Katherine Anne Porter on Art

Author Charles Baxter has required we read the short story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (1930) by Katherine Anne Porter, a Pulitzer winner I had never read. I knew that one of the reasons this Prague experience is seminal for my writing is because of Charles Baxter as an author himself. I had no idea that everything would be connected to this extent! Katherine Anne Porter is not only brilliant but a lot of her writing process is very similar to mine. I don’t share that bit here and will post it at my own website later. For now I wanted to share part of her interview. Although I tweeted this article, the teacher in me knows, no one reads long articles! So here I share to highlight an excerpt of possible interest.

I am indebted to synchronicity.

Excerpt taken from an interview in the Paris Review.

PORTER

Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.

INTERVIEWER
But for the unproven artist that is a very great act of faith.

PORTER
It is an act of faith. But one of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it. If they haven’t got the courage, it’s just too bad. They’ll fail, just as people with lack of courage in other vocations and walks of life fail. Courage is the first essential.

INTERVIEWER
In choosing a pattern of life compatible with the vocation?

PORTER
The thing is not to follow a pattern. Follow your own pattern of feeling and thought. The thing is to accept your own life and not try to live someone else’s life. Look, the thumbprint is not like any other, and the thumbprint is what you must go by.

INTERVIEWER
In the current vernacular, then, you think it’s necessary for an artist to be a “loner”—not to belong to any literary movement?

PORTER
I’ve never belonged to any group or huddle of any kind. You cannot be an artist and work collectively. Even the fact that I went to Mexico when everybody else was going to Europe—I went to Mexico because I felt I had business there. And there I found friends and ideas that were sympathetic to me. That was my entire milieu. I don’t think anyone even knew I was a writer. I didn’t show my work to anybody or talk about it, because—well, no one was particularly interested in that. It was a time of revolution, and I was running with almost pure revolutionaries!

[…]

But I tell you, nothing is pointless, and nothing is meaningless if the artist will face it. And it’s his business to face it. He hasn’t got the right to sidestep it like that. Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist—the only thing he’s good for—is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it’s only his view of a meaning. That’s what he’s for—to give his view of life. Surely, we understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment. But by remembering, comparing, waiting to know the consequences, we can sometimes see what an event really meant, what it was trying to teach us.

INTERVIEWER

That’s a very classical view of the work of art—that it must end in resolution.

PORTER

Any true work of art has got to give you the feeling of reconciliation—what the Greeks would call catharsis, the purification of your mind and imagination—through an ending that is endurable because it is right and true. Oh, not in any pawky individual idea of morality or some parochial idea of right and wrong. Sometimes the end is very tragic, because it needs to be. One of the most perfect and marvelous endings in literature—it raises my hair now—is the little boy at the end of Wuthering Heights, crying that he’s afraid to go across the moor because there’s a man and woman walking there.

INTERVIEWER

You are frequently spoken of as a stylist. Do you think a style can be cultivated, or at least refined?

PORTER

I’ve been called a stylist until I really could tear my hair out. And I simply don’t believe in style. The style is you. Oh, you can cultivate a style, I suppose, if you like. But I should say it remains a cultivated style. It remains artificial and imposed, and I don’t think it deceives anyone. A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it’s a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself—or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind. Style is the man. Aristotle said it first, as far as I know, and everybody has said it since, because it is one of those unarguable truths. You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being. Symbolism is the same way. I never consciously took or adopted a symbol in my life. I certainly did not say, “This blooming tree upon which Judas is supposed to have hanged himself is going to be the center of my story.” I named “Flowering Judas” after it was written, because when reading back over it I suddenly saw the whole symbolic plan and pattern of which I was totally unconscious while I was writing. There’s a pox of symbolist theory going the rounds these days in American colleges in the writing courses. Miss Mary McCarthy, who is one of the wittiest and most acute and in some ways the worst-tempered woman in American letters, tells about a little girl who came to her with a story. Now Miss McCarthy is an extremely good critic, and she found this to be a good story, and she told the girl that it was—that she considered it a finished work, and that she could with a clear conscience go on to something else. And the little girl said, “But Miss McCarthy, my writing teacher said, ‘Yes, it’s a good piece of work, but now we must go back and put in the symbols!’“ I think that’s an amusing story, and it makes my blood run cold.

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