The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter is a collection of, you guessed it, short stories, written by, yes, Katherine Anne Porter.
It is a collection of 26 short stories and short novels (in the preface, Porter expresses a strong dislike for the word "novella"). The 26 stories are every short story Porter ever published, 22 of which were included in prevous collections and four of which were published in book form for the first time. In fact, the collection is almost Porter's entire fictional output, missing only her one novel, Ship of Fools. Many of the stories are set in Mexico, a country that Porter visited enough to consider a second home.
Tropes:
- Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: Rosaleen in "The Cracked Looking-Glass", a woman in her forties married to a man thirty years older who, it is hinted, can't get it up anymore. There's a local tough named Richards who sometimes winks at her and once offered her a ride. Rosaleen angrily says that if he ever laid a hand on her she'd shoot him dead—then she can't stop thinking about just that happening.
- Awful Wedded Life: The poisonous marriage in "A Day's Work." Mr. Halloran hates his wife, who is unquestionably a shrew; besides constantly belittling and insulting him, Mrs. Halloran is an extreme puritan who won't even take her clothes off to bathe, and seemingly hates her husband for deflowering her. He also blames her for refusing to let him take a job some years ago with the local political machine, a decisive negative turning point in his life. But as the story progresses the reader learns more about why Mrs. Halloran hates her husband. He, as it turns out, is a shiftless drunk who has been unable to find work since he was fired from his job seven years prior. He also beats her—in his drunken rage when he comes home he flings an iron at her head, and when the local beat cop notices the welt over Mrs. Halloran's head he makes reference to "this time."
- Call-Forward: In "The Leaning Tower", a 1941 story set in 1931 Berlin, Charles's barber wants to cut his hair in the style of "a little shouting politician" with a square mustache. The call-forwarding gets even more intense later in the story, when Hans, the most nationalistic of Charles's German friends, asserts confidently that while Germany lost the last war it will win the next one.
- Continuity Nod: A character named Miranda who is basically a Porter Author Avatar appears in multiple stories. The short story "Old Mortality" features Miranda as a child aging up to adulthood, who elopes as a teenager (as Porter did). "Holiday" is about Miranda spending a month with a family of farmers. "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is about Miranda as a young journalist, falling in love with a soldier, only to have her romance interrupted by the 1918 flu pandemic.
- Cultural Posturing: Otto in "The Leaning Tower" comes off as a young Nazi-in-training when he starts bragging about the beauty of Germans, saying "the true great old Germanic type is lean and tall and fair as the gods."
- D-Cup Distress: Laura in "Flowering Judas", an American radical with left-wing revolutionaries in Mexico. She has "great round breasts" of "incomprehensible fullness", which she covers with loose tops, because she is a serious revolutionary and does not want the attention. (She also has "long, invaluably beautiful legs" that she covers under long skirts.) She's irritated when Braggioni the revolutionary leader notices her chest anyway.
- Does Not Like Men: Sophia Jane in "The Old Order" has "a deeply grounded contempt for men" and "hates all men". She has good reasons, what with how the men of her family raped and impregnated their slaves—part of the story is set in the antebellum South—how her husband blew her inheritance on gambling and bad investments, and how years later, after she made something of a financial recovery, her sons also blew her money on bad investments.
- Downer Ending: "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" ends with Miranda recovering from a month-long bout with the flu that nearly killed her (this is during the 1918 pandemic), only to find out that her soldier boyfriend Adam has died of the flu. (Which he probably got from her, since he came to her sick room to tend to her.)
- Driven to Suicide: The end of "Noon Wine". Mr. Thompson is acquitted for the murder of Mr. Hatch, but he is unable to bear the social stigma he gets from his neighbors or, worse, the fear and mistrust from his wife and sons. So he kills himself.
- Drowning My Sorrows: In "The Martyr", Ruben drinks a whole bottle of tequila after Isobel dumps him.
- Dying Dream: The entirety of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall". An old woman, on her deathbed, dreams of when she was young and her groom did not show up for their wedding.
- Funetik Aksent: The German-American family that the protagonist stays with in "Holiday" says things like "You vait und see!"
- Good-Looking Privates: "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" has Miranda admiring her handsome boyfriend Adam, who is going through basic training before shipping off to France for World War I. He's not just tall and muscular, he's "infinitely buttoned, strapped, harnessed into a uniform as tough and unyielding in cut as a strait jacket, though the cloth was fine and supple."
- Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: In "Hacienda" Betancourt calls Carlos a "failure" and says he's looking terrible, deliberately saying it in English, a language Carlos does not understand.
- I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: In "Hacienda", a Mexican boy is literally Juggling Loaded Guns (well, one gun). It goes off, and shoots his sister through the heart.
- Indentured Servitude: "Magic" involves a young prostitute who, like all the other prostitutes in her brothel, are bound to the madam by debt slavery. Whenever one tries to escape, the madam, who is friendly with the cops, calls them and the girls are dragged back.
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: In "The Old Order" Nannie, an elderly black woman, remembers being sold as a slave when she was a child. When the white man buying made some crude comments about how Nannie was too scrawny, the slave trader says "it'll grow out of it."
- Kissing Cousins: In "Virgin Violeta", both Violeta and her older sister Blanca are rivals for the affections of their cousin Carlos.
- Murder the Hypotenuse: "Maria Concepcion" ends with Maria murdering Maria Rosa, her husband Juan's mistress. Juan covers for his wife and the one witness who saw Maria walking away keeps her mouth shut, so Maria gets away with it.
- Narrative Profanity Filter: In "Maria Concepcion", Juan Villegas is expressing his contempt for the officer who almost shot him for desertion. He complains how he was almost shot "just in the moment of my homecoming, by order of that—", and the next line is "Glittering epithets tumbled over one another like the explosions of a rocket."
- New Year Has Come: 1941 story "The Leaning Tower" ends with Charles and his buddies going out to a Berlin nightclub to celebrate New Year's 1931-32. It's all very symbolic as the friends—an international crew with an American, a Pole, and two Germans—talk about European politics and nationalities, the last war, and how the next one may go.
- Oblivious to Love: In "Virgin Violeta", Violeta is in love with her cousin Carlos, but he is completely oblivious, having eyes only for her older sister Blanca.
- Roman à Clef: "Hacienda" is told from the perspective of an American woman accompanying a Russian film company trying to make a movie in Mexico. It is obviously inspired by Sergei Eisenstein and his failed efforts to make a film in Mexico in the early 1930s. (The Russians are said to have left California under a cloud of suspicion as political subversives, which is exactly what happened with Eisenstein.)
- Shout-Out: The book begins with a short foreword by Porter called "Go Little Book" in which she briefly discusses her career. This is actually taken from "Go, litel book!
", the postscript that Geoffrey Chaucer put at the end of his long poem Troilus & Criseyde. - Streetwalker: Charles in "The Leaning Tower" sees some Berlin streetwalkers and reflects how they make him nervous and how he was intimidated the one time a street hooker gave him a come-on.
- Taking the Veil: Discussed in "Old Mortality". Miranda and her sister Maria get ahold of some lurid anti-Catholic literature about young women being involuntarily shut up in convents. They think it's the same as their situation, being stuck in Catholic school.
- Terse Talker: Mr. Helton, the laborer that the Thompsons hire to work their farm in "Noon Wine". He almost never strings more than three words together. Mr. Thompson describes him as "the closest mouthed feller I ever met."
- Thunder Equals Downpour: Played realistically in "Holiday", with the narrator watching black clouds on the horizon and noting that A Storm Is Coming. Then, "the cloud rack was split end to end by a shattering blow of lightning, and the cloudburst struck the house with the impact of a wave against a ship."
- Title Drop:
- In "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" a feverish, near-delirious Miranda sings "Pale horse, pale rider, done taken my lover away." It's from an old Negro spiritual, which of course is in turn inspired by the Book of Revelation describing Death as a rider on a pale horse.
- In "The Leaning Tower" Charles accidentally breaks his landlady's knickknack, a Leaning Tower of Pisa figurine.
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: Two old ladies, namely Miranda's grandmother Sophia Jane and Sophia Jane's sister (and Miranda's great-aunt) Eliza in "The Old Order". Sophia Jane was the girly girl, the pretty one in her youth who wore frilly dresses and acts as a proper Southern belle. Eliza for her part is a Maiden Aunt, who clambers around on stepladders to her sister's horror, who takes snuff, and who is something of an amateur scientist with both a telescope and a microscope.
- Translation Convention: Dialogue that would be in Spanish, between Mexican peasants, is rendered in English. This is obviously unavoidable in a story by an English-language author, but in "Maria Concepcion" Porter is careful enough to render Juan addressing Maria with thee, thou, and thy, the archaic English-language familiar version of you that corresponds to the Spanish tu.
- Victorian Novel Disease: Played straight in "Old Mortality". Cousin Eva remembers Amy and Amy's TB, and how Amy would cough Blood from the Mouth and the illness gave her "a flush on each cheekbone", and Amy would sit wrapped up on the couch surrounded by flowers. Cousin Eva, a modern woman and a suffragette, thinks the whole thing ridiculous and scorns Amy for not taking care of herself.
- Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: "Pale Horse, Pale Rider". Miranda has a colleague at the newspaper, Mary Townsend, who writes the gossip column. Her column is called "Ye Towne Gossyp."
