Katherine Anne Porter (163 page)

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W. B. Yeats told how Ezra Pound carried food scraps in his pockets for the hungry street cats who had so many enemies. Yeats doubted he really liked cats, though. “He never nurses the café cat,” he observed. Of course not. The café cat was safe and comfortable.

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John Middleton Murry, her husband.

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N
OTE
.
Mr. Vernon Watkins wrote me a pleasant letter about this, saying Dylan enjoyed telling stories about the hardships of his childhood, family ignorance, and so on. They were certainly not rich, and they were religious enough, but
not
illiterates—educated, respectable people, and most loving and tender parents.
N
.
B
. I sent this letter to
The New York Times
to be published. The editor did not return the letter, and published it changed to appear that the letter had been written to
The Times
instead of to me.

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“His Phoenix.” It was later collected in the volume
The Wild Swans at Coole
(1919) and appears as follows:

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She
did
write that letter, which was misplaced for a number of years—a very good letter, which I found when going over my papers for the University of Maryland. The line I remembered was this marvel of composure in the face of Death itself and her own death.

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These are short hand notes taken of a lecture I made before the American Women’s Club in Paris, 1934.—K.A.P.

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In France.

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1914–1918.

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“Living Water” by S. Sergeev-Tzensky,
The Dial
, July, 1929.

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At the time this was written it was clear enough that I was opposed to every form of authoritarian, totalitarian government or religion, under whatever name in whatever country. I still am.

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This was written on June 21, 1940, seven days after the fall of France.

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In 1790, the Queen’s lover, Count Fersen, wrote to his sister: “She is an angel of courage, of conduct, of sensibility: no one ever knew how to love as she does.” He had known her since they were both eighteen years old, and had been her lover for more than five years. He had himself all the qualities he found in her, and more.

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That was
then!

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See preceding. So much for memory.

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N
OTE
. July, 1952: I lived there just thirteen months.

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A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE
: In this retelling of the Circe episode I have followed the old Butcher-Arnold translation, the first I ever knew, and it still has for me the wonder of early love and true poetry. I believe I have every translation into English of the Odyssey but I preferred this for my Defense.

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Lineal descendant of Christopher Columbus.

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Note and read again, December Second, 1969—K. A. P. in Memoriam.

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Fall, 1952. The hydrogen bomb has just been exploded, very successfully, to the satisfaction of the criminals who caused it to be made.

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I heard this again years later from Germans in Berlin when Hitler was beginning to infect the local mind like a medieval plague.

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Edmund Wilson,
The American Earthquake
, page 573, chapter called “Postscript of 1957.”

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They seem to have it and are getting on with it—1976.

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He died long after this was written.

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Loaned me by Bertram D. Wolfe, of Mexico City.