forcing the other on the ropes, and each is at the end of his rope. The story is another of Miss Porter's examinations of marriage, of love, hate, and frustration. Unlike her other stories dealing with marriage—such as “That Tree” or “The Cracked Looking-Glass”—the exact time, place, and setting and the background of the characters are not known. By implication we know it is late fall, that the setting is in the country, and that both he and she earn money, his income being larger.

The first and last paragraphs emphasize the tranquility of the rural scene. They had only been in the country three days, and already he had told her she looked like a country woman, and she told him he resembled a rural character in a drama. But the hayseedish characters were completely deceptive, and the tranquility soon disappeared, not to return until he came from the store the second time. Ostensibly, she began the quarrel because he forgot to buy coffee, and she had not had coffee that day. He had instead bought a rope, and the rope soon became the center of the argument; he had bought it impulsively, could think of no real use for it.

The indirect quotations emphasize the bitterness of the quarrel which was unraveling their marriage. The rope had broken the eggs; she had no ice to keep them until the next day; she would not have the rope in her pantry. He didn't know what tied them together, why he shouldn't just clear out. She reminded him of the casual affair he had the summer before. Like Miranda's grandmother, she was too busy organizing the house to enjoy the country; he, paraphrasing Emerson, didn't think the house should ride them. He returned to the store, two miles away for her coffee, for her laxative, and for the other items she suddenly remembered. He took the rope to exchange it, but secretly hid it behind a rock.

When he appeared again, rope in hand, masculine pride still intact, she had completely changed; she was waiting serenely for him, supper ready, not concerned at all that he had “forgotten” to exchange the rope. She was playful, kittenish, talking baby talk. The last paragraph derives much of its poignancy from the veiled reference to Whitman's “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” in which the he-bird sat calling for the never-to-return she-bird. Miss Porter's use of he and she may have been influenced by Whitman's poem, although she also uses the names to give a universal, an Everyman-Everywoman effect. They heard a whippoorwill, still there out of season, sitting in a crab-apple tree—fittingly sour fruit—“calling all by himself. Maybe his girl stood him up. Maybe she did. She hoped to hear him once more, she loved whippoorwills … He knew how she was, didn't he?” She projected her own feelings into the sad song of the bird, imagining that his mate had jilted him, wanting to hear the bird's song again.

The story ends with a note of tranquility masking the terrible battle which had just been fought. They had both said too much that could not be forgotten, and many of the threads of the rope holding them together had been unraveled. The final line indicates that the husband was also aware of the implications of the quarrel and of her interpretation of the bird's song: “Sure, he knew how she was.” The disastrous quarrel in “Rope” is similar to the corrosive Jenny-David affair in Ship of Fools.

“THE DOWNWARD PATH TO WISDOM”

“The Downward Path to Wisdom” (first published in The Leaning Tower) begins with another of Miss Porter's ironic contradictions: instead of an ascent to wisdom, Stephen travels downward in his journey from innocence to experience, from blissful ignorance to knowledge, from paradise to hell. An examination of the fiery furnace of childhood, the story concentrates on a few weeks in the life of Stephen, who is called by his correct name late in the story, for he most often was called “baby” or “fellow” or “bad boy.”

Stephen, at the opening of the story, was a four-year-old child described and treated as if he were an animal: when he was lifted into his parents' bed, he sank between them “like a bear cub in a warm litter”; he crunched his peanuts “like a horse.” His peanut-eating reminds one of the monkeys in “The Circus” and of Otto in “The Leaning Tower” who was beaten as a child because his mother did not like the sound of cracking walnuts. The story contains many echoes of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Stephen as Stephen Dedalus, Stephen's meow and Stephen Dedalus' being told the story about a moocow; Stephen's being jeered at by the schoolchildren when he tried to make a meow; Stephen Dedalus' being pushed into the square ditch; Stephen's father with a tough (hairy?) chest and Stephen Dedalus' father with a beard; Stephen's eating peanuts and Stephen Dedalus' being given a cachou.

The rejection of Stephen takes several forms: his mother doesn't like peanut shells spilled all over her, and he was put out of bed and finally out of the room while his parents quarreled over his eating the nuts—an argument as pointless and at the same time as pointed as the one in “Rope.” Since the whole story is reported from Stephen's point of view, the reader does not know exactly what went on between the parents, only how it affected Stephen.

Rejected by both parents, he was soon rejected by the maid Marjory, who called him a “dirty little old boy” because he didn't want his breakfast; she even repeated what we learn later was the family opinion of Stephen's father—he was mean. The fight between the parents became so intense that Stephen was sent suddenly to his grandmother's house to stay. He was frightened, even though he had been sent to her house before; the only comforting thing he could think of was his peanuts, and he cried for them.

Stephen's hostility toward the world was a natural reaction: he could never be certain of the reactions of those around him. His father had given the boy the peanuts and then scolded him for eating them. His Uncle David gave him the balloons but turned on him when he took others without permission; the old grandmother, seeing all the hate building up over the boy, finally declared that she just wanted to be left alone; the old servant Janet who took him to school made him feel guilty about sex.

All of the adults had been expelled from paradise themselves, and the crucial scene in the story is Stephen's expulsion. At school, Stephen met Frances, the archetypal Eve. To win her affection, he gave her balloons; but his offerings did not appease her. She was larger and more mature than he; when they danced at school, she wanted him to follow her; she punished him by saying he couldn't dance and then that she didn't like the way he danced. It was she who had the other children look at Stephen's animal which he thought was a cat but which she declared to be a horse. Stephen learned in his first days at school that popularity could be bought with favors but could vanish suddenly, leaving him a scapegoat, a figure to be ridiculed.

The balloons he and Frances sat blowing on one Saturday swelled, changed colors, became part of his dreams and aspirations; but they grew and grew, only to burst, a final disillusionment. Stephen chose an “apple-colored” balloon and Frances took a “pale green one,” perhaps representing the green fig leaves used by Adam and Eve after they tasted the apple. They were still in paradise: “Between them on the bench lay a tumbled heap of delights still to come.” Frances—her name can be, with a slight change of spelling, masculine or feminine—bragged of a beautiful long silver balloon she had once had (the images become phallic in this scene); but Stephen urged her to go on playing with the round ones they had. He felt of his ribs and was surprised not that he had lost a rib for the creation of Eve but that the ribs stopped in front. Frances was growing tired and restless, just as Eve did. Stephen pushed the “limp objects” toward her and urged her to go on enjoying the delights they had, the millions more that would last and last. Instead, she wanted other delights: “a stick” of licorice to make “liquish” water. Stephen didn't have any money, but Frances was persistent; she was thirsty, and she might have to return home. To keep her, Stephen promised to make lemonade. He took the forbidden fruit and made the drink, putting it into a teapot; to keep the adults (God) from knowing, Stephen suggested they go to the back garden, behind the rose bushes. Frances ran beside him like a deer, “her face wise with knowledge,” as Stephen ran with the teapot. They drank from the spout of the teapot—a phallic image again, and in keeping with her rejection of limp balloons and request for a stick of licorice—playing games, letting the lemonade run over them. Finally full, they began to give the rosebush a drink, and Stephen baptized it in the “Name father son holygoat,” making the Christian ceremony pagan again.

Caught by the maids, Frances looked at her shoes and let Stephen take the blame. Stephen, in this scene, left babyhood, left innocence, and his route paralleled the Old Testament account of man, expelled from the garden and free to follow strange gods.

Uncle David made a great scene about the theft of the balloons, called the boy a thief, railed against Stephen's father. The grandmother made no real attempt to protect the boy; she agreed with David that Stephen should be sent home, but hypocritically referred to Stephen as “your Grandma's darling.”

When Stephen's mother arrived, she quarreled with her mother and brother; but it was a histrionic scene ending with a promise to come for a visit in a few days. Stephen, stripped of all of his innocence, didn't want to go home to his father, who had rejected him; but his mother carried him to the car. In the front seat, rejected and frightened, without love or comfort, initiated into the ways of the world, Stephen sang to himself: “I hate Papa, I hate Mama, I hate Grandma, I hate Uncle David, I hate Old Janet, I hate Marjory, I hate Papa, I hate Mama. …” He had started over and had not yet mentioned Frances. The story does not end with this terrible song, but with Stephen growing sleepy, resting his head on his mother's knee. She drew him closer; he could be her love; she drove with one hand, obviously caressing Stephen with the other.

The martyr Stephen, in the sixth and seventh chapters of Acts, reminded the multitudes that they would not accept the message brought by Jesus and that they always persecuted the prophets. True to his prediction, he was stoned to death. Miss Porter's Stephen was martyred; he was driven into exile just as Joyce's Stephen was. Stephen Dedalus went into exile in France at the end of A Portrait and had just returned from that country at the beginning of Ulysses. Could not Frances be a play on France? And could it not be that the balloons are a subtle reference to the wings of the original Daedalus?

“THEFT”

“Theft” (1929), one of Miss Porter's most subtle and complicated stories, is told from the point of view of a no-longer young writer, supporting herself largely by writing reviews. The central character of the story has much in common with the unnamed, alienated narrator in “Hacienda.” The setting is the New York bohemian world, perhaps in the 1920's; the characters are insecure and poor; and the mood is sad, gloomy, dismal. In the opening scene, the lateness of the hour, the desolate Elevated station, the driving rain, set the tone for the story.

She declared the clearness of her memory and the value she placed on the purse: she had put it on the wooden bench the night before and had dried it. The next day when she realized the purse was gone, she began to think about the events of the night before. Camilo, a graceful young Spanish acquaintance, had walked her to the Elevated station in the rain, even though his new, biscuit-colored hat was being ruined. She saw Camilo as one who used most effectively the small courtesies but ignored “the larger and more troublesome ones.” Somewhat intoxicated, her thoughts were on the impractical hat, which would now look shabby; and she compared Camilo's hat with Eddie's—always old, but worn with “careless and incidental rightness.” She had no intimate relationship with Camilo, no real concern about him except for his hat. She saw him at the corner putting his hat under his overcoat, and she felt that “she had betrayed him by seeing,” though this is certainly her interpretation of the event and may be only partially true.

Before she could get to the Elevated, Roger called to her; and the scene with him is perhaps the most pleasant one of the story. They were old friends and perhaps lovers; he readily admitted the bulge under his coat was his hat being protected—the hats help reveal the characters of three of the men—and she willingly shared a taxi with him. His arm around her shoulders was comforting, and it was obvious their relationship had been an amiable one. Stopped at a light, she saw, and in her recollection she comments on, two scenes: three young men, in “seedy snappy-cut suits and gay neckties” arguing about marriage, the first maintaining he would marry for love; the second wanted him to tell that to the girl; and the third insisted on the sexual connotations: “Wot the hell's he got?” The first had defended his manhood: “I got plenty,” and they had squealed and scrambled away. She saw them not as human but as scarecrows, and her use of “gay” as a description of their neckties may have been her subconscious attempt to de-masculinize them. She also saw, at the same stop, two girls, in transparent raincoats; and the girls were, in a way, transparent to her. One girl said, “Yes, I know all about that. But what about me? You're always so sorry for him …” She saw them not as humans, but as rushing by on “pelican legs.”

Later, Roger told her that Stella was returning, that all was “settled.” She said she had had a letter too, but things had been settled for her. Roger, self-reliant, when asked about his show, announced he wouldn't argue about things; they would have to take it on his terms or abandon it. He borrowed a dime to help pay for the fare, and told her to take aspirin and a hot bath to ward off a cold.

Upstairs, she visited Bill, a self-centered, weak writer, without the outer strength of Camilo or the inner strength of Roger. He complained about paying alimony, was oblivious to the fate of his child, refused to pay her the $50 promised for her help on his play. She let him steal her money, without a real objection. Upstairs she had read the letter, obviously from Eddie, accusing her of destroying his love for her. She tore the letter into strips, and her actions demonstrated clearly that her alienation from those around her sprang from herself. In destroying the letter, she destroyed her last link with Eddie.

She then remembered that the next morning the janitress had come in while she was having a bath, saying the radiators had to be looked after before turning on the heat; and the janitress had sometime later gone out, “closing the door very sharply.” When she returned to the room, the purse was gone. She dressed and made coffee, her excitement and anger growing. She put the cup down in the center of the table (emphasizing the religious ritual) and descended into the basement to demand her purse from the janitress, who was at the furnace and streaked with coal dust. The scene that followed was that of an inferno. The woman first denied stealing the gold-cloth purse. The writer attempted to reassert herself, to act positively, instead of giving in, as she had done with Bill. As she confronted the janitress, she remembered that she had never worried about possessions, that she had been indifferent and careless with them, that she had not loved them just as she had not loved or been able to go on loving others; she had therefore given others the chance to rob her. Then the physical act became a symbol to her: “she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed from her and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, … the long patient suffering of dying friendships and the dark inexplicable death of love”; all of these she had lost and was losing again in memory. Her anger and her desire to get the purse back had been a desire to keep from losing herself. The woman returned the purse, first saying, with “red fire flickering in her eyes,” that she had a seventeen-year-old niece who needed a pretty purse, and then that she must have been crazy to have taken it.

The janitress argued that her niece was young and needed her chance; the writer had already had hers. The writer tried to return the purse to the janitress, who said spitefully that the niece didn't need it because she was young and pretty: “I guess you need it worse than she does.” The writer was then caught in a circular trap, never able to keep from causing her own alienation, her own losses. The janitress had the last word: the purse was being stolen from the niece.

The writer put the purse on the table again, but the coffee (sacrament) was chilled. The purse was on the altar, but the woman knew that “I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.” All of the incidents of the story are chosen to emphasize this final view. The alienation is pointed up by the rain and its effects on Camilo, Roger, and the writer; she saw that the rain changed the shape of everything. Stairs would have taken her to the Elevated (and the life of the spirit); she went down the stairs into the basement, a trip into a heart of darkness, where she saw the fire-filled eyes of the janitress and had the first intimations of the real nature of the theft.

The primary symbol in the story, which unites all the story, is the purse and the woman's feelings about it. At first, it was a material possession, a birthday present probably from Eddie; and therefore it represented their past relationship and its dissolution. The purse, at the beginning of the story, was almost empty, for she was both physically and spiritually poor. The janitress forced her to take the purse, but she had decided she no longer wanted it; she had physical possession of that which she had lost, but was haunted by all the symbolic losses. This final irony is perhaps the most bitter of them all; for, after her descent into hell, she has seen her own tragedy and the tragedy of all men—but in the meantime the wine of the sacrament (coffee) had become chilled.

The search for both profane and sacred love are the important themes of this complex story. The narrator rejects Camilo; loses Roger to his wife; is cheated by Bill, a blasphemer; and causes Eddie to reject her. She did not take the Elevated, or spiritual way, but descended into a hell, and found upon returning from the depths that the modern sacrament was unsatisfactory. She was left with a gold purse and cold coffee, a wasteland figure without any kind of love.

III THE IRISH

“THE CRACKED LOOKING-GLASS”

Stephen Dedalus said of the mirror Buck Mulligan stole from a servant: “It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.” Brother Joseph Wiesenfarth has recently pointed out that the mirror symbol in Miss Porter's story was a reference not only to Joyce, since Rosaleen had formerly been a chambermaid and practiced the Irish art of self-deception, but also to Tennyson's Lady of Shallot who wove her web while observing through a mirror the life outside the tower. Likewise, Rosaleen observed herself through a mirror and often worked on a tablecloth which apparently would never be completed. Miss Porter may also have had in mind I Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” Brother Wiesenfarth in his perceptive study sees that the mirror symbol, central to the story, changes constantly, encompassing “the imagination of Rosaleen, the imperfection of human love, the necessity of accepting that love as it is, the marriage of Rosaleen and Dennis, reality, the difficulty of knowing reality. …”

“The Cracked Looking-Glass” (1932) is filled with Joycean techniques and allusions. Rosaleen, an Irish woman, was similar to Molly Bloom in being married to a man no longer sexually satisfying to her; like Molly, her son had died; and without son, without husband-lover, she had taken literally or in spirit other lovers. It is not quite certain how many young boys she had had in the house: Kevin had been with them for a year but had gone away when Rosaleen became jealous of his young girl friend after seeing the girl's picture. Rosaleen asked Hugh Sullivan to come live with them, but he declared that it was too dangerous. And a neighbor extended the whole field of promiscuity: “A pretty specimen you are, Missis 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—.”Although the reader sees events and characters from the point of view of both Rosaleen and Dennis, he never finds any final statement, never reaches an absolute truth.

The story is an account of Rosaleen's progression from illusion to reality. Thirty years younger than Dennis—the name is ironic because it is derived from Dionysus—Rosaleen was sexually starved and constantly improved on stories, Irish fashion, to make the grim reality of her existence more endurable: the story opens with an account of her Billy-cat and his death which she learned of in a dream. Dennis showed the story to be a fabrication; like Mr. Bloom, Dennis was an outsider because he had grown up not in Ireland but in Bristol, England; and he considered himself “a sober, practical, thinking man, a lover of truth.” As observer, though, Dennis has his weaknesses; he was filled with self-pity and could not see that Rosaleen had changed in the twenty-five years they had been married. He lived almost entirely in the present instead of the past.

Rosaleen lived much in the past, because it could be improved upon in memory and in story. She thought of her girlhood in Ireland as a great triumph, and she still longed for men to fight over her. Instead of the glorious green past, she had in reality a farm in Connecticut, an old husband growing senile, and her own fading looks. In her dreams, she triumphed by having others die; she dreamed that Kevin, the housepainter, did not write because he was dead; she dreamed the Irish boy she could have married was dead. When she had to face actual death, she put aside the grim reality by dreaming about it, as she did after the great-grandfather's death.

The most important episode of the story, the one that shocked Rosaleen back to reality, was her trip to Boston to see her sister Honora, whom she dreamed was dying. Life on the farm was grim, and the dream gave her a chance to escape, a pretext for an adventure away from the small village. Instead of going directly to Boston, she went by way of New York, where she had lived with Dennis, who had been a headwaiter at a hotel. She saw, as part of her adventure, two romantic films: “The Prince of Love” and “The Lover King.”

In Boston, she discovered her sister had moved, without leaving an address, dramatic proof that her dream was not true. She also found that Hugh Sullivan, a young Irishman, either understood exactly or completely misunderstood her invitation to come to the farm. Her dream of having a young man in the house was shattered, and she was left with the reality of living out her life with Dennis. Guy Richards (his name suggests Grant Richards, the publisher, with whom Joyce had many unpleasant dealings), the local drunk, was her last hope of escape from her life with Dennis. She wanted him to visit her, but he did not; and again her dream was shattered.

She had forgotten to buy a new looking-glass, and with the acceptance of the old glass, she accepted her life and marriage. Life was “a mere dream,” she thought, accepting that too; and she put aside the dreams of the green field of her youth. She asked Dennis why he had married her, and he replied that he could not have done better. Suddenly, she felt solicitous, wanted him to keep warmer, and said she didn't know what would happen to her when he was gone. Dennis turned from the reality of his death, saying, “Let's not think of it,” and she agreed not to do so, ending compassionately, “I could cry if you crooked a finger at me.” Rosaleen had accepted the reality of their life; but, in order to go on living, they could not think of the future, of his approaching death. The story ends on the same note of despair on the human condition that one finds in many of Miss Porter's other stories. The poetic Irish language, the realistic details, and the literary echoes are superbly combined in this complex, subtle story.

“A DAY'S WORK”

“A Day's Work” (1940) is more than a story of the battle of the sexes or another of Miss Porter's investigations of marriage, as some critics have seen it. It has as its setting the slums of New York during the depression, and as a social background the political corruption of Tammany Hall. Mr. Halloran, a past middle-aged Irish immigrant from whose point of view we see much of the story, had been fired from his job in a grocery store two years before his retirement, ostensibly because of the depression but more likely to avoid paying him his pension. For seven years he had been sitting at home, drawing his relief money and listening to the complaints of Mrs. Halloran, who added to their income by doing washing and ironing. He was as cantakerous as she, always talking back, constantly provoking his shrewish wife. He was particularly bitter because he had wanted to go into politics—and the numbers racket, closely allied—but his wife wouldn't allow it. Mrs. Halloran had, as McCorkery the political boss had predicted, held Halloran down, but, in holding him down, she had kept him out of the rackets.

Mrs. Halloran, puritanically religious, had disapproved of McCorkery and his fast crowd but had approved of Connolly, a good Catholic with nine children. Halloran learned from a policeman that Connolly was wanted by the G-Men because of his criminal activities; Halloran, completely amoral, objected to police meddling, and the policeman, corrupted by the system, wanted to know what the harm was: “A man must get his money from somewhere when he's in politics. They oughta give him a chance.” On the way to the saloon, Halloran imagined what might have been if his wife had let him work with McCorkery, and he dreamed of what it would be like when he talked with McCorkery, telling him of his dismal home life and his willingness to help get out the votes, now that election time was near.

The dream and the reality came together violently, for McCorkery was at the bar, and Halloran did ask for a job. While McCorkery was in a back room with some of the boys, Halloran was even more depressed by what might have been after seeing the prosperous political boss; he drank too much and dropped the whiskey bottle—reminiscent in many ways of the opening scene of Joyce's “Grace.” McCorkery, needing votes, was outwardly calm when dealing with his old crony who was a failure; his voice was loud and hearty but had a curse in it; he slipped money to Halloran and sent him home by taxi.

At home, Halloran was repulsed by his wife. She appeared in his alcohol-induced state as a ghost in a “faded gingham winding sheet,” and her voice was “thick with grave damp.” He threw the iron at the “devil” advancing toward him and then fled into the street and told a policeman he had killed Mrs. Halloran. Before they could investigate, Mrs. Halloran appeared and told the policeman she had fainted and struck her head on the ironing board. She helped her husband upstairs, threw him on the bed, wet a large towel, tied knots in the end, and began to strike him in the face, at each whack calling out his offense: drunkenness, stealing, walking in his stocking feet, his part in raising their daughter. (The scene is remarkably similar to the Ship of Fools scene in which Mrs. Treadwell strikes Denny in the face with her shoe.) As symbol of her victorious assault, she wound the wet towel about her head, knot over shoulder; put the money from McCorkery in her locked metal box; and called her daughter to announce, for the neighbors to hear, that Halloran had a job. All her objections to the political boss had disappeared.

Illusion and reality come together forcibly and ironically in this sordid, black comedy, filled with mellifluous Irish phrases. Miss Porter managed to capture the sterile, hate-filled lives of the Hallorans, and she brilliantly etched in the political machinations of two Tammany leaders, the corruption of the ward itself, and the corrosive effects of the depression. She presents, as Marjorie Ryan has shown, the “strange, violent life in a society as dead on the surface as Joyce's.” In addition to a moral landscape similar to Joyce's Dubliners stories, Miss Porter also introduces characters named Gogarty and Finnegan, instantly recognizable to those who know Joyce's life and work.

The psychological probings and the rhetorical dialogue are especially noteworthy, and this realistic story of the depression in the New York slums deserves to be better known.

IV GERMANS

“HOLIDAY”

The aristocratic Hans in “The Leaning Tower” announced that, when he spoke of Germans, he did not mean peasants; Tadeusz the Pole replied, “Perhaps we should always mean peasants when we speak of a race … the peasant stays in his own region and marries his own kind, generation after generation, and creates the race. …” Miss Porter presents such a race in the Müller family, third generation Americans, but still German peasants.

“Holiday” (1960) is told by an unnamed narrator who, long after the events had happened, recalled them. The sensibilities and the background of the narrator are similar to Miranda's. The thesis is stated in the first paragraph: the narrator was too young for the troubles she was having, and her family background and training had not taught her that it was possible to run away from some things. She had learned later the difference between courage and foolhardiness; but, when the events of the story had taken place, she did not then know “that we do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours, and it is better to learn what they are earlier than later. And if we don't run from the others, we are fools.”

The narrator, wishing to escape her problems, which with the passage of time had diminished and need not be described, had gone, on the recommendation of Louise, a school friend, to the East Texas farm of the Müller's. Louise had described the family and the farm romantically, but the reality the narrator confronted was quite different. Left on “the sodden platform of a country station,” she was taken in a dilapidated wagon through bleak country to a forbidding farmhouse, set in an infertile spot. The fat puppy of Louise's story had turned into an enormous, detestable beast.

When she arrived at the front door, the whole family, except the father, came out, and the narrator saw that they all had the same eyes, the same “taffy-colored hair,” even though two were sons-in-law. She found herself in a patriarchal society, in which Papa Müller and the men were treated with deference and respect, the wives standing behind their husbands at meal times to fill their plates.

The story seemingly moves slowly, as the narrator observed the customs of this farming family with deep roots in the soil. Deeply conservative, almost completely isolated from the mainstream of American life—in fact from most community life except for Saturday excursions to the Turnverein—the family formed its own little closed society. The narrator found that Papa Müller was a student of Marx, and yet he was the richest member of the community. She observed the discipline children at play, a wedding, a birth, a funeral—the life cycle of the family.

All of the realistic details (the story is filled with animals and animal imagery) suddenly took on more meaning when the narrator discovered that Ottilie, the crippled, dumb servant girl, was actually one of the Müller children. She worked constantly, as if she were in perfect health, preparing the vast quantities of food consumed by the Müller family: she worked because the work had to be done, and because she could do it. John Hagopian in Insight I has speculated that in naming Ottilie, “Miss Porter had in mind the Ottilie Home for Crippled Children in New York (an obvious juxtaposition of Ottilie and Crippled) named after the saint in Alsace, who was born blind but whose sight was restored on baptism.” Ottilie showed the narrator a picture of herself as a healthy little girl, tried to speak, but could not. The past in the picture was frozen, but the picture brought the two together. For a moment, the narrator thought, Ottilie knew she was Ottilie, “knew she suffered,” staggered away, significantly leaving the picture face downward. Later that day, Ottilie regarded her as a stranger, but the narrator could not let Ottilie be a stranger.

In immediate juxtaposition is a long account of the family's treatment of animals: the boys trapped wild animals, the girls tended the animals and chickens tenderly; Frau Müller's death resulted from her overexertions in tending to the animals during the storm. The Müllers had put Ottilie out of mind, the narrator thinks, though this may not be all the truth in this matter; and, out of self-defense, they forgot her.

The compassion for Ottilie is shown with great restraint, however, and is contrasted with the emotional scenes of the Müllers after the death of Mrs. Müller. Even Ottilie was caught in the emotionalism, for the narrator who had stayed alone in her room the day of the funeral, filled with the “terror of dying,” heard strange noises, and found Ottilie howling in the kitchen. The narrator hitched horse to wagon and started after the funeral procession. But they were too far behind, and there was no hope that Ottilie could be made a member of the family for that day, or even that Ottilie wanted to join the family circle.

Something, perhaps the sky or the turning wheels—the narrator never knew—suddenly filled Ottilie with joy. It was definitely spring, the flood had caused a profusion of vegetation (certainly the Müllers could understand only in a literal sense that April is the cruelest month), and the scene, in which they sit, horse stopped, surveying the woods and the heavens, is a variation on Frost's “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The narrator pondered her mistake: “There was nothing I could do for Ottilie, selfishly as I wished to ease my heart of her; she was beyond my reach as well as any other human reach, and yet, had I not come nearer to her than I had to anyone else in my attempt to deny and bridge the distance between us, or rather, her distance from me?” She knew they were both fools of life, both fugitives from death, and, as a celebration, they took a holiday. Ottilie (not the horse, as in Frost's poem) had become fidgety during their pause, but they started again, taking, significantly, “the small road divided from the main traveled one”—again a Frost allusion. The irony, compounded by the overtones from Eliot and Frost, is especially heavy as the narrator thought they would be home in time for Ottilie to prepare supper and nobody need know of their holiday.

The meaning of the story, John Hagopian has said, “is simply this: that man lives in a universe without shape or meaning. He is therefore obligated to project a meaning, to shape and form his own life in an effort that is ultimately doomed since it will end with death and chaos. But while he is making the effort, he can be sustained by love-even love for a twisted, mute, half-beast of a human being like Ottilie. Since we are all prisoners of the universe together, let us love one another.” Richard Poirier, in his introduction to Prize Stories 1962: The O. Henry Awards (“Holiday” won first prize), has a reading far different from Professor Hagopian. To Poirier, “The story is about people whose communal labor has created relationships among them and between them and their natural environment, so close that literally nothing except death can disrupt them.”

The Müllers had dealt with Ottilie realistically: they had given her an importance in the household, a central position; but they had forgotten their blood ties, their spiritual ties. Their position was at the same time cruel and practical. Neither Christianity nor Marxism had taught the Müllers compassion. One can, then, read “Holiday” as a political parable, as Miss Porter's probing of the German question: she describes German clannishness, materialism, cruelty, love of animals and mistreatment of fellow human beings, and a willingness to put out of mind the unpleasantness of the past—characteristics she also has described in “The Leaning Tower” and Ship of Fools. Whether read as personal narrative or as political parable, the conclusion is a sobering one: the narrator, although she was giving Ottilie a holiday, could do little for the girl; for the narrator's own holiday would end soon. She would then leave the Müller farm, leave Ottilie and the Müllers to their fate.

“THE LEANING TOWER”

“The Leaning Tower” (1941) may properly be introduced with some journal notes by Miss Porter in December, 1931. A young poet she knew in Berlin objected that she should not bother reading Rilke's Elegies: “He belongs to the old romantic soft-headed Germany that has been our ruin. The new Germany is hard, strong, we will have a new race of poets, tough and quick, like your prize fighters.” The poet gave Miss Porter some of his poems, and she found that the “words were tough and the rhythms harsh, the ideas all the most grossly brutal; and yet, it was vague weak stuff in the end.”

In another note that December she described a conversation with L. and von G. about Nietzsche: “Nietzsche is dangerous because his mind has power without intelligence; he is all will without enlightenment. His phrases are inflated, full of violence, a gross kind of cruel poetry—like Wagner's music. They both throw a hypnotic influence over their hearers. But I could always resist hypnotists. When I think of Nietzsche and Wagner, at once by simple association I find charlatans of all kinds and degrees. … And madness. In Nietzsche's case, a real, clinical madness: his diseased brain gave his style the brilliancy of a rotting fish. L. and von G. worship them both with a religious awe.” Finally she could not listen, but she captures in 1941 in the short novel much of the spirit of that impression and rumination of 1931.

In January, 1932, still in Berlin, Miss Porter wrote that R. always spoke about religion, but that he was a man filled with maliciousness, one who spoke evil of everyone. He told her that she could know nothing of the higher levels of religious experience because “Religious experience belongs exclusively to the masculine principle.” Without seeing the irony of his words, he assured her that “Only ample, generous natures are capable of the love of God.” Miss Porter does not use these philosophical and religious and esthetic statements in “The Leaning Tower,” but she does incorporate the malignity in German society which she was aware of and writing about in her journal in 1931 and 1932.

The novel may be divided into five major parts: the café as a place of memory, of Charles's childhood illusions of Germany and the reality; the search for a new room and the exit from the hotel; the new room and the inhabitants of the pension; the night club; and the final revelation in the room. Charles Upton, the central character, from whose point of view we see the events, is given a background similar to Miss Porter's. Sensitive but, like Miranda, naïve, he came from a Central Texas farming family with Kentucky ties; and he had, against the initial wishes of his family, been interested in art—just as Miss Porter, against the wishes of her family and society, had determined to be a writer. He had come to Berlin largely because of his boyhood friendship with Kuno Hillentafel, whose mother was alleged to have been a countess. Through a romantic projection of Kuno's descriptions, Charles had imagined Berlin to be a great city of castles towering in the mists.

Alone in the strange city of Berlin that Christmas season, left with his memories of Kuno, who had died on one of the trips to the homeland, Charles had found the city depressing; he escaped his hotel and sat in the café where he could see clearly the illusion and the reality. Among the heavy buildings were heavy, pig-like people or slim young students all dressed alike; he had seen in his few days in the city the desperate poverty of the country, the streetwalkers, and the beggars. His impressions had been harsh and poignant: he had seen fat Germans peering at displays of candied pigs, pig worshipers holding up their dachshunds to see the display, and he had had a poverty-stricken, fearful shopkeeper sell him wrong-sized socks because she had to make a sale. The shock of being in a strange city and culture had unsexed him, and he had been unable to show interest in the streetwalkers. His impressions were not ordered, allowing him to generalize about the German society which he found disturbing. His was not a reflective mind; he was storing his impressions for his drawings, drawings which could be brutally accurate, as when he drew the hotel owners: the woman as a sick fox and the man as half pig, half tiger. He felt completely isolated in the society; for, the larger the crowd he found himself in, the more isolated he became.

The rush of impressions subsided as Charles set out to search for a room, for the rooms fell into an easily distinguished pattern of stuffy, faded elegance or of expensive modernity. At the apartment of Frau Rosa Reichl—whose name is particularly appropriate because she had once been rich, employed many servants, but now lived in reduced but not poverty-stricken circumstances—he was impressed by a bare hallway; but the room itself was standard, with heavy drapes and carpets, massive furniture, whatnots. Charles accidentally broke her plaster souvenir of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a tottering structure in actuality and, in replica, a fitting symbol of a society soon to topple again. Americans had in 1917–18 helped topple German society, and Frau Reichl was not unaware of the significance of Charles's act. Outwardly she saw the fragile souvenir as a memento of her honeymoon, but it had come to be a symbol of the old days that had long passed. Charles knew that she was thinking that she should not have left it out for crude foreigners to touch.

When Charles announced his intentions of leaving the hotel, all civility fled from the hotel owners. He was outrageously overcharged, threatened with police action if he did not pay the bill as it was submitted, intimidated by passport inspection—experienced travelers had told him he would feel like a criminal while traveling in Germany.

The outward brutality and bestiality disappeared once he moved into Rosa's room. On the day of his move, he learned, in a quiet scene in a barber shop, that a shouting politician (obviously Hitler) had made one particular hair style popular. This third section of the story presents Rosa's apartment and the inhabitants as a microcosm of German society in 1931; but, since Miss Porter has only three Germans, one American, and one Pole, her cast is much more limited than in Ship of Fools. Charles said of Rosa and the guests: “They were all good people, they were in terrible trouble, jammed up together in this little flat with not enough air or space or money, not enough of anything, no place to go, nothing to do but gnaw each other.” Charles had the best room and paid the most rent because all Americans were thought to be rich. He was, because of this mythic wealth, protected from Rosa's sharp tongue. Her favorite in the house was Hans von Gehring (the name reminds one of Hermann Goering), the aristocratic-looking young man, a student at Heidelberg, where he had fought a duel and was now receiving treatment for his infected wound. Charles wanted to like the young man, but he was unable to comprehend a society which approved such barbaric acts. Charles rejected the wound and everything that allowed it to be possible, even though he had seen the antique dueling pistols of his great-grandfather. Hans was proud of his scar, often fingered it; and Charles saw in the young man's face his true nature: “amazing arrogance, pleasure, inexpressible vanity and self-satisfaction.”

Rosa's scapegoat was Herr Otto Bussen, a Platt Deutsch, whose inferior social station and poverty gave Rosa license to intimidate and demean him at every opportunity. That he was a brilliant student at the university made no difference to Frau Reichl. When Herr Bussen poisoned himself, accidentally or otherwise, she was as concerned about her rugs as about his health.

The other lodger was Tadeusz Mey, a Polish-Austrian pianist and a cosmopolitan at home in London and Paris, who was living in Berlin because there was a good teacher there. Mey was constantly aware of the evils in society and was opposing them, but he was cynical enough to study and live in the corrupt German society. He and Charles were the only ones in the apartment with insight into the society, but Charles was the only one with a ready escape: he could always return to his own country.

In his sleep, Charles's premonitions about the society, as personified by the house and its inhabitants, could not be put aside. The house was burning, pulsing with fire. Charles walked from the building with all the paintings he would ever do in his life. When he turned to look back at the burning house, he thought at first that they had all escaped; but he heard a ghostly groan (is this not similar to the “weep” Miranda heard?) and saw not a person. Symbolically, then, Charles knew that he would and could walk away from the society which was destroying itself and its members. His artistic creations were more important to him than any attempt to save the unsavable, to save those who, we must assume, would misunderstand his act and turn on him ferociously. Charles did not even reflect on his dream when he awoke, stifling in the feather coverlets; he did not know exactly what it meant; and he did not think of it when he considered giving an extra coat to Herr Bussen, an act which Mey said would be a great mistake.

The next section of the story moves from Rosa's to a newly opened, middle-class bar where the young men go to celebrate the New Year. In many ways, the section confirms Tadeusz's view that losing the war damaged the “nation's personality,” but it goes beyond that to try to search for personality traits which were established long before the war. At the night club, Charles saw another sampling of German society: Lutte, the thin, blonde model, a perfect German type to Hans; the large barmaid, attractive to Herr Bussen; two movie stars; and a large crowd of noisy, sentimental revelers. During the conversation, race was much discussed; and fat Otto, aspiring intellectual, insisted that “the true great old Germanic type is lean and tall and fair as gods.”

The conversation then swirled into a long discussion of races and cultures, and Charles, who, like Miranda, had rejected the mythic views of a “splendid past” which his parents had taught him, could not compete in the conversation since he knew almost no history. Drawn into the gaiety of the night, he danced with Lutte, but found she was interested in him only if he could get her to Hollywood. She soon turned her attention to the more aristocratic Hans.

Tadeusz spoke of his family, which had lived in the same house for eight centuries, of the stifling society of his childhood, of the anti-Semitic attitudes implicit in the religious dogma; his memories of the past were mixed, “something between a cemetery and a Lost Paradise.” Otto, who grew up in a Lutheran family, spoke of his dismal childhood, of building his life on a romantic view of Luther, apparently willing to follow anyone who had become great.

At midnight, a wooden cuckoo announced the New Year; and, after the toast (nobody had been aware of the irony of the cuckoo), a “disordered circle formed”; and there was much singing and drunken revelry until “the circle broke up, ran together, whirled, loosened, fell apart.” The tourists' Germany could not last, and the young men had to get the drunken Otto home. Otto—symbolically, his befuddled moribund state was that of the intellectual—was carried past Rosa, who looked at her young men fondly. Charles in his drunken state, saw (or thought he saw) the Leaning Tower, now repaired, behind the glass door of the cabinet; and, though he could not quite understand why, he knew he wanted to crush the frail, useless thing. The meaning of the tower tried to break into his consciousness but could not; he felt a “dislocation of the spirit” because he was beginning to see that the society was going to fall, that it would involve him, and that there was nothing he would do. He did not feel sorry for himself, but he did know that “no crying jag or any other kind of jag would ever, in this world, do anything at all for him.”

The story has many brilliantly conceived scenes, and it is not the failure that many critics have charged it to be. Charles has vague portents of the meaning of what he sees; in his dream, he saw that the society was facing destruction. He had learned that his initial reaction to the Germans was true: “They were the very kind of people that Holbein, Dürer and Urs Graf had drawn … their late-medieval faces full of hallucinated malice and a kind of sluggish but intense cruelty that worked its way up from their depths slowly through the layers of helpless gluttonous fat.”

“The Germans,” Miss Porter said in an interview in the March 31, 1962, Saturday Review, “are against anybody and everybody, and they haven't changed a bit.” Her view cannot, I think, be dismissed as a crude anti-German one, as some have tried to do. In “The Leaning Tower” she was engaged in a literary probing of the German problem, which contains all the material for a study of the nature and the meaning of evil. Her journal entries from Germany give us an indication of what she saw; and she reported honestly in her fiction what she saw.

Each of these stories is an investigation of what Miss Porter has rightly called the “terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.” Her aim as a writer, she says, has been “to tell a straight story,” and she has succeeded admirably. These stories, set in the South, in New England, and in Germany, and dealing with poor whites, Irish-Americans, artists, Berliners, German peasants, and many others are a remarkable literary achievement. They are as subtle and perceptive as the best works of Joyce of James.