Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico

The Illusion of Eden

Thomas F. Walsh

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781477305263
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In 1920, an unknown journalist named Katherine Anne Porter first sojourned in Mexico. When she left her "familiar country" for the last time in 1931, she was the celebrated author of Flowering Judas and Other Stories and had accumulated a wealth of experiences and impressions that would inspire numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, as well as the opening section of her only novel, Ship of Fools. In this perceptive study of Porter's Mexican experiences, Thomas Walsh traces the important connections between those events and her literary works. Separating fact from the fictions that Porter constantly created about her life, he follows the active role that she played in Mexican political and intellectual life—even to the discovery of a plot to overthrow the Mexican government, which eventually figured in Flowering Judas. Most important, Walsh discerns how the great swings between depression and elation that characterized Porter's emotional life influenced her alternating visions of Mexico. In such works as "Xochimilco, " Porter saw Mexico as an earthly Eden where hopes for a better society could be realized, but in other stories, including "The Fiesta of Guadalupe, " she depicts Mexico as a place of hopeless oppression for the native peoples. Mexico, Porter once said, gave her back her Texas past. Given the unhappiness of that past, her feelings toward Mexico would always be ambivalent, but her Mexican experiences influenced all her subsequent works to some degree, even those pieces not specifically Mexican in setting. Walsh's study, then, is an essential key for anyone seeking greater understanding of the life or works of Katherine Anne Porter.

1. Porter and Mexican Politics

Porter’s Politics before Mexico

Explaining her interest in the Mexican Revolution to Archer Winsten in 1937, Porter claimed that she had always been a “rebel,” making a “revolt” against the “confining society” of her native Texas by fleeing from it. In Mexico, therefore, she “plunge[d] in on the side of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” and was “a so-called Fellow Traveller for many years,” but never joined the party because she valued her “mental freedom.”¹ She had made much the same point about freedom to Caroline Gordon (January 6, 1931), stating she had run away from the South because she had no intention of “not thinking what I please, nor of conforming where conformity would cramp and annoy me.” The pattern of her life was to escape anything and anybody that threatened her “mental freedom,” but that pattern does not sufficiently explain why she became as seemingly radical as she pictured herself to Winsten.

In “Pull Dick, Pull Devil,” Porter identified her youthful rebellion against “confining society” with socialism. Contradicting Malcolm Cowley’s assertion that “Mexico City was her Paris and Taxco was her South of France,”² she claimed she published “a violent defense of Woman Suffrage” when she was fourteen, “was converted to Socialism at the age of 15” after hearing Eugene Debs, and took “all social and political problems for [her] province at 18.” One might doubt the accuracy of this claim, but not Porter’s early interest in the woman’s vote. In 1909 her brother Paul wrote her that “poor old J. H.” [John Henry Koontz, whom Porter married in 1906] is probably a “suffragist at home anyway if merely for the sake of peace.” In the rest of the letter he lectured her on the proper place of women: “You say women are slaves, bound by routine and unappreciated labor. I should call them the White Man’s burden,” adding that a woman’s intelligence does not function in the realm of politics. There is no record of Porter’s reply unless it appeared years later in “Old Mortality” when Cousin Eva, who went to prison for suffragist activism, complains, “In our part of the country, in my time, we were so provincial-a woman didn’t dare to think or act for herself….”³

It is unlikely Porter underwent an instant conversion to socialism after hearing Eugene Debs speak, but certainly she knew who he was and what he stood for. She wrote Kenneth Durant (March 30, 1936) that her father took her to hear Debs when she was about fourteen years old: “I remember the southern newspapers were still referring to him as a raging, blood thirsty monster of revolution, and describing his famous ‘tiger crouch’…. He was a tall, pale colored thin man who did lean over as near as he could get to his hearers; he talked very urgently and gently, and the things he said seemed mild and reasonable.” Porter was not alone in her estimate of Debs. Between 1906 and 1912 he and Mother Jones spoke at Texas camp meetings that attracted thousands of farmers. In the elections of 1912 the Socialists won 20 percent of the vote in some counties and 17 percent in the East Sabine region, the setting of Porter’s “Holiday.”⁴

The main issue was the high percentage of land tenancy, one that would concern Porter in Mexico. In fact, Texas Socialists in 1914 warned that tenants would become more “enslaved” than Mexican peasants who were fighting a “bloody revolution” to liberate their land.⁵ Although Porter complained to Josephine Herbst (October 16, 1933) of government neglect of the farmer and wished she were in the South “to help the farmers fight,” in “He” and “Noon Wine” her concern is not tenancy but the moral fiber of the Whipples and the Thompsons, tested in their hard struggle to scrape a living from the land. In “Holiday,” however, Father Muller, an armchair Socialist who reads Das Kapital as if it were the Bible, offers Texas tenant farmers interest rates lower than those of the bank so that they can buy their own farms, but when his wife dies in her attempt to rescue the livestock during a ferocious storm, he can only bemoan the futility of a “hundert tousand tollers in the bank” (431). The story tells us that economic systems are little compensation for the unpredictable calamities nature inflicts.

We can reconstruct Porter’s political attitudes as a journalist for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News in 1918–1919 from “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” even though it was published in 1938 and influenced by later experiences in New York and Mexico. Early in the story, Miranda and her friend Mary Townsend are genuinely fearful of losing their jobs or going to jail for not buying Liberty Bonds they cannot afford. Earlier two bond salesmen had attempted to intimidate Miranda into buying bonds. The Kafkaesque stare of one of the men, “really stony, really viciously cold, the kind of thing you might expect to meet behind a pistol on a deserted corner,” prompts her to think to herself, “Suppose I were not a coward, but said what I really thought? Suppose I said to hell with this filthy war?” (272–273).

The answer is that she would probably have been convicted under the sedition laws and imprisoned. Miranda had heard of “stories of personal disaster, of outrageous accusations and extraordinarily bitter penalties that had grown monstrously out of incidents very little more important than her failure-her refusal-to buy a Bond” (278). The stories were true. In an all-out campaign to force people to buy bonds, Councils of Defense in some states created elaborate schemes to check up on subscribers. People were called on during the night and told they must buy more bonds; others were threatened with loss of jobs; and in some communities the houses of “bond slackers” were painted yellow.⁶ Senator Norris, arguing against U.S. entry into the war, had stated amid cries of “Traitor!” that “belligerency would benefit only the class of people…who have already made millions of dollars, and who will make hundreds of millions more if we get into the war.”⁷ This argument was shared by the Socialists, but became dangerous to express during the war. Porter’s hero, Eugene Debs, was sent to prison for ten years for an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio. Through Miranda’s view of the “filthy war,” Porter makes clear she sides with the opponents of war for the classic reasons. While a bond salesman makes his pitch in a theater, Miranda whispers, “Coal, oil, iron, gold, international finance, why don’t you tell us about them, you little liar?” (293). In a letter of January 1932 to Eugene Pressly, Porter made her antiwar stance explicit: “Certainly we should have stayed out [of the war], and would have, except for the flood of lying propaganda, the appeals to false sentiment, the hysterical nagging and yelping of the Allies for us to come in.”

Although these remarks have the advantage of hindsight, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” seems to reflect Porter’s feelings toward the war in 1918 and the guilt she felt, either then or later, at her own timidity in not speaking up, especially since freedom of expression was so crucial to her. She might also have felt guilty about her contributions to the war effort. Before coming to Denver, she worked for the Fort Worth Critic. Also a volunteer for the Red Cross and member of the Social Service Club’s Cheer Funds Committee, she wrote a piece about visiting the hospital at Camp Bowie: “After only three visits the men have begun to look forward to Friday, dolling all up for the occasion and appearing nicely shaved and brushed and polite. The ones who are really sick-they have a good many of these now-complain and tell their little-boy grievances and troubles, sure of sympathy and understanding and real interest. It’s too bad so many of them had to go and get measles and mumps and such like ailments of extreme youth.”⁸ The tone of this passage, especially in the last sentence, casts doubt on the value of the cheery social visits; assuming the point of view of the visitors, Porter gently mocks their gushy and insincere attitudes. In the Red Cross scene in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” drawn from the Fort Worth period, the narrator, also assuming the point of view of the Red Cross volunteers but now with a clearly mocking bite, makes Porter’s attitude clear: “With this loot they were now setting out, a gay procession of high-powered cars and brightly tinted faces to cheer the brave boys who already, you might very well say, had fallen in defense of their country. It must be frightfully hard on them, the dears, to be floored like this when they’re all crazy to get overseas and into the trenches as quickly as possible” (275–276). As the young women scatter about the ward, “uttering girlish laughter meant to be refreshingly gay,” Miranda feels “miserably embarrassed at the idiocy of her errand” (276) and soon flees when a patient with a “hostile” face rejects her overtures. When another woman wonders what good such visits do, Miranda replies, “I hate it” (277). The ambiguous tone of the Critic article masked what Porter did not have the courage to reveal about the war in general.

In her story Porter also manipulated history to stress the police-state tactics of the government. Miranda wonders if a threat to fire her “isn’t a kind of blackmail. I don’t believe even a Lusk Committeeman can get away with that” (271). Later she thinks, “The worst thing about the war for the stay-at-homes is there isn’t anyone to talk to any more. The Lusk Committee will get you if you don’t watch out” (290). On another occasion she speculates that a member of the Lusk Committee probably spread the rumor that the Germans caused the influenza outbreak. But the Lusk Committee did not exist during the war. Created by the New York legislature, it operated mainly in New York City from May 1919 until April 1920, when Porter was living in Greenwich Village. Invoking the Red Scare, state senator Clayton Lusk claimed, “More than 20,000 alien enemies in the Communist Party of New York alone are openly organized for the overthrow of the Government by force and violence.”⁹ The committee raided seventy-three “Red Centers” and jailed almost a thousand “radicals.” Eventually a few aliens were deported and the rest were freed for lack of evidence. Remembering such violations of the principle of freedom, Porter turns “Liberty Bonds” into an ironic oxymoron. When Miranda recovers consciousness amid the celebration of the armistice, she hears voices singing “My country, ‘tis of thee”: “Sweet land…oh, terrible land of this bitter world where the sound of rejoicing was a clamor of pain, where ragged tuneless old women, sitting up waiting for their evening bowl of cocoa, were singing, ‘Sweet land of Liberty-’” (312–313). The passage reveals how influenza ravaged Miranda’s mind and body, but the ironic use of “liberty” suggests that fate and state have conspired to deny it to Miranda and Adam.

Following in the footsteps of her close friend, Eva Chappell, who was probably the model for Mary Townsend in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,”¹⁰ Porter left Denver in the fall of 1919 and settled in Greenwich Village. Texas for Porter was “the native land of [her] heart”¹¹ and the setting of half her collected stories, but New York was her intellectual home, where she could freely develop her art among fellow artists. She could easily have subscribed to “the system of ideas” that, according to Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return, characterized Bohemia of the twenties-for example, “the idea of liberty”; “the idea of female equality”; and “the idea of changing place” whereby “the artist can break the puritan shackles” through repatriation (60–61). If her radical friends are any indication, Porter found the Village to her liking politically. Bessie Beatty, at whose home Porter celebrated Christmas in 1919,¹² was editor of McCall’s, had been an active suffragist in California, lectured on feminism, and published in 1918 Red Heart of Russia. Ernestine Evans, whose college graduation photo is among Porter’s papers, had been a Balkan correspondent for the London Chronicle and the socialist New York Call She frequented 12 St. Luke’s Place, home of poet Genevieve Taggard and Helen Black, both writers for the Nation and Porter’s close friends later in the twenties. Porter first met Floyd Dell, novelist and editor of the Nation, in 1919 and later at the Union Square apartment of Alex Gumberg, a Russian-born American Socialist.¹³ Kenneth Durant, who married Ernestine Evans in 1923, was also among Porter’s friends, reminding her in 1936 of his remark in 1920 that she wrote like an angel. Porter wrote Robert McAlmon (August 21, 1934) that she considered Durant one of her best friends, claiming that as his assistant on ROSTA, the Russian news agency that evolved into TASS in 1923, she wrote the daily news story while he wrote the cable.¹⁴ Although I have found no evidence of her work on ROSTA, undoubtedly her New York friends contributed to her radical ideas, making revolutionary Mexico politically attractive to her.

According to Porter’s July 1923 note to the Century, “Why I Write About Mexico,” the country was familiar to her because her father, who had lived there, told her “enchanting stories” about it. She also claimed she “watched a street battle between Maderistas and Federal troops from the window of a cathedral” while an old Indian woman explained to her, “It is all a great trouble now, but it is for the sake of happiness to come,” not in heaven but “on earth” (CE 355). Yet Porter confessed to Robert McAlmon (July 28, 1934) that though she had lived through revolution, major strikes, and the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, “in spite of my frantic endeavors to be everywhere at once, take part in everything, and see all, the battle always takes place nine miles away.” She invented the incident with the didactic Indian woman to dramatize and justify her presence in Mexico because she had “been accused by Americans of a taste for the exotic, for foreign flavors” (CE 356).¹⁵ (The incident is the first example of Porter’s practice of placing herself in a fictitious eye of the storm while hiding her real adventures in Mexico.)

However natural the interest of Texans in Mexico, as Porter claimed in her Century note, it was in New York that two Mexicans, musician Tata Nacho (Ignacio Fernández Esperón) and painter Adolfo Best Maugard persuaded her to visit their country in 1920.¹⁶ In December 1919 Best exhibited his paintings at the Knoedler Gallery in New York and in early 1920 began to create stage settings for a new ballet of Anna Pavlova, with whom he had collaborated in Mexico in 1918. In a long appreciation of his work, poet Babette Deutsch mentions the “ballets for which Mr. Best did the stage settings,” adding, “And the pantomimes were written by Miss Katherine Anne Porter.”¹⁷ Best was nobody’s idea of a revolutionary, as his early self-portrait in three-piece suit with walking stick suggests, but his European training, talent, and art theories, developed out of his study of pre-Columbian art with anthropologist Franz Boas, intrigued Porter. She originally planned to continue their ballet collaboration in Mexico.

Porter had more important irons in the fire. Ernestine Evans, feature editor of the Christian Science Monitor, asked her for “sketches” of Mexico (March 23, 1920). Porter wrote her family (December 31, 1920) that she came to Mexico “fortified by letters from editors and publishers like Scribner’s and MacMillan, with an agreement with the United Press that I might write them a series of stories.” At this crucial time in Mexican history she planned to write a book of her impressions of Mexican culture and develop in that fertile soil her talent as creative writer. Everything was falling into place. Like her Village friends, she would earn a living by her pen in an exciting foreign country with political aspirations to her liking.

On July 4, 1920, she wrote her sister that her ballet pantomimes were delaying her, but her passport was in order and, because an outbreak of bubonic plague had closed the port of Veracruz, she planned to travel to Mexico by land. Pavlova’s ballet had been held up and was finally canceled altogether in October because the sets that Best designed did not pass fire inspection.¹⁸ Also in October a friend, Ira Patchin, gave Porter letters of introduction to “Mr. Robertson,” the consul at Nuevo Laredo, and to George T. Summerlin, U.S. chargé d’affaires in Mexico City, pointing out Summerlin’s Louisiana roots. (She would soon have reason to be wary of both men.)

Porter began her journey in late October. According to the fanciful account she gave Hank Lopez in 1965, when she boarded the Mexican train at the border, “the whole roof was covered with soldiers and rifles and young women with charcoal braziers and babies.” When she asked what was happening, a man told her, “Well, we’re having a little revolution down here” (I 121–122). She warned Kenneth Durant she would tell such a story in her old age, one that, as with the Century...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Note to the Reader
• Introduction
• 1. Porter and Mexican Politics
• 2. Porter in Mexico, 1920–1921
• 3. Porter and Mexican Art, 1922 and 1923
• 4. Thinking of Mexico, 1924–1930
• 5. Mexico Once More, 1930–1931
• 6. Becoming Miranda
• 7. Ship of Fools
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Permissions Acknowledgments
• Photographs