Texas and Berlin: Images of Germany in Katherine Anne Porter's Prose

Like so many other American writers of her generation, Katherine Anne Porter was an expatriate for long spans of her sixty-year writing career. Shortly before her death at ninety she told her biographer she had lived in fifty different cities in a variety of countries. In the 1920s, her wanderings took the native of Texas to Mexico; from there she traveled for extensive stays to Germany, Switzerland, Paris and Italy. Having returned to the United States, in the mid-1930s, her moves took her through several eastern states, always in search of the perfect domicile. As each stage in Porter's life was punctuated by a move to a new environment, so each stage of her literary development evolved with the reflection of the particular surroundings. best of her short stories and short novels are those firmly rooted in a regional or national culture. very early stories, written in Mexico, show her fascination and admiration for this country. No American has written about Mexico or Mexicans with greater insight and sympathy, says one of her biographers, a native of Mexico (Lopez 167). As an astute observer of detail and custom, Porter's portrayals show an understanding of the special fibre of the Mexican culture and great empathy with people's mentality. same is true of another group of stories in which Porter reflected on her own roots in the Texas farmland and the South after the Civil War. Based on personal experience as well is portion of the writer's work dealing with her experience. Her contacts with this culture were of a strangely contradictory and fragmented nature. Occurring as they did during various stages of her life, these experiences resulted in pieces of fiction reflecting, for one, the change and evolution of her creative powers and, for another, her darkening world view. Two of these stories, Holiday and The Leaning Tower, are eloquent examples of the writer's use of contrasting images of Germans to illustrate the act and the art of writing. Written about twenty years apart, the short stories depict way stations, as it were, in the writer's career, interludes portray Porter's coming to terms with her calling at different stages. They are moments of introspection and revelation, critical junctures at which she was forced to confront the art of living and life as the substance of art. Seen in these terms, the early work Holiday is a typical initiation story. narrator goes through painful rites of passage to be inducted into writing, something she had only vaguely and unconsciously known to be her calling. Holiday, one of many autobiographical Porter stories, is based on a visit to the Texas farm of German immigrants around 1912. At the time of the visit, the twenty-two year old Porter was trying to resolve difficulties in her first marriage. Accordingly, she has her young narrator look for a reprieve from personal problems, a holiday in surroundings may help healing and regeneration. On the advice of a friend, the young woman becomes a lodger on the isolated farm owned by the Mullers in a remote area of the Texas-Louisiana border. The great truth impressed ... upon her in the course of events here is as poignant an expression of Porter's artistic and private credo as is to be found anywhere in her writing: that we do not run from the troubles and dangers are truly ours, and it is better to learn what they are earlier than later, and if we don't run from the others, we are fools (The Collected Stories, 407). This statement serves to explain not only the lesson learned in Holiday but also the painful cycle of illusion and disillusionment, foray and retreat, affirmation and dejection, stands at the heart of Porter's narrative technique. We perceive at the center of Porter's work the artist, generally in the guise of an observer-narrator figure, but occasionally as the protagonist, struggling to remain aloof from life's demands. …