Mostly from the New York Review

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Collected Stories and Other Writings
by Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue
Library of America, 1,093 pp., $40.00

by Ch. Baxter in the NYRB June 11, 2009

Katherine Anne Porter is a case of a writer whose last fiction seemed oddly ill-matched with the work that preceded it. Readers of a certain age may remember the literary hoopla surrounding the publication of her only novel, Ship of Fools, in 1962. A work of twenty years’ labor, the book was reviewed everywhere, called “a great work of art” by Mark Schorer, went onto the best-seller list, and was sold to the movies for $400,000. The author’s shrewd, imperious visage appeared in the pages of the Saturday Review and other publications. But readers who actually bothered to start this 497-page novel did not often finish it. Finally a critic told the truth about the book: Theodore Solotaroff, in a long essay-review in Commentary, did an inventory of its faults that still seems, from a distance of over four decades, definitive and irrefutable.

But at the time of its publication, Ship of Fools appeared to have almost everything: a large cast of pan-European blowhards, a historical moment of considerable importance (1931), and great themes having to do with prejudice and international relations. Indeed, Ship of Fools had almost everything except the one element it needed, the breath of life. After a few years, the novel fell off the shelf into oblivion.

None of this would have mattered very much if Katherine Anne Porter’s short stories hadn’t been among the best ever written by an American. But they were so remarkably good, so touched with genius, that the spectacle that followed their publication is more than a bit disheartening. A writer whose work could justly be compared to Tolstoy’s spent over twenty years of her life working on a bloated and sententious novel. With the publication of the Library of America’s edition of the Collected Stories and Other Writings, some questions naturally arise, although most of them are unanswerable. Where did the stories come from? And then what happened?

Katherine Anne Porter made a habit of misrepresenting the year of her birth, 1890, claiming that she had been born in 1894 (two years after her mother died). She also maintained that she had grown up as a descendant of four generations of Southern aristocracy—though in fact she was born in a two-room log house in Indian Creek, Texas. Other misrepresentations followed. Like many other American writers of her generation, she regarded her autobiography as unnecessarily factual and in need of revision.

“I was fed from birth on myth and legend,” she noted, “and a conviction of natural superiority bestowed by birth and tradition.” For her, snobbery and fantasy tended to stimulate each other. But the conditions of her early life were so difficult that one is surprised that she survived it with her faculties intact. After her mother’s death, her father moved her and her siblings to Kyle, Texas, where she was educated by her grandmother until she was ten. Following the death of her grandmother, her father took the children to various relatives, or dropped them in one boarding school or another, and generally left them to fend for themselves. By the age of sixteen, her formal schooling having ended, she was married to her first husband, John Henry Koontz, who habitually beat her. She lived with his alcoholism and physical abuse for eight years. She survived a bout of influenza in 1918. The illness turned her hair permanently white.

There has been a tendency among quite a few of Porter’s critics to criticize her life instead of her work and to give it low marks. According to these commentators, she should have lived some other kind of life than the one she actually had. What kind is not specified—perhaps one with fewer deceptions would have been better. Joan Givner’s biography does not present a particularly attractive picture of Porter, who was much married and given to more than a few of the usual human vanities.¹ She seems to have engaged, rather frequently, in betrayal of people close to her. Still, compared to the alcoholic stupidities of other American writers of her time, her misdeeds seem rather amateurish.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jun/11/flowering-porter/

From the September 24, 2009
John Searle on a book by Paul Boghossian:

A problem faced by social constructivism concerns facts about the past. Are we now constructing facts about the past when we make claims about history? One extreme social constructivist cited by Boghossian, Bruno Latour, accepts this conclusion with somewhat comical results. Recent research shows that the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II probably died of tuberculosis. But according to Latour, this is impossible because the tuberculosis bacillus was only discovered by Robert Koch in 1882.¹ “Before Koch, the bacillus had no real existence.” To say that Ramses II died of tuberculosis is as absurd as saying that he died of machine-gun fire.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/sep/24/men-and-boys/
Interesting article of Greek homosexuality and pederasty. Learned all about intercrural ways.

On Byron via Edna O'Brien through Harold Bloom
In the two centuries since Byron died in Greece (April 19, 1824, aged thirty-six), leading a messy rebellion against the Turks, only Shakespeare has been translated and read more, first on the Continent and then worldwide. High Romantic in his life but not in his art, which carried on from Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Laurence Sterne, the endlessly digressive Byron incarnated countless contradictions of thought and feeling. He bewildered and fascinated his contemporaries with a vitality overtly erotic, compounded of narcissism, snobbery, sadomasochism, incest, heterosexual sodomy, homosexuality, what you will. Of the two authentic English vices, humbuggery and bumbuggery, Byron scourged the first and expanded the horizons of the second. The first matter to bear in mind concerning Byron is his royal lineage, descended on his mother’s side, the Gordons, from Annabella Stuart, daughter of James I of Britain (James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots). His father was “Mad Jack” Byron, gambler and heroic womanizer, who had been guilty of incest with his sister Frances. The daughter of his first marriage to Lady Amelia D’Arcy, Lady Augusta Leigh, the poet’s half-sister, became his true beloved, thus repeating the pattern. Mad Jack died in France, poor and abandoned, when his poetical son was three. Born with a lame left foot, George Gordon, Lord Byron, became a superb swimmer and marksman, and at ten secured the family title.
The rest:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/sep/24/pilgrim-to-eros/