Flowering Judas

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

Interesting Links

“How ‘Poet of the Story’ Katherine Anne Porter was Shaped (And Conflicted) by Growing up in Texas” (Lynn Freehill-May, Texas Highways)

“Katherine Anne Porter’s Place in the Catholic Literary Tradition” (Mary Grace Mangano, Church Life Journal)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Martyr,” Katherine Anne Porter
• “East Side: North Africa,” Jane Bowles
• “Je Suis Perdu,” Peter Taylor
• “The White Azalea,” Elizabeth Spencer

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Katherine Anne Porter: Flowering Judas and Other Stories
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Street in Mexico, 1922, oil on canvas by American painter Walter Pach (1883–1958). Francis M. Naumann Fine Art via Smithsonian.

In the summer of 1922, Pach taught art classes at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he befriended such prominent Mexican artists as José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera; it is likely he met Katherine Anne Porter before she returned to New York that June. Pach was largely responsible for the first exhibition of modern Mexican art in the United States, which occurred at the Seventh Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1923. During this period Porter was trying to arrange a dedicated show in the U.S. for Diego Rivera; she inevitably enlisted the help of Pach, but neither were able to arrange the exhibition.

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“‘Flowering Judas’ was written between seven o’clock and midnight of a very cold December, 1929, in Brooklyn,” Katherine Anne Porter wrote in a preface to the story when it was included in a 1942 anthology.

All the characters and episodes are based on real persons and events, but naturally, as my memory worked upon them and time passed, all assumed different shapes and colors, formed gradually around a central idea, that of self-delusion, the order and meaning of the episodes changed, and became in a word fiction.

The idea first came to me one evening when going to visit the girl I call Laura in the story, I passed the open window of her living room on my way to the door, through the small patio which is one of the scenes in the story. I had a brief glimpse of her sitting with an open book in her lap, but not reading, with a fixed look of pained melancholy and confusion in her face. The fat man I call Braggioni was playing the guitar and singing to her.

Over the next four decades, Porter would expand and embellish the history of the story’s creation. The details of the night she spent writing it would change; in one version, she interrupted a game of bridge with friends to write it. Other works would be written in the same manner: a few hours on a cold night, after which she would immediately send the finished manuscript off to a magazine. For “Flowering Judas,” she finished the story and “at one-thirty I was standing on a snowy windy corner putting it in the mailbox”; for “Rope,” which she wrote in an hour, she “dressed, went out to mail it to the American Caravan, where it was published; returned home, and it was 2:10 a.m.” She increasingly revealed the “real” persons behind her story’s characters. In 1940 she contradicted a friend who had assumed the protagonist was Porter herself, “You are wrong about Laura. She is a composite, five different women of whom I was not one”; a quarter century later she told audiences that Laura was based on her longtime friend Mary Doherty (who was still very much alive and would outlive her by fifteen years). “You see, my fiction is reportage, only I do something to it. I arrange it and it is fiction but it happened.”

Thomas F. Walsh, in several essays and in his 1992 book, Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico, traced both the history and myths behind “Flowering Judas” and determined:

As Porter added details about “Flowering Judas” over the years, “reality” more and more resembled what grew out of it, the story becoming “reportage,” mainly of the actions and motives of Mary Doherty, about who Porter could only speculate in her most accurate statement of 1942. Porter did indeed “arrange” reality to make it fiction, both in her creation of her story and in her evolving versions of that creation.

The “real” incident that opens the story, in which the tone-challenged Mexican revolutionist Braggioni sings to Laura, occurred in 1921. Porter had arrived in Mexico the previous fall and soon fell in with the left-wing crowd associated with American journalist Thorberg Haberman, an editor at the daily Heraldo de México, and her husband, Robert, a labor organizer and a speechwriter for Mexican president Alvaro Obregón. Mary Doherty arrived early in 1921 and lived at the Haberman home for the first six months she was there. The two young American women quickly became friends; like the future character of Laura, Doherty usually dressed in uniform-like dark blue dresses garnished with white lace around the collar that gave her an appearance not unlike a nun. A note in Porter’s journal records the first occasion of a series of evenings that would inspire Porter’s story: Samuel O. Yúdico, a married man who was a leader in the Mexican labor movement, “came in tonight bringing his guitar, and spent the evening singing for Mary.” On a subsequent night, Doherty sat at a table, "a little preoccupied, infallibly and kindly attentive” to her serenader.

Doherty later told Walsh that she was not disturbed by Yúdico’s farcical preening, but Porter almost immediately despised him. Before long, she was referring to him in her journal as Braggioni and imagining how she might portray him in a story: “Get into the scene . . . something of Braggioni's really sinister personality, the soft-spoken, hard-eyed monster.” As Walsh points out, Porter viewed Yúdico’s boorish behavior as “pointedly typical of the revolutionary who violates at every step the principles he pretends to uphold.” For her part, Doherty never felt threatened or fearful of Yúdico and as late as 1925 was referring to him in writing as “one of my good friends.”

In the spring of 1921, as a condition for the recognition of the Obregón administration, the U.S. government requested the deportation of left-wing American political activists. The Habermans, Porter, and Doherty were all on deportation lists; while the women were reassured by both Mexican and American officials, Robert Haberman went into hiding. With little in the way of employment or income, Porter found herself broke and frightened. “Starvation is very hard on the flesh,” she wrote at a low point, “and the idea of death is very hard on the nerves; I should like to deny that I am terrified but I am.” Doherty treated the whole ordeal as something of a lark and wrote in a letter to her sister:

Of course all our crowd is on the list. . . . Americans keep up the rumpus and won’t stop until they get Bob. It has been over two weeks now. . . . Strangely enough—no doubt due to the nervous tension and suspense—we who are still around loose are having a very good time—we go forth gayly with the leaders of the very government that has us on the list for deportation. Katherine, Thorberg & I have hilarious times. Of course we are really quite safe, for they won't take us until they get the more important ones and as yet we have done nothing because we can't speak Spanish—only in disrepute because of our beliefs and our associations and Kath especially because she has refused to associate with the American colony. She is very pretty and very clever and they would like to have her and she is not very radical. . . . It will be very funny to laugh at a year from now—just now a little nerve-wracking.

Disillusioned by Mexican politics and particularly disappointed by the Obregón government, Porter left Mexico the following year. Dohery would live in Mexico for more than seventy years, working for various government officials and institutions. Twenty years later, in the midst of the Second World War, she would write to Doherty:

I never thought I would heave a sigh for the good old days, for I remember them as mostly hell, but still, I will say, must say, they had something, mysterious, indefinable, that made them better than the present, in that country and a good many others. . . . They had hope. . . . Mexico was new to us, and beautiful, the very place to be at that moment. We believed a great deal—though I remember well that my childhood faith in the Revolution was well over in about six months.

In 1921 Porter contributed to The Magazine of Mexico an essay that described a day at her home in Mexico City. Included is a passage of her own yard that resembles Laura’s patio garden in “Flowering Judas”:

The enclosed garden is mottled with cold early shadows. The stagnant shallow fountain, where the tangled shrubberies weave green mats to the water’s edge, has not a ripple. Lilies grow here, spreading pale leaves under a trellis weighted by an arrogant bougainvillea vine, whose fronds rise to my balcony, thrusting their purple through hospitable windows.

Adapting Doherty’s traits and personal experiences for the story, Porter conveyed her own lingering feeling of betrayal by Mexico and by the men—both native and American—who were its leaders. “By donning, as it were, Mary Doherty's nunlike uniform, Porter was able to give voice to all her conflicting emotions and view them with dispassionate objectivity as if they were not her own,” concludes Walsh. “Her transformation of the purple bougainvillea of her Mexican patio into the flowering Judas is example of the process that brought art out of life.”

Notes: The lyric sung by Braggioni, “lonely as a wave,” is from “A la Orilla de un Palmar” (“At the edge of a Palm-grove”), a folk song popularized by Manuel Maria Ponce (1882–1942). Alameda is the large park at the center of Mexico City. Zapata’s army was The Liberation Army of the South, formed in 1910 by revolutionist Emiliano Zapata. Corridos are Mexican popular ballads cheaply printed as illustrated broadsides. Zócalo is the central square in Mexico City; also known as the Plaza de la Constitución. Paseo de la Reforma is the grand boulevard that cuts diagonally across Mexico City where the Paseo, a traditional parade of automobiles and carriages, takes place. “O girl with the dark eyes” is a reference to “Aquellos Ojos Verdes” (“Those Green Eyes”), a popular song of the 1920s by Aldolfo Ultera and Nilo Menéndez. The translation of delgadito is skinny little one; of net (neto), complete and unadulterated. The May-day disturbances occurred on May 13, 1921, when a riot erupted between revolutionists and Catholics in Morelia, Michoacán. More than fifty people were killed, many by police. General Pascual Ortiz Rubio was a cabinet secretary in the Obregón administration and would become president of Mexico in 1930–32.

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Braggioni sits heaped upon the edge of a straight-backed chair much too small for him, and sings to Laura in a furry, mournful voice. . . . 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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