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Porter’s “Magic” at “A Salute to Katherine Anne Porter”

What follows are excerpts of the introduction to and discussion after the staged reading of Porter’s short story “Magic” performed by Jewell Robinson at the “Salute to Katherine Anne Porter” held at Hornbake Library on the campus of the University of Maryland on 13 April 2003. The names of the participants have been abbreviated and include Beth Alvarez (RMA), Jackson R. Bryer (JRB), Jewell Robinson (JR), Janis P. Stout (JPS), Darlene H. Unrue (DHU), and Alexandra D. Subramanian (ADS).

RMA: “Magic” was probably written in early 1927.[...]In 1965 when her stories were being collected into the volume that won the National Book Award, Porter wrote that “Magic” was based on a “story told me by a mulatto woman—then my maid in New Orleans who had worked in a Basin Street house.”[...]“Magic” saw publication in the summer 1928 issue of transition, the first of Porter’s stories to appear in one of the so-called “little magazines.”[...]In the summer 1928 issue of transition, Porter’s “Magic” was in illustrious company. The cover illustration was by Pablo Picasso. The first piece of fiction in it was a “continuation” of James Joyce’s work-in-progress, Finnegans Wake.

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JPS: “Magic” I have always thought was a cryptic and a puzzling little story. But there are two particular things about it that interest me...One, I’ve always thought it was a story that was very powerful about social class and economic exploitation, done with Porter’s typical indirection and subtlety; but, nevertheless, the theme is there. In this evening’s reading, when you came to the line, “it is a business . . . like any other,” that line never really jumped out for me so much until I heard you read it. The other aspect of this story that particularly interests me is how it fits into Porter’s emphasis on her Southern identity, which is one of the big puzzles in dealing with Katherine Anne Porter. She, indeed, was so determined to present herself as a Southerner, which really she was, being from Texas; but Texas can also be conceived as the West or the Southwest, and she wanted none of that. She wanted the South. She was so determined that she told people she was from Louisiana when, in fact, she was born in Texas.

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DHU: I think ["Magic" is] also personal to her in that she had gone through a dreadful marriage, a very abusive marriage, in which she was beaten by her first husband. I found it really interesting that the madam in the brothel loves to beat the prostitutes over the head. Also we find that our narrator, as she becomes more and more enthusiastic in the telling of the tale, gets a little rough with Madame Blanchard, who says, “You are pulling a little here.” At one point in this dreadful first marriage, Katherine Anne Porter was beaten unconscious by her then-husband with a hairbrush. And it was a head beating; so I think there is something very personal there. If we look at it in one way, she felt trapped in that first marriage because she didn’t have any place else to go. She was uneducated. Her father and her younger sister simply were itinerant. They were vagabonds. They wandered around and visited relatives, and she felt as though she had no choice but to stay in an abusive marriage until finally she did bolt in 1914. She tried marriage again after that first one also. And I think she felt that a woman in her circumstances at that time and in that place simply had no economic choice but to remain either in the first case in an abusive marriage or to continue to look for a man who would take care of her. In 1924 she herself suffered a still birth, and I think there is an allusion to what possibly is a miscarriage in the story when Ninette is beaten by the madam. The bleeding suggests that she might have been suffering a miscarriage.

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ADS: I made a few parallels between the way that Porter felt ultimately about her publishers and the way that--I know this might be dangerous--but the way Ninette feels about her madam.[...]While Porter cultivated strong personal friendships with her editors, these alliances over time always dissolved into acrimonious disputes, which, for Porter, resulted in bitterness and a sense of powerlessness and betrayal. The writer’s publishers insisted upon loyalty, and she came to view the tactics they used to ensure her loyalty as manipulative and mercenary. Ultimately she framed her alliances with publishers in terms of economic and artistic incarceration. Her indebtedness to her publishers financially, in addition to her unfulfilled contracts, caused her to think of herself as living in a state of peonage to use her word. She ultimately referred to her publishers at Harcourt, Brace as her “jailers.” In a letter to her editor Donald Brace, in which she declares her intention to abandon her contracts and pay back her debt if she could, she described her impending liberation from these contracts as equivalent to leaving her “cell,” so she could “really live in the world” (KAP to Donald Brace, 9 September 1952). Porter threatened to leave Harcourt, Brace on several occasions when her frustrations with the firm came to a boiling point. But she did not gain the courage to leave the firm for twenty-five years, and she only did so when her editor Donald Brace died in 1955. Her feelings of resentment toward the house culminated when the new president of the firm, Bill Jovanovich, when trying to convince her not to leave Harcourt, Brace, informed her that she “belonged” to the firm and in Porter’s words “belittled her chances of ever getting out of debt to them.” According to his logic, she was a valuable “property,” whose loyalty must be maintained because she “owed something to the stock holders” (KAP to Donald Elder, 23 October 1955). Porter’s pride as an artist was wounded, and her fears of being viewed as a mere commodity were confirmed.

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JRB: All of that bespeaks the deep ambivalence Katherine Anne Porter felt as a woman in the period of the twentieth century in which she lived. She wanted to be independent at the same time as she was obviously very aware of her dependence on men, and it seems as if that also operated in her relationships with publishers. From what little I know of people who knew her, that was one of the deepest ambivalences in her life: namely her desire to be independent but her awareness that she couldn’t altogether be independent and that, in fact, she wanted to depend on others, especially some of the men in her life. She was a very independent person. As many of you know, the reason Maryland has her papers is that she gave them to the Library of Congress and then turned around and decided that she wanted to withdraw them and just took them away and brought them to the University of Maryland. That’s not the action of somebody who is a meek, dependent person; that’s a pretty gutsy thing to do. On the other hand, there was an aspect of her that was very aware of her role as a woman in a male-dominated society in the twentieth century.

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JPS: The one story that’s told which, as far as I know, is quite literally true is that [KAP's father] favored whichever of his daughters happened to look prettier at the moment. He would push them away and say you’re disgusting if they weren’t dressed nicely and clean and then favor the other one because she was prettier. Sometimes I think you have to resent psychiatric theory because it’s so darn accurate, and this is one of those times. Many people have observed that her sequence of husbands and lovers tended to reproduce the appearance of her father when she was a pubescent young girl--again and again the man is tall and blonde and about thirty.

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JR: I was fascinated by this kind of power relationship between the narrator and Madame Blanchard. African Americans have always known that servants have their own ways of dealing with servitude, of outsmarting people that you work for and of finding ways to gain control. So there are always apocryphal stories about what some servant did to some particularly unpleasant employer. You can see just a little bit of control in the story.

ADS: What seems to be communicated to us about the character of Madame Blanchard is that she’s so voyeuristic and enjoys hearing this horrible tale so much. She’s really titillated and entertained by it. She doesn’t seem to be at all shocked or disgusted or just touched by it. It’s like she’s watching a really, really good movie that she’s really enjoying. It sort of makes her even more complicitous.

Audience member: Why did Katherine Anne Porter want to be known as a Southern writer rather than a Texan? What was to be gained by being known as a Southern writer?

JPS: The South had a lot more cachet as far as being literary; it had very strong political and economic ties with England, but this carried over to an image matter. Texas, certainly at that time and, perhaps, even today, had an image of rawness, of being an upstart, of being uncultured.