The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter

Author:Katherine Anne Porter [Porter, Katherine Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9781598533286
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2008-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

A NOTE ON “THE TROLL GARDEN”

Afterword to

The Troll Garden, by Willa Cather.

New York: Signet/New American Library, 1961.

Willa Cather called her first collection of seven short stories, published in 1905 when she was thirty-two, The Troll Garden. It sets its theme on page ii with a verse from Christina Rossetti’s “The Goblin Market”:

We must not look at Goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits;

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their thirsty, hungry roots?

Mr. E. K. Brown in his critical biography, Willa Cather, explains that the trolls are of course the dedicated working artists, and the goblins the savage, famished noncreators, the corruptors and prisoners of the mind and spirit.

Willa Cather was the first writer to express a horror of middle- and lower-class poverty and to give an appalling picture of life in the provinces of this country for the gifted or even just romantic, self-indulgent dreamer like Paul in “Paul’s Case.” The story of a strange boy who simply wanted luxury, a pathological liar, a real “case” in the clinical sense of the word, this is in one way the most contemporary of Miss Cather’s stories: the number of boys like Paul has increased. In the incredible romanticism of “A Death In the Desert,” a young singer has returned to her native Wyoming to die of tuberculosis. Wyoming is for her not only an earthly desert but one of the heart, the mind, the spirit.

Willa Cather did everything by emotional, instinctive choice; she was carried here and there, from country to country, from discovery to discovery, so she believed, and so she did, at very rich levels; but it was like mining gold and precious stones out of rocks, for she had a wonderful balance of mind, a true severity and steadfastness of character, and a discipline that came of will and character formed by intelligence and reason. Without her grand perfectly natural capacity to love, to love her own chosen few, deeply, narrowly, entirely, and to the end; and her power to attract and hold the love of those near her, she can be easily imagined as heading for the bitterest of ends. But the day she died had been a happy day for her and her friends and it ended serenely. And we have her books that should last as long as we are able to know what our treasures of literature are.

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