"Something of a Reputation as a Radical": Katherine Anne Porter's Shifting Politics

Abstract

For years Katherine Anne Porter was studied almost exclusively as a stylist. She was praised as a writer's writer, a shaper of well-wrought stories in the Jamesian tradition. And with good reason: Porter was indeed a consummate stylist and a subtle ironist, a builder of artfully controlled fictional structures. But she was also a writer of substance and very much a person of her time, directly involved in some of its most determinant and controversial episodes. If we are to understand Porter's work more fully, both in its relation to the realities of her life and with respect to the creative process that mediated between life and art, we must understand the nature of this involvement and its blossoming in specific works (such as Hacienda, Horse, Pale Rider, and Ship of Fools) and in her art as a whole.1 Art was Porter's primary concern, the touchstone, for her, of all other values. But that fact, as we shall see, is not unrelated to her politics. Katherine Anne Porter's life spanned a long and eventful period-from 1890 to 1980--and took her from Texas to New York to Mexico (at the time of the Obregon Revolution) to Europe (at the time of the rise of Hitler) to Washington, with a great many points in between. She was a friend of the Southern Agrarians who produced I'll Take My Stand; she shared the religious uncertainties that have troubled the twentieth century only slightly less than they did the nineteenth; and she experienced, observed, and reflected on the profound changes in the understanding of race and gender that characterized her time. Politically, she identified herself with radical, indeed specifically Communist, circles during the '20s and early '30s, but by 1940, like many other liberals and parlor radicals, disavowed ever having been a sympathizer with communism and assumed a stance of liberal anti-communism. Yet even as she adopted the widespread concern of the time about the Red menace to American institutions, she resisted identification with what she regarded as an even greater menace, the forces of native Fascism. Walking a particularly narrow line, she denounced extremists on the right as emphatically as those on the left. She ended her