This Week in Texas History
by BARTEE HAILE

On April Fools’ Day 1962, Katherine Anne Porter published Ship of Fools, her first and last novel that put the uprooted Texan on easy street.

Callie Russell Porter began her long life in 1890 at a wide spot in the road not far from Brownwood called Indian Creek. She was just two, when her mother died and her father took his four small children home to Kyle.

For the next nine years, grandmother Catherine Anne Porter was the glue that held the family together. She was the real-life inspiration for the strong women in her granddaughter’s fiction and undoubtedly would have been pleased to have Callie borrow her name.

After Grandmother Porter’s death in 1901, Katherine Anne attended a private girls school in San Antonio. But her formal education came to an abrupt end, when she had to move to Victoria and support her unemployed father as well as herself by giving dance, voice and dramatic lessons.

Desperate to get out of the house and away from her shiftless sire, Katherine Anne married a railroad clerk in June 1906 a month after turning 16. Eight unhappy years later, she left husband number-one and caught a train for Chicago.

Following a two-year battle with tuberculosis, Katherine Anne covered the theater and society beats for a Fort Worth newspaper. She landed a job in 1918 as a reporter with the Rocky Mountain News but nearly died in Denver during the influenza epidemic.

As soon as she was back on her feet and could afford the fare, Katherine Anne traveled to New York, which served as home base throughout the 1920s. She sold her first short story in 1922 to Century Magazine and turned four visits to Mexico into working vacations with several articles on south-of-the-border politics and culture.

Her Roaring Twenties marriage was to a World War I pilot from England described by one biographer as “a charming rake, passive in temperament, who exasperated Porter.” The knot the couple tied in 1925 was cut the next year.

While in Mexico in 1930, Katherine Anne met Eugene Pressley. They spent most of the Depression together, the last three years in Europe as husband and wife. But the relationship finally ran its course, and she returned to the U.S. in 1936 without her third spouse.

In May of 1936, Katherine Anne made a pilgrimage with her father to her mother’s weed-covered grave at Indian Creek. The melancholy reunion supposedly brought them closer together but not close enough for her to attend his funeral six years later.

The restless writer stayed on the move living in Pennsylvania, New York, New Orleans, Houston (where she shocked relatives with rouged earlobes!) and Baton Rouge over two hectic years. She thrived on the gypsy existence cranking out a trio of classics with Texas settings – “Noon Wine,” “Old Morality” and “The Grave.”

In 1938 Katherine Anne took her fourth and final walk down the aisle with a graduate student nearly half her age. Twenty-seven year old Albert Erskine believed his blushing bride was in her thirties and did not discover until his wedding day that she was really 48. Neither the groom nor the marriage ever recovered from the shock.

The trilogy Pale Horse, Pale Rider made Katherine Anne a big-name author in 1939. She was pleased to have her work nominated for the first book-of-the-year award from the Texas Institute of Letters but crushed when the prize went to J. Frank Dobie for Apache Gold and Yanqui Silver.

Katherine Anne tried to put down roots with the World War II purchase of a home at Saratoga Springs, New York. But a lack of cash caused her to lose the place, and she headed for Hollywood in 1945 with high hopes of making a bundle writing movie scripts. This plan, like so many others, withered on the vine.

In 1948 the financially strapped author stumbled into a new career as guest lecturer at a series of prestigious universities. For someone who had never set foot in a college classroom, the invitations from Stanford, University of Michigan, The Liege in Belgium and Washington and Lee were especially gratifying.

A $600 speaking fee plus the prospect of a triumphant homecoming enticed Katherine Anne back to Texas in 1958, ending her 20-year absence. Surprised and flattered by the enthusiastic reception, she left with warm feelings toward her estranged state.

No sooner had Katherine Anne unpacked than a letter arrived with an Austin postmark. A high-ranking administrator gave her the distinct impression that the University of Texas had decided to honor her with a library. She was thrilled beyond words and quickly wrote back with a promise to donate her papers to the project.

But it was all a misunderstanding, according to UT officials. Ground was never broken, but an old woman’s heart was.

And that’s how Katherine Anne Porter wound up next to her mother in the graveyard at Indian Creek and her papers halfway across the country at the University of Maryland. Even in death the literary exile has not come completely home.

Editor’s Note: The childhood home of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Katherine Anne Porter is located at 508 W. Center Street in Kyle and is open by appointment. To arrange a visit, call 512-268-6637.

“Secession & Civil War” – latest “Best of This Week in Texas History” collection available for $10.95 plus $3.25 postage and handling from Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549 or order on-line at twith.com.