Misanthrope

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER. 495 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.95.

Katherine Anne Porter has consistently been admired for what she is not. Since 1923, when her first story was published, the critics have solemnly compared her to Chekhov, Turgenev, George Eliot; and since 1962, when Ship of Fools became an international bestseller, the book-club brigade has revered the white-haired lady from Texas as the Grandma Moses of literature. Both judgments are wide of the mark.

An author who in 71 years has published only 27 stories and one novel can scarcely be considered a major writer; and that little old white-haired lady is one of the grimmer misanthropes of 20th century literature. Clearly, Author Porter requires reappraisal, and that reappraisal will doubtless be provoked by the publication of this volume: the first complete collection of her long and short stories--among them four never published before. .

Blue Light in the Brain. Author Porter was born on a back-country spread in Texas, got her schooling in Louisiana convents, went on to work for newspapers in New Orleans and New York. She was 29 before she published her first story and 36 before her first book of stories (Flowering Judas) came out. One of the tales, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, is a ten-page masterpiece. Its setting is the Texas farm, the great good place in which all her best writing is rooted; and the Granny of the title is the author's first representation of her own grandmother, a character that develops from tale to tale until it becomes the richest she ever created.

In The Jilting, her grandmother is dying, and the story concludes with an eerie and wonderful description of death. "The blue light from the lamp shade drew into a tiny point in the center of her brain. Granny lay curled down within herself, amazed and watchful, staring at the point of light that was herself. It flickered and winked like an eye, quietly it fluttered and dwindled. God, give a sign! There was no sign. She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light."

"I Hate Love." Having at last dug up her creative capital, Author Porter disbursed it with incredible stinginess. She spent the next nine years making notes for three 50-page stories and then dashed them off in a mere three weeks. In these stories the reader becomes aware for the first time that something had gone seriously awry in the author's life. In Old Mortality, the story of her own emergence from anxious adolescence into worried womanhood, she describes for the first time the emotion that dominates her later work: misanthropy. "She would have no more bonds that smothered her in love and hatred. I hate love, she thought, I hate loving and being loved, I hate it."

Self-sufficiency, it seems, had become her ideal, and in Pale Horse, Pale Rider--a story that tells how she almost died of the flu during World War I--Author Porter describes how she snatched her life, and with it her independence, out of the jaws of death. "Death is death, she said. Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, no longer aware yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself, being composed entirely of the stubborn will to live. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay."

Lost Roots. Trusting that point perhaps too uncritically, Author Porter in her late 40s rashly abandoned her emotional roots and hurled her energies into a grandiose allegory intended to explain "the majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the western world." What she achieved, and it cost her 20 years to achieve it, is embodied in Ship of Fools--a book that is magnificently ingenious but coldly calculated, loveless and finally unbelievable. It is Katherine Anne Porter's tragedy that at the climax of her creative life, she shunted herself onto a sidetrack and went careering to a dead end.

The magnitude of the tragedy will be painfully apparent to the reader of this collection of stories. Author Porter has superb natural gifts. She has irony, she has imagery, she has language. "Her style," wrote Glenway Wescott, "is perfection. It just covers its subject matter as if it were green grass growing on a lawn." Above all, she can think--and therein lies her principal problem. She sees her characters less as people who must live than as problems to be solved. There is too little warmth and softness in her art. But hardness endures, and six or eight of her stories will endure like diamonds.

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