KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
283
and probably illusory simplicity is seen as a potentially destructive
aspect of an ingrained radical idealism which has tyrannized the minds
of Americans for more than a century. The tendency of the characters
in these stories to envision themselves as martyrs to an ideal self-concep–
tion continually converts their actual experience into a form of ritual,
and they become as ruthless in their demands on the world as were
the Puritans, their spiritual forebears. This slightly fanatical strain of
American sensibility has engaged the imaginations of many of our
writers, both in their lives and their works, from Hawthorne and James
to Hemingway and Fitzgerald-all of whom were necessarily concerned
with persons truer to ideas than to themselves. Such persons ask that
the world be an arena in which they
be
allowed
to
prove their in–
corruptibility; when it is not, they make it so, withdrawing into areas
of fantasy where it is possible for them (though at the cost 1)f increasing
estrangement) to maintain both their innocence and their invulnerability.
In
a period which might be characterized by its worship of near–
psychopathic styles of life, of elaborate and extreme forms of detach–
ment, these stories hit a nerve. Less guarded than Miss Porter's stories
usually are, they are also truer to her ambitions, more responsive
to
the
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