ENGL 4310

I started out reading Porter's comments about William Faulkner, just because his was a name I recognized in the index, and when I read this, I knew that I wanted Katherine Anne Porter to be my friend Katherine:

"At last I got hold of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and it curdled the marrow in my bones. I have never seen such a cold-blooded assault on the nerve-ends, so unrepentant a statement of horror as that book. And such good bold sound writing. That must be taken for granted, for only a very good writer indeed could do what he has done. It left me so shaken and unnerved I could hardly believe the face of the sun. Not, of course, that one doesn't read worse in the newspapers, every day. Not that I haven't myself seen a man burned at the stake ... Not that things don't happen. But my God! There should be something in a work of art that gives you something to hang onto after the very worst has been told." (pg. 39 of Letters of Katherine Anne Porter)

Reasons this is cool:
1) This was in an April 24th letter to Caroline Gordon, a writer and, best I can tell, a friend of Katherine Anne's. The previous letter in the collection was written on February 11th, and in it, Katherine Anne expressed that she hadn't "read a word of Faulkner," so I think it's neat that she acknowledged a hole in her literary education and corrected it as soon as she could access a book of Faulkner's. I so, so often say, "Yeah, I've really been meaning to read that," and I don't take action to actually read it.
2) She says things really, really well. It left me so shaken and unnerved I could hardly believe the face of the sun.
3) She's done the thing I admire and adore of taking a common experience that folks don't commonly recognize, describe, or discuss - the fact that disturbing images/tales in fiction somehow carry a different weight than the ones in real live life - and she pins it down exactly.

By the by:
I think Katherine Anne felt none too kindly towards Mr. Faulkner. Weird. I get the impression that she saw him as an uppity fart. She wrote one letter to him and referenced him occasionally in her other letters.