[In the following essay, Troy offers a favorable review of Flowering Judas and Other Stories.]

In the five years that have passed since the almost surreptitious publication of Flowering Judas Miss Porter has apparently written only four stories which she believes worthy of being included in the same collection. With such a record, obviously, this writer can hardly expect to attain to the Titanic company of those recent fictionists who have been busily demonstrating the superiority of matter over mind in literary production. She offers no panoramic survey of modern society, no saga of the American or any other soil, no documentary materials for a study in the elephantiasis of the literary sensibility in our time. She cannot successfully be compared with Balzac, Tolstoy, or Proust—and Rabelais is quite out of the question. Confronted with Miss Porter's 285 widely spaced pages, the most popular of current standards, the standard of quantitative measurement, becomes as ineffectual as a yardstick in an Einsteinian universe. Quality rather than quantity being the only possible issue, criticism is suddenly made aware how little prepared it is for its task.

But it is possible to isolate the essential quality of these stories as an honesty that manages to steer a successful course between the two worst perils of the contemporary prose writer—artificiality and that self-conscious effort at sincerity which is a special kind of artificiality. “A spray of lantern light shot through the hedge, a single voice slashed the blackness, ripped the fragile layer of silence suspended above the hut.” This passage, with its too vivid parade of strong verbs, does come pretty close to being “literary.” But it is just enough justified by the situation and there is no more of it than is necessary. More often an effect depends on a single word so casually imbedded in the sentence as to escape individual attention: Maria Concepcion's friends “were around her, speaking for her, defending her, the forces of life were ranged invincibly with her against the beaten dead.” Here the whole weight of the feeling is contained, with Flaubertian inevitability, in the one adjective toward the end. The same kind of force without emphasis is achieved when Maria Concepcion looks down upon the dead body of her rival: “Maria Rosa had eaten too much honey and had had too much love.” As it happens, Maria Rosa had been a bee-keeper, so that even in this rare use of symbolism Miss Porter does not depart from the literal: the fact and the symbol are one and the same. And throughout these stories it is the same strict adherence to the fact for what the fact can produce that saves Miss Porter both from the rhetorical emphasis of Mrs. Woolf and her followers and from the equally rhetorical understatement of the Hemingway school.

This gift for making audible what might be called the overtones of fact is responsible for Miss Porter's success over such a wide range of subjects. Whether it is the phonographic recording of a quarrel between two young people in the country, or the predicament of a young American schoolmistress in Mexico, or the incorrigible Bovaryism of an Irish immigrant woman on a Connecticut farm, Miss Porter is able to secure richness without too much reliance on the brush. The only objection that may be raised is that in certain of the stories, “Hacienda” and “That Tree,” there is an insufficient crystallization of theme. In “Theft,” the tenuous mood is properly condensed in the “moral” attached at the close: “I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.” But in “Magic” and “He,” no such definition is given to the experience that has been recorded. From this point of view the most satisfactory items are “Maria Concepcion” and “The Cracked Looking-Glass.” If Miss Porter had written nothing but these two short narratives, she would still be among the most distinguished masters of her craft in this country.