A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen

Author:Rachel Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2024-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

22. HART CRANE AND KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

THE SEVENTH time that Hart Crane showed up at her rented house in Mexico in a state of inebriation not merely suggestive of felony, Katherine Anne Porter lost her patience. She wasn’t a very patient person to begin with. She wrote, in a letter to a friend, that Crane had come to Mexico because he had heard from the literary critic Malcolm Cowley that—and her venom overwhelmed her grammar—“all Indians were openly homosexual and incestuous, that their society was founded on this, he would encounter no difficulties whatever.” Crane himself said that he wanted to write an epic, or possibly a play, about the Americas and their real indigenous soul, and Hernán Cortés and the Aztec Empire and Montezuma II, and he planned to find all that in Mexico.

In 1931, Mexico City was thriving, and Mexican and American artists were shuttling back and forth between Mexico City and New York. The Museum of Modern Art was presenting a Diego Rivera retrospective; Miguel Covarrubias had been illustrating books for Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten; Marsden Hartley was on his way to paint Mexican landscapes. Porter and Crane were not the first American writers to think that the stark symbolism they chose to see in the culture and scenery of Mexico would make their own work better, but they were among the most self-absorbed to attempt that route. Neither one of the two lived quietly, studied local customs, or spoke Spanish well. Porter did, however, write many fine essays about the art and politics of Mexico, and a number of her best short stories were convincingly set there. Crane wrote very little of Mexico at all.

Porter and Crane both received Guggenheim fellowships in 1931—Crane used his to travel to Mexico, where he overlapped with Porter, who was about to use hers to go to Europe. Crane had let Porter know that he was coming to Mexico, and as he had nowhere to go and had somehow contrived not to have any money either, he sought Porter out a few days after his arrival. They had mutual friends, particularly Allen Tate, the southern writer and poet who had been something of a mentor to them both. This slight acquaintance had not, however, prepared Porter for Crane’s drunken debauches, which exploded in Mexico. He was described by people who knew him then as “a loaded gun.”

When Crane came to Mexico, Porter was living with her lover Eugene Pressly, in a house just outside Mexico City. Crane showed up, drunk and delighted, bounded into the courtyard, began praising the flowers with manic appreciation, ran up and down the staircase, charged about the roof where Porter and Pressly often sat, and invited himself to live with them. Porter later claimed that she assumed he was drunk and joking and, responding in kind, said, Why not? The next day, he arrived sober, with his luggage, moved into the front room, and turned on his Victrola, which he played at full volume for the next several weeks.

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