Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

By Darlene Harbour Unrue

Katherine Anne Porter Remembered is a collection of reminiscences and memoirs by contemporaries, friends, and associates of Porter offering a revealing and intimate portrait of the elusive and complex American writer.

From a fractured and vagabond girlhood in Texas, Porter led a wildly itinerant life that took her through five marriages, innumerable love affairs, and homes in Colorado, New York, Paris, Mexico, Louisiana, California, and Maryland. With very little formal education, she grew through sheer force of will to become a major American writer of short stories and the author of several books including Flowering Judas and other stories; Ship of Fools; Pale Horse; Pale Ride; Noon Wine; and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Because of Porter’s own dissembling and half-truths about her life, as well as the numerous factual errors that persist in biographical entries and literary dictionaries, a complete and accurate portrait of her life has been hard to establish. The 63 reminiscences gathered in this book paint a vivid portrait of Porter and are testaments to her extraordinary beauty, her gift for mesmerizing and charming audiences and friends, her yearnings for a lasting home, her delusions about love, the astonishing range and scope of her reading, her sharp tongue and vindictiveness, and her final paranoid renunciations of friends and family. Along the way, Porter formed friendships with Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Hardwick, Flannery O’Connor, and CleanthBrooks whose remembrances of her are included in this volume. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: May 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9780817384586

Darlene Harbour Unrue

Darlene Harbour Unrue is professor of English at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. She has authored or edited several books on Katherine Anne Porter, including Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter: Chronicles of a Modern Woman, Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, Understanding Katherine Anne Porter, and Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction. Unrue's work has also been published in The Southern Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature, and The Henry James Review.

Book preview

Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

AMERICAN WRITERS REMEMBERED

Jackson R. Bryer, Series Editor

Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

Edited by

DARLENE HARBOUR UNRUE

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

Copyright © 2010

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: AGaramond

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Katherine Anne Porter remembered / edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue.

          p.   cm. — (American writers remembered)

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978-0-8173-1667-9 (cloth: alk. paper); — ISBN 978-0-8173-8458-6 (electronic)

 1. Porter, Katherine Anne, 1890–1980. 2. Porter, Katherine Anne, 1890–1980—Friends and associates. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Unrue, Darlene Harbour.

   PS3531.O752Z718 2010

   813'.52—dc22

   [B]

2009039638

In memory of John Gregory Unrue (1961–2008)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Introduction

PART 1. TEXAS AND COLORADO, 1890–1919

1. Anna Gay Porter Holloway

2. Donald Stalling

3. Willene Hendrick

4. Erna Schlemmer Johns

5. Paul Crume

6. Pauline Naylor

7. Kathryn Adams Sexton

8. Kitty Barry Crawford

PART 2. NEW YORK, CONNECTICUT, AND MEXICO, 1920–1931

9. W. H. Cowles

10. J. Edgar Hoover

11. Josephine Herbst

12. Matthew Josephson

13. Robert Plunkett

14. Elizabeth Anderson

15. Winifred Hill

PART 3. EUROPE, TEXAS, AND LOUISIANA, 1932–1940

16. Glenway Wescott

17. Toni Willison

18. Paul Porter

19. Breckenridge Porter

20. Cleanth Brooks

21. Eudora Welty

22. John Edward Hardy

PART 4. NEW YORK, WASHINGTON, DC, AND CALIFORNIA, 1941–1951

23. Marcella Comès Winslow

24. Eleanor Clark

25. William Goyen

26. Richard Scowcroft

27. Isabel Bayley

28. John Malcolm Brinnin

29. Elizabeth Spencer

PART 5. NEW YORK, EUROPE, MICHIGAN, VIRGINIA, AND WASHINGTON, DC, 1952–1961

30. Elizabeth Hardwick

31. Seymour Lawrence

32. David Locher

33. Jeanne Rockwell

34. Barbara Thompson Davis

35. Rita Johns

36. Flannery O’Connor

37. James Ruoff

PART 6. NEW YORK, WASHINGTON, DC, AND MARYLAND, 1962–1973

38. Frederic Prokosch

39. E. Barrett Prettyman Jr.

40. John Prince

41. Michael Scott

42. Enrique Hank Lopez

43. William R. Wilkins

44. Kathleen Feeley

45. Maura Eichner

46. Clark Dobson

47. M. M. Liberman

PART 7. TEXAS AND MARYLAND, 1974–1981

48. Charlotte Laughlin

49. Joseph Gallagher

50. Ted Wojtasik

51. Jane DeMouy

52. Lynn Darling

List of Reminiscences

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

Anna Gay Porter, 1905

Baby Callie, Harry Ray, and Anna Gay, c. 1891–92

Katherine Anne Porter, Roscoe Carnike, and Hunter Gardner in the Vagabond Players’ 1921 production Poor Old Jim

Katherine Anne Porter and Josephine Herbst

Katherine Anne Porter at dining table in Mixcoac house near Mexico City, 1931

Katherine Anne Porter, Glenway Wescott, and Monroe Wheeler

Corporal Harrison Paul Porter Jr.

A drawing made in 1944 by Porter

Katherine Anne Porter and goddaughter Rosanna Warren

Isabel Bayley

Katherine Anne Porter’s godson, Daniyal Mueenuddin, with David Martin and Barbara Thompson Davis

Katherine Anne Porter in one of the glamour photographs by photographer George Platt Lynes

Katherine Anne Porter with Major Glover Johns Jr. and other military men at Virginia Military Institute

Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, and one of O’Connor’s chickens that Porter admired

Katherine Anne Porter and attorney E. Barrett Prettyman Jr.

Sister Kathleen Feeley, Katherine Anne Porter, and Sister Maura Eichner

Addie Hubbard, Clark Dobson, and Katherine Anne Porter

Charlotte Laughlin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Alta Ada Schoner

Ted Wojtasik

Acknowledgments

In the course of preparing this volume of reminiscences, I have become indebted to many persons. First, I would like to thank those who set down their memories of Katherine Anne Porter and allowed them to be included in this collection. I am also grateful to those persons I interviewed between 1981 and 2000 who were willing to contribute their recollections to my biography of Porter. Now, transcriptions of those interviews fill in a significant portion of Porter’s portrait. I remain ever grateful to Barbara Thompson Davis and Harrison Paul Porter Jr. for their sustained support of my work on Porter in addition to providing essays for the present work.

I appreciate the careful and judicious reading of the manuscript by Jackson R. Bryer, editor of the American Writers Remembered series, whose suggestions greatly improved the shape and content of the collection; and Beth Alvarez, archivist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who made helpful recommendations that strengthened the accuracy of the collection. The assistance of doctoral student Karen Roop at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was also particularly valuable.

Finally, I thank my husband, John Unrue, for continuous wise counsel and unflagging love and support.

Chronology

Introduction

[. . .] to give a true testimony it is necessary to know and remember what I was, what I felt, and what I knew then, and not confuse it with what I know or think I know now.

—Katherine Anne Porter, Collected Essays

In 1940, when Katherine Anne Porter was fifty years old, Paul Crume published a review of her Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels and remarked on the extraordinary fact that despite Porter’s having been named a new master of American prose nine years earlier, with the publication of Flowering Judas (her first collection of stories), almost nothing was in print about her. She remains more a literary reputation than a person, he wrote.¹ Crume probably knew that three years after the publication of Flowering Judas, Porter had supplied Stanley Kunitz with a brief autobiographical entry for Authors Today and Yesterday. However, it included only a few factual details (such as the year she received her first Guggenheim Fellowship). Crume probably would not have identified the lie about her birth year (she added four years) or the half-truth about her relationship to Daniel Boone (her ancestor was Jonathan Boone, brother to Daniel). But Crume was correct that Katherine Anne Porter the person was not to be found at that time in any published account of her life. He began what was to be a long process of filling in details and correcting the record. He looked up persons in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Arlington who had known Porter as early as 1916 and asked them to recollect her from those years, their reminiscences to be woven into his review.

For years, Crume’s review and the entry in Authors Today and Yesterday were the starting point for biographical studies of Porter.² When Donald Stalling was writing a master’s thesis on Porter and her work in the early 1950s, he retraced Crume’s ground and added the recollections of other persons who had known the Porter family still earlier, in Indian Creek and Kyle. George Hendrick in his Katherine Anne Porter (1965), with the help of his wife, Willene, added more to the gradually increasing body of knowledge about Porter, which by then included the Denver research of Kathryn Adams Sexton. Nevertheless, as late as the 1970s there remained many gaps, especially from 1905 to 1930, despite Porter’s offering selected details about herself and correcting some of the errors, including that of her age.

Since Porter’s death in 1980, her life has been taking shape publicly. As archives at Yale, Stanford, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Austin, and especially the massive Porter archive at the University of Maryland, College Park, have been steadily perused and enhanced by the addition of other persons’ papers, and as public documents and records have been increasingly accessible, Porter has come more and more into focus. In Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (1982), the first full biography of Porter, Joan Givner supplied valuable details about Porter’s hospitalization with tuberculosis and her mysterious first marriage. After extensive research for his Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico: The Illusion of Eden (1992), Thomas F. Walsh constructed a thorough chronicle of Porter’s experiences in Mexico from 1920 to 1931. My own research for Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist (2005) filled in yet more gaps, and I was able also to correct some of the errors in her biographical record that were the result not only of Porter’s own dissembling and misdirection but also of hasty or wrong conclusions reached and perpetuated by other scholars and journalists. In some respects, because biographical entries in encyclopedias and literary dictionaries and online continue to recycle old errors, an accurate account of Porter’s life has yet to become fixed in the general domain.

Katherine Anne Porter was born on 15 May 1890 in Indian Creek, Texas, a small farming community in Brown County. She was the fourth child of Harrison Boone Porter and Mary Alice Jones Porter, who christened her Callie Russell in honor of the twelve-year-old daughter of their neighbors and friends William and Marinda Russell. Harrison and Alice’s three older children were Anna Gay, Harry Ray (later Harrison Paul), and Johnny, who died at about one year of age. Their fifth child, a daughter, eventually named Mary Alice but always called Baby, was born in January 1892, and Alice Porter died two months later. Harrison then moved with his four children to Hays County, Texas, to live with his widowed mother, Catharine Ann Skaggs Porter. Until 1901 Callie lived in relative security under the dominion of her grandmother. In 1901, however, when her grandmother died, she entered a long period of anxiety and insecurity initiated by a period of vagabondage with her father and extending through bouts of serious illness, five unsuccessful marriages, and many years of struggling to support herself financially.

Porter’s formal schooling was modest, comprising erratic education by governesses, a few years in the Kyle public school, sporadic and brief enrollment in convent schools in Texas and Louisiana, and one full year at a private school in San Antonio. But her real education, by means of omnivorous reading that began at an early age, an insatiable curiosity about numerous subjects, and a social talent that drew important and interesting persons to her, lasted until the end of her life. Despite obstacles and setbacks—for some of which she was responsible, while others were tied to the social and economic realities of her time and place—she achieved the greater portion of the artistic success she had set my heart upon, as she described the visible realization of her goals in a letter to her family at the end of 1920.³ By 1980, when she died, she had a sterling reputation as an artist, the label she chose for herself and placed higher than any other human one.

During my research for Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, I quickly learned the importance of public documents, but I learned also the special value of eyewitness accounts—reminiscences—that add a living, speaking human being to the data. However, as every biographer knows, the vividness and charm of reminiscences can be misleading. Recollections of events that took place many years, even decades, earlier may contain outright inaccuracies or at least impressions tainted by time and intervening experience. And some writers may inject fictional elements into their reminiscences in order to tell better stories, while others may fall prey to the inclination to sanctify a person who was an admired or beloved friend or relative.

Caveats aside, the reminiscences in this collection are raw biography, with unexpectedly rich portraiture. These sixty-three pieces, written by fifty-two authors, include essays, letters, interviews, newspaper and journal articles, transcribed talks at conferences and symposia, government reports, excerpts from autobiographies that interpolate scenes featuring Porter, and poems that compress memories of her into lyrical recollections. Twenty-five of the reminiscences have not been previously published. Many are culled from those I gathered during my research and distilled in my Porter biography to a word, a phrase, a sentence, or a short paragraph. Eight others have been written especially for this volume.

Some of the authors of these reminiscences, aware of the unreliability of memory, have depended on diaries, personal correspondence, notes, and audiotapes of Porter to help them recall her more completely and accurately. Some of the pieces entwine biography and autobiography as memoirists have had to recollect their younger selves and their youthful viewpoints to re-create their relationships with Porter.

The remembrances are told from different degrees of historical perspectives: at one extreme is Marcella Winslow’s letters to her mother-in-law written only a few days after the events described; at the other is Robert Plunkett’s clear-eyed recollections three-quarters of a century after he registered a child’s impression of Porter in 1930. Some of the authors of these pieces did not know Porter personally but reported the recollections of those who did.

A few reminiscences are no more than a long paragraph that provides a vignette or tableau, while others are deeply detailed, substantial essays. The range is extensive. Porter is seen in the hour of her birth and at the moment of her death, with scenes from the intervening years strung like beads on an unbreakable cord, as she once described her accumulation of experiences.⁴ The years from 1905 to 1915 are largely, but not completely, absent from the reminiscences. Porter herself did not want to talk about those years of painful struggle except obliquely, and those persons, such as her sister Gay, who knew the whole truth, mentioned only glancingly that period in Porter’s life.

Not all the reminiscences are elegiac. John Prince recounts the stages of the dissolution of his friendship with her, and Breckenridge Porter remembers his and his aunt’s mutual disapproval of one another. A bitter M. M. Liberman revisits events that culminated in her unceremoniously dropping him as trustee of her literary estate.

Common threads run through the collection. Almost everyone remembers Porter’s extraordinary beauty, and many recall her ability to mesmerize an audience or charm a friend. Her struggle to release (and sustain) her creative flow was apparent to all who knew her well. Her yearning for a home and her delusions about love are as visible as the range of her knowledge and the scope of her reading. Even those who love her acknowledge her sharp tongue and, in the last years, her paranoid renunciation of friends and relatives. Her showy purchase of a wooden coffin morbidly fascinates many persons. Her complexity and contradictions are evident in the many recollected facets of her personality, illustrating the validity of her declaration to Kenneth Burke in 1954 that she felt as if she were at least two regiments of people inside, always at civil war.⁵

A subject that implicitly binds the pieces together is the names by which Katherine Anne Porter was known. Erna Schlemmer Johns remembers her as Callie. Miss Callie, Erna’s son and daughter-in-law call her. She is of course Aunt Katherine to her nephews Paul and Breckenridge, and Miss Porter to polite young persons. Glenway Wescott calls her Porter, but to most persons she is Katherine Anne, as she insisted. It would seem, she told one of her agents, that I am called by my first name by any one who ever heard of me. I see no harm in it.⁶ Elizabeth Hardwick confirmed Porter’s assertion: She was spoken of simply as ‘Katherine Anne,’ whether one was actually acquainted with her or not.⁷

In selecting the pieces for this collection I considered the contributions each one could make to a composite portrait of Porter. Some I omitted because others covered the same ground more vividly or extensively. For example, my interview with Janet Lewis Winters and Wallace Stegner’s unsent letter to Joan Givner were superseded by my interview with Richard Scowcroft, who recounted Porter’s Stanford experience with extensive detail absent in the other two. Likewise, the essential points in Paul Porter’s discussion of his aunt’s sense of humor is present in his Remembering Aunt Katherine. Some I rejected because the tidbit of recollection was too slight to stand by itself. For example, although Edgar Skidmore, who shared with me a considerable amount of information about the expatriate American community in Mexico in the 1920s, remembered Eugene Pressly clearly, he only vaguely remembered meeting Porter once at the Regis Hotel.

Within the selections in this volume I have excluded material that was taken from published sources about Porter’s life or works and was not part of the personal experience of the person reminiscing. I have corrected typographical errors and obvious misspellings in both the published and unpublished sources. I made consistent the italicizing of book titles and the placing of quotation marks around titles of short stories, essays, and works-in-progress.

I have placed my own ellipses in brackets and have left unbracketed those that appear in the original sources. Unless otherwise explained, all bracketed information is mine. It is important to distinguish, however, between ordinary ellipses and Porter’s own running series of points, which were intended to create a conversational tone (an eccentricity adopted by some of the persons writing about her). Whether that of Porter or someone else, I standardized the series to five points, in addition to a terminal period. With the exception of the series of points, I left alone direct quotes from Porter’s letters with their original, sometimes unconventional, punctuation and spelling. In the transcribing and editing of letters, TLS is used to describe a typed letter signed, and ALS is used to describe an autograph (written in the author’s own hand) letter signed. I organized for coherence the interviews I transcribed from shorthand notes and audiotapes, omitting the questions I asked, but left intact and unedited the words of the person interviewed.

With three exceptions I have arranged the pieces chronologically according to what I determined was each author’s first meeting with Porter. Although evidence suggests that Frederic Prokosch met Porter in the late 1940s or early 1950s, I let stand his dating of a 1962 party he says he attended with Porter since one of the main statements he recalls her making had to have been made in 1962. John Prince met Porter in the early 1950s and became better acquainted with her when she rented a house near his and his wife’s house in 1959, but his reminiscence focuses almost exclusively on the winter of 1963–64, where I place it in the sequence. Although Jane DeMouy was introduced to Porter in 1978, her reminiscence, which concentrates on Porter’s last weeks and final moments, more properly belongs in the 1980 slot. The reminiscences, many of which overlap because they cover a number of years, fall naturally into seven divisions, which are dated and identified by the places Porter lived during the designated years.

1

Texas and Colorado, 1890–1919

Although for many years not much was known publicly about the first three decades of Katherine Anne Porter’s life—years of loss, vagabondage, illness, bad marriages, poverty, and struggles to gain an artistic foothold—reminiscences by her sister Gay, neighbors at Indian Creek, and her friend Erna Schlemmer Johns unveil her childhood years. Kitty Barry Crawford pulls back the curtain on Porter’s battles with tuberculosis and nearly fatal influenza in 1918. Beniti McElwee and Rosalind Gardner (who shared their recollections with Pauline Naylor), unnamed persons who recalled Porter to Paul Crume, and former Rocky Mountain News colleagues who shared their memories with Kathryn Adams Sexton reveal Porter’s important writing apprenticeship in Fort Worth, Dallas, and Denver. Insights into Porter’s complex personality and sources of some of her most significant stories and short novels are discovered in the process.

1 / Anna Gay Porter Holloway

Anna Gay Porter Holloway (1885–1969) was the first child of Mary Alice Jones Porter (1859–92) and Harrison Boone Porter (1857–1942). Married to Thomas J. Holloway in a double wedding with Katherine Anne and John Henry Koontz in 1906, she lived most of her life in Texas and Louisiana, working as a bookkeeper in later years. Because Gay was the only one of Harrison and Alice’s surviving four children who had memories of the family’s years at Indian Creek, when Porter began to mine her own early life for her fiction, she pressed Gay for information about their mother and their childhood. Many of Gay’s letters over the years contain passages that re-create scenes from the past.

Source: Gay Porter Holloway to Katherine Anne Porter, 14 December 1955, TLS, Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, Libraries.

I carry so many pictures, some of them quite beautiful, that the rest of you know nothing of—one is of that place in Indian Creek, which was a place of beauty, as I remember. Between the house (not the one there now—ours was torn down when you were there)¹ and Indian Creek was one of the most beautiful vineyards I ever saw, with great clusters of purple and white grapes. While you were being born, little fat brother² and sister Gay were out there filling up on grapes which were just turning, and I remember to this day how deliciously cool and sweet they were. When they called us to come see the new baby (you) we hated to leave the grapes, but we went in—Mother smiled, turned back the cover and said—Do you want to see my little tad and there you were, like a new born little black puppy, your little black curls sticking to your head in damp waves and curls.

Source: Gay Porter Holloway to Katherine Anne Porter, 25 July 1954, TLS, Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, Libraries.

And I remember you on a little foot stool showing off before Cousin David Porter (the old Baptist minister)³ singing your little made up songs, and making your little speeches, and all the old Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians were fully convinced you were possessed of the devil and would come to no good end. And dear Grandmother⁴ was so proud of you and always showed you off—and did you love it.

Source: Gay Porter Holloway to Katherine Anne Porter, 3 November 1962, TLS, Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, Libraries.

I have always loved you so, never remember being angry with [you] except when you were a little girl you read in a beauty column that if you ate an onion every night, it would make you beautiful; you got it in your curly little black head that it had to be eaten in bed, and as you were my bedfellow, I could have kicked you to Jericho.

Oh, and I was just receiving beaus, you and the baby⁵ would walk in boldly and confiscate the box of candy that all young beaus brought when they called, and ate it every bit, sometimes right there and I was too self-conscious to say a word.

Oh, Gawd! If looks could have killed!!!!!

Source: Gay Porter Holloway to Katherine Anne Porter, 26 February 1956, TLS, Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College

Reviews for Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

[rebarelishesreading · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read this long (495 pages) short story collection over many months and, I must admit, was glad to reach this end this afternoon. I've said before that I'm not a fan of short stories. When they revolve around a central character, as in Olive Kitterage it's different and I can enjoy them (as I did with Olive), but this collection did not fall in that category. The Collection includes 27 stories (2 of which are more novellas) all with different characters and different settings. Really the only thing they have in common is that they are all somber stories of people with difficult lives.

[agnesmack · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was one of the best collections of short stories I've ever read.I am not generally a fan of short stories. I like to commit to my literature and short stories tend to feel like a summer fling that was over before I was able to analyze it to death and suck all of the fun out it. I especially dislike collections of short stories because even the best authors' voices come through in them. While I typically like to feel as though I can hear an author's voice, when it happens during a book of 30 of their short stories and it's the same author with different stories, I get confused, partially due to the fact that I'm extremely dumb and partially due to the fact that they almost always center around the same themes or characters who hail from similar backgrounds and locations. This was not the case with Katherine Anne Porter. Every one of these stories was completely different in style, voice, content and characterization and every one of the stories was brilliant. It helped that many of them were over 50 pages long (one was over 100). The length allowed me to get to know the characters as intimately as I wanted. All in all, this was a fantastic book from a writer who is not only talented but extremely versatile as well.

[kraaivrouw · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm not generally a big reader of short stories. I want to like them, but mostly end up feeling sort of dissatisfied & not quite filled up. It's like eating a really nice appetizer & nothing else for dinner - two hours later you're scrounging in the fridge for the peanut butter. I guess I just like a longer read.There are some writers who work within this genre who stand out for me - James Joyce, Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, Ellen Gilchrist, & Alice Adams. All of these writers have the ability to encapsulate a moment in time that makes reading them a pleasure. I'm going to add Katherine Anne Porter to my list.Porter's writing is a bit formal, but that works within the context of what she is doing with it. Her stories capture their characters within the frame of the story, but effortlessly acknowledge that there is a life that happens outside of that frame. I loved that I got a true sense of the before & after lives of these characters & that I cared.This collection is also wonderful for the reason all collections like that are wonderful - you really get to see the maturation of the writer through their writing. In this regard short story writers probably have the advantage. It took me a bit over a year to read all of Iris Murdoch, this was substantially quicker.I don't know that I'll go on to become an enormous reader of short stories, but I'm glad I read these. They were beautiful & satisfying in their own way & that's what good reading is all about, right?