Promise Kept

PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER--Katherine Anne Porter--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Not many writers can sustain a literary reputation on the strength of one short story. But for almost ten years that has been the achievement of Katherine Anne Porter. Probably no U. S. writer has been praised so highly while writing so little. The story that made her reputation was Flowering Judas, a sensitive, finely-grained piece of prose, but hardly a lifework in itself.

Critics threw their hats in the air, hailed Miss Porter as one of the most promising American writers when it first appeared in 1930. They tossed them again, finding her just as promising, when it was republished in 1935.

Last week she kept her promise. Pale Horse, Pale Rider is a collection of three short novels which belong with the best of contemporary U. S. writing in this difficult form. A distinctive book, elusive as quicksilver, it has the subtlety that has marked all Miss Porter's writing, none of the preciousness that has previously marred it. Old Mortality tells of the legend-haunted girlhood and runaway marriage of Miranda, a skinny, freckle-nosed Southern girl who is such a relief after traditional Southern belles that she is almost an achievement in herself. Noon Wine is a deceptively artless picture of life on a South Texas farm, written with such quiet good nature that, when it suddenly turns into a tale of murder and suicide, the transition is almost as shocking as the events themselves. Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the title story, brings Miranda back, separated from her husband, working on a newspaper during the War, learning that Wartime love affairs have less chance of survival than influenza victims.

Baton Rouge. Pale Horse, Pale Rider is the second book in three weeks to come out of the new Southern literary centre at Baton Rouge, La. That eminent patron of the arts, the late Huey Long, inadvertently started a writing colony there when he imported a group of young Southern writers to give his Louisiana State University intellectual prestige to match its new buildings. Leader is Robert Penn Warren, who found time to edit a critical quarterly, The Southern Review, while writing his first novel, Night Rider (TIME, March 27).

Katherine Anne Porter is a newcomer to this group. Born in Indian Creek, Texas 44 years ago, the great-great-granddaughter of Daniel Boone, she was educated in Louisiana convents, worked for New Orleans and Manhattan newspapers, has lived in Paris, Majorca, Berlin, Vienna, Mexico City, where Calles' official cameraman used her shapely legs as models for a cinema short on shoes. In 1931 she went to Berlin on a Guggenheim Fellowship, met Goering, Goebbels, Hitler, whom she considers "detestable and dangerous," moved to Paris, where she lived for five years. Last year she divorced her first husband, married Albert Russel Erskine Jr., English professor and business manager of The Southern Review.

Now she is living in a two-room apartment on tree-shaded America Avenue in Baton Rouge. Charming, quiet, well-liked, she cooks, sews, collects old records and music, reads medieval documents, and modern poetry. Her slow writing bothers her not at all: "There are too many bad books without me trying to turn out two a year." But she is working on a novel, Promised Lands, wants to write four books, one for each section of the U. S. If they live up to Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the literary colony of Baton Rouge may turn out to be far more durable and important than most of Huey Long's works.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.