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Mar. 26th, 2012 12:16 pmI have been reading Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a collection of three short novels written by Katherine Anne Porter in the 1930s. I picked up the book on a whim in a used bookstore while Ms. E and I were in Vermont last summer--Porter's name was familiar to me, and I've been interested in fiction of intermediate lengths ever since taking a novella class in grad school. Now I know that Porter herself would reject the term novella; she wrote in the introduction to her Collected Stories, "Please call my works by their right names: we have four that cover every division: short stories, long stories, short novels, novels." So these are short novels, then, or perhaps long stories--as far as I know, Porter didn't specify the precise length of each of her four forms.
I originally intended to wait and write about the book as a whole once I was done with it, but yesterday I finished "Old Mortality," the first piece in the collection, and it filled me with so many thoughts that I wanted to write about it alone. So:
"Old Mortality" fascinated me first with its structure and the glancing way that Porter approaches her themes. It is a story of family history that begins with two little girls who have only a dim grasp and dimmer interest in that history. They hear the stories of their genteel Texas ranching family and the history is palpably important to the adults around them, but to the girls it is just stiff figures in photographs and old letters that their grandmother cries over from time to time. Porter skips lightly across a period of many years, alighting whenever the girls' lives are brushed by the story of their glamorous, scandalous, long-dead Aunt Amy. In this way we--along with the girls--learn about Amy: the known facts, the disputed facts, the aftermath of her life that continues to have consequences after her death. We catch glimpses of the girls as well, at ten, at fourteen, at twenty; we can sense their development throughout the story, but Porter is much more concerned with their relationship to the history of their family than with the events of their own lives.
Porter handles all of this material with tremendous subtlety. I don't even know how she does it, but very indirectly she makes us feel how vital these past events are to the adults in the story. The girls' father, their grandmother, their aunts and uncles and older cousins--they all return to the story of Aunt Amy because it involved them all, it was the central drama of their youth, the sort of protean moment in which their lives were formed. Yet to the girls it is not that, and its meaning is fogged and strange. And the dead woman at the center of it, always talked about but always out of reach... And Porter makes us feel so keenly the passage of time, the way each generation supplants the ones that have come before, the slow march of those preceding generations toward the grave, the march of the old family stories further and further into the mist. And all of this exists in the heart of the story, obviously present yet never touched, like negative space in a painting. Remarkable.
There is more I could write, but it is slipping away from me now. This is a story that I will certainly need to return to, and try to tease out the threads of Porter's story-telling.
Here is a very striking picture of Katherine Anne Porter:
I originally intended to wait and write about the book as a whole once I was done with it, but yesterday I finished "Old Mortality," the first piece in the collection, and it filled me with so many thoughts that I wanted to write about it alone. So:
"Old Mortality" fascinated me first with its structure and the glancing way that Porter approaches her themes. It is a story of family history that begins with two little girls who have only a dim grasp and dimmer interest in that history. They hear the stories of their genteel Texas ranching family and the history is palpably important to the adults around them, but to the girls it is just stiff figures in photographs and old letters that their grandmother cries over from time to time. Porter skips lightly across a period of many years, alighting whenever the girls' lives are brushed by the story of their glamorous, scandalous, long-dead Aunt Amy. In this way we--along with the girls--learn about Amy: the known facts, the disputed facts, the aftermath of her life that continues to have consequences after her death. We catch glimpses of the girls as well, at ten, at fourteen, at twenty; we can sense their development throughout the story, but Porter is much more concerned with their relationship to the history of their family than with the events of their own lives.
Porter handles all of this material with tremendous subtlety. I don't even know how she does it, but very indirectly she makes us feel how vital these past events are to the adults in the story. The girls' father, their grandmother, their aunts and uncles and older cousins--they all return to the story of Aunt Amy because it involved them all, it was the central drama of their youth, the sort of protean moment in which their lives were formed. Yet to the girls it is not that, and its meaning is fogged and strange. And the dead woman at the center of it, always talked about but always out of reach... And Porter makes us feel so keenly the passage of time, the way each generation supplants the ones that have come before, the slow march of those preceding generations toward the grave, the march of the old family stories further and further into the mist. And all of this exists in the heart of the story, obviously present yet never touched, like negative space in a painting. Remarkable.
There is more I could write, but it is slipping away from me now. This is a story that I will certainly need to return to, and try to tease out the threads of Porter's story-telling.
Here is a very striking picture of Katherine Anne Porter:
