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

Buy the eBook
Katherine Anne Porter: Flowering Judas and Other Stories
List price: $6.99

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!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Magic

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

Interesting Links

Interview with Darlene Harbour Unrue: “Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘unflinching account of the human condition’” (Library of America)

“Katherine Anne Porter in the 1920s” (University of Maryland Libraries)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Martyr,” Katherine Anne Porter
• “The Recent Tragedy,” James Gordon Bennett
• “Athénaïse,” Kate Chopin

Buy the eBook
Katherine Anne Porter: Flowering Judas and Other Stories
List price: $6.99

Marguerite Griffin, who worked at Minnie White’s brothel on Basin Street, New Orleans, c. 1912. Gelatin silver print from negative by photographer E. J. Bellocq (1873–1949). Courtesy of the Phillips auction house website.

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Katherine Anne Porter’s career as a fiction writer got off to a promising start when Century Magazine published her first three short stories—one each year from 1922 to 1924: “María Concepción,” “The Martyr,” and “Virgin Violeta.” At the end of 1924, however, her life was upended when she gave birth to a stillborn boy. She then endured a disastrous relationship with a British painter, Ernest Stock, who gave her gonorrhea. Following the advice of her doctor she underwent surgery for the removal of both of her ovaries. She tried to recuperate with friends in New York and Connecticut, but during this period she was not able to finish much of anything other than book reviews. Several attempts at stories, including “Holiday” (which she would complete and publish thirty-five years later), were filed away among her papers in draft form.

Hoping to cash in on a lifelong historical interest, she signed a contract to write a non-academic biography titled “The Devil and Cotton Mather” and, with a $300 advance, moved to Salem to work on the book. Early in 1928, however, she wrote several pages of self-analysis and concluded:

Now I find myself having elected to do a thing that requires merely a constant exercise of my merely surface abilities, and have got myself into an emotional state over it that keeps me from working, and I find myself drifting again to a condition of inertia and apathy, a desire to give up. . . . [I] have never worked at a speed beyond myself, and when I was quite young I decided to set my limitations moderately. Maybe this was my mistake. For by setting my bounds, I find they are real things and have a way of closing upon me without my (conscious) consent.

She never did finish the biography. Instead, while in Salem, she turned again to fiction and over the next half decade, while traveling from New York to Bermuda to Mexico to Europe, she finished the nine tales that, along with “Maria Concepción,” would make up Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1935).

With only 1,200 words, “Magic” is the briefest among Porter’s works of fiction. Set in New Orleans, the story “seems at first glance to be the work of another author,” as William Nance put it in Katherine Anne Porter & the Art of Rejection. “The extreme example of her early experimental and highly objective approach, it is a minor technical masterpiece.” Published in 1928, it appeared in the Paris-based journal transition, alongside new prose works by Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, photographs by Man Ray, cover art by Pablo Picasso, and an excerpt from James Joyce’s work-in-progress Finnegans Wake.

In 1927, the year she drafted the story, Porter wrote to a friend that her research into Mather’s role in the Salem witch trials had reminded her of her past interest in “Voodoo doctors.” As Porter biographer Darlene Harbour Unrue explained at a symposium held in 2003 to discuss “Magic,” Porter was living in western Louisiana with her sister in 1914 when she met “an old woman . . . who told her stories about New Orleans and about voodoo.” Porter later wrote that the idea for the story originated with an anecdote related to her by her Black maid in New Orleans, who had previously worked in a brothel on Basin Street in Storyville—the city’s red-light district, where prostitution was legal from 1897 to 1917.

At the symposium, Unrue agreed with other recent critics that past readers have not “given enough attention to the narrator. We think of her as the conveyor of the real story, which is the story of Ninette and the madam in the brothel, but the narrator is also very important.” The story’s power lies in its ambiguity: The narrator might be an appreciative and chatty servant—or she might have more in common with the cook, wielding dark secrets of voodoo. “Armed thus with the Creole magic of her tale,” contends literary scholar Kerry Hasler-Brooks, “the servant brings the violence of the story into the Blanchard home and quietly but convincingly destabilizes the power structure there.” Thus, the central question of Porter’s story may well be: why is the servant telling her new employer this lurid and brutal tale?

Notes: Unrue points to the ambiguity of the phrase “fall away” as a crucial element of the story. Rather than suggesting that the household linens are disintegrating or simply vanishing in the wash, Madame Blanchard seems to be implying that they are disappearing through theft. A sou marqué was a coin of the French colonies; it was worth less than a penny.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below.
You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

Magic

And, Madame Blanchard, believe that I am happy to be here with you and your family because it is so serene, everything, and before this I worked for a long time in a fancy house—maybe you don’t know what is a fancy house? Naturally .nbsp;.nbsp;. everyone must have heard sometime or other. Well, Madame, I work always where there is work to be had, and so in this place I worked very hard all hours, and saw too many things, things you wouldn’t believe, and I wouldn’t think of telling you, only maybe it will rest you while I brush your hair. You’ll excuse me too but I could not help hearing you say to the laundress maybe someone had bewitched your linens, they fall away so fast in the wash. Well, there was a girl there in that house, a poor thing, thin, but well-liked by all the men who called, and you understand she could not get along with the woman who ran the house. They quarreled, the madam cheated her on her checks: you know, the girl got a check, a brass one, every time, and at the week’s end she gave those back to the madam, yes, that was the way, and got her percentage, a very small little of her earnings: it is a business, you see, like any other—and the madam used to pretend the girl had given back only so many checks, you see, and really she had given many more, but after they were out of her hands, what could she do? So she would say, I will get out of this place, and curse and cry. Then the madam would hit her over the head. She always hit people over the head with bottles, it was the way she fought. My good heavens, Madame Blanchard, what confusion there would be sometimes with a girl running raving downstairs, and the madam pulling her back by the hair and smashing a bottle on her forehead.

It was nearly always about the money, the girls got in debt so, and if they wished to go they could not without paying every sou marqué. The madam had full understanding with the police; the girls must come back with them or go to the jails. Well, they always came back with the policemen or with another kind of man friend of the madam: she could make men work for her too, but she paid them very well for all, let me tell you: and so the girls stayed on unless they were sick; if so, if they got too sick, she sent them away again.

Madame Blanchard said, “You are pulling a little here,” and eased a strand of hair: “and then what?”

Pardon—but this girl, there was a true hatred between her and the madam. She would say many times, I make more money than anybody else in the house, and every week were scenes. So at last she said one morning, Now I will leave this place, and she took out forty dollars from under her pillow and said, Here’s your money! The madam began to shout, Where did you get all that, you——? and accused her of robbing the men who came to visit her. The girl said, Keep your hands off or I’ll brain you: and at that the madam took hold of her shoulders, and began to lift her knee and kick this girl most terribly in the stomach, and even in her most secret place, Madame Blanchard, and then she beat her in the face with a bottle, and the girl fell back again into her room where I was making clean. I helped her to the bed, and she sat there holding her sides with her head hanging down, and when she got up again there was blood everywhere she had sat. So then the madam came in once more and screamed, Now you can get out, you are no good for me any more: I don’t repeat all, you understand it is too much. But she took all the money she could find, and at the door she gave the girl a great push in the back with her knee, so that she fell again in the street, and then got up and went away with the dress barely on her.

After this the men who knew this girl kept saying, Where is Ninette? And they kept asking this in the next days, so that the madam could not say any longer, I put her out because she is a thief. No, she began to see she was wrong to send this Ninette away, and then she said, She will be back in a few days, don’t trouble yourself.

And now, Madame Blanchard, if you wish to hear, I come to the strange part, the thing recalled to me when you said your linens were bewitched. For the cook in that place was a woman, colored like myself, like myself with much French blood just the same, like myself living always among people who worked spells. But she had a very hard heart, she helped the madam in everything, she liked to watch all that happened, and she gave away tales on the girls. The madam trusted her above everything, and she said, Well, where can I find that slut? Because she had gone altogether out of Basin Street before the madam began to ask the police to bring her again. Well, the cook said, I know a charm that works here in New Orleans, colored women do it to bring back their men: in seven days they come again very happy to stay and they cannot say why: even your enemy will come back to you believing you are his friend. It is a New Orleans charm for sure, for certain, they say it does not work even across the river. . . . And then they did it just as the cook said. They took the chamber pot of this girl from under her bed, and in it they mixed with water and milk all the relics of her they found there: the hair from her brush, and the face powder from the puff, and even little bits of her nails they found about the edges of the carpet where she sat by habit to cut her finger- and toe-nails; and they dipped the sheets with her blood into the water, and all the time the cook said something over it in a low voice; I could not hear all, but at last she said to the madam, Now spit in it: and the madam spat, and the cook said, When she comes back she will be dirt under your feet.

Madame Blanchard closed her perfume bottle with a thin click: “Yes, and then?”

Then in seven nights the girl came back and she looked very sick, the same clothes and all, but happy to be there. One of the men said, Welcome home, Ninette! and when she started to speak to the madam, the madam said, Shut up and get upstairs and dress yourself. So Ninette, this girl, she said, I’ll be down in just a minute. And after that she lived there quietly.

First published in the Summer 1928 issue of transition and reprinted in Flowering Judas (1930) and Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1935).

The Martyr

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

Interesting Links

“Katherine Anne Porter’s Pandemic” (Melanie Benson Taylor, Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Katherine the Great” (Don Graham, Texas Monthly)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Charmed Life,” Katherine Anne Porter
• “W. L. S.,” Theodore Dreiser
• “Stories Told by an Artist,” Stephen Crane

Buy the eBook
Katherine Anne Porter: Flowering Judas and Other Stories
List price: $6.99

Creation, 1922–23, encaustic and goldleaf mural by Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886–1957), in the auditorium of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, Mexico City. The figure of Wisdom, an element of Porter’s story, is in the sky on the left, opposite the figure of Science. (www.diegorivera.org)

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In 1965, Hank Lopez, editor of Dialogos, a prominent cultural magazine in Mexico City, interviewed Katherine Anne Porter about her life in Mexico during the early 1920s and early 1930s. When he asked what prompted her to move there, she replied:

I was brought up in San Antonio, which was always full of Mexicans really in exile. . . . It was a revolutionary city, so, we kind of kept up with things in Mexico. But in New York almost the first people I ran into were all these charming young Mexican artists, and Adolfo Best-Maugard was among them. He died a few days ago; was a lifelong friend of mine from that day to this. And there was a wonderful lad—he called himself Tata Nacho [Ignacio Fernández Esperón]. He’s still living—he was at Adolfo’s funeral the other day. He was playing the piano in a Greenwich Village cabaret to make his living, and he was a great revolutionary. I was living in Greenwich Village, too, and we got to be friends: I was thinking of going to Spain. But they told me, “Don’t go to Spain. Nothing has happened there for four hundred years. In Mexico something wonderful is going to happen. Why don’t you go to Mexico?”

Porter took a train to Mexico City in October 1920 with reporting assignments from The Christian Science Monitor and the promise of a job as the managing editor of the new English-language Magazine of Mexico—which, alas, would lose its funding after only two issues. Soon after her arrival, she met American journalist Thorberg Haberman, editor of the English-language section of the daily Heraldo de México, and her husband, Robert, a labor organizer and speechwriter for Mexican president Alvaro Obregón. Porter soon became acquainted with Obregón, as well as many other prominent figures in the new government, the labor movement, and the press.

Like most of the members of her new social circle, Porter favored Obregón, who was elected in 1920—the twelfth president in the chaotic and violent years since Porfirio Díaz’s 31-year regime came to an end in 1911. “After the scintillating procession of remote and inaccessible rulers,” Porter extolled to readers of the Magazine of Mexico, “there came up from the land a farmer, Alvaro Obregón, prosperous and well acquainted with his country in its working dress; a man of straight literal mind, with a detached legal passion for setting disorder to rights.” The following year, Obregón appointed Porter as the American curator of a state-sponsored exhibit designed to tour the U.S. While writing and researching the exhibition catalog, she became an ardent admirer of artists Diego Rivera and Xavier Guerrero and caricaturists José Clemente Orozco and Miguel Covarrubias.

“Mexico was wonderful—a crowd of us were there, perfectly free of each other, yet happily knit together by our interest in Mexican art,” she recalled in one interview four decades later. Rivera had recently returned from fourteen years in Europe, and Porter would meet up with him, his soon-to-be second wife, Lupe Marín, and several of their friends in various spots, including the Café de los Monotes*, which was owned by Orozco’s brother and which featured Orozco’s and Covarrubias’s caricatures on its walls. She also visited Rivera while he worked on Creation, the famous mural commissioned by the Obregón government for the auditorium of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National Preparatory School). After she finished the exhibition catalog, Porter and Rivera collaborated on two publications; in 1924 “The Guild Spirit in American Art, as told to Katherine Anne Porter by Diego Rivera,” appeared in a special issue on Mexico of Survey Graphic magazine, and the following year Porter translated excerpts from Rivera’s notebooks for Arts magazine.

In various essays and reviews, Porter commented on how “there is no conscience crying through the literature of the country. A small group of intellectuals still writes about romance and the stars, and roses and the shadowy eyes of ladies, touching no sorrow of the human heart other than the pain of unrequited love.” Yet she acknowledged that “a literature of revolt” would not reach the masses in a country with such a low literacy rate; she had high hopes instead for the influence of the visual arts on Mexican life. The murals of Rivera (and his compatriots) could be “as immediate, disturbing and almost as dangerous as a Presidential election.”

Privately, however, Porter became disillusioned by Rivera and by the revolutionary spirit in general—or more accurately, by the failure of the national culture to aspire to her own idealistic notions of what a people’s revolution should entail. She complained that Rivera’s artistic circle, with rare exception, had diluted their talents with foreign influences and had abandoned the purity of “the art of the Indian in Mexico”; that his peers “had fled out of Europe with years of training and experience, saturated with theories and methods, bent on fresh discoveries”; that the “pure-blooded Indian artist” did not exist. Forty years later, during her interview with Lopez, she recalled, “I never (after sort of being hoodwinked by that particular school of art) appraised Diego quite the same way. Before I was finished I didn’t like his character—he was a treacherous man and a dishonest artist.”

A story from 1923—the second piece of fiction she published—shows her early disenchantment. Written while she was still working with Rivera, “The Martyr” is (as she put it in 1965) a “little tirade against Diego Rivera and his wild woman Lupe Marín.” In this work of satire, the artist is nearing completion of a mural featuring twenty female figures when his fickle wife, who is his model, abandons him, and he becomes unable to finish the nineteenth figure. As Darlene Harbour Unrue has pointed out, Creation has twenty figures (which conservative critics mocked as “Rivera’s monkeys”). The nineteenth represents “Wisdom,” which according to Rivera’s notes for the mural “is a vigorous figure of a southern Indian” that “unites the group to the central focus.” By turning the painter’s theme from revolutionary idealism to “the pain of unrequited love,” Porter is effectively comparing Rivera to the writers of popular Mexican novels; his work has lost its central focus, its Wisdom.

“The Martyr” was one of Porter’s several attempts to satirize Rivera—but it was the only one she finished. She published it in Century magazine in 1923 but a decade later chose not to include it in the collection The Flowering Judas and Other Stories. In 1965, she added the story in “The Flowering Judas” section of her Collected Stories, claiming she had forgotten why it had been omitted from the earlier edition.

* Monotes can refer to large monkeys or giant puppets, especially of the type used in parades; it was the Orozco brothers’ sly reference to the oversized caricatures on the walls of their café.

Many of the above details about the connections between Katherine Anne Porter and Diego Rivera are discussed in Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction and Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, both by Darlene Harbour Unrue.

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Rubén, the most illustrious painter in Mexico, was deeply in love with his model Isabel, who was in turn romantically attached to a rival artist whose name is of no importance. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

A Christmas Story

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

Interesting Links
“A brief survey of the short story: Katherine Anne Porter” (Chris Power, The Guardian)

Interview with Porter by Barbara Thompson Davis (The Paris Review)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Christmas Dinner,” Washington Irving
• “The Lily-White Boys,” William Maxwell
• “The Christmas Fireside (for Good Little Boys and Girls),” Mark Twain

Buy the book
Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings
Includes The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965) • essays, reviews, & other writings • 1,093 pages
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Front cover of A Christmas Story
by Katherine Anne Porter, hard-
cover “Christmas card” designed
by Tammis Keefe and sent to staff
and associates of Mademoiselle
magazine in 1958. Copy in The
Library of America’s collection.

During her long career Katherine Anne Porter wrote one holiday story. A beloved favorite among her fans, “A Christmas Story” first appeared in Mademoiselle in December 1946, and a decade later the magazine’s editors reinvented it as a limited-edition hardcover “Christmas card” to send to staff and associates. In 1967 Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press reprinted the tale, with drawings by Ben Shahn, as a small book for holiday gift-giving. The piece was collected in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (1970), but today it is available only in The Library of America edition of Porter’s writings—and now you can read it here, as a Story of the Week selection.

The story recalls a day before Christmas 1918—the last time Porter spent with her young niece Mary Alice Halloway. Before embarking on a shopping trip, the aunt and her niece discussed (and dissected) various traditional Christmas legends: the fifteenth-century French song “The Miracle of St. Bertha, the Armless Servant, or The Three Days of the Virgin Mary,” popularized by Belle Époque cabaret singer Yvette Guilbert; a version of The Adoration of the Three Magi, illustrated by French painter Jean Fouquet, who used a likeness of Charles VII as one of the Magi; “The Cherry-Tree Carol,” based on a story about the infant Jesus from the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew; and “The Withy Tree” (better known as “The Bitter Withy”), a medieval English carol likewise based on stories found in the infancy gospels.

In the afterword written for the 1967 book version, Porter wrote:

This is not a fiction, but the true story of an episode in the short life of my niece, Mary Alice, a little girl who died nearly a half century ago, at the age of five and one-half years. The stories are those I told her, and those we sang together. The shopping for a present for her mother, my sister, in the last Christmas of this child’s life is set down here as clearly as I am able to tell it, with no premonitions of disaster, because we hadn’t any: life was daily and forever, for us both. I was young, too. This is, of course, a lament in the form of a joyous remembrance of that last day I spent with this most lovely, much loved being. . . .

Porter sent a copy of the story to a friend in 1974 and inscribed it: “I learned long ago from the life and death of this child how deathless love, and faithful memory, can be. She has lived in my life for more than half a century, a perpetual spring of joy that has helped me to live—  But why was she taken away?”

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When she was five years old, my niece asked me again why we celebrated Christmas. . . . 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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The Charmed Life

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

Another selection by
Katherine Anne Porter
Portrait: Old South
(PDF, Library of America)

Also of Interest
Interview with Darlene Harbour Unrue about Katherine Anne Porter (PDF, Library of America)

Buy the book
Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings

Over 1,175 pages

In October 1920 thirty-year-old Katherine Anne Porter traveled to Mexico on assignment as a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor. During her travels she met William Niven, a Scottish-born American scientist respected for his fieldwork in archaeology and mineralogy (nivenite, one of four minerals he discovered, bears his name and is a source of uranium). But he has since inherited a reputation as a bit of a crank for his pursuit of long-discarded theories of the origins of native Mexican populations, as well as for his alleged discovery of a set of untranslatable tablets that an occult writer, James Churchward, used to “prove” the existence of the Lost Continent of Mu in the mid-Pacific. (The tablets have since disappeared.)

Niven impressed Porter both for his eccentricity and for his “authenticity,” and he proved a rich source of material for her writing. He appears as the character Givens in Porter’s first published story, “María Concepción” (1923), and he assumes the central role in “The Charmed Life,” a portrait that Porter published in 1942, five years after Niven’s death. The sketch is her vaguely fictionalized tribute to the “Old Man” who so charmed her and to the “curiously appealing unhumanness of his existence.”

“The Charmed Life” mentions a cache of letters that Porter asserts would have been “political dynamite” if they had seen the light of day. What is left unsaid in the story, as Darlene Harbour Unrue reveals in her recent biography, is that Porter had transcribed several of these letters, which included details of a plot to kill Mexican President Alvaro Obregon, and had leaked their contents to several acquaintances, including a journalist, a labor leader, and a man who claimed to be a Polish diplomat but who was simply “a complex and fascinating liar.” When five men were later executed, Porter worried that her indiscretion may have been the cause—which, Unrue insists, was doubtful, given the “betrayal and disloyalty” that saturated Mexican politics of the period. What is perhaps the most extraordinary coda to these complex machinations is that a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general was closely monitoring Porter’s activities in Mexico during 1920 and 1921. His name was J. Edgar Hoover.

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In 1921, he was nearly eighty years old, and he had lived in Mexico for about forty years. Every day of those years he had devoted exclusively to his one interest in life: discovering and digging up buried Indian cities all over the country. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.