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Donated to the Department of English at Washington State University in June 1994, the Katherine Anne Porter-Eugene Dove Pressly Papers offer a highly selective but fascinating glimpse into the lives and careers of a significant American writer and the man who was her husband for roughly five years (1933-1938). The processed collection (a small Hollinger box of papers) is currently housed in the University Archives of Holland Library at Washington State University. The documents in it span the years 1924-1962, with the bulk of the materials dating from the 1930s and 1940s.

Eugene Dove Pressly (1904-1979) was Katherine Anne Porter's husband during the period when she created some of her most enduring fiction. The Pressly series consists of personal and professional correspondence, employment and military records, biographical papers, a folder of unidentified shorthand manuscripts, and two typescript prose fragments. During the period of his relationship with Katherine Anne Porter, Pressly was employed by the U. S. Department of State as a clerk-stenographer and translator in postings in Mexico (where they met), in Europe, and in South America. Pressly worked for the American Ambassador in the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalinist Terror in the years 1937-1941. From 1942 until the end of World War II, he worked as a translator in a mobile radio unit of the psychological warfare section of the Office of Strategic Services in southern France and the Rhineland. In addition to his rather interesting international career during the period 1928 to 1947, Pressly also had literary aspirations. The only quasi-literary effort to see publication, however, was the collaborative translation he did with Porter on Jose Fernandez de Lizardi's The Itching Parrot, which was issued in 1942. Porter's 22 May 1942 letter to Pressly describes how the publisher had cut their manuscript "to the bone," eliminating the illustrations, map, and notes they had worked up for the edition. Pressly's life took a downward turn in later years after he suffered a beating in a work-related robbery in 1966.

The collection's three Pressly letters to Porter offer a window on his personality. He writes on 28 June 1938, in the aftermath of their recent divorce, that "words were always difficult for me, on paper or spoken, and just now there is nothing that urgently needs to be said or spoken." But though apparently taciturn, the second Pressly letter, of 26 October 1939, shows his dark sense of humor. Referring to a black box of his possessions that Porter had complained was cluttering her home, he cryptically observes that "All of us have our black boxes, troublesome, in the middle of rooms." Curiously, the correspondence reveals that Pressly's mother did not learn of her son's divorce until some sixteen months after it happened, and this in the 14 August 1939 letter she received from Porter. The Pressly materials are especially good at documenting his life and activities through the 1940s.

The Katherine Anne Porter series is perhaps the more significant part of the collection. Many of the twenty-eight unpublished letters that date from 1934 to 1946, chiefly missives sent to Pressly, offer valuable insights into Porter's personality during a crucial period of her artistic development. Some document financial worries ("You know how it is, jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but dam little jam today." [KAP to EDP, 10 December 1937]), concern over Pressly's situation in Russia shortly before the outbreak of World War II, her intense devotion to French bath oils (Essence pour Bains), and her penchant for pearls and black outfits. They also briefly document the strained nature of the Porter-Pressly marriage. Her 17 January 1938 letter paraphrases her statement in the divorce petition, "your manner and attitude towards this defendent [sic] was in effect so distant (I suppose meaning you were usually somewhere else?) that she became convinced you did not love her any more. . . . Now this is the truth if ever I saw or said it." The correspondence reveals Porter's impatience to end an unfruitful arrangement in order to plan her "life definitely with no more threats of change and uncertainty, and waste and frustrated hopes" (KAP to EDP, 11 January 1938, dated 1937). In addition, Porter dashes off a series of striking psychological apercus on her estranged husband.

Porter offers a version of her genealogy in the 2 June 1934 letter to Elizabeth Merchant, then her mother-in-law: "My whole family, in every branch since 1780 at the latest, and in some branches earlier, are southern." In the same letter she notes that her love of travel and exposure to people were important aspects of the writing life: "For myself, I am interested in every creature living, I like hearing as much as I can about the world and all the people in it. I suppose this belongs to the nature of a writer for its [sic] no good writing about life until you've lived a little."

The 1930s was a period of intense productivity for Katherine Anne Porter. By 1939, three collections of stories sufficed to establish her as a major figure in twentieth-century American fiction. The letters in this collection show her life at this time hedged by intermittent health problems--at one point she was taking medicinal infusions--and financial worries. The letters also provide documentation of her work in Hollywood in the 1940s; she complained, "I will die if they [MGM] try to keep me" (KAP to EDP, 17 April 1945), despite the $2000 a week salary. In another letter from this time (27 September 1945) she evinces delight over the fact that "Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann and Bruno Walter and Lotte Lehmann" also resided in the Santa Monica area. These letters highlight Porter's persistent search for a suitable place in which to live and work. For a period of time in 1942-1943, she apparently found this in South Hill, her "blessed house in the country" near Yaddo, the artist's retreat, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Additionally, the Porter correspondence offers some insight into her fiction, her reactions to World War II, her views on life and people, and wry comments about her stints as a lecturer and "public" figure. The letters reveal levity, too; Porter and Pressly occasionally traded jibes over their weight.

The Porter-Pressly Papers at Washington State University add to our knowledge of these two people during an important period in their lives. In particular, they fill some gaps in our knowledge of Eugene Pressly, who has assumed a peripheral status in Porter scholarship but who was an interesting figure in his own right during the period in which he was associated with her. Porter's letters offer a portrait-in-miniature of a hard-working writer who in 1966 was awarded the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for literature.