I read this article in the Washington Post the other morning: U-Md., Pulitzer winner’s friends locked in messy battle over her estate, legacy By Michael S. Rosenwald, and it tripped a familiar theme for me. Katherine Anne Porter has been dead for thirty years, and outside of some 20th Century lit courses and the state of Texas, who claims her even though she rejected them for the east coast, I’m not sure her work is even read all that much anymore. But of course here it is: a full on legal-wrangling between the inheritors of her literary estate and the university that wants it. Of the original players, Porter herself and the first trustee are both dead; the original executor of her will, E Barrett Prettyman Jr., is eight-five, and now embroiled in this mess of second-string shoves and postures.
And I can’t help but wonder how much the world really does need the “the 175 linear feet of letters and literary artifacts [Porter] left to the university.”
I don’t mean to be uncharitable and I don’t begrudge any writer her literary fame, especially a woman in an era when serious women writers were treated like freaks of nature. From what I know of Porter, too, she’d quite possibly be pleased by getting into the papers again, at this point.
I do wonder what survives as art because of its intrinsic merit, and what survives because we need a to keep a hoop rolling.
kathleengwhite.com 
Which begs the question: how much of us who have no immediate offspring survives? What do we want to survive? What do we hope survives and why?
On Katherine Ann Porter: Being from Texas, I remember reading her but don’t remember what. I guess I wasn’t very impressed.
Favorite sentence: “What survives because we need to keep a hoop rolling?”
The “why” has all sorts of angles to it, but it really is related to that hoop, I think. Porter had hers when she was alive, her heirs and friends made it their cause after she died–or their point of personal significance. If her writing resonates that’s one thing (for instance, To Kill a Mockingbird never going out of print–it will be interesting to see what is fought over when Lee makes the transition) But what do we hang on to, or promote as necessary culture, that really is just something no one wants to challenge? (Do not start me on John Updike)
Doubtless I think about all this way too much, Priscilla–;)
By Priscilla Wright
“Pale horse, pale rider, done taken my lover away.” (p. 193)
I was wrong about Katherine Anna Porter. I’m deeply impressed now, having lived through a world-wide pandemic as she did. What survives is of great relevance, essential, even, revealing the horror wreaked by the uncontrolled and basically untreated Influenza of 1918 found in the short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Here the reader experiences the loss of new love, a young lieutenant headed for the trenches of France, and the loss of oneself in the depths of disease. “In sleep she knew she was in her bed, but not the bed she had lain down in a few hours hence, and the room was not the same but it was a room she had known somewhere. Her heart was a stone lying above her breast outside of her; her pulses lagged and paused, and she knew that something strange was going to happen, even as the early morning winds were cool through the lattice….” (p. 141) None of the other novelists who wrote of the Influenza of 1918 wrote with her sensory specificity. Not Thomas Wolf writing of his brother’s death in Look Homeward Angel; not Willa Cather’s Pulitzer winning One of Us in describing the havoc on a troop ship bound for the Western Front; not William Maxwell’s writing of the loss of his mother and the uprooting of his and his brother’s lives; and finally not even Mary McCarthy chronicling the loss of both parents and the complete collapse of family for her and her three siblings. All are poignant and moving but none have the tenacity and romance of Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Thank you, Katherine Anne Porter.
All good to hear, Priscilla–and worth knowing.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all that the stuff that gets anthologized or trotted out most regularly may not be the best representation over time