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Article Excerpt
Maria Antonieta Rivas Mercado was born in a mansion in Mexico City on April 21, 1900, the second daughter of Matilde Cristina Castellanos de Rivas Mercado, an educated, loose-living beauty, and Antonio Rivas Mercado, a professor at the San Carlos Academy and the distinguished architect who at the request of President Porfirio Diaz created the famous El Angel, the monument to independence, on the Paseo de la Reforma. (1) In her early years Antonieta was educated by tutors and governesses and by her parents. By the time she was four she could play classical pieces on the piano, dance well, and read and write in both Spanish and French. When she was ten years old, her mother left the family to live in Paris. By the time Cristina returned to Mexico in 1915, Antonio refused to let her move back into the family residence. Antonieta, who had not seen her mother for five years and already felt abandoned, considered the banishment justified.
Between 1915 and 1917 Antonieta was her father's hostess for social affairs and with his indulgence and encouragement expanded her intellectual and artistic pursuits. Intensely interested in philosophers such as Rene Descartes and Friedrich Nietzsche and writers such as Francois Rabelais and Maxim Gorky, she flouted Catholic Church doctrine by reading whatever she wanted. She began to hold salons for other like-minded Mexican intellectuals and aesthetes and scandalized the more conventional people in the city. At an amateur gala at which she danced and sang, she met and fell in love with Albert Blair, a young British-born, American-bred engineer who had been educated at the University of Michigan. With Antonio's grudging permission they married within the year. (2)
Ten years older than Antonieta, the stocky blond Albert had rigid ideas about the proper role of a wife and none of Antonieta's intellectual or artistic interests. Of Scottish descent, he was firmly Calvinist, while she was Roman Catholic, even if unorthodoxly so. Blair had been drawn into the Mexican Revolution by two of his Michigan classmates, sons of Francisco I. Madero, who overthrew Diaz in 1910, whereas the aristocratic Rivas Mercado family had benefited from the patronage of Diaz and after his removal had suffered at the hands of brutal peasant revolutionaries. At the time of her marriage Antonieta had little reason to feel sympathetic to the revolution.
The Blairs moved back and forth between Albert's primitive ranch in the state of Durango and an apartment in the Rivas Mercado mansion and immediately confronted the difficulties in a marriage of discordant personalities, symbolized in simple terms by Antonieta's preference for the invigorating society of Mexico City and Albert's fondness for the isolation of the ranch, to which he forbade Antonieta to bring her books. Antonieta was miserable without the stimulation of reading, and the summer after their son, Donald Antonio (Tonito), was born on September 9, 1919, she fled with him to her father's home in Mexico City, never to live with Albert again.
The Madero Revolution that unseated Diaz and in which Albert Blair fought initiated two decades of upheaval and devastation. Elected president in 1911, Madero was ousted and killed in 1913, a victim of power struggles among factions led by Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and others. In the chaos of civil war Victoriano Huerta claimed the presidency in 1913-1914, and Venustiano Carranza, after ruling the country provisionally for two years, was elected president in 1917. Carranza, however, was assassinated in May 1920, and in September Alvaro Obregon was elected to replace him. (3) As preparations for the December inauguration were in progress, Antonieta, still wary of revolutionary regimes, stayed out of the political arena and resumed her literary salons and her former social life.
A month before the inauguration, Katherine Anne Porter arrived in Mexico City. She was thirty years old, three times married and divorced, childless, rootless, trying to support herself with freelance writing. (4) While living in Greenwich Village in 1919-1920 she had become acquainted with Mexican artists and musicians who in the summer of 1920 encouraged her to go to Mexico, where, they told her, exciting changes were going to be instituted by a newly elected revolutionary president. Intrigued, she collected assignments from several magazines and set out on the adventure. (5)
Katherine Anne Porter was born in a small log house on May 15, 1890, in the frontier community of Indian Creek, Texas. Christened Callie Russell Porter, she was the fourth child of Harrison Boone Porter and (Mary) Alice Jones Porter, a genteel, handsome couple, well educated for their time and place, who made their living by farming a piece of land owned by Alice's father. The Porters' third child, a son, had died shortly before Callie's birth, and less than two years later Alice Porter herself died after the birth of her fifth child, another daughter. Harrison then took his four surviving children to Hays County, Texas, to live with his domineering widowed mother, Catharine Ann Skaggs Porter. (6)
From 1892 to 1901 Callie lived in the secure dominion of her aristocratic, iron-willed grandmother, who tried to instill her version of Cumberland Presbyterianism in her grandchildren while entertaining them with romantic tales about her affluent family in antebellum Kentucky and Virginia and grim stories about the hard times in Texas during the Civil War and Reconstruction. (7) When his mother died in 1901, Harrison, who had no plan for making a living, set forth with his children on a sequence of long visits with relatives and short stays in rented houses while he picked up odd jobs as teacher, salesman, and farm laborer. Harrison, who valued education, placed his children in school whenever possible, however briefly, and in 1904 scraped together enough money to send his son to a military school and his daughters to he Thomas School, a well-regarded private Methodist educational institution in San Antonio. (8) Although Callic's single year there was the only sustained formal education she would have, she had been an avid reader from an early age, and by the time she left the Thomas School she was widely read in Dostoevsky, Turgenev, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Dante, Voltaire, Chaucer, the Brontes, and other "older" writers. During that year she also developed her musical and dramatic talents and began to call herself "Katherine Porter." Soon she was giving her name as "Katherine Anne Porter," aligning herself with her indomitable grandmother.
In 1906 sixteen-year-old Katherine Anne Porter married nineteen-year-old John Henry Koontz, the son of a prosperous Texas rancher. (9) Inexperienced, she married with romantic illusions and the comforting expectation that she would have economic security in the Koontz family. Her illusions and expectation were soon shattered. Her husband, who held jobs first as a stenographer with a railway and then as a salesman with a cotton manufacturing company, proved to be parsimonious and physically abusive. For eight years Porter endured his drunken attacks, during which he threw her down stairs and beat her, once with a hairbrush until she lost consciousness. She feared for her life, but it took her a year to stash away enough money to flee to Chicago, where she worked briefly as an extra in the movies before returning to Texas and divorcing Koontz in 1915. (10) During the nine years of her marriage she converted to the Roman Catholicism of the Koontz family and continued her apprentice writing and self-education, reading five or six books a week and discovering the "moderns'--notably Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. (11)
Between 1915 and 1919 Porter contended with poverty, tuberculosis (in 1915-1917), the failures of her second...
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