ENGL 4310

Just as I said in class one day, I am absolutely in love with how eloquent and beautiful Katherine Anne Porter’s letters are. Even when Porter is clearly upset and angry, she remains eloquent. No matter what she is writing about, or to whom, her letters keep their eloquence. After reading letters to and about Hart Crane, it is obvious that they did not have the best relationship. Porter never goes into too many details, but from what I’ve read, Crane could be quite mean. In the one letter that we have to Crane, Porter basically chastises him for his behavior. In another letter about another situation she says that “I lectured Hart in my most motherly Dutch Aunt style” (38). But in her letter to him, it is a bit more than lecturing, “I think that you like making mischief simply through idleness and restlessness, and you don’t feel quite alive unless you are tearing at other personalities like a monkey…Let me tell you plainly that this bores me, I see through it, and I won’t have it” (46). Even when calling Crane a monkey, it still is wonderfully written.

In a letter that Porter wrote concerning her feelings toward Crane after learning of his suicide is very interesting. She expressed shock on hearing of “the manner of it” (83). This is the letter that I think really portrays her relationship with him. I recommend everyone to read it that has not. I find it quite sad that their relationship went from being friends, to Porter being very hurt by him. In another letter this is how she described him, “Look, my dear, at the utterly impossible human beings we have taken for friends… Hart Crane for mine…” (334). Crane obviously hurt Porter, and I find it interesting that when she heard of his death, she didn’t do the socially expected “don’t speak ill of the dead” thing. I kind of like the fact that she didn’t do that.“It was foul and outrageous, and as for me, his suicide has not changed the thing that happened. Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life. And I have yet to see the end, no doubt, of what he did, while he has gone, escaped, without explaining, without once giving a sign that he realized the sin he had committed” (83 ).

Even though Porter is upset about what had transpired between them, throughout the letter she expresses that they were friends and that she did want to view him in a good light “All that was worth touching in him he put into his poetry, and it is this I wish to remember, and keep and foster. Not that living corpse…” (85).

(I have never been in a situation even close to this, so I hope that I did not pass judgment, I just find Porter’s relationship with Crane interesting).