Texas author’s survival of 1918 flu mirrors today
Richard Parker says the lessons Katherine Anne Porter left in her writings seem ‘forebodingly instructive’ about our own time.
KYLE — Nearly every day, I drove past that “dreary little place.”
It was no longer so dreary, lovingly restored over the years by a professor, a small legion of preservationists and even a long-lost nephew of a childhood friend of the woman who coined that description: Katherine Anne Porter. She was one of the greatest writers ever produced in Texas or, for that matter, anywhere.
A white-haired, independent woman, she was from Texas but not so much of Texas. She attained her first real fame with a work of fiction that best captured the last great pandemic, the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1919. Yet her work hauntingly applies, a century later, to 2020.
We seem as a people nearly incapable of mourning these dead then and now. In the wars and attacks, such as 9/11, we have lowered our flag to honor the dead, military and civilian alike. Yet if you look up across Texas and most of the nation you will see the American flag flying at full-staff, as if over 70,000 fellow citizens haven’t died. Yes, it flies at full staff at the White House, too.
Not long ago, I lived on a working cattle ranch just west of Kyle, at the very edge of the Texas Hill Country. Outside my window, big white Charolais cattle grazed, the remnants of a herd begun in the sky islands of Northern Mexico and brought to Texas by an historic ranching family. Sweet, wide-eyed cattle originally from France, they would bunch up at the fence to stare back when I stopped my car on my way out to the black-topped farm road.
Turning left, I would quickly come into the town of Kyle, ancient Center Street clinging to its history in the old rail town, even as the Aus
tin suburbs encroached, like armies, over the hill. And there, on my left, appeared Porter’s childhood home, slightly expanded and painted an avocado green. Its lawn neatly trimmed, it had been lovingly restored and transformed, then placed in the ownership of the nearby Texas State University which, in turn, employed me.
Porter only lived in the home briefly during her early childhood. It had been the home of her paternal grandmother. Porter was born in Indian Springs in 1890 with the name Callie Russell Porter. But Callie most cherished and emulated her grandmother, Catherine Anne Porter, even taking her name with the slightest variation, and lived in that little house until 1902, the year after her beloved grandmother died. Later, after school, a series of failed marriages drew her away from Texas, as did her her chosen line of work: writing, first as a reporter in Denver during World War I.
It was there that she wrote and set “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” one in a series of three short novels published as a collection in 1939 along with two other stories. It was also an account of a time that mirrors our own: The pandemic of the time was the Spanish flu.
Then as now, politicians prematurely ended quarantines and the virus struck like a diamondback, again and again, with two waves in 1918 and a third in 1919. Porter herself fell gravely ill right after settling in Denver and nearly died. After leaving the hospital frail and bald, according to biographer Darlene Harbour Unrue, she forever claimed that the short shock of white hair that grew back was a result of that near-miss with death.
Porter’s temperature had soared to 105 degrees, and while she was ill she had been threatened with eviction by her landlady, who feared the spread of the virus in her boarding house. Only her editor at The Rocky Mountain News saved her by getting her a bed in the overflowing hospitals of the time.
Yet while she was somewhere between life and death, a soldier she had been dating and who had been nursing her at her bedside before she was admitted to the hospital, Lt. Alexander Barclay, contracted influenza at a nearby Army post. By the time she was back among the living, he was among the dead.
“It simply divided my life, cut across it like that,” she explained later in a 1963 interview. “Everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, really. It took me a long time to go out and live in the world again. I was really 'alienated.’”
“It was, I think, the fact that I had participated in death and I knew what death was and had almost experienced it,” she continued. “Now, if you have had that, and survived it, come back from it, you are no longer like other people, and there’s no use deceiving yourself that you are.”
Porter connected her individual experience to that of a collective, the living mourning the dead and brought her concerns to life in the “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” In it, she recounts the illness nearly as a bolt from the blue, surprising in its suddenness, overturning the era’s gentility like an unwelcome stranger knocking over a living room lamp.
“Don't you love being alive?" asked Miranda, the protagonist. "Don't you love weather and the colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?"
Then at another turn, the new reality sets in, stripping the age of its innocence.
“It seems to be a plague,” Miranda said to her beau, Adam, “something out of the Middle Ages. Did you ever see so many funerals, ever?”
The title of her story was selected from the Book of Revelation, where death arrives on a pale horse.
Porter was 20 years past her illness by the time her collection was published in 1939, an event that signaled her arrival both in New York and in the literary world. She had been somewhat out of step with other famed writers from the so-called Lost Generation after the war. Instead of joining Hemmingway, Fitzgerald and others in Paris, she traveled extensively in Mexico. As noted in her front-page obituary in The New York Times, she said, “As a Texan and as an old North American, I had business in Mexico; I had no business in Paris.”
But as the mid-century neared, she began to catch up. And the first praise she won was for her work based on her experiences during the pandemic. Now, over a century later, her work is disturbingly accurate — about our own time. In practical terms, governors of half the states, including our own, are anxious to get us shopping under the guise of “getting back to work.” The death toll is higher than the president ever predicted, and climbing. And then as now, people will leave the cocoons of quarantine. And just as it did a century ago, the virus is likely to come back in waves.
Contrary to Porter’s tale, there is no collective grieving in real life to create a collective memory that will persist. We don’t see the dead on television or the funeral services of grieving families even as the politicians babble — incessantly and ignorantly — about the economy. The stock market plugs ahead against the toll of dead, sick, and out-of-work. Yet this time, there is no Lt. Barclay. There isn’t even a Miranda. Mourning, grieving and worrying is all purely a private matter, out of sight, out of the collective mind.
Then again, maybe that’s not so unique. The memories of the Spanish flu were fleeting, too. “The Spanish flu isn’t well represented in the Western literary canon,” Michael Agresta wrote in
Texas Monthly recently. “Perhaps it was forgotten as the United States’s attention moved on from the Depression to World War II, and then to a new society of affluence that doubted such plagues could ever touch it again.”
The details that laced Porter’s stories were often drawn from Texas and her time in the early 20th century. But the lessons that she left seem forebodingly instructive about the future. She finally won the national adulation she craved in 1966, winning both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, though her work had its critics till the end.
Her best-selling novel of 1962, “Ship of Fools,” recounted the sea voyage of a group of Germans from Mexico back to their homeland. Set in the 1930s, they are varyingly worried about living under Nazi rule or find ways to rationalize it. Of course, Porter wrote from both experience and memory, lacing both into her fictional recounting of the overcrowded ship and the squalid conditions. She drew on her time in Mexico and from her travels in Europe in the years before World War II. In the fall of 1936, she wrote to friends and politicians alike, warning of the rising tides of war on the continent.
“Wars are made by politicians of all shades and classes in pursuit of gain or for the enhancement of personal or party prestiges,” she wrote that October in a letter co-signed by Ford Maddox Ford and other noted writers. “This letter is intended, primarily, as a warning to politicians and those who influence public opinion to its ruin.”
I’m not saying that the period that will follow this one will be necessarily of armed strife. But the old ways are falling away, bit by bit and somehow quickly. The false hopes of cures, vaccines, instant remedies, soaring stock markets and magically restored wealth have all been promised before. And in each instance, they all failed, leading to things far worse: depression and war.
This is why 2020 feels more like 1930 than 1920.
“The past,” Porter said, “is never where you think you left it.”
Parker, author of “Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America,” is a contributing columnist for the Houston Chronicle.