36
PARTISAN REVIEW
Katherine Anne Porter:
I.
All my past is "usable," in the sense that my material consists of
memory, legend, personal experience and acquired knowledge. They com·
bine in a constant process of re-creation. I am quite unable to separate the
influence of literature or the history of literary figures from influences of
background, upbringing, ancestry; or to say just what is American and
what is not. On one level of experience and a very important one, I could
write an autobiography based on·my reading until I was twenty-five.
Henry James and Walt Whitman are relevant to the past and present
of American literature or of any other literature. They are world figures,
they are both artists, it is better not to mortgage the future by excluding
either. Be certain that if the present forces and influences bury either of
them, the future will dig him up again. The James-minded and the Whit·
man-minded people have both the right to their own kind of nourishment.
For myself I choose James, holding as I do with the conscious, disci–
plined artist, the serious expert against the expansive, indiscriminately
"cosmic" sort. James, I believe, was the better workman, the more ad–
vanced craftsman, a better thinker, a man with a heavier load to carry than
Whitman. His feelings are deeper and more complex than Whitman's; he
had more confusing choices to make, he faced and labored over harder
problems. I am always thrown off by arm-waving and shouting, I am
never convinced by breast-beating or huge shapeless statements of general·
ized emotion. In particular, I think the influence of Whitman on certain
American writers has been disastrous, for he encourages them in the vices
of self-love (often disguised as love of humanity, or the working classes,
or God) the assumption of prophetic powers, of romantic superiority to
the limitations of craftsmanship, inflated feeling and slovenly expression.
Neither James nor Whitman is more relevant to the present and
future of American literature than, say, Hawthorne or Melville, Stephen
Crane or Emily Dickinson; or for that matter, any other first rank poet or
novelist or critic of any time or country. James or Whitman? The young
writer will only confuse himself, neglect the natural sources of his educa·
tion as artist, cramp the growth of his sympathies, by lining up in such a
scrimma~e.
American literature belongs to the great body of world litera·
ture, it should be varied and free to flow into what channels the future
shall open; all attempts to limit and exclude at this early day would be
stupid, and I sincerely hope, futile.
If
a young artist must choose a master
to admire and emulate, that choice should be made according to his own
needs from the widest possible field and after a varied experience of study.
By then perhaps he shall have seen the folly of choosing a master. One
sugp;estion: artists are not political candidates; and art is not an arena for
gladiatorial contests.
2. In the beginning I was not writing for any audience, but spent a great
while secretly and with great absorption trying to master a craft, to find a
