Source of book: I own this.
One of my used book finds a few years ago was the collected stories of Katherine Anne Porter in the Library of America edition. I am pretty sure I read a short story or two way back in the day, but it has been so long I do not remember which one. I decided to read Pale Horse, Pale Rider first for two reasons. One was that the first short novel in the trio was mentioned in The Second Sex (about ways young women suppress menstruation), and the other was that the book got a favorable recommendation by a friend of mine.
Porter lived from 1890 to 1980, which covered a pretty transformative period - multiple periods really, in American life. During that time, she won some acclaim as a journalist, had the best selling novel of 1962 (Ship of Fools), and won a Pulitzer for her collected stories. Another interesting fact is that she was born Callie Russell Porter, but chose to change her name later in tribute to her paternal grandmother, Catherine Anne, who essentially raised her after her mother’s death.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider is a collection of three short novels. Not novellas - Porter hated that term and insisted that these three were short novels, not novellas or short stories. Whatever the case, they are all about 50 pages long, and fall into that particular category of works of fiction that are a bit too long to be short stories, but are still too short to really feel like novels (or novellas, or whatever.)
The first story, “Old Mortality,” and the third, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” draw from Porter’s own life in varying degrees. The middle story, “Noon Wine,” does not appear to have any autobiographical elements, and is a contrast to the other two. I figure I will follow the pattern I have with other short novel collections, and devote a section to each.
“Old Mortality”
This story covers a good bit of time, covering the life of the ostensible protagonist, Miranda, from childhood until just after she elopes, when she returns for the funeral of her uncle Gabriel. But the novel also refers back to the legendary Amy, the beauty of the family. Amy lived a somewhat scandalous life, doing things her own way, flirting with multiple men, refusing for five years to marry Gabriel, despite pressure from her family, and finally, after she does marry him, dying of tuberculosis a few weeks later. She managed to inspire an attempted murder, a flight from justice, and the polarization of the family.
As an adolescent, Miranda pays a visit (with her father and sister) to Gabriel and his new wife, where she discovers that he is a nasty drunk, and his new marriage is coming apart very publicly, and she realizes how much Amy lost by marrying him.
In the final scene, when Miranda returns, she has become estranged from her father for eloping at age 18 - Porter herself eloped at age 16, the first of four bad marriages she would make to rather unsatisfactory and often abusive men. She has an extended conversation with Cousin Eva, the feminist who was used as the cautionary tale in the family. Eva has never married, and has become somewhat embittered. Of course, hard not to be when you have always been unfavorably compared to the unattainable (and dead) Amy. In the end, it is hinted that Miranda cuts all ties with her family and perhaps leaves her marriage.
This story in particular seemed to have a lot of great lines. Porter’s writing is pretty good, although I was surprised that it contained the N-word - I tend to think of it as being in use in the 1800s, not in 1939. It is hard to tell if Porter used it because a character would have used it, or if she was just casual about its use. Anyway, here are my favorite lines from this story. This one, near the beginning sets the stage for how the legend of Amy poisons the futures of the young girls.
Maria and Miranda, aged twelve and eight years, knew they were young, though they felt they had lived a long time. They had lived not only their own years; but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in the lives of the grownups around them, old people above forty, most of them, who had a way of insisting that they too had been young once. It was hard to believe.
I feel the weight of this myself sometimes. To a degree, my career and educational opportunities were limited because of the lingering past trauma of my parents’ families. Bill Gothard’s cult was a form of self-medication, where I suffered the side effects more than they did. And my sister became Amy, the golden girl who could do no wrong, and to whom all the other young females of the family were unfavorably compared, although she lacked the dramatic young death.
Later, the girls live at a convent school, and escape the deadly boredom and confinement by reading pulp novels about fallen women who end up in convents. It is a pretty darkly amusing passage. I like this line, even if I don’t entirely agree with it.
They had long since learned to draw the lines between life, which was real and earnest, and the grave was not its goal; poetry, which was true but not real; and stories, or forbidden reading matter, in which things happened as nowhere else, with the most sublime irrelevance and unlikelihood, and one need not turn a hair, because there was not a word of truth in them.
This illustrates one of my points about what Fundies do not get. The cult my wife grew up in tended to freak out about fiction, because it wasn’t “true.” Which is both wrong and irrelevant. Unlike the grownups, who confused fantasy versions of the past with reality, kids can generally tell the difference between reality and stories. Now, I happen to believe that all good fiction is, like poetry, true but not real. With the exception of escapist fluff, good literature (or even well written but non-serious fiction) illuminates the truth of life. P. G. Wodehouse may write absurd and intentionally unrealistic silliness. But the truths of life are still very much in his writing.
At the end, Miranda comes to understand some hard truths about her family, and these help her find freedom. This part really hits home for me.
Miranda walked along beside her father, feeling homeless, but not sorry for it. He had not forgiven her, she knew that. When would he? She could not guess, but she felt it would come of itself, without words and without acknowledgement on either side, for by the time it arrived neither of them would need to remember what had caused their division, nor why it had seemed so important. Surely old people cannot hold their grudges forever because the young want to live, too, she thought, in her arrogance, her pride. I will make my own mistakes, not yours; I cannot depend on you beyond a certain point, why depend at all?
Plenty to think about there. And unfortunately, what Porter hints at seems to be true: old people do indeed hold grudges forever, over their children wanting to live their own lives, not the religious, cultural, and political fantasies of their parents. (That is a whole series of posts, honestly.)
She resented, slowly and deeply and in profound silence, the presence of these aliens who lectured and admonished her, who loved her with bitterness and denied her the right to look at the world with her own eyes, who demanded that she accept their version of life and yet could not tell her the truth, not in the smallest thing.
Heck. Yes. I feel very much that way. My break with my parents has come over a lot time, and at every moment when yet another tie snapped, it was because of a demand that I (and my family) accept their version of life, and because of the insistence that lies were truth. (Especially those lies told by their political party and the religious charlatans they follow. But also stuff like “are vaccines a conspiracy?”) I am in my mid 40s, and just aren’t interested in any more lectures.
“Old Mortality” is an interesting story, and I think Porter’s own person experiences come through in the emotion of the language as much as anything.
“Noon Wine”
This story is a complete contrast. It is told from a male perspective, and has no obvious connection to the other novels in the collection. It is, on one level, a tale of horror, with gruesome homicides, a suicide, and insanity. On other levels, though, it examines some tough ethical issues, and the difficulty of the psyche reconciling difficult events.
“Noon Wine” was made into a movie twice, which I didn’t know before researching it after reading it. It tells of Royal Thompson, a dairy farmer in Texas, who hates his life. He considers a lot of the work that needs to be done on the farm to be “women’s work,” but his wife is a sickly invalid, so it is all left to him. Since he tends to laziness, the farm is in the process of failing.
Then, a mysterious and reticent stranger shows up, Olaf Helton. He is a Swede who claims to have last worked in the Dakotas, and just wants a fair wage, plus room and board. He takes over most of the work of the farm, and it prospers. Sure, he doesn’t talk much or smile, and always plays the same bit of tune on his harmonica, but he works hard.
Fast forward a number of years, and the kids are mostly grown. And then an unpleasant stranger shows up, and is revealed to be a bounty hunter, seeking Mr. Helton, who escaped from a mental institution. He was there because he killed his brother when the brother broke a harmonica and refused to replace it.
In a confusing moment, Thompson thinks the stranger is attacking Helton, so he kills him with an axe. He is acquitted of the murder, because his wife is willing to lie and say that the stranger attacked Thompson. But Thompson is wracked with guilt, even though he is glad the stranger is dead. Unfortunately, so is Helton, shot during the attempt to recapture him.
I didn’t note any specific lines in this story, but it is a memorable and powerful story. Should Helton have been recaptured despite over a decade of good behavior? Is Thompson’s guilt warranted, or is he just suffering from untreated trauma? How much of that is due to the loss of Helton?
“Pale Horse, Pale Rider”
This story is probably the most autobiographical in the set. In real life, Porter, like the protagonist Miranda, did in fact nearly die from influenza in 1918. Like Miranda, she worked as a journalist, although the dramatic love story between Miranda and Adam, a soldier about to ship out, is fictional.
The story itself is good, with humorous depictions of the office politics at the newspaper - what men and women respectively are permitted to write about, the hierarchy of different competing newspapers, and so on. The love story is pretty run-of-the-mill. But what really elevates this story to the high level it has is the phenomenal passages depicting the delirium of fever and illness. The opening gives an idea of what is to come.
In sleep she knew she was in her bed, but not the bed she had lain down in a few hours since, and the room was not the same but it was a room she had known somewhere. Her heart was a stone lying upon her breast outside her; her pulses lagged and paused, and she knew that something strange was going to happen, even as the early morning winds were cool through the lattice, the streaks of light were dark blue and the whole house was snoring in its sleep.
Or this one:
The two living men lifted a mattress standing hunched against the wall, spread it tenderly and exactly over the dead man. Wordless and white they vanished down the corridor, pushing the wheeled bed before them…A pallid fog rose in their wake insinuatingly and floated before Miranda’s eyes, a fog in which was concealed all terror and all weariness, all the wrung faces and twisted backs and broken feet of abused, outraged living things, all the shapes of their confused pain and their estranged hearts; the fog might part at any moment and loose the horde of human torments. She put up her hands and said, Not yet, not yet, but it was too late. The fog parted and two executioners, white clad, moved towards her pushing between them with marvelously deft and practiced hands the misshapen figure of an old man in filthy rags whose scanty beard waggled under his opened mouth as he bowed his back and braced his feet to resist and delay the fate they had prepared for him.
It goes on and on and makes no sense. Having had some nasty fevers and hallucinations myself, I find the pages of this to be brilliant. My worst moment, at the risk of TMI, was a time at age 16 when I staggered from my bed to the toilet in the middle of the night, blacked out, and took a three inch piece of my shoulder out on the cabinet. I was so out of it I crawled halfway back to my bed before passing out again for a while, with bizarre dreams. When I awoke hours later, blood adhered my shirt to my back. No fun at all. I wasn’t a particularly healthy kid, and even now, every few years, something gets me. In case you wondered why I get the flu shots, and got my covid shots as soon as I could.
Back to the story, the way that Porter eases between hallucination and reality is brilliant. Even in one sentence, there is a conversation with a nurse or doctor, and in the middle, she fades to the nightmares, and then back again. On the one hand, it is clear she experienced this first hand, and remembered her experience. On the other, though, how on earth did she manage to remember and write it so perfectly?
This set of three short novels was excellent. I am looking forward to reading more of the stories in the Collected Stories in the future. Porter can’t exactly be called underrated, because she is well respected. But perhaps she should be read more these days and by more people than she is.
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