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Authors: Katherine Anne Porter,Darlene Harbour Unrue

Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter
COLLECTED STORIES AND OTHER WRITINGS

T H E  L I B R A R Y  O F  A M E R I C A

Volume compilation, notes, and chronology copyright © 2008 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced commercially by offset-lithographic or equivalent copying devices without the permission of the publisher.

The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
copyright © 1944, 1941, 1940, 1939, 1937, 1936, 1935, 1934, 1930, renewed 1972, 1969, 1968, 1967, 1965, 1963, 1962, 1958 by Katherine Anne Porter. “Virgin Violeta” and “The Martyr” copyright © 1924, 1923 by Century Magazine, renewed 1951, 1950 by Meredith Publishing Company. “Hacienda” copyright 1934 by Harrison of Paris. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

All other selections reprinted with the permission of The Katherine Anne Porter Foundation.

THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
, a nonprofit publisher, is dedicated to publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing. Each year the Library adds new volumes to its collection of essential works by America’s foremost novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and statesmen.

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2008927625

ISBN
978–1–59853–029–2 (print)

ISBN
978–1–59853–328–6 (epub)

First Printing

The Library of America—186

D
ARLENE
H
ARBOUR
U
NRUE

IS
THE
EDITOR
OF
THIS
VOLUME

Contents

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

Go Little Book. . .

F
LOWERING
J
UDAS
AND
O
THER
S
TORIES

María Concepción

Virgin Violeta

The Martyr

Magic

Rope

He

Theft

That Tree

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

Flowering Judas

The Cracked Looking-Glass

Hacienda

P
ALE
H
ORSE
,
P
ALE
R
IDER

Old Mortality

Noon Wine

Pale Horse, Pale Rider

T
HE
L
EANING
T
OWER
AND
O
THER
S
TORIES

The Old Order

The Source

The Journey

The Witness

The Circus

The Last Leaf

The Fig Tree

The Grave

The Downward Path to Wisdom

A Day’s Work

Holiday

The Leaning Tower

ESSAYS, REVIEWS, AND OTHER WRITINGS

“I needed both. . .”

C
RITICAL

The Days Before

Reflections on Willa Cather

A Note on
The Troll Garden

Gertrude Stein: Three Views

“Everybody Is a Real One”

Second Wind

The Wooden Umbrella

“It Is Hard to Stand in the Middle”

Eudora Welty and
A Curtain of Green

The Wingèd Skull

On a Criticism of Thomas Hardy

E. M. Forster

Virginia Woolf

D. H. Lawrence

Quetzalcoatl

A Wreath for the Gamekeeper

“The Laughing Heat of the Sun”

The Art of Katherine Mansfield

The Hundredth Role

Dylan Thomas

“A death of days. . .”

“A fever chart. . .”

“In the morning of the poet. . .”

A Most Lively Genius

Orpheus in Purgatory

In Memoriam

Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939)

James Joyce (1882–1941)

Sylvia Beach (1887–1962)

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)

P
ERSONAL
AND
P
ARTICULAR

On Writing

My First Speech

“I must write from memory. . .”

No Plot, My Dear, No Story

“Writing cannot be taught. . .”

The Situation of the Writer

The Situation in American Writing

Transplanted Writers

The International Exchange of Writers

The Author on Her Work

No Masters or Teachers

On “Flowering Judas”

“The only reality. . .”

“Noon Wine”: The Sources

Notes on the Texas I Remember

Portrait: Old South

A Christmas Story

Audubon’s Happy Land

The Flower of Flowers

A Note on Pierre-Joseph Redouté

A House of My Own

The Necessary Enemy

“Marriage Is Belonging”

A Defense of Circe

St. Augustine and the Bullfight

Act of Faith: 4 July 1942

The Future Is Now

The Never-Ending Wrong

Afterword

M
EXICAN

Why I Write About Mexico

Reports from Mexico City,

The New Man and the New Order

The Fiesta of Guadalupe

The Funeral of General Benjamín Hill

Children of Xochitl

The Mexican Trinity

Where Presidents Have No Friends

In a Mexican Patio

Leaving the Petate

The Charmed Life

Corridos

Sor Juana: A Portrait of the Poet

Notes on the Life and Death of a Hero

A Mexican Chronicle, 1920–1943

Blasco Ibanez on “Mexico in Revolution”

Paternalism and the Mexican Problem

La Conquistadora

¡Ay, Que Chamaco!

Old Gods and New Messiahs

Diego Rivera

These Pictures Must Be Seen

Rivera’s Personal Revolution

Parvenu. . .

History on the Wing

Thirty Long Years of Revolution

A
UTOBIOGRAPHICAL

About the Author

The Land That Is Nowhere

Chronology

Note on the Texts

Notes

Index

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Go Little Book. . .

T
HIS
collection of stories has been floating around the world in many editions, countries and languages, in three small volumes, for many years. There are four stories added which have never been collected before, and it is by mere hazard they are here at all. “The Fig Tree,” now in its right place in the sequence called
The Old Order
, simply disappeared at the time
The Leaning Tower
was published, in 1944, and reappeared again from a box of otherwise unfinished manuscripts in another house, another city and a different state, in 1961. “Holiday” represents one of my prolonged struggles, not with questions of form or style, but my own moral and emotional collision with a human situation I was too young to cope with at the time it occurred; yet the story haunted me for years and I made three separate versions, with a certain spot in all three where the thing went off track. So I put it away and it disappeared also, and I forgot it. It rose from one of my boxes of papers, after a quarter of a century, and I sat down in great excitement to read all three versions. I saw at once that the first was the right one, and as for the vexing question which had stopped me short long ago, it had in the course of living settled itself so slowly and deeply and secretly I wondered why I had ever been distressed by it. I changed one short paragraph and a line or two at the end and it was done. “María Concepción” was my first published story. It was followed by “Virgin Violeta” and “The Martyr,” all stories of Mexico, my much-loved second country, and they were each in turn accepted and published in the old
Century Magazine
, now vanished, by good generous sympathetic Carl Van Doren. He was the first editor—indeed, the first person—to read a story of mine, and I remember how unhesitatingly and warmly he said, “I believe you are a writer!” This was in 1923.

Several writers or persons connected with literature in some way or another, from time to time in published reminiscences, have done me the honor to mention that they had, so to speak, “discovered” me.

There is no reason to name them, but I shall only say here and now, to have the business straight, it was Carl Van Doren, gifted writer, editor and resourceful friend to young writers, who just lightly tossed my stories into print and started me on my long career, with such an air of it being all in the day’s work, which it was, I went away in a dazzle of joy, not in the least thinking of myself as “discovered”—I had known where I was all along—nor looking towards the future as a “career.” What unpleasant words they are in this context. “Virgin Violeta” and “The Martyr” were left out of the first edition, I forget why, possibly oversight. A friend fished them out of the ancient
Century
files, got them re-published, after forty-odd years, and so they join their fellows. Every story I ever finished and published is here. I beg of the reader one gentle favor for which he may be sure of my perpetual gratitude: please do not call my short novels
Novelettes
, or even worse,
Novellas
. Novelette is classical usage for a trivial, dime-novel sort of thing; Novella is a slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything. Please call my works by their right names: we have four that cover every division: short stories, long stories, short novels, novels. I now have examples of all four kinds under these headings, and they seem very clear, sufficient, and plain English.

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