Her hair changed overnight
Katherine Anne Porter, the Spanish Influenza of 1918, and me.
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For years, I’ve had dreams about my hair transforming over night. As a girl, my hair was bright, light, barely saturated at all from all of the sun it absorbed. My part was a gash in a polar bear’s side; my ponytails lighter in black and white portraits than my very pale skin. It was the hair color, women older than me loved to remind me, that people paid thousands of dollars a year to have, that they sat motionless for hours under the burn of bleach, watching their own face grow more and more tired just to try and get close to. I can’t remember if my mother warned us over and over again or if she only told us the one time and the terror of the idea branded itself into my small brain. It wouldn’t last forever, she said. One day, our hair —my sister’s and mine — would turn brown. Hers had, she told us. After puberty her hair had faded into a color she didn’t even know anymore because she spent so many weekend days in the kitchen of a woman named Betty Jo trying to bury that color under layers of highlights and lifter.
The dreams started when I was a middle schooler, dreams that all my hair turned the color of rust over night, dreams that I woke up and it was all a dark, uncompromising brown, dreams that it all fell out, so that every morning I woke with the same hair felt like a miracle. When my sister’s hair changed in high school, I realized that maybe I had been spared. But the anticipation of the change never left, and now I dream of waking up one morning and all of the, albeit dirtier and duller, blonde adult hairs on my head shimmering white like a morning snow.
That’s what happened to Katherine Anne Porter. When confronted with trauma too big to stomach, all of her dark curly hair turned white overnight, as if it had too much to carry to possibly hold up pigment. Or at least, that’s how the legend goes.
I discovered Katherine Anne Porter a couple of years ago when I was just beginning to think of starting this newsletter. In fact, I would have absolutely sworn that she was one of the first newsletters I wrote. Maybe she was, but when I went back to look for a link for this newsletter, I found nothing. Maybe she became such a staple of my own discovery of women’s writing that I forgot to mention her at all.
Last week, novelist Kate Elizabeth Russell told me about her surprising discovery of Heather Lewis, how what had shocked her wasn’t that she hadn’t heard of this writer (women’s writing is forgotten all the time), but that she hadn’t heard of a writer whose work was so closely in conversation with her own. How had no one mentioned this? How had no one read her work and thought, oh of course she is part of a kind of written heritage, a family of work that she should be familiar with?
That’s how I felt the first time someone mentioned Katherine Anne Porter to me. Here was a Texas-born and bred girl who wrote all her life, who grew up religious and started her career in newspapers, who moved to the East coast and got radicalized and disillusioned with religion, who spent plenty of time in her favorite city ,Mexico City, and who wrote in an accessible style and wished it was more literary. Same!!!!
Porter is best known for her fiction and primarily for her short-stories. She wrote only one novel Ship of Fools, but her collected book of short stories won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.
Katherine Anne Porter is also one of the few writers to tackle the 1918 Spanish Influenza, a plague we simply cannot stop hearing about as we face and mightily fail against our own. Porter wrote a beautiful short little book Pale Horse, Pale Rider, about the Spanish Influenza which was highly beloved. I was going to write a whole little ode to it today, but then my copy of Texas Monthly came yesterday and, of course, they were on it already. Michael Agresta infuriatingly wrote a really nice piece about it, which you can read here.
Here is an excerpt from the book that Agresta and I both pulled independently because it really is just that good and apt
Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider is not a book about Porter’s own life. It is a work of fiction and as she once said, her stories are only "true in the way that a work of fiction should be true, created out of all the scattered particles of life I was able to absorb and combine and shape into new being."
But Porter did get the Spanish Influenza and did almost die. She became very, very ill while in Colorado. Here is how she described it to the Paris Review:
Yes, that was the plague of influenza, at the end of the First World War, in which I almost died. It just simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, ready. It took me a long time to go out and live in the world again. I was really “alienated,” in the pure sense. It was, I think, the fact that I really had participated in death, that I knew what death was, and had almost experienced it. I had what the Christians call the “beatific vision,” and the Greeks called the “happy day,” the happy vision just before death. Now if you have had that, and survived it, come back from it, you are no longer like other people, and there’s no use deceiving yourself that you are. But you see, I did: I made the mistake of thinking I was quite like anybody else, of trying to live like other people. It took me a long time to realize that that simply wasn’t true, that I had my own needs and that I had to live like me.
Porter went on to overturn her life. She moved to New York and then Mexico where she became a revolutionary in the Obregón Revolution of 1921. She bucked what everyone else was doing (notably going to Europe and partying) in favor of what felt right to her. The experience of her illness, of the radicalizing force of an event which forced her to look at the world and her place in it as something momentary and indefinite, caused her to make choices that only she wanted to make.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as this pandemic (which notably is much milder than the 1918 influenza and of which I have also not been infected by) drags onward. A friend (wow it’s Hannah Grouch-Begley, our favorite WWI historian again) told me very early on—as this all was just beginning and we could still go on strolls with friends— that one of the first suburban booms happened after the 1918 influenza, that when faced with the germs and spread of viruses in the city, many people fled. I’ve been thinking about that almost constantly as I watch the numbers continue to tick up in D.C. and my friends in NYC survive their own bouts with this virus. The way we talk to each other seems to have become more whimsical. There is more of a willingness from the people I love to articulate exactly what it is that they want. Whereas before they might have said that maybe they wanted to start dating again or maybe they wanted to write, now they are saying openly and happily that finding a partner or having a baby is a priority for them, that writing things they love is now their ambition. People are verbally acknowledging dreams they thought too wild, or too ambitious to share before. It has had a crystallizing effect that is at once useful and fairly terrifying.
Katherine Anne Porter was exactly the same age that I am now when the Spanish Influenza hit. She had not yet published any fiction. She had not yet become an important writer of the 30s and 40s. She had not yet solidified exactly who it was she wanted to be. Scanning through her book Pale Horse, Pale Rider this morning (which I intend to re-read soon)I felt heartened by the clarity of her writing about what was a hard time in her life. It was published in 1939. In 20 years, I hope to have found some of that clarity too.
You can read Pale Horse, Pale Rider here, but really you should buy it here. (P.S. look at this absolutely gorgeous first edition I am considering trading my left arm for)