Newsletter of the
Society
Volume 12; November 2005
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Inside...A Bouqeut for Aunt KatherineBermuda: Katherine Anne Porter's Lost Paradise "Katherine Anne Porter's Secret," a poem by Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda On "Katherine Anne Porter's Secret" Katherine Anne Porter Society Activities at the 2004 and 2005 American Literature Association Conferences 2006 American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco Porter Activites at the University of Maryland Libraries The Year's Work on Katherine Anne Porter: 2004 and 2005 Highpoints of the Year at Katherine Anne Porter School Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center News Forthcoming Unrue Book Events Forthcoming KAP Postal Stamp KAP Fiction Prize at the University of Maryland
Other NewslettersVolume 1 |
Bermuda: Katherine Anne Porter's Lost ParadiseBy Darlene Unrue, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
[Editor's note: The following is an excerpt. For full article, please contact editor]
After Katherine Anne Porter spent five months in Bermuda in 1929, Bermuda joined Amecameca, Mexico (a town she visited perhaps only once), and Indian Creek, Texas (her birthplace, of which she had no memory at the time), to constitute a Utopian cosmos in her imagination. From 1932 to 1936 she lived in Paris, which became a new planet in her ideal universe, and in 1963, after she visited Sicily in the aftermath of the publication and financial success of Ship of Fools, she added Taormina to her collection of romanticized places. Although the glorification of all those places can be explained in the context of her constant search for an idealized home and her quixotic nature (in conflict with the cold-eyed realism of her imaginative writing), Bermuda of 1929 is distinctive for its timely effect on her creative force and its particular illumination of her personal psychology. In March of 1929 Porter was trying to recover from her usual bout with wintertime influenza and bronchial infection, and she was struggling with a depression that had followed the end of a brief and painful love affair. Friends collected enough money to send her to Bermuda for what they hoped would be a healing of her body and soul. They also hoped, as did she, that in the island seclusion and sun she could find renewed energy to complete her biography of Cotton Mather and two novels, one she called “Thieves Market,” set in Mexico, and one she called “Many Redeemers,” a three-part autobiographical novel that was inspired by the genealogical research she had done on the Mather family in Salem in the fall and winter of 1927. What was released powerfully and unexpectedly in Bermuda, however, was a potent homesickness for her family and her past that led her to the threshold of the most productive period of her life. |