SOURCE: “The Making of ‘Flowering Judas,’” in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 12, No. 1, March, 1985, pp. 109–30.

[In the following essay, Walsh evaluates the autobiographical nature of Porter's story, “Flowering Judas.”]

Over the years Katherine Porter furnished many autobiographical details about her most celebrated story, “Flowering Judas” (1930), stating that “all the characters and episodes are based on real persons and events, but naturally, as my memory worked upon them and time passed, all assumed different shapes and colors, formed gradually around a central idea, that of self-delusion, the order and meaning of the episodes changed, and became in a word fiction.”¹ This essay, drawing from Porter's published comments on the story, her unpublished letters, notes, and fiction,² and my conversations with her and with her friend, Mary Louis Doherty, attempts to distinguish between the “real persons and events” and the “different shapes and colors” they assumed. Despite the thin record of Porter's Mexican period, the questionable accuracy of her recollections of it many years later, and her reputation for fictionalizing her life,³ we can discover many experiences she transformed into “Flowering Judas” and the reasons those transformations took the shapes they did. Thereby we gain a clearer picture of Porter's first year in Mexico and a better understanding of her creative process.

I

Porter's earliest comment on “Flowering Judas” appeared in 1942:

The idea came to me one evening when going to visit the girl I call Laura in the story. I passed the open window of her living room on my way to the door, through the small patio which is one of the scenes in the story. I had a brief glimpse of her sitting with an open book in her lap, but not reading, with a fixed look of pained melancholy and confusion in her face. The fat man I call Braggioni was playing the guitar and singing to her.

Porter “thought” she understood “the desperate complications” of the girl's mind and feelings, but if she did not know “her true story,” she did know a story “that seemed symbolic truth.”⁴ In subsequent interviews Porter gave the expanded versions of the “small seed” from which her story grew. In 1963 she added the Judas tree and identified the girl as her friend “Mary” who was teaching in an Indian school and “was not able to take care of herself, because she was not able to face her own nature and was afraid of everything.”⁵ In 1965 Porter added the fountain and insisted that the small apartment where “Mary Doherty” lived alone was exactly as it appears in the story. Doherty, whom a young Zapatista captain attempted to help from her horse, was a “virtuous, intact, strait-laced Irish Catholic … born with the fear of sex,” who had asked Porter to sit with her because she was not sure of the man coming to sing to her. This Porter did, outwaiting him until he left in frustration. She refused to identify the man, stating that she rolled “four or five objectionable characters into one” to create Braggioni. She also claimed she was like the girl in the story, taking “messages to people living in dark alleys.”⁶ A few years later she added that she visited political prisoners in their cells, two of whom she named.⁷ In a lecture taped at the University of Maryland in 1972, Porter gave the fullest and least reliable account of her story's genesis, stating that both she and Doherty brought food and sleeping pills to political prisoners, one of whom persuaded Doherty to give him fifty pills with which he killed himself. When Doherty reported the man's death to “Braggioni,” he told her they were well rid of him. Later she dreamed that when she refused the attempt of “Eugenio” to lead her to death, “he gave her the flowering Judas buds.” “This is her dream” Porter claimed, adding, “You see, my fiction is reportage, only I do something to it; I arrange it and it is fiction, but it happened.” In a film made at the University of Maryland in 1976, she stated that Doherty should have known better than to give pills to the prisoner and, for the first time, gave Yúdico as Braggioni's model. As Porter added details about “Flowering Judas” over the years, reality more and more resembled what grew out of it, the story becoming “reportage,” mainly of the actions and motives of Mary Doherty, about whom Porter could only speculate in 1942. Porter did indeed “arrange” reality to make it fiction, both in the creation of her story and in her versions of that creation. Her story is “based on real persons and events,” but not as in her versions.

II

Porter met most of the “real persons” soon after her arrival in Mexico on September 4, 1920. She found an apartment on 20 Calle de Eliseo, next door to the home of Roberto and Thorberg Haberman. Although Porter never mentioned him publicly, Roberto Haberman, a member of the labor party instrumental in bringing President Alvaro Obregón to power,⁸ introduced her to the exciting world of Mexican politics. Porter wrote to her family that she was flattered to be accepted into an exclusive group close to or actually “the holders of the government reins.” This group was to change Mexico and she expected “to be connected by a small thread to the affair.” She also informed her family that she planned to write for El Heraldo, where Thorberg Haberman worked, and to collaborate with the Habermans on a revolutionary textbook. She participated in Obregón's inaugural celebration of November 30, drinking tea and champagne with him in his official residence in Chapultepec Castle, and also attended the lottery ticket sellers' ball in company with “the greatest labor leader in Mexico,” Luis N. Morones,⁹ where she danced with “marvelous carbon colored Indians in scarlet blankets” until two o'clock in the morning. On Christmas day at the Habermans' she met other labor leaders, among them her “beloved” R. H. Retinger.

Retinger, like Haberman, was advisor to Luis Morones. Working for CROM, he made valuable connections with international trade unionists in Europe and organized and directed Mexico's Press Agency.¹⁰ A participant in the League of Nations, an acquaintance of Gide, Mauriac, and Arnold Bennett, and a close friend of fellow countryman Joseph Conrad, he represented to Porter “Europe” in all its Jamesian connotations. In her notes she credits him with thoroughly educating her in international politics, but she never mentioned him publicly. They quickly fell in love, but the bickering that fills their letters is evidence enough that their relation would not survive their strong wills.

Mary Doherty, like Porter, was introduced to the labor group by Roberto Haberman.¹¹ At the Rand School of Economics she met Agnes Smedley, Thorberg Haberman's sister-in-law and later apologist for Red China, who encouraged her to visit Mexico. Doherty arrived in early 1921 and lived with the Habermans through July, briefly losing her bed to the legendary labor agitator, Mother Jones.¹² It was to the Haberman home that Samuel O. Yúdico¹³ came to entertain her with his guitar. Doherty was soon assisting Retinger in his publicity work for CROM and teaching twice a week in Xochimilco, a few miles south of Mexico City. She traveled there with Yúdico or, occasionally, Porter and Retinger. Less self-centered and ambitious than Porter, more committed to Mexico's social progress, and, above all, more willing to serve in whatever capacity, Doherty became Porter's confidante and, in a correspondence that spanned fifty years, a continual source of information about Mexico. From the first, Doherty deferred to her more glamorous and talented friend, even rescuing pieces of writing Porter had crumpled up and tossed into the wastepaper basket. More tolerant than Porter of Mexico's shortcomings, Doherty still remembers incidents of her early days in Mexico with pleasure, especially the Sundays she and Porter spent in Chapultepec Park with their friends. She described the happy routine in a letter to her sister in 1921:

We passear in Chapultepec Park in a coche—those nice old family coaches with either one nice, sleek fat horse or two smaller ones with their clank clank on the pavement. Today being Sunday everyone passears from 12 to 2, the cars barely moving along—up one line and down another—much bowing, etc. You see everyone from Obregon down and since most of the people we know are gov't officials, they all come out in their cars—it is great fun.

(Porter also remembered those Sundays, for in “Flowering Judas” Braggioni “hires an automobile and drives in the Paseo on Sunday morning.”)¹⁴

On her first Sunday in Mexico, Doherty met Felipe Carrillo Puerto, then delegate from Yucatán and its next governor.¹⁵ She remembers him earnestly haranguing from a park bench curious passers-by on the glories of socialism. Porter first met him a few weeks before at the Habermans. They became close friends, often dining and dancing in Mexico City's nightclubs.¹⁶ Among Porter's papers are a description of the sinking of their rowboat in the shallow Chapultepec lagoon, his photograph inscribed to his dear friend from Felipe, and a story he told her about a woman driven mad by the Revolution. Porter planned to visit him after he became governor in 1922, but Retinger discouraged her from making the arduous trip to Yucatán.

In January 1921, Porter and Doherty attended the convention of the Pan-American Federation of Labor. They both appear in a photograph of a large group of labor leaders, including Samuel Gompers, head of the A. F. of L., Luis Morones, Carrillo Puerto, and the Habermans. Porter describes in her notes a gathering of these labor people at the Habermans' house, where she fell asleep at the feet of William Green, Gompers' successor in 1925. According to Doherty, she and Porter were among those who saw Gompers off on his return to the United States, Porter contributing a farewell kiss. This was during the brief happy period of Porter's stay in Mexico.¹⁷

III

The bright prospects Porter anticipated in December 1920 had evaporated by May 1921. She reveals her disillusion in “The Mexican Trinity” (August 1921) and “Where Presidents Have No Friends” (July 1922), the first essay beginning,

Uneasiness grows here daily. We are having sudden deportations of foreign agitators, street riots and parades of workers carrying red flags. Plots thicken, thin, disintegrate in the space of thirty-six hours. A general was executed today for counterrevolutionary activities. … Battles occur almost daily between Catholics and Socialists in many parts of the Republic: Morelia, Yucatán, Campeche, Jalisco.¹⁸

What follows in both essays is highly informative political analysis, written from the point of view of one who firmly supports the goals of the Revolution, but hiding the fact that Porter herself deeply felt the growing “uneasiness.” Her situation evolved into Laura's in “Flowering Judas.”

“Uneasiness” may understate the politically unstable conditions of 1921.¹⁹ A clash between Catholics and Socialists on May 12 resulted in the death of J. Isaac Arriaga, head of the Comisión Local Agraria,²⁰ which Porter lamented in her journal, connecting it to the centuries-old history of unjust seizures of Indian lands. His death provoked agrarian reformers to storm the Chamber of Deputies which became so unruly that Obregón ordered the fire department to turn on its hoses. Porter witnessed the hosing and reported it in “Where Presidents Have No Friends” (412). About the same time, Obregón, complying with one of the conditions the United States stipulated for its recognition of Mexico, deported about thirty foreign radicals,²¹ among them several of Porter's acquaintances. Roberto Haberman was also on the list and went into hiding. This incident frightened Porter, who recorded it many times in her journal and letters, writing to friend Paul Hannah that newspapers were clamoring for Haberman's head. She visited him in hiding and described him sitting on a tumbled bed, pale and drawn, and going over a long piece he had composed about how Americans “crack the whip” over Mexico. Later she began to turn this incident into fiction: “a certain Roumanian Jew agitator” recites “romantic yarns of personal treason” and composes a thesis against giving one man absolute power. He resembles the “prisoners of [Laura's] own political faith in their cells … composing their memoirs, writing out manifestoes” (94).

Even more frightening, Porter herself was on the deportation list. She wrote of rehearsing a speech she would make to the police in order to gain time to pack. George T. Summerlin, U. S. chargé d'affaires in Mexico, assured her that her name had been removed, but another informant told her later that it was not. In the meantime, her checks had been held up, and for the first time in her life she experienced hunger. She walked past secret service men sitting on the curb in front of the Haberman house, not caring whether they seized her because at least in jail she would be fed. Not finding Thorberg inside, she stole a dozen tortillas and a bowl of turkey mole. In another note she writes of crying a great deal and feeling sorry for herself: “Starvation is very hard on the flesh, and the idea of death is very hard on the nerves; I should like to deny that I am terrified but I am.”

In a letter to her sister in June 1921, Doherty responds quite differently to the deportation crisis, giving in the process a rare, if brief, contemporary glimpse of Porter in Mexico:

Of course all our crowd is on the list. … Bob is hiding with the papers yammering for his head. … Secret service people guard the house—all mail held up. All the Mexicans are with us all the while because they don't want us deported—Obregon would change his mind and cancel the order, but Americans keep up the rumpus and won't stop until they get Bob. It has been over two weeks now. … Strangely enough—no doubt due to the nervous tension and suspense—we who are still around loose are having a very good time—we go forth gayly with the leaders of the very government that has us on the list for deportation. Katherine, Thorberg and I have hilarious times. Of course we are really quite safe, for they won't take us until they get the more important ones and as yet we have done nothing because we can't speak Spanish—only in disrepute because of our beliefs and our associations and Katherine especially because she has refused to associate with the American colony. She is very pretty and very clever and they would like to have her and she is not very radical. … It will be very funny to laugh at a year from now—just now a little nervewracking.

This letter is not from somebody “afraid of everything,” as Porter claimed Doherty was. Rather, the evidence shows that Porter herself was “terrified.” In a note entitled “A month of uncertainties,” she begins with the death of five followers of rebel General Lucio Blanco, adding “How on earth does this concern me? Yet it does.” She then mentions the trouble stirring Catholics and Socialists in Morelia with “Yudico and Bob polishing their pistols,” the deportation of foreign radicals, Haberman in hiding, Summerlin's information, the hosing in the Chamber of Deputies, and finally her expectations of a summons any minute. At this time her friend Retinger was in the Laredo jail where she wrote him of all her troubles. In her recital Porter intertwines her own fear of deportation with deaths and threatened violence to others. The “uneasiness” in “The Mexican Trinity” is her uneasiness, tempting one to substitute her name for Carranza's in “Where Presidents Have No Friends.”

Just as Porter mingles violence and death with her personal fears, so in “Flowering Judas” “the sight and sound of Braggioni singing threaten to identify themselves with all Laura's remembered afflictions and add their weight to her uneasy premonition of the future” (91). Like Porter, Laura feels engulfed by the presence of death: “Laura feels a slow chill, a purely physical sense of danger, a warning in her blood that violence, mutilation, a shocking death, wait for her with lessening patience” (93). And just as Yúdico and Haberman polish their pistols for “a row between the Catholics and Socialists … scheduled in Morelia for May 1st,” so Braggioni asks Laura to “oil and load his pistols” because of “the May-day disturbances in Morelia” (99). Out of her own remembered fears of 1921 Porter created the deathly atmosphere of “Flowering Judas.”

With Laura's “warning in her blood” of “a shocking death” awaiting her, Porter gave full expression to her all-consuming theme. In this story, earlier fictional fragments, and later stories, culminating in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, death is felt as a terrifying physical presence. In one fragment a character named Natalie complains, “There is something altogether horrible here … I am frightened of all sorts of things. I have terrible dreams,” to which her friend Paul replies that he is “influenced by some indefinite thing in the air, a hovering and sinister presence.” In “Hacienda” the narrator speaks of “the almost ecstatic death-expectancy which is in the air of Mexico … strangers feel the acid of death in their bones whether or not any real danger is near them” (143). Here Mexico is explicitly a place of death, symbolized by the “sour” odor of pulque, “like rotting milk and blood” (161). In Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the air is contaminated with influenza, infecting Miranda, who smells “the stench of corruption” (312) in her own wasted body. This story was based on Porter's near-death struggle with influenza in 1918, but, she noted in her journal, she felt “the terror of death” stronger in 1921 than in 1918. When she wrote Pale Horse, Pale Rider in 1938, the terror she expressed had been magnified by her Mexican experience. Death is the firm link between Porter's Mexican and Miranda stories. She began the outline of the novel she was writing in Mexico with “Book I: Introduction to Death,” which was to include Miranda's childhood. “The Grave” (1935) gives that introduction and tellingly ends with odors in Mexico triggering Miranda's childhood memories: “It was a very hot day and the smell in the market, with its piles of raw flesh and wilting flowers, was like the mingled sweetness and corruption she had smelled that other day in the cemetery at home” (367).

IV

Porter's journal and letters give evidence that she viewed Mexico as a continual source for her creative writing. Seemingly nothing occurred that she did not weigh for its literary potential. She wrote local color sketches like “In a Mexican Patio” and “Teotihuacan”²² and recorded stories told to her by others.²³ But, as we have already seen from the deportation crisis of 1921, her main interests were the political and the personal.

Among Porter's papers is an outline of all the political parties in Mexico along with a thumbnail sketch of the leaders of each party. Her thorough knowledge served her well in such objective reporting as “The Mexican Trinity,” but her ultimate goal was fiction. In May 1921, she wrote Paul Hannah of her “strangely assorted contacts” with diplomats, revolutionists, government officials, and unrestrained internationalists, adding, “I am making a story of these opposed forces.” Elsewhere she recorded her intention of doing sketches of her revolutionary acquaintances, but what might have begun as reportage soon became “making a story.” Thus Yúdico and Morones became Braggioni; Haberman, Silberman; Carrillo Puerto, Vicente; and President Elias Calles, Velarde, the name Porter gives him in “Hacienda.” The link between fact and fiction was her interest in the revolutionary personality, her estimate of which grew more cynical as time wore on.

Porter's personal experiences appear in her journal, often in the form of probing, guilt-ridden self-analysis, and in fictional fragments in which her alter ego Miranda²⁴ makes her debut in scenes with her lover Jerome, who is based on R. H. Retinger. Porter intended to write “our story” about herself and Retinger, who was both political mentor and lover. Although she never completed the story, its fragments contributed, as we shall see, to the formation of Laura's personality.

Retinger himself influenced the composition of “Flowering Judas” in two different ways. While in a Laredo jail because of passport problems in May 1921, he wrote Porter to make sure that Luis Morones approved chapters of Morones of Mexico which she was editing. It is ironic that she, having read Retinger's adulation of Morones and Yúdico in this book, would eventually use both men as models for her negative portrait of Braggioni. Retinger wrote that “Yudico, a tall, fair man, is a regular jack of all trades … he knows every corner of the Republic, and understands the sufferings of the workers. Frank and outspoken, his equanimity is appreciated by his companions and his good heartedness makes him a friend of everybody.”²⁵ Apparently Porter reserved Retinger's hollow rhetoric for Braggioni's followers who “say to each other: ‘He has real nobility, a love of humanity raised above mere personal affections’” (91).

Although Porter raised the thousand dollar bail money for Retinger with an offer of five hundred dollars more and traveled to Laredo at the request of Morones to attempt his release, their love affair was fast disintegrating. In her journal she wrote that he would be pained to know how little she cared about his predicament. In later journal entries she described him as “an Austrian Pole much given to international intrigue” and “a complex and fascinating liar.” In 1943, she still held a grudge against him, calling him, in a letter to Doherty, her “old enemy and parasite.” No wonder her unflattering portrait of him in “Flowering Judas”: “The Polish agitator talks love to [Laura] over café tables, hoping to exploit what he believes is her sentimental preference for him, and he gives her misinformation which he begs her to repeat as the solemn truth to certain persons” (95). Behind this scene we can see Retinger professing his love for Porter in 1921 in the Café Colón on the Paseo, according to Doherty, one of their favorite meeting places. In the story, Laura is not deceived by the Pole's tactics as Porter felt she had been deceived by Retinger's. Reading the story, he would know that his former beloved had taken her revenge.

Porter also turned against Roberto Haberman, describing him in her notes as an unprincipled conniver who would practice any deception to advance his radical cause. In “Flowering Judas” he appears as the “Roumanian agitator”: “He is generous with his money in all good causes, and lies to Laura with an air of ingenuous candor, as if he were her good friend and confidant” (95).

As early as 1921 Porter planned to combine the political and personal in a novel called Thieves' Market. Through the twenties she added to it such events as Carrillo Puerto's death and Morones' fall from power. Later she conceived a three-book structure entitled Many Redeemers or Midway of This Mortal Life, which was to center on Miranda's whole life, beginning with “the history of the rise and break-up of an American family” and ending in the present with “the record of a rich and crumbling society.” Mexico formed only a part of this grand scheme and was to appear as “the Mexican interval which is a tangent for Miranda, the complete negation of all she had known, a derailment up to 1928 or 30.” The project would have challenged a Balzac. Begun in disconnected fragments, it ended as “fragments of a much larger plan”²⁶ in the form of several short stories, Old Mortality coming closest to Porter's idea about the break-up of an American family. In the early thirties Porter visited Germany, which she apparently decided was more important than Mexico for the political statements she wished to make. The result was “The Leaning Tower” and Ship of Fools, according to most critics her least successful works, possibly because she was less acquainted with Germans than with Mexicans. But before turning away from Mexico, she did manage in “Flowering Judas” to unite the political and personal. She quickly knew what she had accomplished, writing to a friend in April 1930, “It's by far the best thing I ever did and is in the mood and style of the novel.” Although she continued to mention a Mexican novel in the forties, there was no need to write it, for her short story was the perfect distillation of everything the novel could have been.

V

The political dimension of “Flowering Judas,” ignored by some of Porter's critics, is concentrated in the character of Braggioni. Since Porter did indeed roll “four or five objectionable characters” into one to create him, it is important to see how the revolutionaries she knew contributed to what was, in her jaundiced view, a portrait of the revolutionary.

A journal note dated 1921 begins, “Yudico came in tonight bringing his guitar, and spent the evening singing for Mary.” This early record of Porter's inspiration for “Flowering Judas” is devoted, as we shall see, to Mary Doherty with no other reference to Yúdico, but clearly he was the physical and moral prototype of Braggioni. The Yúdico who entertained Doherty was a tall, rather stout man with fair complexion, light brown hair, and deep green eyes, sedately dressed with no pistols in evidence. His father, like Braggioni's, was Italian. Braggioni's “tight little mouth that turns down at the corners” (99), giving him a “surly” (93) expression, is an accurate, if unkind, description of Yúdico.²⁷ Porter lightened Yúdico's hair, but turned his green eyes into “yellow cat's eyes” (93) and his stoutness into “gluttonous bulk” which has become “a symbol of [Laura's] many disillusions” about how revolutionists should look and act (91). Porter's Yúdico was not the man Mary Doherty described as a friend to her family or the one Retinger idealized in his biography of Morones. If Doherty overlooked Yúdico's defects, Porter, as other journal notes suggest, saw nothing else.

Porter was apparently fascinated with Yúdico from the start. On September 8, 1921, she wrote of doing four portraits of revolutionaries, with his portrait almost complete. Also in 1921 she wrote that she heard Retinger talking with Yúdico, “a completely savage and uneducated Indian revolutionist, a man with the eyes of a cat and the paunch of a pig and they both agreed that a woman was good for one thing.” In a later note she advised herself, “Get into the scene … something of Braggioni's really sinister personality, the soft-spoken, hard-eyed monster.” The shift here from Yúdico to Braggioni is imperceptible because Porter always saw Braggioni in Yúdico. Yúdico as sexual menace must have provoked her instinctive hatred. Another note begins, “Yudico and his wife—went home to wash feet, wife came home sobbing …”²⁸ and then continues, “Third Wife, fiftieth concubine—not faithful to anything. Study of Mexican revolutionary. … Given charge of blowing up and destroying Mexico City” if it falls into the hands of the enemy. Here and in “Flowering Judas” the sexual and political intermesh. Braggioni revenges himself on a thousand women for the humiliation one woman caused him in his youth just as he would brutally revenge himself against his political enemies if the need arose. His behavior is pointedly typical of the revolutionary who violates at every step the principles he pretends to uphold. In another note Porter wrote that the “spirit of revolutionaries is to escape from bondage to themselves. Their desire to rule, their will to power, is sort of revenge” to compensate for “their own insignificance, their sufferings.” Porter, who attended a feminist meeting with Thorberg Haberman where she became the “79th member of the woman's party in Mexico,” certainly viewed the attitudes of Yúdico/Braggioni toward women as a betrayal of the Revolution and a personal affront to herself and Laura.

In 1928 Porter shifted her attention from Yúdico, who died that year, to Luis Morones, explicitly identifying him with Braggioni in her notes. In 1922 she had praised Morones for paying munitions factory workers the highest wages in Mexico.²⁹ With a thirty million peso budget and a command of a large reserve of men, he enjoyed the prominence and power Porter attributes to Braggioni, with Retinger and Haberman, like the Polish and Rumanian agitators, contending for his favor. But Morones' reputation as a ruthless, corrupt politician became widespread. Porter's acquaintance, Carleton Beals, ridiculed him as “a big pig-like man … always meticulously dressed and perfumed, his hands glittering with diamonds.”³⁰ In the same vein Porter described him in her journal as a “swollen labor leader … who removes inordinate silk scarf, and flashes his diamond like spotlights.” He has “no higher idea than simple comforts and cheap elegance and direct forthright grabbing of whatever he can get.” This description fits Braggioni with his diamond hoop and “elegant refinements” of silk handkerchief and Jockey Club perfume (93). When Morones' presidential ambitions made him suspect in the plot to assassinate Obregón in 1928, forcing him to resign his ministry, Porter wrote that he had done badly and used his fall from power to prophecy the fall of Braggioni, who “will live to see himself kicked out from his feeding trough by other hungry world saviors” (98). In 1922 she had written in her journal, “if Morones is next president, salvation of Mexico is assured.” In “Flowering Judas” words like “salvation” became bitterly ironic.

Angel Gomez and Felipe Carrillo Puerto, whose portraits Porter planned along with Yúdico's, also contributed to Braggioni's character. Gomez pops up in fiction fragments and plays a major role in “The Dove of Chapacalco,”³¹ always as “the bomb thrower” or “the dynamiter”—for instance, “Gomez spent his time on knees as devotee, looking for chance to plan a dynamiting of the holy statue which is chief fame and revenue to church.” Gomez may be Porter's pure invention or may have been a real dynamiter she met through her CROM contacts if Catholic claims that CROM was responsible for the bombing of Catholic shrines are true. In any case, she invests Braggioni, who pins his “faith to good dynamite,” with Gomez's destructiveness. Braggioni envisions everything “hurled skyward” so that “nothing the poor has made for the rich shall remain” (100). He would be more dangerous if he really believed his apocalyptic rhetoric which reveals his arrogance and hypocrisy since he enjoys the luxuries of the rich he would exterminate. To Porter he is the typical revolutionary, one of a “welter of small chattering monkeys busily making over a world to their own desires.”

Carrillo Puerto did not live long enough to disillusion Porter, but her notes and fictional fragments reveal her ambivalence toward him. He is the “beautiful bandit from Yucatan,” “a dreamer of violent and gorgeous dreams,” and “a complete dictator.” His rhetoric, like Braggioni's, was radical, as were the changes he effected in Yucatán.³² He claimed direct descent from pre-colonial Mayan nobility, reminding us that Braggioni's Mayan mother was “a woman of race, an aristocrat” (98). Porter's fictional name for Carrillo is Vicente, Braggioni's first name (94).

More importantly, Carrillo and others are the source of the ironic Christological imagery that unifies Braggioni's portrait. Critics are probably correct in assuming that the image of “Flowering Judas” derives from Eliot's “Gerontion,”³³ but the large pattern derives from revolutionary rhetoric. The photograph Carrillo dedicated to Porter had appeared in Redención (Redemption), a publication of the Feminist League of Merida, Yucatán, the first issue of which (May 28, 1921) is among Porter's papers. Undoubtedly, socialists, opposed to a Catholic Church that, in their opinion, promised redemption to the poor in another life while collaborating with their oppressors in this one, reinterpreted Christian language imbibed in childhood and offered political and economic redemption here and now. Porter comments on the word in “Where Presidents Have No Friends”: Best Maugard's “belief is that a renascence of older Aztec arts and handicrafts among these people will aid immeasurably in their redemption. Redemption—it is a hopeful, responsible word one often hears among these men” (414–15). But Porter's own hope vanished, and so Braggioni emerges as a perverse savior who, like Morones, only talks of “sacrificing himself for the worker.” He is typical of Many Redeemers, which “is all about how men go on saving the world by starving, robbing, and killing each other—lying, meanwhile, to themselves and each other about their motives.” Porter's description of her never-completed novel applies to “Flowering Judas.”

It took nine years for Porter's views of several revolutionaries to blend and unify in her imagination. The result is the richly complex Braggioni, who is completely individualized in his brutal corpulence and perfectly typical of the revolutionary personality she came to despise. The process of Laura's creation is similar to Braggioni's, but complicated by the involvement of Porter's own personality in ways she may never have completely understood then or was willing to admit later.

VI

In her journal note of June 1921, Porter recorded her impression of Mary Doherty seated at a table, “a little preoccupied, infallibly and kindly attentive” to Yúdico as he entertained her with his guitar. She is “a modern secular nun,” “a virgin but faintly interested in love,” who “wears a rigid little uniform of dark blue cloth, with immaculate collars and cuffs of narrow lace made by hand.” She thinks there is something “dishonest” in lace “contrived by machinery,” but “pays a handsome price” for her “one extravagance.” Born an Irish Catholic, “her romantic sense of adventure has guided her to the lower strata of revolution” where she “keeps her head cool in the midst of opera bouffe plots” and “submerged international intrigue.” She intended to organize working women into labor unions, but does not realize that those who thwart her efforts are not as “clear and straight minded” as she. Although she has developed “a little pucker of trouble between her wide set grey eyes,” she still “has the look of one who expects shortly to find a simple and honest solution of a very complicated problem. She is never to find it.”

In her portrait of Doherty, Porter's selection and interpretation of details anticipates the creation of Laura. Porter saw Doherty, as she did Yúdico, pictorially, associating her “rigid little uniform” with her nunlike virginity (a uniform Doherty was still wearing in 1926 as Edward Weston's photographs show). That uniform will eventually symbolize Laura's fearful rejection of love in contrast to Doherty's dawning interest. Doherty's lace, like Laura's, is her one extravagance, but what she “thinks” about the dishonesty of machine-made lace is already a fiction in 1921, for she bought her lace at Altman's in New York, unaware whether it was handmade or not. In “Flowering Judas,” Laura feels guilty about wearing the handmade lace when the machine is “sacred” to the revolutionist (92). From the start Doherty's dress had a meaning, but that meaning changed in the writing of “Flowering Judas.”

Porter appropriated other details from Doherty's life to create Laura. Doherty's Irish Catholic background reinforced the image of “secular nun,” although, unlike Laura, she was not a churchgoer. Like Laura, Doherty taught Indian children in Xochimilco, but never tried to organize women into labor unions. Her horse once ran away from a former Zapatista, Genaro Amezcua, who was head of the agrarian bureau in Cuernavaca where she first met him.³⁴ Porter also knew him, describing him as “the only intelligent pro-feminist in Mexico,” an ironic footnote to Laura's rejection of him and all other men in the story. However, such details do not account for Laura's personality. Doherty's honesty and genuine devotion to revolutionary reform, however naïve they seemed to Porter in her note of 1921, bear little resemblance to Laura's alienation and mechanical performance of duties in “Flowering Judas.”

Porter's claim of coming over to Doherty's apartment at her request to protect her from Yúdico is a fiction. Her 1921 journal entry gives no hint of such circumstances. At that time Doherty was not living alone, but with the Habermans. Also, she categorically denies that she was ever afraid of Yúdico, whom she described in a postcard in 1925 as “one of my good friends.” Why then Porter's fabrication? Apparently she placed herself outside and inside the scene with Doherty and Yúdico. Outside, she imagined herself coming to the rescue of Doherty, who should have been afraid instead of sitting “infallibly and kindly attentive.” Porter's account of outwaiting and frustrating Yúdico is a kind of posthumous revenge on him. Inside the scene, Porter identified with Doherty/Laura's “notorious virginity” (97), expressing her own fear of violation in a world in which men were used to having their way with women. Porter treated endangered virginity in two other works of the period. The “dove” of “The Dove of Chapacalco” is a young servant girl who becomes the prey of a corrupt bishop. “Virgin Violeta” (1924) is based on Salomón de la Selva's account of seducing a friend's young daughter. Porter noted, “Salomon is uneasy because I told a friend of his I detested his attitude toward love and women—‘If Salomon met the Virgin Mary, he would introduce himself as the Holy Ghost,’ I said.” And so she detested what she interpreted as Yúdico's advances on the virgin Mary Doherty, in whom she saw herself, and fictionalized her detestation in “Flowering Judas.” In this light Laura's notorious virginity is a positive virtue, other evidence to the contrary. Although it attracts Braggioni to her in the first place, thereby placing her in danger, it is a power she has over him. He can have his way with others but not with Laura.

Laura's virginity also has its negative side and partly explains why Porter chose not to name her heroine Miranda. Although the two characters resemble each other, there is a difference. Miranda is a woman victimized from childhood by circumstances beyond her control, from a family who does not understand her to influenza that almost kills her. If she has a fault, it is expecting too much from a world that always disappoints her, thereby justifying her reaction against it. Porter's criticism of Laura is much harsher.³⁵ By insisting on Doherty as the original of Laura, she makes her friend the scapegoat for qualities she found difficult to admit as her own.

Negatively Laura's virginity represents total moral disengagement. She does not, understandably, love Braggioni, but she does not love anybody. Thus she is a traitor to the Revolution and to her own religious principles. Braggioni questions Laura's coldness: “You think you are so cold, gringita!” (97), but his hope that she is not is vain, for she suffers from her author's own emotional problems.³⁶ In her journal Porter recorded Retinger's complaint that her “detachment from people and groups is a mark of her selfishness, is a sin against human solidarity.” Another time he told her, “what you need is love. Your body will wither without it.” Porter seemed torn between love and its smothering demands. After examining her attraction to Retinger, she concluded, “For I might as well acknowledge … love is not for me. … Love affects me as a great sickness of the heart, a crushing nostalgia that withers me up, that makes me fruitless and without help.”³⁷ In a fragment from Thieves' Market, Miranda “set herself perversely” against Jerome when he was “passionate,” refusing to “respond” and feeling “happy in having spoiled his plan for him.” Other times she was “really cold, as inaccessible as a virgin.” Jerome would then call her “a Russian nun,” telling her that she expected “to be taken as if [she] were the Holy Wafer.” This fragment best explains Porter's ambivalent attitude toward Laura's virginity which is both revenge against Braggioni and symbol of her sexual and spiritual frigidity.³⁸

Laura's spiritual malaise results in her guilt over the death of Eugenio. The facts behind this incident and Porter's visits to prisoners in jail are impossible to verify. Porter accused Doherty of supplying pills to a prisoner and of dreaming about his death, but Doherty firmly denies ever setting foot in prison until she visited photographer Tina Modotti in 1930, whereas Porter, in tears, told me that she herself had given sleeping pills to a prisoner who saved them until he had enough with which to kill himself, adding that only the death of the man who caught influenza from her had affected her as much. Porter's memory of her friend's death in 1918 probably contributed to Laura's guilt, but no corroborating evidence of visits to prison exists.

However, Porter did write of carrying messages that will result in the death of five men against whom she holds no grudge. She wonders if she is participating in “an act of opera bouffe treachery” out of boredom when she finally blames “the enemy within” her that “lives upon sensation” and “loves the sense of power implied in the possession of these letters” so “potent” that “five men will die at dawn” upon their delivery. This fragment may be Porter's fictional attempt to involve herself in the death of Lucio Blanco's five followers, mentioned in “A month of uncertainties.” Employing the present tense, it describes what she is about to do, not what she has done, and its language is melodramatic and calculated, “opera bouffe” repeating the expression she used in her portrait of Mary Doherty. On the other hand, it is in the first-person, like other autobiographical entries in her journal, whereas all the clearly fictional pieces of this period are in the third-person. If it is a true account of Porter's activities, then it explains the guilt she assigns to Laura, who also engages in deadly intrigue she is not committed to.

Whatever the facts behind Laura's relation to Eugenio, her inability to love, deeply rooted in Porter's own personality, is directly linked to her fear of death, just as Braggioni's sexual aggression is linked to his deadly power. Such power Porter feared, writing in her journal, “Now I seem unable to believe in anything, and certainly my doubts of human beings and their motives are founded in a fear of their power over me.” But fear of another's power makes love as dangerous as overt aggression and explains Laura's defense system. “Her knees cling together” as she closes herself to the “spread knees” of Braggioni (92), who fills her with “a purely physical sense of danger” (93). This resistance is also seen in her escape from the romantic advances of the “gentle” Zapatista captain and the young typographer. But Laura's protective withdrawal into self only results in a death-like stasis of noncommitment. Her desire to escape perilous human involvement paradoxically leads her to the ultimate escape, suicide. We are told, “Sometimes she wished to run away, but she stays. Now she longs to fly out of the room, down the narrow stairs, and into the street where the houses lean together like conspirators under the mottled lamp, and leave Braggioni singing to himself” (92). Here the urge to escape life ends in futile circularity, the conspiratorial houses a nightmarish substitution for Braggioni. This passage Porter developed from a journal entry in which she complains that she would “like exceedingly to die,” not having “that sense of urgency” she had when she nearly died of influenza. Then she writes, “The streets are bowl shaped, and the houses lean inward. … I have continually the sensation of stepping into space, and the side walk seems to curve down from the outer edges.” In the next paragraph she predicts, “In a week I shall be dead.” The leaning houses here are more explicitly related to suicidal impulse than they are in “Flowering Judas.” It is as if Porter were viewing the world through a fisheye lens, a world of unreal dimension she fears entering. In 1931 she wrote her father that she had struggled a long time “against the very strong temptation just to … quit the whole devilish nuisance of life,” but now she was “in a healthy mood of resistance and energy.” Only resistance applies to Laura. Throughout the story her “No” is a rejection of life, but her “No” to Eugenio's invitation expresses her rejection of suicide. She at least reaffirms her will to live despite her continuing state of irresolution.

Like Laura's personality, many of the story's details evolved out of Porter's own experience. For instance, the patio of “In a Mexican Patio,” an unpublished sketch based on her experiences at 20 Calle del Eliseo, with its fountain and “purple” bougainvillaea, is the source of Laura's patio, with its fountain and Judas tree whose scarlet blossoms turn “a dull purple” in the moonlight (96). As evening falls, a young man appears as a shadowy presence, like Laura's young typographer, to communicate his love to a servant girl. Like “Flowering Judas,” the sketch is narrated in the present tense and ends ominously at night: “In the sunlight one may laugh, and sniff the winds, but the night is crowded with thoughts darker than the sunless world.” Journal entries supply other details. Porter's servant Maria was once “the prettiest girl in Guanajuato,” the hometown of Laura's servant Lupe. Porter went to union meetings to hear the spellbinding Morones speak, while Laura goes to union meetings to listen to “busy important voices” (94). In a fragment of Thieves' Market, Laura in church finds nothing to pray for: “Let me set my heart on something, I don't care how poor it is … the legless woman in the Alameda has a perfectly faithful lover—oh God, out of your charity send me something.” Porter, who told me that she often saw the legless woman on a park bench sharing money with her lover, assigned Laura's lines about the woman to Braggioni and gave a mechanical “Hail Mary” to Laura, who is soon distracted by the “battered doll-shape of some male saint whose white, lace-trimmed drawers hang limply around his ankles below the hieratic dignity of his velvet robe” (92). The saint originally appeared in “Teotihuacan” as “St. Ignatious Loyola with chaste lace trimmed trousers showing beneath his black cassock.” He is effectively denigrated by the transformation of “trousers” into “drawers.” Clearly, “Flowering Judas” is based on Porter's own experiences, great and small.

VII

In 1943 Porter wrote Mary Doherty, “Mexico was new to us, and beautiful, the very place to be at that moment. We believed a great deal—though I remember well that my childhood faith in the Revolution was well over in about six months.” By May 1921, the time of the deportation crisis, the prototypes of Braggioni among others had sufficiently convinced her that Mexico as potential paradise was and could be nothing but a dream. But out of the dreamer's failure came the artist's success. If Mexico could not assuage her troubled psyche, it compelled her to contemplate the entwined betrayals of Revolution and of self, and to transform her disillusion and spiritual isolation into Laura's. By donning, as it were, Mary Doherty's nun-like uniform, Porter was able to give voice to all her conflicting emotions and view them with dispassionate objectivity as if they were not her own. In later comments about the creation of her story, she persisted in her disguise, claiming that her friend was model for Laura. “Flowering Judas” was not the “reportage” she claimed it was in 1972, but it did contain “symbolic truth” of her Mexican experience. Her transformation of purple bougainvillaea of her Mexican patio into flowering Judas is sign of the process that brought art out of life.

Notes

1. This Is My Best, ed. Whit Burnet (The Dial Press, 1942), p. 539.

2. I am grateful to the McKeldin Library of the University of Maryland for permission to examine Porter's papers and to Paul Porter for permission to quote from them.

3. For instance, Joan Givner, in Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (Simon and Schuster, 1982), shows that the setting of “Old Mortality” did not derive from Porter's childhood, as Porter claimed, but from her stay in Bermuda in 1929 (pp. 211–13).

4. Burnet, p. 539.

5. Barbara Thompson, “An Interview,” in Lodwick Hartley and George Core, eds., Katherine Anne Porter: A Critical Symposium (University of Georgia Press, 1969), pp. 15–16.

6. Hank Lopez, “A Country and Some People I Love,” Harper's, 231 (1965), pp. 59–60.

7. Enrique Hank Lopez, Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter: Refugee from Indian Creek (Little Brown, 1981), pp. 119–20. Lopez first tape-recorded Porter's conversations in 1966.

8. A Rumanian-born lawyer from the U. S., Haberman, while helping a Hindu group establish a colony in Yucatán in 1918, met revolutionist Felipe Carrillo Puerto, whom he advised in the writing of the state's labor statutes and in developing its “rationalistic schools.” In Mexico City he was advisor to labor leader Luis Morones, becoming the only foreign member of Grupo Acción, and headed the language department of the Ministry of Education. In 1924 he served as liaison between President Calles and the A. F. of L. See Carleton Beals, Glass Houses (Lippincott, 1938), p. 71; John W. F. Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico (University of Texas Press, 1972), pp. 122, 138, 140; Marjorie Ruth Clark, Organized Labor in Mexico (Russell & Russell, 1973), pp. 63, 202; Barry Carr, El Movimiento Obrero y la Politica en México, 1910–1929 (Mexico City: SepSetentas, 1976), I, pp. 195–96. Haberman published “Bandit Colonies” in the Mexican issue of The Survey, L, No. 3 (1924), 147–48, 193. Porter, the issue's art editor, also contributed “Corridos” (pp. 157–59) and two translations. The list of contributors reads like a Who's Who of Porter's acquaintances in Mexico.

9. In 1918 Morones cofounded Grupo Acción, an elite group of laborites, and was elected to the Central Committee of the newly formed Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM), which played a major role in the election of President Obregón. Morones became chief of munitions factories under Obregón and in 1924 Minister of Industry, Commerce and Labor under President Calles. See Dulles, Chapter 31; Clark, pp. 73–74; Carr, I, p. 180.

10. J. H. Retinger, Memoirs of an Eminence Gris, ed. John Pomian (Sussex: University Press, 1972), pp. 46, 67; Carr, II, pp. 52–54, 63.

11. Born in Iowa in 1898 and with a degree in Economics from the University of Wisconsin, Doherty served over the years in Mexico as secretary, translator, and researcher for various government officials, including Moises Saenz, Ramón Beteta, and President Miguel Alemán. I am indebted to her for sharing her memories of Porter and for making her papers available to me.

12. Among Mother Jones's papers is Haberman's letter of April 1921, inviting her to Mexico where she traveled from mid-May until early July. See Dale Fethering, Mother Jones, The Miner's Angel: A Portrait (Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), pp. 176–77, 247. This information helps verify Doherty's statements about her living arrangements in 1921, which contradict Porter's claim that Doherty was living alone when Yúdico visited her.

13. From 1914 to 1916 Yúdico was one of the ablest leaders and last Secretary General of Casa Obrero Mundial, which successfully organized labor syndicates. He was one of the original members of Grupo Acción and Morones' closest associate in CROM. He died mysteriously in 1928. His labor activities are mentioned in Clark, Dulles, and Luis Araiza, Historia del Movimiento Obrero Mexicano (Mexico City: Casa del Obrero Mundial, 1975). Jacinto Huitron, in Origenes e Historia del Movimiento Obrero en México (Mexico City: Editores Mexicanos Unidos, 1974), quotes a letter from Yúdico describing successful organizing in Yucatán in 1915 (pp. 283–84).

14. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 98. Subsequent references to Porter's stories in this edition appear in my text.

15. See Dulles, Chapter 16, concerning Carrillo's activities in Yucatán.

16. Lopez, Conversations, p. 78.

17. At this time Porter also spent much time with such Mexican artists as Adolfo Best Maugard, Xavier Guerrero, and Miguel Covarrubias, but only her labor acquaintances served as models for “Flowering Judas.”

18. The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (Delacourt Press, 1970), p. 399. Subsequent references to Porter's essays from this edition appear in my text.

19. See Dulles, pp. 109–17.

20. Alfonso Taracena, La Verdadera Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1961), VII, pp. 169–70.

21. John M. Hart, Anarchism & the Mexican Working Class 1860–1931 (University of Texas Press, 1978), p. 160.

22. Porter often accompanied Manuel Gamio to Teotihuacán and describes his work in “Where Presidents Have No Friends,” Collected Essays, p. 414.

23. In a note Porter listed Carrillo Puerto's and photographer Roberto Turnbull's stories of their experiences in the Revolution, both of which exist in rough draft, and Salomón de la Selva's “adventure with Palma's sister,” which she transformed into “Virgin Violeta.” De la Selva was a Nicaraguan poet, whom Porter, in her unpublished “An Encounter with Herman Goering,” accuses of exploiting women, although he was “ingenuously charming and … could disarm even the most wary person.” She inscribed in her copy of Emily Dickinson's poetry, “Salomon de la Selva gave me this book in Mexico City in 1922, after reading every poem in it to me.”

24. Porter claimed that a friend, Francisco Aguilera, was the source of her “alter-ego name which now I can never abandon” (Givner, p. 170).

25. J. H. Retinger, The Rise of the Mexican Labor Movement (Documentary Publications, 1976), p. 91; originally published in 1926 as Morones of Mexico.

26. Katherine Anne Porter, Flowering Judas and Other Stories (Random House, 1940), p. v.

27. I am grateful to Samuel O. Yúdico, Jr., for making available to me many photographs of his father.

28. This early version of the foot-washing scene in “Flowering Judas” is apparently pure invention since Porter admitted in her 1972 lecture that she never met Yúdico's wife.

29. Porter, Collected Essays, p. 414.

30. Beals, p. 58.

31. “The Dove of Chapacalco” is a long, almost-completed story that Porter wrote in 1922. It deals with a bishop's seduction of a young servant girl and draws from the life of reactionary Francisco Orozco y Jiménez, Archbishop of Guadalajara during the twenties.

32. Carrillo describes revolutionary changes in “The New Yucatan,” The Survey, L, No. 3 (1924), 138–42, but died before its publication.

33. Ray B. West, “Katherine Anne Porter: Symbol and Theme in ‘Flowering Judas,’” Accent, VII (1947), 183–84. Leon Gottfried, in “Death's Other Kingdom: Dantesque and Theological Symbolism in ‘Flowering Judas,’” PMLA, LXXXIV (1969), also reveals Eliot's influence, but mainly argues that the story reflects spiritual states found in the Inferno.

34. About Amezcua, see John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (Random House, 1970), pp. 202–03, 209–10; and Valentín López González, Los Compañeros de Zapata (Gobierno del Estado de Morelos, 1980), pp. 23–24.

35. William L. Nance, in Katherine Anne Porter & the Art of Rejection (University of North Carolina Press, 1963), writes that Laura's isolation is possibly caused by her own mistakes whereas Miranda's is either justified or disguised by the plot (23).

36. Porter reported to Lopez that in Mexico she received “unwanted” attention from men “obviously disconcerted by her coolness. One of her … friends once told her that certain comrades considered her a very cold gringuita. Selectivity was so often equated with frigidity” (Conversations, p. 121). Givner's account of Porter's frigidity indicates that the comrades were right (pp. 92–93).

37. In Old Mortality Miranda's marriage brings about “an immense weariness as if it were an illness that she might one day hope to recover from” (p. 213).

38. Dorothy S. Redden, in “‘Flowering Judas’: Two Voices,” Studies in Short Fiction, VI (1969), argues that one of Porter's voices “concurs in Laura's self-condemnation,” while the other approves her “spiritual refusal to yield” (p. 201).