Ship of Fools
Page 65
In November 1920, at the behest of friends, Porter moved to Mexico and soon became a high-profile advocate for Mexican art and culture. Her experiences in Mexico provided subjects for her first noted work of fiction, Flowering Judas (1930), a collection of six previously published stories.
In August 1931, with the benefit of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Porter left Mexico for Europe—a lifelong dream—with her companion and eventual husband, Eugene Pressly. The narrative in Ship of Fools was based on this journey. Porter lived in Berlin, Germany, and Basel, Switzerland, before settling with Pressly in Paris in the spring of 1933.
The Paris years, during which Porter started or completed several celebrated works, were some of her most productive. During this period, she also became acquainted with future lifelong friends Glenway Wescott, Monroe Wheeler, George Platt Lynes, and Barbara Harrison.
The year 1936 saw the end of Porter’s European residence. She returned to the United States, publishing Pale Horse, Pale Rider three years later. By this time, Porter had gained a reputation as one of America’s finest writers. Her marriage to Pressly was essentially over in 1937, although the divorce was not granted until April 1938, the month in which she began her final marriage, this time to Albert Erskine. Porter and Erskine separated in 1940 and divorced in 1942.
As Porter’s literary reputation grew during the 1940s and fifties, her public persona flourished. She published literary reviews, nonfiction pieces, and acclaimed short fiction, including The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944). She traveled the country for speaking engagements, participated in radio and television broadcasts, took a residency position at the Library of Congress, and worked in the Hollywood film industry. She continued to focus on academia, teaching at luminous universities such as Stanford University and the University of Michigan, and also furthered her craft with other artists at the Yaddo artists’ colony in upstate New York. In May 1949 the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina awarded her a doctorate of letters, the first of many honorary degrees. It was around this time that Porter struck up a friendship with fellow Texan author William Humphrey. An early champion of his work, Porter enjoyed a close friendship with Humphrey that eventually soured over a professional disagreement.
For Porter, true financial success only came with the 1962 publication of Ship of Fools, which was released as a Hollywood film in 1965, just before Porter won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her fame and reputation grew with these combined successes, and she enjoyed her life as a local celebrity in Washington, DC, where she attended White House events during the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations.
In 1966, as her health began to decline, Porter announced that she would donate her papers, private library, and other personal effects to the University of Maryland, and moved to College Park, Maryland, in 1969. She continued to publish and to make public appearances throughout the last decade of her life.
At the age of ninety, Porter passed away after suffering several debilitating strokes. Her ashes were buried next to her mother’s grave at the Indian Creek Cemetery in Texas.
In 2002 Porter’s childhood home was designated a national literary landmark. In 2006 the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and Porter was featured on a US postage stamp as part of the Literary Arts commemorative stamp series.
Katherine Anne Porter; her paternal grandmother, Catherine Anne Porter; and Porter’s younger sister, Mary Alice, circa 1893–1894.
Porter inscribed the back of this photograph: “Aged 14 years, San Antonio, Texas. Photographer, Hegemann, asked my father to allow him to photograph me for a national photography show. He won first prize in the ‘Young Girl Division.’ He pinned up my hair and draped me in a black lace mantilla and set me in a fashionable pose and turned me to looking about 18. However it seems to be the only likeness that survived that year, 1904.”
Porter in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1912, during her unhappy first marriage.
Porter in a Fort Worth Little Theatre production in late fall of 1921.
Porter on board a ship with other passengers returning to New York after her second trip to Mexico, June 1922.
Porter dressed as a local in Mexico City, circa June–September 1923.
Porter, circa 1929. This formal portrait, probably taken in New York City, nicely captures the author of literary reviews, poetry, essays, and fiction.
Porter in the garden of the house she shared with Eugene Pressly in a suburb of Mexico City, during her last extended residence in Mexico.
Porter in September 1931 on board the ship on which she traveled from Mexico to Germany. This journey provided the inspiration for her novel, Ship of Fools.
The author in Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, April 1932. After a four-month residence in Berlin, Germany, Porter was in Paris briefly before joining Eugene Pressly in Basel, Switzerland, from June to December 1932.
Porter in the Notre Dame des Champs residence in Paris that she shared with Eugene Pressly from April 1934 to October 1936.
Porter and her father, Harrison Boone Porter, in Hays County, Texas, July 1937. Porter had returned to Texas for her father’s eightieth birthday.
Porter with Mexican carved coconut banks and a pre-Columbian vessel in Mexico, 1964.
Porter, circa April 1965, in the garden of the large Washington, DC, home she rented from June 1964 to May 1969. Photograph by her nephew, Paul Porter Jr.
Porter holding a key to the Katherine Anne Porter Room at the University of Maryland on May 15, 1968. Photograph by Bill Clark, University of Maryland.
Porter on May 15, 1975, on the balcony of the College Park apartment where she lived from May 1970 to March 1980. Photograph by Paul Porter.
All images are courtesy of the University of Maryland Libraries.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Earlier versions of some scenes from this novel have been published in Accent, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Mademoiselle, Partisan Review, Sewanee Review, and Texas Quarterly.
Copyright © 1945, 1946, 1947, 1950, 1956, 1958, 1959, 1962 by Katherine Anne Porter
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0353-7
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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