Katherine Anne Porter

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Literary San Antonio Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter statue in San Antonio's Sea World of Texas Sculpture Garden (©1999 SeaWorld of Texas, Inc. All rights reserved)	Between the ages of two and eleven, Callie Porter (1890-1980) lived in Kyle, Texas, with her grandmother, Catherine Ann Porter ("Aunt Cat"), whose name the granddaughter slightly modified and adopted as her own. Aunt Cat would later become the model for the jilted bride in Porter's famous story "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" (1930). After the death of Callie's grandmother in 1901, the family moved 50 miles south to San Antonio, where they temporarily rented a house near Woodlawn Lake. According to Porter's biographer, Joan Givner, Porter later "traced her love of Mexico and her familiarity with it to the early days in San Antonio, when it was full of political exiles from Mexico," anticipating the Mexican Revolution (79). Nevertheless, there were things she did not like about the "shabby Spanish town full of muddy streets and plaster houses with red-tiled roofs" (Givner 79), such as the slum-like Mexican quarter, the ubiquitous saloons, and the rough red-light district, which made the downtown streets unsafe for young girls. There, the Alamo at the beginning of the twentieth century was "a ruin which anyone could have bought (in 1903 Texas patriot Clara Driscoll pledged her fortune to buy a thirty-day option on it), and Porter remembered it as a place for picnicking" (Givner 79).
Woodlawn Lake, the vicinity of Porter's childhood residence in San Antonio	Although there was a fashionable residential area north of downtown around San Pedro Avenue in the vicinity of San Pedro Park, Harrison Porter settled the family in a rent house near Woodlawn Lake, located west of the downtown area. Later they were forced to move into an even more modest apartment. Porter's brief residence in San Antonio had ended by 1905, when the family moved to Victoria, Texas, about 100 miles southeast of San Antonio.
Restored Empire Theater in downtown San Antonio	Probably the most important benefit of Katherine Anne Porter's brief sojourn in San Antonio during her youth was the year spent at the Thomas School, a long-since demolished private academy for girls located near Woodlawn Lake and run by a competent and progressive educator, Asa Thomas. Although Callie was too unfocused and insecure to be a good student, she did gain valuable exposure to literature (especially Shakespeare), music, and drama. At the time she wanted to become an actress and performed one summer at the city's Electric Park with a stock company (Fowler 20). The students at the Thomas School also attended Tuesday morning concerts of the Ladies Musical Club and cultural events at the Empire Theater, which was a downtown landmark.
Bldg. that housed Thomas School on South Presa Tuesday Musical Club at present site in Brackenridge Park	While San Antonio may have exerted a positive influence on Porter's development as a writer, it does not seem to have made much of an impression on her as a location for her fiction, almost none of which alludes directly to the Alamo City. Of course, it is no secret that Porter had a negative attitude toward Texas in general and tended to downplay its importance in her career. On one occasion she told her fellow Texas writer, William Humphrey, "I got out of Texas like a bat out of hell at the earliest possible moment and stayed away cheerfully half a lifetime" (Fowler 18). Even her own recollection of attendance at the Thomas School later took on a negative tone in an allusion to "a rumor that I once went to a school in a thoroughly dinky girls school by a lake in the deep suburbs in an unknown area that I was completely unconscious of and which had no definite place in my life" (Givner 85). Nevertheless, in 1914, about ten years after she had left San Antonio, Porter did earn a dollar from the Chicago Tribune for contributing a piece based on the aftermath of a chaperoned dance involving students from the Thomas School and a local boys' school called the Peacock Academy: Dear Miss Blake: We were coming home from a dance on a brilliant moonlight night, picking our way very carefully along a narrow trail around a little lake [Woodlawn Lake] near my home. He was a shy lad and I was a shy girl, so conversation languished until he mustered up enough courage to slip an arm around my waist and stammer some incoherent thing about loving me, asking me to marry him as soon as he graduated in June etc., when, without warning, a heavy hand seized him by the back of the collar and tossed him into the lake, which was pretty deep there. As it turned out, the heavy hand belonged to the writer's older brother, who brought the brief romantic rendezvous to an abrupt and very un-romantic conclusion. (Givner 82-3)
Monument located on grounds of the former Peacock Academy
Old commercial building in Buda (mentioned in Noon Wine) Another view of Woodlawn Lake	More than two decades after this amusing anecdote by an apprentice writer, Katherine Anne Porter produced some of her best fiction during the late 1920's and 1930's, earning her the reputation among many critics as the most important literary figure to come out of Texas. Several of these works, such as the "Miranda" stories, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," "Holiday," and "Noon Wine," are among her finest and are given at least an implied Texas setting, the latter story most likely taking place in the Kyle-Buda area. While none of these stories specifically mention San Antonio, there is some evidence that it was at least in the back of her mind as an influence during this productive period. Janis Stout, for example, observed in a biography of the author that, when Porter received her first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931, she listed San Antonio as her home, even though she had not lived there in almost twenty years (7, 295). There is also the possibility that Porter's residence in San Antonio influenced her early, important stories set in Mexico, including "Maria Concepción" (1922), "The Martyr" (1923), and "Flowering Judas" (1930). According to Stout, Porter claimed "that the atmosphere of San Antonio. . . provided an early acquaintance with Mexican culture and scenes," although Stout tended to downplay the influence of San Antonio on Porter's Mexican stories. She did concede, however, that what Porter learned from her father's visits to Mexico, as well as her familiarity with San Antonio, would have given her some early indirect knowledge of Mexico, which she could have combined with her own residence there during the early 1920's (70).
House in Kyle, Texas where Porter lived as a child before moving to San Antonio	More to the point, a later story, "The Leaning Tower" (1944), does include two indirect descriptions of San Antonio, as well as one specific allusion. The setting of "The Leaning Tower" is Berlin between the wars (1931), and the protagonist is a young American painter, who has gone to Europe to study art. His name is Charles Upton, and he is actually from San Antonio, where he and his German friend Kuno had grown up together:
Façade of old "Thomas School" building on South Presa with Alamo shaped parapet	They had lived and had gone to school together in an old small city in Texas settled early by the Spaniards. Mexicans, Spaniards, Germans, and Americans mostly from Kentucky had mingled there more or less comfortably for several generations, and though they were all equally citizens, the Spaniards, who were mainly rich and showy, went back to visit Spain from time to time. The Germans went back to Germany and the Mexicans, who lived mostly by themselves in the old quarter, went back to Mexico when they could afford it. Only the Kentuckians stayed where they were, rarely did any of them even go back to Kentucky. (Porter 437)
	While the narrator takes some liberties with the preponderance of Spaniards and Kentuckians in the small, unidentified Texas city, the emphasis on its tri-cultural makeup --Hispanic, German, and Anglo--accurately characterizes San Antonio in the early part of the twentieth century. A few pages later in the story, Kuno compares the idealized streets of Berlin, which Charles has not yet seen, with one of the shabby hometown streets along which Kuno and he are walking: "The streets are polished like a table top and they are as wide as--" he would measure with his eye the street they were walking in, a very narrow crooked dirty little street in an old colonial Spanish city--"oh, five times as wide as this. And the buildings--" he would glance up, disgust in his face for the flat roofs lowering over them--"they are all of stone and marble and are carved, carved all over" (Porter 439).
Side view of Katherine Anne Porter statue	Of course, the idealized Berlin depicted by the German-speaking Kuno differs dramatically from the depressing, ominous Berlin in which Charles spends Christmas and New Year's when he later makes his European visit. In fact, it takes on a decadent tone when Charles discovers that one of his fellow residents in a shabby pension has suffered a disfiguring facial wound in a duel. Charles cannot help thinking how out of place the wounded Hans would seem outside the narrow confines of Berlin:

Trying to see him in America, in a small American town like San Antonio, for example, with that scar. In Paris perhaps they would understand, but how would it look in San Antonio, Texas? The people there would think he had got into a disgraceful cutting scrape, probably with a Mexican, or that he had been in an automobile accident. They would think it a pity that such a nice fellow should be so disfigured, they would be tactful and not mention it and try to keep their eyes off it. (Porter 464)

This passage makes clear to the reader that Charles is a San Antonio native, but, more important, it underscores the cultural gap between the diverse but provincial environment Charles has grown up in and the sophisticated yet decadent culture he encounters in Berlin.

A final, somewhat ironic, connection between Katherine Anne Porter and San Antonio results from the fact that the aquatic theme park, Sea World of Texas, located on the northwestern outskirts of the city, has erected a bronze likeness of the famous writer in its sculpture garden. This seeming juxtaposition of interests becomes less surprising, as a recent article in the Texas Monthly pointed out, when one discovers that the former owner of the amusement park, Harcourt Brace, was also her publisher (Graham 76).