Flowering Judas.
Inscribed
Porter, Katherine Anne. Flowering Judas. And other stories. With a new introduction by the author. New York: The Modern Library, 1940.
12mo.; green cloth, stamped in black and gilt; buff and pink illustrated dust-jacket; lightly frayed; spine darkened.
Modern Library edition, published ten years after the first edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: "For Red Werner From Katherine Anne Porter 23 February 1959 New York, Camera Three. ‘It doth make a difference whence comes a man’s joy.’ Augustine." Werner was a New York advertising executive responsible in the 1950s and ‘6-0s for booking writers on talk shows.
In her foreword, dated June 21, 1940, and written specially for this edition, Porter refers to these unapologetically as “first fruits,” and notes, “I do not repent of them; if they were not yet written, I should have to write them still. They were done with intention and in firm faith…” The balance of the short essay is devoted to the plight of the artist at a difficult historical moment; in part:
I was not one of those who could flourish in the conditions of the past two decades…We none of us flourished in those times, artists or not, for art, like the human life of which it is the trust voice, thrives best by daylight in a green and growing world…. Most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of those threats [of world catastrophe], to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world….
She ends expressing the immortality of the arts, which “do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilizations that produced them.” She concludes, “They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away. And even the smallest and most incomplete offering at this time can be a proud act in defense of that faith.”
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