SELECTED LETTERS OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER: CHRONICLES OF A MODERN WOMAN

Abstract

SELECTED LETTERS OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER: CHRONICLES OF A MODERN WOMAN. Ed. Darlene Harbour Unrue. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. ix + 392 pp. $55.Along with Katherine Anne Porter Remembered (2010), a collection of remembrances also edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue, Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter: Chronicles of a Modern Woman offers insight into the complex woman and artist behind Jilting of Granny Weatherall (1928), Flowering Judas (1930), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), and Ship of Fools (1962), among other works of fiction.Readers have waited over twenty years a new collection of the of Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980). Isabel Bayley's Letters of Katherine Anne Porter (1990) first highlighted Porter's letter writing, but it collected a limited number of heavily edited letters, all written between 1930 and 1966, and failed, therefore, to represent Porter's early and late years. Happily, in this new collection, Porter's often lengthy written over the course of a long are presented in their entirety, and the long is more fully represented than in the earlier collection. Beginning with a letter written in 1916 from a tuberculosis sanitarium and ending with a letter written in 1979 from her apartment in College Park, Maryland, the new collection is intended to offer a life in letters and to present as much as possible of Porter's view of her moment in history (ix).Because Porter's spanned most of the twentieth century and she wrote not only about the United States but also about Europe and Mexico, Unrue characterizes Porter as a modern chronicler who responded to global as she experienced them. Janis Stout's Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times (1995) also underscores Porter's role as a witness to history. Yet this new volume of keeps company not so much with Stout's intellectual biography as with Unrue's biography, Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist (2005), which, as its subtitle suggests, tells the compelling story of an artist whose struggles as a modern woman impress more than her perspective on world events. According to Unrue, extraordinary value of Porter's lies in the span of subjects she addresses, the number of persons she observes, and especially in the artistic sharpness of her comments and descriptions (xxiii). Nevertheless, Porter herself, in a long 1952 letter to William Goyen, admits that, despite the letter's length, she may have nothing of worth to tell about her experiences and observations, for what is really happening is very quiet and deep and it does not have a great deal to do with people or events (231). Indeed, Porter's many insights into her artistic process and her interior make this collection absorbing reading.Although the from Porter's later years are welcome, the early are the revelation here. As Unrue observes, in these early Porter declares her fierce belief in her artistic talent and eventual success (3) even as she faces overwhelming setbacks and hardships and reflects back upon a childhood that already in her twenties she recognizes as cruel and crushing. After nearly dying in the 1918 influenza epidemic, she writes the next year to her sister Gay about the recent death of Gay's daughter Mary Alice, a death that haunted and saddened Porter her entire life. Yet she proclaims, I would rather give up any one of the dear small Ones than to have them go thru the agonies of our forlorn childhood and terrible youth (9). In an effort to gain distance from her tortured past and to establish herself as an artist among other artists, Porter moved that same year to New York City, where she lived off and on the next decade. The from this formative period are invaluable. A 1924 letter to Francisco Aguilera and a 1929 letter to Matthew Josephson provide glimpses into Porter's difficulties with romantic relationships. A remarkable series of to friend and poet Genevieve Taggard refers to Porter's pregnancy and the resulting stillbirth. …