ENGL 4310

I don't know how many of you have read the editor's note and introduction that Isabel Bayley wrote for Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, but they're delightful and illuminating, so I'd really suggest that you do. Something from the introduction stood out to me and reminded me of our conversation in class on Tuesday about the letter-writing process and how much advance thought Porter and O'Connor may have given to their letters. On page 7, Bayley relates this statement of Porter's: "Letters I always thought were meant to be personal messages standing instead of talk between two persons who are not arguing, or trying to convert each other to anything, or writing essays for posterity or even the present public - so the free-er and easier the tone, the nearer it comes to a letter, seems to me." And later on the same page, "I write at top speed with no effort, if I didn't I'd never get time to write letters at all."

If I didn't feel so completely happy about all things Katherine Anne Porter, I'd be a little maddened by this last statement. These letters are just too beautiful. Whether it was habit or natural talent that resulted in such well-phrased sentences and glowing insights with "no effort" on her part, I don't know and couldn't speculate on.

When we started out with the letters of Porter and O'Connor, Kay commented that the volume of Porter's letters (which, according to the book's introduction, is but a very small representation of all the letters Porter wrote in her lifetime) is larger than the volume of her stories. If being a writer of short stories is considered less prestigious than being a novelist, as we talked about once, then I think that being primarily a letter-writer would be seen a little lower even, because they're (a) shorter and (b) personal, so presumably easier to write. Whatever. Porter does the job impressively, and I'd rather read her letters than almost anything else right now.

P.S. I'd suggest looking up the index entry for "Porter, Katherine Anne: on letter-writing," because there are some fantastic entries, particularly about letter-writing as a feminine thing and on the legal mumbo-jumbo of ownership.