Katherine Anne Porter (146 page)

The critic’s second error is more serious. He shares, with his literary contemporaries and fellow pilgrims of that strange American migration to Europe during the 1920’s, a passion for the too-early autobiography, the premature summing up, the pronouncing of verdicts and passing of sentences before the evidence is all in: the cropping of living histories to fit them into a pattern. We none of us know each other’s stories well enough to venture conclusions about them. We do not even each of us know our own, because we do not know the end.

In the epilogue to his republished memoirs, first written when he was a tired Old Master of thirty-three, more or less, our critic, nevertheless, attempts to set all American writers or painters or critics who happened to travel during that ill-starred decade into a careful theory of motive: self-willed exile in search of life; flight, pursuit, return. Sometime later, as an afterthought, he accounts for my absence, hitherto unnoticed, from the crowded European scene of that hour by concluding: “Mexico City was her Paris, and Taxco her South of France.”

After trying at length and in vain to chase this mad logic from its untenable conclusion back, back to the lair of its fantastic premise, I am able only to say: No. Mexico City was my well-loved Mexico City, and Taxco was my abomination. I never saw that town until my last year in Mexico; it was already neatly divided in three, among an American lady (Natalie Scott) speculating in real estate, an American gentleman (William Spratling) who ran an art silverworks factory with Indian workmen, and a few charming Mexican high-career politicians such as Moises Saenz, Minister of Public Charities, who decreed some very rococo pleasure domes in the most picturesque locations. Paris for me is the city I did not arrive at until January, 1932, because until then I had no occasion to be there, and I have yet to see the South of France, though I have heard a great deal about it, from Ford Madox Ford and Janice Biala. I was never one for viewing scenery as such, or for visiting around among friends; if I traveled extensively, it was only on lawful occasions, for I was ever under the necessity of earning, if not exactly a living, a subsistence. Descendant as I am of a vast tribe of nomads who in the course of less than a century, from 1648 to 1720, according to family records, migrated in swarms from England to America, from Virginia and Pennsylvania to the South in 1774 and on to the Southwest around 1850, the field farthest from me always looked the greenest and still does. I am sure my own temperament is in some way to blame for the curious fact that people have so often been willing to pay me to go away on an errand, or having gone, they have often paid me to come back on another. So when I bought a ticket for any place, it was for a sound reason, and I always knew where I was going, and why. The one thing never certain was how or when I should get back, the least disturbing of all
questions to me—I like going onward. Being a writer by vocation and by fate, a fate I had no chance of escaping by any sort of strategy—I carried my breathing life with me wherever I went, and that is an indestructible hearthstone.

Since I had to support my writing by working at other things, my main concern was always to allow myself as much margin of time and energy as was available between my succession of weird chores. On the day enough money had been saved to sit down and work for a while, I dropped whatever I was doing and disappeared. Yet the margins were narrow, the energy unstable. All my early work up to the publishing of my first book was done in these conditions, and a great deal of it since. If they were sometimes dismaying, yet they seemed inevitable, for I had not regarded writing either as career or profession—it was the thing I did, the stipulated work of my life. Nobody had promised me anything for it, and it is inexplicable how little, in a worldly way, I expected from it. Yet I worked as well as I was able, in a constant, irrational, mystical state of hope that in the end, by some grace from whatever source, or some faculty not yet revealed in me, I might become a good artist. That is still my hope.

The appearance of my first book in 1930 led to the grant of a Guggenheim Fellowship in literature. In those days it was good form on receiving this fellowship to leave wherever you were and go somewhere else, the farther away the better. It gave Americans specializing in many fields a modest version of the classic Grand Tour, or a partial substitute for a year or two in a foreign school or university—a good idea. I was in Mexico at the time, where in several visits, from late 1920, I had spent altogether more than five years. Happy to go, I dismembered my lightly assembled household, sold the scraps of furniture I had bought from the National Pawnshop, rendered up the remaining livestock (two ducks and one infant goat) as burnt offerings in farewell feasts to friends, and left the dear country of my predilection and childhood associations once and for all, as it seems now, for I did not go back for thirty years, and had no reason to believe that I should ever (I have twice since, short visits, tours of duty, culturally speaking, for the State Department). At last I had the perfect reason for being in Europe. I went first to Berlin, to Paris, then to Madrid, then to Basel,
then back to Paris, where I stopped short for five years; three of them were lived in “the
pavillon
or summer house, that stood in the courtyard of 70 bis rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, near the Luxembourg Gardens,” where Ezra Pound lived in 1923 when young men-of-letters eagerly went to call on him.

My husband and I were merely looking for a house; after a long search we found this delightful place, and learned only after we had moved in that it was simply stiff with literary history. Our concierge did not remember Mr. Pound, I daresay the only person who ever saw him who didn’t, but she did recall an unfortunate American monsieur who had committed suicide very untidily, not to say inconsiderately, in one of the back
ateliers
; she remembered him gratefully, though, because he had left a cat who had proved to be ever since the joy of her days.

From my earliest recollection I had known that some day I should live in Paris; it was not even a daydream, merely one of the splendid things I was certain would happen when I grew up. Well, there I was, living in Paris, and it was splendid, though my definition of splendor had changed almost right about face with time. Also the ’twenties in Paris, about which everyone had read so much, were safely past, or so I believed. What a mistake that was.

E. M. Forster once wrote about Conrad: “He has no respect for adventure, unless it comes incidentally. If pursued for its own sake it leads to ‘red noses and watery eyes,’ and ‘lays a man under no obligation of faithfulness to an idea’.”

One thing is certain, I never had any notion of looking for adventure; just plain daily experience was more than I could handle. All I wanted was to live pleasantly with a good, long work table and a bright light over it. All sorts of people kept getting in the way of this plan, too simple and reasonable to carry through. And another thing I know well, wherever I went, for whatever reason, I was not looking for culture and civilization, but the life people were living now, and I wanted to live in the world, too. We had culture and civilization at home, in Texas, of all places. Our means were small, our circumstances anything but secure and comfortable, and it was all going to grow worse, not better. But we were brought up on the tallest possible standards of morals, manners, and ideals of
learning—indeed to heights impossible, given the situation, to scale. Still we knew what the standards were and acknowledged them.

I was nourished almost incidentally on good literature, good music, and good art without ever being told it was great, or even good. It was what one read and heard and looked at to the exclusion of everything else. If one pulled out a battered, spine-broken, gotch-eared book, from any shelf or secretary or old cedar chest, it was inevitably an early translation of Dante’s complete works, or one of half a dozen volumes of Shakespeare’s plays, or the sonnets with marginal notes in twenty different handwritings, or Marlowe’s plays, or Erasmus’s
The Praise of Folly
, or the
Letters
of Madame de Sévigné, or the poems of Alexander Pope, or Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park
, or Boswell’s
The Life of Samuel Johnson
, or
Gulliver’s Travels
(not the one rewritten for children), or the
Essays
of Montaigne, or novels, such as
Tristram Shandy
. Laurence Sterne was the first author I ever read who made me feel that I, too, might some day become a real author, such is the incredible two-facedness of that man.
Wuthering Heights
, and
Anna Karenina
, for some reason, together with the letters of Heloise and Abelard, gave me my first inklings of the nature of love—mainly it was painfully disturbing and caused troubles of an extremely serious nature, and was not to be invited lightly, though it was clear that almost no one declined the gambit.

Then there was always Mark Twain, so far as I knew, the only living author of the time. Friends of the family, persons I might actually touch and speak to, had
seen
him, more than once. We did not have
Candide
, or the works of Dr. Rabelais, but a fourteen-year-old girl could hear of them and find them and be allowed to borrow them from the public library in a small, West Texas city, San Antonio; moreover, to sit around reading them in the bosom of her family without a soul even troubling to look over her shoulder. In fact I read at home everything that I was not allowed to read in school. We had beside Dr. Percy’s
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
and Arber
English Reprints
of Elizabethan poetry, the
Confessions
of St. Augustine; and Voltaire’s
Philosophical Dictionary
complete with notes by Smollett, which took me nine long years to work through from A to Z. I started at eleven years and wound up,
a little staggered, the complete skeptic, at twenty. We had every line of verse ever published by Edgar Allan Poe, which we used to sing to tunes of our own. When I was thirteen years old, the beautiful German-born mother of my dearest childhood friend asked me what I was reading. It happened to be Dostoyevsky
—The House of the Dead
—from the public library. “Oh, my dear child, Dostoyevsky? Of course you must read the Russians, but I will give you something beautiful you will like better.” And she gave me Turgenev’s
Torrents of Spring
. I read it dutifully, and went back to Dostoyevsky, whose surfaces were easier to grasp, and certainly the surface was all I could grasp at that time. I had to grow up to Turgenev; but then I had to spend a lifetime growing up to the reading I did before I was sixteen. Yet, the transition, at about that time, to Flaubert, to Thomas Hardy, to Henry James, and from thence to James Joyce (
Dubliners
), W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, and so on, on, came gradually, easily, simply, all in good time, with no sense of shock. It may have been because I had not been told there was a modern movement in literature.

I had begun to write early, at six years, and invented some fearfully bloodthirsty characters and carried them though interminable, improbable events, in deadly earnest. My family passed them around, reading the richest bits aloud, and laughing their heads off. They gave some of the “nobbles” to friends nearby, who laughed
their
heads off. Such were my beginnings in my predestined art.

I will leave out nearly everything about the music, and the wonderful famous old actors and actresses on their last legs who trouped the country in those days in their private trains, playing Shakespeare, Schiller, Alexandre Dumas, Sardou, and Henry Arthur Jones. All the celebrated singers, violinists, and pianists of the world who visited this country stopped at least once in San Antonio, Texas, and even in Austin, and always in New Orleans. They played nobly straight through the wide land in every direction out of New York; there was really no excuse for anyone almost anywhere who could raise half a dollar for a balcony seat not hearing and seeing whatever was going in the regions of the sublime.

Trainloads of audiences from all the small towns came in
when Paderewski played, or Ada Rehan did
The Taming of the Shrew
, or Madame Modjeska appeared as Mary Stuart, and who would have missed Sarah Bernhardt playing
Camille
in a tent? I saw and heard all this when I was so young it was just a dazzling troubling dream, I knew nothing of it but the wonder. The wonder was enough. I would go dazed with my head a mere hive of honey-making bees for weeks, months, years. It unfitted me for living as a simple child should, it tormented me with feelings and thoughts beyond my capacity, it urged me to strain against the bonds of childhood and the rules and the limitations, and the company of other children.

I do not believe that childhood is a happy time, it is a time of desperate cureless bitter griefs and pains, of shattering disillusionments, when everything good and evil alike is happening for the first time, and there is no answer to any question. . . . I was prematurely experienced in the mind, and yet brought up in such a way that I was not allowed even the normal advance in common experience suitable for a growing child. The whole effort of the elders around us was to keep us in total ignorance, so far as they were able, of the actual world we were to live in. But I remember best and most clearly and with love the things I am telling now; they are my true memories, and those experiences in books, in music, in the theater were the real events of my life, my recollections of them is the thin continuous line of consciousness by which I can trace myself, and recognize myself as the same being no matter how endless a series of changing situations.

Patience, please. I still know where I am and where I am going, my aim being merely to set a very minor biographical error straight, but it looks as if in doing it, I too shall write an autobiography—all because I should like you to know, though you have never asked, just why Mexico City was not my Paris, and why, though I have lived of my own happy choice more than fourteen years out of this country, I was never, for one moment, anywhere, no, not even in the place where I was born, an Exile. And I have discovered, without looking for it, “The Land that is Nowhere—That is the true home.”