The few times in the biography that a particular work comes under Joan Givner’s critical scrutiny—divorced for the moment from her main concern, which is the presumed umbilical attachment of life and fiction—the same inclination to outrage flares up. She finds Braggioni, the revolutionary in “Flowering Judas,” to be a “complete caricature.” She adds that he “looms in the story like a grotesque Easter egg in shades of purple and yellow.”
Katherine Anne Porter wrote:
He bulges marvelously in his expensive garments. Over his lavender collar, crushed under a purple necktie, held by a diamond hoop; over his ammunition belt of tooled leather worked in silver, buckled crudely around his gasping middle; over the tops of glossy yellow shoes Braggioni swells with ominous ripeness.
So, the animadversion of the biographer is not quite to the descriptive point. And to be a revolutionary is in some sense to assume a pose. Costume, gesture, personal style, slogan, poster become personification of idea, especially in Latin America.
Perhaps in this remarkable early story, the pure, tasteful, puritan elegance of the American girl, Laura, is somewhat extended beyond credibility. Yet this girl, who has been born a Catholic and is now living among the Mexican revolutionaries, provides an outstanding instance of the magical detail that gives the stories their preeminence.
Laura sometimes slips into church, but no suitable emotions come to her. “It is no good and she ends by examining the altar with its tinsel flowers and ragged brocades, and feels tender about the battered doll-shape of some male saint whose white, lace-trimmed drawers hang limply around his ankles below the hieratic dignity of his velvet robe.” It is not always clear that the biographer understands the elegance of the prose. Instead, she knows from her file cabinet that it was Mary Doherty, an interesting radical living in Mexico, who was probably the model for Laura.
On the subject of Adam, the young soldier in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Mrs. Givner is also casually dismissive: “An insubstantial figure, completely lacking in vivid details and turns of phrase that usually animate the characters based on people whom Porter knew.” “Completely” implies the self-evident in what is a sketchy opinion. The young soldier who is to die of influenza after looking after and being enchanted by the infected Miranda—who does not die but recovers—is necessary to the structure of the story. He serves it well by the charm of his dialogue; the irony of the romantic, accommodating American gives a tragic force to this thoughtful creation about a moment in history, the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918.
The influenza epidemic, Mexico in the days of the Revolution and after, the feeling of World War I, Berlin in the thirties, the Irish in America: The situations in Katherine Anne Porter’s stories show the unexpected felicities of “homelessness.” Afterward, she came to disown the log cabin that sent her out to the highway, and she fell back, still with her stylistic gracefulness, on nostalgia and memory, or the aura of it, of a more traditional kind.
In what are called the “Miranda” stories, Miranda seems to stand for the author’s sensibility, if not for the actual author. These stories often combine scenes contemporary with Miranda’s (Porter’s) life mixed with family anecdotes about dead relations—the “old order.” The old order is a cavalier landscape of powerful grandmothers; a former slave, Old Nannie; the scandalous, bewitching Aunt Amy; the little girls, Miranda and her sister; their attractive father who reads from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Dante and brightens their childhood with prints from Dürer and Holbein—all the pleasant baggage, supposedly, of the old Southern aristocracy. It does not seem to the point that this was not the author’s life, that it is a burial of the detested log cabin in which she was born. The eye that looks across the track might be dangerous to Southern presumption, but what we have so often in the “old order” work is an eye that is too readily assimilating. Miranda’s present is nearly always more vivid and original than her past. The present is harder, more shaded with sadness and uneasy defiance, and in the long run more genuinely dramatic. “Old Mortality” is elevated as a conception by the bitter alcoholic collapse of Uncle Gabriel, his decline into a brilliantly observed social seediness by way of his hysterical, misplaced hopes at the racetrack.
“Noon Wine” is a success indeed, a story of plot, a sort of realistic tale, tightly composed in the manner of Ethan Frome. In this story, felt to be odd because of the backwoods setting, there is no doubt that Porter knows where she is. She knows in transfiguring detail what a dairy farm is like. “The churn rumbling and swished like a belly of a trotting horse.” And hens “dying of croup and wry-neck and getting plagues of chicken lice; laying eggs all over God’s creation so that half of them were spoiled before a man could find them, in spite of a rack of nests.” If this knowledge came from the time she lived on a relative’s farm outside Buda, Texas, and from certain characteristics in the dairy farmer, Mr. Thompson, that can be traced to her own father—“ambivalence” toward whom figures gravely in the biographer’s grave quilt of patches—that is only the beginning. The story has its roots in pioneer and rural American fiction and even in Faulkner. The ancestry of literature is, of course, another story of kinfolk.
Katherine Anne Porter, from the first appearance of her stories, made her mark and impressed other writers by the way she wrote. It is not easy to define her purity of style. The writing is not plain, and yet it is not especially decorative either; instead, it is clear, fluent, almost untroubled. Everything necessary seems at hand: language and scenery, psychology and memory, and a bright aesthetic intelligence that shapes the whole. Sometimes she claimed to have written certain stories at one sitting, but it is known that many were started and abandoned, taken up again and made into something new. She was dilatory perhaps, but the completed work as we now have it does not reveal any deformation of character, and indeed is expansive enough in theme and achievement to satisfy the claims of her high reputation. She was very vain as a beauty and just as vain as a writer, and this latter vanity perhaps accounted for a good deal of the waiting and stalling, a stalling filled with romantic diversions.
Joan Givner, throughout, sees what are often creative problems as problems of life, usually linked to an unsteady childhood that weeps its lacks and resentments right up to the age of ninety. In the case of a complicated egoist like Katherine Anne Porter, the biographer is altogether too insistent upon the writer’s “longing for love.” A typical passage reads: “It should be remembered, however, that Porter’s need for love was far beyond the ordinary, a desperate, compulsive need inspired by the nagging, ever present sense of her deficiencies.” The biographer’s rather smug provincialism distorts the worldly and amusing mishaps of a woman who was not made for marriage and thus married four times. It is agreeable to come upon the writer’s sniffs in the midst of the biographer’s rampaging “longings” and doubts of “self-worth.” When she happened to remember the fiftieth anniversary of her first marriage, Miss Porter observed that the fiftieth was a lot more pleasant than the first.
Ship of Fools was a long novel and long in the making: from 1941 to 1961. The book made over a million dollars and, of course, for poor Miranda that made a difference. Its reception was very favorable at the beginning, but thereafter followed some fierce reservations. The setting of the book is 1931, a ship going from Vera Cruz to Bremen with a passenger list very long and outlandishly challenging. A fixed arena in which persons who would not ordinarily meet can be realistically gathered together would seem to be a gift of structure, in the manner of large hotels or prison camps or hospitals. But the gift of this natural and ordained diversity is claustrophobic, like a sea journey itself. Characters are given their traits, their tics of manner, their past histories. But then they are trapped in them in the dining room, on the deck, in the bar. Diversions of distress or comedy are offered with great skill, but the sea rolls on and the characters roll on, clutching their gestures.
The significant promise of the novel lies in the date and destination: It is 1931, and the bo
at is on the way to Germany, carrying with it Germans who must somehow prefigure what is to come by way of German arrogance and moral limitation, what is to come for the poorly conceived solitary Jew—an unattractive man who makes his living selling Christian religious objects—and what is to come for the German whose wife is Jewish but scarcely knows it, an assimilated person answering to the name of Mary. The historical promise is too pressing for the imagination in the novel. All is too static, and the implied parable is never quite achieved. There is something a little musty, like old yellowing notes. The flawless execution of the single scenes impresses, and yet the novel remains too snug and shipshape for the waters of history.
With the publication of Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter was past seventy, but since she was to live twenty more years, there was time for a daunting accretion of foolishness. She can fight with faithful friends and relatives, she can spend, she can fall in love, she can drink too much, she can buy a large emerald ring, a “longing” from which she did not run away. She also has time for her increasing anti-Semitism: “Everybody except the Jews knows the Jews are not chosen but are a lot of noisy, arrogant, stupid, pretentious people and then what?” She pronounced on desegregation, leading her close friend Glenway Wescott to declare that “her poor brain is just simply one seething smoking mass of molten lava.”
Biographies inevitably record the demeaning moments of malice and decline and have the effect of imprinting them upon the ninety years. In the biographies of today, all things are equal except that the ill winds tend in interest to be—well, more interesting.
Katherine Anne Porter did not have a happy life. She was better at sloughing off love than retaining it. She was often lonely in between her rushes to attachments. Her egotism was disabling. Throughout her life, the most useful condition for her work and for her sense of things came from the part of her that was an audacious, immensely gifted, independent Sister Carrie who knew about poverty and rooming houses and bad marriages and standing alone. The folly of the claim to represent somehow an aristocratic example of taste and moral excellence was not wisdom but just the downward path.
The ending of the biography, a flourish, is an unhappy image of the limitations of the method of composition. It reads: “At the very end she lay, like La Condesa on the Vera, drugged and demented, bereft of her home and jewels, but defiant until the last moment when on September 18, 1980, the little point of light flickered and failed.” The truth is that Katherine Anne Porter was drugged and demented from strokes and the ghastly illnesses of extreme old age. It is not a useful summarizing sentiment to think of her as a fiction, just as it has not been altogether wise to think of her fiction as her life, or for that matter “the life of” as precisely her life.
1982
SONS OF THE CITY’S PAVEMENTS
Delmore Schwartz
THE POET Delmore Schwartz died in 1966, almost twenty years ago. He was fifty-three years old; not a generous life span, but, as he might have said, one year longer than that of Shakespeare. Schwartz has not been forgotten, far from it. Robert Phillips has produced this excellent edition of Schwartz’s correspondence. It follows the appearance of the selected essays and the collection of the last poems, and thus it seems we now have the whole of the writings.
His life story and its relation to his work have been told in the careful and fair-minded biography by James Atlas (1977). Schwartz casts a long shadow in The Truants, an autobiographical work by the philosopher William Barrett, an early friend and a late, if not quite friend, perplexed connection. William Phillips, editor of Partisan Review and a memorialist of the fifty years of the magazine, tells of his personal and professional relation to “Delmore,” as it was natural to everyone, acquainted or not, to call him because of his own delight in the pretty challenge of his first name.
Schwartz made a dramatic appearance on the literary scene in 1937, when he was twenty-four years old, by publishing his most striking creative achievement, the fiction “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” And his end was unfortunately dramatic also. He had a lonely, tragic death by heart attack in the halls of a run-down hotel in Times Square.
Perhaps it is unfairly vivid that the flow of his life took on a kind of iconographic summation in the endurance of his photographic image. As a young poet, he greatly resembled Pasternak, who, as Marina Tsvetaeva said, looked like an Arab and his horse. At the end he is caught by the camera when he is sitting alone on a park bench, his eyes focused sharply aside, as if in a raging suspiciousness, and his body sadly coarsened. The last years were forlorn and forbidding, not very different from the ruin of many another wandering about the streets. More healthful might have been a quiet removal, something like that of the deranged German poet Hölderlin, living in the family of a devoted carpenter and, all the while, majestically bowing to his imaginary subjects. But Schwartz was irredeemably urban and New York City at that; also poor at the end and given by paranoia to the shedding of friends and wives, angrily plucking them off like flies on the worn threads of his jacket.
The letters begin outside the family, since those to mother, father, and brother, Kenneth, have not survived. It is 1931 and Delmore has gone to the University of Wisconsin, his first escape from Brooklyn and the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. He writes to Julian Sawyer, a high school friend. Mr. Atlas describes Sawyer as an esthete, an enraptured, theatrical young man who went to the dock when Gertrude Stein first returned to America, and “fell to his knees.” He could quote “the whole of any Garbo script at will,” and liked to perform all the parts of Four Saints in Three Acts and The Cocktail Party. We see in this friend that indispensable other so longed for in youth, and inevitably one less serious, less learned, less gifted than the imperious master, Delmore, who was only eighteen when the letters begin.
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The youthful letters are more lyrical and more exposing than the best of the later years. They are rich in exalted ambition, the agitated, opinionated, tireless reading of a mind already concentrated upon the challenge of literature. Also, the spendthrift, self-dramatizing inclination is full-blown, the unsteadiness of a displaced son of the Jewish middle class. Delmore’s father was somewhat flashily successful as a business man, but the parents were divorced, the mother hysterical and unforgiving: the promised legacy to come at the father’s death did not arrive, but remained, nevertheless, a taunting, maddening birthright denied.
In the valuable letters to Sawyer, Schwartz enters the “whole provincial collegiate world,” and because it is Wisconsin it is, to this son of the pavements, the surprising world of nature, “the woods full of fresh-water brooks, springs and creeks, deer, too, and rabbits, squirrels. And the long quiet streets, tree-lined (tall trees!), New England white houses.” Such is the backdrop, although not long to be considered. Instead, Delmore is immediately recognized as a formidable intellectual and a group forms around him that looks to him for “authority.”
The letters reveal the almost helpless fascination with his own character, and tenacious the absorption was to be. He is confident enough to see himself as the object of love and also confident enough to caution Julian against counting upon him too greatly. “I always cause those who are near to me more suffering than pleasure.” He is gossipy about the great, insofar as he knows about them from hearsay and from books. He begins to drink alcohol in the collegiate manner, without ceasing to drink from the spring of Stendhal “whose taste is of a coolness.” He is rebuked by the threat of a poor grade (C) for refusing to write a paper on Stephen Vincent Benet’s long poem, “John Brown’s Body”; but he floors them, so to speak, by the substitution of “an essay on Paul Valéry, making fifteen quotations in French.” Feeling his awkwardness and bursts of aggression, he wishes to study gracefulness so that “life may be a poem.” He is a success, he is somebody in the classrooms and yet, “ ’Tis bitter chill, and I am sick and hurt.”
Thus, here is the man, Delmore Schwartz, a troubled prodigy who is to become, in Karl Shapiro’s
interesting and emotionally charged foreword, “the touchstone of his generation.” We do not have any more communications with Julian Sawyer and the scene changes the following year to New York University, then to Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy, back to New York and beginning to publish, marriage, Harvard once more as a teacher, on and on in the literary and academic world.
The cast of the letters becomes then confined to the friendships and occasions of a career among the well known. There is correspondence with his first wife, Gertrude Buckman, and a few letters to his second wife, Elizabeth Pollet, and to four or five scattered others; for the rest, it is fellow-writers, editors, publishers, professors, almost all of them hyphenated beings, writer-editor, poet-professor, like Schwartz himself.
The most impressive of the letters concern poetry and the occasion is often the disputes or rebuttals arising out of Schwartz’s brilliant critical essays on the most intimidating masters of his time—Hart Crane, R. P. Blackmur, Eliot, Auden, Allen Tate, Edmund Wilson, Wallace Stevens, Yvor Winters, and the masters of comedy, W. C. Fields and Ring Lardner. To Philip Horton, the author of a popular biography of Hart Crane, he writes about the famous line from “The Bridge,” “Oh thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits . . .” that a bridge cannot have cognizance or be cognizance and “. . .you seem to have answered that such attributions were merely symbols—of whose cognizance is the bridge a symbol?” And the thoughts linger over a line in a letter to Allen Tate: “I think I can show clearly that Blackmur misunderstands Santayana exactly when Santayana is himself engaged in misunderstanding something.”
Philip Rahv, in a review of Schwartz’s critical essays, suggests that their power and genuineness lay in the fact that, in this form, the author was not so nerve-wrung about “greatness” as he was as a poet and short-story writer. Two letters to Ezra Pound bear on this precocious and unpretentious critical discrimination. They also show a valiant and disinterested attention to important texts.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 40