by Philip Gambone

On November 9, 1920, the Heraldo de México reported, "Miss Katherine Anne Porter, a young writer of much charm and progress, has just arrived in Mexico from New York. She is here to study Mexico, and to gather material for a book."

The thirty-year-old Porter had, until then, written little fiction. Her early years had been difficult ones. Her mother died when she was two; her beloved grandmother when she was eleven. Her first marriage, at sixteen, was not successful. (None of her four marriages were.) It ended in divorce in 1915. Three years later, she came close to dying during the influenza pandemic.

Despite all these difficulties, Porter found the courage, "remarkable in a woman of her time," says her biographer, Joan Givner, "to shed all the bonds that prevented her from being free and independent and able to discover herself." Going to Mexico—which eventually became her "much-loved second country"—was a step along her journey to independence and self-expression.

Before her Mexican sojourn, Porter had tried her hand at writing. She landed small positions at various newspapers including the Rocky Mountain News, where she rose to the position of drama editor. In 1919, she moved to Greenwich Village. There she met many Bohemian artists and writers, including two Mexicans: Tato Nacho, who was playing piano in a Village cabaret, and the painter Adolfo Best-Maugard. Her Mexican connections led to the offer of a job with the Magazine of Mexico, which required her to reside in Mexico City.

Adolfo Best-Maugard
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During her first two months in Mexico, as Porter reported in a letter to her family, she drank champagne with President Álvaro Obregón, went to the bullfights, attended dances, and helped out on an archaeological dig. She was inspired by the new president's post-Revolution reforms and those of his Minister of Education, José Vasconcelos. (See my article: "Mexico's 'cultural caudillo': José Vasconcelos and La raza cósmica" in the July 28, 2024 Lokkal.) But her left-leaning sympathies made her vulnerable to accusations that she was a Bolshevik. "Uneasiness grows here daily," she wrote in one of her earliest reports from Mexico City. "Battles occur almost daily between Catholics and Socialists in many parts of the Republic." In danger of being deported and no longer feeling safe, she got herself back to the United States in late August 1921.

Porter's time in Mexico constituted, writes Thomas F. Walsh in his book Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico, "one of the most important periods of her long life." And while she had not written her hoped-for book, she brought back to the United States plenty of material for fiction writing. "She set to work," says Givner, "with a fierce determination to write a good story." The result, after seventeen days and nights of hibernation in a Greenwich Village rooming house, was her first published story, "María Concepción," which appeared in 1922 in Century magazine. They paid her $600.

Century magazine
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Based on a story she had heard, "María Concepción" is an impressive debut. A little past her eighteenth year, María Concepción, a good Christian and newly married ("in the church, instead of behind it"), discovers that her husband is having an "escapade" with another woman. In the wake of the savage retribution that she carries out, she also performs an act of tender and surprising mercy that brings her "a strange, wakeful happiness."

The story, writes Givner, reflects Porter's "outrage … at the oppression of the Mexican Indian, whom she felt to be the life of the country." Moreover, all of Porter's signature traits as a writer are already present here: a main character (usually a woman) who is strong—Givner says "queenly"—but who has been wronged; a plot worked out with moral complexity; the rigorous avoidance of sentimentality; and a pitch-perfect ear for prose style.

Not long after she left Mexico, Porter returned. She stayed until 1923. Out of that second period in the country came more stories. The torment of love surfaces again in "Virgin Violeta" (1924). Like "María Concepción," it was based on a story Porter had heard in Mexico. The title character, at home for the summer from her convent school, watches jealously as her older sister and handsome cousin Carlos flirtatiously read poetry together. Their youthful sexuality leaves the virgin Violeta feeling enclosed in a cage where she can't breathe. She longs for a future where everything beautiful and unexpected will happen to her. When a small, unexpected something does happen, it throws her into a fit of confusion, misery, and eventually frustration with the puerile lessons being taught at her school.

"Flowering Judas" (published in 1930 but simmering in her mind for several years) focuses on 22-year-old Laura, a gringa living in Mexico City who is sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. She attends union meetings and smuggles letters to men hiding from firing squads. The passionate agitators, revolutionaries, and "professional lovers of humanity" with whom she associates are smitten with her, but Laura rejects them all, especially Braggioni, who sings to her every night. "You think you are so cold, gringita!" Braggioni tells her. "Wait and see. You will surprise yourself some day!" As in "Virgin Violeta," the surprise comes in an unexpected way and opens the well-meaning but confused Laura to an awareness of her complicity in a tragic event. The story "made her literary reputation," Givner says.

Porter called her early Mexican stories "fragments, each one touching some phase of a versatile national temperament." A few of these "fragments" are slight. "The Martyr" (1923), for example, loosely based on the stormy love affair between Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, concerns a jilted painter's grief after his lover runs off with another man. His friends are powerless to rouse him from his bereavement. In the end, one of his friends sets out to write an intimate biography of the great painter, promising to include every sacred episode of the man's life, including his supreme fondness for tamales and pepper gravy.

Porter was back in Mexico in 1930, but after several months wrote to her friend and fellow writer Caroline Gordon: "tied up in knots and can't write a line." She had in mind a novel, about the corruption in Mexico—about the "sink this country has become"—but found herself "constantly choked by my own gall rising to my throat." Nevertheless, two more short stories came out of this stay.

One is her longest and most ambitious Mexican stories is "Hacienda" (1934). Populated with a dozen disparate characters, it feels like a warm-up to Porter's 1962 novel Ship of Fools. Both the novel and the short story feature an assemblage of "chance-gathered people," each with his or her own agenda. In the case of the short story, the core group includes three members of a Russian movie company making a film in Mexico (based on Sergei Eisenstein and his film crew), and Kennerly, their American business manager, who fumes and glares at everything. The film crew is invited to the pulque hacienda of Don Genaro and his wife Doña Julia, who has an affair with one of the actresses.

The story was, Givner says, "a summation of all her feelings about Mexico." While Porter's other Mexican stories had each dealt "with a single aspect of the place," in this story, "she brought together all the strands of Mexican life." Those aspects included the insouciant Spanish landowners and the "deathly air" of their hacienda; the effete intellectual class; the ineffectiveness of the revolution; and the boorish Americans who see Mexico only as a place where money can be made.

Americans are the focus in "That Tree" (1934), where an unnamed journalist dreams of being a "cheerful bum lying under a tree in a good climate, writing poetry." He moves to Mexico to fulfill his bohemian fantasy. After three years of planning, his fiancée, Miriam, a schoolteacher from Minneapolis, joins him. But neither the country nor her husband's poetry wins her over. She holds her nose when she goes to the market and pronounces Indian servants "dirty." She despises her husband for thinking it a picnic to wash the gayly-colored crockery in the sunshine "with the bougainvillea climbing up the wall and the heaven tree in full bloom." The marriage falls apart, leaving him resigned to a career in journalism, his sympathies now falling with "the high-priced magazines … which paid him well for telling the world about the oppressed peoples."

Throughout her Mexican stories, Porter's keen sense of the telling detail reigns supreme. In one story, she describes the "tinsel flowers and ragged brocades" of an altar upon which stands "the battered doll-shape of some male saint" who is dressed in "white, lace-trimmed drawers [that] hang limply around his ankles below the hieratic dignity of his velvet robes." In another story, second-class passengers haul their bundles into a train compartment—bales and hampers of domestic goods, each a "little mountain of confusion yet drawn into a unit." In a third, a Mexican woman's bedroom is "restless with small ornaments." And in another, a man scratches his guitar "familiarly as though it were a pet animal, and sings passionately off key, taking the high notes in a prolonged painful squeal."

Porter who received little formal schooling, developed masterful skills as a fiction writer. In one of her essays, "No Plot, My Dear, No Story," she wrote: "have faith in your theme; then get so well acquainted with your characters that they live and grow in your imagination exactly as if you saw them in the flesh; and finally, tell their story with all the truth and tenderness and severity you are capable of." Truth, tenderness, severity—she articulated an important trio of virtues that every fiction writer should have.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, has just been published by Rattling Good Yarns Press and is available on Amazon, at the Aurora Bookstore, and at the Biblioteca bookshop.

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