280
STEPHEN DONADIO
like him, what about him does not merely serve the generalization. As it
is, both the character and his behavior remain hypothetical. The problem
becomes acute in stories like "The Martyr" and "That Tree," where even
the main characters are sacrificed to convenience.
No matter what their length, stories conceived in this way can
be
no more than anecdotes, and anecdotes can be boring. Miss Porter's are
no exception. To keep the reader interested, she must keep writing, and
her language, often forced to do the work of her imagination, tends
to
be overripe ("the leaves were budding in tiny cones of watery green
besprinkling the new shoots") and sometimes ludicrously violent ("a
single voice slashed the blackness"). Describing the site of an archaeo–
logical excavation, she selects a metaphor not only excessive but, under
the circumstances, pointlessly grotesque: "The long crevasses, in which
a man might stand without being seen, lay crisscrossed like orderly gashes
of a giant scalpel." All this to make an action conceived thinly and
sporadically appear continuous and dense with meaning.
With the possible exception of some parts of
Old Mortality,
Miss
Porter's "southern" stories are among her least successful. In part, this
is due simply to her fascination with the picturesque; but there are
deeper reasons. At the end ,of
Old Mortality,
Miranda swears off "the
legend of the past" and vows to strike through the veil of fantasy which
shrouds southern experience, at least to "know the truth about what
happens to me." The author attributes this vow to her heroine's "hope–
fulness, her ignorance." The judgment is ambiguous, for it admits the
desirability of the impulse to escape historical illusion, while it condemns
the ignorance which regards that escape as an imaginative possibility.
The ambiguity
is
crucial to
this
story, in which two senses of the South
are poised against each other; indirectly, however, it also allows the
author to justify her own infatuation with the fantasy on the grounds
that any attempt
to
resist it is hopeless and therefore naive. As a result
of this imaginative maneuver, Miss Porter's
encha~tment
gradually
assumes the character of a commitment.
The legend of the past, that "old painful structure of distorted
images and misconceptions," may very well be ultimately inescapable,
a secret part of what we think we are. It may also destroy us. Indeed,
in
Old Mortality
it has destroyed Gabriel; ridden by alcohol and dreams,
he
is
a man for whom the present is unreal, a man committed to the
memory of someone who could not have been as beautiful, and was
surely not as virtuous, as he imagines. Gabriel's condition parallels that
of the South. He is in love with a past which, although existing only
in his mind, continues
to
infect-and finally nullifies-the present.
