A Long Drink of Porter
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. (Cape, 35s.) DYLAN THOMAS, at one of those devastating and eventually devastated parties in his American honour, picked up Dr. Porter like a doll and lifted' her to the Ceiling. Would anyone, even a poet, dare to do that now, after Ship of Fools and this present job of consolidation? Np light- weight, Dr. Porter has gotten up there on her own; though whether she's really reached the ceiling of contemporary American letters is another matter. We waited a long time for Ship of Fools, and some of us were disappointed. It was dangerously close in spirit to the puddingy Narrenschiff whose title it borrowed; it was too self-consciously a 'great' work, a massive vessel that didn't leave harbour (its wright had pro- vided too many passenger-decks and too little room for engines). At seventy-four, Dr. Porter has a right to ask what she's going to be re- membered by. And now she answers the question herself.
More than twenty years ago I was using 'Rope' in an army short-story class as one of the best examples I knew of the genre. It's in Dr. Porter's earliest volume, Flowering Judas, and, re-reading it after so long, I'm impressed again by the economy and virtuosity, the setting of a deliberate stylistic problem and the trium- phant solution. In 'Rope,' eight brief pages of indirect speech are enough to create two whole people and their long relationship, set in a climate and a landscape, and the immediacy of the tension between them is caught, paradoxi- cally, by the eschewal of ordinary dialogue. That's one way of looking at it. Another way is to regard many of Dr. Porter's best stories as monologues—full of speech-elements without ,themselves being speech. She approaches the whole unit with the faucet turned on—in that mood of relaxation which the novelist only knows when he launches into a long passage of pure dialogue.
In other words, the secret of her stories is flow. It's a flow which one might (if one didn't think of Hemingway) call feminine. Paragraphs sometimes seem to end only because of the con- vention of indenting for direct speech. The flow is checked by the solidity of a symbol—a symbol which often supplies the title, as in 'Flowering Judas' with its cannibalistic nightmare, or `The Cracked Looking-Glass.' The real triumph of the collection is the trilogy of novelle—Pule horse. Pale Rider—of which the title novella is as close to a masterpiece as anything Dr. Porter ever wrote, or is now ever likely to write. The impact of the Kaiser's War on an American city is as sharply observed as it is in Dos Passos's Nine- teen-Nineteen, the hopeless love of Miranda and Adam (Tale horse, pale rider,' sings Adam pro- phetically, 'done taken my love away') chronicled with a terrible cold passion. It is in this power- boat of a story that the author of Ship of Fools really makes her hav4;n.
ANTHONY BURGESS
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