Theft

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)
From Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links

Online exhibition: Katherine Anne Porter: Correspondence from the Archives, 1912–1977

Book Review: The Life of Katherine Anne Porter, by Joan Givner (Hermione Lee, Literary Review)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Magic,” Katherine Anne Porter
• “The Bubble,” Nancy Hale
• “Agatha,” John O’Hara
• “The White Azalea,” Elizabeth Spencer

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Katherine Anne Porter: Flowering Judas and Other Stories
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Katherine Anne Porter in Bermuda, 1929. University of Maryland Libraries.

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As the Roaring Twenties drew to a close, Katherine Anne Porter took stock of her life. Now in her late thirties, she had published an assortment of pieces—three short stories in Century Magazine, a catalog for a Mexican art exhibition, a ghost-written biography, several journalistic essays, a handful of poems, and a string of book reviews—but her debut book was still out of reach. In 1928, while in Salem doing research for a biography of Cotton Mather, she wrote a series of journal entries that literary scholars have since referred to as “self-analysis”:

I have allowed all sorts of people to trespass on my human rights because I was too timid to fight for them, and too lazy and indifferent to put up the battle that I knew was necessary to hold my proper ground. I always rationalized this timidity and weakness by putting a moral construction on it. . . .

I have suffered a good deal because, of what I have had to give, other persons have been able to make some use, more use than I have at any rate. Whereas my disorderliness and lack of self-discipline have made my material, got from others, almost useless to me.

“It was a peculiarly detestable decade to me, and I have very few recollections of it that I can enjoy,” she told a friend thirty years later. The year 1928 was particularly rough, aggravated by a serious case of bronchitis and her increasing dissatisfaction with the Mather biography. Among other misfortunes, she helped William R. Doyle with the writing of a Broadway play and received a small partial payment for her services. When Boston critics were less than enthusiastic during its trial run, he stiffed her for the balance. Yet the following May, she wrote to a friend, the novelist Josephine Herbst: “In the World I noted that THAT play, Carnival, had come in, run four weeks, and closed again, and until now I have not had a line from my collaborator such as he is, nor a penny.”

Then, after moving to New York later in 1928, Porter took an editing job at the Macaulay Company, a small literary publisher. She became friends with a colleague, Matthew Josephson, ten years her junior, who had just published a popular biography of Zola and who offered Porter advice on her writing. She fell in love and they began an affair—only for her to learn that he was married and his wife was pregnant. The relationship soon ended when Hannah Josephson learned of the infidelity, but Matthew insisted on remaining on friendly, quasi-romantic terms, sending Porter gifts and intimate letters for months afterward. A couple of years later, Porter wrote to him:

[When] I first knew you, you were just emerging from the Zola period, when a literary man should engage in battles for the right and keep a mistress. . . . Later when you feared I might stubbornly keep on being in love with you when the occasion that called for me had passed, you wrote that “our emotional feats” were of no consequence compared to the realistic businesses of life such as running a household, begetting young and writing books. We were to be machines, I remember distinctly, functioning with hair’s breadth precision. I wasn’t convinced nor deceived then, dear Matthew, and still I’m not when you decide that we must all be romantic rather than decorous.

Still recovering from bronchitis and overdue with her long-promised manuscript for the Cotton Mather biography, several friends collected funds so that Porter could stay in Bermuda from March through July of 1929 to complete the book. She managed to write several chapters of the biography (which she would never finish) and a handful of poems, and she apparently worked on a story called “The Fig Tree,” which wouldn’t see print until 1960. It was probably during this trip that she wrote “Theft,” a story inspired by her experiences of the previous year. “It is likely the story summarizes what she felt in her darker moments about her achievements as both a woman and an artist in the 1920s,” writes Mary Titus in The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter. “As an artist, she struggled to ‘hold out,’ attempting to preserve the integrity of her talent. Yet over the years she paid out that talent, dime by dime.” Describing the story, Porter herself observed during an interview in 1961: “It’s about a woman who leads a sacrificial life. She had a strange sense of alienation. No one could get near her. . . . The woman really wanted to commit suicide but didn’t know it, so she killed herself bit by bit.”

The story was accepted for publication by The Gyroscope, a mimeographed California literary quarterly edited by the poet Yvor Winters that lasted only four issues and had fewer than 180 subscribers. “Theft” appeared in the November 1929 issue, and Porter was surprised and pleased when the story came to the attention of a prominent literary figure. “Just the other day,” she wrote to a friend the following year, “a letter came from Edward O’Brien in Switzerland asking permission to reprint a story of mine in his annual collection; this year’s The Best Short Stories of 1930. . . . Only a few people saw it, and I wrote it in a dreadful hurry, but I liked it and am glad it is going to have a wider circulation.”

Porter reprinted “Theft” in her 1935 collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories, and it eventually became one of her most anthologized works, culminating in its selection by John Updike and Katrina Kenison for The Best American Short Stories of the Century (2000).

The “self-analysis” journal entries by Porter are reprinted from Mary Titus’s The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter (2005).

Notes: The Elevated refers to one of three elevated train lines that ran north and south through Manhattan from the 1850s through the 1950s. Seymour de Ricci was a British expert in rare books and manuscripts, tapestries, rugs, and fine furniture; he was long associated with Anderson Galleries in New York. Marie Dressler was a comic actress of vaudeville, stage, and screen.

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She had the purse in her hand when she came in. Standing in the middle of the floor, holding her bathrobe around her and trailing a damp towel in one hand, she surveyed the immediate past and remembered everything clearly. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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