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(More customer reviews)I can't believe no one else has reviewed this book yet, but perhaps it reveals something about the way Katherine Anne Porter has been devalued in modern US literary society, all the odder since I can remember a time when she was the toast of the literary world, even when her novel SHIP OF FOOLS had been dismissed people still said, but her short stories and short novels are of the highest quality.
Darlene Harbour Unrue had her work cut out for her, but she had an incomparable advantage, she knew Porter slightly and so was able to make out what sort of person she basically was, so hard to discern from the long view. She was very beautiful in an odd sort of way, with prematurely white hair, great velvety eyes that looked purple in the right light, and a low speaking voice like Cleopatra's that made a lot of man (and Carson McCullers) fall in love with her the minute she parted her lips. Even Goering had a thing for her, if Porter is to be believed.
"If Porter is to be believed"--aye, there's the crunch, isn't it? She was nearly as famous for her lies as Anais Nin, and scholars and journalists early on believed very little she told them. Unrue reveals much about rhe five marriages Porter wanted to downplay, but more importantly she helps us understand just why some subjects were painful for her to revisit, so we come to empathize with a woman whose first marriage was nine years of real physical abuse, broken bones and hatred, a life that might well have driven her insane. Instead she picked herself up, shook herself off, and went completely independent. I have rarely read the life of a person so little connected with others, besides her acolytes like Eudora Welty. She seems to have played up her great beauty and her liberty, and she played games of use with each of her publishers, signing contracts she couldn't fulfill, running out on them despite her promises, and yet whining like all authors about their meanness.
She lied about her age, and her 4th husband didn't know he was a full 25 years younger than she was. In 1953 or 1954, she outdid herself by having a sexual affair with a man of 28 when she was 63. She could have given tips to Cher and, with her constantly propinquity, she probably did. I didn't know the extent of Porter's Hollywood connections, how she spent a year at Paramount trying to re-write MADAME SANS-GENE for Betty Hutton! Wish that baby got made! All in all, THE LIFE OF AN ARTIST is one of the very finest biographies I've recently read. Unrue backs off from making the highest claims for Porter's importance as a fiction writer, but in the interstices of her discretion a hunger for her work grows among us. She makes us want to read Porter anew, through the refracting surfaces of her insight.
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From the moment Katherine Anne Porter arrived on the American literary scene in 1922, the public was intrigued with her life. Yet she herself revealed only scant facts of her background and often gave conflicting accounts. She maintained, though, that a germ of her own experience lay at the core of everything she wrote.
In Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, Darlene Harbour Unrue finds that Porter's deceptions were a screen for deep personal turmoil. With unprecedented access to archival and personal papers, Unrue brings much new information to light. Porter's maternal grandmother was institutionalized; Porter had more marriages than she acknowledged; she lost babies to miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth, and she grieved over her failed motherhood. Ever present were her fears of exile and insanity.
Despite these constant fears, Porter (1890-1980) lived an extraordinary life that vaulted her from poverty and obscurity to wealth and the fame of being a best-selling author. She experienced or observed many of the major events of the twentieth century. So often on the move, she lived in Greenwich Village during its heyday as a hotbed of radical politics and experimental art, in Mexico during the cultural revolution of the 1920s, in Europe during the rise of Nazism, and in America during the Cold War. Thirteen years old when she first rode in an automobile and saw an airplane, she was invited in her last decade to observe and write about the launching of the final Apollo space ship. Asked to summarize her own life, Porter was fond of quoting Madame Du Barry: "My life has been incredible. I don't believe a word of it!"
Darlene Harbour Unrue is a professor of English at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. She has written several books on Katherine Anne Porter, including Understanding Katherine Anne Porter and Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction.
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