The Lucidity and Fate of Katherine Anne Porter

The volume includes three short novels: The ancient mortal condition, The midday wine and Pale horse, pale rider, which gives the collection its title. All were written in the late 1930s, when Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980), the author, was an emancipated and adventurous woman who traveled extensively, worked both as a film extra and as a university professor, was divorced four times, and cultivated storytelling; the fullness of her literary talents.

Porter is considered one of the four great writers of the American South, along with Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty. Her literature precisely blends poetry and sordidness, elegance and brutality, and is capable of portraying both the rural environment of a poor Texas farm and the precarious and frenetic daily life of writing a newspaper in a city in the midst of the Great War. A virtuoso of withering descriptions—"they were a face and a figure where nothing could be read except the chronicle of fifty years of ineptitude for sensual life"—and with an impeccable command of narrative rhythms, the fluidity of dialogue, the drama of situations, and the ellipses within the ellipses within the gap that exists between the deluded or naive experience of her protagonists and the authentic nature of reality.

Aunt Amy's example

The short novel that opens the volume, The ancient mortal condition, is divided into three parts or sequences and functions as a coming-of-age story and, at the same time, as a portrait of the perverse and claustrophobic dynamics that can occur in families. The two protagonists are Maria and Miranda, two girls who, throughout the story, will become two young women and who grow up surrounded by the stories of a mysterious and almost mythical Aunt Amy, who tried to live her life her way, who left her mark—for better or worse—on all who knew her and who died suddenly. Aunt Amy's example, and the admiring or resentful memories she generates in those who knew her, lead Miranda to adopt a rebellious attitude toward life. In this sense, the end of the story, told in the third person, is memorable: the narrator, with a somewhat sarcastic but also compassionate final sentence, imposes on the young protagonist, brave but ignorant of how the world works, the full weight of the fatality of existence.

The second short novel, The midday wine, also has at its dramatic and expressive core the idea that the lives of men and women are often governed by a kind of fatal force that imposes itself on them and that they cannot control. It tells the story of a family of cowboy farmers, husband, wife, and two children, who one day employ a silent and taciturn Swede, about whom they know nothing because he never shares anything. The prosperity and strange companionship of the mysterious Swede are shattered the day someone arrives looking for him. The literary grace and human depth with which Porter writes about the good moments and the terrible episodes of his characters demonstrates the enormous versatility of his talent.

Pale horse, pale rider, which closes the volume, is a beautiful and sinister story about the two great terrors of the early 20th century: the Great War and the 1918 flu epidemic. With the same energetic, vivid, and transparent prose, Porter describes love and death, the hustle and bustle of journalism, and the delusions of faith. One of the greats.