134
PARTISAN REVIEW
MISS PORTER'S NEW STORIES
THE LEANING TowER AND OTHER STORIEs.
By Katherine Anne Porter.
Harcourt~
Brace.
$2.50.
I
T HAS
for a long time been apparent that Katherine Anne Porter con–
sistently writes a luminous prose, of an exactness of choice and sug–
gestiveness of phrasing, which is altogether extraordinary. Miss Porter's
work has probably been subjected to the kind of scrutiny that most
writers hardy dare to hope for, rarely achieve, and can almost never
withstand. That Miss Porter can bear such careful reading proves
her much more than simply an excellent stylist. Even at their slight–
est, even when as in this, her latest collection, she has written stories
which at first glance seem to be little more than self-indulgent puffs
of nostalgia, she holds. so fast to reality, there is so much heart in
her accuracy, that the stories spread out beyond the bare meanings of
the words and the incidents related, to become authoritative and sub–
stantial images of an entire society.
Though there are no stories in this volume as first-rate as her previous
best, and the group has none of the unified impact, the impressiveness
of the
e~rlier
books, her essential qualities of purity and delicacy are
again revealed. It is difficult to trace the literary influences that have
shaped her writing; whatever of them she has found useful, she has
absorbed; there has been a transmutation of elements; she continues to
speak in her own voice, clear, straightforward, serene.
Miss Porter moves freely in a number of realms; her sensibility has
not impelled her to breathe only in a rarer atmosphere; she is
of
the
world, its objects are her familiars, she recognizes them and enjoys them
for what they are, knows their place in our lives. Her imaginative power
· springs from her alert sense of the actual. Though as "feminine" a writer
as Virginia Woolf, she could hardly be more different from her in this.
She has avoided neither squalor nor evil in their many aspects. To watch
the ways of human beings is to witness too many horrors, and Miss Por–
ter has not been afraid to look at anything, nor to tell what she has seen,
and a straight categorical account of the betrayals, thefts, murders,
hatreds and terrors in her stories would make her out another James
Cain. What lifts her every time is love; not love that sentimentalizes
corruption, but love that gives her a sad wisdom even as it carries her
to joyousness. In the face of ugliness she neither becomes hard nor suc–
cumbs to the bald jargon of the amateur analyst. She utilizes her know–
ledge in the ways of art. Her tone undergoes the subtlest of alterations
with her theme; and if she does not shock us it is because she knows
how to prepare us. She properly leaves the sensationalism to the lesser
artists, herself using a stricter method, which is more admirable even
where it does not altogether succeed, and which makes it possible to
contemplate a page of her writing, come upon unexpectedly, with a
sense of peace.
GERTRUDE BucKMAN
