2 of 2
Her first published story, "Maria Concepcion" (1923), is an unsentimental tale about a Mexican man who takes back his wife after she kills his lover and steals the woman's child. Porter's descriptions are painterly and sharp; nature and human nature run together, with the harsh, beautiful landscape reflecting the inner turmoil of the characters. As Porter became a more confident writer, she continued to anchor her stories in particular, often exotic places.Her writing is physical and immediate, qualities which make it still so readable today. Yet whether writing about Mexico, Berlin, or Texas, Porter's deeper landscape is the unpredictable, unchartable human heart. In "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," a heavily autobiographical piece from 1939, she starts to tell a simple love story about a man and woman dealing with World War I and the Spanish influenza; then she abruptly turns and follows the young woman into death, into an afterlife, and back into a kind of half life, where death itself is a lost lover. "The human faces around her seemed dull and tired, with no radiance of skin and eyes as Miranda remembered radiance."
Another theme she visits often is guilt and absolution and the human desire to defend our own innocence. In "Noon Wine," a farmer drags his haggard wife from house to house as he tries to convince his neighbors that he's not guilty of murder. "Sometimes the air around him was so thick with their blame he fought and pushed with his fists, and the sweat broke out all over him, he shouted his story in a dust-choked voice, he would fairly bellow at last: 'My wife, here, you know her, she was there, she saw and heard it all, if you don't believe me, ask her, she won't lie!'and Mrs. Thompson with her hands knotted together, aching, her chin trembling, would never fail to say: 'Yes, that's right, that's the truth—'"
People have often compared Porter to Faulkner. Obvious differences notwithstanding (no man could have written "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"), it's easy to see why. Though she left the South once and forever, lived around the world, married multiple times unhappily, championed Socialist causes, lasted long enough to see man on the moon and (almost) to see Ronald Reagan in the White House, Porter remained a 19th-century southerner in so many ways. "I am the grandchild of a lost War," she writes in "Portrait: Old South." "I have blood-knowledge of what life can be in adefeated country on the bare bones of privation." This birthright—a sense of vanquished glory, of hard times always around the next corner—gives her work a legendary quality that a more prosperous age can't match. Another subject for another scholarly essay, perhaps.
Many such essays are sure to follow the publication of this exhaustingly large book. When you read it, as you should, don't hurry. Linger for a while. You'll definitely want to come again.
Betty Smartt Carter writes fiction and teaches Latin in Alabama.
Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture
magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
share this page
RSS Feed
