Rachel’s blog on Porter and Crane was interesting to me because I had also read Porter’s letters to and about Crane. Both of our authors know just the way to cut someone down to size with a sense of grace and wit that many people do not have. In her letter to Hart Crane on page 45 I was fascinated that Porter starts out quite benignly with “First about the lunch. I was disappointed too…” before she tells Crane that she did not go out to say hello to him because he called her a “whore and a fancy-woman.”
She writes, “You know you have the advantage of me, because I share the superstition of our time about the somewhat romantic irresponsibility of drunkenness, holding it a social offense to take seriously things said and done by a drunken person.” I just love how she will write something so matter-of-factly and underscore it with a biting comment. She later writes a little more bluntly, “I am beginning to believe that a sanitarium for the mentally defective is the proper place for you. If this is true, I should be sorry at having been angry with you. But I think it is time you grew up and stopped behaving like a very degenerate adolescent.”
When we talked about the letters in class, we were always fascinated by the way in which O’Connor and Porter get after people and how that wit often carried over into their stories. It’s a shame that people just can’t insult other people like they used to.
Tags: bio/geography, Jillian Pagan, letters, Porter, response