Flowering Judas.
Inscribed
Porter, Katherine Anne. Flowering Judas. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, (1930).
8vo.; gray paper-covered boards, brown cloth spine. In a specially made quarter morocco slipcase.
First edition of this collection of six previously published stories; 600 copies the entire edition. A presentation copy to Porter’s close friend and Parisian publisher, Barbara Harrison, inscribed: For dear Barbara with love/ at Mulhocaway/ April 30 1939/ Katherine Anne/ ‘Turning again that same corner, meeting again that same ghost.’
Even though Porter’s reputation as a short story writer had been solidified by 1929, Harcourt Brace was reluctant to publish this collection. Porter claimed that Harcourt was hostile, Brace lukewarm, and “a little worm” in the firm, named Raymond Everitt, was violently opposed. The literary mafia mobilized on her behalf, however, with Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and Yvor Winters all writing to Harcourt Brace, which finally agreed to publication but dropped three stories (“Virgin Violetta,” “The Martyr,” and “Theft”) and printed only 600 copies. Porter was humiliated, but had the satisfaction of reissuing the title in 1935 with “Theft” restored, and three new stories added: “That Tree,” “The Cracked Looking Glass,” and “Hacienda.” But even the six stories in this edition strikingly reveal the immense amount of insight, experience, and literary skill that Porter had acquired by the time she turned forty.
Born Callie Russell Porter in Texas in 1890, her mother died when she was two years old, and her father struggled to support his five children. Callie’s grandmother, Catherine Anne Porter, was the strongest influence in her early life and in adulthood Porter adopted a modified version of her name. Married at age 16, divorced by 25, Porter supported herself by reviewing music and theater for the Fort Worth Critic and then the Rocky Mountain News. In 1920 she migrated to Mexico, writing for several English language papers and working on a book of cultural reporting—Outline of Mexican Popular Arts and Crafts—that was published in 1922, her first book and a very rare one.
Several of these stories are set in Mexico, but Porter’s attention is focused on the interior landscapes of the women who occupy center stage in each piece. Whether a Mexican peasant or a modern American working woman, her characters are bold, complex, and vividly human. In “Maria Concepción,” (which first appeared in Century magazine in 1922), a Mexican Indian woman murders her husband’s lover and gets away with the crime—and even finds absolution--when the women elders of the town protect her from the male police officers and refuse to turn her in. The 1928 story “Rope” is a charming and quite funny story about a modern American couple in their new fixer-up country home. Porter shows how an argument about groceries brings into play the complex social and psychological issues that roil beneath the surface of any sexual relationship. (One of those issues being the equitable division of household chores!) The title piece, “Flowering Judas,” was originally published in Lincoln Kirstein’s famous avant garde literary journal Hound & Horn in 1930 and is justly considered one of Porter’s best. It is a subtle, skillfully drawn portrait of a young American expatriate woman who wrestles with her own sexual and cultural inhibitions amid the cynical politics of a Mexican revolutionary cabal.
Mexico was not the only place where Porter found literary inspiration. She traveled to Paris in the early thirties with her second husband, an American diplomat, and lived there for four years. It was there that she became friends with Barbara Harrison, who, along with Monroe Wheeler, ran a small publishing firm, Harrison of Paris. They put out Porter’s second book of stories, Hacienda, in 1934, and a book of musical translations, Katherine Anne Porter’s French Song-Book. The year that Porter gave Harrison this book—19
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