Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Katherine Anne Porter - Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Th...
Preface
For a long time I was afraid to revisit the writings of those who had been my favorite writers when I was in my teens (a very long time ago!). I have been relieved to find that the writers I admired then hold up well. I was disappointed by later works (which I read when they first appeared) by Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, but in rereading what they wrote that I loved and/or admired when I was young, I find still at least admirable. I like John Cheever's Falconer even more than his Wapshot novels. Philip Roth has continued to produce at least interesting books (at a grueling pace).
Although I was unable to get through The Magic Mountain again, I still adore many of Thomas Mann's shorter fictions (and his last novel, which I did not read during my adolescence, Felix Krull. And Melville's shorter fiction, and the novels of E .M. Forster. (I haven't tried Moby Dick again... yet anyway). The Faulkner that enraptured me then still does (and though I was underwhelmed (then and now) by Fable and overwhelmed (not in a good way) by Absalom, Absalom!. I enjoyed Faulkner's comic final novel,The Reivers, which I think that I read sometime during the 1960s. I have yet to reread anything by John O'Hara, though his status (as a skilled but not great writer) seems unchanged in the decades since his death and since I last read anything by him.
I was particularly reluctant to risk rereading "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" by Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), because it is the work of fiction that made me want to write when I was thirteen. I don't recall what I wrote directly under the influence of reading it. I do remember the book I wrote when I was fourteen (fortunately, it is not extant) and know only too well that neither was worthy a tribute to Porter/"Pale Horse" or "Noon Wine."
Stimulated by MsMorvay's (5th) resurrecting the oldies writeoff, I finally overcame my trepidations to exhume an especially formative idol of my youth.
The Review
The book Pale Horse, Pale Rider contains three long stories (Porter despised the term "novella"): ""Old Mortality," "Noon Wine," and Pale Horse, Pale Rider." I was surprised to be reminded that the book was not published until 1939 -- by which time Porter had had the experience that went into only novel, Ship of Fools (1962). The stories take place between 1885 and 1919, and only the title story reaches the time of World War I -- and the "Spanish" flu that killed as many as a hundred million people during the winter of 1918. Porter herself nearly died of it in Denver.
The three stories are in chronological order, with "Old Mortality" reaching back to a legendary beauty in the family of Miranda, Porter's recurrent autobiographical figure. Miranda, like Hemingway's Nick Adams is an observer, more than a little detached from her own life. Moreover (and here the resonance is with Faulkner, rather than Hemingway), Miranda's family lived in/on the past. As noted very early in the story (where I would have started it):
"Maria and Miranda, aged twelve and eight years, knew they were young, though they felt they have lived a long time. They had lived not only their own years; but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in the lives of grown-ups around them, old people above forty, most of them, who had a way of insisting that they too had been young once. It was hard to believe."
The girls are further puzzled that the legendary beauty, their Aunt Amy, dead before they were born seemingly willfully, following closely upon marriage to Gabriel (after years of refusing his bids to wed), does not look particularly gorgeous in the few photos of her, which their elders insist "do not do justice to her." Uncle Gabriel, a prematurely aged lush also disappoints casting him as a romantic leading man in the family story.
There was a scandal and serious questions arose within the honor code, not only in what Amy did, but in her brother Harry's. The last third of the story brings family members together for a funeral (in 1912). has, by then, given up trying to ascertain what occurred before she was born, but there are intimations of a partial repetition of the family legend.
You want to extrapolate from the legend of the family romance to the romanticization of the pre-bellum Southern past? Go right ahead? Porter does not do so, but that path is open. And the restrictions on well-brought-up Southern belles to avoiding bringing dishonor to their family names are shown, rather than lectured about.
"Noon Wine" is the most famous of Porter's short fiction and was adapted for ABC's "Stage '67" in its greatest production, directed by Sam Peckinpah, starring Jason Robards, Olivia de Havilland, and Theodore Bikel. It was also adapted into a theatrical movie in 1985 with Fred Ward and Stellan Skarsgard. I long for the Peckinpah version to appear on DVD!
Porter portrays "Royal Earle" Thompson with more than a little scorn for his refusal to do work that he considers not fitting for men (which is to say, most everything on the egg and milk operation in South Texas he runs). Earle is a small-minded man, and the character would surely use the "n-word" as he does and express contempt for the black hired hands who got into trouble with the law.
One day in 1896, a Swede named Olaf Eric Helton shows up, seeking work. Thompson hates paying wages nearly as much as he hates doing any work himself, and is discomfited that Helton accepts his offer of $7 a month (plus room and board).
Helton throws himself into work and has no hang-ups about what isn't fit work for men. The farm prospers. The two boys, Arthur and Herbert, grow up working more like Helton than like their father. And they learn not to touch Helton's harmonicas the hard way -- being shaken.
The past intrudes with the arrival (when everything seems to be going well in 1905) of the insinuation-slinging Homer T. Hatch. The tragedy that ensues is considerably more ramifying than Hemingway's great story of waiting for "The Killers" (one in which the point of view is that of Nick Adams, BTW).
None of these three long stories immediately grabs the reader, though "Noon Wine" comes closer than the other two do.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider is written in the third person, but, even more than "Old Mortality" is told from the point of view of. Given that is feverish through much of the story, "consciousness" is not entirely accurate in calling it a "stream of consciousness," though the reader can better distinguish what is hallucination than herself can (since she is not the narrator, she cannot be an unreliable one).
The external events are World War One and the influenza pandemic of 1918-19. As had Porter, works for a newspaper. She has been demoted from being a reporter to being a drama critic in some unspecified city (Porter was in Denver) for not being ruthless enough.
Before being knocked off her feet by the "Spanish" flu, she is swept off her feet by Adam Barclay, a dashing young US Army officer on leave before shipping off to France, where he expects to die in the trench warfare. The flu pandemic killed more people than the (first world) war (indeed, more even than the second world war), and the expectations of the young lovers are not realized.
In both "Noon Wine" and PH,PR, there are very sinister representatives of government authority: Homer T. Hatch in the former, two men "investigating" why has not pledged to buy Liberty Bonds (US Treasury bonds) in the latter. These figures are opportunistic, self-serving scoundrels. is intimidated and suppresses expressing her thoughts ("Suppose I were not a coward, but said what I really thought? Supposed I said to hell with this filthy war? Suppose I asked that little thug, What's the matter with you, why aren't you rotting in Belleau Wood?").
The war ends while is deathly ill -- and has about as much joy for her as for Guillaume Apollonaire.
Conclusions
All three short novels are highly polished gems of writing, with the horrors underplayed (what E. M. Forster called "tea-tabling"). "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is the most High Modernist of the three, the one most centered on an individual consciousness (one deranged by fever). And I think that "Noon Wine" deserves its canonical status.
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As for my own younger self, I am pleased to approve of his taste. I am, however, somewhat puzzled why PH,PR would so appeal (inspire) me as a 13-year-old. My more recent idols have been the similarly concentrated fiction of Penelope and Fitzgerald and Muriel Spark, but what I read in my teens was almost all by male authors and mostly told from male perspectives. I read PH,PR before US military personnel went from being "advisors" to being combatants in Viet Nam, and long before the AIDS pandemic surrounded me. Or before I had any personal experience of sex and love.
I'd guess that I picked up the ironies of PH,PR. Since I remembered the intimidation by the bond-pushers more than the romance or the interiority of the flu, it has to be my early modification of Emerson (from "last resort" to "first resort," if that is not strong enough an indication, how about "chicken hawks"?).
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